The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer form weekend reads:
• Elon Musk’s Totally Awful, Batshit-Crazy, Completely Bonkers, Most Excellent Year: In 2020, the COVID-doubting, media-hating Twitterholic CEO became the third-richest man alive, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, and Tesla became the most valuable car company on the planet. Inside the mind of Silicon Valley’s most vainglorious villain. (Vanity Fair)
• The Wondrous Banality of Democracy What followed were two quietly revelatory days. To observe the count was to encounter the inexorable and simple logic of democracy. Democrats and Republicans sat together with civil servants and tabulated votes rationally and deliberately. (Yale Review)
• The Sharpe Ratio Broke Investors’ Brains Most practitioners fail to understand that the Sharpe ratio is intended for one’s whole portfolio. Yet individuals and institutional investors have the bad habit of allocating as if high Sharpe ratios are all it takes to build strong client portfolios, piece by optimized piece. (Institutional Investor)
• ‘A Black Eye’: Why Political Polling Missed the Mark. Again. As politics becomes a high-stakes spectator sport, pollsters are reviewing their latest failures. But is part of the problem the public’s overly high expectations of precision? (New York Times)
• Financing the American Home: The 30-year fixed-rate fully prepayable mortgage. On American streets, the product is everywhere. It makes up around 80% of an $11.3 trillion mortgage market. Yet, with the exception of Denmark, it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. (Net Interest)
• The Magic of Mushrooms It’s easy to get excited about psychedelics. MDMA combined with therapy looks like it may cure PTSD in a large number of patients. Psilocybin with therapy is showing promise in fighting depression. And unlike traditional medication, psychedelics can cure while creating meaning. (Not Boring)
• The People of Las Vegas: Las Vegas is both stranger and more normal than you might imagine, and for some reason, people don’t think anyone lives there. Las Vegas is a place about which people have ideas. They have thoughts and generalizations, takes and counter-takes, most of them detached from any genuine experience and uninformed by any concrete reality. This is true of many cities—New York, Paris, Prague in the 1990s—owing to books and movies and tourism bureaus, but it is particularly true of Las Vegas. (The Believer)
• Why I Hope to Die at 75 An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly. Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. (The Atlantic)
• My Priceless Summer on a Maine Lobster Boat During her college break, the author went all in on solitude—living alone on a Down East island and working for one of the area’s few female skippers. Luna Soley reflects on a time of loneliness, hard work, and natural beauty. (Outside)
• Concentrate! The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life Arriving at the chess board is like entering an eagerly anticipated party. All my old friends are there: the royal couple, their associates, the reassuringly straight lines of noble infantry. I adjust them, ensuring that they are optimally located in the centre of their starting squares, an anxious fidgeting and tactile caress. I know these pieces, and care about them. They are my responsibility. And I’m grateful to my opponent for obliging me to treat them well on pain of death. (Aeon)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business conversation with Penny Pennington, Managing Partner (CEO) of Edward Jones. The 98-year old Fortune 500 financial services firm has over 7m clients, with $1.3 trillion in assets and 17,000 financial advisors. Pennington is first non-family member to manage the firm; she is ranked #33 in Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business list.
How RNA Vaccines Work
Source: Washington Post
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