Category: Magazines

Am I Too Old To Start A Second Brain?

by James Wallace Harris, 12/8/25

For years now, I’ve been reading about people who create a second brain to record what they want to remember. Most of these second brain systems use software, but not all. Many base their ideas on the Zettelkasten system, which was originally stored on note cards.

Over the years, I’ve tried different methods and software applications. I’m currently learning Obsidian. I’ve used note cards, notebooks, Google Docs, Evernote, OneNote, InstaPaper, Recall, and others. I love reading – taking information in – but I don’t like taking notes.

The trouble is, information goes through my brain like a sieve. When I want to tell someone about what I’ve learned, or think I’ve learned, I can’t cite my source, or, for that matter, clearly state what I think I know. And I seldom think about how I’ve come to believe what I believe.

I’m currently reading False by Joe Pierre, MD, about how we all live with delusions. This book makes me want to rededicate myself to creating a second brain for two reasons. First, I want to take precise notes on this book because it offers dozens of insights about how we deceive ourselves, and about how other people are deceived and are deceiving. Second, the book inspires me to start tracking what I think I learn every day and study where that knowledge comes from.

One of the main ways we fool ourselves is with confirmation bias. Pierre says:

In real estate, it’s said that the most important guide to follow when buying a house and trying to understand home values is “location, location, location.” If I were asked about the most important guide to understand the psychology of believing strongly in things that aren’t true, I would similarly answer, “confirmation bias, confirmation bias, confirmation bias.”

Pierre explains how the Internet, Google, AIs, Social Media, and various algorithms reinforce our natural tendency toward confirmation bias.

Pierre claims there are almost 200 defined cognitive biases. Wikipedia has a nice listing of them. Wikipedia also has an equally nice, long list of fallacies. Look at those two lists; they are what Pierre is describing in his book.

Between these two lists, there are hundreds of ways we fool ourselves. They are part of our psychology. They explain how we interact with people and reality. However, everything is magnified by polarized politics, the Internet, Social Media, and now AI.

I’d like to create a second brain that would help me become aware of my own biases and fallacies. It would have been more useful if I had started this project when I was young. And I may be too old to overcome a lifetime of delusional thinking.

I do change the way I think sometimes. For example, most of my life, I’ve believed that it was important for humanity to go to Mars. Like Elon Musk, I thought it vital that we create a backup home for our species. I no longer believe either.

Why would I even think about Mars in the first place? I got those beliefs from reading dozens of nonfiction and fictional books about Mars. Why have I changed my mind? Because I have read dozens of articles that debunk those beliefs. In other words, my ideas came from other people.

I would like to create a second brain that tracks how my beliefs develop and change. Could maintaining a second brain help reveal my biases and thinking fallacies? I don’t know, but it might.

Doing the same thing and expecting different results is a common fallacy. Most of my friends are depressed and cynical about current events. Humanity seems to be in an immense Groundhog Day loop of history. Doesn’t it seem like liberals have always wanted to escape this loop, and conservatives wanted to embrace it?

If we have innate mental systems that are consistently faulty, how do we reprogram ourselves? I know my life has been one of repeatable behaviors. Like Phil Conners, I’m looking for a way out of the loop.

Stoicism seems to be the answer in old age. Is it delusional to think enlightenment might be possible?

JWH

Are Podcasts Wasting Our Time?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/16/25

While listening to the Radio Atlantic podcast, “What If AI Is a Bubble?,” a conversation between host Hanna Rosin and guest Charlie Warzel, I kept thinking I had heard this information before. I checked and found that I had read “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens” by Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, which Rosin had mentioned in her introduction.

Over the past year, I’ve been paying attention to how podcasts differ from long-form journalism. I’ve become disappointed with talking heads. I know podcasts are popular now, and I can understand their appeal. But I no longer have the patience for long chats, especially ones that spend too much time not covering the topic. All too often, podcasts take up excessive time for the amount of real information they cover.

