Twitter, Investing, and Golden State Warriors

Thursday morning articles

• How Jack Welch’s Reign at G.E. Gave Us Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed: The onetime ‘manager of the century’ paved the way for C.E.O.s to moonlight as internet trolls. (New York Times)

• Twitter, cut in half: More than anything they were struck by the fact that the world’s richest man, who seems to revel in attention on the platform they had made for him, had not once deigned to speak to them. (Platformer)

• How Do the Wealthy Invest? Wealthy households are exceptional, but younger wealthy households are even more exceptional in how they got wealthy. You can see this clearly in the data. Having $3 million in net worth (excluding home equity) would put you in the top 7% among 55-59 year olds, but near the top 0.1% among 25-29 year olds. (Of Dollars And Data)

• Seizing a Russian Superyacht Is Much More Complicated Than You Think: Those floating Xanadus cost millions of dollars a year to maintain. Some of that money is coming from US and European taxpayers (Businessweek)

• Apple Built Its Empire With China. Now Its Foundation Is Showing Cracks: Lawmakers’ objections to an obscure Chinese semiconductor company and tough Covid-19 restrictions are hurting Apple’s ability to make new iPhones in China. (New York Times)

• They made a material that doesn’t exist on Earth. That’s only the start of the story. Material found in meteorites is a combination of two base metals, nickel and iron, which were cooled over millions of years as meteors tumbled through space. That process created a unique compound with a particular set of characteristics that make it ideal for use in the high-end permanent magnets that are an essential component of a vast range of advanced machines. (NPR)

• Inside the Underground Market for Fake Amazon Reviews: Seedy scam networks are using social media to organize campaigns that influence product ratings. They’re a headache for shoppers—and tough to crack down on. (Wired)

• Spam: America in a can: Everything you need to know about Spam in five minutes or less, including how it became such a global success. (Quartz)

• How The Golden State Warriors Became Kings Of The NBA: The Golden State Warriors are kings of the NBA. No, I’m not talking about them winning four of the last eight NBA Championships or even their ridiculous 73-9 regular season record in 2015-16. I’m talking about their fast-rising valuation. (Huddle Up)

Mid-Term Elections, the Housing Market, and Weird Al

Wednesday morning articles

• Why Mid-Terms Matter More Than Presidential Elections — At Least for Investors: A study tracking elections back to the advent of the U.S. republic reveals some intriguing trends. (Institutional Investor)

• What Will the Midterms Mean for Big Business? The G.O.P. and corporate America, longtime allies, are showing signs of a breakup — which recent polls suggest will likely play out with a Republican House. (Dealbook)

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s First Year on the Job: Undoing Bezos-Led Overexpansion: Amid one of the worst stretches for financial performance in Amazon’s history, the new CEO is working to cut back the excesses of an e-commerce operation the company expanded at breakneck pace during much of the Covid-19 pandemic (Wall Street Journal)

• The Housing Market Is Worse Than You Think: Buyers, sellers and renters are in for more twists and turns, as soaring mortgage rates and stubborn inflation signal belt tightening ahead. (New York Times)

• Older, White and Wealthy Home Buyers Are Pushing Others Out of the Market: The share of first-time buyers fell to 26 percent, plummeting to the lowest level in four decades, when a real estate trade association began tracking such data. (New York Times)

• Ray Dalio: The Changing World Order Is Approaching Stage 6 (The War Stage): History shows that the movements to civil and/or international wars that change the domestic and world orders take place via a progression of stages that transpire in big cycles that have occurred for logical reasons throughout history. (LinkedIn)

• The Harvard of Automobile Restoration Gets $500 Million Pledge: An anonymous donor has given McPherson College a big boost Tiny Kansas school offers bachelor’s in automotive restoration (Bloomberg)

• Weird cars are becoming the new normal: With brands struggling to maintain their identities in an age of silent electric cars with incredible performance, many are leaning into gimmicky features to find traction on the road ahead (The Verge)    

• This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible: When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, a small peptide called neurotensin determines which way they will go. (Wired)

