Reading

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

August 2026

• How to become a wizard for the weekend — Financial Times ($)
  I don't have access to the article text needed to write an accurate description.
• This Is What It Feels Like to Live Through a Political Revolution — New York Times ($)
  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' daily reading rates have fallen from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023, with fewer than half of adults reporting any book reading in 2022.