The return of Serena Williams to Wimbledon’s courts has raised the question of whether GLP-1s are performance-enhancing drugs. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Luyten on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Let? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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The AirPods Effect • The Escape

Markham Heid:

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The popularity of AirPods is nothing new. But as the functionality of our tech-connected ear gear has improved — and as podcasts have exploded into one of the most consumed forms of media in America — earphones have assumed a bigger role in our daily lives.

By some market estimates, 44% of Americans use Bluetooth or wireless earphones, and an additional 24% use something wired. I couldn’t find good data on the percentage of people who regularly wear earphones as they go about their daily lives. But during my recent trips to Michigan and Florida, I felt like half the people around me in public had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.

There is disappointingly little peer-reviewed research on the effects earphones have on our daily lives and interactions. But the evidence we do have suggests that while AirPods and similar technologies do some wonderful things for us, they also subtly influence our beliefs, reinforce our insecurities, and push us farther apart.

During the pre-smartphone era of iPods and other portable music devices, a small study of college students found that those who were heavy users of headphones experienced higher levels of social isolation and loneliness.

More than 15 years later, in 2021, a survey conducted by the audio technology company Jabra came to similar conclusions. Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. It also makes people less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone new. Many of those interviewed for the survey said they wore headphones in part to avoid having to talk to other people.

This habit of using headphones to dodge uncomfortable interactions may be especially common among younger adults, for whom social unease and feelings of isolation are well-documented problems that have become more common in recent decades.

“I believe human interaction is fading, largely in part to the constant usage of AirPods or other forms of headphones,” wrote Eva Long, a student at Liberty University in Virginia, in a 2025 opinion piece for her school’s newspaper, The Liberty Champion.

“No one talks on the bus. No one greets the barista. Even in class, students are choosing to listen to music instead of their professors,” Long wrote. “When passing someone I know who has AirPods in their ears, it’s difficult to catch their attention unless we make direct eye contact. This lack of engagement is discouraging, and it makes spontaneous social connections less likely.”

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Of course it could be that the socially isolated people tend to use headphones, but the general point is worth making: the more technology helps you ignore people, the more you will ignore people.
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On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake • The Guardian

Olivia Lee and Juliette Garside:

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Rachel Lowe was hired in 2012, to help advise startups. When she arrived at the Ariadne offices, she says she found herself entering “a temple to Julie”: framed pictures of Meyer lined the walls. While the boss looked the part, Lowe says the organisation felt chaotic. “Everything was just an absolute mess,” she recalls. “There were just a lot of young people who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

Meyer, says Lowe, had a tendency to explode with rage at staff: “I knew whether Julie was in the office just through feeling something in the air … She ruled by fear.” Towards her, however, Lowe says Meyer was sweetness and light. At least, at first.

After a few months without problems, Lowe says Meyer began making excuses for not paying her invoices, eventually accusing Lowe of poor performance. Lowe brought a legal claim against her. The judge ruled in Lowe’s favour and awarded her approximately £26,000 plus interest and costs. By then, multiple staff and suppliers were also claiming to have not been paid. A PR agency sued for about £76,000, and settled out of court.

Writing anonymously on the recruitment website Glassdoor, a former employee claimed Meyer would sometimes hide from her creditors. “Once, when a supplier came to the office demanding payment, she snuck out down the fire escape.” (Meyer has previously said of the Glassdoor reviews: “There are a lot of people much more important than me who get written up on anonymous websites. Comes with the territory.”)

By the summer of 2017, Ariadne could no longer afford the rent on its offices. The staff were sent to work from home.

So where did it all go wrong? It seems the vision never quite matched the reality.

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To say the least. This is a great investigative piece. The money around the dot-com boom really did bring some characters to the surface who would probably have been better left troubling the HR desks of local leisure centres.
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Are GLP-1s performance-enhancing drugs? • The Atlantic

Nicholas Florko:

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The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sets rules adopted by most international sporting leagues, has said that it is keeping a close eye on whether GLP-1s are being abused; for now, athletes are free to take them. (A Ro spokesperson [for the company making the GLP-1 drug Serena Williams is taking] told me that “any patient who receives a GLP-1 prescription through Ro has been determined to be clinically eligible for that treatment by a licensed medical provider.”)

