Posts in: news

This morning’s Financial Times has the headline of the week: “Ben & Jerry’s calls for permanent ceasefire in Gaza”. Straight, serious, factual, and comically absurd.

The Washington Post has your weekend reading covered: “He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable”.

The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.

So it goes…

🏀 And the award for the most poetic basketball headline goest to The Washington Post: “Wizards cast hopeful look into mirror of future, see Thunder looking back”.

At least they are only the second-worst team in the NBA this season, topped only by the worst-ever team in the league’s history.

The Washington Post reports another wave of covid is coming to America. Well, it certainly came to our household. And much like the first time around, I got it days after a vaccine — just my luck. At least this time it’s only 3 days of sore throat and runny nose, and not a full week of high fevers.

Today’s Washington Post has a good write-up on how genetic engineering of the near-extinct American chestnut tree to make it more resistant to infection went wrong:

After he enlisted the help of Ek Han Tan, a geneticist at the University of Maine, to analyze the chestnut’s genome, they made their discovery this fall: The plants they were working on were, in fact, not Darling 58 trees.

Instead, they found they were working with a different chestnut line — called the Darling 54 — where the gene was inserted in another chromosome entirely, potentially corrupting one of the tree’s existing genes.

…

In a phone interview, Newhouse, the SUNY ESF director, acknowledged the mix-up but said he wasn’t sure what transpired.

“As far as exactly how it happened, we don’t know,” he said. “It must have been a label swap between these two trees that we were working with at the same time” in or around 2016.

The brilliant minds who think engineering mosquitos is a good idea can’t foresee that even a seemingly innocuous clerical error can lead to disaster, never mind the second-order effects to nature if your project succeeds. Whoever’s read Taleb’s Incerto (or some of his tweets) knows better.

What kind of a wimpy autocrat has complete control of the media, no serious opposition, gives pre-election handouts left and right, but still needs to bus people from out-of-state to stuff the ballots? Serbia’s president, apparently. Maybe that’s why Putin hasn’t yet called to congratulate.

The best newspaper article I’ve read in ages is also about government dysfunction. The Washington Post lays out in great detail all the ways in which much of D.C. is vulnerable to flooding, and some of the ways to overcome it, yet:

It is the quintessential story of how Washington works that none of these proposals has reached senior decision-makers. That’s because more than a dozen federal agencies own land and buildings there, each with its own congressional appropriation committee to please.

But that is just a wrinkle in a dissertation about climate change, urbanism and governance. Highly recommended.

This morning’s Axios DC newsletter has a few words to say about the city’s political dysfunction:

Last Tuesday, after racing to Capital One Arena to counteroffer Ted Leonsis with Mayor Bowser, Council chair Phil Mendelson gaveled a hearing about school truancy two hours late. Truancy!

But of course, you already knew the place was a mess. It’s almost as if ineptitude had consequences.

For Malaysia Airlines, 2014 was a devastating year. I remember flight MH17, which was shot down on July 17 while flying over eastern Ukraine. But months before, another flight — MH370 — disappeared from the radar never to be seen again (well, not intact). A friend directed me to this video, and the story is as engrossing as anything you’ll see on the big screen, only done with flight simulator software and stock footage. Make sure you can spare the full hour before you start watching!

Side note: it’s a good documentary, but Good lord how I hate YouTube’s aesthetics of catchy titles and eye-grabbing thumbnail videos. At least they’ve fixed the comments.

After mentioning my planned media fast yesterday, I have to note two things:

I, too, endorse FT’s daily Big Read!