Links
3 stars
Barack Obama Considers His Role in the Age of Trump | New Yorker
24-minute read
In Barack Obama’s final days in office, he found himself in the painful position of trying to console his staff, the Democratic Party, and millions of supporters. He attempted to convince them—even if he could not entirely convince himself—that the looming Presidency of Donald Trump was not a national calamity. In the past, he would say, the country had endured slavery, the Civil War, the Great Depression, Jim Crow, assassinations. And, though Trump was alarming in many ways, America was blessed by the strength of its institutions and the resilience of its people. The word “guardrails” was uttered constantly. In Obama’s estimation, Trump would not erase all his achievements. As he put it, “Maybe fifteen per cent of that gets rolled back.”
This kind of calm was pure Obama. His appeal had as much to do with character and temperament as it did with his center-left ideology. Although Obama believed that Trump’s ugliest slurs against him, particularly his deployment of the birther theory, were a racist outrage that heightened the threats against him and his family, he now took pains to set aside his contempt. Insuring that there was another orderly transition of power—that, too, was part of his rhetoric of consolation.
[...]
A few weeks ago, I spoke to Obama about how he’s spent the past decade—and whether events have shaken the confidence that he expressed in that farewell speech. “I would be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that,” he replied. How Obama has used his time—including since Trump returned to office—says much about how he sees his role, its potential and its limits.
Original link | Archive.is link
Why Japanese companies do so many different things | David Oks
13-minute read
The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.
[...]
The crucial thing, Aoki suggests, is that we understand all of these distinctive features—lifetime employment, no benefits for individual performance, hostility to outside financing—as reflecting a particular bundle: a “J-firm” bundle, as he calls it, as opposed to the “H-firm” bundle that you encounter in the United States or Europe. The core difference, Aoki says, is that while in the H-mode production is organized vertically, in the J-mode it’s organized horizontally. (H is for hierarchy; J is for Japanese.)
[...]
And the complete Japanese bundle, I should say, ends up producing something with entirely different objectives and interests than the American bundle. The H-firm exists to make money, or rather to return money to shareholders; but the J-firm, run by its employees and largely indifferent to the interests of shareholders, exists simply to continue existing. That’s why Japanese companies are so protean and willing to change what they do.
How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration) | PerThirtySix
5-minute read
You’re at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It’s right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.
How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?
Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It’s neither of those. What it’s actually doing is far more clever.
2 stars
My Absolutely Chaotic Adventures at Sea During the Summer of 1984 | Narratively
12-minute read
“The anchor’s stuck!”
Dominic* crouches over a grimy metal box on the foredeck of the Wildebeest, the 20-foot yacht carrying us from Turkey to Gibraltar.
“Release the brake,” Tom shouts from the cockpit. “It isn’t complicated.”
I stop prepping the sails and squat beside Dominic.
“I have released the brake,” he whispers. “The crank won’t move.”
I lean over the rail and peer into the water. It’s glassy, but it’s not immediately clear what I’m looking at.
“The anchor’s caught on a cable,” I shout. “A massive one.”
Tom lurches forward, beer in hand. “That’s a first,” he grumbles, fiddling with the greasy machinery, failing to free any slack. He drains his bottle and scratches his head.
“Should we swim down?” I ask.
Tom shoots me a look — aggravation, condescension, it’s hard to tell. “Well done, Einstein,” he says dryly. “Off you go.”
I grab a mask and flippers. Dominic does the same. Together, we plunge into the balmy Aegean Sea, feet first. The anchor hovers 10 feet from the sea floor and 25 feet from the surface. A sturdy cable — phone lines, maybe — drapes over it, shifting gracefully, ominously, in the milky blue. We dart up for air.
“We can’t do it all in one breath,” I tell Tom. “Throw us a line. We’ll tie it off, and you can haul the cable up a few feet.”
Dominic snatches the rope Tom chucks at us, and we dive again. He wants to impress, but fumbles the knot and kicks for the surface.
