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2026-06-19
AI and hiring
Agents changed everything about hiring except the outcome
Well, hiring was probably broken, but AI didn’t change the outcome.
Instead, it made it into an arms race where candidates are sold AI tools that help them apply to companies and roles en masse in an automated way. On the other side, recruiters who have increasingly gotten tired of the same AI-generated answers, resumes, and artefacts that have been generated by AI have resorted to deploying AI systems to filter out candidates and get what they are looking for. And AI companies sit on both sides of the transaction, billing tokens while hiring outcomes come back to exactly where they were.
The tragedy is that AI companies profit from both sides of the world they’ve created. On one hand, they’ll charge people to create huge volumes of cheap, low-quality content, and then they’ll charge humans to protect them from it.
Different framing on mental illness
We call it "mental illness." We could call it "a brain doing its best in an environment it wasn't designed for." The second framing isn't a kind lie - It's simply more accurate. And it gestures toward completely different interventions.
The whole thread is worth reading.
I found this amazing report on the role of Evolutionary Psychiatry approaches: Before Evolution: The State of Mental Health
This report examines the state of mental health research, treatment, and policy across eleven sections. Its central argument is that dominant paradigms — including neuroscience, genetics, and pharmacology — have not, despite enormous investment, delivered the breakthroughs that were expected; and that evolutionary biology offers a powerful complementary framework that has been largely absent from mental health science, education, and clinical practice worldwide. Evolutionary thinking does not replace existing approaches — it provides the explanatory context within which their findings make sense, and points towards new directions for research into prevention and treatment that could be applicable across cultures and healthcare systems. Evolutionary theory has revolutionised our understanding of biology over the last century. It could do the same for the understanding and treatment of mental health.
Dutton Ranch Wisdom
Today's wisdom from Dutton Ranch S01E07
No Other Choice
I am only a third through the movie, but this review was hilarious and relatable at the same time.
2026-06-18
Kombucha is the next tequila
If Kombucha’s the New Tequila, What’s Next for Alcohol Brands?
Logged only for the headline because Kombucha being the next Tequila is the trend I am here for.
2026-06-17
AI reliability
AI Builds Some Pyramids - Bloomberg
Nice quote from Matt Levine's latest.
It’s a fascinating recursive vulnerability: Modern AI relies on trusted human sources to understand the world, but humans increasingly rely on AI to understand the world. If the trusted human sources take whatever AI says at face value, then whatever AI says will just become fact. Who can dispute what both Claude and KPMG say is true?
Samurai culture and death
How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day
The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life.
When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak?
When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak?
The historian Dylan Gottlieb, in his new book, “Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York” (Harvard University Press), considers his subject with an eye to this interior view. Gottlieb is no yuppie apologist, but he offers a portrait of yuppie motivations with more nuance than simple consumerism. He does so by focussing on the thing that defined yuppies more deeply than their fondness for Chardonnay or sushi: their work.
Career, for Gottlieb’s yuppies, was a life style: the ethos of hard work and competition which defined their lives on the job pervaded their leisure hours as well. Long-distance running was the most blatant case in point—a punishing feat of endurance that held out the promise of quantified individual success. Marathon-training regimens were the subject of office bonding; lunch-hour jogs supplanted a previous generation’s golf and Martinis as occasions for networking. But even pursuits that might appear more obviously indulgent—dining, say—attained gruelling rigor in yuppie hands. Eschewing rote fine dining, Gottlieb writes, the yuppie “accrued more status by consuming omnivorously” (and thus dim sum earns Tess credibility with Katharine). The Zagat restaurant guide began as the hobby of a husband-and-wife pair who’d met at Yale Law, and soon became a popular business gift—one that, in Gottlieb’s telling, affirmed giver and receiver alike as “knowing members of the meritocratic elite.”
The way people feel about work is a phenomenon larger than any one job, and it involves a sprawling world of relationships. In Hochschild’s research, which she wrote up in her 1997 book, “The Time Bind,” she notices something unexpected. People told her that they wanted more time with their families, and Amerco offered policies that were, on paper, generous. Yet few took advantage of them, and, in fact, many Amerco workers seemed to gravitate toward shouldering ever more work. Sometimes this was the result of unspoken norms that official company policies had failed to counteract: an H.R. department talking up flextime didn’t suddenly dissipate the arms-race pressure ambitious employees felt to prove their dedication through long hours. Sometimes it was a response to their families’ material needs. In either case, work had come to look like a problem and a solution simultaneously. Work was a place to see friends, to accomplish tasks, to receive recognition; it was a place that promised a sense of control, which was particularly seductive because control was so frequently lacking at home. “People wonder: Where do we feel the safest?” Hochschild writes. “Even among those with lousy jobs, the answer is sometimes ‘at work.’ ”
This sense of control is the crux of Jodi Kantor’s ode to jobs. “For many of us, work is the route to satisfaction over which we often have the most agency,” she writes. “In a healthy work setting the rules of the game have clarity: if we are hard-working, strategic, skilled, and collegial, we maximize our results.” But “many of us” and “often” are hedges that are (as they say) doing a lot of work. The workplace’s sense of control can prove illusory—as it did in the era of yuppie-wrought corporate consolidation, and as it does now for graduates entering an economy destabilized by new uncertainties.
New Yorker profile of Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age
You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.
None of this would have surprised a previous generation of German thinkers—the group known as the Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School. The institute emerged in the nineteen-twenties, went into exile during the Nazi period, and returned to Germany after the war. Its leading figures, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, saw capitalist society not as the antithesis of totalitarianism but as its more affable, aw-shucks twin. Citizens become commodities; technology increases the power of an already powerful few; pop culture serves up mechanized slop; truth and lies commingle. Their default mode was apocalyptic: “The fully enlightened Earth glows under the sign of triumphant disaster.” Now, with gig workers frantically self-branding, tech barons amassing unthinkable wealth, algorithms dictating consumption, A.I. infecting reality, and Earth itself turning feverish, Horkheimer and Adorno’s worst-case scenarios begin to seem overly optimistic.
At the heart of Habermas’s omnivorous, at times contradictory, body of work is an idea as simple as it is profound: in adopting the perspectives of others, we learn to become ourselves.
Adorno assails the last topic [domination of culture] in a chapter titled “Culture Industry,” which has few rivals in the annals of élite dyspepsia. “All mass culture under monopoly is identical,” he notes. Consumers have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” He is arguing with the absent Benjamin, who saw liberatory potential in Charlie Chaplin movies. Until recently, Adorno seemed to have lost the debate. Generations of readers rejected his snobbery, his prejudice, his tendency to write sentences such as “The same babies grin endlessly from magazines, the jazz machine endlessly pounds.” But the underlying ideas sting harder now. Adorno sees mass culture as a pivotal component of the capitalist scheme to mollify the populace with calculated compensations. It claims to be serving the public while inventing needs that the public had been happy to live without. The façade is democratic—Hollywood stars are just like us!—yet the structure is authoritarian, training us to bow down before celebrity gods. The birth of a fascist President out of the spirit of reality television could be seen as a Q.E.D. for Adorno’s thesis.
The question, of course, is what we are supposed to do with these bourgeois jeremiads against bourgeois civilization, beyond enjoying them as high-end primal-scream therapy. Members of the Frankfurt School were prey to what Habermas’s colleague Karl-Otto Apel called the “performative contradiction”: if you have used the tools of reason to dismantle reason, your own work might be compromised in turn. The Marxist theorist Georg Lukács complained that Adorno and company had taken up residence in what he called the Grand Hotel Abyss—“a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.” Habermas wished, in a sense, to vacate the hotel and traverse the abyss outside.
Adam Tooze on Tempelhofer
Transcript: Ones and Tooze - Live From Berlin | Transcript Reader
This podcast which was filmed live in Berlin is one of my favorite Ones and Tooze episodes. I have been a long time Tooze Boy, and this is him at his electric best.
His co-host Cameron Abadi introduces Tempelhofer Feld
So I wanna shift to talking about Berlin specifically, and I have another data point there. And it is 950, as in 950 acres, which is, the size of Tempelhofer Feld, which makes it one of the largest inner city public open spaces in the world. And for our listeners who are not here in Berlin, I will briefly describe what Tempelhofer Feld is. Tempelhofer Feld is the space of the former Tempelhof Airport, which is the 1st airport in Berlin. It is now in the very center of Berlin as the city grew up around it.
Here are some excerpts from Adam's response
And if you flew from city of London, it's not small, it had a short runway. And you came in, people will have seen the footage in the post war period. You come in over the rooftops of Berlin. I think it's in Wings of Desire. Think it's in Vemde's as an aerial sequence, which I think may have been taken from around there. But yeah, I mean, I guess the next time we're all there, we should think about the gateway to Germania that we're actually rollerblading in today.
And it's the general who performed that extraordinary feat who, in the summer of '48 — when the Soviets blockade Berlin in retaliation for the decision by the British and Americans to introduce the Deutsche Mark, the unifying currency of the Western zones — is put in charge of the airlift to West Berlin.
And it's a really daunting proposition, because there are about 2,300,000 civilians plus military in Berlin at the time. They reckon they don't need 300 tons like in Stalingrad, but they need 4,500 tons a day to sustain Berlin. The average transport aircraft at the time can fly 5 to 10 tons. So that's 450 flights with the heaviest aircraft in existence at the time, a day, into Berlin — into an airport which at its peak before the war, when it was the busiest airport in the world, had had 90 flights a day into Tempelhof. So this is literally the largest aerial operation ever mounted.
And they peak at being able to deliver 12,000 tons a day on this airlift. So what that means — I did the math in the green room earlier — is that they were basically landing an aircraft every minute, 12 hours a day, for 15 months. Every minute there's an aircraft landing. So then when you imagine that in the air, this is the origin of modern air traffic control.
Managing this was the largest air traffic control feat ever pulled off. They built radar stations, they brought in massive electronic infrastructure, guidance beams — all the stuff they'd used to bomb Berlin, they were now using to actually direct the traffic in. There's this amazing advertising from one of the American bombing companies which shows them bombing German children with milk after '45, rather than with high explosives and incendiaries. And basically they stack, at any given moment, about 35 airplanes in the air en route from the British bases up by Hamburg and the American bases by Frankfurt, heading towards Berlin on an absolute conveyor belt. They land, they basically have to discharge them — it's like Ryanair. They discharge them within 45 minutes — they can do it in 45 to 50 minutes — turn the aircraft around and fly it back. And in the end they deliver 2,200,000 tons of cargo. Two thirds of that is American, the other third is British.
The British literally convert wartime bombers to do this. And the freakiest thing about it — the most mind-boggling thing about it — is that two thirds of what they're shipping is coal. It's coal. So this is like the most expensive coal in the history of the world. Why are they shipping in coal? Because it's Berlin, for heaven's sake, and you're heading into the winter, and you know what this place is like from about October — and the electricity system, which is half damaged, is running on this as well. So two thirds of these heavy loads are coal, with a little bit of milk powder added, basically to keep everyone alive.
And the British repurpose flying boats to land not at Tempelhof but on some of the waterways. Why flying boats? Because they're designed to withstand saline water, and one of the things you need to ship into a beleaguered city is salt. So they literally fill North Atlantic U-boat patrol flying boats with salt and fly them in. It's a mad, bonkers thing. It's an extraordinary thing.
It would make a great game — somebody, some video game designer out there. The distance they flew would have gotten you from the Earth to the Sun. Just linger over that for a second. In propeller airplanes, in propeller airplanes in relay, they flew from the Earth to the Sun in 18 months. I mean, can we even get there with a rocket in that kind of time? It's extraordinary. It's truly mind-boggling.
2026-06-14
Alice and Steve
I am watching S01E04 of Alice and Steve, and it is kinda okay. But this was an interesting wisdom drop. #relationships
Linen
All linen is the same right? Then how can two linen products be priced so differently...? #clothing
This is such a great breakdown of what linen is and how the different quality linen products line up and what makes them different from each other. This is actually useful to me as I seriously consider buying some linen stuff.
Full transcript of the YouTube short below.
This shirt costs $30. This one costs $350. These sheets $90. And these are over 700. All four labels say the exact same thing, 100% linen, the same plant. So what are you actually paying for? This is episode 58 of Chasing Beauty. And today we're looking at the misleading labeling of linen.
The thing is, all linen comes from one plant, flax, which sounds like it should make linen simple. But it's the opposite. Because if every label says 100% linen, the entire difference lies in what the label doesn't tell you.
Let's start inside the stalk. A flax stem contains two kinds of fibers. Line fibers, long continuous strands that run the entire length of the flax plant up to almost a meter. And tow, the short broken scraps left over from processing. Long fibers mean fewer ends sticking out of the yarn. Fewer ends means less friction on your skin, less shedding, and less of that haystack scratchy feeling that people blame on the linen itself. That $30 shirt usually tow or worse cottonized flax deliberately chopped short to run on cheap cotton machinery. Linen demoted to imitate cotton.
