Links
3 stars
Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball | New Yorker
20-minute read
Russell Vought is using the White House budget office to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy—firing workers, decimating agencies, and testing the rule of law.
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Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits, and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an O.M.B. general counsel during the Biden Administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through O.M.B.”
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I’ve Gone to Look for America | Atavist
19-minute read
We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos.
The Light of “The Brothers Karamazov” | New Yorker
8-minute read
No one could claim that “The Brothers Karamazov” is polished, or even beautifully written—it is characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s style that everything is desperately urgent and seems to burst forth, and that the details don’t much matter. Reckless and intense: we are headed straight to the point of the matter, and there is no time. This urgency, this wildness, the seeming unruliness of his style, which is echoed in the many abrupt twists and turns in the action toward the end of the chapters—the reader must be kept in a state of suspense until the next installment—runs against something else, something heavier and slower, a patiently insistent question that is related to everything that is happening: What are we living for?
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2 stars
Can the Golden Age of Costco Last? | New Yorker
16-minute read
Costco, in one sense, is simple enough to define. It’s a chain retailer that operates on a club model, offering members who pay sixty-five dollars a year the chance to buy bulk goods at prices close to wholesale. Costco sells fresh and packaged foods, household and pharmacy staples, electronics, furniture, and clothing, from both name brands and Kirkland Signature, the company’s private label, which appears on everything from golf clubs to gasoline. Employees, who receive excellent wages and benefits, often work there for years. The stores are called warehouses, and this captures their look: merchandise stacked on pallets across industrial shelves rising toward high ceilings.
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But what exactly makes Costco Costco? This is a question that interests Maggie Perkins, a corporate trainer at the company who travels the country to instruct employees in its ways. Perkins posts about her job on TikTok, and she has noticed something in people’s replies: “They say ‘my Costco.’ ” The loyalty of Costco’s following—at latest count, it had a hundred and forty-five million members globally—is an existential matter for the company. “The most important item we sell is the membership card,” Ron Vachris, the current C.E.O., has said. The company’s low prices are possible because membership fees account for much of the profits. “For Costco, culture is a business strategy,” Perkins told me.
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Robotaxis and Suburbia | Stratechery
10-minute read
What is worth considering, however, is if the last wave of urbanism, which started in the 1990s and peaked in the 2010s, might be the last, at least in the United States (Asia and its massive metropolises are another story). The potential physical transformation in transportation and delivery I am talking about is simply completing the story that started with entertainment and television in the first wave of suburbia, and then information and interactivity via the Internet, particularly since COVID.
Inside the Mysterious Smuggling of the El Ali Meteorite | Scientific American
9-minute read
Known locally as Shiid-birood (“the iron rock”), the El Ali meteorite is 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel. For generations it rested in the ground some 24 kilometers (15 miles) outside the village, becoming a landmark that was featured in folklore, lullabies and poems. According to one story, the region had been a green paradise until its inhabitants stopped believing in Waaq, the local god, who punished them with volcanic stones, leaving behind the El Ali meteorite as a reminder of their folly. Over the centuries people hammered the brown rock from the heavens with stones, banging off flakes of cold iron, or used it as a whetstone. Children pretended to ride it like a horse.
[...]
Now, though, the El Ali meteorite is gone. Shaky cell-phone videos suggest the rock is being stored in China, where sellers hope to hock it for millions, either whole or in pieces. How did it get there? The journey of the ninth-largest meteorite in the world involves lies, smuggling and possibly death. Mystery surrounds its departure from its landing site, a lawless region of Somalia, one of the poorest and most contested places on the planet. In August, a Somali cultural minister asked the UNESCO World Heritage Center to recognize the meteorite as part of the country’s patrimony, calling for its return in a statement. The fate of the cosmic cannonball is now anyone’s guess.
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Why the Media Is Pro-Trump (yes, you read that right) | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
9-minute read
The media certainly reports on Trump like he is more corrupt and dishonest than other politicians. Yet there’s nothing to indicate that they are biased against him, in the sense of exaggerating his flaws. Again, the Trump family has profited to the tune of $3.4 billion, versus $11 million for Hunter Biden, or a 309x difference. Have Trump corruption scandals been treated as 309x worse than the Hunter Biden story? Just a pure monetary comparison undersells the difference, since Trump has been directly involved with his various family ventures while no credible evidence has emerged linking Joe Biden to Hunter’s activities.
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Ironically, Trump has managed to both make the media more anti-Republican, while at the same time “solving” the problem of liberal media bias by being so corrupt and dishonest that it’s impossible to sufficiently stress the degree to which he behaves outside of accepted legal standards and norms.
The concerning thing here is I think we’ve all been learning a lesson in how civilizations decline.
Exclusive | How a Handyman’s Wife Helped an Hermès Heir Discover He’d Lost $15 Billion | Wall Street Journal
10-minute read
Nicolas Puech says his wealth manager isolated him from friends and family and siphoned away a massive fortune. Then came the clue that began to reveal the deception.
