The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of weak coffee (?!) coffee, grab a seat on the settee, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• A scientific hunch. Then silence. Until the world needed a lifesaving vaccine. Drew Weissman helped make ‘hugs and closeness possible again.’ It didn’t happen overnight. (Washington Post)
• Crews Are Abandoned on Ships in Record Numbers Without Pay, Food or a Way Home Failing companies ditch vessels too expensive to repair or too difficult to sell, leaving behind cargo-ship castaways trapped in ports or offshore (Wall Street Journal)
• Eleven Un-Magical Secrets I Learned While Working at Disney World From parents leaving their kids with “Mary Poppins” to ladies lusting after Captain Jack Sparrow, the most magical place on Earth is also one of the most colorful places to work. (Bloomberg)
• The Unstoppable Appeal of Highway Expansion: U.S. transportation authorities have spent billions widening urban freeways to fight traffic delays. What makes the “iron law of congestion” so hard to defeat? (Citylab)
• How IBM lost the cloud: Insiders say that marketing missteps and duplicated development processes meant IBM Cloud was doomed from the start, and eight years after it attempted to launch its own public cloud the future of its effort is in dire straits. (Protocol)
• Fatty Arbuckle and the Birth of the Celebrity Scandal A murder charge, a media frenzy, a banishment, and accusations of sexual abuse in Hollywood. What can the Arbuckle affair, now a hundred years old, teach us today? (New Yorker)
• The Cheap and Easy Climate Fix That Can Cool the Planet Fast CO2 is only part of the patchwork of warming. Methane locks in far more heat in the short term and has been leaking just as relentlessly. (Bloomberg) see also Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change? Amid an escalating crisis, the power source offers a dream—or a pipe dream—of limitless clean energy. (New Yorker)
• The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It The former Facebook employee says her goal is to help prompt change at the social-media giant (Wall Street Journal)
• Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers: It’s officially arachnicide season in the Northern Hemisphere. Millions of spiders have appeared in our homes – and they’d better be on their guard. Why do we kill them so casually? (BBC)
• Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans For half a century, she has taken the things we know best— our bodies, our rituals, our nation — and shown us how strange they really are. (New York Times Magazine)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital. He began his career as an engineer and team leader at AOL, Facebook, and Slack, but soon moved into Venture Capital. He earned the nickname “SPAC King” for numerous successful deals he has done, and today is a part-owner of the Golden State Warriors.
Five Decades of Mortgage Rates
Source: @lenkiefer
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