Haskell, the Spooky, Esoteric Cult Classic

Sheon Han (Wired)

This article is about Haskell, the programming language. Within, the book Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! is mentioned, which I have a digital copy of in my vast e-library. I haven't read it yet though. This is a story of a man learning Haskell. It talks over the history of the language, and drops a hot meme that I had never heard of, but that seems hilarious. "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors". There is a rabbit hole online about this quote and how every functional programmer will eventually make a tutorial explaining monads to the layperson. It's made me want to look into it again.

Are the Olympics Running Out of Hosts?

Amit Katwala

This one isn't really an article, but a really informative infographic, by a gifted designer. In a two-page spread, information about Olympic host cities, their estimated budget, the total cost, and other bidding cities. It's something hard to describe in words, rather it has to be seen to be appreciated. It's just on the list cause it's a banger and I want others to look it up.

Phil Wizard's Tricky Breakaway

Dexter Thomas (Wired)

This is a nice interview of an icon of the breakdancing scene. The whole article has a happy, expectant feeling due to the inclusion of breakdancing into the Paris Olympics. But as of publication time, the event hadn't happened yet. Most people saw Raygun's performance, or at least the memeification of breaking at the Olympics, and it puts this article in an interesting context. Phiz Wizard seems like a genuine dude though.

The Communist & The Celebrity

Hannah Zeavin (Wired)

With a title like this, and the subtitle of, "China Miéville Writes a Novel with the Internet's Boyfriend", I was not sure what to expect from this interview. And let me tell you, it's a great one. I had never heard of Miéville before, but I quickly find out by process of elimination that he isn't the "Internet's Boyfriend". That moniker belongs to none other then Keanu Reeves.

The gist of the article is about the novel that Reeves has cowritten with Miéville, but the article author does such a good job that I came away with many more book recommendations from Miéville's back catalogue. The article describes how Miéville gave himself a mandate to write in every genre imaginable. And they go on to list sci-fi, detective novel, historical fiction, and steampunk. Pretty much every book title italicized in the article, I added to my reading list. Learning about Reeves' BRZRKR universe was also cool, and the graphic novel sounds like it would be an interesting read. Perhaps the co-authored The Book of Elsewhere is more my speed.

11,196 Years in Prison

Jenna Scatena (Wired)

Crypto. Crypto. Crypto. The world has moved on to a new hype cycle now in the form of AI (whether hype or real depends on your bets), but before that was Crypto and Blockchain. This article focuses on Faruk Özer, the CEO of Thodex, a crypto exchange based on Turkiye. Özer's flight from the country with a USB key containing $2 billion in cryptocurrency shocked the nation and made headlines across the globe in 2021. I was surprised that I missed this news.

The article goes into the history of Özer, his siblings, and the political and technological climate of Turkiye at the time. It highlights Erdogan's rise, the corruption and bad monetary policy that sparked triple digit inflation, and thus, the allure and "freedom" of cryptocurrency. Crypto as resistance, even. "Backgammon cafés, where old men haave been drinking tea and talking politics for centuries, buzzed with crypto gossip". After nearly two years on the run, he was captured in Albania and extradited back to Turkiye, facing a combined maximum prison sentence of 43,000 years from ripping off 400,000 "investors" in his Thodex exchange. In the end, Özer and his siblings got matching ~11,200 year sentences, and Turkiye remains a haven for cryptocurrency exchanges and use per capita.