Shane Steinert-Threlkeld's blog

_Sixty Meters to Anywhere_ by Brendan Leonard

2026-04-11T00:00:00Z

Sixty Meters to Anywhere by Brendan Leonard. If you don’t know Leonard by name, you might know him as “the semi-rad.com guy”. I’ve followed his blog and other writings for years, as have many folks in my little intersection of outdoor sports and (especially online) writing.His “Friday Inspiration” series heavily inspired my temporarily-dormant-but-to-be-revived Week Links series. Although I have a good sense of his voice from years of reading his writing, I was excited to pick up this olderPublished in 2016. memoir chronicling his journey from an alcoholic teenager in Iowa (a “flatlander”) into a self-described mountain person. More concretely: from jail and court-mandated rehab straight to an MS in journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula. And then through Arizona and Denver.He’s now back in Missoula, though this book finishes before the move back there.

I’ve reviewed my share of climbing memoirs and this is one of the best. Maybe because it’s not really a climbing memoir, but rather a memoir of a life diverted (“saved”? Leonard has thoughts about this that I’ll let you read directly) by the chance gift of a sixty meter climbing rope from his brother. This transition into having an identity based not on drinking or the hard fight to not drink at all was summarized nicely towards the end of the book:

I am a climber, finally identified by something I do instead of something I don’t do.

This formation of an identity resonated with ideas from James Clear that have for some reason been coming into my media diet recently on identity-based habits.I actually searched for a review of Clear’s Atomic Habits in my archive, only to learn that I haven’t actually read it. The closest I have: Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. A rough two-step process: (1) choose an identity; (2) accumulate evidence that you are that type of person through small wins. This feels on par with major shifts in my life like starting graduate school (self-conceiving as a scholar) and becoming a climber.I had climbed very recreationally during a multi-year period when I played competitive ultimate frisbee. During rehab from an injury, when I was able to climb more consistently but couldn’t play ultimate, I fell in love and self-consciously decided to “become a climber”, as cheesy as it sounds. Lots of life decisions have been shaped by that identity since then. And many of my peers distinguish between people who climb and climbers, the latter being an adopted identity. But maybe this is turning into a new post, not a margin note. And maybe I’ll pick up the Clear book.

One other quote that I screen-shotted from this book captures one aspect of why climbing has hooked me and others so strongly:Another reason is well-articulated by C Thi Nguyen in “The Aesthetics of Rock Climbing” and his recent book The Score. Stay tuned for a review of that one.

There is nothing else when you’re climbing. There isn’t room for the mind to wander. No bills, no angry boss, no girlfriend, no debt, no depression, no heartbreak, no expectations, no questioning your life choices or career, no success and no failure; …

I’ve been surprised to learn that not everyone experiences climbing this way but, for me, it’s always been a place where the world shrinks to a tiny box surrounding my mind, body, and the wall. While I’ve had a pattern of intense interest in different athletic hobbies (maybe even identities in each?), only climbing has had this forced mental focus which, together with its interacting with the natural world and never-ending puzzle-solving, have really made it sink in. But I digress.

The final reason to pick this book up, which maybe should be the first: Leonard can write. It’s his trade and his craft. He has made a living out of freelance writing and related pursuits and you can tell why. This book will have you hooked whether or not you struggle with addiction or love climbing. Just pick it up and get going. Grade. A-

_Meditations for Mortals_ by Oliver Burkeman

2026-04-03T00:00:00Z

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. A few years ago, I read and was genuinely moved by Burkeman’s earlier “anti-self-help” book Four Thousand Weeks.This was at a time when I logged what books I read, but didn’t write reviews. You can find it listed in “The Books I Read in 2022”. So when I heard about this new book from Brendan Leonard’s illustrations of some chapters, I quickly ordered it from bookshop.org. The core thesis of that earlier book was a liberating one: instead of fighting to get all the things done, one has to embrace one’s unescapable limitations—primarily, timeThe title comes from the amount of time in an 80 year life.—and accept that you can’t do it all. Things fall by the way-side, but all you can do is prioritize and make incremental progress. The message was timely for me, as I was in the process of shedding a PhD-internalized form of perfectionism while on a tenure track, realizing that I could no longer optimize things but had to satisfice given the many demands of the job.I describe an academic job as “three jobs in a trenchcoat” to my students.. The apt label for this belief that Burkeman has since adopted for an email newsletter: imperfectionism.

