Links
3 stars
Bad Lunch | The Sun Magazine
12-minute read
April 1999, one o’clock in the afternoon. I was cooking on the 150-foot motor yacht The Rental Cow when Megan, our chief stewardess, swooped into the galley to tell me our guests were displeased with their lunch.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. A petite, blond Australian who often made bawdy jokes, she didn’t wear her usual smile. Instead she looked slightly frightened, which told me this was no ordinary complaint. Our two guests were paying $30,000 a day to sit on the top decks and take in the Mediterranean views. Like every set of guests on board that yacht, this couple needed the food to be perfectly suited to their tastes, which caused me hours of nail-biting anxiety as I sent up plate after plate, taking note of what they devoured or ignored.
How far back in time can you understand English? | Dead Language Society
11-minute read
As his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.
It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.
Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger).
Baby-Making on Mars | Broadcast
20-minute read
Humanity has entered a new era of space exploration. This time, we don’t just want to visit, we want to stay. From Musk and Bezos to former NASA administrator Michael Griffin and the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, advocates for moving off-planet increasingly frame the need to migrate as imperative to our survival, key to withstanding existential threats and building long-term resilience. But if getting to space will be a feat of engineering, staying there will be a feat of biology.
At Last, Hydrofoils | Changing Lanes
10-minute read
The Navier N30 looks deceptively ordinary on land, like a surprisingly-oversized luxury day boat. The magic reveals itself when you see what’s underneath. Three carbon-fiber wings extend below the hull, each carefully shaped to generate lift as water flows over them. At speed, these foils will lift the entire six-passenger vessel four feet above the water’s surface; the boat seems to be flying.
Understanding what the N30 represents made me believe that urban water transit, a category I’d previously dismissed as impractical, might finally become real.
[...]
What’s changed is the convergence of three technological shifts. As Bhattacharyya explained when I asked what’s different from Boeing’s era: “Three things really change the dynamics from the technology perspective: cheaper, faster computing and sensing, batteries, and scalable manufacturing.” We can see all three in Navier’s N30.
On Tilt | Harper’s Magazine
14-minute read
But even if I weren’t hardwired to crave a rush, there’s a good chance I would have found my way to sports betting anyway. The Supreme Court struck down a twenty-six-year-old federal ban in 2018, and today, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia permit the activity. Nearly half of all American men aged eighteen to forty-nine maintain an online sports-betting account, a statistic surely buttressed by a multibillion-dollar advertising blitz.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
When the Flames Went Out | Los Angeles Review of Books
11-minute read
A couple days after my house burned down, my mom called with a delayed revelation: her house in Saigon, Vietnam, had also burned down, when she was a child. The detail that stuck—she ran out holding her pillow. For comfort, maybe. Or, simply, because it was there.
What unsettled me was how she told the story. She kept interrupting herself to say “I did not remember.” I wondered if I would ever forget. Repression is its own gift: memory wrapped for you, ready to open when it’s needed—or not.
Bang the Drumstick Slowly | New York Review of Books
10-minute read
There was an actual, historic chicken that ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. In the 1940s Mike, a Colorado rooster on his way to the dinner table, survived an incomplete decapitation that left enough of his brain stem intact that he remained partly functional and could run around. During the eighteen months he lived in this condition, his owner toured the United States and exhibited him as a sideshow attraction. In Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them, Tove Danovich describes Mike sympathetically but says that he “wasn’t great for the reputation of the chicken.”
She says that chickens are smart and soulful, and she regrets that people make fun of them. Philip Levy, the author of Yard Birds: The Lives and Times of America’s Urban Chickens, feels the same. He says, “One of my goals is to make people think twice before laughing at chickens.” Some immutable principles of humor work against this goal, however, because chickens are humor, in a sense, and even their long overuse to get a laugh will not discourage people from using them to get one.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Murder of The Washington Post | The Atlantic
10-minute read
We’re witnessing a murder.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.
