Inflation, MAID, Vegas Knights, Jokic and the Nuggets

Articles of the week

• Larry Summers Was Wrong About Inflation: His call for austerity was premised on the notion that only a sharp increase in unemployment could prevent a ruinous wage-price spiral. In reality, both wage and price growth have been slowing for months, even as unemployment has remained near historic lows. Summers’s failure to anticipate this outcome should lead us to reconsider just how prescient his analysis of the post-COVID economy ever was. (New York Magazine)

• Due Diligence: Using ESG as a Risk Mitigator: Although seldom apparent in financial statements, environmental, social and governance deficiencies can come out of nowhere and slam investors. (Chief Investment Officer)

• America’s Long, Tortured Journey to Build EV Batteries: The fall of startup A123 still haunts the US decades later—and reveals everything that’s wrong with this country’s approach to innovation. (Businessweek)

• Inflation Is Overhyped, Says This Pro. “I hear a lot of people say that we’re never going to fix it, that 7% is the new normal. That’s overhyped. There were multiple things that drove inflation up, but almost all of them are being corrected. The massive Covid-related stimulus was, in hindsight, possibly too much. But that money has been spent. So we’re mostly past it. The supply-chain issues have been largely corrected. Freight costs have come back down. And the Fed kept rates at zero for way, way too long. That has obviously been corrected. We will be back in the 2% to 3% range for inflation.” (Barron’s)

• Jerome Powell’s Big Problem Just Got Even More Complicated: The Fed aims to avert financial instability while also fighting inflation—predicaments that frequently call for opposite policies. (Wall Street Journal)

• These millionaires want to tax the rich, and they’re lobbying working-class voters: The nonprofit Patriotic Millionaires has lobbied Congress to make changes for more than a decade. Its members see inequality as a danger — they worry big money is corrupting politics and driving civil unrest. But they haven’t had much success. President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts largely benefited the wealthy, and even when Democrats controlled the Senate in 2021, they failed to pass a bill to raise the minimum wage. (NPR)

• The tech industry was deflating. Then came ChatGPT. Last year, Silicon Valley was drowning in layoffs and dour predictions. Artificial intelligence made the gloom go away (Washington Post)

• Rich nations say they’re spending billions to fight climate change. Some money is going to strange places. Wealthy countries have pledged $100 billion a year to help reduce the effects of global warming. But Reuters found large sums going to projects including a coal plant, a hotel and chocolate shops. (Reuters)

• Suncor helped write ‘first draft’ of Canadian plan for tackling carbon emissions Newly obtained documents reveal a Shell executive is also part of the federal advisory group for carbon capture, utilization and storage, which has been kept under wraps for two years (Narwhal)

• ‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’ While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach (Guardian)

• NASA’s newest X-plane wants to save the planet: The space agency has a plan to “skip a generation” of passenger aircraft design to fight climate change. (Vox)

• Does Journalling Actually Improve Mental Health? Writing down your thoughts can be helpful. But getting the perfect notebook isn’t a substitute for professional care (Walrus)

• Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far? As Canada expands access to MAID, many people with disabilities are sounding the alarm. Some say the law was flawed from the outset (Walrus)

• 'A good death' Saskatoon artist Jeanette Lodoen wanted Canadians to understand the realities of medically-assisted dying. She and her family granted CBC News unrestricted access to the weeks before, during and after her death. (CBC)

• Golden Knights ‘misfits,’ Matthew Tkachuk and the Stanley Cup playoffs’ winners and losers It took eight weeks and 88 games, but the Stanley Cup has been awarded and the 2022-23 NHL season is over. (Athletic)

• The Psychedelic Scientist Who Sends Brains Back to Childhood Kids soak up new skills, adults not so much. But neuroscientist Gül Dölen might have found a way—with drugs—to help grownups learn like littles. (Wired)

• I placed my first wager when I was 10. I’ve gambled more than $1 million since.

