Weekly Reading List: 15/11/2025

Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think

This week’s reading list basically lives at the intersection of three questions:

• What do we want (from our bodies, our work, our tech, our stories)?

• Who decides what we’re worth?

• And what happens when those two get completely out of sync?

On one end, you have pieces about capital and infrastructure. Electricity demand going vertical, AI companies lighting money on fire, Berkshire rearranging the endgame of one of the world’s biggest fortunes. On the other, you have essays about Eros, sex-positivity, romantasy, Indian beauty brands dying in an allegedly “booming” market, and men who don’t want to finish during sex because they’re trying to optimise their “energy.” Somewhere in the middle sit stories about prisons replacing mental hospitals, media laundering ideology as “balance”, and historians trying to make sense of India as both temptation and cautionary tale.

What I liked about this mix is that almost every piece is, in some way, about management: Of grids. Of desire. Of reputations. Of institutions. Of risk. Of fantasy.

But beneath the management-speak and moralising, you keep bumping into a simpler theme: systems get really weird when we treat people as inputs instead of protagonists. AI becomes a capex story instead of a usefulness story. Beauty becomes a CPM game instead of “does this actually work on Indian skin in 40° heat?” Men become “a crisis demographic” instead of, you know, people who need childcare, friends, and less deranged gender scripts.

So: this week is a little economics, a little theology, a lot of sex and soft power, and some nerd joy (Vitalik thinking about thinking; Derek Thompson thinking about monks in casinos; Sanjay Subrahmanyam thinking about India and temptation in the long arc of history).

Read in order, they feel like one long argument about what happens when optimisation (for shareholders, for desirability, for virality) eats the point of the thing itself.

Let’s go.

1. Electricity Is the New Oil – Load Growth & the Grid Supercycle (Crack the Market)

This is a macro brain’s love letter to substations and transmission lines. After two decades of sluggish load growth in the West, power demand is suddenly surging, pushed up by AI data centers, EVs, electrified industry, and very old infrastructure that’s falling apart. The piece walks through the electricity value chain (generation → transmission → distribution → equipment → software) and argues we’re entering a “Golden Age of Electrification” where the grid, not generation, is the real bottleneck and therefore the real opportunity.

What I got out of it:
Two things:

1. “AI as a power story, not just a compute story.” Everyone talks about GPUs; far fewer talk about transformers, cables, right-of-way, and permitting. This is a nice reset: if you want to invest around AI, you might actually want to look at boring grid infra, not yet another model wrapper.

2. Cycles vs fads. This reads as a genuine multi-decade capex cycle, not a vibes rally. For me, it reinforces a simple investing question: “Is this a consumer mood, or a balance-sheet inevitability?” Electricity is the latter.

2. Everyone Wants to Be Desired, No One Wants to Want (Amy Coded)

Amy starts with a man on 75 Hard who proudly hasn’t ejaculated in three months, despite having sex; a self-help-era remix of Napoleon Hill’s “sex transmutation” idea. From there, she moves into our current optimisation kink: low-dopamine mornings, GLP-1 lunches, abstinence as productivity hack. Her core line: everyone wants to be wanted; no one wants to actually want. Desire is treated like a liability in the marketplace of desirability.

She contrasts pornified, algorithm-safe sexuality (Sabrina Carpenter as sex symbol who somehow looks anatomically smooth) with Marina Abramović’s attempt to reclaim the erotic as “a portal into cycles of life.” The piece reframes “erotic” not as porn, but as presence- that charged state where you’re fully in your body and in the moment, and how optimisation culture is fundamentally hostile to that.

What I got out of it:
This read like a diagnosis of a thing I’ve been vaguely annoyed by for years. A few lines that stuck in my head (paraphrased):

• We’ve rationalised Eros to death and replaced it with efficiency.

• Disembodiment isn’t neutral; it makes us easier to exploit and easier to script.

It also gave me language for that specific kind of “wellness” that’s secretly a market-value project: the body as a LinkedIn profile, not a home. As someone on GLP-1s, in the gym, and online, this essay pressed on all the tender points around control vs aliveness.

