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:
• A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them: Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022. Western intelligence agencies had the playbook for Russia’s invasion months in advance. The story of why the warnings were ignored. (The Guardian)
• The Rise of the Manhattan Mega-Mansion: Big-money buyers are no longer content with the usual conversions. Steven Harris, an architect whose eponymous firm has worked on more than 100 single-family townhouses over the past 30 years, says demand for bigger urban homes has been booming. (Citylab)
• Pills Are Becoming Machines That Work Inside the Gut: The next generation of medicine isn’t just delivering drugs — it’s deploying tiny machines inside your body that can diagnose, report back, and take action on their own. (IEEE Spectrum)
• Rolex Opened a College—and It’s as Selective as Harvard: The Swiss watchmaker is training its next generation of craftspeople at a school with an acceptance rate that rivals the Ivy League. America has fewer than 2,000 professional watchmakers. Rolex’s new Dallas school aims to fix that—and the demand for admission says a lot about the state of work in 2026. (GQ)
• The Fallacy Fallacy: Why you shouldn’t go looking for faulty reasoning everywhere. Knowing the names of logical fallacies doesn’t make you a better thinker — it just makes you better at dismissing arguments you don’t like. (Persuasion)
• Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking: Sam Kriss goes inside an AI startup founded by a kid and finds something stranger and more unsettling than the usual Silicon Valley origin story. (Harper’s) see also Kids Show Us What They’re Into, From Pokémon to Pop Stars: Bloomberg photographs Gen Alpha kids’ rooms and obsessions — a window into the tastes, brands, and cultural forces shaping the next generation of consumers. (Bloomberg)
• My maddening battle with chronic fatigue syndrome: ‘On my worst days, it feels almost demonic’ I suffered with my mystery illness for decades before gaining a diagnosis. Could retraining my brain be the answer? A deeply personal account of living with ME/CFS — a condition that remains poorly understood, widely dismissed, and devastatingly debilitating for those who suffer from it. (The Guardian)
• Metabolism, not cells or genetics, may have begun life on Earth: A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. A provocative new theory suggests life didn’t start with DNA or cells — it started with metabolism. Chemical reactions came first; biology came later. (Big Think)
• Has Trump Delivered on His Promises? What These 12 Metrics Tell Us: Every year, Bloomberg Opinion chooses specific metrics to cut through the noise and measure the current president’s results on the job. This year, the 12 data points our columnists broke down are more important than ever, with control of Congress hanging in the balance ahead of the midterms. The analysis, in both text and video below, shares a consistent approach. For each issue, we focused on the numbers that best measured success, failure or something in between. A dozen data points against Trump’s campaign promises. The scorecard is mixed at best. (Bloomberg)
• ‘Survivor’ Is America It’s our greatest game and our truest mirror. Season 50 of Survivor is here, and the show remains the most durable metaphor for American culture — alliances, betrayal, individualism, and the illusion of meritocracy. And in its tiki-torch-festooned way, it’s captured our society as an ever-changing collection of tribes. (New York Times
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Jeff Chang, cofounder and President of VEST. The firm manages over $55 billion in client assets across various “Buffered” and “Target Outcome” strategies. Backed by Y Combinator, the firm launched in 2012 and pioneered an approach to portfolio construction based on defined outcomes and engineered certainty.
Brazil, Canada, and Mexico gain as the 15% Section 122 tariff replaces higher IEEPA rates and USMCA shields North America.
Source: BofA Global Research
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