This book continues on very similar lines as that book, in a somewhat unusual format belied by its subtitle: “Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts”. It’s a bit eye-rolly; had I not already trusted Burkeman, it might have turned me off of the book for good. The book’s divided into four seven-chapter “weeks”: Being Finite, Taking Action, Letting Go, and Showing Up. Each chapter is a short and easily-digestible chunk of advice about implementing and embracing imperfectionism. Burkeman recommends reading one per dayThe cynic in me wonders if this is genuine or a publisher’s scheme to encourage longer engagement with a relatively short book. but, given his general disposition and commitments, also encourages the reader to not let perfect be the enemy of the good and consume it however you can. In other words, a four-week sequence of meditations.This book is decidedly not a how-to guide on meditating. For me, this wound up being a hodge-podge: I started the first few days on that pace, but would then skip several days, did a few two-a-days (and a four-chapter-day to finish), and switched between my print version and a version on my phone borrowed from the library as travel and circumstance dictated. Imperfect, but good enough.

For more of a taste of the content, I’ll refer you to the afore-linked illustrations. I will simply note that the overall message that Burkeman sells continues to resonate with me and it was nice to have many of the ideas put into relatively concrete form.

One idiosyncratic observation of an at-the-time-unknown intrusion of this book into my daily life. For over 15 years now, my morning ritual has been to read updates from RSS feeds that I curate. You should do this, too. It’s a way of bringing high-quality, relevant writing to me instead of jumping into an endless stream of rage-bait thrown at me by an algorithm designed to keep me hooked. I’ve recently been trying a new RSS readerA big deal given the centrality of this ritual in my life. called Current. It’s centered on a design philosophy that treats your reading as a river to step into, as opposed to an inbox with an unread count that you feel pressure to get down to zero. The developer of Current, Terry Godier, foreshadowed this app with a very-relatable post called phantom obligation, a great coinage for a real phenomenon.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read on Day 5, “Too much information: On the art of reading and not reading”, this advice from Burkeman (emphasis in original):

Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.

I’d take a gander that Godier was specifically influenced by Burkeman here. Possibly through a blog post of his explicating this idea.Which I just found while writing this book review.

That anecdote can serve as a testament to the power of Burkeman’s ideas. Learning to let go and embrace inescapable imperfection has felt liberating, so this is one of the rare self-help books that I’m more than happy—nay, enthusiastic—to recommend. Grade: A-.

_The Language of Food_ by Dan Jurafsky

2026-03-08T00:00:00Z

The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky. I’ve known about this book since it came out in 2015,I was in grad school adjacent to Jurafsky’s department when it came out. but somehow took over a decade to getting around to reading it. Especially surprising since it almost feels algorithmically generated for me.Possibly second only to There’s Always This Year. While I know Jurafsky’s writing from his academic papers and canonical textbook, I’m not surprised that he writes very well for a general audience. The chapters can be read mostly independently, with each one focused on explaining a fun linguistic fact: e.g. that ketchup descends from fish sauce (historically and etymologically), that English and Korean differ in the positive words they use, and why macarons, macaroons, and macaroni are all related. Although some of the intros and outros of the chapters can come off as a tad self-indulgent,You will not forget that Jurafsky and his wife live in San Francisco, that’s for sure. that’s a small price to pay for a fun tour through how to use historical and computational linguistics to understand ourselves better. Grade: B+

_Proto_ by Laura Spinney

2026-01-13T00:00:00Z

Proto: How One Acient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney (audio). This book is about as work-adjacent as I’d like my pleasure readingErrr, listening. to get. That being said, being a linguistics professor with zero degrees in linguistics does leave certain holes in my educational background. While I know the very broad contours of proto-indo-european,I happily knew this as the answer to a $1000 Jeopardy clue that stumped the contestants. historical linguistics is an area where I’ve lacked formal training. While this book is not formal training, it does a very nice job at summarizing and synthesizing the state of the art from historical linguistics, archaeology, and the relatively recent genetic breakthroughs in ancient human DNADavid Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here has been on my list since listening to him on the Dwarkesh podcast. to tell a story about pre-historic human migration to/from the Steppe and how the PIE languages trace and inform those patterns. Engaging and certainly of interest to anyone interested in the human condition, not just linguists with impostor syndrome. Grade: B+

