Bostonian

...

The best writers don’t only keep you engaged with a gripping tale. They will, under the guise of that compelling narrative, teach you more about human motivation that lies at the base of everything in politics, business and life itself.

Fiction engages the emotions as well as the intellect in a way very little nonfiction can. The ease with which stories become embedded in the memory also gives a novelist the edge. We are much more likely to remember a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end than a list of valuable instructions. While I can barely remember a page from my undergraduate textbooks, I can still recount stories I learned as a child.

The good novel exploits the virtues of storytelling to capture a truth. I doubt there is as good a nonfiction book that conveys the reality of the life, economics and politics of New York in the 1980s as well as Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You can read as many guides to living your best life as you wish, but I defy you to find a better account of the travails of love, happiness, faith and morals as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” Histories of the Cold War are fine, but nothing portrays the moral ambiguities and complexities of geopolitics as effectively as John le Carré’s novels of the age. (Though not his later ones, where the espionage-era paranoia that had entered his soul descended into generic anti-Western, anticapitalist tropes as tiresome as any critical theory textbook.) Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” is as good a portrait of 20th-century American capitalism as any economics treatise. If you think you’ve only just discovered technology’s corrosive effect on the human spirit, read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” from 1932.

...

'Between an abandoned market and a rusty, decades-old electrical substation in a rundown part of Liverpool sit two buildings with a shiny coat of white paint behind a high-security fence. This ordinary-looking site is considered “critical national infrastructure” because of what’s inside: two 95-ton cylinders with rotors turning 1,500 times per minute. It’s called a synchronous compensator, and it’s northwest England’s best hope of avoiding blackouts.

The UK’s grid operator pays a Norwegian power company to keep the rotors running at a fixed speed. And the service it provides is so valuable to the grid that the company, Statkraft, has nabbed orders to build four more of these around the country.

“If Spain had enough of these machines, the countrywide blackout could have been avoided,” says Guy Nicholson, head of zero-carbon grid solutions at Statkraft, while giving a tour of the facility. He’s referring to the April afternoon when Spain’s electrical network came to a screeching halt and the whole Iberian Peninsula went dark for nearly a full day — the worst outage in Europe’s modern history.

Solar farm outages had destabilized Spain’s grid, and there weren’t enough gas plants online to provide stability. Synchronous compensators could have kept clean power flowing at the right frequency and voltage, avoiding the blackout. But continental Spain doesn't have any.'

...

It was January 2007, and Bevacqua oversaw the consumer-price index at Argentina’s national statistics agency, Indec. Rising inflation threatened the electoral hopes of leftist President Néstor Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was running to succeed him. Bevacqua was unwilling to fudge the numbers, so Kirchner replaced her with a loyalist who did it.

Echoes of the Argentine saga have reverberated in the U.S. since President Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on Aug. 1 after big downward revisions to jobs data. He accused the bureau of rigging the data to make Republicans look bad but provided no evidence, and independent economists dismissed the allegation.

“This is the sort of thing only the worst populists do in the worst emerging economies,” economist Phil Suttle said of McEntarfer’s dismissal in a note to clients.

Although Argentina is an emerging economy, its statistics agency was regarded as professional and independent, and governed by a solid legal framework. That makes its experience a useful lesson in what awaits the U.S. if new leadership politicizes economic data.

Following Bevacqua’s removal, Argentina’s officially reported inflation rate fell to 8.5% in 2007 from 9.8% in 2006. Fernández de Kirchner easily won the election, and the government initially saved billions of dollars in interest on inflation-linked bonds which could be spent on social programs and subsidies.

In reality, inflation had accelerated to around 25%, private economists estimated. The government faced lawsuits from unions and pensioners whose social-security checks were indexed to inflation. Some of the government’s savings on inflation-linked bonds were offset by higher payments on debt tied to gross domestic product, which came in artificially high.

“It started to become a huge mess,” said Alberto Cavallo, an Argentine economist teaching at Harvard University who created a website that tracked inflation based on publicly available prices to fill the void left by Indec. Users bombarded him with all sorts of questions over email, like how much to adjust settlement payments to an ex after a divorce. “The examples add up, and you end up realizing how important some of these statistics are,” he said.'