  A memoir of addiction, desperation and the dangers of sports betting (Macleans)

• The Vegas Golden Knights Make Their Own Luck—and Have a Stanley Cup to Prove It Less than six years after joining the NHL as an expansion team, Las Vegas has its first championship. To get there, the Knights beat the odds—and created their own good fortune. (The Ringer)

• The Denver Nuggets Were Built to Last: Not every franchise can be so lucky as to draft the best player in the game, but any can afford to be patient—and the Nuggets’ long, steady march carried them all the way to the NBA title. (The Ringer)

• Where Does a Title Put Nikola Jokic in NBA History? The Denver Nuggets star has reached rarefied air after bringing a championship to the Mile High City. Is he already one of the game’s 20 best players ever? “He’s one of the all-time greats and still 28 years old. There’s so much more to go,” says Nuggets GM Calvin Booth. (The Ringer)

• How the Lionel Messi Deal Stymied Saudi Arabia: A complex arrangement, involving Apple, to bring the soccer star to Miami shows how to trump the free-spending kingdom — and how hard that may be to duplicate. (Dealbook)

Investing, Stocks, Grocers, and Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic

Articles of the week - We have moved to doing a weekly post instead of daily.

• The Crypto Winter Cost People More Than Their Money: Some acolytes lost faith, others blamed devils—and some went even harder. An essay exploring what happens when the prophecy of blockchain fails. (Bloomberg)

• The Stock Market Will Pick the Winners For You: Index funds ride the winners. And while they don’t completely discard the losers right away, the stocks that are coming up pick up the slack for the eventual underperformers. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Why Should I Hold Stocks? And yet here we are, halfway through the year with the S&P 500 up 10%. The Nasdaq-100 is up 31%, one of the best first half of a year ever. (Irrelevant Investor)

• The Real Reason Your Groceries Are Getting So Expensive: Big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. (New York Times)

• How Saudi money returned to Silicon Valley: All the ways Saudi Arabia’s cash powers tech startups and venture capital. (Vox)

• 5 winners and 5 losers from the debt ceiling deal: Biden and McCarthy win. The Freedom Caucus loses. (Vox)

• Adidas After Yeezy: The partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was the stuff of sneakerhead legend—and its demise has the shoe company scrambling to replace nearly half of its profits. (Businessweek)

• A.I.-Generated Content Discovered on News Sites, Content Farms and Product Reviews: The findings in two new reports raise fresh concerns over how artificial intelligence may transform the misinformation landscape online. (New York Times)

• The One Thing Holding Back Electric Vehicles in America: The biggest hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars is not the cars themselves. (The Atlantic)

• The Unexpected Problem With EVs: They ‘Tire’ Quickly: Electric vehicles go through tires 30% faster than gas-powered vehicles, Bridgestone says, so it developed its first EV-specific replacement tire that protects range and improves durability. (PC Magazine)

• The Repo Man Returns as More Americans Fall Behind on Car Payments: Pandemic relief measures shielded many people from repossession, but that’s changing as interest rates and auto prices soar. (Businessweek)

• Why Your Steak Is Getting Pricier: Ranchers are shrinking cattle herds because of drought and high costs, cutting down the nation’s supply of beef. That threatens to push prices for steaks and burgers to records. (Wall Street Journal)

• Students are increasingly refusing to go to school. It’s becoming a mental health crisis. Since the pandemic, more students are school-avoidant, leaving parents feeling hopeless and schools unequipped to find a solution. (USA Today)

• A Model of Influencer Economy: With the rise of social media and streaming platforms, firms and brand-owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both common product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. As outreach and distribution technologies improve, influencer payoffs and income inequality change non-monotonically. More powerful influencers sell better-quality products, but pluralism in style mitigates market concentration by effectively differentiating consumer experience. (National Bureau of Economic Research)

• The Girl of the Endless Summer How ‘Gidget’ helped to put surfing on the map. (Quillette)

