Rat hunting in Louisiana and signs we're approaching the end of reality

Dear Friends,

A story in ProPublica this week broke my heart. It’s the tale of Mohammad Halimi, who, prior to 2001, had worked for the Taliban, advising it on issues involving foreign diplomats. After the war, he switched sides and worked for the United States. He became an important advisor to the American government and even helped prepare the first Trump administration for its negotiations with the Taliban. As Kabul fell, he escaped to America by disguising himself as an ambulance driver and making it to Bagram airbase. Once here, he got a contract from the United States Institute of Peace—where my father worked for many years—providing advice, again, to American diplomats. 

And then, one day, a young college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh was named, via DOGE, as the head of USIP. An Institute that was once full of august veterans who cared about democracy around the world was now run by a small cluster of young men who had never much cared or followed foreign affairs. They seemed not to care about any of the good that the organization did. It was just a fun thing to dismantle. And they appeared not to understand any of the documents they saw. They also passed misinformation up the chain. Soon, Elon Musk tweeted, “United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban.” Next came a Fox segment with Jesse Watters.

The results for Halimi were catastrophic. The State Department was warned that Musk and DOGE’s lies could put people in danger, but no one seemed to care. And, in fact, three members of Halimi’s family were kidnapped by the Taliban’s intelligence services. The whole piece is a devastating story about the cruel, careless, senseless dismantling of an important institution, when American government resources are reallocated from careful diplomacy to Twitter shitposting. The story ends with a quote from Halimi: “Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice? Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”

Relatedly, I want to give a shout-out to the always brilliant Helen Lewis and her new book, The Genius Myth. It’s a sneaky history of the world that dismantles our traditional notions of what makes a genius. The folks we remember with this word are often just amazing marketers. You can read an excerpt here. But you really should buy and read the whole thing. It’s smart, surprising, and often very funny. (“In light of all this, here is another prescription for anyone who wants to bolster their genius myth: find either a wife, or a younger peer, and impress upon them the importance of preserving all your work and maintaining the approved version of your life.”)

Meanwhile, the latest issue of Harper's has an amazing and absurd story about hunting Louisiana nutria: big swamp rats that can consume one quarter of their body weight each day. They're a nuisance to the local ecosystem and ravenously eat away marshland along the coast. The state of Louisiana offers $6 for every nutria killed—which brings us to the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo, an annual competition to see which crew can hunt the most rats in 40 hours. This year, Miss Louisiana competed, chefs prepared nutria dishes that “resembled pulled pork,” and a great debate erupted over the ethics of killing a pregnant rat. The “Nutria toss” was won by a college student who once trained in shot put. It’s a riotous tale about the very rare part of the world where the rats are bigger than they are in Brooklyn, and it’s well worth a read.

Did you know you can update Google to prioritize preferred sources, like, perhaps, The Atlantic? Here’s how. Henry Blodget has an excellent, and clear-eyed, interview with David Deming. I very much enjoyed this interview on The Daily Stoic with the brilliant, untiring historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. And here’s a very good conversation between Molly Fletcher and Admiral McRaven. 

The Most Interesting Things In Tech This Week

The most promising paper I read this week was a preprint from a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who used AI to analyze the molecular pathways of 132 different diseases to determine similarities in how they work. They identified some surprising connections, including genetic overlap between Gaucher disease and kidney cancer, and a myriad of diseases with links to hypertension. 

The research could lead to new breakthroughs, but it’s also an illustration of AI’s incredible capacity to analyze data. One professor, one research assistant, a lot of AI trawled a massive dataset and found creative connections in a way neither traditional computers nor an army of humans could do. That’s pretty cool.

Meanwhile, this New York Times story underscores the weird economics of the AI era—and the blurring of reality. Last year, actor Scott Jacqmein licensed his likeness to TikTok for $750. He traveled to the Bay Area, where the company took a bunch of footage of him. Now, he’s all over the platform. At least, a part human, part AI version of him is. His digital doppelgänger is hawking products he’s never used, in languages he doesn’t speak. TikTok created an avatar of Scott that businesses promote their products with. 

Scott isn’t getting royalties from the videos. Obviously, he could’ve used a better agent, but this isn’t just a tale about exploitation. It’s also a sign we’re approaching what I keep calling the end of reality. AI Scott is just stilted enough to discern it isn’t a real person—but we’re moving ever closer to a time where that won’t be the case. The lines between what is real and what isn’t are blurring.

I was at TechBBQ in Copenhagen this week, where I interviewed Tomer Cohen and visited Copenhill power plant. The facility is a marvel of environmental engineering. Industrial waste is brought in, hazardous materials are removed, then the waste is burned at a super-high temperature, which boils water to create thermal energy that powers part of the city. It also, rather wonderfully, features a carpeted ski slope and a giant rock climbing wall.

Bjarke Ingels designed the space to combine sustainability and pleasure. It’s a concept he calls hedonistic sustainability, which challenges the idea that environmental stewardship has to be associated with dreary activities. As I saw firsthand at Copenhill, it can be fun, too.

Also in Copenhagen, the restaurant Alchemist has a taste wall featuring an array of jars with different ingredients. They use it to conduct all sorts of experiments. My favorite was a test to see whether the outer shell of a spinach leaf can serve as a vessel in which cow tissue can grow. If it works, one day you could use spinach to help grow a steak, which is related to the subject of this brilliant piece by Michael Specter, which was one of the first things I had the joy of editing back when I worked at The New Yorker.

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Cheers * N

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