The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form (surprisingly arts & entertainment oriented) weekend reads:
• 23 Ways You’re Already Living in the Chinese Century: The robotics explosion. The energy revolution. The cultural takeover. It’s everything you wanted for the United States—but done better in China. (Wired)
• The Cult of Costco: Its consistency is its superpower. (The Atlantic)
• Can Department Stores Ever Be Fun Again? Saks Fifth Avenue’s bankruptcy filing has revived debates about how these once celebrated shopping emporiums can regain their luster. (New York Times)
• The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up: You don’t see this with fiction like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Sales of those books may rise and fall in response to new film or TV adaptations, but those franchises aren’t bound to a particular generation in the way that Harry Potter is bound to the millennials. (New York Times)
• By All Measures: Our problems are too vast, our distance from them too great. How do we navigate our derangement of scale? (Longreads)
• Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? How American tourists took over everything. (The Dial)
• How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE: ICE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technology to spy on anyone—and potentially everyone—in the United States. It can be hard to imagine how to defend oneself against such an overwhelming force. But a few enterprising hackers have started projects to do counter-surveillance against ICE, and hopefully protect their communities through clever use of technology. (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• There is No Proto-Dragon: The Illusion of Fictional Taxonomy: Ask not what a dragon does, but what a dragon is. (Typebar Magazine)
• Defining Moments in TV History You’ve Probably Never Heard About: Many of the most-important events have slipped from our collective memories. But their impacts live on. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Search for Alien Artifacts: Is Coming Into Focus From surveys of the pre-Sputnik skies to analysis of interstellar visitors, scientists are rethinking how and where to look for physical traces of alien technology. (Wired)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Kate Burke, CEO of Allspring Global Investments a global asset manager with more than 600 billion dollars in assets under advisement. She is also a director on the firm’s board. Previously, she was at AllianceBernstein as COO/CFO.
GS survey: Half of investors plan to increase exposure to hedge funds
Source: Wall Street Journal
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
