The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush: White snus pouches were designed to help Swedish women quit cigarettes. They’ve become a staple for American dudes. (New Yorker)
• Drones and ‘Game Film’: Inside Chick-fil-A’s Quest to Make Fast Food Faster: The booming chicken chain aims to reinvent the drive-through process; reducing bottlenecks in the ‘cockpit’ (Wall Street Journal) see also Fast-er food: A productivity surge at U.S. restaurants: From the very beginning, fast-food restaurants were designed to be the epitome of productivity. Nearly everything about them was geared toward serving customers as quickly and efficiently as possible (NPR)
• The $32 Billion Wizards Who Picked the Best Time to Start a Company: The Worst Time: Google just made its biggest deal ever for Wiz, a cybersecurity startup founded only five years ago. It’s even unlikelier than it sounds. (Wall Street Journal)
• Rebuffed: A Closer Look at Options-Based Strategies: The holy grail for many investors is a strategy that generates market-like returns, but with less risk. Enter options-based strategies, often labeled with words like “Buffered,” “Overlay,” and “Defined Outcome.” These strategies use options to capture the upside or downside of an asset’s returns, and managers who employ a mix of options can tailor an asset’s risk/return profile to align with an investor’s goals. (Options trading-related categories have amassed $234 billion in AUM). Investors should expect disappointment from these types of strategies — the actual results have been overwhelmingly disappointing, and economic theory says these strategies should be overwhelmingly disappointing. (AQR)
• Oracle of the Apocalypse: Human beings are the apes that forget. While the list of today’s pressing global challenges is long – climate change, pandemics, increasing authoritarian politics, fiscal deficits, and demographic decay, to name just a few – all of them put together don’t hold a candle to the risk that the planet could stumble into the nuclear abyss. (William Bernstein)
• The Social Turn: Psychoanalysis at an inflection point: Psychoanalysis, I’d heard, was modernizing. APsA was opening up to the broader world. There was a push to bring in new members, as well as a rising tide of psychoanalytic work that sought to make analysis more accessible to and effective for people of different stripes. I wanted to understand what these changes meant for clinicians and patients and whether they were being resisted. What would it take for psychoanalysis to change? (Harpers)
• Ghosts among the philosophers Cambridge, home of analytic philosophy, was also a hotbed of psychical research. How did this spooky subject take root? (Aeon)
• “Knowingness” and the Politics of Ignorance: Much ink has been spilled about “polarization.” Most of it ignores a major cause: the widespread, misplaced faith that we already know that which we do not know. (The Garden of the Forking Paths)
• Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece. The recent discovery of an art forger’s workshop reminds us of the long history of fraudulent artworks – here are the simple rules to work them out. (BBC)
• The 2025 NCAA Men’s Tournament Bracket Breakdown: Which teams can win it all? Which can’t you trust? And what are the Cinderella candidates you should be most aware of? That and more ahead of the start of March Madness. (The Ringer)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jim O’Shaughnessy, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC (“OSV”), an investor in and accelerator of creative endeavors, fueling the worlds of art/science/tech. He is also the host of the Infinite Loops pod. Previously, he was founder andchair OSAM, which developed Canvas custom index (since sold to Franklyn Templeton), and Firector of Systematic Equity for Bear Stearns. His latest book is “Two Thoughts: A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom.”
What’s the future of remote work?
Source: LinkedIn
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
