This week’s highlights:  Bird Scooters, The Largest VC Fund of All, and is Nicholas Cage a better actor than you think?

Fifteen on Friday – 05/25/18 – Issue 286

Food for Thought:

1. TheAtlantic – Electric Scooter Charger Culture Is Out of Control.  “Bird hunting” has become a pastime and a side hustle for teens and young professionals, but for some it’s a cutthroat business.
2. Inc – Why It’s Time to Become Your Company’s Chief Laziness Officer.  Most of the work you do is not important and in fact slows you down.
3. Bloomberg – Wall Street’s Latest Secretive Trend? Board Game Nights.  This fraternity-like network of players is more Snakes & Ladders than Skull & Bones—but no less well-positioned.
4. New Yorker – How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds – Credit SF – The craze for the third-person shooter game has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and eating Tide Pods.
5. WashPo – I was chief of disguise at CIA. ‘The Americans’ got a lot right.

Business/Economics:

1. Economist – The meaning of the Vision Fund  Succeed or fail, Masayoshi Son is changing the world of technology investing
2. Wired – A New Look Inside Theranos’ Dysfunctional Corporate Culture  When a chemist raised concerns about the blood testing machines’ high error rates, she was ignored. So she resigned.
3. RetailDive – To survive the apocalypse, retailers must think of retail as a service
4. II – What Exactly Happened to David Einhorn?  The tarnishing of a hedge fund legend.
5. YouTube – An Interview with Charlie Munger – Credit TP –

Culture/Tech/Science:

1. TheAtlantic – An Unusual Idea for Fixing School Segregation.  What if the answer lies in changing how college admissions work?
2. MarketWatch – Why the American Dream of owning a big home is way overrated, in one chart
3. 538 – The Five Types Of Nicolas Cage Movies  Looking at the list of box office stars who have made the most money from movies based on an original screenplay — the people who make a living outside of adapted franchises — Cage comes in ninth, with $1.7 billion derived from 45 original screenplay films. Set aside the “Star Wars” trio and he’s sixth, behind only Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Robert De Niro.
4. NYT – ‘Mustang Means Freedom’: Why Ford Is Saving an American Icon Ford is phasing out its passenger cars, except one: the Mustang. The car may be only modestly profitable for Ford, but it has deep emotional power.
5. NYP – Dazzling photos capture bald eagle stealing fox’s dinner