KarenAWyle

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𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙑𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙜𝙚 𝙏𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝘿𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙉𝙖𝙯𝙞𝙨: 𝙉𝙞𝙚𝙪𝙬𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙚’𝙨 𝘾𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙘𝙪𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙃𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙙𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙅𝙚𝙬𝙨 🧵 In the summer of 1942, a quiet Dutch farming village in the province of Drenthe made a decision that would turn it into one of the most extraordinary sites of resistance in occupied Europe. Nieuwlande was remote, peatland country where farms stood far apart and privacy was part of daily life. Before the German invasion of May 1940 it had no Jewish residents and almost no connection to the Netherlands’ Jewish communities. Yet by 1943 every single household in the village was sheltering at least one Jewish person or family. The man who set this in motion was Johannes Post, a 35-year-old farmer and village councillor. The youngest of eleven children in a devout Calvinist family, Post had had little contact with Jews or Judaism before the war. What changed him was the suffering he saw around him. He joined the underground resistance, first helping Dutch men evade German forced labour by hiding and moving them. One of those he sheltered was Arnold Douwes, the son of the local Protestant pastor and an outspoken anti-Nazi activist who had already been in hiding. Douwes immediately recognised Nieuwlande’s potential. Its isolated farms, tight-knit community and distance from German administrative centres made it ideal for concealment. Together with Post he devised a plan that was bold in its simplicity: every household would take in at least one Jewish refugee. Not some households. Not the willing ones. Every household. The entire village would act as a single hiding network. If everyone was complicit, no one had reason to betray anyone else. The secret would be safe because it belonged to everyone. Post travelled across the Netherlands, from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to smaller cities, seeking Jewish families in desperate need of shelter. He brought them back to Nieuwlande, where his wife Dina initially cared for them while Douwes arranged permanent placements. Where hosts needed extra food or money, the resistance supplied coupons and stipends. Where families hesitated, Douwes, never one for diplomacy, sometimes invoked “resistance orders” and left them little choice. By 1943 Jewish refugees were hidden in every home in the village. Before the war Nieuwlande had sheltered none; now it had one of the highest per-capita densities of hidden Jews anywhere in occupied Europe. Douwes, a former gardener by trade, took charge of the operation. He cycled tirelessly across the countryside, placing refugees, delivering false papers, and moving people when raids threatened. He is estimated to have been personally responsible for saving at least 500 Jews, including around 100 children whom he collected from Amsterdam, sometimes without a confirmed hiding place, trusting that one would materialise by the time the train or bicycle journey ended. “𝑊𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑢𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑛. 𝑊𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝐴𝑚𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑑𝑎𝑚 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑏𝑒𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑒𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑛 𝑔𝑜, 𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑎𝑓𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑛𝑜 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑠… 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑: 𝑖𝑛 ℎ𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑠, 𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑠, 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠, 𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒.” 1/2

"I Thought I Was Autistic. I Was Wrong." thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-…

This door in Westminster Abbey is older than most modern nation-states. Made in the 1050s from an English oak, it's the only surviving Anglo-Saxon door in Britain.

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT. The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time. A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B. Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself. GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won. Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective. It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect. Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance. 99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time. If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars. Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

My Substack for this week springs from a couple of examples of silver linings in my life . . . which makes them silver linings in yet another way. karenawyle.substack.com/p/silver-linin…

@AgathaChocolats Headline: dogs enter another caring profession. #sixwordstory

In six words or fewer, write a story about this photo. #sixwordstory #WritingCommmunity #dogs

@AgathaChocolats Doc, I keep hallucinating you're human! #sixwordstory

@JasonWMizer The author, the book description, the first few pages. If I don't know the author, the cover may be what leaves me to look at the description and potentially the sample.

Be honest. What actually makes you buy a book? The cover, title, recommendation, or first page? What's your secret sauce that makes you buy a book?

From John Scalzi, some thoughts about career longevity and the importance of a reputation for actual thinking and creating: whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/24/an-…

A question for historical fiction readers: would you be offended by a reference to "gypsy toast" (aka French toast)?

Here's an article about the construction of conlangs. sciencenews.org/article/conlan…

18 April 1942: The #Doolittle Raid, a U.S. bombing of Tokyo, occurs. It is the first raid on #Japan by the U.S. during World War II. The raid was planned and led by Lt. #Colonel James Doolittle. Sixteen B-25B Mitchell bombers were flown off the USS Hornet. #History #OTD #ad amzn.to/2wOdYiV

I’m not telling you what to do, but many of us don’t use beta readers, so unless you have some you’d trust with your life, maybe right now is not a good time to start looking. I’ve seen dozens of angry/sad “My beta reader told me they fed my book to AI” posts, and fuck that.

Trump to sign executive order on psychedelic drug used abroad to treat PTSD. The White House instapundit.com/790330/

Medical researchers are currently evaluating a non-invasive wearable device designed to drastically alter emergency neurological interventions. By utilizing precisely targeted low-intensity sound waves, this technology enhances blood flow and exponentially increases the efficacy of traditional intravenous medications. Neurological emergencies require immediate action because oxygen deprivation causes rapid and irreversible cellular death within mere minutes of an arterial blockage. Implementing this acoustic technology in preliminary emergency settings, such as ambulances, could bridge the critical time gap before a patient ever reaches an operating room. While still undergoing rigorous clinical trials, this acoustic approach represents a monumental leap forward in preventing long-term disability and improving overall survival rates.

Renovation on a bookshop in Guildford, England in 1996,revealed a medieval chamber forgotten beneath the ground for some 700 years. Archaeologists have identified it as a Synagogue dating back to the year 1180. The oldest Synagogue remains on the British Isles.

Finding the best tweet you've ever seen then the feed refreshes and it's gone forever.

Meet the tardigrade. Did you know that these microscopic ‘water bears’ can survive the vacuum of space, boiling heat, freezing cold, crushing pressure, and radiation? They’ve even been shot into orbit and revived. Nature’s ultimate survivors

I understand why Draft2Digital decided to impose sign-up fees, but the "if you don't sell enough, we penalize you" fee is not going to go over well. (Also, it makes them look like they're hurting for money, which does not inspire confidence.) Waiting to see how it plays out but I doubt it plays out well. Makes me glad I set up my own shop.