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Koch, Balckouts and Ageism

August 16, 2019

How an Oil Theft Investigation Laid the Groundwork for the Koch Playbook

Christopher Leonard | Politico (Book extract from ‘Kochland’) | July 22, 2019 | 4,700 words

The oil theft case ended there. But the political apparatus Koch built to fight it only continued to grow. The pieces put into place in the early 1990s—the third-party front groups like Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence, the massive campaign contributions, the media outreach, the direct corporate lobbying—all of it would be used to fight Koch’s primary adversary: the federal government.

When the Lights Went Out: On Blackouts and Terrorism

David E. Nye | MIT Press Reader (Book extract from ‘When the Lights Went Out’) | August 14, 2019 | 3,300 words

A generation ago, the immediate question when the lights went out was whether a fuse had blown or lightning had struck. But today, when a blackout strikes, time stops, plans fall apart, and fears fill the sudden void.

Meet the next generation of entrepreneurs. They’re all over 65

Lauren Smiley | MIT Technology Review | August 12, 2019 | 3,000 words

“When you live in an ageist society, your dreams, which might seem totally normal to you, are a threat to other people,” he warns. He’s speaking not only in rapid-fire sentences, but in paragraphs now. “People are trying to hold you back—because they’re afraid of their own aging. Or because you’re competing with them economically. Because they don’t want to have to introduce somebody else’s ideas into their young-person culture,” Kamber continues, his holy roller sermon coming to its emotional peak. “People are a pain in the ass!”

That’s why Kamber created Senior Planet, a tech-themed community center that preps seniors to hack their way through a world conspiring to keep them sidelined.

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Wind, Money and Washing Machines

August 15, 2019

A Brief Eerie History of How the Wind Makes Us Crazy

Lyall Watson | LitHub | August 13, 2019 | 4,000 words

When air is completely still and cool, we can enjoy bright starlit nights and the respite from manic combustion. But when calms are warm, or go on too long beyond the dawn, they become awkward and disturbing. They tend, we have learned, to precede the storm.

So wind, when it comes, is usually welcome. But not always and not for everyone.

How Monopolies Broke the Federal Reserve

Matt Stoller | BIG newsletter | August 13, 2019 | 3,200 words

Very low or negative interest rates mean that investors can’t find any place to place their savings. Investors perceive there are no more factories to build, no distribution centers to create, no new energy systems to research, no more products to create. You can only stuff money under a mattress, and the price of mattresses is going up. Our financial system, in other words, is acting like we have no more social problems to profitably solve.

Why Washing Machines Are Learning to Play the Harp

Laura Bliss | The Atlantic | September 2019 | 1,700 words

A kitchen isn’t a casino, however. Can a well-considered score really make consumers more likely to buy a Whirlpool over a GE? Will the sock washer still feel heroic the 50th time he runs the machine—or merely annoyed? Audio UX, an audio-branding studio based in New York, recently commissioned a study that found that custom-made “premium” sounds, as opposed to “generic” ones, were likelier to be associated with the correct action (e.g., turning on a dishwasher) by test users, most of whom also said they’d prefer to own the brand that offered the customized cues.

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Charity, muons and life

August 14, 2019

Jeff Bezos is Quietly Letting his Charities Do Something Radical — Whatever they Want

Theodore Schleifer | Vox / Recode | August 12, 2019 | 2,200 words

And since then, he has done something that even the nonprofits receiving his millions remark is highly unusual: He has given them life-changing money with virtually no restrictions, formal vetting, or oversight, according to Recode’s interviews with eight of those funded by him and others familiar with his donations.

Impossible Muons

miuntephysics | YouTube | November 13, 2018 | Video (4:33 minutes)

The meanings of life

Roy F Baumeister | Aeon | September 16, 2013 | 5,500 words

The meaningful life, then, has four properties. It has purposes that guide actions from present and past into the future, lending it direction. It has values that enable us to judge what is good and bad; and, in particular, that allow us to justify our actions and strivings as good. It is marked by efficacy, in which our actions make a positive contribution towards realising our goals and values. And it provides a basis for regarding ourselves in a positive light, as good and worthy people.

