The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat by the fire, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Climate Change from A to Z: The stories we tell ourselves about the future. (New Yorker)
• A comprehensive guide to how Elon Musk is changing Twitter: Mass layoffs, trolling, and check marks: How Elon Musk is running Twitter. (Vox) see also Twitter was special. But it’s time to leave. Tweets were always short-lived. Turns out Twitter was too. (Pwn All The Things)
• The Toxic History of Color: For all of human history, our species have used both natural and synthetic dyes—but have we taken our obsession with color to an extreme? (Atmos)
• The $6 Billion Shot at Making New Antibiotics—Before the Old Ones Fail: Antimicrobials cost as much to develop as other drugs, but don’t earn the same returns. Congress could give drugmakers a boost, but time is running out (Wired)
• The Robot Tractors Are Coming, Just as Soon as We Crush a Few Bugs: A plucky team from a small English agricultural college tackles one of the hardest challenges in tech. (Businessweek)
• Inside the Hip-Hop Record Store Run by Undercover Cops: Locals knew Boombox as the shop with a recording studio in the back. It was also part of a Met Police sting codenamed Operation Peyzac. (Vice)
• Ukrainian Hospital Stymied Russians With Defiant Doctors and a Fake Covid Outbreak: In occupied Kherson, Tropinka staffers outwitted—and outwaited—the invaders, as they fought over hallway posters and the flag out front. (Wall Street Journal)
• A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism. Our most farsighted seers knew the war for humanity had begun (The Upheaval)
• Cigars, Booze, Money: How a Lobbying Blitz Made Sports Betting Ubiquitous: The gambling industry and its allies got their way with lawmakers after showering them with donations, gifts and dubious arguments. (New York Times)
• The World Cup’s New High-Tech Ball Will Change Soccer Forever: All tournament long, match balls will contain a sensor that collects spatial positioning data in real time — the first World Cup to employ such a ball-tracking mechanism. This, combined with existing optical tracking tools, will make VAR (video assistant referees) and programs like offside reviews more accurate and streamlined than they’ve ever been. Combining these two forms of tracking has long been a holy grail of sorts in technology circles, and FIFA’s use of the ball sensor in particular will serve as a highly public test case over the next four weeks. (Fivethirtyeight)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend for a live interview at Bloomberg Invest with Boaz Weinstein of Saba Capital discussing “Whales, Tails & Fails.”
In less than a decade, China has built one of the world’s biggest green bond markets, with more potential than any other to alter the course of climate change.
Source: Bloomberg
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