Links
3 stars
The Man Who Broke Into Jail | New Yorker
34-minute read
Lieutenant Thomas Conrad was standing in a control room in Nashville’s new central jail when he noticed something off with one of the key rings hanging on the wall. It was midday on December 30, 2019, and in two weeks the still empty jail would take in about seven hundred inmates. While contractors were finishing their work, Conrad, a senior correctional officer with the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office, was organizing equipment: handheld radios, handcuffs, and keys. Conrad had been an infantryman in Iraq, where he’d learned to spot slight inconsistencies in the landscape. Looking more closely at the key ring, he realized what was wrong: it was circular. All the others were horseshoe-shaped.
The key rings were fastened with hard plastic locks. The lock on the circular ring, Conrad saw, was cracked. On each key ring was a disk stamped with the number of keys that should be in the set. The disk on the circular ring was stamped “18.” Conrad counted the keys three times: there were only sixteen. He phoned Lieutenant Timothy Dial, the jail’s key-control officer, and said, “I’m going to need you to come down here.”
Dial arrived. “We don’t use rings like this,” he told Conrad.
“It’s got to be maintenance,” Conrad said. Speculating that a cleaner had somehow broken the original key ring, he radioed the maintenance crew.
The plastic lock on the mysterious key set was yellow, signifying “restricted,” because it held a general-movement key that could open almost any door in the jail. Dial consulted a key-inventory spreadsheet; the general-movement key was one of the two that were missing.
[...]
When news of the arrest got out, people who knew Friedmann were similarly shocked. So were those who only knew of him. Friedmann was one of the most respected prison-reform activists in America. He was the associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, a prisoners’-rights organization, and the president of the Private Corrections Institute, a watchdog group that monitors the for-profit-prison industry. He was the managing editor of Prison Legal News, a newspaper written by and for inmates. He often addressed the Tennessee legislature and had testified before Congress. He’d spoken at A.C.L.U. and N.A.A.C.P. conferences, lectured at law schools, and consulted on prison legislation for Bernie Sanders.
Friedmann was the sort of activist that people who normally can’t abide activists could appreciate. He seemed more like a professor, maintaining a neat white goatee, and wearing button-down shirts, ties, and rimless glasses. Allies and critics alike described him as brilliant and single-mindedly devoted to his cause, yet also as so rational and eloquent that he won over law-and-order conservatives and recalcitrant public officials. He could be vain, but he was better known for his gentleness.
Original link | Archive.is link
Tom Junod Finally Reckons with What It Means to Be a Man | Esquire
15-minute read
In a long list of classic stories, the legendary magazine writer helped teach readers what masculinity looks like in the 21st century. To write his first book, he had to confront the man who first taught him: his father.
Original link | Archive.is link
One Man’s Quest for the End of the World Started on a Ranch in Texas | Texas Monthly
17-minute read
It was nearly Christmas, and Jerome Urbanosky was expecting unusual company. The easygoing 72-year-old rancher stood outside his redbrick home, watching as a dozen or so vehicles crunched along the gravel road that winds through the grassy plain of his 1,500-acre ranch northwest of Houston. The delegation that piled out into his driveway included high-ranking rabbis who’d flown straight from Israel, a U.S. documentary crew toting multiple cameras, and a Texas businessman named Byron Stinson.
Urbanosky was taken aback by the size of the crew—but that wasn’t the thing that startled him the most. Four men dressed in black tactical gear and carrying military rifles approached and told him they needed to sweep the property to make sure no “foreign agents” were present. “They were armed to the teeth,” Urbanosky remembered. He wasn’t inclined to stand in their way. His wife, Jane, who was in the kitchen preparing the weekly Sunday meal, stared saucer-eyed as the armed men entered her home.
Once the security team cleared the property, Urbanosky led the rabbis to a red barn, where two calves awaited. Urbanosky Ranch is home to a herd of more than 450 Santa Gertrudis cattle, a hardy breed that’s known to produce good beef and whose origins trace back to the King Ranch, in South Texas. But as Urbanosky knew, this delegation wasn’t here for a steak.
