The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat by the pool, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Welcome to the Church of Bitcoin Thousands gathered in Miami to talk about the OG cryptocurrency — but instead of your typical finance conference, it had the feeling of a fringe religious event (Rolling Stone)
• Moderna’s Next Act Is Using mRNA vs. Flu, Zika, HIV, and Cancer The biotech has reached a $100 billion market cap. But after Covid, the challenges get even bigger. (Businessweek)
• Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know What would it mean for lockdowns not to work? We know that viruses spread through person-to-person contact. Lockdowns make people see each other less. How could this not reduce viral transmission? (Astral Codex Ten)
• On the hunt for his next sports-card score: He used to clean swimming pools. Now he buys and sells trading cards. But as the market cools, how long can he stay in the game? (Washington Post)
• Your Brand Has Never Been Easier to Destroy Welcome to the wild world of product displacement, in which no brand is safe from “hatejacking” and other threats. (Bloomberg)
• The Endless Pursuit of Better: How the aspirational class lost its way. You shall know them by their aspirations. Or so one might think, judging by the manifold ways in which Americans brand themselves by the things they seek to acquire and the ideals they seek to live by. Americans of all classes and identities aspire to various things, of course.. (Hedgehog Review)
• Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit. Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him. (GQ)
• 50 astronauts, in their own words The views are great. The bathroom breaks, not so much. What’s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their stories (Washington Post)
• Trey Mancini’s remarkable return The Orioles first baseman and Home Run Derby invitee is the most magical story of the 2021 season — just by being part of it at all. (ESPN)
• Before & After ‘Maggot Brain’ Funkadelic’s third album was a psychedelic blast of freewheeling protest music. As the LP turns 50, we look back at the music that fueled it — and that was inspired by it. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Matt Ishbia, CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage. UWM is the number 1 wholesale lender and the number 2 overall mortgage lender in the nation. The firm went public in the biggest SPAC ever (UWMC) this year. Ishbia is also the author of “Running the Corporate Offense: Lessons in Effective Leadership from the Bench to the Boardroom.”
Food Fight: An update on private equity performance vs public equity markets
Source: JPM via Meb Faber
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