The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Selling Art to the Rich, Famous, and Inebriated: Behind the scenes during Art Basel Miami Beach—a weeklong bacchanal of parties, paintings, and pills held in the name of shopping for art (The Atlantic)
• Stop saying “there is no China decoupling.” There is! Decoupling will take time, and it won’t look like the Iron Curtain, but it’s happening.(Noahpinion)
• The World’s Fastest-Sinking Megacity Has One Last Chance to Save Itself: Parts of Jakarta are subsiding at unprecedented speed. The longshot fix rests with noodle billionaire Anthoni Salim. (Bloomberg)
• Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit: The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition. (New York Times)
• Your Very Own Consciousness Can Interact With the Whole Universe, Scientists Believe. To explain quantum consciousness, it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically. (Popular Mechanics)
• The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure: So many people are nearsighted on the island nation that they have already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us. (Wired)
• As it planned for Oct. 7, Hamas lulled Israel into a false sense of calm: The assault stunned Israelis, who, for years, had been assured by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military leaders that Hamas had been deterred, its fighters safely fenced off inside Gaza. But across the Israeli army, analysts had warned for months that a multipronged attack was in the works: an unprecedented infiltration of Israel by land, air and sea. (Washington Post)
• In Ukraine, a war of incremental gains as counteroffensive stalls. Based on interviews with more than 30 senior Ukrainian and U.S. military officials, as well as over two dozen officers and troops on the front line. Some officials and soldiers spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe military operations (Washington Post)
• It Was Never About Sticking to Sports: Years after many of the staffers—including me—were scolded into keeping our opinions to ourselves, ESPN’s real crisis is coming into focus. (Slate)
• Two undrafted players, an unbreakable bond and the NFL’s top backfield: The two undrafteds learned they had much in common. Both had been doubted and dismissed, tossed to the side of the road like bottles after the last sip. And then they came together, creating an uncommon synergy. You can see it on game days now. (The Athletic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity, where since 1989, he has managed the Fidelity Low-Priced Stock Fund (and others). Over his 32-year tenure, the fund has beaten 100% of peers, and outperformed the Russell 2000 benchmark by 3.49% annually, and has more than doubled the performance of the S&P 500.
How many dogs work for the government?
Source: USA Facts
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