Welcome to the weekend.
Here’s my September playlist. Cheers!
Prime Numbers
2 — A Stanford Medicine study in Nature Neuroscience argues the brain is really two distinct organs, the forebrain and the hindbrain, which evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years and only later converged into one.
82% — China’s share of the global shipbuilding market has reached 82 percent, up 14 points year over year, as the Iran War drives Asian countries dependent on Middle East oil to order tankers ahead of a possible ship shortage.
14% — 14 percent of American lawyers are over 65 and a third are 55 or older, and senior partners who decline to retire have created a logjam that is pushing ambitious younger partners to rival firms.
Hard School Choices
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” That was Najya Hannah-Jones in the car after seventh grade, having just Googled her school’s ratings. Ten years earlier her mother, Nikole Hannah-Jones, wrote a New York Times Magazine cover essay about enrolling her in a high-poverty, mostly Black Brooklyn school instead of a wealthier one, believing families with power should stay and fight. The essay spurred activism nationwide. The schooling did not go well. A fourth-grade teacher never performed the mandatory reading assessments and never graded the math, so Najya believed she was excelling while getting most answers wrong. In middle school she earned A’s in algebra and failed the state exam. Given the choice for high school, she picked a selective, heavily white school, where tutoring revealed gaps reaching back to long division. This June her mother stopped defending the decision and offered an honest apology. “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” Najya told her. That acknowledgment was what she had needed all along. New York Times (28 minutes)
Home Depot’s Real Moat
$1,000 invested at Home Depot’s 1981 IPO with dividends reinvested is worth about $17M today. The same money in the S&P 500 is about $170,000. Home Depot brought Sol Price’s warehouse club idea to home improvement, but the format was the visible innovation, not the moat. Home Depot hired former plumbers, electricians and carpenters to teach customers how to finish their projects, which manufactured do-it-yourselfers rather than merely serving them. Someone who succeeds at painting tries drywall next, and in company lore a 25-cent washer turned into a $100,000 kitchen remodel. Associates held stock, so good service and their own wealth were the same thing, and thousands of early floor staff became millionaires. The belief is visible in the org chart. Home Depot’s Atlanta headquarters is officially the store support center, which inverts the pyramid: the people closest to the customer sit on top, and everything above them exists to make their job easier. A rival can copy a warehouse in a year. Copying that takes a generation. Read the breakdown in my other newsletter Acquired Briefing. Acquired Briefing (12 minutes)
One In Six Emails
One in six legitimate marketing emails never reach the Primary inbox, and most of what causes that has nothing to do with the subject line or the content itself. A cold sending domain, poor list hygiene, missing DNS records: Any one of these can route a newsletter to spam or promotions, no matter how much time or energy it took to produce. Future Forest, a newsletter operations agency, built a newsletter deliverability checklist covering the foundational work that ensures your emails reach your audience. See how your newsletter holds up. Future Forest (Sponsored)
AI Almost Started a War
An intelligence report circulated across the US military this spring, during the war with Iran, said a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying components of a nuclear weapons program. The military moved to intercept. Armed personnel were preparing to board and planes were in the air. Only just before the operation did officials look closer and find the report had been generated with help from a chatbot, which had misidentified the cargo. The report was “entirely false,” one source told CNN, but it “almost started a war,” since any American action against a Chinese vessel risked spiraling into armed conflict. The analyst had queried a chatbot about intelligence on the ship’s manifest, and the bot fused open-source material with secret signals intelligence to reach its conclusion. The analyst then used AI again to package it into the kind of standard report military officials trust. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s AI Acceleration Strategy, released in January, aims to put AI in the hands of three million personnel, and there is no single standard for verifying what those tools produce. As one source put it, “AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster.” CNN (4 minutes)
Red Phone
Two days after CNN published that account, the United States proposed a red phone for AI. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington wants a “notification mechanism” for artificial intelligence incidents that could affect national security, ahead of Thursday’s White House meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping. “We want a shared vision of common goals and common threats,” he told reporters after talks with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York, adding that moving “from opaque to more transparency between the No. 1 and the No. 2 AI powers in the world is very important.” The original hotline was built after the Cuban Missile Crisis on the premise that what would start a war between superpowers was not malice but misunderstanding. Trump has resisted calls to slow AI development, arguing it would help China catch up. AP (1 minute)
The Roman Telescope
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was set to lift off from Florida at the end of August, and a lot is riding on it. Its main job is mapping the universe at the largest scales, but the more interesting instrument is a coronagraph, a device that blots out a star’s light to reveal the planets around it. Program scientist Dominic Benford compares the problem to spotting a firefly circling a searchlight from thousands of miles away, since even the largest planets are a billion times fainter than their suns. The coronagraph works through two mirrors smaller than a makeup compact, each carrying more than 1,600 actuators that warp the glass by less than the width of a helium atom. Nothing this complex has ever flown. If it works, Roman will deliver the first direct images of distant planets in visible light, rather than the wobbles and dimming that have found nearly all of them so far. The primary mirror, incidentally, was a spare the National Reconnaissance Office had lying around. It was built to point at the ground. The Atlantic (7 minutes)
Microbes in Limbo
An engineered enzyme can eat the plastic in a water bottle in under 24 hours. Other microbes detect cadmium at five parts per billion, or pull rare earth metals from ore 73 percent faster than the natural strain. Unfortunately, none of these can be deployed in the real world. The reason traces to 1986, when White House staff decided that engineered microbes did not need a law of their own. Since genomes are made of chemicals, and novel chemicals were already covered by the Toxic Substances Control Act written in 1976 for industrial chemicals, engineered microbes would fall under it too. Development has been frozen ever since. Between 1987 and 2018 researchers filed more than 240 applications and only a handful were ever approved for widespread use. The EPA has never published a checklist of what it wants, so companies guess, and the applications stay private, so nobody can learn from earlier filings. Works in Progress (11 minutes)
The Advice Monster
Do you want advice, or do you just want to vent? Often people want the second thing, because they came to talk about how they feel, or to share the shame of things not working out. Michael Bungay Stanier has a name for the part of all of us that hears a friend start talking and thinks, right, I am about to add value here. He calls it the advice monster. Moving to advice too fast signals that you think you are smarter and faster, which makes people resist the very thing they came for. Research from Yitong Zhao at the University of Toronto found that staying with someone’s feelings and adding perspective left them feeling more supported, while de-escalating lines like “it’s not as bad as it seems” often land as an accusation of overreacting. The test Bungay Stanier suggests is simple. Can you let a conversation run three minutes before jumping in? The Guardian (8 minutes)
Most Read Last Week
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America, 1926 - America in 1926 was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work and money. Sound familiar?
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
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. - Arthur C. Clarke