Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Elliot Hershberg on GitLab cofounder Sid Sijbrandij's high-effort/high-budget battle with cancer. In literature, you can sometimes get a lot of mileage out of just taking some everyday concept more seriously than anyone has any plausible reason to, like Emily Dickinson being bowled over by how amazing a particular bee is. The result you get outlives the original subject; we still read the poem, even though the bee in question is long-gone. You can apply a similar kind of logic to healthcare, which is a messy and complex topic that has room for going into arbitrary depth on things—pick one seriously ill person, and learn every little detail about how sick they are and how they respond to different treatments. It wouldn't be feasible for an institution to do this, because they'd be stuck between the unfairness of having a tiny number of test subjects and the ludicrous cost of having a lot of them. But one really rich person with a penchant for quantifying things and producing comprehensive documentation can potentially pull it off.
• Judge Glock in Works in Progress on the ridiculous cost of marginal improvements in American water safety. You can look at an article like this and ask: surely we shouldn't complain that we spend so much on having clean, safe drinking water! But that's exactly the kind of reasoning that puts average spending on water cleanliness at 0.8% of GDP, or about a quarter-trillion dollars each year. The gap between how much a country can produce and how much wealth it actually produces for citizens is measured in countless cases just like this one.
• Tyler Cowen interviews Diarmaid MacCulloch on his new book, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. MacCulloch's book on the Reformation was fantastic, and he's very thoughtful on a necessarily complicated subject. As with that book, part of his project is to illustrate how abnormal our historical norms are: he argues that Christianity originated in a more polygyny-friendly culture, and that monogamy was partly a way to fit in with the Greeks and Romans. One reading of this whole project is that it's a story of institutions figuring out the exact dividing line between public and private life. Legislating every little detail would be absurd and intrusive, but a free-for-all doesn't work well, either. One of the highlights of this piece is unrelated to the book: it's MacCulloch's deep love for the institution of a parish, i.e. a bit of territory that's all within a day's walk for a member of the clergy.
• In The Guardian, Robert Baird profiles Adam Tooze. Tooze is just lefty enough that people who describe themselves as "leftists" and would be insulted to be called "liberals" can fight over whether he's part of their project or actually some sort of fake leftist who makes capitalists feel good about their sins. And he's also left enough that he seems to be genuinely hurt when Marxists look at his excellent object-level histories and complain that he isn't talking enough about structural explanations.
• Clare Malone profiles Bari Weiss in The New Yorker. Media bias is a funny thing: every writer and outlet has it, and is theoretically aware of this, but generally the most egregious cases are the ones that are invisible to the perpetrators because of their unquestioned background assumptions. For example: it's impossible for another journalist to write about Weiss without the subtext of "You're saying this is the kind of journalism that makes someone a centimillionaire?" Weiss herself, of course, has her own perspectives, interests, etc. that make it hard for her to report straightforwardly. But her project has actually been pretty interesting: usually, people who get annoyed with media bias will either mirror it (creating Fox as a conservative alternative) or they'll try to split the difference and write something center-left instead of left. Going to the center gives every partisan a reason to be mad, but there's a reasonably big demographic of media consumers whose politics are to the right of the NYT circa mid-2020, but not especially right-wing overall.
• In this week's Capital Gains, we look at the semi-topical question of when countries buy land, and why they don't do it any more. Highlights include the Netherlands conquering part of Germany after the Second World War, and selling most of it back, as well as the observation that if you include transactions made under extreme duress, most of the US's territory was purchased.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• A frontier investment firm is looking for someone with exceptional judgement and energy to produce a constant feed of interesting humans who should be on their radar. This person should find themselves in communities of brilliant people hacking on technologies (e.g. post-quantum cryptography, optical computing, frontier open source AI etc.) that are still well outside the technological Overton window. You will be responsible for identifying the 50–100 people globally who are obsessed with these nascent categories before they are on-market, then facilitating the high-bandwidth IRL environments (dinners, retreats, small meetups) that turn those connections into a community. (Austin, NYC, SF)
• A Founders Fund backed, decentralized AI infrastructure company that’s solving the compute shortage by offering hardware procurement, financing, software, and customer demand that allows any data center operator to become an AI factory/turn data center infrastructure into cash flow is looking for a capital markets associate to help facilitate GPU financings and support the company’s growth into an institutional private credit platform. You’d be helping underwrite a multi-hundred-million-dollar loan pipeline and encouraged/expected to find and pursue new angles for corporate development. Investment banking, private equity, capital markets, or structured finance experience within asset-heavy industries (data center/GPU, energy, etc.) preferred.
• A leading AI transformation & PE investment firm (think private equity meets Palantir) that’s been focused on investing in and transforming businesses with AI long before ChatGPT (100+ successful portfolio company AI transformations since 2019) is hiring experienced forward deployed AI engineers to design, implement, test, and maintain cutting edge AI products that solve complex problems in a variety of sector areas. If you have 3+ years of experience across the development lifecycle and enjoy working with clients to solve concrete problems please reach out. Experience managing engineering teams is a plus. (Remote)
• A well-funded, Series C startup building the platform and agent primitives to drive operational transformation at large, complex institutions (starting with higher education) is hiring platform engineers. The work spans distributed systems, applied AI, and full-stack infrastructure, focused on deploying reliable agents that meaningfully bend institutional cost curves. (Remote)
• A blockchain company that’s building solutions at the physical limits of distributed systems and driving 10x performance improvements over other widely adopted L1s is looking for an engineer with expertise in systems programming languages (e.g C, C++, Rust, etc.) HFT, embedded systems, high performance computing or operating systems experience a plus. (SF)

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