I grab the line, loop it around the cable, tie it off and tug at it. My lungs are bursting, but I don’t panic. I know not to. Panic wasn’t an option growing up.
How Mark Roberge Built HubSpot’s Sales Engine | Commoncog
8-minute read
Mark Roberge, the head of sales at HubSpot, wasted hours posting ads across job boards while hiring for his team. He got hundreds of applications, completed 50 phone screens and took dozens of in-person interviews. Despite this, he hired zero candidates.
Back in September 2007, this was critical for Roberge. He had just joined HubSpot as its first sales hire and had no experience running a sales team. As he put it himself: “I’ve never done sales before. I’m a mechanical engineer by trade. I wrote code for the first years of my career.” Yet he would go on to serve as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services, scaling the company’s revenue from $0 to over $100 million and expanding the team from one employee to four hundred and fifty. An MIT-trained engineer by background, Roberge brought a metrics-driven, process-oriented approach to sales that would eventually earn him recognition as one of Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. HubSpot had grown revenues more than 6,000% since 2007 and by 2011 was recognised as the second fastest growing software company and 33rd fastest growing company overall by Inc. 500. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2014, raising $125 million in its initial public offering. But that was all later. In those early days, none of that was guaranteed. First, he had to figure out how to actually hire salespeople who could sell.
The Last Nation to Play | Longreads
14-minute read
“This is a special team, man,” he said, without breaking stride. “It’s a special team.”
It was indeed. Aside from Matt, none of these players were from Springdale. Half the team had flown in from places like Virginia and Washington and Pennsylvania. The others had made significantly longer journeys, traveling nearly 6,300 miles over two full days from map-dot islands in the Pacific Ocean. Much of the coaching staff had flown in from the UK.
A passerby peering through the bars of the metal fence would not have thought much of this scene—just another soccer team practicing at a high-school stadium—but had they zoomed in on the intricate blue logos on the breasts of the players’ jerseys, they would have realized the oddity of the team’s presence: This was the Marshall Islands men’s national soccer team. Had the spectator stuck around to watch a few drills, they would have also noticed that these young men, despite their matching uniforms, clearly did not know one another.
Why not Venus? | Mars For The Rest of Us
7-minute read
Venus researchers Janusz Petkowski and Sara Seager have made an intriguing case that all the anomalies I list can be explained by the presence of microorganisms that produce ammonia from nitrogen and water. The ammonia would react with sulfuric acid to create a kind of slurry, accounting for both the depletion of SO2 and the Mode 3 haze. The pH in such a neutralized droplet would be close to 1, a perfectly livable environment for acidophiles we find on Earth. And a byproduct of their metabolism would be molecular oxygen.
The appeal of this theory is that it’s ridiculously easy to test. Unlike Mars, where we have to delve deep underground to hope to find relic life, we can just go look at the clouds on Venus with a party balloon. The mission is simple enough that Petkowski and Seager are flying a private version of it with RocketLab as a side project, funded by an anonymous benefactor.
If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? | Derek Thompson
8-minute read
“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time,” the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 paper. “It is not happy now.”
Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population” after COVID that “mainly persists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in national sentiment. After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness plunged. And it’s hardly bounced back at all.
Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.
[...]
So, those who privilege economic statistics over self-reports might be tempted to summarize the situation this way: America’s resilient economy is a fact, while Americans’ sad-sack survey results are mere irrational feelings. There is something to this; the gap between so-called “hard data” (e.g., the unemployment rate) and “soft data” (e.g., a survey) is certainly wide and widening. But a feeling is an important kind of fact. Feelings don’t just shape consumer behavior. They shape political attitudes; and attitudes influence voting; and voting determines policies; and policies shape the economy. To understand the future of the US economy and the United States writ large, one cannot afford a haughty indifference toward sentiment.
And on the sentiment front, what we’ve got are four survey results—four facts, you might even say, of American lugubriousness—all of which point to one unmistakable conclusoin. This decade has been the very opposite of “roaring.” We are mired instead in the Tragic Twenties.
