Weekend Reading
“A 21-year-old computer science student, Luke Farritor from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has emerged victorious in the Vesuvius Challenge, unlocking the mysteries of the ancient Herculaneum scrolls. These scrolls, carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, have long eluded scholars due to their fragility, but recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are bringing them to light. The Herculaneum scrolls, discovered in the 1700s in a grand villa believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, have been a tantalizing enigma. Traditionally too delicate to unwrap, the scrolls have presented a unique challenge to researchers seeking to decipher lost ancient texts. However, the Vesuvius Challenge, backed by Silicon Valley funding and led by Brent Seales, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky, is revolutionizing our understanding of this unique historical artifact. The breakthrough came as Farritor successfully deciphered the first word from the scrolls, a monumental achievement in the quest to unveil the secrets of this intact ancient library. The word, ‘porphyras,’ an ancient Greek term for ‘purple,’ was identified using a machine learning algorithm developed by Farritor. This discovery has not only earned him a reward of $40,000 but has also opened the door to decoding the remaining 800 scrolls. The Vesuvius Challenge, launched earlier this year, invited participants to employ AI and machine learning to unravel the scrolls without physically touching them. The use of 3D X-ray images, provided by Seales and his team, allowed contestants to navigate the challenging task of deciphering texts that have remained unreadable for over two millennia … The discovery is not only a triumph for Farritor but also for classical scholarship. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, expressed excitement about the potential impact on our understanding of the ancient world. She emphasized that the preserved texts from the Library of Herculaneum are entirely unknown from other sources, offering the possibility of expanding the ancient canon.” (Dario Radley/Archaeology)
“A drive from the sandy northern outskirts through Sudan’s once-vibrant city of Omdurman passes by shoots of normal life reemerging from the worst moments of war. In bustling pockets of the city, which lies just across the Nile River from the capital of Khartoum, a stream of cars, trucks and carts hauled by donkeys fills busy streets. Customers shop at reopened supermarkets and grocery stores, and eat at restaurants and outdoor cafes selling tea and falafel, sheltered by trees. But most of the journey across Omdurman reveals a city in ruins. Felled battle tanks sit along the eerie streets. Souq Omdurman, a sprawling market, lies deserted, a carcass of charred store fronts and shattered windows. The more than a century-old Sheikh GaribAllah Mosque sits defaced, its sky-gray walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Torched cars fill the razed compound, where every window has been shattered. NPR saw bullet casings and shell fragments around the site, as worshippers streamed in for Friday prayers. Even the graves were dug up, according to the imam, Abdul Rahim. Fighters searched for the corpse of the mosque’s wealthy founder, to steal the gold and jewelry they believed he was buried with, Rahim said. ‘But they didn’t find the tomb, it’s still there.’” (Emmanuel Akinwotu/NPR)
“Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi has conceded defeat after parliamentary elections in which voters overwhelmingly rejected the ruling party that had been in power for 58 years. Official results were yet to be confirmed by the electoral commission early on Friday, but early tallies showed the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) had lost its parliamentary majority. ‘The evidence is overwhelming. We lost the election massively,’ Masisi said in his concession speech. In a post on X, he offered his ‘heartfelt congratulations’ to Duma Boko, leader of the opposition coalition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), referring to him as the president-elect.Boko, a human rights lawyer, spent five years between 2014 and 2019 as the country’s leader of opposition. The UDC accused the ruling party of corruption and economic mismanagement in the run up to this month’s election … Botswana is one of the world’s biggest producers of rough diamonds by value. But global diamond sales have been hit by oversupply and poor demand, in part tied to rising sales of lab-grown gems.At a presidential debate earlier in October, Masisi said shrinking revenues from the diamond market had affected economic growth, even as the country seeks to diversify its economy.” (Martin KN Seale/semafor)
“I got back to the city in time for the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. MAGAs — judging from their accents, mainly from South Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island, Rangers hockey fans who know how to find the trains into the city — lined up on the avenues in their red hats, spewing the usual idiocy and resentment for the fake news media. My favorite clips from the crowd are of two separate women explaining to the Good Liars video team how the hurricane that ravaged North Carolina was man-made, a ‘cloud-seeding or something’ manufactured by the government to ‘take the land’ so that Kamala Harris’ husband could mine it for lithium. The thousands of oafs and neckbeards that accompanied the motley collection of Trump women were easily satirized, as one Xitter wag summed them up: ‘the largest concentration in history of domestic abusers with an Uncle Michael on the force’ … The free ranging Trump celebrants, his people who’d come in from the sticks, passed these vibrant little prisons looking confused and wandered off lost and lonely. Something was wrong with this celebration, but what? So much creativity on our side, that’s one thing they hate. On Sunday in Manhattan, the MAGAs streamed into the venue and enjoyed five hours of cheap, vulgar insults. Men stood in front of an audience of 16,000 — plus however many millions were watching the live stream — and actually said these things: Harris is the devil, the antichrist, she’s a prostitute with pimps, and, from Tucker Carlson, a little wink-wink racism, she is ‘Samoan-Malaysian.’ The show’s featured comedian was reportedly going to call her a cunt, but someone nixed that line. Censorship! How unfair.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“On October 29, a week before the election, a California hedge-fund manager was letting me in on some of the trades he’s made ahead of the event. On that day, the odds of Donald Trump winning the presidency on Polymarket, the offshore betting site, had hit their highest level — 67 percent — since Kamala Harris entered the race. One of his picks, he said, was GEO Group, the private-prison company. It just so happened that GEO’s stock was trading in roughly the same pattern as the betting odds on Trump, reaching a high not seen since mid-July. ‘Very controversial stock. A lot of managers won’t own it because it’s seen as evil. They own private prisons, and they run detention centers and track migrants who come over the border,’ the hedge-fund manager, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. ‘But to us? We remember what the stock did after Trump won last time. It doubled after the election. I mean, it actually doubled. And, by the way, we remember what happened to it one year later, too. It lost all of that value and then more.’ Is there anybody left on Wall Street who thinks Kamala Harris is going to win? With days to go before the election, it seems everyone in the world of finance — from billionaire investor Ken Griffin to convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli — is predicting that Trump is going to trounce his rival to win his second trip from Mar-a-Lago to the White House, and they are betting accordingly. The capital class expects the kind of pro-business, tax-cutting, go-go-go economy that was a hallmark of all but the last year of Trump’s first term. Bitcoin, gold, oil companies, and health insurers have all hit or come close to all-time highs, as money managers try to position themselves in assets that they think will rise on news of a Trump win. “They’re bidding gold, they’re bidding bitcoin, they’re bidding every asset in sight, and they are shorting the fucking shit out of bonds,” the hedge-fund manager told me. (Trump’s tariff-heavy, low-rate economic agenda is expected to lead to higher inflation, which would make bonds less valuable to hold over the long run). Of course, there are prominent Democrats among the financier class, including Raymond McGuire, the president of Lazard, Marc Lasry of hedge fund Avenue Capital, and billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban. Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has reportedly told friends in private that he supports Harris, even though he is publicly remaining neutral.” (Kevin T. Dugan/NYMag)
“To be honest, it took me decades to appreciate the scope and power of what Kim Hastreiter, my former boss at Paper Magazine, has achieved. It is no exaggeration to say that she is one of the most important figures in New York’s downtown culture in the last 40 years. She has discovered, championed and connected talented people with unparalleled purity and enthusiasm. (For my 1996 wedding, she suggested I have a dress made either by her good friend Isabel Toledo or an up-and-coming designer at Mr. Beene’s studio named Albert Elbaz....) She is unflaggingly curious and energetic, and at 72, she is busier than ever. She’s publishing a 400-page book, Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, on her collections of people and things, with two more titles in the works. She just launched a Substack, and will be in residence at Whaam! Gallery, where they’re reconstructing her office, for a December holiday store and talent outreach in the fashion, design and food worlds … When you left Paper, what excited you most about the blank page in front of you? Hastreiter: The most exciting part is I could stop dancing as fast as I could to keep the doors open and lights on. It was exhausting. And surviving took up most of my time. I’m an artist, so I wanted to dream and create amazing things again! I had zillions of ideas in my head, so I was thrilled to start making rain again creatively.” (Christine Muhlke/Xtine)
“Elon Musk is obsessed with procreation. We know this because (1) he frequently says things like, ‘A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far’ and (2) he’s fathered nearly a dozen children with three separate women, and presently appears to be trying to at least double or triple those numbers, with whoever will accept his offer of DNA.The New York Times reports that in addition to the women he’s already had children with, Musk has ‘offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances.’ One of those acquaintances, according to the Times, was former independent vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, whom Musk reportedly proffered his DNA to in 2022; Shanahan, who would go on to become Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, is said to have declined … The Times story follows similar reporting from The Wall Street Journal, which ran an article in June about Musk’s ‘boundary-blurring relationships with women at SpaceX.’ According to the outlet, a woman who directly reported to Musk ‘alleged that [he] had asked her on multiple occasions to have his babies, according to people familiar with the allegations.’ While that woman reportedly said no, not all people who have worked for Musk have turned down his offers. In 2022, Business Insider reported that Musk had fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at Neuralink, another company owned by the billionaire. Musk has since fathered a third child with Zilis; throw in the five kids he had with his first wife, Justine Musk, and the three with Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes, and that puts his tally at at least 11. ‘At least’ because Musk has previously tried to keep various children a secret, and with the way he goes around offering to father relative strangers’ children, there could very well be others out there … Not surprisingly, attempting to single-handedly boost the global birth rate is not the only creepy thing Musk has been up to.” (Bess Levin/VF)
