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3 stars
Rattlesnakes at My Door | Oxford American
21-minute read
It is the shortest story in American literature: a rattlesnake appears, a man kills it, and he is celebrated as a hero. This scenario is so well understood by readers of both fiction and non-fiction that it barely needs writing. A hero can be made and evil vanquished in two or three sentences. Often, the killing is not even a part of the action, but a story told by a character to establish character. From Stephen Crane to Joan Didion, the bodies pile up. The act is never questioned, the morality clear, the point succinctly made. The ubiquitous threat of rattlesnakes is a trope that even children learn from their formative books:
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We were at a loss, impatient to utilize the springhouse. We’d be using the dark, unlighted outbuilding to store all of our tools and lumber. It would be insane to allow venomous snakes to hide in the clutter. So, we finally adopted the ending that my English major had pre-determined for us. We agonized, but felt out of options. He was huge and really, really did not want to move. We knew no one in the area, had no phone reception or Internet on the mountain yet. Without mail service, we couldn’t even write a letter for help.
Of course, I made my husband do it. Nowhere had I ever read of a woman fulfilling this patriotic rite.
My Mother’s Body | VQR
16-minute read
Alone in the cottage, I thought about the past asserting itself on the present and longed for my mother, who plunged to her death in a stairwell when she was forty-three. I was thirteen.
My mother was commensurate with the world, the first person to teach me I was a person, distinct, a self. To lose her was to become unmoored, to lose my bearing on time and place.
[...]
I returned to New York, taken with this idea of a conversation with the past, however painful it might be. When I told friends and colleagues that I was looking for my mother’s file, I was met with misgivings. An unsentimental older friend bluntly asked what I hoped to achieve. I didn’t think it would do anything. Some things are irredeemably bad and resistant to our narrative efforts, I told her, knowing my protests disavowed the notebook in my bag and my life as a writer.
A few months later, I heard from Rigsarkivet. I could only get the file in person. And so, in late June, I was back in Copenhagen, walking along lakes that mirrored the weak gray sky.
Plume | The Bitter Southerner
11-minute read
July 8, 1905. A blood-soaked, small wooden skiff bobbed in the waves, adrift off the eastern short of Cape Sable in Florida Bay. Inside, a man lay dead from a single gunshot wound, a revolver by his side.
There are a million ways to die here in the waters surrounding the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands. These include: venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, sharks, swarms of mosquitoes, punishing heat, and the near constant threat of tropical storms and hurricanes. The man had understood that, here, nature gives no quarter.
He also knew that this vast and wild frontier provided cover to murderous outlaws, poachers, bootleggers, fugitives, and a Seminole tribe fighting against their forced removal by the United States government.
He was keenly aware that certain men wanted him dead, simply because his job was protecting local birds whose plumage had become more valuable than gold in the Gilded Age lust for exotic millinery. Still, he persisted, paddling and slogging across vast distances in an audacious bid to defend the defenseless, and knowing it would likely cost him his life.
His name was Guy Bradley, and we are chasing his ghost.
Anthropic and Alignment | Stratechery
10-minute read
If AI is a weapon, why don’t we regulate it like one? | Noahpinion
10-minute read
I have tremendous respect for what Anthropic has done recently and find it hard to agree with the next two pieces. But the arguments are cogent...
What is important to note is that the entire debate is ultimately pointless: the very concept of “international law” is fake, not because pertinent statutes and agreements don’t exist, but because their effectiveness is ultimately rooted in their enforceability. That, by extension, means there must be an entity to enact such enforcement, with the capability to match, and such an entity does not exist.
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Our adversaries, meanwhile, will certainly be developing autonomous fighting capabilities (and yes, I admit my chip prescriptions make this more likely much sooner — tradeoffs are hard!); the U.S. will need to move in this direction if we are to remain the ultimate source of international law. And, by the U.S., I mean a democratically elected President and Congress, not a San Francisco executive. I don’t want that, and, more pertinently, the ones with guns aren’t going to tolerate it. Anthropic needs to align itself with that reality.
