The Most Interesting Reads: May 20, 2025
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Dear Friends,
We’ve just launched season two of the podcast I host, The Most Interesting Thing in AI. It’s been a joy to get to host longer, weekly conversations with some of the smartest people in the field. In the first episode of this run, I debated the logic of neurosymbolic AI with Gary Marcus, one of the most unconventional thinkers in the field. His view is that the top companies in the field have all pursued the path of “scaling” that leads, inevitably, to hallucinations and inexplicable behavior. New episodes come every Wednesday, and tomorrow we’ll release my conversation with Audrey Tang, the first digital minister of Taiwan. I sometimes say that AI may kill us all, but if it doesn’t it’ll be because of Audrey. We discuss both the ways AI can strengthen democracy and the kind of open-source work that will be necessary to build humanistic values into the core models. You can see a preview in this short interview I did with her last week in Italy.
Moving to books, I want to recommend three, starting with my dear friend Abby Reyes’s wrenching new release. Back in 1999, just after we had graduated from Stanford, Abby’s boyfriend, Terence Freitas, had traveled to the cloud forests of Colombia to work with the indigenous U’wa people trying to defend their land from oil exploitation. Terence and two other activists were kidnapped and then found murdered, several days later, with their bullet-ridden bodies in a cow pasture just across the border in Venezuela. I remember the agony of the days when no one knew what had happened and then the agony when we did. I will hold with me, forever, the feeling of catching Abby as she collapsed when returning to her apartment the day after we learned of the murders and saw her new mailbox with the label “Reyes/Freitas.” Twenty years later, Abby was sent a letter by the Colombian government asking for her “Truth Demands,” and asking for proof of their relationship through love letters. This sent her on a quest to finally and fully understand what actually happened and why. It is, as she writes, quoting Rilke, a story of entering “the startled space which youth as lovely as a god has suddenly left forever.”
I also loved Andrea Marcolongo’s new book The Art of Running, in which she probes her knowledge of ancient history to understand why she was training for a marathon. Marcolongo is a journalist and a classics scholar and she’s produced a book that is insightful, erudite, and also at points genuinely funny. Runners, she notes, are the first people Dante encounters in the vestibule of hell. And I recently had occasion to reread Daniel Levitin’s 2006 classic, This Is Your Brain on Music, a deep journey into the way music works and the reasons it affects us so deeply. The last time I read the book, I was young enough to smile while learning about the ways our hearing changes as we age. Now I’m sad to learn that I’m too old to hear the strange high pitch that the Beatles put at the end of “A Day in the Life,” perhaps to confuse their dogs and perhaps to make the point that you shouldn’t trust anyone over 40.
I’ve recently been listening to lots of podcasts, most likely because I finally bought a new pair of noise-canceling AirPods after forgetting mine in an airplane seat. I want to start with an interview of A.G. Sulzberger on the issue of press freedom under Donald Trump. We don’t just need to protect the rights of the free press here; we also need to make sure the example of America doesn’t further erode rights around the world. Rich Roll, as usual, had a superb conversation with one of my favorite authors, Alex Hutchinson, about his new book The Explorer’s Gene, which seeks to understand the deep human desire to uncover new things. The conversation has convinced me that I need to start driving more with my GPS off. And I found two conversations on the 80,000 Hours Podcast both unsettling and illuminating. Here is Will MacAskill explaining how AI might lead to a “century in a decade.” And here’s Tom Davidson on how a small group of people with powerful AI could gain power in a coup, which provided lots of fodder for conversation with my eldest son and eldest niece on a long drive up to New Hampshire two weeks ago.
In the new edition of The Atlantic, George Packer offers the smartest, most thoughtful analysis of J.D. Vance and the unknowable question about how much of his political shift comes from changing ideals and how much comes just from opportunism. “The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy,” Packer notes, “sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at ‘childless cat ladies,’ peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X.” And to understand the legal chaos we’re entering, I highly recommend the terrific journalist Reynolds Holding and his new newsletter, Better Judgment.
Speaking of Gary Marcus, I want to recommend the first long story I ever edited of his, from back in 2009, about a woman who everyone thought had a “perfect memory,” which Gary knew is something that doesn’t exist. I also recommend this great Orion essay on raising chickens, and caring for one when a dog sneaks through the fence and bites off half of its rear. Relatedly, Eric Lach has a terrific essay on the uninspiring muddle that is the next race to be mayor of New York City. And this profile of Anthony Weiner, as he attempts to make his comeback, is superb all the way through. But if you just have two minutes to read one thing in this email, I suggest you make it the first few paragraphs of that piece.
Best * N
And a special thanks to Atlantic Re:think for producing the podcast in collaboration with PwC.
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