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Kashmir, Phone Farmers and Reggae

August 13, 2019

Of Home, Mutton Curry and Picnics in Shalimar Bagh

Kaveree Bamzai | Livemint | August 11, 2019 | 1,000 words

I suppose I should be overjoyed. Except the Kashmir I once knew, loved and lived in is gone. My family left Kashmir immediately after independence, thanks to a peripatetic grandfather who went from being political editor of Blitz in what was then Bombay to special aide to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. We always went back every year, the day summer holidays began, to be with the extended family—my mother’s six sisters, their husbands, and their many offspring. It was a time straight out of a 1960s Bollywood movie: a procession of cars, blankets, badminton rackets, cricket kits, and—always—a pressure cooker carrying the mandatory mutton dish, to Chashma Shahi or Shalimar Bagh. There were games in the vast grounds of my grandfather’s home, racing around apple trees, ruining carefully tended vegetable beds, and mysteries featuring the attic or the outhouse or both.

And then one not-so-fine summer, in 1990, we didn’t go home. The next time I saw our home, it had changed owners, was stripped of its trees and denuded of its grass, the road to it accessible only through a tangle of concertina wires.

America’s DIY Phone Farmers

Joseph Cox | Vice | August 1, 2019 | 2,500 words

"I [would] much rather be doing this than playing taxi, or delivering food for extra money," one farmer, who went by the name Tommy, wrote in an email. "It's practically a second job, but it's work from home. Usually while hanging with my wife and kids, or watching TV."

From Bob Marley to Peter Tosh: the reggae empire built by a Chinese-Jamaican family

Bernice Chan | South China Morning Post | August 12, 2019 | 1,500 words

“He was not expecting to see a Chinese woman talking about reggae,” Patricia Chin, now 82, recalls with a laugh, during a telephone interview from New York.

But the half-Chinese, half-Indian Chin, who was born on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, knows just about everything there is to know about reggae. She and her late husband, Vincent “Randy” Chin, helped build the nascent reggae music scene in the late 1950s from their home in Kingston, Jamaica, along with the likes of the legendary Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.

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Drugs, Trees and Honeyland

August 12, 2019

War and drugs: Together since forever

Eric Mankin | Knowable Magazine | August 6, 2019 | 2,400 words

A notable example is amphetamines, which became fuel for World War II. This was the first major armed conflict with widespread use of a synthetic psychoactive drug. Some researchers have argued that the unprecedented speed of Nazi advances during the war was partly thanks to meth, which the Germans manufactured under the brand name Pervitin. It was ironic: Addicts were stigmatized under the Nazi regime, but meth was the privileged exception. It played into the Nazi obsession with superiority — a way to be superhuman.

The Japanese imperial government also contracted methamphetamine production during the war; they called it the “drug to inspire the fighting spirits.” British and American forces used amphetamines as well; they were added to US soldiers’ medical kits in 1943.

The Most Controversial Tree in the World

Rowan Jocobsen | Pacific Standard | June 25, 2019 | 4,800 words

Does a GMO in the forest diminish its naturalness? To answer that, we need to grapple with another question: How natural is the forest, anyway? And, perhaps even weirder: How unnatural is a GMO? [...] one of the big takeaways from the genetics revolution of the past decade is that life is shockingly plastic. DNA is just DNA, and cells aren't too picky about where their source code comes from. [...] scientists no longer envision a classic tree of life, with plants, animals, and fungi all diverging on isolated branches, bacteria sticking to a separate trunk, and so on. Instead, the new diagram looks more like an interstate map, with shoots curling off some arteries and merging with others.

Sundance Film Review: ‘Honeyland’

Guy Lodge | Variety | February 1, 2019 | 725 words

Macedonian docmakers Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska make a visually poetic debut with this stark, wistful portrait of a lone rural beekeeper.

