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4 stars
The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
“There is no good way to say this”—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence is not ominous enough. The first time I heard the line, I already knew what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to an appropriate distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence—“there is no good way to say this”—struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation.
The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment’s thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair in the living room where my husband should sit and took the other chair. My heart began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen stood.
There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home; Vincent near Princeton Junction, James near Princeton Station.
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My most humiliating writing experience took place in fourth grade. For a school contest, instead of turning in a patriotic essay praising the glory and beauty of our mother China, I wrote a piece decrying the hypocrisy of such contests, and elaborating on the ugliness of life a child experienced while being forced to lie about it—“ugliness” was the word I used, more than once, in that essay.
The acts of writing the essay and of entering it in the contest were not done out of courage. I wasn’t brave; rather, I was ten, and I was feeling suicidal despair.
I recognized Vincent’s despair when he was in fourth grade; so did his teacher, who wrote me about the poems he turned in for schoolwork, which were astonishingly painful yet beautiful contemplations of life and death.
My entry in the writing contest caused a scandal among the schoolteachers. I was called to a conference room to be greeted by six or seven teachers jeering and laughing at me. An older woman, a friend of my mother’s (my mother was also a teacher at the school), walked over and pinched my cheeks, first one and then the other, as an adult might do to an infant. She said, “You’re a good student. You’re not too ugly. You look like a child with some potential, but who would’ve thought that you could be so stupid as to write such nonsense?”
The only good thing that came out of this episode: I learned not to take reviews and criticism of my future work to heart. I should add that my mother was in the conference room that day and laughed and jeered along with her colleagues. But her wrath, when I got home from school that evening, was a story that I prefer not to remember.
When Vincent was around the same age, he asked, pointedly, “You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well. Why did you give birth to us?” A question for which I never had a good answer.
[...]
Was it intuition or paranoia that led to the discussion shortly before James died—a premonition I couldn’t explain? It doesn’t matter, as the facts remain irrefutable: I did not anticipate that James would choose suicide; I did not detect any sign. For six years before Vincent’s death, I lived in dread that he would. For the six years between the two boys’ deaths, James, too, was pondering suicide—Vincent’s, and then, at some point, his own. I did not know when that shift happened; I did not even think that shift would happen, as I worried only about James’s life, not about his death.
3 stars
REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
Langlands frames his book around the concept of cræft, which (as you can probably guess from that æsc) is the Old English origin of our modern “craft.” The ancestral word is richer and more complicated than the modern one, though, pointing to far more than handmade tchotchkes and beer with too much hops.
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Langlands is obsessed with preserving (and if necessary recovering) the skills of the rural past. He wants you to understand what’s been lost to industrialization, and how our contact area with the world has shrunk, and why doing things with your body is part of being human
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The greatest risk of AI is probably “we all get turned into paperclips,” or maybe “someone uses it to design a novel and incredibly fatal pathogen,” but the most certain risk — the one that’s already here, at least on the edges — is a great deskilling. Just as the mechanization of physical labor lost us all those traditional skills that Langlands describes, the ability to automate cognitive tasks undermines their acquisition in the first place. Why pay any attention at all to word choice and metaphor and prosody when ChatGPT can churn out that essay in a few seconds? Why worry about drafting a convincing email when you’re pretty sure your recipient is just going to ask Grok for a summary?
Conquest of the Incas | Matt Lakeman
Super, super long — but worth it if you find the subject of interest:
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go back to them until recently when I read Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of New Spain and then The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie. My goal was to get a thorough understanding of the two major Spanish New World conquests and how small Western military forces achieved such stunning successes over gargantuan native empires.
In the case of Hernan Cortes, about 400 Spanish soldiers (later increased to over 1,000) subjugated the Mexican Empire of about 6 million inhabitants. In the case of Francisco Pizarro, about 180 Spanish soldiers (eventually rising to over 1,000, but with rarely more than 500 ever concentrated in one place) conquered the Inca Empire of maybe 10 million inhabitants. In both cases, the Spanish invaders had almost no understanding of the local politics, geography, culture, religion, or people they were invading. In both cases, the expedition leaders deserve a ton of credit for extraordinary leadership and competence while leveraging a technological imbalance to achieve a staggering military force and diplomatic multiplier.
The Human Cost of Louisiana’s Drive to Resume Executions | Bolts
Chris Duncan’s death sentence—built on the testimony of two discredited doctors—illustrates just how faulty the system can be.
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On March 18, at 6:50 pm local time, the state of Louisiana executed 46-year-old Jessie Hoffman Jr. by nitrogen hypoxia. Hoffman, a Black man from New Orleans, spent more than 26 years in Angola, where he grew close to Chris and others as a member of the death row community. Hoffman had become a practicing Buddhist during his time in prison. According to his lawyers, the state’s decision to gas him to death on Tuesday represented not just a form of torture but a violation of his religious freedom.
