Higher Interest Rates, FTX, and Anthony Bourdain

Thursday morning articles

• A year of pain: investors struggle in a new era of higher rates: Twelve months after Jay Powell called an end to super-cheap money, fund managers are still adjusting to a very different environment. (Financial Times Alphaville)

• A Missing Piece of the SBF Puzzle: In a range of interviews and Twitter threads (see links and excerpts below), SBF explained that he approached financial decisions with little or no aversion to risk. That’s a valid personal choice, but it’s highly unusual. In our own experience, we’ve never met anyone who made important financial decisions consistent with being anywhere in the ballpark of zero risk aversion. (Elm)

• Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich? The question of why some countries join the developed world while others remain in poverty has vexed economists for decades. What makes it so hard to answer? (Asterisk)

• Here’s what employers are cutting instead of your job: You may get to keep your job, but you might lose your Zoom and your desk. (Vox)

• Anti-Woke Republicans Aren’t Making Business Sense on Climate: The GOP’s opposition to meaningful climate policy is increasingly at odds with corporate pragmatism. (Bloomberg)

• Is China heading toward another Tiananmen Square moment? How a deadly fire in Xinjiang ignited a nationwide protest against zero-covid in China. (Grid)

• When Visiting Michelangelo’s David, She Brings a Duster: The revered statue in Italy is not going to dust itself. That’s where Eleonora Pucci comes in. (New York Times)

• What if everything is going to be OK? The severity of the global financial crisis left deep emotional and intellectual scars on everyone who went through it. Since then a lot of people have been desperate to identify the next big economic faultline, the next CDO, the next financial cataclysm to befall us. Some permabears have managed to turn their apocalyptic visions into lucrative careers. (Financial Times)

• FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident Sam Bankman-Fried is a con man and fraudster of historic proportions. But you might not learn that from the New York Times, CoinDesk’s Chief Insights Columnist David Z. Morris writes. (CoinDesk)

• A Cloud Startup Wants to Be a Crystal Ball for Farmers Everywhere: India’s Cropin aims to boost agricultural efficiency by helping growers know what to plant and when to sow, water and fertilize.  (Businessweek)

• Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century: By the end of the century, Africa will be home to 40% of the world’s population – and nowhere is this breakneck-pace development happening faster than this 600-mile stretch between Abidjan and Lagos. (The Guardian)

• ‘He was fast … he ran you right over’: what it’s like to get hit by an SUV: One Thursday afternoon, I stepped out to cross a city street – and woke up in hospital with broken bones and a brain injury. After I recovered, I started looking into why so many drivers just don’t stop (The Guardian)

• What Kind of Man Was Anthony Bourdain? He was so damaged, and yet he showed us so much of the world. (The Atlantic)

FTX and Investing Scams, and Soccer Balls

Wednesday morning articles

• How Much Growth Can You Expect? Imagine I present to you a magical box that can turn your money into more money. The only problem is that you don’t know exactly how much more money you’ll get from this box. You could put $100 into the box and get back $200, $400, or maybe only $150 when all is said and done. Also, there’s one final catch—you have to wait many decades for this extra money to materialize. The box needs time to work its magic after all. Given this information, would you use the box? (Of Dollars And Data)

• Why going into work five days a week is a thing of the past: “You can either try to figure out flex arrangements now or you can battle your employees for the next 5 to 10 years and then pay a consultant a lot of money to help you figure out what you should have started figuring out five to 10 years ago.” (CNN)

• These Young Workers Are ‘Romanticizing’ the Return to Office: As many others chafe against employer mandates, creators on TikTok — some new to the work force — are trying to show that the office can be fun. (New York Times)

• Why America Doesn’t Have Enough EV Charging Stations: Gas stations spar with utility companies, rural areas predict years of losses on chargers, spotty equipment threatens reliability: The U.S. EV charging network is a mess. (Wall Street Journal)

  It’s not your imagination: Shopping on Amazon has gotten worse:  The first page of Amazon results includes an average of about nine sponsored listings, according to a study of 70 search terms conducted in 2020 and 2021 by data firm Profitero. That was twice as many ads as Walmart displayed, and four times as many as Target. (Washington Post)

• There’s a Job-Market Riddle at the Heart of the Coming Recession: Tech giants and banks are already cutting workers, but many employers seem desperate to keep hiring. (Bloomberg)

