The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Volcanica coffee, grab a seat by tbe pool, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Hidden Fees Making Your Bananas, and Everything Else, Cost More: A cadre of ocean carriers are charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports. Sellers of furniture, coconut water, even kids’ potties say the fees are inflating costs. (ProPublica)
• How the Amusement Park Conquered America From the trolley parks of the early 20th century to the theme parks of today, these spaces of shared pleasure have been both a reflection of urban life, and an escape from it. (CityLab)
• The Biggest Challenges for a Hybrid Workplace—and How to Overcome Them It won’t be easy to make sure hybrid and remote workers are productive and content. But it can be done. (Wall Street Journal)
• How One Restaurateur Transformed America’s Energy Industry Charif Souki’s longshot bet on liquid natural gas, or L.N.G., paid off handsomely — and turned the United States into a leading fossil-fuel exporter. (New York Times Magazine)
• The rise of dognapping: How sky-high prices for purebreds have led to pet scams, predatory leases and violent robberies How do we stop the dognapping epidemic? (Grid)
• It’s the best and worst of times for semiconductor supply chains: Chips are in short supply. Chips are over-supplied. Chip manufacturing has expanded too fast and surpassed demand, but also can’t scale up fast enough to meet demand. The chip business is booming. Chip stocks are falling. It’s a confusing time to figure out what’s going on in the semiconductor industry.(Quartz)
• How Uber won access to world leaders, deceived investigators and exploited violence against its drivers in battle for global dominance: When the ride-hailing giant called, powerful politicians answered, leaked text messages and emails reveal. (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)
• The World as a Game What is a game? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously chose this nebulous concept to illustrate what he meant by “family resemblance,” where the individual members of a class can be determined to fulfill no necessary and sufficient conditions for admission, and instead only share some traits with some others in the class, others with others. (Liberties)
• The Hidden History of Tehran’s Red-Light District: After a revolutionary mob torched Shahrinaw in 1979, the Iranian authorities erased all traces of the neighbourhood that had served as Tehran’s red-light district since the turn of the century. Simply retelling its story represents an important intervention in the ever-present struggle to claim public space for women. (Failed Architecture)
• van ghosts: The long hard road of being Vincent Van Gogh. Over a hundred years later, the painter who is infamously (and inaccurately) reputed to have never sold more than one painting and denied the recognition is now a household name. We just can’t stop talking about him. (The Smart Set)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Antti Ilmanen, AQR Capital’s co-head of Portfolio Solutions Group. Ilmanen market theories and research are highly regarded, and he has won multiple awards, including the Graham and Dodd award, the Harry M. Markowitz special distinction award, multiple Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy awards, and the CFA Institute’s Leadership in Global Investment Award. His most recent book is “Investing Amid Low Expected Returns.”
The Housing Shortage Isn’t Just a Coastal Crisis Anymore
Source: New York Times
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
