My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• Holes in the Recession Story. With surging inflation and a new war in Europe, the first half of 2022 was understandably gloomy for economies and financial markets around the world. But recent developments offer some hope that the prevailing pessimism may no longer be as warranted as it was a few months ago. (Project Syndicate)
• This Year, the Boss Is in the Office While Employees Hit the Beach: Managers hoping to coax workers back to the office are trading their ocean views at vacation homes for seas of empty desks; ‘It’s pretty lonely.’ (Wall Street Journal) but see also If the Job Market Is So Good, Why Is Gig Work Thriving? Conventional employment opportunities abound, but online platforms still have appeal — for flexibility or additional income. (New York Times)
• Mercedes and Ferrari’s Edge in the Electric Age: High-End Motors: Axial motors are smaller, lighter, more efficient and open up all sorts of possibilities for future performance cars. They will be crucial to brands like AMG and Ferrari as they race to electrify the high-performance vehicles that earn prestige and bumper profits. (Bloomberg)
• China is beating the U.S. in clean energy. Can America catch up? The race in five charts. China is the world’s biggest polluter — but also the biggest investor in clean energy. (Grid)
• Wait, When Did Everyone Start Using Apple Pay? It took longer than expected for the iPhone to become a wallet. But the patience of Apple is slowly paying off. (Wall Street Journal)
• Can a Zebra Change Its Stripes? Silicon Valley is puzzling over Marc Andreessen’s decision to back Adam Neumann’s new startup Flow. (Newcomer)
• Harsh Truths That Will Change Your Life Whether we admit it or not, we spend a good portion of our lives protecting ourselves from reality. On some subliminal level, we are clearly aware that reality is not always the happy, fair, flowery world that we want to believe we live in. So we make a subconscious decision to avoid it. We take the proverbial “blue pill” and continue on our merry way. (Sahil Bloom)
• Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion: As Milley laid out the array of forces on that October morning, he and the others summed up Putin’s intentions. “We assess that they plan to conduct a significant strategic attack on Ukraine from multiple directions simultaneously,” Milley told the president. “Their version of ‘shock and awe.’ ” (Washington Post)
• McLovin It: An Oral History of ‘Superbad’ 15 years later, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Emma Stone, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hader, and more remember making their seminal teen comedy. (Vanity Fair)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, and author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice and Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath.
TikTok is a top online platform for U.S. teens; Facebook has fallen sharply
Source: Pew Research
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