Cultures & Dot Com

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There are no pure cultures

Aeon • 10 Jan 2025 • ~4300 words

All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history.

This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times. And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown. But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world. Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past. Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale, which begins much, much earlier – long before the arrival of international supply chains, ocean-going sailing ships, and continent-spanning silk roads. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong?

My uncle got rich in the dot com bubble

User Mag • 7 Jan 2025 • ~4500 words

Writer Colette Shade examines the frenzy of the early internet and San Francisco culture at the turn of the millennium. This is a book excerpt, but it stands well on its own.

As the dot-com bubble inflated, I spent more and more time online. Back then, with dial-up, you actually had to log on. I’m going online, people would say. I’m surfing the web. And then you would sit, as I had, through that thirty-second cacophony. If a parent or a sibling picked up the phone, you’d be immediately booted off. “Hang up!” you’d yell. “I’m on the internet!”

Recommended Articles

The wealth whisperers who save super-rich families from themselves

The Economist • 10 Jan 2025 • ~3500 words • Archive Link

A new caste of consultants is helping to avoid “Succession”-style crises.

Over the next 20 years, younger generations are set to inherit $72 trillion from their baby-boomer parents and grandparents, according to Cerulli, a financial-services consultancy. For the super-rich, it is a process fraught with risk, said Dominic Samuelson, chief executive of Campden Wealth, a British company that advises moneyed families. Such families can go from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” in three generations, as the saying goes. Siblings feud, an heir succumbs to addiction, an errant child squanders the fortune – and the family “falls down”, as Samuelson put it.

Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine?

The New Yorker • 10 Jan 2025 • ~5250 words • Archive Link

A group of sociologists found that few Russians were steadfast supporters of the war. Most had something more complicated to say.

“A few years ago, if someone had said they were going to call someone because I’d criticized Putin, it would have been very odd,” Marina told me. “I’d have laughed. Whereas, this time, it really scared me.” Marina, who is still in Russia as of this writing, has developed a very keen sense of what is allowed and what can get you in trouble. Being detained at a protest is no big deal, unless it happens three times in one year—then you could be imprisoned. Marina is a soft-spoken academic, but she has been detained twice at anti-government protests: once in 2022, for a night, and another time last year, when she spent ten days in jail. “They can’t get me for ‘fakes,’ ” she said, referring to the law against “fake information” which has frequently been used to jail war opponents, “because I’m very careful about what I post on social media. But ‘promoting terrorism’—that one is very elastic.”

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

New York Times • 10 Jan 2025 • ~6950 words

Shujun Wang seemed to be a Chinese democracy activist, but an F.B.I. investigation showed just how far China will go to repress citizens abroad.

At his trial, Wang struck me as an improbable spy. In manner and appearance, he seemed more like an absent-minded academic than someone steeped in spycraft. During a break on the second day, just as the prosecution was getting ready to lay out its evidence, I saw Wang emerge from the courtroom and move down the hall with an urgency that suggested a full bladder. A little later, I found him standing in front of the restroom door, looking befuddled, probably because the sign next to it was obscure. Speaking in barely understandable English, he asked me where the restroom was. I pointed him to the door. Later, returning to the courtroom, he gave me a wide smile and said, with almost exaggerated courtesy: “Thank you, my friend!” The proceedings resumed, and I sat down to hear the prosecution make its case.

A New Suburban Politics

Dissent Magazine • 9 Jan 2025 • ~4250 words

A more capacious suburban politics—beyond the myth of the white, affluent enclave—is fundamental to addressing the problems of racial segregation and economic inequality that shape American life.

[suburbs] remain contested political terrain and symbols of the major class realignments changing the parties and nation as a whole. Rather than either celebrating or decrying their homogeneity, we must first recognize their heterogeneity—a step toward developing policies around housing, education, poverty, and criminal justice that can better address the varied lived realities of the people who inhabit these spaces.

How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days

The Atlantic • 8 Jan 2025 • ~4700 words • Archive Link

He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.

But given that Social Democrats and Communists collectively commanded 221 seats, or roughly 38 percent, of the 584-seat Reichstag, the two-thirds vote Hitler needed was a mathematical impossibility. “Now if one were to ban the Communist Party and annul their votes,” Hitler proposed, “it would be possible to reach a Reichstag majority.”

Has The Tennis Ball Gotten Worse?

Defector • 9 Jan 2025 • ~3150 words

Giri Nathan writes about the complaints of players when it comes to tennis balls used in tournaments, the impact of the pandemic on ball production, and the ongoing debate over the future of the sport's equipment.

Complaints about the tennis ball are a staple of both the men's and women's tours, though the exact nature of the complaint has changed over time. The type of ball varies between tournaments, which is a common source of consternation. Before the 2022 U.S. Open, eventual champion Iga Swiatek said the balls used were "horrible," and wondered why the women couldn't use the fluffier "extra duty" Wilson balls used by the men at that tournament. Ashleigh Barty, who won three different majors before retiring suddenly at age 25, never figured out the U.S. Open. Her coach Craig Tyzzer once said—somewhat bizarrely on the day of her Australian Open title—that Barty would never win the U.S. Open unless they changed the ball.

Bad Beef

Public Books • 9 Jan 2025 • ~3750 words

Austin McCoy writes about the rap beef, and how they profit record labels and corporations.

As Shakur himself had begun to articulate, however, the Death Row and Bad Boy rivalry demonstrated the profitability of rap beef. It sold records and magazines, so much so that some rappers like KRS-One accused music media outlets, like The Source and Vibe, of escalating tensions. While Shakur’s animosity seemed too personal and combustible to entirely blame magazines for the beef’s escalation, it is not unreasonable to suggest that magazines profited from their coverage. According to Charnas, The Source overtook Rolling Stone as the leading magazine in the US amid the rivalry, while Vibe’s circulation increased to 450,000 copies in 1997.

The House on West Clay Street

Curbed • 9 Jan 2025 • ~6950 words

Tabatha Pope thought she’d finally found an affordable place to live. It was the beginning of a nightmare.

Pope took a series of pictures with her phone, her hands shaking, and hurried back around the house and into her apartment. She locked the door and sat against it holding her phone. She tried to second-guess what she’d seen. She’d found the blood, the knife, and all the rest months ago. But in the intervening time, she’d come to see Merritt and Brown as sympathetic people — if not normal, they were certainly human.