The Atlantic

While outside analysts downplayed their chances, the Ukrainians were quietly planning an offensive across the Russian border. Phillips Payson O’Brien writes:

Algorithmic collusion appears to be spreading to more and more industries—and existing laws may not be equipped to stop it, Rogé Karma writes. “The classic image of price-fixing involves the executives of rival companies gathering behind closed doors and secretly agreeing to charge the same inflated price,” Karma continues. But today, technology may be offering a work-around. If you rent your home, your landlord might use RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as helping landlords set the most profitable price. “But a series of lawsuits says it’s something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy,” Karma writes. The many lawsuits against RealPage all make the same central argument: The company “has enabled a critical mass of landlords to raise rents in concert, making an existing housing-affordability crisis even worse,” Karma writes. The lawsuits also argue that RealPage pressures landlords to comply with pricing suggestions—which “would make no sense if the company were merely being paid to offer individualized advice,” Karma continues. The company has disputed these arguments, claiming that it offers “bespoke pricing recommendations” and lacks “any power” to set prices. Winning cases like the ones against RealPage is difficult: “Alleging the existence of a price-fixing agreement is hard to do without access to evidence like private emails, internal documents, or the algorithm itself,” Karma writes. And for future cases, it could become even more difficult to prevent or prosecute situations in which an algorithm learns to fix prices withouts its creators or users intending it to. “Algorithms themselves actually learn to collude with each other,” Maurice Stucke, a former antitrust attorney, told Karma. “That could make it possible to fix prices at a scale that we’ve never seen.” The result of price-setting algorithms across industries could be a kind of pricing dystopia: “permanently higher costs for consumers—like an inflation nightmare that never ends,” Karma continues. “It would undermine the incentives that keep economies growing and living standards rising.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/emVaND6h 🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Jo Hamya’s new novel, “The Hypocrite,” asks whether we should pity bad men—and consider the plight of bullies and boors, Hillary Kelly writes: The novel pushes readers to contemplate “whether we can understand women’s stories about powerlessness and oppression without men’s voices.”

The marathon’s ancient origins are murky—but its modern (re)birth owes its existence to a 19th-century philologist who turned a Greek legend into a sport. Joshua Benton on the man who invented the marathon:

Two boxers at the Paris Olympics have been subjected to brutal public scrutiny about their eligibility to compete in the women’s category, Helen Lewis writes: Clear rules would stop athletes “from being subjected to cruel and embarrassing questions—and would prevent the discussion from being hijacked by culture-war bomb-throwers.” https://lnkd.in/euX2xh5v Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwain’s Lin Yu-ting face questions over whether they have XY chromosomes and a disorder of sexual development—also known as an intersex condition—which give them an unfair advantage over other female competitors. “The result is a bitter debate fueled by misinformation on many sides, in a sport where matching the size and strength of competitors is vital for safety as well as fairness,” Lewis writes. Last year, Khelif and Lin were disqualified from the Women’s World Championship because they had failed genetic eligibility tests required by the Russian-led International Boxing Association. But the Olympics have different rules: Athletes can, according to the IOC, “compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity.” But in boxing, “biology really matters,” Lewis writes. “The women’s category is not just about fairness, but about safety.” The International Olympic Committee has made nebulous statements about the boxers’ eligibility. “Perhaps it does not want to compromise the athletes’ privacy” or maybe they “are not prepared to defend their own rules, which state that even if Lin and Khelif do have XY chromosomes, they are allowed to compete in Olympic women’s boxing.” This debate isn’t about “whether to accept someone’s sense of their own gender, or about an intolerance of gender nonconformity,” Lewis continues. “The debate should be a respectful one grounded in evidence about the effects of testosterone and male puberty.” Sporting categories are not designed to be degrading— “we don’t let flyweights take on heavyweights,” Lewis writes. “But if the questions around their eligibility remain unresolved, the medals they win will always have an asterisk next to them. That isn’t fair to them, or to their opponents.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/euX2xh5v 🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Tightwads are people who often “do not scrimp because they lack money,” Olga Khazan writes. “Instead, they’re afraid to spend money that they do have.” In the Wonder Reader, Isabel Fattal explores the tricky links between our money and our mind:

Tim Walz has slid perfectly into a load-bearing trope of social media: dad memes. Charlie Warzel investigates the latest battle for the internet’s attention—and what it could mean for the upcoming election. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e-6DwFcs

Algorithmic price-fixing seems to be spreading, Rogé Karma writes: The result could be a “pricing dystopia in which competition to create better products and lower prices would be replaced by coordination to keep prices high and profits flowing.”

The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists, Ariel Sabar writes. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets. https://lnkd.in/eezzscdV In the past 500 years, countless academics and so-called “Voynicheros” have attempted to crack the code of the Voynich manuscript; none have been successful. “The manuscript’s unintelligibility had made it a blank screen, onto which people freely projected their own fantasies,” Sabar writes. Centuries of wondering have resulted in countless debunked theories about what exactly the manuscript means. First introduced to the text as a Ph.D. student, Lisa Fagin Davis returned to the Voynich Manuscript decades later. After building a respectable career as a prominent medievalist, she felt ready to again tackle the mystery of the Voynich. Davis was forced “to reconsider almost everything she thought she knew about it. The manuscript’s notoriety—­ as history’s hardest puzzle; as grist for unhinged conspiracies—had for many years scared scholars away,” Sabar writes. “But what if you looked past its extravagant strangeness? What if you focused instead on the things—little noticed—that it shared with countless other manuscripts? Could the ordinary illuminate the extraordinary?” Davis and other scholars have formed a cross-disciplinary team to tackle the Voynich piece by piece. Maybe one day, these small truths will add up to a broader understanding of the text—but there’s no guarantee. “What if the Voynich remains unsolvable?” Sabar asks. “What if the manuscript is in some sense smarter than us all, its anonymous author, or authors, laughing from the grave at the hubris of reason?” “Davis has come to believe that the manuscript has meaning, and that scholars will one day find it,” Sabar continues. “A lot of people try to make the argument that surely it would have been read by now if it could be read,” Davis told Sabar. “But that’s just not enough of a reason to give up hope.”

With Joe Biden out of the race, the third-party candidate suddenly appears to pose a bigger threat to Donald Trump, John Hendrickson writes.