Last week, we shared a preview of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less, a guide to clear communication by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz. This week, we’re sharing an excerpt of Ed Latimore’s upcoming debut, Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business,* *a raw and honest story about turning pain into purpose.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

How I practice at what I do

Tyler Cowen · Marginal Revolution

After economist and writer Tyler Cowen’s viral call for knowledge workers to train like athletes, he followed up with a list of ways he practices. Among them: "I do serious reading every day" and "I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes. I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate... For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list."

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How Smartphones Are Breeding a New Kind of Inequality

Mary Harrington · The New York Times

This brief but data-rich insight from journalist Mary Harrington raises an unsettling possibility: screen time and literacy may be diverging along class lines. "Poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones — in one 2019 study, about two hours more per day for U.S. tweens and teens whose families made less than $35,000 per year, compared with peers whose household incomes exceeded $100,000. Research indicates that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills and executive function... In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures."

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Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs

Geoffrey Litt · Geoffreylitt.com

Drawing on a 1992 talk by researcher Mark Weiser, Geoffrey Litt revisits Weiser’s metaphor of the AI copilot and extends it using the Head-Up Display (HUD) to illustrate an alternative interface. "The agentic option is a ‘copilot’ — a virtual human who you talk with to get help flying the plane. If you’re about to run into another plane it might yell at you ‘collision, go right and down!’ Weiser offered a different option: design the cockpit so that the human pilot is naturally aware of their surroundings. In his words: ‘You’ll no more run into another airplane than you would try to walk through a wall.’"

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Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

I Gave Every iPhone USB-C

Exploring the Simulation

Hardware consultant and hacker Ken Pillonel details his quest to create the ultimate iPhone case for holdout users: one with a built-in adapter that converts the Lightning port to USB-C—without sacrificing fast charging. "When I came up with my original hack in 2021, it wasn’t perfect. Basically, if you plug the cable in one way, the fast-charging signals could pass through. But if you flip the cable over, it will force the phone to charge at 5 volts. Since the AirPods are designed by Apple to only use 5 volts anyway, it wasn’t an issue, and I was able to produce all those adapters for them. But for the iPhone, we need to fix that."

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Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

What are large language models actually doing?

Alex Prompter

God of Prompt co-founder Alex Prompter distills the Foundations of Large Language Models textbook into a few simple takeaways. "This is all possible because of the way these models are trained: predict the next word over and over until they internalize language structure, reasoning patterns, and world knowledge. it’s not magic. it’s scale."

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Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Protein Guide

Arnold’s Pump Club

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new Maui-Nui venison-sponsored guide shatters protein myths, offering practical, research-backed advice to help everyone—from bodybuilders to aging loved ones—improve their health and longevity. "The lesson? If you’re newer to lifting, aim for 0.6 to 1 gram per pound of goal body weight. That’s your foundation. If you’re an experienced, consistent, hard-training lifter? Going above 1g/lb and toward 1.1-1.2g/lb or beyond-can continue to deliver results."

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Hand-picked book of the week

Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business

Ed Latimore

"We’ve all got a choice. We can get better at fighting or worse at life."

In Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, former heavyweight boxer Ed Latimore transforms a painful childhood marked by violence, addiction, and street fights into a powerful story of resilience. With honesty and humor, Ed traces his journey from Pittsburgh’s public housing projects to signing with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Sports, showing how boxing gave him the discipline to confront trauma and alcoholism.

"I’ve always made a lot of jokes about drugs and the ghetto. Seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine once wrote, ‘Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.’ My sense of humor is how I cope with the residual trauma from my childhood. I figure I can either laugh a little or cry a lot. I choose to laugh."

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Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Wild Bare Thoughts

Although she refuses to limit herself to a niche, Stepfanie Tyler consistently delivers thoughtful reflections on her Substack—ranging from systems-thinking and techno-optimism to art, memory, solitude, and giant dogs. From Taste Is the New Intelligence: "Every time you read something thoughtful instead of watching some random show Netflix just recommended, you’re voting for your future self. Every time you build a library instead of a wishlist, you’re telling your mind what it’s allowed to prioritize. Taste is how you teach the world to treat your attention."