Links

Short posts pointing to things from around the web.

Why is Everything a Conspiracy Now? ↗ — Hannah Glenn, Hannah is Spiraling

And I often wonder if conspiracy theories are actually comforting to people, because the idea that there is no plan, might be far worse.

There are plenty of good reasons to be suspicious of powerful people and institutions. But there’s a difference between questioning what you’re told and deciding that whatever you’re told must be a lie. The second one can feel like critical thinking without requiring much thinking at all.

I also keep coming back to the entertainment part. Are we trying to understand what happened, or are we hoping the next detail makes the story more interesting?

Distrust isn’t discernment

Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Own Kids ↗ — David Streitfeld, The New York Times (gift link)

Take them at their word. They built something they won't let near their own children. They've been telling us so, on the record, without much visible shame, and in the same stretch of years the products only got more aggressive. Whether they know was never the question. The question is what it means that knowing has never once cost them anything.

Cigarette Candy

Why Are We Giving So Much Weight to What Influencers and Celebrities Have to Say? ↗ — Hannah Glenn, Hannah is Spiraling

Hannah Glenn’s right that fame carries no correlation to expertise, yet we keep treating famous people as authorities on gender, politics, eating disorders — anything charged enough to trend. Her fix: stop giving these opinions our attention.

I’d go a step further. The reason we can’t stop is that we’re never just encountering a celebrity’s opinion — we’re being served it, repeatedly, by a system that profits from our reaction. Attention discipline is real, but it’s a fair fight only if the stream stops pushing. At some point the question isn’t “whose opinions are we amplifying” but why we keep tolerating a feed built to provoke us in the first place.

When do we take power back over our own feeds, services, algorithms?

Stop Amplifying — or Stop Being Fed

Eclipses should be celebrations of science, not pseudoscience ↗ — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Wednesday’s eclipse will cross Greenland, Iceland, and Spain — and astronomers called the exact time and path years ago, to the second. Gruber wrote this in 2024, and it’s aged into something sharper than he probably intended. Two years on, we’re not just tolerating pseudoscience as harmless — we’re watching institutions built on evidence get gutted by cranks, grifters, and zealots, who all get airtime and coverage as if they’re offering an equally valid take.

The eclipse is a good reminder of what happens when you do the math: you get the right answer, on time, every time.

Down to the Second

Everything New in iOS 27 Beta 5 ↗ — Julie Clover, MacRumors

Good roundup of everything new in today's developer beta. This is shaping up to be a much-needed quality-of-life update. Hopefully, our long national nightmare of software quality issues in Cupertino is over. Though it's still too early to call.

New in iOS 27 DB 5

Poolsuite FM ↗

Poolsuite describes itself as "the ultra-summer internet radio station, playing an infinity pool of summer sounds 24/7. Swimwear optional." That undersells it. What actually happens is that you open the site and a vintage computer boots up in your browser — startup chime, pixel fonts, the works — as if a Macintosh from 1986 had spent its entire life on vacation. Then the music starts, and it is somehow always the exact right amount of summer.

It costs nothing. It asks nothing. Its a lovingly overbuilt machine for feeling slightly better.

Summer Vibes Radio

Welcome to the Age of Diarrhea ↗ — Peter Shamshiri, String in a Maze

Shamshiri's piece is about the four-month cyclospora outbreak, and it does the necessary work of tracing the funding cuts, the optional reporting, the White House sitting on Taylor Farms' recall deadline while naming only Taco Bell. But the line that stuck with me is the one that isn't about blame at all:

You'll see the illness, but you won't know its source.

A crank got put in charge of health policy and now people are sick. But cranks come and go. What Shamshiri is describing is the dismantling of the machinery that lets a society notice things about itself.

We know measles cases have exploded — more since 2025 than in the previous twenty-five years combined. We know that because someone built the thing that counts measles. That number isn't a fact of nature sitting out in the world waiting to be observed. It's the output of a surveillance system, staffed and funded, that has to be maintained the way a bridge has to be maintained. Take away the counting and the cases don't stop. They just stop being a number. They become a feeling. A bad season. Something going around.

A problem can be argued about. A mystery can only be endured. And an administration that would rather be endured than argued with has an obvious interest in converting the first thing into the second — not by lying, exactly, but by defunding the instruments that make lying necessary.

