Chad Aaron Hall

I’d easily pay $9.99 a month for an army of robots to binge-read my entire library at 3,000x speed so they can map my curiosities and

recommend excerpts to me as I craft sentences in real-time

.

Turns out, this kind of exists already, through an app called

re:collect

(you should request access). I played around with it in 2022

,

and it gave me a... See more

No Tax on Overtime Pay

I have a hard time keeping my equanimity on this one, because the incentives are so awful.

The natural response is, instead of working 8 hours a day 40 days a week, ask your boss to work 15 hours a day two days a week and 10 the other day. Or just go on two 20 hour shifts.

One is that length is often the only thing signaling effort and thoughtfulness. Consumers of information rarely try to dissect an argument objectively; that’s too hard. When reading they just try to figure out whether the author is credible or not. Does this sound right? Does it pass the smell test? Has the author put more than a few seconds of... See more

For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning. That creates a dynamic the novelist can use as a kind of lever in the fashioning of his narrative. This is quite a roundabout way to do things,

... See more

Obviously, people are not as productive as they work longer and longer hours. It’s bad for health. It’s especially bad for women, people with families, people who have to care for elderly parents, people with children, and so forth. (My Hoover colleague Val Bolottnyy has a nice paper with Natalia Emanuel showing how overtime hurts women, even with... See more