If you haven’t heard about the fight between the AI company Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War, you should read about it, because it could be critical for our future — as a nation, but also as a species.
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To exist and carry out its basic functions, a nation-state must have a monopoly on the use of force. If a private militia can defeat the nation-state militarily, the nation-state is no longer physically able to make laws, provide for the common defense, ensure public safety, or execute the will of the people.
The End of Mail in Denmark | The Dial
7-minute read
I didn’t end up with a job in health care or the postal service. It’s probably a good thing I changed my mind about the latter, because on December 30, 2025, the company known as PostNord delivered the very last physical letter in Denmark. Actual, brick-and-mortar post offices no longer exist here. No more Postman Pat. No more dad jokes about kids “looking kind of like the mailman.” They’ve also removed the beautiful, distinctive-looking red postboxes from our streets. The only place you’ll find a postbox these days is in “The Children’s Post Office,” which for inexplicable reasons is still available for purchase. I think they might have added a fake ATM since I was a kid; these too are on their way to becoming extinct.
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In Denmark, we’ve been talking a lot in recent years about the rise of a digital underclass in our otherwise flawless welfare state. It’s made up not just of older people and those living on the social margins, as one might expect, but also of people who work manual jobs, for example, and therefore haven’t previously needed to upload their entire lives into the digital space. Studies show that between 20 and 25 percent of Danes belong to the “digitally disadvantaged,” which means that they struggle to use the more than 100 digital platforms dedicated to public services now bogging down our society. Every Danish person has a “digital mailbox,” for instance, which we are required to check. If we don’t, we’re punished. Let me explain one way that this might happen: The Danish government withholds 12.5 percent of each individual’s salary. It’s known as “holiday money,” which to be honest I always thought was a little infantilizing, like we’re not capable of figuring out how to save up for our own holidays. Once a year, by a particular deadline, you have to apply to have it paid back into your account. One man missed a notification in his digital mailbox reminding him to apply to receive his own money (roughly 6,000 kroner, or $1,100), and as a result, the state simply decided to keep it.
2 stars
On Being a Dad | Derek Thompson
4-minute read
A lovely piece:
My daughter and I have played this game approximately one thousand times. Nothing in my life could have anticipated this hunter-prey pageantry or the joy I get from it. I’m not a monster guy, generally speaking. Friends who had kids before me never once pulled me aside to whisper, “oh, another thing, you will have to pretend to be a monster all the time.” But I’m struck by the sense that I was born to play this game just as she was born to play it.
Parenthood is everything you’ve heard: confusion, panic, joy, sadness, anxiety, boredom, and anxiety again. Beneath these passing moods is a deeper feeling for which there is no good word. It is the feeling of suddenly finding yourself playing the oldest game in the world, a game you know that billions of people have played before you. There is nothing about being a parent that isn’t a cliché. This is a terrible inconvenience for the suckers out there who try to write essays about it. But I also find this to be an existential balm: I was built for this, and it was built for me.
One way to think about life is that you are locked inside an amusement park. The park has no clear purpose. It’s just there, and so are you. You ride the rides, and then it’s lights out. Falling in love is a ride, and making deep friendships is a ride, and sex is a ride, because these are all experiences that were built for us to do. And then, stretching over the park, there is a twisty and vertiginous rollercoaster called “having a child.” Parenthood is not special. It’s just another ride in the park. But it is there, and it was built for us, and we were built for it, too.
So, that is a second reason to become a parent. You’re in this amusement park only once, and I think you might as well ride the rides.
