Weekend Reading: 4th / 5th July 2026

Jul 03, 2026

What Happened to Medium by Harris Sockel
- “From day one,” a former Medium exec tells me, Ev Williams, our founder, wanted the company to be worth “$20 billion.” He was a Nebraska farm boy who’d moved to California thousands of dollars in debt before founding Blogger (the precursor to WordPress), keeping it alive by sheer force of will, servers stacked above his kitchen sink, until selling it to Google”.
Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei
- “I think the truth is likely to be some messy admixture of these two extreme pictures, something that varies by task and field and is very subtle in its details”.
Rishi Sunak: My sleepless nights as PM — and what Andy Burnham should know by Rishi Sunak
- “Any embattled prime minister has dark nights of the soul. You lie awake in the Downing Street flat wondering whether you are the problem, or whether the job is just impossible in the current circumstances. When the military bands start practising on Horse Guards at 5am, it is a relief. You now have an excuse to get up”

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