Links
4 stars
How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power | New York Times
30-minute read
Impressive, damning reporting:
It was 5:44 p.m., according to minutes of the meeting. At that moment, the prime minister was forced to choose between the chance of a truce and his political survival — and Netanyahu opted for survival. There was no cease-fire plan, he promised Smotrich. “No, no, there’s no such thing,” he said. And as the cabinet discussion moved on, Netanyahu quietly leaned over to his security advisers and whispered what must have by then become obvious to them: “Don’t present the plan.”
[...]
Yet for all these caveats, our reporting has led us to three unavoidable conclusions. In the years preceding the war, Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas helped to strengthen the group, giving it space to secretly prepare for war. In the months before that war, Netanyahu’s push to undermine Israel’s judiciary widened already-deep rifts within Israeli society and weakened its military, making Israel appear vulnerable and encouraging Hamas to ready its attack. And once the war began, Netanyahu’s decisions were at times colored predominantly by political and personal need instead of only military or national necessity.
[...]
The cost of delay has been high: With each passing week, the delay has meant death to hundreds of Palestinians and horror to thousands more. It also meant that at least eight more hostages died in captivity, deepening the divisions in Israel between those who sought a hostage-release deal above all else and those who thought the war should run until Hamas was destroyed.
Original link | Archive.is link
Dying for gold: who killed the miners of Buffelsfontein? | The Economist
17-minute read
The miners had known hunger before, but never like this. Afterwards they would talk of cracked skin, sores that would not heal, an emptiness that stopped you from sleeping or ever being fully awake. George and Alfred called it “the grief of hunger”, a numbness that engulfed you from within. Once they didn’t eat for 18 days. Although what was a “day” anyway, when they had not seen sunlight for months?
Their job was to sit in one of the middle tiers of the 37-level Buffelsfontein gold mine, about a kilometre underground, collecting the food that was lowered through the concrete shaft on a rope, then sending it on to the levels below. In the good times, the miners could get almost anything they desired, albeit at inflated prices: maize porridge, pilchards, biltong, milk, biscuits, mayonnaise, Coca-Cola, beer, whisky, cigarettes, even buckets of chicken from the local KFC.
[...]
Sometimes, in my conversations with them, the two old friends spoke of ubuntu, a traditional African philosophy that encourages people to find their humanity through helping others. They did not deny that they had broken the law. But they wondered what ubuntu meant to the ministers and the police, who had punished those crimes with a de facto death sentence. “I’m not going to lie,” said Alfred, as though ushering up the voices of the dead. “They killed us.”
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
Your Review: Joan of Arc | Astral Codex Ten
60-minute read
Meet Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans. Yes, yes, she defeated an invincible army and is a feminist hero and also one of the national saints of France, fine. More importantly, Joan of Arc is documented! She's a miracle-working saint who has evidence! She might have more evidence than any other non-monarch before the printing press! This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.
Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War? | New Yorker
25-minute read
The TAF fabs are part of a constellation of similar facilities, hidden in basements, warehouses, and old factories, which have helped the Ukrainians battle the Russian Army to a stalemate. The one that I visited makes about a thousand drones a day. They are sophisticated and lethal and, above all, cheap, produced for about five hundred dollars apiece. Some are used for surveillance and some to ferry supplies, but most of them, laden with explosives and directed by an operator through a video screen, are crashed directly into their targets. One of Yakovenko’s managers showed me a fuzzy black-and-white video, taken in April, of a night operation behind enemy lines. Onscreen, a drone equipped with a thermal camera dived toward a TOS-1 rocket launcher, and then the screen exploded in a white flash. Russia builds TOS-1 units for about five million dollars apiece. “One of our drones costs a tiny fraction of what it destroys,” the manager told me. “That’s our advantage.”
[...]
While the future of warfare is being invented in places like Ukraine, U.S. officials are looking on with a growing sense of urgency. For decades, the American armed forces have relied on highly sophisticated, super-expensive weapons, like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, which take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce. (The country’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were not for a lack of technical prowess.) Since the end of the Cold War, these munitions have given the U.S. near-total dominance on land, sea, and air. But now the technological shifts that have stymied the Russian invasion of Ukraine are threatening to undermine America’s global military preëminence. David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official and a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, told me that the American way of war is no longer viable. “We are not moving fast enough,” he said.