• Football bonded them. Its violence tore them apart. They were roommates and teammates at Harvard, bound by their love of football and each other. Then the game — and the debate over its safety — took its toll. (Washington Post)

• How New Rules Turned Back the Clock on Baseball: Nearly two months into the season, a series of rule changes — including the new pitch clock, enlarged bases and a ban on the infield shift — has translated into a game that evokes the 1980s more than the 2020s. (New York Times)

• The Game NBA Defenders Hate to Play: See Steph Run: Stephen Curry’s long-range 3-pointers make the highlight reels. The distances he travels before he shoots them are what really destroy NBA defenses. (Wall Street Journal)

• He’s the Best Player in the NBA. He’s Also the Bloodiest. The Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic has long been near the top of the leaderboard in points, assists and rebounds. He leads the league in flesh wounds, too. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Legend of Nikola Jokic Is Growing: The Nuggets big man beat every scheme, won every matchup, and sank seemingly every improbable moonball in a series sweep of the Lakers. (The Ringer)

• Lionel Messi, Soccer’s Most Coveted Free Agent, Picks Miami Days after he announced he would not return to Paris St.-Germain, Messi, Argentina’s World Cup hero, said he planned his next stop to be Inter Miami of M.L.S. (NY Times)

US Economy, US Debt and Defaulting on the Economy

Wednesday morning articles

• Why Water Access Should Be Part of Your Risk Metrics In the current tally of key risks and mitigants it’s easy to feel that the risk side of the equation is having a banner era; with business leaders being forced to manage through challenges that previous generations could have never anticipated or experienced. Climate change, populism, pandemics, high inflation, interest rate risk, economic migration, and the list goes on. Yet there is another risk that many businesses have not incorporated into their five- and 10-year strategies, and that is water risk. (BMO)

• Will The U.S. Economy Pull Off a ‘Soft Landing’? In the ’70s and ’80s, we thought that you needed to raise unemployment to fight inflation. Next, we thought that cooling down inflation would require higher unemployment. In the early ’70s, economists thought that price controls could slow inflation. …and were surprised when unemployment stayed low. In the late ’80s, we thought that a good inflation target was 4 percent. Then we decided that a better target would be 2 percent.. (New York Times)

• JPMorgan’s US debt default Q&A: JPMorgan late on Friday published a fantastic Q&A that explores most of the technical issues surrounding a possible US default. While the bank’s analysts stress that they “fully expect a timely resolution of the debt ceiling constraints”, it noted that clients naturally had a lot of questions. (Financial Times)

• Even Flirting With U.S. Default Takes Economic: Toll Financial markets are still betting that Congress and the White House will strike a deal. But the uncertainty alone is having consequences. (New York Times)

• How Did Hyundai Get So Cool? Korean carmaker known for budget brands becomes EV innovator; sets sights on Tesla. (Wall Street Journal)

• Decoupling is just going to happen: Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here. (Noahpinion)

• Why Are Economists Still Uncertain About the Effects of Monetary Policy?  Despite decades of research, there remains substantial uncertainty about the quantitative effects of monetary policy. Different models produce conflicting predictions, and these predictions lack precision. This article discusses some reasons for these issues. In addition to the relative lack of data, the structure of the economy has continued to evolve, posing challenges for empirical macroeconomic analysis more generally. Economists have been confronting these challenges by developing tools to jointly consider a range of models and continuing to seek new sources of data. (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond)

• Foresight: The mental talent that shaped the world: When humanity acquired the ability to imagine the future, it changed the trajectory of our species. But in the age of the Anthropocene, we need to harness this mental skill now more than ever, say the scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jon Redshaw and Adam Bulley. (BBC)

• How Will We Know When Self-Driving Cars Are Safe? When They Can Handle the World’s Worst Drivers: Call it the Mad Max driving test, a gantlet only a Hollywood director—or a mild-mannered engineer—could dream up. (Wall Street Journal)

• ‘The exact opposite of Donald Trump’: Republican senator Tim Scott’s vision for America: Can the politician’s Reaganesque optimism and rightwing principles convince the GOP to pick its first Black presidential candidate? (The Guardian)

