Tootfinder

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

Towards Interpretable Deep Neural Networks for Tabular Data
Khawla Elhadri, J\"org Schl\"otterer, Christin Seifert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08617 https://

Towards Interpretable Deep Neural Networks for Tabular Data
Tabular data is the foundation of many applications in fields such as finance and healthcare. Although DNNs tailored for tabular data achieve competitive predictive performance, they are blackboxes with little interpretability. We introduce XNNTab, a neural architecture that uses a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to learn a dictionary of monosemantic features within the latent space used for prediction. Using an automated method, we assign human-interpretable semantics to these features. This allows u…

I think that if we use fraud, stock manipulation, money laundering, and other financially related crimes - and perhaps brew in sex related crimes - measured on a per-capita basis, my guess is that Palm Beach, Florida will come out near the top of the list of most criminal cities in the US of A.
So send in ICE? I know of a Slovakian who lives there who snuck in the the US on false visa claims, worked as a nude model (too skinny to be interesting), and has been associated with known int…

Billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of defence contractor Palantir, famed for exploring receiving blood transfusions from teenagers for longevity purposes, says that tax is a tool of the Antichrist.
"Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “"It's become quite difficult to hide one's money."”
…

Le MIT est la première université Š refuser de signer l’accord sur l’éducation supérieure de l’administration Trump
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/artic

Le MIT est la première université à refuser de signer l’accord sur l’éducation supérieure de l’administration Trump
Au risque de perdre d’importants financements fédéraux, la présidente du prestigieux Massachusetts Institute of Technology a refusé de céder à la pression du gouvernement et a choisi de défendre l’indépendance de son institution.

The shape of economics before and after the financial crisis
Alberto Baccini, Lucio Barabesi, Carlo Debernardi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09079 https://arx…

The shape of economics before and after the financial crisis
This paper investigates the impact of the global financial crisis on the shape of economics as a discipline by analyzing EconLit-indexed journals from 2006 to 2020 using a multilayer network approach. We consider two types of social relationships among journals, based on shared editors (interlocking editorship) and shared authors (interlocking authorship), as well as two forms of intellectual proximity, derived from bibliographic coupling and textual similarity. These four dimensions are integr…

Docs: Oracle generated ~$900M from its Nvidia cloud server rental business, with a $125M gross profit, or a 14% margin, vs. its ~70% overall gross profit margin (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/internal-oracl…

Internal Oracle Data Show Financial Challenge of Renting Out Nvidia Chips
Oracle became the best-performing megacap stock of 2025 after its executives said last month that the once-sleepy database firm will generate an astonishing $381 billion in revenue from renting out specialized cloud servers to OpenAI and other artificial intelligence developers over the next ...

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen