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:
• On Quality: An ode to Pirsig: What quality is and how it is degraded. Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle. That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen. (Worse On Purpose)
• The Second Derivative: Why No One Understands the AI Boom: The second derivative problem: bulls and bears alike are arguing about the AI boom’s level when the rate of change is what matters. The market misremembers 2008. That same blind spot sits at the center of the AI boom. (Groundbreaker) see also Will OpenAI ever be profitable? Deep dive + Initiating coverage. Musings from a value creating PE investor. Musings from a value creating PE investor. (The Finance Quotient)
• Your company blocked ChatGPT for sensitive files. Grab the guide to strip the name, the address, and the price, and the block stops mattering. “DoN’t UpLoAd SeNsItIvE FiLeS to AI.” Okay, well now what? The hard part is deciding what a model needs to know, and who should have to make that decision. (Nate B. Jones)
• The American Dream according to Bill Ackman: In business and in public life, Ackman comes across as a man riding an unstoppable winning streak. But fate recently delivered a painful personal reminder to this master of the universe who has so often bent the world to his will: There are some things that even a powerful billionaire can’t control. Equal parts megalomania, conviction, and genuine civic ambition. (Fortune)
• Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise: Society burned through social capital and replaced it with ruinous private expenditure. (Becoming Noble)
• Rain Robbers: How Four Farmers Faked a Drought and Stole Millions in Crop Insurance: Dust became dollars in one of the wildest agriculture crimes on record. (AgWeb)
• The new Fed boss is tight-lipped. That might upset the markets: The new US central bank chief is reluctant to signal future interest rate moves — how will hedge funds react? (Financial Times)
• Summer etiquette: 47 essential rules – from sex to sunloungers to shopping in swimming trunks. When is it OK to go shirtless? What time can you start drinking on holiday? And can you ask a stranger to apply your sunscreen? A field guide to the season when rules and norms loosen. Experts explain the behaviour that’s hot this summer – and what’s really, really not. (The Guardian)
• Luck is being ready Climate change is happening. It will get worse. It will be expensive. And you can’t just ignore it. A short essay on the intersection of preparation and fortune — the people who get “lucky” are almost always the ones who put themselves in position to be. (Hybrid Economics)
• The Odyssey Review: The Origin of a Never-Ending Story: Why Homer’s story has never stopped being retold. Christopher Nolan’s passionate, dazzling adaptation of Homer’s poem is an epic to end—and begin—all epics. (Pitchfork)
Video of the day: The Ultimate Guide To Absolutely Everything In The Universe
Be sure to check out our latest Masters in Business interview with Lori Heinel, Global Chief Investment Officer of State Street Investment Management, the money management arm of investing giant State Street. She oversees over $5.7 trillion in assets (as of year-end 2025), which includes everything from index funds and ETFs to active strategies, multi-asset solutions, and alternatives. She was named to Forbes’ 2025 “50 Over 50” list.
El Nino: The next supply shock?
Source: Deutsche Bank
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