How to Crash | Pangyrus
7-minute read
On the morning of the ceremony, Joe handed me a tailored blue tweed jacket and an orange knit tie to match his own. I put them on and clambered into the back of a rented 1967 Volkswagen camper van with Joe’s parents, two sisters, and Euan Kennedy — driver and urologist.
The van was cream with white leather benches, silver buckets for champagne, and no seat belts. We rattled along country roads and onto the motorway. We made small talk and I tried to remember the outline of my speech for later.
A mile short of the church, on a roundabout, moving around twenty miles an hour, the chatter was replaced with screaming. For the van door had rattled open and I had fallen out.
Calamities seem to happen in slow motion, then very fast. I remember sliding along smooth white leather as the van banked in the turn, then feeling the door give way and swing open, and then falling backwards out of it as though I were a figment in someone else’s dream. My head smashed into the road.
After that there is a gap in my memory.
An Eccentric Tycoon Left a Fortune to the Winner of a Baby-Making Contest. The Great Stork Derby Divided Canadians During the Great Depression | Smithsonian Magazine
7-minute read
Before his sudden death on Halloween in 1926, the wealthy Toronto lawyer and financier Charles Vance Millar built a reputation as a bachelor and a prankster. In one of his favorite practical jokes, he would place money on a sidewalk and hide nearby, roaring with laughter at people’s reactions as they contemplated their next move. Undoubtedly eccentric, Millar amassed a fortune by investing in breweries, real estate and infrastructure. He once modernized a stagecoach company in western Canada by replacing horses with automobiles.
Millar never married or had children, and he had no living relatives when he suffered a fatal heart attack at age 72. His death “proved to be the beginning of a posthumous career that eclipsed everything he had accomplished in his lifetime,” attorney and author Mark M. Orkin wrote in a 1981 book. Millar’s last will and testament contained a number of strange provisions, but the most peculiar was the one that launched the so-called Great Stork Derby.
The clause in question established a competition among Toronto mothers that would allocate a portion of Millar’s estate to the participant who gave birth to the most children over the next ten years. The bequest was valued at about 500,000 Canadian dollars—equivalent to nearly 9 million Canadian dollars today. In the case of a tie, those funds would be divided equally among the winners.
The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine | WIRED
20-minute read
Her movements were tracked, over and over. When she sat down. When she ordered a drink. When she went to the bathroom. When she took the elevator. Nina Richards went to New York Knicks games quite a bit, and the security forces at Madison Square Garden used the arena’s network of cameras to follow her.
New Yorkers have known for a long time that going to a game or concert at the Garden meant surrendering some privacy. That, as you watched the show, the Garden in a real sense watched you. Since 2018, there have been reports of the venue deploying face-recognition technology in what critics believe are increasingly intrusive ways. Owner James Dolan has watch lists of basketball fans who have dared criticize his management. He keeps a close eye on his other venues too, including Radio City Music Hall and the Sphere in Las Vegas. Last March, Dolan’s security team blocked a graphic designer from seeing a concert; the designer, years earlier, had printed and sold a half-dozen T-shirts reading “Ban Dolan.” He has locked out whole firms’ worth of lawyers, even keeping out a mom who was trying to take her 9-year-old Girl Scout to a Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall; the mom’s coworker had pissed him off.
[...]
But the true extent of Dolan’s panopticon has only been caught in glimpses. A 2025 lawsuit by a former member of the MSG security team lifted the veil, just a bit. We started our own digging into the Garden’s operations. We discovered that Dolan’s security teams obsessively tracked Nina Richards, a trans woman, over a two-year period, monitoring her movements through the venue down to the second. (WIRED is using a pseudonym in this article out of respect for her privacy.) Dolan’s biometric surveillance is so extensive that a New York City police officer’s photo was added to a face-recognition database, and a child triggered an alert at one of Dolan’s properties. According to that lawsuit and our sources, Dolan’s head of corporate security takes such an expansive view of his mission that his employees will functionally cosplay as cops—patrolling the neighborhood, snooping on protesters if they happen to be in the area. You don’t have to enter a Dolan venue to be under his watch.
