Investing, Rental Markets, and the Oscars

Monday morning articles

• How to Print Money: Cash may seem old-fashioned these days — but in much of the world, cash is still king. The process of making money requires teams of experienced designers and engravers who etch the plates with portraits, vignettes, lettering and ornamentation. The designs are crafted with both aesthetics and security in mind. (New York Times)

• Apartment Rents Fall as Crush of New Supply Hits Market: Declines signal tenants may be maxed-out on how much income they can devote to rent. (Wall Street Journal)

• US Housing Market Posts $2.3 Trillion Drop, Biggest Since 2008: San Francisco and New York are slumping as the pandemic boom fizzles out, but migration to Florida has boosted Miami. (Bloomberg)

• Does Long-Term Investing Work Outside of the United States? The MSCI World ex-USA dates back to 1970. These were the annual returns1 from 1970 through January 2023: S&P 500: 10.5% MSCI ex-USA: 8.4% (Wealth of Common Sense)

• I’m not Sure Speculation Is Gone: Jim Chanos, president and founder of Chanos & Company, believes the level of silliness and speculation seen in 2020 and 2021 marked an important moment for valuations. He talks about the biggest fraud which is hiding in plain sight and why he believes Tesla has a long way to go down. (The Market)

• Welcome to the 5% World, Where Yield Chases You: The dark cloud of rising interest rates comes with some significant silver linings (Wall Street Journal)

• What You Can Learn From Warren Buffett’s Mistakes: The incessant talk in Berkshire’s shareholder letters about what went wrong may have a purpose.  (Bloomberg)

• To the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The disposition of money unmasks humans. Charlie and I watch with pleasure the vast flow of Berkshire-generated funds to public needs and, alongside, the infrequency with which our shareholders opt for look-at-me assets and dynasty-building. Who wouldn’t enjoy working for shareholders like ours? (berkshirehathaway)

• Awards are meaningless: From the Oscars to best in business, why do we do awards for adults? “Plenty of things are deeply wrong with America today; being nice to 6-year-olds isn’t super one of them…” (Vox)

• How inflammation in the body may explain depression in the brain: Inflammation is a pathway to depression — and a potential avenue for treatment, research suggests. (Washington Post)

• We’re living in an age of small creatures: 340-pound penguins were once normal—and maybe they will be again someday. (Slate)

Bond Yields, Tesla, and Tax Breaks

Friday morning articles

• Rising Bond Yields Rattle 2023 Stock Rally: The 10-year Treasury yield has surged higher, erasing an element of support for U.S. share indexes. (Wall Street Journal)

• The five-day workweek is dead: The calls for something better are just getting louder. (Vox)

• Pension Risk Transfers: What to Watch Out For: Will the PRT be financially solid? Will the sponsor be left worse off? How will transferred beneficiaries fare? (Chief Investment Officer)

• Tax Breaks Threaten Remote Work If Cities Start Enforcing Them: Many tax incentives hinge on employees coming to the office. Officials are deciding whether to enforce them as downtowns bear the cost of hybrid work arrangements. (CityLab)

• Tesla Undercuts Average US Car by Almost $5,000 in EV Shakeout: Elon Musk’s latest US price drop brings Tesla’s electric-vehicle premium to a record low. (Bloomberg)

• Just How Good for the Planet Is That Big Electric Pickup Truck? Electric vehicles are starting to look more like the rest of America’s automobiles: Big. (New York Times)

• How lithium gets from the earth into your electric car: Lithium has never been more in demand the soft silvery metal gives batteries more life and allows them to hold the charge longer a lithium ion battery is likely powering the device you’re using right now to use these words and if you own an electric vehicle these batteries make it go. (Washington Post)

• Dalio Exits: Hedge Fund Founder Retires: Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, retired last year after months of negotiations that guaranteed him a gigantic exit package. (New York Times)

• If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: The problem with human intelligence. (The Guardian)