Original link | Archive.is link
A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot | The Guardian
10-minute read
In the summer of 1978, a team of geologists exploring southern Siberia found something rarer than diamonds. While searching for a helicopter landing site amid the steep hills and forested canyons of the western Sayan mountains, their pilot caught sight of what appeared to be a garden, 150 miles from the nearest settlement. Hovering as low as he could, he saw a house. No people were visible, but someone was clearly tending the garden. He and his geologist passengers were shocked to find a dwelling in an area long considered too remote for human habitation.
Science Fiction isn’t Predictive, but It’s Important Anyway | Sophie’s Notes
4-minute read
A piece of AI science fiction moved a trillion dollars this week.
It doesn’t matter whether Citrini’s 2028 “Global Intelligence Crisis” is prescient (it’s explicitly a scenario, not a prediction) or whether it’s “doomer porn.” The interesting part is that markets treated a thought experiment like a leaked earnings report.
The sell-off this week functioned like a stress test of the market’s “AI anxiety”, a reminder that (a) investors are poorly anchored on how to value software moats in an agentic world, and (b) macro narratives about labor and demand are being fought with thin and lagging measurement.
Citrini frames three connected risks: (1) software margins collapse when incumbents lose pricing power, (2) competitive dynamics accelerate disruption faster than diffusion models predict, and (3) consumer spending buckles if white-collar workers shift from “secure” to “maybe not”, even before official unemployment data shows it.
[...]
Some of the rebuttals seem to blatantly misread the software sell-off. No one credible is claiming that AI is going to replace incumbents tomorrow. The risk is in pricing power.
Software is effectively a user interface that sits on top of a database, where the vendor locks in customers through switching costs and network effects. AI agents upend that. Customers can now say, “This is our data. We’re building our own interface.”
I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong | WIRED
12-minute read
It should be the best of times for the tech world, supercharged by a boom in artificial intelligence. But a shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.
Original link | Archive.is link
Death of an Indian tech worker | Rest of World
10-minute read
On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident.
The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley.
[...]
But something has gone awry in the industry Somwanshi was entering. Eighty-three percent of India’s tech workers suffer from burnout, according to one recent survey. One in four clocks over 70 hours a week. In Karnataka state, home to Bengaluru, tech workers account for a starkly disproportionate 20% of patients seeking transplants due to organ failure, according to a leading regional newspaper. A study of tech employees in the IT hub of Hyderabad found that 84% had a liver disease linked to long hours of sedentary work and high stress.
Some of India’s tech leaders, meanwhile, are advocating 70-hour and even 90-hour workweeks, instead of the national legal maximum of 48.
How Markdown took over the world | Anil Dash
12-minute read
Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.
After 54 Years, Astronauts Are Going Back to the Moon | TIME
11-minute read
Humanity has changed an awful lot in the past 58 Years. The moon? Not so much. It was in 1968 that astronauts first drew near the moon, and it will be early this year, if all goes as planned, that a crew will return, representing a species with gadgets and abilities—and yes, problems—that didn’t exist that half-century-plus ago.
When Does a Divorce Begin? | The Yale Review
13-minute read
Most people think of it as failure. For me it was an achievement.
Original link | Archive.is link
Rockhopper Penguins’ Athleticism Makes Them the Daredevils of the Animal World. Will a Warming Climate Slow Them Down? | Smithsonian Magazine
10-minute read
On a rocky ledge over the coast of an island in the far south Atlantic Ocean, a young penguin peers nervously at the chasm ahead. Her bushy yellow eyebrows waggle as she tilts her head one way, then another, scouting the route home to her nest high above. This next step will be a doozy. To reach the ledge on the other side, she’ll have to make a gravity-defying leap more than twice her diminutive height. Her wet feathers shimmer in the setting sun as she musters her courage. “You can do it,” Petra Quillfeldt coaxes the little penguin. “You’re a rockhopper!”
The coach’s confidence is well founded. Quillfeldt, a seabird ecologist from Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, has been visiting this southern rockhopper colony in the Falkland Islands for nearly 20 years, studying how the penguins, with their piston-like bodies, are being affected by climate and ocean conditions. As if buoyed by the pep talk, the hesitant bird cocks her flightless wings. Her powerful pink feet push off the rock with tremendous force. She catapults across the gap and sticks the landing with the clasp of strong, gripping claws. After a beat to shake her feathers and toss us a backward glance, she hops off to join her colony-mates bounding up the steep hill.
