My day of remembrance for those who have been lost reads:
• Memorial Day. Eric Paliwoda was a big dude. Probably six-foot-six. Those big, meaty hands that would swallow your own in a tight handshake. His jaw stuck out, exaggerated by a lip full of dip. He was raised in Connecticut, but seemingly emerged from a Nebraska cornfield, ready for war.A short, ten-year-old Memorial Day piece worth pulling up again for the weekend. Quiet, well-said, no flag-waving. (STSW)
• The Legend of Chief Shannon Kent: On the late Navy cryptologist and Senior Chief — a profile of a remarkable career and the quiet community that knew her. Memorial-weekend reading. (Coffee or Die) see also Fullbore Friday: The secrets we keep. Every Naval officer should know his name, but few do. He was born in 1925, and he is still with us. What a story. Imagine you are just your standard-issue U.S. Navy fleet Lieutenant in your late 20s. You missed the big war, but you are ear deep in the next one, the Korean War. You know, on paper at least, you are flying a plane outclassed by your opponent. Doesn’t matter. Then one day you find yourself facing not just a better aircraft—but outnumbered by them. To make it even worse, you find out after the merge that you are not facing the JV team, but the varsity. (CDR Salamander)
• A Suicide. He’d been on five or six deployments, defusing bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the previous decade-plus, and was a few years away from retirement. He knew his trade and trained his soldiers hard for our upcoming deployment, which would include missions of varying lengths in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. But he was also loud and gregarious and flirtatious, and the special waggishness that comes from a youth spent in combat could be mistaken for frivolity. A Memorial Day weekend essay on veteran suicide that does the rare thing of being specific instead of statistical. Hard to read; worth reading. (Colossus)
• Marine who crawled under bridge to plant explosives approved for Medal of Honor: Marine Capt. John Ripley hung demolition charges beneath a key bridge, swinging hand-over-hand for three hours while under fire. Task & Purpose on the Medal of Honor for the 1972 Đông Hà bridge demolition. The story has been told for fifty years; the medal took as long. (Task and Purpose)
• Chasing the Man Who Stole the Gods: How investigators tracked down a former child soldier whose thefts drove a global art conspiracy. (Businessweek)
• Experience: we found a baby on the subway — now he’s our 26-year-old son: A short first-person Guardian piece that has no business being as moving as it is. Read it in two minutes and feel slightly better about people. (The Guardian)
• They knew they were dying soon, so they threw a party: Living funerals — where people near the end of life plan and attend their own memorials — are becoming increasingly popular. A WaPo feature on the rise of “living funerals” — people with terminal diagnoses gathering loved ones while they can still enjoy it. Gentle, surprisingly upbeat, and worth the read. (Washington Post)
• We need better stories about the future.: Mayer argues the doom-loop dominating tech discourse is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagination is a strategic resource we keep underinvesting in. (Ashley Mayer)
• Inside Israel’s High-Tech Campaign to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker: A WSJ deep-dive on the intelligence and targeting infrastructure Israel has built to systematically pursue every individual identified from October 7. Disturbing in its precision regardless of where you sit on the conflict. One by one, militants who videotaped their exploits that day have been identified and killed, in a measure of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution (Wall Street Journal) see also The Challenge for American Jews: The Atlantic on the political and identity crosswinds American Jews are navigating right now — Israel, the Trump-era right, and a left that has moved on key questions. A thoughtful piece even if you disagree with the framing. Progressive alliances are weakening, political identities are shifting, and emotional ties to Israel are being strained. What now? (The Atlantic)
• Miles Davis: A Visual Dictionary: Fast cars, huge shades and, surprisingly, any old trumpet: These are the things that made Miles Miles. Miles Davis, the jazz legend and style innovator who would have turned 100 this month, remains for many people the pre-eminent avatar of cool. And while Davis’s greatest legacy is musical, he also cut a distinctive image over the course of his five-decade career. (Davis died of pneumonia in 1991, at 65.) His style shifted alongside his sound, but he had his touchstones — face-obscuring sunglasses and ticket-magnet sports cars among them. (New York Times)
Video of the day: World War II told in 20 Episodes with Tom Hanks
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.
The great digital media valuation collapse
Source: Axios
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