Links
3 stars
Could the Girls of Camp Mystic Have Been Saved? | New York Magazine
31-minute read
The women sound like men who have been to war: They can only try to tell you. “It was a place,” says a former camper, “I have been doing my best to re-create in my life wherever I have lived.” And another: “The closest I have felt to God.” “You know,” another alum tells me, “the poignancy of, I, I can’t be a child again. I can’t be innocent like that again. I can’t have my whole life ahead of me again.”
When rain hits New York, Alexa Fleet is transported back to her cabin, Bubble Inn. She had never heard such storms as those, “as if the Earth were releasing everything it had.” They were “terrifying, so loud, so hard, so intense. It imprints on you. I yearn for a storm like that. It felt cleansing.” Those summers, six of them, were raw with “everything a girl feels so deeply at 13.” As a second-grader, she would begin building out a calendar toward summer, x-ing out every day from January until June that she had to wait until camp, when finally the world would not revolve around the needs and achievements of boys. “You’re quiet and smile 11 months of the year,” she said, “but there you were safe — the gates were closed — it was just you and the girls. Your personality could de-thaw.”
[...]
The parents were told to gather at Ingram Elementary, a school 13 miles and a 20-minute drive from the camp. The Childresses arrived a little after 1 p.m., among the first parents to show. There were tables and laptops to log parents in when they arrived and water and clothes and blankets. Matthew began to feel very nervous, though he still knew basically nothing about the scope of the flood that had enveloped the town he was not in. He did not want to wait by a pile of blankets in another town for his missing daughter; he wanted to speed toward the river and start moving trees. But others had tried and gotten nowhere. The roads were blocked, impassable.
Original link | Archive.is link
Redshift, by Elena Saavedra Buckley | Harper’s Magazine
23-minute read
To become a Martian colonist, I first had to fill out a Google Form. It asked me about my aviation know-how, medical training, and experience “working in extreme environments.” I sheepishly wrote “N/A” each time, adding a note that highlighted my cooking and social skills. It turned out that this was okay: I was only going to Utah, after all, and the institution running the show was not a multibillion-dollar federal agency but the Mars Society, a scrappy nonprofit. The organization was founded in 1998 by the aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin to advocate for human settlement of the red planet. In 2002, it opened the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Martian settlement—laboratory, theater, and summer camp all at once. Located in a corner of rural southeastern Utah, the MDRS’s environment looks enough like Mars to play the part while still being accessible to participants and potential donors. (Antarctica and the Atacama Desert, arguably the best Martian analogues on Earth, are harder sells.)
[...]
The Mars Society’s simulations, on the other hand, are usually two weeks long. Crew members’ research projects can seem a bit perfunctory, often involving testing gadgets or mimicking the sort of fieldwork that might someday be done on Mars. (This isn’t to say that the longer-term missions always produce mountains of technical research. In Russia, the six crew members played a lot of Guitar Hero, and mission control had to fake a fire to keep them alert.) Most participants are either graduate students or ordinary Mars enthusiasts, the majority of whom pay the Mars Society between $2,000 and $3,500 to attend. Only a handful of them have ever actually made it into space. It wasn’t initially clear to me what, exactly, the organization’s simulation had done to nudge humanity toward the red planet. It seemed more like an elaborate team-building exercise, a logistically complicated and expensive ropes course for space-travel diehards.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice | Astral Codex Ten
15-minute read
This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out.
[...]
I’m too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent.
[...]
The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.
I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.
There are countless reasons to lie when you’re writing. Maybe you thought of a clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it’s exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there’s no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice.
The Mansion, the Heiress, the Jewel Heist, and Me: A Bel-Air Fairytale | Vanity Fair
7-minute read
In Los Angeles, the night of Friday, December 8, 1961, was appropriately dark and stormy. A tree was downed on Bel Air Road, causing a man on a scooter to crash as he raced around a steep corner. A member of the Bel-Air Patrol later came by to discover the accident and the dazed man on the ground. He helped him up, handed back the white pillow sash he’d been carrying, and, without curiosity or question, sent him on his way.
Meanwhile, 15-year-old Carla Kirkeby was home alone—aside from her family’s sleeping staff—in their approximately 22,000-square-foot residence at 750 Bel Air Road. If the address sounds familiar, it’s because the house’s grand limestone facade, originally designed by architect Sumner Spaulding, was used for exterior shots in the hit ’60s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Once referred to as “the house of the golden doorknobs,” the 10-acre estate, also known as Chartwell, is currently owned by Lachlan Murdoch; he bought it in 2019 for $150 million.
[...]
