Recommended Reading – March 2025

Welcome to the March list of stuff I’ve found around the Internet and enjoyed reading (maybe not enjoyed, as such, but you know what I mean). The plan is to do occasional similar posts as I stumble across worthy reads, but how many links per post, and how often, are yet to be determined.

Driving an EV restomod that costs as much as a house—the JIA Chieftain - Ars Technica

My perfect car would be an NA model MX5 (the one with the pop-up headlights) electric restomod. This isn’t that, but it makes me think that one day someone might be crazy enough to do one (and I might suddenly get rich enough to afford it).

The End of Children | The New Yorker

Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero.

I’m not convinced that a declining population is a bad thing, but the effects of it in Korea are pretty sobering reading.

The questions ChatGPT shouldn’t answer | The Verge

Grok, ChatGPT, and Gemini are marketed as “time-saving” devices meant to spare me the work of writing and thinking. But I don’t want to avoid those things. Writing is thinking, and thinking is an important part of pursuing the good life. Reading is also thinking, and a miraculous kind. Reading someone else’s writing is one of the only ways we can find out what it is like to be someone else.

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Lopatto’s writing and she definitely doesn’t disappoint here. I came across someone saying recently that the Verge had got a lot more forthright since it started taking subscribers and I’d suggest that Lopatto had been let off the leach, if that didn’t sound particularly derogatory when used in reference to a woman. Maybe we can just say she had run out of fucks to give.

I’m Entering My Curmudgeon Era

My current project: I’ve been dusting off the old hard drives with my ripped CD collection and loading them into an iPod. A 20-year-old piece of tech with its click wheel intact, no WiFi, and no algorithm feeding me recommendations I didn’t ask for. The result: I’ve started listening to music - actually listening to it - in a way I haven’t in years. Giving it my attention. Not taking it for granted, not treating it like day old shrimp at a discount buffet.

I’ve seen Joan Westernberg’s posts re-posted into my Mastodon feed for quite some time now, but I’ve only started following her writing more diligently since waves hands around vaguely but this piece in particular struck me. Taking a more deliberative approach to technology is actually difficult, but worth it. I still use Instagram, but just to follow users I want to follow – when it suggests other posts I just snooze them (you can’t turn them off permanently, unfortunately), and when I get to the end of my timeline, I just stop. What I should probably do is delete Instagram off my phone and just pick up a book, but one challenge at a time, I guess.