• Why isn’t Joe Biden getting credit for the economic recovery? The job market is booming. Inflation is falling. But you’d never know it by looking at President Biden’s poll numbers. (Vox)

• A Jeff Koons balloon dog shattered. Now collectors want to buy the shards. But where aghast guests saw the loss of a $42,000 artwork, Stephen Gamson, an artist and collector who witnessed the sculpture’s fall, saw an invaluable piece of art history. He’s now hoping to add each fraction of the smashed “Balloon Dog (Blue)” — a 2021 work that stood a little over a foot tall — to a personal collection of ephemera that includes Roy Lichtenstein’s ruler, Kenny Scharf’s refrigerator door and “multiple paint brushes from famous artists.” (Washington Post)

Bear Markets, REITs, and Economic Stimulus

Thursday morning articles

• This Bear Market (Probably) Isn’t Over Yet Tuesday’s drop is less a blip than a harbinger of another rough patch (Wall Street Journal)

• Office Landlord Defaults Are Escalating as Lenders Brace for More Distress: Delinquency rate for office loans that back commercial-mortgage-backed securities remains low, but it is heading higher. (Wall Street Journal)

• REITs Can Hedge Inflation — But Not During a Market Crisis Allocators need a long-term time horizon if they want listed real estate to be an effective inflation hedge. (Institutional Investor)

• An Ongoing Stimulus in the Economy For Years to Come. It’s estimated 2/3 of those with mortgage debt are at 4% or lower. Those who locked in ultra-low mortgage rates are receiving an ongoing form of stimulus, giveng them more disposable income on a monthly basis that can be used for spending or saving elsewhere in their budget. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• What Do US Growth Zones Have in Common? They Build Housing: Migration to the South and inland West has many causes, but the availability of new houses and apartments is the most important one. (Bloomberg)

• Leaked files reveal reputation-management firm’s deceptive tactics: A reputation-management company promises it can secretly remake anyone’s online image. But how do they do it? (Washington Post)

• They Lost Their Jobs, Then Went Viral on TikTok: Some workers are using the platform to share stories about job cuts, give advice and search for new roles. (New York Times)

• Smaller, safer, cheaper? Modular nuclear plants could reshape coal country: The Biden administration envisions dozens of ‘modular’ nuclear plants sprouting across the country. Why coal communities are so eager to be the staging ground for the risky endeavor. (Washington Post)

• How Barnes & Noble Came Back From Near Death: “How is it that bookstores do justify themselves in the age of Amazon? They do so by being places in which you discover books with an enjoyment, with a pleasure, with a serendipity that is simply impossible to replicate online. And to do that, you have to have a good bookstore.” (New York Times)

• How Supergenes Beat the Odds—and Fuel Evolution: Stretches of DNA that lock inherited traits together often accumulate harmful mutations. Recent work shows that their blend of genetic benefits and risks for species can be complex. (Quanta Magazine)

• Marvin Gaye’s iconic NBA All-Star Game national anthem: ‘He turned that thing into his own’ For one afternoon, America’s anointed theme song had a suede soul, velvety enough to be simultaneously sexy and spiritual. For one afternoon, patriotism masqueraded as a Motown kind of cool. The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., was graced by a superstar’s serenade, stirring together hope and love, resilience and confidence, into a concoction delightful enough to be served on the rocks. (The Athletic)

Super Bowl Revenues, Aliens, Kawhi Leonard, and Keanu

Wednesday morning articles

• Super Bowling for cash with the NFL’s club of billionaires: Spending for last week’s Super Bowl came in around $15 billion; yearly league revenues are approaching $20 billion. League profits are likely to keep growing given the popularity of this sometimes brutal and increasingly lucrative sport. (NY Post)

• “This Is Not an Invasion of the Aliens”: How UFO Mania Went Mainstream: Mysterious aerial phenomena have been generating serious news coverage for the past few years. With unknown objects now being shot down from the skies, the latest headlines are out of this world. (Vanity Fair)

• Alien Invasion!!! More important than UFOs1 is the intriguing process by which humans sift through a morass of conflicting information. I believe proficiency in this ability is an important life skill and is especially important to investors. (TBP)

• Election deniers face a nationwide wave of pushback: The growing effort by election officials and others is intended to counter mistrust arising from Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged 2020 vote. (Washington Post)

• Why So Many States Want to Ban China From Owning Farmland: National Agricultural Law Center datafound 9 states have new bills aimed at expanding the existing laws to limit or prohibit foreign ownership of agricultural land, a designation that can include cropland, livestock pastures and timberland. An additional 15 states withare considering new bills on the matter, many designed to prevent foreign governments, companies and, in some cases, nonresident citizens of other countries from owning agricultural land. (FiveThirtyEight)

• The Road to Disinflation: Inflation is Coming Down, but the Journey Now Looks More Bumpy. (Apricitas Economics)

• We Will Never Fully Understand How AI Works — But That Shouldn’t Stop You From Using It: To unlock the true potential of artificial intelligence, investors need to accept the black box. (Institutional Investor)

• The World’s Plastic Use Is Getting Worse. Cheap New Plastic Is Choking the World. ‘It’s a Recipe for Disaster.’ A glut of so-called virgin plastic is pushing down prices and fueling demand as recycling fails to advance. (Barron’s)

• Fighting climate change: These 5 technologies are our best weapons: Our ever-expanding use of technology is helping to push carbon emissions upwards, but it could be used to bring them down too. Here’s how. (ZD Net)

• Kawhi Leonard Is Back—and the NBA Should Be Petrified: One of the most devastating two-way forces in NBA history is looking like his old self once again. That could spell trouble for the rest of the league. (The Ringer)

• Keanu Will Never Surrender to the Machines The Matrix movies brought Reeves and Chad Stahelski together. Now the duo is killing it on their fourth John Wick—and still keeping technology in check. (Wired)

The Inconvenient Truth of Electric Vehicles

Tuesday morning articles

• The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles: The experience of owning, charging, and driving an electric vehicle makes the rising inequality of America more visible in new and subtle ways. (The Atlantic)

• Electric Vehicles Could Match Gasoline Cars on Price This Year: Competition, government incentives and falling raw material prices are making battery-powered cars more affordable sooner than expected. (New York Times)

• The stock market’s pullback is healthy: Wall Street’s mood is surprisingly subdued—and that’s bullish • The stock market’s pullback is healthy (Marketwatch)

• The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it: U.S. productivity jumped in the second quarter of 2020 as offices closed, and stayed at a heightened level through 2021. Then, when companies started mandating a return to the office in early 2022, productivity dropped sharply in Q1 and Q2 of that year. Productivity recovered slightly in Q3 and Q4 as the productivity loss associated with the return to office mandate was absorbed by companies–but it never got back to the period when remote-capable employees worked from home. (Fortune)

• US Housing Market Is Overvalued by Billions Due to Ignored Flood Risk: Home values don’t currently reflect expected losses from flooding, a new study finds, leaving low-income homeowners especially vulnerable to price deflation. (Bloomberg)

• Poor, Busy Millennials Are Doing the Midlife Crisis Differently: They don’t really have a choice. But the internet generation might just be making some improvements to that cliched mashup of paunch and panic. (Businessweek) but see The First Car: Where We Are is a series about young people coming of age and the spaces where they create community. (New York Times)

• That’s Tory Burch? Over the last few seasons a new energy has emerged at the preppy American label. Fashion insiders are taking note. (New York Times)

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

• Tuition Revenue Has Fallen at 61% of Colleges During the Pandemic: A likely factor in the dip was colleges’ struggle to bring back students two years into the pandemic, according to a Chronicle analysis of finance data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which examined how net-tuition revenue fluctuated from 2019 to 2021.  (Chronicle of Higher Education)

