The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Southdown coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Last of Lehman Brothers: The Long, Slow Death of LEH Is Almost Complete The bank whose collapse marked the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis is only mostly dead. These are the people attending to its last remains ahead of its final court cases. (Bloomberg)
• Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution The new movement wants to free us from Big Tech and exploitative capitalism—using only the blockchain, game theory, and code. What could possibly go wrong? (Wired) see also A Crypto Emperor’s Vision: No Pants, His Rules: Sam Bankman-Fried is a studiously disheveled billionaire who made a fortune overseeing trades that are too risky for the U.S. market. Now he wants Washington to follow his lead. (New York Times)
• London’s lost ringways: A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions. (Works in Progress)
• Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face Albert Einstein in 1951. Photograph: Arthur Sasse/Bettmann Archive Thanks to a savvy California lawyer, Albert Einstein has earned far more posthumously than he ever did in his lifetime. But is that what the great scientist would have wanted? (The Guardian)
• The case for revolutionizing child care in America Suskind’s core message: creating a nurturing, interactive environment for kids aged zero to 3 is vital for their development — and many kids are getting left behind during this critical period. Kindergarten — and even preschool — may be too late for interventions to try and close an opportunity gap that begins to open up at birth. She argues we need to start much earlier. (NPR)
• The angry White populist who paved the way for Trump Fifty years ago, George Wallace was winning Democratic presidential primaries. Gunfire ended his campaign but not the political forces he unleashed. (Washington Post)
• The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence These breakthroughs are both fascinating and exhilarating. They also have profound economic implications. Just as earlier general-purpose technologies like the steam engine and electricity catalyzed a restructuring of the economy, our own economy is increasingly transformed by AI. A good case can be made that AI is the most general of all general-purpose technologies: after all, if we can solve the puzzle of intelligence, it would help solve many of the other problems in the world. (Daedalus)
• The Birth of Spy Tech: From the ‘Detectifone’ to a Bugged Martini The urge to snoop is as old as time—and by the 1950s, the electronic listening invasion had begun. (Wired)
• Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From? Einstein’s description of curved space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the quest for quantum gravity with host Steven Strogatz. (Quanta Magazine)
• The young Yankees fan who lost his autographs After an unbearable silent dinner, she posted a broken-hearted message around 7 p.m., explaining to the world what her young son had lost and what it would mean to get it back. It was a half-court heave, and the whole family went to bed that night unaware that an unlikely savior was about to emerge overnight: the internet. (ESPN)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Gerard K. O’Reilly, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Dimensional Fund Advisors, which manages $650 billion in client assets. Previously, he was Head of Research at DFA, managing the firm’s rigorous approach to interpreting, testing, and applying research in portfolios.
How TikTok used science to grow fast
Source: The Hustle
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