• FTX And The Rise Of Investment Scams: How To Guard Yourself: The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has triggered investigations. Aspects of the scandal are reminders that complaints of investment swindles are soaring. The good news? You can protect yourself by taking five precautionary steps.(Investor’s Business Daily)

• She Was a Little-Known Crypto Trader. Then FTX Collapsed. Caroline Ellison, who ran the cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research, has found herself at the center of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto empire. (New York Times)

• Robot Landlords Are Buying Up Houses: Companies with deep resources are outsourcing management to apps and algorithms, putting home ownership further out of reach. (Vice)

• This Is Where Most of the World’s Soccer Balls Come From: Sialkot, a city in northeast Pakistan, produces about 70% of the world’s supply—including Adidas’s Al Rihla, the official ball of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. (Businessweek)

Holiday Scams, Stocks, Crypto Crashes, and the World Cup

Tuesday morning articles

• Holiday scam email season is here. Don’t fall for it. Sorry, no one is actually going to give you a free Yeti cooler. (Vox) 

• If the Price Ended in 99, You Probably Overpaid: The age-old practice of prices ending with a 9 now serves to camouflage bad deals. (Wall Street Journal)

• Quantum Computing Will Change the World. How to Play the Stocks. Investors finally have ways to play the first radical shift in computing since the 1950s, but you’re better off waiting before jumping in. (Barron’s)

• The S&P 500 is Not the Economy: Technology stocks make up nearly 24% of the S&P 500. And that number is probably understating things since many of the biggest companies aren’t technically in the tech sector. Amazon and Tesla are two of the biggest holdings in the consumer discretionary sector. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• What the Latest Crypto Crash Means for ETFs: The implosion of FTX may have set digital assets back by years, and the fallout is still expanding. (Bloomberg)

• The future of Twitter: Four scenarios: Bankruptcy, a company with a much smaller staff that does little content moderation and allows extremist speech to spread, a company that suffers serious technical problems, or a company with a smaller staff that adds innovative new products and survives the bumpy start. (Brookings)

• Are you addicted to Investment Porn? The hidden dangers for your portfolio: What is Investment Porn? It’s media statements that make investors believe that anyone can become a millionaire in a short time, even with a small amount of start-up capital. From my point of view, however, the statements aiming in the opposite direction also belong to this area, particularly those of the Crash-Prophets. You rarely get rich quick on the stock market. And then only by taking high risks and having a lot of luck. (Onveston Letter)

• The Death of the Key Change: One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened? (Tedium)

• The Ukraine War in data: After 9 months of war, what the data tells us Facts and figures cannot convey the horror of the war in Ukraine. But they offer perspective and a sense of scope. (Grid)

• For Ukraine, So Much Unexpected Success, and Yet So Far to Go: Ukraine is on the offensive along most of the 600-mile front line, and the Russians are in a defensive crouch. But about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory is still occupied by Russia. (New York Times)

• Why Big Business Can’t Get Enough of the World Cup, Scandal and All: The World Cup in Qatar, which started this week, has been plagued by controversy — and yet companies and countries are tripping over themselves to be part of the show. (Dealbook)

The World Cup of Soccer, Soccer Technology, and Robot Tracktors

Friday morning articles

• The Worst Bond Market Ever: By history’s standards, stocks have not performed too badly, but bonds certainly have. (Morningstar)

• The Best 50-Year-Old Investing Advice Money Can Buy: Nearly 50 years ago, the economist Burton Malkiel came out with a book that said, in effect, that all of us should be in index funds. The stock and bond markets incorporate new information into prices almost instantly, so trying to beat them is a fool’s errand, Malkiel wrote. Instead of trying to winnow winners from losers, you’re better off saving on brokerage commissions and headaches by spreading your investment dollars across the entire market. (New York Times)

• Billions of Dollars at Stake in a Puzzling Holiday Shopping Season: It promises to be unpredictable, with retailers and consumers still figuring out how much will be spent and on what kinds of goods. (New York Times)

• The donut effect: How COVID-19 shapes real estate: Rents in high-density areas and central business districts of America’s largest cities have fallen more than 10 percent since the start of the pandemic. Though housing demand within cities is shifting from dense urban centers to more spacious suburbs, there has yet to be a substantial move from more expensive to less expensive cities. Working from home has caused commercial office occupancy rates to plummet and commercial property prices to fall in crowded zip codes. Falling property values in cities are likely driven by richer, more skilled residents leaving high-value properties. That will cause a drop in property taxes and strain city budgets. (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research)