But linen has a second secret where it grew. About 75 to 80% of the world's quality flax comes from one narrow coastal strip. It runs through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The flax belt. The climate there does something almost no other region can. It's called retting. The stalks are left lying in the field. An alternating rain and sun lets natural microbes slowly dissolve the glue binding the fiber to the stem. Weeks of patience, zero chemicals, and the long fibers come out intact and soft. Cheap flax gets the faster version. Chemical or hot water retting that's harsher on the fiber.
Then there's the spin. Premium yarn is wet spun. Fibers pass through hot water right before twisting. So the mill can spin them fine, smooth, and strong. That's shirting grade linen.
Now what about sheets? Here linen has a genuine superpower. Flax fiber is hollow and absorbent. It can take on a serious amount of moisture and release it fast. Linen adapts with the season. It's the anti-polyester. For sheets, quality has a key number. GSM, g per square meter. The sweet spot is roughly 170 to 230 gsm. Below that, the sheet can get flimsy. It will thin out at the center and tear at the seams. Trust me, this has happened to me so many times.
And what you need to watch out for is the industry's favorite scam, instant softness. Real linen comes off the loom crisp. Factories know you don't want to wait, so they bathe the fabric in cellulase enzymes, catalysts that literally eat the surface of the fiber to soften it. It ends up coming out buttery on day one. This can be called stonewashing or biopolishing. What it actually is is pre-aging your sheets. You're paying full price for fabric that has already spent half of its useful life.
So, how do you shop when the label refuses to help? GSM and pedigree. The sheets should feel substantial. Linen softness is supposed to be earned. Good linen starts crisp and gets better with every single wash for years. Brands that care will tell you where they got their linen and what the GSM is. And if those details are missing, that's your answer.
Henry David Thoreau Documentary
I saw this quote at the beginning of a 3-part documentary series on Henry David Thoreau that is highly recommended by The Economist.
First thought went to LLMs for some reason 🤷🏽♂️.
Henry David Thoreau (TV Mini Series 2026) ⭐ 7.9 #movies
2026-06-13
Boast of Quietness by Jose Luis Borges
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigous than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensible, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away,
he doesn’t expect to arrive.
I was at a book launch event for Kiran Desai's latest book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny in German translation. In a wide ranging conversation she referenced a poem by Borges and I had to look it up.
2026-06-11
India's Mango Exports
The Ken has a nice little podcast breaking down India's mango export market.
Full Transcript: Daybreak - India's mango paradox | Transcript Reader
India produces nearly half of the world's mangoes over 24m metric tons a year. But it exports only around 30,000 tons of fresh fruit. Of every thousand mangoes, basically, that are grown in this country, roughly 1 or 2 leave it as fresh fruit. To be fair, India does export significant volumes of mango pulp. But pulp is not what commands £19 to £20 a box in London.
The fresh market is where the ambition lies, and that is precisely where India keeps losing ground. So why does a country that grows half of the world's mangoes keeps getting shut out of market after market?
Mubi Podcast about Bend It Like Beckham
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM — Gurinder Chadha shoots and scores - MUBI Podcast
This podcast was a throwback to a very different time. But I also learned some new interesting things about how music was such a big part of the movie and how Bally Sagoo made tracks for the movie. The bit in the podcast tracing Bally Sagoo's musical history was nice.
NEETs in UK
No job, no future? Inside Britain’s new ‘Bedroom Generation’
Dave is far from the only one stuck in this cycle. It is no secret that the job market is in a dire state. Rising employment costs, the advent of AI, and ghost jobs have created a perfect storm of employment scarcity, which young people who are attempting to enter the workforce for the first time are bearing the brunt of. According to a recent government report by Alan Milburn, approximately one million young people across the UK are not in employment, education or training – ‘NEETS’. The number of NEETS is the highest it’s been in 12 years: the Milburn report refers to the situation as a “moral crisis” and paints a bleak picture of a lost, “bedroom generation”. It’s a story, Milburn writes, “that should disturb anyone who cares about the future of young people in this country”.
2026-06-09
Indian Uncles
accurate tbh
LET ME TELL you how to identify an Indian uncle. A dead giveaway is the phrase “let me tell you”. It is inevitably followed by a thesis on what really ails the country. Another hallmark is unsolicited advice, veering from career counselling (“only girls study literature”) to dietary prescriptions (“eat five soaked almonds to build immunity”). But the defining feature of the Indian uncle is his bottomless disdain for the youth of today: feckless phone-addled softies, the lot of them. They need discipline.
The uncle reigns supreme across India’s divides of religion, caste and language. He earns his radioactive confidence through the simple act of reaching middle age, thereupon instantly gaining omniscience. But despite proselytising the Way of the Uncle on WhatsApp, his authority extends only to his own circle. The uncles who run India, however, know no such boundaries. They inflict their fossilised notions upon the nation. India is a republic of the uncles, by the uncles, for the uncles.
The Indian uncle’s toolkit for dealing with criticism is limited. At home it starts and ends with “Don’t talk back okay!”
Influencers vs Evidence-based medicine
Part 1: Influencers v evidence-based medicine (part one)
Part 2: Influencers v evidence-based medicine (part two)
Very informative two-part podcast which might help you discern when to listen to health influencers. I learnt a lot about how this influencer and treatment/drug marketing works behind the scenes.
For e.g. this bit about the usefulness of various measuring devices and trackers
Assumption in healthcare, the more data we collect, the better. Yeah, that’s a much better way of thinking about my question. Condense up for you. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes it is. It’s on very much a case by case basis.
The evidence seems to suggest in terms of the footstep count and everything else, there’s a period where it’s effective and then there’s a novelty effect. And what systematic reviews have found is they don’t tend to lead to much health gain in the long run.
She knows, she’s like, why can’t I just go out and enjoy the beautiful Scottish countryside and I turn it into a festival of data misery instead with all my apps and wires and everything else.
And there can be benefits there and there can be communities, but it depends what your end goal is. But does it make you fitter? No, not necessarily.
But the problem is, is this idea of generalizability. So a lot of the studies are done on athletes where they are shaving a second off. An event means the difference between winning gold and silver. That ain’t me that’s like chugging along on a treadmill in a gym.
specifically continuous glucose monitoring
So one example is continuous glucose monitoring.
So, your body has homeostatic mechanisms. If you eat bar of chocolate, your glucose goes up and guess what? It should come back down again. If it doesn’t come back down again, then you might start thinking, do I have diabetes? Yeah.
And these devices are used for people with type 1, type 2 diabetes in particular that use insulin to monitor their condition to help them adjust their.
This is life or death.
The evidence currently would say no, we don’t know whether it makes any difference in the short or long term and the reason why you monitor your insulin or your glucose if you’ve got type 1 diabetes, the immediate effects of the ketoacidotic coma or hypoglycemia, but longer term it’s the impact on your blood vessels.
And some practical advice at the end of the first podcast.
Alok Jha [00:32:24] That’s perfectly preempted my last question, which is going to be, none of these technologies are going away. What practical advice can you give to people about how to sort of harness all of this in a constructive and informed way? Because there is something good in there, it’s just how do you find it?
Deborah Cohen [00:32:39] I think we’re learning. I think were at the foothills. So two things really, if you’re on social media is, first of all, why is this person telling me this? What is the incentive? It might be perfectly well-meaning, but how are they making the money? What’s the incentives behind them being there? And it’s just being a bit healthily sceptical. If they’re only telling me about the benefits and not telling me the harms, are they telling me their full story? If it’s a personal experience, are there other sources of information I can go to that provide more of a evidence-based look at this particular condition or treatment. You might get your preliminary sort of warmth and relationships and everything else from social media, but there are other sources. Just cross-check. And what are the conflicts of interest? And then if you’re using a wearable, why am I measuring this metric? Will altering this metric do anything good for me in the short term or even the long term? So if you’re radically change in your diet, like with the glucose example and introducing loads of burgers rather than bananas, you might think, well, further down the line, that might not be a good thing. And that’s why I wrote the book. I was trying to show people how doctors think when they’re in a healthcare setting and the questions they ask and the question they want to know when they are diagnosing or they’re interpreting tests or they are looking at the benefits and harms of treatment.
Alice and Steve
Founds this lovely British comedy on Hulu: Alice and Steve (TV Series 2026– ) ⭐ 6.3 | Comedy, Drama, Romance
A two and-a-half decades long friendship between Alice and Steve becomes strained when Steve starts dating Alice's daughter.
The effect of environment on classifying mental health "disorders"
We pathologise the kid who won't sit still, the adult who can't focus, the teenager who sleeps wrong, the griever who grieves too long, the worker who burns out. At some point the sheer number of "disorders" should make you suspect often the problem is the yardstick, or the environment , not the people.
2026-06-08
Spatial Homogenisation and Coffee Shops
Welcome to the Pinterest Ghetto
Came across this nice reel on Insta, which gave me a nice term to describe something I have always observed - "spatial homogenisation". This reel talks about it in the context of Indian coffee shops, but tbh this is true for coffee shops across the whole world.
Welcome to the Pinterest Ghetto.
Step into any specialty café from Bangalore to Bandra, shut your eyes, and try to guess what city you are in. Chances are, you can’t.
Exposed brick, industrial black metal, a lone monstera plant, and hanging Edison bulbs. It’s an identical aesthetic template that has quietly colonized our urban spaces.
In design theory, this is called spatial homogenisation. Somewhere along the line, the Indian middle class was taught that to look “sophisticated,” our spaces must mimic a gentrified warehouse in Brooklyn.
By letting global algorithms dictate our surroundings, we are substituting genuine, climate-responsive architectural restraint with theatrical props built purely for an Instagram grid.
Our public spaces are where urban culture is performed. If the stage looks identical everywhere on earth, our culture starts to feel identical, too.
It’s time to look past the feed and look again.
Here is the substack post on the same topic from the author: Lesson 1.1: The Pinterest Ghetto and the Loss of Vernacular Space
I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder
I Want You to Be Happy: The Sally Rooney-approved book of the summer
In the 18th century, great novels followed certain tropes. The love stories were grand and convoluted, often tragic but nearly always neatly resolved by the end. These were books about relationships which took place in grand country houses, in which communication was careful and often declared on some type of bucolic pastoral background. Marriage and babies inevitably followed. But that was then, and this is now. In 2026, nobody kisses hands over white silk gloves and promises their estate to their one true love. In 2026, we have something much worse: the situationship.
Jem Calder’s new novel, the aptly-titled I Want You To Be Happy, follows its two protagonists Chuck and Joey over the course of an (arguably) always doomed, always poorly defined relationship. It begins inauspiciously. Chuck, a 35-year-old copywriter who dreams of writing the next great novel, has just broken off an engagement with his long-term partner when he gets drunk in a bar and chats up Joey, a 23-year-old barista and sometime poet with crippling impostor syndrome. They find kinship in the threadbare nature of their lives in London; their unfulfilling jobs, the loneliness and atomisation of trying to build a life in a city that seems, by its very existence, ambiently determined to make you broke and unhappy. But this is not, let’s be clear, a love story.
“… I think older people think that people are pursuing these kinds of relationships for the sake of it, because there’s a freedom to it, but ultimately it just ends up being the hedonistic treadmill of the dating app, and another way to make you feel completely replaceable and cog-like in this very impersonal feeling city.”
But Calder, 34, does not want his novel to be read as ‘relationship negative or pessimistic’. “I think people can have meaningful encounters with other people that can be sustaining and creatively generative, and formative in terms of identity, but at the same time there’s a bitter irony as the novel goes on that this relationship just means fundamentally different things to these people.”
I Want You To Be Happy ends on an open, unfinished note. It invites the reader to imagine the possibilities for Chuck, for Joey, for every corporate drone millennial in London. It confronts us with the cold hard facts: that our capacity to imagine a world better than situationships, flat-shares, overdrafts and horrendous WhatsApp chat is up to us. Good luck.
you might be into what you say you don’t want
I’ve always thought there’s something very powerful about Carolyn Elliott’s framework of Existential Kink. Sasha has a great post about it, but I’ll roughly summarize it as integrating your shadow (in the Jungian sense) by accepting that you might be into what you say you don’t want. Like, let’s say you complain all the time about your terrible job, but you’ve refused to quit over a period of years. You might actually achieve integration by realizing that you actually, in her language, get off on hating your job. In other words, you have what you want.
The Jevons Misunderstanding
The Jevons Misunderstanding #ai #software
The Jevons Misunderstanding assumes the old production system continues to scale when demand expands as a result of the new technology.
That was more plausible in earlier industrial cases where efficiency made the existing resource economy larger.
AI is different because it can re-architect the production system itself. It:
Separates the worker from the customer,
Turns the augmented worker’s continued expertise into raw material for training,
Codifies craft by progressively unbundling previously tacit knowledge into components that can be absorbed by the tool.
Expansion no longer has to pass through the old labor bundle. It can bypass it - meaning the worker stays employed but at progressively lower wages in worse conditions, not seeing the benefits of the market expansion.
