james choice

reddit almost started as something completely different.

huffman and ohanian first pitched a mobile food ordering idea to y combinator. it got rejected, but they were invited back to try something else. that something became reddit.

in the beginning, they created multiple accounts themselves and posted links just to make the site feel alive. then one day huffman opened reddit expecting the usual empty page and found it full of posts from usernames he didn’t recognize.

real people had finally shown up.

about 16 months after launching, reddit was sold to conde nast for a reported $10 million.

pretty good reminder that sometimes the idea that gets rejected is just the thing that gets you to the idea that works.

bretton woods didn’t make the u.s. a superpower by itself. world war ii had already left america as one of the world’s dominant economic and military powers.

but bretton woods helped lock that advantage into the global financial system.

the u.s. held about three quarters of the world’s official gold reserves, other currencies were tied to the dollar, and the dollar was tied to gold at $35 an ounce. suddenly, countries around the world needed dollars for reserves and international payments.

so america didn’t just have the biggest economy. its currency became part of the infrastructure of the global economy.

even after the gold link ended in 1971, that central role of the dollar survived.

planned obsolescence is the practice of designing products to become outdated, difficult to repair, or less useful sooner than necessary so people have to replace them.

it’s heavily criticized because it can prioritize repeat sales over durability, create unnecessary waste, and turn products that could last for years into disposable purchases.

the election where the president is not on the ballot, but the president’s ability to govern can still change overnight.

on november 3, americans will elect all 435 members of the house and roughly one third of the senate. control of either chamber can completely change what gets passed, blocked, investigated, or confirmed for the next two years.

that is why americans call them the midterms.

halfway through a presidency, the country basically gets another chance to rearrange the power structure in washington.

one of history’s clearest examples of how a reputation can completely reverse.

in world war i, petain became a national hero for his role at verdun. twenty four years later, after france fell to germany, he became head of the vichy regime, which collaborated with nazi germany and introduced its own antisemitic laws.

after the war, france convicted him of treason and sentenced him to death. because of his age and his earlier military service, charles de gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

few biographies go from national savior to convicted traitor quite that dramatically.

this feels like the update where the iphone starts becoming less of a phone with ai features and more of an ai system that happens to be a phone.

siri ai can understand personal context, what is on your screen, and perform actions across apps. apple also refined liquid glass, improved system performance, and added more intelligence throughout core apps.

ios updates used to be about new buttons and redesigned apps.

now the real question is how much of your phone can understand you without you having to explain everything first.

a maltese nobleman whose father wanted him to become a lawyer, so naturally he moved to constantinople and spent the next forty years painting street vendors, coffeehouses, markets, costumes, and everyday ottoman life instead.

before photography made cities endlessly reproducible, preziosi was basically producing hand painted snapshots of istanbul for european travelers. his studio in pera became so well known that even the future king edward vii stopped by and bought his watercolors.

he also worked as a dragoman for foreign embassies and became so associated with the city that ottoman art writers later treated him almost as one of their own painters.

a foreigner who came to paint istanbul and ended up becoming part of its visual memory.

a world where facts still exist, but they have lost their monopoly on reality.

people do not necessarily believe what is true. they believe what feels true, what fits their identity, what confirms what they already think, or what gets repeated often enough to become familiar.

that is what makes post truth so dangerous.

the lie does not have to defeat the truth.

it just has to make the truth feel optional.

years have passed and i still haven’t forgotten this movie.

some films you simply watch. others stay in your head like a scent.

this one stayed with me less as images and more as a smell.

i’m reading ron chernow’s biography titan: the life of john d. rockefeller, sr.

rockefeller was about as capitalist, conservative, and monopolistic as it gets. at one point he was hated across america and became almost a symbol of the ugliest side of capitalism.

and yet, at the same time, he had been giving money away since he was basically a teenager. throughout his life he helped countless people and institutions, donated heavily to medicine and public health, and funded schools, foundations, and projects that ended up having a real impact on society.

