---
title: 'Reading materials'
date: '2025-10-20'
tags: ['reading']
draft: false
summary: What does Jack read?
---

_Author's Note: This was all done and written up a few months ago - I somehow forgot to publish it!_

So I find myself waiting on a job to finish and I feel... rather overwhelmed by the stuff to read, so I'll instead write about how I do so.

I am a prolific reader and fill most of my idle time reading one thing or another. There are several sources this comes from:
  - IGM polls: 80 econ experts polled on timely questions. If you want to find out what the right answer is to something quickly, this is a great way of doing it.
  - Best of econ twitter newsletter: the best of economics.
  - Matt Levine. I read every single newsletter he puts out and love most of them.
  - Hackernews: I have an alfred shortcut to poll the top of alfred for ~a day. I'll tend to open everything that seems vaguely interesting and stash it in a set of chrome tabs. I'll try and visit it after several hours to see the comments made by others.
  - Zvi's newsletter!
  - The Economist: the least-bad mainsteam source. I still really dislike it; I'll entirely skip the US and UK sections, I... strongly dislike the editors of both sections. The rest are ok.
  - Random book recommendations, usually one a quarter. There's a lot of quality under here; some of my favorites:
    - Godel Escher Bach
    - A Practical Guide to Evil
    - Slouching Towards Utopia
    - The Power Broker

Book hate list:
  - What's Our Problem


I also am on reddit, but I (regrettably) don't see much quality in it besides the occasional BadEconomics post. Neoliberal and Destiny is probably closest to me,
but they ran into the problem of attracting tons of people who don't actually think through positions and just like to signal seriousness and left bash. Very boring to read the 1000th take praising the Germans maintaining the black zero debt policy even during negative nominal interest rates.

To manage all of this, I have a chrome tab monitor that shows how many tabs are open; most of them are tabs that I have yet to read. Hitting ~250 means it's time to focus on getting it down. I try to have it hover around 50.