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Buddha, cleanliness and Kashmir

August 11, 2019

Walking the Path of the Buddha in a Neglected Corner of India

Paul Salopek | The New Yorker | August 9, 2019 | 2,000 words

Chronically listed as one of India’s poorest states, Bihar isn’t usually associated with spiritual revival. Its news cycle instead tallies droughts, floods, fatal encephalitis outbreaks, and the violent aftershocks of a failed Maoist insurgency. [...] On day four, we limped into Nalanda under clouds the color of polished lead. Anand showed us around. At its peak, Nalanda, in central Bihar, was the largest center of Buddhist learning in the world. It housed as many as ten thousand student monks. They argued about Buddhist doctrine and studied cosmology, astronomy, and art. Scores of villages nearby were dedicated to feeding resident scholars. Nalanda’s graduates helped carry Buddhism to Tibet and points along the Silk Road. “They used big mirrors to reflect light onto the Buddha statues inside temples,” Anand said, highlighting the monastic center’s architectural wonders.

The People Who Love to Watch Other People Clean

Tyler Kingkade | The Atlantic | August 7, 2019 | 1,300 words

“You can’t control everything in your life,” Hendy said. “You might have a very stressful job, but you can make your bed. You can at least be on top of that aspect of your life and sort of feel like you have your shit together.”

A Twitter thread on Kashmir

Śrīkānta Kṛṣṇamācārya | Twitter | August 9, 2019

So what should we do to make J&K work?

Increase its within-group variance, so that the "mean" difference between say J&K and any other Indian state (e.g. Punjab) becomes less critical!

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Rambo, Work v. Hobby and South Africa

August 10, 2019

Book Review: First Blood by David Morrell

mcjunker | Reddit | July 10, 2019 | 2,900 words

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell that was inspired (as the author explains in the 1992 introduction) by watching the TV during the height of the war in Vietnam and seeing footage of jungle gunfights and explosions intermingling with footage of civil riots activists rioting. It struck him that if you turned the sound off and watched it all with no context you could easily get confused and think that it was all happening in the same place- those protestors and the police fighting suddenly picking up machines and blasting away at each other. The far distant war coming home to American streets where it was birthed…

The Costs of Reliability

Sarah Constantin | Less Wrong | July 20, 2019 | 1,000 words

But I can’t just trivially “up my efficiency” in my paid time; reliability itself has a cost.

The costs of reliability are often invisible, but they can be very important. The cost (in time and in office supplies and software tools) of tracking and documenting your work so that you can deliver it on time. The cost (in labor and equipment) of quality assurance testing. The opportunity cost of creating simpler and less ambitious things so that you can deliver them on time and free of defects.

The rainbow beauty of Hashim Amla

Niren Tolsi | The Cricket Monthly | January 4, 2018 | 6,400 words

"Because we had come out of isolation, the history of [international] SA cricket is not long, and it's also divided, so I am sure the country didn't even know our identity," he says of that moment. [...]. The players wanted a "team that mirrors the country". "The mirror of the country that you want to see is a team that is happy, a team that works together, a team where when you go through difficulties - because in life you are going to go through difficulties - you are resilient, when you go through success you maintain your dignity in your success, and your failures. That is what you would like the country to be, and that is what we wanted the team to be, and we tried to, since 2010, we tried to live that.

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German soldiers, Toni Morrison and net neutrality

August 9, 2019

Where Veterans Aren’t Thanked for Their Service

Noah Barkin | The Atlantic | August 6, 2019 | 2,100 words

There is no Veterans Day here to honor soldiers like Alex, and veterans aren’t celebrated at sporting events or other public occasions as they are in the United States and other European countries. The memorials erected in recent years to remember Germans who died in foreign wars are not prominently displayed, like those for American soldiers on the Mall in Washington, but rather hidden on a barren side street near the defense ministry and behind fences on a military base south of the capital. Few politicians speak openly about Germany’s combat veterans, and the Bundeswehr does not recognize those who fought abroad as a distinct group. Even the term veteran remains tainted by associations with the Nazis.

On Black Difficulty

Namwali Serpell | Slate | March 26, 2019 | 1,800 words

Toni Morrison would never accede to a request to explain a short story. Toni Morrison would never write a critique she didn’t believe in. I often think of her words: “All of my life is doing something for somebody else. Whether I’m being a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good lover, a good teacher—and that’s all that. The only thing I do for me is writing. That’s really the real free place where I don’t have to answer.” I, too, yearn for that specific, human, black, female freedom: to feel at ease to be difficult.

