Pattern, Murdoch & Flu

I'm back after a few days of traveling, so we have a long list today. I highly recommend the Granta piece by Lescure; it is already on my Best of 2025 shortlist. It was surprising to see two major articles about the Murdoch family published in quick succession by The New York Times and The Atlantic. While you may not initially feel inclined to care, both are deeply reported and deserve recognition. Brandon Keim's piece on the bird flu is an eye-opener, shedding light on how much our food production practices may have contributed to its evolution.

Featured Reading

The Secret Pattern

Granta • Published on 2025-02-12 • ~3300 words
By Aube Rey Lescure

Aube Rey Lescure recounts a journey back to China after years of absence, the return to a homeland that feels both familiar and foreign in unexpected ways.

It’s here that I begin to sense that things have in fact changed. The future has arrived already, insidiously: amid the bustle of a provincial capital known for mountains, meadows, and an emergent hippie culture, markers of dystopian technology and global capitalism are everywhere, as omnipresent as they are in Shanghai. The barbecue and foldout chairs, along with tarps and rugs, are the product of a ‘camping glam’ trend surging this year on Chinese social media. The restaurant menus rely on QR codes to order and pay without interacting with any staff. Live-streamers amble around with high-end equipment, responding to comments surging on their phone screens. Even the tiniest convenience stores have Oatly.

Growing up Murdoch

The Atlantic • Published on 2025-02-14 • ~13750 words
By Mckay Coppins

Mckay Coppins reports on James Murdoch, presenting a detailed examination of his life and his complex relationship with his father, Rupert Murdoch, and the family's media empire. The intense sibling rivalry between James and Lachlan and Rupert's favoring of Lachlan as his successor are focal points. James also made efforts to distance himself from the family's conservative media outlets and establish his own identity. Did Rupert Murdoch's drive for dynastic control damage his family, leave behind strained relationships and unresolved conflicts?

I wanted to press him on this point—to suggest that it might not actually be normal for your father to conspire to destroy your career and place you in legal jeopardy in order to give your job to your older brother. But James surely knew all this. Maybe he just didn’t want to dwell on his father’s cruelty, or the fact that he’d never been the favorite. James wasn’t protecting Rupert, I realized. He was protecting himself.

In Rupert’s conception of the family empire, the empire always takes precedence over the family.

‘You’ve Blown a Hole in the Family’: Inside the Murdochs’ Succession Drama

New York Times • Published on 2025-02-14 • ~13700 words
By Jonathan MahlerJim Rutenberg

In this exploration of the Murdoch family's internal power struggles, Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg dive into the events surrounding Rupert Murdoch's attempts to secure his legacy. With over 3,000 pages of court documents available as a source, the authors illustrate a tale of betrayal, familial tensions, and a secretive plan to consolidate control within the empire.

This would be Rupert’s last deal, and it was in many ways his most important one. He had devoted his entire life to building this vast global media empire, and it had changed the course of history. But the messiness of his own personal life — and a family trust whose terms had been largely dictated by a spurned ex-wife — prevented him from controlling its destiny after he was gone. His legacy was under threat, not from a competitor but from his own family.

Emotions quickly boiled over at the special meeting of the trust. Liz, who was secretly taping the proceedings, accused her father and brother of “raping” the family company. “You think there’s going to be consensus with a gun to our head?” she said. “If you think that’s harmony, we must be in North Korea.”

The Unnatural History of Bird Flu

Nautilus • Published on 2025-02-12 • ~5050 words
By Brandon Keim

Brandon Keim explores the history of the H5N1 virus, tracing its roots from poultry farms in Guangdong, China, to its global spread and potential threats to human health. As the story unfolds, it reveals the interplay between agricultural practices and the evolution of the virus and asks questions about how our food choices may be shaping the future of infectious diseases.

