substack
Peter Turchin, the ecologist who founded cliodynamics, treats history as a science: quantitative models of why states rise and fracture — elite overproduction, popular immiseration, the demography of polities — tested across centuries of data and then pointed at present-day America and Europe. Contestable and partly paywalled, but nothing else on the shelf does this.
March 16, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape episode on surveillance, Gwern's writing process revealed, and Martha Nussbaum on why fear is toxic to democracy.
February 16, 2026
An EconTalk episode on America's WWII production miracle, Gwern's scaling hypothesis revisited, and Scott Alexander introduces the AI 2027 scenario.
July 13, 2026
Scott Alexander's team publishes its plan for AI going well, Joel Mokyr defends his Nobel thesis, and Ted Gioia argues the Odyssey belongs in the music department.