A Framework for Moderation

Ben Thompson | Stratechery | August 7, 2019 | 2,700 words

To be perfectly clear, I would prefer that 8chan did not exist. At the same time, many of those arguing that 8chan should be erased from the Internet were insisting not too long ago that the U.S. needed to apply Title II regulation (i.e. net neutrality) to infrastructure companies to ensure they were not discriminating based on content. While Title II would not have applied to Cloudflare, it is worth keeping in mind that at some point or another nearly everyone reading this article has expressed concern about infrastructure companies making content decisions.

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Money, persistence and Svalbard

August 8, 2019

The Invention of Money

John Lanchester | The New Yorker | July 29, 2019 | 3,700 words

Money makes the world go round. But what is it? What is the value of money? Two individuals whose ideas were influential role in shaping how money works today. Also, Kublai Khan. Paper money, backed by the authority of the state,was an astonishing innovation, one that reshaped the world.

The Radioactive Boy Scout

Ken Silverstein | Haperper’s Magazine | November 1998 | 8,000 words

The typical kid [working on a merit badge] would have gone to the doctor’s office and asked about the X-ray machine. David had to go out and try to build a reactor.

The Dream of Open Borders Is Real—in the High Arctic

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | The Nation | July 29, 2019 | 4,500 words

[...] Svalbard cannot turn away anyone on account of nationality. The result [...] is that the Norwegian government provides as little as possible [...]. And that, in turn, shapes Svalbard’s spirit—for better or for worse. “A lot of people are coming here with different kinds of dreams and visions, and it’s not always a success for them,” Askholt said. “When you can come from so many countries, to come up at all says something about the kind of person you are. You have to have something in you.”

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Migrants, depression and Ebola

August 7, 2019

How the Media Contributed to the Migrant Crisis 

Daniel Trilling | The Guardian | August 1, 2019 | 3,200 words

In short, this has involved the EU and its members signing treaties with countries outside its borders to control immigration on its behalf; an increasingly militarised frontier at the geographical edges of the EU; and an internal system for regulating the movement of asylum seekers that aims to force them to stay in the first EU country they enter. This, cumulatively, had the effect of forcing desperate people to take narrower and more dangerous routes by land and sea, while the prioritising of border control over safe and dignified reception conditions compounded the disaster. How well, really, did media organisations explain all this to their audiences?

The Truth About Wanting to Die 

Anna Mehler Paperny | The Walrus | August 6, 2019 | 4,800 words

This is not a triumphant story. No one finds herself; no one is saved, although some remarkable people do incredible things. There is no happy ending. It’s an uncomfortably personal exploration of a sickeningly common illness no one likes talking about, one that remains undertreated and poorly treated and grossly inequitably treated in part because of our own squeamishness in confronting it or our own denial of its existence as an illness and the destruction it wreaks when left to its own devices.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are pathways to compassionate, equitable, informed care for an illness that pummels too many for too long without respite. But we need to act like this is something we care about.

What the Beginning of an Ebola Outbreak Looks Like 

Richard Preston | Literary Hub | August 2, 2019 | 2,000 words

In the funeral of Menindor we are seeing something that resembles a high-­speed movie displaying the first instants of a nuclear explosion. We are looking into the core of the expanding fireball right at the start of detonation. The funeral produced an unseen biological flash of a new virus, and the virus began explosive amplification in the human species.

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Cars and UFOs

July 31, 2019

Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake? 

Nathan Heller | The New Yorker | July 22, 2019 | 5,600 words

‘A smarter futurism would focus less on pushing through advances and more on being sure we will use them wisely when they come. The coming age of robot vehicles should find us dreaming not of their role in this world but of their risk and potential in a future not yet made.’

UFOs, Religion & Technology 

Samuel Loncar | LARB | July 27, 2019 | 2,200 words

An exploration of our relationship with truth and beliefs. There are ‘extraterrestrial artifacts’, ‘Invisible College’, Indiana Jones-esq personalities and of course aliens.

