Adjacent Weekend

This week: a decades-long physics hunt that may have finally paid off, a Silicon Valley fruit farmer retiring after a lifetime coaxing peaches out of land tech giants covet, the sports plutocracy myth Derek Thompson wants to retire, and a New Yorker descent into one of the world's deepest mines. Plus: taxes as the price of democracy, a mountain-biking identity crisis, and a monument built to needle the world's richest man.

Have physicists finally discovered glueballs? New evidence points to yes.

Physicists have been chasing glueballs — particles made purely of the force that binds quarks together, with no matter in them at all — since the 1970s. This is a patient, well-explained account of what the Beijing Spectrometer III found, and why a particle made of "pure force" is stranger and more satisfying than it sounds.

Ars Technica · 12 min

A Silicon Valley Dirt Farmer Hangs Up His Shears (paywall)

Andy Mariani has spent decades growing exotic, unreasonably delicious stone fruit on land surrounded by the offices of the companies that remade the valley around him. At 80, he's retiring, and this profile uses his orchard as a specific lens on what got paved over and what didn't.

NYT · 11 min

The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit

Prompted by the Lakers' sale to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, Thompson takes apart the tidy narrative that pro sports ownership is just another rich-get-richer story, and finds a messier, more interesting set of incentives underneath. The argument piece backs its claims with numbers rather than vibes.

Derek Thompson · 10 min

A Mysterious Discovery Deep Underground

A biogeochemist's descent into one of the world's deepest mines in search of life that shouldn't exist — this is science writing as adventure story, patient enough to let the strangeness of the find build slowly.

The New Yorker · 14 min

“A few hundred years ago, doctors didn't wash their hands between the morgue and the delivery room — because no one had connected the two acts yet.” — Seth's Blog

Vanessa Williamson on Taxes and Democracy

Krugman talks with historian Vanessa Williamson about her short history of American taxation, and the conversation turns out to be less about rates and brackets than about what a tax system says a society believes it owes itself. A good corrective to how flat and technical tax debates usually feel.

Paul Krugman · 16 min

The Dust-Up: Has Mountain Biking Lost its Roots?

A candid, slightly cranky roundtable on what happened to a sport that started as a scrappy, DIY counterculture and became — like most things — an industry with a marketing department. Worth reading even if you've never touched a mountain bike, because the arc is familiar from a dozen other subcultures.

The Radavist · 13 min

Help build a monument to that 'sad little bitch' Elon Musk

Cards Against Humanity's latest stunt is exactly as unhinged as it sounds, and exactly the kind of gleeful, well-funded troll that's more entertaining to read about than most actual news of the week. A short, sharp palate cleanser.

The Verge · 6 min

Their Eyes Were Watching God (2 of 3), The Brothers Karamazov (9 of 16) and Lolly Willowes

For anyone doing the slow-read-the-classics thing this year, this week's dispatch tackles Dmitry's chapter in Karamazov — one of the most theatrical stretches of the novel — alongside check-ins on Hurston and Sylvia Townsend Warner. A nice companion for a weekend with an actual book in hand.

Read the Classics · 9 min