The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Volcanica coffee, grab a seat on the beach, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• SEC Enriches Fraudsters, Lawyers as Secrecy Shrouds Tips Program: SEC whistleblower decisions are inconsistent, cloaked in secrecy, often go to clients of agency ex-officials/ Program increasingly busy but has drawn ire of federal courts at times (Bloomberg Law)
• How colours affect the way you think Our world is awash with a rainbow of colours, but certain shades can have a surprising impact on our ability to concentrate, our mood and even the flavours we experience. (BBC) see also Unpicking the link between smell and memories: The ability of aromas to bring back highly specific memories is becoming better understood, and could be used to boost and heal our brains (Nature)
• Is Selling Shares in Yourself the Way of the Future? Two tech-minded brothers are testing the market on themselves (New Yorker)
• Fraudpocalypse: VW solved this conundrum by cheating. Instead of incurring the extra costs and inconveniences of reducing NOx emissions – which was doable, but so expensive it would break the business model for the cars – the company resorted to what the industry calls ‘defeat devices’. It is surprisingly easy to tell when a car is being subjected to a laboratory-based emissions test, because engines on a test track run with a regularity never seen in real-world use. This is ‘trivial’, as engineers say, for software to detect. A defeat device then kicks in: a gadget, sometimes physical and sometimes software-based, which overrides the normal operation of the engine and switches it to a cleaner, lower emissions mode for the duration of the test. (London Review of Books)
• Why Americans Hate the Media: Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media’s self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country’s real problems (The Atlantic)
• The Resurgence Of Tesla Syndrome Why has disruption been elevated as a virtue to the point where it’s become orthodox to be heterodox? It’s a symptom of the erosion of trust in institutions. (NOEMA)
• How a near-death experience could change the way you live Near-death experiences can occur when someone faces a life-threatening situation such as cardiac arrest or is under deep anesthesia. Some people have reported the feeling of leaving their body and observing their surroundings. For Schiefer, his journey started with what looked like an airplane fuselage. (NPR)
• These Vaccines Will Take Aim at Covid—and Its Entire SARS Lineage Scientists are developing vaccines to target the virus family that spawned Covid-19. Their efforts could thwart future variants, or even new related viruses. (Wired)
• Could the US highways that split communities on racial lines finally fall? The freeway removal movement is being boosted by $1bn in federal funding. Will it be enough to reverse decades of damage? (The Guardian)
• “I Believe in America”: Fifty Years of ‘The Godfather‘ In the end, Coppola got the cast he wanted, including Brando, Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and Diane Keaton, but he was soon confronting a host of fresh problems on the set. The script wasn’t finished. Pacino sprained an ankle early in the shoot. And Coppola fought constantly with cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose painstaking, classical approach to composition clashed with Coppola’s improvisatory nature and love of arty angles. (Quillette)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview next weekend with Hannah Elliott, who covers all things automotive for Bloomberg. We discuss today’s wild car market, Motorcycles going electric, LA car culture, vehicles competing with Tesla, all of her favorite hypercars, and why you should do the $10,000 Ferrari track course.
Why are cars so expensive now?
Source: Grid
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