The guy who helped invent Grubhub rarely orders delivery anymore. This Atlantic piece explains why: delivery apps are bleeding restaurants dry (some pay 23% of revenue to platforms), turning dining rooms into ghost towns, and forcing food to be designed for cardboard boxes instead of people. It's a devastating look at how Silicon Valley subsidies created expectations no one can afford—except the platforms extracting the fees.

This New Yorker piece reveals how Daniel Kinahan ran a third of Europe's $20 billion cocaine trade while openly working as a boxing advisor to Tyson Fury and other champions. He orchestrated the "Super Cartel" from Dubai - where he lives freely despite a $5 million U.S. bounty - using encrypted phones to order hits in Europe while negotiating million-dollar fight deals. It's a stunning portrait of how modern organized crime hides in plain sight, using legitimate businesses and jurisdictional arbitrage to operate with impunity.

This excerpt from Chasing the Dark: A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity follows a writer who discovers the archive of Tony Cornell, a meticulous British parapsychologist who spent decades investigating ghosts, poltergeists, and unexplained phenomena. Cornell would show up at ordinary homes experiencing extraordinary terror—water materializing from nowhere, invisible dogs leaving real wounds, children moving objects with their minds—armed with questionnaires, tape recorders, and systematic skepticism. Machell captures the eerie tension between Cornell's rational, insurance-adjuster demeanor and the genuinely unsettling cases he documented, turning dusty archive boxes into a meditation on what happens at the edges of explicable reality.

Gawker's founding editor reflects on what made early 2000s blogging special: you had to build something worth visiting, and critics had to do the same on their own sites. It was like having separate houses instead of brawling in a lawless town square. She traces how this slower, more thoughtful medium helped her evolve from a Southern Baptist college Republican to a registered Democrat—not through indoctrination, but through substantive exchanges that required effort to participate in. It's a sharp, nostalgic case for why quality of speech matters as much as freedom of speech, and why decentralized independent media might be our best defense against both algorithmic chaos and authoritarian censorship.

Really hope you enjoyed the selection of stories today. I am always interested in hearing from you. If you have thoughts on how I can make this email even better, do not hesitate to reach out.

Brett

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