Links
4 stars
Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler | The Atlantic
33-minute read
On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.
With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.
I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.
When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
The Shooting of Two Cornell Freshmen, 42 Years Later | Collegetown
13-minute read
In 1983 six students were taken hostage in a Cornell dormitory. Two of them were killed. How have the survivors reckoned with what happened to them, and what made us forget about this act of violence?
Yearning for the Apocalypse | The Sword and the Sandwich
11-minute read
As chaos and violence break out across the Middle East in a war led by the US with Israel as junior partner, I wanted to revisit my research on Christian apocalyptic prophecy. This adapted excerpt from my book Wild Faith talks about the evangelical Christians eagerly looking forward to the end of the world—and influencing foreign policy to bring it closer. It’s difficult to conceive of willful courting of disaster for religious reasons, but decades of modern Christian prophecy eagerly foresee mass bloodshed in the Middle East as a prelude to Christ’s triumphant return. Evangelicals of this stripe form a crucial part of Trump’s base and governing coalition.
We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America | Derek Thompson
7-minute read
A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?
Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.
“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.
What Happens When a Whale Is Born? | New Yorker
3-minute read
After a couple of hours, they happened upon eleven sperm whales, bunched closely together at the surface. This behavior was odd enough that the researchers dropped their plan to tag a whale. They launched a pair of camera-equipped drones to hover above the group. After another hour or so, a great cloud of blood swirled through the water. Then a new gray head appeared. Thanks to a crazily unlikely accident, the researchers had witnessed a sperm-whale birth and had managed to videotape the entire event.
Thanks to another crazy accident, I was onboard the catamaran that day. Not only did I get to witness the birth but also I got to watch the normally sober-minded researchers react to it. The scene on the deck resembled something out of the Marx Brothers. Everyone raced to the front of the boat to get a better view. “Oh, my God,” one of the scientists said, clutching his head. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
My dad made the biggest jewelled egg in the world. The obsession would destroy his marriage, family and fortune | The Guardian
12-minute read
BBC Television Centre, 2 May 1990. “Who would spend £7m on an egg?” The question echoes around the TV studio. At home, six million people watch as chatshow host Terry Wogan smiles knowingly, his brown eyes twinkling. “Seven million pounds,” he repeats in his Irish brogue.
“And you can’t even eat it.”
The audience laugh. A heckler shouts that he’d offer a fiver for it. The band strike up. At the back of the studio, two burly bodyguards stand silhouetted. The egg’s diamond-studded shell sparkles under the bright lights.
“It was no silly goose that laid this, the world’s biggest golden egg.” Wogan gestures towards the giant jewelled object, his voice infused with pantomime-style levels of excitement. “And let’s welcome the man who made it,” he says smoothly. “Paul Kutchinsky.”
My father saunters out, beaming from ear to ear. His shiny new loafers glide across the studio floor and he stretches his arm out towards Terry Wogan to steady himself. With his unruly mane, slender build and gold-rimmed glasses, he looks a bit like a mad professor.
You Can Just Do Things | n+1
7-minute read
Why did Trump strike Iran, for the second time in less than a year, during a second go-round in the White House, after having already carried out a targeted assassination of an Iranian general in his first? Why do so after undoing Obama’s nuclear deal, repeatedly blowing up negotiations (figuratively), and cheering as the Israelis did so literally? Why attack Iran without any explicit stated objective? You can take your pick of answers, all of them gratingly obvious, none of them mutually exclusive.
[...]
We may think we’re playing a game that ends when we say it does, that the past only matters when we want it to, that the places we project our power will somehow always remain elsewhere, that the repressed will never return, and that repression takes no toll on all parties involved. At some point, and on some timeline you don’t get to choose, the world pushes back. You can just do things, sure, right until the game is up, and then you can’t.
The Secret Police Playbook | Can We Still Govern?
7-minute read
Most people assume that repressive organizations are filled with true believers — ideological extremists who genuinely want to harm others, or at minimum sadists and sociopaths for whom the work is personally gratifying. The logic of this view is that the way to build a secret police force is to find the worst people and give them badges.
Our research tells a different story.
