Summer 2026
Locations: This week I’m in the Basque Country enjoying pintxos and beaches, but I’ll be in London for most of the rest of the summer, working near Aldgate as a Strategy and Product intern at Jane Street. I’ll also be in NYC for a week, from 25 Jul to 1 Aug. Let me know if we’re in either city at the same time!
Projects: Lots of website upgrades – you can now subscribe to these updates (I’m still resisting Substack), read all my Finals revision notes, and look at previous projects or just vibes.
Cycling between Trajan House and Merton during my last few weeks in Oxford, I often found myself thinking about what a crazy time it is to be alive. This decade might be the most important ever, and yet the physical world we inhabit looks completely normal: it doesn’t feel futuristic or technologically-cutting-edge, and it’s not even visibly changing much. The houses you pass are built of brick and only two storeys high, like they have been for a few hundred years; there are still nearby fields with animals grazing. We’re potentially on the cusp of creating systems more intelligent than us, but even the most observant person going about their day would hardly notice anything was happening at all. Perhaps this invisibility is one reason why we’ve been so slow to prepare for the prospect of AGI. I’m reminded of the adage that if only CO₂ weren’t odourless and colourless, we would’ve taken heed of climate change much sooner – although AI progress is now accumulating far, far faster than greenhouse gases ever have.
Despite its physical stasis, Oxford does contain a strange juxtaposition of transience and permanence. As a student, you get used to switching between life at uni and being back home, packing your life up into a few boxes every eight weeks or so. But the Fellows stay the whole time, over the vacations and from one year to the next. And more than for teachers at school, the college really is their permanent home, for decades.
It’s remarkable how today’s Merton would be fairly recognisable as an institution to someone familiar with it in 1264. The college is a community of scholars living, studying, and eating together; it earns income from its land – a few Fellows still make an annual “Warden’s Progress” road trip to some of the college’s tenant farms – and tries to preserve its endowment for the future; Chapel services continue, even though religion’s role is much diminished. Most impressive, I think, is that it’s still a largely self-governing body, where the academics themselves decide how to organise and run the college.
Although universities were once more powerful than they are today, they have managed to preserve their autonomy over the best part of a millennium. As frontier AI developers become strategically crucial for their density of intelligence (human and silicon) – and tensions escalate between them and the US government – I’ve found it interesting to think about the kinds of structures that we could set up today to preserve those companies’ missions into the future. Oxbridge colleges aren’t unique – there are other institutions, like the Inns of Court and monasteries at Mount Athos, which have managed to remain close to their original purpose and governance. But what these all have in common is that they were highly federalised, geographically bounded, and limited in ambition – hence not too much of a threat to the state’s power. AGI development is very different to that, and I’m not sure even cloistered Merton will be able to weather the transition.
The only time that Oxford ever really feels unsettled is on moving-out days. There’s always a slow, unceremonious trickle of goodbyes: one friend moves out, then another; some leave before you get to catch them. Even for the rest, the parting seems too short for the occasion. Logistics dictates how things go – trains to be caught, flights checked in for, parents not left waiting.
The progression from school to university to graduate life comes with new freedoms, as you’re released from constraints of geography and scheduling. This is good in some ways – you get to live your life how you like! But the loss of structure also means your friends become further away than before, just because they can be. One of the things I’ll miss most about Oxford is having the collective of my friends within a 10min cycle. We’ll still meet up individually in future, of course, and there’ll be larger reunions too, but no more hall lunches or spontaneous walks or evenings just spent in each other’s company.
Media consumption
- I’ve been continuing with watching “realist relationship drama”, both films and TV shows: Conversations with Friends, Normal People, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Before Sunrise. The naturalness of the dialogue in Before Sunrise was striking – I can’t think of any other films I’ve seen where the characters do as much self-repair or talking over each other.
- Played a little Slay the Spire, but I think the roguelike format is too brutal for me; I really don’t enjoy having to start all over again.
- I’m reading The Line of Beauty at the moment, and I feel like there’s this sense of foreboding hanging over Nick’s obsession with the Feddens. It reminds me a little of Saltburn, although here I think it’ll turn out badly for Nick rather than for them.
- The new Bleachers album is a lot of fun; I’m excited to see them in September!