That is what the Jevons debate misses. The issue is not whether AI expands demand. It often will. The issue is whether workers sit above the algorithm, using AI as leverage, or below the algorithm, feeding the system that captures the value.
2026-05-29
Lower Value Human Capital
Standard Chartered to replace “lower-value human capital,” cutting jobs “in favor of the machines”
Just logging this for the sheer brazenness of somebody using the word "lower value human capital" in a sentence.
The Vibecession
Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not?
Some insights from Kyla Scanlon's latest
People are living in fear of the economy.
The vibecession, the marked disconnect between economic data and consumer sentiment, is back in the discourse again, with terrific new research from Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus pointing to enormous price level variability as a driver of negative sentiment and Annie Lowrey at the Atlantic advocating for erasing the term entirely and replacing it with the term “permacession.”
I read the 600+ comments on her piece — all of them, plus many on r/Economics. Most relitigated what she’d already granted and what many people grant when the vibecession comes around: that housing and healthcare and groceries are brutal. But the ones who actually engaged her question — why the vibecession exists — kept talking about the concept of economic security, which appears to be defined as a:
- Bounded downside: an illness or layoff can’t erase everything you’ve built
- Predictable floor: you can count on and plan around where you are
- Reward for work: A perceived link between effort and outcome still holding
- Anticipated progress: And a believable path to the next thing: the job, the house, the kid.
The vibecession is complicated, but there seems to have been a structural break in sentiment in 2022, I think largely driven by structural gaps in how people feel connected to their economic reality. Economic data captures a moment, but I think sentiment is capturing people’s concern about their economic future. People can’t save, so of course, they aren’t going to think to positively about the future they can’t save for.
AI and other people
I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.
Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people. Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you're stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal. Remember: hell is other people, so while your friends unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform (this is bad for you, but good for Zuck), they also refuse to organize their social media lives to "maximize your engagement" and thus the number of ads you see (which is bad for Zuck). By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socializing:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever
Billionaires are betting that bosses (and other would-be billionaires) will spend trillions buying AI products, captured by the fantasy of a workplace without workers. They think AI could be the remedy for the ancient, nameless dread that bosses experience every time they contemplate the fact that if they don't show up for work, everything hums along fine; whereas if the workers don't show up, the whole enterprise collapses. Secretly, bosses are haunted by the fear that they're not driving the car, they're strapped into the back seat, amusing themselves with a toy steering-wheel:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
Four Seasons
The Four Seasons (TV Series 2025–2026) ⭐ 7.2 | Comedy, Romance #tv
I like this show, but as an Andor superfan this was a bit triggering 😀!
and this
2026-05-26
Buddhist Nationalism
How is Buddhist nationalism transforming Asia? In conversation with Sonia Faleiro by Reading Our Times #religion #culture #politics
Listened to this on a commute and learned a lot about the politics of Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand.
Buddhism is often seen in the West as a religion of peace and serenity - rarely, if ever, associated with violence. But that comforting image has obscured a darker and more complex reality playing out across Southeast Asia.
> Journalist and author Sonia Faleiro joins Nick Spencer to explore her latest book The Robe and the Sword, which examines how Buddhist nationalism has fuelled ethnic tension, discrimination, and outright genocide in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. From the militant monks who emerged out of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war, to the Facebook-driven hatred that preceded the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the patterns Faleiro uncovers are uncomfortably familiar to anyone watching the rise of religious nationalism elsewhere in the world.
You can buy Sonia's book, _The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhism is Shaping Modern Asia, here: https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-robe-and-the-sword
Dutton Ranch
Dutton Ranch (TV Series 2026– ) ⭐ 8.5 | Drama, Western #tv
By the time I had got on the Yellowstone train, it was too late. The show was too many seasons in and I had no patience to catch up.
Which is why I intend to catch the Dutton Ranch train early. This show is pure entertainment.
2026-05-25
The Job Search has become a humiliation ritual
The Job Search has become a humiliation ritual
AI tools appear to be on the rise on both sides of the job search, creating uncanny automations like getting a rejection email message 40 seconds after submitting a labor-intensive application. It has grown easier than ever for a person to apply, in a desultory, semi-automated way, to a job, whether by having Claude write their cover letters or hitting EasyApply on LinkedIn, which means that within 24 hours any job posting online might already have 100 applicants. LinkedIn reports applications went up 45 percent annually, averaging 11,000 a minute. Employers, overwhelmed, returned fire with their own automations. The result: a maelstrom of AI-powered résumé screening, chatbots for early interviews, gamified skills tests, and unconventional-to-jarring behavioral interview modes that are trying to control for the likelihood that a candidate is typing prompts into Claude or ChatGPT to cheat through the interview.
Many of the people I spoke to about their job searches are office workers and would be considered part of or on track for the PMC, or professional-managerial class. Their jobs have historically been often better-paid and relatively shielded from poor working conditions. But now, the promise of upward mobility and identity through a job is starting, slowly, to dissolve, leaving a generation of laptop workers confronting a new, hostile economic and cultural landscape.
We’ve long been sold the idea of work as identity, purpose, and social mobility. So what happens if the machine breaks down? When people are doing everything “right” — networking, optimizing, trawling LinkedIn — and still hearing nothing back? What does it feel like to search for employment now, to swim against the current in the sea of American insecurity?
“I will certainly not get a job I don’t apply to,” David notes wryly. “I will almost certainly not get a job I do apply to. And that ‘almost’ is why I keep applying. It’s like going to services for a religion I don’t believe in. It’s a ritual.”
Large cohorts of economically stranded young people have been fertile ground for radical solidarity movements and reactionary politics alike. That’s not hopecore, just historical comprehension. The Gilded Age, the Depression, the waves of deindustrialization in the late 20th century — each period produced its own hybrid of worker despair and immiseration, followed by reform and reinvention. The worker gains of the 20th century — including unions, Social Security, civil-service protections, and the weekend — were all wrested into being by people who refused to see themselves as failures in isolation and instead recognized themselves as part of a mass that were being failed. It is fashionable among elites now to frame the majority of people as “NPCs,” or non-player characters, in the parlance of video games: unthinking, sheeplike, atomized automatons. But deny a vast multitude what they need for long enough and you’d be surprised at how many decide to play.
Midlife Crisis–ing in the End-times
Midlife Crisis–ing in the End-times
Older millennials now have less money and more problems than ever before. Basically, we’re in retrograde
This time around, I have almost 20 years of experience in my field. I have a diverse set of skills and I’ve even written a book, Life After Ambition, which was published this year and became a national best seller in Canada where I live. And yet, like so many of my friends right now, I am out here applying for (and being rejected by) random content jobs at places that won’t exist in a year. We’re midlife millennials, now in our mid-30s and early 40s, still spinning in circles like we had to do in the early aughts, during 9/11, the ensuing wars in Afghanistan, or the 2008 financial crash — retrograde, let’s call it — only today we have kids or pets or mortgages or aging parents or all of the above.
Even during that horrible year of job searching in my early 20s, I truly believed things would work themselves out. Now I’m scared for the future in a way I have never really been. Between AI, climate change, and ongoing social, political, and financial global chaos, and the fact that every single thing a human being needs to be comfortably alive now costs twice (at least) as much as it used to, I don’t see things getting better. The best we can hope is that they don’t get worse.
I talked to writer Rainesford Stauffer, who covers work and affordability and has talked to people on all sides of this issue about why things are so bad and what’s next. I asked her if things really are as bad as they feel. “Based on what I’m hearing from millennial and Gen-Z workers, it feels like a really horrific time to be finding a job, be in a job and try to navigate the rest of your life alongside that job,” she says. She’s talked to people who are mid-career who are competing for jobs alongside workers who are a lot younger, “who employers in turn can offer lower compensation because they have less experience.” Plus you get workers in their 40s who feel pressure to “age-proof” their résumés so that they appear younger, now nervous about discrimination as well as exploitation. We’re still too young to get ahead and increasingly too old to be competitive with our younger colleagues.
2026-05-24
Marilyn Monroe
The rare midnight photos that might reveal the ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe
“Men don’t see me,” Marilyn Monroe once said. “They just lay their eyes on me.” She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926, a century ago this year; by 1962, she was dead, aged just 36. We have been trying to see her clearly ever since.
Trying to catch a glimpse of the true Marilyn in photography and footage is, to some degree, a fool’s errand: if interviews and transcripts of her therapy sessions have famously revealed her to be a well-read neurotic rather than a trifling bauble, her command of the lens is so uncompromising that we only really get to see her exactly as she wanted to be seen. “I never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera,” Arnold said. “She was special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after.”
The French Colonial Tourism in Morocco
Podcast: The French Colonial Tourism Industry in Ifrane, Morocco | Maghrib in Past & Present | Podcasts
Full Transcript: The Cosmopolitan - The French Colonial Tourism Industry in Ifrane, Morocco | Transcript Reader Great short podcast on an interesting aspect of colonialism - the promotion of tourism.
This is a good explanation of the concept of "Hill Stations" - prevalent also in British colonies like India.
So Ifran is a colonial hill station, and a hill station is a type of urban settlement generally located high up in the mountains and generally located up where the climates are cooler. In East Asia and South Asia, we have about a 108 hill stations mapped out. And Ifran is an example of 1 of these places, but it's within Northwest Africa. Hill stations, I would define as having a couple requisites. The first being climate and the second being health.
European So colonialists at this time generally believed that climate and health were very, very closely interlinked. That's the reason that you get places like the now abandoned hospital in Benzmir, Morocco, high up in the mountains. These places were types of sanitariums. And over time, places of rest became places of leisure. So when European colonists are settling the interiors of Morocco and interiors of other countries within the Colonial Hill Station model, they established tourism over time.
And what's important to note about Colonial Hill Stations is that they're a settlement. They're not a place that existed otherwise. So if you look at Ifrane itself, it was developed in about 6 months in 1929 from near nothing. I'm not going to say nothing because many Tamazare speaking communities lived there, especially the Benny Magild imagines. But the place sprung up very quickly.
Another thing about Hill Stations is that the people that worked there, the people that labored are not necessarily the people that benefited from this, and this is where the colonial relationship really comes in. Within Ifran, we have photographs and records of about 400 prison laborers from the area who were forced to labor to build this town, And this is common within the French Empire and common within other hill stations more broadly. And hill stations generally located high up in the mountains are located far away from the so called native in the European colonial relationship. And this is why you get the sister city of Tim Dakin next to Ifren, which originally was a Bidonville, a shanty town. And of course, Tim Dakin has gotten better over time, especially after independence.
But the population that worked in Ifren did not live there. The population that was served in Ifran was visiting there from outside. And even before that, they were settler colonialists coming in either from Europe or coming in from Morocco's coast towards the interior.
Within the advertising, there's 1 document I have that talks about the civilized man and camping. It's an advertisement for a camper van. And roughly translated, it says, the civilized man, part excellence, is an animal of luxury. He has demands. The civilized woman is doubly demanding.
It is necessary for the civilized man to adapt to the savage life, only being able to live in it with certain commodities. This is a rough translation of a document within Archie de Marocque. The reason I bring this up is that within the French civilizing mission, it permeates the tourism industry as well, where there are ideas about bringing civilization to Morocco, sort of differentiating between the civilized and the savage. And this goes back to classic orientalism and what we see with Edward Said's work. The idea of there's a people who need to be protected until they're ready to become sovereign.
And that's the whole foundation of the French protectorate. So in advertising the camping industry and camper vans in a way that makes it seem as if there's a way to experience this savage land in a civilized way, It's another way in which the French justified empire. And if it was in an advertisement for a camper van, imagine it in military and political activities as well.
How to have friends past 30
How to have friends past age 30 #friendship
Stumbled upon this article because of another recent article I came across on this substack and got sucked into the rabbithole. Nothing too remarkable here (it is after all billed as a quick and simple guide), but I thought this part was worth re-emphasising
There are basically two things that define a really close friendship: understanding, and interdependence. Your close friend has to understand who you really are, and you also have to know that you can count on them if you need help. If a friendship has only one of those things and not the other, it’s not really a close one.
Understanding gets built up over time, but it can’t reach a truly deep level without confessions. We all have certain things that we’re reluctant to tell other people about ourselves — not necessarily secrets, but core truths of our lives that we don’t like yelling at everyone we meet at a party. Occasionally these might be facts about your life, but usually they’re just vulnerabilities and desires and fears.
In order to make a really close friend, you have to tell them at least some of those things, and they have to tell you theirs. You have to have moments when you open yourself to another person and make yourself vulnerable to them. And you also have to have moments where they do this for you. You don’t both have to do it at the same time, but it has to happen on both sides.
Those moments of vulnerability and openness can happen in a group setting, but much more often they happen one-on-one. So you have to hang out with your friends outside of the group sometimes.
