This week’s highlights: Cults, Fast Fashion, and an Oversized Cheez-It

Happy Friday,
Hope your weekend is a pleasant one.
Cheers,
David
Food for Thought
- Esquire – The Follower. When he was 19 Jeff Gross fell under the sway of the charismatic, fifty-one-year-old Mildred Gordon and spent more than half his life in an “intentional community” they built together. It turned out to be much, much more than that.
- WSJ – America’s Coming Charity Deficit Young people aren’t attached to religion, which could augur ill for their future giving
- Harpers – The Anxiety of Influencers. Educating the TikTok generation
- NYT – Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding Surveillance State
- NYMag – Masters of the Bubbleverse. Secretive hedge fund Tiger Global changed the rules on tech investing. Then it all went bad.
Business and Markets
- RoW – What Chinese media reveals about Shein’s secretive operations. While it’s acknowledged that Shein has upended the e-commerce industry, the company is a black box;
- Oaktree – The Roundup: Top Takeaways From Oaktree’s Quarterly Letters
- WSJ – The Surprising Reason Your Amazon Searches Are Returning More Confusing Results than Ever
- FFI – A Renewed Call for Accurate Research about Family Wealth Longevity
- Twitter – Why Are There So Many Bad Spiderman Movies. Interesting thread on media rights
Science, Technology, and Culture
- Vulture – ‘No Aliens, No Spaceships, No Invasion of Earth’. An oral history of Contact, the sci-fi movie that defied Hollywood norms and made it big anyway.
- OWID – Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?
- CNN – Taco Bell’s newest food uses an oversized Cheez-It. This is either the pinnacle or nadir of capitalism.
- Youtube – The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure
- TheSun – Humans can learn mindblowing ‘SIXTH sense’ – and it only ‘takes 10 weeks to master’. People with vision loss can learn to navigate their surroundings using a technique more commonly associated with bats and dolphins.
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
- Does how you handle your wealth actually align with what you care most about in the world?
- Do you feel like you are pro-active and intentional with your financial affairs or entirely reactive to a busy world?
Growing financial wealth is a natural occurrence on the path to success. While this should make life easier, that is not always the case. With greater wealth, comes great opportunity and an overwhelming number of choices to make.
When Anything is Possible is the guidebook about how to engage strategically with wealth. It will help you change your wealth from something overwhelming and all-consuming towards a resource to be deployed to help you positively impact the things that you value most.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.