Weekend Briefing No. 600
On Western Feminism -- Humanity's Quiet Extinction -- Amazon’s Story
Welcome to the weekend and to the 600th edition of the Weekend Briefing! Thanks so much for coming back week after week and telling your friends about it. You guys are great!
Here’s my August playlist. Enjoy!
Prime Numbers
3,000 — The Edinburgh Fringe features over 3,000 shows across all artistic mediums this month, making it the world's largest arts festival where current-events musical parodies like this year's Raygun-inspired "Spraygun" have become reliable crowd-pleasers.
76 — A staggering 76% of X users are bots, meaning three out of every four accounts on the platform are automated rather than real people engaging in discussions about topics like sports debates.
515 — The longest lightning strike ever recorded spanned an incredible 515 miles from East Texas towards Kansas City in October 2017, beating the previous record by 38 miles when satellite data was reanalyzed last year.
On Western Feminism
While American feminists debate tampon taxes and boardroom representation, girls in Sierra Leone are trading sex for sanitary pads just to stay in school. This stark reality exposes how Western feminism has become dangerously insular, fighting passionately for wage gaps at home while remaining largely indifferent to the millions of girls worldwide for whom education itself is conditional on survival. True feminist politics requires acting "in concert" across boundaries, recognizing that liberation is meaningless if it excludes those who must bleed, beg, or barter for the chance to learn. With U.S. aid being cut and international support dwindling, these girls aren't asking for pity—they're demanding that feminism live up to its promise of universal freedom. New York Times (4 minutes)
Humanity's Quiet Extinction
We're sleepwalking into species obsolescence, not through catastrophe but through comfort—trading physical reproduction for digital connection as social media rewires our deepest biological drives. The second fertility transition is dropping birth rates below replacement levels globally, creating a future where shrinking populations of aging humans huddle in empty cities, sustained by AI collective intelligence rather than individual genius. While we gain unprecedented access to humanity's accumulated wisdom through large language models, we're simultaneously losing the capacity for individual heroics and creative breakthroughs that once defined human progress. The posthuman age isn't arriving through dramatic technological singularity but through the quiet dissolution of what made us human—our drive to create new life, think independently, and act as individuals rather than nodes in a digital hive mind. Noahpinion (8 minutes)
Amazon’s Story
When Jeff Bezos discovered the internet was growing 230,000% annually in 1993, he applied his "regret minimization framework" and left a lucrative Wall Street career to catch the biggest technological wave in human history. Amazon wasn't revolutionary because of its technology—it was brilliant because Bezos recognized that the internet's "infinite shelf space" could offer millions of book titles versus Barnes & Noble's 80,000, then systematically figured out how to make ecommerce actually work through relentless experimentation. The company's early success came from solving fundamental ecommerce problems: building trust through reviews and easy returns, creating personalized recommendations, and turning customer payments into free working capital by collecting money before paying suppliers. While competitors like Barnes & Noble were trapped by their physical infrastructure, Amazon perfected the art of riding technological disruption by focusing obsessively on long-term customer value over short-term profits. Acquired Briefing (8 minutes)
Schools Weren't Built for Learning
Modern education exists not because brilliant minds designed the optimal learning system, but because centuries of power structures needed obedient workers and compliant citizens. For hundreds of thousands of years, children educated themselves through play and exploration until agriculture demanded child laborers, feudalism required servants, and industry needed factory workers—all requiring the systematic suppression of children's natural willfulness. When universal schooling emerged, it combined religious indoctrination, employer demands for punctual workers, and nationalist goals of creating patriots, using the same power-assertive methods once used in fields and factories. Today's schools still operate on the fundamental premise that learning is work children must be forced to do, rather than recognizing that humans evolved to learn naturally through self-directed play and exploration. Play Makes Us Human (7 minutes)
America's Secret Housing Crisis
A small Wyoming town 100 miles from nowhere has suburban homes costing $300 per square foot—more expensive than metro Atlanta—revealing how the West's housing crisis extends far beyond California's cities into remote rural areas. While eastern rural counties are losing population and have affordable housing, western rural areas are experiencing unprecedented demand driven by natural amenities like mild climates, mountain views, and varied topography that climate change is making even more attractive over time. This demand surge, combined with restrictive land use regulations scoring 0.41 standard deviations higher than the national average, creates the perfect storm where basic homes in isolated western towns cost more than urban properties elsewhere. The real story isn't that western states are uniquely bad at building housing—it's that America fundamentally struggles to build sufficient housing anywhere people actually want to live. Construction Physics (6 minutes)
Mankeeping
Women are becoming the sole emotional infrastructure for men who have abandoned friendship, creating an exhausting new relationship dynamic called "mankeeping" where female partners must serve as therapist, social coordinator, and motivational coach all at once. As male friendship rates have plummeted—from 3% of men having no close friends in 1990 to 15% today—women find themselves shouldering the entire burden of their partners' social and emotional needs, from planning couple activities to managing mental health crises. This isn't just about emotional intimacy; it's about women becoming responsible for "bringing the light to the relationship" while men retreat into isolation, relying on romantic partners as their only source of human connection. The solution isn't teaching women to set boundaries but addressing the deeper crisis: men need to invest in friendships and rebuild the social institutions that once naturally fostered male bonds. New York Times (5 minutes)
Smart People's Paradox
The brightest minds often harbor the deepest doubts about their own intelligence, creating a cruel irony where achievement breeds anxiety rather than confidence. This intellectual self-doubt manifests in five distinct patterns: perfectionists who set impossible standards, natural geniuses who expect effortless mastery, soloists who refuse help, super-achievers who overwork to compensate, and experts who delay action until they know everything. The solution isn't eliminating doubt but learning to act despite it—reframing your internal narrative, practicing just-in-time learning, asking for help, celebrating wins, and treating challenges as experiments. Remember that the most successful people aren't those who never doubt themselves, but those who've learned to move forward while questioning their competence. Ness Labs (5 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
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Weekend Wisdom
Jobs fill your pocket, but adventures fill your soul. — Jamie Lyn Beatty
Congrats on 600 issues!!!