The other thing you need for a close friendship is interdependence — you need to know you can rely on your friend, and they need to know they can rely on you. There’s no way to prove this in an absolute sense, of course — you’ll almost certainly never know if your friend would really lay down their life for you, because that sort of situation almost never actually comes up.
Instead, what you need is to ask favors of your friends, and do favors for them as well. Maybe you help them put together a bookshelf, and then borrow their car. Maybe they take care of your rabbit, and you help them find a job. Etc. You have to not be afraid to ask for favors from your close friends, and you have to want to do favors for them too. Don’t intentionally test people by seeing if you can get them to do stuff for you, of course. Just wait until you really need something, then ask. Eventually this builds up, like a muscle — whenever you learn that your friend needs help, you won’t even think twice before you offer to do it.
I have always struggled with the interdependence part, and I suspect so have many others.
2026-05-23
Reading Gap Relationships
Help! My boyfriend doesn’t read
They’ve now been broken up for over a year, and while there were many reasons for the split, April attributes at least some of it to the reading gap. “I remember feeling really lonely at times because I would be excited by something I was reading, and I was just never able to have conversations about it with him,” she recalls.
TIL 👇🏽 women read books and men listen to podcasts (fwiw, I do BOTH, and quite extensively as to - so where does that leave me I wonder 🤷🏽♂️😂!)
Whether it’s through restrictive gender norms or marketing by the book publishing industry, we have, over time, been conditioned to think of reading for pleasure as a feminine hobby. Even when it comes to non-fiction, which men have typically preferred, they’re getting their information elsewhere: men aged between 25 and 34 now make up the largest audience for podcasts. With the reading gap between men and women continuing to widen, it’s not surprising that reading gap couples exist. But how much should these gaps actually matter in dating, and does a literary mismatch really have to be a dealbreaker?
Exercise Addiction
For some exercisers, a healthy habit spins out of control
many such cases
The unhealthy pattern commonly described as exercise addiction (or exercise dependence) can begin unremarkably enough. At first, a person might decide to run just a little more or lift a little heavier. The exercise routine steadies them emotionally. Someone with anxiety, for example, might start adding an extra 20 minutes to their training sessions and feel immediate relief. The routine becomes the anchor that holds the day in place. But over time, the anchor grows heavier. The workouts start to be seen as the only reliable way to manage emotions, stress and frustrations. Tension builds, training provides relief. The routine hardens.
Typically, someone who has developed an exercise addiction plans their life around their workouts. They might wake before dawn to train because the idea of missing a session feels intolerable. Taking a rest day, usually a welcome pause, breeds irritation or guilt. The run or bike ride starts to feel like an obligation that must be met to regain a sense of equilibrium. A major motivation to exercise becomes avoiding withdrawal symptoms – such as irritability, disturbed sleeping patterns, or anxiety – that one experiences without it.
Eventually, compulsive exercise can have adverse effects on a person’s physical, psychological and social wellbeing. The runner who keeps adding ‘just a few more kilometres’ may find himself treating minor injuries and fractures that never quite heal. The teen who doubles up on gym sessions could struggle with persistent fatigue. Other compulsive exercisers might frequently decline social invitations that interfere with their routine, frustrating friends and family. The exercise routine can reshape and shrink the rest of someone’s life.
Letting Friendships Die
This is what I’ve learned. Some friendships should die as we change and grow. I’m not meant to maintain every connection forever, while the guilt of letting relationships fade is often less painful than the slow suffocation of maintaining them. When I stopped propping up every connection, I discovered which ones had actual life – the ones that can handle silence and absence, that don’t require constant performance. Those are the friendships worth having.
Real friendship doesn’t need the artificial respirator of scheduled meetings. It can handle the messiness of people who sometimes don’t text back, or disappear for weeks, or show up unexpectedly on a Wednesday with chai and nowhere particular to be. And it can survive the people we become – because we do become different people, and not every friendship is meant to make that crossing with us.
Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth
This is one of the best overviews of the book that I have ever come across. It was convenient that I was listening to it while going about the house taking care of stuff, because I am not sure if I would have had the patience to read through it.
Having listened to it, I did read through the transcript: Overthink - Closer Look: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth | Transcript Reader
Ellie, today we're going be talking about a text that is really important in philosophy, but also in some ways very unique, and that is Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It is a wonderful text that has been quite influential in a number of fields, including political theory, decolonial philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, you name it, the text has left its mark. And the reason that I say it's also a unique text is because it's a text that was written at the very end of Fanon's life when he was dying from leukemia in the 1960s. And so it is Fanon's final word to the world. And, the text is written both as a work of philosophy, but it also reads very much like a manifesto of sorts, which is why it doesn't really have a lot of references or citations.
And so that makes it somewhat challenging from the standpoint of a scholar.
I think one of the important things to mention about this text is that it was banned in France upon publication. And this is due to one of the things that we're going be talking a lot about today, which is its advocacy of violence. I mean, Fanon thinks that decolonial projects require violence that was obviously very threatening in France at the time.
Yeah. It tells you something about the place that it occupies in the contemporary philosophical landscape, but I also want to say that it was already that influential already 50 years ago back then, because there is in the foreword by Homi Bhabha, a passage where Homi Bhabha talks about just how many revolutionary movements in the 1960s and onward were influenced by this particular text, which has been called the Bible of Decolonization.
But even beyond that, Fanon says, even if we accept the colonizer colonized distinction, at some point we also have to go beyond that because even that is not granular and nuanced enough, especially when you consider that in a colonial setting, you can have a lot of people who are members of the colonized race or nationality, but who are complicit because either they work for the colonial rulers or because they get some kind of economic benefit. So you can be a member of the colonized and still have a vested interest in the maintenance and the perpetuation of the system of colonialism. And similarly, he says, it's in theory possible to find a member of the colonizing group who at some point turns on the colonial regime and becomes an ally to the decolonial cause.
And this is where he takes us from maybe a purely, let's say, destructive interpretation of violence to a more constructive understanding of violence, where violence actually achieves something positive precisely at the moment that it seeks the annihilation of the colonists. And I really love the way Fanon puts this. He says, What violence does for the colonized is it restores them their basic dignity and humanity of which they have been robbed by the colonizing force.
And so with violence, see actually, a restoration or a recreation of the very humanity of the colonized.
Yeah. And I think also what's powerful about these case studies in part is that they show that Fanon is not offering in this text a celebration of violence. I think the fact that he offers a defense and a justification of violence sometimes gets misunderstood as like, oh my God, he loves violence. And no, if anything, I think what these cases really show are the tragedies that violence wreaks on individuals. But as you mentioned, David, those individual tragedies speak to broader social systems.
And so I think his, I read his point about we have to fight violence with violence as somewhat an expression of resignation and compatible with the acknowledgement that violence is a tragedy.
So Fanon describes this post colonization period as requiring the development of a national consciousness because that national consciousness doesn't exist just in virtue of overthrowing the colonial power.
He says at first, it's just a crude empty shell. And 1 of the big obstacles to developing a national consciousness is a tension between the colonized bourgeoisie and the colonized proletariat. He says that the elite and the masses don't really have a lot of practical ties. You know, the elite or the colonized bourgeoisie are accustomed to being a lot closer actually to the colonizers than they are to the other colonized. And so there has to be a long process of development of national consciousness, which then he says leads to a development of social consciousness and education has a really big role there.
And he says, even if you manage to overcome that problem, which is a practical one of creating the infrastructure that is a precondition for a nation state, then you have a second problem, which is that if the nation state that you decide to create really tries to embody this new humanism that is more collective, more socialist, and more communitarian, you have to now face the danger of other already existing nations putting pressure on you not to go down this socialist communist path. And so it's not as if the kind of country that people create is not going to be subjected to new pressures once that country enters into the international sphere, right? Like that's what we know has happened throughout the twentieth century, that whenever any country challenges the hegemony of capitalism, that country is squashed by an alliance of capitalist nation states. And so I say that only to underscore that he is painfully aware of just how difficult the path ahead is and to avoid this impression that violence will bring about a fully formed new nation from one day to the next.
2026-05-22
Darecation
Who wants to relax on holiday?
TIL - Darecation
“A vacation having nothing to do and all day to do it in,” said Robert Orben, an American comedy writer. Summer holidays have long involved reclining on a far-flung beach. But more tourists are forgoing sun loungers in search of adrenalin-packed pursuits, such as canyoning (scrambling down gorges) and abseiling (descending rock faces). “Darecations” are a top tourism trend of 2026, according to Pinterest, a social-media firm. Around 14% of international travellers are keen on such pursuits, suggests the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), a trade group.
There is “a shift away from fly-and-flop holidays”, notes Lisa Marçais of Airbnb, and towards “immersive and memorable travel experiences”. As the wealthy amass even greater riches, they have more to splurge on tailored trips. Darecationers say they want to get off the beaten track; many see adventure travel as a status symbol.
Where do Men Go From Here
Where Do Men Go from Here? #masculinity
Full Transcript: Critics at Large | The New Yorker - Where Do Men Go from Here? | Transcript Reader
There are many statistics that show that men are falling behind women in grade school, that they enroll in college in lower numbers, that their career prospects are dwindling, that their lifespans are shorter than women's lifespans. And on top of the stats, we're seeing a very distinctive cultural moment that's been going on for a little while, but is really worth highlighting, which is the world of the manosphere. Men who traffic in an aggressive misogyny and the idea that masculinity is directly about suppressing women, subjugating women, and maximizing their own sexual worthiness by all kinds of cosmetic interventions, surgical interventions, hormonal interventions. This has become a huge part of discourse around masculinity, and I would totally argue, probably not alone, a big part of what is going wrong for men right now.
I loved how the podcast breaks down each of the TV shows and how they reflect the culture.
In terms of culture right now, we're seeing a "two roads diverge in a wood" situation. On one hand, there are cultural texts like the new HBO show Half Man, created by Richard Gadd, which really leans into the violent aggression of the alpha male, investigating where that comes from and what its consequences are. On the other hand, we have something like Heated Rivalry, which asks whether men can get back in touch with their softer side—what might be available to them emotionally, whether boys can cry, and so on. That, I think, is what we're dealing with in culture right now.
I'd take it back, honestly, to the feminist movement—we're still in the midst, not even close to the tail end, of the backlash that came out of the women's liberation movement of the seventies. Some men (not all men—this episode should really be called "Not All Men") felt overlooked, oppressed, and disturbed by the recalibration of gender roles, responsibilities, and identities, and out of that grew a men's rights, men's pride agenda. When I think about that, I think about a fictional character from the late nineties: Frank T.J. Mackey from Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 film Magnolia. Mackey is a men's rights advocate who gives seminar performances, rising up before a group of frankly lame dudes and enjoining them, as Nomi said, to "respect the cock."
This is the clip being referred to in the para above 👆🏽
And a reference to Fight Club
I'm thinking about another movie from the same year, in fact: David Fincher's Fight Club, which treats the crisis in masculinity less from the position of being cucked by women and more in the sense of the softness that capitalism has begat. It's made men into softened cucks, and the way to confront that, of course, is by going to the underground fight club, where a fist hits flesh, blood spurts, and the man feels alive again—regaining the powers that the late twentieth century has sucked out of him.
Heated Rivalry
Well, we we've talked about our beloved Heated Rivaly, which also takes place in a highly masculinist world of professional sports. And the sports professional sports sphere in which it takes place allows for a kind of, like, old school closetedness that, creates kind of a plot possibilities and tonal possibilities. And these two characters, Ilya and Shane, should by all rights be expected to be Reuben [reference to Half Men], right, to be these killers who cannot kind of accept any sign of kind of, like, softness or or weakness or anything that diverts from kind of alpha masculinity, hyper straight, and so on. And yet, the show shows them exploring exactly that and shows the joy that they find.
…
…The thesis of Heated Rivalry is that you need to let the sunshine in. The the that you need to expose things. You need to be living in the open. Let the world catch up with you. Take the risk. It's worth it not to feel the degrading shame that comes with living in the shadow in the closet.
and the show Adoloscence
A couple of years ago, we also had Adolescence, also from the UK, about a young man who, under the sign of bullying, commits the heinous crime of killing his female classmate—a little girl. Adolescence isn't the opposite of Half Man, exactly, but by situating the problem among children, it felt like it carried this ray of possibility that things could be otherwise, if only we would all change. I think that was very much the point. Created by Jack Thorne, it's been shown in schools in France, the Netherlands, and the UK as an educational text meant to make the youth aware of toxic masculinity—though I'd be curious how that's actually worked out, because I wouldn't recommend making art in the service of educating anyone, certainly not the youth. I respect the youth too much for that. Adolescence was riveting, and it's also didactic, and the same is true of Half Man. There was a female columnist in England who said she thought Half Man should be shown anywhere men are gathered—strong disagree. What's that going to do? The idea that you'll see the consequences of your actions and feel so horrified you change your ways—I find that such an irritating approach to both men and art. Both deserve better.
The Forsytes
Starting watching this show, and loving it so far.