When we combed through the personnel archives of Argentina’s Intelligence Battalion 601 — the secret police unit that orchestrated the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands during the country’s so-called Dirty War — we were not looking for monsters. We were looking for patterns. And the pattern we found was strikingly mundane: the officers who joined Battalion 601 had, in the main, performed worse than their peers at the military academy. They had graduated toward the bottom of their cohorts. They had stalled in the lower and middle ranks. They were men whose regular career paths had quietly closed.
These were not the most extreme officers in Argentina’s army. They were the most stuck.
And herein lies the key insight. The Argentine army maintained a rigorous, century-old meritocratic promotion system — Prussian in design, consistent across political regimes, based on performance at each career stage. This system did exactly what meritocratic systems are supposed to do: it identified and advanced the most capable officers. But it did something else too, something less discussed. It reliably produced a large pool of men who did not make the cut — men who underperformed early, fell behind their cohorts, and faced the prospect of forced early retirement under the army’s unforgiving up-or-out rule.
California’s Deadliest Avalanche Turned on One Choice | The Atlantic
8-minute read
Why did a group of 15 skiers take a risky route on a dangerous day?
Original link | Archive.is link
My road trip with the do-gooding cactus smugglers | Economist
13-minute read
There are plants and then there are plants that make you sink to your knees and weep. Ran Fowler was on the hunt for the second kind—specifically a fine example of a rare succulent called Agave shawii. Fowler had first encountered the specimen in 2023 on a plant-hunting expedition to the Mexican desert. He was blown away by the beauty of its spines. Normally they are evenly spaced along the edge of the leaf, but on this plant they had fused, creating a ragged fringe that looked as if it had been dyed purple and pink.
Fowler, who owns a succulent nursery in southern California, knew it was risky to take a cutting from the agave.
Original link | Archive.is link
Culture Shift | Asimov Press
9-minute read
We tend to think of fermented foods as something humans invented and then chose to eat. But the evidence shows the opposite: fermented foods shaped human biology.
What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind | The Atlantic [gift article]
10-minute read
The odds of being struck by lightning in America in a given year are one in 1.2 million. How does the experience reorient a person’s sense of chance, of fate?
Original link | Archive.is link
My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump’s America | Navigating the Drift
7-minute read
The people I am driving around are, like me, trying to navigate that drift. They are widows, teachers, hospital workers, mechanics. They are people who get up before dawn to feed their families. They trust me to get them to work on time. I trust an app to buy me another day. None of us has any real leverage. Like the migrants who survived the deadliest border crossing on the planet, we are all at the mercy of the sea.
Darwin’s Barnacles | Science History Institute
5-minute read
If asked to pick an animal that influenced Charles Darwin, most of us would select the same one: the iconic Galápagos finches with their precisely crafted beaks, each tuned to a different ecological niche.
But the truth is, Darwin didn’t really care about finches. He collected some during his famous voyage on the Beagle but proceeded to make a complete hash of them. He actually misidentified the birds, calling them grosbeaks, and had to be corrected by an expert back in England. Worse, he forgot to record the island of origin for most of the finches, making them useless for evolutionary study. Darwin didn’t even specifically mention Galápagos finches in his monumental On the Origin of Species.
So while pop culture usually associates evolution with the Galápagos, Darwin left the islands in the same state he’d arrived—a creationist. What animals shaped his theory of evolution, then? Pigeons played a part, as did worms. But the biggest influence on Darwin was a lowly, much-despised marine pest—the barnacle.
The Weather-Changing Conspiracy Theory That Will Never End | The Atlantic
7-minute read
Throughout the long, true history of secretive military science, the government really did favor sparsely populated areas (and specifically Alaska) to avoid prying eyes, which has had the ironic knock-on effect of making any distant outpost seem like it’s up to something nefarious, even when nothing very interesting is going on. If HAARP were located just outside of Cleveland, maybe nobody would care about it.
Living with a conspiracy theory means thinking about this kind of thing all the time. Should the university share really cool photos of the array with aurora visible above it, or is that inviting a rash of Facebook misinformation? Should it sell merchandise featuring cartoon aliens, or is that making too much fun of people’s concerns? After dark, Matthews and I drove around the facility grounds, and she stopped in front of the array to point to the red lights at the base of each of the poles, which indicate that the transmitters are operational. They gave the entire scene an ominous glow.
