Reading

Thinking material, saved for your enjoyment. Some items paywalled.

October 2026

• ‘Number Stations’ Send Messages to Spies. Hobbyists Can’t Stop Listening — Bloomberg.com ($)
  Governments continue broadcasting coded radio messages to field agents using decades-old number stations that hobbyists monitor without decoding them.
• How the AI boom could worsen the rich world’s fiscal crunch — The Economist
  AI-driven productivity gains could shrink labor tax revenues faster than they expand the overall economy, forcing governments to raise taxes on capital or consumption.

September 2026

• The Machine — break-down.org
  China's state blocked polysilicon producers from coordinating production cuts, insisting it alone control capacity reduction despite industry losses.
• The Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole Ever — Nautilus
  The Soviet Union's Kola Superdeep Borehole, drilled to 40,230 feet between 1970 and 1989, revealed the continental crust's actual composition rather than seismic predictions.
• Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh — NOEMA
  Widespread reliance on the same large language models across industries is eroding competitive differentiation and homogenizing knowledge work output.
• Rerun or sequel? Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on end times fascism — Financial Times ($)
  Klein and Taylor argue that contemporary fascism differs from its 1930s predecessor by incorporating nuclear weapons, climate catastrophe, and concentrated technological power into its apocalyptic ideology.
• The Mars Delusion — NOEMA
  Mars settlement advocates ignore the planet's radiation, isolation, and physiological hazards that would sicken and kill colonists.

August 2026

• Harry Potter and the risk of geopolitics — Financial Times ($)
  European banks' geopolitical stress tests assumed they could execute rescue actions during crises that historical evidence suggests rarely succeed.
• Nobody Knows What a Robot Is — thefai.org
  Ambiguous robot definitions in proposed U.S.
• Greenwich moon time? The high-stakes race to set lunar clocks — Financial Times ($)
  The International Bureau for Weights and Measures is preparing to standardize timekeeping on the Moon, where time passes 57 microseconds faster daily than on Earth.
• Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored — the Guardian
  Early computer scientists warned that automated systems could replace democratic deliberation with algorithmic prediction, but their warnings went unheeded.
• Life on the Uncanny Precipice — Naomi Saphra
  As AI becomes indistinguishable from human communication, the inability to verify intent erodes trust in all mediated encounters.
• This Is What It Feels Like to Live Through a Political Revolution — New York Times ($)
  Political theorist Ivan Krastev argues that contemporary politics resembles revolutionary upheaval without a shared vision of the future, leaving societies trapped between nostalgia and dystopian fear.
• Drones Are Reshaping the Soundscape of War — Bloomberg.com ($)
  Drone warfare is creating persistent acoustic stress for civilians in Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Sudan, altering sleep patterns and psychological responses to conflict.
• Freemasons seek a new generation of members — Financial Times ($)
  England's Freemasons, whose membership has fallen from 500,000 to 175,000, are attempting to reverse decline by recruiting members under 40 through transparency and university lodges.

July 2026

• How a Few Hundred Dollars Could Manipulate Election Prediction Markets — Bloomberg.com ($)
  A $44,000 bet on a minor California candidate briefly pushed his Polymarket odds to 96%, demonstrating how prediction markets can be manipulated with relatively small sums.
• The Rise of the “Scenario,” a Trendy Way of Forecasting our Dystopian Future — The New Yorker ($)
  Annie Jacobsen's "Biological War" uses speculative fiction grounded in real bioweapons research to imagine societal collapse from a engineered pathogen.
• AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making — hermit-tech
  An engineer with broad industry access reports zero successful AI implementations across 18 months of observed projects.
• Rules-based disorder: why prediction markets struggle if reality is contested — The Economist ($)
  Prediction markets struggle to settle bets when event outcomes are ambiguous, forcing platforms to make costly rulings that disadvantage ordinary users.
• Debt Is More Beautiful Than You Think — Bloomberg.com ($)
  Debt instruments achieve elegance through simplicity—bonds require less verification overhead than equity, making them structurally superior to more complex financial engineering.
• ‘This Is Not Financial Advice’ — NOEMA
  Social media financial influencers promote speculative OTC stocks with unsubstantiated claims, leaving retail traders with losses and little legal recourse.
• The Norwegian case for mediocracy — Financial Times
  Norway's wage-compression system and cultural acceptance of "good enough" produces lower inequality and less work-related stress than American meritocracy.
• The AI Doomsday Scenario Nobody Talks About — Bloomberg.com
  AI-driven job losses in high-wage sectors could erode income tax revenue faster than governments can adapt, risking fiscal and political instability.
• How AI Is Rewriting Human Nature — NOEMA
  AI-driven life extension coincides with collapsing birthrates in technology hubs worldwide, suggesting a shift away from biological reproduction.
• Jemima Kelly seeks peace at an alien sound bath — Financial Times ($)
  A California dome built by a UFO contactee in the 1950s now operates as a sound bath venue, capitalizing on claims of acoustic perfection and spiritual properties.
• Latent Space as a New Medium — KK
  Kevin Kelly argues that the compressed knowledge within AI models' latent spaces constitutes a new creative medium for artists and scientists.
• How a Gang of Thieves Pulled Off a Multimillion-Dollar Data Center Heist — New York Times ($)
  A 2007 data center theft targeting financial records involved impersonating police and stealing servers worth millions in hardware and incriminating data.
• The Age of Reading Is Over — The Atlantic ($)
  Americans' reading rates have fallen below 50 percent of adults, with preference shifting to short online content and simpler texts.