Hoffman’s killing marks a profound rupture in Louisiana: The state has not seen another contested execution since 2002. For the past two decades, executions have effectively been dormant, thanks to the glacial pace of litigation challenging the lethal injection procedure, a short supply of the required drugs, and a slight ebb in support for the practice among the state’s voters. “No one was clamoring for an execution,” Samantha Kennedy, executive director of New Orleans’ Promise of Justice Initiative, told me.
Then, in October 2023, Jeff Landry won election as governor of Louisiana. Landry is an ardent death penalty supporter and ally of President Donald Trump. He won a US House seat as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, and after one term in Washington, he returned to Louisiana, where he served as attorney general from 2016 to 2024.
The Machine in the Garden | Oxford American
First came the notices for rezoning and the announcements from development companies that wanted to “build your dream home.” NEW MODELS OPEN and NOW SELLING and $0 DOWN beckoned from streamers and billboards. The new neighborhoods were given dulcet, meaningless names advertised on foam-core signs, evoking a fantasy of pulling up stakes and moving to this leafy sanctuary away from the cities and snowbirds and coastlines—back to the country, where there’s still enough forest to hide your sins—and planning out the best days of your life. But that message is complicated by a different type of sign across the street, one that has you preparing instead for the end of your life, with visions of biohazard symbols, skulls and crossbones, and the words STOP TOXIC SOLITE alongside LEAD, DIOXINS, AGENT ORANGE, ARSENIC, and CYANIDE.
Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal | The Atlantic
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
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The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.
2 stars
The Biggest Loser | Slate Magazine
At a private baccarat table near the back of the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on a chilly January afternoon, a crowd of fans gathered to watch one of the world’s most famous gamblers at work. Some had come all the way here just to watch him play. They savored every detail—how he cut chips, ruffled his cash, bantered with the dealer. He was dressed for the job. His gray hair was molded into a tight crew cut, and he wore a knitted gold necklace low across his collarbone and a Super Bowl–sized ring with a Ruby 777 jackpot dangling from his hand.
The scene was impressive, except in one way: This man absolutely sucked at gambling. I’d been with Vegas Matt—the YouTube tycoon whose millions of followers salivate over his every bet—for only a few hours. He’d already lost close to $30,000. His four-figure slot machine deposits had gone bust, an unyielding blackjack jet had hoovered up his teetering stacks of chips, and his rare victories had been reinvested into more audacious, ill-fated propositions. There was no way he’d end the night with dignity, yet here he was, perched at the baccarat table, trying to get even.
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This is the fantasy that Vegas Matt is selling: an everlasting bro paradise, sweatless and free, where the bankroll never runs dry and the weekend stretches out into eternity. “It’s like watching a reality show,” he said of his channel’s appeal. “What would happen if you were in Vegas, every day, and gambled? Because that’s what we do every day."
Opinion | How to Have a Passionate Life | The New York Times
The first question that pops into my mind is: Why would he do something that regularly makes him miserable? But when you look around, you see a lot of people out there choosing to do unpleasant things. I don’t just mean those adventure freaks who feel compelled to climb Mount Everest, walk across Antarctica or row the Atlantic — though all those things sound truly miserable. I mean us regular folks leading our regular lives.
All around us there are people who endure tedium to learn the violin, who repeatedly fall off stair railings learning to skateboard, who go through the arduous mental labor required to solve a scientific problem, who agree to take a job managing other people (which is truly hard) or who start a business (which is insanely hard).
My own chosen form of misery is writing. Of course, this is now how I make a living, so I’m earning extrinsic rewards by writing. But I wrote before money was involved, and I’m sure I’ll write after, and the money itself isn’t sufficient motivation.
Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI | WIRED
The search giant should’ve been first to the chatbot revolution. It wasn’t. So it punched back with late nights, layoffs—and lowering some guardrails.
Understanding Solar Energy | Construction Physics
Solar generation capacity has grown incredibly quickly. By some metrics, solar PV has been deployed faster than any other energy source in history, going from 100 terawatt-hours of generation to 1,000 terawatt-hours in just 8 years, compared to 12 years for wind and nuclear, 28 for natural gas, and 32 for coal. In the US, solar PV projects are by far the largest share of planned new electrical generation capacity. Of the roughly 1,900 gigawatts of electricity generation projects in the interconnection queue, around 50% of them are some type of solar PV project.
But while solar PV is growing rapidly, in absolute terms it’s still fairly small potatoes. As of 2023, solar made up around 4% of overall electricity generation, and less than 1% of total US energy production. That means that the main questions around solar PV are about its potential: how long can its rapid growth rate continue, and how large a fraction of our energy can it effectively supply?