• What Do a Falling Apple and an Orbiting Moon Have in Common? Isaac Newton connected the two motions in a way that revolutionized physics and made space travel possible. (Wired)

• Killers of the Flower Moon review – Scorsese’s magnificent period epic is an instant American classic: Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star in a sinuous, pitch-black tragedy about how the west was really won. (The Guardian)

Stock Market, Inflation, and TV Finales

Tuesday morning articles

• Large-Cap Stocks Outperform as Investors Seek Stability: The gap between large- and small-cap stocks has widened since the banking crisis, according to FTSE Russell. (Institutional Investor)

• Fed Rate Increases Hit Small Businesses the Hardest: Companies with smaller payrolls and valuations are facing higher funding costs. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Stock Market Usually Goes Up (But Sometimes it Goes Down): There have been just 13 bear markets since World War II (including the current iteration). That’s one out of every 6 years or so, on average. During that same time frame, the stock market has fallen by 30% or worse 4 times. That’s one out of every 13 years on average. A crash of 50% or worse has occurred just 3 times. That’s one out of every 26 years on average. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Office Workers Don’t Hate the Office. They Hate the Commute. Let’s address why folks aren’t coming back — and why they probably won’t unless we fix a big problem with office work that few C.E.O.s seem to mention: Getting to and getting home from the office. Survey after survey bears this out. If we want people to go to the office more often, we have to do something about a ritual of American life that’s time-consuming, emotionally taxing, environmentally toxic and expensive: the daily commute. (NYT)

• How America’s Largest Restaurant Franchisee Decides When to Raise Prices: Flynn Restaurant Group, owner of eateries including Applebee’s, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is at the vanguard of menu strategy. (Wall Street Journal)

• Once a fringe theory, “greedflation” gets its due: Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka “greedflation,” is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press. (Axios)

• Gen Z just wants a stable job: Young people are suddenly interested in working for the military industrial complex. (Vox)

• Where’s my self-driving car? EVs may seem closer to reality than AVs, but our view of both is distorted by our rigid understanding of transportation. (Fast Company)

• Why most car dealers still don’t have any electric vehicles: A new survey finds two-thirds of car dealers didn’t have a single electric vehicle for sale. (Vox)

• Why Suicide Rates Are Dropping Around the World: Over the past couple of decades, global suicide prevention efforts have reduced deaths by a third—but some countries are falling behind. (Wired)

• Fox News’s ‘vitriolic lies’ present clear threat to US democracy, says woman suing rightwing network: disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, who is suing over campaign of falsehoods, says ‘if Fox isn’t brought to account, it will not stop.’ (The Guardian)

• Negotiating with post-Trump Republicans is like dealing with a toddler’s tantrum: While one side is happy to defecate on the floor, the other side has no choice but to clean up the mess. (The Guardian)

• The 40 Best TV Finales of the 21st Century, Ranked: It’s hard to say goodbye. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that we often get a tremendous hour of television. In honor of ‘Succession’ and ‘Barry’ ending this week, we’re ranking the best series wrap-ups since 2000. (The Ringer)

Global Wealth, White Collar Jobs, Tacos, and Dark Money

Thursday morning articles

• Here’s How Much Wealth You Need to Join the Richest 1% Globally: It takes $12.4 million to join Monaco’s wealthiest group The US, by comparison, requires $5.1 million to make the cut. (Bloomberg)

• Brew Another Pot, Robinhood’s 24-Hour Stock Trading Is Here: As the company launches a new nighttime buying and selling feature, one Reddit poster asks: “Why would anyone want this?” (Businessweek)

• The Disappearing White-Collar Job: A once-in-a-generation convergence of technology and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return. (Wall Street Journal)

