TouchStone Reads - March 6th, 2026

We often set aside articles that are longer, deserve a re-read, are broader in scope…or just for fun - for weekend reading. Below are some from this week - pour yourself a hot cup of coffee & enjoy... 

• Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking: Sam Kriss goes inside an AI startup founded by a kid and finds something stranger and more unsettling than the usual Silicon Valley origin story. (Harper’s) 

• The Fallacy Fallacy: Why you shouldn’t go looking for faulty reasoning everywhere. Knowing the names of logical fallacies doesn’t make you a better thinker — it just makes you better at dismissing arguments you don’t like. (Persuasion)

• Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras: Citizens are taking matters into their own hands, physically removing the license plate reader cameras that have quietly blanketed American cities. (Blood in the Machine)

• A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them: The story of why the warnings were ignored. (The Guardian)

• The Rise of the Manhattan Mega-Mansion: Big-money buyers are no longer content with the usual conversions. Steven Harris, an architect whose eponymous firm has worked on more than 100 single-family townhouses over the past 30 years, says demand for bigger urban homes has been booming. (Citylab)

• Pills Are Becoming Machines That Work Inside the Gut: The next generation of medicine isn’t just delivering drugs - it’s deploying tiny machines inside your body that can diagnose, report back, and take action on their own. (IEEE Spectrum)

• Rolex Opened a College - and It’s as Selective as Harvard: The Swiss watchmaker is training its next generation of craftspeople at a school with an acceptance rate that rivals the Ivy League. (GQ)

• New blood test spots cancer before scans. Chinese scientists have built a highly sensitive blood test that can detect tiny traces of lung cancer long before a tumour shows up on a scan. The convergence of three technologies, DNA nanotechnology, CRISPR, and quantum dots (how’s that for a 21st century cocktail) had made it possible to spot near-invisible warning signals in blood, opening the door to earlier diagnosis and faster treatment decisions. (Science Daily)

• Metabolism, not cells or genetics, may have begun life on Earth: A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. A provocative new theory suggests life didn’t start with DNA or cells - it started with metabolism. Chemical reactions came first; biology came later. (Big Think)

• 10 Least Reliable Cars of 2026: Consumer Reports’ annual survey of 380,000+ vehicles names the models most likely to leave you stranded. (Consumer Reports)

• Some light & funny streaming Shows that you might like:

  • Fisk - Good Aussie show about a dysfunctional law firm (Netflix)

  • Trying - Feel good show about a young British couple navigating adoption (Apple)

  • Queen of Chess - Terrific documentary about three sisters emerging into the Chess world from behind the Iron Curtain (Netflix)

• Brazil, Canada, and Mexico gain as the 15% Section 122 tariff replaces higher IEEPA rates and USMCA shields North America (Source: BofA Global Research)
  

What are you reading or listening to?