The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• AI Chatbots Know More About You Than You Realise: A handful of casual questions is enough for a chatbot to assemble a strikingly detailed profile of the user. The language we use is full of signals we don’t know we’re sending; AI has learnt to read them. (Straits Times)
• ‘It Beats Pitchfork Rebellions and the Guillotine’: Why These Super-Rich Americans Are Asking For Higher Taxes: As far as political protest goes, this was among the most civilized I have ever witnessed. The organizers did not make any noise beyond the idling truck covered in changing digital billboards. There were no chants on the sidewalks, no signs to leave behind as litter. The workers at the estate of billionaire Jeff Bezos looked with curiosity that quickly gave way to indifference as the visitors’ vehicle flipped through a three-minute slide deck mocking the Amazon founder: “Congratulations! You won capitalism! Now pay your damn taxes. It beats pitchfork rebellions and the guillotine” — a very civilized class of protesters. (Time) see also What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat: For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters. (The Atlantic)
• The Man Who Invented the Future: The Widener family fortune was built on electricity — and on a founder who imagined the modern world before it arrived. Are we the conflicted heirs of the world according to Francis Bacon? (Hedgehog Review)
• The Great Ozempic Experiment: Online and in doctors’ offices, people are finding that GLP-1s may help with everything from arthritis to addiction to migraines.It’s a new era of D.I.Y. medicine. Now the health establishment needs to catch up. GLP-1s may help with everything from arthritis to addiction — and we’re all the test subjects. (New York Times)
• 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now: MIT Tech Review’s take on the ten AI trends, tools, and debates that actually matter heading into the rest of 2026. (MIT Technology Review see also The Warehouse, in Plain Sight: How the American warehouse — now being repurposed by DHS — became invisible infrastructure hiding in plain sight. That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture — of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly. (Places)
• AI, Iran and the Gulf 101: Deutsche Bank’s primer on how AI investment, Iran policy, and Gulf capital fit together. (Deutsche Bank)
• It’s Been Quite the Year for Victoria Beckham: The Spice Girl turned fashion designer clawed her way out of debt and posted record profits. Family troubles aren’t standing in the way of her success. (WSJ)
• OnlyFans Model, 20, Made $43 Million Last Year. To Her, It Doesn’t Conflict with Christian Values: ‘The Lord’s Very Forgiving’ (Exclusive) At just 20 years old, Sophie Rain is making a life-changing yearly income of over $43 million — and sees no contradiction with her faith. (People)
• The invention of the soul: Humans weren’t given souls by God or genes. We made them ourselves with language – turning sentience into something sacred (Aeon) see also You’ve lived this life before: The mystical insight came to Nietzsche like a lightning flash: time eternally recurs – and life must be lived accordingly (Aeon)
• Marilyn Monroe’s Nudes Made Her Notorious. “Surprisingly Good” Acting Made Her a Star. In an exclusive excerpt from their new book, The Marilyn Monroe Century: From Norma Jeane to Icon―A Story in Photographs, John Miller and Mark A. Fortin trace the icon’s meteoric rise from scandal to stardom. Plus, a selection of previously unpublished photographs by Bruno Bernard. (Vanuty Fair)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with David Gardner, cofounder of The Motley Fool in 1993 (with his brother Tom Gardner). Originally launched as a print investment newsletter based on the idea that ordinary investors could beat Wall St., it gained traction when promoted on America Online (AOL) in 1994; it soon became a major presence on AOL and then Fool.com. His latest book is “Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth.”
There’s never been an investment like the investment in railroads
Source: @paulg
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