📚 Neat Stuff I Read in September 2025

Tips for self-improvement. Deep dives on how to do a deep dive, the infrastructure demands of tourist destinations, and useful experiments.

Oct 08, 2025

Happy October, everyone. This month I’m practicing my sketching skills with the Inktober challenge, and trying to decide if I dare give National Novel Writing Month another try. The stuff I read last month offered a lot of inspiration for stories and drawings, so I hope you enjoy these as much as I did:

Self-Improvement

I am not a math person, but my husband and son are, so I’ve been re-learning chess and poking around looking for ways to engage his interests. A friend mentioned Project Euler, “a repository of math problems that need to be solved by developing and implementing an appropriate algorithm. It follows a philosophy of incremental learning, where ideas developed in solving one problem can be starting points for solving later, more difficult ones.” Not being a math person, this does not appeal to me personally, but a stupendous number of my friends and subscribers are math-loving programmers, so if you haven’t heard of it before, I recommend checking out this brief guide to Project Euler. I enjoyed reading these articles from
Universal Set
for the same reasons I like reading about other subcultures I don’t belong to, so even if you’re not a math person either, you might like it… if for no other reason than advice like: “It’s worth your time to try to find efficient solutions on your own, rather than calling these functions or just running an obvious brute force. This is not so much because calling library functions is “cheating”, but rather because you can learn quite a lot from figuring out and implementing things yourself.”
Some folks are using AI agents to curate a personalized feed, which seems like a nice idea for people with more technical skills than I have. I tried something similar (but easier) with the Comet browser, but realistically it made me look at social media more, not less, so ymmv.
This deep dive on the Zeigarnik Effect is a nice explanation of how just a few open loops overwhelm us and cause us to lose track of the essential. I enjoyed that it talked a lot about the history of its discovery as well as how it works, from a nerdiness perspective and from a “how to make my memory work for me, not against me” perspective. Fans of the “Getting Things Done” approach will probably find the article particularly interesting.
This series of photographs was a nice reminder that sometimes success is not measured by how hard you work but by how patiently you wait — and how quickly you pounce when the moment is ripe.
Here was a nice Twitter (long) post about the value of confronting your fears, and how he got shy kids to be good public speakers — ritualized acting out of their worst fears coming true, i.e. kids making fun of them when they made a mistake (in a good-natured way).
I also quite liked this Twitter (long) post about the importance of practicing sub-skills, playing around, and figuring out your blockers. There were a lot of gems in the comments.
Here’s another article I enjoyed about “cultivating feel,” which talks about how to get really good at things in the “10,000 hours” sense but with what I suspect is a much more accurate analysis of the relevant literature from someone who got really good at basketball — and retained those skills well into middle age. It was a nice companion piece to this article (from a different author) about running with hardcore Ethiopian runners and how different the culture of running is there.
Another way to get great at something is to be disproportionately annoyed by something, but this is harder to game. Many of my most popular articles are motivated by being annoyed at something (like the folders vs. tags debate), so I wish it were easier to cultivate, but alas. At least this story about a freakishly productive lawyer was useful because it offered another angle on what outlier-levels of productivity can look like.

History

Here’s a neat history of the Aksumite Empire, which was located in modern-day Ethiopia.

This deep dive on the history of the smoke detector was fun in its own right, but really shines as an exemplar of how to do a diligent search for truth in the modern age.
ab
commented “it feels like a crime thriller, with suspense, dead ends, and twists. The inventor of the smoke detector was this guy the whole time!” In an era where more and more people are being snookered by fake things on the internet (like nonexistent, AI-hallucinated books they ask their librarians for), I think it’s important to remember the value of going hard at tracking down sources for claims.
Did you know that the word slang’s first recorded origins are that it was itself a slang term used by thieves in the 1700s? I definitely did not. Here’s a related article from Atlas Obscura, which is equally interesting, not least of which because I always thought it was just a made-up thing from fantasy books. But no: “Thieves’ Cant, also known as Flash or Peddler’s French, existed in many forms across Europe.”
I also did not know about the Great Emu War in Australia, but it was an interesting (and comical) example of how straightforward financial incentives can be more effective than government-run initiatives. After a plague of emus overran veteran-run farms, the military sent in a couple of soldiers to wipe them out. It didn’t work; bounties did. The actual story is a lot funnier.
This article touches on more recent history than I’m usually interested in, but it was a well-written breakdown of a very interesting period in Chinese history: the purge of the People’s Liberation Army. “The intensity, speed, and high-level ranks involved are rare in the CCP’s history.”
r/AskHistorians hosts a lot of authors to talk about their books, but this AMA about Mexican witchcraft during the Spanish Conquest period was my favorite in a long time. I haven’t read the author’s book yet (The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico) but it’s high on my list. Apparently, “In Mexico the Inquisition burned 45 people in 300 years. None was an accused witch.” […] “if you look at the documentation of the Inquisition in Mexico (which I have) after 1571, you find an avalanche of ACCUSATIONS against curanderas. The response from the actual inquisitors was: whatever, we don’t care, we’re busy hunting down Jews and Protestants.”
David Roman
wrote a neat article about the widespread human sacrifice and cannibalism among various Native American groups, not just the Aztecs. There was also a nice overview of culture and religion in pre-contact Mexico, including what we know about their popular sports.
I enjoyed this discussion of how mythmaking and propaganda work, in the context of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq.
I also enjoyed this drug history of the 50s and 60s, with particular emphasis on how they impacted housewives. Relatedly, the history of dealing with picky eaters is a lot lengthier and more interesting than I realized. Related to that, sort of, was an in-depth look at another issue specific to historical mothers: how our ancestors dealt with uterine & vaginal prolapse.

Infrastructure

We tend to think of pilgrimages thru a religious lens. But the engineering challenge inherent in allowing huge numbers of people to gather in an incredibly dense, centralized location, is fascinating in its own right. Here’s a great breakdown of how engineers and designers handle the complex infrastructure needs of tourist destinations.
Syncing is a hard technical problem, which
Marco Bambini
argues is a big reason that local-first applications aren’t more popular. Most of his anecdotes ring true to my experience.

Science

Science fiction fans may be interested to note that scientists have successfully used cryopreserved mouse stem cells that spent 6 months in space to produce healthy baby mice back in the lab. This is a big deal because between the weird gravity, radiation, and messed-up sun exposure, spaceflight can damage eggs and sperm. We’re not at the point of “deep sleep” generation ships yet, but it was an interesting study that took an important step in that direction.
This article, about the difference between organisms and machines, got deep into the nitty gritty of how cells differ from circuit boards, and I learned a lot from it. I appreciated the nuanced take and that it didn’t oversimplify. “The unreliability of biological building blocks is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cells are better thought of as active agents which pursue goals than passive mechanical parts.” It made me think hard about what problems are best suited for non-deterministic AI outcomes, and when I really want to use a program where the outcome will always be the same.
Here’s a neat investigation of the various ways you can mess up a cake. I learned a lot about baking, and about the value of experimentation.

Psychology

I am generally wary of psychology experiments thanks to a combination of the Replication Crisis, how incentives work, and my own experiences in psychology classes, but this 5,000-person experiment live at a TEDx event in Buenos Aires was an incredibly compelling update on the “wisdom of the crowds” heuristic. “If the answers from averaging individuals were good, the average of the consensus answers was even better. […] The implications for collective decision making are startling. Asking for discussion for just 1 minute means you can make a better estimate with approximately 1.4% of the people. A large efficiency gain!”
On the topic of psychology more generally, I loved this article about how psychology experiments are gardens, not digsites, which claims (among other things) “When studies provoke consistent behavior, it’s not because they’ve uncovered a universal law of human cognition. It’s because they’ve built a reliable garden that is able to get consistent framings.”
This was a really neat perspective on when interdisciplinary conversations are worth having: a lot less often than I (a determined generalist) previously believed.

Books

Note: The Amazon links are affiliate links. I earn a small kickback if you buy stuff using one of those links.

This was a really neat reading list based on RPG sourcebooks. It’s a fascinating look at classic speculative fiction and meaty nonfiction that inspired popular RPGs like Dungeon & Dragons, compiled in one spot. By definition the books have been vetted by people who are some of society’s most hardcore nerds. I wrote about the value of reading the classics awhile back, so I was delighted to find such a well-rounded list compiled in one spot.
I enjoyed A Drop of Corruption, the sequel to the Hugo-Award winning The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. The worldbuilding in this series continues to be stellar, the mysteries are quite well done, and there weren’t any weird dives into questionable ethics this time. Instead, we got some interesting meditations on how the “unsung heroism” of dedicated bureaucrats is critical for society to function.
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte was good enough that I read all of it in a week, and my son enjoyed listening to parts of it as well. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about dentition, fossil records, evolutionary trees, continental drift, and a thousand other things I somehow found interesting even though the author loves dinosaurs and I don’t normally care about dinosaurs at all. If you’re looking for a solid pop science book that keeps environmental moralizing to a minimum, I recommend this one wholeheartedly.

I hope you find something interesting here to learn from! Despite the kind comments on last month’s neat stuff list, I’m still a bit self-conscious about this kind of linkspost. Some people really don’t like them and they feel a bit derivative, but I for one always like it when guys like Zvi and Scott Alexander do big roundups like this, so… as before: here you go, enjoy!

And feel free to share anything you read lately that you think I might like 🙏