手写对大脑有益：Neal Stephenson的手写工具选择与技巧指南
Neal Stephenson 基于25年手写经验，反驳“手写导致手酸”的迷思。指出关键在于笔尖与纸张间的适度摩擦（tooth），完全无摩擦的触控笔反而更累。建议新手从Pilot G-2等廉价凝胶笔入门，搭配含棉量高的纸张，并强调连笔书写比印刷体更省力。
Graphomane
Neal Stephenson 的 Substack，主要探讨科技与艺术的交汇，偶尔也会跑题和岔开。我会聊聊正在积极进行的项目，其中一些我本人有经济利益。点击阅读 Graphom…
评论
点赞
收藏两篇旧帖的更新：回应争议与一战声学专家轶事
Neal Stephenson 回应此前关于 A16Z 文章的争议，并分享了关于一战物理学家 Z. Carrière 的新背景资料。Carrière 曾利用声学专业知识在军中从事火炮定位工作，这解释了他后来为何能用鞭子打破音障。内容涉及科技史挖掘与作者个人互动，信息增量适中。
国歌尾音中的刺：一个问句的双重解读
Neal Stephenson 重读美国国歌歌词，指出结尾问句“yet”的双重含义。从历史语境看，Francis Scott Key 原意是问国旗是否还在飘扬；但结合其奴隶主身份及后世视角，若将 yet 理解为“尚未”，则歌词成为对美国自由民主现状的尖锐质问。文章通过语义分析，将国歌从颂歌转化为对当代社会状态的反思。 
D Book Tour
Just a quick post here to mention the upcoming tour for my next book. This is the next book in the series that began with Polostan. It overlaps chronologically (by a few weeks) with the end of Polosta... 
My Prodigal Brainchild – By Neal Stephenson
It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to variou...
Bangers from Gibbon
I did an appearance on Shilo Brooks’s podcast about books, and picked Edward Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as my favorite. I have a seven-volume copy of this work that I obtained ... 
Stephenson Impersonator; Minor Update
Just a quick note to mention that I’m being impersonated by someone using the email address “contactnealstephenson (at) gmail (dot) com” and sending out emails consisting of AI slop that I wouldn’t be...
KdK part 4: Carrière's experiment
Z. Carrière was on the faculty of the Institut Catholique de Toulouse in the 1920s. He seems to have specialized in acoustics. At some point he noticed a similarity between the sound made by a whipcra...
KdK part 2: a medical mystery from postwar Germany
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, a German man visited his eye doctor complaining of “floaters” — little specks drifting around in his field of vision. As anyone today can verify by googl...
KdK part 3: Kucharski and the Knickstelle
W. Kucharski studied the physics of whips by doing exactly what the guy in this video is doing, so it’s worth clicking that link and watching it in order to visualize his experiments. Here’s a still f... 
KdK (Kinetik der Kontinua) part 1: Introduction
An early participant in Blue Origin recently sent me this link, which depicts a category of device that when I was there (1999-2006) we referred to as an Aitkenator or, more colloquially, a chain-flin...
A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read. Some of my books are listed. Since...
What I've been up to
It has been a little while since I’ve posted anything here, and that is because I’ve been busy on a few fronts. Here’s what I’ve been up to in the middle part of 2025. D Over the summer I delivered th... 
Say it, don't show it
I’m generally not very interested in meta-writing, which is to say, writing about how to write. But for the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tin...
Remarks on AI from NZ – By Neal Stephenson
Last week I participated in a panel discussion on AI as part of a private event in New Zealand. The organizers asked me to kick it off by talking for ten minutes, so I pulled together a few ideas on t...
Buy These Books
Within the span of about a week I became aware of four new books from people who are friends, former collaborators, or both. These are very different books from very different people, but I’m spreadin... 
The OED on Wrong (Wrong 4)
The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of “wrong” occupies about five large-format pages covered with small print. It's about equally divided between the noun form (“Bob committed a great wrong”) ... 
Rauch on Peirce (Wrong 3)
In my first post about Fallibilism I mentioned that Charles Sanders Peirce didn’t provide a lot of detail about the Method of Scientific Investigation, which is the fourth and best method of fixing be...