The answer to this question is shaped by two salient facts about solar power. First, the cost of it has fallen precipitously over time. Since its invention in the 1950s, the cost of solar PV has fallen by a factor of close to 10,000.1 In the last 10 years alone, the cost of solar PV cells has fallen by more than 50%, and they’re projected to get even cheaper. This has made solar PV one of the cheapest methods of electricity generation.
The second salient fact about solar PV is that it can’t generate electricity on demand.
The Great AI Art Heist | Chicago Magazine
I am firmly in the world of Kim Van Deun, a Belgian artist who, after getting her master’s in biology and PhD in veterinary sciences, left academia to dedicate herself to illustration. It’s easy to surmise that her specialty is fantasy, something she confirms once we begin to email back and forth. When she was a kid, she says, her brother came home with The Dark Eye, a role-playing video game similar to Dungeons & Dragons. She found the illustrations of goblins and kobolds intoxicating: “I only wanted to know how you could draw things like that and spend your life dreaming up such monsters.”
Van Deun was able to push that childhood idea aside for years, she says, until it was “beginning to yell and throwing a ruckus in my head.” So she walked away from the promise of a steady paycheck and a pension to pursue the thing that she felt she was meant to do.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that generative artificial intelligence was going to be trouble — or that it would, at the very least, change everything — for independent artists. It was 2022, and generative AI models like ChatGPT were beginning to pique mainstream interest. The app Lensa AI had dazzled social media with the allure of summoning up instantaneous portraits of whomever you wanted, in any style you wanted. No one seemed to be thinking about how it manufactured such creations.
Chapter 25: The Spice Islands | Analog-Antiquarian
Clove trees, for example, grew only in the Maluku Islands of the South Pacific until fairly recently. And yet their aromatic dried flower buds started to travel incredibly far from their home islands at an incredibly early date. Modern archaeologists have discovered them in household pantries in the ruins of the Bronze Age city of Terqa, in present-day Syria. This suggests that a long-distance trade in cloves had already begun 700 years before the Trojan War. Globalization as a reality if not a concept is older than we think.
For centuries, the Philippine city of Manila served as the hub of the trade in cloves; from here they reached China, India, and most of the other civilizations of Asia. Surviving Chinese documents dating from around the time of Jesus Christ instruct courtiers to be sure to chew cloves in order to sweeten their breath before entering the presence of the emperor. It was through China and India that tiny quantities of cloves eventually made their way to Europe, via the fabled overland Silk Roads. They were so rare and precious in Christendom as to become almost mystical treasures, delicacies beyond compare for the refined palates of kings and popes. Small wonder that they were ascribed all manner of curative properties. They were believed to improve one’s vision when applied directly to the eyeball, to cure colds when rubbed onto the forehead, and when swallowed to improve digestion and to increase male potency.
The Great Hobby Lobby Artifact Heist | Off-Topic
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state.
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Around four thousand years ago, in a metropolis called Irisagrig situated between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, a people thrived. Even in the eyes of their most direct modern ancestors, these people would have seemed almost alien – they spoke in languages that have long since died out, wore strange woolen clothes out of place in the arid desert that’s since usurped their former homes. But they were unmistakably people, and they did all of the things that people do to make day-to-day life something more than a frantic struggle for survival. These people developed numeral systems and learned to work with metal and clay. They enslaved each other, and, in quiet moments, dreamed about gods and the heavens.
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This begs an obvious question. The cuneiform texts of an ancient Mesopotamian people should, in theory, hold little interest to an arts and crafts vendor based in the midwestern United States. So why, exactly, would Hobby Lobby shell out millions of dollars to get their hands on stone tablets crafted so many years ago?
Why Donald Trump and Joe Rogan Are Not "Elites" | Richard Hanania's Newsletter
Everyone talks about populism and elites, yet the way we use these terms has become somewhat strange. When we say “elites oppose Trump,” we don’t think there is anything off about this statement despite him being president and having established absolute dominance over one of our two major political parties. We usually refer to “populism” to indicate a movement that stands in opposition to elites, but that just brings us back to the question of what elites are. Fifteen years ago, that was an easy question, as we could simply point to the Republican and Democratic establishments and mainstream media outlets and say they were the ones with power and influence.
Yet today, Joe Rogan and Candace Owens get more viewers and listeners than CNN hosts, and Donald Trump controls the Republican Party like no other figure in American history. Nonetheless, we don’t say that the Joe Rogan Experience is elite in the same way CNN is. Somehow, Mitch McConnell, who now stands alone against the entire Republican caucus on high-profile votes, still seems more like an elite or member of the establishment than Donald Trump.
