Notion's AI pivot, dog longevity pills, Li Lu's post-Tiananmen arc, Havel's greengrocer, Dallas border fortunes, Renaissance Stoicism, Chloé Zhao's "poorface" brand, Japan's rearmament strategy, pinhole camera physics, and a Ukrainian hero's execution.
Inside Notion
Notion's 2022 transformation began when co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last locked themselves in a room during a Mexico retreat, emerged having "felt the AGI," and declared the company would go all-in on AI, a full month before ChatGPT launched. Notion wasn't a technical powerhouse built on engineering chops; it was a community-driven, ideology-first productivity tool that somehow captured infinite context for millions of users. Now that context is fuel for agents that actually do work, and the result is a rare pre-AI company finding its second act without abandoning what made it beloved in the first place. Ivan still micromanages every pixel and offer letter, still demands prototypes over decks, still insists features feel "light like a piece of paper" — and somehow that obsessive craft is exactly what's letting Notion rebuild itself for the new era while competitors with better pedigrees flounder.
Your Next Dog May Live Longer
Celine Halioua's Loyal just cleared a major FDA hurdle with a pill designed to extend dogs' lives by tweaking insulin sensitivity — the same metabolic pathway that makes calorie restriction work, minus the smaller bowl. Dogs age like we do (cancer, cognitive decline, incontinence), they live short enough lives that results come fast, and federal approval for animal drugs is vastly easier than for humans, making them the perfect advance scouts into longevity medicine. Halioua, who tattooed a Labrador on her tricep to honor the Purina study that proved restricted feeding adds years, is betting that if this works in dogs, humans will clamor to be next. We hitched our fates to theirs 10,000 years ago at the campfire; now they're padding ahead into yet another frontier.
The Graduate
In 1996, Li Lu graduated from Columbia with three degrees simultaneously — college, law, business — seven years after fleeing Tiananmen Square as one of its last student leaders. The New Yorker profiled him as he fielded job offers from Lazard Frères, hung out with Madonna and Sting, and spoke carefully about leveraging overseas Chinese capital to eventually reshape his homeland. Li became Warren Buffett's favorite protégé and one of the world's best investors, turning China's markets into a goldmine while the democracy dream quietly receded into the background.
The Power Of The Powerless
Canada's PM Mark Carney's speech at Davos made me seek this one out. Havel's famous 1978 essay dissects how totalitarian systems survive without terror or true belief, through a ritual of mutual complicity. His greengrocer hangs a "Workers of the World, Unite!" sign not from conviction but because everyone does, because refusal signals danger, because the system runs on pretending to believe what no one actually believes. The brilliance is recognizing that ideology functions as a veil: it lets people obey power while never admitting they're merely obeying power. Havel's thesis is that "living in truth" (refusing the charade, even in small ways) fractures this edifice — not through force, but by exposing the lie everyone was already half-aware of. A text that anticipated 1989, written by the man who'd later govern its aftermath.
How Fernando De Leon Quietly Built a $10 Billion Empire in Dallas
Fernando De Leon spent childhood mornings in Texas, afternoons in Mexico, watching identical people produce wildly different outcomes across a 15-minute border crossing. That contrast turned him into a systems thinker who studied chimp hierarchies at Harvard, then applied the lessons to distressed real estate during the financial crisis (buying Dallas condos for $5,500 and flipping them for $160,000). Now he runs a $10 billion family holding company spanning healthcare, industrial real estate, and financial services, deliberately structured to avoid the short-term pressures of traditional PE. His grandmother's advice was "spouting whales get harpooned," which kept him obscure for decades, but he's starting to sense that silence won't cut it in an AI-accelerated world that needs people articulating a vision.
The Transformation of Stoicism Over The Centuries: An Interview With Historian Ada Palmer
Ada Palmer traces stoicism's Renaissance surge as a near-perfect mirror for today's tech-bro embrace: both bloomed during crises (plague-ravaged Florence, algorithmic anxiety) when elites dumped moonshot money into reviving ancient texts, hoping Caesar's curriculum might produce Caesar-level leaders. However, Renaissance Scholars assumed all wisdom pointed toward Christianity, so they sanded down stoicism's pagan edges (no afterlife, materialist physics) into a Providence-soaked self-help manual. Later scholars realized Petrarch had it backwards and the ancients were describing entirely different worlds. Silicon Valley's "sad" rich men echoes Seneca on Rome's soft elites, suggesting that existential hollowness at the top might be less a bug of modernity than a recurring feature of wealth without philosophy.
Survival of the Richest: Hollywood's Broken Talent Pipeline
Chloé Zhao's rise to Oscar glory gets framed as scrappy indie hustle, but the back of envelope math tells a different story. Nearly a million in elite education (Brighton College, Mount Holyoke, NYU film school), a "low-budget" debut that pulled in grants from every major film institution plus Forest Whitaker as a producer, and a second feature she claims was self-financed on credit cards, except her production company had offshore entities tied to her steel-magnate father's name. The real cost of replicating her path is north of $1.5 million before you've shot a frame that matters. Zhao calls Hollywood's class filter "poorface," and she's exhibit A.
Evaluating Japan’s New Grand Strategy
Japan's 2022 National Security Strategy marks a decisive break from postwar pacifism, driven by China's military buildup, North Korea's provocations, and doubts about American reliability. The shift includes plans to double defense spending to 2% of GDP, acquire counterstrike capabilities (read: missiles that can hit back), and deepen ties with Australia, India, and European powers beyond the traditional U.S. alliance. Tokyo is betting it can deter Beijing without triggering an arms race or spooking neighbors still wary of Japanese power. Whether that gamble pays off depends on execution, budgets, and whether Washington actually shows up when it matters.
Cameras and Lenses Bartosz Ciechanowski
Bartosz Ciechanowski walks you through building a camera from scratch: starting with a grid of photodetectors in total darkness, then adding color filters, then enclosing the sensor in a box with a pinhole. The interactives are mesmerizing: you watch photons rain onto pixels, trace light rays bending through apertures, see why images flip upside-down and why corners go dark. By the time he's explaining the cos⁴(α) falloff law or why smaller pinholes sharpen the image but starve the sensor of light, you've already intuited it from dragging sliders around. This is how technical writing should work — visual, rigorous, and oddly satisfying to play with.
Russian Spy or Ukrainian Hero? The Strange Death of Denys Kiryeyev
Days into Russia's invasion, Ukrainian intelligence agents shot Denys Kiryeyev in the back of the head and dumped his body on a Kyiv sidewalk, calling him a Russian spy. Yet Ukraine's military intelligence chief insists Kiryeyev was a hero whose tips from Moscow contacts saved the capital, and Zelensky awarded him a posthumous medal. The banker had spent years straddling both worlds: managing assets for oligarchs with Kremlin ties, hunting with Russian generals in Crimea, then feeding invasion plans to Ukrainian intelligence and negotiating cease-fires on camera. His widow still doesn't know which version was true, and neither does anyone else who survived him.
Extras:
Edo imprisoned Japan's samurai elite, OneTaste's orgasmic meditation cult, Medici bypassed Christian usury bans, bitcoin miners pivot to AI, Russian ceasefire violations continue, €1bn manuscript Ponzi scheme, Bay Area hiking club for the laid off, San Francisco's 20-something A.I. boom, $25,000-a-day AI gurus, Kurdish militants abandoned by America, Adam Neumann fails up spectacularly, and Chinese firms save Western brands.