If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
What Are Data Centers Doing? A Mind-Boggling Amount of Math.: The calculations needed to train A.I. are nearly impossible to visualize — but we tried anyway. (Aatish Bhatia Oct. 15, 2026, NY Times)
| An iPhone | 13 million years |
| A PlayStation 5 | 3 million years |
| A high-end gaming PC | 300,000 years |
| An Nvidia H100 chip | 64,000 years |
| 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips | 8 months |
The Kids Who Identify as Animals: A rising subculture of kids says they don’t feel entirely human. Here’s what their parents are learning to do with that. (Kara Baskin, 10/14/26, Boston Magazine)
What is new is where—and how young—the search happens. The furry world these kids move through lives largely online: The International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a group of scholars who study it, finds a heavy overlap with digital media use, and nearly 60 percent of furries say they found the fandom before turning 18. It’s a place where identity is constantly performed, debated, and policed, often by other kids. Yet even for the most online generation in history, some things arrive before the algorithm. The Internet gave Sol the word for it, and others who understood. But the feeling was already there.
The fandom also overlaps heavily with other marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ and nonbinary young people—which has made it a target of moral panic. In 2022, the baseless claim that schools were installing litter boxes for students who identified as cats ricocheted across the Internet and into political speeches, sparking a new battle in the culture wars.
Furries are also routinely conflated with sexual fetish—adult furry content exists online—though that bears little resemblance to the kids sewing tails, painting masks, and trading art at PortCon. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that there’s sort of an adult undertone when really, this is about expression, identity, and creativity,” Werkhoven says. “There’s the conception that furry is strictly like a kink, and that’s not true. It’s: ‘I have a character, and that character is a dog.’”
That fear-and-fascination cycle is where most parents come in. Catherine, a Newton mother of two furry kids (now 27 and 21), found out her older child was a furry only because her younger one let it slip years ago; the older one feared the stigma too much to say so. “These furries are all anonymous. They’re in big fur suits, right? It could be anybody. I don’t know, factually, if this has ever happened, but there is fear that pedophiles will take advantage of younger kids,” she says. Then she chaperoned her younger child to a convention and found it closer to an art fair than a den of iniquity: kids and caregivers, mental health workshops, and costumes of startling craft. “They come up with a whole character. They have very elaborate stories of their character and terminology. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or girl, gay or straight; they become this other person, and they can open up,” she says. “I was impressed.”
Catherine’s reassurance, though, rests on something therian parents don’t have. Her children invented their “fursonas.” Sol didn’t invent the cat. The question in Susanne’s house isn’t whether this is safe—it’s what it means that her daughter isn’t pretending.
The Complex Legacy of the Great Wynonna Judd: Her devastated and victorious new album follows the suicide of her mother Naomi. (Crispin Sartwell, 10/12/26, Splice Today)
“The dirt made me. The dirt made me, like a mother with no shame made me,” she sings, shockingly on “Kentucky Queen.” Who sings like that about their mom, much less about their mom the beloved country star? But Wynonna has been freed to tell the truth as she experienced it, hard as it may be.
A different day
The same ol’ call
Lost your mind in Mobile
Fallin’ off again
It’s too far, I can’t find you
A counterfeit fix, that’s what you run to
I know, Lord, I knowIt’s a strange transaction
That nobody wins, but I buy in
Oh, here we go againAnd I’m desperate for change
From the rain and stormy weather
I would drag you out of Hell if I could
But I don’t have the power
I can’t save you, but I try
I don’t want to, but I still believe
In a hopeful lieI hear this song as being about the struggle when someone you love is in and out of rehab, for drug abuse or mental illness issues. She’s saying (I think) that she believed it, or tried to, or said she did, each time Naomi headed toward a recovery, or got more therapy. But perhaps the song is about her daughter Grace, who’s had similar struggles and is currently in jail. In any case, the song registers how the pain has been exacerbated by hope, which is a terrible truth. But she manages to sing about these matters directly, with no obscurity or evasion, and I hope that expressing it with this sort of intensity will help her.
