David Hsu

"What stayed with Amundson most, she said, was not the adrenaline of the moment but the realization that came while she was holding the agent’s head in her hands and keeping his airway open.

“I was hit so hard with the fact that this man would not do this for me,” she said.'"

You may not believe that new-builds lower rents, but your landlord does.

Joe Montgomery, Who Made Bicycles Lighter, Dies at 86

Some have observed that people are attracted to the things that they couldn't afford when they were growing up; Cannondale was that for me. A great obituary for a cycling pioneer. Rest in peace. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

It was fun, but we stopped riding it once my daughter became a teenager, and my wife refuses to ride any tandem, so we sold it to a nice older couple who needed the step-through. 😀😀😀

We enjoyed our Family Tandem.

Trees and snow.

White cloudy sky over a snow-covered pond.

Trees and snow.

Trees and snow.

Greetings from New England.

What is happening on MIT campus this weekend? We have a clue. Sort of. - The Boston Globe The annual Mystery Hunt returns to the Cambridge campus for MLK Jr. weekend, bringing thousands of puzzle hunters together for one epic quest.

The long winter term, called IAP (Inter-Activities Period) and indeed full of weird activities, is one of the best times at MIT. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/16/a...

Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump The U.S., once Denmark’s closest ally, is threatening to steal Greenland and attacking the country’s wind-power industry. Is this a permanent breakup?

I’m so sorry, Denmark:

“This year’s annual threat assessment from the Danish military-intelligence service seemed to concur. For the first time, it cited the U.S., along with Russia, China, and terrorist groups, as a risk to Danish security.”

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

From the whatisit community on Reddit: Mystery beach find: Suitcase-sized white lumpy mass + turns oily with heat Explore this post and more from the whatisit community

Curiosity: www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/s...

Just finished reading “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a very well-written, firsthand account of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg. About all three topics, two words:

EVEN WORSE.

My House Burned in the L.A. Fires. What Happens Now? A devastated community fights for rebirth.

I missed this one year anniversary yesterday but it is always a good day to reflect on what we are trying to avoid in the changing climate and what we are trying to build towards. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I've watched thousands of videos from the Jan. 6 riot as part of NPR's reporting and archive project on that day.

Here are some of the lesser known videos that have really stuck with me.

🧵

Texas A&M Bans Plato - Daily Nous Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That's a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy a...

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato."

surreal times

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

Opinion | 5 Years After Jan. 6, Lawlessness Has Triumphed

I believe that lawlessness, hate, thuggishness, and violence can not and will not triumph. The NYT op-ed page is often a letdown and despite the title, this is a good summary and concludes well. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/o...

Jan. 6 video evidence has 'disappeared' from public access, media coalition says A coalition of news organizations said in a court filing that video exhibits from a Jan. 6 riot case had "disappeared" from a government platform that provided access to evidence used in court.

They can try to disappear the evidence but we all saw it happen.
www.opb.org/article/2025...

Never forget: five years ago today on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump gathered a mob that then rioted and attacked the US Capitol Building, in order to disrupt the counting of votes from across our country that showed that he did in fact lose the election. www.usatoday.com/picture-gall...

Polls conducted in late 2025 show that most Americans, by a 25-50 point margin (depending on question wording), oppose the use of military force against Venezuela.

www.gelliottmorris.com/p/americans-...

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Picture of a Chinese car testing lab.

A nice detail in this picture of a Chinese car testing lab is the prominent piece of American equipment, the big blue piston labelled ServoSled by Seattle Safety. So we have something, or at least one thing, to trade! www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/b...

Lol even Marlon knew he committed PI there what on earth

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

Here are some non-fiction recommendations and reactions if you're interested. bsky.app/profile/dhsu...

Koch Political Operation Spent Nearly $550 Million During 2024 Cycle

Cleaning up the house this morning and came across a copy of Jane Mayer's book, "Dark Money", on how the Kochs pioneered new ways to use money for political influence. My first thought was that this 2016 classic might now be outdated, but an hour later I saw this: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/u...

THIS is what makes my head spin: The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I'm not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn't care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There's nothing he would die for - not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young

son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He's not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, "the common man"" veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn't care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he's not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn't - in a more secular key - even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel's hand. Doesn't even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn't live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he's

very ugly and barely mammalian. Am I missing an obscure moral system to which he so much as nods? Also are there other people, living or dead, like him?

Virginia Heffernan wrote this shortly after the 2016 election and it still holds true

"He took every Advanced Placement class he could, earned a scholarship to Brown and worked at Wawa over the summer to make enough money to buy a laptop, according to his two sisters."

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Most importantly, are they expressing themselves by video or text?

That was my reading seminar this semester! I really enjoyed the experience of a book a week, the practice prepared my mind to think about how books work and therefore how to structure my own book. So much so that I thought about teaching an extra seminar in the spring, but now it is time to write.

15: Samantha Harvey's "Orbital". Fiction, Booker Prize winner last year. They generally liked it, tho one student said that it could be a spreadsheet, another a poem, and tbh I don't know if they meant good or bad by that. But I would happily go to space and be changed, so you should read it.

Trump Is Changing America From the Top. These Groups Did It From the Bottom.

14: Linda Gordon's "Seven Social Movements that Changed America". The "least infrastructur-y book" a student said, but we all found it interesting to read about various movements to think about how the climate movement goes forward. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/b...