What I’ve noticed is that the information density between podcasts and long-form journalism is very different. Here’s a quote, five paragraphs from the podcast:

Warzel: There’s a recent McKinsey report that’s been sort of passed around in these spheres where people are talking about this that said 80 percent of the companies they surveyed that were using AI discovered that the technology had no real—they said “significant”—impact on their bottom line, right?

So there’s this notion that these tools are not yet, at least as they exist now, as transformative as people are saying—and especially as transformative for productivity and efficiency and the stuff that leads to higher revenues. But there’s also these other reasons.

The AI boom, in a lot of ways, is a data-center boom. For this technology to grow, for it to get more powerful, for it to serve people better, it needs to have these data centers, which help the large language models process faster, which help them train better. And these data centers are these big warehouses that have to be built, right? There’s tons of square footage. They take a lot of electricity to run.

But one of the problems is with this is it’s incredibly money-intensive to build these, right? They’re spending tons of money to build out these data centers. So there’s this notion that there’s never enough, right? We’re going to need to keep building data centers. We’re going to need to increase the amount of power, right? And so what you have, basically, is this really interesting infrastructure problem, on top of what we’re thinking of as a technological problem.

And that’s a bit of the reason why people are concerned about the bubble, because it’s not just like we need a bunch of smart people in a room to push the boundaries of this technology, or we need to put a lot of money into software development. This is almost like reverse terraforming the Earth. We need to blanket the Earth in these data centers in order to make this go.

Contrast that with the opening five paragraphs of the article:

The AI boom is visible from orbit. Satellite photos of New Carlisle, Indiana, show greenish splotches of farmland transformed into unmistakable industrial parks in less than a year’s time. There are seven rectangular data centers there, with 23 more on the way.

Inside each of these buildings, endless rows of fridge-size containers of computer chips wheeze and grunt as they perform mathematical operations at an unfathomable scale. The buildings belong to Amazon and are being used by Anthropic, a leading AI firm, to train and run its models. According to one estimate, this data-center campus, far from complete, already demands more than 500 megawatts of electricity to power these calculations—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. When all the data centers in New Carlisle are built, they will demand more power than two Atlantas.

The amount of energy and money being poured into AI is breathtaking. Global spending on the technology is projected to hit $375 billion by the end of the year and half a trillion dollars in 2026. Three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks; the value of every publicly traded company has, in a sense, been buoyed by an AI-driven bull market. To cement the point, Nvidia, a maker of the advanced computer chips underlying the AI boom, yesterday became the first company in history to be worth $5 trillion.

Here’s another way of thinking about the transformation under way: Multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was. Much like how Saudi Arabia is a petrostate, the U.S. is a burgeoning AI state—and, in particular, an Nvidia-state. The number keeps going up, which has a buoying effect on markets that is, in the short term, good. But every good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.

America appears to be, at the moment, in a sort of benevolent hostage situation. AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and by another calculation, those AI expenditures accounted for 92 percent of GDP growth during the first half of 2025. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in late 2022, the tech industry has gone from making up 22 percent of the value in the S&P 500 to roughly one-third. Just yesterday, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet all reported substantial quarterly-revenue growth, and Reuters reported that OpenAI is planning to go public perhaps as soon as next year at a value of up to $1 trillion—which would be one of the largest IPOs in history. (An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters, “An IPO is not our focus, so we could not possibly have set a date”; OpenAI and The Atlantic have a corporate partnership.)

Admittedly, the paragraphs in the article are somewhat longer, but judge them on the amount of facts each presents.

Some people might say podcasts are more convenient. But I listened to the article. I’ve been subscribing to Apple News+ for a while now. I really didn’t use it daily until I discovered the audio feature. And it didn’t become significant until I began hearing major articles from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine.

Whenever I listened to a podcast, including podcasts from those magazines, I was generally disappointed with their impact. Conversational speech just can’t compete with the rich informational density of a well-written essay. And once I got used to long-form journalism, the information I got from the internet and television seemed so damn insubstantial.