The Forsytes #tv
2026-05-21
High Agency
Opinion | All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’
A bit late reading this article, but I mostly logged it for its title.
2026-05-19
Before you move to San Francisco, read this.
Before you move to San Francisco, read this.
Tech didn’t always run San Francisco. There’s a reason we call this industry Silicon Valley. For the last fifty years, most of tech existed forty miles south of here, in Mountain View and Palo Alto and Cupertino.
But tech isn’t the only thing here. If you fly in from Twitter, tech is what you see. It has the easiest front door with its conferences, hacker houses, demo days, group chats and dinner parties. But the other scenes are still here. There are still surfers at Ocean Beach, parents in Noe Valley, a gay scene in the Castro. You can find any of them. You just have to look harder.
Most people don’t look that hard. Instead, they dive headfirst into venture-backed tech. They work in startups, socialize with other startup people, and spend most of their time in the same few neighborhoods. There’s nothing wrong with that. SF is one of the only places on earth where you can do this. The unhappiness arrives when people do this and wonder why they haven’t found the community they came here for.
Modern Sleep
Reading this feels a bit wild to me. It's just hard to imagine things were actually this way
Continuous sleep is a modern habit, not an evolutionary constant, which helps explain why many of us still wake at 3am and wonder if something’s wrong. It might help to know that this is a deeply human experience.
For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.
Breaking the night into two parts probably changed how time felt. The quiet interval gave nights a clear middle, which can make long winter evenings feel less continuous and easier to manage.
The midnight interval was not dead time; it was noticed time, which shapes how long nights are experienced. Some people would get up to tend to chores like stirring the fire or checking on animals. Others stayed in bed to pray or contemplate dreams they’d just had. Letters and diaries from pre-industrial times mention people using the quiet hours to read, write or even socialise quietly with family or neighbours. Many couples took advantage of this midnight wakefulness for intimacy.
The disappearance of the second sleep happened over the past two centuries due to profound societal changes. Artificial lighting is one of them. In the 1700s and 1800s, first oil lamps, then gas lighting, and eventually electric light, began turning night into more usable waking time. Instead of going to bed shortly after sunset, people started staying up later into the evening under lamplight.
Biologically, bright light at night also shifted our internal clocks (our circadian rhythm) and made our bodies less inclined to wake after a few hours of sleep. Light timing matters. Ordinary “room” light before bedtime suppresses and delays melatonin, which pushes the onset of sleep later.
The Industrial Revolution transformed not just how people worked but how they slept. Factory schedules encouraged a single block of rest. By the early 20th century, the idea of eight uninterrupted hours had replaced the centuries-old rhythm of two sleeps.
Relationship Wisdom
This is ostensibly an article about dating, but as it often happens it actually is an article about relationships
The hardest thing about dating is learning to see people clearly. It requires you to first see yourself clearly, how your biases and desires color your perspective. It’s easy to become enamored with an aspect of a person and blow it up into a grand idea of who they are. There’s a quote attributed to Marcel Proust that goes, “it is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
One of the most misleading ideas in dating is that there exists a “right person” for you. I think you can have many meaningful intimate relationships, and if you’re monogamous, then you are simply selecting one person to build a life with. Some might genuinely believe their partner is “the one,” but you don’t need that kind of conviction in order to feel happy and fulfilled. Dating has no end game. We can’t optimize our choice of a partner.
Unfortunately, social media trains our brains to keep filtering for unrealistic specifications. To feel envied is to feel powerful is Instagram’s implicit motto. By feeding us images of people living their best lives, it creates the illusion that everyone’s relationship is more beautiful, nurturing, exciting, and adventurous than our own. The comparison worms its way into our brains, making us tetchier the next time our partner does something that annoys us.
and also some social media wisdom thrown in
When we curate pictures of our life on Instagram, we’re effectively narrating in the third person. I believe it is possible to share what genuinely excites us without performing for an audience. But it takes intentionality and inner attunement, and love, which is by nature an act of imagination, is particularly susceptible to the trappings of fantasy on our screens.
Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage
Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change
In between laying out her resolutions for a life worth living and contemplating how two souls can interact with one another in friendship and love, she observes that “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:
A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.
With an eye to “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures” that would bedevil every love if we didn’t counter them with “a lot of tenderness and pity,” she considers the tenderness for change — in oneself and in the other — essential to love yet unaccounted for in the fundamental premise of marriage:
The horror of the definitive choice is that we engage not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Thus, we must try to determine which one repeats our changing self the most often. One must create a sort of abstract self and say to oneself: this is the state in which I find myself the most often; this is what I want the most often; thus, this is what suits me.
AI as the new avatar of American capitalism
AI as the new avatar of American capitalism
So we have AI looming over our withering creative industries, a generation of young people who are angry and disillusioned by the lack of opportunities, and precarity and anxiety nearly everywhere. In exchange, we get a new batch of tech oligarchs, new shady billion-dollar businesses that employ no one at all and use AI to evade consumer protection laws—that pretty unequivocally leave the world worse off in the wake of the founder’s mad dash to personal enrichment—and new tools for the unscrupulous to accumulate wealth at the expense of those still following the rules, whether in stock trading, prediction markets, or even online poker. That and Claude Code.
That’s why the students are booing, I think.2 They’re experiencing AI in realtime as a forecloser of futures; as the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism, as the prime agent moving a world that’s become a deck stacked against them.
Clippers
The clippening TIL about clippers
Clippers are largely anonymous social media accounts whose sole purpose is to rack up views. The accounts take a piece of long-form content — an hourslong livestream, for example, or a podcast — and pull out the most exciting, controversial, or shocking moments. Sometimes the accounts are dedicated to clipping, but companies will also recruit accounts with existing followers. Clippers can be based anywhere in the world (one tech founder who uses clippers has described some of them as “hungry Slovakian teenagers”) while targeting English-speaking audiences.
After clippers get the source material that a brand wants to promote, they cut it down and blast their version into the open web. Hundreds or even thousands of clipping accounts might be sharing similar videos, all in competition with one another. You have perhaps learned about a TV show moment, a celebrity podcast appearance, or a new band via clippers without even realizing it; it just looks like someone sharing something. Clippers do not need to be affiliated in any real way with the subjects they are clipping, and the clipped content does not need to be creative, transformative, or even interesting. It is the cartilage of the internet, the placeholders for the algorithm to suck in and spit out.
For well over a decade, content creators have worked to reverse engineer “the algorithm.” Deploying clippers allows companies to gamble on content at scale, without paying a network of contractors upfront: Why bet once, when you could bet 50 times? Clipping is nothing new, despite the recent discourse around who uses it and why, and whether paying random accounts to share content promoting something is deceptive or manufacturing fake fandom. The reality is that more and more, the social internet is filled with clips, paid and unpaid, that stand in for the full-length podcast, video, film, album, or piece of writing. As online content increasingly becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version even serve?
Converting tech job ads to plain english
The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again
too real
Here’s what I reckon some of the terms in Google’s job advert will add up to on the job:
“Founder’s mindset”. No one will provide a spec, and scope creep is your problem to deal with. If your project doesn’t ship, that’s also your problem
“High-agency”. There are no resources besides your own
“White glove”. Do not say “no” to anything the customer suggests, even when they should probably listen to your feedback about whatever it is
“Critical feedback loop transforming real-world field insights into Google Cloud’s future product roadmap”. You will file tickets and a few PMs at Google may read some of them
2026-05-18
Toronto Multicultural Slang
The strange, multicultural slang of Toronto’s teenagers #linguistics
This new dialect emerged from an impoverished cluster of public-housing projects in Toronto—namely Driftwood, Shoreham and Jane & Finch (a district as well as a shopping centre). It is known as Toronto Mans. Differing from Canadian norms through features like TH-stopping (saying “dis” instead of “this”), it is defined by rapid, intense speech, or “squawking” as one speaker puts it. It is, a teenager admits, used by gangs or “wannabe gangsters”.
Much of Toronto Mans is borrowed from the languages of immigrants: from Jamaican patois comes “ah lie” (meaning “right?”) and “two-twos” (“being honest”); from Somali there is “kawal” (to “scam”) and from Arabic “wallahi” (an exclamation, “by Allah”). The roots of others like “crodie” (meaning “brother”) and “gerbert” (meaning “immature”) may well be local.
Slang from Britain also packs the dictionary: “peng” (“beautiful” or “great”), “ends” (the area in which one lives), “oppblock” (an area in which one’s enemies reside), “wasteman” (loser), and “mandem” (a group of men). The “Mans” in “Toronto Mans” is a derivative of “mandem”. “We take a lot of inspiration from London,” says one Driftwood resident. “But we mix it up.”
Either way, Toronto Mans is spreading. TorontoTide, a social-media channel, posts videos of teens speaking the dialect. Filmed in Yorkdale Shopping Centre, a fancy mall, these kids boast the loudest screeches. Their Jane & Finch counterparts say they are exaggerating for clout, and that many of them come from nicer suburbs like Vaughan. “There’s nothing going on in Vaughan,” tuts a Driftwood teen.
In Shoreham not everyone is enamoured. A young dad who speaks in the dialect says he will teach his child “proper English first” so they can succeed at work. Another forbids his daughter from using the lingo: “I don’t want to hear that in my household,” he says. What clearer marker of success than parental censure?
Laptop Free Cafes
Can “laptop-free” coffee shops survive in the digital age? - Coffee Intelligence
Here in Berlin, a LOT of cafes have a weekend laptop-free policy which I thought is a great compromise.
“Our main purpose is to give our customers an outstanding coffee experience,” he says. “The share of travellers who come specifically to us for this is over 50%. We love to offer them a seat to enjoy their coffee.
“At the same time, we can see a desire from those working remotely to do so in a cafe.”
While this dual function may seem complementary, it often creates friction in practice. Coffee shops are designed around turnover – not extended occupancy – and prolonged laptop use can disrupt both revenue and atmosphere.
In some cases, the financial impact is significant.
In response, some coffee shops have introduced restrictions on laptop use, aiming to restore balance between hospitality and productivity by effectively driving laptop users out.
Other approaches across the industry include limiting laptops to specific tables, removing power outlets, or restricting WiFi access altogether.
At The Barn, Ralf says that this has taken a structured approach, aiming to accommodate laptop users while also preserving the ambience of the coffee shop environment.
“We therefore started a café-wide policy of restricting laptop users to 1 hour, or we ban it completely on specific days, for instance during busy weekends,” he explains.
Pea Protein Dumping in US
U.S. company working to thwart pea protein dumping by China Really interesting video I came across randomly. I have no idea how legit it is, or whether it is a whole lot of propaganda.
Some excerpts from transcript summary
The US is the largest global market for pea protein, accounting for about 70% of demand. However, China has been dumping low-quality pea protein, a byproduct of their pea starch production, into the US market at artificially low prices. This has created a glut of cheap product, undermining domestic producers who invest heavily in infrastructure. The Chinese imports are subsidized by their government, enabling them to undercut prices and attempt to gain market control.
The imported Chinese pea protein mainly originates from peas grown in Canada and Russia, with Russia’s share increasing significantly in 2023. Puris emphasizes that producing pea protein domestically supports US farmers and ensures a secure and resilient supply chain. Maintaining domestic processing capability is critical for food security and industry stability.
New York and Affordability
In a City of Big Dreams, Many Young Adults See a Cloudy Future #nyc
NYC is among the top two cities I have lived in ever, so this breaks my heart
It was around No. 87 when Soban Ali started to lose track of all his job applications.
He had moved to New York City, eager to start life away from the Washington area, where he was born and raised. But seven months after arriving, he was laid off from his job at a federal contractor during last fall’s government shutdown. So he started a spreadsheet: “The Great Job Hunt of 2025.”
He applied to roughly 450 openings. He landed upward of 10 interviews. He still doesn’t have a full-time job.
Now, Mr. Ali, 24, feels guilty telling friends he can’t join them for dinner. He wants to start a family one day, but worries. “I can’t even afford myself, so how am I going to afford someone else?” he said. And he laments that he can’t pursue some of the hobbies that have always brought him joy, such as hip-hop dance. Classes are too expensive: about $25.
“It’s this existential depression and existential dread of, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’” said Mr. Ali, who earns $18 an hour working part-time at an after-school program. That’s just $1 more per hour than minimum wage.
He wonders about five years from now: “Am I going to be making a good, livable income? Or am I going to be flipping burgers?”
It’s a rough time to be a young adult. Young college-degree holders face their worst spring in the U.S. job market since the coronavirus pandemic.
And if headwinds are blowing across the United States, they can feel like gale-force squalls in New York, one of the world’s most notoriously expensive cities.
2026-05-17
Tech Minimalism
In what way if any are you a tech minimalist while maintaining your job/love for tech? | Lobsters
Very relatable thread
Curious what others think about this recently popular lifestyle shift. I love my coding, selfhosting, and useful tools but I’ve found myself moving towards “low” tech solutions such as pen and paper or just micro, iPod, a physical calendar versus all these different SaaS and selfhosted services.
