Links
4 stars
My Father Was a Conservative Evangelical Pastor. Then I Came Out. | New York Times
20-minute read
Lovely, touching piece. The original link below should work (gift article); if not, try incognito mode. If that doesn't work, you can use the archive.is link, but the formatting is wonky.
This is me with my dad, Bill White. For decades, he has been an evangelical pastor. Before I was born, he wrote a letter to my future wife. He didn’t know what we both do now: that I’m gay. When I came out nearly 16 years later, it shook his faith and fractured his church. But it never separated us. I wanted to understand how. So I read his journals.
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
REVIEW: Road Belong Cargo, by Peter Lawrence | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
20-minute read
“Cargo” is the catchall word for Western material culture in Pidgin English, the lingua franca of New Guinea’s many language isolates, and New Guineans were understandably obsessed: before European contact, they were living in the literal Stone Age. It would be an exaggeration to say that they hadn’t made any technological progress since their ancestors settled the island 50,000 years earlier, since they domesticated several local plants (taro, yams, and the cooking banana) and got pigs plus a little admixture from some passing Austronesians about 1500 BC, but they were solidly Neolithic and had been since time immemorial. So of course as soon as they encountered cargo — especially steel tools, tinned meat and dried rice, and cotton cloth — they wanted it desperately. And they almost universally believed they could get it by ritual activity.
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Forget everything you think you know about cargo cults. (Especially forget those pictures you may have seen of “decoy” airplanes or satellite dishes made out of straw and wood: one popular airplane photo is from a Japanese straw festival, another is a Soviet wind tunnel model, and the radio telescope is just one advertisement from a British ice cream company.) Nowadays we use “cargo cult” as a lazy shorthand for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but that’s not what was happening at all. If the New Guinea natives built airstrips, it wasn’t out of a belief that airstrips attract cargo planes like planting milkweed brings Monarch butterflies — that would be seem silly but basically understandable from our frame of reference. No, it’s much weirder than that. They built airstrips for exactly the same reason anyone else does: because they thought cargo planes were coming. They just thought the planes were coming because of the dancing.
Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? | New York Times
23-minute read
Despite Ritalin’s rapid growth, no one knew exactly how the medication worked or whether it really was the best way to treat children’s attention issues. Anecdotally, doctors and parents would observe that when many children began taking stimulant medications like Ritalin, their behavior would improve almost overnight, but no one had measured in a careful, large-scale scientific study how common that positive response was or, for that matter, what the effects were on a child of taking Ritalin over the long term. And so Swanson and a team of researchers, with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, began a vast, multisite randomized controlled trial comparing stimulant treatment for A.D.H.D. with nonpharmaceutical approaches like parent training and behavioral coaching.
[...]
Though Swanson had welcomed that initial increase in the diagnosis rate, he expected it to plateau at 3 percent. Instead, it kept rising, hitting 5.5 percent of American children in 1997, then 6.6 percent in 2000. As time passed, Swanson began to grow uneasy. He and his colleagues were continuing to follow the almost 600 children in the M.T.A. study, and by the mid-2000s, they realized that the new data they were collecting was telling a different — and less hopeful — story than the one they initially reported. It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms. Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career, and when he talks about his life’s work, he sounds troubled — not just about the M.T.A. results but about the state of the A.D.H.D. field in general. “There are things about the way we do this work,” he told me, “that just are definitely wrong.”
Original link | Archive.is link
The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him | New York Times
11-minute read
What Engine Company 329 never saw was the ritual that Firefighter Reen performed after his shift. On the walk home, he would stop in a secluded part of the beach parking lot and undress, whatever the weather — shaking out his clothing, snapping his shirt and pants in the wind coming off the Atlantic, intent on ridding them of invisible particles before returning to his family.
[...]
But when vaccines became available, he felt dread. He grew obsessed with the idea that an injection of this new vaccine could put him in a permanent state of contamination, an unbearable thought.
[...]
Like most firefighters, he had planned to work 25 years, which would have significantly boosted his pension. But he could not stay on if it meant receiving the vaccine. “My O.C.D. wouldn’t allow it,” he said. “I would have no way of decontaminating myself.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Apple and the Ghosts of Companies Past | Stratechery
10-minute read
Consider this in the context of AI: the iPhone does have AI apps from everyone, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc. The system-wide assistant interface, however, is not open: you’re stuck with Siri. Imagine how much more attractive the iPhone would be as an AI device if it were a truly open platform: the fact that Siri stinks wouldn’t matter, because everyone would be running someone else’s model.
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All of these decisions — even the ones I have most consistently disagreed with — were defensible and, in some cases, essential to Apple’s success; Cook has been a very effective CEO for Apple and its shareholders. And, should he stay on for several more years, the company would probably seem fine (assuming nothing existential happens with China and Taiwan), particularly in terms of the stock price.