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Dogs, travel and a curiosity

July 29, 2019

A Carolina Dog

Cy Brown | The Bitter Southerner | 2019 | 5,400 words

This dog's ancient bloodlines were never altered by humans. Its ancestors crossed the Bering Strait with the first humans ever to settle this land — I'm talking about North America, not just the South. These dogs traveled the expanse of this great continent and went as far they could, finally creating a home on the border of Georgia and South Carolina, hidden from human eyes under longleaf pine and in cypress swamp for thousands of years. They scratched and survived and were molded by the land, made by natural selection into the perfect vessel for survival in the wild South. Unlike most dogs, they don't exist because people needed help with a job or wanted a companion. They exist only because Mother Nature decided they earned that right. And a motley crew of folks gathers every year, deep in the South Carolina woods, to help keep these mangy, yellow dogs thriving.

Around the World in Perfect Weather: A 52-Week Dream Trip

Reservations.com | 2019 | 2,700 words

So if you’re interested in a year filled with perfect temperatures, we’ve carefully mapped and planned a single year that travels through 52 cities across the world resting at the ideal temperature. And trust us, finding these very specific places around the world isn’t an easy feat as most of these locations are pockets with very specific times within the year when they are within this magical range.

Curious cure: Human waste

Kendall Powell | Knowable Magazine | July 25, 2019 | 2,500 words

Today’s data show that fecal transplants cure 80 percent to 90 percent of patients with recurrent C. diff infections — and doctors across the globe have accepted them as a legitimate medical treatment. The procedure is considered experimental (no regulatory body in the world has officially approved it outside of investigational protocols), but hospitals now perform fecal transplants for up to 10,000 cases of recurrent C. diff infections per year in the US alone.

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Rocket science, handwriting and tattoos

July 28, 2019

How to Land the Space Shuttle... from Space

Bret Copeland | YouTube | November 6, 2017 | Video (18 minutes)

The Papers of J.B.S. Haldane

Samanth Subramanian | Aesop | June, 2019 | 1,000 words

Through his handwriting alone, I watched Haldane grow before my eyes, from childhood into adolescence and then into adulthood and so to death. Cradle to grave—or in his case, cradle to dissection table of a medical college in Kakinada. The only people to witness such complete arcs of life at close quarters are biographers and the unfortunate parents who outlive their adult children. When I read Haldane’s final essay, I still vividly held in my mind the letter he wrote at the excitable age of five to his granny, telling her about a meringue he’d eaten. No one who’d written a biography ever told me what a heartbreaking exercise it is.

The rise of the indelibly-illustrated everyman

Theodore Dalrymple | Standpoint | May 30, 2019 | 2,000 words

Even if tattooing is now so common that it can be considered normal in the statistical sense, as once it was not, it retains a faint connotation of rebellion or revolt, at least for those who cannot be considered marginal themselves and would therefore not have had themselves tattooed. They think that by having themselves tattooed they are shocking the bourgeoisie à la Baudelaire; and in so far as their parents don’t like it, and are in effect silencing them by a fait accompli of which it is useless for them to complain, they are exercising power over them.

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Revival, stress and decisions

July 27, 2019

How Kargil won itself back

Asmita Bakshi | Livemint | July 26, 2019 | 3,600 words

Now, 20 years later, with infrastructural restoration completed, the people of Kargil are asserting a completely different kind of might—that of their rich and diverse cultural heritage, with locally run museums coming up across villages. Through these, locals and the administration are working to dislodge the war narrative that has long stuck like shrapnel to this district in western Ladakh.

Podcast : How to Stress Proof Your Body and Brain

Dr. Mithu Storoni with Brett McKay | Art of Manliness | July 15, 2019 | Audio

Today on the show we discuss the difference between acute stress and chronic stress and why acute stress can actually be good for you, while chronic stress can change your brain so that you get more stressed out when you experience stress. We discuss how both cortisol and inflammation can actually be beneficial in the right amounts, and how to get them in the right doses — including the particular type of exercise that will best help you recover from stress,  and the role diet and even Tetris can play in managing it. We end our conversation discussing how making time for hobbies can prevent you from falling into the stress trap.

Why drafting Le'Veon Bell in fantasy football wasn't the worst decision you ever made

Ramin Mohajer | ESPN | July 25, 2019 | 1,200 words

First, put yourself in the best position to win with a strong decision-making process, and don't be discouraged if luck goes against you. Second, when analyzing decisions to draw lessons for the future, "judge the process" and focus only on how you can improve your process for next time.

