Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Plot to Steal the Other Secret Inside a Can of Coca-Cola: Shannon You was a good chemist, a bad colleague—and a thief. When she tried to use the $120 million technology she stole, she got played. (Businessweek)
• The Corruption of Lindsey Graham: So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison. A case study in the rise of authoritarianism. (The Bulwark) (112 page PDF)
• How to Build (And Destroy) a Social Network: Status means everything to platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But contrary to what Elon Musk thinks, it doesn’t come from a blue checkmark. (The Atlantic)
• The mysterious middlemen being blamed for America’s sky-high drug prices: How pharmacy benefit managers found themselves the targets of a bipartisan push on drug prices. (Vox)
• A list of recent high-profile shootings in the United States: The attack is the country’s 22nd mass killing — in which four or more people died, not including the assailant — of 2023, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. Here are some other notable U.S. mass shootings over the past 12 months. (AP)
• An American Catastrophe: The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy: During the year and a half in which the U.S. government separated thousands of children from their parents, the Trump administration’s explanations for what was happening were deeply confusing, and on many occasions—it was clear even then—patently untrue. I’m one of the many reporters who covered this story in real time. Despite the flurry of work that we produced to fill the void of information, we knew that the full truth about how our government had reached this point still eluded us. (The Atlantic)
• The real reason for the Supreme Court’s corruption crisis: Who watches the philosopher kings with lifetime appointments? (Vox) see also Harlan Crow Sure Isn’t Paying for Your Kid’s School: Of all that’s come out of the past few weeks, this is perhaps the most insulting. (Slate)
• New Surveys of Asian Americans Show Persistent Racism and Hardship: Research released for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month reveals that anti-Asian sentiment has not abated with the end of the pandemic, and safety is a top concern. (CityLab)
• How Trump’s anti-science meddling erased 3 years of crucial COVID research: It is undisputable that the Trump White House ordered the National Institutes of Health to terminate a $3.4-million grant to EcoHealth in April 2020, based on entirely unfounded right-wingers’ claims that EcoHealth was funding so-called gain-of-function virus research in China, something they say could have allowed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to escape from a Chinese laboratory and infect the world. (Los Angeles Times)
• These ten books are considered pornography in Ron DeSantis’ Florida: New records, obtained by Popular Information shows that few of the books removed from Florida school libraries were deemed pornographic or sexually explicit. Many books that did receive that label do not meet the definition of pornography — or anything close — under state or federal law.. (Popular Information) see also The rising Republican movement to defund public libraries: Libraries bolster democracy. Republicans want to get rid of them. (Vox)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with venture capitalist and seed investor Howard Lindzon. He is the founder and CIO of Social Leverage, where he makes early-stage investments. He founded Wall Strip (sold to CBS in 2007), co-founded StockTwits (which pioneered the ‘cashtag’ e.g., $AAPL), and was the first investor in Robin Hood. Social Leverage recently launched its 4th fund.
As Emergency Ends, a Look at Covid’s U.S. Death Toll
Source: New York Times
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