Santa Gertrudis cattle also have striking coats of deep rusty red, which is what had initially attracted Stinson’s attention. A seventy-year-old Glen Rose business owner who’s described himself as a “Jesus zealot,” Stinson had visited Urbanosky at his ranch once before and explained that he was in search of an unblemished, completely red heifer—a scratch or a single white hair, and it wouldn’t do. Such a heifer hadn’t been identified in two thousand years, but it was key to unlocking an ancient Jewish ritual described in the book of Numbers, a necessary precursor to constructing the Third Temple in Jerusalem and, ultimately, bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. It’s a fringe but nonetheless influential belief, and Stinson’s Israeli associate, Yitshak Mamo, had convinced Urbanosky that he, too, was essential to this journey.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
A Hockey Dad, a Cartel, and a $12 Million Fraud | Rolling Stone
20-minute read
Noble had spent almost 16 years as an FBI agent, working mainly on violent crime and narcotics, and Wilkinson had spent most of her 10-year career in analytical and managerial roles across the U.S. Both had only recently started working in white-collar crime, and neither had seen a con like it. Youngblood’s was no ordinary online phishing or Nigerian-prince baiting scheme. It was a confidence game built on proximity — on family dinners, on the slow, yearslong conversion of friendship into obedience. Youngblood studied his victims’ personalities like a psychologist analyzing a patient, identifying the anxious father, the loyal friend, the keen investor. And he capitalized on their fears of an unknown other, something that existed outside of their aspirational lives, often the cartel just over the border.
The agents discovered Youngblood created two worlds. In the first, he was an avuncular presence at the Chaparral Ice rink in north Austin. He introduced himself as just another hockey dad, with two sons and a doctor as a wife. Still, there was a significant whiff of intrigue. People from that world tell me Youngblood spoke in a low, confidential murmur, flashed military tattoos, and dropped hints about tours in Afghanistan and secret government work. But he was also an alpha-male dad who mostly kept to himself and always thanked the coaches for working with his son. To Eric Perardi, a successful businessman and part-time coach of the hockey team, who would later become one of the primary victims, Youngblood was fascinating. He seemed to fill the humdrum of the parents’ middle-class suburban lives with just enough mystery to be exciting, but never enough to be unbelievable or uncomfortable.
Original link | Archive.is link
The case of the disappearing secretary | Rowland’s newsletter
10-minute read
Not so long ago, the work of secretaries – typing, filing, organising, administrating – was a cornerstone of the economy. By 1984, six years after the map above, there were around 18 million clerical and secretarial workers in the United States, roughly 18 percent of the entire workforce. This was totally normal. In the UK at the same time, between 17 and 18 percent of the workforce was some kind of secretary. In France it was 16 percent. Different economies with different economic policies; all ended up with one in five or six workers employed in clerical work.
Why so many? Because every stage of information processing required a human hand. In a mid-century organisation, a manager did not “write” a memo. He dictated it. A secretary took it down in shorthand, then retyped it. Then made copies. Then collated the copies by hand. Then distributed them. Then filed them. And so on and so on. Nothing moved unless someone physically moved it. There was no other way.
[...]
Now, the interface with the machinery of work is changing once again: from the computer to AI. This isn’t meant as a grandiose statement about the all-encompassing power of AI. I mean, simply, that if you want to get things done, it’s increasingly obvious that the best way is going to be through some kind of conversation with a machine, especially when the machine can then go and complete the task itself. Think of an admin-enabling app, whether it’s Outlook, Teams or Expedia. It’s hard to see a future where they’re not either replaced or mediated by AI.
[...]
So, in summary: computerisation ended some jobs, changed lots of others and created many ones. Yet that description covers so little of what really happened, because the biggest change wasn’t to the jobs, it was to the people and how they behaved. This is what I really learned writing this piece. I went in expecting to find out about tasks and technologies and I came out having learnt about a strange world very different from my own, a world now almost entirely vanished.
Agents Over Bubbles | Stratechery
11-minute read
There is a weird paradox in terms of AI prognostication: on one hand, you don’t want to be the one to completely dismiss the most terrifying doomsday scenarios; who wants to be found out to be foolishly optimistic? At the same time, there is also pressure to give credence to the possibility that we are in a bubble, and all of this hype and spending is going to go belly up.
While I have argued against the former, I have very much been on board with the latter, making the case that bubbles can be good.
Sitting here in March 2026, however, on the morning of Nvidia’s GTC, I’ve come to a different conclusion: I don’t think we’re in a bubble (which, paradoxically, maybe is the truest evidence we are).
The Strait of Hormuz: It Must Be Open for All or Closed to All | Home & Away
4-minute read
From Richard Haass, previously the President of the Council on Foreign Relations:
This special edition of Home & Away is devoted to one issue: the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It includes a new proposal – one described here as “Open for All or Closed to All” – that I believe holds the best chance of resolving this issue satisfactorily.
The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why | Al Jazeera
6-minute read
I don’t think this is right, but it’s about as good an argument for this view that I’ve seen:
Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.
The chorus is loud and, in some respects, understandable. War is ugly, and this one has imposed real costs on millions of people across the Middle East, including the city I live in.
