Links
4 stars
The boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max | The Guardian
17-minute read
I look back at the last day of our old life with a kind of wonder now: the million summer freedoms, the complacency of our ease.
I watched the cricket with Max on my knee. Friends came to visit, and Ruth fed Max while we talked about our new neighbourhood among piles of books and packing boxes. Max gurgled regally as I changed one of his famous nappies. I organised our phone chargers and put his birth certificate carefully in a drawer with our passports and the mortgage statement. Then I hung a picture in what would soon be his room: a print from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, of a little boy sailing bravely across the ocean, with “Max” emblazoned on the prow of his ship. I stood back and admired it, feeling all three of us to be limitless, and wondering what would happen next.
Ruth called her mum and gave her the latest; I told one group chat I thought Ring doorbells were for dickheads, and asked another what had been happening at work during my paternity leave. I ate half a chocolate bar, then forgot about it. Finding it a week later levelled me. This melted Dairy Milk, left for me by another person entirely, a stranger from an antique land.
Then I have an in-between memory. I woke at five and stumbled to the bathroom to drink from the tap. The house was silent. Maybe the unknowable internal dominoes had already started to fall, or maybe they could still have been stopped. Maybe I could have decided to get Max up early, for no particular reason. Gina, the night nanny helping us through the move, would have thought me strange, but it would have been fine. Or if I had picked him up for a cuddle and put him straight back. Or if changing any single moment in his life or mine might have made everything different. A different bedtime. A different bed. A different house. A different dad.
Just before six, the day already too hot, the pallid dawn creeping around the blinds: Gina’s voice, bursting into our room, screaming, blurred by a dream. I don’t remember her words. She is holding Max towards us, maybe hoping we will say she is wrong and he is fine. But he has no pulse, and he is not breathing. He is limp, cold, the colour of marble.
3 stars
Witness: Inside America’s Death Chambers | The Atlantic
19-minute read
Lately, I’ve been having dreams about my own execution. The nightmares mostly unfold in the same way: I am horrified to discover that I’ve committed a murder—the victim is never anyone I know but always has a face I’ve seen somewhere before. I cower in fear of detection, and wonder desperately if I should turn myself in to end the suspense. I am caught and convicted and sentenced to death. And then I’m inside an execution chamber like the ones I’ve seen many times, straining against the straps on a gurney, needles in both arms. I beg the executioner not to kill me. I tell him my children will be devastated—and somehow I know they’re watching from behind a window that looks like a mirror. I feel the burn of poison in my veins. After that comes emptiness.
Maybe everyone dreams of dying, even if not in quite this way. I once had nightmares about being a victim of crime, but after I began witnessing executions, I came to imagine myself on some subconscious plane as the perpetrator instead. This is perhaps a result of overidentification with the men I’ve watched die—and my understanding of the Christian religion, in which we’re all convicted sinners. I’m particularly interested in forgiveness and mercy, some of my faith’s most stringent dictates. If those forms of compassion are possible for murderers, then they’re possible for everyone.
Original link | Archive.is link
‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star | The Guardian
14-minute read
Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.
[...]
Donaldson is not by any means one of God’s chosen entertainment-industry stars. He’s not especially handsome, and neither is he particularly funny-looking. At 6ft 5in, and with the sparse reddish beard he nowadays sports, he has the charmingly awkward aspect of a teen who has recently put on a growth spurt and hasn’t quite settled into himself. He’s likable, and is possessed of a goofy and anarchic sense of humour, but more in a guy-you-went-to-school-with sense than, say, the Eric André or the Jack Black sense. You definitely wouldn’t call him cool, either, and he’s certainly not edgy, but neither is he staid or offensively corny. My wife – who has, in passing, taken in a fair measure of MrBeast content over the time I have been working on this essay, consuming them in a manner roughly analogous to passive smoking – described Donaldson and his crew of sidekicks thus: “They just seem like good kids.”
A good deal of his success stems from his ability to balance this quality with the obsessive grandeur of his schemes. He is, simultaneously, a gifted algorithm-charmer, possessed of arcane knowledge as to attention and engagement, and a guy who is just hanging out, amusing himself and his friends (and his hundreds of millions of viewers). His most effective videos exhibit a fanatical clarity of purpose, as though he had taken the form of the YouTube video and squeezed it for its essential oil of entertainment, discarding as so much useless husk everything that cannot immediately be rendered down into pure content.
My Harrowing Months as Patricia Highsmith’s Assistant | The Yale Review
17-minute read
Highsmith opened the door before I rang the bell, as if she had been waiting behind the curtains. She was shorter than me, very thin, petite. Wearing a sweater and oversize jeans, her greasy gray bangs partially hiding her face, she looked unfriendly. She shook my hand in silence, then said, “Thank you for coming.” I closed the door and followed her into the house. Without turning around, she offered beer or tea; I asked for water. She looked fragile, but she moved quickly. She told me to sit on a large white sofa covered with colorful cushions and blankets, then disappeared into what I guessed was the kitchen.
It was a cozy living room. I stared at the bookshelves around me. An orange cat crossed the room, ignoring me. On the coffee table, I spotted a European magazine opened to a feature on the one hundred best living writers. Pat was right below Gabriel García Márquez. She finally returned with my water, moving as stealthily as the cat had.
She sat down in a chair across from me and asked, “Do you like Hemingway?”