2026-05-16
Song of the Samurai
Started watching this show on HBO and it's quite good!
2026-05-15
Brooklyn Coffee Shop and Berlin
bkcoffeeshop - Episode 81: Normal Berliner visits the shop featuring @lau_ramoso)
As a former New Yorker and now Berliner, this episode hit so hard!
Berliner Hello. This place looks nice. Thyme How are you? Are you, like, visiting from somewhere? Berliner I'm actually on vacation from Berlin. Thyme Berlin. Berlin. We love Berlin. I'm about to go on a three week silent techno retreat there. Cale My eight year situationship, Capricorn, lives there. Great. Thyme So what can I get you? Maybe, like, an accidentally vegan unsweetened barley latte? Cale Or we can spit in your mouth or slap you in the face for an extra $30? A lot of Berliners ask for that. Berliner Actually, a plain drip coffee would be good. Thyme Oh, so like a minimalist approach, like a palate cleanser. I get it. Cale You're so lucky you live in Berlin. Who are your fave local artists? I need to know. Berliner Oh, you know, I really have been listening to Sabrina Carpenter lately. Cale The new metal German DJ, the one that spells the name with only fours and fives? Berliner No. It's the one that goes thinking about me every time oh, that's that me espresso. Oh, I mean, that's a really catchy song. Cale Have you heard that song? I don't know that song. Thyme I don't know that song. Berliner No. Oh, I brought my own mug. Thyme I love Berliners. They just get it. Starbucks? Cale Ew. You're carrying that ironically. Right? Berliner No. Yeah. I actually wanted to go to a Starbucks, but could not find one around here, so I came to this place. Thyme This has to be an artistic statement. Cale Incredible job staying in character. Berliner By the way, do you have any recommendations for things to do in the city? It's my first time in New York. Cale Of course. We have Marxist multimedia art installations, poetry nights, and acoustic listening bars. Thyme Oh, and Dry Humor is my favorite non alcoholic bar, Gemini Gemini for vintage. Berliner So far, I'm really excited about exploring Midtown. Yeah. Because I've heard great things about the M and M store in Times Square. Oh, and I cannot wait to do the Friends experience. Yeah. I mean, I know you can tell. I am a Monica. What is the name of that street in Dumbo by the Brooklyn Bridge thing? Yeah? Because I have to get a photograph. Thyme Are you sure you're from Berlin? Berliner Yes. Cale What are your purposes in New York City? Berliner I'm actually here for a b to b marketing conference. I work for a paint company, and we just discovered a new shade of beige. Cale That can't be your job. Berliner Yeah. In fact, the walls in here are actually looking a bit chipped. I can get you a quote. Thyme Are you at least asexual or, like, poly or something? Berliner My husband, Jan, is a consultant at Deloitte. We are high school sweethearts. He is blonde. Cale She has such little edge. She's like an infinity pool. Berliner You know, I really have had enough. You are really projecting your idea of Berlin onto me, and I have to say it's actually very culturally insensitive. You know, most Berliners are just normal Germans working hard, trying to avoid this hipster circus. Cale Projection redacted. I'm so sorry. We just thought statistically you should be cooler than this. Berliner Apology accepted. Okay. Anyway, I have to go to my autoerotic asphyxiation workshop in Ridgewood. I am leading it, so I cannot be late. Thinking about me every time. Oh. Thyme The song again. The grammar. Cale It's so bad.
Raghu Rai has died
Raghu Rai’s whole canvas was India
Check out the article for some of his iconic photos. One of my favorite photographers ever.
India in every aspect was his canvas, but it was the people who enchanted him. Throughout his more than 18 books of photo essays, there was barely a frame that did not show their intensity and energy. He was not an intrusive photographer. Only one camera, usually his faithful Nikon Z8 with a zoom lens, hung round his neck, and he carried no bags. His movements were leisurely. Over the years he had learned patience. Mud-sculptors making goddesses, near-naked wrestlers relaxing under Kolkata’s Howrah bridge, the boy splashing paint and running off laughing, mourning women raising their arms, did not try to pose for him, and he did not want that. Humbly he preferred to merge with his people, a part of the beating whole, seeing them with a pure and unsentimental eye that was led not by his mind, but by his heart.
Only an Indian could do this, someone who understood from the inside his country’s many layers. He could have been a photographer of the world, but when he was invited to join the Magnum agency in 1972—on the recommendation of Henri Cartier-Bresson, no less, who had seen his work at an exhibition in Paris—it took him five years to reply. Meanwhile he went to work for various Delhi-based magazines, especially India Today, where he stayed for a decade, showing India to itself.
To catch that one moment of revelation was already his mission. For photo-shoots of celebrities he insisted on continuing until he found it: until the actress Aparna Sen laid her head on the table in mock frustration, or the actor Satyajit Ray, still smoking his pipe, suddenly twisted round to gainsay him; or until his favourite tabla-player, Zakir Hussain, entered a trance of silence. With the very famous he did the same. He caught tiny Mother Teresa slowly negotiating stairs, her sari filled with light; his friend the Dalai Lama, with an untroubled smile, taking a screwdriver to his TV; Indira Gandhi, in a moment of anxiety, contorting her face with her hands. An evening visit to a friend’s house produced one of his favourite images, achieved only when he turned to look one last time: a view of the whole of Delhi, spread out under a darkening sky, with at its heart a small lit room in which a woman prayed.
2026-05-14
There is nothing more romantic than friendship
Are our friends the real loves of our lives?
For young women who date men – and who are increasingly dissatisfied with the state of heterosexual dating – romantic friendships are setting the standard for what to expect in love. Arasasingham says she and her friends have similar love languages, giving each other more thoughtful gifts than any romantic partner has. “The more I pour into your platonic relationships, the better I feel,” she says. “And the more it raises my standards for romantic relationships because I feel seen so deeply.” Feifei, a 22-year-old writer in Nigeria, says her friendships have consistently shown her what love is supposed to feel like. “There’s no hot and cold, and I don’t have to constantly prove myself worthy of basic affection,” she says. “My friends love me on my bad days, celebrate my wins without making it weird, and tell me hard truths because they actually care.”
It is hard to measure romance, especially when what we are so often sold as romantic is wrapped up in heteronormativity. That is why even speaking about how loving some friendships feel becomes important to expanding our ideas of what is actually romantic. For Basi, it is the depth of intimacy in her friendships, and the constant knowingness that carries through all stages of life, that makes them feel more romantic than her dating life. “At the moment, dating is feeling quite transactional, and we’re all missing the realness, openness and vulnerability of relationships that’s gotten lost along the way,” she says. “If you take away physical intimacy, how much more value is your partner actually adding to your life compared to your friends?”
To compare the romance of platonic love to romantic love would be a disservice to the unparalleled beauty of friendship, but acknowledging that romance can come from a range of places opens up a wealth of possibilities for our romantic lives. “I don't think friendship needs romance’s validation,” says Idowu. “The problem isn’t that friendships aren’t romantic enough; it's that we’ve spent so long treating romantic love as the only love that counts that we’ve underinvested in our friendships and then wondered why we feel lonely.” The remedy, according to Idowu, is simple: start taking your friendships as seriously as your romantic relationships. “I think the most radical thing you can do right now is to be a good friend,” she says.
Olivia Rodrigo's Dress
If you think Olivia Rodrigo looks like a sexy baby, that’s on you
I learned so much just from this one paragraph 😂
The design itself – the babydoll dress – was not even made for children originally. It emerged in the 1940s as a way of conserving fabric during wartime rationing, and was later popularised by the 1956 film Baby Doll. It was later taken up in the 1990s, as a symbol of sarcastic hyper-femininity, by female rock musicians like Courtney Love and Kim Gordon as part of a trend called Kinderwhore. Rodrigo has nodded to the fashion of both eras throughout her career. The outrage, then, says far more about how some people interpret her dress than about her choice to wear it.
Cursive's Comeback
Cursive Club, Where Students Learn With a Flourish
Brought back memories
Years after it was omitted from the Common Core standards, some students are practicing cursive in clubs after school and in libraries. Some states are bringing it back to classrooms.
What is Linen
All About Linen – From Flax to Fabric
Linen is a bast fiber, which means it comes from the inner part of the plant. In linen’s case, that’s the flax plant.
General properties:
- One of the strongest natural textile fibers: Linen is generally stronger and more durable than cotton, making linen fabrics hard-wearing and capable of lasting for decades with proper care
- Eco-friendly life cycle: flax typically requires less water and fewer pesticides than conventional cotton; linen is also recyclable and biodegradable
- Soft hand: linen is often stiff or textured at first, but softens noticeably with wear and washing*
- Structurally sound fiber: Linen garments tend to hold their shape well due to the fiber’s low elasticity
- Launders well and can maintain color effectively when properly dyed and cared for
- Naturally resistant to irritation and often suitable for sensitive skin
- Naturally low-static
- Good moisture absorbency: linen can absorb up to 20% of its weight in moisture before feeling damp**
- Highly breathable and thermoregulating
- Low elasticity, which contributes to both durability and wrinkling
- Time- and labor-intensive extraction process (from plant to usable fiber)
2026-05-12
Flaubert on having kids
The aggravations and the disgrace of existence 🤌🏽
“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”
I found this on an insta post of somebody making their way through Madame Bovary and I was immediately struck by this observation.
Career Situationship
Danger Signs That You’re Stuck in a Career Situationship #work
When you’re stuck in a career situationship, you essentially have one foot in and one foot out. You’ll be able to identify pros and cons to your career, but you're not sure which side outweighs the other. If someone asks whether you’re happy with your work, your answer will be different on different days.
But are you really stuck in a career situationship, or are you just having a bad month or two? Here are some red flags that will let you know if it's the real thing:
2026-05-11
Emoji Guide
this is actually a great guide.
I don’t know whether it’s appropriate to use the heart emoji at work. Am I implying that I am in love with the person?
Great question. It depends on whether you are using a reaction emoji (that’s the small one that attaches to a specific message), which is clearly a response to what has just been said. If you send a heart emoji as a reply on its own, you are basically proposing.
I told my boss that I would not be at work one week because I was suffering from amoebic dysentery. I then got a notification that she liked my message. I’ve lost half my body weight and she’s apparently taking pleasure in my misfortune.
If you do a thumbs-up reaction emoji on some platforms, it tells the other person that you “liked“ their message. Your boss should have written back but she was probably acknowledging your message rather than rejoicing in it. Some Gen Zers regard thumbs-up emojis as a bit frosty, by the way. This is why.
…
A few of my colleagues put a palm tree by their names on Slack. I know it means that they care about the climate. I’d like to show my commitment to the planet, too, but cannot find the emoji. Can you help?
Where’s that thinking emoji?
Celebrity Book Clubs
Many celebrities now have book clubs. Most are irritating
Ms Lipa is a British pop star. She is also an increasingly popular literary critic, thanks to her book-club podcast, in which she interviews authors. But Ms Lipa does not have a splinter of ice in her heart. She has something much lovelier. She loves books (“I love books”). She loves storytelling (“I love storytelling”). She loves Helen Garner, an Australian novelist (“I fell in love with you”). She loves Margaret Atwood’s biography (“I loved it. I love it. I love it so much”).
Book clubs are changing. A hobby that was once dull, domestic and faintly frumpy has had a glow-up. Now, anyone who is anyone—and, given the nature of modern celebrity, plenty of people who are almost no one—has a book club, whether podcast, website, YouTube channel or newsletter. Reese Witherspoon, an actor and producer, has a book club. (She is its “book-lover-in-chief”.) Gwyneth Paltrow had a book club as part of her lifestyle brand, Goop. (“Crime and Punishment”, Ms Paltrow declared, is one of her “all-time favourite novels”.) Kaia Gerber, a model, has one with the perplexing aim of “building up our community of rage readers”.
Book clubs, it is true, can be irritating. They are also a little paradoxical. Reading rates are declining rapidly, everywhere. Yet there are podcasts about reading, campaigns about reading and handwringing books about reading. The public seems simultaneously unable to start reading—or to stop banging on about it. Perhaps, instead of listening to people talk about books, you should enjoy books the old-fashioned way. Sit down. Open a book. And silently enjoy it.
AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did
AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did
Wrong. AI didn't kill programming. You killed programming decades ago by stripping it of all individuality and curiosity to satisfy the whims of giant corporations. You created universities that taught only one language and trained programmers to never think of programming as personal expression. You turned programming into a sterile profession who's only purpose is making other people money. You even went so far as to hunt down and threaten anyone who dared to disagree with you. You threatened their jobs, their reputations, and their mental health over petty bullshit like an underscore in a variable name.
You worked extremely hard to frame programming as only a profession that serves corporations, and made sure anyone who threatened the great corporations was shut down, ridiculed, humiliated, and fired. So everyone fell in line, made only projects for corporations, and talked only about how they could best serve corporations. Even when they tried to fight back against the corporate mindset they came up with a movement that's still about corporate efficiency.
