The bizarre story of a man who broke into jail, plus a family's harrowing fight to survive a flood

Dear Friends,

I want to start with Ben Sasse, the former Nebraska senator and University of Florida president. I spent a couple of days with him this past summer and left thinking of him as one of the few people with the wisdom and character to help put the politics of this country back together. A few months later, this past December, Sasse—who is 54 years old—announced that he had been diagnosed with fast-moving pancreatic cancer. He was given about 90 days to live. He’s currently in experimental trials and fighting hard. In this beautiful conversation with Peter Robinson, Sasse explains how he’s approaching the time he has left. He wants to live up to the ideals of his Christian faith and he wants to “redeem the time” he has left. He wants to be the right father for his 14-year-old son, and he wants to help society figure out what meaning is as we enter a new technological age. “Death is terrible, and yet death doesn’t win,” Sasse says, while retelling the story of Jesus and Lazarus. “Death is a wicked thief. It’s an enemy. But it’s pretty great that it’s the last enemy.” And, as Sasse said in January, “you can play a lot of basketball in the last sixty seconds.”

I’ve read a whole batch of wild, cinematic stories in the past two weeks, starting with this absolutely bizarre and captivating story by James Verini of a prominent activist in Nashville—once a consultant to Bernie Sanders on prison reform—who kept sneaking into a new jail, often disguised as a construction worker, in order to hide weapons in its walls. He somehow snuck a fully loaded revolver into a cinder block in one of the visitation rooms. Why? It’s not exactly clear, but some of the best parts of the story are the author’s attempts to understand. Verini has a particular eye for upside-down stories like this, and I highly recommend this piece he wrote in The Atavist twelve years ago about a woman who spent decades in Kabul trying to build a library that would compile the documents that could explain a country at war with itself.

Speaking of escapes, I loved this tangled Linda Burstyn piece about a Hasidic businessman named Jacob Ostreicher who moves from Brooklyn to Bolivia to farm rice and is unjustly imprisoned by a corrupt government. It’s a sad story—until Ostreicher’s tale somehow gets from a rabbi to Mark Wahlberg’s bodyguard to Sean Penn. The actor, who has a part-time role as unofficial state department envoy to South American dictators, travels to meet Ostreicher—at one point with a translator who is actually a professional extractor in tow. Eventually, Ostreicher is freed.

There’s also this terrifying first-person account of a family swept away from their Texas home when the Guadalupe River floods. The piece is riveting, redemptive—hold tight to those tree branches!!—and utterly heartbreaking. And here’s a story in Racquet of how tennis helped save the life of a man pushed in front of the downtown 1 train at 18th street. It’s a horror that he was pushed and a miracle that he survived. Now he’ll spend the rest of his life processing that moment and trying to figure it out. 

The Most Interesting Things in Tech

The showdown between Anthropic and the Department of War is by far the most interesting—and consequential—story in tech. On Thursday, the DoW followed through on its threat to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk over the company’s objections to the government’s potential use of Claude for the mass surveillance of Americans or in autonomous killing. This could potentially be a death sentence for the company. And as Dean Ball argues, killing innovative American companies should probably not be the top priority of the United States government—particularly when our military is actively using their services in the middle of a war. The company will fight and probably win in court. But it all raises a whole bunch of questions about what happens next, including how companies that work with both the government and Anthropic will react. This situation is beginning to border on the absurd.

One of the most fascinating details from the war with Iran is that Israel reportedly hacked the traffic cameras in Tehran and used them to track the movements of Ayatollah Khamenei and his bodyguards. This helped them confirm his location before striking. We still don’t know exactly how they did it. But we do know that Iran had cameras everywhere so it could surveil and suppress its citizens. One of the deepest questions about modern technology is whether it aids or subverts authoritarian regimes. In this case, Iran's panopticon was good for the government—until it wasn’t. 

I want to leave with a few more words from Sasse. At the end of the interview he talks with Robinson about his decision to undergo painful treatments. “I felt a duty to try to get into a clinical trial and to fight to live a little while longer chiefly because I have a young kid still at home and he needs a dad to slap him upside the head a little bit longer and give him some advice and wrestle through some questions and help him recognize that he's gonna need to be a man earlier than those of us who were blessed to have a dad in our lives a lot longer did. So I wanna be a good dad for longer.” 

One of those questions is how to live in a world that technology is changing faster than it has ever been changed before. “Every revolution that's ever come before has been intergenerational. What we're living through right now really might be the first intragenerational revolution ever,” Sasse says. We’re going to have robots building robots and massively powerful AI. We’re going to need to find new ways of meaning and new things that matter in life. Trying to figure that out—with friends and with family—“seems like a useful way to spend some weeks or months.”

Events

I have a few public book events coming up. Please do come by if you’re free.

Cheers * N

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