when it came to standard oil and money, though, he was ruthless.

he bribed people, made secret deals, crushed competitors, manipulated transportation rates, and used every advantage he could get. but strangely enough, even during the gilded age, he never really embraced the kind of absurd luxury you would expect from someone that rich. by billionaire standards, his personal life was relatively restrained.

i’m not here to praise rich people, but compared with people like elon musk and jeff bezos today, rockefeller almost comes across as mild.

what makes it even stranger is that despite all the philanthropy he did because of his own beliefs and religious convictions, he never really managed to win over the public, and all his wealth still could not stop standard oil from being broken up.

today’s billionaires seem to operate in a completely different environment.

they can cut public programs, influence politics, involve themselves in other countries’ affairs, launch cars into space, try to shut down parts of cities for private events, and generally behave in ways that would have looked outrageous even by gilded age standards.

and somehow, millions of people still cheer them on.

that might be the strangest part.

an ottoman born tobacco entrepreneur from manisa, turkey who became a new york millionaire and left behind a hospital in the city where he was born.

born musa eskenazi in 1855 to a sephardic jewish family, he left manisa as a teenager, learned the tobacco trade in alexandria, then moved to the united states and built schinasi brothers with his brother solomon.

their business imported turkish tobacco and became hugely successful. at one point, around 200 jews from manisa reportedly worked in their new york operation. in 1906, sultan abdülhamid ii awarded schinasi the fourth class order of the medjidie.

he later lived in a marble mansion on riverside drive designed by william tuthill, the architect of carnegie hall. image

but the most interesting part of his story came after his death in 1928.

schinasi left $1 million to establish a hospital in manisa. only $200,000 was meant for construction and equipment. the remaining $800,000 was preserved as an endowment to help keep the hospital running.

his widow helped carry out the plan, and the hospital opened in 1933.

quiet quitting isn’t actually quitting. it’s when you stop treating your job like a personal sacrifice and start doing exactly what you’re paid to do. no late night emails, no unpaid extra work, no pretending the company is your family.

basically, doing your job without letting your job become your entire personality.

“i realized that the entire journey had been from myself to myself.”

let's start with the anatomy of it.

where are the feet? at the very bottom of the body, right? because they touch the ground, they have often been culturally associated with dirt, inferiority, and low status. that symbolism has always made its way into language, literature, proverbs, and everyday expressions.

now think about what a foot fetishist typically does. they show affection toward the feet using their lips, tongue, and hands.

the lips and tongue belong to the face, one of the highest and most symbolically honored parts of the body. the hands, meanwhile, are associated with cleanliness, eating, creating, working, and almost everything we actively do in the world.

so what does it mean when someone uses what we consider their most elevated and capable body parts to show intense attention and affection toward another person's lowest body part?

the answer seems fairly simple. it can represent an unusually strong sense of admiration, devotion, and belonging.

history gives us an interesting parallel. in the past, someone granted an audience with a king, sultan, queen, or other ruler might bow down and kiss their feet or the hem of their clothing as a gesture of respect and loyalty.

in that sense, foot fetishism can be understood as a particular form of attraction in which one person symbolically places the other above themselves and takes pleasure in openly expressing that admiration. it can also allow affection and desire to be expressed in a way that is less centered on the body's more obvious sexual areas and more focused on reverence, intimacy, and attention.

so why does it seem to be more common among men?

one possible reason is that women's feet are much more heavily aestheticized in fashion and popular culture. they are often smaller and more delicate in appearance, and there is an entire visual culture built around pedicures, nail polish, anklets, toe rings, decorative socks, stilettos, heels, sandals, and countless other ways of drawing attention to them.

deleted all of his photos on instagram. right now, only the real madrid reels seem to be gone too, and he even removed his profile picture.

something serious must have happened during today’s negotiations. it honestly looks like real madrid might be preparing to move him on.