“Would you post a photo of that on social media?” she asked. I considered it. It looked like something that could freak a lot of people out, I told her. It was kind of freaking me out just sitting there. No, I thought. I probably wouldn’t.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Dreams of a Bumblebee in Autumn | Nautilus
4-minute read
For insects do in fact sleep, and the sleep of bumblebees also resembles our own, alternating between a deep slumber and a shallower, more mentally active state that seems akin to REM sleep, with our rapid eye movements replaced by a twitching of antennae. Which poses the question: Do those sleeping bees dream?
The Zombie Regulator | New Yorker
16-minute read
As the cost of living continues to spiral upward, the Trump Administration is gutting the government agency built to protect Americans from financial ruin.
Original link | Archive.is link
Language Birth | Asterisk
12-minute read
In October 1992, a Circassian man by the name of Tevfik Esenç passed away at the age of 88. Esenç had been, as his gravestone attested, “the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh.” An extreme example of the remarkable languages of the Caucasus mountains, Ubykh was articulated with all of 80 different consonants, compared to English’s 24. Regarding Ubykh, linguist John Colarusso noted that “any rigorous account of human phonetic perceptual capacity will have to take into account this precious marvel.” We know something particular about the human mind in large part thanks to Ubykh. And we know about Ubykh in large part thanks to Tevfik Esenç.
[...]
Yet Ubykh is merely one of hundreds of languages that have withered and expired in recent decades. About 3000 of the world’s 7000 or so languages are endangered. A highly disproportionate fraction of now-extinct languages have gone silent just since 1960, and most were not blessed with a Tevfik. Major global languages like English, Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi continue to accrue speakers, while smaller ones shrivel.
The Chronicler of Decline | Hedgehog Review
5-minute read
Reading Gibbon, a work of imaginative literature as much as empirical historiography, we certainly see distressing parallels. “The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost,” writes Gibbon, “when the legislative power is nominated by the executive”—a caution that our Congress should more carefully heed. “But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest”—a tendency which the Supreme Court majority might have considered more carefully before it made its Citizens United decision. “Whole generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour”—a truth that might have become the motto of DOGE. “The Roman government appeared every day less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects”—as pithy an encapsulation of the current situation as can be imagined.
The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home | Construction Physics
18-minute read
It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods. Most houses in the US are still built on-site, using manual labor and hand tools, a manner of construction that doesn’t seem all that different from construction in the 19th century. By contrast, sectors like agriculture and manufacturing have shifted from this type of “craft production,” where work is done primarily by skilled manual labor, to industrialized, factory production, where work is mainly done by high-volume, highly automated machinery. Direct labor — the labor needed to actually physically produce something — makes up only about 10-12% of the cost to manufacture a modern car, while it’s roughly half of the cost of building a new single family home. Extending this line of thinking suggests that if construction could be similarly industrialized — if homes were built in factories and then delivered to their sites, rather than built on-site, by hand — we’d see the sorts of falling costs and rising productivity in construction that we’ve seen in manufacturing and agriculture.
Shaun Maguire: “xAI will win” | X
5-minute read
I’m told that this Sequoia partner is not to be trusted, but he makes an interesting argument nonetheless:
People are sleeping on Elon... again. And especially on xAI.
[...]
The narrative engineers want you to see distraction and decline. But what’s actually happening is a convergence of multiple decades long roadmaps into an acceleration unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Space, chips, energy and AI are all coming together. Elon is a leader in all of these fields.
Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite | London Review of Books
10-minute read
Mummy loved Andrew, and what Mummy loved, Mummy protected. By 1984, it seemed he’d got the basic point about dropping the floozies and finding the sort of woman who would ‘understand him’. Enter ‘Chatterbox One’, the codename given to Sarah Ferguson by air traffic controllers when she was learning to fly, a woman in happy possession of two O-levels who exuded jolliness and scads of suitability. (Her father was Prince Charles’s polo manager and it was Diana who set her up with the fourth-in-line.) After a few country weekends and acres of japes, Ferguson was installed as the Duchess of York.
Building Brasília | JSTOR Daily
5-minute read
Think of a country. Now consider its capital. Why was this particular city chosen as such? Because it’s the most populous, as in Seoul? Because it represents the country’s economic center, like Tokyo? Because, like Rome, it’s full of history? Or because it resulted from a political agreement, as in Washington, DC?
