Sunday, April 26, 2026
Glen Campbell
[ed. Never heard this before, but apparently Brian Wilson gave it to Glen as a thank-you for something or other. Glen does a great job, but you can easily guess who wrote it.]
Engineering the Disposable Diaper
Adventures in product design.
‘You know more than you think you do’, the author told readers. ‘We know for a fact’, he wrote with medical authority, ‘that the natural loving care that kindly parents give to their children is a hundred times more valuable than their knowing how to pin a diaper on just right’.
You want a covered pail partially filled with water to put used diapers in as soon as removed. If it contains soap or detergent, this helps in removing stains. Be sure the soap is well dissolved, to prevent lumps of soap from remaining in the diapers later. When you remove a soiled diaper, scrape the movement off into the toilet with a knife, or rinse it by holding it in the toilet while you flush it (hold tight).On this subject, the 1957 edition contains two telling differences from the original. In 1946, Dr Spock recommended the knife method to those without flush toilets. And starting with the second edition, he advised new parents to buy an automatic washer and dryer if they could possibly afford them. ‘They save hours of work each week, and precious energy’, he wrote. ‘Energy’ in this case referred not to electricity or gas but to maternal stamina.
You wash the diapers with mild soap or mild detergent in [the] washing machine or washtub (dissolve the soap well first), and rinse 2 or 3 or 4 times. The number of rinsings depends on how soon the water gets clear and on how delicate the baby’s skin is. If your baby’s skin isn’t sensitive, 2 rinsings may be enough.
Disposable diapers did exist, but they accounted for a mere one percent of US diaper changes. They were expensive, specialty products and not that great. ‘The full-sized ones are rather bulky’, noted Dr Spock. ‘The small ones that fit into a waterproof cover do not absorb as much urine as a cloth diaper and do not retain a bowel movement as well’. Disposables were mostly used for travel, when washing diapers wasn’t an option.
But even as the second edition of Baby and Child Care was hitting bookstores and supermarket racks, change was afoot. After buying Charmin Paper Company in 1957, Procter & Gamble began looking for ideas for new paper products.
Motivated by the less pleasant aspects of spending time with his new grandchild, the company’s director of exploratory development, Victor Mills, suggested disposable diapers. After analyzing existing products and conducting consumer research, P&G created a dedicated diaper research group.
The research this group conducted, like that of its successors and competitors, wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t advance basic science. It wasn’t even an obvious route to profit. (One percent of the market!) It was a high-stakes gamble that required solving difficult engineering problems. How that happened represents the kind of hidden progress that leads to everyday abundance.
P&G’s first design flopped. Tested in the extreme heat of a Dallas summer, the pleated absorbent pad with plastic pants made babies miserable and left them with heat rashes. Starting over, the group had a one piece diaper ready for testing in March 1959. With an improved rayon moisture barrier between the baby and the absorbent tissue wadding, the new diaper was softer and more comfortable. An initial test of 37,000 hand-assembled prototypes went well, with about two thirds of the parents deeming the disposables as good or better than cloth. The next step was mass production.
Designing one well-functioning disposable was hard enough. Turning out hundreds a minute was practically impossible. ‘I think it was the most complex production operation the company had ever faced’, an engineer recalled.
There was no standard equipment. We had to design the entire production line from the ground up. It seemed a simple task to take three sheets of material – plastic back sheet, absorbent wadding, and water repellent top sheet – fold them in a zigzag pattern and glue them together. But glue applicators dripped glue. The wadding generated dust. Together they formed sticky balls and smears which fouled the equipment. The machinery could run only a few minutes before having to be shut down and cleaned.Eventually, the diaper team mastered the process. In December 1961, Pampers went on the market in Peoria, Illinois. Once again, the test failed.
This time mothers liked the diapers. But the price was way too high for a single use item: ten cents a diaper, equivalent to about one dollar today. By contrast, diaper delivery services, which served about five percent of the market, charged no more than five cents a diaper. Home laundry costs ran to one or two cents.
Lowering the price of a diaper required much larger volumes. Aiming at about six cents a diaper, P&G engineers spent several years developing what Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter described as ‘a highly sophisticated block-long, continuous-process machine that could assemble diapers at speeds of up to a remarkable 400 a minute’. After successfully testing Pampers at 5.5 cents each, P&G began a national rollout in 1966. By 1973, disposables accounted for 42 percent of the US diaper market. [...]