• Taco John’s trademarked ‘Taco Tuesday’ in 1989. Now Taco Bell is fighting it. It’s a battle between taco chain restaurants. Taco John’s, which has about 400 locations in 23 states, trademarked “Taco Tuesday” back in 1989. Now, Taco Bell argues it should be able to get in on using the popular phrase – with no legal ramifications. It filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday asking for the trademark to be reversed. Taco John’s trademarked ‘Taco Tuesday’ in 1989. Now Taco Bell is fighting it. It’s a battle between taco chain restaurants. Taco John’s, which has about 400 locations in 23 states, trademarked “Taco Tuesday” back in 1989. Now, Taco Bell argues it should be able to get in on using the popular phrase – with no legal ramifications. It filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday asking for the trademark to be reversed. (NPR)

• Recession Calls Keep Getting Pushed Back, Giving Soft Landing Believers Hope: Defying sharp rate hikes, unemployment stays low and consumers resilient. (Businessweek)

• Have all the beers gone woke? An investigation. Conservatives are mad about a Miller Lite video from March now. I don’t know. (Vox)

• ‘You can’t say that!’: how to argue, better. A good debate isn’t about one person declaring victory, it’s about both people making a discovery, says psychologist Adam Grant (The Guardian)

• Who Is Leonard Leo’s Mysterious Dark Money King? America needs to know who Barre Seid is, what kind of country he wants, and just how massive an impact his $1.6 billion gift can have on our political discourse. (New Republic)

• We’re All Bored of Culture: Anglo-Calvinist moralism has turned the American arts into something strenuously polite and deadly dull. (Tablet)

FTX, Office Space, and Financial Literacy

Wednesday morning articles

• The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better. About a year after the author Michael Lewis began to shadow Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried was arrested. As the story evolved, Lewis has had a front-row seat to the drama. (New York Times)

• The Return to the Office Has Stalled: Offices remain half empty as companies settle into hybrid work plans. (Wall Street Journal)

• Paper Bears: If everything is so bad why are most people happy? I’m fine but everything else is terrible seems to be the default assumption for most people these days. The pandemic has obviously had an impact on how people generally feel about the state of the world and not in a good way. But it is weird that most people seem satisfied with their life in general but assume everyone else must be miserable. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• How Close is Tokenization for Mainstream Investors? Several money managers now offer tokenized funds to investors, while other firms are exploring ways to utilize tokenization for clients. (CIO)

• The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury: How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam (The Atlantic)

• The case for financial literacy education: The damage wrought by a lack of financial literacy extends beyond the individual — to companies and even to the economy. “Influential policymakers and central bankers, including former Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, have spoken to the critical importance of financial literacy.” If only… (NPR)

• How Tokyo Became an Anti-Car Paradise: The world’s biggest, most functional city might also be the most pedestrian-friendly. That’s not a coincidence. (Heatmap)

• These Next-Generation Vaccines Could Upend Cancer Treatment As We Know It: Some of the tech used to make Covid-19 shots could help treat cancer and heart disease. (Inverse)

• The Era of Warriors Inevitability Is Over, But a New One Starts: Now Golden State’s dynastic run came to an end with a Game 6 loss to the Lakers, but don’t count out a rebound. (Sports Illustrated)

• What Little Richard Deserved: The new documentary “I Am Everything” explores the gulf between what Richard accomplished and what he got for it, and between who Richard was and who he let himself be. (New Yorker)

Crypto, Credit Suisse, and Electric Vehicles

Tuesday morning articles

• Miami’s Love Affair With Crypto Is Souring as Bitcoin Faithful Flock to the City: On the eve of the annual bitcoin conference, the city and its mayor have mostly moved on from crypto. (Wall Street Journal)

• Crypto’s Most Influential Companies Often Follow Their Own Rules — Even After FTX’s Collapse: A review of practices at 60 of the sector’s most influential companies found many lack basic guardrails. (Bloomberg)

• The audacious plan to trigger Credit Suisse’s CDS: Can a bond that no longer exists trigger a default? This is the quasi-metaphysical question facing the panel of experts who have to determine whether Credit Suisse’s credit-default swap contracts will pay out. Call it Schrödinger’s swap. (Financial Times)