_Amsterdam_ by Ian McEwan

2026-01-12T00:00:00Z

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. This book was a holiday gift from my mother.Typical mom-like reasoning: “What made you think of this book for me?” “Well, you lived in Amsterdam!” I’ve not read any Ian McEwan before and my partner also got a novel of his as a present, so I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about. After reading this book—very quickly, since it’s rather short and easy to plow through—I can’t say I yet understand the fuss. The basic premise: two old friends meet at the funeral of their shared former-lover, along with a government dignitary and her late, detested husband. One’s a famous composer, the other the editor of a prominent newspaper. Both friends face moral dilemmas while going about their lives and, separately, enter a pact that winds up sealing their fate.Rather predictably, one must say. While the book was easy to read, I can’t say it will leave any kind of indelible or lasting mark on my conscience, which you might want a goodIn this case, Booker-prize-winning. book to do. The characters aren’t particularly deep; the story-line is not that surprising. The last section or so has an interesting structure, where the parallels in the two protagonists’ lives are reflected in alternating chapters. I don’t normally read other reviews of the books I read before writing my own, but in thise case read one from the Guardian and one from the New York Times. The former eviscerates the novel. The latter claims to praise it,It is titled “Dark Tour de Force”. but feels like it’s forced to do so because of the prize-winning status:

For all the appeals to high-flown principles like art and freedom that Clive and Vernon make in coming to their decisions, their problems do not really open out into the sort of weighty philosophical debates that animated “Black Dogs” and “Enduring Love.” Nor, given the predictable outcome of the story, is there the sort of grisly narrative tension that made “The Innocent” so suspenseful to read. Instead, there are the simple pleasures of reading a writer in complete command of his craft, a writer who has managed to toss off this minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb that it has won him the recognition he has so long deserved.

The best I can say about this book is that it has made me want to read other McEwan novels, since it seems like they will be better. Grade: B-

_There's Always This Year_ by Hanif Abdurraqib

2026-01-08T00:00:00Z

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib.

This book is amazing. And amazingly hard to categorize. The former partially because of the latter.

People often lament these days that certain media, especially new TV shows and movies, are designed for (or by?) the algorithm: instead of being driven by a compelling idea or novel story, some reek of being produced solely to cater to the demands of the audience. Analytics say viewers like X, Y, and Z, so let’s find a way to mix those up in a bowl together.

In a much more positive sense, this book—a holiday gift from my partner—felt custom-made for my “algorithm”, the book equivalent of the hyper-niche reel only your best friend knows to send your way.As much as I mostly loathe social media and the effects its having on society and our attention, this is a particular form of emotional expression worth reflecting on. Spending years 11–18 of my life as a jew in the northeast, basketball was part of the essential fabric of my formative years: my brother and I played around on a driveway hoop, my friends and I frequented the outdoor courts behind the school and the superintendent’s building in our town, and the sound of shoes squeaking on gym floors was the background TV to a lot of our hangs.

Though most of my friends established loyalties to the Knicks or Celtics, I was never one for true team-based fandom, not wanting my emotional well-being determined by something so beyond my control.A recent piece on fandom not disconnected from the present story. Instead, I latched on the LeBron James, whose meteoric rise coincided with my becoming conscious more broadly. To me, a privileged kid from a small town, LeBron represented among many other things the pursuit of excellence and the matching (and exceeding) of unreasonable expectations. I always appreciated how, unlike someone like Michael Jordan who "imposed his will"Not my favorite sports metaphor. on the other team, LeBron had the talent and skillset to pick apart another team in myriad ways. He could respond to the game and do what was needed of him, whatever it may be.Why am I talking in the past tense? At age 41, he’s still mostly doing just that. I remember where I was when he scored 25 straight in the 4th quarter and OT to will an undermanned Cavs team past the Pistons in the playoffs, when Ray Allen saved the 2012 Heat against the Spurs with a miraculous 3-pointer, and when James made his pivotal chase down block against the Warriors in game 7 of the 2016 finals when the Cavs overcame a 3-1 deficit against the best single-season team in NBA history.

Abdurraqib tells a story that traces many of those same events seen through the prism of his own life, growing up in east Columbus, Ohio. Not Akron (where James is from), nor Cleveland, but still: Ohio. The book is not about LeBron; it’s not about Basketball; hell, it’s not even necessarily about Abdurraqib. What is it about?

We are told with 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter: “If I haven’t made it clear yet, this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn’t.” All told from the perspective of someone who got the chance to make it out but loves the place that built and nourished him so much that he returned to and still lives there.

“With 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter”? In a book? Not a typo.

The content is not the only thing that makes this book hard to categorize. It has an unusual formal structure too: there are four “quarters” instead of chaptersFollowing a “pregame” instead of a foreword, and each punctuated by “A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators” and concluded with an Intermission meditating on a famous movie featuring basketball. and each one is broken up by a countdown from 12:00 to 0:00, as the clock winds down in a basketball game. These time-stamps break up the text the way chapter or sub-section headings usually do, but are quite often thrown right in the middle of sentences.