• A ‘Distinctly Human’ Trait That Might Actually Be Universal: Disgust is surprisingly common across nature. (The Atlantic)

• Florence Pugh’s Radical Self-Acceptance: When Pugh was three, the family moved to an international enclave in southern Spain, near Gibraltar, partly for the adventure, partly for the weather, which the family thought might help with her tracheomalacia, or “floppy trachea,” a condition that had made Pugh something of a sickly child. She was in and out of the hospital when she was a baby, though she is adamant that this didn’t define her. “I never want this to be a sob story.” (Vogue)

NFL, Sports Experiences, Superbowl Adversity, and Mahomes

Thursday morning articles

• How Massive The NFL Really Is, In 4 Charts: Football’s grip on American sports fandom expands well beyond just watching the Super Bowl. More generally, Gallup has been asking Americans about their favorite sport to watch since 19371 — and for the past half-century, American sports fans have come to a pretty clear consensus: Football is king. (fivethirtyeight)

• The 18 Best Live Sports Experiences on Earth: From a medieval horse race in Siena to a breathtakingly beautiful ultramarathon in a small French village, consider this the ultimate travel bucket list. (GQ)

• How steep is your curve? We’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let R* be higher by 150-200bp. “The most compelling reason for the discrepancy is the presence of a strong prior among investors about R* [the neutral long-run rate of interest that balances the economy] being low and similar to estimates from the last cycle, despite the very different nature of the current cycle,” it told clients. (Financial Times)

• When Financial Bubbles Are Hard to Pop: In Japan, China and the US, some mindsets persist despite changing policy decisions. (Businessweek)

• The Psychology of Market Tops & Market Bottoms: What do you call a stock that’s down 70%? A stock that was down 90% and then rose 200%. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• “Reality Is Submerged in Fantasy”: The Villages Is a Boomer’s Utopia—And Demographic Time Bomb. Florida’s Trump-loving retirement community was meticulously created “to make boomers in particular feel comfortable and happy,” as Philip Bump writes in his forthcoming book, Aftermath. But behind its idyllic façade lurks a crisis that the Villages—and the rest of the country—have yet to reckon with. (Vanity Fair)

• The housing shortage is the root of all of America’s problems: The US hasn’t built enough homes in recent decades. The shortage is among the reasons homes are unaffordable for many Americans. It could also be contributing to other problems — like inequality, low birth rates, and climate change. (Business Insider)

• How Everybody Miscalculated Housing Demand: Post-GFC, Builders shift to multi-family and apartment buildings. It takes more than a decade for annual new single-family home construction to return to its pre-boom average, as Household Formation is weak and fewer young people gett married, despite increasing population. (The Big Picture)

• How the ‘boneless wing’ became a tasty culinary lie: Part of the reason for the rise of the “boneless wing” is money. In recent years, with prices of actual chicken wings rising, the alternative became more cost effective. The average price for prepared “boneless wings” is $4.99 a pound compared with $8.38 a pound for bone-in wings, according to Tom Super, senior vice president of communications for the National Chicken Council, citing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He calls it “a way to move more boneless/skinless breast meat that continues currently to be in ample supply.” (AP News)

• Google is scrambling to catch up to Bing, of all things:Google bookended Microsoft’s big AI search announcement with underwhelming AI news of its own. (Vox)

• Are we racing toward AI catastrophe? As tech giants like Microsoft and Google compete to capture the AI market, safety could be an afterthought. (Vox)

• That Wine You Can’t Get Enough Of? These Guys Probably Discovered It: Decades before grower Champagnes became hip, back when now-legendary Burgundy producers were unknown stateside, these importers brought extraordinary acumen to scouting winemaking talent and overlooked regions. (Wall Street Journal)

