The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty: How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market. (New York Times)
• Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule: How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in. (New Yorker) see also How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic Reality: In an excerpt from his new book, The End of Reality, the author warns about the curses of AI and transhumanism, presenting the moral case against superintelligence. (Vanity Fair)
• Oddly satisfying: what’s behind our drive to collect useless items? Fans say their collections of mugs, Crocs and plush toys ‘scratch an itch’. You might call it one-in-every-colour capitalism. (The Guardian)
• China hoped Fiji would be a template for the Pacific. Its plan backfired. Fijians are increasingly souring on China, an example of how Beijing can overreach as it attempts to build its global influence. (Washington Post)
• Open challenges in LLM research: Never before in my life had I seen so many smart people working on the same goal: making LLMs better. After talking to many people working in both industry and academia, I noticed the 10 major research directions that emerged. The first two directions, hallucinations and context learning, are probably the most talked about today. I’m the most excited about numbers 3 (multimodality), 5 (new architecture), and 6 (GPU alternatives). (Chip Huyen).
• The Story Behind This Modernist House Has as Many Twists and Turns as Its Architecture: Blue Dream, overlooking the ocean in East Hampton, N.Y., has precedents in such earlier buildings as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy Airport, but it’s unique in that its ground floor rises and falls with the dunes. The Hamptons home came to be with 22 architect interviews, a scrapped design plan and an untimely death. (Wall Street Journal)
• We are not empty: The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff: Misconceptions feeding the idea of the empty atom can be dismantled by carefully interpreting quantum theory, which describes the physics of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter – like electrons, nuclei and the molecules they form – can be portrayed either as waves or particles. (Aeon) see also Our Universe wasn’t empty, even before the Big Bang: All of the matter and radiation we measure today originated in a hot Big Bang long ago. The Universe was never empty, not even before that. (Aeon)
• The Polycrisis: Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife? (Aeon)
• Riley Keough on Growing Up Presley, Losing Lisa Marie, and Inheriting Graceland: Daisy Jones & the Six propelled her to stardom even as she navigated tragedies, new motherhood, and a legal struggle with Priscilla. (Vanity Fair)
• The Vicious, Multibillion-Dollar War Over Sports Trading Cards: The two firms atop the industry are exchanging accusations of anti-competitive practices as the wholesome hobby gets sucked into the antitrust wars. (New Republic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Greg Davis, Chief Investment Officer of the Vanguard Group. Davis is responsible for the oversight of approximately $7 trillion managed by Vanguard fixed income, equity index, and quantitative equity groups. He also serves as a member of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee of the US Treasury Department.
The rental market slowdown is finally reflected in inflation numbers
Source: Apartment List
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