Shane Steinert-Threlkeld's blog

_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.

Papers of CogSci 2025, pt 1

2025-11-17T00:00:00Z

CogSci—or, rather, the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society—is probably my favorite academic conference. It has Goldilocks mixes of size (not too big, not too small) and research breadth (not purely computational, not purely experimental) that makes it very stimulating to attend. This past year, however, I didn’t attend both because San Francisco wasn’t an exciting place to travel for me personally and because a lot of our projects didn’t fit with the submission deadline.

The FOMO was still real, however, and so I’m here going to catalogue some papers that seem interesting to me from the proceedings (in no particular order). Maybe with a brief sentence or two about why. Note: given how my mind works, what this actually means is that I’m also clearing out tons of tabs from my browser that have been open for months. Win-win.

“Words with more diverse semantic networks are more readily extended to novel meanings”. Network analysis of word meaning combined with lexical change.
“Simulating the Emergence of Differential Case Marking with Communicating Neural-Network Agents”: a phenomenon I’m recently interested in investigated using methods I’ve worked on in the past. Also saw this one as a talk in Göteborg in late 2024. And here’s an experimental paper on differential argument marking in artificial language learning.
“Learning Efficient Recursive Numeral Systems via Reinforcement Learning”: it was Emil Carlsson’s PhD defense—of which this paper was a chapter—that brought me to Göteborg in the first place.
“Soft production preferences emerge from a bottleneck on memory”: explicit modeling of memory bottlenecks during language production yields novel, testable predictions.
“Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Explanation”: saw this one at an event honoring my PhD advisor’s 75th birthday and enjoyed it, so was happy to see the paper version.
“Constituency tests in human adults’ language of thought for geometry”. I’m a fan of the Language of Thought hypothesis and its resurgence in the past two decades or so. It’s interesting to see cosntituency tests applied to such languages, especially for a domain (geometry) that’s not paradigmatically linguistically structured. Can similar methods be used to identify the primitives in an LoT (one of the main questions in any application)?
“Can input statistics over-ride a prior bias in morpheme ordering? A test case with gender and number”. Saldana, Culbertson, and others write an artificial language study on morpheme ordering? I read it.
“Efficient compression in locomotion verbs across languages”: information bottleneck applied to verb meaning, a less “static” domain. I want to check how exactly they built the meaning space here.
“Function shapes form: Compositionality emerges from communicative needs, not environmental structure alone”. Manipulating communicative context has an effect on the emergence of “compositional” languages (i.e. disentangled meanings emerge only when the relevant factors are communicatively useful).
“Modelling compounding across languages with analogy and composition”: I was an external examiner of Aotao Xu’s PhD thesis, which included this paper. Cool formal modeling of multiple intepretive strategies, applied to novel compounds.

Week Links #3

2025-11-14T00:00:00Z

Rad Power Bikes—North America’s largest ebike company—sent a notice to its employees that it may go out of business as soon as January 2026. Although I went with a similar rival company when I bought an ebike a little over 4 years ago,Market dilution is one, but not the only, issue Rad is facing. They are partially a victim of their own success, having created a market. the Rad headquarters near where I live in Ballard in Seattle is the first place I rode an ebike. I’m broadly a big fan of ebikes since they help so many people replace trips they would otherwise do by car and can really help move things forward, so it’s sad to see this collapse unfolding. Anyways, GeekWire has a bit more detail on the rise and fall of Rad.

I’m an avid watcher of Top Chef and have long been a fan of now-former host Padma Lakshmi. So I was happy to read this interview of her, which mainly focuses on her new book. They do, however, also tease a new cooking competition show that she will host at the end. Can’t wait!

Corporations are people: groan. But so are ships, and some other unexpected things.

The great Len Necefer has a long piece on why the environmental movement has been struggling, focusing on a certain kind of stasis in communication and lack of imagination from the large organizations behind it. He always strikes me as someone on the left with a robust theory of change who’s not afraid to express it and who’s also not afraid to have a (often very funny) personality.

I’m looking forward to Age of Audio, a documentary on the history of podcasting.

It’s long, but you must read An Age of Hyperabundance, where Laura Preston recounts her experience at “The Voice”, a conversational AI conferenceShe calls it “the” such conference, but I’m not sure it’s deserving of that article. where she was invited to be the resident skeptical keynote. The conclusion of a sad anecdote from her from 2019 when she was the human fallback from an apartment rental chatbot:

The story of Ella was an example of a chatbot working badly. It was also an example of a chatbot working wonderfully. Not once was a landlord’s silence disturbed by this woman and her problems. She was not even a person in the database, but a hysterical pronoun. And how apt, in the end, for her troubles to divert to us, a group of poets and novelists hired specifically for our feelings, who could feel for her endlessly but do nothing else, as we did not know the landlord’s name or how to reach him and lived very far away.

The rest of the story from the conference reads like satire but, alas, is not.