📖 What I’m Reading:

How the 7-minute Louvre robbery unfolded – DailyMail

• Imagine holding something worth $100 million in your hands and dropping it and then just shrugging and getting on a scooter and scooting off into the crisp Parisian morning air.

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist – The Guardian

• Obviously his arguments are unhinged and just plain wrong. (Why exactly are international agencies bad? Just because you think they’re “shadowy?” Grow up.) HOWEVER. I do appreciate when people pull from wildly disparate sources to make arguments. Thiel’s quoting the Bible, manga, classic literature, Succession, pop culture, etc., all in the same breath. That’s kinda fun.

Is Sora the Beginning of the End for OpenAI? – Cal Newport

• Good point: why would a company that claims it can automate 50% of the workforce be spending its time and resources on a video-sharing social media app?

☝️ Word of the Month:

sobriquet (n) SOH-bri-kay

A fancy nickname or a humorous name.

From French sous (under) + briquer (to strike).

“In a speech honoring the airmen waging the Battle of Britain – `Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ he (Churchill) said, coining the soubriquet (‘the Few’) by which the RAF pilots would forever be known.”

🎵 Jams of the Month:

• SPEED OF LOVE - Masayoshi Takanaka. Groove.
• D’Angelo - Devil’s Pie. Bassline.
• Mobb Deep - Cradle to the Grave. Crackle.
• Turn Me Up - T & Sugah, Venjent. D&B. Laggy synth rules.
• Breathing - Ben Böhmer, Nils Hoffmann. Chill.

💬 Quote of the Month:

“We must learn to honor excellence in every socially accepted human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

-John W. Gardner

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ps: scary chart from Dallas Fed (X)

pps: curry goat rice and peas (Instagram)

ppps: wholesome (Instagram)