The 3-day weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of local brew, grab a seat by the window, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The New Secret Chicken Recipe? Animal Cells. Here’s an early taste of the laboratory-grown meat that companies are racing to bring to market, and a look at the questions it raises about how we feed ourselves. (New York Times)
• The Mystery of How Agatha Christie Could Afford a Maid and a Nanny but Not a Car The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.; “Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.” (Slate)
• The Everything Town in the Middle of Nowhere: How the tiny town of Roundup, Montana, became a hub in Amazon’s supply chain (The Verge)
• The Lesson to Unlearn The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. (Paul Graham)
• Live Like the Ancient Cynics: Modern cynicism traps you in an unhappy cycle. The original version will set you free. (The Atlantic)
• ‘I hate everybody including you’: The art of saying no Admittedly it’s thin, but there is definitely a silver lining to the pandemic: for the best part of a year we have all been granted a bulletproof excuse to turn down pretty much any invitation, and I, for one, am grateful. (Letters of Note)
• This Is How To Overcome Regret: 5 Secrets From Research When asked, “How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?” — you know what people said? (Barking Up The Wrong Tree)
• What Is Spacetime Really Made Of? How to grow an extra dimension: Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time—a curlicue dimension, looped back onto itself. Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant. Spacetime may emerge from a more fundamental reality. Figuring out how could unlock the most urgent goal in physics—a quantum theory of gravity. (Scientific American)
• Taking a Fall: The 120-MPH, 35,000 Feet, 3-Minutes-To-Impact Survival Guide You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale. (Popular Mechanics)
• Picasso’s Secret Love. Laporte’s charming memoir, Sunshine at Midnight: Memories of Picasso and Cocteau (1973), covers the seventeen years between 1944, when she first met him in his vast Parisian studio-flat on the rue des Grands-Augustins, to their last, chance encounter in St. Tropez on the French Riviera in 1961. She faithfully records many of Picasso’s clever and incisive remarks. Her covert theme is the conflict between her desire to live her own life and realize her potential as an artist or, like the sacrificial Roque, devote herself to adoring, serving and nourishing the genius of Picasso. (The London Magazine).
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Samantha McLemore, Miller Value Partners. She is the co-portfolio manager of the Miller Opportunity Trust and related strategies, and founder/CIO of Patient Capital Management. For the 10 years ending 1/31/22, LMNOX returned 16.42% annually and was in the top 1% of its Mid-Cap category.
6 companies that dominated the conversation and defined 2021
Source: Visual Capitalist
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