Some interesting things to read this April weekend

Dear Friends,?

One of the most moving stories I’ve read this year was my old friend Vauhini Vara’s?essay?in The Believer about her sister’s death. Vauhini had never written about it, but this year she tried to by enlisting GPT-3, an AI system that has something resembling human-like intelligence. Vauhini feeds the machine ever more details and then lets it complete the story based on whatever version she’s given it. It’s a way to see how the computers of the future will process information; and a way for us to understand loss.?

Another story I greatly enjoyed is from an old friend in a different way: a long piece about Facebook in WIRED. This is one of my?favorite?genres, and I was taken by?this profile?of Joel Kaplan, who has quietly led the company’s strategy in Washington and either through—or into–so many of its crises, depending on how you see things. “One person described Kaplan to me as ‘Washington dark matter’—exerting powerful gravitational forces but strangely hidden,” Benjamin Wofford writes in the piece.?

As the war goes on, the editorial team here at The Atlantic is publishing consistently?terrific work, including this?explainer?piece that just went up yesterday. You’ll absolutely want to read Anne Applebaum on?the idea of a liberal world order, the?only acceptable outcome?to the war, and?why we should all read?Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism right about now. The battle in Ukraine is the front line in a much larger struggle that no one writes about better than Anne.

And from the pages of our recent March magazine, I was moved by?this beautiful piece?from Jennifer Senior on navigating friendship in middle-age: what it takes to make new friends and why so many friendships painfully unravel. She writes about everything with grace and insight: envy, loss, the pandemic.?“There’s loads of open country between enervation and intoxication. It’s just a matter of identifying where to pitch the tent. Finding that just-right patch of ground, you might even say, is half the trick to growing old.”

I did an event last month in Miami with Shane Battier, the NBA star known for always middling stats, but almost winning. And it reminded me of one of my favorite sports profiles ever written,?this piece?by Michael Lewis. “Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are,” Lewis writes. “He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.” It’s a story full of metaphors about how everyone can try to do their work.

Much of what I have linked to is long, so if you want a brilliant succinct piece, read Molly Jong Fast on the?Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation?hearings.

Back to tech—each year, the ever-insightful Benedict Evans offers his thoughts on big trends and what the next big thing in tech will be. This year, he?presents?“three steps to the future”—or, how Web 3.0 and the metaverse will change our lives in 2030. Getting there will be … complicated. And here’s an excellent?piece?from Casey Newton on three key issues crypto needs to address. Crypto-specific futurism aside, I also enjoyed Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin’s?essay?on thinking about the future using the Stockdale paradox. Might part of the role of future technology be to introduce useful friction into our lives?

In the world of running, I greatly enjoyed?this story?from GQ about a group of Ethiopian runners who fled persecution in their home country to train in the U.S., as well as?this Washington Post piece?about champion marathoner Germán Silva running the length of Mexico.?

The best movie I’ve seen recently is “14 Peaks,” which details Nirmal Purja’s insane climbing adventures. And the best book I read last month was Nick Griffin’s “The Year of Dangerous Days” about Miami in 1980, which undoubtedly will be a movie down the line. And the best essay I’ve recently rediscovered is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up” from 1936, which has a line everyone quotes—”the test of a first-rate intelligence …”—but a deeper message that’s usually lost

And Thursday, I went to a dinner where Margaret Atwood accepted the Hitchens Prize. I’ll leave with her?closing words: “Our times are desperate,” she spoke, having just finished walking through some of the great existential threats in modern society: our global pandemic, attacks on democracy, climate change. But the solution is this, she went on to say: “Don’t panic. Think carefully. Write clearly. Act in good faith. Repeat.”

Best, *N?

P.S. Yes, that's a photograph of a new friend,?Roti, who often plays 2 v 2 basketball, on my team against my two youngest sons.