Irregular Reading Roundup (#2)

Not NOT my favourite reads of 2025

Another roundup of words I’ve enjoyed sometime in the past however long it’s been since the last one of these.

Blog Posts

REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr - The Psmiths

Everything the Psmiths write is great, but this review of “Leap of Faith”- about the Bush administration’s decision-making in the run-up to the Iraq War- stands out for the quality of ideas from both the original author and the Psmiths themselves.

The highlights from the book are, by turns, shocking, hilarious, and deeply upsetting, but what the review has to say about decision-making in large organisations (or, as they put it, in “strangely-shaped minds”) resonates far beyond this specific- admittedly pretty bad- example.

Anyway, one big downside of the US government as a whole making the decision to invade Iraq “unconsciously” is that it was never actually debated or discussed in blunt term. This meant no hashing it out in a big room, no arguments sharpening each other, no big list of pros and cons, and, crucially, no big list of risks and how to mitigate them. Nobody even knew what the invasion would look like. Were we going in with a light footprint and knocking out Saddam, then leaving again? Were we engaging in a long-term occupation? Were we just bombing? Was the goal to free the Iraqi people? To fight al-Qaeda? To get rid of the WMD? Nobody knew the answers to these questions. Or perhaps everybody knew the answers, but they all had different ones in mind.

I sometimes think that most bad outcomes happen like this- not from decisions made badly, but from decisions not made at all.

The British economy cannot sustain its contradictions - Chris Bayliss

It’s easy to compare modern Britain- grey, damp, impoverished, and riddled with grinding bureaucracy- with late Soviet Russia (fun, too!). Things are probably Not That Simple™, but it’s hard not to nod along to parts like this:

In the Soviet Union, people’s pay lost any real meaning because, without any supply of consumer goods, there was nothing for workers to spend their money on. So, productivity dwindled because there was no point in doing anything more than pretending to work and not causing a fuss. In Britain, with our increasingly rights-based approach to resource allocation, we see a similar flatlining in worker productivity, as the non-working population grows. The link between production and consumption has been broken.

Under Marxism-Leninism, an authoritarian system of government attempted to prove a hypothetical theory of economics by brute political force. In today’s Britain, we see a growing trend of economic matters being redefined as questions of rights and obligations justiciable by law. Whereas the Soviets ultimately attempted and failed to prove that the realm of economics could be subverted to political will, in Britain today we are attempting to create a system in which the economic realm is subservient to that of jurisprudence.

The Great Data Integration Schlep - Sarah Constantin

Most normal people’s experience of AI extends to using ChatGPT to make shopping lists and/or compose amusing limericks about their pets. They would readily admit to not understanding the algorithms behind these tools; they don’t even realise how little they understand about how the datasets they’re trained on are mined, scraped, cleaned and structured into something that an algorithm can work on.

You’d think that this should be table stakes for talking sensibly about AI, but for some people ignorance is no barrier to an opinion (the tax rate is MARGINAL, Darren). People confidently tell me AI will replace me at work, apparently unaware that most of my job is copy-pasting data between systems that don’t talk to each other. To train my replacement, someone would first have to wrangle all this data into a clean, structured format, thereby eliminating the need to shunt it around in the first place.

Every working data scientist will tell you they spend more time on “data cleaning” than actually running any statistical or machine-learning models.

What does that mean?

Removing commas. Formatting adjustments generally. Normalization. Imputing missing data in some consistent way.

And, understanding what your data sources actually refer to so that when you make judgment calls they make any practical sense at all.

Data cleaning doesn’t seem intellectually challenging, but it is surprisingly difficult to automate, in a way that I think would make David Chapman smirk — there are unenumerable ways you might need to “clean” data to get it into a standard format appropriate for training a model, and it empirically never seems to be possible to write a program that just does that for you, though of course individual parts of the process can be automated.

Having spent a little time in the data mines (I still shiver at a double-barrelled surname or an inconsistent date format), I already had some appreciation for the importance of this unglamorous work- this article does the rest.

Numb at Burning Man - Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss, more than anyone else on this list, is self-recommending. This particular one (my favourite since Taylor Swift does not exist) is nominally an account of his experiences at Burning Man, but only in the way that The Lord of the Rings is an account of a long walk. This is some of the best writing anywhere on the internet.

Books

Unsong by Scott Alexander

I re-read this book this year and have recommended it to everyone I know, but I still can’t quite explain why it’s so good. The ideal situation is you just trust me on this one; failing that, consider whether a comedy-thriller based on Kabbalistic wordplay, Gnostic Christianity, and the problem of evil sounds up your street:

In retrospect, there had been omens and portents.