Media coverage of H5N1 captures this urgency but tends to focus on the day-by-day—the latest “depopulation,” as mass exterminations at poultry facilities are known, the latest sick cows or dead cats, the latest mutations. Lost in the furor is a clear sense of where H5N1, and the class of influenzas to which it belongs, comes from: the evolutionary crucible of intensive animal production.

Recommended Reading

Breakfast for Eight Billion

The New Atlantis • Published on 2025-02-14 • ~3600 words
By Charles C. Mann

In the 1980s, a significant shift occurred in global food production, allowing the average person to access enough calories for the first time in history. Charles C. Mann explores how innovations from the Green Revolution, particularly advances in fertilization, irrigation, and genetics, transformed farming practices and reshaped our relationship with food.

… the Haber–Bosch process, as it is called, was arguably the most important technological development of the twentieth century, and one of the most consequential human inventions of any time. It made it possible to win “bread from air,” as the German physicist Max von Laue wrote in an obituary of Haber.

France today is famed for its great cuisine and splendid restaurants. But its people did not reach the level of 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day until the mid-1800s. And even as the French left famine in the rear-view mirror, starvation was still claiming hundreds of thousands of Irish, Scots, and Belgians. As late as the winter of 1944–45, the Netherlands suffered a crippling famine — the Hongerwinter. More than 20,000 people perished in just a few months. Food shortages plagued rural Spain and Italy until at least the 1950s.

‘Here Lives the Monster’s Brain’: The Man Who Exposed Switzerland’s Dirty Secrets

The Guardian • Published on 2025-02-13 • ~3850 words
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian writes about how Jean Ziegler has spent the past 60 years exposing how Switzerland enabled global wrongdoing.

Switzerland adopted a strategy of active obstruction, whether by adopting federal policies that precluded negotiations with other governments that might have held tax cheats accountable, by letting the Swiss banks “self-regulate”, or simply by refusing to crack down on the practice. The Swiss also benefited from a federal system that encouraged cantons to compete not only with foreign entities but with one another – and to provide clients with plenty of options.

For centuries, the Swiss had prided themselves on keeping blood and money apart: of keeping its bank vaults isolated from the upheavals of the outside world. In Ziegler, they spawned an iconoclastic figure who forced them to reckon with the moral cost. “Blood may not run down the walls of the UBS headquarters,” he told me one afternoon in June 2021. “But it’s as if it did: the relative wellbeing of Swiss people is financed by death, fear and famine. This is Ali Baba’s cave: the world’s haven. That’s unique to Switzerland.

Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate owner chose profits over safety

The Guardian • Published on 2025-02-13 • ~5700 words
By Emily Elena DugdaleHanisha Harjani

The Guardian investigates the safety practices of Match Group, the parent company of popular dating apps like Tinder and Hinge. Despite being aware of numerous reports of sexual assault by users, this piece argues that the company has often prioritized profits over the safety of its customers.

Banned Tinder users, including those reported for sexual assault, would easily rejoin or move to another Match Group dating app, all while keeping most of their key personal information exactly the same.

Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews’s profile.

If You Ever Stacked Cups In Gym Class, Blame My Dad

Defector • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~5400 words
By Kit Fox

In a nostalgic dive into the origins of cup stacking, Kit Fox tells the story of how his father turned a shipment of seemingly useless plastic cups into something that would find its way into gym classes across America.

The couple's future hinged on accomplishing what the world's second largest toy company could not: convincing thousands of kids that stacking these plastic cups in pre-determined patterns was … fun. More critically, the couple needed to convince the parents of those kids to actually buy these cups, despite not even being able to drink from them.

Please understand: I know this whole endeavor is silly, that it's worthy of your slight mockery and general patina of confusion. But also understand that my dad created a culture in which German coaches passed strategic tips to Australian competitors. Where Japanese teenagers became pen pals with suburban Texans. Where nerves collapsed faster than the cups. Where kids and adults shrieked with joy over millisecond improvements. Where tension and drama and friendship mingled with the clattering cacophony of sliding and tapping plastic (there really is no sound like the one at these competitions).

