Excellent Reads

51 min read

A single working mom begins a whirlwind romance with a man named Martin Lewis, then discovers that Martin Lewis doesn’t exist. This true story picks up right where Scorsese’s ‘GoodFellas’ left off.

https://archive.ph/iWtPK Bubble Trouble An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.

by Bryan McMahon March 25, 2025

the millions of children who have it worldwide are practically invisible, their suffering — and the formative years they're losing to this disease — obscured by the myths that COVID is "harmless" for kids and the pandemic is "over".

the lack of awareness is biting in shocking ways. Too many children with long COVID are being dismissed by doctors who say there's nothing they can do to help — or worse, that their pain and fatigue is "all in their head". They're being pushed out of school by teachers who don't understand why they can't come to class or run around with their peers. Their parents have been gaslighted and blamed, too, not just by medical professionals but their closest friends and family. And experts are concerned that all this ignorance and apathy — and the unwillingness of governments to do more to curb COVID transmission — is exposing a generation of children to the same chronic illness and disability, with potentially devastating consequences.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/lroTY The kratom question Millions are turning to an unregulated herbal extract to curb their opioid addiction. But do the risks outweigh the benefits?

The Takeaway — Collapse Isn’t a Flaw, It’s the Plan

The rich are not scrambling to prevent collapse. They welcome it — because they know they’ll be the only ones left standing. While the rest of us are told to “sacrifice” and “tighten our belts,” billionaires are building bunkers, buying private islands, and hoarding resources for the dystopia they see coming.

https://archive.ph/06OXT Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”

https://archive.ph/QroYA Dear Reader,

When I first approached James Murdoch in early 2024 to pitch him on a series of in-depth interviews, I figured it was a long shot. Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, the onetime heir apparent to the Murdoch media empire, almost never spoke to reporters. Still, I could only imagine the stories he had to tell.

In his 20 years working for the family business, he’d been inside rooms where decisions were made at the most powerful conservative-media empire in the world. He’d seen up close how his father’s British newspapers came to champion Brexit and how Fox News had helped deliver Donald Trump to the White House. There were signs that James had grown disillusioned with these aspects of how his family fortune had been made: In 2020, he’d abruptly resigned from News Corp’s board of directors with a cryptic letter citing “disagreements over certain editorial content.” Might he finally be willing to elaborate? Sometimes, as a reporter, all you can do is ask. What I didn’t know when we sat down for our first meeting was that the Murdochs were secretly fracturing. Rupert had decided, at age 94, to rewrite the irrevocable family trust to give sole control of the empire to his eldest son, Lachlan, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children as planned. A bitter (and not-yet-public) legal battle had commenced. James—liberated by what he saw as his father’s betrayal—decided, somewhat to my surprise, that he was ready to talk. The conversation that started that day ended up lasting a year. I met more than a dozen times with James and his wife, Kathryn, as they told me stories that would shock even the most devoted viewer of HBO’s Succession. These interviews were wide-ranging, filled with revelations that help explain how America got to this fraught political moment. But the stories that stayed with me most were the intensely personal ones about the unraveling of a family.

The article has some interesting information about European passports, too.

The rise of tourism in North America and Europe in the mid- to late 19th century caused difficulties for the existing passport and visa systems in Europe and in 1861, France abolished passports and visas, with the rest of Europe following suit.

By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, passport requirements were nonexistent nearly everywhere in Europe and the United States. The First World War brought new concerns for international security, prompting the requirement of passports and visas to travel abroad.
...
the U.S. passport requirement was only a war measure that officially ended when President Wilson left office in 1921. The U.S. was not a member of League of Nations – despite it being the brainchild of its aforementioned president – and did not require passports for international travel again until Nov. 29, 1941, mere days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/zm5LU

An exploration of the causes of the Irish Potato Famine, and how the British blindspots in the attitudes of their aristocracy failed to recognize, then failed to solve, a deadly famine and depopulation in their own geographical yard.

It is easy to draw parallels to today's US Washington elite attitudes towards homelessness, rural struggles, and environmental stress can unravel things before anyone at the top realizes what's happening.

New Yorker article, archived version

Reading Time: 12 - 15 minutes.

Wired is soft paywall, clear cookies, use reader mode, or something like bypasspaywallsclean

Reading Time: 20 - 25 minutes.

About intuition and practicing medicine and dddrugs. One of a most difficult proffesions- to make people sleep

Reading Time: 8 - 10 minutes.

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• Reading Time: 12 - 15 minutes
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Vladimir Putin’s anti-LGBT blueprint has made its way across the world to the Oval Office, where Donald Trump is using it to draw up American policy

Quite a long read about Rationalists and Zizians