We’re delighted to announce that the one and only @tylercowen, our internet writing sensei, is joining Works in Progress as a regular contributor. worksinprogress.co/issue/com… His first column is about Brazilian food, and like everything Tyler writes, it’s packed with hidden gems that make it much more than a food story. Some of the nicest tidbits: on her first trip to Brazil, his daughter declared she had “never had a banana before” – this is how good Brazilian bananas are, apparently. And Tyler and a well-traveled friend from Modena (of all places) agreed that Brazil is the third-best country in the world for Italian food, behind only Italy and Japan. If an Italian says that, we’d better trust him! But as always with Tyler, he manages to draw larger lessons from apparently mundane and object-level stories. So, in a short read, we learn much more than just the fact that Brazilian food is really good. First, food can be seen as a progress story. Brazil’s agricultural yields rival, and sometimes beat, those of the US, even though Brazil is a much poorer country. Abundant fertile land, high productivity, and short supply chains make ingredients plentiful and fresh. Tyler’s regret is that the rest of Brazil’s economy hasn’t embraced technology the way its food sector has. We also learn how immigration shapes Brazilian cuisine. Brazil has roughly 2 million citizens of Japanese descent, which makes it arguably the best place outside Japan for Japanese food. Tyler had a 15-course omakase at a Michelin-starred São Paulo restaurant for $110, booked just half an hour ahead. Brazil is also home to about 30 million people of Italian descent, the largest Italian diaspora in the world, which goes a long way to explain why his Italian friend was so satisfied with the food. The whole column is a delight, so do read it in full!

In which I guest host for the NYT podcast and interview @dwarkesh_sp, Dwarkesh Patel, about San Francisco and the future of AI: nytimes.com/2026/10/15/opini…

🎧 Seventeen episodes of Humane Pursuits so far: academic freedom, the pursuit of happiness, church and state, Adam Smith, the Revolution’s great historians, pluralism, property rights, humanomics, fusionism, and the modern university. Link in profile.