Speaking things into existence | One Useful Thing
Influential AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote two years ago that “the hottest new programming language is English,” a topic he expanded on last month with the idea of “vibecoding” a practice where you just ask an AI to create something for you, giving it feedback as it goes. I think the implications of this approach are much wider than coding, but I wanted to start by doing some vibecoding myself.
If and when you live in a dictatorship, how will you know? | Noahpinion
Once again, Trump defenders will claim that this is just playing hardball, while Trump opponents will say that fundamental freedoms have been abrogated. But what’s unambiguous is that Trump’s action goes in the direction of greater executive power and fewer institutional checks and balances.
I have written a book! | Noahpinion
I have to admit, publishing a book on the Japanese economy with the word “weeb” in the title is pretty on brand for me.
Yes, it’s a funny title. But surprisingly, almost nobody in Japan knows the word “weeb”, so I’m hoping that the novelty will be eye-catching, and that teaching the country a fun and important new word will provide a good excuse to expound my own ideas about how to revive Japan’s stagnant economy.
The new half of the book is all about how Japan can leverage its global cultural appeal to get more foreign direct investment. As things stand, most FDI into Japan comes in the form of mergers and acquisitions — foreign companies buying Japanese companies in the hope of using them as beachheads to sell into the Japanese market. Japanese people are understandably wary of this type of investment, since it doesn’t really create jobs, and the acquired companies are often mismanaged.
But what Japan really needs is more greenfield platform FDI — companies building factories or research facilities in Japan in order to make and sell products to the rest of the world, or foreign entrepreneurs starting export-oriented startups in Japan. That kind of investment has been used to supercharge the economy of Poland, which is due to overtake Japan in terms of living standards in the near future. As a country, Japan’s exports are surprisingly weak, it has fallen out of many key global supply chains, and its technological ecosystem is often isolated from the rest of the world.
Reading List 03/15/25 | Construction Physics
This is mostly paywalled; what isn’t is worth being aware of:
Semi Analysis has a very long analysis of the robotics landscape, and how China is poised to dominate it. China is installing far more robots than other countries, and those robots are increasingly Chinese-made at low cost. As AI makes robotics more and more capable, dominating their production will become more and more valuable:
This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West.
1 star
Archaeologists find 'unprecedented' Iron Age hoard | BBC News
Archaeologists have helped uncover one of the "largest and most important" Iron Age finds in the UK. The Melsonby Hoard was discovered in a field near Melsonby, North Yorkshire, by metal detectorist Peter Heads and excavated with the help of Durham University. It includes more than 800 items, including two cauldrons or vessels, horse harness, bridle bits, ceremonial spears and 28 iron tyres, believed to have been buried about 2,000 years ago. Historians believe the "unprecedented" find could lead to a "major re-evaluation" of the wealth and status of the elite living in northern Britain at the time.
How a Stuffed Animal Named Billy Possum Tried—and Failed—to Replace the Teddy Bear as America’s National Toy | Smithsonian Magazine
In 1909, wealthy widow Susie W. Allgood marketed a plush marsupial inspired by President William Howard Taft. But children thought the toy looked “too much like a rat,” and it sold poorly
A breakthrough moment: McMaster researchers discover new class of antibiotics | McMaster University
The last time a new class of antibiotics reached the market was nearly three decades ago — but that could soon change, thanks to a discovery by researchers at McMaster University.
How Old Is Your Body? Stand On One Leg and Find Out | Medium
According to new research, the time you can stand on one leg is the best marker of physical aging.
Blameful Post-Mortems | Stay SaaSy
In summary, software post-mortems are much lower severity and much more frequent than aviation or healthcare post-mortems. In fact, they’re so common that they’re a critical part of regular accountability and learning in software organizations. As a result, software culture becoming too blameless is just as bad as being too blameful: Individuals and teams miss the opportunity to learn. Without actually saying whose fault something is, people can end up living in a world where they never hear the thing that they need to hear most.
We are lucky good LLMs were invented at the time they were | Marginal Revolution
If quality LLMs had come along forty years later, I am not sure what their philosophic foundations would be, or even if they would be centered in America and the West.
Climate Migration: Why Some People Aren't Suited for the Cold (or Heat) | Harvard Business School
You might think that moving from, say, Maine to Florida isn’t a big deal, but it can be. In fact, our research suggests that a climate mismatch can shorten one’s life.
The Madmen and the AIs | Marginal Revolution
In other words, they created AIs which were high and low on the “big 5” OCEAN metrics, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and then they paired the different AIs with humans who were also rated on the big-5.
The results were quite amusing.
‘Microlightning’ in water droplets may have sparked life on Earth | Stanford University
Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller “microlightning” exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves.
Where do stock market returns come from? | Marginal Revolution
We estimate that 40% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation. Economic growth accounted for just 25% of the increase