The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of BeanBox coffee, grab a seat in the lobby, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why. Texas-based RealPage’s YieldStar software helps landlords set prices for apartments across the U.S. With rents soaring, critics are concerned that the company’s proprietary algorithm is hurting competition. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits. (ProPublica)
• Rethinking Arthur Burns, the “Worst” Fed Chair in History: An inflation-fighting strategy for today might come from the most unlikely of sources. (Democracy)
• John Mack, Who Led Morgan Stanley Into a Crisis, Regrets Little: “I have f—ing killed it,” he writes in a new memoir. (Businessweek)
• How a magician-mathematician revealed a casino loophole: When a gang of gambling cheats sussed out how to beat the house, they inadvertently highlighted a loophole from a shuffled deck. It took a magician-turned-mathematician to reveal how. (BBC)
• Leonard Leo Pushed the Courts Right. Now He’s Aiming at American Society. After leading efforts to put conservatives on the bench, the activist has quietly built a sprawling network and raised huge sums of money to challenge liberal values. (New York Times)
• Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’ The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. We’ve attempted to connect the proton’s many faces to form the most complete picture yet. (Quanta Magazine)
• What Happened When the U.S. Military Played ‘Shark Tank’: Central Command went searching for good ideas. It had to flatten the chain of command to find them. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Search for a Pill That Can Help Dogs—and Humans—Live Longer: People have been searching for a fountain of youth for thousands of years. Celine Halioua thinks she’s found one—for canines. Be patient, we’re next. (Wired)
• Whites now more likely to die from covid than Blacks: Why the pandemic shifted. The imbalance in death rates among the nation’s racial and ethnic groups has been a defining part of the pandemic since the start. Over time, the gap in deaths widened and narrowed but never disappeared — until mid-October 2021, when the nation’s pattern of covid mortality changed, with the rate of death among White Americans sometimes eclipsing other groups. (Washington Post)
• The Real Star of M*A*S*H: A personal tribute to the overlooked genius of writer W.C. Heinz. (Quillette)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Marta Norton, Chief Investment Officer of Morningstar Investment Management. The firm manages directly or advises on $249.4B in client funds. She began her career as BLS economist, and before her current role, she was Head of U.S. Outcome-Based Strategies for Morningstar.
Four years into the trade war, are the US and China decoupling?
Source: Peterson Institute for International Economics
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
