The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Trump’s threat to economic data: The federal statistical system is at risk. Declining data quality would compound the harm of an economic downturn or financial crisis. (Slow Boring)
• ‘Why would he take such a risk?’ How a famous Chinese author befriended his censor: Online dissent is a serious crime in China. So why did a Weibo censor help me publish posts critical of the Communist party? (The Guardian)
• What America Can Learn From the Americas: Greg Grandin’s sweeping history of the new world shows how immutably intertwined the United States is with Latin America. It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys. (TNR)
• A New Holy Trinity of Watch Brands for the Non-Billionaire Class: At the world’s biggest watch fair, upper-middle-class dreams are destroyed. (Bloomberg)
• How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down a $57.8 Million Texas Lottery: A global team of gambling whizzes hatched a scheme to snag the jackpot; millions of tickets in 72 hours. (WSJ)
• Why America Should Sprawl The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth — but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it. (New York Times)
• This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops: Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.” (Wired)
• Has the campaign to get smartphones out of schools reached a tipping point? In today’s newsletter: Momentum is growing for stricter smartphone rules for children, as schools, parents, and the Children’s Commissioner push for bans amid rising concerns? (The Guardian)
• When The Sopranos Took Off, James Gandolfini Took Off Too: In a new biography of the Emmy winner, Sopranos cast and crew members recall the difficult era in which their leading man would frequently disappear from set: “At a certain point, HBO was fining him 250 grand a day. And he would say, Fuck it. I can’t come in to work.” (Vanity Fair)
• Pierre Boulez Was a Titan of 20th-Century Music. What About Now? The legacy of this composer and conductor may not be in his rarely performed works, but in how we think about music itself. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Martin Escobari of, General Atlantic, where he is Chairman, and head of the Global Growth Equity Investment Committee, and Managing Director. Before joining General Atlantic in 2012, Martín was Co-Founder and CFO of Submarino.com, a leading Brazilian online retailer that went public on the Bovespa and was sold to Lojas Americanas in 2006. He was recently appointed to the Harvard Management Company Board.
Tax cuts account for 38% of the national debt today, while recession responses and spending increases each caused 29%
Source: @SteveRattner
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
