The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• How Donald Trump Won Everywhere: This was the second COVID election. (The Atlantic)
• A timeline of two years of chaos at Elon Musk’s X: The company has shed a jawdropping $35 billion in value in just two years. Let that sink in. (Sherwood)
• Reinventing the world’s favorite building material: Concrete, the second-most-used material on Earth, generates about four times more CO2 emissions than planes. (Washington Post)
• The Giant Supercomputer Built to Transform an Entire Country—and Paid For by Ozempic: The world’s latest AI machine is powered by the success of two products: Nvidia’s chips and Novo Nordisk’s weight-loss drugs. (Wall Street Journal)
• Trump’s economy vs. Biden’s — in 17 charts: Biden has delivered an impressive recovery, but many voters remember lower prices under Trump. (Washington Post)
• I Saw the Future of the City in Los Angeles: The city can reduce traffic, build housing, and pull off the Olympics with one simple trick. (Slate)
• The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time: A decade after the discovery of the “amplituhedron,” physicists have excavated more of the timeless geometry underlying the standard picture of how particles move. (Wired)
• We were just trying to get it to work’: The failure that started the internet: On 29 October 1969, two scientists established a connection between computers some 350 miles away and started typing a message. Halfway through, it crashed. They sat down with the BBC 55 years later. (BBC) see also ‘‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website. With HotWired, we introduced the world to the internet. Hyperlinks! Verticals! Banner ads! Cookies! Thirty years later, the hangover is real. (Wired)
• A Brief History of the Most Famous Swear Word in the World: Jesse Sheidlower on the Limberness and Literary Uses of “Fuck” (Literary Hub)
• Quincy Jones and Frank Sinatra: the audacious partnership that rocketed them to another planet Jones was behind many inflection points in American music, but it all began with a brotherhood with Ol’ Blue Eyes. (The Guardian)
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.
S&P 500 if weights were based on share buybacks instead of market cap
Source: @VladBastion
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