Links
3 stars
The Last Great Weed Smuggler | Rolling Stone
15-minute read
The smugglers were halfway to Key West, Florida, with a boat full of bad weed when the winds turned against them. The winds had not been kind the whole trip, and when you’re running weed in a 61-foot steel-hull sailboat, you need the wind on your side. Harvey Prager had been on watch for hours, steering through lashing rain and 20-foot waves in the Yucatan Channel. Watches were four-hour shifts, day in, day out. Belowdecks, crew members tried to sleep despite the violent pitching of their ship, called The Escape. On deck, Prager knew he had to be vigilant. The passage was a good place to get snatched by the Coast Guard, or worse, get run over by a cargo ship. The Escape had a powerful engine that recharged the batteries that powered the crew’s rudimentary lights and equipment, but it was struggling, chewing through diesel as it pushed the ship up and down through mountainous waves. The end was in sight, though: If they could grind their way through the channel, dodge the container ships and cops, they’d catch the Gulf Stream winds and be able to shoot straight north to the coast of Maine, where they’d tuck the boat into a quiet little inlet, offload the weed, and rake in the cash, living like kings in New England just as the summer of 1976 came to a close. That’s what Prager was dreaming of, at least, before the radio crackled below.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Brand Age | Paul Graham
20-minute read
Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, unit sales of Swiss watches fell by almost two thirds. Most Swiss watchmakers became insolvent or close to it and were sold. But not all of them. A handful survived as independent companies. And the way they did it was by transforming themselves from precision instrument makers into luxury brands.
In the process the nature of the mechanical watch was also transformed. The most expensive watches have always cost a lot, but why they cost a lot and what buyers got in return have changed completely. In 1960 expensive watches cost a lot because they cost a lot to manufacture, and what the buyer got in return was the most accurate timekeeping device, for its size, that could be made. Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol.
Infinite Jest Extraction | Matt Lakeman
35-minute read
I’m not sure there has ever been a book written anywhere in the world at any point in human history that is better suited to an extraction essay than Infinite Jest. It is a vast, opaque, and impenetrable work from the outside, and actually sitting down to read it doesn’t clarify its meaning so much as bury you in it. It’s a true classic novel in the sense that it’s a book that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.
Why ‘Cost Disease’ Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude | Derek Thompson
4-minute read
A brilliant, if sobering, observation:
In capitalism, it often pays to be anti-social.
TV and smartphone-based activities are, after all, very much part of the ever-more-productive economy. They benefit from technology gains: Actors once performed every night for a small local audience. Then TV networks aired one program at a time for national audiences. Now Netflix streams an ever-growing library of content for a global user base. The world of digital, solitude-inducing entertainment is scalable, so investors give founders millions to build the next short-form video app, delivery platform, or AI companion company.
But concerts, independent bookstores, and restaurants (with table service) are in the humans-only economy. They are labor intensive. When they get more efficient over time, it’s generally by becoming less social, like the fast-casual restaurant chains that have customers order by kiosk and sit on uncomfortable metal chairs that prod them to eat quickly and leave promptly. And definitely not linger over dessert or one more drink, the conversation reaching an emotional frontier in the warm glow of a long meal.
Hassan Took a Bike Ride. Now He’s One of the Thousands Missing in Gaza | WIRED
15-minute read
In the early morning dark, Abeer Skaik turned to her husband, Ali Al-Qatta, and said that today would be the day they would find their son. Ali nodded in silence, and she handed him the stack of flyers. Each bore a photograph of 16-year-old Hassan smiling widely, his shoulders loose, wearing a plain red T-shirt. He is looking directly at the camera, unguarded. On top of the page, in large letters, Abeer had written a single word in bold red ink: Munashada!—an appeal.
Abeer watched as Ali stepped into a car with a few close friends and drove away. They started the 30-kilometer trip south, from al-Tuffah, east of Gaza City, to the European Hospital in Khan Younis. They had heard that a group of people detained by Israel, including children, would be released there.