Discovering a historic jewel heist might easily be the most interesting thing to happen to most people. But the captivating details of Carla’s life threaten to reduce it to a footnote. At 14, she threw a wild rager that ended after a partygoer made off with one of her parents’ prized Christmas presents: a silver platter engraved “to Arnold and Carlotta, from Ron and Nancy.” (The Reagans were the Kirkebys’ next-door neighbors and friends.) At 23, police stopped her for going over 100 miles per hour down the Pacific Coast Highway in a Ferrari 275 GTB4—the same make and model as a missing car that belonged to Sharon Tate, who had recently been murdered by Charles Manson’s followers. She says she once wrested her mother from the notorious clutches of John Paul Getty after what she described as “a mediocre dinner” at the magnate’s Surrey estate. On another England adventure, she strolled into a chauffeured Rolls-Royce in London to find herself face-to-face with a young Mick Jagger. Angelina Jolie’s mother was her children’s babysitter.
Original link | Archive.is link
If we avoid sadness in life, why do we seek it in art? | Psyche Ideas
6-minute read
As an opera singer, I’ve noticed that some of my favourite soprano arias are incredibly sad: about dying, losing the love of your life to someone else, or even lamenting that you’ve been cursed by an evil sorceress. When it comes to art, I’m far from the only one drawn to dark themes. From Taylor Swift’s breakup anthems to Picasso’s Blue Period paintings to poignant movies like The Notebook (2004), many people seek out art that expresses profound feelings of sadness. Maybe you do too?
It’s a phenomenon that has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers alike. Given that we usually dread sadness and strive to avoid it because it feels so bad – from painful conversations to the grief of loss – why do we actively seek it in art? Why do we pick films that we know will leave us sobbing in the movie theatre, or stream Sad Girl playlists carefully curated to provoke sorrow and melancholy? Why, when we look at paintings depicting human suffering, do we find them beautiful?
Fortress Yellowstone | In These Times
16-minute read
Wild Eagle Mountain is one of a growing number of billionaire-owned ranches in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses some 12 million to 22 million acres (depending on how you measure) and supports the largest concentration of wildlife in the contiguous United States. As such places grow increasingly rare—a 2021 study estimated that only 3% of the Earth’s land area retains all of the species that lived there 500 years ago — proximity to Yellowstone has become an increasingly valuable commodity. In recent years, the ultra-rich have been buying up slopeside mansions, frontage on trout rivers and great swaths of land here in one of the last nearly intact ecosystems left on Earth. And it’s not only in Montana: This influx of wealth has made Teton County, Wyo. — on the other side of this ecosystem — the richest and most unequal county in the United States.
A day with England’s hunt saboteurs | Dispatch
7-minute read
“A man unlike any other is roaming in the pastures,” a trapper complains to the king in The Epic of Gilgamesh. “He helps the wild game to escape; he fills in my pits, and pulls up my traps.”
Four thousand years after humanity chiselled its first story in cuneiform, I’m in the car park of Hawkesbury Upton’s village hall. I’m about to meet Weasel, who’s not a man “unlike any other”. She’s a retired teacher in her seventies who enjoys playing golf and singing in a choir.
Like Enkidu in the ancient tale, however, she spends much of her time liberating animals, filling in pits, and pulling up traps. Weasel is a hunt saboteur: one of hundreds across the UK who, since 1964, have staged weekly interventions in the countryside to save foxes, mink, hares and stags from grisly fates.
In an hour’s time, horses and hounds will sweep across 54,000 acres of South Gloucestershire countryside for the Beaufort Hunt’s “closing meet” – the final “trail hunting” outing of the season, and possibly the last ever. If the government gets its way, this technically legal practice, in which hounds are said to follow pre-laid trails of fox urine rather than live animals, will be banned.
Original link | Archive.is link
Furniture in the Closet | News Items
11-minute read
The Wall Street Journal had some fun a while back, reporting on a fraudster’s guilty plea to crimes that its own columnist, Jason Zweig, solved all by himself. In a series starting in 2024, Zweig uncovered a onetime broker, Paul Regan, who had conned some 300 people out of more than $50 million, by promising guaranteed returns of up to 17.1 percent per year.
“Any interest you earn is ‘locked in’ and can’t be lost,” said the ads. Zweig knew it was too good to be true, so he made phone calls, stood by his guns, and bit by bit the whole scheme unravelled. Regan, it turned out, had been banned for life from the U.S. securities industry, but he had moved to Medellín and started over.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were more watchdogs like Zweig, warning people away from too-good-to-be-true offers? That’s especially true in the life-and-annuity business. The promises can run for decades, a good deal today can turn into a bad bet by the time you need it, and the financial statements that could steer you out of harm’s way are either hidden behind a paywall or nonexistent.
[...]