• John Oliver on Republicans and voting: ‘If I lose, it’s rigged, if I win, it’s fine’ The Last Week Tonight host examines election denialism, GOP attempts at election subversion and the fragility of American democracy. (The Guardian)

• The Real Story of How the Weird Al Movie Scored Fake Cameos: The comedian talked to WIRED about how he raided his address book to cast his biopic parody Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. (Wired)

Montreal Screw Job 25 Years Later

Tuesday morning articles

• The Great Divide: How Montreal Created the Cult of Bret and Shawn Twenty-five years after their heated backstage feud became the Montreal Screwjob, WWE Hall of Famers Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels reflect on the incident that changed everything (Ringer)

• The Ferrari Fugitives: Josh Cartu and his brothers collected race cars, hung out with celebrities and bounced between luxury villas in private jets. But behind their playboy façades was a dark secret: they had thousands of jilted investors and an army of investigators on their tail. (Toronto Life)

• The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine: Russia’s meddling in Trump-era politics was more directly connected to the current war than previously understood. (New York Times Magazine)

• Hurricane Sandy Devastated Coney Island 10 Years Ago. So Why Has NYC Added Almost 2,000 Homes to the Area Since? Gleaming new high-rise towers, built to the latest standards, stand alongside older family homes, badly in need of retrofitting. Climate change puts both at risk — although on starkly different timetables. (The City)

• The $24 Trillion Market That Predicts and Influences Interest Rates: The market for U.S. government bonds, called the Treasury market, offers predictions on the path for interest rates and the economy. (New York Times)

• When Should You Change Your Asset Allocation? A handful of these funds do have the ability to employ these more complex strategies but the majority of nonprofits would be better off keeping things simple. Not everyone can invest in the top quartile or decile of the best funds (by definition). (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Federal Officials Trade Stock in Companies Their Agencies Oversee: Hidden records show thousands of senior executive branch employees owned shares of companies whose fates were directly affected by their employers’ actions, a Wall Street Journal investigation found (Wall Street Journal)

• The Car Safety Feature That Kills the Other Guy: When we count on vehicle size to protect us in a crash, what do we expect to happen? (Slate)

• What It Means to Be a Republican Today: Evan McMullin’s lesson on what his former party now stands for—and what it can’t stand. (The Bulwark)

• What Are the 500 Best Albums? Rolling Stone Has An Answer: If you disagree with the rankings, don’t blame the folks at Rolling Stone. Blame Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Iggy Pop. Nile Rodgers, Questlove, Billie Eilish, Herbie Hancock, Saweetie, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lin-Manuel Miranda and members of Metallica and U2, among dozens of other artists. They were among the judges. (Bloomberg)

Bitcoin Crash, Elon Musk, and Bob Dylan

Monday morning articles

• Bitcoin mining in the crypto crash — the mining companies’ creative accounting: Bitcoin miners used to be ruthless economic agents, in it for the money. They knew how volatile crypto was, so they sold their coins as soon as they mined them to cover power bills and other business expenses. As some point, miners’ business model changed from selling bitcoin to holding bitcoin — and borrowing against it. (Amy Castor)

• Quitting Elon Elon Musk’s former fans have lost faith in the idea of the billionaire genius. (Vox)

• Investing in Influence: Companies invest billions of dollars in political influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and other means. However, as with other intangible assets, political capital tends to be overlooked by the market. We show how investors can earn excess returns buying undervalued political capital. (Sparkline Capital)

• When Netflix and HBO Turned on Each Other, They Forged a New Era of Television: The defining rivalry of the streaming-TV era began with an insult and a sneak attack. An exclusive adaptation from It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO. (Businessweek)

• The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water: We’re being packaged and sold a bottle/can/box of lies on water. (Vox)

• Plywood Gourmet: How thousands of restaurants speedily, messily, and probably permanently took over the street. The mass extemporaneous construction of alfresco structures probably represents the speediest reshaping of the built environment in the city’s history. (Curbed)

• How to Win at Wordle (Without Cheating) Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game. (Quanta Magazine)

• A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan: He’s in his eighties. How does he keep it fresh? (New Yorker)

