📚 Neat Stuff I Read in December 2025

Famine-fighting wheat, hippopotamus schemes, pagan witchcraft historiography, Boox e-reader hacks, and mythbusting deep dives on asthma, colds, & Supreme Court bias.

It’s been awhile since I compiled my “neat stuff I read lately” notes, mostly because I had other things I wanted to say instead. But today kicks off Christmas Break for many of us, so I thought it might be a good time to show up in your inbox with some good stuff to read. Some of the following are affiliate links, but I assure you I read much more than this that I’m not mentioning because it wasn’t that good. Enjoy!

Books

• I loved the Stainless Steel Rat books as a child, and was delighted to discover that the first of the series (ignore that it says #4, that’s chronological) now in the public domain. Out of nostalgia, I read it last week, and am happy to say it holds up pretty well.

• Mistress of the Waves by George Phillies, libertarian politician and physics professor, was excellent. I was devastated to discover that there is no second book, though — it really feels like the kickoff to a rollicking series. Evan Þ recommended it to me (and reviewed it on his blog) as a tech-regressed-space-colony sci-fi, focused on the protagonist's expanding shipping business. It’s pretty similar to Nathan Lowell’s Trader’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series, which I reviewed in my chill fiction roundup.

Economics

• One of my favorite things is putting things that people are upset about now in their historical context to make myself feel better, and to this end Zvi Mowshowitz provided some great charts in his write-up of cost changes over time, focused on clothes, housing, and food.

• I rarely dip my toes into legal arguments anymore — my law career is long behind me and I’m glad of it — but I found this article about which Supreme Court cases are actually important from Eric McKee to be very thought-provoking. He proposes using the metric of the number of amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” briefs filed for each case, as a lens to look through beyond “which cases journalists care about.” The data showed some interesting trends, like that only roughly 20% of the cases with “above median” numbers of amicus briefs were decided ideologically, and what civil liberties cases attract a disproportionate number of amicus briefs.

History

• In 1970, Norman Borlaug won a Nobel for breeding wheat to be shorter and produce more grain. This sounds small but probably saved billions of life. I care a lot about how famines happen, and was delighted by this story of a man who devoted a huge chunk of his life to making them less likely.

• This was a really neat deep dive on Galla Placidia, who married a barbarian and ruled Rome when the world power fell into chaos.

• I enjoyed this thought experiment about the Treaty of Versailles, although it’s a bit more recent than the history I know a lot about so I wasn’t able to participate in the discussion in the comments.

• This is a really neat youtube channel with videos of how things used to be made, with old videos showcasing things like handcrafted millstones and carpenters making floorboards the old fashioned way. A lot of the videos are in black and white and it’s a delightful change of pace from the usual upbeat algorithmically optimized stuff.

• R.W. Richey offered his take on the Wager and some of author David Grann’s other works, with a focus on the people who wanted to go on the journey and the sort of men who go exploring under dangerous conditions.

• This was a beautiful retrospective on fifteen years of history blogging from Benjamin Breen. I love Res Obscura, and Benjamin is a lot more prolific than I am, but I’m coming up on my own tenth anniversary and it was nice to see someone else reflecting on a big milestone like this. He also shares a ton of great Substacks that feel like they’ve revitalized the blog-discussion space, and I generally agree with his take. Lately I’ve been seeing people post responses to my articles, or articles inspired by my articles, and it’s the most inspiring thing in the world.

• This history of the American hippopotamus is old but excellent. Larger than life characters, excellent research and writing on the part of the author.

• This deep dive into how a small town in rural 1970s China defied collectivism and pioneered China’s road to economic reform was fascinating, especially in the context of recent discussions online about East Asian success in the post-industrial world.

• Here’s a short review of Domination by Alice Roberts from Richard Carter about the rise of Christianity with a particular focus on early ‘Celtic’ Christianity in and around the British and nearby Isles. I haven’t read the book myself, but I did read and review Tamed: Ten Species that Changed Our World a few years back on Richard’s recommendation.

Sociology

• David Friedman (who is, rather ironically for my categorization, an economist rather than a sociologist) wrote up some thoughts about cohabitation before marriage that I found thought-provoking mostly because my husband is much more on the “get married then live together” side of things than I am, and only afterward did I find out that the data bears out his instincts.

• I deeply enjoyed this review of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Ronald Hutton. The reviewer, Gabriel Rossman, is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA and does a really nice job of breaking down the differences between what we really know about ancient religions and what various people like Gardner and Crowley added on later.

• I enjoyed this discussion of yards and fences in the context of building a good neighborhood.

Science & Technology

• Apparently some people use Boox e-readers as a second monitor. Android tablets are really cool, and everything I said about the Boox in my summer 2024 review holds true… with the addition that I got to try out a colleague’s 2nd generation Boox Go Color 7 and I like the buttons on it even better.

• My friend theredsheep is a respiratory therapist, and one year at an annual get-together, we got to talking about my son’s lingering cough and how confusing and unsatisfying I found the doctor’s explanation of what was going on. He gave me a lot of great explanations during our discussion, so I’m delighted that he finally started a Substack. Here’s his inaugural piece on asthma, albuterol, and how useless a lot of common medical interventions really are.

• On the topic of health, Robert M of LessWrong put together a great deep dive on how colds spread that I learned a lot from.

• This is a neat science experiment about the difference between cheap and expensive ingredients when baking cookies with the same recipe. I personally am a sucker for expensive chocolate chips and butter.

• I loved this article about the difficulty of listening to feedback, and how feedback doesn’t scale as a mechanism for improving (particularly software). But since I’m not yet at that scale, please do feel free to comment with feedback about what you’d like to see more of!