...

https://archive.is/E3kxj

'This summer the knowledge settled in about where we are with artificial intelligence. Almost everyone is rattled by the speed of its development. The story is no longer “AI in coming decades will take a lot of jobs” or “AI will take jobs sooner than we think.” It is “AI is here and a quiet havoc has begun.”

Jobs growth in July was lower than expected, the May and June jobs numbers were revised downward, and news reports on this mentioned various causes—tariffs, general economic uncertainty and, lower down, AI.

But all sorts of feature reporting puts AI higher up. Last week Noam Scheiber in the New York Times reported economists just out of school are suddenly having trouble finding jobs. As recently at the 2023-24 academic year, said a member of the American Economic Association, the employment rate for economists shortly after earning a doctorate was 100%. Not now. Everyone’s scaling back, government is laying off, big firms have slowed hiring. Why? Uncertainty, tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers. Mr. Scheiber quotes labor economist Betsey Stevenson: “The advent of AI is . . . impacting the market for high-skilled labor.”

That’s only economists, not beloved in America, we probably have enough. Here’s another unbeloved group. This week Journal reporter Chip Cutter had a piece titled “AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’ ” If AI can crunch numbers, analyze data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck in two seconds, what will the consulting firm do to survive? Rewire its business. Smaller, leaner teams; let AI build the PowerPoint. McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, said that in the future the company will likely have one AI agent for every human employee. It’s already reduced head count.'

https://archive.is/cWkOT

...

I applied to countless tenure-track positions across the country in 2019 and 2020. One of those applications went to Cornell, for a position in their Neurobiology and Behavior department. Unknown to me, a few months later Cornell initiated a separate search for a faculty member in evolutionary biology—my exact field—but kept it confidential. Internal emails now show this was no accident.

Last month, the America First Policy Institute released internal Cornell emails showing the university conducted an effort to recruit what the search committee referred to as a “diversity hire.” One committee member described the process bluntly: “What we should be doing is inviting one person whom we have identified as being somebody that we would like to join our department and not have that person in competition with others.” That “somebody,” who is black, was selected not because of research excellence, but because of race. I was denied the chance to compete—so were other academics who might have been qualified.

This discriminatory practice, conducted in coordination with Cornell’s Office of the Provost—led at the time by current Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff—violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race. That’s why, with representation from the America First Policy Institute, I’m taking legal action against Cornell.

What makes this worse is the university’s continued dishonesty. This year, Mr. Kotlikoff wrote: “We do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we admit or evaluate students, hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes not relevant to merit.” The leaked documents show otherwise.

...

"Seventy years ago, at the dawn of the nuclear age, atomic energy was viewed as the next great hope of modern civilization. Lewis Strauss, then the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, infamously said it could be the key to making energy “too cheap to meter” and a catalyst for an age of enduring peace. Today, a similar optimism animates the pursuit of nuclear energy. This time, however, the framing is that the peaceful atom is too important to ignore because of its potential to free us of fossil fuels.

In “Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World,” Tim Gregory sees nuclear energy as the “only hope” for “mitigating” climate change because it eliminates “emissions released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels.” Similarly, in “Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy,” Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow believes “nuclear advocacy and climate alarm … go hand in hand.” These books join dozens of other pro-nuke books published in the past few years."

'Late one night in June 2021, a tanker-truck driver on Phoenix’s Red Mountain Freeway barreled through a line of stopped cars at more than 60 miles an hour, leaving mangled metal and broken bodies in his wake. Four people were killed, 11 injured. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.

Fatigue-induced roadway disasters aren’t uncommon. In the same year, a Greyhound bus driver on an overnight run crashed outside an Illinois truck stop, killing three of his passengers. A 2016 estimate by the National Academy of Sciences found as many as 1 in 5 fatal collisions involving a large truck or bus could be fatigue-related. The sum effect is grim. In 2019-21, more than 200 such fatal collisions took place across America.