The success of Pampers drew competitors into the growing market. ‘Any diaper maker that carved out a modest market share against Procter & Gamble could expect sales to triple as a result of sheer market growth’, write business historians Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor in Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies, a history of Kimberly-Clark. But there was a catch. The bulky diapers took up so much space on shelves that stores rarely stocked more than two brands, plus maybe a discounted private label. Second place meant profits, third place disaster.
by Virginia Postrel, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: A nurse demonstrating to young immigrant mothers how to diaper their babies: Israel Government (1950)
Saturday, April 25, 2026
Intelligent Parts vs. Physical Parts
Imagine you’re trying to bat in baseball. Your brain does some genuinely impressive computation — predicting trajectories, coordinating dozens of muscles, adjusting for wind — and puts it all together using Bayesian algorithms. But here’s the thing: making your brain infinitely smarter would not allow you to hit all balls. Some are out of reach, others move too quickly. At some point, regardless of your intelligence, you hit physical limits. You can only stretch so far or react so fast. No amount of genius overcomes the physics of your body.
This is intelligence saturation. For a given task, more intelligence helps. But it helps less and less as you add more intelligence. And it’s the key concept missing from most debates about AI and the future of work.
On one side, we have AI researchers who see exponentials everywhere: compute resource doubling every six months, costs halving faster than every six months, model performance doubling every seven months. The AI folks see that “intelligence” is scaling at unbelievable rates and conclude we’re headed for an economic singularity. In one popular scenario, human wages will go up as automated tasks make the not-yet-automated parts of a job more productive, until AI takes over everything and their wage goes to zero as there is no work left to be done. Then, the theory goes, everyone will have to be on Universal Basic Income.
On the other side, economists look at 200 years of steady growth despite countless “revolutionary” technologies and shrug: AI is just another general-purpose technology, nothing special. In a scenario popular with these econ folks, it is hard to make human workers obsolete even in the intelligence domain. In this view, AI replaces workers in some jobs that it can do better or more cheaply, but new jobs are also created, and AI makes people overall more productive. Overall growth is then just like without AI, only a little bit faster.
Physical Meets Intelligence
Economists traditionally divide the economy into two complementary sectors: capital and labor. We can replace capital, which includes machinery, equipment and technology, with human labor and vice versa, but that replacement is often difficult. The more we replace one with the other, the harder it is to replace more, because the easiest tasks to replace are targeted first. In our paper we argue that it is crucial to also divide the economy into the “intelligence parts” and the “physical parts.”
The intelligence sector comprises things that can be done virtually, remotely, purely through information processing. The physical sector comprises things that require bodies, presence, and manipulation of the actual world.
We believe that AI may be eating the pure intelligence sector alive. But here’s the catch: intelligence and physicality are complements, not substitutes. You need both.
by Konrad Körding and Ioana Marinescu, Transformer | Read more:
Image: Getty/Alex Bierens de Haan
[ed. Not if you have the Terminator standing at the plate. Besides, the more the work force transitions to "physical professions" (plumbing, electricians, beauticians, etc.) the more wages are likely to decline because the market can only absorb so many workers. I don't need a plumber every week.]
[ed. Not if you have the Terminator standing at the plate. Besides, the more the work force transitions to "physical professions" (plumbing, electricians, beauticians, etc.) the more wages are likely to decline because the market can only absorb so many workers. I don't need a plumber every week.]
Dump the Jones Act. Permanently.
Image: uncredited
[ed. Expect to hear a lot more about this as a 90-day waiver has now been enacted to counteract rising oil prices. Alaska and Hawaii in particular have been held hostage to the Jones Act for decades, resulting in higher transport/shipping costs. See also: Jones Act Watch (Zvi).]
Sports Go Sports
The Trump administration tries to set broad NCAA policy by fiat, as in Executive Order, demanding a five-year eligibility cap, one free transfer, national agent registry, medical care protections for athletes, women’s/Olympic sport protections and a ban on NIL collectives it calls ‘fraudulent schemes.’
This is not how our government works, but Trump would to just declare things, so he’s trying to threaten NIH or other funding to force the universities to do what he wants, even when what he wants has been ruled illegal by courts and doesn’t actually have a working legal definition or plan to deal with the existing court rulings. He just thinks he can say ‘implement these things or else I will cut your funding, even though the courts probably think that is illegal, I don’t care,’ and sit back.
How did we end up with a legal system where there is no punishment for repeatedly issuing orders that you yourself know are illegal, other than ending enforcement of those illegal orders after someone sues, thus allowing this to be used as leverage?
Shrug.
This is not how our government works, but Trump would to just declare things, so he’s trying to threaten NIH or other funding to force the universities to do what he wants, even when what he wants has been ruled illegal by courts and doesn’t actually have a working legal definition or plan to deal with the existing court rulings. He just thinks he can say ‘implement these things or else I will cut your funding, even though the courts probably think that is illegal, I don’t care,’ and sit back.
