Weekend Briefing No. 652
One True Passion? -- Free Ben & Jerry’s -- Miracle Made Mundane
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
1.4 — When researchers emailed 80,000 U.S. school principals posing as a two-parent household, mothers were 1.4 times more likely than fathers to get the first call back, and principals still called mom first even when dad was listed as more available.
8,700 — A four-ton SpaceX rocket stage slammed into the moon at 8,700 kilometers per hour, and though nobody actually witnessed the impact, telescopes caught the evidence: a plume of sodium and lithium streaming kilometers into space.
21 — After a three-year purge of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the deepest since the Cultural Revolution, 21 of the 27 top theater command posts have no confirmed full general in the seat.
One True Passion?
The search for your one true passion is a game you win only by refusing to play. Dan Kennedy has spent a lifetime falling hard for callings that never called back, a fleeting fascination with airport freight work, songwriting despite no musical ability, van-life fantasies, and pandemic manuscripts his agent rejected. His conclusion is not that he failed to find his purpose but that the premise itself is broken: treating existential dread as a problem one perfect pursuit can solve guarantees the dread wins, while a portfolio of small, unranked enthusiasms actually gets lived. Maybe the healthiest confession available to most of us is his: “I’ve either never found the one thing I’m truly passionate about, or I’m just quietly, equally, stupidly passionate about everything.” Big Think (7 minutes)
Free Ben & Jerry’s
Ben Cohen wants you to boycott ice cream to save an ice cream company. When he and Jerry Greenfield sold Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever for $326 million in 2000, the deal preserved an independent board with final say over the brand’s voice and values, but Cohen says that independence is gone: the board sued Unilever in 2024 for silencing its activism on Gaza, CEO David Stever was ousted, the philanthropic foundation was forced to close after new parent Magnum cut its funding, and Greenfield quit the board saying a company that couldn’t stand up for its beliefs “wasn’t worth being a company at all.” So Cohen, now 75, is calling for a boycott of Magnum’s other brands, Yasso, Breyers, Talenti, and Klondike, backed by some 200,000 signatures, betting that tanking sales can pressure the €7.9 billion ice cream giant into selling him back a brand he values at $1 billion or more. Magnum insists it’s not for sale, which makes this a live test of whether a mission-protecting acquisition means anything once the founders lose the votes. The Guardian (6 minutes)
Miracle Made Mundane
You pick it up 100 times a day without once considering that you’re holding the most intricate machine humans have ever mass-produced. A single section of your phone’s processor packs 20 billion transistors, each so small that 10,000 of them fit across the width of a human hair, while the battery squeezes enough chemical energy into a thin slab to run the whole show on about 3 watts. Every detail is its own engineering saga: the oleophobic coating that wears away a little with each swipe, the invisible grid of indium tin oxide that senses your finger, the tiny barometer reading air pressure, the neural chip recognizing your face. Humanity has built some 20 billion of these devices, enough to wrap the planet 73 times if laid end to end, and the real miracle may be how completely we’ve stopped noticing. Everything Machine (13 minutes)
Going Critical
America’s nuclear revival hit its July 4th deadline with a reactor to spare, as four microreactors reached criticality against the administration’s goal of three. The startups behind them, Antares Nuclear, Valar Atomics, Deployable Energy, and Aalo Atomics, were all founded within the last few years, and their machines are 10 to 100-plus times smaller than conventional light-water reactors, with Aalo targeting 10 megawatts of electricity in 2027 and Deployable Energy projecting commercial units by 2028. But criticality is a first step, not a finish line: former assistant secretary for nuclear energy Kathryn Huff notes that a zero-power test “can be achieved without making real engineering progress on fuel or design,” and the think tank Third Way calls the microreactor focus a diversion from meaningfully expanding capacity. The race that matters now is from milestone to megawatts on the grid. MIT Technology Review (5 minutes)
The Global Conversation
The frontier of the AI debate isn’t a conference keynote, it’s a few dozen strangers in a rented room arguing about consciousness. Grassroots groups like AI Salon, founded in San Francisco in 2023 and now running chapters in Bengaluru and Lagos, and the AI Collective, which counts over 200,000 members across some 200 chapters in 50 countries, are turning questions about AI and climate, education, art, and intimacy into a global salon circuit, with 3,000 members in Nairobi alone. The gatherings fill a real gap, Kenya’s AI adoption still sits under 10 percent while India has become the second-largest market for Anthropic’s Claude, but the rooms skew heavily toward tech professionals. As Utrecht professor Payal Arora warns, truly inclusive AI communities “cannot simply globalize Silicon Valley’s conversations,” and whether these salons broaden the debate or just franchise it is the question that matters. Rest of World (5 minutes)
Moonshot, Remastered
Using high-definition open source videos and photos from NASA and his own music, John Boswell (aka Melodysheep) created this mesmerizing eight-minute video recap of the Artemis II mission that enchanted us all back in the spring. Like all of his videos I’ve featured, this one is really well done. Melodysheep (8 minutes)
Growing Up Fugitive
In September 1984, two girls from Pittsburgh’s wealthiest suburb were told to pack for a quick trip, and the trip became two years of counterfeit passports, borrowed names, and boarding schools on the run. Their father, John McCann III, posed as a shrimp-farming investor while smuggling cocaine in a private jet fitted with mirrored partitions and hidden compartments, funding a life of Hermès accessories, gold Rolexes, and family crests embossed on car doors. When federal agents closed in, the family scattered through Mexico, Panama, and Ecuador to Spain, until McCann was caught at the Washington border in 1986 with a fake license and sentenced to life plus 100 years. Decades later, a box of government files their mother tried to throw away forced Erin and Meredith McCann to confront how much she really knew, and their choice of forgiveness over estrangement is what makes this saga land. The Atavist (40 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.
Weekend Wisdom
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. - E.B. White (general fit)