• Climate Change from A to Z: The stories we tell ourselves about the future. (New Yorker)

• A comprehensive guide to how Elon Musk is changing Twitter: Mass layoffs, trolling, and check marks: How Elon Musk is running Twitter. (Vox)

• The $6 Billion Shot at Making New Antibiotics—Before the Old Ones Fail: Antimicrobials cost as much to develop as other drugs, but don’t earn the same returns. Congress could give drugmakers a boost, but time is running out (Wired)

• The Robot Tractors Are Coming, Just as Soon as We Crush a Few Bugs: A plucky team from a small English agricultural college tackles one of the hardest challenges in tech. (Businessweek)

• Inside the Hip-Hop Record Store Run by Undercover Cops: Locals knew Boombox as the shop with a recording studio in the back. It was also part of a Met Police sting codenamed Operation Peyzac. (Vice)

• The World Cup’s New High-Tech Ball Will Change Soccer Forever: All tournament long, match balls will contain a sensor that collects spatial positioning data in real time — the first World Cup to employ such a ball-tracking mechanism. This, combined with existing optical tracking tools, will make VAR (video assistant referees) and programs like offside reviews more accurate and streamlined than they’ve ever been. Combining these two forms of tracking has long been a holy grail of sorts in technology circles, and FIFA’s use of the ball sensor in particular will serve as a highly public test case over the next four weeks. (Fivethirtyeight) 

• Qatar’s World Cup is an unparalleled disgrace: There’s truly only one story at this World Cup. (SFGate)

• The Qatar World Cup Exposes Soccer’s Shame: The absurd spectacle of a tiny Gulf petrostate hosting the world’s premier tournament reveals the ugly side of “the beautiful game.” (The Atlantic)

Fed Rate Hikes, Office Buildings, and James Cameron

Thursday morning articles

• Fed’s Aggressive Rate Hikes Are a Game Changer: Monetary policy usually acts on the economy with ‘long and variable’ lags (Wall Street Journal)

• Why Office Buildings Are Still in Trouble: Hybrid work, layoffs and higher interest rates are leaving lots of office space vacant and hurting the commercial real estate business. (New York Times)

• Inside the Disney Board’s Decision to Swap Bobs: While some directors were looking to fire Chapek as early as June, Chairman Susan Arnold was reluctant to pull the trigger. Now even those cheering the move call Chapek’s dismissal brutal: “No statement from him, no comment from him, no grace. It’s f***ing insane.” (Hollywood Reporter)

• The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed: The media firm BuzzFeed built a digital media empire in part by aggregating viral content from social media. A decade later, what’s next? (The Verge)

• The incredible shrinking future of college: The population of college-age Americans is about to crash. It will change higher education forever. (Vox)

• Inside the Elite, Underpaid, and Weird World of Crossword Writers: Efforts to diversify the industry might be having the opposite effect. And although puzzles are an important part of The New York Times’ business strategy, only a handful of people actually make a living from crosswords. (New Republic)

• How one man quietly stitched the American safety net over four decades: Robert Greenstein isn’t a household name. But his career lobbying for the poor has changed the

• A $300 Billion Bond Market Holds the Key to Solving the Climate Crisis: In less than a decade, China has built one of the world’s biggest green bond markets, with more potential than any other to alter the course of climate change. But as the country’s pile of green debt swells beyond $300 billion, investors and regulators are confronting a troubling reality: It’s almost impossible to know how the money is being spent – or whether it’s having the intended impact. (Bloomberg)

• The Return of James Cameron, Box Office King: It’s been 13 years since James Cameron released Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time. Now, the director is back with a deeply personal sequel—and the reasonable expectation that it could be the biggest thing he’s done yet. (GQ)

Construction in Victoria, Twitter Chaos, and Housing Inflation

Wednesday morning articles

• Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter: Mr. Musk ordered immediate layoffs, fired executives by email and laid down product deadlines, transforming the company. (New York Times)

• Setting the Record Straight on Crypto, FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, Jamie Dimon, and Financial Regulators: No one should be shocked by FTX’s demise. The fiction if not fraud of crypto and its collapse were not hard to see as long as you weren’t on the payroll of FTX/crypto directly or indirectly and didn’t let FOMO and greed cloud your judgment. (Better Markets)

