Weekend Briefing No. 638
The Jevons Paradox -- Every Brilliant Thing -- Best American Songwriters
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
80 - Colombia plans to euthanize 80 invasive hippopotamuses that Pablo Escobar illegally imported in the 1980s and that have since multiplied wildly around Hacienda Nápoles, but Indian billionaire heir Anant Ambani has now offered to take the feral herd off Bogotá's hands for his private zoo in Gujarat.
425 - Nepal's "icefall doctors" just cleared a 30-meter wall of ice blocking the route to Camp 1 on Everest, opening the season for the 425 climbers who hold permits to summit this spring and the roughly $6.1 million in government revenue those permits will generate.
1,900,000 - Oregon's 2024 wildfires burned 1.9 million acres and cost the state $350 million against a $10 million firefighting budget, prompting Salem to slap a 65-cent tax on every tin of nicotine pouches to stockpile cash for the next blow-up season.
The Jevons Paradox
When the steam engine made coal more efficient in 19th-century Britain, the country didn't burn less coal, it burned vastly more, a counterintuitive pattern economists have called the Jevons paradox ever since. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok argues that professional services are now living through the same dynamic as AI tools collapse the cost of legal, consulting, and accounting work, with weekly US business formation sitting at the highest level in recorded history and the unemployment rate falling fastest for young workers. Cheaper inputs aren't shrinking these industries, they're expanding the addressable market, letting startups led by recent grads compete with established firms on tasks that used to require partner-level pricing. If Slok is right, the AI doom narrative has the arrow pointed the wrong way: the historical bottleneck on professional services has always been cost, and removing that bottleneck produces more workers, not fewer. Apollo (2 minutes)
Every Brilliant Thing
The premise sounds impossible: a one-actor show, performed with audience participation, about a depressed mother and the son who keeps trying to give her reasons not to die, somehow staged as one of the funniest evenings in modern theater. "Every Brilliant Thing," Duncan Macmillan's 2013 play built around a list of every good thing in the world that the central character has been compiling since childhood for his depressed parent, is currently running on Broadway with Daniel Radcliffe in the lead, with Mariska Hargitay set to step into the role within weeks. On The Sunday Daily, host Michael Barbaro sits with Radcliffe and Hargitay to ask why a play that hands strips of paper to audience members and asks them to read items aloud has been performed in dozens of languages and hundreds of cities since its debut. In a moment when American despair feels structural, the play's quiet thesis, that depression cannot be reasoned out of a person but joy can be slowly stacked into a corner of their life, may be the most countercultural idea on a Broadway stage right now. I saw the show and it’s the best piece of theater I’ve seen in a long time. NYT (44 minutes)
Best American Songwriters
Rock criticism has spent 60 years asking who deserves to be in the canon, and the question has always quietly meant: who deserves to be next to Dylan? More than 250 music insiders and six New York Times critics just answered that question with an unranked list of 30 living American songwriters, and the surprising thing isn't who made it (Springsteen, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon) but who shares the page with them: Bad Bunny, Romeo Santos, Young Thug, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and Nashville's behind-the-scenes country trio of Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, and Shane McAnally. The list is a quiet declaration that the American songbook now includes Spanish-language reggaeton, Atlanta trap, Houston R&B, and the country co-write rooms of Music Row, not just the Greenwich Village folk and Tin Pan Alley pop tradition. What "American" means in American music has been shifting for thirty years, but seeing Babyface, Bad Bunny, and Bob Dylan on the same page makes the shift impossible to politely ignore. NYT (20 minutes)
Surveillance Pricing
The next time the grocery store charges you more than the person behind you in line for the same gallon of milk, the difference may not be a coupon, it may be your phone, your address, and how badly the algorithm thinks you need it. Maryland just became the first state to outlaw the practice, with Governor Wes Moore signing the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, which bans grocers and delivery apps from using personal data to set individualized prices and gives the state attorney general power to fine repeat offenders starting October 1. The law arrives after an FTC study found retailers quietly experimenting with pricing tied to mouse clicks, abandoned carts, and search urgency, the same data signals airlines and rideshare apps have used for years to extract a higher willingness to pay. Eleven other states are weighing similar bills, and the deeper question Maryland just put on the table is whether a price tag is supposed to reflect the cost of an item or the maximum the seller has decided you personally will swallow. Kiplinger (4 minutes)
Pampered
In 1957, an executive at Procter & Gamble named Vic Mills was unhappily babysitting his grandchild and decided, with the indignation of a man who had just changed too many cloth diapers, that there had to be a better way. What followed was one of the most underrated R&D sagas in American manufacturing, as P&G eventually engineered a "block-long, continuous-process machine" that could assemble 400 diapers a minute, dropping per-diaper cost from 10 cents to 5.5 cents and letting Pampers go national in 1966. By the early 1990s disposables had captured roughly 95% of the American, Canadian, Japanese, and most European markets, and the introduction of superabsorbent polymers in the mid-1980s shrank the diaper itself by half, then by another third. Disposable diapers are the kind of progress that doesn't get monuments, the unsexy chemistry and supply chain that quietly made the dual-income household possible, and that defeats every legislative attempt at a ban because parents, when given the choice, vote with the laundry hamper. Works in Progress Newsletter (10 minutes)
The Substack Church
The headlines claiming young Americans are flooding back into churches are, according to the data, largely fiction, but what’s actually happening in American religion is stranger and more interesting than a revival. The fastest growing segment of Christianity isn’t a denomination at all, it’s thousands of non-denominational churches with names like “Enjoy Church” and “I Heart Church,” started by former insurance brokers and real estate agents who didn’t ask anyone’s permission, built a following, and now command congregations that collectively dwarf the entire Southern Baptist Convention. Religion scholar Ryan Burge calls this the “Substack-ification” of American faith, the same anti-institutional, personality-driven, gatekeepers-be-damned energy powering independent media and Trump-style politics is also powering the only growing corner of Christianity. Meanwhile the data on happiness is consistent: religious people are measurably happier than secular ones, it could be their connection to God, but because churches provide the dense social networks, mutual aid, and forced regular community that modern life has otherwise dismantled, and which almost no secular institution has successfully replaced. Derek Thompson (15 minutes)
Landing On A Moving Train
Swiss pilot Darius Rouholamin did something that had never been done before: landed a small plane on top of a moving freight train traveling at 120 km/h, then took off again, all within a two-kilometer window before the tracks ran into a tree line. The engineering challenges were staggering, including turbulence powerful enough to throw the plane four meters in any direction, a landing zone just 158 centimeters wide with 50 centimeters of margin per side, and an airspeed so low (47 knots, just two knots above stall) that the aircraft was barely flying. To hit that number, the team stripped the plane to its minimum weight and Rouholamin himself lost five kilograms. He landed blind, seeing nothing but sky, guided entirely by feel and a ground crew calling out position, and pulled it off on the attempt. YouTube (10 minutes)
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Weekend Wisdom
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. -Alfred North Whitehead