• A Different Kind of Team. A Different Kind of Adversity. Another Chiefs Super Bowl. Sunday brought a second Lombardi Trophy and a second heroic performance from a one-of-a-kind quarterback, the coach who can’t stop winning and the GM he helped shape. (Sports Illustrated)

• How Mahomes’ Chiefs beat Hurts’ Eagles in Super Bowl 2023: One good way to measure offensive dominance is down set conversion rate, which looks at every time a team took the ball on first down and sees whether it turned that series into a first down or a touchdown. The Chiefs converted 93.8% of their first downs into another first down or a touchdown in the second half, and the only reason they didn’t hit 100% is because Jerick McKinnon slid down on the 1-yard line to set up the title-winning field goal. (ESPN)

Uncertain Markets, ChatGPT, and Misinformation

Wednesday morning articles

• All Markets Are Uncertain: The Forecasters’ Hall of Fame Has Zero Members:  In any given year, someone, simply due volume of forecasts, is “right”. I have yet to see anyone who can repeatedly, accurately forecast market outcomes. What we can say, with all certainty, looking backward, is that the S and P (and virtually every other market) has inexorably risen. I find it interesting that there is no Forecasters’ Hall of Fame. There is no one to induct. (The Uncertainty of It All)

• The Chatbots Are Coming for Google: ChatGPT and a handful of startups founded by Google alumni are aiming to reimagine search for the AI age. (Businessweek)

• ChatGPT Sparked an AI Craze. Investors Need a Long-Term Plan. Artificial intelligence has sparked new competition in internet search—for the first time in decades. Here’s how to build an AI portfolio. (Barron’s)

• Stan the Man: How one man came to exert immense influence over an entire generation of central bankers — and still does: Stanley Fischer is the pocket-sized colossus of modern central banking. Although Fischer himself is long retired, it now looks like yet another of his disciples is to pick up the reins of major central. (Financial Times)

• The Little Research Firm That Took On India’s Richest Man: Nate Anderson’s Hindenburg, named for the exploding airship, is locked in a battle with Gautam Adani, whose conglomerate is a pillar of the nation’s economy. (Businessweek)

• PE Has Only Scratched the Surface of Sports Investing. These Firms Are Trying to Change: That. Generational, cultural, and legal shifts are making sports investing more attractive. Capital has yet to follow. (Institutional Investor)

• How Spotify’s podcast bet went wrong: Bill Simmons sent an email to her boss. Simmons had sold the sports and pop culture audio empire The Ringer to Spotify a year earlier for $200 million. Now he wrote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to argue for keeping the Ringer’s mass audience on Apple and its advertising revenue, driven by the explosion of sports betting. (Semafor)

• Inside the Near-Collapse and Resurrection of the Redstone Media Empire: In the new book Unscripted, authors James Stewart and Rachel Abrams dissect the prolonged, tumultuous battle over the media behemoth that is now Paramount Global—and reveal how, against all odds, Shari Redstone emerged victorious. (Bloomberg)

• The Death of the Smart Shopper: Internet retail was supposed to supercharge the informed consumer. What happened? (The Atlantic)

• Influence Networks in Russia Misled European Users, TikTok Says: The covert and coordinated campaign was disclosed in a new report that also addressed misinformation, fake accounts and moderation struggles. (New York Times)

• Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated. Drawing on research examining the use of big data in social science and reception studies, we identify six misconceptions about misinformation and highlight the conceptual and methodological challenges they raise. (Sage Journals)

• “You’re So Vain”: An Oral History of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, and more look back on 20 years of love ferns and that yellow dress. (Vanity Fair)

NFL Teams, HBO, and Shell's Plan for Climate Change

Tuesday morning articles

• Can the N.F.L.’s Rules for Team Ownership Survive its Skyrocketing Valuations? Other sports leagues have changed their rules to allow private equity firms to invest. But so far, the N.F.L. has resisted. (NY Times)

• How HBO’s creatives survived corporate chaos Authors Felix Gillette and John Koblin explain how your favorite shows kept HBO afloat. (The Verge)