But experts are divided over whether GLP-1s have the potential to improve athleticism. “I can’t see that there would be much of an advantage at all to using these substances in an athlete,” Thomas Hudzik, a pharmaceutical consultant who has served on the advisory group that recommends what drugs WADA should ban, told me. Meanwhile, Lars Engebretsen, the head of WADA’s health, medical, and research committee, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he believes the drugs should be banned, but mostly because they could exacerbate eating disorders.

Opinions diverge because no studies have yet tested these drugs in elite athletes. Williams’s return to tennis—which will continue with a doubles appearance alongside her sister Venus at Wimbledon—is one of the first opportunities, as far as we know, to see how an elite athlete performs after taking a GLP-1. So far, the results have been uneven: She won with Mboko at the Queen’s Club, but lost her first doubles match at the Berlin Open this week. Doubles also demands less of athletes than a singles match does, so Williams’s full abilities have not yet been tested in competition. (Tennis fans are eager to know if Williams will get a wild-card singles spot at Wimbledon too. [Overspill update: she will play singles.]) “The jury is out in terms of endurance, stamina,” Rick Macci, who trained Williams during her childhood, told me.

Being trim can be an advantage in some sports. A lighter frame can reduce the amount of effort needed for, say, climbing, running, or gymnastics. And weight is built into the structure of other sports. Wrestlers, for example, must weigh in to qualify for their matches. The popular strategy is to get just under the maximum weight for a given class—a process that GLP-1s might make easier. “It makes perfect sense in weight-category sports,” John Hawley, the director of Australian Catholic University’s Centre for Human Metabolism and Performance, told me via email.

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The former No.1 tennis player Andy Roddick says that if he intended to start playing competitively again (he doesn’t) he’d go straight onto a GLP-1 to shed the weight. But – I’d observe – that’s just to get going; once you’re at a competitive weight, you probably don’t want to stay on something that effectively makes you starve yourself.
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The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed • Wired via Ars Technica

Matt Burgess, Maddy Varner, May Bulman and Gabriel Geiger:

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Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are—to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers.

An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios.

The findings also come as the second Trump administration and governments around the world increasingly adopt anti-migrant policies while spending billions on surveillance technology that is often deployed against vulnerable people who have little knowledge of its use, how it works, or ways they can challenge it.

The leaked Home Office document obtained by Lighthouse Reports largely details the “best” performing of seven facial age estimation algorithms that the department tested last year, although it does not directly name the companies behind them. The report found that the system performed significantly worse when it was used to estimate the ages of Sub-Saharan Africans compared to other groups. Sub-Saharan Africans are the largest group of migrants entering the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats in recent years, and had more age assessments raised in 2025 than cohorts from other regions, according to Home Office data. For female Sub-Saharan Africans, the age that the system guessed was off by an average of 4.6 years, meaning that a 13.5-year-old girl could be assessed as an 18-year-old adult.

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I really don’t think a 13-year-old is going to be mistaken for an 18-year-old; that’s just playing with numbers rather than reality. It might mean a 16yo being taken for a 20yo., which would be more problematic.
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The secret cause of the Industrial Revolution • Works In Progress

Ben Southwood:

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Spanish output per capita was flat for half a millenium between 1300 and 1800. Other areas saw temporary bursts of growth, followed by stagnation or reversion: Swedish and Portuguese incomes were lower in 1800 than in 1550, and the Italian efflorescence during the Renaissance was followed by steady decline for centuries. Even the Dutch golden age of 1500 to 1680, which saw the Netherlands buck the European trend with a large majority of its population working in industry or commerce and living in towns, was followed by more than a century of relative stagnation.

Property ownership was so fragmented that nobody investing in improvements could expect to make a return. Splintered ownership of farmland discouraged the adoption of new crops and rotations. Rigid inheritance rules made it prohibitively difficult to invest in improvements to land or infrastructure. Roads were bad because nobody took responsibility for them, hindering the transportation of manure for fertilizer and preventing the trade that would allow different areas to specialize in different crops. Agricultural yields were so low that nearly everybody had to work to produce food instead of in other industries like mining or manufacturing.

Many European states tried to solve these problems, and nearly all failed. The reason was usually the same: monarchs depended on the support of landowning aristocrats and clergy, and those landowners had no confidence that reforms would leave them better off.

