The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Bean Box coffee, grab a seat on the beach, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• AMC’s CEO Turned His $9 Billion Company Into a Meme Machine: How Adam Aron, a 67-year-old executive with a background in loyalty programs, transformed himself into a Twitter-obsessed, gold mine-buying, populist folk hero for retail investors. (Businessweek)
• Five Lessons from History: The most important lessons from history are the takeaways that are so broad they can apply to other fields, other eras, and other people. That’s where lessons have leverage and are most likely to apply to your own life. But those things take some digging to find, often sitting layers below the main story. (Collaborative Fund)
• What Big History Misses: Sweeping the human story into a cosmic tale is a thrill but we should be wary about what is overlooked in the grandeur (Aeon) see also What Our Fantasies About the European “Middle Ages” Say About Us: An exhibition depicts how people have reimagined the medieval period in the centuries since, and how they have revealed their own interests and ideals with each new interpretation. (Hyperallergic)
• Someone stole my truck. I got a crash course on the wild black market for stolen cars: Car manufacturers and individual car owners in Europe were just like those in the United States: they lacked much in the way of incentives to do something about the problem. But there was one group that did have strong incentives to fight the problem: insurance companies. (NPR)
• Get Ready for the Magic Mushroom Pill: The medical benefits of psychedelic drugs have gone from Age of Aquarius punchline to solid science, but the startups racing to market might still be getting ahead of themselves. (Businessweek)
• The Twisted Life of Clippy: In the ’90s, Microsoft created an annoying paperclip that it quickly retired. Its developers never imagined the virtual assistant would become a cultural icon. (Seattle Met)
• How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything: The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum. (Quanta Magazine)
• Twitter Whistleblowing Report Actually Seems To Confirm Twitter’s Legal Argument, While Pretending To Support Musk’s The first and most important thing to remember is that, even as Musk insists otherwise, the Twitter lawsuit is not about spam. It just is not. Many of Musk’s claims were based on either misunderstanding or deliberately misreading Twitter’s SEC filings. (Tech Dirt)
• Beto O’Rourke’s risky quest for votes in deep-red Texas On a road trip to find untapped votes, the Democratic challenger for governor faces armed protestors, shouting matches and a stolen catalytic converter. (Washington Post)
• Why Competitive Chess Is as Vicious as 10 Rounds in a Boxing Ring: Our writer was looking for a mellow pursuit to replace rec league hockey. Unfortunately the centuries old board game proved to be a lot more savage. (Inside Hook)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Eric Balchunas, Senior ETF Analyst for Bloomberg, where he is co-creator of the Bloomberg podcast Trillions, and co-host of Bloomberg TV’s ETF IQ. He has authored several books, most recently “The Bogle Effect: How John Bogle and Vanguard Turned Wall Street Inside Out and Saved Investors Trillions.”
Are we going back to the cable days?
Source: The Hustle
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