The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs: There’s a tech industry habit of second-guessing “what would Steve Jobs have done” ever since he passed away, and most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent. But recently, we have one of those very rare cases where we know exactly what Steve Jobs would not have done. Tim Cook and Apple’s leadership team have sold out the very American opportunity that made Steve Jobs’ life and accomplishments possible, while betraying his famously contemptuous attitude towards bullshit institutions. (Anil Dash)
• AI Will Not Make You Rich: The disruption is real. It’s also predictable. (Colossus) see also ChatGPT as the Original AI Error: The human fascination with conversation has led us AI astray (Paul Kedrosky)
• 5 forecasts early climate models got right – the evidence is all around you. The earliest climate models made specific forecasts about global warming decades before those forecasts could be proved or disproved. And when the observations came in, the models were right. The forecasts weren’t just predictions of global average warming – they also predicted geographical patterns of warming that we see today. (The Conversation)
• ‘JennaWorld’ Spotlights Jenna Jameson and the Glory Days of Porn: The 13-part podcast, from Molly Lambert and iHeartPodcasts, recalls an era in the late ’90s and 2000s when porn stars were (almost) mainstream. (New York Times)
• How Britain built some of the world’s safest roads: The death rate per mile driven has declined 22-fold since 1950. (Our World In Data) see also How to Build a Medieval Castle: Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France? (Archaelogy Magazine)
• Rivals Rub Shoulders in the World of Competitive Massage: Each year, massage therapists from around the globe gather to face off, collaborate, and make sure that no body gets left behind. (New Yorker)
• The European Heir Restoring Forgotten American Cars to Glory: An Italian jewelry scion has turned an old drive-in theater in Pennsylvania into a showplace for his collection of domestic vehicles. (New York Times)
• How Ben Franklin’s French Diplomacy Raised Money—and Saved the American Revolution: He led the effort to secure the financing the fledgling country needed to survive and win the war. It’s hard to imagine anybody else could have succeeded. (Wall Street Journal)
• NASA discovers ‘clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars’ Detailed analysis of images of speckled rocks found by NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a “potential biosignature.” (Washington Post) see also Happy Birthday, LIGO. Now Drop Dead. Ten years ago, astronomers made an epic discovery with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Cosmology hasn’t been the same since, and it might not stay that way much longer. (New York Times)
• The argument against the existence of a Theory of Everything: The Holy Grail of physics is a Theory of Everything: where a single equation describes the whole Universe. But maybe there simply isn’t one? (Big Think)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Heather Boushey, previously a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Biden, and chief economist to the president’s Invest in America cabinet. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen
Source: @OurWorldInData
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