The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Oppenheimer of Our Age: Sam Altman insists the AI he is creating could destroy us even as he hastens its advancement. Do we know enough about him? (New York Magazine)
• It’s not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird. With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they’re posting much more often. The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it’s the content of the posts that’s shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world’s strangest social networks. (Business Insider)
• “We’re not at war; we’re at work,” said Marty Baron.. Running The Washington Post in Donald Trump’s D.C. How We Got “Democracy Dies In Darkness”: And other stories from eight years running The Washington Post (The Atlantic)
• Why We’ll Never Live in Space: Medical, financial and ethical hurdles stand in the way of the dream to settle in space. (Scientific American)
• How not to be fooled by viral charts Part 1: How to spot misinformation, mistakes, and meaningless data. (Noahpinion)
• The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists: Stanford’s president and a high-profile physicist are among those taken down by a growing wave of volunteers who expose faulty or fraudulent research papers. (Wall Street Journal)
• ‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world: When a microbe was found munching on a plastic bottle in a rubbish dump, it promised a recycling revolution. Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve our waste crisis. But will it work? (The Guardian)
• How Benjamin Netanyahu Pushed Israel Into Chaos: The nation’s current crisis can be traced back, in ways large and small, to the outsize personality of its longest-serving prime minister. (New York Times)
• The Movie Song Guru: In movies like ‘Once,’ ‘Sing Street,’ ‘Begin Again,’ and, most recently, Apple TV+’s ‘Flora and Son,’ director John Carney has again and again been able to foster the creation of fictional songs that are actually great, and that transcend the movies they were made for. (The Ringer)
• The stuffiest country club stories we’ve ever heard: Golf has made progress in loosening up, but at some clubs old habits persist. (Golf Digest)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Gary Cohn, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council from 2017-2018; he was President and Chief Operating Officer of The Goldman Sachs Group from 2006-2016. Currently, he is Vice Chairman of IBM.
New polling shows top issues for GOP voters are largely sociocultural rather than economic
Source: @cremieuxrecueil
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