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic | Astral Codex Ten
5-minute read
13 thoughts on Anthropic, OpenAI and the Department of War | Silver Bulletin
4-minute read
I’ve been debating it on Twitter all day and think I have a pretty good grasp on where I disagree with the (thankfully small number of) Hegseth defenders. Here are some pre-emptive arguments so I don’t have to relitigate them all in the comments.
February 2026 is likely to be remembered by historians as the inflection point when we moved into some sort of accelerated timeline on AI-related developments. Not necessarily with respect to the technology itself (although see bullet #3 below); I remain fairly skeptical of the hyper-turbocharged timelines toward superintelligence envisioned by the AI 2027 report, for example. But the point at which AI became a major storyline — maybe the major storyline — in politics and economics, too big even for the skeptics to ignore. The 42 percent of people who said that AI will only be “a marginal issue” or “a non-issue” in the 2028 election in this Twitter poll a week ago are probably going to be wrong.
Iran Strategy: The “Deep State” at Work? | David H Levey
3-minute read
On Bombing Iran | The Scholar’s Stage
3-minute read
Iran, Cuba, Trump. | News Items
4-minute read
Nobody could believe that our addled, narcissistic president could have come up with a sophisticated military-diplomatic strategy of this type on his own. It is quite likely that he’s doing things for all the bad reasons critics of the war point to -- distracting from Epstein and low popularity, personal financial gain, disregard for constitutional procedure, authoritarian power-grabbing, etc. All of that criticism is perfectly fair and will need to be taken into account in assessing whether the U.S. carries this strategy through to a finish that is positive for the people of Iran, or falls short and leads to chaos or civil war. Nevertheless, the strategy and its likelihood of success or failure needs to be evaluated in its own right.
[...]
Iran, in contrast, doesn’t need “nation-building.” It is a much more developed society with great economic potential and high levels of education, whose population is crying out to be liberated from the repressive, regressive rule of the mullahs and whose young people, especially, are ready to throw off the shackles of theocracy and move toward liberal democracy. As Richard argues, what is needed is regime degradation and removal, so that the people of Iran have a chance to elevate their economy and society to its full potential. We can’t know for sure if that is what is going to result, but it’s worth taking a chance.
A consistent theme in Trumpist policy making across all domains is that Trump tends to demand the maximal aim and then climb back to an achievable one. Thus the “TACO” memes. But it is not difficult to see a certain wisdom in the TACO approach. This is how many of our most successful men—the men Silicon Valley calls “high agency”—make their way through life. They have learned that you will not get what you do not ask for. So ask! Often what you desire is already yours. You need only the gumption to demand it. In most settings there are no downsides to the maximalist gambit. Either you ask for what you want, and are given it; or you ask for what you want, and are given something less. In neither case are you worse for the asking.
[...]
A regime that lasts is a regime that will rebuild. Do we have the stomach to do this again (and then yet again?) in the decades to come? More important still: can we afford to do this again and yet again? Many serving in this administration opposed all American military aid to Ukraine for fear that it might tax our military position in East Asia. This worry presses far more urgently here than it ever did in Ukraine. The American industrial base has atrophied; American stockpiles are limited. The types of munitions we use in an air campaign over Persia come directly at the expense of the munitions we might need to wage an air campaign in the Pacific. The war of the moment can only be justified if it changes the regional dynamics so conclusively that there is no future need to spend blood or treasure there again.
Written before the strikes:
It’s passing strange, politically speaking, that President Trump has chosen to bring the United States to the brink of war, or something like that, in the Middle East. The president knows his political base. He knows what they will abide and what they will not. And he knows that they will not abide a war in the Middle East.
A scoundrel’s last refuge | The Pursuit of Happiness
4-minute read
Back in Wisconsin, almost no one decides on whether they’ll root for the Badgers based on which party currently controls the governorship. That’s a healthy patriotism. For some reason, when we move from the state level to the national level, people become much more irrational in their patriotism, with an unhealthy obsession with politics. I suspect that the public in places like Switzerland and Norway do not decide whether to root for a local athlete based on which political party is in power.
