Friday morning articles
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin Culture: Crypto’s first token created a culture and then a monster. (CoinDesk)
Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe: Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? Just maybe, a holographic cosmos. (New York Times)
New York seems to have a weed store on every corner. None of them are legal. New York’s admirable — and awkward — efforts to legalize weed. (Vox)
There Was No Great Stagnation: Every day, most of what I do in work and play was impossible 30 years ago. The same probably applies to you, along with hundreds of millions of other people around the world. For many of us, life now revolves arounds technologies that were unimaginable only a generation ago. Yet, oddly, this era has coincided with slower growth on conventional measures. (Works in Progress)
The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari: The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors. (Current Affairs)
There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief: An expert in medical evidence looks at the science of loss. A state of infinite sadness combined with the internet of grief didn’t help. (The Atlantic)
Bullard Becomes Wall Street’s Go-To Guy for Hint of a Fed Pivot: St. Louis Fed boss, a leading hawk now, hasn’t always been one In interview he cites Volcker influence, bike-inflation shock. (Bloomberg)
Companies Hoarding Workers Could Be Good News for the Economy: Employers have been burned by a labor shortage. Will that make them act differently if the economy slows down? (New York Times)
What Great Resignation? Workers Are Staying Put: Median job tenure in the US was unchanged from early 2020 to early 2022, and it isn’t much different from what it was in the 1960s. (Bloomberg)
If America Needs Starter Homes, Why Are Perfectly Good Ones Being Torn Down? Many communities effectively ensure the only viable replacement for a starter home is a new one that’s much larger and more expensive. (Upshot)
Do Solar-Powered EVs Make Any Sense? I Drove a Prototype To See How It Could Work A Dutch startup called Lightyear let us drive a pre-production prototype of its 0 sedan, which is billed as the world’s first “solar electric car.” (The Drive)
One of the most important women in Apple’s history never worked for Apple: Margot Comstock took her winnings from a TV game show and bought a computer. It led to a magazine, which turned into a major hub for the nascent community of developers and fans of one of the most important computers in history. (The Verge)
Pioneering Quantum Physicists Win Nobel Prize in Physics: Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking experiments with entangled particles. (Quanta Magazine)
The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump: It’s clear to me that Merrick Garland will bring charges against Donald Trump. It’s just a matter of when. (The Atlantic)
It’s Never Too Late to Pivot From N.F.L. Safety to Neurosurgeon: When Myron Rolle was cut from the Pittsburgh Steelers, he fell into a funk until his mother reminded him of his two childhood dreams: Play football, then become a neurosurgeon. It was time for Plan B. (New York Times)
You’re going back to the office. Your boss isn’t. Bosses are ordering people back to the office from the comfort of their own homes. (Vox)
The Great Post-Covid Online Shopping Bet Was a Costly Delusion: Amazon, Wayfair, and other big e-commerce companies bet the pandemic would permanently change shopping behavior. They were wrong. (Businessweek)
What Happens When You Add a Hurricane Crisis to an Insurance Crisis? Florida’s property insurance market is deeply broken, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The average premium is three times the national average, and rates are rising by 30 to 50 percent a year. Allstate and State Farm have limited their exposure there, and smaller companies are foundering: Six insurers have already become insolvent this year, and another two dozen are at risk of a credit downgrade. Only in Florida, man. (Slate)
How the Lottery Works, and Is It Worth Playing? Here are the odds of winning the lottery, and why we do it anyway. (U.S. News)
The economics of Costco rotisserie chicken: Costco’s popular chickens have stayed fixed at $4.99 for more than a decade — even in the face of raging inflation. But it’s come at a cost. (The Hustle)
Have you exercised your body fat lately? Everyone has fat cells. But the more exercise you do, the more likely you are to have healthy and small fat cells. (Washington Post)
How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors: Chinese social media companies and users are locked in a never-ending battle between free speech and censorship. (Rest of World)
Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars Execs say that a deluge of new music — and the difficulty of influencing TikTok’s algorithm — has made building an audience harder than ever for new acts. (Billboard)