3. You Have No Idea How Screwed OpenAI Is (Planet Earth and Beyond)

This is a long, very skeptical teardown of OpenAI’s financial and technical trajectory. The author argues that:

• OpenAI’s losses are growing twice as fast as predicted.

• They’re doubling infra spend through 2030, which means they’d need insane revenue growth just to cover opex while growth is already slowing.

• The current “scale more data + more compute” approach doesn’t really fix hallucinations in a way that makes AI reliably productivity-boosting.

• The one “new” revenue stream (erotic chatbots) is both ethically cursed and economically trivial.

The kicker is incentive design: AI companies aren’t valued on performance or profits, but on infra spend. So leaders are financially rewarded for driving straight into a wall, as long as they can exit before impact.

What I got out of it:
I don’t think this is a perfectly balanced piece, but it is a useful counterweight to the “infinite S-curve” AI optimism. A few takeaways:

• Capex ≠ progress. There’s something deeply cursed about a market that treats “number of data centers” as a proxy for intelligence.

• We are in the era of capital theatre. Infra is being used as a signalling mechanism to investors, not just as an enabler of product.

• “Greed at the cost of everything” is a bit melodramatic, but the structural critique, that you can torch the financial system while personally doing great, is accurate.

It made me more interested in: (a) business models where AI is quietly embedded into workflows instead of selling “AI” as the product, and (b) downside scenarios where the infra bubble pops but useful AI survives.

4. Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani (LitHub)

Peter Coviello, former Africana Studies professor at Bowdoin, writes about being contacted by the New York Times to comment on his once-student-ish, now-politician Zohran Mamdani. The piece is less about Mamdani and more about how prestige media “metabolises” left politics and ethnic studies: the faux-balance structure (“critics say…”) that gives right-wing think tank positions equal footing with lived reality and decades of scholarship.

He walks through how a Times story framed Africana Studies as a pipeline to dangerous radicalism, how “grievance studies” discourse is manufactured, and why this style of coverage matters far beyond one New York council race in everything from climate to Palestine.

What I got out of it:
This is such a good education-in-media-literacy essay. For me, it did three things:

• Named that queasy feeling of watching “both sides” reporting flatten power and context.

• Located Mamdani as a small, hopeful crack in American barbarism, not a radical edge case.

• Reminded me that a lot of our political common sense is downstream of editorial choices dressed up as neutrality.

As someone who sits at the edge of media, politics, and capital, it’s a nice reminder to read around the “paper of record”, not through it.

5. The Beauty Industry in India Is Growing Exponentially. Why Are Brands Still Shutting Down? (The Established)

This is a sharp, grounded explainer of why Indian beauty looks like it’s booming on the surface, and why so many brands are dying underneath. It tracks:

• Global slowdown + layoffs across big beauty.

• India’s hyper-crowded, low-barrier market where visibility is expensive and loyalty is rare.

• Over-reliance on paid performance marketing and “aesthetic” as moat.

• The split between scale-first, VC-backed brands vs slower, longevity-focused ones like d’you, Aminu, Purearth.

It also brings in data on how only ~10% of Indian beauty consumers are loyalists; everyone else is sampling constantly, which breaks a lot of fragile D2C models.

What I got out of it:
Honestly, this is one of the most sensible things I’ve read on beauty-as-business in India. Takeaways:

• “Cool is not a moat, it’s a moment” should be tattooed on every founder’s forehead.

• Reach in India is cheap; repeat is not. Paid media can give you trial; it can’t give you trust.

• Beauty closures are less about “no demand” and more about broken economics + me-too positioning.

It reinforced my bias that the only beauty brands worth backing now are the ones built like boring, fundamentals-first businesses.

6. What Did Men Do to Deserve This? (The New Yorker)

This essay on “the crisis of men” discourse (think Scott Galloway et al) and whether men are uniquely hard-done-by right now. The writer traces the real issues (deaths of despair, economic precarity, loneliness, fatherlessness) but also pokes at how the conversation often recenters men’s feelings while leaving women’s ongoing burdens (care work, safety, pay gaps) untouched.