Eugenics and the Nihilism of Law-and-Order Politics (Terence Keel, September 6, 2026, LA Review of Books)
His conclusion was, however, fatefully turned on its head in 1912 by Arthur H. Estabrook, working out of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Estabrook “reanalyzed” Dugdale’s data and decided that heredity mattered more than Dugdale realized. With Charles Davenport, one of the nation’s leading eugenicists and the director of the Eugenics Record Office, Estabrook published a study of another “degenerate” family, entitled The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics. Unsurprisingly, the two men concluded that there was nothing to be done to correct the genes of a criminal. “The rural communities of ‘degenerates,’” they argued, suffered from “an unusual lack of industry, retardation in school work, and a failure to observe the conventionalities in sex-relationships. There is reason for concluding that the first and second traits are hereditary and are, in a measure, the raison d’être of the foundation of such communities.” They used the term “cacogenics” (derived from an earlier concept developed by British physician and biologist E. E. Fournier d’Albe) for the generational deterioration of a (white) family. The sentiment behind the concept had considerable staying power, even if the term itself fell out of use.
Estabrook and Davenport helped normalize the notion that some families were burdened with an insurmountable defective inheritance. The state, it followed, could do nothing against a “cacogenic” family’s slide into criminal degeneracy and poverty. Combining policing, incarceration, segregation, and sterilization was the best course of action to protect the privileged from the hopeless.
Reducing complex social problems to a hereditary defect—to “bad genes”—had the virtue of sounding scientific while hiding a profound pessimism about American people. Conservative ideologues seized on this “diagnosis” to argue against state and philanthropic investment in the lives of people like the Jukes. Similar arguments about Black people were made during the period of Jim Crow segregation, with advocates of Darwinian evolution arguing against investing in a population destined to become extinct once forced into open competition with whites. In their 2009 book Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore describe how “natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. […] Europeans were the agents of Evolution.” Political pluralism and multiracial democracy effectively stood in the way of evolution. State investment could not possibly make a meaningful difference in the lives of inferior people—a view that has generated a lingering apathy plaguing US policy decisions around medical care, employment, and poverty ever since.
Deirdre McCloskey Wants Old Liberalism Back: ‘Equality of Permission’: In ‘Equality of Permission,’ McCloskey returns to familiar ground: free markets, individual dignity, and the dangers of statism. What makes it distinctive is the force and flair of her argument. (Joakim Book, October 13, 2026, Daily Economy)
My book argues for a substantial restoration of this first, Scottish, Smithian, and individual liberty. Alone. It argues against a state-directed, collectivist, and faux-predictable pursuit of an unattainable utopia, a top-down social engineering advocated widely in the French Enlightenment, which promises, through what it calls its numerous nice-sounding but coerced ‘policies,’ to serve a general will.
The British Radical Who Used the American Revolution to Curb the Crown: Danielle Allen’s valuable history of Charles Lennox shows the two sides weren’t foes but allies for popular sovereignty against tyranny (Andy Craig, 10/12/26, The UnPopulist)
In the spring of 1778, with the war in America going badly, a member of the House of Lords proposed that Britain withdraw its forces and recognize American independence. Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, was a great-grandson of King Charles II, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and about as well-placed in the British establishment as anyone could be. He was also, for 15 years, its most persistent critic.
Richmond is not a name most Americans would recognize. Danielle Allen’s Radical Duke makes a good case that he ought to be. […]
The central argument of the book, and its most valuable contribution, is that the reformers in London and the rebels in America were reacting to the same problem, and that the problem was not taxation as such. It was that Parliament had stopped functioning as an independent check on the Crown.