Artificial-intelligence tools are emerging that can make such disasters less likely. Samsara, a firm based in San Francisco, is one of several vendors now offering AI-enabled cameras that go inside truck cabs to track driver eyelid behavior, head position, and other signs of alertness. The cameras issue warnings if risk factors show. These systems are improving rapidly. San Diego-based Lytx has upgraded its in-cab camera monitoring platform with real-time fatigue risk scoring that integrates in-cab observations with contextual roadway data collected from billions of driving miles.

Despite the promise of safer roadways, the Teamsters are against these innovations. In 2023 the union negotiated contractual bans on driver-facing cameras—the baseline tech necessary for catching signs of fatigue—with major freight companies like United Parcel Service. “Teamsters won’t move a single package after July 31 if UPS insists on driver-facing cameras in the new contract,” the union declared. Their position rests on the tangential argument that such technology is undue workplace surveillance.'

'California lawmakers on Monday night rolled back one of the most stringent environmental laws in the country, after Gov. Gavin Newsom muscled through the effort in a dramatic move to combat the state’s affordability crisis.

The Democratic governor—widely viewed as a 2028 presidential contender—made passage of two bills addressing an acute housing shortage a condition of his signing the 2025-2026 budget. A cornerstone of the legislation reigns in the California Environmental Quality Act, which for more than a half-century has been used by opponents to block almost any kind of development project.

The abuses of the law have spread so widely that opponents used it to block some bicycle-lane expansions when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor, he said during a signing ceremony at the Sacramento capital. Democratic leaders of the Assembly and Senate, who had steered the bills to bipartisan passage earlier Monday, flanked him.

“We have seen this abuse over and over and over again,” the governor said. “We have fallen prey to a strategy of delay. As a result of that, we have too much demand chasing too little supply. This is not complicated, it is Econ 101.”

Some environmentalists and other defenders of the longstanding law were furious, and warned that developers will now go unchecked. “Who needs Trump when we have a wolf in sheep clothing negotiating backroom deals while he and his oligarch donors score big,” one critic wrote on X.'

President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites on Saturday helped rid the world of a grave nuclear threat and was a large step toward restoring U.S. deterrence. It also creates an opportunity for a more peaceful Middle East, if the nations of the region will seize it.

“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Mr. Trump said Saturday night. He made clear Iran brought this on itself. “For 40 years, Iran has been saying ‘death to America,’ ‘death to Israel.’ They’ve been killing our people,” he said, citing 1,000 Americans killed by Iran-supplied roadside bombs and other means. A nuclear Iran was a perilous threat to Israel, the nearby Arab states, and America.

Mr. Trump gave Iran every chance to resolve this peacefully. The regime flouted his 60-day deadline to make a deal. Then Israel attacked, destroying much of the nuclear program and achieving air supremacy, and still the President gave Iran another chance to come to terms. The regime wouldn’t even abandon domestic uranium enrichment. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted a bomb more than peace.

Military conflict is often unpredictable and the potential for Iranian retaliation can’t be dismissed, no matter how self-destructive it would be. Iran and its Iraqi proxies have threatened U.S. regional bases with missile fire, but Mr. Trump warned that “future attacks will be far greater” if Iran goes down that road. The U.S. has evacuated some personnel and brought military assets into the region. If the regime values self-preservation, it will give up its nuclear ambitions and stand down.

Much of the press has fixated on the idea that Mr. Trump has now joined or even started a conflict. But Iran has been waging regional and terrorist war for decades. It’s as likely that he has helped end it. Leaving Iran with a hardened nuclear enrichment facility after an Israeli military campaign would have been a recipe for maximum danger, all but asking Iran to sprint to a bomb.

At the same time, the Israeli campaign yielded a unrivaled strategic opportunity. Suddenly, Iran’s airspace was uncontested. Its substantial ballistic-missile program was degraded. Several of its proxies had been bludgeoned into silence. Its nuclear program had been reduced to a few key sites, one of which only U.S. weapons could be trusted to penetrate.

The opportunity to act and the danger of standing pat may have proved decisive. We would say that they left Mr. Trump little choice, except U.S. Presidents always have a choice, and have been known to kick the can down the road. To his credit, Mr. Trump didn’t, hitting the Fordow enrichment site as well as Natanz and Isfahan. This shows the President wanted to leave no doubt about Iran’s nuclear program and take it all down.