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Sarcasm, Complexity and Money

July 26, 2019

Please Consider My Application to Give You Labor So I Can Stay Alive

Chandler Dean | McSweeney’s | July 24, 2019  | 700 words

I understand that this is a competitive position, and you’ll be receiving hundreds of similar applications from other qualified individuals. And it would be ethically unjustifiable for me to argue that my humanity is somehow superior to that of the other applicants, and that you should select me, leaving the others to find some other means of making a living.

Yet, at the same time: I am arguing that my humanity is somehow superior to that of the other applicants. You should select me. Leave the others to find some other means of making a living.

The Human Brain Project Hasn’t Lived Up to Its Promise

Ed Young | The Atlantic | July 22, 2019 | 1,600 words

The brain’s intricacies—how neurons connect and cooperate, how memories form, how decisions are made—are more unknown than known, and couldn’t possibly be deciphered in enough detail within a mere decade. It is hard enough to map and model the 302 neurons of the roundworm C. elegans, let alone the 86 billion neurons within our skulls. “People thought it was unrealistic and not even reasonable as a goal,” says the neuroscientist Grace Lindsay, who is writing a book about modeling the brain.

The Psychology of Money

Morgan Housel | Collaborative Fund | Jun 1, 2018 | 7,900 words

In what other field does someone with no education, no relevant experience, no resources, and no connections vastly outperform someone with the best education, the most relevant experiences, the best resources and the best connections? There will never be a story of a Grace Groner performing heart surgery better than a Harvard-trained cardiologist. Or building a faster chip than Apple’s engineers. Unthinkable.

But these stories happen in investing.

That’s because investing is not the study of finance. It’s the study of how people behave with money.

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Time, archaeology and parenting

July 25, 2019

A woman's greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself

Brigid Schulte | The Guardian | July 21, 2019 | 1,900 words

Women’s time has been interrupted and fragmented throughout history, the rhythms of their days circumscribed by the sisyphean tasks of housework, childcare and kin work – keeping family and community ties strong. If what it takes to create are long stretches of uninterrupted, concentrated time, time you can choose to do with as you will, time that you can control, that’s something women have never had the luxury to expect, at least not without getting slammed for unseemly selfishness.

Archaeology of the 99%

Bob Holmes | Knowable Magazine | July 23, 2019 | 1,700 words

Why had archaeologists overlooked the commoners for so long?

Before World War II, archaeological research was funded mostly by museums or wealthy individuals or foundations. They wanted spectacular finds — temples and palaces, not the remains of perishable structures of everyday life. They wanted royal burials, such as King Tut’s tomb, the royal treasures of Ur, great sculpture, murals, beautiful pottery, jade, what have you. They were looking for materials that they could bring back and display in museums.

Against ‘natural’ parenting

Olga Mecking | Aeon | July 23, 2019 | 3,200 words

As the world is evolving, all humans are evolving with it. In other words, we don’t know how we used to parent. We can only know how we parent now – as individuals bound to a certain time, place and culture.

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Future, ATC and Qandeel Baloch

July 24, 2019

The Psychology Of Prediction

Morgan Housel | Collaborative Fund | July 21, 2019 | 4,200 words

But prediction is hard. Either you know that or you’re in denial about it.

A lot of the reason it’s hard is because the visible stuff that happens in the world is a small fraction of the hidden stuff that goes on inside people’s heads. The former is easy to overanalyze; the latter is easy to ignore.

This report describes 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made.

Going Down the Pipes

Darcy Frey | Topic | July 15, 2019 | 9,100 words

By the mid-’90s, the American air traffic control system was on the verge of a nervous breakdown: broken equipment, insane overtime, impossibly high stakes.

‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone’: the murder of social media star Qandeel Baloch

Sanam Maher | The Guardian | July 9, 2019 | 5,200 words

Qandeel created a story about herself – part truth and part lies, fibs and exaggerations. The story allowed her to be whoever we wanted her to be. It allowed her to be whoever she wanted to be. And the small fibs are just as much a part of the “real story” of Qandeel – as important as the filtered memories of her friends and family, if not more so.

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