There’s a lot in here about the limits of self-help scripts (“lift, get rich, get a wife”) and the structural reality that domestic labour and social support haven’t caught up with the world we live in.

What I got out of it:
This was useful as both empathy training and bullshit filter:

• Empathy, because men are clearly struggling in ways the current system doesn’t know how to hold.

• Bullshit filter, because a lot of “male crisis” punditry is just rebranded patriarchy: “care about men” actually means “recenter male authority.”

As a woman who works with a lot of male founders, I’m increasingly convinced that “fixing men” requires less lifestyle optimisation and more boring policy: childcare, health care, better schools, and less precarity. This essay backed that hunch.

7. Galaxy-Brain Resistance (Vitalik Buterin)

Vitalik coins “galaxy-brain resistance” as a way to describe arguments that sound so complex and clever they can justify anything, therefore becoming useless. He’s basically asking: how do we tell apart genuinely deep reasoning from convoluted cope, especially in crypto, AI, and politics?

He talks about over-fitting narratives to data, falling in love with contrarian takes because they feel intellectually flattering, and the need for heuristics that resist getting seduced by the most baroque explanation in the room.

What I got out of it:
Even second-hand, the idea is sticky:

• Complexity can be a status move, not a truth move.

• If a framework can be used to defend literally any outcome, it stops being a framework and starts being fanfic.

For me, this links nicely to founder evaluation. The best founders I’ve met can hold real complexity and still say, in simple language, what they’re doing and why it should exist. Galaxy-brain resistance feels like a good filter for every pitch, policy, and Twitter thread.

8. Altman and Masa Back Episteme, a New “Bell Labs” (Ashlee Vance / Core Memory)

Episteme is a new deep-science lab in San Francisco, led by 27-year-old Louis Andre and backed by Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son. The ambition: recreate a modern Bell Labs / Xerox PARC for disciplines like AI, energy, materials, and neuroscience, but with equity and salaries instead of grants, plus a clear path to productisation.

Scientists get full-stack support (labs, IP help, ops) so they can focus on hard problems instead of grant-writing. In return, the lab and researchers share upside on any commercial breakthroughs.

What I got out of it:
This sat interestingly next to the OpenAI doom piece. A few thoughts:

• Altman is hedging: if “just scale models” breaks, maybe “own the upstream science that makes the next wave possible” is the real play.

• Episteme is a bet that our institutions for doing science (tenure-track academia vs venture-backed startup) are both broken at the edges.

It made me weirdly hopeful. I’m always suspicious of “New Bell Labs” claims, but the structural experiment of treating scientists more like founders, with time + equity, is worth watching.

9. Gabe Whaley – Playing the Crowd & Outlasting the Hype (Jackson Dahl / Dialectic)

A long profile of Gabe Whaley (MSCHF founder) that’s really about mischief as a product strategy. It traces his path from internet pranks to MSCHF’s big stunts (Lil Nas X’s Satan shoes, the “Eat the Rich” ice creams, etc.) and looks at how you build an organisation around provocation without burning out or getting boring.

It’s half founder psychology, half cultural critique: how do you keep making things that cut through noise without becoming predictable or purely cynical?

What I got out of it:
The big takeaway for me was: mischief still needs a system. Gabe comes off not as a chaos demon, but as someone who has a fairly disciplined process for shipping weirdness: cadences, teams, and a sense of where the line is.

If you’re building any sort of media or brand (hi, me), it’s a good reminder that “outrage” is cheap; delight is harder; and sustained, structured mischief is almost an operations problem.

10. “Going Quiet” – Berkshire Hathaway Letter, Nov 10 2025 (Warren Buffett)

This is Buffett’s announcement that he’s converting 1,800 A-shares to 2.7 million B-shares and donating them to four family foundations, and, more symbolically, that he’s stepping back from writing Berkshire’s famous annual letters and from being the main voice at the shareholder meeting. Greg Abel becomes “the boss” at year-end.