Kyle Saunders: And here’s the thing Heitner caught that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Section 4(b) of the order conditions the NCAA’s rulemaking mandate on actions taken “to the extent permitted by law and applicable court orders.”The good news is that there seems to be momentum behind passing something, and everyone smiled about the order. The bad news is that all of that is meaningless.
The order contains its own limiting principle. It knows it can’t override the courts. It says so, in its own text, and then directs the NCAA to do things that courts have already ruled are antitrust violations.
How did we end up with a legal system where there is no punishment for repeatedly issuing orders that you yourself know are illegal, other than ending enforcement of those illegal orders after someone sues, thus allowing this to be used as leverage?
Shrug.
by Zvi Moshowitz, DWAtV | Read more:
[ed. Don't know much about the issue in question, but this short description of Trump administration strong-arm tactics is near perfect. It's a strategy. Here's another Republican doing exactly the same thing (using the legal system to run out the clock): DeSantis plots end run of Florida law to create more GOP House seats (Axios).]
We Absolutely Do Know That Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers
In a recent article in Bloomberg, David Zipper argued that “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Big if true! In fact, I’d been under the impression that Waymos are not only safer than humans, the evidence to date suggests that they are staggeringly safer, with somewhere between an 80% to 90% lower risk of serious crashes.
“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.
It’s also completely wrong. The article drags its audience into the author’s preferred state of epistemic helplessness by dancing around the data rather than explaining it. And Zipper got many of the numbers wrong; in some cases, I suspect, as a consequence of a math error.
There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.
But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.
Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.
Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.
It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”
The safety gap between, for example, Cruise and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?
Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?
This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”
[ed. I'd take one any time (if reasonably priced), and expect to see them everywhere soon. See also: I Was PromisedFlying Self Driving Cars (Zvi):]
A Waymo moving 17mph hits the breaks instantly upon seeing a child step in front of it from a blind spot, hits the child at 6mph and dialed 911. If a human had been driving, the child would likely have been struck at 14mph and be dead.
What did some headlines call this, of course?
“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.
There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.
***
In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.
Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.
Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.
It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”
The safety gap between, for example, Cruise and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?
Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?
This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”
by Kelsey Piper, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images[ed. I'd take one any time (if reasonably priced), and expect to see them everywhere soon. See also: I Was Promised
***
A Tesla Model S drove itself from Los Angeles to New York with zero disengagements. Full reverse cannonball run.Mike P: I don’t mean to say this in a way that discredits what they’ve done, but ngl, this stuff isn’t even surprising to me anymore like ya, makes total sense. I went from Philly to Raleigh NC to Tennessee and back to Philly and the only thing I had to do was re park the car at 2 charging stops when the car parked in the wrong place.
Tesla did the thingThere’s still a difference between full self-driving (FSD) that can take you across the country, and the point when you can sleep while it drives.
A Waymo moving 17mph hits the breaks instantly upon seeing a child step in front of it from a blind spot, hits the child at 6mph and dialed 911. If a human had been driving, the child would likely have been struck at 14mph and be dead.
What did some headlines call this, of course?
TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa MonicaThis was another good time to notice that almost all the AI Safety people are strongly in favor of Waymo and self-driving cars.
Samuel Hammond: A more accurate headline would be “Waymo saves child’s life thanks to superhuman reaction time”
Rob Miles: Seems worthwhile for people to hear AI Safety people saying: No, self driving cars are not the problem, they have the potential to be much safer than human drivers, and in this instance it seems like a human driver would have done a much worse job than the robot
Friday, April 24, 2026
Iran War Updates: April 24, 2026
Image: USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) sails in the Indian Ocean, April 23. CENTCOM/X
[ed. Updates from a variety of sources. Draw your own conclusions. See also: Iran War: Team Trump as Narrative War Captives? (NC).]
What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center
Image: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty
[ed. An order of magnitude worse than I imagined.]
We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America
Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.
1. BaseballIn November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.
2. BombsOn the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.
A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.
It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.
3. Bombs, againOn March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.
Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”
A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?
Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.
“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.
From Laundromats to Airplanes
What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.
For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. [...]
Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.
Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.
And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:
It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.
“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.
Four Ways to Lose (Or, What's a 'Rigged Pitch' in a War?)
There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.
Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.
And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:
Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”
It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.
“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.
Four Ways to Lose (Or, What's a 'Rigged Pitch' in a War?)
