Some readers have commented that I am obsessed with AI. This is not correct. I wish I was. But is there anything more interesting happening in the world right now? I don't think so.
Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music:
Art can outlast the artist — but what about their artistic impulses?
A new art installation project in Australia, titled "Revivification," raises this question with a very literal interpretation of "impulse": using his DNA, the team behind the project have performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals.
At the center of the piece is an "in-vitro brain," grown from blood that Lucier, who passed away in 2021, donated in the final years of his life. Housed in a plinth, it's grown on top of an electrode mesh that connects it to twenty large brass plates placed around the room. Visitors can listen as the brain fires off electrical pulses that trigger a transducer and a mallet behind each plate, striking them to produce sound.
Is this art? Is this science? Is this composing?
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Teachout’s idea that suppliers “make up the difference” by charging smaller stores more is also economically incoherent. Profit-maximizing firms already charge what the market will bear. If Costco’s volume justifies a discount, that doesn’t mean suppliers can or should charge higher prices to other buyers. Yes, there are models where costs change with volume but costs could go down with volume and, in any case, those models don’t rely on the folk theory of “making up the difference.”
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This isn’t to say AI won’t help improve economic policy—it might, if we listen. But the future economy won’t look like a centrally planned machine. It will look like an economy of von Neumanns—autonomous agents buying, selling, and strategizing in complex interaction.
I Analysed 25,000 Hotel Names and Found Four Surprising Truths:
And yes, the cat’s out of the bag: there are over 200 Hotels Bristol worldwide, and the reason goes all the way back to an 18th-century English aristocrat whose hotel preferences turned into a naming tradition.
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The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards. As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.
Legend.
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An essay series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life — and what happens if we don’t maintain them
This should be amazing. So far, Agriculture, Water and Electricity.