(“We are now approaching lunar sunrise,” said William Anders, “and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.”)

Rivers flowed uphill. A new star was seen in the night sky. A butchered pig was found to have the word “OMEN” written on its liver in clearly visible letters.

(“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”)

Lightning struck in clear weather. Toads fell from the clouds. All ten thousand lakes in Minnesota turned to blood; scientists blamed “phytoplankton”.

(“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”)

A majestic golden eagle flew onto the Vatican balcony as Pope Paul VI was addressing the faithful. The bird gingerly removed the Pontiff’s glasses with its beak, then poked out his left eye before flying away with an awful shriek.

(“And God called the light Day,” said Jim Lovell, “and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”)

A beached whale was found hundreds of miles inland. A baby was born with four eyes.

(“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”)

Pieces of paper with the word “OMEN” written on them fell from the clouds. A beached whale was seen in the night sky. Babies left unattended began to roll slowly, but unmistakeably, uphill.

(“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”)

One of the additional eyes on the four-eyed baby was discovered to be the left eye of Pope Paul VI, missing since the eagle incident. The provenance of the fourth eye was never determined.

(“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place,” said Frank Borman, “and let the dry land appear: and it was so.”)

A series of very precise lightning strikes seared the word “OMEN” into the rust-red sand of the Sonora Desert; scientists blamed “phytoplankton”.

(“And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”)

The New York Stock Exchange rose by perfect integer amounts eleven days in a row. An obstetrician published an article in an obscure medical journal claiming that the kicks of unborn children, interpreted as Morse Code, formed unspeakable and blood-curdling messages.

(“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of – ” [sudden burst of static, then silence])

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Much easier to explain, and certainly one of the best “traditional” (written by a real author, published by a real publisher) books I’ve ever read. It’s a modern retelling of David Copperfield, which I haven’t read; for philistines like me, it’s better described as a novel following a boy through foster care, poverty, and the Appalachian opioid crisis. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and, even more prestigiously, is one of my top five books of all time.

What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.

Into the Night: A Year with the Police by Matt Lloyd-Rose

An ethnography of a year as a Special Constable with the Metropolitan Police in London. The author, a former teacher and carer, had the anthropological curiosity to actually join the police and see how it works from the inside, rather than just commentating from outside, and I think his outsider perspective makes for a different kind of account than a lifelong policeman would have given.

Policing was not what I had expected and it was not what it seemed. Much of it appeared to be care work and youth work conducted bluntly, reluctantly, even punitively. A lot of the officers I met wanted to catch bad guys, not support vulnerable people. It was not that they thought it unimportant - they simply did not think it was their job.

It seems that in the public sector, a range of seemingly disparate roles- catching criminals, teaching students, saving lives- actually wash out into a lot of amateur social work, punctuated occasionally by the excitement of actually doing what you trained for. What’s not- in my experience- shared across these professions is the casual misogyny that runs through the Met as portrayed here, made even more shocking by everything the force has been involved in since the book came out.

The Accidental Soldier by Owain Mulligan

Mulligan’s dispatches from the war in Iraq as a reservist Army officer. Like Lloyd-Rose with the police, he discovers the gap between what soldiering is supposed to be and what it actually is- except he’s also genuinely funny, in the way that makes you laugh out loud on the bus and strangers shuffle politely away from you.

Captain Abdullah pours the tea himself, and Ali and I sit down on a sofa opposite his desk. I pull out the sheaf of paper that Jonty gave me and start scanning the list of questions I’m supposed to ask. By conservative estimate there are about 350,000 of them. I flip the sheaf open at a random page: Q67a: Does the station have Internet access? Yes/No/Unclear Q67b: Does the station have an Internet use policy? Yes – written/Yes – but not written/No Q67c: Does the station have a designated Internet officer? Yes – primary duty/Yes – secondary duty/No I look up from the page and through a broken window into the courtyard outside. The dog we saw earlier is curling one out next to a generator that looks like it’s been salvaged from the wreck of the Titanic. Briefly I wonder if I’ve been given the wrong set of questions, and these are the ones for a police station somewhere else. Like Surrey, for example. I find another random page – uniform policies; health and safety in the workplace; school outreach. I close the sheaf.

As always, you can let me know your thoughts on any of these- or what I should be reading next year- by replying to the email or commenting below.