Remote Executives, Daylight Savings Time, and Bono and U2

Friday morning articles

• The rise of the ‘chief remote officer’ While many firms have pivoted to hybrid or remote work in an ad-hoc way, others are creating a new role to oversee their workplace transformation. (BBC)

• Everyone seems to hate daylight saving time. Do we even need it, and why is it so hard to get rid of? Shifting the clocks messes with people’s circadian rhythms — making everyone groggy, cranky and sometimes dangerously off their game. (Grid)

• Rejoice in the End of Daylight Saving Time: It’s the most wonderful day of the year! (The Atlantic)

• Revisiting the Case Against Value Investing: This fact that value works better around recessions in and of itself is not necessarily a problem for value. Where the potential problem comes in is in a situation where we have a permanent reduction in the number of recessions. It would be bad for value if it gets much of its outperformance during these periods — and we have had fewer recessions in recent decades. (Validea)

• The First Biodegradable Water Bottle Is Coming, For Real This Time: With backers including James Murdoch and Diplo, Cove says its sustainable water bottle will retail at $2.99 a pop. (Green)

• The Difference Between Amateurs & Professionals. “Amateurs attribute success to skill and failure to luck. Professionals recognize the role of skill and luck in every outcome. They focus on the controllable factors. They create an environment where luck is more likely to strike.” (Curiosity Chronicle)

• ‘He is poised to open the floodgates’: can Twitter survive Elon Musk – or even thrive? Since buying it, the billionaire has wasted no time shaking up the struggling social media firm, cutting staff and introducing fees. But can he make the platform matter again – or will it become a hellscape of hateful content and misinformation? (The Guardian)

• Will we ever… live in city-sized buildings? The cities of science fiction are frequently portrayed as all-encompassing and self-contained structures, but how feasible is it build a colossal city in a building? (BBC)

• The US Midterms Will Decide If the 2024 Election Can Be Stolen: Republican candidates on the ballot around the country who deny Joe Biden Won in 2020 are pushing changes to election laws that would make it easier to dispute the results in the next presidential election (Bloomberg)

• The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It: Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality. (Scientific American)

• The Too-Muchness of Bono: In Dublin with the irrepressible U2. (The Atlantic) see also Bono Is Still Trying to Figure Out U2 and Himself (New York Times)

Crypto, Inflation, and ESG Initiatives

Thursday morning articles

• The Death of Crypto Has Been Greatly Exaggerated, Again: Crypto’s descent into hell, rather than sending institutional investors straight for the exits, has triggered a hunt for the next big bet. (Institutional Investor)

• Why Today’s Inflation is Not a Repeat of the 1970s: I’m not a huge fan of the Federal Reserve’s current policy choices. They obviously had to do something about the persistently high inflation but I think they run the risk of overdoing it. The magnitude of their interest rate hikes increases the risk of something breaking in the financial system. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The messy true story of the last time we beat inflation: The usual narrative about the “Volcker shock” leaves a lot out — and policymakers risk learning the wrong lessons. (Vox)

• How Investors Feel About ESG Initiatives A survey finds that investors’ attitudes vary widely by age, wealth and the specific ESG issue. (Wall Street Journal)

• Mortgage Rates Too High? (Blame the Fed, Wall Street and Your Neighbor) Lenders use several bits of data to set mortgage rates, including trading moves by investors. Without market volatility, the rate could be under 7 percent. (New York Times)

• Can the Fed fight inflation without triggering a meltdown? After the recent turmoil in Britain, anxiety about the stability of the financial system is rising alongside interest rates. (Washington Post)

• It’s not just politicians: American workers are facing a sharp spike in threats and violence: Harassment is worse for everyone from airport screeners to librarians to nurses: “That’s my Tuesday death threat.” (Grid)

• How job openings explain everything in the economy and the markets right now: The level and trajectory of this metric has been very telling. (TKer)

• U.S. workers have gotten way less productive. No one is sure why. Bosses and economists are troubled by the worst drop in U.S. worker output since 1947 Image without a caption. (Washington Post)