The gate was already crowded. Families stood shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in blankets against the cold, clutching photographs and ID cards. Ali distributed the flyers among his friends. When the buses of released detainees arrived, he and the others moved slowly through the narrow gaps between clusters of people. Some of those who had just been released were being pulled into embraces. Ali waited at the edge of each reunion. “Have you seen my son?” he asked. One after another, people shook their heads. The crowds thinned. It was 2 am by the time Ali returned. Abeer watched her husband place the photographs on the table. They stood and looked at each other without speaking, Ali’s eyes distant as if he was entering someone else’s house. It had been 10 months since they had last been with their son.
Original link | Archive.is link
Seeing like a spreadsheet | David Oks
12-minute read
This is a story about how a piece of software transformed the way that American businesses understood themselves, and how they were understood by others; how it enabled the rise of financial engineering and the entire apparatus of Wall Street dealmaking; how it helped reshape the American corporation from an organization that built things into an organization that optimized numbers; and how it offers us a lesson, and a warning, about how artificial intelligence will transform economic life.
But we should start with the world before Excel.
Menace on the Streets | MacLean’s
13-minute read
E-scooters and their burlier brethren, e-bikes, have zoomed onto Canadian streets faster than the law can keep up. Today, a mishmash of conflicting regulations governs their use in provinces and cities nationwide. No government ever decided that Canadian streets should become a test track for unregulated machines capable of going as fast as cars, and now these devices have obliterated long-established rules and norms of the road. Pedestrians see unpredictable interlopers zipping along sidewalks. Cyclists see invaders in their hard-won lanes. Drivers see chaos. And doctors see a plague of facial fractures, broken wrists and concussions.
The Year I Was Supposed to Die | Slate
14-minute read
At 42, with young kids, I got a devastating diagnosis. I knew I was in for a harrowing journey. I didn’t know quite what kind.
2 stars
“The Worst Neighbor Ever” | Slate
21-minute read
He moved to the block promising a new bookstore. He brought a whole lot more than that. Now no one is quite sure how to describe what happened outside Quirky Books.
Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life | WIRED
12-minute read
The visit to Hernandez’s store activated something deep inside Concepcion, a moral unease that would gradually blossom into an all-consuming drive to thwart ICE. In early February 2025, he described his experience at the Mexican market—not far from the home of Harriet Tubman—in an op-ed for the Syracuse Post-Standard. “I plan to help in any way I can. I hope you do, too,” he wrote. “History should count on us to do the right thing.” After the column attracted scores of irate comments (“How about FOLLOWING THE LAW. You people make me sick”), Concepcion felt compelled to escalate his activism. Polite op-eds were clearly insufficient against ICE, which had already tripled its daily arrests to more than 600 since President Trump’s latest inauguration.
Before he started teaching multimedia storytelling at Syracuse’s prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communications, Concepcion had worked around the edges of the tech industry for two decades. So he decided to develop a mobile app meant to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when confronted by ICE.
Original link | Archive.is link
They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout | Public Books
4-minute read
In Tehran, the winter of 2026 did not arrive with the cold; it arrived with two nights of bullets and blood. It was a darkness so absolute that it didn’t merely swallow the streets—it severed the very nervous system of our connection to the world. We had long learned to read the sudden death of our screens as an omen, but this time, the silence carried a heavier, more stifling texture. As the entire country was plunged into a digital blackout, the only light remaining in my room was the cold, clinical glow of my disconnected laptop.
There, in that forced isolation, I sat translating a story about death. Meanwhile, the real thing operated just outside my window.
The Great Stupidisation | UnHerd
5-minute read
‘Idiocracy’ was too optimistic about America
Original link | Archive.is link
What happens when you don’t die on time? | National Post
6-minute read
Hélène Campbell was supposed to be long dead by now. She emptied her bucket list, bank account — and, at 34, is left to wonder: “What next?” And she’s not alone.