But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.
[...]
Iran now faces a strategic dilemma that tightens every day. If it fires its remaining missiles, it exposes launchers that are promptly destroyed. If it conserves them, it forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war. Missile and drone launch data suggest Iran is rationing its remaining capacity for politically timed salvoes rather than sustaining operational tempo.
This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength.
[...]
None of this minimises the human costs. More than 1,400 civilians have been killed in Iran, a moral burden the US and Israel will carry. Oil price spikes are hurting every economy on Earth. At least 11 US service members have been killed. I live with these sirens every day, as does everyone across the Gulf. The costs are real, they are serious, and any accounting that ignores them is dishonest.
But the critics are making a different error: They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.
1 star
Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations | Astral Codex Ten
3-minute read
I hate the term “hallucinations” for when AIs say false things. It’s perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes.
AIs say false things for the same reason you do.
At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn’t know the answer to a question, I would guess. Schoolchild urban legend said that “C” was the best bet, so I would fill in bubble C. It was fine. Probably got a couple extra points that way, maybe raised my GPA by 0.1 over the counterfactual.
[...]
AIs have no shame. Their entire training process is based on guessing (the polite term is “prediction”). It goes like this:
AIs start with random weights, ie total chaos.
They’re asked to predict the next token in a text.
They give a random answer.
When they get it wrong, the training process slightly updates their weights towards the pattern that would have gotten it right.
After trillions of tokens, their weights are in a good, nonrandom pattern that often predicts the next token successfully.
But even after step 5, they’re still guessing. Consider the following sentence: “I went out with my friend Mr. _______ “. With your human knowledge, you can predict that the token in the blank will be a surname. But you have no way to know which. If your life was on the line, you might guess “Smith”, since it’s the most common surname. Even the smartest AI can do little better.
[...]
Understood correctly, this is a story about alignment. AIs are smart enough to understand the game they’re actually playing - the game of determining strategies that get reward during pretraining. We just haven’t figured out how to align their reward function (get a high score on the pretraining algorithm) with our own desires (provide useful advice). People will say with a straight face “I don’t worry about alignment because I’ve never seen any alignment failures . . . and also, all those crazy hallucinations prove AIs are too dumb to be dangerous.”
25 years of iPod brain | Dirt
4-minute read
I spent the summer of 2004 working at a food establishment that sold “subs, wings ‘n’ things.” My employment was a little dubious; I was 14, which I think was fair game in the state of Vermont, but I got paid in cash and wasn’t allowed to use the deep fryer. My coworker was a woman with a son named Moose; she enjoyed giving me advice for my upcoming high school experience (“Go to class”). My boss was fond of sending customers off with full-sized bottles of ketchup in their to-go bags. I spent a lot of time pressing raw potatoes through a metal french fry cutter into a big plastic bucket. At summer’s end, I brought a stack of cash to Best Buy and bought a fourth-generation iPod. Now my life could truly begin.
It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had.
A Danish Fix for U.S. Mortgage Lock-in | Marginal Revolution
2-minute read
In other words, there actually is a free or at least a low-priced lunch because lock-in is bad for homeowners and it doesn’t benefit lenders. As a result, moving to a Danish system would create net benefits.
How the Turner Twins Are Mythbusting Modern Gear | Carryology
4-minute read
Ross and Hugo Turner are genetically identical professional adventurers. By dressing one in cutting-edge technical apparel and the other in 100-year-old heritage kit on the world’s toughest expeditions, they are conducting the ultimate A/B test on modern gear.
Why Fallacies Don’t Exist | Maarten Boudry’s Substack
9-minute read
Have you ever wondered why people believe the moon landing was faked, vaccines secretly poison us, and Mercury in retrograde can ruin your love life? Why does irrationality seem so pervasive? A popular answer, beloved by academics and educators alike, points to fallacies—certain types of arguments that are deeply flawed yet oddly seductive. Because people keep falling for these reasoning traps, they end up believing all sorts of crazy stuff. Still, the theory offers hope: if you memorize the classics—ad hominem, post hoc, straw man—you will inoculate yourself against them.
It’s a neat little story, and I used to believe it too. Not anymore. I’ve become a fallacy apostate.
Who is a victim? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed.
Claims about grade inflation | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Being assigned a higher average grade inflating teacher reduces a student’s future test scores, the likelihood of graduating from high school, college enrollment, and ultimately earnings. In contrast, passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back and increases high school graduation, with limited long-run effects. The cumulative impact is economically significant: a teacher with one standard deviation higher average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of their students by $213,872 per year.