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4 stars
REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
26-minute read
I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity. But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation,” and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war.
[...]
It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity.” I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire.
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Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.
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Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails
Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?” Let’s get started.
A Hit Man Sheds Light on a Notorious Louisiana Cold Case | Atavist
31-minute read
The killer is happy to see us. That’s the first thing we notice when we spot Larry Thompson halfway across the visitation room of the David Wade Correctional Center. He rises from a chair and waves, his face unfurling into an avuncular grin. Our separate journeys to this prison in Homer, Louisiana—me from Maine, and Myron Fuller from the mountains of Utah—afforded plenty of time to set expectations, and neither of us anticipated a Norman Rockwell greeting. I pictured a menacing scene bathed in the neo-noir lighting of The Silence of the Lambs. And Fuller? He long believed that the next time he and Thompson saw each other would be through gun sights.
[...]
When Fuller asks how many hits there were, Thompson gets quiet. He allows that there were bodies “from coast to coast and border to border.” Fuller says that he heard the number 14. “There were several more than that,” Thompson replies.
We wait for elaboration. Instead, for ten seconds, Thompson stares serenely at us. Through us. A sphinx in prison-issue cornflower blue.
Despite all the mayhem he perpetrated, Thompson spent barely a night in jail for most of the seventies and eighties. “Local lawmen call him lucky, a modern-day Jesse James—smart enough to do the crime but pay no time,” the Shreveport Times reported in 1987. Philip Martin, a local journalist who covered his exploits, once wrote, “I’ve never been more terrified than when I heard Larry Thompson laughing at the other end of the telephone line.”
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“Everybody that I’ve done business with all my life will tell you that I’m very secretive about what I do,” he says.
Fuller and I are eager to learn how this approach informed some of his most notorious hits, including the Maria Marshall murder, which Thompson breaks down for us in detail. But we also want to glean more about the Leslie murder. I tell Thompson that there’s something I want to ask him about from our first meeting. We noticed how readily he recalled the detail about the murder’s location.
“You answered so quickly,” I venture, “it sounded as if you were there.”
He smiles and says, “I probably was.”
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
Amelia Earhart’s Reckless Final Flights | New Yorker
16-minute read
Earhart had become instantly famous in 1928, as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane. But, though she’d been photographed wearing a flight suit and a leather helmet, she was merely a passenger; the plane had actually been piloted by two men, Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. She had since been working on establishing her command of the cockpit. There were plenty of accomplished female pilots who could’ve taken command of a transatlantic flight themselves, and some of these women considered Earhart’s notoriety unearned. In 1932, after logging more flight miles—but not as many as other top female pilots—she flew solo across the Atlantic in a cramped red Vega, a single-engine plane barely insulated against storms and cold temperatures. She fought exhaustion, iced wings, and a broken altimeter. Her intention was to land in Paris, but she ended up in a cow field in Ireland. Earhart approached the experience with an easy, almost reckless, confidence.
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Some top female aviators also had their doubts about Earhart’s latest project. Elinor Smith, who had been flying since she was a child and who, at sixteen, became the youngest licensed pilot in the U.S., felt that Earhart was courageous and determined. But in 1929, in New Castle, Delaware, Smith had an eye-opening experience with her during an evaluation flight of a plane designed by the aircraft manufacturer Giuseppe Bellanca. A Bellanca test pilot, George Haldeman, handled takeoff, with Earhart in the co-pilot seat and Smith observing from the rear. At about a thousand feet, Earhart took over, and the plane immediately began lurching and wobbling. Embarrassed, she signalled for Haldeman to take over. “She knew the basics, I guess, but she didn’t have that much practice,” Smith recalled in a memoir. “As sure as God is my judge, she could not keep her nose on the horizon.”
In Smith’s view, Putnam was a grifter who kept pushing Earhart’s celebrity ahead of her skills. Getting her into a Bellanca cockpit before she was ready, Smith thought, was typical of his approach: “Knowing full well she was too inexperienced to fly it, he would simply sideline the plane in a hangar until the day when she could. He would meanwhile line up backing for a future flight.”
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Your Review: School | Astral Codex Ten
20-minute read
Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.
