Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Down the Hatch

Fergus McCullough reviews the book Drink? The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health and comes away with sobering conclusions. Alcohol is one of the top five causes of death and disease in Europe. It exacerbates mental health problems and anxiety. In England alone, 350,000 hospital admissions are attributable to alcohol each year. But there is more:

What I didn’t realise before, though, is how poorly evidenced the beneficial effects of alcohol are. Looking at the available studies, Nutt writes that the positive effect on cardiovascular health has never been definitely proven (i.e. beyond mere association), and even if there is a small positive effect, the optimal level of consumption would be around one unit a day. The benefits don’t outweigh all the other risks.

2. Over-Brewed

Jason Diamond’s 2500-word rant about the decline of coffee goes down smoothly. He concedes that Starbucks raised the bar. And now everywhere, you have to settle for disappointment:

We hit peak coffee at some point in the last decade. You have countless choices when you go to the grocery store in terms of the beans you can buy. And the truth is that making coffee at home is really the way to go and this argument isn’t about that coffee. Instead, it’s about how everywhere you go now offers that “good” coffee and it costs anywhere from three to six dollars, maybe more. And the part that’s more offensive than the price is that a lot of times it isn’t good.

3. Remarkable Man

Was John Train the world’s most interesting man? The philanthropist, who died this month, was a Wall Street titan, a biographer of Warren Buffet, a founder of the literary journal The Paris Review, an expert in oriental rugs, a historian of olive trees, a leading organizer of Afghanistan relief, and a dollar-a-year consultant for the Pentagon and CIA. But perhaps his most memorable habit, writes Philip Terzian, was collecting anecdotes about people with funny names:

Best of all, he was also the compiler of Remarkable Names of Real People (1977), the culmination of a lifelong delight in oddball monikers that began with his discovery, as a Harvard undergraduate, of an individual named Katz Meow.

Train’s remarkable books, listed here, form a library of fascinating topics.

4. Winter Is Coming

New York’s interview with the writers behind the indispensable business substack, Doomberg, go full negative on the energy outlook for Europe. They don’t flinch: the winter will be cold in Berlin:

You can’t print molecules. You can’t print energy. If you head into the winter without enough energy — and because of Putin’s decisions, Europe almost certainly will — and then you also have a very sloppy, guaranteed-not-to-work rationing mechanism, you could have chaos. And that’s our main concern. We’d argue we’re kind of already there. What we’re experiencing today — bailouts by the hundreds of billion — electricity prices up by a factor of 14 or 15 before coming down by a third and everybody cheering … this is Weimar-like stuff. If even just three months ago we had said this was going to happen, we would have been dismissed, and I would say correctly, as alarmists

5. Checkmated

The cheating scandal rocking the chess world has introduced a new wrinkle in understanding how AI will change sports. World champion Magnus Carlson has now publicly accused Hans Niemann of consulting a chess engine during an online match. Yet as Polygonexplains, at the pinnacle of the game, cheating is hard “because high-level chess players already know most optimal moves.” The real impact of AI in chess, it seems, is not coming up with a winning move, but how merely the inkling that your opponent might be cheating messes with your psychology:

Even the perception that someone might be cheating changes how an opponent plays. Chess engines like Stockfish will suggest moves that seem out of the ordinary for a human player, and playing against someone that you perceive to be assisted by AI means that you question why an unforeseen or visibly bad move has been made.

Carlson’s public letter on the scandal is here.

6. Death in Japan

The funeral of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, more than 10 weeks after his assassination, created national furor and division in Japan. Some ascribe the rancor to partisan politics. But Spencer Cohen, writing in Foreign Policy, offers a different analysis: the assassination was merely the most recent evidence of growing Japanese social dysfunction:

There is another way to see the shooting: as a symptom of decline, of collapse. As 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, the suspect, was one of several actors in recent violent attacks that at first glance appear disconnected and one-offs. Last month, Tomohiro Kato was executed at the age of 39 by the Japanese government—the first execution since December 2021—for a brutal killing in 2008, when he drove his car into a crowd .... In 2019, Ryuichi Iwasaki, a 51-year-old unemployed man who lived with his family, was armed with a knife and approached children waiting at a bus stop, killing two people and himself and injuring more than a dozen others. That same year, Shinji Aoba, a 41-year-old, set an animation studio in Kyoto alight, killing 36.

Websites Worth Reading

Doomberg: Business pattern recognition substack

Manifold Markets: Odds on every question

Who Owns Which Car: Guide to car brands

Feeds We Follow

@PitchingNinja: Pitching analyst for MLB playoffs

@RoyalFamily: God Save the King

@NYTObits: Obituaries and photos