There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.
by Derek Thompson, Substack | Read more:
Image: Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash
Super Bird
Before it took off, the bird ate parts of its own liver, kidneys, and gut. That was the only way to be light enough to fly. Then it flew 8,425 miles from Alaska to Australia, in 11 days, without eating, drinking, or landing once.
The bird is called B6. It's a bar-tailed godwit, four months old, weighing about as much as a can of beans. In October 2022, scientists at the US Geological Survey tracked its flight from Alaska all the way to Tasmania. The trip took 11 days and 1 hour. It is still the longest non-stop flight of any animal on Earth.
For two weeks before takeoff, godwits eat until they almost double in weight. Fat ends up being 55% of their body, more than any bird ever measured. Then they shrink their own insides. About a quarter of their liver, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gets broken down and reused for fuel, making room for the extra fat and cutting weight. Their heart and wing muscles grow bigger at the same time.
They never drink along the way. The water they need comes out of burning fat, the same reaction their muscles use for energy. They also never really sleep. B6 flapped its wings for 264 straight hours, cruising around 35 miles per hour with help from storm tailwinds. By the time it landed, it had lost almost half its body weight. The shrunken organs grew back over the following weeks. Scientists still cannot explain the navigation. B6 had never made this flight before. Adult godwits leave Alaska weeks earlier, so young birds fly alone with nobody to follow. How a four-month-old bird finds its way across 8,425 miles of open ocean to a place it has never seen is still an open question. About 100,000 bar-tailed godwits leave Alaska every fall. Most of them land in New Zealand or Australia 10 or 11 days later, having eaten parts of themselves to get there.
by Anish Moonka, X | Read more:
Image: All Day Astronomy
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism
If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to a close. “The novel is finally finished,” he writes. “In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I’ve finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.” They will go to a literature festival, where he will endure an interview and then his wife will, too, since her own book has just come out. “Afterwards we will catch the train to Malmö, where we will get in the car and drive back to our house, and the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”
Beyond the physical relief of putting down the carpal-tunnel-inducing final tome (1,157 pages in all), you might have sighed with despair at the thought of post-Struggle existence. After all, you’d spent countless hours swimming through Karl Ove’s mind, seeing through his eyes as he smoked, chugged coffee, “trudged” through various forms of bad weather, tried to write and then wrote and wrote and wrote, took care of his children, felt ashamed of taking care of his children, painfully recalled his father’s drunken misbehavior and his own, fretted over his sexual imperfections and moral indiscretions, agonized about his overwhelming shyness but also his glaring narcissism, stared at himself in various reflections, and, on two occasions, sliced up his face with broken glass. How will I fill my time, you might have wondered, if not by reading Knausgaard? And if he was renouncing the vocation he struggled so hard to claim, what had it all been for?
But of course Knausgaard didn’t stop writing. In fact, just the opposite. My Struggle was released in Norway between 2009 and 2011; by the time the final installment of this Viking longship of a novel invaded the English-speaking world, in 2018, Knausgaard had already published five more books in his native country...
[ed. Like with Proust... two books and I'm good.]
But of course Knausgaard didn’t stop writing. In fact, just the opposite. My Struggle was released in Norway between 2009 and 2011; by the time the final installment of this Viking longship of a novel invaded the English-speaking world, in 2018, Knausgaard had already published five more books in his native country...
Now the cycle continues with The School of Night (2023/2026), a bildungsroman about a young Norwegian photographer and the Faustian bargain that catapults him to artistic greatness. So far, we’re at 2,512 pages and counting. Two more tomes have already been published in Norway; Knausgaard told a Norwegian newspaper that the seventh will be the last, because, incredibly, “there is so much else I want to write.”
An attentive Struggler will identify bits and pieces that Knausgaard recycles in these novels: the aphrodisiac qualities of prawns, or a grandfather’s antisemitic quip, or the frequent appearance of hospitals and mental institutions. There is typically Knausgaardian attention paid to the precise color of piss (sometimes, like Knausgaard’s father’s, disturbingly dark) and the unevenly shared burdens of domestic life; much Pepsi Max is slurped, significant time is spent brooding on verandas, and the destructive desire for just one more drink is often satisfied. Narrators resemble Karl Ove at various points in My Struggle, like the alcoholic literature professor and aspiring novelist whose mentally unstable wife is hospitalized, as Linda was in Book Two; The School of Night’s young artist maps onto student Karl Ove in Book Five.
