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:
• The Clocks on One Building: Four-Year Leases. Sixteen-Year Guarantees. Debt to 2049: Shanaka Anslem Perera’s essay on the clocks of a single building — a small meditation on time, architecture, and attention that unfolds into something larger. (Shanaka Anslem Perera)
• How Hard Can Quant Trading Really Be? I Tried It to Find Out. Hedge funds have armies of PhDs, Bloomberg terminals, and million-dollar data feeds. I have Python open in VS Code – and a PhD in political economy. How much can I reproduce on my laptop? Lauren Leek’s experiment in DIY quantitative trading — the strategies, the backtests, and the humbling distance between academic finance and live P&L. (Lauren’s data Substack)
• The Rich, Lonely Life of a Top-Tier Male OnlyFans Creator: The economics work. Everything downstream of the economics does not. CJ Clark makes millions selling adult content—and the illusion of companionship — to subscribers on the internet. His work pays for his nice house in the San Diego suburbs and the McLaren in his garage. But human connection is harder to come by. (GQ)
• G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost: A new book, “Little Blue Dot,” by Katherine Dunn, raises questions about the unintended consequences of knowing where we are. (New Yorker)
• Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry That’s Keeping Your Beer Cold—and Saving Lives: Ice is essential to Texans in so many ways. So why does thinking about it give some of us a case of brain freeze? Ice is essential to Texans in so many ways. So why does thinking about it give some of us a case of brain freeze? (Texas Monthly)
• The Ultimate Horse: Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology. But at what cost? This is the paradox of the thoroughbred: breeders have spent centuries trying to create a faster horse, but in doing so, they may have bred away the very genetic diversity that would allow the horse to keep improving, or even to remain robust. Works in Progress on the centuries-long breeding project that produced the modern thoroughbred — selection, speed limits, and why horses stopped getting faster. Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology. But at what cost? (Works in Progress)
• What Was the Internet? As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next. Five writers on how far the web has fallen as artificial intelligence overtakes it, and what replaces it. Fifty-six minutes, perfect for the weekend. (Boston Review)
• The Tantalizing Possibility Of Locating Consciousness In The Brain: NOEMA on the neuroscience of consciousness localization — the competing theories, the adversarial collaborations, and what’s actually testable. Few discoveries would be more consequential than identifying the specific neural structures responsible for subjective experience. ZZZ (NOEMA)
• See the Battlefield Innovations Reshaping the Russia-Ukraine War: Midrange strikes taking out Russian logistics, long-range strikes causing a fuel crisis in occupied Crimea and reaching refineries deep inside Russia. Technology helps Ukraine achieve an edge on the battlefield (Wall Street Journal)
• RIP Tony Bourdain, You Would Have Hated All This Discourse: How would Tony the man feel about Tony the film? As Bourdain’s longtime assistant, I learned never to predict his responses. Bon Appétit on the A24 biopic and the posthumous Bourdain industrial complex — the man who despised sanctimony has become its favorite subject. (Bon Appetit)
Video of the day: I doubted this was the greatest album ever – then I heard these tapes. This is the full story of how The Beatles recorded Revolver, an album that changed popular music forever.
By the Numbers: Tim Cook’s era as Apple CEO ends on September 1, 2026.
Source: Ritholtz Wealth
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.
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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