America Became Rich Because of Liberalism (Peter J. Boettke, October 12, 2026, ProMarket)
The great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, argued in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that what is most overlooked in discussions is the radical transformation of society that resulted. Colonial America was a society of status, of privileges, of station. Patronage and personal favoritism by those with power played a major role in social mobility—to the extent that it existed. This social system would all be transformed by the Revolution. One prominent example of the legal transformation was the abolition state by state of the practice of primogeniture between 1777 to 1798. Not only did this change the laws of inheritance, but transformed the meaning and use of property, encouraged entrepreneurship, credit markets and social and geographic mobility. Legal distinctions based on rank disappeared, and economic opportunities were based in interest, aptitude and talent rather than birth. Certainly not perfectly, it must be acknowledged. But in a far more sweeping nature than anywhere else in the world, ordinary individuals were enabled to “give it a go,” as the historian Deirdre McCloskey likes to stress about the ascendancy of the Bourgeois Era. Almost overnight, Wood argues, Americans became “the most liberal, most democratic, most commercially minds, and most modern people in the world.”
As a result, America became the richest country in history over the next 250 years. It did so without an aristocracy, and without central planning or a comprehensive blueprint by the governmental authorities. The Revolution succeeded because it created the institutional conditions for commercial civilization. It unleashed the creative powers of a free people to a greater degree than had ever been experienced before. As Hayek would stress, the transformation for a society of status to one of contract is critical to experiencing modern economic growth. And this is only possible if the governing system seeks to eliminate privileges and instead binds itself to the rule of law.
The American Constitution, democratic self-governance, geographic advantages, and abundance of resources all played a role, but it was the transformation of society that drove progress. The system of social hierarchy, deference, patronage, and inherited privileges was transformed into a system of equality before the law, civil society consisting of voluntary association, social mobility, entrepreneurship and dignity and respect for ordinary work. Commercial activity ceased being morally suspect and the marketplace was characterized by entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and independent participants rather than clients dependent on the good graces of the privileged and powerful elite.
The tragedy of Joe Biden was his disinterest in restoring the free movemnent of goods and people.
Amazon has over 1 million robot workers. What’s next for human employees? (Jeremy Hsu, Oct 12, 2026, Ars Technica)
In many ways, robotics and AI are well suited to the relentless pace of work that is already happening inside e-commerce fulfillment centers. Amazon’s promise of speedy deliveries for its 200 million Prime subscribers in particular requires hundreds of thousands of human employees to speedily assemble and ship out customer orders that often combine a dizzying array of products.
Much of the work in fulfillment centers also frequently involves “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks that people may prefer to hand over to robots. The injury and illness rate for workers in the US warehouse sector has typically been more than double the average across all industries, according to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“You have almost 2 million people working in the warehousing sector in the United States, and it’s characterized by very high turnover and very high workplace injury rates,” said Greenwood.
Thymos and American Foreign Policy: Marco Rubio seems to have quoted my work on recognition. He doesn’t understand it. (Francis Fukuyama, 10/12/26, Persuasion)
Secretary Rubio’s desire to stay on his boss’ good side leads him to twist reality like a pretzel. He speaks about an alliance between the United States and Europe based on shared values, gliding over a president who clearly admires Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping far more than those of other democratic countries. He talks about the wonders of science and technology created by Western civilization, even as his administration is cutting funding for scientific research across the board. He celebrates the agreement over Greenland, without mentioning his desire to grab it away from Denmark.
Secretary Rubio praises thymos without regard to the ends to which it is directed. He would do well to remember that it was an excess of megalothymia that led Alcibiades and the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which Thucydides explains was the beginning of their defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The Secretary should also focus a bit on the lines from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal.” It is this principle of human equality, and not the celebration of great individuals, that has underlined a lot of American foreign policy over the decades.
One Grieving Mother, Two Mariners Tickets and a Season of New Friends (Tim Arango, Oct. 12, 2026, NY Times)
On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles.Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who served as commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months until he died suddenly in 1989, famously wrote that baseball is “designed to break your heart,” because it “leaves you to face the fall all alone.”
Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart.
After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief.
So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives.
So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.
“This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.”
The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio.Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips.
But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages.
And a shared love of baseball.
“I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”
“Baseball has a calming effect on them,” she added, “and they want someone to share it with.”