3 stars
How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World | New Yorker
The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them.
Death on the Savage Mountain: What really happened on K2, and why 100 climbers stepped over a dying man on their way to the summit | Insider
In the darkness, they rose. More than 150 men and women advanced warily through the ice, grasping lines that had been anchored into the mountainside just hours before.
Some had waited months for this ascent. They had a small window: Winds had finally calmed on the morning of July 26, giving teams their first chance to summit K2, the King of Mountains, in the Pakistani-administered area of the Kashmir.
A storm would hit the mountain on the 28th, they were told. It was now, or next year.
Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain? | Scientific American
Insects have surprisingly rich inner lives—a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical implications
What Happens to All the Stuff We Return? | New Yorker
The twentysomething daughter of a friend of mine recently ordered half a dozen new dresses. She wasn’t planning to keep the lot; she’d been invited to the wedding of a college classmate and knew in advance that she was going to send back all but the one she liked best. “Swimsuits and dresses for weddings—you never buy just one,” Joanie Demer, a co-founder of the Krazy Coupon Lady, a shopping-strategy Web site, told me. For some online apparel retailers, returns now average forty per cent of sales.
Steady growth in Internet shopping has been accompanied by steady growth in returns of all kinds. A forest’s worth of artificial Christmas trees goes back every January. Bags of green plastic Easter grass go back every spring. Returns of large-screen TVs surge immediately following the Super Bowl. People who buy portable generators during weather emergencies use them until the emergencies have ended, and then those go back, too. A friend of mine returned so many digital books to Audible that the company now makes her call or e-mail if she wants to return another. People who’ve been invited to fancy parties sometimes buy expensive outfits or accessories, then return them the next day, caviar stains and all—a practice known as “wardrobing.” Brick-and-mortar shoppers also return purchases. “Petco takes back dead fish,” Demer said. “Home Depot and Lowe’s let you return dead plants, for a year. You just have to be shameless enough to stand in line with the thing you killed.” It almost goes without saying that Americans are the world’s leading refund seekers; consumers in Japan seldom return anything.
The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure | Wired
So many people are nearsighted on the island nation that they have already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us.
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule | New Yorker
A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”
The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”
What makes a strategy great | A Smart Bear
Most so-called “strategies” are vague, wishful thinking, written once and never seen again. Don’t do that. These are the characteristics of great strategy.
2 stars
Eric Adams’s Administration of Bluster | New Yorker
Mayor Eric Adams’s exuberant self-regard stops just short of biceps-kissing. He has talked in public about the warmth of his own smile. Describing “Healthy at Last,” a book that he published in 2020 about his disciplined response to a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, Adams told a podcast host, “Every time I read it, I find another nugget, and say, ‘Wow! This was a good point that I made.’ ” Adams once told an audience, “I get out of the shower sometimes and I say, ‘Damn!’ ” He has said that he is the face of a new Democratic Party.
On a recent Sunday evening, Adams—who is sixty-two and was born in Brooklyn, although he has sometimes said that he was born elsewhere—was in a restaurant on the Upper West Side. His shirt was white and uncreased, and he wore a stud earring, an adornment that he adopted while running for mayor. He removes the stud ahead of events likely to have a more serious tenor, as if lowering a flag to half-mast. Adams ordered French fries and, unprompted, said, “This is going to be one of the most fascinating mayoralties in history.” He later added, “Anyone who believes there’s not a God, they need to watch my journey.”
She Sacrificed Her Youth to Get the Tech Bros to Grow Up | Wired
When Patricia Moore was 26, she looked in the mirror and saw an 85-year-old woman. Crow’s feet clustered at her eyes, her back hunched, and silver hair gathered around her face. Another person might be horrified. Moore held a hand to her cheek, astonished and thrilled at the transformation.
Back then—this was the spring of 1979—Moore was a young industrial designer living in New York City and working at Raymond Loewy Associates, the famous designer of everything from NASA’s Skylab space station to home appliances. At a planning meeting one afternoon, Moore mentioned that, growing up, she’d seen her arthritic grandmother struggle to open refrigerators. She suggested creating a fridge door that unlatched with ease. “Pattie,” a senior colleague told her, “we don’t design for those people.” The firm’s target users were middle-aged male professionals. Moore fumed at the injustice, to say nothing of the lost business opportunity. But, she thought, who was she to advocate on behalf of elderly consumers? Moore had never struggled to open anything. She left the meeting frustrated, with a feeling she couldn’t shake: If she could understand what it was like to be old, she could develop better products. Not just for elders, but for everybody. […]
Today, Moore, who started a firm called MooreDesign Associates in the early ’80s, is considered one of the founders of “universal design,” the idea that products and environments should be built to accommodate the widest range of people possible. Moore has designed for Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, Kraft, AT&T, Herman Miller, and 3M, among many others. She’s known in the industry as the “Mother of Empathy.” In interviews, colleagues called her a Jedi, a unicorn, and a design goddess. David Kusuma, president of the World Design Organization, told me, “I don’t think there is anyone in the design world who hasn’t heard of her.”
