I just had a discussion with Razib Khan about some of the exciting recent developments in paleogenetics. In 2018, I read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here and was absolutely captivated by the idea that we could learn about cultures, population movements, and other aspects of our past through the analysis of prehistoric, ancient, and more…

Just did a livestream on the importance of “race posting” in right-wing culture. Things have gone well beyond being anti-woke. Young right-wingers have created a horrifying inverse of woke culture where race and attitudes towards racial issues, along with attitudes towards those who dislike racism, become the center of one’s worldview. I argue that…

I did a livestream today with Noah Smith, someone whose writing I have admired for a long time and who I was happy to finally get to meet. We start out by talking about what’s going on with the Trump administration, and all the recent craziness, including the president’s supposed plan for the US to take over Gaza. This blends into discussions about…

David Lynch recently passed away, so Rob and I decided to honor the legendary director by watching two of his movies, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2008), and discussing them. We liked the first film, and debated various interpretations of it, including the standard one and other possible theories. I’m motivated to have a contrarian ta…

The stock market was sent reeling today as a result of the release by the Chinese company DeepSeek of an open source AI model that comes close to or matches the performance of American models, but was created for a fraction of the cost. While traditional models have cost in the range of $100 million to $1 billion to produce, the latest application …

I just did a livestream with Bryan Caplan on Trump’s executive orders on DEI and my role in making them happen. For context, see my post from yesterday. We discuss the history of EO 11246 and Bryan talks about the pressure his dad got from the government to hire more minorities in the airline industry in the 1980s. One point to emphasize is that ev…

I just did a stream on the inauguration and Trump’s potential executive orders, some of which might be signed by the time you watch this. I did this stream with screensharing, so you can follow along as I scroll X, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and read about the Biden pardons, what Trump is expected to do on his first day, and more. …