Yet the Star series is in many ways My Struggle’s opposite. Rather than the unrelenting voice of one man, we get an array of perspectives, and some of the most compelling characters are women. Whereas My Struggle somehow keeps you engaged despite its apparent formlessness, with little plot beyond the shaggy shape of an actual life, the Star series is structured around a series of more or less suspenseful mysteries. But the most obvious difference is the weirdness. While Knausgaard continues to beguile us with his trademark hyperrealist style, predictably observant down to the coffee granules dissolving inside a mug, what happens in these new novels transcends the real. One of the narrators — Egil, a trust-funded documentarian turned religious searcher who composes an essay on death that constitutes the last fifty or so pages of The Morning Star — helpfully informs us that the titular phrase is not just a literal translation of Lucifer, the name of the fallen angel who rebels against God, but also one of the ways Jesus describes himself. And the dark corners of these novels are illuminated by a gleam equal parts demonic and divine: hordes of crabs scuttle their way inland, a Sasquatch-like beast emerges from the woods and seemingly possesses an escaped mental patient, dreams start changing, dead bodies stop arriving at mortuaries, and people who should be dead seem somehow to keep living.
The struggle of My Struggle is, at heart, about what to believe in the face of death when religion is not an option, ideology has failed, and there’s nothing more than the life you’ve got. “Attaching meaning to the world is peculiar only to man,” Knausgaard writes in Book Six. “We are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our own responsibility but also our obligation.” Knausgaard sought a form that would not just describe but enact the process by which meaning is made in secular life. But in the Star books, secular lives — and seemingly mortality itself — are disrupted by the new star; characters and readers alike wonder whether it’s a sign to be interpreted or simply a phenomenon to be explained. Knausgaard widens his frame to encompass not just the banal and everyday, but the cosmic. He tries, in other words, to reenchant the secular world, and the secular novel, dramatizing a search for meaning beyond the self and beyond realism. But like his characters, we’re left wondering what it all means.
An attentive Struggler will identify bits and pieces that Knausgaard recycles in these novels: the aphrodisiac qualities of prawns, or a grandfather’s antisemitic quip, or the frequent appearance of hospitals and mental institutions. There is typically Knausgaardian attention paid to the precise color of piss (sometimes, like Knausgaard’s father’s, disturbingly dark) and the unevenly shared burdens of domestic life; much Pepsi Max is slurped, significant time is spent brooding on verandas, and the destructive desire for just one more drink is often satisfied. Narrators resemble Karl Ove at various points in My Struggle, like the alcoholic literature professor and aspiring novelist whose mentally unstable wife is hospitalized, as Linda was in Book Two; The School of Night’s young artist maps onto student Karl Ove in Book Five.
Yet the Star series is in many ways My Struggle’s opposite. Rather than the unrelenting voice of one man, we get an array of perspectives, and some of the most compelling characters are women. Whereas My Struggle somehow keeps you engaged despite its apparent formlessness, with little plot beyond the shaggy shape of an actual life, the Star series is structured around a series of more or less suspenseful mysteries. But the most obvious difference is the weirdness. While Knausgaard continues to beguile us with his trademark hyperrealist style, predictably observant down to the coffee granules dissolving inside a mug, what happens in these new novels transcends the real. One of the narrators — Egil, a trust-funded documentarian turned religious searcher who composes an essay on death that constitutes the last fifty or so pages of The Morning Star — helpfully informs us that the titular phrase is not just a literal translation of Lucifer, the name of the fallen angel who rebels against God, but also one of the ways Jesus describes himself. And the dark corners of these novels are illuminated by a gleam equal parts demonic and divine: hordes of crabs scuttle their way inland, a Sasquatch-like beast emerges from the woods and seemingly possesses an escaped mental patient, dreams start changing, dead bodies stop arriving at mortuaries, and people who should be dead seem somehow to keep living.
The struggle of My Struggle is, at heart, about what to believe in the face of death when religion is not an option, ideology has failed, and there’s nothing more than the life you’ve got. “Attaching meaning to the world is peculiar only to man,” Knausgaard writes in Book Six. “We are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our own responsibility but also our obligation.” Knausgaard sought a form that would not just describe but enact the process by which meaning is made in secular life. But in the Star books, secular lives — and seemingly mortality itself — are disrupted by the new star; characters and readers alike wonder whether it’s a sign to be interpreted or simply a phenomenon to be explained. Knausgaard widens his frame to encompass not just the banal and everyday, but the cosmic. He tries, in other words, to reenchant the secular world, and the secular novel, dramatizing a search for meaning beyond the self and beyond realism. But like his characters, we’re left wondering what it all means.
by Max Norman, The Drift | Read more:
Image: Maki Yamaguchi
Thursday, April 23, 2026
Suddenly Everyone Wants a Tailor. They’re in Short Supply.