• Have We Been Measuring Housing Inflation All Wrong? Focusing on rents on new leases, as commercial indexes do, gives a better read on price pressures than existing government gauges like CPI. (Bloomberg)

• ‘I Finally Had Enough.’ Real-Estate Agents Reveal Why They Canned a Client. A ghost, an over-the-top character and unwanted advances led these three pros to cut ties with their clients. (Wall Street Journal)

• This School Took Away Smartphones. The Kids Don’t Mind. Here’s what happened when a Massachusetts school decided smartphones were splintering its community. (Wall Street Journal)

• Inside the billion-dollar meeting for the mega-rich who want to live forever: Hope, hype, and self-experimentation collided at an exclusive conference for ultra-rich investors who want to extend their lives past 100. I went along for the ride. (MIT Technology Review)

• 8 billion and counting: This week, the world’s population ticks over a historic milestone. But in the next century, society will be reshaped dramatically — and soon we’ll hit a decline we’ll never reverse (ABC)

• Construction is Riding High in Victoria but Will it Last Despite gathering dark clouds for the economy, the number of units under construction has been hitting an all time high in recent months. That’s not just for the past few years, it’s the highest level of construction activity in the data series which starts in 1972. (House hunt Victoria)

Ukraine, Crypto, Margot Robbie, Tony Khan and AEW

Friday morning articles

• Ukraine’s Repair Crews Dodge Bullets and Splice Cable to Keep the Country Online: In the trenches and beneath the utility poles with the teams keeping citizens and soldiers connected. (Businessweek)

• Are we really prisoners of geography? A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise. (The Guardian)

• The Dinosaurs of Park Avenue: Apartments in the grandest uptown co-ops are sitting on the market for years. Why These $20 Million Uptown Co-ops Aren’t Selling (Curbed)

• How Food Powers Your Body Metabolism, which unleashes the energy in what you eat, may be nature’s most electrifying invention. (New Yorker)

• Can’t go to the moon? This crater in Canada is the next best thing. The Mistastin crater on Earth holds large quantities of the bright white rock on the majority of the moon’s surface. (Washington Post)

• How the Story of Soccer Became the Story of Everything: Oligarchs, private-equity moguls, and petro states took over the sport—and the world. (Mother Jones)   

• The Rise of Influencer Capital: How social media, celebrity promoters, and banks looking for a quick buck transformed the markets. (New York Magazine)

• Why does the Department of Homeland Security suck? The Department of Homeland Security’s 20-year boondoggle: The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to rally nearly two dozen agencies together in a modernized, streamlined approach to protecting the country. So what the hell happened? (The Verge)

• The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont: A hunt for stolen goods has put citizens and business owners in the center of a debate about policing and a growing, sometimes violent, problem with crime. (New York Times)

• The 1960s Experiment Created Today’s Biased Police Surveillance: The Police Beat Algorithm predominantly addressed four problems associated with police operations: 1) pattern recognition, identifying crime patterns within a set of crime data; 2) profiling, associating crime patterns with probable suspects; 3) dragnetting, linking probable suspects of one crime with past crimes or arrests; and 4) patrol positioning, how to best place patrols within appropriate geographical divisions of the city based on where the most crimes take place and where known criminal suspect profiles predicted who will most likely commit those crimes and where. This is where planning problems and operational problems intersected. (Slate)

• The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin, Part 1: The Shadow The notorious Alpha02 oversaw millions of dollars a day in online narcotic sales. For cybercrime detectives, he was public enemy number one—and a total mystery. (Wired)

• ‘Dark Ships’ Emerge From the Shadows of the Nord Stream Mystery: Satellite monitors discovered two vessels with their trackers turned off in the area of the pipeline prior to the suspected sabotage in September. (Wired)

• DEA’s most corrupt agent: Parties, sex amid ‘unwinnable war’ José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he conspired with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of sports cars, jewels and paramours around the world. (ABC News)

