March / April / May 2026 Reading

Books

• Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (1998)
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1980)
• Illuminations, Walter Benjamin ed. Hannah Arendt (1969)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
• The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt (2000)
• Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History", Michael Löwy (2005)
• Last Words: Large Language Models and the AI Apocalypse, Paul Kockelman (2024)
• Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1809)
• Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño (1996)

Papers

• SimpleFold: Folding Proteins is Simpler than You Think, Yuyang Wang et al. (2025)
• olmOCR 2: Unit Test Rewards for Document OCR, Jake Poznanski et al. (2025)
• Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model, Nicholas Sofroniew et al. (2026)
• NarraBench: A Comprehensive Framework for Narrative Benchmarking, Sil Hamilton et al. (2026)
• Too Long, Didn't Model: Decomposing LLM Long-Context Understanding With Novels, Sil Hamilton et al. (2025)
• Attention Flows: Tracing LLM Conceptual Engagement via Story Summaries, Rebecca M. M. Hicke et al. (2026)
• CEI: A Benchmark for Evaluating Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models, Jon Chun et al. (2026)
• Natural Language Autoencoders Produce Unsupervised Explanations of LLM Activations, Kit Fraser-Taliente et al. (2026)

Blogs / Essays

• A Claude of the Seven Kingdoms, Maia Mindel
• Generative modelling in latent space, Sander Dieleman
• Computing sharding with einsum, Edward Z. Yang
• What Would Non-Linear Features Actually Look Like?, Liv Gorton
• Hill-Climbing ARC-AGI-3, Alexis Fox
• 2023, Dean W. Ball
• Cosma Shalizi Is Aware of All Internet Traditions, Ben Recht
• China and the Future of Science, Tanner Greer
• Why Poetry Is a Variety of Mathematical Experience, Peli Grietzer
• The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon
• In the City of Fury, Maia Mindel
• Is Labor a Luxury in the Long Run?, Philip Trammell
• After Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI Alignment, Peli Grietzer
• Building Political Superintelligence, Andy Hall
• The Dostoevskian Moment, Palladium
• Varieties of Doom, John David Pressman
• Feeding Ever Forward, Maxim Raginsky
• Fear of Breakdown, Kate Wagner
• The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite, Tanner Greer
• Using Group Theory to Explore the Space of Positional Encodings for Attention, Jane Street
• AI Policy Must Fail Gracefully, Nat Purser
• Teaching Fundamentals of Machine Learning, Kyunghyun Cho
• The Politics of Jobless Prosperity, Andy Hall
• AI as Social Technology, Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi
• The Great Zombification, Owen Yingling
• Goethe's Elective Affinities, Walter Benjamin (1924–25)
• On Grindslop, Will Manidis
• China's AI Optimism Isn't What It Seems, Zilan Qian
• Party in the Permanent Underclass, Jasmine Sun
• Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind, Anne Carson
• Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo XIV
• Is AI Going to Destroy Our Lives?, Kyla Scanlon
• A Cascade of Conscientiousness, Dean W. Ball