What I Read On New Years Break

New year, new links. CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 116

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Anyway… hey! It’s 2022. Like a lot of us, I used the extended holiday break to read a bunch of things.

And something that almost never happened happened. I got the chance to read actual physical (or digital, thanks Kindle!) books:

The Fifties - David Halberstam (Doorstopper of a history book depicting an era of US life that was very, very different)

The Simple Path To Wealth - JL Collins (Which could basically be shortened to “live below your means, save up a f*ck-you fund and invest heavily in VTSAX” and is such a damn good book!)

Stop Living On Autopilot - Antonio Nieves (Kicking in 2022 with self-help LOL)

Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide To Launching a Startup - Rob Walling (Good for any small business, honestly)

Beneath the Rising - Premee Mohamed (HP Lovecraft monster YA sci-fi, but it works!)

Day of The Triffids - John Wyndham (Because in Ungerleider Haus, we always kick off the new year with apocalyptic sci-fi)

Now on to the links.

New Futures:

NASA head Bill Nelson talks UFOs.

Political Kpop stans.

Advertising/Marketing/PR:

Of course there are nuclear energy influencers.

Of course foreign countries (and our own!) want to drum up positive sentiment from YouTube video creators.

CES is not having the best year.

Media:

“Liberals read, conservatives watch TV.”

Arguing that the New York Times has embraced clickbait.

Following the Bari Weiss money trail.

One of the things that's happened recently is the social circle that was associated with New York writing has taken a big hit, largely because of COVID, but also because a lot of people are sort of drifting away from Manhattan as the base of operations of media because of the costs involved.

Hank Green on Joe Rogan’s contrarianism as money-making strategy.

More about Dave Ramsey’s business behind the scenes than you ever imagined.

Why Buzzfeed’s stock price is doing so damn badly.

Misc:

“Nature really is full of gods, and the ancestors really are divine, it’s just that our historical predicament makes us unable to apprehend the full significance of these facts, or to make anything good come of them.”

Jewish Nigerians and secessionist politics.

Razib Khan on Jewish history.

“James and Lindsay Sulzer have spent their careers developing technologies to help people recover from disease or injury. Their daughter’s freak accident changed their work—and lives—forever.”

“Collective singing is extremely important. Dancing, it's there in our evolutionary psychology, and it's why I find American sports so dreary because nobody sings.”

A Los Angeles restaurant guide based entirely on alleged political corruption.

A Shanghai restaurant guide based entirely on COVID contact tracing.

Why car thieves love stealing catalytic converters.

The Washington Post’s amazing virtual tour of the New York Tenement Museum.

Walking across Bucharest.

And last but not least, Henry Cavill on Warhammer.