#18. How Play Promotes Cooperation in Adult Mammals | Play Makes Us Human
#19. How Play Enables Female Bonobos to Prevent Male Dominance | Play Makes Us Human
As you may have noticed, I’m really enjoying Peter Gray’s Substack:
When I go for a walk with my little dog Cookie (who would rather be called “Brutus” or anything more macho than “Cookie”) and we meet a dog he hasn’t met before, he begins barking ferociously. But if I then dare to take him off the leash, so he is free to approach the other, his mood begins to change. He seems to alternate between an aggressive posture and the submissive play posture (called the play bow) that characterizes canids generally, in which he lowers his front end while arching his neck upward. If the other dog responds to this play invitation in a similar way, I sigh with relief. There will be no fight; they will play. If I and the other dog’s owner allow the dogs to play for a while and then we meet again on another day, there is no aggressive barking. They immediately greet one another in the friendly manner of dogs (sniffing one another’s rear ends) and then begin to play.
Cookie, like all dogs, is a descendant of wolves (he likes to brag about that). Like all wolves and most of their descendants, he carries DNA that promotes aggression, but also DNA that enables him to counter the aggressive drive and form bonds of friendship. That anti-aggression DNA is the DNA for play. […]
While the goal of a real fight is to end the fight as quickly as possible by winning and driving off or asserting dominance over the other, the goal of a play fight is to keep the interaction going for the pleasure and, ultimately (from an evolutionary perspective), the practice it provides. To keep it going, each animal must avoid hurting or threatening the other, that is, avoid winning or even appearing as if it wants to win. Play always requires the voluntary participation of both (or all) partners, so play is always an exercise in restraint and in retaining the other’s good will.
A number of studies indicate that adult bonobos of both sexes use play to prevent or reduce fighting in stressful situations. In one study of a captive colony, play was most frequent during the pre-feeding period, a time when tension in the group was especially high because of anticipated competition for food (Palagi, Paoli & Tarli, 2006). In another study, play among adults increased significantly when the animals were temporarily restricted to relatively crowded indoor quarters (Tacconi & Palagi, 2009). There is little or no evidence of such tension-reducing play in adult chimpanzees.
The most striking social difference between bonobos and chimpanzees, however, is that female bonobos are generally dominant over males (Parish & de Waal, 2000). Chimpanzees, in contrast, exhibit the far more typical primate pattern of male dominance over females, which is sometimes quite violent (Muller, Kahlenberg, & Wrangham, 2009). […]
Female bonobos dominate males even though they are smaller and physically weaker than the males. They accomplish this by coming to one another’s aid in aggressive encounters with males (Palagi 2023). If a female is attacked or threatened by a male, other females (her friends) come quickly to her aid, and together they drive off the offending male. Male bonobos, in contrast, do not help one another in encounters with females.
The capacity of female bonobos to form and maintain such cooperative relationships is especially striking given that bonobos practice female exogamy, meaning that the females, not the males, leave their natal group and join a new one upon reaching sexual maturity. Thus, the bonds formed among female adult bonobos are most often among individuals who are not close relatives and were not raised together.
How do female bonobos form these cooperative friendship bonds? According to researcher Elisabetti Palagi (2011; 2023) and others, they do so largely through play.
Don’t Doubt: Saint Thomas in India | Marginal Revolution
The incredible journey | The Guardian
Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.
And here’s the Dalrymple piece Tabarrok links to — a very interesting read:
Nevertheless over the past 100 years, as research has progressed both into ancient Indian history and the links between India and the Roman Middle East, a series of remarkable discoveries have gone a long way to prove that the story contained in the Acts seems to be built on surprisingly solid historical foundations. First, British archaeologists working in late 19th-century India began to find hoards of coins belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the Rajah Gondophares, who ruled from AD19 to AD45. If St Thomas had ever been summoned to India, it would have been Rajah Gondophares who would have done it, just as the Acts had always maintained.
The fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the name of an obscure Indian rajah, whose name and lineage had disappeared, implied that it must contain at least a nucleus of genuine historical information. Archaeological discoveries have since confirmed many other details of the story, revealing that maritime contacts between the Roman world and India were much more extensive than anyone had realised.
