- Lily Lynch: Birthday Baffler. This is little more than a call-out to her article Yugoslavia Calling, about the world’s first Internet war(s). Well, it’s one more thing: a note that today is Lynch’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lily!
- Branko Milanović: Yuri Andropov: A man who could have become another Deng Xiaoping…or not. Leave it to Milanović to write an engrossing, educational and highly relevant review of a 40-year-old book. His own Capitalism, Alone from 2019 has also aged quite well.
- Bryan Vartabedian: Three Bottlenecks in Healthcare Delivery. Ah, we have come to the AI section of the link list. This one is about creating abundance in health care and all I could think of while reading the article was the Isaac Asimov quote from 1953: “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.”
- Adam Mastroianni: Infinite midwit. The titular midwit is your friendly neighborhood LLM, because Mastroianni shares my observations about the ChatGPT style of writing. As a semi-professional writer, he is more relieved that he won’t be out of work any time soon than frustrated that he keeps encountering dreck. Oh well.
- Ruxandra Teslo: The Bureaucracy Blocking the Chance at a Cure. Teslo asks for more abundance. The Asimov quote a few bullet points up still stands, though it is only a matter of degree that is unknown: we know full well what kind of shenanigans releasing the brakes on early-stage trials would unleash. Again, letting China do it would be a sign of maturity.
- Kyla Scanlon: The Ozempicization of the Economy. I don’t know which part of this hot-take smorgasbord I liked more: Scanlon’s digs at the “prediction” “markets”, her overview of “The Manosphere” (I watched the first 10 minutes of Theroux’s documentary and promptly turned it off as it was little different from watching the actual TikTok videos), or her observations on the most recent war. So, I will only re-quote one MG Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who per Scanlon tweeted (confusing em-dash spacing included):
We are aware of what is happening in the paper oil market, including the firms hired to influence oil futures. We also see the broader jawboning campaign. But let’s see if they can turn that into “actual fuel” at the pump —or maybe even print gas molecules!
Tee hee.