Bird history, Motorcycles and Cows, and other ideas I enjoyed this month

February/March 2026 recap

I’m combining the February and March recap because of pneumonia. Feeling lucky for modern medicine and greedy for more progress.

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My Writing

• I spoke with Robert Francis, writer of Bird History, about the origins of bird names, why birds offer such a rich lens on American history, and what our changing relationship with them can tell us about conservation and progress. You can watch, listen, or read the transcript. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:

Robert: In the 1400s, the English had this endearing practice of giving birds people names. You had Tom tit, Jenny wren. There’s also a bird called a pie, and they called it Margaret pie, or Maggie pie, and that just became magpie. There are other birds that this happened to as well. There was a bird called a daw, and they named him Jack, so that became Jackdaw.

There’s a bird called a redbreast that they named Robin. Robin redbreast became so popular and attached that the original redbreast fell away. That name has spread all over the world too. American robins are named after English robins, which were just a nickname. It was like we had all these birds flying around and we’d call them Steve, and that just became the name that we call them. This is something that has a six hundred year history. It shows that people, the culture, and history have these long through lines for the birds we see around us all the time.

• My essay, Powering progress: The quest for energy abundance, came out several months ago as part of Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress. I’m relinking to it because a few weeks ago the The Roots of Progress featured it in their recap of the Climate and Energy tracks from Progress Conference 2025. I strongly recommend checking out the recap for great talks by Ramez Naam, Dakota Gruener, and many others.

  From “Powering Progress”:

Progress runs on power. There is no progress without energy. Our ability to harness energy has enabled enormous strides in agriculture, industry, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine. The more energy available to a society, the wealthier it becomes.

• My Interintellect series on The Odyssey is still going strong. Last month I wrote about Why Odysseus Turns Down Immortality. The next session is Thursday, April 9. We’re having a great time, join us!

  • You can watch sessions 1, 2, 3, and 4 on Interintellect’s Youtube channel

• I created a new landing page on the website I’m calling Marginalia. It’s a place for me to post shorter pieces or blog style reflections, not full essays. I generally won’t send these out via email, but I’ll share them on notes and in these recaps.

  • Growing up and saying goodbye

I told him it was just me teasing, that I actually love watching him grow. He’s such a big boy now, and I love him. He smiled and went back to his cookie.

I put him to bed and knew, once again, I had just said goodbye forever to another version of my little boy.

(Mike Riggs gets it; so does Derek Thompson “To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.”)

• Moments that come and go

I appreciate Impressionism much more since I had kids. I get what an artist like Monet was trying to do now. Trying to hold on and capture a moment before it disappears into another.

• One more note about parenting while we’re on the subject:

Ideas I enjoyed

• Motorcycles and Cows: My brother took a three week motorcycle trip across India. He wrote a great, and often quite funny, essay about the experience:

“Always eyes are forward in India, never left and right.” He continued on his diatribe, explaining how common it was for cows to wander into the street. With four or five examples, he sounded like nothing more than that Fred Armisen meme from Parks and Rec, where the answer to every infraction is “straight to jail.” Here, any possible circumstance ended with “cow.”

“You are driving on highway? Cow.

You are crossing street? Cow.

You see market, want to stop? Cow.”

I assured him I would keep both eyes forward, always on the lookout for cow.

• Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching: Multiple people sent me Listers after listening to my podcast with Robert, and it’s easily one of the best things I’ve ever watched on birding. Also a good example of why I do things like the podcast and these posts in the first place — as Henrik Karlsson said “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

• I know I’m late to the party, but I just discovered Brink Lindsey’s blog, and I’m loving it. In The anti-Promethean backlash he makes a very important, but often overlooked distinction between environmentalism and the anti-progress crowd. They’re related, but “it’s critically important not to conflate the two.”

It was primarily through environmentalism that the anti-Promethean backlash manifested itself and exerted influence over events, yet there is no fundamental, necessary connection between concern for the health and beauty of the natural world and antipathy toward — in Francis Bacon’s formulation, the use of science and technology “for the relief of man’s estate.” Indeed, as is now becoming clear in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused.

I content the misanthropic views often attributed to environmentalism are not representative of the movement writ large. Environmentalism can be positive-sum and as Lindsey says, “must be judged as a large and necessary step forward in human progress.”

• In a similar vein, Shawn Regan wrote a great story for The Ecomodernist, Can Abundance Include Nature? Certainly! Plus, restoration will become even more of an imperative as land is decoupled from production. More from less means more marginal land taken out of production and the need for tools to restore it.

• Speaking of decoupling land from production, I’ve been pondering what will become of ranch and grazing lands if synthetic beef makes traditional ranching obsolete. In The AI Revolution No One’s Talking About: How Artificial Insemination reshaped the American beef supply by Abby ShalekBriski, she shows how artificial insemination is improving dairy economics and what that means for beef production. It’s a good example of how technology is revolutionizing food production in often surprising ways.

• On that note, years ago I worked on an investment to grow and export blueberries in Peru. Rhishi Pethe does a nice job in Chasing Counter Seasonality explaining how and why it became such a booming sector. His article How packaged salads took over America is another great read on the technology in agriculture and food systems.

• Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow? by Andrew Miller is an excellent economic and historical explanation of why we don’t have high speed passenger rail in the US. The answer is much more interesting than the US doesn’t know how to build.

• Are screens bad for children? An excellent interview of Matt Bateman by Samantha Watkins. One takeaway from the conversation is how important discernment and judgment is for a parent. Simple rules like no screen time are easy to enforce (and easy for others to comprehend), but taking the time to be thoughtful and discerning, and teaching kids to do the same, opens up far more opportunities for growth.

One last thing

• Give your kid a pencil and pad of paper. You’ll be surprised what they come up with!

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