10 Sunday Reads

• Where’s all the Money in Personal Transformation? Why are rich people sad and spiritual people poor? (The Leading Edge)

• X Is a White-Supremacist Site: Elon Musk has made one of Twitter’s most glaring problems into a core feature on X. (The Atlantic)

• Why on Earth does Trump want to cancel the CHIPS Act?? A second Trump presidency would truly be a gift to Xi Jinping. (Noahpinion)

• Inside a Firewall Vendor’s 5-Year War With the Chinese Hackers: Hijacking Its Devices Sophos went so far as to plant surveillance “implants” on its own devices to catch the hackers at work—and in doing so, revealed a glimpse into China’s R&D pipeline of intrusion techniques..(Wired)

• Millions of Movers Reveal American Polarization in Action: They both moved away from Sioux Falls. Mr. Troyer left in the fall of 2021, and Mr. Fisher about a year later. In the process, they unwittingly became a part of a nationwide pattern that could matter in a close presidential election. They made the country more geographically polarized. (New York Times)

• Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed? The full effects of the President’s economic policies won’t be felt for years. That might be too late for Kamala Harris and other Democrats. (New Yorker)

• Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer. (New Republic) see alsoInside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign: “What’s discipline got to do with winning?” (The Atlantic)

• A media critic urged ‘not the odds, but the stakes.’ Did it work? My interview with Jay Rosen, who coined the phrase urging less ‘horse race’ and more consequences. (American Crisis)

• The Crash of the Hammer: How concerned citizens ran a neo-Nazi out of rural Maine. The first step in establishing a neo-Nazi compound is to clear and level the land. These sites tend to pop up in rural America, which means that there’s brush to hack down, tree stumps to pull up, and piles of debris to burn. All this work is done to make room for the barracks, kitchens, and meeting halls where modern-day devotees of Adolf Hitler will live, work, and train together. (Atavist)

• The Myth that Musicians Die at 27 Shows How Superstitions Are Made: Famous people who die at age 27, such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse, get even more famous because of the mythology surrounding that number—an example of how modern folklore emerges (Scientific American)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Peter Goodman, global economic correspondent for New York Times, and author of the book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain.” He has reported from more than 40 countries, won two Gerald Loeb awards, 8 prizes from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer for his work on roots of 2008 financial crisis.