How the Moon became a place

Aeon • Published on 2025-02-13 • ~3200 words
By Danny Robb

Danny Robb traces how our perception of the moon evolved from a mythological entity to a real place that has been scientifically explored and mapped. He recounts through centuries of observation and technological advancements, revealing how our relationship with the Moon has shifted dramatically.

With the Moon now appearing more like a tangible place and potential destination every day, popular culture climbed on board. The novelist Jules Verne began describing trips to the Moon, and movies from the French film industry depicted a lunar landing.

Greek scholars applied mathematical analysis to the Moon, but they also began to theorise about physical mechanisms for the motions of the planets. To the philosopher Aristotle, the Moon was embedded in a giant sphere with the other planets and the stars. Earth sat at the centre of these nested spheres, which moved around Earth. These spheres were composed of a fifth element, aether, and they were incapable of any sort of change. Even if they were somehow worlds in themselves, in the Aristotelian model, the Moon and its sphere were an impenetrable barrier between our world and the celestial realm. The universe was literally divided into the sublunary and the superlunary.

In many countries, people breathe the cleanest air in centuries. What can the rest of the world learn from this?

Our World in Data • Published on 2025-02-17 • ~2450 words
By Hannah Ritchie

Hannah Ritchie shows that air quality in many countries has improved significantly over the years, with significant reductions in pollutants like sulfur dioxide. She argues that we can accelerate this process in the countries where it has not

… we could expect that all countries will go through this transition naturally, just like the UK and many other rich countries did. The problem is that this process took a long time: centuries, in fact. If it takes the rest of the world just as long, billions of people will be exposed to high levels of air pollution for most of their lives. Hundreds of millions will die prematurely due to air pollution.

Ley Lines and the Allure of Imposing Order on History's Chaos

Atlas Obscura • Published on 2025-02-12 • ~3250 words
By Colin Dickey

Colin Dickey explores ley lines, theorized as unseen lines connecting ancient sites, and their evolution from archaeological speculation to metaphysical importance. It traces the origins of the idea to Alfred Watkins' "The Old Straight Track" and its subsequent interpretations, capturing the imagination of both skeptics and believers alike.

The contemporary world, after all, is already gridded with lines—railway tracks, interstates, property lines, and the boundaries of towns, cities, counties and states—all of which are necessary to keep private property and capitalism functioning and running on schedule. To re-envision the world via ley lines is to argue for an alternative cartography in which these concerns are superseded by something more fundamental.

Jailed, Failed, Forgotten

London Review of Books • Published on 2025-02-13 • ~7350 words
By Dani Garavelli

Dani Garavelli writes about the systemic failures within the Scottish prison system through the stories of William Lindsay and Katie Allan, two young prisoners lost to suicide while incarcerated.

Everything the Allans uncovered about deaths in custody showed that these lives didn’t count: the length of time families had to wait before inquiries took place; the complacency of the SPS; the lack of any meaningful subsequent action. The main purpose of an FAI is to establish whether death could have been prevented and to identify measures that could prevent future deaths, yet in 90 per cent of the examined cases, the sheriff made no recommendations. And even if a sheriff does call for changes, the SPS is not legally obliged to carry them out.

Why are so many children and young people falling through the gaps? And why does the Scottish government keep talking up the benefits of a less punitive justice system while – along with England and Wales – jailing more people than any other country in Western Europe?

Artificial Cryosphere

London Review of Books • Published on 2025-02-12 • ~2850 words
By Bee Wilson

Bee Wilson reviews Nicola Twilley’s book “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves.” Refrigeration is a huge part of our lives, and this technology has reshaped not just our diets but also our relationship with food itself. For all the good it does, it also has impacts on flavor, nutrition and the environment.