Does New York City have the world's best food? | Silver Bulletin
I think Nate Silver’s breakdown is obviously right, but also takes some of the fun out of it:
Recently, people have been arguing about food on the Internet again. In particular, they’ve been arguing about whether the United States has better food than France. My answer is — well, maybe it does — but it obviously depends on where you live in the US and how you define the question. […]
It's obvious that these are apples-to-oranges comparisons. So here’s my attempt to develop a taxonomy of what people mean when they argue about the best food cities or the best food countries. I think they have roughly five different definitions in mind — which can yield very different answers. […]
So which country has better food, the US or France?
France clearly wins by Definitions 4 and 5.
The US probably wins by Definition 1 — remember, this definition assumes high effort, i.e. really taking advantage of the extensive degree of consumer choice and the wide variety of international cuisines available in the US.
France probably wins by definition 2, though it’s close if you’re a wealthy American living in a major city.
Finally, Definition 3 is subjective enough as to be hard to resolve. As for my subjective opinion, I’ve long found France in general and Paris in particular a little hard to approach foodwise as an outsider and that colors my answer. If you’re comparing the US to Italy, though, my answer is Italy.
Interview: Jean Twenge, psychologist | Noahpinion
I usually dislike interviews / transcripts, as they lack the polish of a well-crafted essay…but this was good:
During the early 2010s when Millennials were drawn to Bernie Sanders, economic issues were a big issue for young adults. The economy was slow to recover from the Great Recession, median incomes for young adults were down, and Millennial wealth-building was slower than for other generations. But that changed significantly after about 2015 when the economy improved, median incomes for young adults rose significantly, and Millennial wealth-building was neck and neck with previous generations. Yet there's still a lot of negativity about the Millennial economic situation, almost like views got stuck in the early 2010s. Oddly, depression started to increase among 26- to 34-year-olds only after 2015 -- so just as their economic situation was turning around, more became depressed. That suggests something other than economic factors are behind the rise. Disappointment with adulthood after an adolescence of high expectations might be one factor. The general negativity and political and social division in the culture after that time might be another.
Disney’s Taylor Swift Era | Stratechery
There is much to say about the summer of Taylor that is pertinent to technology and the Internet: start with the desire for communal in-person experiences driven not only by the pandemic, but also the general fracturing of culture inherent in a media landscape where personalized content delivered directly to your personal device is the norm. Then there is the way in which social media acts as a FOMO generator: being able to access every moment of every show on social media doesn’t decrease the value of attending the show, but rather increases the desire to obtain a scarce number of tickets to see the spectacle in person. And, it must be said, there is the excellence at play: not only does Swift have an incredible catalog of popular songs, the show itself spares no expense — or exertion on Swift’s part — to give the fans exactly what they were hoping for. […]
The end result is the inversion you see in Disney’s recent results. Disney is, from this point forward, not much different than Taylor Swift: sure, there is money to be made (hopefully) in areas like streaming, but the real durable value and outsized profits will come from real life experiences. This is, to be sure, a good business, but it has its limits: it is remarkable that Swift performed six shows in seven nights in Los Angeles, but it was still only six shows; concerts don’t scale like CD sales used to. Disney, similarly, only has so many theme parks, that only accommodate so many people, and operating those theme parks takes significant ongoing resources.
It’s interesting, then, to observe how differently Swift and Disney are perceived at this moment in time: I opened with Simmons analogizing Swift to Jordan, and I think it’s a fair comparison; the reality of the fractured world wrought by the Internet is that any star who can emerge from the noise becomes bigger than anything we have seen before, from hunger for a unifying experience if nothing else, and admission to that experience becomes valuable through unprecedented demand combined with physically limited supply.
Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually | Astral Codex Ten
Suppose there is a good idea. People will be attracted to it. It will gather momentum. Eventually it will have made all the true claims it can make, but it won’t have used up its hype. Its momentum will carry it forward into making false claims and doing bad things.
After a while, it will get a reputation as “that idea which makes false claims and does bad things”. People will rush to dissociate themselves from it. The dissociation will itself gather momentum. Supporting the idea will look naive at best; more likely it will signal that you’re a predatory scammer. There will be a virtue signaling cascade to compete over how much you hate the idea. […]
Likewise, cognitive biases are real, well-replicated, and have strong explanatory value. Grifters went on to argue that they controlled every facet of our lives, which made lots of people allergic to the whole field. But that’s an over-reaction, and we should go back to “merely” believing them to be real, well-replicated, and with strong explanatory value.
In Praise of Heroic Masculinity | The Atlantic
Caitlin Flanagan:
The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.” […]
Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?