Tech fortunes, however, are cast years in advance; Apple is not doomed, but it is, for the first time in a long time, fair to wonder about the long-term: the questions I have about the company are not about 2025, but 2035, and the decisions that will answer those questions will be made now.
Defending democracy is easier when you listen to voters | Silver Bulletin
13-minute read
And third, in Abrego Garcia’s case, I’m not sure that voters actually will become more sympathetic to Democrats if they spend more time studying it.
At a minimum, voters are left to evaluate some strongly competing claims. Vance described Abrego Garcia (not even mentioning him by name) as an “MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien)”. The Atlantic, conversely, described him as a “Maryland father with protected legal status” who “came to the United States at age 16 in 2011 after fleeing gang threats in his native El Salvador.”
I’m just going to be honest here: when I first started reading about this story, I assumed that Vance and conservative news sources were, at best, grossly exaggerating. But having invested the time to learn more about the underlying facts, I’m not sure where the truth lies beyond that his deportation was both mistaken and illegal.
Liberal news outlets often take claims made by Abrego Garcia’s attorneys at face value and downplay some unfavorable aspects of the case. The BBC has one of the more neutral summaries about the facts, and some of them aren’t so flattering.
2 stars
She was America’s parenting hero. Then the backlash came. | The Independent
11-minute read
For women used to vibes-based parenting manuals and paternalistic medical attitudes, these books were nothing short of a revelation. Obstetricians will tell you to cut out coffee and alcohol; Oster concludes that studies suggest you can actually safely have a small amount of both. Doctors also caution women to avoid deli meats and never to eat sushi; Oster’s research suggests high-quality sushi is just fine (“People eat it every day in Japan,” she reminds me) and deli meats are no riskier than salads, but it’s best to avoid turkey. When it comes to breastfeeding, she concludes there’s only a minuscule benefit as compared to formula-feeding, and even that’s not entirely certain. She also says bacteria levels show you can probably leave pumped breastmilk in storage much longer than you’ll be told by your pediatrician.
The way she comes to these conclusions is by crunching numbers and then parsing out the quality of each medical study — were the people involved from a certain socioeconomic background or from an unusually risky or risk-averse group? Are listeria outbreaks really found primarily in sliced ham? She also looks into cause and effect — for instance, just because people who miscarry often report having consumed a lot of coffee, can we fairly conclude that that’s what harmed the pregnancy? (Answer: Probably not, because high levels of the pregnancy-protective hormone hCG causes nausea, and people who are nauseous tend to avoid caffeine.
Original link | Archive.is link
Pablo Picasso's Stunning Repetitions | Noted
4-minute read
His son, Claude Picasso, describes the artist’s notebooks as “stepping-stones to trampolines for somersaults.” And, critics agree that Picasso used his notebooks to work on discrete artistic problems ranging from stylistic to thematic issues.
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One need only look at Picasso’s notebooks to recognize the staggering amount of work that went into “Les Demoiselles.” He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks with his attempts to represent the women. It was with this painting that he introduced the world to what would become known as cubism.
MAGA doesn't build | Noahpinion
7-minute read
MAGA, however, is fundamentally not a conservative movement. Its ideology is fundamentally isolationist rather than libertarian — cutting America off from dependency on foreign workers and foreign products is seen as the overriding goal, even if this ends up making the country poorer and more stagnant. When private companies want to build things using imported components or immigrant labor, conservatism lets them do so; MAGA does not.
The purpose of MAGA’s isolationism is fundamentally a destructive one. Modern America’s prosperity is built on globalization — before Trump, our fabulous wealth stemmed largely from the fact that the U.S. occupied a pole position in a worldwide network of supply chains, financial arrangements, and flows of human capital. MAGA ideology says that this globalization is a net negative. It believes (incorrectly) that trade deficits make a country poorer, and it believes that immigration is eroding the foundations of Western civilization. The “greatness” that the G in MAGA refers to is the cultural greatness that America supposedly enjoyed before we supposedly sacrificed it on the altar of material prosperity.
The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great | Technologizer
11-minute read
But the crème de la mail-order crème was a company called PC Connection. In a field where it was hard for any one merchant to stand out, PC Connection’s ads were vastly more distinctive than the competition’s. They might even one of the most memorable elements of any given issue of a magazine—yes, including the editorial material.
[...]
What on Earth was this beautifully done, homey scene—part Beatrix Potter, part Norman Rockwell—doing in a mail-order ad for computer products? The text below, by copywriter David Blistein, acknowledged that people might find it puzzling. It explained that PC Connection was based in tiny Marlow, New Hampshire (population 567) and prided itself on good customer service. The point of the characters, it said, was to add “a human touch to high tech.”
The pundit's dilemma | Noahpinion
7-minute read
Conservative industrialists, however, are facing a much harder dilemma right now. Biden’s industrial policy was a mixed bag, with more successes than failures. But Trump’s tariff policy is a giant flaming disaster. The dollar is down, as investors flee American bonds, putting the country’s whole financial stability in danger. Forecasts for the real economy are getting more pessimistic by the day. Stocks are down yet again.
[...]
Any time you hear the words “worst since 1932” in connection with the American economy, you know things are not going well.
Given this disaster, commentators who support Trump have a hard choice to make. Do they denounce Trump’s policies, thus condemning themselves to certain excommunication from the MAGA movement, and dropping their influence to basically zero without altering Trump’s course in any perceptible way? Or do they scramble to find some way to put lipstick on the tariff pig?
The latter course of action will preserve their influence within MAGA-land, but will also make them look ridiculous to the rest of the country, who has no such ideological commitments to uphold. And in the process, the commentators will become an accomplice to this act of economic self-mutilation.
America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back | Molson Hart
14-minute read
I'm sure this is preaching to the choir, but the analysis is pretty straightforward and sensible:
This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s just an opening negotiating position. Maybe it’s designed to crash the economy, lower interest rates, and then refinance the debt. I don’t know.
But if you take it at face value, there is no way that this policy will bring manufacturing back to the United States and “make America wealthy again”. Again, if anything, it’ll do the opposite; it’ll make us much poorer.
Many are saying that this tariff policy is the “end of globalization”. I don’t think so.
Unless this policy is quickly changed, this is the end of America’s participation in globalization.
Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine
6-minute read
A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found.
Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat | Internal Tech Emails
7-minute read
I just got off the phone with Evan. He said he enjoyed getting to know us but he thinks they can build much more value on their own. For reference, our offer was $3.1b for the company plus $1b in retention packages. [REDACTED] on his board was advising him strongly not to take the offer. Evan did not offer a counter.
[...]
I delivered the offer to Evan and he seemed to take it well. He told me he thought he could get it done and that he'd call me back quickly. Five hours later he called me and told me he was turning down the offer. He says the offer is what he wants but he just wants to build the company on his own. I'm disappointed and frustrated by this. I don't know what else to say to him.
[...]
At this point, we should probably prepare for it to leak that we offered $6b for them and all the negative that will come from that.
Ancient horse hunts challenge ideas of ‘modern’ human behavior | Science News
7-minute read
On a bright, late-summer day in north-central Europe around 300,000 years ago, a team of perhaps a couple dozen hunters got into their assigned positions for a big kill.
Little did they know that remnants of this lethal event would someday contribute to a scientific rethink about the social and intellectual complexity of Stone Age life.
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Archaeologists have traditionally held that an ability to plan and organize communal hunts, along with other aspects of so-called modern human behavior, emerged only about 50,000 years ago. Some researchers suspect still unspecified brain-related genetic changes at that time rapidly transformed thinking abilities in H. sapiens.
1 star
The $20,000 American-Made Electric Pickup With No Paint, No Stereo, and No Touchscreen | The Verge
6-minute read
Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.
Astronomers discover a planet that’s rapidly disintegrating, producing a comet-like tail | MIT News
3-minute read
MIT astronomers have discovered a planet some 140 light-years from Earth that is rapidly crumbling to pieces.
The disintegrating world is about the mass of Mercury, although it circles about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to the sun, completing an orbit every 30.5 hours. At such close proximity to its star, the planet is likely covered in magma that is boiling off into space. As the roasting planet whizzes around its star, it is shedding an enormous amount of surface minerals and effectively evaporating away.
Bites on gladiator bones prove combat with lion | BBC News
2-minute read
Bite marks found on the skeleton of a Roman gladiator are the first archaeological evidence of combat between a human and a lion, experts say.
The remains were discovered during a 2004 dig at Driffield Terrace, in York, a site now thought to be the world's only well-preserved Roman gladiator cemetery.
Forensic examination of the skeleton of one young man has revealed that holes and bite marks on his pelvis were most likely caused by a lion.
Why the Right Way To Fly a Rhino Is Upside Down | ZME Science
3-minute read
In the skies above South Africa, a surreal scene unfoldsed: a 1,300-kilogram black rhinoceros swings gently upside down from a helicopter. Legs bound to soft straps, horn pointed downward, it looks like something out of a Salvador Dalí dream. But this isn’t surreal, and it isn’t Photoshop. This is conservation.
For the critically endangered black rhinoceros, being lifted by its feet is sometimes the only ticket to survival. What seems absurd at first glance is, in fact, the safest, fastest, and most effective way to relocate these creatures to new habitats.
The Prophet’s Paradox | Marginal Revolution
2-minute read
Consider a pandemic. When early actions—such as testing and quarantine, ring vaccination, and local lockdowns—prevent a pandemic, those inconvenienced may question whether the threat was ever real. Indeed, one critic of this paper pointed to warnings about ozone depletion and skin cancer in the 1980s as an example of exaggeration and a predicted disaster that did not happen. Of course, one of the reasons the disaster didn’t happen was the creation of the Montreal Protocol to reduce ozone-depleting substances.