The farm-to-tablers drew attention to the disconnect between eaters and farmers. Twilley’s well-researched project is subtly and importantly different. She shows that modern eaters are ignorant not just of farming but of the vast and wintry logistics that bring farm produce to our plates and determine the form and content of much of our diets.

During the ten years she was working on this book, people used to ask Twilley whether she thought they should get rid of their fridges. To which her answer was: of course not. And yet, for every virtue, refrigeration has a corresponding vice. On the plus side is the astonishing abundance of fresh and nutritious produce now available to us. The negative is that none of it is quite as nutritious as it seems. Spinach loses three-quarters of its vitamin C after a week spent stored in plastic in the fridge. It may still look and smell OK – which is a marvel in itself – but it is not fresh in the sense that newly picked spinach is.

Murder in the Blue Mountains

Toronto Life • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~6500 words
By Luc Rinaldi

Ashley and James Schwalm had what seemed like a fairy tale life—two wonderful children, fulfilling careers and a gorgeous home close to the private ski club where they’d fallen in love. Then Ashley’s remains turned up in a burned-out car at the bottom of a ditch, and all signs pointed to her husband.

James Schwalm’s wife, in his eyes, had ruined his life and shattered the sterling reputation he enjoyed in their tight-knit community. Perhaps, in a noxious fog of hatred, egomania and vengefulness, he reached the gruesome conclusion that murder was a justifiable retaliation for infidelity. Or maybe his primary motivation was simply greed. There were two insurance policies on Ashley’s life, one that would leave $250,000 to the kids and another that would leave $1 million to him. If Ashley were to die, James could keep the house and custody of the kids. He’d be seven figures richer, his community would shower him with sympathy and he’d be free, in time, to pursue another romance. He just had to make it look like an accident.

What a $2 Million Per Dose Gene Therapy Reveals About Drug Pricing

ProPublica • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~5850 words
By Robin Fields

Robin Fields reports on Zolgensma, a groundbreaking gene therapy priced at over $2 million per dose. The drug’s early development was funded by taxpayers and small charities, but in the end, executives, VCs, and Novartis reaped the profits.

The story of Zolgensma lays bare a confounding reality about modern drug development, in which revolutionary new treatments are becoming available only to be priced out of reach for many. It’s a story that upends commonly held conceptions that high drug prices reflect huge industry investments in innovation. Most of all, it’s a story that prompts, again and again, an increasingly urgent question: Do medical advances really have to be this expensive?

Wall Street analysts predicted Novartis’ new prize drug would be the first therapy to smash the million-dollar-a-dose mark. The Swiss colossus crafted a sophisticated campaign to justify more than double that amount, enlisting a team of respected academics, data-modelers and pricing strategists to help make its case.

What MAHA’s crusade against seed oils reveals about flaws in America’s food system

STAT • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~2850 words
By Sarah Todd

Sarah Todd argues that the rising skepticism about seed oils is more than a dietary debate; it reflects deeper issues with America's food system. The scientific consensus is that there is no clear evidence seed oils are harmful to health. The alternatives are not necessarily healthier, but there is profit to be made either way.

But the seed oil backlash is about more than what fats get used in our packaged snacks and veggie stir-fries. Fears about the oils have taken root amid rising concerns about possible links between industrial food processes and chronic disease and a public that’s grown more distrustful about everything from how their food is produced to the government’s ability to ensure its safety. Americans are increasingly convinced that something — possibly a lot of things — in their food is making them sick, and that neither government policies nor the food industry are doing enough to look out for them. That vacuum has given more sway to health-conscious influencers and advocates who question mainstream nutrition advice. And for businesses hawking seed oil alternatives like beef tallow or avocado-oil chips, there’s also a lot of potential for profit.

The future of nutrition literacy may rely on teaching people to bring a healthy skepticism to what they hear on social media, too, and to anyone who claims with one hundred percent certainty that there’s a single villain — whether seed oils, dairy, gluten, or sugar — in American diets. A tenet of responsible public health messaging, after all, involves admitting room for doubt.