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3 stars
GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
17-minute read
And then, in a tremendous climax, there were the awesome conquests of Alexander the Great, who destroyed the most powerful empire on Earth and conquered the known world by the age of 33, only to die young and have his empire swiftly broken up after his death.
…And then the story would promptly lurch 700 miles to the northwest and start over. Greeks? What Greeks? Now I was reading about the rise of a different city, Rome, and the achievements of its great republic. Instead of the Assembly and the ostracism, there was the Senate and the consuls. I would read about the Samnite Wars, the Punic Wars, the Gallic Wars, and finally the great civil wars that transformed Rome from a republic into the empire that men still think about a few times a week. In this story, the Greeks appear again, but only as enemies for Rome first to easily defeat, then be culturally influenced by. This fusion of Greek and Roman culture leads to European Christianity, the Renaissance, the cultural canon — in a word, the West itself.
Kid me didn’t think too much about it at the time. But as I grew, I and many others finally had a thought intrude: Wait a minute, what the heck was going on in Alexander’s old empire before the Romans got there?
And if you’re like me, asking that question is how you wind up reading Alexander to Actium.
2 stars
Only One Performer Has Won Three Best Actor Oscars. Is It Fair That He’s Also a Joke? | Slate
14-minute read
Anyone who knows anything about Day-Lewis can see where all this is going. The stories of Day-Lewis’ process are legion. Often he tells them himself, as he looks bashfully at his shoes. Other times he must hear them recited, and he looks like a man undergoing an appendectomy without anesthesia. There’s the flintlock he carried with him everywhere in The Last of the Mohicans. There’s the refusal to ever leave the wheelchair when playing Christy Brown in My Left Foot. There’s the requirement that the cast and crew address him by his character’s name in Lincoln. The most Day-Lewis-y of these stories comes from his time making In the Name of the Father, which he discussed over a decade ago in response to a question about whether the rumors that he slept in his character’s jail cell were true. The actor replied that they weren’t because he didn’t exactly sleep. Ruffians came and harassed him every couple of hours and then, at the end of a couple of days of this, they hired someone from Special Branch to interrogate him for nine hours without a break.
Perhaps you are asking yourself the same question I asked when I encountered this tale: Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone do that to themselves?
The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist | The Guardian
14-minute read
The Warsaw book heist was not an isolated incident but one of the final stops on an unprecedented grand tour of bibliophilic crime, which snaked its way from north-east to south-west Europe between spring 2022 and winter 2023. As many as 170 rare Russian books, valued at more than £2.5m, vanished from the shelves of the National Library of Latvia in Riga, two university libraries in Estonia, Vilnius University Library in Lithuania, the National Library of Finland in Helsinki, the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, Bibliothèque Diderot in Lyon, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the University Library of Languages and Civilisations in Paris, the Bibliothèque de Genève in Switzerland, the State Library in Berlin and the Bavarian State Library in Munich. “In terms of scale and sophistication, we have never dealt with anything like this before,” said Laura Bellen of Estonia’s southern district court, one of the first public prosecutors to investigate these thefts. “Libraries just aren’t used to thinking of themselves as targets for major crime.”
The thieves’ tactics in each of these cities were broadly the same: two people would use fake identities to order up rare Russian books from the stacks. If they were being watched closely, one would distract the librarians while the other walked out with the books. Their cover stories varied, and they were not always the same two people. In Warsaw they posed as Slovakians, in Helsinki as Poles.
He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer’s 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn’t He? | New York Times
7-minute read
For 14 years now, Mr. Whitney has been the one-person focus of exceptionally detailed scientific investigation, for which he travels periodically to St. Louis from his home in Port Orchard, Wash. It is not because he is ill. It is because he was supposed to be ill.
Mr. Whitney, 76, is a scientific unicorn with potential to provide answers about one of the world’s most devastating diseases. He has a rare genetic mutation that essentially guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late 40s or early 50s and would likely die within a decade.
His mother and nine of her 13 siblings developed Alzheimer’s and died in the prime of their lives. So did his oldest brother, and other relatives going back generations. It is the largest family in the United States known to have an Alzheimer’s-causing mutation.
“Nobody in history had ever dodged that bullet,” Mr. Whitney said.
But somehow, he has done just that. Something has shielded him from his genetic destiny, allowing him to escape Alzheimer’s for at least 25 years longer than anyone expected.
Original link | Archive.is link
Resiliency and Scale | Stratechery
8-minute read
There seems, at first glance, to be little in common between the two big stories of the last two weeks. On October 9, China announced expansive export controls on rare earths, which are critical to nearly all tech products; then, on October 20, US-East-1, the oldest and largest region of Amazon Web Services, suffered a DNS issue that impacted cloud services that people didn’t even know they used, until they were no longer available.
There is, however, a commonality, one that cuts to the heart of accepted wisdom about both the Internet and international trade, and serves as a reminder that what actually happens in reality matters more than what should happen in theory.
