Herstory Lessons

Plus: Where the f*** are we? (#566)

David Bauer

13 Mar 2026 — 5 min read

This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I'm here to help you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. It's great to have you.

🤖 Can you outsmart the machine? Thousands have played my new game since I mentioned it last week. So far, humans have won 55% of the games.

1. 100 Years of Women Who Changed History

It's hard not to look at the world today and think: Well, we should never have allowed so many emotionally unstable men into positions of power. So, let's look elsewhere for a moment. The New York Times has revisited obituaries of women who made a difference – «not to retrofit them into models of uncomplicated heroes. But to re-examine them with the benefit of distance — to see what was emphasized, what was minimized, what might have been left unsaid.»

2. The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of

I'm not going to spoil it, so you can take a guess: The Iran War prompted Freakonomics to update a 2025 podcast episode because it feels even more relevant now. Who are those powerful people «you've never heard of»? Excellent episode.

3. Where the f*** are we?

Straight from the department of «Huh, I never thought of that!»: Before humans had GPS, it was much harder to calculate longitude than it was to calculate latitude. And if you're crossing an ocean, that's kind of a problem. Super interesting episode from the 99% Invisible podcast.

And if you're now wondering «but I also have no idea how GPS works!», the Weekly Filet archive has you covered.

4. Meta’s AI Smart Glasses: Workers Say “We See Everything”

Smart Glasses are cool. They see everything you see, record from your point of view and they can answer questions about what you're looking at. You know who else sees what you see? The workers in Kenya that Meta pays to help their AI get better at recognising what it sees. Cool, cool.

5. How Russia Made Trump

An excellent miniseries by The Rest Is Classified podcast. It's based on the premise that if you leave aside the question of whether Trump actively colluded with Russia, it's a pretty straightforward story of how Russia laid the groundwork and then influenced the 2016 election that got Donald Trump in the White House the first time.