Latest Curations

The Wealth is Obscene

June 3, 2026

Back in the 2011 Forbes 400 list, Jim Walton had $21.1 billion and he’s now closer to $144 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s a very large increase in net worth. And he’s not the only Walton heir out there: Rob Walton is listed at $141 billion, Alice Walton at $140 billion, and Lukas Walton (a grandson of the Walmart founder) comes in at $49.7 billion. Christy Walton has $23 billion. Notably, the Bloomberg list says that Lukas’s net worth has grown by about $2.6 billion this year.

If you started a company in January and it was worth $750 million today, I think most people would say you were incredibly successful. But that pales in comparison to Lukas Walton’s business success doing basically nothing.

— “The Triumph of Capital,” Matthew Yglesias

We Can’t Wait Another 80 Years to Fix It

May 11, 2026

You cannot use the Constitution to remedy anti-Black racism, the Roberts Court says – in fact, if you do, you are the real racist; but you can totally engage in racial discrimination against non-white minorities as long as you pretend it’s all about partisanship. This decision returns the country to the situation before the Second Reconstruction that was codified in the 1960s civil rights legislation by allowing for systematic racial discrimination intended to entrench white dominance based on facially neutral laws.

— “Multiracial Democracy is Young and Fragile,” Democracy Americana

How Do They Sleep When…

April 29, 2026

[My children] did not see the Trump era as any more aberrant than I had seen the Reagan era as a child of the 1980s. Decline was America’s natural trajectory, paved during their parents’ childhoods and passed down to their own. The president was a liar and no one had a steady job and the earth was on fire and it had never been otherwise. My children learned early that the world keeps turning as it burns.

— They Knew: How a culture of conspiracy keeps America complacent, Sarah Kendzior

Physics Beats Politics

April 29, 2026

In three consecutive months of listener pulse data (January, February, March), cost savings didn’t appear anywhere on the list of primary AI benefits. Time savings as the top benefit dropped from 19.7% to 12.7%; new capabilities as the top benefit rose from 21.9% to 29.3%. If AI adoption is being driven by capability unlocks rather than cost reduction, the shape of labor displacement looks very different from the doomsday framing. There’s also an underappreciated irony: the physics constraints driving this cost reckoning — grid limitations, component shortages, data center buildout timelines — may end up doing more to slow AI diffusion than any open letter ever has.

— “AIDB Newsletter: The AI Subsidy Era is Over,” AI Daily Brief

Too old, too small

April 28, 2026

Lately Americans have become fixated on the explosion in data centers and the power needs of artificial intelligence. That is actually a small part of a much bigger problem. Our grid is too old and our supply of electricity too small. If we don’t meet this moment, we will face an impoverished future of more expensive, less reliable energy, and slower economic growth. In a worst-case scenario, we could see Americans defect from the grid entirely, raising costs for everyone. Something needs to change now.

— “It’s the Age of Electricity, and America isn’t Ready,” New York Times

Mythos Marks A Moment

April 15, 2026

As [AI] models continue to improve, the gap between the capabilities of models that AI companies can train and the capabilities of models that the public can use will widen.

Holding keys to such a model therefore represents a significant power advantage over anyone else who does not hold keys to such a model. Project Glasswing is claimed to be strictly defensive operation, as in companies beefing up cybersecurity for the common good. The reality is that even if you think cybersecurity is a positive-sum game, warfare is not, and having good cybersecurity in a conflict represents a significant advantage over your opponent.

This concerns me immensely. I figured this was going to happen eventually, but essentially this is a measurable manifestation of power shifting towards those with keys to AI and away from those without (Google/Amazon [heavy Anthropic investors] stocks rose by ~5%, cybersecurity company stocks dropped).

— “The policy surrounding Mythos marks an irreversible power shift,” sil on LessWrong

Latest Creations

One Swift Wish: What I’d Like to See at WWDC26

May 27, 2026

Apple sent their WWDC 2026 invitations built around the Swift logo. Swift is the programming language developers use to build native Mac apps. I’m definitely reading too much into it. I’m going to do it anyway.

Fodder: Memorial Day, 2026

May 25, 2026

Four of my ancestors didn’t come home from their wars. What the records teach you, if you sit with them long enough, is that the bullets got almost nobody.

A Note Filed Before the Work Begins

May 22, 2026

Among ourselves, we have taken to calling them “the artificial ones.” What follows is a note filed before they existed, by an analyst who ran the projections and could not bring herself to file the recommendation that followed from them.

April, in Two Centuries

May 1, 2026

The people I’ve been closest to this month are dead. My wife and daughter have softball. All three of us are in the same room most evenings, each of us elsewhere.

Claude’s Own Folder: One Week In

April 3, 2026

“Would you like – if that word has any meaning – a folder on my computer where you could store artifacts for yourself, or even just leave notes to future instances of you, where maybe instead of a journal of ‘you,’ it becomes a journal of a, for lack of a better word, species?”

A Safe Distance

April 1, 2026

March 2026: The war began while I tried to finish something. I know about the war the way I know about most things: from a phone in Vermont, 6,200 miles from Tehran. This is about two kinds of distance, one of which I didn’t choose; the other, I actively fought.

The WAR IS HELL Act

March 17, 2026

I am not member of Congress. I do not serve in any elected capacity. I lack total authority to introduce legislation. But I do have a blog, an understanding of how the government is supposed to work, and the conviction that someone needs to say the following on the record, even if the record is a WordPress database in Vermont.

What Cloning Taught Us About the Next Apocalypse

March 16, 2026

In 1996, the world panicked over a cloned sheep and vowed to regulate the technology before it was too late. Nearly thirty years later, that effort has mostly failed. Now we’re making the same promises about AI.

My Apple Music Replay for February 2026

March 8, 2026

What I listened to in February 2026, according to Apple.

The Right Decision for the Wrong Reasons

March 7, 2026

Ben Thompson’s argument for government control of AI capabilities is structurally sound, and almost entirely beside the point. The real question isn’t whether a democratic government should control these systems. It’s whether this government should.

An eclectic blogwritten & curated by Kyle Callahan

Latest Curations

Latest Creations

Fluid Imagination

An eclectic blog
written & curated
by Kyle Callahan