Original link | Archive.is link
Creating baby geniuses to thwart the AI threat? (Yes, really.) | Mother Jones
11-minute read
Among the numerous ethical questions raised by genetic engineering is whether its use will effectively create a new hereditary caste system, not unlike the dystopian pecking order in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where “Alpha” elites rule over the lesser classes. The future that Malcolm Collins describes sounds very much like a society stratified by genetic haves and have-nots: “I think it will be both dramatically less equitable, but dramatically better for the poor individuals in the same way that the United States right now might be less equitable than it would have been at the time of the Revolution,” he says. “But right now, the poorest Americans still have cellphones and computers and refrigerators, right? They’re not dying of cholera in the streets.”
In Benson-Tilsen’s ideal tomorrow, there would be no genotocracy—some of the wunderkinds optimized for superior intelligence will have quashed the threat of advanced AI, and the technology needed to have healthier and smarter babies will be widely accessible and affordable. But current trends—a small group of Silicon Valley titans holding a vast amount of our nation’s technological, political, and financial power—don’t seem to point in that direction. What, I ask him, will stop billionaire investors from hijacking the tech of even the most well-intentioned embryo-editing entrepreneur? After a long pause, he concedes he doesn’t have a great answer: “It’s an interesting question I haven’t thought that much about.”
Well, perhaps the superhumans will figure it out.
The Stress of Elite Chess Is Wearing Down the Game’s Champions | The Walrus
9-minute read
Maybe, they think, it could be theirs: the world championship, immortality. And then, for all except one, they learn the crushing truth. Someone out there is better.
Life in chess has always been a struggle, never more so than today. During the two-year battle for the 2024 world chess championship, I saw tantrums, I saw tears, I heard one top grandmaster muse about leaving the game for a career in fashion.
The Hardy Men | The New York Review of Books
9-minute read
In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted as a right-wing Internet provocateur, founded a boutique publisher called Passage Press. His goal, he told Ross Douthat in a New York Times interview last year, was to build a reactionary cultural apparatus that would form an “enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left.”
For too long, he argued, conservatives had stood by stuffily as the left commandeered arts and entertainment and bent mainstream institutions to its ideological will. Keeperman wanted to change that. By drawing on the energies of the so-called New Right and its various overlapping cohorts—red-pilled Silicon Valley types, Dimes Square podcasters and playwrights, manospheric influencers, proselytizers of raw milk—he hoped to show that the right could produce culture that was just as vital, just as possessed of spiritedness and “thymos,” as that produced by the left, if not more so. “If you are telling the truth about the world,” Keeperman told Douthat, “then you are going to make right-wing art.”
[...]
Last year, however, Passage put out what at first seemed like a very different set of books—books beloved by millions of readers around the world, very few of whom, presumably, would consider them far-right texts. In two handsome box sets with illustrated covers by Alex Wisner (a comic artist who has published two graphic novels with the press about an anti-Bolshevik Russian general), Passage released the original versions of the first six Hardy Boys novels, which began entering the public domain in 2023.
Lest anyone think Passage was broadening its curatorial horizons to include nonpolitical material, or simply making a cash grab by appealing to young readers, the press made clear that it considers these tales of sleuthing teen heroes to be of a piece with its revanchist worldview.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Rise & Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’ | NOEMA
15-minute read
I have many thoughtful friends who are depressed about the state of the world. I am less depressed than they are — not because I’m an optimist, or because I deny the evil and stupidity in our political system that are causing so much harm, but because I believe history reveals a pattern that leaves reason for hope.
When democratic governments fail to serve their people, voters recognize that something is wrong. Democracy is the best system ever devised for peacefully removing ineffective leaders from power, but some bad leaders, whom I call “petty tyrants,” can undermine the democracy itself.