She looked me in the eyes for the first time. I drank some of my tepid tap water. I knew the question was important. But I did not know anything about Pat or her life history. I did not know her tastes, or her relationship with other twentieth-century North American writers. I did not even know she had lived in New York and Paris. I had read only that one book by her, just before on the train. I set my glass on the table, knowing I was running out of time, like in a game show, and I decided it was a heads-or-tails choice. I could not guess the right answer, I reasoned, so I might as well tell the truth. “No,” I answered, as if putting my last chip down on the roulette table.
“I HATE Hemingway!” she screamed.
She stood up and walked to the door to show me out. Is that the entire interview? I wondered, following her. I had a thousand questions about the job, the daily tasks, the car, the salary, the conditions. But I didn’t dare open my mouth. She thanked me again for coming and told me she would call Dani as soon as possible to convey her decision. She shook my hand, then quickly slammed the door behind me.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
I Was A Juror On A Murder Trial | Thing of Things
20-minute read
Last January, I was on a jury for a murder trial: it was my job to determine if Bomani Hairston-Bassette murdered Charles Wright. You’re not supposed to sell your story for money for 90 days after the trial is over, but it’s been more than 90 days, so now I can tell you all about it. I’m going to first talk about the case, then about what it was like, then about how the experience affected my views about the justice system.
Brain Freeze | Asterisk
15-minute read
With everything we’ve learned, let me summarize the requirements for robust, state-of-the-art cryonics today: Effective human cryopreservation can only happen under very controlled circumstances. Advance preparation is an absolute requirement. Just before death, the patient must be injected with heparin. They must then die a quick and controlled respiratory death, after which the expert team has 12 minutes to preserve the body. Only under these conditions can we get a properly perfused brain and crisply-preserved synapses rather than mush.
These conditions make cryopreservation impossible for most people: people who die unexpectedly, or people who die slowly in hospice care. Biology is too exacting — preserving people who died suddenly remains beyond our capabilities, at least for now.
If you want to be cryopreserved under these controlled circumstances in 2025, you must come to Oregon, where you must be prescribed death-with-dignity medication, which currently requires a terminal diagnosis with a prognosis of six months or less.
You need to build mastery in order to find your flow | Aeon
9-minute read
Flow is a fleeting, immersive state in which time and space seem to compress or expand, accompanied by a delicious fusion of movement and awareness – where you don’t just move: you are the movement. You have a very clear goal of what you’re trying to achieve. You know what you’re doing. You’re receiving clear feedback from the task itself about how it’s going, and you know when you’re doing it right. You’re also feeling intrinsically motivated to keep going, and the noise of uncertainty fades, leaving you feeling in control of your life and free from ruminative thought loops. All the while, Csikszentmihalyi’s core principle of matching the challenge to your skill makes you hover in this sweet spot, where what you’re doing is neither too hard nor too easy. Altogether, these dynamics form the eight core principles of flow.
The Case for Regime Change in Iran, and How Not to Screw It Up | Richard Hanania's Newsletter
1-minute read
I disagree, but I haven't seen a stronger defence of this position:
Those who oppose American involvement in Iran often cite the Iraq War. In their telling, and this narrative is believed by much of the educated public, there was a group of “neocons” who fantasized about bringing democracy to the Middle East, went to war on that basis without knowing anything about the region, and brought the US into a quagmire. As I explain in my first book, this story isn’t true. The people in the American government who pushed for war with Iraq were, before Saddam was deposed, uninterested in nation building and wanted to get out relatively quickly.
Nonetheless, citing Iraq has become a stand-in for the idea that you should never try to overthrow a foreign state, regardless of the circumstances. While cavalierly going around the world knocking off governments can’t be the right approach, the idea that existing regimes should continue forever no matter how brutal to their own people and threatening to the world also cannot be the answer. Such a rule would have never allowed the Soviet Union to collapse.
In response to charges that those in favor of regime change are leading us into another Iraq, one could point to North Korea as an example of what happens when an evil regime is allowed to exist indefinitely and has armed itself with nuclear weapons. It is an impoverished nation of 26 million people without any semblance of individual freedom, and little reason to believe things will ever get better as long as the current government is in power. Civil war would clearly be an improvement over the current North Korean regime, as there would be some hope of a better future.
1 star
The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine | Amusing Planet
5-minute read
In the late 19th century, a rare and highly unusual neuropsychiatric condition was observed among a group of French-Canadian lumberjacks living in the Moosehead Lake region of northern Maine. Those affected exhibited an extreme and exaggerated startle reflex. When startled by a sudden movement or loud noise, they reacted with dramatic involuntary responses, such as leaping into the air, screaming, repeating words, or instantly obeying shouted commands. It was reported that the "jumpers" were primarily of French descent, born in Canada, and worked as lumbermen in the Maine woods.
The objectivity of Community Notes? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful overrepresentation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.
Win-Win Denial: The Empirical Psychology | Bet On It
1-minute read
A core proposition in economics is that voluntary exchanges benefit both parties. We show that people often deny the mutually beneficial nature of exchange, instead espousing the belief that one or both parties fail to benefit from the exchange. Across 4 studies… participants read about simple exchanges of goods and services, judging whether each party to the transaction was better off or worse off afterwards. These studies revealed that win–win denial is pervasive, with buyers consistently seen as less likely to benefit from transactions than sellers.
Flying on Frying Oil | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Clever entrepreneurs have cut out the middleman. Virgin palm oil can be substituted for used cooking oil and voila! Sustainable aviation fuel is contributing to deforestation in Malaysia. Malaysia exports far more “used” cooking oil than oil that it uses. No surprise.