The rest is Buffett doing what he does best: telling stories. Childhood appendectomy in Omaha, fingerprinting nuns, missing Charlie Munger by a whisker as a kid, how geography shaped Berkshire, and a long meditation on luck, ageing, and dynastic wealth.

What I got out of it:
It’s part eulogy, part handover memo. A few lines I read twice:

• His frankness about being born in 1930 as a healthy, white male in America and how that’s basically an insane lottery win.

• His refusal to romanticise longevity. “Father Time is undefeated” energy.

• The way he normalises philanthropy at scale: the default is that most of the Berkshire stake goes back out into the world.

For me, as someone thinking about capital and legacy, this is a masterclass in tone: neither self-flagellating nor delusional. Just clear.

11. Medical Theories on the Cause of Death in Crucifixion (Journal Article)

I realised I had no idea how someone actually dies when they’re crucified. Like, I know Jesus died, obviously, but… how? So I went down the rabbit hole, and it turns out the mechanics are way more mundane (and methodical) than the drama makes it seem. Morbid, but weirdly grounding. Stay curious.

What I got out of it:
Reading things like this usually does two things for me:

• It strips away the stained-glass romance of crucifixion and replaces it with… biomechanics. It’s disturbingly mundane in its cruelty.

• It also shows the limits of over-medicalising religious narratives. There’s a point where “was it more likely respiratory acidosis or arrhythmia?” misses the cultural and spiritual weight of why the story persists.

If you’re already steeped in theology and history, this kind of paper is a useful reminder that “symbolic suffering” was also a very specific, engineered, physical horror.

12. The Future of Sex Positivity (Playboy)

A look at where “sex positivity” goes next, after the Tumblr-era slogans and buzzwords. The piece traces how sex positivity got flattened into “say yes to everything” or “post your thirst traps for empowerment,” and how that model collides with consent, trauma, kink, tech, and a much more complicated online landscape.

It brings in therapists, educators, and activists talking about how to rebuild sex culture around communication, safety, and pleasure, not just performance or aesthetics.

What I got out of it:
Next to the Amy essay, this felt like the pragmatic sibling. Amy is talking about Eros; Playboy is talking about logistics:

• How do we make sex-ed less shy and more honest?

• What does consent look like in a world of screenshots and AI porn?

• How do we hold both freedom and boundaries without sliding into puritanism or nihilism?

It gave me language for “adult sex positivity”, less about being game for anything, more about being deeply clear on what you want, what you don’t, and how you keep everyone whole.

13. The Monks in the Casino (Derek Thompson)

Thompson contrasts two archetypes: the “monks” (people who deliberately build lives of focus, constraint, and depth) and the “casino” (our current attention economy: TikTok, markets, 24/7 news). He looks at people who manage to do important work inside the casino (founders, writers, investors) without getting fully eaten by it.

It’s part time-management essay, part cultural analysis of why the internet makes us all feel like gamblers chasing the next hit of novelty.

What I got out of it:
This is very “how to live and work online without losing your mind.” My big takeaway:

• The monks aren’t off in caves; they’re just ruthless about boundaries.

• Systems beat willpower. The people who win long-term have designed routines, spaces, and relationships that dampen the casino’s pull.

For someone making a living in the content economy and investment world, it’s a nice nudge to be more monk where it matters, even if the casino is fun sometimes.

14. Indian Temptations (Granta)

A long conversation with historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam about India as an object of fascination, projection, and anxiety, from European travellers to present-day nationalism. He talks about the “temptations” of India: spiritualism, empire, wealth, exoticism, and the stories people (inside and outside) tell themselves about what India is for.

What I got out of it:
This scratched the history brain itch nicely. A few things I liked:

• Subrahmanyam’s refusal to romanticise either the pre-colonial or the post-colonial state.

• The way he keeps circling back to who controls the sources, the syllabus, the narrative.

