Links
Will try to get a “Best of 2023” issue out later today as well…
3 stars
Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away | New Yorker
A draconian legal doctrine called felony murder has put thousands of Americans—disproportionately young and Black—in prison. […]
When Donna heard the charges, she asked, How is this even possible? Ian had learned the answer in law school: a sweeping and uniquely American legal doctrine, often couched in terms of justice for victims’ families, called felony murder. To engage in certain unlawful activities, the theory goes, is to assume full responsibility if a death occurs—regardless of intent.
The precipitating offenses in this case: Sadik Baxter had searched five cars for stray cash before surrendering when cops appeared, and O’Brian Oakley, his twenty-six-year-old friend, had fled the scene, lost control of his car in a police chase, and killed the bicyclists. The prosecution charged both men with two counts of felony murder in the first degree.
Recently, Ian spoke with me about the case while caring for his newborn daughter in Brooklyn; as we talked, he sometimes ran his hand down a thick beard he’d grown in homage to his dad. “It’s truly one of the cruellest ideas in the American legal system,” he said of felony murder. “And most people don’t even know it exists.”
1,374 Days — My Life with Long COVID | New York Times [gift article]
Interactive feature:
Every morning, I wake up in my Brooklyn apartment, and for two seconds, I can remember the old me. The me without pain, the me with energy, the me who could do whatever she wanted.
Then I’m shoved back into my new reality. As I fully come into consciousness, I feel dizzy, faint and nauseated. Pain pulses throughout my body, and my limbs feel simultaneously as heavy as concrete and weak as jelly. It feels as if a machine were squeezing my skull, and extreme exhaustion overtakes me.
These sensations have been a daily occurrence, with few exceptions, for the past three years and nine months. In the morning my boyfriend will be the one making coffee for us. He will run all of our errands. He will cook and clean. He now does all the things I used to do, the things I can’t do anymore.
Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus | After Babel
Why is the culture of elite higher education so fertile for antisemitism, and why are our defenses against it so weak? Don’t we have the world's most advanced academic concepts and bureaucratic innovations for identifying hatred of all kinds, even expressions of hatred so small, veiled, and unconscious that we call them “micro-aggressions” and “implicit biases”?
2 stars
In The Long Run, We're All Dad | Astral Codex Ten
A lovely ode to fatherhood from Scott Alexander:
On December 13, 2023, two surprisal-minimization engines registered an unpredecented spike in surprisal. They were thrust from a sunless sea into a blooming buzzing confusion, flooded with inexplicable data through input channels they didn’t even know they had. The engines heroically tested hyperprior after hyperprior to compress the data into something predictable.
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me | Sam Altman’s Blog
More insightful than it seems, at first glance:
Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
We raise 18 billion animals a year to die — and then we don’t even eat them | Vox
This isn’t surprising if you think about it, but it is still strikingly appalling:
From farm to plate, one in four animals raised on factory farms are wasted.
The Long Shadow of Checks | Bits about Money
A recurring theme for Bits about Money is that financial infrastructure is heavily path dependent. We’re (oft unknowingly) standing atop decades and centuries of work which came before. Sometimes, the specific contours of that work, and of decisions made decades ago, is a roadmap to what continues to work today and what doesn’t.
Let’s talk checks.
#25. Why Hunter-Gatherers' Work Was Play | Play Makes Us Human
By all accounts, hunter-gatherers did not have a concept of work as toil (Gowdy, 1999). They did not confound productiveness with unpleasantness. They did, of course, engage in many productive activities, which were necessary to sustain their lives. They hunted, gathered, built and mended huts, built and mended tools, cooked, shared information, and so on. But they did not regard any of this as burdensome. They did these things because they wanted to. According to some researchers (e.g. Gould, 1969, Gowdy, 1999, Lee, 1988), hunter-gatherer groups did not even have a word for work as toil, or, if they did, it applied to what neighboring farmers, miners, road-builders and other non-hunter-gatherers did, not to what they were doing.
My reading about life in many different hunter-gatherer cultures has led me to conclude that their work was play for four main reasons: (1) There was not too much of it. (2) It was varied and required much skill and intelligence. (3) It was done in a social context, with friends. And (4) most significantly, it was, for any given person at any given time, optional. Let me expand on these, point by point.