This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook's strategy tax | Internal Tech Emails
13-minute read
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: Chris Cox; Javier Olivan; Mike Schroepfer; Sheryl Sandberg; David Wehner; [REDACTED]
Sent: 5/3/2018 1:17:12 AM
Subject: Thoughts on Family Management — privileged and confidential
Confidential — do *not* share beyond this group
I am growing more convinced that we are approaching our family strategy incorrectly — especially around Instagram. While we believe our current trajectory will yield strong business growth over the next 5 years, I worry it will also undermine our global network effect, erode our corporate brand, impose an increasingly large strategy tax on all our work, and then over time we may face antitrust regulation requiring us to spin out our other apps anyway.
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Based on this, I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company. I understand the business value of having Instagram and Facebook together, so I don't raise this lightly. I'm also not suggesting this is the likely outcome. But I don't think this is quite as crazy as it may initially seem either. And I'm beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals: (1) focus each team on building the best app to reduce the strategy tax, (2) immediately stop artificially growing Instagram in a way that undermines the Facebook network, and (3) retain Kevin to make sure Instagram can do its best work. Of course doing so would prevent us from building sharing bridges between our apps like I suggest above, but our history suggests it will be hard to build those anyway.
2 stars
The Impossible Calculator | Asterisk
8-minute read
Consider this straightforward calculation: (10^100) + 1 - (10^100)
The answer, of course, is 1. But if you were to input it right now on your iPhone calculator, the answer you would get is 0.
Android, however, gets it right.
Why is there a difference? The answer to that question begins with the story of how one of the world’s top computer scientists ended up working on a humble calculator app.
Why We’re Still Falling in Love With Pamela Anderson | The Atlantic
8-minute read
Caitlin Flanagan:
That exchange says more about Anderson and her appeal than anything mewled by the misbegotten. She is 58. She can keep going until she’s 102 and she’ll still have plenty of male attention. Because she’s been famous for so long, and because that fame is the result of her youthful work in Playboy and on Baywatch, she can seem dispensable, one more Populuxe American Blonde from an era when Hollywood was full of them. In fact, she’s a much more interesting person than that, serious and funny, an eager student of a range of arcane topics.
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Monroe lived her life dependent on the kindness of sadists; Anderson has lived hers on the strength of what once would have been called her own “hopes and dreams.” Her current cultural relevancy—she was cast in her first serious film role last year, and she’s at the center of conversations about beauty and youth—might seem like the result of a series of power moves, but she doesn’t operate on that economy. Her vulnerability is as much a part of her constitution as her strength is. It’s the old, dangerous combination, but she has triumphed by it.
Original link | Archive.is link
Robots in China are riding the subway to make 7-Eleven deliveries | Popular Science
2-minute read
Subway commuters in Shenzhen, China, may soon need to make room for a fleet of chunky, snack-carrying delivery robots.
Earlier this week, more than three dozen autonomous, four-wheeled delivery robots boarded and exited active subway trains, and eventually delivered packages to several 7-Eleven convenience stores. Although this demonstration was only a preliminary test and took place during off-peak hours, the company behind the subway-riding robots believes they could soon help stock shelves at around 100 7-Eleven locations. The initiative is part of a broader effort in China and other countries to normalize the presence of delivery robots operating in public spaces.
The test run, first reported by the South China Morning Post, featured 41 robots developed by a subsidiary of Vanke, a large Chinese firm partly owned by the Shenzhen Metro. A video demonstration shared by the company shows the roughly three-foot-tall, stocky bots lining up at a subway stop. They wait for human passengers to exit the subway car before rolling onboard. Once they reach their stop, the robots exit the car and drive themselves to an elevator, which is remotely activated.
1 star
The Via Appia: Elegy For a Queen | 3 Quarks Daily
3-minute read
Cultural critic Robert Hughes described roads as Rome’s greatest physical monuments. Their network extended some 50-75,000 miles and they were the sine qua non of Rome’s expansion. I should add a minor but nonetheless relevant detail here: some of my happiest moments have been spent on Roman roads. As were some of yours, in all likelihood, if you have ever felt ebullient in Rome or on the Italian peninsula, or indeed in Spain or France or England or Germany or the Balkans or Greece or Turkey or Syria or Israel or Gaza or Egypt or Algeria or Morocco.
