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:
• Americans are terrible at taking vacations. Why are U.S. workers so bad at taking time off? U.S. companies are stingy with vacation time when compared with other countries. But U.S. workers can’t seem to leave work at work anyway. (Grid)
• In Seattle, It’s Almost Normal: The pandemic may have left some gaps in the urban fabric, but a neighborhood-by-neighborhood rundown of new restaurants and art events reveals that recovery is well underway. (New York Times)
• The Family That Mined the Pentagon’s Data for Profit: The Freedom of Information Act helps Americans learn what the government is up to. The Poseys exploited it—and became unlikely defenders of transparency. (Wired)
• Tech tool offers police ‘mass surveillance on a budget’ “Local law enforcement is at the front lines of trafficking and missing persons cases, yet these departments are often behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick, a Fog managing partner, said in an email. “We fill a gap for underfunded and understaffed departments.” (AP)
• Why Effective Altruists Fear the AI Apocalypse A conversation with the philosopher William MacAskill. (New York Magazine)
• No Promises: Does Alcoholics Anonymous work? Maybe the most convincing feature of AA is that it feels awful at the beginning. Sometimes that feeling doesn’t last through the first meeting. You hear something you can (here borrowing from Wallace again) Identify with and you are filled with hope, and it feels the same as the simulacrum, I’m sorry to say, but it’s better. (Plough)
• Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them That person who looks just like you is not your twin, but if scientists compared your genomes, they might find a lot in common. (New York Times)
• Behind the American Right’s Fascination With Viktor Orbán: An admiration for autocrats was once seen as a disorder of the left, but American conservativism has its own discreditable history of this. (The Atlantic)
• This company is about to grow new organs in a person for the first time A volunteer with severe liver disease will soon undergo a procedure that could lead them to grow a second liver. (MIT Tech)
• Foreign Candy Puts American Candy to Shame: It’s so much more than the flavors. (The Atlantic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Lynn Martin, President of the NYSE, which is part of the Intercontinental Exchange. NYSE is the world’s largest stock exchange, with 2,400 listed companies and a combined market cap of ~$36 trillion dollars. She began her career at IBM in its Global Services.
How Americans feel about law enforcement and the military
Source: YouGov
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