Uphold territorial integrity | Noahpinion
An organizing principle for U.S. power in the 21st century.
Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think | Vox
A new paper explores what “supercentenarians” have in common. Turns out it’s bad record-keeping.
Payroll providers, Power, Respect | Bits about Money
Most paychecks (and direct deposits, and earned wage access vehicles, and similar) are not sent directly by employers, but instead go through a payroll provider. Payroll providers are the original financial technology company, and were some of the first scaled adopters of computers generally.
You have almost certainly depended on payroll at some point in your life and probably never thought much of it. And it is fascinating! Let’s discuss a bit of history, a bit of politics, a bit of financial technology, and a heavy, heavy dash of extremely boring schlep in service of larger societal goals.
What the Solow Model can teach us about China | Noahpinion
Economists knew back in the 1950s that a country can't build its way to infinite wealth.
Why Do Poor People Commit More Crime? | Marginal Revolution
Well this is an unhappy result:
It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.
A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime.
Byrne Hobart, the unlikely oracle | Meridian
It’s impossible to say what precise role Hobart’s article did or did not play in the events leading up to the bank run. Even if Armstrong’s theory was right, it’s not obvious how someone like Hobart could have such an influence. Hobart does not sport a diploma from an Ivy League education. He does not have a degree at all. Nor does he have the reputation of a serial founder or venture capitalist with a track record of winning bets on outlier companies. Armstrong himself refers to Hobart as “one overly prolific dude in Austin.”
So how would “one overly prolific dude in Austin” go on to possess a trusted voice of reason, a voice that sometimes has the potential to influence the inner circle of tech elites?
1 star
Mesopotamian bricks unveil the strength of Earth's ancient magnetic field | PhysOrg
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how changes in the Earth's magnetic field imprinted on iron oxide grains within ancient clay bricks, and how scientists were able to reconstruct these changes from the names of the kings inscribed on the bricks.
The team hopes that using this "archaeomagnetism," which looks for signatures of the Earth's magnetic field in archaeological items, will improve the history of Earth's magnetic field, and can help better date artifacts that they previously couldn't.
Kumataro Ito’s Illustrations of Nudibranchs from the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition (ca. 1908) | Public Domain Review
If you ask people what the most spectacular creatures on Earth are some might say the flamingos of the Andes, the birds-of-paradise of Papua New Guinea, or the tropical fish of the Galapagos. How many would say sea slugs? Yet the roughly 3,000 species in the family nudibranchia are legitimate contenders, coming as they do in a delightful, dizzying array of shapes, patterns and colours. […]
The vibrant paintings below are the work of Kumataro Ito, the chief illustrator aboard the USS Albatross as it undertook the monumental task, for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, of surveying the aquatic resources of the 7,000 islands of the Philippines.
The Fruit Shaped Bus Stops in Nagasaki, Japan | Kottke
The small town of Konagai in Nagasaki Prefecture has a number of whimsical bus stops shaped like fruits.
Soup's On! And On! Thai Beef Noodle Brew Has Been Simmering For 45 Years | NPR
There's food that's old. There's food that has gone bad. And then there's soup that has been simmering for 45 years.
In Bangkok, customers can't get enough of the latter at Wattana Panich, a noodle soup joint in the trendy Ekkamai neighborhood, where third-generation owner Nattapong Kaweeantawong wants to clear up what he thinks is a popular misconception about his beef soup.
"Lots of people think we never clean the pot," he says. "But we clean it every evening. We remove the soup from the pot, then keep a little bit simmering overnight."
Facial symmetry doesn’t explain “beer goggles” | University of Portsmouth
A new study has tested the hypothesis that people are more likely to find someone attractive while drunk, because their face appears more symmetrical
This piece of paper could revolutionize human waste | AsapSCIENCE [YouTube]
Could this simple kirigami paper be a solution to our waste problem? I got to chat to the inventor of Cushion Lock, Tom Corrigan, and discover the amazing potential these designs have unlocked. Thanks to 3M for giving me this peek behind the science of it all.