My end of week morning train WFH reads:
• Your Backyard Is the Hot Destination This Summer: Stuck at home, Americans transform their outdoor spaces with giant waterslides, fire pits, movie theaters and ambitious gardens (Wall Street Journal)
• You Know What Else Has Sold Well During the Pandemic? Weed Edibles: Pandemic anxiety and mounting concerns about vaping have helped shift sales of cannabis products. (New York Times)
• The Lawsuit Against America Online That Set Up Today’s Internet Battles: The plaintiff, who sued because of tasteless comments about the Oklahoma City Bombing made under his name, lost—but he still wants to fix the internet. (Slate)
• Tesla May Call Warranty Repairs Goodwill Due To Lemon Laundering: The practice of “lemon laundering” consists of automakers reselling defective cars they were obliged to buy back trying due to avoid lemon laws (Inside EVs)
• Bankruptcy forced this California city to defund police. Here’s how it changed public safety (Los Angeles Times) See also This town of 170,000 replaced some cops with medics and mental health workers. It’s worked for over 30 years (CNN)
• Life Isn’t Fair: Bad people prosper. Exploitation and repression are the norm. Governments are corrupt. Inequality prevails. Crime pays. Wherever one looks, nobody is ever shocked… (BetterLetter)
• How Pandemics Wreak Havoc—and Open Minds: The plague marked the end of the Middle Ages and the start of a great cultural renewal. Could the coronavirus, for all its destruction, offer a similar opportunity for radical change? (New Yorker)
• Why Facebook failed its civil rights audit: The new, deeply critical report highlights the tension between free expression and hate speech on the social network. (Vox)
• White House’s massive payouts to farmers will be hard to pull back: The president was already spending double his predecessor to spare farmers the cost of his trade war. Now the price is reaching unsustainable levels. (Politico)
• Oliver Stone Thinks Hollywood Has Gone Crazy: The director’s standing as a finger-on-the-pulse filmmaker has been gradually subsumed by the image of him as a political provocateur, thanks to his documentaries about the likes of Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Martin Franklin of Mariposa Capital. Franklin is credited with successfully reviving the use of SPACs, or blank check companies, as public vehicles for long term M&A.
With wave of major rulings, Roberts and Supreme Court emerge as powerful counterweight to Trump and Congress
Source: Washington Post
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