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:
• Dopamine Markets: Investing is entertainment, traders are celebrities, BREAKING news comes with live odds, everyone has inside information, the American dream is to get rich quick. (Dopamine Markets)
• The $2 Billion Experiment to Transform Restaurants With Robots and AI: E-commerce mogul Marc Lore’s Wonder is trying to do to takeout what Amazon did to shopping. Do people want food made in a culinary fulfillment center? (Businessweek)
• The Dawn of the AI Drone: In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born: As the war grinds on, sophisticated Russian defenses have pushed Ukraine to develop a frightening new weapon: semiautonomous killing machines. In the past year, drone warfare in Ukraine has undergone a chilling transformation. Most drones require a human pilot. But some new Ukrainian drones, once locked on a target, can use A.I. to chase and strike it — with no further human involvement. This is the story of how the battlefield became the birthplace of a powerful new weapon. (New York Times)
• The Mischievous Ex-Bankers Behind “Industry:” Konrad Kay and Mickey Down failed as financiers—but they’re making a killing by depicting the profession on HBO. (New Yorker)
• The Front-Runner: California’s Gavin Newsom would rather be wrong than weak. (The Atlantic)
• How to Do Great Work. If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. (Paul Graham) see also 37 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I’d Known Earlier: I wouldn’t say I’ve done it all because that’s one thing you learn–how much you have left to learn–but I have done a lot. I’ve had to think a lot about how to be a good employee as well as how to be a good boss. I’ve seen what makes good companies succeed and bad companies fail. I’ve seen how people get ahead…and how people get stuff. (Ryan Holiday)
• How Amy Poehler’s ‘Good Hang’ broke through celebrity podcast fatigue: The market was saturated with stars chatting with other stars. But the ‘SNL’ veteran channeled the old magic of late-night TV talk shows. Now she’s a favorite in a new Golden Globe category. (Washington Post)
• Trump: The Anti-Lincoln: On emergency power, constitutional preservation, and the regime crisis now unfolding. (Notes from the Circus)
• A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science: Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. (Wired)
• Inside the Lost ‘Star Trek’ Movie That Would Have Rebooted Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy: How this bold prequel plan unraveled amid studio politics, fan backlash and cast fears. (Woman’s World)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Ben Hunt, founder of Perscient, a firm that studies how narratives and stories shape markets, investing, and social behavior through the lens of information theory, game theory, and unstructured data analysis. His work analyzes the language, story arcs, and viral spread of explanations in media
The US ended the year with an effective tariff rate of more than 10% — the highest since WW2
Source: Financial Times
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