Documenting Life

“I was struck by the familiarity of the tone and structure of the descriptions of these extreme beauty routines: the exhaustively enumerated but still unexplained accessories, the painstaking multi-step cycles, the stubborn personal theories, the air of weary hard-won confidence from long hours of research. Over the years I have read some very similar paragraphs about hi-fi systems, S.L.R. cameras, espresso machines, and other objects of obsessive hobbyism on message boards, mailing lists, and forums”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-corporate-thrillers-tell-us

“A few days a notable event happened in the course of not just the Russo-Ukraine War but also in modern, machine-defined war. The Ukrainians assaulted and took a Russian position using only machines—both UAVs and UGVs (drones and pilotless land vehicles). Not a single Ukrainian soldier was put in harms way, while the Russians ended up losing humans, some of which were even filmed surrendering to the Ukrainian machines”

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-usa-does-not-understand-war

“Instead, Labour offers up its book of coupons, an ill-formed lattice of sticking-plaster solutions that nobody will feel the benefit of and for which nobody will thank it, coupled with a raft of promises it cannot remotely keep. And of course, the net effect is not zero. Rather, it maintains the dangerous fallacy that household expenditure is not simply an imperfect function of a lucid economy but a kind of lever to be pulled and yanked by politicians, tying this and every subsequent government to the tyranny of the monthly bill”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/labour-energy-price-crisis-energy-security-reform

“Baumol recognized that this principle extended across the entire economy, beyond farms and opera houses. Some sectors, such as growing corn and making electronics, have become more efficient and productive thanks to new technology, trade, and automation. But other sectors— especially services, such as haircuts, theater performances, and watching toddlers in daycare—still require as much labor as they did before the Industrial Revolution”

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-cost-disease-is-the-secret-force

“big publishing houses are generating hits by trawling self-published offerings on Amazon and scooping up anything with sales momentum. They are ever so slightly moving away from being reliable curators of fine writing and great storytelling to acting as distribution outlets for whatever is hot, because it’s hot. To borrow a term that was popular in the telecom world I briefly inhabited, publishers are edging toward becoming dumb pipes, carrying data across a network without adding any value or control over it.

I don’t want to overstate this, because much of what is being published is being published as ever it was, but there’s definite movement in the dumb pipe direction. The big houses are increasingly relying on upstream signals—whether Amazon rankings or TikTok virality or Goodreads buzz—rather than editorial conviction in their acquisitions”

https://shush.substack.com/p/shy-girl-is-a-window-to-the-future

“In a way the modern big-club coach takes the job with the full awareness that they are basically a narrative device, a reset button to press when things get sticky, a meat sacrifice that allows everyone else to indulge the illusion of renewal. You can’t shift the owners and you can’t sell an entire playing squad. So the purpose of the manager is essentially to be fired: to be responsible for the things they’re not really responsible for, to be immediately disposable, to provide the illusion of a simple solution where none exists”

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/mar/18/liverpool-arne-slot-premier-league-champions-league-football

“The proverb “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” ought to be seen in this context. If you really are at the stage of development where the only tool you have is a hammer, then it strikes me that it’s incredibly sensible to go around looking at your various problems, and seeing if any of them could be improved by a bit of hammering”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/everything-is-a-nail-or-at-least

“it is important to understand that trolling is not simply about being obnoxious on the internet. It is about baiting people. The term itself arguably comes from a form of fishing. The victory came not from being horrible per se, but from getting people worked up, making them care. It gave rise to a moral economy with a single, absolute rule: the worst thing you can be is someone who meant it”

https://www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/on-radical-sincerity

“The woman across from you at the coffee shop may be someone who will never ever want to fuck you – that is often the case – but she’s also not a jewel locked in a vault that only a six-foot-three hedge fund manager with a Greek statue’s bone structure can crack. Rather, she’s a human being with free will and a body that wants things, a mind that gets lonely sometimes, a heart that may like very much to find someone else to press against in the dark… a person, in other words”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-incels-veto-and-other-observations