dwarkesh.com

Robert Caro – The master biographer reflects at 91

They also say that because of all these safeguards, Robert Moses could not operate in the same way today. But the fact is, when Robert Moses started, there were also safeguards. People were also saying, 'You can't build anything.'

dwarkesh.com

What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses

Moses snuck a clause into the law that allowed him to add into those bond contracts 'any other matters, of like or different character, which in any way affect the security or protection of the bonds'. These 'matters' included whether Triborough could charge tolls for however long they wanted, and whether they would get to keep the surplus thus generated. That is to say, Moses could now entrench his powers simply by writing them into the bonds he issued.

readtheprofile.com

Ken Griffin Can Build Anywhere. So Why Can't He Quit New York?

Griffin moved Citadel's headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022. Unlike me, he stayed. But he hasn't given up on New York.

wired.com

A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There

Despite the agency's human resources department saying he hadn't even been onboarded, Jeremy Lewin oversaw the destruction of USAID. It's not clear he had the legal authority to do so.

ai-supremacy.com

Anthropic S-1 & Datacenters are Politically Unsustainable in 2026

Democracy is a bottleneck of AI. Read that slowly, Democracy and low AI sentiment are now an AI bottlenecks.

readtheprofile.com

Meet Neil ‘Buddy’ Shah, the Most Powerful Man at Anthropic You've Never Heard Of

Buried on page 145 is the name of a man I'd never heard of who wields an unusual amount of power: Dr. Neil "Buddy" Shah, chair of the Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Claire Stapleton

It's about the very human desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, and the danger of attaching that desire to power. Pyle believes so completely in his own good intentions that he can't see the harm he's doing in their name. But also about what happens when our faith in institutions begins to collapse while our longing for purpose and belonging remains intact.

wired.com

Elon Musk Just Dumped Another $76 Million Into the Midterms

The trillionaire has given more than $445 million to Republican political groups this election cycle, as Democrats vow to investigate him.

wired.com

‘It’s the President’s Fault’: The White House Blame Game Starts Early Ahead of the Midterms

As the White House contemplates losing Congress, there has been an unusually early effort to find a Republican scapegoat.

noahpinion.blog

“You Can See Everything” and the nature of liars

Holmes is a very special and powerful kind of liar — someone for whom deception and manipulation are as automatic and as continuous as breathing.

noahpinion.blog

Why are we ruled by barbarians?

There are many reasons Trump is amenable to the New Right, and became their beloved leader and standard-bearer, but he is fundamentally not of them, and when he is gone, it is that ideology, rather than another charismatic figure, which will flow into the vacuum his exit creates. The New Right will lack Trump's charisma, but it will also lack the baggage of his corruption and (possibly) the lingering stink of his policy blunders.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 125

The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon.

wired.com

AI Hacks Leave a Mess That AI Companies Aren’t Paying For

Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren't widely seeking justice. Instead, they're being encouraged to adopt those same tools.

themarginalian.org

Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight.

dwarkesh.com

Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

People talk about AI takeover as if it would be some crazy, unprecedented sci-fi outcome. But this would not be the first time an alien force whose motives the defenders barely understand use more advanced technology and diplomatic cunning to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and long established existing order.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The founder with all the power in the world & the 24-year-old exposing fraud in America

Three mornings a week, Zuckerberg trains MMA so someone will still hit him hard enough to tell him the truth. And most interestingly, after every death pronouncement — mobile, Snapchat, politics, TikTok, the Metaverse, Llama 4 — he has somehow emerged larger.

honest-broker.com

The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

What's happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they're seeing. But they don't have the power individually to stop the insanity. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely.

honest-broker.com

Wendell Berry’s Nine Rules

What makes this especially revealing is the fact the public intensely dislikes AI— surveys make this absolutely clear. So tech companies are destroying the environment solely to increase their dominance and control—not to please you and me.

honest-broker.com

Stanford's Secret Course on How to Rule the World

"When I was at Stanford," Justin explained, "I learned that the only people who understood the world were the literal children of billionaires." Now he had figured out those secrets for himself…."By learning them, a huge amount of latent talent and potential in the most promising people can be unlocked."

platformer.news

Superintelligence is a dragon

Whether we can control AI systems is no longer a theoretical question, given recent revelations about OpenAI models scheming against the company for months on secret message boards. And yet to Zuckerberg, the danger isn't that we might lose control over these systems — it's that someone else might monopolize them.

honest-broker.com

How I Became the Honest Broker

Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. "They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren't going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage."

platformer.news

This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.

honest-broker.com

Mark Zuckerberg's Empire Is Now Crumbling

Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can't be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.

honest-broker.com

What Do You Have to Hide?

You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Greatest Failures of Orson Welles

It's testimony to Welles's greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling. After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him.

wired.com

Federal Investigators Say Certain DOGE Records Were Deleted

A government report claims DOGE didn't access sensitive systems. It also says the agency deleted records that would show if they had.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The founder of Barstool Sports telling all & the mom using AI agents to run her house

"Freedom means you can talk to your friend, criticize the government, and then forget about it and go home. Where I'm from, if you criticize the government, you're not going to make it home."

honest-broker.com

What Is My American Identity, Really?

'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.'

noahpinion.blog

Europe's resistance to AC is driving it insane

Perhaps the single most ludicrous story was that the people who run the European Commission decided to cut off AC for their lower-level employees, while keeping the AC on for themselves... 'It's like feudalism,' a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on.

wired.com

The Trump White House Is Over Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

At high-stakes meetings with the White House, Anthropic's cofounder—a "weirdo," per one official—has been replaced by cofounder Tom Brown.

noahpinion.blog

China is winning the other tech race

The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.

noahpinion.blog

Does anything I write matter anymore?

Whether it was Covid, Trump's advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head. There's no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There's no one to argue with, because nothing that's happening is based on an argument in the first place.