• What happened at Alameda Research: Despite success with some discretionary positions, on net, Alameda & FTX jointly continued to lose large amounts of money and liquid cash throughout 2021-2022 as a result of excessive discretionary spending, illiquid venture investments, uncompetitive market-making strategies, risky lending practices, lackluster internal accounting, and general deficiencies in overall organizational ability When loans were recalled in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to use FTX users’ deposits to repay creditors This repayment spurred on increasingly erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling, eventually resulting in total insolvency. (Milky Eggs)

• Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed: From the rubbles of his crypto empire, SBF has repeatedly admitted that he “fucked up.” While we don’t yet know what the actual legal implications of this mess are, or who exactly bears the most blame, it’s clear that confession is a bit of an understatement. (Slate)

• Monuments to the Unthinkable: America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany? (The Atlantic)

• Margot Robbie Is Nobody’s Barbie: The Babylon Star on Navigating Hollywood: Like Nellie, Robbie, who’s 32, got Hollywood’s attention with a breakout performance, in The Wolf of Wall Street, and has built a career that suggests what a modern movie star can be. She’s a no-bullshit actor and producer who bounces between blockbusters and dark indies, even if she’s still a little uncomfortable with the spotlight. “The way I try to explain this job—and this world—to people is that the highs are really high,” she says, her hand hovering over her head, “and the lows are really, really low. And I guess if you’re lucky, it all balances out in the middle.” (Vanity Fair)

• Detonation by Design: The Inevitability of Tony Khan’s ‘Dynamite’ For many wrestling fans, the story of All Elite Wrestling begins in 2019. For AEW founder Tony Khan, the story goes back three decades, at the start of his pro wrestling fandom. (Ringer)

The Four Day Workweek, Tech layoffs, and MTB Uphill Achievement

Thursday morning articles

• These companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days: The same pay for less time at work? 73 companies ran an experiemnt. They include financial firms, recruiters, consultants, health care companies and even a fish and chip shop in the U.K. While the data on the study hasn’t been released yet, the anecdotal feedback from these firms appears to be positive. 86% said they will likely continue the four-day workweek policy. (NPR)

• Don’t be misled by no-context reports of big tech layoffs: Big tech isn’t as big an employer as you might think (TKer)

• Sears Limps Through What Could Be Its Final Holiday Season: With just a handful of stores left and much of its real estate on the block, the once-dominant retailer has a grim outlook. (Businessweek)

• Bubbles Aren’t Just For Stock Markets: What was historic was we saw the collapse of three giant bubbles within hours of each other. The crypto bubble had its biggest comeuppance yet with the collapse of Sam Bankman-Freed’s FTX empire, Elon Musk lost his halo, and the election results appear to have taken the air out of Donald Trump‘s political career. (Ian’s Blog: Nominal Returns)

• How America’s top real estate agent sells 16 homes every day A typical agent in the US closes on 10 homes in a year. One record-setting agent in Texas does better than that nearly every day. (The Hustle)

• Forever & Always: Could the Taylor Swift ticket apocalypse bring change to Ticketmaster’s grip on the music industry? The ticket giant’s prices and fees have been a sore point for fans and entertainers. (Grid)

• The Russian Empire Must Die: A better future requires Putin’s defeat—and the end to imperial aspirations. (The Atlantic)

• The Beautiful, Brutal World of Bonsai: An American undergoes a gruelling apprenticeship to a Japanese master. (New Yorker)

• Is Time Running Out for the Leap Second? To the world’s timekeepers, the leap second is a kludge, a bane, a pain in the little hand. Now they’re proposing to ditch it. Will our days ever be the same? (New York Times)

• Is This Mountain Biking’s Greatest Uphill Achievement? Braydon Bringhurst Versus the Beast: This former pole vaulter is the rare athlete who can blend explosive power with precision and control. But he’d need a lot more than that to ride his bike up this insanely technical downhillt rail. (Bicycling)

Crypto Chaos, Toyota Prius, and Lindsay Lohan

Wednesday morning articles

• Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced boy king of crypto, explained: He was a billionaire who had quickly amassed political and philanthropic influence. What happened? (Vox)

• Electric Vehicles Start to Enter the Car-Buying Mainstream: While sales are still skewed toward affluent buyers, more people are choosing electric vehicles to save money. (New York Times)

• Toyota to Unveil New Prius as Hybrids Lose Luster to Battery EVs: Sales of the pioneering hybrid have fallen from a peak of 500,000 to around 86,000 last year. (Bloomberg)

