09 Dec 24 Monday Briefing

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News Roundup

What a week, friends. Straws have finally broken on camels’ backs – a billionaire CEO has been assassinated, a billionaire despot is on the run, a not-quite-billionaire politician staged a coup that lasted for 6 hours AND survived an impeachment vote, and the eldest daughter of the Church reopened her cathedral even as her government collapsed.

In more salubrious news, UNESCO inscribed the kebaya onto the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity… and that’s it, really, as far as I know from the past week.

Watch/Scroll

Fascinating thread about a young Millennial’s hustling of Gen Z. (h/t Spouse™)

Read

How Madrid managed to build its metro system reasonably cheaply seems to be astounding to some but not if you consider that time + efficiency = cost savings, as with most things in life.

Indigenous and native perspectives have been in current discourse for about a decade now, and inroads are being made into that bastion of tradition, archaeology. How would “deep history” instead of “prehistory” help shape our understanding of aeons past?

Ponder

Casey Newton (respectable) argues that we ignore AI at our own peril, and Ed Zitron (also respectable) argues that it’s just about all rot. Rotten peril sounds like the worst of both worlds.