📚 Neat Stuff I Read in February 2026
Elephant bone tools, AI burnout, and why marrying well might be the best productivity hack. Also: spear-wielding lady chimps, the decline of starships, & the Smithsonian on several cool animals.
Here in Maryland it snowed a lot in February, which meant the kids were home way more than expected and I did not get as much done as I wanted to. I did however read a bit more than usual. Below are my favorite pieces, carefully curated for your reading pleasure.
Productivity
Jillian Hess examined Benjamin Franklin’s productivity notes — Franklin’s personal note-taking and productivity systems in historical context.
Oliver Burkeman, writing about treating your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket, says that the real problem is having too many genuinely worthwhile things vying for limited attention, so accept you can’t consume it all. It reminded me of my 2022 exhortation to stop feeling guilty, rebrand your to-read list as a filtered list of high-quality options available to you when you have time.
Nadav Zohar wrote about his experiences switching from tech to being an electrician at 40. He seems really happy with his choices, but the most telling part for me was just how big a deal it is to be a guy who will reliably show up and legally be able to drive a car.
Steve Magness explained some recent research on how negative pre-performance focus raises cortisol and hurts performance while positive feedback during preparation time boosts testosterone and improves outcomes. I’m not totally sure I buy it, but it sounds plausible.
Brittany Solomon et al. found that having a conscientious spouse boosts your career. Partner conscientiousness predicted future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion, because conscientious partners handle more household tasks and model pragmatic behaviors. Perhaps the best productivity hack is marrying well (shoutout to my husband who did the dishes while I wrote this article!)
I found this Quanta article on why there’s no single best way to store information really useful. It discusses how hash tables, heaps, and other data structures each trade off time, memory, and organization, and recent theoretical advances pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Samantha Lippert wrote about how four minutes a day changed math in her classroom. Structured timed retrieval practice produced automaticity in math facts, reduced working-memory load, and drove large benchmark gains in third grade. I bet this works for adults, too.
AI
Readout is a fully native macOS app providing a real-time, local overview of your Claude Code config with instant search across sessions, agents, skills, and repos. Free, no account required. Closed source but from the head of design of a fairly big company so I’m not overly worried about it being a horrifying malware bonanza.
Harvard Business Review ran a piece arguing AI doesn’t reduce work — it intensifies it, based on research demonstrating that the faster pace, broader scope, extended hours of AI backed productivity leads to workload creep and risks burnout. It definitely resonated with me; I feel busier than I’ve ever been and missed writing an article last week because being able to code with Claude has been enabling me to get SO many things done that were previously blocked on other people.
In a similar vein, Stefan Schubert wrote about the centuries-long shift to better jobs from a hopeful perspective; since Industrial Revolution, job quality has steadily improved. AI so far trims routine tasks but hasn’t reversed the long-term trend.
Dr Philippa Hardman had a nice article on the hidden cost of AI-generated feedback and how AI feedback may undermine learning by removing the social elements that help encourage kids to actually bother improving themselves.
Mitchell Hashimoto shared his AI adoption journey. He moved from inefficient chat to reliable agent workflows by iteratively forcing agents to reproduce his manual work and engineering fixes so they stop repeating mistakes. Sounds pretty banal when summarized, but I found the walkthrough helpful.
Hannah Stulberg has some nice suggestions for using Claude Code for everything, i.e. a personal assistant beyond just coding.
Science
A carpal bone carbon-dated to the Second Punic War period provides rare physical evidence that Carthage kept war elephants in Iberia. Also in elephants, Simon A. Parfitt and Silvia M. Bello published an article on the earliest known elephant-bone tool in Europe: a cortical bone fragment deliberately shaped into a percussor for resharpening flint tools. It’s the first documented case of elephant bone used as a knapping hammer. Awhile back I learned that elephant long bones were systematically broken to make blanks appropriate for shaping tools in what amounts to a Neolithic factory efficient enough to drive Paleoloxodons to extinction, so I always perk up when I come across neat elephant bone history.
John Hawks examined how Sahelanthropus tchadensis moved — it’s a deep dive on what locomotion evidence from one of the oldest proposed hominins (~7 million years old) tells us about early bipedalism.
LiveScience covered new evidence that Neanderthals made fire 400,000 years ago in England, which pushes controlled fire use in England back dramatically; the lead archaeologist called it the most exciting find in forty years.
Senegal’s spear-wielding savannah chimps have heat-adapted behaviors that mirror possible early hominin strategies. Fongoli chimps soak in pools, and get cool in caves. The females (!) craft and use spears to hunt bush babies.
The Guardian reported on the Floreana giant tortoise returning to the Galapagos after nearly 200 years. Yes, they are a keystone species whose grazing maintains open habitats and distributes native seeds, but also they are apparently incredibly useful to old-style sailors because they can store fresh water in their bodies for months. I should note that Darwin does not agree that they’re delicious, but even so, they’re a big deal. Eden Undone by Abbott Kahler (which I started but haven’t finished yet) mentions logbooks recording thirteen thousand tortoises taken by whalers, one surviving in storage for two years.