• The ‘Next Warren Buffett’ Curse Isn’t Always Fatal: Eddie Lampert Jr., Chamath Palihapitiya, Guo Guangchang, Cathie Wood, Sam Bankman-Fried couldn’t survive the comparison. Others who actually invest somewhat like the Berkshire Hathaway chairman fare better. (Bloomberg)

• TikTok Builds Itself Into an Ads Juggernaut: The Chinese-owned video app’s ad business is thriving, even as a digital advertising slump hurts Meta, Snap and other rivals. (New York Times)

• The Secret Agent: Americans in Notting Hill: A seller laments his £15 million house offered at a “mid-range” price and demands the agent double it. (Bloomberg Wealth)

• Matt Levine Explains the World: A ‘Weird’ Walk in the Park With the Star Bloomberg Columnist From Elon’s follies to crypto’s “death-spiral convertibles,” the “Money Stuff” writer has become an indispensable translator of the complex, arcane and bizarre. (The Information)

• First Came the Crypto Crash. Now Comes the Taxman. Cryptocurrency investors may need to act within the next few weeks to reduce their tax bill—and get ahead of an increasingly aggressive IRS (Wall Street Journal)

• Policies for Adapting to the ‘New Normal’ of the Anthropocene: Two sets of value systems that underlie Western society trigger environmental problems. The first is a faith in market capitalism. This faith embraces a free market, property ownership, shareholder rights, limited regulation, and unlimited economic growth to produce socially optimal outcomes such as economic prosperity or a clean environment. This value set leads us to believe in the “win-win” solution to all our problems; that we can, for example, correct climate change by pursuing solutions that also make us money. (Behavioral Scientist)

• The Lonely Hearts Club Man: Men are losing friends and struggling to make new ones – and missing out on powerful health benefits in the process. Buddy, what’s going on? (BBC Science Focus)

• Eight Hours With Lindsay Lohan: In which the icon—and new Cosmo cover star—digs into her first Netflix project, surviving early-2000s paparazzi, her friendship with Al Pacino, married life in Dubai, and what comes next. (Cosmopolitan)

Investing, Twitter Parodies, and Jennifer Aniston

Tuesday morning articles

• Boring is Beautiful in Investing: Successful investing should be boring. It should be long-term in nature. It requires patience and discipline and the ability to ignore the madness of the crowds. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Dear Elon, I can save Twitter for you. Here are my terms: No matter, no matter. Plainly we both love Twitter, despite its faults and flaws. I don’t think either of us wants to see it fail. It seems to be heading in that direction, but I think it can be saved. (Los Angeles Times)

• The Parody Gold Created by Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue: What impersonation issues, you ask? Countless users bought Twitter Blue to use it on “verified” parody accounts of all sorts of things, places, and people—from impersonations of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Honestly, Twitter hasn’t been this much fun in a long time. (Slate)

• How Apple Stores Went From Geek Paradise to Union Front Line: Store employees helped create some of the most valuable square footage in the US. Now they feel more like regular salespeople—so they’re unionizing. (Businessweek)

• The Crypto Ponzi Scheme Avenger: From his home in New Zealand, the YouTuber Danny de Hek assails what he calls a dangerous and deceptive scheme, one rant at a time. (New York Times)

• How Hot Wheels became ‘the largest auto manufacturer out there’ More than 16 cars are sold every second. But what does it take to make a tiny classic motor? (Financial Times)

• America has an earthquake early-warning system now — on your phone : If you use the right app or phone settings, ShakeAlert will give you a few crucial seconds to drop, cover and hold on before an earthquake reaches you. (Washington Post)

• Russia’s retreat from Kherson is a military disaster that not even the Kremlin and its propagandists can spin: The recapture of Kherson may be Ukraine’s most significant victory in the war so far. (Grid)

• For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test: Though the battle for Ukraine remains largely a grinding artillery war, new advances in technology and training there are being closely monitored for the ways they are starting to shape combat. (New York Times)

• Donald Trump 2024: Six ways running for president will be harder this time: Donald Trump has announced his third straight presidential bid, in an extremely rare attempt by a former US leader to recapture the White House after losing an election. (BBC)

• Jennifer Aniston Has Nothing to Hide: Jennifer Aniston has spent most of her adult life in the spotlight, with all its glare. At 53, she opens up about her path to leaving regrets and some deeply personal pain behind. (Allure)