These magazines have spoiled me. I’m even disappointed with their short-form content. Over my lifetime, I’ve watched magazines fill their pages with shorter and shorter content. Interesting tidbits came to magazines long before the internet appealed to our ever-shortening attention spans.

As an experiment, I ask you to start paying attention to the length of the content you consume. Analyze the information density of what you read, either with your eyes or ears. Pay attention to the words that have the greatest impact. Notice what percentage of a piece is opinion and what percentage is reported facts. How are the facts presented? Is a source given? And when you look back, either from a day or a week, how much do you remember?

What do you think when you read or hear:

According to one estimate, this data-center campus, far from complete, already demands more than 500 megawatts of electricity to power these calculations—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. When all the data centers in New Carlisle are built, they will demand more power than two Atlantas.

Don’t you want to know more? Where did those facts come from? Are they accurate? Another measure of content is whether it makes you want to know more. The article above drove my curiosity to insane levels. That’s when I found this YouTube video. Seeing is believing. But judging videos is another issue, but that’s for another time.

JWH

Reading With a Purpose

by James Wallace Harris, 11/12/25

I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.

I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.

However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.

I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.

At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.

I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.

I then found Recall AI.

It reads and analyzes whatever webpage you’re on. Providing something like this for today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II, “What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century:”

Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.

Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.

This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?

Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.

I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.

I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.

I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:

  • Climate gentrification
  • Heat islands
  • Climate dead zones
  • Insurance market collapse
  • Climate change acceleration
  • Economic no-go zones
  • Corporate takeover of public services
  • Climate change inequality
  • Histofuturism
  • Sacrifice zones
  • Corporate feudalism

Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.

I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.

Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by  Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.

The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.

That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?

JWH

My Attachment to Old Magazines

by James Wallace Harris, 9/6/25

I’ve always loved magazines. I worked six years in the periodicals department of a university library. As a kid, I loved all kinds of magazines. Even before I could read, my sister and I found a pile of old magazines in the attic of the house my parents were renting. The pile was as high as we were. It was old picture magazines, like Life and Look. Becky and I loved looking at the pictures. Magazines were like television, showing us people and places we’d never seen.

Later on, when I had a few coins, I’d buy magazines like Popular Science and MAD. Eventually, I discovered science fiction magazines. My favorite was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but I also loved Galaxy, Analog, Amazing, and Fantastic. I eventually subscribed to the first three around 1968. I also loved finding old issues at used bookshops for a dime or quarter.

By 1975, I had collected more than three-fourths of F&SF’s back issues. By then, I had also acquired pulps going back to 1928. Holding those magazines made me feel like I owned a piece of the past. I loved that. But in 1975, I had to sell my magazine collection.

Then in the 2010s, I started collecting those old magazines again through eBay. I eventually found 90% of the issues of F&SF published before 1975, and about 30% of those published after that. I also picked up about 95% of Galaxy.

Today, I started thinking about selling those old magazines. I took down the December 1961 issue of F&SF and read the beginning of each story. Every story hooked me, but I didn’t keep reading. I have this tremendous attachment to these old magazines, but I also feel a great need to have fewer possessions.

I have scans of all these magazines that I read on my tablet. In fact, it’s easier to read the scans than the original paper copies. The paper copies are becoming fragile. They are collector items, and I don’t want to hurt them.

I considered donating my magazine collection to the Friends of the Library, but I worry they won’t receive the love they deserve. I’m arranging to sell them on eBay. That way, a collector will acquire them. But it’s disturbing me to do this.

When I held the December 1961 issue of F&SF, it triggered a wave of nostalgia. It hurt me to imagine parting with it. I don’t value things. My truck is 26 years old. My watch cost $15. My clothes are Amazon Basics. I see no point in gold or diamonds. There’s nothing I own that’s expensive or trendy. If I’m not using something, I give it away.

If I had the choice between having the Mona Lisa on my wall or a complete run of F&SF, I’d pick the magazines.

Why am I so attached to these old magazines? It’s not the content because I have digital copies of all of them.