As AI sweeps into white-collar workplaces, old-timey hands-on jobs are getting a new look—and some of those professions even have shortages.
Consider tailors. Sewing is a vanishing skill, much like lacemaking and watchmaking, putting tailors in short supply when big retailers like Nordstrom and Men’s Wearhouse, as well as fashion designers and local dry cleaners, say they need more of them.
The job, which can take years to master, can be a tough sell to younger generations more accustomed to instant gratification. But apprenticeships that offer pay to learn on the job and new training programs are helping entice more people. 
“It’s not glamorous and not something you want to post about on social media,” says Khaleel Bennett, a 30-year-old who lives in Queens, N.Y. “But it’s a skill that will carry me for life.”
Bennett had been working as a technical designer for a fashion company, responsible for verifying that production met quality and construction standards. When he was laid off, he had trouble finding a new job. Then he came across a new Nordstrom-backed program at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology that teaches custom alterations and tailoring.
Bennett completed the training late last year and is now a tailor’s apprentice at the department-store chain, where he is getting real-life experience on the intricacies of pant hems. (Denim requires a different technique than slacks. For denim, the original hem is cut, the pant leg is shortened, and the hem is reattached to give the jeans a worn-in look.)
For the first semester of its program, which concluded in December, FIT received more than 190 applications for 15 spots. The nine-week course requires prior sewing experience. Nordstrom hired seven students from the inaugural class.
“It’s increasingly becoming more challenging to find people to fill these alterations jobs,” said Marco Esquivel, the director of alterations and aftercare services at Nordstrom, which employs about 1,500 tailors. Similar to other high-end retailers, Nordstrom offers free basic tailoring for garments purchased at the department-store chain and charges a fee for those bought elsewhere.
Tailored Brands, which employs about 1,300 tailors at its Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and other chains, is updating its apprenticeship program to include more self-guided videos with the goal of moving people through the training faster.
“The pipeline has dwindled,” the company’s chief operating officer, Karla Gray, said.
While counterintuitive, there is an acute need for tailoring even in the current age of casual dressing. Pants and cuffs still need to be hemmed to say nothing of bridal, prom and other special-occasion clothes.
Decades of offshoring affected the American apparel industry, decimating the profession. Now most tailors who are working are starting to approach retirement age, so demand for them outstrips the supply of labor, industry executives say.
Other colliding factors have had an impact, too. As more women took traditional corporate jobs outside the home, schools eliminated home-economics programs, which were a steppingstone to becoming a professional tailor or seamstress. More recently, the explosion in popularity for resale clothing and the growing use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss have created more need for nipping and tucking what is in peoples’ closets.
“These are all trends that require more tailored clothing,” Nordstrom’s Esquivel said.
U.S. tailors numbered about 18,500 in 2024, a nearly 30% drop from a decade ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1997, there were almost twice as many. Federal data show the typical annual wage for a dressmaker is about $43,000 a year, but some tailors and seamstresses can make more.
Jenny Robbins, 61 years old, recently joined Nordstrom after completing the Fashion Institute’s program. It is her latest reinvention after starting her career as a math teacher, working as a tutor for Princeton Review and then becoming a pattern maker for designer Anna Sui after taking a few sewing classes.
Robbins says she learned to operate industrial sewing machines, which stitch much faster than home machines, create blind hems where the stitching is essentially invisible, and can cuff a blazer.
“There is no shortage of work,” she said.
The lack of tailors and sewers has also been a blow to reviving apparel manufacturing in the U.S.
Cindie Husbands opened an apparel manufacturer in Las Vegas in 2013 but closed it in 2021 partly due to a lack of trained sewers, she said. [...]
“Tailoring is one of the oldest skilled trades in the world,” she said. “Yet the pathway has almost vanished in a single generation.”
by Suzanne Kapner, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Consider tailors. Sewing is a vanishing skill, much like lacemaking and watchmaking, putting tailors in short supply when big retailers like Nordstrom and Men’s Wearhouse, as well as fashion designers and local dry cleaners, say they need more of them.
The job, which can take years to master, can be a tough sell to younger generations more accustomed to instant gratification. But apprenticeships that offer pay to learn on the job and new training programs are helping entice more people.
Bennett had been working as a technical designer for a fashion company, responsible for verifying that production met quality and construction standards. When he was laid off, he had trouble finding a new job. Then he came across a new Nordstrom-backed program at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology that teaches custom alterations and tailoring.
Bennett completed the training late last year and is now a tailor’s apprentice at the department-store chain, where he is getting real-life experience on the intricacies of pant hems. (Denim requires a different technique than slacks. For denim, the original hem is cut, the pant leg is shortened, and the hem is reattached to give the jeans a worn-in look.)
