Edition #16: Longform Profiles
This edition features a look into the origins of modern AI by 8 Google employees, J.B. Smoove's transition from fan to star, a physics whiz's lucrative gamble on natural disasters, and more.
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🤖 8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Steven Levy // Wired
A startup called OpenAI was much faster to pounce. Soon after the paper was published, OpenAI’s chief researcher, Ilya Sutskever—who had known the transformer team during his time at Google—suggested that one of its scientists, Alex Radford, work on the idea. The results were the first GPT products. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told me last year, “When the transformer paper came out, I don’t think anyone at Google realized what it meant.”
Jason Diamond // Vulture
Larry, Jeff, Susie, Bob Einstein, goddamn Richard Lewis, fucking Cheryl Hines — it’s just a melting pot of amazing people. These people are real friends, and they have locked themselves into a culture that keeps moving. You know how hard it is to remain relevant with characters who are also aging?
🏠 How 33-Year-Olds, the Peak Millennials, Are Shaping the U.S. Economy (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
By Jeanna Smialek // The New York Times
As the biggest part of the biggest generation, this hyper-specific age group — call us what you will, but I like “peak millennials” — has moved through the economy like a person squeezing into a too-small sweater. At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake. My cohort has an outsized amount of economic power, but that has sometimes made life harder for us.
🍄 The Prophet Of Shroom (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Will Yakowicz // Forbes
If the Church of Ambrosia sounds like a joke, Hodges admits that it did start out that way. In 2010, like every summer, he went to Burning Man, the week-long arts festival held in the Nevada desert that’s often fueled by psilocybin, LSD, MDMA (or ecstasy) and electronic dance music. Hodges wore an old Halloween costume he dubbed the “Church of More Pot” and walked around in a white shirt holding a black book in his arms.
🌪️ How a Physics Whiz Made a Fortune Betting on Nature’s Catastrophes (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Gautam Naik // Bloomberg
Seo, who has a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University, founded Fermat in 2001 with his brother Nelson, an economics graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a room above Seo’s garage, the two built a science-based model to weigh the probability of a natural disaster against the returns of a cat bond. They named the fund after Pierre de Fermat, a French mathematician who helped lay the foundation for probability theory.
🎬 The Last Angry Man (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Michael Riedel // Air Mail
Reed, who has written for The New York Times, the New York Daily News, and, since 1987, The New York Observer, is the last of the celebrity critics, those taste-makers who wielded power over the movie business from the 1960s through the 1990s. A knife in the throat could destroy a career. A pat on the head could lead to an Oscar nomination. Their quotes were splashed on full-page ads in newspapers, the sides of city buses, and movie-theater marquees.
🚀 The Billion-Dollar Unraveling Of The 'King' Of Silicon Valley (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Sarah Emerson, Iain Martin // Forbes
When Breslow’s bills started coming due, he struggled to manage them. In November 2022, with just three months until the $30 million repayment deadline, Breslow asked his previous board for an extension, Activant claimed in its lawsuit. That same month, the company terminated 29% of its workforce in a second round of layoffs for the year, citing a need to “secure our financial position, extend our runway, and reach profitability with the money we have already raised.”
🎶 The Oral History of Pitchfork
Dan Kois, Nitish Pahwa, Luke Winkie // Slate
Pitchfork was made by people who had grown up idolizing legacy magazines. They had the impulse to dethrone them, while also wanting to emulate them.
📺 Carol Burnett on Palm Royale, The Carol Burnett Show, and Comedy
Julianne Smolinski // Harper's BAZAAR
It would be near impossible not to draw a line between The Carol Burnett Show and the muggy, often bouffanted characters Wiig played during her seven seasons on Saturday Night Live. There’s an overt zaniness that feels like vintage Burnett—the repeated physical tics, the funny walks.
📚 Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has had problems with addiction, including myself’
Alex Clark // The Guardian
“We’re a whole group of people who never saw themselves reflected in these ways that allowed a kind of dreaming,” he says. “If you never see a Native person as an actor, or as a visible writer with success, it’s harder to dream that it’s something you could do. So I think there’s a kind of momentum building, and I truly hope it continues. Because if it gets bigger, and starts to get a sustainable kind of momentum and visibility point, it’ll just mean generations of growth.”