Though the book is partially chronological, it’s not completely a memoir, and it’s not completely about basketball. Abdurraqib can extract extremely subtle nuances of human emotion from many places, from the pleasurable sweat on his dad’s bald forehead while eating to the subtle offsets indicating uncertainty in break-up and pleading soul songs. Both topics which invite multi-page meditations that you can’t stop reading, among many others. The structure changes too, from neat narrative prose, to in-line poetry, to—with 5:19 left in the fourth quarter (titled “City as Its False Self”)—a page-long run-on “sentence” describing what he saw after cops killed Henry Green in a way that partially induces in the reader the anguished exasperation he felt.

Just as this book is hard to categorize, it is also hard to review. Not least because my writing can’t begin to hold a candlestick to Abdurraqib’s. So, to wrap up: do yourself a favor. Go read this book.And I will now be reading some of his other’s.

Grade: A

The Books I Read in 2025

2026-01-06T00:00:00Z

Starting in 2020, I began keeping track of all of the books I read, a habit I adapted from my brother. Starting in 2023, I jotted down a quick long-paragraph review (with a “grade”) of each book as well. Here’s the list of books I read in 2025, in reverse chronological order. The year ended with a bit of a whimper; I spent November and December partially reading six or so books in parallel (gritting teeth emoji here), which I promise to finish before too long. I still at least hit my rough goal of a book a month, averaged across the year.

On Writing by Stephen King
04 January 2025
Tags: book-reviews, writing, craft, memoir
Grade: A-

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
09 February 2025
Tags: book-reviews, language, cults, power
Grade: B+

States of Adventure by Fitz Cahall
16 February 2025
Tags: book-reviews, outdoors, adventure, coffee-table-book
Grade: A-

The Uncanny Muse by David Hadju
17 February 2025
Tags: book-reviews, art, artificial intelligence, history
Grade: B+

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
19 February 2025
Tags: book-reviews, science fiction, dystopian, capitalism
Grade: A

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neal Postman
25 February 2025
Tags: book-reviews, public discourse, technology, communication
Grade: B+

Beyond the Mountain by Steve House
11 April 2025
Tags: book-reviews, alpinism, climbing, memoir
Grade: B+

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell
24 April 2025
Tags: book-reviews, climate, natural history, memoir
Grade: A-

The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes
01 June 2025
Tags: book-reviews, attention economy, social media
Grade: B+

Thirty Below by Cassidy Randall
05 June 2025
Tags: book-reviews, alpinism, climbing, feminism
Grade: A

Everest, Inc. by Will Cockrell
22 June 2025
Tags: book-reviews, alpinism, business, climbing, history
Grade: A-

Uplifted by Sonnie Trotter
22 July 2025
Tags: book-reviews, climbing, memoir
Grade: B-

Technopoly by Neil Postman
05 August 2025
Tags: book-reviews, technology, history
Grade: B+

The Explorer’s Gene by Alex Hutchinson
18 August 2025
Tags: book-reviews, science, neuroscience, adventure
Grade: A-

Endurance by Alfred Lansing
27 August 2025
Tags: book-reviews, adventure, arctic, exploration
Grade: A-

The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits
05 October 2025
Tags: book-reviews, philosophy, games, meaning-of-life
Grade: A-

The Color of Everything by Cory Richards
05 November 2025
Tags: book-reviews, meaning-of-life, climbing, memoir, alpinism, mental health
Grade: B+

Week Links #3

2025-11-21T00:00:00Z

First, I’ve got a confession to make. I actually missed not one but two days of daily blogging this week. Although I back-filled yesterday, I didn’t write on either Wednesday or Thursday of this week. I’ve got plenty of excuses lined up, but mainly I just let work / life get in the way. Luckily, I made some progress on some academic writing projects in the spare writing time that I did have, so that also feels like appropriate prioritization. *pats self on back*

In this week’s episode of “if you build it, they will come” applied to urban design: after Iowa City made its buses free, traffic cleared and air quality improved. You love to see it.

Closer to home, KirklandYes, of Costco’s Kirkland Signature fame. voters elected a city council set on continuing plans for growth and building more housing against a NIMBY opposition group.

In the latest round of codified thought policing from the Republican party, “Texas A&M systematizes massive violation of core academic freedom rights of faculty”.

I’m officially old. Dictionary.com’s word of the year was “6-7”. Having no idea what that was or meant, I had to rely on this post from Language Log to point me to this explainer from WHYY, Philadelphia’s local NPR station. I guess it’s just the cycle of life.

