My end-of-week morning reads:
• The New Wild West: Texas Experiments With Raw Capitalism: The state’s light regulation and low taxes are luring dozens of big companies. It’s also setting up a water crisis and a “race to the bottom” in shareholder protections. (Barron’s)
• Is Artificial Intelligence Making Us More Productive? What the UK Industry Data Show: Bank of England staff go looking for the productivity payoff in actual United Kingdom industry-level data rather than in vendor decks. Ten minutes, and the answer is more complicated than either camp wants. (Bank Underground) see also How to spot AI writing: The tells that survive editing — the em-dash abuse, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” constructions, the frictionless blandness — and why detection keeps getting harder. (Archive)
• Big tech meets Milton Friedman: Spend your own money on someone else and you keep the cost discipline but lose the value signal (the recipient might not want what you bought them). Spend other people’s money on yourself and you lose the plot on costs and sometimes get a subprime mortgage crisis. And finally, spend other people’s money on other people — that’s why people hate the government. Semafor’s view on the shareholder-primacy revival in tech — the mission statements are out, the Friedman doctrine is back, and the pivot says everything about the moment. (Semafor)
• The Great Shift From Workers to Owners: For decades, workers got a remarkably stable share of America’s income. Then something changed. Here’s where the money went. Platypus Economics on the K-shaped economy’s persistence — the income share flowing to capital keeps climbing, and the worker-to-owner wealth transfer is the decade’s defining economic fact. (Platypus Economics)
• McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There : I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase. Wired’s writer requested his data file from McDonald’s and got back 515 pages — every order, every app open, every prediction about his future behavior. The loyalty program is a surveillance program. (Wired)
• Why We Think We Know More Than We Do: Matthew Hutson took up house-dance classes after two decades of being complimented at raves and parties. The studio supplied a rapid education in the gap between feeling competent and being competent. Breaking down the famous “Dunning-Kruger effect” with David Dunning himself (Nautilus)
• Reese Witherspoon and Me: Will I join her on the red carpet some day? Maybe these folks have good reason to distance themselves from AI. The financial world is turning on the bot business. The ten most shorted investment grade bonds are now all linked to AI. Ted Gioia on his unlikely intersection with the actress’s media empire — and what her book club’s power says about who actually moves culture now. (The Honest Broker)
• The Fifth Estate: What happened to the American university? The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world.
(The Nation)• The New Science of Cannabis and Sleep: Ariana Eunjung Cha on research showing cannabis suppresses REM sleep — which raises harder questions about memory, emotional processing, and what dreams are actually for. Research suggests cannabis suppresses REM sleep, raising questions about memory, emotion and the purpose of dreams. (Washington Post)
• Before ‘Saturday Night Live,’ a Film Exec Told Jon Lovitz to Become a Lawyer: The Wall Street Journal’s house call with Lovitz — the career advice he ignored, the SNL years, and the real estate. The ‘Don’t Say Good Luck’ co-star on studying Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen albums, his Liar character and his love for old movies (Wall Street Journal)
Video of the day: Edge of Tomorrow: The Franchise That Never Was
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents. She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.
Google’s monthly token processing increased roughly 300-fold between May 2024 and May 2026
Source: Derek Thompson
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