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Dear Friends,
Ten years ago, Abraham Jiménez Enoa decided that he needed to start an independent magazine to tell the real story of Cuba. He had been working for OnCuba, a publication beholden to the state, and felt like a low-grade propagandist, using the island’s flickering electricity to describe a world that didn’t exist. “Living there as a journalist was like being a zombie who knows he’s dead,” he writes in a beautiful new book excerpt in The Dial. “I ruminated constantly on one idea: If, in the future, somebody tried to reconstruct early-21st-century Cuba from a press archive, what they would find would be the story of a country that didn’t exist. Our mission was to bring reality back. We wanted to hold a mirror up to Cuba, show the island what the hell it was.”
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He quit his job at OnCuba and got to work. Authoritarian governments know, however, that truth corrodes their power, and so misery followed. (Garry Kasparov once said, in a line I’ve always loved, that democracies are countries with certain rules and uncertain results; autocracies are the opposite.) For his sin of reporting reality, Jiménez Enoa was tracked, interrogated, stripped naked, and harassed. One of his most severe crimes appears to have been reporting on the World Series, starring two Cubans who the government claimed were enemies of the state. In one particularly vivid scene, he writes, “A very young agent, maybe 20, came in, along with Lieutenant Colonel Kenia. She was infamous. Two gold chains dangled outside her uniform. Her nails were long pink claws, and her hands were loaded with more gold. For years, she had interrogated any dissident or artist who challenged the regime. She was despotic, aggressive, always trying to get a rise out of her victim. She looked at me as if she wanted to slit my throat. Her manner made it clear that she loathed me and found me repulsive. Likewise, ma’am, I thought.” Jiménez Enoa fled to a democratic country, Spain, where he now lives and, for all of our good fortune, is free to write what he wants.
Speaking of freedom, I loved Anne Neuberger’s recounting of how her parents were freed on the Fourth of July 50 years ago from terrorists holding them on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. What has Neuberger done to honor their story? Well, she served for many years as one of the nation’s top intelligence officials, helping to keep the rest of us safe from threats like this. “My parents’ rescue on America’s Independence Day was especially meaningful because my family is proof that the promise of American freedom is real,” she writes. “Seven of my eight great-grandparents were murdered in the German death camps of Europe. The grandmother who watched me when my parents were held hostage had survived Auschwitz. After World War II, my father and his parents had been trapped in Hungary as it fell to communism. Yet in coming to America, they were given an opportunity to build a better life, a life in which they were free to practice their faith without fear.”
(I should add one detail I’ve always loved: She keeps the Sabbath and told me, back when I was the editor at Wired, that she would read the print magazine on Saturdays. I used this once as an argument with a consultant who was telling us that we should stop publishing in print. We certainly can’t do that, I said, or we would lose one of our most influential readers.)
I was riveted by this long, devastating story in The Atavist, “The Extremist in the Family,” about a couple whose deep religious beliefs lead them to refuse all medical treatment for their newborn children, even when the result will surely lead to death. Their family members are forced into one of the worst decisions you can have to make: Do you betray your sister or daughter to save a life? And here is William Finnegan on another sort of alleged betrayal: Did an experienced hiker really leave his girlfriend to die near the summit of Austria’s tallest mountain? Mountaineering can give one a deep spiritual connection to the world. And it also, it seems, can make you selfish and perhaps sadistic.
I recently went back to one of the great stories of American ingenuity, or at least one of the ones that is most relevant to me: David Grann’s astonishing story from 2003 about the efforts to build a third water tunnel under New York City, which includes the history of how New York learned, through disease and fire, to pipe water from the Catskills down to Wall Street and off into Queens. You may think that sounds boring! But I promise you, in Grann’s hands, it’s not.
Here is one paragraph that will be hard to forget:
“More unnerving, though, was the threat of a ‘blowout’—a breach in the lining of the caisson wall, caused by a sudden imbalance of pressure, which created suction much like that of an airplane door opened in mid-flight, accompanied by a terrifying kettle-like screech. Men had a few seconds to climb inside the air lock; if they didn’t make it, they could be sucked into the earth, as happened in 1916, during the construction of a tunnel under the East River, when three men were swallowed through a crevice; two died, while a third, Marshall Mabey, was propelled safely into the afternoon sky on a geyser said to be four stories high. ‘I felt myself being pushed into the hole,’ Mabey later explained to a reporter. ‘As I struck the mud it felt as though something was squeezing me tighter than I had ever been squeezed. I was almost smothered.’”