Congratulations bootlickers, you got what you wanted. A boring soulless profession with no originality and a total focus on what corporations want with no regard for individualism and free expression. "Everyone should code exactly the same like good little robots." That's you, bootlicker.
2026-05-05
Europemaxxing
this could have been you europe-maxxing this summer but instead you chose to share a 1bdr with four other dudes in sf to walk around the city with your laptop slightly open so your agents won’t stop running.
this is how i convince myself after moving to Europe.
2026-05-03
Toto's AI Pivot
Shares in Japanese toilet maker Toto soar on AI-related pivot
Unlike AllBirds this one is actually real.
Japanese toilet maker Toto’s shares surged 18 per cent to a five-year high on Friday after unveiling plans to boost production of semiconductor components and posting record annual profits.
Its advanced ceramics business has turned Japan’s largest toilet manufacturer into an AI play and caught the attention of activist investor Palliser Capital.
Despite being better known for its bidet washlets that have defined the Japanese toilet globally, Toto is also the world’s second-largest producer of electrostatic chucks used in the manufacturing of Nand memory chips.
Surging sales of semiconductor components — gaining 34 per cent year on year — have lifted the division to account for more than half of Toto’s operating profit, which jumped 11 per cent to ¥53.8bn in the year to March.
2026-05-02
The Permanent Underclass
Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass
Whether you talk with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians, the so-called San Francisco consensus on the impact of A.I. for workers is bleak. Many are convinced that advanced A.I. will soon surpass human capabilities. This would produce tremendous growth and scientific achievement, but it would also displace millions of jobs as fewer humans are needed to make the economy run. The technology will depress economic mobility and exacerbate inequality, while ferrying power and wealth to the A.I. companies and the existing owners of capital.
Some even believe that artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., will create a permanent underclass. In the United States, the term “underclass” gained currency in the 1960s to describe the factory workers left behind by the postwar automation boom. Today, it has become repopularized as a viral term for a theory that posits that people have a limited window of time to build wealth before A.I. and robotics are advanced enough to fully replace human labor. At that point, we will get frozen in our current class positions: The rich will be able to deploy superintelligent machines to do their bidding, and everyone else will be rendered useless and unemployable, left to live off welfare scraps.
Has taste in music been hijacked?
Has taste in music been hijacked?
In March, two of the co-founders of digital marketing agency Chaotic Good sat down for a live podcast recording with the music trade publication Billboard to discuss their company’s strategies for making songs go viral. Their approach, they explained, is designed to manipulate social media algorithms using thousands of fake accounts. They specialise in “trend simulation” — creating hundreds of posts, with tracks by their clients playing in the background, to manufacture the feeling that a song is everywhere.
This is also known as paid-for “user-generated content”, or UGC, and is increasingly common in today’s online media. “We can drive impressions on anything,” one of the co-founders explains in the podcast. “At this point, we know how to go viral.” Chaotic Good also runs what it calls “narrative campaigns”, where it purports to shape public sentiment around an artist by saturating algorithmic feeds and flooding comment sections with positive reactions. An artist playing on Saturday Night Live, for example, might hire the company to ensure that when clips from the performance are shared online, there will be hundreds of positive comments posted by Chaotic Good, perhaps from the large collection of phones in their office.
Match
The Real Truth About Expensive Matcha #matcha #cafe #education
This is a succinct but really good explanation of what makes matcha special among the green tea varieties.
Full transcript below. Other videos from this creator are worth checking out as well (I really loved this one about nail cutters.)
This 1oz tin costs $100 for some weird green dust that your favorite influencer goons to sleep over. But why does a powder made from the exact same plant as your Lipton tea bag cost more than a prime steak dinner? This is episode 8 of Chasing Beauty, and today we're looking at the story behind matcha.
Matcha originates from the Camellia sinensis plant. If you pick the leaves and let them fully oxidize, you get black tea. If you steam them immediately to stop that oxidation, you get green tea. Matcha is actually green tea with a very specific kind of manipulation. It's born in the dark. 20 to 30 days before harvest, farmers cover the tea bushes with black netting or straw, effectively removing 90% of sunlight from the plant. This forces the chemical composition of the plant to shift: higher chlorophyll, brighter color, and a sweeter, more umami profile.
The highest grade of matcha, ceremonial, is typically pulled from the first spring harvest — the cleanest, softest growth of the year. Once picked, the leaves are steamed, air-dried, and then de-veined and de-stemmed. If you've ever wondered why cheap matcha tastes like literal grass and dirt, it's likely because the whole leaf was tossed in. High-grade ceremonial matcha uses only the meat of the leaf, called tencha. It's the culinary equivalent of a filet mignon versus a hot dog.
To get that ultra-fine, silk-like texture, the tencha is ground between two granite stones. This is not a high-speed industrial process. If you go too fast, the friction cooks the matcha and ruins the delicate flavor profile. It takes a traditional stone mill roughly 1 hour to produce just 30g of matcha. This results in a powder so fine it doesn't dissolve in water — it suspends, creating a frothy, creamy beverage that hits your tongue with a wave of umami.
But matcha has another secret: L-theanine. It's packed with this unique amino acid that promotes relaxation without the drowsiness. When paired with matcha's high caffeine content, you don't get the coffee jitters. It's a 4-hour steady burn instead of a 30-minute spike and then a crash 4 hours later.
Next time you see that goon whisking their bright green bowl on your feed, now you know. They're drinking time-honored craftsmanship, 20 days of darkness, and an hour of stone-cold patience. But they honestly probably have no idea. Peace.
Women Drone Pilots in the Ukrainian Army
‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself.’
Hidden in the inner pages of Life and Arts section of this weekend's FT was a long and beautiful story about women drone pilots in the Ukranian army. Its main focus is a woman drone pilot who goes my the codename Multik.
Some weeks later, on a chilly February evening, I met Multik at a chic Lebanese restaurant in Kyiv. Yana Viktorivna Zalevska does not conform to any archetype of a modern soldier. She’s 25, about five-foot-four, lean and strong, with the posture of a trained dancer. Blade-straight dark hair frames her oval face. Her blue-grey eyes stare piercingly from behind prescription lenses in oversized hipster frames. At that first meeting, I noticed a deliberate femininity in how she presented herself. She wore matching pink athleisure wear with clean white sneakers, a nose ring, thick eyeliner, lacquered Kiko Milano lip gloss. Her manicured fingernails were filed to points and painted a deep ruby red. If “Multik” was built for the front line, it seemed Yana was meant to blend into the world behind it.
A few times during our conversation, she noted how odd it had begun to feel for her to be so far from the front, and I sensed her anxiety as she twisted uncomfortably in her seat. The tables around us filled up. To one, where a large family was sitting, a waiter brought out a cake and half of the restaurant began singing “Happy Birthday” to a young woman. Not for the only time, Zalevska excused herself to smoke outside. She confessed she felt like the war had split her personality in two. “There is Multik, who is definitely around more now,” she said, referring to the front-line persona who emerges when she dons her uniform and straps on her metallic-red pilot goggles. “And there is Yana . . . Yana wouldn’t do what Multik does, you know? She wouldn’t . . . No way in hell. But Multik — she loves to punish her enemies.”
To that end, Multik is in the process of forming an all-women FPV drone unit within Ukraine’s 141st Separate Mechanized Brigade. She calls her crew of half a dozen pilots and trainees the Amazon Banshees, after the warrior daughters of Ares, the Greek god of war, and a female spirit in Irish folklore who portends imminent death.
Zalevska’s mind has been tuned by war to function in conditions of survival and extreme stress. “My psyche has been protecting me like this for a long time,” she told me. Over three long interviews with her in Kyiv and closer to the front line, as well as with her parents and several of her sisters-in-arms, I would come to learn that she often speaks about war in this way, as if to keep it contained, away from her civilian life, where she hopes one day to live unburdened by it.
“You could say I am fighting two wars,” she told me. “One against the fucking Russians, and one inside myself.”
The videos are a key propaganda tool, instilling fear and paranoia in the enemy while boosting morale at home. For Kyiv, they also serve a practical purpose. Working towards its strategic goal of killing or catastrophically wounding 50,000 Russians each month, Ukraine’s defence ministry has gamified the war with a macabre point system. For each confirmed kill captured on video, military units earn points that can be exchanged for new equipment through an Amazon-like platform called Brave1 Market. Killing a Russian soldier may be worth 12 points, while wounding one might earn eight. Eliminating a Russian FPV drone pilot is around 25 points.
There is a physical distance between FPV drone pilots and the killing machines they control, but the psychological impact of directing violence on another human being, even one’s enemy, is heavy. And because of their effectiveness, drone pilots themselves are high-value targets, further increasing the stress they are under. “Right now our pilots are really burning out,” Zalevska admitted. She couldn’t estimate how many ask for mental health leave, but some military psychologists and doctors told me there are “dozens” ordered to take leave each month due to burnout, acute stress and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence and the General Staff of the Armed Forces did not respond to my requests for official information and comment. They typically do not disclose information about the number of troops struggling with mental health disorders.
Zalevska’s superior officers have approached her about taking a break in the past, but she pushed back. She wants to see the war out, however long that takes, from the thick of it. She says Multik is still needed as long as the Russians remain hell-bent on destroying her country.
circularity of need
friendship is a series of affordances offered and accepted #relationships
Real closeness requires a circularity of need.
Those of us with a hyper-independent, high-functioning bent often find it hard to want from other people, but are equally happy to give. We work towards a kind of frictionless existence where we give maximum utility to others but need zero maintenance ourselves. We want to be the sun, but the sun is a lonely thing. It sits at the centre of a system, but is not a part of it.
When I refuse to need anything, I’m signalling to friends that there is no shape in my life that they’re required to fill. The circularity of need is the realisation that my messy middle is the gift of agency to a friend. Inviting them in is handing them a tool and saying, “your presence here can change the outcome”. The question of much to ask of them is always a gamble, and one I can’t offer sure-footed advice about. But what I do know is this: To be loved is to be seen, but to be known is to be needed.
Why I Don't Vibe Code
Lots of reasons listed, but I liked this one.
Weirdly, nobody seems more miserable than LLM boosters. I might be more swayed if developers were using their newfound productivity gains to finally live that 4-hour workweek that nerds were pretending to idolize 10 years ago. But perversely, it seems like many in Silicon Valley are outsourcing work to the AI agents and then using their newfound spare time to do even more work. Instead of using their time for relaxation or art or joy, they’re embracing 9-9-6 work schedule and a hyper-quantified workplace that would make even Frederick Taylor blanch in horror. It’s possible that the LLM revolution will finally come for me and my job, but I’d rather not work myself into the grave first.
Hany Farid on the erosion of shared reality
Transcript: The Machinist - Hany Farid on the erosion of shared reality in the age of deepfakes | Transcript Reader
The whole lecture is fascinating, and worth hearing (or reading the transcript of) in full. But this is the bit that struck me especially. It is great to get validation from a researcher/expert on deepfakes on how mainstream news is far from irrelevant.
Audience Member
Yeah. You were talking about social media and being very concerned about anything you see there or digest from there. What about regular media? How accurate is stuff that we're seeing on networks and
Hany Farid
Good. I think that's the right question to ask. So here's what I can tell you. Everybody makes mistakes. Mainstream media makes mistakes.
The New York Times, The Post, everybody makes mistakes. But here's the difference. First of all, they're trying to get it right and you can't say that about Elon Musk and social media. People aren't necessarily trying and there's no consequence for getting it wrong every single day. So I have much, much more confidence in what I read in the large networks than I do what I see on social media because first of all, they have standards, they have ethics, they have consequences.
They have an unbelievably smart people who work incredibly hard every day to bring you reliable information. Do they get it right a 100% of the time? Of course not. Alright. So, what do you do?
You don't just pick one newspaper. You read three of them and you wait. You don't need to get your news in the first 30 seconds of something happening for God's sake. This isn't a race. We're not sprinting.
Take your time. And by the way, you got to read past the first paragraph. This is for the young people in the audience. You know, TikTok is not going to give you news about what's happening in Gaza or in Iran. You got to like you got to dig in.
This is really complicated and it's hard. And you got to reserve judgment. You got to keep your biases aside. But do I think they do better than social media? A 100 times better.
A hundred times better. I would much rather get my information from BBC, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal than anywhere else. I feel like I'm definitely better informed about what is going on in the world.
Food Noise
When did food noise get so loud?
TIL about "food noise". It's kinda fascinating because it seems like a portal to a whole subculture, that I simply cannot relate to. How can people be okay with this?
Kate “absolutely loves” watching food content on social media. “Sometimes I’ll find myself deep in a rabbit hole, watching an influencer eat six vegan pastries in Taiwan or something,” she says. Sometimes, though, that kind of content can trigger intense, incessant cravings. “I’ll realise that all day tomorrow, I’m going to really struggle with wanting something sugary, because I’ll be thinking about the video I watched.” The 32-year-old says that, at times, her relationship to food has been “a very difficult thing” to navigate, adding that she experienced binge eating disorder in her 20s. While she now has “more of a handle” on things, “the deluge of advertising” doesn’t make it easy. “It’s become immeasurably more difficult to resist thinking about food,” she says.