A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida | The Atlantic
13-minute read
What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.
Original link | Archive.is link
Yoshie Shiratori’s Remarkable Prison Escapes | Amusing Planet
4-minute read
Wandering through its dim corridors, visitors often stop short at a startling sight: a life-size mannequin dangling overhead, seemingly caught in the act of wriggling to freedom through the rafters. Clad in nothing but a white loincloth, the figure portrays Yoshie Shiratori, a prisoner no jail could hold. Between 1936 and 1947, the man known as the “Harry Houdini of Japan” pulled off four daring prison escapes, earning a legend’s status among escape artists.
Scam Cities | Asterisk
6-minute read
On paper, Yatai may resemble a promising experiment for innovation and prosperity. The city, which labels itself as a “special economic zone,” is also historically beyond the direct reach of the Burmese central government. The new city’s private developer provides public utilities and maintains security. It’s also welcomed new technologies: Branding itself as a “blockchain smart city,” Yatai has embraced cryptocurrencies to facilitate everyday transactions. In 2019, it collaborated with BCB Blockchain, a Singaporean startup, to build Fincy, an app that maintains the city’s on-chain finance. By 2020, Fincy was adopted by 90% of the city’s merchants. Far away from Myanmar’s state infrastructure, the city has adopted Starlink for internet communication and solar panels for electricity.
[...]
But despite its stated ambitions, Yatai didn’t become Myanmar’s Silicon Valley. Today, its largest industry is cyber scams. According to news reports, inside Yatai’s low-rise office buildings, scammers pulled victims from faraway countries into virtual romances, cultivating a trusting relationship before defrauding them with “investment advice.” Yet the scammer on the other end shouldn’t always take the full blame. Many are themselves victims of forced labor, abducted to the region from countries in Asia and Africa after responding to supposedly legitimate job postings and having little freedom to leave.
BRIEFLY NOTED: Summer Reading | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
12-minute read
You may never have heard of John McMahon, but he’s one of the most influential people alive today (there are many such people, because the world is fractally interesting). American economic growth is increasingly dominated by a handful of companies that sell software subscriptions at eye-watering margins to other large companies, and most such companies are run by John McMahon’s disciples. All enterprise software sellers today speak a common vocabulary, and that vocabulary was invented by John McMahon. Enterprise software sellers, like all professions, have weird feuds and religious disputes about what exactly the letters in various acronyms should stand for, but the acronyms were invented by John McMahon. The rival factions and schools in enterprise software sales mostly argue about the correct way to interpret John McMahon’s thought, because he is the great teacher and systematizer who laid down the laws of their world.
Bring Back the Internet Gatekeepers | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
10-minute read
If anyone has an interest in a free speech absolutist regime, it’s me. Still, while it is easy to simply complain about how stupid discourse has gotten, there is only one acceptable way to reduce the impact of conspiracy theorists and grifters. We need a return to gatekeeping on the internet.
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The focus needs to be on limiting the reach of conspiracy theorists and making them less politically influential. This means laying off social media companies and letting them regulate content, with pressure being applied in the direction of making them more responsible actors. Do I think that they’ll do a good job? No, but other than Elon Musk, I can’t imagine most of these companies wanting their platforms to be dominated by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and that is good enough.
Argentina Could Be a Superpower | Uncharted Territories
11-minute read
Despite these striking advantages, Argentina has not been able to translate them into immigration and wealth. Geography is not destiny.
One way to put it: Geography is the hardware, our institutions are the software. When both work well, a country is unstoppable. With bad hardware but intelligent software, a country can go far. But it’s easy to waste good hardware with very bad software. This is what Argentina has done.
1 star
How the Earth Invented Sleep | Derek Thompson
3-minute read
But the thing about having a brain is that it is literally so exhausting. As soon as brains got big enough to make use of oxygen, animals had to start sleeping. In the 2025 paper “Mitochondrial origins of the pressure to sleep,” a team of scientists tried to understand how sleep might have evolved in the most basic organisms, long before it accumulated more complex functions, such as learning, memory consolidation, and giving Freudians a bunch of dubious ideas about sexual repression. “Aerobic metabolism was the innovation” that gave birth to nervous systems, “and with them, apparently, the need for sleep,” the authors write.
Their theory centers on mitochondria, the energy factory in our cells. These organelles take electrons from food and make useful energy. Mitochondria are good at their job, but not perfect. As they work with electrons, a few slip away and react with oxygen, causing damage to the cell if they’re not cleared. Over time, sleep seems to have evolved to be the body’s release valve for that pressure: a temporary factory shutdown.
Human Error Is the Point: On Teaching College During the Rise of AI | The Rumpus
3-minute read
In my classroom, there is always a delay. Between question and answer. Between what we meant to say and what came out instead. That space—the stutter, the pause, the gesture—is where the actual teaching happens. Not in the bullet points or in the Google Doc comments, but in the moment someone says, “I don’t know if this makes sense, but—” and suddenly it does.