10 Weekend Reads

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• The Un-Fuckening: Stop talking about AI like this: Stop it with the rageposting. Stop it with the performative fearmongering. Stop behaving like little brats getting a high from scaring each other in the locker room, desperate to prove they belong. There is no shortage of voices predicting some version of social collapse. Their vision of the future somehow always involves most people getting left behind. (Dadalogue)

•  The Strait of Hormuz is today’s energy chokepoint. China is tomorrow’s.: A Big Think piece arguing the geographic chokepoints that matter for energy security are shifting east. As the global economy moves beyond oil, the strategic importance of the world’s most critical hydrocarbon chokepoint is likely to decline rapidly. (Big Think)

• The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters: The NYT Magazine’s definitive ranking — guaranteed to start arguments, end friendships, and generate more heat than light. That’s the point. (New York Times)

• The Old Guard: Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis: Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us. (Harper’s Magazine)

• 11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview: Have you ever taken a pause and considered the events, learnings, and forks in the road that have constructed and built your current worldview? (The Great Simplification)

• The Social Edge of Intelligence: An argument that what we call ‘intelligence’ is mostly social cognition wearing a lab coat. Worth a read if you think IQ debates miss the point. AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering. (The Ideas Letter)

•  U.S. Mint Buys Drug Cartel Gold and Sells It as ‘American’: A jaw-dropping investigation into how cartel-laundered Colombian gold ends up in U.S. coins. The supply chain rinses cleaner than the money. As prices for the precious metal soar, the industry’s guardrails have broken down. (New York Times)

•  What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?: Mathematicians are quietly exploring physics without infinities — and finding the framework holds up. A satisfying primer on a deep idea. Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond. (Quanta Magazine)

•  An Oral History of the Harvard Lampoon, the College Magazine That Remade Comedy: A look back at the 150-year-old college humor magazine whose alums went on to write Conan, SNL, The Simpsons, and a generation’s worth of American comedy. (Washington Post)

• What to Watch For at the 2026 Kentucky Derby: We found the 5 most important rules of thumb when trying to figure out which horse will wear the roses. (Neil’s Substack)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Lawrence Calcano, CEO and Chairman of iCapital, The firm is a fintech platform built to be the OS for alternative investments and complex products for financial advisors, wealth managers, and banks. The firm has over $1.2 trillion in active global assets on platform,  across 2,455 funds used by 123,ooo financial professionals.

SpaceX Is Going Public. Why a Tesla Merger Could Be Musk’s Real Endgame

Source: Barron’s

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