The best answer I can think of is this: Holding them recalls the past that no longer exists. If I didn’t have them, I wouldn’t have that connection to the past. Their covers are like photographs that remind me of who I used to be. Buying them on eBay was like buying back part of me that no longer exists.

I need to let them go. I feel like the kid in an old movie who has to free a wild animal they rescued. I rationalize to myself that whoever buys them will love them in the same way I have.

Over the last decade, since I’ve been retired, I’ve been trying to recapture my past by buying things I once owned. But I don’t want to be some old boomer dude living in the past.

Psychologically, I didn’t think I’d live this long. Now that I’m 73, I’m wondering, what if I live another decade or two? I don’t want to waste all that time living in the past.

I wonder if we recall who we were when it feels like the end is approaching. I’m not feeling that now. I wonder if I will buy another run of F&SF when I’m 88?

JWH

12 Reasons Why I’ve Stopped Watching the NBC Nightly News

by James Wallace Harris, 7/29/25

I developed the habit of watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite when JFK was assassinated in 1963. I had just turned thirteen. Cronkite had been the first to switch to a half-hour evening news format that September. I only had a vague sense of what the news was before that. I stuck with CBS until the 1980s, into the Dan Rather years. For some reason, my wife and I then switched to ABC for a couple of decades before finally switching to NBC. When Lester Holt retired, I decided to stop getting my news from television.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about what it means to follow the news. Does it require a daily habit of studying current affairs? Should we consider the news to be any reporting of significant events that have recently happened? How much information can be crammed into twenty-two minutes of television? Who decides what is worth knowing? Recently, NBC chose to make the deaths of two celebrities the lead story two nights running. Were the careers of Ozzy Osbourne and Hulk Hogan the most important information I needed to know on those two days? Think about it. Of all these events happening around the world on those two days, were their deaths the most essential for me to learn about?

Reason 1

I’m not picking on NBC. All the broadcast networks and the cable news networks decided what their audiences want to watch based on ratings. It’s not that Ozzy and Hulk’s deaths are more newsworthy than famine in Gaza, but NBC knows its audience is tired of hearing about starving Palestinians, and more people would watch their show if it opened with Osbourne and Hogan.

Decision 1: I need to decide what’s newsworthy.

Reason 2

Is twenty-two minutes enough time to learn about the critical world events that happened in the last twenty-four hours? Just how much time should I devote to being well-informed? If it is as little as twenty-two minutes, then television is the wrong medium. Reading just the headings of all the news stories from a quality newspaper app on my phone serves me far better.

Television news spends most of its time on visual news. Often, NBC repeats exciting film clips several times. That’s not an efficient use of time. Airplane crashes and flooding rivers grab our attention, but is it really news we need?

Decision 2: I need to decide how much time I want to spend on the news. Additionally, I need to decide on the best medium that maximizes that time.

Reason 3

Too much of television news is taken up by reporters and anchors. Often, reporters take more time asking a question than the time given to the eyewitness’s reply. I’m not interested in reporters or anchors.

Decision 3: I need to look for news sources where the journalist is in the background. That excludes television and most podcasts. Generally, good print reporting only includes the reporter’s byline.

Reason 4

Television news offers low-quality information. A major article in The Atlantic might have taken months to research and write. Such articles are information-dense. TV news is written and edited quickly. There’s not much time for fact gathering or checking. It’s often based on eye-witnesses who mainly add emotional impact rather than inform. Television news relies on soundbites, which are mostly opinions. Experts interviewed on TV news are often selected by convenience rather than their authority.

There have been over 22,500 days since I started watching nightly news programs on TV. There is an incredible sameness to the kind of content TV news presents. I should have abandoned it long ago, but it gave the illusion I was being informed, and it was convenient.

Decision 4: Pick another medium for consuming news.

Reason 5

Television news is narrow in scope. It focuses on catastrophes, tragedies, and political conflict. Over a lifetime of seeing thousands of news reports on wildfires, they all look and feel the same. That’s also true for wars, airplane crashes, riots, elections, famines, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Television news mainly focuses on the types of stories we’ve seen repeated throughout our lives.