Which is why anti-transparency isn't a side effect of this politics. It's load-bearing. Shamshiri points at Clarence Thomas spending decades arguing that disclosure laws are unconstitutional, worried that transparency invites "reprisals" from an angry public. Reprisals meaning: people finding out, and then having opinions about it.

Worth reading in full.

The Instruments Were the Point

I Hate The Way We Talk Online ↗ — Jason Toney

Jason Toney asked a simple question on Threads: without googling, do you know the top songs in your favorite genre right now? Could you hum one? No agenda, no side to pick. What he got back was defensiveness, conspiracy theories about the charts, and people bragging about how far their taste sits from anything popular. The post widens from there into "main character" mentality and algorithm-speak, and ends with a plea I'll happily co-sign: "Have something real to say? Write a blog."

Rudeness online is nothing new, but nobody in those replies seemed to consider that Toney was asking because he wanted to know. When winning is the goal, a sincere question is read as a setup, as bait, the first move in an argument nobody agreed to have.

I don't know what it costs a culture when asking becomes suspicious. But we're clearly running the experiment online.

Can You Hum It?

Uncovered.ink — Judge a Book by Its Writing ↗

Try this out. It gives you a single page of a real book. No cover, no title, no author, no genre label, no star average, no "readers also enjoyed." Just the prose. You read the opening, decide whether you'd keep going, and swipe up for the next one. The pages that catch you go on a shelf. There's no account to make and nothing to buy.

It's worth noticing how much apparatus we've bolted onto the simple act of choosing a book. The cover art, the jacket blurb from a more famous writer, the fifteen-second BookTok clip, the four-and-a-half stars from ninety thousand strangers, the store table it was stacked on, the algorithm that surfaced it. Every one of those was added to help answer "is this any good?" without reading a sentence of the actual book.

That's the part of book discovery Uncovered tries to fix. It removes all the marketing, and everything you are told how to feel about the book before you even crack it open. After enough years inside the recommendation economy, I'm not fully sure I could tell the difference between a book I love and a book I was effectively sold. Uncovered is a low-stakes way to find out, which is probably why it's a little addictive.

Reading Blind

Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name ↗ — TechCrunch

Good catch-up piece on Reed Jobs and Yosemite, his oncology-focused venture firm. Three years in: the firm now has a team of 17, and AI has helped accelerate part of what Yosemite does. A few things worth highlighting:

  • Yosemite’s model is unusual — they only work in oncology and prefer building companies themselves rather than just writing checks, using no-strings philanthropy to de-risk early academic ideas.
  • On AI’s actual near-term impact, Jobs is clear-eyed: it’s not necessarily doing science better, but doing grunt work incredibly fast and reproducibly — with the biggest opportunity being synthetic control arms that could cut clinical trial patient recruitment in half.
  • The p53 section is the most striking part of the interview — a tumor suppressor gene implicated in nearly every human cancer, long considered untouchable, that Yosemite is attacking with three different companies.

Cancer is horrible. Lord knows Reed Jobs knows. Wishing him and the whole Yosemite team great success — this is exactly the kind of work worth rooting for.

Three Years Into Yosemite

First ‘true sugar’ molecule found in space — offering hints to life’s origins ↗ — Nature

Astronomers just detected erythrulose — a four-carbon sugar also found in raspberries and self-tanner — drifting in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. It’s the first true sugar ever found in interstellar space, formed with no star, planet, or life anywhere nearby.

The implication: some of the raw chemistry for life may have been floating around long before Earth existed, waiting for a comet to deliver it.

Interstellar Sweet Tooth

Netflix invented binge watching. Now it may have outgrown it. ↗ — TechCrunch

Bloomberg’s data shows Netflix viewers abandoning shows after one season, and TechCrunch is framing it as a competitive threat from TikTok and short form content.

I say bring back the weekly release. It forces a show to live in your head between episodes — to become something you discuss, theorize about, look forward to. Notably, Netflix already knows this works, dropping “Love Is Blind” in weekly batches specifically because it makes great watercooler conversation.

The industry’s answer to shrinking attention spans should not be to make content shorter. Instead, give people something worth waiting a week for, and they’ll wait. Give them everything at once, and you’ve traded a relationship for a transaction.

Savoring requires high quality and a bit of scarcity. Apple TV knows this well with shows like Severance.

Bring Back Weekly Drops