Speaking of all that water, here’s a delightful short piece by Taffy Brodesser-Akner about her experience in a cold plunge. “The methodology goes like this: Sit in the cedar sauna for 20 to 30 minutes, until you are starring in both Mad Max: Fury Road and Ishtar. There’s a weird woolen hat you’re supposed to wear so that your brain and hair don’t fry. Again, you’re no scientist, but is that how you’re supposed to get your brain to not fry? A serene woman enters and breaks a ‘snowball’ of different essential oils over the business end of the mechanism that heats the room and then waves a giant towel around so it sweeps over you and into your nostrils and your pores, which have been steamed to the size of manholes.”
And since you subscribe to this newsletter, and have somehow made it all the way down here, I know that you like to read. So please take a look at Rose Horowitch’s remarkable new Atlantic cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here.” It seems almost unethical to summarize it. But some time today, set aside half an hour, and read the story. Then throw your phone in another room, or out the window, and grab a book.
The Most Interesting Things in Tech
A paper from Anthropic suggests AI models have developed a new area where they store information while they think. Called the J-space, it’s where the model puts ideas it is not directly addressing. To test this, researchers asked Claude to copy a sentence while also thinking about something that had nothing to do with it—in one instance, the Golden Gate Bridge. After the prompt, they checked the J-space and found words like “bridge” and “California” were activated. This is a reminder of what I consider the most interesting thing in this whole field: no one really knows exactly what’s going on in these models.
How is AI impacting jobs? The answer is still unclear, but a study from Ramp and Revelio introduces an interesting wrinkle: companies that adopt AI rapidly are hiring more people—and more entry-level workers at that. It takes time for companies to see the benefits of AI, but at a certain point they usually do. The businesses that use it the most reap those rewards faster, enabling them to increase headcount. The lesson here: if you’re going to use AI, go all in.
Last, I want to share a few wonderful conversations I had at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva this week. Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi beautifully laid out his vision for how to build compassion into AI models. Daniela Camberos described how she built an AI tool to keep women from getting duped by drug cartels. This project from Firas Shamsan to resurrect the qanbus, a traditional Yemeni instrument, is one of the coolest music preservation stories I've ever heard. And if there were an award for a question so good it made everybody’s jaw drop, it would go to Dilly Severin for this idea on how insurance companies can help cover the potential harms of AI.
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A little while back, the author and engineer Paul Ford was vibe-coding on an airplane—"the most ecologically damaging thing I could do," he told me. Ford has been building software for thirty years, and watching what Claude Code could do on that flight shook him. Shortly after, he walked into his office to find his business partner. “I literally said these words: ‘Death is coming.’ It was like watching a house get built in five minutes.” His partner expressed skepticism: Organizations change, but they don't change quickly. Both of them, of course, were partly right.
After Ford settled down and thought it through more, he realized that AI had just made it more evident what actually matters in his work. “The code was never truly the hard part,” he told me. “The hard part was pushing things forward, coming up with new and novel ideas, communicating with consumers, building really good products that people wanted to use all day.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told me something similar: He writes code far faster now, but an hour of generation doesn't replace ten hours of work, because those ten hours were where he thought about the problem, revised it, and came to understand it. AI can help you make bad things faster; but good work still takes time.
This helps explain one of the most counterintuitive findings from recent episodes of the podcast: AI is not the great equalizer that many people predicted and that I hoped it would be. Dan Priest, PwC's chief AI officer, told me that across every industry his firm works in, “the best talent gets the most from AI”—the best engineers, and even the best musicians, see possibilities in the tools that average performers don't. Ford put his finger on why: AI gives you velocity, not quality. It can make a mediocre business reporter faster. It cannot make them better. Everyone has the same Steinway now. Bad musicians still play Chopsticks; good ones play Thelonious Monk and Bach.
This also explains why the economic transformation is lagging behind. I asked Priest why there's such a gap between AI's improving capabilities and its effect on the economy. He responded: “Adoption and AI value realization will move at the speed of trust.” We’re not going to use it if we don’t trust it. Organizations, he said, are built around “altitudes of accountability,” and no machine can be accountable, or trusted, the way a person can.
Eli Pariser takes it one step further, pointing out that humans will remain deeply involved in anything that involves reciprocal connection. An influencer can publish a thousand optimized, charming posts a day—and since the audience's bond with them was always one-directional, “the idea that you can only have a parasocial relationship with a real human is probably a thing we'll look back at and think was cute.” That profession, he thinks, is among the first to go. But where relationships run both ways—your friend, your neighbor, the person you'll run into on the street tomorrow—there's “a high social cost to displacing yourself.” Real interactions matter even more in a world where making infinite fake ones is nearly free. That’s a good lesson for the future of work, as well as another reason why I’m never going to use an AI version of myself to make my daily videos—even if I have to stand outside in the 92-degree heat.
Cheers * N