Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes: NYT on Hany Farid losing confidence in unaided visual judgment as generative video improves. The implications for evidence, journalism, and trust are large. In the age of A.I., Hany Farid is struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides for itself. (New York Times)
• The Billion-Dollar Peptides Gold Rush: As black-market drugs go mainstream and legalization is within reach, entrepreneurs, investors and healthcare players are racing to cash in. (Bloomberg free)
• Copycats: How big a problem is plagiarism? Perhaps most complicated of all is the plagiarizing of ideas. On some rare occasions two people—one thinks here of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution—will come upon the same or a highly similar idea at roughly the same time. Others are only too pleased to take up the ideas of someone else and claim them as their own. (Commentary)
• Triple-Digit Club: A Wave of Stocks Have Seen Huge Gains in 2026: The AI infrastructure boom has driven huge rallies in many of these stocks. Morningstar on the surprisingly broad set of 100%+ YTD names in 2026. The market isn’t quite as narrow as the index would suggest. (Morningstar)
• Kremlin bots respond with disinfo after former U.S. national intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard publishes report on “biolabs” in Ukraine: The Russian bot network Matryoshka has devoted a series of fake videos and posts to the topic of “American biolabs” in Ukraine, AntiBot4Navalny, a project that analyzes disinformation campaigns. The Insider tracks the predictable Russian-bot amplification of Gabbard’s biolabs report. The operation is so routine it barely registers as news. (The Insider)
• The Apotheosis of Donald Trump: On the president’s 80th birthday, it became clear that he has entered his decline. It took 250 years and 45 presidents, but cage fighting has finally come to the White House. Donald Trump’s 80th birthday was in many ways the apotheosis of the Trump administration—the Ultimate Fighting Championship held a seven-fight card on the South Lawn of the White House, with the president and members of his family in attendance. The Atlantic uses the UFC card as the lens for the Trump-as-spectacle moment. The argument is sharper than the framing suggests. (The Atlantic) see also The Most Surprising Miscalculation of Trump’s Second Term: Politico Magazine on the structural miscalculation underneath the past 18 months: the assumption that nationalist policies are politically self-stabilizing. Brexit’s example keeps not being learned. (Politico)
• What lies behind the new boom in Colombian cocaine: FT on record Colombian coca production and the supply-chain mechanics underneath it. The demand side stays unspoken, as always. Leftwing rebels have been replaced by gangsters selling ever more drugs to Europe and Asia. (Financial Times).
• How the Right Captured State Power as a Weapon in Its Anti-Government Crusade: Republicans made state power a core part of conservative ideology. Democrats can take it back. TPM on the contradiction at the heart of the modern right: capture the state to dismantle it. Long read, well-argued. (Talking Points Memo)
• Apocalypse Early Warning System: In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse. Kyle McDonald’s running tracker of civilizational risk indicators — climate, financial stress, geopolitical tail risks — in one place. Bracing and useful. (Apocalypse Early Warning System)
• 7 unexpected takeaways from the newest research on cannabis and brain effects: Whether it’s used in adolescence, midlife or older age may make a big difference. WaPo’s run-through of the most recent cannabis neuroscience. Some genuine surprises; most of them not great for heavy users. (Washington Post)
Video of the day: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Network of Power
Be sure to check out our Master’s in Business this week with Seth Klarman, CEO and portfolio manager of The Baupost Group. Founded in 1982 with $27 million in seed capital, over the past four decades, Baupost has grown to $22 billion, with annual net returns of over 20%. The legendary investor is known for his patient, risk-averse, and contrarian approach to finding deeply discounted securities across equities, distressed debt, and real estate. He is the author of Margin of Safety (1991) and the editor of the 7th edition of Security Analysis (2023).
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