• Why Musicians & Other Creative Professionals Will Soon Get Their Revenge on the Old Guard: I finally have happy predictions about the future of arts & entertainment. (The Honest Broker)

• Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Exodus of Advertisers and Executives: At least five Twitter executives have left in recent days, as one of the world’s largest ad companies said clients should pause spending on the social media platform. (Dealbook)

• Silicon Valley’s Unbridled Euphoria Runs Into Economic Reality: Once-buzzy start-ups had held out against the new reality that the good times are over. No longer. (New York Times)

• Can a new form of cryptography solve the internet’s privacy problem? Techniques which allow the sharing of data whilst keeping it secure may revolutionise fields from healthcare to law enforcement . (The Guardian)

• Taylor Swift Makes History as First Artist With Entire Top 10 on Billboard Hot 100, Led by ‘Anti-Hero’ at No. 1: Swift passes Drake, who claimed nine of the top 10 in September 2021. (Billboard)

Stock Market, Elon Musk, and Home Improvement

Wednesday morning articles

• Is the Stock Market Gaslighting Us? A downturn in the market doesn’t always precede a downturn in the economy. Yes, the stock market is forward-looking, but sometimes it sees things that aren’t there. At its low, the S&P 500 was 25% below its high. It’s hard to completely dismiss this as a leading indicator and I’m not here to do that, but while most drawdowns of this magnitude have led to economic contractions, they haven’t always. (Irrelevant Investor)

• In the Markets Nothing is as Dependable as Cycles: Nothing is more dependable than cycles because market psychology, fundamentals, risk appetite and investor emotions are constantly changing. Strategies, asset classes and securities go in and out of style in part because the pendulum always swings back and forth between fear and greed but also because the future is unknowable. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Why Stock Multiples Say the Market Could Continue to Drop: History suggests the stock market’s current bottom would be `the most expensive bear-market low.’ (Morningstar)

• Fed Seen Aggressively Hiking to 5%, Triggering Global Recession: Survey of economists sees 75 basis-point hike, then slowing Three-quarters say the Fed will err by doing too much. (Bloomberg)

• Revenge of the Dow: Change is the only constant variable in the market. Startups mature. Incumbents become complacent. Markets get saturated. And so turnover at the top is inevitable. It’s only a matter of time before the king loses his crown. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Food Prices Soar, and So Do Companies’ Profits: Some companies and restaurants have continued to raise prices on consumers even after their own inflation-related costs have been covered. (New York Times)

• New-Car Prices Are Starting to Cool After Years of Soaring to New Records: Inventory on dealer lots is ticking up again, but executives say pent-up demand should keep prices elevated for the foreseeable future. (Wall Street Journal)

• Welcome to hell, Elon: You break it, you buy it. The problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. (The Verge)

• What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture: You can make a thing so perfect that it’s ruined. (The Atlantic)

• The Home-Improvement Boom Isn’t Over Yet: The housing market has turned from hot to freezing cold, but spending on home renovation appears well insulated for now. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Front Trunk Is Electric Cars’ Most Divisive Feature: The “frunk” that comes standard with most electric vehicles is proving the best kind of marketing engine: one that runs on its own. (Green)

• How Twitter Will Change as a Private Company: The social media company went public in 2013. But Elon Musk is taking it private as part of his acquisition of the firm. Here’s what that means. (New York Times)

• It’s a Bad Time to Be a Booster Slacker: Americans aren’t getting the new bivalent COVID shot. What does that mean for the looming winter wave? (The Atlantic)

• “Thank You, and Goodbye” On October 30, 2002, a cancer-stricken Warren Zevon returned to the ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ stage for one last performance. Twenty years later, Letterman and more remember the gravitas and emotion of that stunning night. (The Ringer)