For the first semester of its program, which concluded in December, FIT received more than 190 applications for 15 spots. The nine-week course requires prior sewing experience. Nordstrom hired seven students from the inaugural class.
“It’s increasingly becoming more challenging to find people to fill these alterations jobs,” said Marco Esquivel, the director of alterations and aftercare services at Nordstrom, which employs about 1,500 tailors. Similar to other high-end retailers, Nordstrom offers free basic tailoring for garments purchased at the department-store chain and charges a fee for those bought elsewhere.
Tailored Brands, which employs about 1,300 tailors at its Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and other chains, is updating its apprenticeship program to include more self-guided videos with the goal of moving people through the training faster.
“The pipeline has dwindled,” the company’s chief operating officer, Karla Gray, said.
While counterintuitive, there is an acute need for tailoring even in the current age of casual dressing. Pants and cuffs still need to be hemmed to say nothing of bridal, prom and other special-occasion clothes.
Decades of offshoring affected the American apparel industry, decimating the profession. Now most tailors who are working are starting to approach retirement age, so demand for them outstrips the supply of labor, industry executives say.
Other colliding factors have had an impact, too. As more women took traditional corporate jobs outside the home, schools eliminated home-economics programs, which were a steppingstone to becoming a professional tailor or seamstress. More recently, the explosion in popularity for resale clothing and the growing use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss have created more need for nipping and tucking what is in peoples’ closets.
“These are all trends that require more tailored clothing,” Nordstrom’s Esquivel said.
U.S. tailors numbered about 18,500 in 2024, a nearly 30% drop from a decade ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1997, there were almost twice as many. Federal data show the typical annual wage for a dressmaker is about $43,000 a year, but some tailors and seamstresses can make more.
Jenny Robbins, 61 years old, recently joined Nordstrom after completing the Fashion Institute’s program. It is her latest reinvention after starting her career as a math teacher, working as a tutor for Princeton Review and then becoming a pattern maker for designer Anna Sui after taking a few sewing classes.
Robbins says she learned to operate industrial sewing machines, which stitch much faster than home machines, create blind hems where the stitching is essentially invisible, and can cuff a blazer.
“There is no shortage of work,” she said.
The lack of tailors and sewers has also been a blow to reviving apparel manufacturing in the U.S.
Cindie Husbands opened an apparel manufacturer in Las Vegas in 2013 but closed it in 2021 partly due to a lack of trained sewers, she said. [...]
In November, Husbands founded the American Tailors and Sewing Association, which aims to create a standardized, scalable training and certification model for the industry.
“Tailoring is one of the oldest skilled trades in the world,” she said. “Yet the pathway has almost vanished in a single generation.”
by Suzanne Kapner, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. No kidding, try finding a good tailor or seamstress these days. It's nearly impossible (or they're booked for weeks). What a lost art. My grandmother, aunties, mom... everyone used to sew (and awesomely well! I think they were all competing against each other), all kinds of clothes, and beautiful quilts and pillows, placemats, whatever... it was Art. Now those lessons seem to be fading, maybe not everywhere, but surely here in the US.]
Organs on Demand
The initial heart transplant was not greeted with universal applause. Shortly after Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the procedure for the first time in 1967, people bombarded his hospital in South Africa with letters that characterized the doctor as a butcher and a ghoul. A fellow cardiologist likened the operation to a form of cannibalism. Many people criticized Barnard for picking one life over another and playing God.
It did not take long for most of this criticism to dissipate. Within a couple of years, the public became accustomed to the idea of heart transplants and then they welcomed them. Last year, about 10,000 people worldwide had heart transplants, while nearly 165,000 people received a kidney, liver, lung or pancreas.
There would be far more organ transplants if there were more viable organs available. Which brings us to the next medical and ethical quandary that society may soon face.
A three-year-old startup named Kind Biotechnology has begun work on what it calls an integrated organ network, or ION. This acronym undersells what Kind is making, which is a collection of organs that can be grown inside of an animal’s womb and then harvested for transplantation. Cue the gasps from some and the cheers from others.
By creating a series of genetic edits, Kind can alter the development of an embryo so that it forms organs without also forming limbs, a central nervous system and brain. The result is a group of organs growing in the womb. It sounds like science fiction, but Kind has already done this hundreds of times in mice and now rats, according to Justin Rebo, the company’s founder and CEO.
In the months ahead, Kind plans to expand its technology to larger mammals like pigs and possibly sheep with the hopes of producing organs good enough to endure the transplantation process. One day, Rebo expects that humans might be able to use these animal-grown organs to deal with medical emergencies and to help people live longer.
