6. Learn what to look for in an art museum

I’m visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts. Which pictures in particular should I be looking for, and what is some useful context for viewing them?

Why was this chat valuable? “After two visits in three days, I would second the advice I got from this chat.”

Here is the link to the answer.  And know when to ask it to read the local newspapers for you, to learn about a place.

There are some good photos in the piece, including some hitherto unpublished photos of Spinoza.

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• Translated from the Chinese

 

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.

Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?

PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.

COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?

PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.

I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.

He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.

And:

COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?

PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.

The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.

A good episode with many points of interest.  And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.

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2. The new balance of power across companies and governments.

3. Using AI to find Brazil’s next soccer star? (NYT)

4. Token resale markets in everything.

5. A music critic reviews himself at age 93.

6. A claim that the World Cup is damaging market liquidity.

7. Soumaya Keynes on whether ideas are getting harder to find (FT).

8. Biology this year so far.

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Chris Gillett points out something surprising: the US has plenty of electricity generation capacity ready to go, the problem is connecting it to the grid. Grid connection is complicated because on the grid, supply must equal demand at every moment in time. Even without speeding the process, however, we could get more power connected to the grid if we rationalized the ordering of connections.

The main flaw of the interconnection process is that it uses a first-come, first-served queue. This means that high-priority requests can spend years stuck at the back of the line behind other less important ones.

In essence, we have an airport congestion problem in which small Cessnas can bump 747s. Auctions for connection rights are the solution, as pointed out for airports by Vickrey and the classic paper by Rassenti, Smith and Bulfin. Gillett also emphasizes that some loads should be allowed to connect on a flexible basis: if a data center can disconnect or use backup power during the few peak hours each year, it should not have to wait years for firm service.

Gillett also has a very nice explanation of how market prices balance electricity from different sources:

Market prices signal to power plant developers about levels of supply and demand. In the same way, prices balance different energy sources based on the strengths and weaknesses of each. For instance, as more solar panels are built, the value (and therefore price) of power during the middle of the day, when the sun is shining most, adjusts downward. From December 2020 to September 2025, maximum solar output in ERCOT increased from 4 to 29.8 gigawatts. And from 2020 to 2025, the value of power at 1pm relative to the highest-priced hour decreased from 92.9 percent to 38.7 percent. As one technology type becomes overbuilt, prices reflect that and developers react accordingly.

The evolving daily price shape in response to the abundance of solar energy was a signal that the grid needed storage capacity, and power plant developers responded. From 2020 to October 2025, ERCOT went from having almost no battery storage to a combined battery discharge of 8.6 gigawatts. The same process has played out in California and many European markets.

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We now have de facto AI regulation. It’s not obvious why from here on out models that have certain levels of capability or are trained on certain compute sizes won’t have to be reviewed by the government before release.

Realistically, as AI models became more and more powerful this was going to be inevitable (I think it’s too early, but here we are). So now it’s mostly just interesting to think about the implications and scenarios from here. A few would be:

* America gets to control who gets access to frontier intelligence and when. This generally works as long as we remain at the frontier at all times and don’t have a risk of being surpassed. At the moment we have a clear lead in frontier intelligence so this is a good bet, but lots of motivated parties would love to change that.

* This likely creates backlog of AI releases which means that we will see less rapid fire back and forth jumps in model progress. Bull/fine case is that we just get bigger step functions per release at a slower rate and we end up at the same point we would have. Bear case is those incremental smaller jumps were necessary for the continued flywheel of innovation.

* Other countries likely have even more incentive to at least hedge their bets with sovereign AI strategies so aren’t dependent on access to US AI all times. Previously this was relatively moot because the alternative wasn’t good enough, but that could change out of necessity and what we’re seeing in China.

* Open weights obviously a big winner here as it becomes what likely sovereign AI gets built out on, and what (for now) can still be released to the market without the same controls. One interesting question would be how regulation eventually extends to open models, which would have its own set of long term consequences.

Anyway some big updates to everyone’s mental models of AI regulation as a result of the capabilities we’re now seeing in AI. Wild times.

Here is the link.  I would say I have long thought something like this was coming, but am pleased we got in so much early progress “under the wire” up until now.  And here is more from Aaron.

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More than 2 billion people participate annually in Ramadan fasting, making its potential effects on cognitive performance important for workplaces, education and high-stakes decision-making. We study these effects in tournament chess, an incentivised, real-world cognitive task in which move quality can be evaluated objectively by a strong chess engine. We analyse nearly 300,000 games and more than 25 million moves played by almost 10,000 expert players from 178 countries over 10 years. Two validation exercises support our Muslim-status classification, covering almost 11% of the sample and survey evidence indicates substantial Ramadan fasting compliance among Muslim chess players. In the preferred intention-to-treat specification, using pre-game controls, player fixed effects and year-month fixed effects, we find no impact of Ramadan fasting on Muslim players’ overall move quality or shares of optimal and nearly optimal moves, with tightly bounded estimates around zero. Muslim players make 0.13 additional percentage points of large errors during Ramadan, but this small estimate is fragile across alternative measures, samples, Muslim-status definitions, fasting-compliance adjustments and event-study diagnostics, with no evidence of heterogeneous effects, selection bias, or compensatory behavioural adjustments. We conclude there is little robust evidence that Ramadan fasting broadly impairs cognitive performance among expert chess players.

