Weekend Briefing No. 639
The Kill Chain -- AI Killed The Essay -- Blame Modernity, Not Markets
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
20 — Kashmir’s autumn saffron yield came in at just 20% of normal output due to poor weather, a crisis compounded by Strait of Hormuz blockages strangling Iranian imports — leaving traders short of a spice Iran produces at over 90% of global supply.
210 — The Internet Archive has amassed 210 petabytes of archived material for its Wayback Machine project, while simultaneously ingesting 100 terabytes of new content daily — a storage burden made costlier as AI infrastructure demand renders their preferred high-capacity drives scarce or unaffordable.
200,000 — Bariatric surgery procedures in the U.S. dropped below 200,000 in 2024 for the first time since 2020, a more than 20% decline from the prior year, as GLP-1 medications surge in popularity despite less than 1% of eligible patients receiving surgery annually.
The Kill Chain
American forces destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in southern Iran during the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, killing nearly 200 people, most of them girls between seven and twelve, and the political conversation immediately fixated on whether a chatbot had selected the target. The chatbot did not. The actual targeting ran on Maven, the Palantir system that compressed what 2,000 people did during the 2003 Iraq invasion into a workflow handled by 20 soldiers, with a stated goal of 1,000 targeting decisions an hour, or one every 3.6 seconds. The school had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that nobody updated, even though it had been visible on Google Maps and listed in Iranian business directories for a decade. When you compress the kill chain that far, the friction Clausewitz called "war on paper" becomes lethal, because nobody is left to ask whether the file in front of them still describes the world. The Guardian (20 minutes)
AI Killed The Essay
Between May and December of 2025, the share of American students regularly using AI for homework jumped from 48 to 62 percent, and the take-home essay, a cornerstone of education for generations, has effectively become unenforceable. Teachers across the country, from Ivy League professors to community college instructors, have responded by moving writing back into the classroom, requiring students to write by hand or on locked-down browsers while being watched. The more durable shift is in what gets assigned: personal reflection, live debate, scissors-and-tape draft revision, anything that resists being outsourced to a chatbot. The deeper tension is unresolved, though, because the same schools under pressure to protect authentic thinking are also under pressure to prove they’re preparing students for workplaces where AI fluency is increasingly expected. NYT (8 minutes)
Blame Modernity, Not Markets
The problems people blame on capitalism, including pollution, inequality, alienation, and soulless bureaucracy, showed up just as reliably in Soviet factories and Chinese collective farms, which suggests the real culprit isn’t the economic system but modernity itself: the organization of society around technology, scale, and formal institutions. Any society that wants to deliver modern healthcare, for example, must build massive bureaucratic organizations to develop mRNA vaccines, manufacture MRI machines, and coordinate millions of specialized workers, and those organizations will be impersonal, politically dysfunctional, and forced to ration scarce resources regardless of who owns them. The profit motive isn’t the disease; it’s actually one of the few correction mechanisms that forces dysfunction to eventually surface, which is why not-for-profits and government agencies can sustain incompetence indefinitely in ways that companies cannot. Weber saw this clearly, that the iron cage of bureaucracy is the price of operating at modern scale, while Marx convinced generations of reformers they could escape it by changing who owns the factory. Marginal Revolution (5 minutes)
The Real Lord of the Flies
William Golding made his career imagining what would happen if a group of boys were stranded on a deserted island, and the real-life answer turned out to be almost the opposite of what he wrote. In 1965, six Tongan teenagers ran away from their Catholic boarding school, drifted for eight days after losing their way, and washed up on the uninhabited island of ‘Ata, where they spent the next fifteen months not descending into chaos but instead building a small society of songs, prayers, chore rosters, and time-outs during arguments. When one boy broke a leg, the others set it with sticks and cared for him until he recovered, and when fights flared, they had a rule about going to the ocean alone until you could clear your head. The boys credited their poor, close-knit families for the habits that kept them whole, a quiet rebuke to a half-century of cultural mythology insisting civilization is a thin veneer over a savage default. Mental Floss (4 minutes)
A Hundred Years of Listening
At 100 years old, Sir David Attenborough has done more to make humans care about non-human life than anyone alive, and he did it almost entirely by talking quietly. His half-hushed voice, somewhere between a golf announcer and a loving grandfather, has narrated decades of nature documentaries with the intimacy of someone telling you a secret, including the time he crawled six feet underground into a 15-foot Nigerian termite mound and was bitten so badly by soldier termites that the take was unusable, then climbed back in and nailed it on the second try. That ability to drag a viewer into something they had no idea existed, a clay air-conditioning system built by million-strong colonies of "warlike big termites," is the engine of his life's work. As his voice carries both wonder and warning into a second century, the planet he illuminated is harder to hold onto, and the man who taught a species to look at itself from outside is, fittingly, running out of time to do so. The Ringer (15 minutes)
Hired Herself First
In 2012, designer Jenny Volvovski wanted to design book covers but had no commissions, so she did the only thing she could: she hired herself. She set rules, green and black and white for color, Futura plus typewriter plus handwriting for type, hand-made imagery whenever possible, and started redesigning her entire personal library, eventually producing covers for everything from Crime and Punishment to The Hunger Games to Klara and the Sun. As real commissions came in, she broke her own rules more often and made fewer unsolicited covers, but the project had already become the portfolio that proved, before any client did, that she could do the work. It's a small case study in a larger truth that creative people learn the hard way: nobody is going to hand you the career you want, but they will frequently hire you for it once you've already started doing it. Jenny Volvovski (3 minutes)
The Longest Show On Earth
Fred again.. has posted what is reportedly the longest video on YouTube, a 106-hour document of every set from his USB002 world tour, spanning Glasgow, Brussels, Madrid, Lyon, Dublin, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, and London. The tour’s defining feature was its back-to-back format, with Fred playing alongside a rotating cast that included Four Tet, Floating Points, Caribou, Ben UFO, Skream and Benga, Thomas Bangalter, Underworld, The Streets, Denzel Curry, Danny Brown, and dozens more, sometimes three or four artists deep at once. The whole archive took editor Theo 108 hours to assemble, and one city, Mexico, is being held back for a separate release. It’s essentially a time capsule of what live electronic music looked and felt like at its most collaborative peak in 2024 and 2025. YouTube (106 hours)
Should We Work Together?
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Weekend Wisdom
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. - Leo Tolstoy
Enjoying the British flavour to the content and media this week. From Attenborough to Fred Again; good to be reminded of the positive in a week where the party of the guy who gave us brexit was rewarded in local elections.