🏛️ The Mystery Social Media Account Schooling Congress on How to Do Its Job
Gabe Fleisher // Politico
Surdy first began following American politics during the 2020 election, which he said many of his friends and peers in the UK paid close attention to as well. A few months later, he watched the 2021 House speaker’s election, and became fascinated with the unusual-sounding procedures governing the session. “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he said.
❤️ Shakira: ‘I put my career on hold for Gerard Piqué’ (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Ed Potton // The Times
Music and football both involve bracing amounts of money and media scrutiny, but there are differences, she says. “Empathy is key in an artist’s work. An athlete is in a constant state of war and has to avoid empathy at all costs.” Ouch. “That’s why it’s probably a really bad idea for an artist to hook up with an athlete.” Maybe she needs to find herself an artist. “I don’t know what I need…”
Frederick Kaufman // Harper's Magazine
On January 11, a federal grand jury indicted him on six counts—two felonies and four misdemeanors—and Jacob became one of the first insurrectionists to be arrested and charged. He faced twenty years of imprisonment, plus a fine of up to $250,000. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram removed his accounts.
👔 ESPN Boss Jimmy Pitaro’s Chaotic Race to Remake the Sports Giant (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Isabella Simonetti, Robbie Whelan // The Wall Street Journal
Pitaro is considered one of the contenders to succeed Disney CEO Bob Iger in 2026, when Iger’s contract expires and he has said he expects to step down. How Pitaro handles the next two years and the launch of the new streaming joint venture, expected in the fall, will go a long way in determining his chances.
Andrew Marantz // The New Yorker
Yudkowsky argues that a superintelligent machine could come to see us as a threat, and decide to kill us (by commandeering existing autonomous weapons systems, say, or by building its own). Or our demise could happen “in passing”: you ask a supercomputer to improve its own processing speed, and it concludes that the best way to do this is to turn all nearby atoms into silicon, including those atoms that are currently people.
🎭 Gina Carano on Getting Sacked From Star Wars and Her Grudge Match With Disney
Seth Abramovitch // The Hollywood Reporter
“I just laid down and cried and cried,” Carano recalls. “I curled into a fetal position. It’s not that I didn’t think that something like that could happen. It was that I couldn’t imagine they would put out this horrendous statement about me after working with me — the most powerful entertainment company in the world saying that about me.” Carano sold her place in Hermosa Beach and bought an RV.
🎩 The Billionaire And The Con Artist (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Will Yakowicz // Forbes
Both men grew up poor in the Boston area. Adelson was born in Dorchester to immigrant parents, his father from Lithuania and his mother from Wales. The Adelsons lived in a one-bedroom apartment where young Sheldon slept on the floor and his father supported them by driving a cab. But entrepreneurship gave Adelson a way out of poverty.
🌟 How Quinta Brunson Hacked the Sitcom
Molly Fischer // The New Yorker
Donald Glover, a friend of Brunson’s and the creator of the experimental FX comedy “Atlanta,” said that “Abbott” made him jealous. “I always get in my way about making a simple, good sandwich,” he told me. “I complicate things.” Brunson’s show was a reminder of the satisfactions of saying, as Glover put it, “I’m just going to make a good-ass hamburger.”
⚖️ Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Adam Liptak // The New York Times
“When you’re a professor, you’re mostly involved in what people decided already in the past,” he said. “When you’re a judge, you’re also interested in that, but what you’re deciding is going to affect present and future. And that’s hard. Because you don’t really know how it will work out. You have to do your best there. I like that kind of job.”
🧠 A Lawyer Abandoned Family and Career to Follow the Voices in His Head (🔒 Reply to this email if you can’t access the paywall link)
Julie Wernau // The Wall Street Journal
In 2022, working from home in the pandemic, he stopped therapy and quit his medicines. The voices returned. Within a year, he was homeless, drifting in and out of reason. He ranted gibberish one moment and spoke with a lawyer’s clarity the next. On library computers, he posted online messages, by turns indecipherable, ominous and poetic.