The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat by the fire, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• So, you want to buy a sports team? Here’s how: Thinking about joining the likes of Ryan Reynolds, David Beckham, and (probably) Jeff Bezos in the mad scramble to land your own club? It’s suddenly the hottest pastime of the global super-rich – here’s how the game is played. (GQ)
• Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro: Inside Apple Park, the tech giant’s CEO talks about the genesis of a “mind-blowing” new device that could change the way we live and work. A-list directors are already on board—“My experience was religious,” says James Cameron—but will your average iPhone user drop $3,500 on a headset? (Vanity Fair) see also Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules: The pioneering PC revolutionized how people interact with computers. As the Mac enters its fifth decade, Apple says it will continue to evolve. (Wired)
• If you want to know where the world economy is headed, look at the bottom of this toy car: We have a small collection of these cars, and occasionally I use them as a teaching tool. I ask students in my economics classes to inspect the cars’ undersides, and together we trace the gradual movement of toy car manufacturing: from England and the United States in the 1960s to Japan in the mid-1970s, from South Korea in the mid-1980s to China in the late 1990s and Vietnam after. (Washington Post)
• The Seven Laws of Pessimism: If life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing? (Quillette)
• How a Group of Israel-Linked Hackers Has Pushed the Limits of Cyberwar: From repeatedly crippling thousands of gas stations to setting a steel mill on fire, Predatory Sparrow’s offensive hacking has now targeted Iranians with some of history’s most aggressive cyberattacks. (Wired)
• The Dogs That Live Longest, by a Nose: Small dogs with prominent noses live longer than bigger, flat-faced canines, a new study suggests. (New York Times)
• They’ve lived 100 years. Here’s their advice about everything. We can learn a lot from people who have lived 100 years. We asked 14 centenarians from around the world to reflect on what it takes to live a healthy and happy life, and to share the advice they would have given to their younger selves.. (Washington Post) see also A Short Guide to Living More Pointlessly: The digital platforms we rely on for connection and self-improvement are invariably built on point systems. But do we really want to play life like a game? (Beside)
• Texas Is Already Running Out of Water: Parts of the state are starting the year with low reserves. With light winter rains failing to replenish supply, and a scorching summer predicted, key areas may be pushed to the brink. (Wired)
• Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue: For Court and Spark, Joni the lonely, Joni the soloist, did something nobody expected her to do. She hired a band. (The Walrus)
• In a ‘Dark Dimension,’ Physicists Search for the Universe’s Missing Matter: An idea derived from string theory suggests that dark matter is hiding in a (relatively) large extra dimension. The theory makes testable predictions that physicists are investigating now. (Quanta Magazine)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Tom Hancock, Grantham, Mayer & Otterloo‘s head of the Focused Equity team and Quality Strategies. He is the portfolio manager for the Quality Fund (GQETX). The fun has returned 13.43% annually over the past decade (versus 12.03% for the S&P 500), putting it in the top 1% of peers, and is a Morningstar 5 Star, Gold-rated. He oversees an exchange-traded fund US Quality Equity ETF (QLTY) — the first retail product from GMO since its launch in 1977.
U.S. winning world economic war
Source: Axios
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