“We’re working on a platform to build abundant organ medicine, which we believe is a path not only to treating organ failure, but eventually to being more broadly medically useful and even impacting human lifespan,” Rebo says. “The point of medicine is to make people live longer and healthier lives. That’s what it’s always been. And that’s what we’re working on.”
TENS OF thousands of people languish waiting for viable organs each year. Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for decades by trying to create individual organs in their labs. In some cases, they take the cells of an organ and then coax them into developing more fully to make, say, a lab-grown kidney or liver. Companies like United Therapeutics and eGenesis have also been editing the genes of pig organs to make them more suitable for human use.
While there has been some success with these approaches, Rebo considers them too basic and limited to produce the full complement of organs that humans need. He contends that you can’t create the best organs in isolation and that they need to develop alongside each other. “The heart relies on the kidney to modulate the system environment in the right way to allow it to live and grow,” he says. “And both rely on the lungs and the liver and so forth, and both need access to nutrients, which is provided by the intestines.”
Rebo is a doctor and scientist with a long history in the bio-tech and longevity fields. And he’s not alone on this quest to create organs inside of what could be called headless bodies. R3 Bio, co-founded by John Schloendorn and Alice Gilman, is pursuing similar technology, although without much detail as of yet. Gilman has talked about trying to create animal models that could be used for medical testing so that researchers would no longer need to experiment on living, conscious mammals like primates. RenewalBio in Israel is also believed to be working in this area, trying to build organs from a patient’s own cells. (Schloendorn and Rebo were previously collaborators.)
Before even getting to the ethical considerations of Kind’s technology, there are myriad practical, scientific matters to confront.
[ed. Not sure the technology is as advanced or straightforward as they'd have you to believe, but you can see where it's heading.]
It did not take long for most of this criticism to dissipate. Within a couple of years, the public became accustomed to the idea of heart transplants and then they welcomed them. Last year, about 10,000 people worldwide had heart transplants, while nearly 165,000 people received a kidney, liver, lung or pancreas.
A three-year-old startup named Kind Biotechnology has begun work on what it calls an integrated organ network, or ION. This acronym undersells what Kind is making, which is a collection of organs that can be grown inside of an animal’s womb and then harvested for transplantation. Cue the gasps from some and the cheers from others.
By creating a series of genetic edits, Kind can alter the development of an embryo so that it forms organs without also forming limbs, a central nervous system and brain. The result is a group of organs growing in the womb. It sounds like science fiction, but Kind has already done this hundreds of times in mice and now rats, according to Justin Rebo, the company’s founder and CEO.
In the months ahead, Kind plans to expand its technology to larger mammals like pigs and possibly sheep with the hopes of producing organs good enough to endure the transplantation process. One day, Rebo expects that humans might be able to use these animal-grown organs to deal with medical emergencies and to help people live longer.
“We’re working on a platform to build abundant organ medicine, which we believe is a path not only to treating organ failure, but eventually to being more broadly medically useful and even impacting human lifespan,” Rebo says. “The point of medicine is to make people live longer and healthier lives. That’s what it’s always been. And that’s what we’re working on.”
TENS OF thousands of people languish waiting for viable organs each year. Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for decades by trying to create individual organs in their labs. In some cases, they take the cells of an organ and then coax them into developing more fully to make, say, a lab-grown kidney or liver. Companies like United Therapeutics and eGenesis have also been editing the genes of pig organs to make them more suitable for human use.
While there has been some success with these approaches, Rebo considers them too basic and limited to produce the full complement of organs that humans need. He contends that you can’t create the best organs in isolation and that they need to develop alongside each other. “The heart relies on the kidney to modulate the system environment in the right way to allow it to live and grow,” he says. “And both rely on the lungs and the liver and so forth, and both need access to nutrients, which is provided by the intestines.”
Rebo is a doctor and scientist with a long history in the bio-tech and longevity fields. And he’s not alone on this quest to create organs inside of what could be called headless bodies. R3 Bio, co-founded by John Schloendorn and Alice Gilman, is pursuing similar technology, although without much detail as of yet. Gilman has talked about trying to create animal models that could be used for medical testing so that researchers would no longer need to experiment on living, conscious mammals like primates. RenewalBio in Israel is also believed to be working in this area, trying to build organs from a patient’s own cells. (Schloendorn and Rebo were previously collaborators.)
Before even getting to the ethical considerations of Kind’s technology, there are myriad practical, scientific matters to confront.
by Ashlee Vance, Core Memory | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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