This is light, maybe a bit frivolous, but I know I’m always looking for reading/watching/listening material at the beginning of the week. Here are ten things I read last week, in chronological order:

  1. Flatland: I knew this vaguely as a fun exercise in geometry. However, it goes surprisingly hard at 19th-century sexism and authoritarianism.

  2. St._Joseph’s Episcopal_Church, Detroit: I found myself here, stumbled into a cool rally, and wanted to learn more about thr church’s history as an abolitionist organizing point.

  3. Thomas Sowell and the American Dream: Decent analysis (for what it’s worth from economics outsider me) and a certain satisfying pettiness in griping about photography and baseball.

  4. Streusel Versus Crumbs: A rabbit hole opened up by trying to replicate a German apple cake. I’m weak to any recipe with ratios. Add chemistry and I’m dead.

  5. Great Salt Lake Water Level Decline: Good meat and potatoes science. I had assumed upstream irrigation, but surface evaporation seems obvious when it’s brought up. ‘Seems obvious’ isn’t good enough, though, is it?

  6. Sixteen and Evangelical: A Vanity Fair reprint. I was once both those things at the same time. It resonated.

  7. Donald C. Peattie: I picked up his “Book of Hours” at a library used book sale. Really lovely writing. He was a major advocate for preservation at the Indiana Dunes.

  8. Taro Fries: I think I knew that not all taro was purple, but I did NOT know that all taro can irritate your skin with calcium oxalate when raw. Fries were good.

  9. Anomalous DeepSeek Tokens: My first breadcrumb toward ubiquitous Deepseek coverage. I thought the probing of the system was interesting, but the discarding of tokens representing Chinese characters was not.

  10. Mormon Scholars on the Book of Abraham: Your interest may vary, but as someone interested in belief formation and retention, this was fascinating. I saw smokescreening, obfuscation, and other rhetorical tricks to get around a fake translation of a real hieroglyphic text. It’s interesting to see techniques like this used in an area where I have no emotional investment.