• What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? Here’s everything you need to know: This AI chatbot’s advanced conversational capabilities have created quite the buzz. Here’s what you need to know. (ZD Net)

• AI Tech Enables Industrial-Scale Intellectual-Property Theft, Say Critics: Are ChatGPT, Stability AI and GitHub Copilot the next big breakthroughs, huge legal and regulatory liabilities, or something else entirely? (Wall Street Journal)

• I was asked to invent the next Wordle. How hard could it be? Wordle is the deceptively simple puzzle that became a global sensation last Christmas. The challenge: to create a rival. (The Guardian)

• Downward Spiral The nautilus’s lineage made it through all five of Earth’s previous mass extinctions. But can it survive the Anthropocene? (bioGraphic)

• Apple in 2022: The Six Colors report card: It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. This is the eighth year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category.. (Six Colors)

• The Astonishing Transformation of Austin: My town, once celebrated for its laid-back weirdness, is now a turbocharged tech megalopolis being shaped by exiles from places like Silicon Valley. (New Yorker)

• Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure? How to text, tip, ghost, host, and generally exist in polite society today. (The Cut)

• Shell’s Grand Plan to Fight Climate Change (and Continue to Cause It): The company is investing billions of dollars in zero- and low-carbon energy solutions, but selling oil and gas at record profits is a hard habit to break. (Businessweek)

• The Last Boeing 747 Leaves the Factory: The plane known as “Queen of the Skies” helped make air travel more affordable, but it has been supplanted by smaller, more efficient aircraft. (New York Times)

• Bon Voyage, Boeing 747. You Really Did Change Everything. (New York Times)

• The First Family of Human Cannonballing: David and Jeannie Smith gave up their day jobs for a life of daredevil stunts —with six children in tow. Five decades, thousands of cannon shots and multiple Guinness World Records later, this stupendous family business is still defying gravity and all other expectations. (Narratively)

Recessions, Economy, and the Superbowl

Monday morning articles

• What Recession? Some Economists See Chances of a Growth Rebound. The Federal Reserve has raised rates rapidly. But instead of cracking, some data point to an economy that’s thriving. (New York Times)

• Is the economy kind of good now? If this is a recession, it is a weird one. (Vox)

• U.S. Business Owners Pay Premium to Hire Migrant Workers in Extremely Tight Labor Market: Employers, struggling to fill hourly wage jobs in construction, restaurants and other services, are offering higher pay and better working conditions to people coming to the U.S. to work; ‘The scarcity is huge.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• Lab-Grown Meat Has a Bigger Problem Than the Lab: Leading scientists agree that cultured meat products won’t give you cancer, but the industry doesn’t have the decades of data to prove it—so it’s trying to avoid the question instead. (Businessweek)

• Why Do People Believe Everything They Watch on TikTok? We’re just as bad as boomers falling for misinformation on Facebook. (Vice)

• How America Lost Its Grip on Reality: Life in the metaverse is fueling conspiracies across America. (The Atlantic)

• Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It: The concept of Impostor Syndrome has become ubiquitous. Critics, and even the idea’s originators, question its value. (New Yorker)

• American Dream For Rent: Investors elbow out individual home buyers Metro Atlanta is ground zero for corporate purchases, locking families into renting. (Atlanta Journal Constitution)

• Minerals are crucial for electric cars and wind turbines. Some worry whether we have enough. Minerals are crucial for electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels. Some worry whether the future supply can meet the rising demand. (Washington Post)

• Data from New Jersey is a warning sign for young sports bettors: A small group of bettors seem to be most at risk. About 5% of all sports bettors placed nearly half of all bets and spent nearly 70% of the money. That means the people losing the most money are the most essential to operator profits. (The Conversation)

• Ford Bought a Newspaper at the Height of His Career. It’s a Warning for Musk. The Tesla founder’s ownership of Twitter could pose risks for him, just as Ford’s ownership of a newspaper created controversy. (Barron’s)

