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We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys
Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. They regard “humanness, and Earth itself … as a burden to be sloughed off.” Gal Beckerman contemplates the new book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” by Jill Lepore.
Like Musk, Thiel and Sam Altman, I grew up reading Heinlein, Asimov and Adams. I found the writing inspiring. But I stopped taking it literally a long time ago.
2026-09-04
Columbia House: The First 12 Cost A Penny, But … Columbia House was a great way to get 12 CDs, tapes or records for a penny. But its business model set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.
2026-09-04
Marco Arment: “If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my ‘side’ considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?”
2026-09-05
Rebuilding is brutally expensive in Los Angeles’s burnt-out neighborhoods, so instead homeowners are reviving the lost art of house-moving, transporting historic homes across town to be installed on lots that were recently made vacant by wildfires.
Nicola Twilley at The New Yorker:
In his prime, [George] Kress was a kind of P. T. Barnum figure, dazzling the city with his ambition and showmanship. He moved greenhouses without breaking a pane, entire high schools in one piece, and office buildings while workers remained at their desks. In 1924, his clients hosted a party–with the mayor in attendance–inside a nine-bedroom Queen Anne-style building while Kress moved it more than two miles west, on Wilshire Boulevard, from the newly commercial neighborhood of Westlake to the upscale Windsor Square.
If I had a time machine, that party would be one of the first places I’d go.
2026-09-05
1969 interview with Don Rickles by WMAR-TV reporter Susan White. “Rickles had a reparation for not letting reporters get a word in edgeways, so Susan decided to hilariously turn the tables…”
Rickles has a reputation for being kind, gracious and charming in his personal life and that shines through in this video.
2026-09-05
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