When Coyotes Threatened Livestock on Central Texas Ranches, the Solution Was to Unlock an Ancient Ability in Dogs | Smithsonian Magazine
14-minute read
By 2016, it was clear to Grant that the status quo wouldn’t hold. He was losing as many as 20 percent of his lambs and kid goats to predators, and he knew things could get worse: On the Edwards Plateau, 50 percent and even 90 percent losses were not unheard of. Coyotes were driving some stockmen out of business, others to the brink of collapse, and generally threatening a way of life that is integral to Texan identity. “It’s like having an ever-increasing-
size hole in your canoe, and you’re trying to bail out water,” Grant said. In desperation, he decided to go see a fellow rancher about a decade younger than his father who was reputed to have cultivated an ancient knowledge, largely neglected in the United States, that had allowed him to prosper while his neighbors flailed. His name was Bob Buchholz. He was a man who knew about dogs.
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day | Astral Codex Ten
11-minute read
On Friday, the Pentagon declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation never before given to an American firm. This unprecedented move was seen as an attempt to punish, maybe destroy the company. How effective was it?
Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, so we turn to the prediction markets. Ventuals.com has a “perpetual future” on Anthropic stock, a complicated instrument attempting to track the company’s valuation, to be resolved at the IPO.
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The chance of Anthropic getting a $500 billion+ valuation in 2026 fell from 90% to 76%, before rebounding to 83%.
Why have the markets shrugged off this seemingly important event?
Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds | Quanta
7-minute read
In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-130 turboprop plane. It was too dark to see the sandy hills of the Atacama Desert below, but the darkness suited Bretherton just fine. The researcher wasn’t going sightseeing. Seated directly behind the pilots, he kept his focus entirely on the sky.
The plane was stuffed with instruments, and its wings bristled with sensors and other devices. Bretherton’s immediate mission was to help the pilots collect information about the ice, water vapor, and air pressure around them. His longer-term goal was to use that data — as well as data he would collect over California, Hawai‘i, and Antarctica — to deal with one of the most challenging factors in climate science: clouds.
Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong | The Guardian
12-minute read
Last year, Estrada-Belli’s team, including his Tulane University colleague Marcello A Canuto, published a study with a central finding that would have seemed, just a few years ago, like an outrageously speculative overestimate. When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size.
Superintelligence is already here, today | Noahpinion
12-minute read
People argue back and forth about when artificial superintelligence will arrive. The truth is that it’s already here.
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A lot of people who think about the risks of superintelligence — and those risks are very real — ask what the upside is. Why would we invent a technology that has the capability to end human civilization? What might we get that could possibly justify that risk?
I don’t know where the cost/benefit calculation lies. But I’m pretty sure that the #1 answer to this question is better science. Before AI showed up, scientific discovery was hitting a wall — the picking of much of the Universe’s low-hanging fruit meant that ideas were getting more expensive to find, and requiring research manpower that the human race simply was not producing at sufficient scale.
Now, thanks to the invention of superintelligence and the supercharging of scientific productivity, we will be able to break through that wall. Fantastic sci-fi materials, robots that can do anything we want, and therapies that can cure any disease are just the beginning. There is a whole lot left to discover about this Universe, and thanks to superintelligence, a lot more of it is going to get discovered.
Pregnant women’s brains shed grey matter to prime them for motherhood, study suggests | BBC News
4-minute read
“Baby brain” is a cliche long-used to describe women becoming forgetful and feeling less capable during pregnancy.
But a recent study - the largest to date - indicates that pregnancy has a profound structural impact on brains and offers new clues into the neurological changes in mums‑to‑be.
It suggests that grey matter - the nerve-rich part of the brain involved in processing information, emotions and empathy - decreases by an average of nearly 5% during pregnancy.
But rather than being a cause for concern, these changes may be beneficial when it comes to caring for newborns, say scientists working on the project in Spain.
How Metrics Make Us Miserable | Derek Thompson
12-minute read
My mentor, the philosopher Barbara Herman, a Kantian ethicist, once told me, “I think you’re just confusing a goal and a purpose.” And I was like, “There’s no difference between a goal and a purpose.” And she said, “Of course there is. When you have friends over for cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.” And I think that structure is so common in games, where the goal that you aim at in the game is separate from the reason you play the game. I call it “striving play.”