Swiping and Dating Preferences | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Interestingly, a recent survey found that men in cohabiting relationships are just as satisfied in their relationships as married men, but women in cohabiting relationships are much less satisfied than married women. Much of social progress was supposedly intended to benefit women and instead ended up benefiting men.
Perhaps this is one contributing factor to the paradox of declining female happiness.
Women used to report having higher well-being than men. Over the past several decades, though, this has reversed. Women’s self-reported happiness has plummeted. Today men report higher well-being than women. […]
When my late adoptive grandparents met back in the 1950s, after about 2 weeks, my 21-year-old grandfather proposed to my 18-year-old grandmother. She replied that she had 3 requirements for him: stop smoking, stop drinking, and stop gambling. My grandfather agreed, immediately dropping all 3 habits (and never returning to them). Today, it is laughable to imagine such a scenario occurring in the U.S.
My Beautiful Friend | The Point
Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming. That even back when I still held out hope, my features were meanwhile settling, treacherous, into a mediocrity which surprised, humiliated, crushed me. In other words, I was not going to be any great beauty. I was only going to be what I was: attractive occasionally, like most people, relative to whoever happened to stand nearby. I was horrified; I couldn’t get over it. Being average-looking is, by definition, completely normal. Why hadn’t anyone prepared me for it?
I could not have discovered I was plain without discovering K was pretty. She is my friend of many years. Back then, it obsesses me: how we make each other exist. We attend elementary school together, then high school. She enrolls at a nearby college. Her tall grants me my short; my plump her skinny; her leonine features my pedestrian ones. I resent her as much as I exult in her company. In between us, and without words for it, the female universe dilates, a continuum whose comparative alchemy seems designed to confront me, make me suffer, lift her up. Her protagonism diminishes me, or does it? I confuse myself for a long time thinking I am the planet, and K is the sun. It takes me a long time to forgive her.
CoDeF: Content Deformation Fields for Temporally Consistent Video Processing | GitHub
I don’t entirely understand what the words mean, but check out these crazy demos…
Why China's economy ran off the rails | Noahpinion
OK, so I guess I’m writing about China one more time. For those subset of readers who are rolling their eyes and saying “Oh my God, ANOTHER China post?”, all I can say is, when there’s a big event that’s all over the news, people need a lot of explainers. And right now, the big event that’s in the news is China’s economic crisis.
This is a pretty momentous happening, since a lot of people had started to believe — implicitly or explicitly — that China’s economy would never suffer the sort of crash that periodically derails all other economies. That was always wrong, of course, and now the bears are coming out for a well-deserved victory lap. But there are a whole lot of narratives out there about why China’s economy crashed — it took on too much debt, it invested too much of its GDP, it increased state control at the expense of the private sector, and so on. So I think it’s useful for me to give my quick account of what happened.
Moving From IC To Engineering Manager | Stay SaaSy
Good principles, independent of job function:
Moving from individual contributor (IC) to engineering manager is a big move. These promotions are done very differently across industry, with varying results. Here we’ll go over some best practices for this change, including:
The right motivations for a new manager
The necessary skills for a new manager
Avoiding the team lead role
Managing with training wheels
1 star
‘Asian glow’ from alcohol isn’t just a discomfort. It’s a severe warning. | Washington Post
Nothing too new, but perhaps the strongest warning I’ve seen:
People with alcohol flush reaction produce a version of the second enzyme, mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2), that has very low activity. This ALDH2 deficiency leads to alcohol not being metabolized normally, and acetaldehyde — essentially, a poison — builds up in the blood.
“Acetaldehyde is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization, meaning it has been proven to cause cancer in humans,” said Che-Hong Chen, country director of the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education. “Even with just two cans of beer, the amount of acetaldehyde in their blood is already reaching carcinogenic levels.”
I Put a Waterfalls Terrarium in my Table (Custom Build) | YouTube
There were a few key features I wanted to include in this terrarium table - a waterfall edge, a live edge, a stream, and an actual running waterfall. Deciding how to best construct it, while retaining a beautiful design was difficult, but I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. It's hands down one of my favorite projects I've ever done.
An Amazing 19th-Century Autograph Quilt | Kottke
In 1856, a 17-year-old girl named Adeline Harris started making a unique quilt. Over the next two decades, she sent pieces of silk to famous people from around the world and they signed them and sent them back to her. She assembled them into a quilt with a tumbling blocks pattern (aka, the Q*bert pattern).
The signatures that Harris was able to acquire are astounding: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, Alexandre Dumas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexander von Humboldt, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oh, and eight US Presidents: Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.