“I learned this week just how brain-poisoned I am from following the cryptocurrency industry. When I first saw reports that HyperVerse’s CEO was revealed to have been completely made up, I thought “lol yeah that makes sense” and went on with my day. I was then surprised to see headlines about it in mainstream outlets…
Month: January 2024
“A Continual Christmas” – Ed Zitron
“Failing to say what is actually happening for fear that you won’t be “objective” is failing your audience. Accepting that humans are biased, thoughtful, and terrible creatures, and that writing for humans requires a clarity of message and spirit, is necessary to fully communicate what is happening around us. Journalism is not objective, has never…
“Widows and Orphans” – Warren Ellis
“Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to…
“The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think” – Caitlin Stall-Paquet (The Walrus)
“He cites S&P Global’s estimate that, in transitioning to green energy, manufacturers will need more copper in the next three decades than the world consumed over the past 120 years. Demand for copper is expected to roughly double between now and 2035, to make hardware such as rechargeable batteries, solar panel heat exchangers, and wind…
“Bill Gates is bad for humanity” – Quinn Slobodian (New Statesman)
“Although Schwab’s book is a tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Perhaps we are starting to solve the “Bill Gates Problem” by the creeping (if highly uneven) return of faith in the ability of public authorities to do…
“Cake and Casualties” – Christoph Reuter (Das Spiegel)
“A family stands at the grave of Danylo Boguslavskyi, born on April 7, 1990, and killed in action on October 16, 2022. “We always come on Saturdays,” says his brother Roman. “One Saturday, I drove him to the station. That was the last time we saw him. He was a lawyer and historian and was…
“Begin End” – James Somers (New Yorker)
“Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most…
“The end of anonymity on Chinese social media” – Caiwei Chen (restofworld)
“other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over…
“The worst thing about writing a book is that one day you’ll be done” – Marcin Wichary
“All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for…
“Warhammer Records: Brian May, bungled tours, and 40,000 hard rock anthems” – Callum Bains (Polygon)
“Warhammer’s gothic ultraviolence was clearly gelling with the studded leather getups of Britain’s burgeoning metal scene. And with Games Workshop embracing what Jones describes as an “entrepreneur spirit” where “anything was possible,” the idea of following up these musical dalliances with a full-blown record label seemed less like pivot than a natural next step. “We…