Pico Iyer, Aflame, 2025 (Non-Fiction: In a series of meditative vignettes drawn from decades of retreats to a Benedictine hermitage above the Pacific, Iyer reflects on silence as a lens for seeing more clearly what it means to live, to attend to others, and to accept mortality with a kind of lucid tenderness. The book is a string of luminous reliquaries, inviting the reader to linger, slow the pulse, and consider how much of modern life is a distraction from the few things that actually matter.)

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either,” The New Yorker, February 9, 2026 (The neural networks used in A.I. systems, which have a layered architecture of interconnected “neurons” vaguely akin to that of biological brains… They were not programmed step by step; they were given shape by a trial-and-error process that made minute adjustments to the models’ “weights,” or the strengths of the connections between the neurons. The models matched patterns…How they did this was inscrutable. The human analogue is called tacit knowledge. [F]ew English speakers can articulate that the standard order of adjectives is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. But we know that it sounds broken to say “the Siberian large young show lovely cat.”).

David Baker, “Breath,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2026
Matthew Shenodoa, “The Tomb Attendant Contemplates His Own Death,” The New Yorker, March 2, 2026 (“……There are and have been sorrows greater than mine, and joys, I imagine, too. Though who knows the inner heart beyond the song that the mouth sings? In the small call of the bird my peace is made like a braided mat, still like a palm filled with sand, to be left in the quiet, in the cool stone days.”)

Information without action is entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but don’t confuse it with research. If you read something and it doesn’t make you think or cause you to change something in your life, it’s entertainment. Be honest about which one you’re doing. —Zeneca, “Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #45,” email newsletter, February 26, 2026.