Television makes it seem like there is nothing new under the sun. I’ve learned from reading quality magazine articles and newspaper journalism that that old bit of wisdom is completely untrue. Magazine and newspaper articles constantly amaze me with news that surprises me because it’s about people, places, concepts, ideas, and events I’ve never heard of before.

Decision 5: Find more news sources that teach me about reality, inspire my curiosity, and better inform.

Reason 6

TV news is seldom memorable. If John F. Kennedy’s assassination was only reported once on the CBS Evening News on November 22, 1963, I doubt I would even remember the event. I remember it because of constant coverage over several days, including all the documentaries, movies, and books that have been produced since that day. I remember Project Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions because of the around-the-clock television coverage, as well as the documentaries, movies, and books that have been produced since those events. That’s why I don’t remember all the space missions since. They didn’t get such coverage.

A thirty-second spot on the nightly news, or even a big event stretched to four minutes of reporting, just isn’t remembered. I don’t need to waste time on ephemeral news stories. I’ve discovered it’s far better to spend thirty minutes on one topic than two minutes on fifteen topics.

Decision 6: Focus on one news topic for most of my daily time spent on the news. Then quickly go over the headlines.

Reason 7

Television news isn’t educational because it focuses on the same topics. Shouldn’t news enlighten us about reality? Shouldn’t we always expand our awareness of what’s going on in the world?

How can short videos and soundbites be truly informative? I want news that adds to my personal growth. News that adds wisdom, not ephemeral data.

Decision 7: Make lists of what I want to learn about and then find news reports that bring me up to date on those topics.

Reason 8

Television news is biased. Knowing the truth is impossible. Content produced for money-making ratings or to promote a political agenda will always be questionable. I even suspect the kind of long-form journalism that goes out of its way to appear unbiased. I expect all writing to have some bias. It’s my job to spot it.

Decision 8: Start analyzing prose for bias. Think about word choices in each sentence. Always wonder if information is left out.

Reason 9

Real knowledge is statistical. Science is our only cognitive tool that consistently explains reality. News is too close to word-of-mouth. We need news to be closer to peer-reviewed science journals. That’s probably impossible, but we need to think about it. Ground News attempts to apply statistics to the news by comparing political bias and the amount of coverage a story receives. Can’t we find other statistical methods to measure the news?

Decision: Don’t trust any news unless it comes from multiple sources.

Reason 10

Replying on a single network for news is dangerous.

Decision 10: Seek out different gatekeepers. Every group or organization has an agenda. Learn what that agenda is before interpreting what they are saying.

I’ve discovered that reading/listening to one well-reported article a day is much more informative and educational than a package of video clips and soundbites. I’ve been achieving this with Apple News+, which offers content from over 400 magazines and newspapers. Each morning, I listen to a single long-form article from magazines such as The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and New Scientist, while I do my physical therapy and morning walk.

Reason 11

Television news can be misleading. It’s not as dangerous as AI-generated fake news on YouTube, but television news is easily corrupted by money, marketing, and politics.

Decision 11: Always consider the source of the news. I need to decide which news sources I will trust.

Reason 12

Most television news gives the United States’ perspective of world events.

Decision 12: Find news sources from around the world.

Conclusion

This is just the beginning of changing a lifelong habit of watching the nightly news on television. I should have made these changes long ago. We all get into ruts that are hard to escape. I believe getting old is making me regret not trying other approaches to understanding reality. However, all the political turmoil since 2016 is making me question everything I know. Human-created and computer-created fake news is disturbing. In recent years, I’ve decided that all of us suffer from multiple delusions.

You shouldn’t ask yourself if you’re delusional, but how delusional. Anyone who feels they know the truth is crazy. We can only guess what might be true by using statistics. Television has always depended on the false assumption that seeing is believing. I have doubts about believing anything.

Television, politics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet have corrupted our perception of reality. I want to rethink everything. I’m starting with my old habit of watching the nightly news.

JWH