In the past, you could rely on state insurance regulators to make sure your carrier was solvent. Even now, the Delaware Insurance Department, Brighthouse’s primary state regulator, must bless the Aquarian buyout before it can be done. But how will Delaware decide? If you look carefully at regulatory filings, you’ll see that Delaware hasn’t been holding Brighthouse to its own solvency rules for years.
So What if They Have My Data? | Card Catalog
10-minute read
Sometime in the mid-2000s, most of us started handing over pieces of ourselves to the internet without giving the exchange a second thought. We created email accounts, signed up for social media, bought things online, downloaded apps, swiped loyalty cards, connected fitness trackers, stored photos in the cloud, and agreed to terms of service that almost none of us have ever read in full. We did this thousands of times over two decades and counting, and each interaction felt small enough to be inconsequential.
But the accumulation is enormous. More than 6 billion people now use the internet, and each one makes an estimated 5,000 digital interactions per day. Most of those interactions happen without our conscious awareness: a GPS ping, a page load, an app opening, a browser cookie refreshing, a device checking in with a cell tower. The average person in 2010 made an estimated 298 digital interactions per day. In fifteen years, that number multiplied more than sixteenfold. Those digital interactions produce records that can persist indefinitely, stored, copied, indexed, bought, sold, and combined with other records to build profiles of extraordinary detail.
High Amplitude Disagreeableness | Stay SaaSy
3-minute read
True startup people are one of the most important advantages that many tech companies have. Startup people are aggressive, entrepreneurial, and often bring a dynamism that allows them to cut through significant roadblocks. When there’s a large platform shift (e.g. the AI wave that is currently occurring), they’re often literally the only people at your organization that can help you transition into the new world. There is a reason that many sharp investors strongly prefer to bet on founder-led companies and their startup-oriented teams, particularly during times of extreme change.
[...]
Some people are basically argumentative and combative all the time: high frequency. Others are actually very genial and (usually) conflict-avoidant: low frequency. That’s just human nature.
But all startup people share an ability to reach an extremely high amplitude of disagreeableness – if you’re really wrong, they will fucking nuke you from orbit, and they are willing to get in front of the entire company and call you an idiot because it doesn’t bother them one bit if there’s an audience when they push the big red button. One of the defining traits of a startup person is their willingness to disagree publicly, even with senior people, and to remain insistent over a long period of time – for example, fighting to change a bad process or build the right product even if it takes years. When you see a mid-level person politely but firmly disagree with some member of the C-suite in front of a hundred people, you’re seeing the startup spirit at work.
1 star
#110. “Extended Childhood Disorder”: An Alternative Way of Understanding Teen Suffering | Play Makes Us Human
4-minute read
Teenagers in the United States and many other modern nations are suffering psychologically at tragically high rates. In the most recent National Comorbidity Survey, 49.5% of U.S. teens met the criteria for diagnosis of at least one psychological “disorder” using the official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
I put “disorder” in quotation marks in the above, as an implied objection to the APA assumption that the psychological disturbances, like physical diseases, lie in the person.
[...]
Epstein and his colleagues suggest that the primary cultural shifts that led to teen problems are those that cut them out of adult society and meaningful adultlike activity. In farming communities, where teens take on ever more responsibility for the family farm, or in craft communities where teens become apprentices, working along with adults, there is little if any evidence that the teenage years are more problematic than any other years. The problem, according to Epstein, is that we continue to treat teens as children long past the time when they are ready to be treated more like adults and be integrated into the adult world. We hold them back.
The California town with less than 30 residents begging for young people to move in | SFGATE
9-minute read
But Darwin never became a ghost town, and at one point, even appeared poised to become one of the state’s next booming metropolises. It began as a bustling mining town founded in 1874, shortly after the area was found to be rich in silver and lead. Named for Darwin French, a prospector who had led expeditions in the area, the town was flooded by eager adventurers hoping to strike it rich. The boom didn’t last long, with the bulk of residents leaving by the late 19th century as markets fluctuated and resources became scarce in the harsh desert conditions. Those who stayed were dealt an even bigger blow in the 1930s, when state officials decided to reroute the main road on the way to what was then Death Valley National Monument away from the town.
Weapons, Wealth, and the Fates of Societies | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Why do weapons sustain durable peace in some societies but provoke perpetual violence in others? We develop a theory in which the value of human life and the frequency of violence are jointly determined by weapons technology and economic conditions. Lethal weapons deter conflict but raise mortality, taxing the future returns to investing in one’s livelihood. When those returns are high, deterrence dominates and peace and investment reinforce each other. When those returns are low, the mortality tax dominates, agents divest from the future, the value of life falls, and violence deepens, a trap that deadlier weapons worsen.