Original link | Archive.is link
Why Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’ | Old North Whale Review
5-minute read
This is an invisible revolution. Most modern Chinese speakers cannot truly comprehend Classical Chinese (文言文, Wenyanwen); the texts of their ancestors are nearly as alien to them as they are to a foreign learner. Modern Mandarin is effectively a creole, a hybrid tongue born from a collision between East and West.
How Japan has changed in the last 20 years | Noahpinion
10-minute read
If there’s one way to summarize these changes, it’s that Japan is becoming a much more normal country than it was when I lived there. The quirky art culture, vibrant street scenes, and mosaic of small independent businesses that defined 2000s Japan are vanishing under the relentless assault of aging, economic stagnation, and social media. Japanese people have started dressing down, and their waistlines have begun to expand. But at the same time, Tokyo has become a sort of enchanted spaceship of a city, with world-beating food scenes and architecture. And Japan as a whole has become more international and open, less sexist, and less soul-crushing of a place to work.
‘This was the real thing’: Meet the woman who alerts the world when an asteroid could hit | The Guardian
4-minute read
The UN official had trained for this moment. She had run drills and table-top exercises at her offices in Vienna, housed inside a grey and unassuming 1970s concrete tower complex next to the Danube River.
Aarti Holla-Maini, a British lawyer with a background in the satellite business, needed to have at least played out the scenario step by step. As the director of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), she was required to know exactly what she was expected to do if – and it was a big if – she were informed that a significantly large asteroid was on a possible collision course with Earth. Or, as she says with a laugh: “Armageddon.”
The Music of the Spheres | Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
3-minute read
Terry Tao joins Zach Weinersmith for a delightfully nerdy comic series:
A priori, we might not have expected discrete hyper-dimensional sphere-packing to have applications, but that’s exactly what happened.
What Iran Won | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
10-minute read
Last night, less than ninety minutes before Trump’s deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, Pakistan announced that there was a deal. The US and Israel will now stop striking Iran for two weeks. Iran will likewise refrain from attacking Israel, the Gulf Arabs, and US military forces. Iran sent the US a 10-point plan, which Trump calls a “workable basis on which to negotiate.”
This is quite remarkable, since nearly every point in the plan involves the US moving toward the Iranian position, rather than vice versa. Among the provisions are lifting all sanctions, continued Iranian control over Hormuz, US military withdrawal from the Middle East, reparations for the war, and acceptance of nuclear enrichment, although Iran commits not to build nuclear weapons.
The Epstein Class | Dissent Magazine
8-minute read
Jeffrey Epstein checks every conspiracist box. The late sex trafficker was a Jewish financier linked to the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His influence extended to the House of Saud, the House of Windsor, the Russian Federation, and Israel. He liked pizza. Renewed attention to the astonishing number of prominent men cultivated by Epstein has poured fuel on simmering conspiracy theories of shadowy child trafficking rings run by powerful elites. As Ana Marie Cox observed in the New Republic, “every new file drop brings at least a whisper of validation to QAnon’s core contentions.” Even some serious-minded observers are willing to entertain increasingly outlandish claims. Tara Palmeri, one of the most prominent journalists on the Epstein beat, even suggested that Epstein might have been growing mind-control plants in his garden to turn his victims into zombies.
[...]
The Epstein records released by the Department of Justice have exposed a world of unimaginable privilege and sparked a global backlash against what has come to be known as the Epstein Class. QAnon was a right-wing movement, but Epstein conspiracism has now gone fully bipartisan. Presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold the powerful to account, we are teetering on the edge of lunacy. Yet the real scandal of the Epstein saga is not that a billionaire cabal runs the world. It’s that there is a billionaire class.
1 star
My Prodigal Brainchild | Graphomane
5-minute read
Neal Stephenson:
It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to various reports, spent eighty billion dollars.
I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.
[...]
I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.
Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails. What’s behind ‘alpine divorce’? | The Guardian
6-minute read
Five years ago, MJ and a new partner – he was not exactly her boyfriend, and the pair were not exclusive – traveled from Los Angeles to Utah for an adventure getaway. MJ, who is 38 and works in PR, was looking forward to exploring Zion’s striking scenery; its vast sandstone canyon and pristine wading trails were on the list. But on the morning of their big hike, MJ was not feeling well. She could not shake the feeling that something was “off”; indeed, MJ would learn on this trip that her partner was seeing other women.
As they made their way up Angel’s Landing, MJ’s partner started walking faster than her. “I could tell it was getting on his nerves that I was slow,” she said. “I was like, ‘Fuck it, just go ahead of me.’” He did without hesitation.
How to Guess If Your Job Will Exist in Five Years | The Atlantic [gift article]
4-minute read
Following the rise of Claude Code and ChatGPT, pretty much every white-collar worker I know has been asking themselves that question. AI can code like an engineer, write a business plan like a consultant, decorate like an interior designer, and answer medical questions better than a doctor. It can make up a shockingly catchy and shockingly filthy country tune, and croon it in a voice drenched in Tennessee whiskey. The realization that America might not need so many engineers, consultants, interior designers, doctors, and country singers in the future naturally follows. Searches for the phrase job apocalypse are spiking. Polls show that voters are beginning to freak out. But there’s a better question for white-collar workers to ask themselves: Am I coal, or am I a horse?
Original link | Archive.is link
Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism | Astral Codex Ten
4-minute read
“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.
This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?
Iran’s shattered economy means any success in war may be fleeting | Reuters
3-minute read
Iranian authorities see the truce with the United States and Israel as a strategic victory, but they emerge battered and isolated with an economy in tatters, little prospect of rapid recovery and an impoverished, embittered population. After weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes, many Iranians have lost their jobs. Prices have surged. Factories, power plants, railways, airports and bridges have been destroyed. And the critical trading relationship with Gulf states has been severed - maybe for decades.
World’s Largest Group of Chimps Waging Deadly ‘Civil War,’ Scientists Discover | 404 Media
3-minute read
The Western chimps, despite being smaller in number, have since amped up hostilities by staging 24 violent attacks against their former kin, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The death toll may well be higher, but some deaths and disappearances cannot be conclusively attributed to the conflict.
The oldest breath: A 300-million-year-old mummy reveals the origins of how amniotes breathe | Phys.org
3-minute read
In a new study published in Nature, researchers describe the extraordinary preservation of the oldest known costal breathing system in Captorhinus aguti, a small, lizard-like creature from the early Permian period. The mummified fossil, which is only a few inches long, preserves not only bones, but also three-dimensional skin, calcified cartilage, and—most astonishingly—protein remnants that predate the previous oldest-known example by nearly 100 million years.
Kenya’s queen ants worth $220 each fuel booming global wildlife black market | BBC News
5-minute read
The scale of the illicit trade in Kenya became apparent last year when 5,000 giant harvester ant queens - mainly collected around Gilgil - were found alive at a guest house in Naivasha, a nearby lakeside town popular with tourists.
The suspects - from Belgium, Vietnam and Kenya - had packed the test tubes and syringes with moist cotton wool, which would enable each ant to survive for two months, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).
AI, Unemployment and Work | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.
So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution.
Quantum system of nine atoms beats network made up of thousands of nodes | Interesting Engineering
3-minute read
For years, progress in artificial intelligence has followed a simple rule: make it bigger with more layers, more connections, more computing power. However, a new study suggests otherwise.
Instead of scaling up, the study authors built something incredibly small—a quantum system with just nine interacting atomic spins—and asked it to take on problems that usually demand far larger machines.
The result was unexpected. This tiny system didn’t just hold its ground; it outperformed classical machine-learning models with thousands of nodes in tasks like predicting temperature patterns over several days.
Japanese artist creatively turns everyday objects into whimsical miniature worlds | Reddit
1-minute read