Striving play is when you’re trying to win, not because winning is valuable, because you want something about the process. Party games make this particularly clear, because when you have your friends over and—unless you’re a complete asshole—if you try to win, but you lose, and you all had a great time, you don’t think the evening has been wasted.
I think the crucial thing here is to understand the structure of games. You have to understand that for some people, winning is the purpose. Their goal and purpose are one. If they just want to win, they just want to win. But for some of us, I rock climb to clear my mind. And what’s interesting is I cannot clear my mind by trying to clear my mind. So the philosophers have a name for this: a self-effacing end. You cannot clear your mind by trying to clear your mind. You try to clear your mind by trying to climb the rock as hard as you can and forgetting that you’re trying to clear your mind.
1 star
This Is the Worst Thing That Could Happen to the International Space Station | WIRED
6-minute read
In the vacuum of space, the amount of debris—spent rocket stages, splintered satellites, micrometeoroids—numbers in the millions, all zooming about, often at 17,000 mph speeds. They’re also constantly hitting each other in a tsuris of exponential littering. Most of these pieces are tiny, and many are not anywhere near the altitude of the ISS. But the area isn’t completely clean.
Debris actually pelts the ISS all the time, and noticeable dents and cracks line the exteriors. But should something fully breach the station, cabin atmosphere will seep into the vacuum of space and alarms will go off. Pressure gauges will confirm to astronauts that the station has, almost certainly, been hit, and the speed of the seepages may indicate how much time the crew has to respond. According to one NASA estimate, a 0.6-centimeter-wide hole leaves 14 hours to plug the leak. A 20-centimeter hole leaves less than a minute.
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But in the worst worst-case scenario, we don’t have any control. Instead, the station will crack through the atmosphere. Sure, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some might hit people, possibly in a town or a city. The station could break apart across thousands of miles and multiple continents. This would be exceedingly hard to anticipate. As NASA puts it, “Calculating the probability of this penetration cascading into loss of deorbit capability has a very large range of variables, making predictions ineffective.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Freak Out! | The Pursuit of Happiness
3-minute read
When is it time to panic? The answer is simple. It’s time to panic when the act of panicking works to prevent the thing that you were worrying about. Here are some examples:
After Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, the markets panicked. Trump’s advisors realized that they had made a serious error and persuaded Trump to back off.
After Trump hinted that he would appoint Kevin Hassett to be the new Fed chair, people were appalled. There was so much pushback that it became clear that Hassett might have difficulty getting approved. Trump backed off.
After Trump threatened to take Greenland from Denmark, there was so much criticism from both our allies in Europe and key figures in Congress that Trump was forced to back off and leave Greenland alone.
After Trump sent ICE agents into America’s bluest cities with instructions to get tough, the public became so outraged that Trump was forced to back off, ICE agents were moved to less volatile places, and Kristi Noem was fired.
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The real problem is that there has recently been far too little panic. People did not freak out when the Trump administration ordered the US military to begin murdering Venezuelan civilians on small boats in the Caribbean. Because there was no widespread panic, the murders have continued.
There was also very little panic when businessmen and foreign governments paid bribes of hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for favors from the Trump administration. As a result, the bribes have continued.
SEIU Delenda Est | Astral Codex Ten
6-minute read
On one level, it’s no surprise that California, a state full of bad socialists, is considering bad socialist policy. But I think this is the wrong perspective. This proposition isn’t being sponsored by some generic group of Piketty-reading leftists. It’s the project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a union of mostly healthcare workers.
This immediately clarifies the debate about whether it’s net negative for revenue. 90% of the revenue from the tax is earmarked for health care. So even if it’s net negative for the state, it isn’t net negative for the health care budget in particular, ie for the people who are sponsoring the measure.
But we can get even more conspiratorial. The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative.
A Zone Under Antarctica Has the Weakest Gravity on Earth—and It’s Evolving, Scientists Say | Popular Mechanics
2-minute read
The “gravity hole”—a region under Antarctica where gravity is unusually low—began to form at least 70 million years ago.