Kate has a point. Today, images of food are everywhere – not only in traditional advertising spaces like billboards and TV, but all over social media too. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are saturated with pictures and videos of food designed and edited to appear extra indulgent: think Wingstop mukbangs with creators drenching their tenders in ranch, or the endless hype around limited-edition sweet treats (like M&S’s ‘speckled egg cookies’). At the same time, as the cost of living creeps ever higher, many of us are finding it harder to resist small luxuries like Uber Eats deliveries or expensive chocolate, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “lipstick effect”.
At the same time, Brown says, “consumer culture has intensified the constant availability of food. Digital platforms, delivery apps, and targeted promotions mean that food is now accessible and promoted 24 hours a day. The result is an environment where food cues are not only everywhere, but also highly personalised and difficult to opt out of.”
Experts agree that these drugs are far from a silver bullet. According to John Warner, emeritus professor of paediatrics at Imperial College London, using Ozempic to treat food noise is akin to “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted”. It is ultimately a short-term sticking plaster for an issue with much deeper roots; as Higgs says, while Ozempic’s appetite-dulling effects “can be helpful at an individual level, [they do] not change the broader context in which eating takes place.” In Brown’s view, “addressing food noise in a meaningful way requires reconsidering the scale and nature of food marketing, product placement, and digital food environments.”
None of this is to say that all food-related content on social media is an insidious ploy to sell highly processed foods or extreme dietary trends. Many foodie influencers have helped viewers embrace intuitive eating and normalised nourishing yourself across a broad range of food groups (case in point: Maddi Neye-Swift’s popular series “carbs before a night out are a must”, where the creator shares videos of her favourite stomach-lining dinners). But equally, many creators do push distinctly _un_balanced ideas about food. Warner’s suggestion? “Be critical of all you read and hear” online. Which, really, is sound advice for any kind of content — food-related or otherwise.
Friendship and the art of hanging out
I fear I’m doing friendship wrong: why do we lose the art of just hanging out? | Carolin Würfel
There’s a black and white image of the photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller and her friend Tanja Ramm. The two are having breakfast in bed at Miller’s studio in Paris, casually reading newspapers. Their faces are framed by untamed hair and they’re dressed in cotton shirts, with coffee cups in front of them. The image, captured in 1931, is quiet and intimate. They share a blanket, their arms touch. There’s no rush, no urgency. It’s a scene about love but, above all, it’s about friendship.
When was the last time I lay in bed with a friend like that? For most of us, it was probably during school or university, when staying over or crashing at someone’s house was a regular occurrence – sometimes a necessity, but mostly just part of our routines. It kept us close. Staying in a friend’s room or apartment felt like being on an island – safe, cosy and fun. It was about whispering, giggling and sharing secrets. And sometimes it was about nothing at all except being together.
As an adult whose usual habitat is a large European city, when I meet friends now, it starts with a text that goes something like: “Hey, how are you? Would love to see you. Maybe we can grab dinner or drinks?”
Then the struggle begins to find a date. It’s a messy process, especially in Berlin. Days pass. Sometimes, weeks. Finally, if we are lucky, the day arrives and we meet – at a restaurant or a bar, somewhere public, where we’re expected to behave, sit properly and engage in “polite” chat. We update each other on our projects, gossip a little, sigh, complain about circumstances at home or work and then we part ways.
Sometimes, a few hours later, or the next morning, I’ll send or receive a message: “I’d missed you. It was so good to see you. We should do this more often.” An honest message, but an empty one at the same time. Because we won’t do it more often. We’ll continue rushing through our daily lives and responsibilities, fitting each other in where we can.
How close can you really be to someone you only see for a couple of hours every now and then? What can you actually share? In these meetups, we present condensed versions of ourselves. So much of who we really are stays in the dark. We talk. And talking is the only way to feel connected and to bond.
2026-05-01
Maladaptive Frugality
Maladaptive frugality - Herbert Lui
When you default to the lowest cost option without considering the drawbacks, procrastinating or hesitating on spending, or guilt tripping yourself about an essential expense or making a recoverable mistake, you’re engaging in maladaptive frugality.
The most useful thing you can do is be mindful of it and try to draw yourself into the present moment. As Tim Ferriss asks, “What does your last year—not your childhood beliefs—tell you about where you might invest more for a higher quality of life?”
When you make frugality your servant, it can offer you freedom. When you make frugality your master—maladaptive frugality—it traps you and limits your possibilities.
2026-04-30
This Japanese art of breaking from routine
Life is meant to be experienced, not endured.
If everything feels predictable or mechanical, I wake myself up with awe or an element of surprise. I give myself a break from monotony to bring wonder back. And keep life from becoming stagnant.
The Japanese call it datsuzoku.
Datsu means “to escape”, “to flee” and zoku can be translated as “routine” or “convention”. It’s a practice of breaking out of routine, “escaping from the usual” or “stepping outside the ordinary.” Also of freeing yourself from patterns that take away that “alive” feeling of being human.
Datsuzoku is all about surprise.
Freedom from the usual. The kind of break that shocks you into awareness. It’s not just unwinding; it’s reconnecting with a side of life that’s alive, unpredictable. Breaking patterns keeps the mind alert and excited.
Investing
The Robots Make the Predictions - Bloomberg
I wrote last week that, in investing, “There’s no magic, no dark matter, no other source of gains. Everyone’s gains come from (1) economic growth and (2) other people’s losses.” In the aggregate, everyone gets the market return, which comes from allocating capital to economic growth. Some people get more and others get less, but they necessarily cancel each other out. People invest anyway, though, because allocating capital to economic growth is a good long-term proposition.
Prediction markets don’t have that. People put $1 into a prediction market event contract, and at resolution it pays out $1 to the winner. There is no investment in economic growth, no source of long-term returns; everyone’s winnings come from someone else’s losses.
2026-04-29
Post-romanticism
Podcast: 🆕 Never Post! Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man #relationships #dating
Transcript: Never Post - Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man | Transcript Reader
The whole podcast is worth listening to, but this term "post-romanticism" caught my eye. This is probably the first time I am encountering it.
There's a cheery fatalism here. If the marketplace of love offered you a freedom of endless choices, then this new mindset offered freedom from choosing it all. And Carolina explained to me that this ushered in a new kind of dating landscape. Some refer to it as heterofatalism or heteropessimism. But in our conversation, Carolina called it post romanticism.
This post romantic vibe or mood is characterized by sort of a loss of faith in romanticism, of a disbelief in romanticism or at least a performative disbelief in the romantic plot, which is seen not only as a myth, but also as a potentially danger of oppressive one.
Post romanticism trades the emotionally ruinous experience of situationships and ghosting and gaslighting for a completely sanitized view of dating that does not allow for any risk of getting hurt at all. The simplest solution would be to never date men ever. But under post romanticism, you can date. You can have sex. You can have fun if you want to.
But you do so with a kind of intense vigilance that borders on the hypochondriac.
think what is at stake, it's a reversal of the romantic idea of love. Roland Barthes in the Fragments of a Lovers Discourse says that the lover, the 1 who love wants to be loved back so that to become perfect. It is the love I receive that makes me perfect. Whereas in the post romantic discourse, you have to be perfect in order to deserve to be loved. I don't think there is ever a world where you will dine at the table of post romanticism and leave with your belly full. It's a crash diet of avoidance to vulnerability, a commitment to your own misery and the expected misery of others as if it's an intellectual win. But all it really does is make everything so much harder for everyone.
Tech bros and Gutka
The Tech Bros Are All In on Zyn
Everytime I hear Zyn, my mind goes to Gutka.
Gutka is a type of betel quid and chewing tobacco preparation made of crushed areca nut (also called betel nut), tobacco, catechu, paraffin wax, slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and sweet or savory flavourings, in India, Pakistan, other Asian countries, and North America.
The article is kinda wild.
Entrepreneur Garrett Campbell has a 6-mg “cool mint” Zyn tucked under his lip at all times during his mammoth 15-hour workdays, aside from when he is eating.
“I was always very against nicotine,” says the software company founder. The 26-year-old saw his peers using nicotine pouches at college, when they first emerged as a potential productivity-boosting hack, and considered it a “degenerate thing to do.”
But then all of his fellow founders started fueling themselves with nicotine pouches, of which the Philip Morris International–owned Zyn is the market leader. The company distributed 794 million cans in the US in the last financial year, a 37 percent increase over the previous year. Now, Campbell says “every single one” of his friends that runs a company does so with a nicotine pouch in their mouth.
“The brand marketer person [is] doing a hell of a job,” says Campbell, who has slicked-back dark hair and usually wears plain T-shirts in black, white, or gray. He also has ADHD and sold a sales recruitment company last year for a “good chunk of change.”
Nicotine’s core mechanism hasn’t changed in the journey from puff to pouch; the compound still floods the brain with dopamine. Dependence develops quickly, but for some users in the tech sector, the rush of productivity balances out the risk of dependency.
But how “clean” really are the pouches? A gulf is swiftly emerging between nicotine advocates who use the pouches and those who use toothpicks, lozenges, pills, patches, or sprays. Biohacking guru and author Dave Asprey describes nicotine as being close to a perfect psychotropic. “If you're under-aroused, it brings you up; over-aroused, it brings you down,” he says.
…
Nicotine is perhaps the only “biohacking tool” that encounters such strident opposition in other circles. Fellow biohacker Bryan Johnson is against nicotine entirely, and not only due to his claims that the pouches can cause gum recession, oral lesions, and irritation.
2026-04-28
Most People Dont Have a Type
Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’ #dating #relationships
This is not an uncommon trajectory. Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.”
That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.)
The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence. Do you like the guy from Tinder and the joke he cracked about The Big Lebowski just because you were in an unusually good mood on the day you met up with him? If you’d been in a rotten mood, would you have liked him (and his stupid joke) less?
…
All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely. “You might have a middling first impression of somebody,” he said, “but then you meet them again, and you end up really liking them.” The apps, however, present so many options that if a date is “anywhere south of great,” people may be inclined to hastily decide “I’m not gonna do the second date.”
2026-04-27
Marriage and Settling
Are on-screen relationships normalising settling? | Dazed
Very similar themes to the New Yorker podcast I logged last week.
What is marriage for? It’s an interesting question in our day and age, when marriage feels less and less necessary. Women are no longer as dependent on men for financial security (although many still are), and there is far less social stigma around having children or living together outside of wedlock. We also know that a significant amount of marriages don't last, with approximately 42 per cent in the UK projected to end in divorce before their 25th year. So why are we still so drawn to the fantasies of this institution?
This is one of the underlying questions of season two of award-winning Netflix drama Beef. Several answers are explored through the series’ three main couples: Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan), Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton), and Chairwoman Park and Dr Kim (Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho). In episode six, Chairwoman Park, bogged down by efforts to cover up her husband’s culpability in a patient’s death, speaks candidly about why she married him: “This is such a headache! The whole reason I remarried was because he was fun. Someone to eat with. To travel with. That’s all.”
People get married for all kinds of reasons: family and societal pressures, visas, economic and financial security, and, of course, love. But one of the most common motivations is the simple fact that people don’t want to be alone. A 2024 survey commissioned by Forbes Advisor, which polled 1,000 divorced Americans, found that companionship was the second most common reason for getting married, with financial security first and love third. On Reddit, marriage forums are full of questions about marriage and loneliness, with one user questioning whether the idea that “you should never marry out of fear of ending up alone” makes any sense. “Isn’t [that] really the only reason to get married?” they ask. “If people seek stability and companionship, they get married.”
In a climactic exchange in the final episode, Chairwoman Park offers a jaundiced view of love under capitalism: “Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They are all the same, another way to serve the self.” Marriage is supposed to save you from loneliness. It is supposed to grant you rights and signal to the world that you are lovable, desirable, chosen.
I don’t want to spoil the ending of Beef – it is messy, complicated, depressing and unsatisfying, in ways both good and bad. But it shows that while marriage is often an attempt to ameliorate the loneliness of being alive, it can sometimes make that loneliness even worse. It is only in allowing ourselves to be seen and known, helped and supported by others in our best and worst moments, that we can, as Lindsay tells Ashley, “finally give our existence some semblance of meaning.” This might also teach us how to genuinely love one another: not by force, or out of desperation, but truly by choice.
Geopolitics and Economy
Came across a couple of podcasts related to this theme.
Fertilizer 101 How the war with Iran and Hormuz crisis is upending fertilizer supply chains. However, beyond just the current news cycle, this episode goes really deep into how the fertilizer supply chain is organized.
Rare Earths and China Traces the history of the discovery of these rare earths and how eventually China came to dominate them.
- Episode: Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China - YouTube
- Transcript: Planet Money - Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China | Transcript Reader