Crypto, Clime Change, and U2s Bono

Tuesday morning articles

• Crypto Story Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters by Matt Levine. There was a moment not so long ago when I thought, “What if I’ve had this crypto thing all wrong?” I’m a doubting normie who, if I’m being honest, hasn’t always understood this alternate universe that’s been percolating and expanding for more than a decade now. If you’re a disciple, this new dimension is the future. If you’re a skeptic, this upside-down world is just a modern Ponzi scheme that’s going to end badly—and the recent “crypto winter” is evidence of its long-overdue ending. But crypto has dug itself into finance, into technology, and into our heads. And if crypto isn’t going away, we’d better attempt to understand it. Its only the 2nd time in Businessweek’s 93-year history that a single author has written a cover-to-cover issue of the magazine.   (Businessweek)

• Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View: You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives. (New York Times)

• Billionaire investor Barry Sternlicht says Jerome Powell and ‘his merry band of lunatics’ are destroying faith in capitalism and leading us toward ‘social unrest’ “So the rich guy who loses 30%, he’s still rich, right? But the poor guy who’s working in an hourly job that loses that job, he’s going to say: ‘Capitalism is broken, it didn’t work for me. I lost my job. And this whole system has to go out the door,’” Sternlicht told Fortune. “You’re going to have social unrest,” he added. “And it’s just because of Jay Powell and his merry band of lunatics.” (Fortune)

• Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker: Signal messages are more private than iMessage and WhatsApp. Here’s how. (The Verge)

• The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger: In more than 50 years of reporting, I have never disclosed the raw interviews or full transcripts of my work. But after listening again to the 20 interviews I conducted with President Donald Trump during his last year as chief executive, I have decided to take the unusual step of releasing them. I was struck by how Trump pounded in my ears in a way the printed page cannot capture. In their totality, these interviews offer an unvarnished portrait of Trump. You hear Trump in his own words, in his own voice, during one of the most consequential years in American history: amid Trump’s first impeachment, the coronavirus pandemic and large racial justice protests. (Washington Post)

• COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab: The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis. (ProPublica)

• Behind TikTok’s boom: A legion of traumatised, $10-a-day content moderators: Horrific videos such as these are part and parcel of everyday work for TikTok moderators in Colombia. They told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about widespread occupational trauma and inadequate psychological support, demanding or impossible performance targets, punitive salary deductions and extensive surveillance. Their attempts to unionise to secure better conditions have been opposed repeatedly. (Bureau of Investigative Journalism)

• On the Alex Jones Verdict: The Very, Very Lucrative World of Lying: How should we grapple with the current historic transformation of the public sphere? I focus on the Alex Jones trial and verdict, but my question is about the future: what can we do, what should we do, to prevent future cases? I suggest that we take a closer look at money as an incentive, and also focus on friction as an answer. (The Insight)

• Bono Is Still Trying to Figure Out U2 and Himself: There are different Bonos to different people, including the man himself. He is, as you may know, the lead singer of U2, one of the most successful and longest-running rock bands of all time. He’s also a prominent activist, having helped lead campaigns that resulted in some of the world’s richest countries forgiving its loans to some of the world’s poorest and in procuring tens of billions of dollars in AIDS relief for African nations. “It’s not like you’re creative when you’re being a musician and when you’re an activist, you’re being an activist. That’s why I wrote the book: These different characters are all part of me.” (NYT Magazine)

The Chilled Bear Market, Bank Stocks, and Stevie Wonder

Monday morning articles

• The surprisingly chilled bear market: The equity sell-off has been weirdly tranquil. (Financial Times Alphaville)

• Which Asset Class is More Attractive Right Now: Stocks or Bonds? Losing money stings but I prefer to look at bear markets as an opportunity. And with both stocks and bonds down big this year, there is no shortage of opportunities right now. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• What the Banks Stock Rally Says About Wall Street: A strong batch of earnings have propelled bank stocks in recent days, but investors remain more cautious on the outlook of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. (New York Times)

• What’s the Inflation Rate? It’s a Surprisingly Hard Question to Answer: Microeconomic analysis suggests underlying inflation could be as low as 3%; macroeconomic analysis suggests it isn’t (Wall Street Journal)

• How the Fed Causes CPI to Increase: Rising mortgage rates has sent made apartment prices higher market. The result is as Federal Reserve attempts to fight inflation by raising interest rates, it leads to higher CPI inflation each month — even as prices of goods have come down. (TBP)