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The Mild Mannered Englishman Who Was the World’s Most Prolific Ghost Hunter | Literary Hub
11-minute read
And underpinning everything—the papers, notes, cuttings, photographs, correspondences and transcripts—is one question, asked again and again and again. What happens when we die? When our bodies fail and our hearts stop and the lights go out, is that it? Are we all faced with an eternity of nothingness, of blank, perennial non-existence? Or is there more to humankind than our physical bodies? Do we possess a soul, spirit or sense of consciousness that can transcend physical mortality? The contents of these boxes are the memories of a man who spent his life probing the very edges of reality. Testing the barrier between life and death.
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For decades, thousands of ordinary people who found themselves in these circumstances called upon the help of a balding, bespectacled man from Cambridge. His name was Tony Cornell, and between the 1950s and his death in 2010, he was one of the most prolific parapsychologists—which is to say, one who investigates psychic phenomena and other paranormal claims— on the planet. The contents of these cardboard boxes, stored deep within the Special Collections archive, once belonged to him.
how to speak to a computer | personal canon
22-minute read
I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, lately, because it shows our desire to treat computers as confidants, not just tools, is much older than the present AI furor. And ELIZA shows, too, that our capacity to believe in an interlocutor’s intelligence isn’t just about the sophistication of the language model. Our intense longing to be understood can make even a rudimentary program seem human. This desire predates today’s technologies—and it’s also what makes conversational AI so promising and problematic.
Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots | New York Times
5-minute read
Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far-reaching plan to automate 75 percent of its operations.
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Should we worry about AI’s circular deals? | Noahpinion
6-minute read
As far as I can tell, there are two main fears about this sort of deal. The first is that the deals will artificially inflate companies’ revenue, tricking investors into overvaluing their stock or lending them too much money. The second is that the deals increase systemic risk by tying all of the AI companies’ fortunes to each other.
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So the question is: Are the AI industry’s circular deals more like round-tripping, or are they more like vendor finance? I’m inclined to say it’s the latter.
First of all, in deals like Nvidia’s relationship with OpenAI, the revenue is only flowing one way. OpenAI pays Nvidia for chips. OpenAI needs chips to perform its core business, which is selling AI services. And Nvidia’s core business is selling chips, especially to people who provide AI services. Both companies are just doing what they’re set up to do.
Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 | One Useful Thing
5-minute read
I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model. It is very good. But rather than give you benchmark numbers, I’m going to show you how far AI has come in three years by asking the AI to demonstrate it.
It has been slightly less than three years since the release of ChatGPT. A few days before that launch, I wrote my first post on this Substack about OpenAI’s earlier GPT-3 model. Then ChatGPT came out, and I wrote immediately afterwards that “I am usually pretty hesitant to make technology predictions, but I think that this is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically. Rather than automating jobs that are repetitive & dangerous, there is now the prospect that the first jobs that are disrupted by AI will be more analytic; creative; and involve more writing and communication.”
I think I got that one right.
I could explain the difference between the original ChatGPT and the new AI model from Google, Gemini 3, that launched today. But I don’t have to. Instead, I gave the screenshot above to Gemini 3 with a single prompt:
Me: “show how far AI has come since this post by doing stuff.”
How the Brain Moves From Waking Life to Sleep (and Back Again) | Quanta
7-minute read
You’ve started your journey into sleep, the cryptic state that you and most other animals need in some form to survive. Sleep refreshes the brain and body in ways we don’t fully understand: repairing tissues, clearing out toxins and solidifying memories. But as anyone who has experienced insomnia can attest, entering that state isn’t physiologically or psychologically simple.
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To fall asleep, “everything has to change,” said Adam Horowitz, a research affiliate in sleep science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The flow of blood to the brain slows down, and the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid speeds up. Neurons release neurotransmitters that shift the brain’s chemistry, and they start to behave differently, firing more in sync with one another. Mental images float in and out. Thoughts begin to warp.
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Sleep has been traditionally thought of as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, Lewis said. You’re either awake or asleep. But the new findings are showing that it’s “much more of a spectrum than it is a category.”
Are stereotypes usually true? | The Pursuit of Happiness
6-minute read
Perhaps equally understandable, but scientifically untenable, is the corresponding belief that because stereotypes contribute to these many malignant outcomes, that they must also be—in the main—inaccurate. The tacit equation is, if stereotypes are associated with social wrongs, they must be factually wrong. However, the accuracy of stereotypes is an empirical question, not an ideological one. For those of us who care deeply about stereotypes, prejudice, and social harmony, getting to the truth of these collective cognitions should guide inquiry about them.
1 star
Every Winning Photo From Nature Photographer of the Year 2025 | PetaPixel
6-minute read
The Nature Photographer of the Year 2025 winners have been revealed, and acclaimed Norwegian photographer Åsmund Keilen has earned the prestigious title, “Nature Photographer of the Year,” for his breathtaking, ethereal photo of a bird in flight against the glowing Sun.
Animals are developing the same chronic diseases as humans | ScienceDaily
2-minute read
Across the globe, a wide range of animals, including household pets, livestock, and marine species, are developing serious health problems such as cancer, obesity, diabetes, and degenerative joint disease. These non-communicable diseases (NCDs) chronic diseases are becoming increasingly common, yet the scientific community still lacks broad, interdisciplinary research that explains why they are rising in so many species. Understanding these trends is essential because the same factors influencing animal health often affect people as well.
Confidently Wrong | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge but express higher subjective confidence. In other words, anti-consensus respondents are the most confidently wrong—the gap between what they know and what they think they know is widest.