• All the arguments against EVs are wrong EVs are just going to win. Some on the political right are still suspicious that EVs are a government-subsidized scheme to reduce their standard of living, while some on the left worry that EVs will cause exploitation and environmental destruction and suburban sprawl. And pretty much everyone is asking whether the world has enough minerals to complete the transition. (Noahpinion)

• The New EV Gold-Rush: Automakers Scramble to Get Into Mining. A scarcity of EV battery materials pushes car companies and miners to work closer together; for both, there is a learning curve (Wall Street Journal)

• Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving, Too. Major coastal metros have been hubs of the kind of educated workers coveted most by high-powered employers and economic development officials. Economists have lamented the growing coastal concentration of their wealth. A politics of resentment in America has fed on it, too. These urban centers have become a class of their own — “superstar cities” — with outsized impact on the American economy fueled by the clustering of workers with degrees. (New York Times)

• Why Google is reinventing the internet search: Generative AI is here. Let’s hope we’re ready. (Vox)

• Do You Still Believe These 19 Ridiculous Tech Myths? Fact and fiction frequently collide when it comes to the technology we use in our daily lives. We set the record straight. (PC Magazine)

• This New Airline Is Raising the Bar, From First Class to Economy: Starlux has officially begun flying in the US. Here’s a look inside its fancy cabins (Bloomberg)

• • The Art of the Doomer on worldviews and cognitive models: I’m really fascinated by doomerism – how loud and confidently people will talk about what presumably is the end of their world. I am not sure why there tends to be an undercurrent of “if things collapse, I will be okay because I have gold bars” because if things do end up falling apart, they tend to exist within a state of rubble rather than a state of utility, but alas. (Kyla)  

• A California journalist documents the far-right takeover of her town: ‘We’re a test case’. Doni Chamberlain’s been a journalist in Shasta county for nearly 30 years. Now she’s targeted by the extremists who are looking to reshape the region (The Guardian)

• ‘We Just Want Someone Sane’: What Happens When a Small Town Goes MAGA. Washington County, Pennsylvania, was never known as Crazytown. Then election deniers decided to run for local office. (Bloomberg)

• How modern singing was invented: Modern singing – whether on the charts or Eurovision – is radically different to the kind familiar to our ancestors. (BBC)

Stock Market Past Performance, Debt Ceiling, and Seinfeld

Monday morning articles

• Ken Griffin’s Hand-Picked Math Prodigy Runs Market-Making Empire: Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao left for college at age 14, caught Griffin’s eye early in his career and built systems now mopping up market share. (Businessweek)

• The sobering stats behind ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results’: Most top performing managers fail to stay on top, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. It’s incredibly difficult to construct a portfolio of stocks in a way that beats the competition. Even if you are able to generate industry leading returns in a given year, history says it’s an almost insurmountable task to stay on top consistently in subsequent years. (TKer)

• The Debt Ceiling Dispute Raises the Risks for ‘Risk-Free’ U.S. Bonds: Short-term costs for insuring U.S. bonds are skyrocketing, and the long-term effects of repeated flirtations with debt default are already a burden, our columnist says. (New York Times)

• These companies cynically used global crises to juice profits — and brought us inflation: Throughout all the debate in the last year over what has caused higher prices and how to remedy them, one term hasn’t received the attention it deserves, given how well it explains the trend: “Greedflation.” (Los Angeles Times)

• Artificial Intelligence Is Not Going to Kill Us All: Yes, the fast-growing technology could be dangerous—but A.I. doomers are focused on the wrong threat. (Slate)

• Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible? (New Yorker)

• The Most Important Machine That Was Never Built: When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. (Quanta Magazine)

