The Understory

Today, I’m in my third week of Sabbatical! I’ve been doing a lot of reading and I’m feeling the urge to revive an old ritual of sharing what I’m finding interesting lately.

The Benefits of Bubbles by Ben Thompson

Not all bubbles destroy wealth and value. Some can be understood as important catalysts for techno-scientific progress. Most novel technology doesn’t just appear ex nihilo, entering the world fully formed and all at once. Rather, it builds on previous false starts, failures, iterations, and historical path dependencies. Bubbles create opportunities to deploy the capital necessary to fund and speed up such large-scale experimentation — which includes lots of trial and error done in parallel — thereby accelerating the rate of potentially disruptive technologies and breakthroughs.

The piece is quite good and turned me on to Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation which I started reading yesterday.

Tripping Forever: The New Science of Psychedelics & Longevity by Tripsitter

The paper revealed two remarkable findings.

First, cells treated with psilocin showed delayed aging, with telomere length preserved compared to untreated cells. Other molecular markers of longevity shifted in the same direction — higher SIRT1, lower GADD45a, and reduced oxidative stress — all consistent with slower cellular senescence.

Second, mice receiving monthly psilocin doses lived significantly longer — with survival rates climbing to about 80%, compared to roughly 50% in the control group.

In other words, the cells — and the mice — aged slower.

Countless claims have been made about the benefits and side effects of psychedelics. This one is the first I know of related to longevity.

How to Combine Highlights On-the-Fly with Readwise by Readwise

Simply highlight the first string of text you want to combine and add the note .c1 (“c” for “concatenate”). Then, highlight the second string of text and add the note .c2. Upon importing into Readwise, these two highlights will be combined into a single annotation.

I use Readwise Reader for nearly all of my reading. I recently learned it’s possible to combine highlights, something I’ve wanted to be able to do for a while.

How to not build the Torment Nexus by Mike Monteiro.

Industries in decline tend to pick up speed, not reverse course, and their death moan comes when they shift from making things to extracting value.

Not a new piece, but it resonates within the context of the social, economic, and political research I’m doing this week.

Washington County Declares Emergency Over Increased ICE Activity at OPB

Oregon’s most diverse county declared a state of emergency this week because of increased immigration enforcement that has cloaked much of the community in fear over the past few weeks. ... The move follows at least 135 reported arrests by immigration enforcement in the county in October, according to the Portland Immigration Rights Coalition. This number accounts for nearly half the 329 arrests made throughout the state in October.

I’m hearing more and more second-hand reports of questionable tactics and arrests happening in my community. Unbreaking is a great resource for staying up-to-date on immigration and other topics like Food Safety. Their latest piece distills a torrent of activity on immigration from the past few weeks:

For months now, we’ve seen the expansion of a violent and unaccountable federal police force under the aegis of immigration enforcement, and this week, the way that enforcement threatens and interacts with data security is our biggest story. We’re tracking how federal agencies are using facial recognition software in the streets and vastly expanding mandatory biometric data collection for immigrants and their US connections — including by taking DNA from both adults and young children.

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