• Family Offices Get Opportunistic Amid Market Chaos: Distressed hospitality, digital assets, lithium, and even Ukrainian tech companies are commanding the attention of these allocators. (Institutional Investor)

• How the 60/40 Portfolio Makes A Comeback: If bonds don’t do well when starting yields are low, inflation is high, and rates are rising, then this implies that they do perform well when yields are high, inflation is low, and rates are stabilized or dropping. (Of Dollars And Data)

• Is Most Personal Finance Advice… “Wrong”? I can plot out the next five years of my life neatly in a spreadsheet, full of Future Value formulas, average returns, and estimates about income increases—but it’s mostly an illusion that provides a sense of control. But there’s a problem with “the plan”: The human psyche. We don’t live in Excel World. We live in the Real World. And in the real world, people behave irrationally. (Money with Katie)

• Elon Musk Seems to Answer to No One. Except for a Judge in Delaware. Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, the chief judge of Delaware’s Chancery Court, gave Mr. Musk until Friday to acquire Twitter. She is also the judge in at least one other case involving the billionaire. (New York Times)

• Why Daylight Saving Could Exacerbate Europe’s Energy Crisis: Ending the practice of turning back the clocks one hour would generate financial and environmental savings for Europe just when the continent needs it most, according to new research. (CityLab)

• Home prices are finally starting to fall—especially in California: Nobody is sure why home prices are falling faster west of the Rockies. (Full Stack Economics)

• Britain’s Productivity Problem: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world,” they wrote. “We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.” (NPR)

• 50 Years Ago, Stevie Wonder Heard the Future: On the anniversary of the landmark 1972 album “Talking Book,” musicians who made it and artists who cherish it share their stories. (New York Times)

Economic Projections, Stock Market, and Taylor Swift Has So Much New Music

Friday morning articles

• Fed Is Losing Billions, Wiping Out Profits That Funded Spending: Central banks around the world paying more in interest Governments may need to make up holes at central banks The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC. (Bloomberg)

• There is a rosy projection for the US economy. Americans may not have felt it: 2.9% GDP? Why so rosy despite all the bleak news? For one, a big chunk of GDP is comprised of consumer spending — and though we’re all complaining about inflation, rising prices haven’t actually stopped consumers from splurging just yet. Retail sales were up 8.2% in September from a year ago. (CNN)

• US Already in Recession or Will Be Soon: Almost two-thirds of respondents in a survey of business economists say the US is either already in a recession or has better-than-even odds it will be within the next year. (Bloomberg)

• Stocks Bottom First: Overweighting today’s news, for better and for worse, gets investors in trouble because today is already priced in. Stanley Druckenmiller recently relayed this message to an audience, saying: “Do not invest in the present. The present is not what moves stock prices.” (Irrelevant Investor)

• Builders Say They’re Ready for This Housing Slowdown. ‘I’ve Learned My Lesson.’ Meltdown of 2007-09 fostered less risky tactics; not as much debt. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Federal Reserve Owes the World a Mea Culpa: The US central bank can’t ease the international repercussions of its rapid monetary tightening, but it can and should own up to its mistakes. (Bloomberg)

• Economic Outlook: Rubber Bands on a Watermelon: With enough pressure, the watermelon *will* explode. (Kyla Scanlon)

• Zoom, Teams, Slack Are Wreaking Havoc on Employee Productivity: Shifting between multiple apps to get stuff done drains workers’ time, efficiency and engagement. Can anything be done? (Bloomberg)

• Rising Shipping Costs Prompt Businesses to Get Creative With Deliveries: FedEx, UPS and U.S. Postal Service have increased shipping fees as their costs rise. (Wall Street Journal)

• Why the Price of Gas Has Such Power Over Us: “When prices go up, we have this feeling of oppression that we can’t do everything we want.” (Upshot)

• Taylor Swift Has So Much New Music. How Will She Ever Perform It All? With her new album ‘Midnights,’ the pop superstar has four whole records she has never performed live, creating an unusual concert challenge. ‘She’s in a complete logistical nightmare.’ (Wall Street Journal)