The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Gambler Who Beat Roulette: For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game. (Businessweek)
• Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple: As Apple CEO, he has defied his skeptics and refashioned the world’s most creative company on his own exacting terms. Now, in a frank conversation, he offers new insight into his leadership—explaining why he sees himself as an outsider, how he asserts Apple’s values, and what he does to keep from staring at his iPhone all day. (GQ)
• What Happened When Uber’s CEO Started Driving for Uber: Dara Khosrowshahi and other executives realized drivers’ complaints were valid. They revamped the app, helping Uber attract workers and extend its lead on Lyft. Driver pay remains a sticking point. (Wall Street Journal)
• How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole: Rupert Murdoch built an empire by giving viewers exactly what they wanted. But what they wanted — election lies and insurrection — put that empire (and the country) in peril. (New York Times)
• How the Panama Papers rocked pop culture: Band names, dozens of song titles, a racehorse and even cigarette rolling papers. Seven years on, the ICIJ-led reporting collaboration that sparked a global political earthquake continues to show up in surprising ways. (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)
• Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital Was Spiraling, and Then Came FTX: The hedge fund’s bad crypto bets—and a reputational hit from its partnership with Sam Bankman-Fried—have investors looking for the exit. (Bloomberg)
• Venice Is Saved! Woe Is Venice. After centuries of flooding, Venice has at long last raised seawalls to save itself from high water. (New York Times)
• Three abandoned children, two missing parents and a 40-year mystery: Elvira and her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, were left at a train station in Barcelona aged two, four and five. As an adult, when Elvira decided to look for her parents, she discovered a family history wilder than anything she had imagined. (The Guardian)
• And So It Begins: On the First Charges to Drop Against Former President Donald Trump: It alleges serious misconduct: plotting to pay hush money to multiple people to avoid electoral consequences and falsifying documents to cover it up. (Lawfare)
• Can cosmology untangle the universe’s most elusive mysteries? From the Big Bang to dark energy, knowledge of the cosmos has sped up in the past century — but big questions linger. (Knowable)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Known as the Dean of Valuation, he teaches Corporate Finance and Valuation to the MBA students at Stern where he has been voted “Professor of the Year” by the graduating M.B.A. class nine times. His textbook “Investment Valuation” is the standard in the field. His next book comes out in December, and is titled The Corporate Lifecycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications.
Largest 200 state-controlled Sovereign Wealth and Public Pension Funds ($bn)
Source: Flourish
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