Original link | Archive.is link
Notes on Bed Rest | New Yorker
15-minute read
In the morning, one doctor after another spoke with me. I seemed to have something called “incompetent cervix,” they explained. “Incompetent?” I said. I imagined my cervix as a well-meaning but chronically disorganized employee in the corporation of my body. “Whoops!” she’d say, cheerily, having mixed up the files again. The condition was also sometimes called short or insufficient cervix, one doctor said, apologetically. They would need to place a rescue cerclage around my short, incompetent, and insufficient cervix to prevent it from opening. I was presented with choices that didn’t feel like choices. The procedure carried a risk of miscarriage, they explained, but not doing it would almost certainly result in miscarriage. I signed the forms.
[...]
Pregnancy is forty weeks long, but it feels much longer on bed rest. When you’ve been asked not to move much in order to protect your unborn child’s life, time stretches out before you like a vast, inhospitable landscape. You must navigate this terrain, carefully, by the subtle markings left behind by previous travellers. In this strange land—a deserted space—time becomes a location, a place to get to. I will get to twenty-four weeks. I will get to twenty-eight weeks. If I can make it to thirty weeks. In the ten weeks I spent on modified bed rest, I sometimes imagined my body as a ship with holes in it travelling toward the safety of land.
Original link | Archive.is link
What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom | Literary Hub
15-minute read
My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. They use it to make study guides, interpret essay prompts, and register for classes, turning it loose on the course catalog and asking it to propose a weekly schedule. They use it to make their writing sound more “professional,” including emails to professors like me, fearing that we will judge them for informal diction or other human errors.
Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students. Today’s English students are tomorrow’s writers and readers of literature. If you enjoy thoughtful, consequential, human-generated writing—or hope for your own human writing to be read by a wide human audience—you should want young people to learn to read and write. College is not the only place where this can happen, of course, but large public universities like UVA, where I teach, are institutions that reliably turn tax dollars into new readers and writers, among other public services. I see it happen all the time.
Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone | Silver Bulletin
9-minute read
Firing the BLS commissioner won’t prevent the effects of tariffs. But it will reduce American economic leadership and increase uncertainty for businesses, workers and investors.
Becoming El Jefe: The story of Ryan Wedding, Canada’s Olympic snowboarder turned ruthless drug lord | Toronto Life
16-minute read
Before Ryan Wedding landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list as a high-level associate of El Chapo, he was a bright-eyed kid from Thunder Bay. The inside story of how an Olympic snowboarding prodigy became one of the world’s most dangerous and powerful drug lords.
2 stars
I Drank Every Cocktail | Adam Aaronson
10-minute read
As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.
The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.
Myths and Lessons from a Century of American Automaking | Economic Innovation Group
17-minute read
The protectionist argument for insulating the American auto industry from foreign competition not only draws the wrong lessons from history, it gets the history itself wrong. It rests on four myths, all of which I debunk in this analysis:
The U.S. auto industry has collapsed.
Globalization caused the death of Detroit.
Japanese imports nearly destroyed the auto industry in the early 1980s…
… until auto protectionism saved it.
Once these myths are set aside in favor of a clear, accurate understanding of the auto sector and its history, there is no reason to be optimistic that the Trump administration’s protectionist approach to the sector will work as intended. Indeed the case for it falls apart entirely.
Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes | Astral Codex Ten
12-minute read
Excerpts don't really capture what makes this essay interesting; trust me, it's worth reading.
This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances?
This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance.
[...]
At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers.
Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps:
Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.
Pared back to this level of abstraction, a surprising amount of stuff starts to seem like my father’s instant mashed potatoes.
The Pressure That Made Miyazaki and Takahata | Animation Obsessive
10-minute read
There was a time, before Studio Ghibli existed, when Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata weren’t well known. They weren’t the directors of Grave of the Fireflies or Spirited Away yet. For a while, they weren’t even successful.
