“Reach for the ceiling” – David Moldawer

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“Meanwhile, I can’t tell the difference between a top violinist and your average pro despite years of classical music, both as listener and performer. I don’t have the ear.

As human beings, we’re each gifted in different ways. To be an artist is to develop the necessary skills to express our unique gifts, whatever they are. If you find yourself unmotivated or unable to improve at writing, painting, or any other form of creative expression, chances are you weren’t born with the discrimination that would make additional efforts pay off. How would you even know you were getting better? Sure, you may recognize on some level that someone else’s work is better than yours, but if you can’t articulate why, take it as a sign”

https://www.mavengame.com/p/reach-for-the-ceiling

“The AI Layoff Bill Is Coming Due, And CTOs Are Going To Pay It Twice” – Sarah Choudhary

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“Demand specificity before automation. The rule my team uses is simple. If you cannot describe what the human did, with examples, you do not understand the job well enough to automate it. Generalities about “handling customer queries” or “writing boilerplate” are not descriptions. They are the fog that hides the part the AI cannot do.”

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/05/14/the-ai-layoff-bill-is-coming-due-and-ctos-are-going-to-pay-it-twice/

“Everybody scream for war” – Hamilton Nolan

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“The historical precedents of Israel and of the United States are quite different, yes, but the basic dynamic of “religious minority feeling the sting of persecution secures homeland by forcefully taking the land of other, weaker people who were not the ones persecuting them, while being extremely self-righteous about it”—well, that should ring familiar to anyone who has ever watched the Dallas Cowboys play the Washington Redskins.

When you stand surrounded by hundreds of flexing young men drunk on rage, testosterone, and politics, you can really feel part of a tradition running through all of human history, and through all of the world’s nation-states. Any country that wants to draw borders and motivate its young men to kill for them must whip up a crowd like this, at scale”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/everybody-scream-for-war

“The new age of diminished expectations” – Dan Davies

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“In other words, during a period in which birth rates and family formation has been falling, and adults living with their parents has been rising, is it such a great puzzle that so many people answer positively to questions about “how are your personal financial circumstances?” but negatively to questions about the performance of the economy?”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-new-age-of-diminished-expectations

“Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?” – Max Read

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“I was struck by the familiarity of the tone and structure of the descriptions of these extreme beauty routines: the exhaustively enumerated but still unexplained accessories, the painstaking multi-step cycles, the stubborn personal theories, the air of weary hard-won confidence from long hours of research. Over the years I have read some very similar paragraphs about hi-fi systems, S.L.R. cameras, espresso machines, and other objects of obsessive hobbyism on message boards, mailing lists, and forums”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-corporate-thrillers-tell-us

“The USA Does Not Understand War” – Phillips P. O’Brien

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“A few days a notable event happened in the course of not just the Russo-Ukraine War but also in modern, machine-defined war. The Ukrainians assaulted and took a Russian position using only machines—both UAVs and UGVs (drones and pilotless land vehicles). Not a single Ukrainian soldier was put in harms way, while the Russians ended up losing humans, some of which were even filmed surrendering to the Ukrainian machines”

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-usa-does-not-understand-war

“Here’s the danger: if Labour doesn’t offer a radical solution to the energy-price crisis, others will” – Jonathan Liew (Guardian)

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“Instead, Labour offers up its book of coupons, an ill-formed lattice of sticking-plaster solutions that nobody will feel the benefit of and for which nobody will thank it, coupled with a raft of promises it cannot remotely keep. And of course, the net effect is not zero. Rather, it maintains the dangerous fallacy that household expenditure is not simply an imperfect function of a lucid economy but a kind of lever to be pulled and yanked by politicians, tying this and every subsequent government to the tyranny of the monthly bill”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/labour-energy-price-crisis-energy-security-reform