• Using job postings to quantify remote work: The COVID pandemic initiated a rapid, enduring, and largely unprecedented shift to remote work. But there is little evidence to explain where this shift is taking place at a micro level because the sample sizes are too small. This column develops a large-language model that flags postings offering remote work and applies the model to 250 million job postings in five English-speaking countries. The results show a rise in remote-work offerings since spring 2020, with tremendous heterogeneity in levels and trends between and within cities, industries, occupations, and firms. (Vox EU)

• Mark Zuckerberg Has a Problem Even Bigger Than the Metaverse: It’s hard for Meta employees to build something they believe in if they don’t know who to trust. (Slate)

• MSG Is Finally Getting Its Revenge: The much-maligned seasoning could be the secret to eating less salt. (The Atlantic)

• What’s the Deal With Adulthood? 25 Years Later, ‘Seinfeld’ Feels Revelatory. The show about nothing ended in May 1998. But in an era when priorities are being re-evaluated, the sitcom has taken on new relevance. (New York Times)

The Fed, Work Life Balance, and Stock Diversification

Thursday morning articles

• Is the Fed data-driven or data-ridden? The Federal Reserve constantly reminds us that its decisions are “data-driven” or “data-dependent.” But what does that even mean? And what are the dangers when data loom too large? (Stay at Home Macro)

• Workers Are Happier Than They’ve Been in Decades: Labor shortages and shifting expectations lead to improvement for millions, survey shows. (Wall Street Journal)

• Work-Life Balance Is Their Second Priority. Work Is Their First. Young professionals pledge admiration for peers who carve out personal time, then fail to do the same for themselves. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Case For International Diversification: Basically, international stocks went from relatively expensive (hello Japan) to relatively cheap and U.S. stocks went from relatively cheap to relatively expensive. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• A Tax Loophole Makes EV Leasing a No-Brainer in the US: An exemption in the Inflation Reduction Act is worth $7,500 to drivers who lease. (Businessweek)

• Tweaking Vegetables’ Genes Could Make Them Tastier—And You’ll Get to Try Them Soon: Flavor is a tricky target, but technology and powerful genetic techniques are making it more feasible to improve the taste of vegetables. (Scientific American)

• Where Are the Treatments for Long COVID? We don’t know why the virus can lead to persistent symptoms. We urgently need more research on therapies anyway. (Slate)

• RIP Metaverse: An obituary for the latest fad to join the tech graveyard. (Business Insider) see also Something Awful is racing to save the best and worst of web history: A long-running web community enlisted its goons to stop an Imgur extinction event. (The Verge)

• Here’s Every Single Lie Told by My Congressman, George Santos. The New York Representative was indicted on May 10 on 13 federal charges, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and lying to Congress. While this was certainly a dramatic twist in the Santos saga, it wasn’t exactly a shock. Since the New York Times first revealed in December 2022 that Santos was not quite the man he sold himself as to voters, it’s been hard to track down exactly what is true about the congressman’s life story. Is he broke or rich? Is he Jewish or Catholic? Did his family members really die in the Holocaust or September 11? Most often, it’s best to assume what the Republican from Long Island has said about his life is bogus, but in case you need to double-check, here is the guide to everything he has made up about himself… (New York Magazine)

Broke Millennials, Finance, and the top NBA Players

Friday morning articles

• The Myth of the Broke Millennial After a rough start, the generation is thriving. Why doesn’t it feel that way? (Atlantic)

• You’ve Heard About Behavioral Finance. But What About Physical Finance? Research suggests a fascinating link between the physical world and how investors price stocks. (Institutional Investor)

• The real reason Mexico suddenly dominates global beer exports: Today, Mexico ships out more than twice as much beer as any other country and single-handedly accounts for 30 percent of the world’s entire export-beer market, according to Geneva-based trade statistics provider Trade Data Monitor. That puts Mexico far above the Netherlands (14%), Belgium (13%) and even Oktoberfest progenitor Germany (9%). (Washington Post)