Good for him for meeting the moment, despite the doubts from part of his political base. The isolationists were wrong at every step leading up to Saturday, and now they are again predicting another Iraq, if not a road to World War III. Mr. Trump had to act to stop the threat in front of him to protect America, which is his first obligation as President.

“History will record that President Trump acted to deny the world’s most dangerous regime the world’s most dangerous weapons,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night. Mr. Trump thanked him and said “we worked as a team.” The Israelis, who proved their strategic value as an ally, would like to complete the mission by destroying what remains of Iran’s missile infrastructure. They deserve a green light, especially as those missiles are threatening U.S. bases.

The chatter about TACO—“Trump always chickens out”—will now quiet down, but the more significant reassessment has to do with U.S. foreign policy. The Obamaites of the left, and lately of the right, counseled that the world had to bow to Iranian intimidation. The best we could hope for was a flimsy deal that bribed Iran with billions and left open its path to a bomb. They were wrong.

Subtitle: 'The leading expert on its nuclear program, David Albright, sizes up the progress of Israel’s military campaign.'

'As Israel’s mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity continues, a grave and obvious question confronts us: How did the West, the U.S. in particular, allow Tehran’s nuclear threat to grow unchecked for so long?

David Albright, an American physicist and nuclear-weapons tracker, is among the world’s foremost experts on Iran’s nuclear program. He’s president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution that focuses on the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue nations and terrorists. On June 12, the day before the first Israeli attack, Iran could “make enough weapon-grade uranium for 11 nuclear weapons within a month,” Mr. Albright says. Pre-attack Iran was on track to have enough highly enriched uranium for 22 weapons in five months.

Israel’s continued pounding of Iranian sites has degraded Iran’s capabilities. But the damage’s extent will take many days to establish, and the threat from Iran isn’t remotely contained. Mr. Albright’s “worst-case assessment” is that Iran could “still break out and produce enough weapon-grade uranium at Fordow”—the clandestine enrichment facility deep under a mountain south of Tehran—“for a nuclear weapon in several days. I do not know how much of the current stock of 60% uranium has been destroyed by Israel. If most of it is still in Iranian hands, then Fordow could make enough weapon-grade uranium for nine nuclear weapons within a month, assuming it continues to operate.”

Iran could still have enough for 15 weapons in five months. But there’s also some reassurance: Iran’s “overall breakout capability,” he says, “has been degraded because of the loss of Natanz,” its largest enrichment facility, which Israel struck on June 13.'

Subtitle: 'Researchers and companies are tapping into new sources of data to predict conditions in an area as small as a backyard or a city block.'

By Thomas E. Weber

Wall Street Journal

June 19, 2025

'Researchers and companies working on hyperlocal forecasts hope to tap a number of sources beyond traditional satellite and radar data. One is the Internet of Things—the billions of internet-connected devices that gather data, from barometric pressure sensors built into cellphones to webcam video feeds. Across the country, states have been building networks of weather stations called mesonets that can supplement the National Weather Service monitors typically found at airports. LIDAR technology, which can measure wind speed by bouncing lasers off particles in the air, is able to gather information with a small box on the ground instead of a weather tower.

Nearly every kind of weather forecasting relies on a mix of public and private data sources, but in the hyperlocal realm private companies are growing more prominent, in part because business customers have the most to gain from tailored forecasts. Microsoft, for instance, deploys its machine-learning technologies to refine weather predictions, which it then incorporates into broader cloud-computing products it markets to agriculture companies. Tomorrow.io provides hyperlocal forecasts to major airlines to help guide airport operations.'

'Corporate America is convinced: Fewer employees means faster growth. U.S. public companies have reduced their white-collar workforces by a collective 3.5% over the past three years, according to employment data-provider Live Data Technologies. Over the past decade, one in five companies in the S&P 500 have shrunk.

The cuts go beyond typical cost-trimming and speak to a broader shift in philosophy. Adding talent, once a sign of surging sales and confidence in the future, now means leaders must be doing something wrong.

