The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Volcanica coffee, grab a seat by the pool, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Is Scott Galloway the Howard Stern of the Business World? The professor and podcaster aspires to be an influential thought leader. But his appeal to a mostly male fan base is about more than just his prognostications. (New York Times)
• Venture capital’s silent crash: when the tech boom met reality Investors of all stripes have crashed the clubby world of VC, drawn by the potential of tech start-ups. But there are signs the party is over. (Financial Times)
• Understanding Jane Street: The point of the poker chip challenge is not just to test out people’s probability chops in a thematic way. It’s to measure what’s arguably the most important bundle of traits for a trader to have: a sense of when to risk what, and enough self-awareness to calibrate confidence. It’s also a way to filter out one particular form of overconfidence: no trade is good enough that it’s worth the risk of losing everything. (The Diff)
• Reflections on the Investing Process with Michael Mauboussin: “This is the nature of what we do. It’s the intersection of business, people, psychology, sociology, and numbers. It’s just inherently fascinating. There’s a lot of macro factors and stuff that make sure you never have the game beat. Never.” (Compound Manual)
• Tales from the Thrifts: From savings-and-loan crooks to crypto hucksters (The Baffler)
• The Meat Paradox: How Gordon Ramsay’s lamb slaughter joke explains our confusing relationship with meat: The mental dissonance caused by our empathy for animals and our desire to eat them. Australian psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, and Brock Bastian coined the term in 2010, defining it as the “psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering.” We empathize with animals — after all, we are animals ourselves — but we’re also hardwired to seek calorie-dense, energy-rich foods. And for most of human history, that meant meat. (Vox)
• The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi: Our long history of constraining the river through levees has led to massive land loss in its delta. Can we engineer our way out? And at what cost? (Hakai Magazine)
• One of TikTok’s Biggest Stars Roasts Dudes for Their Misogyny, Racism, and Fatphobia Drew Afualo is using trolls’ tactics against them and giving her 7.5 million followers some laughs. (Businessweek)
• Christianity and Poetry: Poetry is not merely important to Christianity. It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice. The fact that most Christians would consider that assertion absurd does not invalidate it. Their disagreement only demonstrates how remote the contemporary Church has become from its own origins. It also suggests that sacred poetry is so interwoven into the fabric of Scripture and worship as to become invisible. At the risk of offending most believers, it is necessary to state a simple but unacknowledged truth: It is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry. (First Things)
• Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis: But no matter where they ply their trade, and despite the technology they have on hand, these artists can’t always fix everything they touch. And what they cannot fix becomes a problem for the consumer, who ends up getting lower-quality visual effects for their dollar. Audiences have been exposed to enough shoddy digital effects this century that the term “CGI” itself now implies poor craftsmanship. This problem is so widespread in Hollywood, not to mention accepted, that producers have their own acronym for effects work that passes muster for them but might not for audiences: a final approval note of CBB, for Could Be Better. (Defector)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She is also the director of the Corporations and Society Initiative, and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, She was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and is the co-author of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It.
Who do we spend time with across our lifetime?
Source: Our World In Data
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
