The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Alto Grande coffee, grab a seat outdoors, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes Owners like Steve Ballmer can take the kinds of deductions on team assets — everything from media deals to player contracts — that industrialists take on factory equipment. That helps them pay lower tax rates than players and even stadium workers. (ProPublica)
• Older Americans Stockpiled a Record $35 Trillion. The Time Has Come to Give It Away. Transfers to heirs and others are unleashing a torrent of economic activity, including buying homes, starting businesses and giving to charity (Wall Street Journal)
• TikTok made me buy it The video app is causing products to blow up — and flame out — faster than ever. TikTok allows certain creators and businesses in the UK and Indonesia to sell products within its TikTok Shop, though the feature doesn’t yet exist in the US. But it’s almost certainly coming. What effect that might have on American consumerism depends on whom you ask. (Vox)
• The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine? Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline (The Guardian)
• ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Resurrection of Bass Reeves His almost superhuman exploits made him one of the West’s most feared lawmen. Today, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal is widely believed to be the real Lone Ranger. But his true legacy is even greater. (Texas Monthly)
• How May Edwards became the forgotten whistleblower Edwards is largely unknown and mostly forgotten. She is scheduled to report to the Bureau of Prisons in August, and no celebrities are clamoring about the injustice on Twitter. She is one of the most important whistleblowers of our era, and yet hardly anyone remembers her name. (Washington Post)
• Ideas that work: Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origins (Aeon)
• Untold stories of Ichiro: Wrestling with Griffey, All-Star speeches and ‘Ichi wings’ Twenty years ago, Ichiro Suzuki joined the Seattle Mariners, so The Athletic asked former teammates, managers, executives and rivals to explain the wonder, absurdity and hilarity of the Ichiro experience. Joba Chamberlain, Yankees teammate: Oh, I mean, do we have enough time for Ichiro stories?(The Athletic)
• The Tin Man Gets His Heart: An Oral History of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ Three decades ago, James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Linda Hamilton joined forces again to make the biggest, baddest, most eye-popping sequel ever. Here’s the story of how the machines took over Hollywood. (The Ringer)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Christine Hurtsellers, CEO of Voya Investment Management. The firm manages over $245 billion in assets. Hurtsellers was recently named to Barrons’s top 10 most influential women in wealth management.
The global normalcy index Is the world returning to pre-pandemic life?
Source: Economist
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