I’m looking forward to watching this feature length documentary on the history of rail trails for bicycling soon. Of course, while I love these rail trails—and commute on one of the earliest in the country every day—I also wish we could have rails and trails.

Here’s an interview with the author of a new book on effective altruism.Provocatively titled Death in a Shallow Pond Not the most illuminating thing I’ve ever read, but a useful overview of some of the history.

My colleague Noah Smith will become a Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence after a $10M donation.

Papers of CogSci 2025, pt 3

2025-11-20T00:00:00Z

Welcome to part three of my round-up of CogSci papers, an unordered list of papers that jumped out at me from the proceedings in one way or another, since I didn’t go in person this year.

“Learning about Inductive Potential from Generic Statements”: I came for the title, but felt instantly attacked by the first sentence of the abstract—“Generic statements (e.g., “Climbers drive Subarus”) shape what categories people take as meaningful bases for generalization.”—as a Subaru-driving climber.
“The origin of the possible: 12-month-olds’ understanding of certain, likely, and unlikely events”: infants can distinguish 66%- from 33%-likely events, but not from 100%-likely ones.
“Representations of what’s possible reflect others’ epistemic states”: another modal cognition one, this one focusing on epistemic effects on non-epistemic modal spaces.
“Iterated language learning is shaped by a drive for optimizing lossy compression”: a power-house team—led by my former masters student and long-time collaborator Nathaniel Imel—analyzes adult artificial language learning data showing that it tends towards optimal efficiency in the information-bottleneck sense.
“Re-examining the tradeoff between lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity in recursive numeral systems”: re-analyzes results from Denić and Szymanik on numeral systems and provides a few interesting additional analyses.
“Developmental evidence for sensitivity to hierarchical structure in the noun phrase”: my earlier work with Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro on artificial language learning was inspired by earlier work by this group. Exciting to see them using the same method now to conduct studies on children. Spoiler alert: they find the same preference for scope-isomorphic ordering!
“The role of contrast in category learning”: clever experimental manipulation of contrastiveness in category learning, looking at whether the “same” category is learned differently when presented positively or merely in contrast with other ones.
“Neglect zero: evidence from priming across constructions”: cross-construction priming suggests that neglect-zero phenomena (where empty sets and the like are ruled out in interpretation) are in fact a unified category.
“Efficient communication drives the semantic structure of kinship terminology”: need to read this one more closely, but it looks like a clever method of using topographic similarity to reverse-engineer which semantic features matter for different languages.
“PACE: Procedural Abstractions for Communicating Efficiently”: I also saw this one as a talk at a different event and thought it was a clever combination of ideas from abstraction-learning and RL-based communication. I want to revisit the paper to get more detail.

Papers of CogSci 2025, pt 2

2025-11-18T00:00:00Z

Welcome to part two of my round-up of CogSci papers, a totally unordered list of papers that jumped out at me from the proceedings in one way or another, since I didn’t attend the conference in person. While I’m enjoying finally going through and seeing what I missed, this exercise does also highlight that what’s best about conferences is meeting new and old colleagues, in-person discussion of ideas, and the serendipity of finding these things in not-always-expected places. It also seems like there might need to be a lot of these round-ups, but I will try and not make every day this week one of them.

“Studying Cross-linguistic Structural Transfer in Second Language Learning”: large-scale analysis of L1->L2 transfer, focused on morphosyntax. Should we start calling some of these things Hartshornian-scale?
“Thinking through syntax: Expanding the scope of “thinking for speaking””: learning an artificial language with different syntactic structures for a simple domain may effect similarity judgments on that domain (colored objects)
“Teasing Apart Architecture and Initial Weights as Sources of Inductive Bias in Neural Networks”: initial weights may matter as much as architecture as a source of model bias, and all models fail at out-of-domain (from meta-learning domain) generalization
“Dimensions of Identity-Representing Belief”: I’ve recently developed, thanks to a student of mine, a small side-interest in believe versus think. These non-epistemic kinds of belief seem relevant to the difference in these verbs.
“Reinforcement learning produces efficient case-marking systems”: I’ve thought about case-marking as a candidate domain for efficient communication analyses, and have also used RL in similar scenarios in the past. Curious to read more and see how much communication is in this model.
“Interactions Between Linear Order and Lexical Distributions in Artificial Language Learning”: in addition to manipulating frequency of types and tokens, the authors find an effect of prefix vs suffixing in ALL, which is relevant for one of my projects.
“Testing counterintuitive predictions about cost-based inferences in learning from the Rational Speech Act model”: little evidence of RSA’s prediction that costly signals should be preferably ambiguous, with a suggestion that RSA might be a better model of communication than of learning.