Category: Misc

When I saw the post above, my response was “that’s the kind of bookstore I would like to own” — just tons of books and never any customers to bother you. It got me thinking about an old bookstore I used to go to in a small town, the kind of town with only one stop sign. The store was in an old log cabin from probably the turn of the century or so — no straight walls or 90-degree corners to be seen. The shelves were filled with books, but there were also piles of books on the floor, and the sorting method on the shelves might have made sense to someone, but not me — it didn’t appear to be alphabetical or by topic.

When I spoke to the older lady who ran the store, she appeared to be almost completely uninterested in selling any books. She was happy to talk about them until the cows came home — favourite authors, new books and old books, anything related to books. Or the weather for that matter. But she never mentioned how much a book cost, and when you asked to buy one it seemed like she just made up a price on the spot. And she seemed almost sad to let it go (maybe I am making this up but it seemed that way to me).

There was an overstuffed arm chair in the corner that looked very lived-in, with a small table that had a vase of flowers and a teapot and a cup and saucer, and a pile of books. Of course, there were cats who came and went — I have no idea whether she owned them or not, they paid no attention to her. And as I left the last time (she closed it not long afterwards and someone sells weed out of there now) I thought what a perfect life that would be. I honestly can’t even remember whether she had a cash register or not.

The bookstore below feels similar, although they do sell books somewhat more enthusiastically. It’s the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris, right across the Seine from Notre Dame cathedral. It was opened in 1951 by George Whitman, and named after a bookstore of the same name that was founded in 1919 and closed in 1941. In addition to selling books, it houses aspiring writers in exchange for helping out around the bookstore — more than 30,000 people have slept in the beds found tucked between bookshelves. The shop’s motto, “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise”, is written above the entrance to the reading library.

Sean Penn always knew that rescuing Jacob Ostreicher from his years of Bolivian imprisonment would be difficult. Ostreicher, a then-52-year-old Hasidic businessman who had moved to the country from Brooklyn to manage a rice farm, got stuck there for two and a half years after he was accused of money laundering and criminal organization. His detainment in one of Bolivia’s most brutal prisons had attracted international attention — ABC News’ Nightline had run a segment about his incarceration; it was covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, and the Bolivian and Jewish press. It seemed like he would never get back to the States. Until suddenly, in December 2013, he returned. The Bolivian justice minister claimed Ostreicher had slipped away while out of prison on house arrest. Chaya Gitty Weinberger, Ostreicher’s daughter, told the Times that her father had been “dropped off in Pacific waters,” then released — but only after her uncle had negotiated a ransom. A State Department spokesperson would only confirm to news organizations that Ostreicher was in the United States. What really happened remained a mystery. (via NY mag)

This Nobel Prize winner’s invention can generate pure drinking water from the air

A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says. The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions. Atoco, a company that Yaghi founded, said its units, comparable in size to a 20ft shipping container and powered entirely by ultra-low-grade thermal energy, could be placed in local communities to generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day, even if centralised electricity and water sources were interrupted by drought or storm damage. Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry, said the invention would change the world and benefit islands in the Caribbean. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “How Sean Penn saved a man trapped in a Bolivian prison”

(from Northwestern comp-sci prof Jessica Hullman)

Referencing my desire to disprove that AI is “merely a stochastic parrot,” Claude told me that “political theory may be the one field where ‘stochastic parrot’ is actually a compliment, since the whole discipline consists of creatively recombining things Tocqueville and Mill already said.” Ouch.

Professors at top universities are — in good part because of what it now takes to get a good job in the field — more focused on publishing erudite contributions to niche debates in scholarly journals which only a handful of their colleagues will ever read than on teaching and mentoring the ever-dwindling ranks of their students.

Yascha Mounk gets an AI to write an academic paper in political theory and says the result is more or less indistinguishable from papers written by experts in the field

This interesting fact comes from a Longread about the success of the Silence of the Lambs movie: