Weekend tabs: From Zurich
This week came and went. I got to Zurich a week ago. I did a three day workshop on panel econometrics Monday to Wednesday at the University of Zurich. Six hour days, three days a week. It was unusually fatiguing and I think it’s because I vibe coded all my old lecture slides into a new design to make room for new material, and I guess it just messed with my game a little, making me feel absolutely exhausted as I didn’t quite know my lines.
That was actually the first time that happened. I know my lecture slides like the back of my hand, and as such, the level of intensity I can bring to them is pretty high. But because I vibe coded the new ones, even though I was just migrating them over, I was intentionally trying to redesign and it just felt different. And that’s because I’m pretty sure when I usually write slides, by the last one, I’ve memorized the talk. But here it wasn’t like that, and so even small deviations seemed to throw me off.
This is again just this thing I’m noting — the psychological sense of human capital, or something, wherein I know something well because of the sustained attention from intensive time use, just isn’t there. But weirdly, it wasn’t there even for a topic I’ve taught 10,000 times.
I don’t lament this stuff. Rather, this is the new world, with new problems, and I just have to solve those new problems — sooner than later.
But that’s neither here nor there. Today is that day of the week where I close tabs, while simultaneously sharing some photographs of Zurich. I’ll just intersperse the post with pictures.
MIT suggests that chatbots may be giving out your phone number. I tried to do it with Claude, but I couldn’t figure out a prompt that would make him give me a friends number. But no doubt, given the training these LLMs are undertaking, a smart hacker can probably figure out how.
Drake dropped a new album called Iceman, but that’s one of three new albums he’s either released or releasing. I started Iceman, but didn’t get far before throwing in the towel. I couldn’t get excited by it. But first impressions with albums has always been unreliable, so who knows — maybe it’s outstanding. Here’s Variety them.
Men and women fall in love differently. Men tend to get there first, so says some new study, but women experience it more intensely. They give an evolutionary explanation for it but I never got that far.
How republicans came to support psychedelic medication. The TLDR, I think, is it has to do with treating veterans successfully for chronic mental health conditions like PTSD. Veterans are universally beloved, bipartisan, and the post-9/11 vets have very high suicide rates. PTSD due to their service likely has been a lightning rod for drawing open mindedness to experiment with psychedelics, and my understanding is that treatment happens now anyway within the military, just not necessarily publicized.
If you and your friend both have an Apple Vision Pro, then you can call on FaceTime, click SharePlay, And then watch a movie or show together. But it sounds like you will maybe then as a hologram be sitting in the same room with the other person and their voice will sound like they are right beside you in some weird way that only Apple can engineer. My friend has one, so we’re going to try it. Of course that means I have to go to bed at 2am to do it, though.
I have now watched all of the episodes of the new Apple show Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Michelle Pfeiffer’s back and she’s amazing in it. Actually everyone is. Elle Fanning plays Margo who has a baby with her literature professor, a common trope, who ends up not then being in the picture. She goes on OnlyFans. Things happen. It’s dramatic, funny, filled with family depth, has people who amaze you — like Nick Offerman from Parks and Rec who plays a former pro wrestler and Fanning’s dad, Nicole Kidman who seems to be in everything these days, and the great Michelle Pfeiffer. It has 97% on rotten tomatoes and was just picked up for a second season. Episodes are 30 minutes long; you’ll binge the whole thing without even batting an eye. Here’s the trailer.
OpenAI is partnering with finance institutions to create a more robust personal finance option for its product, I think probably ChatGPT. I have been trying to get that to work with Claude on my own, automating a lot of API pulls, but Bank of America doesn’t yet have a way to automate your stuff from them for Claude. But one of these days…
Advik Shreekumar, a postdoc at UC Berkeley and former MIT grad from the Econ dept, and Pierre-Luc Vautrey, also at MIT, have a new working paper on studying the effect of online mindfulness apps on both mental health and economic behavior. They implemented a large and low attrition RCT and it sounds like the effects were sizable. Around a half standard deviation improvement in mental health measures up to a month later persisting for three months. But no effects on a productivity measure commonly studied suggesting it is not via skill based management of negative emotions that those earlier studies were finding effects.
These AI videos of Spencer Pratt running for mayor are wild.
The effect of recreational cannabis on employment has not been as studied as other things. But in the AI generated paper I did for one of my Claude code series, that’s what Claude found. Apparently there was though already a paper on this by Joe Sabia, and coauthors. Here’s that NBER paper. And here’s my old post. You can see in the thumbnail the event study that Claude made from its own analysis of specific data it collected.
Luca Fornaro and Martin Wolf write up a paper of theirs for VoxEU on the macroeconomics of AI related policy.
Christopher Roebuck wrote up a post summarizing and interacting with an NBER healthcare and AI panel organized by Kosali Simon.
Bloomberg story about how Bezos successor, Andy Jassey, CEO at Amazon, is doing five years into his tenure, and on what new challenges the company faces.
A new update to your iPhone may let you put your car keys in your wallet (that is if you own a car that works with Apple to do this).
Speaking of Apple, OpenAI is apparently planning legal action against them for how they handled the ChatGPT integration. I actually forgot they even had ChatGPT integrated on this phone. Apparently that’s part of the case — they buried it. I think things maybe cooled a little when Altman hired Jonny Ive too.
The 2026-2027 Harvard Radcliffe scholars have been announced. Come see if your name is posted.
Is napping a sign of emerging health problems? Harvard research says maybe. Actually didn’t read this and I’m almost sure I covered this on here before.
A new episode of the podcast, Harvard Thinking, sounded interesting. The topic was about the psychology of regret, and the distinction between regret and remorse. You can listen to it at the link, but you can also just read the transcript. It’s about breaking that pattern around regret. I think maybe a lot of it comes from forgiving yourself, loving and accepting yourself.
A provocative new Economic Journal article about journal rankings shows the “society journals” have shot to the top. AEJ Applied, Micro and Macro — as well as AER: Insights — are now occupying spots 6-10. But incredibly, Journal of Labor Economics is listed as a top 10, and Journal of Human Resources is like 12 or 14. You can access the paper now as it’s currently open access but the article is about these society journals, like AEA. I think JOLE and JHR rising so high is for sure interesting though. The ongoing trend in labor economics dominance?
What effect will AI have, and is maybe already having, on the academic paper? Who knows but Kevin Smith offers up some thoughts. If you buy, by the way, that AI is driving a wedge between the production of research and its verification, then whatever changes happen, it’s still likely that verification of research and not merely the production of papers will be the perennial issue. More research doesn’t itself mean more publications. For that we need changes on the demand side.
New paper on AI governance and regulatory frameworks. Or publication, I should say, not “paper”.
Pitchfork calls Chris Brown’s new album “soulless”.
A college education graduate speaker got booed when she said AI was the next “Industrial Revolution”. Boo’ing rarely stops the consequences of massive technological shocks, but it can feel like it does I guess?
Acemoglu on three things to watch for in AI. They are AI agents of course; the hiring of economists at the big firms; and AI apps. The hiring of economists into various positions is for sure interesting. Will OpenAI or have Anthropic have their version of the late Pat Bajari, former chief economist who is thought to be responsible for Amazon becoming such a huge employer of Phd economists. But maybe that’s why Acemoglu said to watch for it.
New paper on how well AI agents can completely replicate a paper’s findings with only a description of the research question and the original data?
A mathematician writes about how impressive he found original mathematical work by GPT-5.5.
What’s the best streaming device? Some say it’s by NVIDIA.
Texas led the US in complaints about Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl. Lame.
The labor supply of American clergy may be collapsing? Of course, another explanation is it’s in equilibrium and falling religiosity is likely a major part of this. Rising returns to education is not a small part of the supply side story too though given pastors often have not just a college degree, but also three year divinity masters degrees. I suspect real wages and standards of living have fallen for pastors over the last 50 years as a result of rising returns to skill in secular work.
Scott Galloway on the returns to higher education.
Billy Bob Thornton had some health problems related to his diet that took him a while to properly manage.
The wars among the Wikipedia editors is always a fun story to read about. Some new blood are shaking things up.
Which jobs are “future proofed”?
A postdoc position at Barcelona for those interested.
“Identifying variables that predict …” you name it may not be a principled research task, so says Gelman and Carlin.
And that’s it! Today I change hotels because Claude Code mistakenly forgot I was checking out today but flying out tomorrow. Ive been using Claude code to completely automate every single detail of my logistics across Europe this summer and so far it’s gone well except for when he makes me nearly homeless stuck in a city without a place to stay. But otherwise impressed! Anyway, next time you hear from me I’ll be in Glasgow. I’ll try to get my writing back up and going next week. I’m finally sleeping through the night so I expect to be a bit better rested.