It Was All the Things

https://www.aei.org/commentary/it-was-all-the-things/

So, let’s walk through some of the major events of Trump’s second term, and see how it affected these groups. Trump’s approval holds up reasonably well (for him) through mid-March. There is some decline, but he was still at a 50-50 level in popularity, and the initial reactions to DOGE weren’t overwhelmingly negative, so that is where we’ll pick up. A few key moments had a particularly brutal impact on his job approval, and we’ll linger on those as we march through.

It’s important, however, to remember that events don’t have to have an immediate impact to matter. Things build up cumulatively, and most people who don’t write about elections for a living don’t remember specific events from Trump’s presidency. They just sort of keep a running tally in their minds about how they feel about Trump, which at a certain point flips to “negative.”

u/Most-Gold-434 on connecting with people

https://www.reddit.com/r/sociallycharismatic/comments/1xl69lw/i_sat_alone_at_a_coffee_shop_every_saturday_for_2/
Two months of sitting in the same chair at the same time and I went from knowing nobody to having an actual social circle. Not from an app. Not from a forced networking event. From being a predictable presence in a space until the space absorbed me.

There’s a psychology term for this. Propinquity effect. People form bonds with whoever they encounter repeatedly. Not whoever they click with instantly. Not whoever shares their interests perfectly. Whoever shows up consistently in the same space over time. Proximity plus repetition equals relationship. That’s the formula.

Making friends as an adult isn’t hard because adults are less social. It’s hard because adults don’t have built-in repeated proximity anymore. School forced you to see the same people every day. Work does it for some. But outside of that you have to manufacture the repetition yourself.

Pick a place. Go at the same time. Become a regular. Let the space do the work. It’s slower than a meetup app. It’s also how every real friendship I’ve made as an adult actually started.

The Unwritten Map: How large institutions actually operate, and what change leaders are never told

https://honeydacanay.ca/writing/unwritten-map.html

At the senior level of most large institutions, there is a compact. It is never negotiated nor acknowledged as such; it is simply the air that the senior group breathes.

The compact is this: I will not challenge your judgment in a way that costs you, and you will not challenge mine. I will not raise the uncomfortable question about your initiative at the committee meeting, and you will not raise the uncomfortable question about mine. I will perform my confidence in your leadership, and you will perform your confidence in mine. We will, together, maintain the version of reality in which everyone at this table deserves to be here and everything that has been decided was the right decision.

This compact develops through a selection process; that is, the people who made it to the senior level are the ones who learned, on the way up, that challenging your peers and superiors in ways that cost them something is not how advancement works. The ones who challenged too directly found the path upward closed to them. The ones who learned to disagree quietly and manage their challenges through the right relationships in the right settings while still getting things done? Those are the ones who arrived.

‘I’m Not Going to Have Blood on My Hands’ - Why Nicole Noren, a decorated ESPN producer, quit in protest.

https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/nicole-noren-espn-producer-quit-protest-sports-betting-gambling-addiction-draftkings-im-not-going-to-have-blood-on-my-hands.php

What ultimately persuaded you to leave?

For so many years, there was a really strict line in the sand when it came to sports betting. Then the tide slowly began turning internally. It was very troubling for me to see the normalization of betting and ESPN’s complete acceptance of that, and finally, they just decided to go all in. It worried me. I knew what gambling addiction could do to families.

My grandfather, my father, and one of my brothers were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction. I grew up in Ventura, California, and multiple times, we suddenly had to move because of extreme financial ups and downs. I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to. We were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren’t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track. 

My brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas. It’s a stark reality, but it illustrates the tragic arc of being brought there as kids so our dad could gamble at sportsbooks, to then surviving on the streets there as a homeless person and dying at thirty-six.

@ayoships on instagram decompiled a mobile game to see how it rigs things to get more ad views

https://www.reddit.com/r/decomps/comments/1x5cjqr/someone_decompiled_blockblast_and_turns_out_they/

The Pagan Nationalism of Marco Rubio’s Athens Speech

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-pagan-nationalism-of-marco-rubios-athens-speech-dc530f58?st=TS7xCd

Untethered from law and justice, overweening power becomes dangerous not only to those on its receiving end, but also to those who wield it. The Greeks understood that when daring and pride go too far, they mutate into reckless and self-destructive hubris.

Egged on by demagogues, Thucydides narrates, Athens embarked on a war of choice—the Sicilian expedition, the disastrous failure of which contributed to Athens’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Hubris leads people and nations to overestimate what their power can accomplish and to underestimate the effectiveness of their opponents’ response. This lesson isn’t obsolete.

the 400 ton lynchpin of American electric power

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/17/magazine/transformers-power-electric-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7FA.Fjad.cHKm1xl5jKxn&smid=url-share

To understand how this laborious process unfolds, the photographer Christopher Payne visited Delta Star, a transformer manufacturer based in Lynchburg, Va.

The contagion of fear

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/the-contagion-of-fear/

What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it".) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus.