The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Dave Portnoy Bought Barstool Back. Can Erika Ayers Badan Keep His Pirate Ship on Course? As Penn pivots from Portnoy’s brand of bro-ish excess to family-friendly ESPN, Barstool is free to be itself. (Vanity Fair)
• Inside the delicate art of maintaining America’s aging nuclear weapons: The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country’s most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project. (AP News)
• The Patriot: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump: Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders. But his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. (The Atlantic)
• Addicted to cool: How the dream of air conditioning turned into the dark future of climate change. (Washington Post) but see also How to Cool Down a City: Singapore is rethinking its sweltering urban areas to dampen the effects of climate change. Can it be a model? (New York Times)
• Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us They were long derided as knuckle-draggers, but new discoveries are setting the record straight. As we rethink the nature of the Neanderthals, we could also learn something about our own humanity. (The Guardian)
• Quantum poetics: How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality. (Aeon)
• The Bizarre Story Behind Shinzo Abe’s Assassination: The man who allegedly killed the former prime minister says he was aiming for something larger: the Unification Church—the Moonies—and its political influence in Japan. (The Atlantic)
• The Iceman Runneth: Inside Vivek Ramaswamy’s intense, high-maintenance, and highly air-conditioned empire: Vivek Ramaswamy got rich in finance and pharma before declaring war on “wokeness.” Former staff say he could be finicky and paranoid, and treat staff more like servants than workers. Rooms had to be set to 64 degrees or below, with three Army Rangers tasked with keeping him cool. (Business Insider)
• Vintage Nirvana: Thirty years after the release of ‘In Utero,’ T-shirts commemorating the album can go for four figures. The most iconic band of the 1990s—one that openly rejected the commodification of rock—is now one of the biggest brands in the vintage industry. (The Ringer)
• Deion Sanders Is Writing College Football’s New Playbook: In his first season at the University of Colorado, “Coach Prime” has harnessed the power of social media, the NCAA transfer portal and his own celebrity to transform a perennial loser into must-see TV. (Businessweek)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Armen Panossian, incoming Co-CEO and Head of Performing Credit at Oaktree Capital Management, where he oversees all performing credit 2019 at Oaktree. Previously, he was at Pequot Capital Management managing distressed debt strategy.
U.S. states with the highest property taxes (NY + CA aren’t in top 10)
Source: CNBC
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
