A four-day weekend meant an extended period to curl up with some very rewarding reads. Let’s just get to it.
“The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave” (NY Times; 2024) and “The Squatters of Beverly Hills” (Curbed) — Not sure why the topic of luxurious squatting is edging its way into my feeds these days, but here are two fascinating stories about how they got in and how they were removed.
“The text file that runs the internet,” The Verge (2024) — Where possible, I much prefer that we live our lives based on customary norms versus codified laws enforced by legalized monopolies on violence and coercion. When those customary norms break down, a powerful institution is lost and, perhaps, a certain measure of innocence. (Nowhere is this more powerfully described than in this piece about Somali tribal law and how it’s subversion by colonists and do-gooders has contributed to much of that country’s struggle.) This article by The Verge talks about how the file robots.txt used to be the Internet’s handshake agreement and how AI bots could erode it.
“Club Med: Dispatches from the Adderall Epidemic,” Pioneer Works (2024) — Call it white-collar meth, but Adderall (which got its name from “ADD for All,” according to the origin story told here) has been pervasive among the technology and financial communities. This piece offers a number of personal perspectives without coming off as an ‘80s-era PSA.
“93 Years of Shatner,” Quillette (2024) — Parodied as he has been for his “over-acting,” this career retrospective makes a very good point: Shatner was the actor that offered up the energy that audiences with small TVs and bunny-ears-fed programming needed.
“Sam Bankman-Fried is the New Face of Evil,” Dark Markets (2024) — The best-possible summary of this piece comes from the author himself, David Morris, here at his most incisive: “Sam Bankman-Fried did not suddenly find himself, in late 2022, in a crunch that forced him to cut corners. He was not forced into fraud by bad market conditions. He had been knowingly stealing for years, in pursuit of the false image of a success that never actually existed.” Cannot wait for the book.
“His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him,” Texas Monthly (2024) — The old journalistic saw of “news” taking the form of “man bites dog” probably didn’t anticipate stories like this.
“The Last Days of Mezcal,” Bloomberg (2024) — Many of you know my fondness for fine cachaça, Brazil’s native spirit. More generally, though, the liquor supply chain and their relationship to changing tastes has always fascinated me. (On one crisis assignment, I was briefly brought in on a situation where one provider of fine spirits was caught reducing the ABV of its products in order to stretch its inventory.) This piece discusses the growing popularity of mezcal and the struggle to square it against its slow-growing ingredient.