The Long Read

This week: an interview with Replit's CEO on what "vibe coding" is actually doing to the software business, a deep profile of the woman running Russia's largest online retailer through a war that's eating her warehouses, and a philosophical case for letting children take more risks than current parenting culture allows.

Platformer · 28 minutes

Vibe coding was never about coding. It's about collapsing the distance between having an idea and having a product.

A profile of Tatyana Kim, founder of Russia's largest online retailer Wildberries, which has lost an estimated third of its warehouse space to Ukrainian attacks

A profile built on contradiction: Tatyana Kim built Wildberries into a retail empire that made her one of Russia's richest women, and now watches it absorb literal war damage — a third of her warehouse capacity gone to drone and missile strikes — while continuing to operate, hire, and expand inside a wartime economy that has learned to normalize this kind of loss. The Times traces Kim's rise from a maternity-leave side hustle to a company that functions as essential civilian infrastructure, then follows the harder story: a bitter, public feud with her estranged husband over control of the company, playing out against sanctions, capital flight, and the strangeness of running a Western-style e-commerce giant in a country increasingly cut off from the West. It's a rare, granular look at what business continuity actually looks like inside a sanctioned wartime economy, told through one specific, stubborn person rather than through macro statistics.

The New York Times · 22 minutes

Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety

Tyler Cowen's engagement with Peter Gray's new book takes the form of a genuine wrestling match with an argument that runs against most of contemporary parenting culture: that children need unsupervised risk, boredom, and independent play far more than they need enrichment, supervision, or safety engineering. Gray's case, as Cowen lays it out, is a philosophy about what childhood is for, built on research into play, self-directed learning, and the psychological costs of a generation raised inside constant adult oversight — not nostalgia about screens. Cowen pushes back in places, testing where Gray's prescriptions hold up against economic and cultural realities parents actually face, which keeps the piece from being a simple endorsement. It's a rare long-form treatment of a debate usually conducted in tweet-length panic, and worth the time for anyone who wants the actual argument rather than the headline version of "kids need more free play."

Marginal Revolution · 18 minutes