New technologies like generative artificial intelligence are allowing companies to do more with less. But there’s more to this movement. From Amazon in Seattle to Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C., and at companies big and small everywhere in between, there’s a growing belief that having too many employees is itself an impediment. The message from many bosses: Anyone still on the payroll could be working harder. In a note to employees on Tuesday, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy wrote that the “once-in-a-lifetime” rise of AI will eliminate the need for certain jobs in the next few years. And earlier this year, he told his staff that not every new project requires 50 people to do it. The best leaders, he added in his annual letter to shareholders, “get the most done with the least number of resources required to do the job.”'

'If it feels like there aren’t enough hours to get everything done during the workday, you’re part of a growing club: More of us are working a second shift in the evening.

Workers slid into the habit of working at all hours during the pandemic, when many worked from home and could more freely change up their regular 9-to-5 schedules. Though fewer people are fully remote now, many are still toiling into the night—and say an expanding load of meetings, emails and actual work are a big reason.

The number of meetings people logged after 8 p.m. over the 12 months through February, in fact, were up 16% from the year before, according to new data from Microsoft on the activity of millions of workers who use the company’s business applications. By 10 p.m., nearly a third of them were back in their inboxes after pausing for dinner, the gym or home duties.'

Subtitle: "Nebraska sues Temu for siphoning sensitive data from Americans."

"Two decades ago, the US military kicked off the race to build self-driving cars by sending a fleet of fledgling robot vehicles across the Mojave Desert in its seminal Darpa challenge. By 2015, autonomous vehicle technology was being widely pursued, and the industry was abuzz with predictions that driverless cars would soon be everywhere.

It didn’t happen. Some legacy carmakers and startups abandoned their efforts, citing excessive costs and complexity. Regulators stepped up scrutiny of the emerging technology after crashes involving cars equipped with partial-automation systems.

The companies still making progress are proceeding with caution, aware of the heavy reputational damage when someone is injured or killed by a self-driving car. Waymo, a venture of Google parent Alphabet Inc., introduced its driverless taxi service to a fourth major US city in March through a partnership with Uber Technologies Inc. Tesla Inc. is planning a long-delayed robotaxi service confined to Austin, Texas, in June. It aims to start with roughly 10 or 20 Model Y cars operating under remote supervision — a far cry from what Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk pledged in 2019, when he said the carmaker was a year away from putting 1 million robotaxis on the road."

The article is about Jason Mudrick, whose company is Vertical Aerospace, symbol EVTL.

"Prospective parents using IVF will soon be able to rank embryos using genetic and other information in the hopes of extending the longevity of their offspring, according to the 25-year-old entrepreneur behind Nucleus Genomics, a DNA testing and analysis company.

“Lifespan has dramatically increased in the last 150 years,” said Kian Sadeghi, the company’s founder and chief executive. “DNA testing to predict and reduce chronic disease can make it happen again.”

Nucleus plans to charge $5,999 for an analysis of up to 900 conditions, including diseases that occur later in life and are major causes of death in older people such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and cancers. The company will analyze up to 20 embryos.

The embryos are given probabilities for the likelihood they will get these chronic conditions. It is up to the parents to decide the qualities most important to them when choosing which embryos to use. They can book sessions with genetic counselors if they want to discuss the results."

https://archive.is/p08Lf

"Morgan Stanley, he said, was able to train the tool on its own code base, including languages that are no longer, or never were, in widespread use. Now the company’s roughly 15,000 developers, based around the world, can use it for a range of tasks including translating legacy code into plain English specs, isolating sections of existing code for regulatory enquiries and other asks, and even fully translating smaller sections of legacy code into modern code.

But when it comes to full translation, the technology still has some room to mature, he said. It can technically rewrite code from an old language like Perl in a new one like Python, but it wouldn’t necessarily know how to write it as efficient code that takes advantage of all Python’s capabilities, he said. And that’s one big reason humans are staying in the loop, he said.

Where the tool really shines is in translating legacy code into English specs, basically a map of what the code does, according to Pizzi. It’s something an ever dwindling pool of developers, trained on super-old or specific coding languages, knows how to do. With those specs, any developer can then write the old code as new code in a modern programming language, he said."

subtitle: Madrid knew solar and wind power were unreliable but pressed ahead anyway.

By Bjorn Lomborg