The highlights:  The Enduring Appeal of Cruises, 10 Years After the Financial Crisis, and the Price of Pets

Fifteen on Friday – 07/06/18 – Issue 292

Food for Thought:

1. NYT – Cruises Are So Uncool They Are Cool  Hating on cruises is a favorite of travel writers…here the NYT weighs in that their greatest drawback is in fact their greatest feature…”What I believe is the flowering root of the widespread appeal of cruises: their unapologetic, gleaming banality.”
2. Rolling Stone – The Trouble With Johnny Depp. Multimillion-dollar lawsuits, a haze of booze and hash, a marriage gone very wrong and a lifestyle he can’t afford – inside the trials of Johnny Depp
3. Economist – Tortured by meetings  You take minutes and waste hours
4. Medium – The Way You Read Books Says A Lot About Your Intelligence, Here’s Why.  This is why the smartest people in the world own tons of books they don’t read.
5. Investopedia – Staying Rich Is Harder than Getting Rich – Credit TP – More than 70% of the Forbes 400 (or their heirs) fell off that list between 1982 and 2014.

Business/Economics:

1. WIC – Full of Surprises, Even After All of These Years – Market Commentary – Woodmont’s look at the market during Q2’18.
2. London Review – After the Fall.  Some of the more pessimistic commentators at the time of the credit crunch, myself included, said that the aftermath of the crash would dominate our economic and political lives for at least ten years. What I wasn’t expecting – what I don’t think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast.
3. CBM – The Next-Gen Director Dilemma  Ninety percent of directors say diversity of age is important—and for good reason. Yet, there are only 315 directors age 50 and under in the S&P 500, according to PwC’s annual corporate directors survey.
4. BothSides – All The Questions You Wanted Answered about Bird Scooters and Their Recent $300 Million Funding
5. CBM – Get Ahead of the Next Big Investor Push: Human Capital Reporting  Scan pretty much any proxy statement and you’ll find that boilerplate line that says something like “our people are our most important asset” or some such. But keep reading and you’re equally likely to see little else about how the company actually engages with this crucial “asset,” let alone any meaningful metrics to help investors understand and compare performance.

Culture/Tech/Science:

1. NYT – The Secret Price of Pets  The care and feeding of America’s “fur babies” has grown increasingly baroque.
2. TO – Are we stuck with cement?  The cement industry has little reason to improve its material’s enormous environmental impact.
3. ITS – Ridehail Revolution: Groundbreaking ITS dissertation examines discrimination and travel patterns for Lyft, Uber, and taxis – Credit CM – Lyft and Uber nearly eliminate the racial differences in service by taxi operators.
4. Forbes – The Model S Finally Has Competition–From The Model 3–And That’s Not Good for Tesla
5. BI – Why Rolex watches are so expensive – Credit SF