“Rural places are growing in racial and ethnic diversity. The non-Hispanic white population in rural America reported by the 2020 Census hovers just above 75%, compared to 58% of the overall U.S. population. The proportion of non-Hispanic white residents declined in rural places between 2010 and 2020, however, as the rural population of color grew from 21% to 24%. While the absolute number of people living in rural America declined in the 2020 Census for the first time ever, population gain in rural places is largely driven by increases in the Hispanic population, as evidenced in parts of the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and Southeast. Nearly one-third of all children in rural areas are now part of a racial or ethnic minority. The picture is mixed, but portions of rural America may be better off than the public perceives. Rural America is home to some of the most disadvantaged and some of the most advantaged places in the country.Eighty-five percent of persistently poor counties1 are rural, with nearly half of that aggregate population identifying as a racial or ethnic minority. In the modern era, rural America is the place where the dual burden of race and place manifests most acutely. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, employment and labor rate participation in rural places had not recovered from the Great Recession to their pre-2008 levels—and have just returned to those levels, trailing urban areas by a year. Rural places comprise nearly half of the geographic areas in the country experiencing prime-age employment rates that are significantly lower than the national average. The rural affordable housing crisis is especially acute. More than 40% of rural renters are cost-burdened, and nearly one-third of rural counties saw home prices rise by at least 40% between 2020-2023 (compared to 18% of urban counties).” (Anthony F. Pipa and Zoe Swarzenski/Brookings)
“Throughout the war in Ukraine, the most important capability that Ukraine and Russia have employed and honed has been their ability to learn and adapt. This is an interactive fight because each side is learning based on the reactions of their adversary, and then finding and implementing solutions to improve their effectiveness against that enemy. This process, which I have described as The Adaptation Battle, occurs at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. At its best, learning and adaptation takes evidence-based observations from the battlefield, shares them with the right analytical agencies, ensures the resulting lessons are then integrated into evolved training, doctrine, organisations, infrastructure, logistics and leadership models. In many cases, adaptation is local or shared within a small community. And, in some cases, learning and adaptation does not improve the overall effectiveness of a military institution because the context or the situation has changed. There have been examples of all three approaches, from both Ukraine and Russia, since the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But adaptation also occurs at multiple levels within military institutions, it occurs before and during wars, and it also takes place in corporate entites who have links to, or interests in, military organisations. Finally, adaptation takes place within enemy organisations as well as within allies.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“Ukraine is using dozens of domestically made AI-augmented systems for its drones to reach targets on the battlefield without being piloted, a senior official said, disclosing new details about the race against Russia to harness automation. Systems that use artificial intelligence allow cheap drones carrying explosives to spot or fly to their targets in areas protected by extensive signal jamming, which has reduced the effectiveness of manually piloted drones. ‘There are currently several dozen solutions on the market from Ukrainian manufacturers ... they are being purchased and delivered into the armed forces and other defence forces,’ Ukraine's deputy defence minister Kateryna Chernohorenko said of drone AI systems.” (Max Hunder/Reuters)
“For years, Russia has promoted the Wagner mercenary group to authoritarian leaders in Africa as a force of fearsome warriors who could protect leaders’ grip on power and help their armies reclaim territories from armed groups. In return, Moscow has gained access to resource-rich countries, dislodged Western and U.N. troops and seeded influence across West and Central Africa to a degree not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. But a major defeat for Wagner this summer in northern Mali showed that its actual capabilities might be overstated and unable to meet the ambitions of one of the group’s closest African partners. The New York Times confirmed the deaths of at least 46 Wagner fighters and 24 allied Malian soldiers by matching details seen in footage of the corpses, such as uniforms and tattoos, with imagery of the soldiers when they were alive. The loss is Wagner’s largest ever on African soil and one of the deadliest in its entire history, outside Ukraine. Among those killed was Nikita Fedyanin, one of Wagner’s most influential online propagandists, whose death silenced a key platform for cultivating the group’s ruthless image. And the fallout extended to the Russian home front, too, The Times found, as relatives of the mercenaries accused Wagner of failing to tell them that their family members were dead.” (NYT)