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 Future, Made in China: Beijing is competing with the U.S. for tech supremacy. Who wins will have huge political implications. Beijing is competing with the U.S. for tech supremacy. Who wins will have huge political implications. (New Yorker)
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Michael Mauboussin’s Consilient Observer paper on when crowds are smart and when they’re dangerous — the diversity, independence, and aggregation conditions that make collective judgment work, and what happens when they break down. (Morgan Stanley / Consilient Observer)
• Bernard Arnault: Inside the court of France’s richest man: Investigation’Bernard Arnault’s Empire’ (1/6). The billionaire at the head of LVMH is as secretive as he is powerful. He relies on a devoted entourage in which a mix of fear and admiration prevails. Raphaëlle Bacqué’s six-part series on the LVMH founder — the free-marketeer who whispers in the ear of every president, keeps his media outlets in line, and patronizes the arts. (Le Monde)
• How Hulk Hogan’s Heel Turn Changed Everything: An excerpt from David Shoemaker’s new book. When Hogan joined the nWo he didn’t just rewrite his own legacy — he recalibrated what fans expect from storytelling generally. As this excerpt from David Shoemaker’s new book, ‘Why Hulk Hogan Matters,’ explains, Hulk’s shift to villainy recalibrated how fans watch wrestling—and what they expect out of storytelling on a much deeper level. (The Ringer)
• Can Robots Save an Aging Japan?: The New York Times on Japan’s demographic bet — with a shrinking workforce and resistance to immigration, the country is wagering its future on automation, from elder care to cherry blossom maintenance. (New York Times)
• Nobody Said Stop: Inside 1.8 Million Chatbot Conversations: Digital Digging’s analysis of a massive conversation dataset — what people actually use chatbots for, and how rarely anyone pushes back on anything the AI says. How ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot keep the conversation going (Digital Digging)
• Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers. NOEMA’s essay on the industry’s emotional recession — the layoffs, the AI anxiety, the collapse of the mission-driven self-image, and the malaise settling over the people who were supposed to be building the future. (NOEMA)
• The end of the age of heroes AI will soon be better at math than any human. What does that mean? Noah Smith on the cultural shift away from great-man narratives — the founders, the geniuses, the visionaries — and toward institutions, systems, and collective competence. (Noahpinion)
• The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything. When President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from a federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, in 2017, the President was angry. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he yelled. But Roy Cohn—an American scoundrel and the lawyer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, aided Senator Joseph McCarthy in implementing the Red Scare, and showed Trump the ropes in the real-estate business—was long gone. (New Yorker)
• Inside the Long, AI-Powered Quest to Perfect Pringle-Making: The Wall Street Journal on Kellanova’s chip optimization program — machine vision, predictive maintenance, and the surprisingly hard physics of the saddle-shaped crisp. (Wall Street Journal)
Video of the day: How George Lucas Outsmarted Every Studio In Hollywood
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, Young Money.
America’s biggest companies report ‘rock solid’ profits as consumers face higher costs
Source: Financial Times
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