In 1746, Spain’s King Fernando VI tried to replace his country’s complex tax system with a single income tax to fund public investment, but was blocked by nobles, the church, and municipal oligarchies. In 1776, French Minister of State Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to liberalize the property system and replace the patchwork of taxes with a single land value tax, but the Parlement of Paris refused to register his reform edict. In 1781, Austrian Emperor Joseph II abolished formal serfdom, but ex-serfs remained effectively bound until 1848, since the crown enforced landlords’ prerogatives.

Only one country succeeded in modernizing its property rights in this period: England. The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners. One might expect this to have produced an oligarchy that jealously guarded its privileges. But the landowners, precisely because they were empowered, did something their continental counterparts could not. They dismantled the fossilized property arrangements that had blocked development elsewhere, and in doing so, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

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Ta-daa!
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Harari vs. Henrich • In Due Course

Joseph Heath:

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Human beings have four distinct qualities (traits, capabilities, behaviours, etc.) that make us quite different from other animals. These are fairly obvious, but there is unfortunately an entire subgenre of academic pedantry that involves challenging items on the list, saying “other animals do that too!” because there are of course similar capabilities to be found elsewhere.* So in the list below I have added the qualifications needed to disarm these objections and pick out what is absolutely distinctive about humans.

1. Intelligence. Humans possess superior intelligence, not just with respect to instrumental tasks, but also in the ability to engage in mathematical, hypothetical/counterfactual, and logical reasoning.

2. Language. Humans employ complex grammatical speech, with propositional differentiation providing context-independent representation of states of affairs.

3. Cooperation. Humans exhibit a distinctive form of ultrasociality, involving complex cooperation among large groups of genetically unrelated individuals.

4. Culture. Humans engage in domain-general transmission of learned behaviours, producing a large body of cultural artifacts and knowledge that exhibits cumulative improvement over time.

What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved. At some level they must have been adaptive, but nobody really understands specifically why or how any of it was adaptive. On the other hand, we know a great deal about how it could not have evolved, because so many bad theories have been proposed over the years, which have not stood up to careful scrutiny. Typically they start out as speculative theories, until someone comes along and says “show me a model of how that could have evolved,” and someone takes the bait, starts building a model… and then realizes that it couldn’t have evolved that way. Indeed, it has turned out to be so difficult to produce an evolutionary model that could plausibly explain any the items on the above list that formal modelling has been where the most interesting action has occurred over the past several decades of research.

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This is not short, but it’s fascinating: what order did, or could, those characteristics evolve?
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Preliminary thoughts on the Midjourney scanner • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist rather than a radiologist, but still doesn’t think the Midjourney ultrasound scanner announced last week is a great idea:

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Ultrasound is great, but it can’t penetrate bone or air. Many things doctors want to look at involve bone or air in some way. For example, the brain is behind the skull, which is a bone. The bowels are full of air. The lungs are super full of air. This limits ultrasound to the remainder – especially parts of the digestive, endocrine, and vascular systems, and superficial tissue like fat and muscle.

(it’s actually worse than this. Normal ultrasound can be used to image certain organs like the heart or prostate, but only via the technician carefully angling the probe. Midjourney hasn’t given details, but most likely their Scanner won’t be able to match this level of precision, so the heart, prostate, and some other usually-ultrasound-compatible organs will be outside its reach.)

Most MRIs or CTs involve one of the organs ultrasound can’t reach (this would be one reason doctors might do an MRI or CT, instead of just using ultrasound). In other cases, you don’t know what organ you’re looking for, and you want to be able to see everything (for example, if you’re scanning for cancer metastases, you can’t leave the brain and bowels out of the scan!) So this technology can’t replace most MRI or CT.

What about replacing ordinary ultrasound? One of the big advantages of ordinary ultrasound is that it’s a cheap machine you can keep on a cart and connect to a patient who’s lying in a hospital bed. Even though it might work better to put the patient in a giant water-filled tank surrounded by hundreds of ultrasound machines, if you tell your hospital orderlies “please transport this frail 90-year old to my giant water-filled tank, and lower them in slowly” they will stab you with your own scalpel. So this would need to be much better than ordinary ultrasound to capture even a fraction of these use cases. But ordinary ultrasound is already pretty good, this technology is untested, and it will be hard for it to be that much better.

