This clever confection is a mystery about murderers who don’t kill people and murders that mysterious do not occur. It’s spun sugar, but in the days after the murder of Alex Pretti, perhaps confectionery is what we require.

January 27, 2026 (permalink)

Winner of a Hugo for Best Novella, this is the story of a tea monk — a sort of itinerant psychotherapist — who meets a robot on the road. Robots were emancipated long ago, and long ago they left and absented themselves in the wilderness. Now, a volunteer has been sent to check up on how the humans are doing. The result is very heavy on exposition, and indeed nearly everything here is exposition. The robot, whose name is Splendid Speckled Mosscap, owes something to Iain M. Banks but is exceptionally well drawn.

January 22, 2026 (permalink)

For some time, I’ve needed a sounder foundation for my claim (in Uncle Fred’s Book) that Jews are inclined to argue. It’s true, as my cousin reminds me, that this goes without saying and really needs no justification. I want to have the footnote, just in case.

This is perfect. I’ve been reading a lot of Twitter from Fania Oz-Salzberger about October 7 and the ensuing war; she, along with Simon Schama and Simon Sebag-Montefiori, has made consistent good sense.

This volume a wonderful essay on strong women in (and out of) the Bible, some terrific notes on humor, and demonstrates a wonderful (and I think sound) approach to the problem that the ultra-orthodox pose to secular Jews.

Also, this was a delightful read.

January 19, 2026 (permalink)

A fascinating research report from a fascinating researcher. Wolfram studies cellular automata, which are very small and simple models of abstract computation in which each “cell” adjusts its state according to the state of some number of neighbors. These automata are even simpler than neural networks, but they, too, can learn. It appears that machine learning, in this case at least and perhaps in all cases, including animals and people, may be a matter of sampling lots of abstract computations and refining those that seem to have some slight utility for addressing the current situation.

January 4, 2026 (permalink)

Reid set out to write a love story, and it’s rather adorable. I’m struck that a Lesbian love story set in a time I remember can seem sweetly nostalgic, but here we are. Not everything about our time is awful.

Reid missed that, in searching for colorful background, she also committed herself to writing a School Story, or possibly a Boot Camp Story. Joan and Vanessa are Astronaut Candidates in the early 1980s. It doesn’t really seem like the 1980s: the book unfolds a dozen years after Stonewall, but it never seems to have occurred to Asst. Prof. Joan Goodwin that she might be gay. Allison Bechdel figured in out when she went to college (in 1979); Joan is about a decade older and has a PhD, but then again she’s a Texan. The obligatory training scenes are sometimes good and sometimes feel tacked together.

This is also a Flight Story, and this is a missed opportunity. Reid isn’t that interested in astronomy (Joan’s field) or flying (Vanessa’s passion), and has a better idea of how she might pitch astronomy to her readers than piloting. That’s a shame because, from a very early stage in the first chapter, the reader knows precisely where this is heading: Vanessa Ford is going to get her dream of piloting a space shuttle and be taught to be careful what you wish for.

Despite all this, I quite liked this book.

December 22, 2025 (permalink)

It is 1989, and the sleepy Austrian border town of Darkenbloom proceeds on its way, not yet knowing that history has not, in fact, ended. A stranger comes to town, looking for mass graves. A group of students come to restore the abandoned Jewish cemetery. The town physician, who has been there since his 1930s assignment to replace Dr. Bernstein, wants to retire. Dr. Alois, who used to be assistant Gauleiter, wants to do small favors and offer advice. And Farmer Faludi wants to build a big water tank is the disused Rotenstein meadow.

December 19, 2025 (permalink)

This reflection on AI and its shortcomings, published in 2024, is an able argument that machines are not and will not become intelligent, that they merely fool us by writing the sorts of things a person might write. That was what I thought in 2024, too, pretty much. I do not think that position is supportable today, save by adopting a vitalist position that amounts to insisting on ensoulment. Yes, it is hard to think of intelligence that is not embodied, but we have a name for people who think about things that are not easy to think about, and that name is “philosopher.”

Claude Sonnet 4.5, for example, is quite good at thinking about food and cooking. I asked it for some ideas for using leftover roast beef; it suggested hash, or a composed salad, or a stroganoff. From previous discussions I know that Claude is not a fan of classical roux-thickened sauces, so I asked if it had ideas for a modern stroganoff. “Yes!” it replied, suggesting crème fraîche in place of sour cream, fresh pappardelle in place of egg noodles, reduced beef stock for body, and asian mushrooms in place of the usual white mushrooms. Claude was anxious that the beef be sliced thinly and only barely heated. Claude, of course, has never had dinner, but it sure knows how to talk about food. (On classical music, however, Claude seems to be completely as sea.)

Vallor holds that a machine cannot be intelligent because it is not like us: it has no body, it has no senses, it has no past. All it knows is how to make plausible noises. But that may be all we know, too; it's a disturbing thought, but there it is.

December 19, 2025 (permalink)

A fine short biography of the philosopher who explored, among much else, the questions of whether language is complete: are there things that can be known but cannot be expressed in language? Wittgenstein had a knack for knowing people: at school, there was a boy a couple of classes ahead of him named Hitler. His brother Paul was a concert pianist, and when he lost an arm in the First World War he went right ahead an commissioned a repertoire of piano work for the left hand, a collection that would prove invaluable to Leon Fleisher when Fleisher lost the use of his right hand. Wittgenstein was also strange and perverse fellow who quarreled with his admirers, disparaged his teachers, and deplored his own character. Essentially friendless, when Vienna grew unwelcoming to Jews he slotted directly into a lectureship at Cambridge. He frequently lived in people’s spare rooms. Wittgenstein was impatient with amateur philosophy, but seldom read philosophy himself and cost himself a good deal of trouble because, wanting a degree, he refused to cite sources in his dissertation.

November 27, 2025 (permalink)