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Closing out the week with stories that will challenge the way you think about technology and people in power…or maybe reinforce your thoughts. And a look at the Marshall Islands national soccer team as a lighter story to bring the mood up! Hope you enjoy:
Stanford researchers modeled what happens if childhood vaccines disappear, and the numbers are hard to sit with: 290,000 measles deaths, 23,000 paralytic polio cases, and potentially over a million diphtheria deaths over 25 years.
The Marshall Islands fielded a national soccer team for the first time in history last August, assembling players from across the Pacific diaspora for a debut match in Springdale, Arkansas, home to the largest Marshallese community outside the islands.
Silicon Valley billionaires are funding startups to genetically screen and edit embryos for higher IQ, framing it as a bulwark against the superintelligent AI they are simultaneously racing to build.
Timothy Noah traces how the tech industry went from garage idealists promising to democratize information to monopolists spending $670 billion on AI while lobbying against every form of accountability.
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ProPublica
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Lucas Waldron and Patricia Callahan
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Stanford epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo built a simulation model to quantify what losing childhood vaccines for polio, measles, rubella, and diphtheria would mean over 25 years. The numbers are staggering: 290,000 projected measles deaths, 23,000 cases of paralytic polio, 41,000 babies born with congenital rubella syndrome, and potentially over a million diphtheria deaths in worst-case scenarios. The researchers published their findings well before RFK Jr. began reshaping federal vaccine policy, but both now say those once-extreme scenarios feel considerably more plausible.
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Longreads
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Jordan P. Hickey
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The Marshall Islands, a Pacific nation of scattered atolls carrying a brutal nuclear legacy and an existential climate threat, had never fielded a national soccer team until August 2025. Writer Jordan P. Hickey follows the squad's first week together in Springdale, Arkansas, home to the largest Marshallese diaspora outside the islands. Players flew in from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and nearly 6,300 miles across the Pacific, many strangers to each other. They lost their debut 4-0, but the story is really about belonging, identity, and what it means to represent a nation that may not exist much longer.
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Mother Jones
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Abby Vesoulis
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A cohort of Silicon Valley billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong, and Marc Andreessen, are funding startups aimed at genetically optimizing embryos, partly justified as a hedge against superintelligent AI. The pitch: if machines eventually outthink us, humanity's best hope is smarter humans. Companies like Nucleus already screen IVF embryos for hundreds of traits, including IQ, despite scientists warning the genetic basis for intelligence is poorly understood and the average expected gain from selecting among five embryos is just 2.5 IQ points. Germline editing remains illegal in most countries, but the investment is accelerating anyway.
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The New Republic
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Timothy Noah
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Timothy Noah traces how Silicon Valley went from counterculture idealists sharing tools with ordinary people to oligarchs pouring $670 billion into AI, invoking quasi-religious frameworks to frame regulation as satanic. The piece runs through Peter Thiel's literal Antichrist lectures, Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," Meta's documented tolerance of fraud, and Palantir's role targeting bombing strikes. Noah's argument is structural: once companies scaled into monopolies, their original liberatory politics collapsed into pure Mammon, and now they have more money, more lobbying power, and less democratic accountability than the Gilded Age robber barons they're starting to resemble.
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