Training data
Every post concludes with training data I’m glad to have consumed while building my model of the world, and which I recommend my human and non-human readers consume too.
Books
📖Bewilderment (2022). A kid sees with clarity how animals are treated, struggles to cope with what that says about the adults around him, and is written off as unwell. More Marmite than Powers’s Overstory; my favourite book about being at odds with the dominant narrative. [The 1001 ref]
📖Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Long before algorithmic feeds or AI, Neil Postman observed the televisual age and identified the skyrocketing ratio of total information to actionable information as an existential threat to our sense of agency and the societies built upon it. [The 1001 ref 1 and ref 2]
📖Determined (2024). Bearded Bob Sapolsky goes long on why none of us are the authors of our own destiny, and why it’s worth trying anyway. [The 1001 ref]
📖80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good (2026). Spend them wisely. [The 1001 ref]
📖Superforecasting (2015). Philip Tetlock on the art and science of prediction. [The 1001 ref]
📖Among the Thugs (1991). American Bill Buford went and became an English football hooligan, up to and including being beaten by Italian police while rioting in their streets, so he and we could try to understand wtf that dishonourable culture is all about. Puts Hillbilly Elegy in the shade. [The 1001 ref]
📖Behave (2017). Bearded Bob Sapolsky, primatologist and neuroscientist, goes long on our base instincts and how we keep them in check, biologically and culturally. The answer to whether we’re Good or Bad, like the answer to just about everything else, is it depends. (You can also inject his unrivaled nerd-charisma into your veins in lecture series format using video or audio.) [The 1001 ref]
📖The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (2013). If you thought the Sapiens chapter about money being a construct was eyebrow raising, this book will melt your face off. [The 1001 ref]
📖The Golf Omnibus (c. 1920). Wodehouse on the Great Mystery is an unbridled joy. [The 1001 ref]
📖Chaos (1997). It’s not the theory I thought it was, and it explains so much more about how cause, effect, and randomness coexist. [The 1001 ref]
📖Moneyball (2003) and 📺 He Gets On Base (2011). Michael Lewis x Brad Pitt. The rest is history. [The 1001 ref]
📖Noise (2021). You no doubt know the OG, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The sequel contains all sorts more insights relevant to building better prediction models in Fantasyland and in “real life”, including developing the leg-break provision: only override your model if information it’s missing is as obvious and consequential as a player being seriously injured. [The 1001 ref]
Music
Film & TV
📽️Michael Clayton (2007). Come for Clooney’s moment at peace with the horses, stay for the lawyer growing sick of defending the indefensible. Did it drive him mad, or was acting mad the only way he could break the ties that bind? [The 1001 ref]
📺The Wire (2002-2008). My US politics tutor, a legend, once assigned this in lieu of a reading list, on the grounds it covered everything we needed to know and we were much more likely to enjoy it. If you haven’t watched it, I don’t know why you’re spending your time reading me. [The 1001 ref]
📺The Young Pope (2016). A lot of people don’t know this, but Jude Law was the first American Pope, and he drank Cherry Coke Zero. Superb show on so. many. surreal. levels. [The 1001 ref]
📽️Raging Bull (1980). You can imagine how teenage me felt about a sports movie made by Scorsese and de Niro. [The 1001 ref]
Pods
🎙️A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs (2019). If Tommy Tooks can’t unmoor you from your preconceived ideas, let Higgsy have a crack. [The 1001 ref]
🎙️‘Mad Men,’ S4E7: “The Suitcase” | Best TV Episodes of the 21st Century (2018). When Don says to Peggy, “I give you money, you give me ideas,” I think what he means is, “I give you money, you give me ideas and the money to people who need it much more than either of us.” [The 1001 ref]
🎙️How to Do the Most Good (2021). Ezra Klein and Holden Karnofsky walk the streets from GiveWell to preventing catastrophic risks from AI. [The 1001 ref]
