Rob Topping

A woman from St. Louis booked a single day of fishing in Canada, her first time ever on that river, and pulled up a fish her guides think is more than 100 years old. It's over 11 feet long, and it'll never make the record books. In British Columbia it's illegal to lift a sturgeon that size out of the water, so nobody can put it on a scale. The official world record is a 468-pounder from 1983. This one got sized up with a tape measure instead. Sixty inches around the middle, run through a length-and-girth formula, comes out to roughly 1,100 to 1,200 pounds. It had also never been caught or tagged before, so it spent its whole life in a busy fishing river without anybody landing it. If the age guess is right, it hatched into a river that had just been gutted. In 1897 the Fraser gave up about 1.1 million pounds of sturgeon. By 1905 the catch was down to around 44,000. The canneries were after caviar, so the big females went first, with some of the roe shipped to Russia of all places. Problem is, a Fraser female doesn't spawn until she's about 26, and after that only every 4 to 10 years. Every egg-heavy fish they pulled was a quarter century of growing the river couldn't replace. First Nations fishermen warned the cannery owners it would crash, and by 1905 it had. That fish then made it through decades of commercial nets until B.C. banned keeping sturgeon in 1994. A female that hatched the year of the ban would've only hit her first spawn around 2020. Funny thing is, nobody can actually prove the age. You age a sturgeon by slicing a fin ray and counting rings like a tree stump, and when USGS researchers tested that on fish whose real ages were known, the readers' consensus matched only about 31% of the time, and got worse the older the fish was. So "over 100" is an educated guess on a fish nobody had ever measured. Sturgeon outlasted the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and Fraser River caviar almost got them in eight years.

Back in 1985, barely anyone knew who Tommy Hilfiger was. So he bought a billboard in Times Square saying he was one of the four greatest designers in America, right next to Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein. Twenty-five years later, the company that owned Calvin Klein paid $3 billion for him. Somebody just put the same trick up on a billboard in San Francisco. The Hilfiger sign was basically a game of hangman. It read "The 4 great American designers for men are" with blanks for each name and only the initials filled in, and down at the bottom in small type it admitted his logo belonged to the least known of the four. He had almost no money for ads. George Lois, the ad guy his investor brought in, told him that if he marketed himself like every other fashion brand, it would take him 20 years to build a name. Tommy's first reaction to the hangman idea was that people would think he'd lost his mind, and he only said yes because he figured he had nothing to lose. Think about what your brain does when you read that sign. You see three names you already think of as the best in the business, and you drop the fourth one into the same bucket before you ever stop to ask whether he belongs there. Hilfiger got filed next to Calvin Klein without proving a thing, because your brain did the filing for him. Now look at the billboard sitting by the Bay Bridge on-ramp in San Francisco. It's five app icons floating in front of a giant moon, and that's the whole ad. Four of those apps come from Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI and OpenAI. Add up what investors last paid for those companies and you get more than $2 trillion. (xAI, the company behind Grok, is part of SpaceX now.) The one sitting in the middle is Notion, last valued at $11 billion. That's about half a percent of what everyone else on that sign is worth put together. Notion has spent three years trying to get people to stop thinking of it as a notes app and start thinking of it as an AI company, and the business is getting there. Reports say AI plans were bringing in more than half its revenue by early this year, and Sacra estimates it hit $865 million in annual recurring revenue this summer, up 82% from a year ago. There's been IPO talk for months too, and Wall Street pays a lot more for every dollar an AI company brings in than it does for a notes app. Which bucket you put Notion in is worth billions of dollars to them. Leaving the words off is the smartest part. If the sign said "Notion, the AI workspace," you'd roll your eyes and keep driving. With nothing written on it, the only thing left to think about is who made the row, which is exactly the question you want people asking about you. Nobody's signed it, either. If that N in the middle turns out to be the one paying, it wouldn't be Notion's first mystery billboard. Back in July it put up "AI Dread?" signs around the city with nothing but a phone number on them, and only owned up after the SF Standard tracked it down. It took Tommy 25 years to go from that billboard to a $3 billion check, and with an IPO on the table, Notion would very much like its version to pay off a lot sooner.

