Why Ethiopia produces great runners
Dear Friends,
At this point in my life, I don’t often encounter an essay about running that stops me in my tracks. But it happened with “The Ethiopian Running Secret,” by Geoff Burns and Michael Crawley, two elite runners and excellent writers. Their argument, based on deep work in the country, is that Ethiopian running is completely different, culturally, from the way the sport takes place in the West. Here, elites focus on data, precision, and the exact splits that one can run on a track before exhaustion. There, the sport is more intuitive and based on culture. The authors write: “In Ethiopia, it is the ability to run in a way that protects your own and others’ energy that is seen as the primary skill of an endurance athlete. In this instance, doing this well was often seen to require the rejection of quantified data rather than its embrace. Rather than seeing energy as contained within the individual body, and the athlete as a system of inputs and outputs, Ethiopian athletes see the process of expending and monitoring energy as a collective responsibility.” They write: “Among Ethiopian athletes, running alone is seen as deeply antisocial in the same way that eating alone is.”
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Sticking to sports, my favorite athletic profile I’ve read in a long time is Wright Thompson’s essay on Steve Kerr, the coach of the Warriors. It traces his life starting at the time of the murder, at the hands of Hezbollah, of his diplomat father. It explains how he has grappled with success and failure as an athlete, and the ways he got lost sometimes in self-criticism. “I was so in my own head the whole time. I was so mean to myself. So harsh. I read [The Inner Game of Tennis], pretty much every season. I'd go back to it. I realized we are all two people. We are Self One and Self Two. There's our body and our mind. What we all try to do, in life and in sports, is combine the two. To find the rhythm of life.” And, of course, it includes a few tips on how exactly to coach an aging Draymond Green. Oh, and you should pair it with this remarkably reflective and self-aware personal essay by Keldon Johnson of the San Antonio Spurs.
There’s a dark, utterly captivating story in New Lines Magazine about a photograph of an execution in Bosnia. How, the author wonders, did an award-winning photographer get such clear pictures of an execution in 1992? As she gets deeper into the mystery, the story gets weirder and more tragic. Speaking of peculiar, though not nearly as dark, I was recently pointed again to a remarkable Susan Dominus piece about two sets of identical twins in Bogotá who were mixed up in a hospital error. They grew up as fraternal twins until, in their 20s, they figured out who they really were and had to confront an entirely new reality.
I also enjoyed this story about the rescue of a humpback whale and a remarkable Atlantic essay about stolen antiquities. And here’s a very good story in Equator about Pakistan’s desire to completely wipe the country of information about Imran Khan, its most famous citizen, who has been imprisoned since 2023. The effort, the author writes, reminds him “of the popular idiom Chaudhry had used: ‘Aankh ojhal, Pahaar ojhal.’ (‘Hidden from the eye, even a mountain disappears.’) They think if he’s not in front of people’s eyes, they’ll forget him. They are wrong.”
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The Most Interesting Things in Tech
This section is sponsored by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a leading science and engineering university where creativity and technology converge to solve society's greatest challenges. Visit here to learn more.
It feels like we’re starting to see a major shift in how young people view AI. This has been quietly evident in recent polling—and was loudly vocalized by boos during commencement speeches this past week. It likely hasn’t helped that AI executives have spent years warning of the dangers their products might bring. (My favorite phrase for this phenomenon is “dystopia as marketing.”) Gen Z also sees warning signs that the technology is wiping out the job market. And they worry about environmental issues more.
Two wild stories caught my eye recently. One involved a man who used Claude to help recover a long-lost password to a file containing five bitcoin. He didn't use it to crack the wallet or brute-force guess the password, but instead had it scour all of the files from an old laptop. The chatbot found a clue the man never realized was there and he used it to guess the correct password. The second is a report from researchers at Symantec, which shows how Fast16, malware from the mid-2000s, was designed to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Rather than destroying the machines, it screwed up test data so the scientists thought their experiments failed even if they had succeeded.
Last, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how media publishers will be compensated in a world where AI agents access our content more than humans. The Atlantic has partnered with Parallel, a company working on that problem, and I talked to its CEO, Parag Agrawal, about what the business model might look like. I’ll be discussing how agents might change all kinds of industries on June 2 in Chicago for an event I’m co-hosting with Glean. I hope to see you there.
Cheers * N
Stories like these are a reminder how unexpected narratives can reshape how we see business and leadership—it’s often the human twists, not the stats, that stick with investors.
Can’t wait to read!
That Bosnia photograph story alone sounds impossible to stop reading, mate.
A deeply fascinating and culturally profound reframe, Nicholas. Highlighting the Ethiopian endurance model as a collective preservation of energy rather than a Western fixation on hyper-quantized metrics targets the exact limitation of modern performance design. From a Human Architecture perspective, the Western obsession with tracking every biometric data point often introduces a layer of Systemic Friction, a cognitive hypervigilance that locks the central nervous system into a continuous defense loop. When an elite athlete or a high-stakes executive views their body purely as an isolated machine of inputs and outputs, they over-exhaust their Cellular Energy Budget. The Ethiopian method leverages near-field biological co-regulation. By rejecting rigid algorithmic constraints and moving in state synchronization with the collective, they minimize thermodynamic drag and maintain native signal fidelity. At Bio Vibes Quantum, we observe that true Biological Sovereignty requires shifting from tracking depletion to engineering systemic infrastructure safety. Outstanding framework to contemplate!
Osman Samiuddin ~ a quiet mention :)