Aren’t there a few edge cases that are poorly-served by existing modalities and ordinary ultrasound? Yes – the classic one is certain types of breast cancer, which don’t show up well on mammography against dense breast tissue, and require too much of a search for ordinary ultrasound.

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Another example is from South Korea, where the adoption of intensive monitoring for thyroid cancer detected lots of possible thyroid conditions which were investigated at great expense and trouble for the patients, but had no effect on mortality from thyroid cancer.
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Here’s how Russia’s nuclear-powered ‘Skyfall’ missile works • NPR

Geoff Brumfiel and Connie Hanzhang Jin:

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According to Russian and Western sources, the new weapon, known in Russian as Burevestnik and by NATO as Skyfall, was powered by a small nuclear reactor. Few other details were forthcoming.

In this image made from video provided by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, Russia’s new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is test launched at an unspecified location in Russia.

Now, two MIT researchers have published an analysis that sheds fresh light on how the nuclear-powered missile actually worked. If they are correct, the October flight test marks the first time a nuclear-powered aircraft has ever flown. It would also suggest the opening of an extraordinarily dangerous new chapter in the 21st century’s simmering arms race.

…If Hecla is correct, then Burevestnik is the first aircraft ever built and flown using nuclear power. It’s also incredibly problematic, said Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at Middlebury College who specializes in studying rockets and missiles and was not affiliated with the MIT study.

“This thing is an environmental nightmare,” Lewis said. In addition, the reactor poses a huge risk to members of the military who might be required to handle it. “Just the question of how you safely load one of these things is, I think, really pretty challenging,” he said.

In 2019, an accident off the Russian coast killed several Russian nuclear personnel. Shortly thereafter, a spike in radioactivity was detected nearby. It’s now widely believed the accident was the result of a Russian team attempting to recover a prototype Burevestnik reactor. Hecla said it’s possible that the reactor restarted as it was being hauled from the bottom of the sea, sparking an explosion.

Given all the problems, both real and potential, associated with Burevestnik, Hecla questions why the Russians developed it at all. He notes that although its range is likely significantly longer than that of a conventional cruise missile, that doesn’t mean it’s particularly hard to intercept.

“It’s not a game-changing idea by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “We are able to routinely shoot down cruise missiles today, and there is no reason to think this will be particularly more difficult to do.”

Moreover, Russia has said that Burevestnik will only be used with a nuclear weapon as its warhead. A conventional warhead would likely be heavier, Lewis noted, and the reactor would still end up spreading lethal radiation over a significant area where the missile strikes. Given all that, “I can’t see the Russians wasting one to deliver a few hundred pounds of explosives,” he said.

Put it all together, and the weapon appears to be “kind of useless,” Lewis said.

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So is it a dangerous new chapter, or kind of useless? It’s unclear from the analysis quite what risk this would pose from radiation output.
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California ‘billionaire tax’ makes ballot despite opposition from tech moguls • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr:

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The California Billionaire Tax Act, colloquially known as the billionaire tax, would levy a one-time 5% tax on any California resident worth more than $1bn. The proposal is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) as a means of funding California’s strained healthcare, food assistance and education programs.

The proposal has become one of the state’s biggest political flashpoints. As it gained popular momentum throughout the year, it’s also prompted prominent billionaires, such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, to make moves to cut ties with the state and Newsom vowing to block it from going to a vote. Although it has gained enough signatures for the ballot, the coalition backing the measure has until 25 June to decide whether to move forward or potentially strike a deal.

While the union that floated the proposal has framed it as a way of getting the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, many of the state’s tech elites have condemned the tax and spent millions attempting to crush it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent at least $82m alone on efforts to fight the tax and has relocated just over the California border to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

The Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and the DoorDash CEO, Tony Xu, are among other tech moguls who have donated millions to oppose the tax. California has the most billionaires out of any state – more than 200 – many of whom have increased their wealth in recent years amid the AI boom.

Notably, Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO of Nvidia, has said he’s fine with the proposed tax and that he chose to live in Silicon Valley. During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April, he said: “I say to everybody: ‘Move to California. Don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”

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“We’ve given millions to stop this tax that would cost us millions”. Makes some sort of sense, perhaps.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified