Welcome to the weekend.
Here’s my August playlist. It’s a fun mix of pop electronic remixes.
Prime Numbers
63,000,000 — All of 2025’s Formula 1 viewership in America adds up to just 63 million hours — roughly equal to the audience for a single Sunday Night Football game, despite Formula 1’s outsized media buzz.
310,000 — A woman scammed by someone impersonating country star Kenny Chesney lost $310,000 after the fake Kenny claimed he needed cash for an awards show, instrument repairs, and music videos — and an appeals court ruled she can’t sue the real Chesney to recoup it.
1 — People with working-class backgrounds make up half the US labor force but just 1% of state legislators and Congress members, a gap driven not by lack of interest, but by the financial burden of campaigning.
Logging Off Isn’t Enough
A gnome in a cardboard costume telling you to trade your iPhone for a popsicle-stick apple sounds like performance art, but it might be the first step toward real political power. Across a growing Neo-Luddite, permacomputing, and “rewilding the internet” movement, activists are naming exactly how tech grabbed control: it masquerades as political organizing while building none, dodges regulation by rewriting its own rules, fills gaps left by broken public systems (think Uber replacing transit) and then entrenches itself there, and treats users, workers, and even democracy itself as raw material for growth. The fightback splits into four camps: refusing tech outright, remaking smaller tools people can actually understand, rewilding platforms toward decentralization, and building cooperative ownership. But symbolism alone won’t cut it. Real change means turning cultural rebellion, the clown workshops and burner-phone classes, into unions, coalitions, and demands with teeth, because logging off is easy while rebuilding the muscle to fight power collectively is the actual work. Rebecca Williams (12 minutes)
The Daycare Panic
Turns out both the daycare doomers and the daycare utopians are wrong, and the actual data is almost boringly reassuring. Critics claim daycare spikes cortisol and shrinks kids’ amygdalas into anxious, aggressive adults, but that’s mostly speculation stretched from studies too noisy to detect much of anything. Meanwhile politicians love citing a supposed $7 return for every $1 spent on childcare, a number that traces back to two tiny 1960s studies of severely disadvantaged kids getting intensive, individualized support, not a scalable claim about universal preschool today. The honest takeaway: for most families, daycare’s effects are too small to show up clearly in decades of research, so parents can stop agonizing over a decision that isn’t nearly as high-stakes as the internet makes it feel. Works in Progress (9 minutes)
Gifted Summits
A seven-year-old shouting “I’m going to the moon!” from El Capitan sounds like triumph, but the real story is about who got erased from the photo. Joe Evermore has now sent three sons up El Cap by their early ages, each time relying on illegally hired guides, unpaid dirtbags hauling 300-pound bags, and a nine-person team that violates his own wilderness permit, none of whom appear in a single Instagram post. One hired hauler described kids crying on every pitch while Joe staged hour-long photoshoots with checkers and props for the perfect shot. The deeper question isn’t whether the kids physically survived the climb, it’s whether handing a child an accomplishment they didn’t earn actually gives them anything at all. Climbing (14 minutes)
The Garbage Brotherhood
Garbage is honest in a way people rarely are, and that’s exactly why the men who haul it away love the job. Twenty years running behind trucks in Montreal reveals a hidden world of former bikers and dropouts, guys with alcoholic fathers and no path to college, who form a fierce, self-selecting brotherhood that treats visibility as a curse and camaraderie as the whole point. The work is brutal, fifteen-hour shifts in ninety-degree heat or waist-deep snow, and the pay comes with a strange dignity: nobody lies to a garbageman, because trash strips away every pretense the “good tax-paying citizen” tries to maintain. Recycling itself is mostly theater, since only about 10 percent of plastic actually gets reused while the rest gets shipped to women in Vietnam sorting it by hand, which means the truck that vanishes your guilt every Tuesday morning is doing far less than you think. Harper’s Magazine (18 minutes)
Melting Point
Bubbling asphalt isn’t a metaphor, it’s what actually happened to the roads under this year’s Tour de France as a record-shattering heat wave scorched the race by over 6 degrees Celsius above average. Organizers shortened one stage by 18 miles for the first time in the event’s history, while riders battled the same threats facing marathoners and triathletes everywhere: kidney damage from breaking-down muscle tissue, brain swelling from sodium loss, and a heat index where every single-degree increase raises severe casualty risk by 22 percent. Fixes on the table range from Qatar’s air-conditioned, retractable-roof stadiums to simply moving races out of summer entirely, though none of them solve the whole problem cleanly. As climate change keeps pushing endurance sports toward their physical limits, the real race may be against the calendar itself. News Items (6 minutes)
Gerontocracy at Work
A NASA engineer applied for a promotion and lost it to someone who already held that exact job, decades ago, before coming back to reclaim it at nearly 75. That story sparked a Reddit meltdown of younger workers convinced older colleagues are hoarding jobs, and one Yale historian has actually built a policy case around it, arguing companies should be allowed to bring back mandatory retirement for high-paying white-collar roles like professors, lawyers, and CEOs. It’s not a crazy idea historically. Mandatory retirement was standard in half of American jobs until the 1980s, and economists say it once balanced out a real tradeoff, where workers took lower pay when young in exchange for a guaranteed bump later, an arrangement that only works if the older worker eventually leaves. But critics counter that there’s no fixed pool of jobs to fight over, and with Social Security strained and skilled-labor shortages everywhere from nursing to piloting, pushing capable people out earlier might cost the economy more than it gives back. NPR (17 minutes)
No Service, Full Life
Nearly a thousand young adults now compete each year for the chance to disconnect completely, phones useless, dishwashing shifts at dawn, birthdays celebrated by getting thrown in a lake. San Francisco’s century-old Camp Mather runs on 1920s infrastructure and zero cell service, and its seasonal staff, mostly college dropouts and burnt-out twentysomethings, describe it as the community they never found at university. The camp’s 99-year-old naturalist, who first worked there in 1944 and met his future wife on the property in 1949, still leads sunset hikes and plans to celebrate his 100th birthday on-site next summer. In an era of infinite apps and endless scrolling, the thing people are lining up for is a place that forces them to look up. SFGATE (13 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
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. -Seneca
If you are thinking about tech and its impact, you may want to read Gil Duran's new book -- The Nerd Reich -- very well documented description of how the wealthy tech bros are moving all of us towards an autocracy of the Uber wealthy.