USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

Advice to gen-z Americans: skip the performative Eurosummer (St Tropez, Monaco, Mykonos, Amalfi Coast, etc.) Instead do a 10-day walk in the Alps, rent a house with friends in Brittany / Basque Country, eat oysters, take cold swims, drink cheap wine. It will bring you more joy than Instagram ever will.

If a reading list does not have Dostoyevsky amongst top 10, it is not a serious reading list.

I'm a big fan of AI American Intelligence 🇺🇸

Folks are fired up about Western Chemicals artwork, so here’s some more!

Let’s just say George RR Martin isn’t the only one who’s written 1,200 pages of Winds of Winter. We’ll see who finishes first Georgie boy @GRRMspeaking

Announcing Talkie: a new, open-weight historical LLM! We trained and finetuned a 13B model on a newly-curated dataset of only pre-1930 data. Try it below! with @AlecRad and @status_effects 🧵

If schools and universities refuse to teach the great books of Western Civilization, we will do it ourselves. Athenaeum now has 500 members reading the classics alongside us!! Thank you all 🙏 We're about to start our 12th book — see you on 28 April for the next discussion...