When we consider Brasília, the capital city of Brazil, we see a place that meets none of the above conditions and seems to make no sense. Brasília was built from scratch, in the middle of nowhere, in the hostile climate of the Cerrado—a savanna-like biome—hundreds of miles from any highway, railway, or airport. That the new capital was inaugurated in 1960, just four years after its construction began, makes it all the more impressive. Why would a country set out to build a capital city from scratch when one—Rio de Janeiro—already existed? Photographs and visual records preserved in Rice University’s Brasília Iconography collection and shared via JSTOR capture this ambitious undertaking as it unfolded.
When Do We Become Adults, Really? | New Yorker
6-minute read
As humans, we want our lives to be like building blocks that make sense when put together, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a research scholar at Clark University, told me. In 2000, Arnett coined a new life stage—emerging adulthood—to reflect life-style changes he had observed in people between eighteen and twenty-nine. He told me that another stage was proposed even more recently, in 2020: established adulthood. It is said to fall between thirty and forty-five, so I was smack in the middle of it. I wondered whether this stage would suit me better—and whether I needed one at all. Does it matter how we carve up a life?
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents | The Hustle
6-minute read
US parents toilet train their kids much later than they used to. And that trend is a sales bonanza for Pampers and Huggies.
Competitive Scrabble Is A Lexical Shitshow | Defector
13-minute read
But I’d never seen anything like what happened during Round 9 of the high-school division at the 2025 tournament. It had nothing to do with the ability of the players—the top two seeds, classmates and pals, regulars on the tournament Scrabble circuit, and great kids, too. Instead, it reflected some uncomfortable realities about humans and words: the dysfunction that defines the small community of competitive Scrabble players in North America, to which I’ve devoted a big chunk of my life for more than a quarter-century, and the debate, rancor, misunderstanding, and confusion around what constitutes a word, and who, ultimately, gets to decide.
How Natural Are Tradeoff And Failure Components? | Astral Codex Ten
2-minute read
All multifactorial problems should naturally be combinations of tradeoffs and failures.
Consider something human-level and common-sensical like poverty. People may be poor because of “failures” - negative qualities with no counterbalancing advantages. For example, they may be unintelligent, or chronically ill, or stuck in poor areas with bad education systems. These are cases where something goes wrong - their body, their health care system, their schools.
Other people are poor because of tradeoffs. The starving artist who spends all their time pursuing a creative vision instead of working a 9-5 job. The bohemian who prefers a relaxing lifestyle to the corporate grind. These people start with average capacity for success, but choose to spend their optionality in ways that give them less money and more of other things.
We can trivially extend this to most other negative situations. Single people might be ugly and awkward, or they might have chosen to trade off the good of a relationship for the goods of freedom and casual sex. A bad pizza might be bad because the chef was incompetent, or because it’s traded off taste for some other value like cheapness, convenience, or dietary restrictions (eg vegan, gluten-free).
What I Found When I Tried to Walk Across Dallas in a Day | Texas Monthly
5-minute read
Determined to find adventure in my own backyard, I tramped across my famously pedestrian-averse hometown. The most memorable part turned out to be the serendipitous encounters with neighbors I met along the way.
[...]
All told, I walked 52.44 miles over 35 hours and 50 minutes and met 231 people.
Original link | Archive.is link
Musketeer d’Artagnan’s remains believed found under Dutch church | BBC News
2-minute read
More than 350 years after the death of legendary French musketeer d’Artagnan, his remains may well have been found under the floor of a Dutch church.
Always Keep Your Eye on Production | Bet On It
1-minute read
When I encounter stories like this, I reply with an adage I urge my fellow economists to adopt: “Always keep your eye on production.” Whenever analyzing an economic problem, you should, by default, ignore longs chains of social causation and ignore distribution. Instead, remember that mass production is the root cause of mass consumption. Then ask yourself, “How will whatever we’re talking about change the total amount of stuff produced?”
Physician Incomes and the Extreme Shortage of High IQ Worker | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Physician incomes are extraordinarily high in the United States. A new NBER paper finds that U.S. physicians earn roughly two to four times as much as their counterparts in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Why? Is it some feature particular to the US health care sector? Probably not. The same paper finds that physicians in the US have about the same relative income ranking as in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In other words, lots of high-skill workers in the US earn high incomes and physicians don’t look unusual relative to these other high-skill groups.
That is exactly what one would expect in an economy with an extreme shortage of high-IQ, high-skill workers.