My back to work morning train WFH reads:
• Most Return-to-Office Plans Unchanged, for Now Delta variant worries notwithstanding, many people report they are already back at their workplace or will be soon. (New York Times)
• Why Gold Bugs, Bond Bears and Amazon Skeptics Think Alike Investors often prefer to stick their heads in the sand rather than confront the evidence in front of them. (Wall Street Journal)
• Here Are the Pitfalls When Allocators Make Direct Deals or Co-Investments Legal experts weigh in on contracts, due diligence, and potential conflicts when pension funds and other investors do deals outside a fund structure. (Institutional Investor)
• You’ve Never Heard of the Biggest Digital Media Company in America: Red Ventures, which started as a digital marketing company, has attracted serious investments from private equity firms. Its location has helped obscure what is perhaps the biggest digital publisher in America, a 4,500-employee juggernaut that says it has roughly $2 billion in annual revenues, a conservative valuation earlier this year of more than $11 billion, and more readers, as measured by Comscore, than any media brand you’ve ever heard of — an average of 751 million visits a month. (New York Times)
• What Are Stores Even Thinking With All These Emails? It feels like every company and organization I’ve ever transacted with sends me email every week. Some every day, even. Some multiple times a day. My mortgage broker emails on my birthday and holidays. So does my dentist. Certain retailers email much more often. (The Atlantic)
• The spectacular implosion of Mike Lindell He has pushed many false, baseless and crazy theories about voter fraud, but the symposium was billed as focusing on one in particular: “irrefutable” proof that hackers backed by China stole the election for Joe Biden. Lindell had the data, and he was going to show it to you over 72 hours. What’s more, his website promised to give $5 million to anybody who could “prove that Mike’s cyber data … is not valid.” (Washington Post)
• Tested: 2021 Ford Bronco First Edition Goes Big, Sticks the Landing The triumphant return of the Ford Bronco has the country agape. The awe is well deserved. (Car & Driver)
• For a Clean Ocean, Just Add Oysters From picturesque Mediterranean isles to New York’s bustling harbor, strategically placed oyster colonies are depolluting the sea with ease. (Reasons to Be Cheerful)
• Unvaccinated America, In 5 Charts So who, exactly, are we talking about? Three in 10 American adults remain unvaccinated, according to the latest survey from the KFF. But they’re not a monolith — their reasons, backgrounds, politics and willingness to eventually get vaccinated all vary. (Fivethirtyeight)
• Peek inside NASA’s starchitect-designed condo for Mars What is it like to live in Mars? NASA is in the midst of recruiting four volunteers to find out during a year-long simulation at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The selected crew members will move into Mars Dune Alpha, a starchitect-designed habitat touted to be “the highest-fidelity simulated habitat ever constructed” for living on the red planet. (Quartz)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Greg Becker, CEO of Silicon Valley Bank. The bank has helped fund more than 30,000 start-ups, 50% of venture-backed tech and life science companies in the US, and 69% of U.S. VC-backed tech + life science companies with an IPO banked with SVB.
Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series
Source: NOAA
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