If you care about “Indian dynamism” (industry, climate, infrastructure) it’s useful to also sit with “Indian temptations”: the myths, flattery, and selective amnesia that shape how capital and power move.

15. Did Prison Just Replace Mental Hospitals? (Slow Boring – Matt Yglesias)

Yglesias revisits the story that, after deinstitutionalisation, US prisons effectively became the new mental hospitals. He digs into data on psychiatric beds, incarceration rates, and mental illness prevalence among prisoners to ask: how true is that narrative, and what policy conclusions should we actually draw?

The answer is, as always, more complicated: yes, many people with serious mental illness are in prison; no, simply rebuilding 1950s-style asylums is not obviously the solution.

What I got out of it:
This is a good example of why I still read Matt:

• He takes a widely repeated line (“prison replaced mental hospitals!”) and forces you to look at numbers, not vibes.

• He pushes for better institutional design, not nostalgia for old ones that were often abusive.

Paired with everything else on this list, it’s another example of how we keep using blunt tools (prison, optimisation, consumption) to handle intricate human problems, and then get surprised when it all goes sideways.

16. Escape Artists (The Drift) – Romantasy’s Reign

This is about how romantasy (fantasy + romance) has become the dominant genre for a huge slice of mostly-female readers. Think dragons, courts, fae, and a lot of “knife to the throat, mutual obsession” energy. The essay looks at why this genre, right now: capitalism, burnout, loneliness, sex, female rage, and the desire for worlds where power is legible and love feels high-stakes and fated.

It’s also about what critics miss when they dismiss these books as unserious: they’re doing a lot of emotional and imaginative work for readers, even if they’re not “literary” in the traditional sense.

What I got out of it:
As someone who also mainlines fantasy, this felt like being Seen. A few-ish threads:

• Romantasy is training data for emotional pattern recognition: loyalty, betrayal, ambition, duty, desire.

• It gives women worlds where their bigness (feelings, wants, power) isn’t a problem, it’s the plot.

• Escapism is not the opposite of engagement; sometimes, it’s how you stay emotionally resourced enough to keep going.

Grids, Girls, Gods, and Greed

Across all sixteen, a few themes kept ricocheting:

1. Infrastructure is destiny, but it’s also a choice.

   • Power grids, AI data centres, Bell Labs 2.0, even Berkshire’s philanthropic plumbing: these are all decisions about what gets built and who benefits.

   • When the incentive is “spend more capex”, you get the OpenAI story. When the incentive is “stay useful for 50 years”, you get grids, labs, and letters that age better.

2. Desire is being industrialised and resisted.

   • From no-nut hustle bros to algorithm-safe sexuality, from sex positivity 2.0 to romantasy’s rise, there’s a quiet war over who gets to script Eros.

   • The most interesting work (Amy’s essay, Abramović, the Playboy piece, romantasy) is trying to make desire feel human again, not just brand-safe or productivity-compatible.

3. Narrative is an instrument of power.

   • The Times piece on Mamdani, the “men in crisis” essay, Indian Temptations, the prison vs mental hospital debate — all of them show how stories become policy, prejudice, and paychecks.

   • Who gets framed as a threat vs a hero vs a problem to be managed is not accidental.

4. Optimisation has a body count.

   • Whether it’s crucifixion as a perfectly tuned execution machine, prisons as catch-all institutions, or beauty brands running out of oxygen in a saturated market, systems that worship efficiency often end up chewing through the very people they claim to serve.

It’s easy to read a list like this and come away a bit bleak: greedy AI barons, collapsing brands, broken institutions, men lost, women pornified, prisons full. But that’s not actually how this week left me feeling.

Because tucked into each piece is a refusal:

• Historians refusing neat nationalist mythmaking.

• Scientists trying new models.

• Writers refusing to let sex, beauty, or fantasy be only what the market says it is.

• A 95-year-old billionaire refusing to hoard his shares till the bitter end.

If there’s a through-line, it’s this: we are not just subjects of systems; we’re constantly rewriting them. In the grid, in the bedroom, in the bookstore, in the boardroom.