This week’s highlights: Kanye’s Second Coming, Gamma Traps, and Sleep
Issue 338
Happy Friday Everyone,
A quick word of welcome to all the new subscribers that have come in over the past couple of weeks. Fifteen on Friday will be off next week, so look for the next issue on 7/26.
Articles This Week:
- Reading List – 1st Half of 2019 – I regularly get asked for book recommendations. Here is a quick update of what I have read so far in 2019.
- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work In Half the Time – Scrum / Agile were originally efforts to improve software development efforts. Their success in those arenas (often with exponential levels of improvement) has led to their application in other areas of management.
Best,
David
Food for Thought:
Top Read(s) of the Week: Forbes – Kanye’s Second Coming: Inside The Billion-Dollar Yeezy Empire
Why It Matters: Personally, Kanye is something of an enigma to me. It may be tempting to write him off after the whole Taylor Swift / VMA thing years ago. But I think you’d be under-estimating who he is and what he’s trying to accomplish.
Consider as well:
- TheAtlantic – Cancel Qatar The tremendous competition and pure joy of watching the US Women win the World Cup this week stands in stark contrast to the corruption of the men’s game. “The money for the next Men’s World Cup would be better invested in the women’s game.”
- VanityFair – “I Really Feel Most Comfortable in Prison”: A Hedge Fund Ex-Con Finds It’s Hard Coming Home to GreenwichChip Skowron pleaded guilty to securities fraud, lost his freedom, and found religion. But, as it turns out, federal prison is more forgiving than Connecticut high society.
- GQ – The Troubling Business of Bounty Hunting You may not realize it, but bounty hunting is still alive and well in America in 2019. It’s fueled by old laws, loose guidelines, and not-great money. In order to get a closer look inside the world of “bail enforcement agents,” writer Jeff Winkler got licensed and spent months working as a BEA. What he found was a mess for pretty much everyone caught up in a broken system.
- NYMag – Instagram Accidentally Made Emoji Fun Again
Business/Economics:
Top Read of the Week: WSJ – Markets Are Calm, Then Suddenly Go Crazy. Some Investors Think They Know Why.
Why It Matters: This is behind the Wall Street Journal’s paywall – so it may be harder to access. Another interesting example of the impact of this cycle’s round of financial product innovation. “Investors have noticed a force some call a ‘gamma trap,’ and use tools to estimate its size and direction in order to predict market moves.”
Consider as well:
- CNBC – McDonald’s US franchisees ask for a Southern-style chicken sandwich to compete with Chick-fil-A “You may not have Chick Fil A’s in your market or to the degree they have them in the southeast, but they are coming,” the board said in the email. “And they don’t discount.”
- Longreads – The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.
- II – Inside the Geeky, Quirky, and Wildly Successful World of Quant Shop Two Sigma. Co-founders David Siegel and John Overdeck have earned Institutional Investor’s Lifetime Achievement Award for hedge fund management this year. Paul Tudor Jones and Tom Hill dish on the $60 billion quant powerhouse’s early days.
- Hustle – How Costco gained a cult following — by breaking every rule of retail Costco has found immense success by prioritizing the interests of its customers and employees over those of its shareholders.
Culture/Tech/Science:
Top Read of the Week: NYT – Justin Verlander: The Astros’ Ace and Sleep Guru
Why It Matters: “One of the secrets to Verlander’s dominance at this age: a lot of sleep. He regularly gets nearly 50 percent more than the average American.”
Consider as well:
- Jalopnik – Peak SUV Isn’t Here Yet But It’s Coming Ever Faster. In 2014, there were 70 models, by 2023, there will be 149.
- Mel – The Oral History of the Super Soaker A crazy tale of how a NASA engineer accidentally invented the greatest squirt gun ever made — and changed summertime forever
- Bloomberg – Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World There are greener ways to make it, but customers are slow to embrace the change.
- Guardian – ‘We’re anti-influencer’: ice-cream truck makes Instagram ‘stars’ pay double Joe Nicchi has had enough of self-proclaimed influencers wanting free cones for publicity. Now he’s the one going viral