Dan Williams argues that people are confused, maladapted apes that are nonetheless highly strategic. We often end up choosing tribal or self-interested ignorance because incentives, not just misunderstandings, drive social dysfunction.
A Nature trial found that timing immunochemotherapy by time of day changed immune cell dynamics and improved outcomes in lung cancer patients, which has really interesting implications for medical treatments if it replicates...
The Lancet flagged a long-scrutinized report of an infant allegedly poisoned by opioids in breast milk, amid new allegations of falsified toxicology data. I don’t normally share modern politics-ish controversy takes, but this one hit close to home and I am extremely grateful to the guy who doggedly tracked down this appalling fraud.
Lin Bian’s paper on toddlers and ingroup loyalty shows that context-sensitive social reasoning develops very early. Toddlers are monsters, and preschoolers not much better, but it was still a pretty interesting study.
Smithsonian Magazine had a ton of neat articles that I read this month: these small, stubby-armed dinosaurs may have been egg-thieves, shovel-tusked elephants had surprisingly species-specific feeding styles, I did not realize the extinct camels of North America even existed, there was once a giant carnivore that ran on hooves, and rove beetles apparently steal ant scent to infiltrate colonies.
Literature
Jonathan Muth looked offered some nice graphs of where all the starships went. Classic sci-fi title keywords (space, Mars, planet) peaked in the 1950s-60s and have steadily declined, while fantasy keywords (dragon, magic, witch) surged after 2000.
Sweden is bringing books back to classrooms. Reading physical books out loud is how I spend most of my evenings these days, and it’s sort of... reassuring? to see that even the educationally vaunted Nordic countries went astray a bit there but are bringing it back.
This YouTube video on what fantasy gets wrong about sacred groves talked a lot about how sacred groves are socially constructed, managed, contested spaces… not pristine primeval forests.
History
Bret Devereaux also wrote a ton of interesting things this month. History nerds should definitely check out his overview of ancient Mediterranean mercenaries, this piece on ancient migrations, and his analysis of warfare in Dune. Bonus: don’t forget about my rant about how Fremen walking into the desert to die are violating their cultural norms around water.
A small reminder that Carthage dominated Mediterranean trade and seemed likeliest to control the region before the Punic Wars ended badly for them; international power dynamics are weird and can change faster than you’d think.
Anne F. Broadbridge’s chapter on women in steppe society shows how steppe women ran large autonomous camps, managed resources and personnel, and exercised political power as managers, regents, landholders, and diplomatic marriage-brokers. Their hospitality and kin networks were essential to Mongol military success.
Davis Kedrosky reviewed a paper on how Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries fueled the rise of the gentry. Land reform after 1536 commercialized property and differentiated Britain’s economic trajectory, though Kedrosky argues the paper overstates the link to industrialization since monastic lands were concentrated in the agrarian south and east, not the industrial northwest.
Alice Evans had a neat piece on how courtship transformed masculinity — European courtship norms empowered female choice, transforming marriage from arranged/kin-controlled unions into companionate, monogamous partnerships.
Mary Anne Smith woke London workers by blasting dried peas at their windows as a paid human alarm clock. The practice persisted into the 1970s until affordable electric alarm clocks made it obsolete. It was a nice reminder of the kinds of jobs that have gotten outsourced to mechanical devices in the last few hundred years.
Stone Age Herbalist had a deep dive on how smiles signaled everything from demonic possession and drunkenness to nobility at various points in history, and the “uncanny smile” now functions as a mask signaling inner displacement.
Benjamin Breen wrote a deep dive on the secret history of knocking on wood because his daughter prompted him to think about the cultural evolution of gestures. It’s a cute story with some interesting data visualizations and some good points about the kinds of things humans know but don’t write down.
ICYMI: My February Articles
I wrote an article about the importance of staying aware of the implicit, difficult-to-record layers of your workflows, with some reflections on Extracting Value from the Process Layer of Your Notes. Nowhere near as popular as the piece on how Claude + Obsidian got a level up, which now has more likes than anything I’ve ever written on Substack.
I also reviewed a book about the history of coal, which I’ve since learned got the details a bit wrong when it comes to the relationship between the British navy and coal ships. Feedback like that is a huge part of why I write in public, so huge shoutout to bean for the correction :)
The most popular link from last month’s edition of Neat Stuff I Read was Curating a Journaling Ecosystem by Brooke. If you missed it, check it out!
& as always, if you read something interesting that you think I might be interested in, please reach out! In the meantime, did you know that this week is my ten year anniversary for blogging online? I archive the really old stuff behind a paywall to avoid feeling obligated to keep everything up to date with new research and tech, but I went back and looked at some of those early pieces and it’s fun to see how long I’ve been writing about things like religion & war in myth cycles, the great man paradox, and the importance of ancient African history.
Here’s to another ten years, and a big thank you to all of you for your encouraging words over the years — I definitely couldn’t sustain this newsletter if y’all didn’t actually read it and write in and discuss these essays and ideas with me :)