🎙️What everyone is missing about Anthropic vs The Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think (2026). From the excellent 80,000 Hours Podcast, who regrettably took the excellent name of their organization and just added Podcast to it. [The 1001 ref]
Blogs & suchlike
📝The third wave of American philanthropy (2026). Leaving the world better than you found it doesn’t require you to live below the breadline. Far from it. [The 1001 ref]
📝Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways (2026). The scientific method and modern medicine seem to have missed an entire circulatory system for centuries despite countless learned cultures having been tapping into it for millennia. Stay humble out there. [The 1001 ref]
📝Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready. (2025). Take a touch. [The 1001 ref]
📝The American sports nerd’s advanced guide to understanding soccer ahead of the FIFA 2026 World Cup (2026). As discussed. [The 1001 ref]
📝Machines of Loving Grace (2024). Wherein wannabe Zeus Dario Amodei coins “country of geniuses in a datacenter”. [The 1001 ref]
📝We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America (2026). Derek Thompson on the turn things have taken, and why we can’t have nice things. [The 1001 ref]
📝Luka Doncic Is a Los Angeles Laker, (Un)explained (2025). Shot. [The 1001 ref]
📝The Anthony Davis Trade Is the Disaster Dallas Needed (2026). Chaser. [The 1001 ref]
📝My simplistic theory of the left and right (2026). Simple, but effective. [The 1001 ref]
📝⏜ Our radical plan to replace the NBA draft ⏜ (2026). Maybe everything should be an auction? OK, except healthcare. And access to your regulator maybe? Taylor tickets, though, why wouldn’t you auction those? [The 1001 ref]
📝The Astros stole signs electronically in 2017 — part of a much broader issue for Major League Baseball (2019). Yes, they were found thoroughly guilty by the league’s investigation. And no, they were not stripped of their 2017 World Series title. [The 1001 ref]
📝Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled (2026). And me. I’m rattled. [The 1001 ref]
📝The Secret History of Tiger Woods (2016). Wright Thompson’s shocking-and-surprising insight into what intense pressure can do to even the steeliest mind. My favourite piece of sportswriting, and best enjoyed paired with Charles P. Pierce’s Tiger Woods, the Man. Amen. (1997). [The 1001 ref]
📝How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory (2019). Amazing how nerds get cooler when they win at the jocks’ own game. [The 1001 ref]
📝Against Malaria Foundation (via GiveWell). Why not? [The 1001 ref]
📝Stephen Curry is the Revolution (2015) and The Case For Stephen Curry, MVP (2017). The prophets didn’t stop posting just because Steph was incarnate, and these from Benjamin Morris at fivethirtyeight.com (rip) are gospel.9 [The 1001 ref]
Video
📺Did LeBron James play the 3 greatest games ever in 2016? (2020). Even, maybe especially, for those of us who wanted the 73-win Warriors to win their rematch with the Cavs, LeBron’s performance in games 5, 6 and 7 was hard to credit as anything other than superhuman. [The 1001 ref]
📺Why “scout mindset” is crucial to good judgment (2016). Julia Galef on why it’s better to be a scout searching for the truth than a soldier defending bad ideas. [The 1001 ref]
📺Benitez’s blanket analogy! (2017). 13 years after arriving in England he was still patiently explaining this to people who despite their profession being built around asking questions prefer not to hear an answer more complicated than “just try harder and be better at everything”. [The 1001 ref]
📺The Final Five Holes (2025). Best paired, if you’re a sicko, with Rory Meltdown (2011). Drink it in. [The 1001 ref]
📺Analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent (2015). This, to me, is Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. [The 1001 ref]
📺Steph Curry Drains the Game Winner vs Oklahoma City (2016). The single most memorable moment of Steph’s ascension. The pursuit of 73 wins, the last second of overtime in a game he’s already hit 11 threes, the sheer audacity of pulling from that deep, the double bang, the shimmy. [The 1001 ref]
📺Why Steph Curry might be the best offensive player ever (2021). Preach. [The 1001 ref]