• Winners of the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest The 11th annual Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, winners and honorable mentions from 14 categories, have been announced. (The Atlantic)

• We Have Never Seen a Football Player Like Patrick Mahomes: In leading the Chiefs to their second Super Bowl title in four years, Patrick Mahomes is redefining quarterbacking greatness. (Ringer)

• Andy Reid’s Master Game Plan Won the Chiefs the Super Bowl—and Secured His Legacy This season was always going to be a test for Reid and Patrick Mahomes, with a newly retooled offense that prioritized precision over explosivity. But as the coach showed Sunday night, he was more than up to the challenge—just as he’s been his whole career. (Ringer)

Classic Car Sales, Tulipmania, and the Beatles

Friday morning articles

• Boom Times for Online Classic Car Sales: The pandemic changed the auction picture somewhat, giving a boost to eBay Motors, BringATrailer.com, and other online auction/sales companies. The wisdom initially had been that online sales were O.K. for smaller purchases, but for big-ticket items enthusiasts needed to see the cars in person. That assumption has been proven wrong, though traditional auction houses also did well in 2022—with values climbing on collector cars. (Barron’s)

• The Pandemic Used-Car Boom Is Coming to an Abrupt End: Dealership are seeing sales and prices drop as consumers tighten their belts, putting financial pressure on companies, like Carvana, that grew fast in recent years. (New York Times)

• The Unusual Crew Behind Tether, Crypto’s Pre-Eminent Stablecoin: The stablecoin has become a lucrative business at center of crypto economy. (Wall Street Journal)

• Tulipomania! On Holland’s legendary tulip bubble, which burst today in 1637. (Paris Review)

• Best Practices for CIO Succession Planning Require Long-Term Preparation: Carrying out executive transitions smoothly requires thoughtful processes established well in advance. (Chief Investment Officer)

• How we fell out of love with voice assistants: For the past three years voice assistant use has been falling and adoption continues to slow. (BBC)

• Welcome to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s desert dystopia in the making: Western architects are scrambling to work on a Saudi Arabian dream: a city founded on a 170km-long line of mirrored towers. But will it end up as a series of broken pieces? (Prospect)

• How Stockpickers Finally Beat the Index Funds: With less riding on slumping tech stocks such as Amazon, Tesla and Microsoft, many active fund managers finally surpassed their benchmarks in 2022. (Bloomberg)

• America’s Fever of Workaholism Is Finally Breaking: For the first time in 50 years, the rich are buying more free time. (The Atlantic)

• Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Private Parts and an Echo Chamber: What Mr. Musk says on Twitter has a huge reach, now more than ever: His audience is one of the largest, with nearly 128 million accounts following him. It is where he solicits advice, conducts polls, condemns censorship and announces sweeping policy changes on the platform. As a power user who now controls the company — he recently called himself the “chief twit” — Mr. Musk has vowed to remake the social network in his vision. (New York Times)

• Forget Pandemic Puppies. Meet the Inflation Chicken. People are snapping up chickens that are “heavy layers” in response to egg inflation. The chick situation holds lessons about the broader economy. (New York Times)

• The link between our food, gut microbiome and depression: A new study takes an important step forward in understanding the relationship of gut bacteria to what we eat and how we feel. (Washington Post)

• The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think: Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease. (Quanta Magazine)

• Golf’s Existential Crisis Is Coming to Netflix: When it greenlit its new golf series Full Swing, Netflix was hoping to build something like the next Drive to Survive—then a controversial new Saudi league took aim at the PGA Tour and the fight for the soul of the game commenced. It’s a good thing cameras were rolling. (GQ)

• How to Age Gracefully in Hollywood: A TV comedy writer on how to survive a business model of ageism. (The Ankler)

• Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews? An inquiry into how critics stumble. (The Honest Broker)