Let me put another question to you. What is your favorite Roman road? If you’re a pilgrim, you might say the Via Francigena. And should you offer the Via Flaminia, Via Aurelia, or Via Aemilia or some other ancient equivalent, I imagine you have your reasons. But if you are a romantic like me, the only possible answer is the Via Appia, which is, after all, the regina viarum, the queen of roads. Think of cypress trees, ancient, crumbling tombs, jasmine and pinecones and fields of wildflowers. Think also of tourist traps, gladiator impersonators, a War World II massacre site, and prostitution. Think of paradox as the defining feature of the human condition. Still, even its name is beautiful: Via Appia. Look at all those a’s and i’s, like a palindrome just off its center, the V and A the very valleys and arêtes through which the road cuts.
How to get started with Old English poetry | Dead Language Society
7-minute read
Most people who know anything at all about Old English poetry will be aware of the existence of Beowulf. Perhaps they will even have read it. But far fewer will be aware of the 90% of Old English poetry that is not Beowulf.
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Although Beowulf is great heroic poetry, the Old English poetic corpus has a lot more to offer than just heroic poetry! It also contains elegiac poetry, which are meditations on the fleeting nature of life. It contains riddles as well, some of which are quite salacious. There are also wisdom poems, which provide the kind of timeless, well, wisdom that you also see in the Biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes or the Old Norse Hávamál. Finally, there are religious poems, which transpose Christian themes into the Germanic worldview.
New DNA Evidence Reveals Ancient Matrilineal Society in Neolithic China | Wall Street Journal
2-minute read
Scientists in China have discovered one of the oldest known matrilineal societies—where family lines and inheritance are traced through a community’s women, not its men.
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After recently analyzing DNA from the bone samples of 60 individuals at two burial sites, researchers found that all of those buried in the northern cemetery descended from the same woman for about 10 generations over a span of about 250 years. Those buried in the southern cemetery shared a different maternal lineage.
Original link | Archive.is link
Curse Not the King | Daring Fireball
7-minute read
CBS is owned by Paramount, and Paramount is controlled by Shari Redstone. Redstone has a deal to sell Paramount to Skydance, a company controlled by David Ellison (son of Oracle gazillionaire Larry Ellison) for $8 billion, but the deal needs approval from the FCC, and the FCC answers to Trump. That’s why CBS settled a bullshit lawsuit by Trump against 60 Minutes for $16 million. As former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft told Jon Stewart (righteously, on Paramount-owned Comedy Central) regarding the “settlement”: “They never said, ‘We screwed up.’ They just paid the money. It was a shakedown, that’s what I call it. Some people call it extortion, that’s a legal term.”
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The first shoe dropped at CBS last night. TV-wise, it’d be crazy for Paramount to drop Jon Stewart too. But dropping Colbert is even crazier, and they already did that. It’s not tyranny or the threat of state violence that is taking The Late Show With Stephen Colbert off the air, but rather oligarchy and unchecked cronyism and corruption. The breathtaking abdication we’re seeing at CBS — first news with 60 Minutes, now commentary and humor with The Late Show — are signs of a decidedly American descent into curse-not-the-king mass media acquiescence to Trump’s authoritarian hostility to criticism and dissent.
hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of "creative writing" LLMs | Tumblr
8-minute read
Although it wasn't R1's selling point, multiple people including me noticed that it seemed surprisingly good at writing fiction, with a flashy, at least superficially "literary" default style.
However, if you read more than one instance of R1-written fiction, it quickly becomes apparent that there's something... missing.
It knows a few good tricks. The first time you see them, they seem pretty impressive coming from an LLM. But it just... keeps doing them, over and over – relentlessly, compulsively, to the point of exhaustion.
Lookism and VC | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Analyzing early-stage deals from 2010-2020, we find that greater facial resemblance increases match probability by 3.2 percentage points even after controlling for same race, gender, and age, yet funded companies with similar-looking investor-founder pairs have 7 percent lower exit rates. However, when deal sourcing is externally curated, facial similarity effects disappear while demographic homophily persists, indicating facial resemblance primarily operates as an initial screening heuristic.
The Role of Blood Plasma Donation Centers in Crime Reduction | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Our findings indicate that the opening of a plasma center in a city leads to a 12% drop in the crime rate, an effect driven primarily by property and drug-related offenses. A within-city design confirms these findings, highlighting large crime drops in neighborhoods close to a newly opened plasma center.