Articles of the week - We have moved to doing a weekly post instead of daily.
The Crypto Winter Cost People More Than Their Money: Some acolytes lost faith, others blamed devils—and some went even harder. An essay exploring what happens when the prophecy of blockchain fails. (Bloomberg)
The Stock Market Will Pick the Winners For You: Index funds ride the winners. And while they don’t completely discard the losers right away, the stocks that are coming up pick up the slack for the eventual underperformers. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Why Should I Hold Stocks? And yet here we are, halfway through the year with the S&P 500 up 10%. The Nasdaq-100 is up 31%, one of the best first half of a year ever. (Irrelevant Investor)
The Real Reason Your Groceries Are Getting So Expensive: Big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. (New York Times)
How Saudi money returned to Silicon Valley: All the ways Saudi Arabia’s cash powers tech startups and venture capital. (Vox)
5 winners and 5 losers from the debt ceiling deal: Biden and McCarthy win. The Freedom Caucus loses. (Vox)
Adidas After Yeezy: The partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was the stuff of sneakerhead legend—and its demise has the shoe company scrambling to replace nearly half of its profits. (Businessweek)
A.I.-Generated Content Discovered on News Sites, Content Farms and Product Reviews: The findings in two new reports raise fresh concerns over how artificial intelligence may transform the misinformation landscape online. (New York Times)
The One Thing Holding Back Electric Vehicles in America: The biggest hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars is not the cars themselves. (The Atlantic)
The Unexpected Problem With EVs: They ‘Tire’ Quickly: Electric vehicles go through tires 30% faster than gas-powered vehicles, Bridgestone says, so it developed its first EV-specific replacement tire that protects range and improves durability. (PC Magazine)
The Repo Man Returns as More Americans Fall Behind on Car Payments: Pandemic relief measures shielded many people from repossession, but that’s changing as interest rates and auto prices soar. (Businessweek)
Why Your Steak Is Getting Pricier: Ranchers are shrinking cattle herds because of drought and high costs, cutting down the nation’s supply of beef. That threatens to push prices for steaks and burgers to records. (Wall Street Journal)
Students are increasingly refusing to go to school. It’s becoming a mental health crisis. Since the pandemic, more students are school-avoidant, leaving parents feeling hopeless and schools unequipped to find a solution. (USA Today)
A Model of Influencer Economy: With the rise of social media and streaming platforms, firms and brand-owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both common product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. As outreach and distribution technologies improve, influencer payoffs and income inequality change non-monotonically. More powerful influencers sell better-quality products, but pluralism in style mitigates market concentration by effectively differentiating consumer experience. (National Bureau of Economic Research)
The Girl of the Endless Summer How ‘Gidget’ helped to put surfing on the map. (Quillette)
Football bonded them. Its violence tore them apart. They were roommates and teammates at Harvard, bound by their love of football and each other. Then the game — and the debate over its safety — took its toll. (Washington Post)
How New Rules Turned Back the Clock on Baseball: Nearly two months into the season, a series of rule changes — including the new pitch clock, enlarged bases and a ban on the infield shift — has translated into a game that evokes the 1980s more than the 2020s. (New York Times)
The Game NBA Defenders Hate to Play: See Steph Run: Stephen Curry’s long-range 3-pointers make the highlight reels. The distances he travels before he shoots them are what really destroy NBA defenses. (Wall Street Journal)
He’s the Best Player in the NBA. He’s Also the Bloodiest. The Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic has long been near the top of the leaderboard in points, assists and rebounds. He leads the league in flesh wounds, too. (Wall Street Journal)
The Legend of Nikola Jokic Is Growing: The Nuggets big man beat every scheme, won every matchup, and sank seemingly every improbable moonball in a series sweep of the Lakers. (The Ringer)
Lionel Messi, Soccer’s Most Coveted Free Agent, Picks Miami Days after he announced he would not return to Paris St.-Germain, Messi, Argentina’s World Cup hero, said he planned his next stop to be Inter Miami of M.L.S. (NY Times)