A new book says Dutch spies spent months watching Jared Kushner's iPhone screen in real time, and one of the things they saw him open was a bank account with about $750 million in it. They got in because the Russians had already hacked the phone, and the Dutch found a way to ride along. Here's how it went down, according to Matthew Cole's reporting in Vanity Fair. In late 2017, Dutch military intelligence found out a Russian GRU officer was about to travel to the UK. The guy was a dark-web hacker who dealt in stolen bank data. The Dutch gave him two options, work for them or get picked up by the British, and he picked the Dutch. He then handed over access to a GRU server in Rostov, and sitting on that server were screenshots from Kushner's iPhone X. So Russian military intelligence was already inside the phone of the man running America's Middle East policy. From there, Dutch hackers in The Hague figured out how the Russians pulled it off and built their own way in. Cole says they could see his screen whenever he was using it, and they saved every frame. Sound was the one thing they couldn't get. Think about what that means for anyone who uses WhatsApp or Signal. The encryption does its job while a message is flying between two phones. Once it pops up on a hacked screen, whoever's watching just reads it right along with you. End-to-end encryption stops at your screen. That's relevant here, because back in 2019 the head of House Oversight said Kushner's own lawyer had confirmed he used WhatsApp for official White House business and kept records by screenshotting his chats. The lawyer pushed back on parts of that account. The Dutch have pulled this kind of thing on Russia before. In 2014, their spies got inside the network of Cozy Bear, the Russian hacking crew later tied to the DNC hack. They even took over the security camera in the hallway outside the hackers' office near Red Square and had photos of everybody walking in and out. When Cozy Bear went after the State Department that November, the Dutch tipped off Washington, and the Americans reportedly sent them cake and flowers as a thank-you. As for the money, Cole alleges the Saudi and Emirati rulers put at least $2 billion into accounts tied to Kushner during Trump's first term. Kushner says every word is false and that the author never produced a single bank record. His lawyer is threatening to sue. The full book comes out October 27, so we're about to find out who has the receipts. If Cole's sources hold up, there's a hard drive somewhere in The Hague with a frame-by-frame replay of the most sensitive phone in Trump's first White House.

Scorpions kill more than 3,250 people a year, mostly kids, and the cure is still made by milking venom from thousands of scorpions and injecting it into horses. Anthropic just let a team of investment researchers with zero biology background try to cut the horse out. The horse method is over a century old. You immunize the animal for months, draw its blood, and purify out the antibodies its immune system made. Given early, it works against a narrow set of toxins, and because you're putting horse protein into a child, it can trigger anaphylaxis. Barely anyone makes it, because the people getting stung can't pay enough to cover the factory. Mexico has about a quarter of the world's scorpion stings and relies on a single lab. Last year in Sonora, a 5-year-old was stung at preschool and rushed to a public hospital that had already burned through a shipment delivered days earlier. Staff found more 45 minutes later. She'd already gone into cardiac arrest twice. So Citrini Research walked into Anthropic with a question. Could motivated amateurs with Claude make real progress on a disease the drug industry ignores? An internal Claude model ran for 64 hours off one prompt and four follow-ups. It drove 12 protein design tools, generated 318,484 candidate molecules, ran 553,052 simulated matchups against five scorpion toxins, and picked 180 to build. Then it emailed the order to the lab itself. Two labs made 211 of them. 17 latched onto their target toxin, covering scorpions from Mexico, North Africa and the Middle East. Brazil's yellow scorpion beat every single design. The best two grab a Mexican scorpion toxin at the same spot as an antibody already shown to protect mice. The computer finished in under three days. The lab work stretched past a month, held up by contracts, shipping, and the hassle of sourcing the toxins themselves. One of the outside experts who reviewed the results said binding is no longer the main bottleneck. There's no antivenom yet. None of these molecules has touched a living cell or a mouse. Anascorp, the only scorpion antivenom the FDA has approved, took 35 years to go from a Mexican lab to US approval. The first candidate molecules for a horse-free successor took 64 hours, for a team whose day job is writing investment research.