Friday morning articles
Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words (Steve Jobs Archive)
Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama: With the $1.6 billion Dominion lawsuit threatening to hobble Fox News, the ink on his divorce to Jerry Hall still wet, and his broken engagement to Ann Lesley Smith even fresher, it’s been a chaotic 12 months for the 92-year-old conservative media baron. As Fox and family insiders tell it, this could just be the beginning. (Vanity Fair)
Groundwater Gold Rush: Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California’s scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink. (Bloomberg)
The False Promise of Opportunity Zones: Tax breaks for investors don’t help poor communities. Rather than court venture capital, cities must build new institutions to grow neighborhood wealth. (Boston Review)
How does a magician trick other magicians? We went to find out. At the “magic Olympics,” magicians from around the world compete to be deemed the world’s best. To win, they must fool each other. (National Geographic)
The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin: Bitcoin mines cash in on electricity — by devouring it, selling it, even turning it off — and they cause immense pollution. In many cases, the public pays a price. (New York Times)
The False Promise of Opportunity Zones: Tax breaks for investors don’t help poor communities. Rather than court venture capital, cities must build new institutions to grow neighborhood wealth. (Boston Review)
A small town became the center of a QAnon storm. Now it’s fighting back: The Netherlands’ most notorious conspiracy theorist is now in prison. (Ars Technica)
At FTX, Multimillion-Dollar Expenses Were Approved by Emoji: Report outlines control failures at the failed crypto firm. (Wall Street Journal)
Rise of the Climate Rating Agencies: Government and the private sector rely increasingly on risk-modeling firms that claim they can zero in on exposure to climate change. The independent modelers look a lot like rating agencies. (American Prospect)
$388 in Sushi. Just a $20 Tip: The Brutal Math of Uber Eats and DoorDash Delivery drivers were hailed as pandemic heroes. But they say the rise of contactless delivery has made customers less inclined to tip generously and gig work is becoming an even harder way to make a living. (New York Times)
Florida health officials removed key data from COVID vaccine report: The surgeon general’s guidance against the vaccine for young men ignored results showing infection was a greater risk for cardiac-related deaths. (Tampa Bay Times)
The Super Rich Are Worried. Should You Be? We human beings act irrationally, which makes for bursts of creativity in the arts and, yes, even on Wall Street, but inevitably precipitates overexuberance in capital markets and bank runs. It also means that there is probably some limit on the marginal utility of incremental units of regulation, I suppose. But does that mean we can never tame these spirits? (Barron’s)
There is No Index Fund For the Housing Market: While stock market ownership during the Great Depression was a rounding error of the total population, plenty of people owned houses. Real estate got obliterated just like everything else in the economy back then but the homeownership rate still only got as low as 44% following the Great Depression. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
No Sellers, No Buyers: Like every other market in the world, real estate has a large psychological component. But unlike liquid markets where Animal Spirits can dominate, primary residences are more governed by arithmetic than almost anything else. The prices are what they are, and you can either pay for the mortgage or you cannot. (Irrelevant Investor)
Here’s Where Market Timing Works: Factor timing has its champions and skeptics — so academics set out to find an answer to the controversial practice. (Institutional Investor)
The inside story of Credit Suisse’s collapse, by Credit Suisse: Dispatches from the room where nothing was happening. (Financial Times)
Elon Musk: Owning Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster”: The multi-billionaire entrepreneur said he would sell the company if the right person came along. Musk, who also runs car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44bn in October. The interview at the firm’s HQ in San Francisco also covered the mass lay-offs, misinformation and his work habits. (BBC)
Twitter Isn’t a Company Anymore: It’s been merged into a new entity called X Corp. Here’s what that could mean. (Slate)
Abortion was a 50/50 issue. Now, it’s Republican quicksand. Six in 10 voters support legal abortion in most cases. Just over a third want it to be entirely or mostly illegal. (Politico)
China May Not Need Western Technology Much Longer: The latest ranking of global spending on research and development has US tech companies on top and Chinese rivals on the rise. (Bloomberg)
‘Secret Invasion’ Revealed: Inside Samuel L. Jackson’s Eye-Opening New Marvel Series. Why he has no eyepatch, where you’ve seen Emilia Clarke’s mystery character before, and 10 new images from the shape-shifting alien saga. (Vanity Fair)