This week’s highlights:  The Race with No End, Microbrands, and Post Malone

Fifteen on Friday – Issue 309

Happy Friday Everyone,

David

Food for Thought:

1. Deadspin – Ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter Takes On The World’s Most Sadistic Endurance Race  There was no known finish line. The race went on, day and night, until the bell clanged and only one runner answered.
2. NYT – The Price of Cool: A Teenager, a Juul and Nicotine Addiction  E-cigarettes may help tobacco smokers quit. But the alluring devices can swiftly induce a nicotine habit in teenagers who never smoked. This is the tale of one person’s struggle.
3. HBR – What to Do If Your Career Is Stalled and You Don’t Know Why
4. NewYorker – The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome  Unexplained brain injuries afflicted dozens of American diplomats and spies. What happened?
5. TheCut – The Skimm Brains  7 million people wake up to their newsletter, and their voice, every morning.

Business/Economics:

1. Economist – The growth of microbrands threatens consumer-goods giants  Often the giants’ best and only response is to acquire them
2. NYT – How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter
3. Bloomberg – Michael Milken: High Yield Bonds, Career and Philanthropy.  David Rubenstein interviews Michael Milken.
4. II – Cereal Killer.  Short-seller Eiad Asbahi has tangled with the likes of Warren Buffett. Now, with his big bet against Kellogg, he’s going up against another American icon.
5. BBC – Why Big Tech pays poor Kenyans to teach self-driving cars

Culture/Tech/Science:

1. NYT – He Was 302 Pounds, but in This Battle, He’s David and Not Goliath.  As president of the N.F.L. Players Association, Eric Winston is up against billionaire owners, the commander in chief and an existential threat to football itself.
2. Ringer – Aaaand Now … an Oral History of the Greatest Starting Lineup Introduction in Sports History  How the Chicago Bulls created the perfect soundtrack for a dynasty and pioneered the art of in-arena entertainment in the process
3. WashPo – Post Malone is the perfect pop star for this American moment. That’s not a compliment.  “Post Malone’s music is dead-eyed and ignorant, astonishingly dull in its materialism, an abandoned lot of creativity with absolutely no evidence of traffic in his cerebral cortex — and there’s also a negative side.”
4. PS – Bespoke Vs. Made-To-Measure –  Eduardo proposed an experiment. He offered to make me two jackets in the same cloth – one bespoke and one MTM – in order to physically compare the differences between them.
5. FastCo – A device that can pull drinking water from the air just won the latest XPrize  The winner of the Water Abundance XPrize creates enough water for 100 people every day by making an artificial cloud inside a shipping container.