• How Interest Rates & Inflation Impact Stock Market Valuations: You would assume, all else equal, that much higher interest rates and price levels would have had a far greater impact on the stock market. Don’t get me wrong — we’ve had a nice little bear market. And this kind of snapshot approach to looking at market indicators can be misleading. But if you were to tell investors two years ago that we were about to enter one of the most aggressive Fed hiking cycles in history combined with inflation reaching 9%, most would have assumed things would be a lot worse. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Don’t Bother Investing in China Unless You’re Chinese: Only a local can properly circumvent the country’s infamous firewall. Even asset managers in Hong Kong no longer have a clear picture of the mainland. (Bloomberg)

• Why was Labor Productivity Growth So High during the COVID-19 Pandemic? The Role of Labor Composition: In the first few weeks of the COVID-19 recession, around 20 million people lost their jobs, with half of those losses occurring in the last two weeks of March 2020. On the tail of these unprecedented job losses, labor productivity grew at an annualized rate of 11.2 percent in 2020q2 and the average hourly wage increased sharply. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

• Is this a soft landing or the start of a recession? If the economy avoids a recession, it will be in spite of the Fed, not because of it. (Vox)

• Megatrends: The Longevity Economy: Global demographics are signaling a gray wave over the next decade that could boost consumer spending in key areas. (U.S. News

• The State of Global Gender Equity: Despite efforts to advance gender equity, women still lag behind men in home ownership, labor force participation, board representation and many more areas. Here’s why. (J.P. Morgan Research)

• My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top: I was just looking to make rent when I stumbled into a part-time gig stealing secrets from Wall Street elite. I made millions once I realized how desperate we humans are for someone who will actually listen. (Narratively)

• What Real Meteorologists Wish You Knew About Your Weather App: The realization you are seeing is one possible outcome of a model that gets run every six hours. But weather is more complex. It’s a broader envelope of outcomes, which you’re probably not seeing in your app. (Slate)

• 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Herbie Hancock We asked musicians and experts, including Thundercat, Patrice Rushen and Nicole Sweeney, which Hancock song they would play for a friend. (NYT)

• • AI Can Write a Song, but It Can’t Beat the Market: Quants have tried for decades with limited success at their biggest challenge (Wall Street Journal)

• ‘Overemployed’ Hustlers Exploit ChatGPT To Take On Even More Full-Time Jobs: “ChatGPT does like 80 percent of my job,” said one worker. Another is holding the line at four robot-performed jobs. “Five would be overkill,” he said. (Vice)

• Pre-rolled Joints and TikTok Feuds: This Is the Diamond District? The demise of Manhattan’s Old World jewelry industry has been predicted for years. But the 47th Street hustle has some life in it yet. (New York Times).

• How the Dutch Mastered Bike Parking at Train Stations: A decade ago, the Netherlands began building a national network of bicycle garages integrated with rail stations. Here’s how that investment has paid off. (CityLab)

• Fire and Ice: The planet’s ice is fundamentally tethered to weather patterns that stretch across the globe. Scientists are finding that as the climate changes, that connection could be helping fuel disasters.  More than 25 million acres have burned in the Western U.S. since 2018. Some fires have been so extreme, they’ve seemed impossible to contain. Weather has been the deciding factor in many of those fires. When hot, arid conditions settle on the Western U.S., the fire danger skyrockets. Far to the north, the season of ice is changing. The Arctic Ocean is normally covered in a vast, frozen blanket for most of the year. But sea ice is shrinking. It’s breaking up earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. As the climate gets hotter, the Arctic is spending more days as open ocean. These extremes of fire and ice are more than 3,000 miles apart. But now, connections are emerging. (NPR)

• Welcome to The Ringer’s Top 125 Players in the NBA Ranked: a year-round, around-the-clock ranking of the players making the biggest impact on the league right now. Throughout the regular season and into the offseason, our triumvirate of analysts—Rob Mahoney, J. Kyle Mann, and Michael Pina—will update this list based on recent results. Check back regularly for revised rankings, fresh analysis, new features, fan letters from Ringer friends and family, and more. (The Ringer)