The Long Read

This week: a sprawling investigation into Silicon Valley's rationalist subculture and its darker edges, a landscape architect's improbable fire-prevention army, and Krugman's slow-build case for why interest rates are the most consequential and least understood force in the room.

The Disturbing Cult Taking Over Silicon Valley

Taylor Lorenz spends real time inside Manifest, the annual Berkeley gathering of rationalists, AI researchers, and prediction-market obsessives, and comes back with something far more unsettling than a trend piece. The piece is patient — tracing how a subculture built on "just asking questions" has curdled into something with real institutional power, real money, and real casualties among the people who took its logic to its conclusions. It's strongest when it follows the money and the org charts: who funds these gatherings, who graduates from them into AI labs and VC firms, and what gets normalized along the way. Long, but rare in that it's written by someone neither inside the world nor reflexively sneering at it from outside.

User Mag · 30 min

We're in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we've glided well past the edge of the cliff and it's just a question of when we look down.

The Sheep That Stop Wildfires

New Yorker science writing at its best: a landscape architect wakes to smoke and wind in 2017, and years later has helped assemble an argument for grazing sheep as wildfire infrastructure. The piece moves between one woman's personal reckoning with a fire that nearly took her home and a larger story about land management, controlled grazing, and the slow-moving bureaucratic apparatus that decides how California prepares for the next fire season. What earns the full read is the texture: ranchers, fire scientists, and property owners all pulling in different directions toward the same unglamorous solution, and the piece never lets the charm of "sheep as firefighters" substitute for the harder policy questions underneath.

New Yorker · 25 min

Booms, Bombs and Bonds: Interest Rates, Part I

Krugman opens with an old military aphorism — amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics — and spends the rest of the essay arguing that interest rates are the logistics of the entire economy: unglamorous, poorly understood, and decisive. The first installment of what looks like a genuine explainer series, written with the patience of someone who assumes his reader is smart but not steeped in monetary theory. Rather than chasing the week's Fed headlines, he builds from first principles — why rates move, what bonds are actually pricing in, why a market reaction isn't the same as a market being right — toward a framework applicable to every rate story you'll read for the rest of the year. It rewards a slow read precisely because it refuses to shortcut to a hot take.

Paul Krugman, Substack · 20 min