A bonkers story about a life-or-death Olympics, plus the choice that led to tragedy in Tahoe

Dear Friends,

My favorite story of the week is an old one that a friend pointed me to: “Doubt,” by William Finnegan. It’s from 1994 and it describes the aftermath of a mugging in the Astor Place subway station. There’s a witness, two victims, and three assailants. Then there’s a trial, an alibi, a verdict. Finnegan serves on the jury and then, afterwards, decides to investigate further. 

There are no stunning reversals or shocking plot twists. There are no object lessons about the criminal justice system or about race and class in America. Instead, it just slowly brings you deeper and deeper into a complicated story. It’s a Rashomon tale, told beautifully by one writer. Nothing is given away too soon, and nothing is held too long. With so many magazine stories about crime, particularly in an age of social media, you know what’s going to happen from the Tweet, the headline, or the art. Here, you’re not even really sure what happened when the story ends.

Speaking of twists and turns, you have to read this utterly bizarre McKay Coppins caper about a man in Mexico who said he was a former Olympian kidnapped by the cartels and then forced to compete in the highest-stakes flag football game you can imagine. “If you win, you live. If you lose, you die.” The story was made for Hollywood. And McKay had a busy week! He also wrote beautifully about how he took $10K from The Atlantic and, through a year of compulsive gambling, turned it into $109. The story is perhaps the rawest portrait of what gambling can do to any of us. As the man indirectly responsible for covering McKay’s losses, I’ll just add that I forgive him both because it’s such a damn good piece—and because he lost a good chunk of it betting on the Patriots.

Speaking of Boston sports, there’s a moving story about the five Venezuelans now playing for the Red Sox. Carlos Narváez, the starting catcher, wasn’t a heralded prospect with a huge bonus. After his country’s economy collapsed, he had to work cleaning nightclubs and in construction, even as he tried to make it to the big leagues. The ace pitcher, Ranger Suárez, wasn’t able to travel home to see the birth of his daughter. “You live a double life,” says Wilyer Abreu, the starting right fielder. “A life inside the ballpark, inside the lines, that everybody gets to see, and then you live this other life, the one that is away from the field.”

Sticking with sports, Joshua Hunt has an excellent piece about sumo wrestling in Japan and what the rise of Mongolian superstars has meant for Japanese nationalism. This is a devastating story about the one choice that led to tragedy during the recent avalanche near Tahoe. And I enjoyed this piece by Blair Braverman about her beloved sled dogs. Here’s one sentence that conveys much of the madness of the story, “Once, 900 miles into a race, I woke from a nap to find Colbert grinning stupidly and discovered that he’d sneaked into my sled and eaten 10 pounds of frozen chicken skin while I slept. We put him on a bush plane to the finish line because he was too full to run.”

I was saddened to read the news on Friday of the death of the great Calvin Tomkins at the age of 100, after nearly 70 years of writing for The New Yorker. “The sentences cut a swift, clean trail across the page—a mackerel through the water,” wrote David Remnick. Here is Tomkins on the great Merce Cunningham from 1968, Cindy Sherman from 2000, Jasper Johns from 2006.

Rolling Stone has a new page of collected interviews that is absolutely gorgeous. Kudos to their web designers. And I particularly recommend the conversation with Ray Charles: “I never coast on nothing. Before I coast, I quit.”

The Most Interesting Things in Tech

Clive Thompson has an excellent story about the end of computer programming as we know it, and what this new world of agents means for a profession in which many people no longer need to use the skills they’ve spent their lives developing. “The reason that tech generally—and coders in particular—see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” says Anil Dash in the piece. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”

Speaking of jobs turning upside down because of AI, a new working paper from the Brookings Institution and GovAI examines not just what jobs are most at risk but who’s best positioned to withstand that disruption. The good news: Most people in high-risk roles are highly adaptable. But there are also entire economies built on vulnerable roles where new jobs will be hard to find.

This paper from researchers at Alibaba used an ingenious method to determine how trustworthy the code written by AI actually is. Just because you can solve a problem now doesn’t mean that you aren’t quietly creating worse ones in the future. And the strange saga of a Times of Israel journalist who received threats from Polymarket gamblers over his reporting on a missile strike outside of Jerusalem might be a sign we’ve gone too far with prediction markets.

I also loved this story about the meeting between the physicist Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, a computer scientist, which launched the partnership that just earned them the Turing Award. Brassard was swimming in the ocean during a break at a conference in the ‘70s when Bennett came up to him with ideas about how they could use quantum effects to encrypt information. Brassard says, “if I had been on firm ground, I would have run for my life.” Forty-seven years later, they’re winners of the highest prize in computing.

Meanwhile, I have several events coming up, including a rare one open to the public in New York City—this coming Monday night. Please come on by!

Events

Cheers * N

I hope you enjoy this newsletter. Please continue to forward it to anyone else who might enjoy it. They can sign up here.