Friday morning articles
Ukraine’s Repair Crews Dodge Bullets and Splice Cable to Keep the Country Online: In the trenches and beneath the utility poles with the teams keeping citizens and soldiers connected. (Businessweek)
Are we really prisoners of geography? A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise. (The Guardian)
The Dinosaurs of Park Avenue: Apartments in the grandest uptown co-ops are sitting on the market for years. Why These $20 Million Uptown Co-ops Aren’t Selling (Curbed)
How Food Powers Your Body Metabolism, which unleashes the energy in what you eat, may be nature’s most electrifying invention. (New Yorker)
Can’t go to the moon? This crater in Canada is the next best thing. The Mistastin crater on Earth holds large quantities of the bright white rock on the majority of the moon’s surface. (Washington Post)
How the Story of Soccer Became the Story of Everything: Oligarchs, private-equity moguls, and petro states took over the sport—and the world. (Mother Jones)
The Rise of Influencer Capital: How social media, celebrity promoters, and banks looking for a quick buck transformed the markets. (New York Magazine)
Why does the Department of Homeland Security suck? The Department of Homeland Security’s 20-year boondoggle: The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to rally nearly two dozen agencies together in a modernized, streamlined approach to protecting the country. So what the hell happened? (The Verge)
The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont: A hunt for stolen goods has put citizens and business owners in the center of a debate about policing and a growing, sometimes violent, problem with crime. (New York Times)
The 1960s Experiment Created Today’s Biased Police Surveillance: The Police Beat Algorithm predominantly addressed four problems associated with police operations: 1) pattern recognition, identifying crime patterns within a set of crime data; 2) profiling, associating crime patterns with probable suspects; 3) dragnetting, linking probable suspects of one crime with past crimes or arrests; and 4) patrol positioning, how to best place patrols within appropriate geographical divisions of the city based on where the most crimes take place and where known criminal suspect profiles predicted who will most likely commit those crimes and where. This is where planning problems and operational problems intersected. (Slate)
The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin, Part 1: The Shadow The notorious Alpha02 oversaw millions of dollars a day in online narcotic sales. For cybercrime detectives, he was public enemy number one—and a total mystery. (Wired)
‘Dark Ships’ Emerge From the Shadows of the Nord Stream Mystery: Satellite monitors discovered two vessels with their trackers turned off in the area of the pipeline prior to the suspected sabotage in September. (Wired)
DEA’s most corrupt agent: Parties, sex amid ‘unwinnable war’ José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he conspired with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of sports cars, jewels and paramours around the world. (ABC News)
What happened at Alameda Research: Despite success with some discretionary positions, on net, Alameda & FTX jointly continued to lose large amounts of money and liquid cash throughout 2021-2022 as a result of excessive discretionary spending, illiquid venture investments, uncompetitive market-making strategies, risky lending practices, lackluster internal accounting, and general deficiencies in overall organizational ability When loans were recalled in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to use FTX users’ deposits to repay creditors This repayment spurred on increasingly erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling, eventually resulting in total insolvency. (Milky Eggs)
Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed: From the rubbles of his crypto empire, SBF has repeatedly admitted that he “fucked up.” While we don’t yet know what the actual legal implications of this mess are, or who exactly bears the most blame, it’s clear that confession is a bit of an understatement. (Slate)
Monuments to the Unthinkable: America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany? (The Atlantic)
Margot Robbie Is Nobody’s Barbie: The Babylon Star on Navigating Hollywood: Like Nellie, Robbie, who’s 32, got Hollywood’s attention with a breakout performance, in The Wolf of Wall Street, and has built a career that suggests what a modern movie star can be. She’s a no-bullshit actor and producer who bounces between blockbusters and dark indies, even if she’s still a little uncomfortable with the spotlight. “The way I try to explain this job—and this world—to people is that the highs are really high,” she says, her hand hovering over her head, “and the lows are really, really low. And I guess if you’re lucky, it all balances out in the middle.” (Vanity Fair)
Detonation by Design: The Inevitability of Tony Khan’s ‘Dynamite’ For many wrestling fans, the story of All Elite Wrestling begins in 2019. For AEW founder Tony Khan, the story goes back three decades, at the start of his pro wrestling fandom. (Ringer)