How to be less awkward | Experimental History
10-minute read
Here’s the most replicated finding to come out of my area of psychology in the past decade: most people believe they suffer from a chronic case of awkwardness.
Study after study finds that people expect their conversations to go poorly, when in fact those conversations usually go pretty well. People assign themselves the majority of the blame for any awkward silences that arise, and they believe that they like other people more than other people like them in return. I’ve replicated this effect myself: I once ran a study where participants talked in groups of three, and then they reported/guessed how much each person liked each other person in the conversation. Those participants believed, on average, that they were the least liked person in the trio.
Should the Supreme Court Be “Pro-Congress”? | Wake Up To Politics
9-minute read
For a ruling that has already been called possibly “the most important Supreme Court decision this century,” Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion striking down President Trump’s sweeping, worldwide tariffs was incredibly short and to the point.
[...]
Why, then, does the total amount of writing produced by the court in Learning Resources stretch out over 170 pages? Out of the nine justices, seven wrote opinions in the case: Roberts’ majority opinion, four concurrences, and two dissents.
This morning, we’ll try to tease out some of the nuances that emerge across these writings, especially on a central question that runs throughout all seven, about whether (or to what degree) the Supreme Court should be trying to elevate one of its two fellow branches of government over the other.
Why does America feel worse than other countries? Crime. | Noahpinion
9-minute read
The thesis of this post is that when you compare America to other countries, what stands out as America’s most unique weakness is its very high crime rate — not just violent crime, but also public chaos and disorder. That statement might come as a shock to people who are used to hearing about very different American weaknesses.
For example, it’s common to hear people say that Europeans and Asians “have health care”, and that Americans don’t. That’s just fantasy. Around 92% of Americans, and 95% of American children, have health insurance, and those numbers keep going up.
From island to ice: The origins of Olympic curling stones | Reuters
5-minute read
While the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games embrace cutting‑edge sporting technology, the equipment for one event remains rooted in tradition. Curling stones are still carved from ancient Scottish rock and shaped much as they were half a century ago.
1 star
H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery | Inconspicuous Consumption
5-minute read
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
Falling From Ivy League Grad to Prisoner Expanded My Social Circle | New York Times [gift article]
1-minute read
On my second day into my 16-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Ky., I surprised myself by doing something that I well understood you aren’t supposed to do in prison: I cried.
I had joined the inmate-led Bible study in the prison’s small, drab chapel, pulling a chair up to the circle of a dozen men. A member of the group introduced a short scriptural reading followed by a prompt, and each one of us was given a chance to respond.
I hadn’t yet been able to get access to the prison phone room, and when it was my turn to talk, I told the group how desperately I wanted simply to hear my wife’s voice and get news on how our two young sons were doing. From the guys in the circle, there were no insults, no admonishments to toughen up or be a man. They offered encouragement, comforted me and said that we were all navigating a difficult stretch of life together.
I did not fully understand it then, but the place where I was least free in my life would also become a place where I felt deeply connected to those around me and where I got to experience a level of camaraderie and solidarity that so many on the outside go without. Unlike in the version of prison conjured on TV and in the movies, where shot callers control subordinates, I found a community quick to be generous and much less inclined to try to assert superiority over one another.
Original link | Archive.is link
Some like it hot | The Pursuit of Happiness
3-minute read
At a global level, virtually all population growth is occurring at or near the tropics—mostly Africa and South Asia. Even tropical parts of China are still growing, as the country’s overall population declines. The world is getting hotter in a physical sense—the climate is warming—but it is also getting hotter in a demographic sense, as more and more of the world’s population is living in hot places. Even if the climate were not heating up, the average human would be living in an increasingly hot environment due to both migration and international fertility differences.
We need to talk about naked mole rats | The Oatmeal
2-minute read
What you’d expect from The Oatmeal
Your morning coffee could one day help fight cancer | ScienceDaily
3-minute read
Could something as common as coffee play a role in treating cancer? Scientists at the Texas A&M Health Institute of Biosciences and Technology believe it might. Their research combines caffeine with CRISPR, a powerful gene editing tool known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, to explore new ways to treat chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes. The approach relies on a strategy called chemogenetics, which allows researchers to control cells using specific chemical signals.