The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat: Entrepreneurs have invested billions in plant-based and lab-grown meats, and the possibilities are endless. (The Atlantic)
• He Pushed the New York Times to Buy Wordle. Now He Has to Make Sports Work. David Perpich, cousin of publisher A.G. Sulzberger, was an architect of the subscriber bundle of games, a cooking app, the Wirecutter and sports-media site the Athletic. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Story of Titanium: The earth contains a lot of titanium – it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it’s only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal (titanium dioxide has been in use somewhat longer as a paint pigment). Because titanium so readily bonds with oxygen and other elements, it doesn’t occur at all in metallic form in nature. One engineer described titanium as a “streetwalker,” because it will pick up anything and everything. (Construction Physics)
• Grading the economic schools of thought: Who got the 2020s inflation right? (Noahpinion)
• In Search of Van Halen’s Brown M&Ms: Contract riders and the meaning of a modern pop star: The history of music is full of outlandish tales with varying degrees of truth. Maybe you’ve heard this one. (Snack Stack)
• Welcome to ‘Zombie Twitter’ Elon Musk has killed the one thing that made Twitter special. It’s been less than a year since he bought it, and Elon Musk’s Twitter is already well on its way to suffering a fate worse than death — irrelevance. (Business Insider)
• Taleb as miseducator: People overestimate their understanding of almost everything, because they usually see the manageable uncertainty and causally explainable outcomes, missing the contingency and the possibility of something happening which is way out of their experience. (Back of Mind, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
• Dream of Antonoffication | Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet: In the history of pop, the producer’s place is clearer. A producer serves as a shorthand for the dominant sound of a whole era: George Martin and Eddie Kramer for the “studio as a musical instrument” experiments of the late ’60s; Quincy Jones for the clinically precise grooves of ’70s and ’80s R&B; Glen Ballard for the drum-machine-and-acoustic-guitar mallscapes of ’90s adult alternative; Babyface for the smooth textures of that decade’s R&B; Max Martin for the Eurodance sheen of 2000s teen pop. Each of these sounds is curiously detachable from the music itself, and certainly from the artists who make it. In fact, you could say that the producer first arose as a significant figure in the pop world as a response to a need for a ready-made, portable sound. (The Drift)
• Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness. The weirdness manifested in the national political scene, too: in the 4chan-fueled 2016 Trump campaign, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere were trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong. It felt like a widespread identity crisis — as if they didn’t know how to be. (Washington Post)
• The Job Where Being a Good Co-worker Pays $22 Million a Year: Hard data is one way to measure employee performance. But so are soft skills. They’re the reason a role player is now the highest-paid player on his NBA team. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Tom Wagner, Co-Portfolio Manager at Knighthead Capital. The $10 billion event-driven is a deep value-focused investor specializing in companies that need financial and operational restructuring. He is a co-investor with football legend Tom Brady in several sports assets, including a Pickleball team, Birmingham City FC in the English Football League, and an endurance auto racing team. Wagner began his career doing hedge fund accounting at Ernst & Young.
Climate denialism has burnt to a crisp
Source: Washington Post
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