Questions and seniority, brain organoids, Scotland's Darien colony, IVF technology, looks-based discrimination, Chris Hohn's hedge fund, title insurance, Prince Paul of Romania, robo-callers and the Do Not Call list, and SharkNinja's gadget formula.
The Secret to Good Questions
By the time you reach the boardroom, your principal output is questions, but most organizations are terrible at them. Researchers analyzing Glassdoor interviews found candidates reject high-wage offers after softball questions, treating them as signals about colleague quality. "Boomerasking" (asking a question just to supply your own answer) makes you seem insincere, while inconsistent questions let bias creep in. The gold standard is "curveball questions" that are unpredictable but relevant, hard to prepare for, but impossible to dodge. Star analysts and analysts new to covering a firm ask the most curveballs, the first because of expertise, the second because they haven't absorbed conventional wisdom yet.
AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive
Biologists can take a skin sample, revert the cells to an embryonic state, and grow a brain organoid: a few million neurons that produce brain waves nearly identical to a premature baby's. At UC San Diego, Alysson Muotri zaps these organoids with electricity and watches them respond, remember, and anticipate signals. At Cortical Labs in Melbourne, researchers grew neurons on microchips and trained them to play Pong by rewarding correct moves with predictable pulses and punishing mistakes with chaos. The startup now offers neural computing hardware where living human neurons handle tasks remotely, aiming to replace silicon with self-repairing, energy-efficient biological matter that learns by minimizing surprise.
The Darien Scheme and Union with England
Scotland lost roughly a quarter of its liquid capital trying to plant a colony on the Isthmus of Darien in the 1690s. King William III and the English Parliament crushed the venture before it began, forbidding English subjects from investing and ordering colonial governors across the Americas to deny the Scots any aid. Twelve members of Clan Forbes subscribed between £100 and £1,000 each; one councillor died en route, and the 10th Laird of Tolquhon was arrested for debt when the scheme collapsed. Of 2,200 colonists sent in two waves, fewer than 300 returned alive, and the financial wreckage pushed Scotland directly toward the 1707 Union with England.
What’s next for IVF
IVF success rates haven't budged much in decades—even healthy embryos implant only 40% to 60% of the time, and nobody knows why. Researchers in Valencia have built a device that injects embryos directly into the uterine lining instead of leaving them to burrow on their own, while Columbia's STAR system uses AI to scan a million microscope images per hour hunting for viable sperm in near-empty samples. Conceivable has gone further, automating the entire process with robots that select eggs and sperm, fertilize them, and culture embryos (19 babies born so far). Meanwhile genetic screening has exploded—some US clinics now offer tests predicting traits from Alzheimer's risk to left-handedness, though most practitioners won't touch them.
Should We Do More to Fight Looks-Based Discrimination?
Lookism—discrimination based on unattractiveness—is real (pretty people earn roughly $140,000 more over a lifetime), but there's no organized movement against it because calling yourself or someone else ugly is too painful and complicated. A few jurisdictions ban height and weight discrimination, and some employers now use blind hiring, but the effects are unpredictable and appearance unfolds along a spectrum rather than in neat categories. Journalist Stephanie Fairyington's new book "Ugly" argues we suffer from what philosopher Miranda Fricker called epistemic injustice: lacking the language or social permission to name a harm that shapes our lives.
How Chris Hohn built the world’s most profitable hedge fund
Chris Hohn runs the world's most profitable hedge fund with half a dozen analysts, $77bn in just 15 positions, and an average holding period of nine years. TCI returned 2,924% after fees since inception by betting big on global monopolies with pricing power (railroads, toll roads, airports), most famously an $14bn position in GE Aerospace that's 18% of the entire fund. Hohn says there are maybe 200 investable companies in the world, a number shrinking as AI and climate change create new uncertainties. The fund is down 4.3% through April as AI advances challenge his portfolio and the Iran war hits airlines.
Title Insurance
The United States cannot definitively tell you who owns a piece of property. County recorders log transactions, not ownership, so title is inferred by replaying every deed and lien since some arbitrary starting point, blockchain-style. This creates genuine risk: an undisclosed out-of-state marriage can void a sale years later, because community property law doesn't care that no database recorded the wedding. Title insurance exists to backstop these edge cases that no amount of searching can eliminate. Meanwhile, for $300 a year, a land trust can keep your mortgage details out of the hundreds of data broker feeds that otherwise automatically ingest public property records.
The fugitive prince
Prince Paul of Romania spent his life trying to prove he was the rightful heir to a throne that no longer existed. His grandfather, King Carol II, fled Romania in 1940 with billions in treasure, but Paul's father was born out of a teenage elopement that Carol's family annulled, leaving "Lambrino" on the birth certificate instead of the royal name. After marrying Lia, a Melvin Belli ex-wife turned Oxford student, Paul moved to Bucharest in the 1990s and tried to reclaim the family fortune under new property laws. In 2006, a telecoms millionaire named Remus Truică offered millions upfront and a 50-50 split on whatever Paul recovered, backed by an Israeli billionaire who made risky deals in corrupt countries.
How Robo-callers wrecked the Do Not Call list
The Do Not Call Registry signed up 50 million people in three months and nearly killed traditional telemarketing. Then robo-callers arrived with technology that could blast a billion calls a year, and the math flipped: the FTC shuts down operations, collects million-dollar judgments, and the callers just shrug and restart under new shell companies. Mike Jones, who facilitated a billion robo-calls annually from his $25,000-a-month rental in Laguna Beach, showed up to his FTC deposition in 2015, admitted everything on the record, got hit with a $2.7 million penalty in 2017, and kept calling anyway. By 2017, monthly robo-call volume had jumped from 1 billion to 2.5 billion, and the registry's 230 million members were filing 19,000 complaints a day.
Sharkninja Gadget Empire
SharkNinja releases 25 gadgets a year by making every employee a guinea pig, testing prototypes on accountants and HR reps in a mock Walmart store at headquarters. The formula is simple: take premium appliance categories (Dyson hair dryers, Breville espresso machines), strip out the intimidation factor, add a TikTok-worthy gimmick (a facial device with a glowing cartridge full of your own pore gunk), and sell it for half the price. The Ninja Creami ice cream maker has a 62,000-member subreddit dedicated to recipes, the Slushi sold out 10 times with a 170,000-person global waitlist, and retailers now give SharkNinja shelf space without even seeing the product specs first.
Extras:
Philippines' offshoring industry, the city of Shantou, more on Executive Order 6102, the social dynamics of sorcery, hand making furniture, light and noise pollution, Neal's Yard cheese heist, quitting caffeine, awkward silences, the iron lung, the wedding sting, and the Jefferson bottles.