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Some thought-provoking stories for today’s edition. Hope you enjoy!
A 27-year-old woman spent months experimenting on herself with an unapproved synthetic compound, trying to kick a kratom addiction that traditional rehab couldn't fix.
A Wall Street Journal data analysis reveals that on Polymarket and Kalshi, a tiny fraction of accounts take home the overwhelming majority of profits, while casual users bleed cash to algorithmic trading firms with million-dollar data feeds.
A philosopher at Oxford makes the case that your smartphone was never a neutral tool; it was designed from the start to surveil, predict, and control.
An essayist who clawed out of poverty once spent months investigating injured insurance claimants on social media, and he writes about what it cost him to do it.
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The New York Times
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Matt Richtel
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Becks, a 27-year-old kratom addict from suburban Boston, ran her own detox experiment using SR-17018, an unapproved synthetic compound that gained attention after a 2019 study showed it reversed opioid dependence in mice. No human safety trials exist. The compound's inventor, Dr. Laura Bohn, called self-experimentation "a terrible idea." Becks documented her attempt in an online diary: partial relief, a relapse on Day 10, a second attempt, then a fentanyl binge, then rehab. She credits SR-17018 with giving her an opening. Bohn is now seeking funding to study it formally, partly informed by what people like Becks have compiled on Reddit.
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The Wall Street Journal
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Neil Mehta, Katherine Long, and Caitlin Ostroff
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On Polymarket, 67% of profits go to 0.1% of accounts. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 1.6 million accounts found casual traders losing steadily to professional firms that pay millions for live data feeds and run algorithms executing tens of thousands of trades daily. On Kalshi, losers outnumber winners nearly 3 to 1. The platforms advertise themselves as tools for ordinary people to monetize what they know. What they don't advertise: quantitative trading firms like Susquehanna are on the other side of those bets, and they are not there to lose.
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Philosopher Carissa Véliz argues that digital devices are not neutral tools but artefacts designed with embedded purposes, and that the dominant purpose built into most smartphones, apps, and platforms is surveillance feeding prediction. Surveillance enables control; prediction enables self-fulfilling prophecy. The libertarian idealism of the early internet, she writes, was naive at best and cynical cover at worst, pointing to Peter Thiel's simultaneous defense of freedom and construction of mass surveillance infrastructure. Véliz calls for treating digital technology as a political problem, demanding products designed to support rather than undermine democracy, before authoritarian actors fully exploit the systems already in place.
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The Baffler
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Bertrand Cooper
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Bertrand Cooper, an essayist who escaped poverty through a decade in educational technology, was laid off in 2023 and spent sixteen months unable to pay rent, rationing gas, fighting off a tax lien, and managing untreated sinus polyps. The only job offer that came through was at MediaStrategy, an insurance-defense firm that paid him $48,000 to comb through injured claimants' social media for contradictions. Most of his subjects were poor. Most showed no obvious fraud. He stayed long enough to go remote, then left. The essay is a reckoning with what survival costs, and why writing has never felt financially safe.
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Other Things Worth Reading
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What I read this weekend
When I run, I enjoy listening to audiobooks. I cannot stand podcast ads in the middle of my workouts, and audiobooks give me an opportunity to get through books on my list while I am out pounding the pavement.
I picked up I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom on Friday, and I listened to the entire thing over the course of my weekend runs and gardening. It is an easy book, but it feels real and grounded in the times we are living in now in a way that doesn’t feel forced or schlocky. It is humorous at times, eye-roll inducing at others, but it is a fun ride nonetheless.