Petty tyrants are more focused on personal victories than on national priorities. The good news is that they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Once we understand their common flaws, it becomes apparent why they eventually fall rapidly from power and leave few changes to government that last. Understanding this pattern can help us recognize a critical feature that distinguishes leaders who damage their nations from those who create lasting good: their relationship to truth.
1 star
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat | The Atlantic
6-minute read
In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.
On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.
[...]
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Farmer Signal in Intelligence Appears in East Asia Too: The Rise of the Han | PifferPilfer
5-minute read
In Europe, I previously found a positive association between Early European Farmer / Anatolian farmer ancestry and educational-attainment PGS. That was not just an isolated observation: Akbari et al. later reported a similar farmer-related signal in their ancient-DNA analysis. So the European comparison is not merely that farmers expanded. It is that farmer ancestry appears to carry a detectable positive EA signal.
But Europe is not the only test case. China had its own great Neolithic agricultural cores, especially around the Yellow River and the eastern farming societies of Shandong. If farming populations really carried a distinctive trait profile, we should not expect the signal to stop at the Bosporus. We should see something similar in East Asia.
That is what I find here.
Archaeologists Find Egyptian Mummy Buried With the ‘Iliad’ | New York Times [gift article]
4-minute read
Yes, I sent an article about this last month -- but this piece adds informed speculation about why the Iliad fragment might be buried with the mummy:
“The find is incredibly significant, primarily for the discovery of such a papyrus with Greek literary text in its original context,” said Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago. “We have evidence that such Greek literary texts could be used as magical amulets and that Homer was frequently cited in such amulets, as well as in the large handbooks now known as ‘The Greco-Egyptian Formularies.’ The new find directly supports that indirect knowledge.”
[...]
For residents navigating the complex, vibrant crossroads of Roman Egypt, Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport, said Anna Dolganov, a historian at the Austrian Archaeological Institute. In Egypt, being Hellenic connoted an exclusive social status and financial privilege — and had to be meticulously documented through genealogies going back across several centuries.
Buried with the dead, the “Iliad” perhaps served as a cheat code for a more comfortable afterlife. Dr. Dolganov wonders if carrying the epic poem was a deliberate strategy to secure entry into the Greek underworld, effectively sidestepping the torturous trials of Egyptian mythology. For these individuals, a Hellenic identity wasn’t just for this world — it was an eternal upgrade, offering a smoother path and higher status in the great beyond.
Original link | Archive.is link
Does Looksmaxxing Give Women the Ick? | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
3-minute read
Welcome to the weird and twisted philosophy of looksmaxxing, the online subculture devoted to optimizing male appearance through gym routines, skin care, jawline exercises and surgery. Clavicular himself is an advocate of “bonesmashing”, or hitting one’s face repeatedly with a hammer to change the face shape. He told the New York Times that he suspects he is sterile after years of injecting himself with testosterone.
[...]
But, ironically, the very purpose of looksmaxxing, which is designed to attract women to “masculine men”, will not achieve its purpose. Because the harder a young man tries to appeal to women, the more likely he is to appeal to other men instead.
That is the lesson from a recent experiment by the PhD student William Costello. Costello posted two photos side by side on X. One was of Clavicular. The other showed Felix Yongbok Lee, a popular K-pop singer with extremely feminine features. Costello asked his 20,000 followers to pick the more attractive of the two.
Men picked Clavicular. Women, in contrast, preferred Yongbok Lee. This is consistent with studies indicating that men overestimate women’s preferences for highly masculine features.
Some male commenters claimed that the female commenters were lying. This is a comforting belief, allowing men to ignore feedback that contradicts their assumptions.
A much simpler explanation is that women mean what they say.
Neanderthals may have shared key DNA for complex language, reshaping when human speech began | Phys.org
3-minute read
In a first-of-its-kind finding, researchers at University of Iowa Health Care discovered that specific genetic sequences have an outsized impact on humans’ language abilities and that these sequences evolved before humans and Neanderthals diverged.