Ways of Looking #21 (May '26)
In this issue: a piece of fiction, testimonies of miracles, babies, Toxoplasmosis, and titanium watches.
Welcome to Ways of Looking. Roughly every month, I send my friends links and summaries for anything I’ve written recently, plus a few things I’m enjoying.
Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.
What I wrote last month
COHERENCE: a short story — a piece of fiction about belief, miracles, and messaging — and how much words might matter.
I wanted to explore this concept and thought a story would be the best way. I’ve ~never written fiction before (and am not sure I’ll do much more), but would love to hear any sharp criticism or feedback.
Using AI for fiction — an accompanying piece on where AI was and wasn’t useful in writing that piece (spoiler: editing and high volume idea generation = great; writing = terrible).
Congruence updates: Baby photos and Custom widgets. You may remember earlier posts in this series about the features of my “personal app” Congruence. It continues to be my most-used phone app every day, in part thanks to these new adds.
AI Captain’s Log — regular reflections, this month on putting in the effort required for long-running prompting.
What I’m enjoying
Book: They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire, professor of history & religion at Yale. An impeccably-researched and beautifully-written academic history of the accounts and testimonies of miracles (levitation, bilocation, and the like). It is not, as one might assume, so much a history of the miracles themselves as it is a history of the observations and testimonies of said miracles — and that nuance is why this book is so interesting.
I also note that it served as the source for the first epigraph in my piece COHERENCE mentioned above (Hume: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”) and spurred some of the ideas in the story.
Products:
For the engineers reading, Superset is my new favorite agentic coding interface. For me, it’s the Goldilocks balance of “close enough to just a plain Ghostty terminal” but with some really nice quality-of-life features. I don’t like the interfaces that layer too much on the Claude Code / Codex harnesses or use the SDKs instead of the official CLIs, but I also want seamless worktree support, good visual organization, diffs, and the like.
Three clothing recs:
New favorite barefoot (zero-drop, wide toebox) shoes: Ohne Project. Best-looking ones I have found out there. They almost look normal! I continue to strongly prefer barefoot shoes over typical ones.
Industry of All Nations. I may have mentioned this brand before. But now, it’s mostly what I (and my wife, and our baby) wear every day. Just great products across the board.
Unimatic titanium tool watches. I’ve had (and enjoyed) a Unimatic watch for awhile, and just recently got their new titanium GMT (UT-4-U-TI-GMT). Very light / easy to wear, and I really like the style.
Articles:
Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy And Then Killing You: Toxoplasmosis Spotlight by Riva-Melissa Tez. An excellent post from a few years ago I just revisited. If the title makes you roll your eyes, you should probably read it.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom by Henrik Karlsson. Excellent writing (as is typical of the author) on attention and experience.
Where Geniuses Hide Today by Tomas Pueyo. People often wonder where all the great works and discoveries have gone — why aren’t there modern Einsteins or Michaelangelos or Mozarts? This post posits some arguments.
How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time by Kevin Kwok. A five-year old business strategy essay with Figma & Canva as its primary case study that continues to age extremely well.
Experiment: this bullet typically covers some health or productivity technique I’m trying out. But my dominant experiment for the last six weeks or so has been experiencing life with a newborn. It has been absolutely 10/10 delightful and wonderful and I would recommend it to most everyone :)
For a compilation of all past recommendations, see the Recommendations page on my site.
About me: I’m a multi-time founder (Eco, Lightwork Home Health, CoinList, Sidewire). I’m currently spending time on: a stealthy AI company, investing at Amity, Lightwork, Eco, tinkering with interface0 and other products, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
— Andy