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:
• Who Pays the Cost When Americans Opt Out of Science?: Adam Frank thought science denial would hit a bottom once people experienced the direct consequences of being wrong. It turns out he was wrong. Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He’s since changed his mind. (Big Think)
• Imagine an Organism: Imagine a human infant. And imagine, further, part of its development. The organism gestates for some time, eventually developing a visual system, a hearing system, a phonatory system, and some means of locomotion, among other things. It enters the world mostly fully formed, though not fully grown, and reacts to it in ever-changing ways during its physical development. It starts sorting out the world right away, and within 10 months has created a rich knowledge base, building categories of two main kinds – verbal and visuo-spatial – which in time will give rise to more abstract concepts. In particular, the organism puts together linguistic meanings (for gestures, words, and phrases) on the verbal side, and spatial relations and object categories on the visuo-spatial side; in time, these two kinds of categories will combine into more general representations. David Lobina reviews Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence? — noting that radiologists are still around, despite Geoffrey Hinton predicting their demise in 2016. (Inference) see also What To Expect When You’re Expecting (A World of Multi-Agent Systems): How do we model the future of work? It takes an AI village. Researchers gave a set of AI agents a shared goal, memory files, individual virtual computers, and a group chat, email, and Google Docs — then watched. The result is the AI Village. How do we model the future of work? It takes an AI village. (Asterisk)
• App Life in China Notes on a Long-Delayed Return to China: It may be hard to make money in China in 2026, but it is very pleasant to spend it. A major element of involution is the brutal competition in every market that puts downward pressure on prices as consumers, spoiled for choice, demand higher and higher quality. Hotels, trains, flights, food, clothes, cars, phones, electronics, massages, mountaineering gear, Labubus: all are cheap compared to the United States. (ChinaFile)
• Einstein’s Miracle Year: Many attempts have been made to explain relativity to non-scientists, among them several by Einstein himself, beginning with Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916, first published in English in 1920). It is still in print today, though despite having had so many readers it has not succeeded in persuading the general public to abandon fundamental intuitions about space, time, mass, motion and gravity in favour of the deeply counterintuitive view of the physical world put forward by Einstein. Our minds and imaginations remain stubbornly Newtonian. Most of us find it hard to shake the instinctual belief that an apple falls to the ground because it is pulled there by the force of gravity, the same force that keeps the planets in their orbits. (London Review of Books)
• The Church of Raising Cane’s: The hottest restaurant chain in America is inspiring people to fly 16 hours to try it. I went to find out why—and I saw too much: Steffi Cao joins the Church of Raising Cane’s — a chain inspiring people to fly 16 hours for chicken fingers. “I went to find out why—and I saw too much.” The hottest restaurant chain in America is inspiring people to fly 16 hours to try it. I went to find out why—and I saw too much. (Slate)
• LIV Long and Prosper: Dispatches from the End of an Era: Loathe it or love it, LIV Golf was a gift from the content gods. Lives were changed, fortunes amassed, legacies elevated and reputations shattered. It all came to an unceremonious end on Sunday night in Indianapolis. Flash mobs and the Rhino Jive, NFTs and positive EBITDA — four and a half years of LIV Golf’s fever dream come to a close in Indianapolis. (Skratch)
• The Kill Switch for Harmful Genes: Saloni Dattani on why biomedical research has spent decades as a boot stamping on a biologist’s face — the boot labeled “medicinal chemistry” — and the new class of drugs that changes the equation. (Works in Progress) see also Every Disease Is a Policy Failure: Mathias Kirk Bonde on why doubling global life expectancy in a century fails to register. (Works in Progress)
• The most influential works of American culture: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the iPhone were the most cited omissions on The Post’s list. Carla Spartos on what readers said the Post’s list of 25 left out — one work per decade since the founding was never going to satisfy anyone, and monuments were the first complaint. (Washington Post)
• The Qataris Gave Trump an Airplane. He Crippled Their Country in Return. The tiny Gulf state is learning that the U.S. president doesn’t always keep his end of the deal. Shane Harris on the repurcussions. (The Atlantic)
• An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism: Is it the sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is it Wadsworth the butler who butles in Clue, is it Stephen King’s sewer clown in It? Or is this—seriously, this short, ridiculous cutscene from Red Alert 3—the defining performance of Tim Curry’s long career? (Vice)
Video of the day: Martin Scorsese Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films | GQ
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with David Booth, Founder, Chairman, and former CEO of Dimensional Funds Advisors. DFA just crossed $1 trillion dollars, and has become the largest active equity ETF manager. Booth’s new book is “Stay Calm: Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing and Life.”
The Market, Not The Fed, Now Sets Long Rates
Source: Apollo
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