Edition #125: Longform Profiles
This edition features the man who blew up a nuclear power station, Japan's oldest whisky maker, the sad wives of AI, and more.
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☢️ The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared
Stephen Robert Morse | The Guardian
Eleven years after the incident, the same man, who had learned what physics does to a body, was working as a contract engineer at the Koeberg nuclear power station, 19 miles north of Cape Town. He was furious with the regime that had conscripted him, sent him to fight a war in Angola he didn’t believe in, and made his country a pariah. In an act of folly or courage, in December 1982 he walked four bombs into South Africa’s only nuclear power station, weeks before it was due to come online. On 17 December, he pulled the pins, made it out of the control room, had a farewell drink with his colleagues, and then disappeared.
🥃 The Founding Story Behind Japan’s Oldest Whisky Maker
Rachel King | Town & Country
The most famous ad for the sweet drink was a 1922 image featuring actress Emiko Matsushima in what was the first nude poster printed in Japan. The sepia-toned photo depicted Matsushima topless while holding a bright red glass of wine. The public reaction was immediate and divided given Japan was still very conservative at the time. But the ad won first place at a global poster contest in Germany despite the controversy. Akadama is still produced today, though it has been sold as Akadama Sweet Wine since 1973, when Portugal successfully pushed to restrict the use of the word “port” to fortified wines produced in Portugal.
Alessandra Ram | WIRED
There’s a strange and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it’s doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it’s potentially destroying family dynamics. I’m sure this applies to all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members. The technology is coming, has come, for us all. But for the purposes of this story, I mostly spoke to white-collar heteros in the Bay Area, because that’s where a certain psychological crisis seems most acute. Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI—or feels he must work in AI—and she wants him to do literally anything else.
Sophie McBain | The Guardian
The Doomsday Clock was established in 1947 in response to the threat of nuclear war, by a group of Manhattan Project nuclear scientists who wanted to warn the public and politicians of the dangers, the destruction they had helped unleash on humankind. The time is usually set annually – though the setters say if events warrant it, they can change it more frequently. They are members of the Bulletin’s science and security board, a group of leading scientists, academics and diplomats who aim, each year, to reach a consensus on where to set the clock’s hands.
🎬 24 Hours Inside the Cult of A24
Julian Sancton | The Hollywood Reporter
The company now finds itself at a crossroads, in some ways a victim of its own success. Renowned as much for its taste as for its marketing acumen, the 13-year-old studio has developed a cult following not just for its films and shows but for the A24 brand itself. It is financed largely by such private equity firms as Thrive Capital and Guggenheim Partners and was valued two years ago at $3.5 billion, more than 10 times the valuation of its closest indie rival, Neon. It’s hard to justify that amount with the kind of mid-budget art films the studio built its reputation on, which may explain why both its budgets and box office grosses have swelled in recent years as it has pursued a wider audience. But now it’s facing the thermodynamics of trends: The cooler something is, the more popular it gets, and the more popular it gets, the less cool it seems.
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🏕️ Night Soil
Kristin Dombek | Harper’s Magazine
Settled in together now, it is our turn to listen for the next motor, the next tires crunching the gravel road. Will they park too close? Will they be poor and actually living, will they be drunk and violent, will they be loud, will they be dilettantes vacationing with all the gear they’ve found online and obsessed over and gentrify the campground, will they be nervous about us because we’re not vacationing but living? Will they be kind? In this way, even out there in so-called nature, we create the United States of America again and again.
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