The Curse of Carrara Marble | The Dial
9-minute read
Meanwhile, the profits of the billion-dollar industry — largely controlled by multinationals and private investors (including the Bin Laden family, which owns 50 percent of Marmi Carrara, one of area’s largest firms) — largely bypass the region itself. The city of Carrara, wedged at the foot of quarries, is mired in debt and poverty. The industry has taken a toll on the area’s biodiversity and water quality.
Now, locals whose ancestors once toiled proudly in the quarries have established a movement to shutter them. I went to Carrara to understand how marble, once the pride and lifeblood of the region, and a symbol of old-world splendor, has come to be seen as a curse.
White Collar PEDs | Colossus
14-minute read
For years now, I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with the world of what my editor dubbed “White Collar PEDs,” or productivity-enhancing drugs. Though I’d never heard the phrase before, I knew immediately what he was talking about—the seemingly infinite profusion of supplements and “nootropics,” prescription “study drugs,” and illegal or semi-legal drugs that have become popular among young professionals seeking not to get high, but to optimize their brains and bodies for work.
Paradigm Shifts and the Winner’s Curse | Stratechery
13-minute read
Both Apple and Amazon’s arguments are very plausible! To summarize each:
Apple: Large language models are useful, but will be a commodity, and easily accessible on your iPhone; what is the most useful to people, however, is AI that has your private data as context, and only we can provide that. We will provide AI with your data as context at scale and at low cost — both in terms of CapEx and OpEx — by primarily running inference on device. People are also concerned about sharing their personal data with AI companies, so when we need more capabilities we will use our own compute infrastructure, which will run on our own chips, not Nvidia chips.
Amazon: Large language models are useful, but will be a commodity, and widely available on any cloud. What is the most useful to companies, however, is AI that has your enterprise data as context, and more enterprises are on AWS than anywhere else. We will provide AI with a company’s data as context at scale and at low cost — both in terms of CapEx and OpEx — by primarily running inference on our own AI chips, not Nvidia chips.
India and the invidious comparison with China | The Tangled Woof
7-minute read
At first I thought I was over-interpreting things because I am biased to look at things from a China perspective, so I asked around to check my perceptions. The answer was: Yes, all this is in fact about China. It’s because the Indian elite has assumed for decades that India is destined to be the next global economic superpower after China, so the overriding question for them is why that hasn’t happened and what needs to be done to make it happen. The comparison with China seems to revolve around a number of generally accepted stylized facts, which form the basis for identifying policy issues and posing research questions. To me (as, again, an outsider to these debates), the key ones seemed to be around manufacturing, investment, human capital and state capacity.
Will data centers crash the economy? | Noahpinion
7-minute read
This time let's think about a financial crisis before it happens.
Literacy lag: We start reading too late | The Intrinsic Perspective
9-minute read
So despite American parents’ best efforts to prioritize reading over screen usage for their toddlers, due to our enforced literacy lag, being a daily reader is a trait easily lost early on, and then must be actively regained rather than maintained.
Once lost, reading often doesn’t recover. Even when surveyed from a skeptical perspective, reading is, almost everywhere, in decline.
No to Borders, Yes to Allowing Whites-Only Enclaves | Richard Hanania's Newsletter
3-minute read
At the same time, the whites-only enclave has no such problems. It is as pure an instance of the innocent exercise of private property rights as one can imagine. People here are setting out on their own far from civilization. They build their own community only with others who have opted into it. “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” Here’s an instance of people going so far away there’s no danger of anyone else even having to look at their arms, much less being hit by them. If liberalism means anything, it means leaving these people alone.
The conservative movement, then, while justifying immigration restrictionism by an appeal to a metaphorical version of private property rights, is somewhere between ambivalent and hostile when it comes to protecting the real thing. The fact that it is “racism” that so horrifies them only adds to the irony. What exactly is their basis for opposing immigration? Did Republican voters all study economics and decide that the profession is wrong based on their deep understanding of the issues involved? Why do they suddenly develop an interest in income inequality when talking about this issue but no other? It’s beyond obvious that racism – or perhaps some adjacent concept like nativism that similarly values people based on characteristics unrelated to character or any other form of merit – is the motivating force behind immigration restrictionism.
GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff | One Useful Thing
5-minute read
I have had early access to GPT-5, and I wanted to give you some impressions of what it is and what it means. But the answer to the first question everyone will have is: Yes, this is a big deal.
#87. ADHD Is a Personality Trait, not a Disorder | Play Makes Us Human
8-minute read
In the second of these Psychology Today articles, I argued that what we call “ADHD” is not a “disease” or “disorder” that people either “have” or “don’t have,” but is a personality trait that can exist in people to a matter of degree. The primary personality characteristic that leads to a diagnosis of ADHD is best described as impulsiveness. Some people are, by nature, more impulsive than others. On average, boys are more impulsive than girls, which explains why boys get diagnosed with ADHD at much higher rates than girls.
As I pointed out in that article, impulsiveness seems to underlie most, maybe all, of the APA’s defining characteristics of ADHD. Impulsiveness leads one to be easily distractible, which is why they are seen as inattentive. It also leads one to be impatient and restless, unable to tolerate tedium or to sit still unless something truly grabs and retains their interest, which is why they may seem to be hyperactive. And it leads one to be highly emotionally reactive, tending to respond immediately, emotionally, overtly, to arousing situations.
I also pointed out that, like other personality dimensions, impulsiveness can be a detriment in some situations and a benefit in other situations.
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine
6-minute read
Yet a paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.
Misconceptions about tariffs | The Pursuit of Happiness
8-minute read
By and large, the media doesn’t like Trump. Nonetheless, they are giving his trade policies more respect than they deserve. This is not because the media wishes to be fair to Trump, rather it reflects longstanding misconceptions about how the global economy functions. These misconceptions were once concentrated on the left, but have recently spread to large portions of the right. Those of us trying to preserve the wisdom of classical economics are fighting an increasingly lonely battle, like those medieval monks in Ireland trying to preserve classical learning. In this post, I’ll delve into 15 common misconceptions about tariffs and the broader economy.
1 star
How to alter the passage of time to feel fast or slow | Psyche
6-minute read
Put simply, if you want to slow down time prospectively, as it unfolds, then pay attention to it. Savour it. Whether you’re on a family holiday or enjoying a lovely meal out, bringing your attention to the moment could help to slow it down. Conversely, if time is dragging while you’re waiting for a flight or enduring a dull lecture, the worst thing you can do is to watch the clock. Whether it’s people-watching at the airport or doodling, try to find a fun distraction instead.
[...]
The reason for this phenomenon has to do with memory consolidation. Habitual activities – those you’ve mastered and that might have become part of the daily grind – require little effort or conscious thought, and so are encoded only weakly into memory. In contrast, novel activities and situations demand attention and so are more richly encoded. Crucially, the remembered timelines for new experiences are then stretched, compared with everyday ones. This is why peppering your year with fresh and unfamiliar experiences – be they vacations, meeting new people or trying new activities – can make the year feel more enduring in retrospect.
You Have Too Many Metrics | Stay SaaSy
3-minute read
Having a few great metrics is much better than having a bunch of trash metrics. Metrics require intense focus to keep accurate and to have high integrity. Metrics require expectations and action to be worth spending all of the time it takes to make them accurate and have high integrity.
If someone says “I got metrics” ask them the last time they did something because of a metric. If they don’t immediately know, they don’t have metrics, they have a dashboard of graphs that they use to persuade people.
David Sacks is correct | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
As you have read here, I am quite pleased with GPT-5. But it does not indicate that the more extreme (whether destructive or utopian) scenarios for AI development are correct, quite the contrary.
New data on tenure | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Publication rates rise sharply during the tenure-track, peaking just before tenure. However, post-tenure trajectories diverge: Researchers in lab-based fields sustain high output, while those in non-lab-based fields typically exhibit a decline.