📖 What I’m Reading: OpenAI as we knew it is dead – Vox Seems weird. Investing in an Age of Distraction – Jack Raines I’m still mad I missed out on $MOODENG. The Prophecy of Rust Cohle – Frederik Gieschen Excellent exegesis of True Detective Season 1, the greatest philosophical television of all time. History will exalt Matthew McConaughey and for good reason. ☝️ Word of the Week: thanatopsis (n) than-uh-TOP-sis A reflection upon death. From Greek thanatos (death) + opsis (appearance, view)....
12 days ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us – The New Yorker Profile on the author of The Overstory. “We play to keep on playing.” How to Succeed in MrBeast Production – MrBeast Leaked onboarding memo. Some interesting stuff. A modest tax reform proposal to roll back federal tax policy to 1997 – Owen Zidar & Erick Zwick Interesting proposal. I don’t agree with all of it—and certainly wouldn’t call it “modest”—but it’s fun to see the math and history...
26 days ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: How to Make Millions as a Professional Whistleblower – GQ “’When I was first going undercover, I would get back to my car and throw up.’ These days, he relaxes by listening to metal bands (Tool and Nine Inch Nails are favorites) and playing video games like The Last of Us. ‘And before I’m about to meet with a potential scammer, I’ll meditate for 30 minutes or I’ll jump on Zoom with my therapist,’ he tells me. ‘After that, I’m in kill mode.’” Curious George and the case of...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad – Hamilton Nolan “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Exclusive: US sees increasing risk of Russian ‘sabotage’ of key undersea cables by secretive military unit – CNN I think everyone should probably have an emergency plan for being without internet for a decent period of time. China is pushing divisive political messages online using fake U.S. voters – NPR Well well...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: An Age of Hyperabundance – Laura Preston The labyrinthine dystopia of an AI convention. A bit doomerish for my taste, but wonderfully written. Solar and batteries are helping Texas weather heat waves. Here’s how. – Canary Media “All told, zero-carbon power from wind, solar, and nuclear made up 47 percent of the power delivered on ERCOT’s grid in the first quarter of 2024, up from 40 percent throughout 2023 — a shift driven almost entirely by utility-scale solar and...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: U-2 Twilight Landings At Beale Provide A Spectacular Show – Forbes Welcome to my world. Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom – Defector The parasociality to sociopathy pipeline. Chip War’s Chris Miller on Putin, China, and The Future – Mario Gabriele We are underestimating the risk of WW3. ☝️ Word of the Week: grawlix (n) GRAW-liks The characters, such as @#%$*!, used to convey profanity in a comic. Coined by the cartoonist Mort Walker (1923-2018)....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: Robbins v. Lower Merion School District – Wikipedia Why webcams have tape on them now. The Rise of Neotoddlerism – Gurwinder Many broad brushes but much good analysis. Juvenile protests abound across the world on both political extremes, and they represent a growing issue—”the grim irony is that, by believing the world is worse than it actually is, neotoddlers make the world worse.” China Is Done With Global Carmakers: “Thanks For Coming” – Michael Dunne China has...
2 months ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: A Stalled American Dream – Chris Arnade “America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.” Why are Republicans red and Democrats blue? – The Verge “In 1976, NBC debuted its first election map on the air,...
2 months ago • 1 min read
📖 What I’m Reading: A brief foray into Dallas, missing Kampala, and some thoughts on over-tourism – Chris Arnade “You are cocooned in a perfectly sterile world of efficiency and luxury, with chance encounters, such as bumping into strangers, rung out of life. Almost all the messy parts of being human, the muddled sloppy and organic parts, have been eliminated, or at least minimized, usually justified by an appeal to safety. God forbid you should do something as crazy as trying to walk from...
2 months ago • 1 min read
