This week’s highlights: Grave Robbing, Zillow, and Toxic Positivity
Issue 447
Happy Friday!
Best,
David
Food for Thought
- VF – How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in, of All Places, Rural Indiana. A 90-year-old amateur archaeologist who claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb was also one of the most prolific grave robbers in modern American history.
- NewYorker – Brené Brown’s Empire of Emotion
- WSJ – I Spent 44 Years Studying Retirement. Then I Retired. *paywall* I was more prepared than just about anybody. And some things are exactly what I expected. But other things—not so much.
- NewYorker – Revisiting “The 4-Hour Workweek”. How Tim Ferriss’s 2007 manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval.
Business
- Bloomberg – Zillow is Done Trading Houses
- NYMag – Revolt of the Goldman Juniors. Crushed by pandemic workloads, Wall Street’s youngest want more money and better conditions. But mostly more money.
- FBD – Leftover Candy and Lazy Capital. The threat of lazy capital accumulating on the balance sheet is greatest for successful companies. How do successful companies wind up with excess capital?
- TWUR – Richard Thaler: ‘I became an academic because I’m not good at taking orders. John Morgan meets the Nobel prizewinning father of nudge economics, who believes that the dismal science can only be improved by taking account of people’s ‘predictable mistakes’
- NYMag – Why the ‘Big Short’ Guys Think Bitcoin Is a Bubble
Culture / Arts/ Tech / Science
- WSJ – Toxic Positivity Is Very Real, and Very Annoying. Forcing ourselves or others to always be positive can be harmful to our well-being and our relationships. There’s a better approach.
- EffortlessGent – The New Smart Casual Dress Code for Men. Are you confused about what to wear in a business casual environment? Well, you’re not the only one, that’s for sure. And that’s because there are no well-defined rules for this specific dress code
- TheAtlantic – Hot Streaks in Your Career Don’t Happen by Accident
- YouTube – How Japanese Knives Are Made With Japan’s RAREST Steel
- THR – Will Ferrell Just Wants to Entertain You (and Himself) The ‘Shrink Next Door’ producer-star on building (and winnowing) his empire, splitting with collaborator and pal Adam McKay and chasing the funny above all else: “I’ve always loved making other people laugh. I’ve just never needed to make you like me.”
Last Week’s Most Popular
- GGM – Ten Ways to Make Your Time Matter. Accepting our mortality helps us let go of busyness and focus on what’s most important to us in order to live a happier, more meaningful life.
- Vox – The problem with America’s semi-rich. America’s upper-middle class works more, optimizes their kids, and is miserable.
- NYPost – Americans are more generous than Europeans — by a large margin
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
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