That is from a recently published paper by Samuel Buckland and David Smerdon.  Some claim that people think best when they are just a wee bit hungry?

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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Railways are a golden thread in the history of cricket, making national competition possible in every current Test-playing nation (with the exceptino of the West Indies and Afghanistan).  In later years, we will see railway workers as exporters of cricket to Scotland and Wales and beyond to Britain’s formal and informal commercial empires.  We will see enduring railway-based teams, including in Pakistan the winners of cricket’s most comprehensive first-class victory.

That is from Richard Heller and Peter Oborne, Full Circle: A History of Cricket.  And I had not realized this: “As recently as 1945, 98 percent of Australians had their family origins in Great Britain or Ireland.”

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2. Is it London brutalism if it has plants?

3. The Russian stock market.

4. Which states are trying to deny AI personhood?

5. Chinese political lookism?

6. Recommended songs from the 1960s.

7. Bryan Caplan on UATX.

8. Lawsuit on Fable 5 issues.

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Business formation first jumped in 2020 as the pandemic reorganized work, shopping and logistics. After the pandemic ended, business formation leveled off, but it did not return to its old path. It remained historically high. Moreover, in the past 18 months or so business formation has surged again. Registered Agents Inc tracks new Articles of Organization or Incorporation filed in the 50 states and they report:

Every month in 2026 has set a new formation record, including March, which stands as the highest single-month total in the history of the Business Formation Report. Through May, 2.9 million new businesses have been formed nationwide, the strongest five-month start on record.

Stripe Economics agrees and calls this the age of the solopreneur.  Among businesses using Stripe, recent cohorts are reaching serious transaction volumes faster than earlier cohorts.

The share of businesses (not just solopreneurs) reaching $1 million in cumulative revenue within a year after going live on Stripe was roughly 30% higher for the 2025 cohort as it was for the 2023 cohort, and it was roughly 3x higher for the 2025 cohort than the 2019 cohort.

Furthermore, the trend is not just in the United States. France, where, as the story goes, they have no word for entrepreneur, has also seen business creation reach record levels, driven heavily by micro-entrepreneurs.

The most likely explanation is the devolution of power. A single person armed with Stripe, Shopify, cloud software, automated bookkeeping, and now AI can do what once required a small staff. Dynamism had been on a long secular decline, but we may now be seeing the early stages of an experimental economy—one in which far more people can test ideas, reach customers, and launch firms, some of which will grow very large, very fast.

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St. Mary’s Abbot’s Church in Kensington.

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I think this is the Cursor moment for academia.

The Stanford REAP team has made their move, http://CoPaper.AI is mass-terminating the manual labor of traditional empirical papers. Link: https://copaper.ai/landing

If using large models to write papers before was just about polishing and compiling references for you, then this Project from Professor Ross Griebenow’s team at Stanford is like dropping a nuclear bomb in the empirical circles of social sciences and economics.

The greatest truth is the simplest; the heaviest sword has no edge. Its functions are straightforward. Feed in the raw dataset, and within 30 minutes, it can generate a complete DOCX paper complete with full Stata/R code and publication-quality charts.

It chains together EDA, variable definition, econometric model building (from OLS to advanced DID, regression discontinuity, causal forests) all using an Agent workflow.

Every chart it produces comes with 100% reproducible Stata, R, EViews source code underneath. How many low-quality paper mills and data drones’ jobs will this smash?

Data drones and paper ghostwriters are collectively facing unemployment countdown. Because from now on, for social science papers, AI handles all the entropy-increasing drudgery—humans only need to define the problem.

Here is the link.  Mostly that is not true, so perhaps the Chinese are trying to demoralize us.  But will it never ever be true?  In two years be true?  Less?

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Do not focus the discourse on aliens, rather focus on whether the phenomena are real.  If they are confirmed as real, as many insiders insist, they we can return to debating what they might be.  And focusing on concrete evidence is something a committee can be relatively good at.  Trying to find agreement on “aliens” does not fall into that same category.

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2. Why is China still exporting T-shirts?

3. Greenspan and Keynes crossed paths in 1944.  Clarinet!

4. Robert Shiller opposes AI negativity (NYT).

5. The opportunity cost of Trae is really not that large.  Think in terms of opportunity cost here, not “cost.”  By the time the Wizards need to up the pay of their younger players, Trae’s contract will be expiring.

6. “A new bill seeks to restrict who can and cannot teach a course at the California State University’s 22 campuses. The criterion, though, is pretty simple: to be a professor, you must be human.“

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GLP-1 medications generate large weight loss and may also alter social and economic outcomes. Using the Understanding America Study, I compare women starting GLP-1s for weight loss with matched women who would like to start a GLP-1 but have not. Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline non-employed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters. Existing partnerships do not dissolve, and already-employed women show no upward job mobility. The pattern suggests that part of the female obesity penalty operates at new-match formation rather than only through health or incumbent productivity.

Here is the paper by Rebecca Diamond.  And here is a thread on the paper.  And not everyone believes the size of these estimates.  I do not find them so crazy?  Here is Steven’s dialogue with GPT.

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