US Interest Rates, Banks, Credit Suisse, and March Madness

Thursday morning articles

• U.S. central bank raises interest rate another 25 points Move marks U.S. Federal Reserve's ninth consecutive rate hike to fight inflation (CBC)

• Banks are in turmoil. Here's how Canadians might be affected Financial tremors in U.S. and Europe bring back memories of 2008's crisis (CBC)

• How the Swiss ‘trinity’ forced UBS to save Credit Suisse: The takeover of its local rival could end up being a generational boon for UBS. But the government-orchestrated deal has angered many investors. (Financial Times Alphaville)

• Why Job Reshoring Is Merely a Trickle: U.S. manufacturing can’t compete on cost, but it has a leg up in some areas. (CIO)

• Job Listings Abound, but Many Are Fake: In an uncertain economy, companies post ads for jobs they might not really be trying to fill. (Wall Street Journal)

• Volatility is Nothing New: I’ve been in the finance industry for close to 20 years and it feels like we’ve lived through every type of environment imaginable — booms, busts, rising rates, falling rates, 0% rates, low inflation, high inflation, deflation, bull markets, bear markets and everything in-between. Even though it feels like I’ve lived through every economic or market environment imaginable, I know there will be plenty of stuff that happens in the future that will surprise me. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Falling Lithium Prices Are Making Electric Cars More Affordable: An unexpected decline in the price of an essential battery material, along with those of other commodities, is good news for buyers. But experts disagree on how long low prices will last. (New York Times)

• Cool People Accidentally Saved America’s Feet: Millennials popularized bulky, super-cushioned shoes. Then Millennials got old. (The Atlantic)

• Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices. (New Yorker)

• Iraq war, 20 years later: An insider reflects on the nightmare — and what America has learned A former State Department official reflects on the road to war and the traumas that followed. (Grid)

• Inside the 3 Months That Could Cost Fox $1.6 Billion: The decision by Fox News executives in November 2020 to treat the more hard-right Newsmax as a mortal threat spawned a possibly more serious danger. (New York Times)

• The Big Winners From A Mad First Week Of The Men’s NCAA Tournament: No teams added more to their Final Four odds than Tennessee, Michigan State and Creighton. (fivethirtyeight)

Inflation Rate Drops to 5.2%, Bank Collapses, and March Madness

Wednesday morning articles

• Inflation rate drops to 5.2% in February — but grocery prices are still up Rate previously slowed to 5.9 per cent in January (CBC)

• Are Banks OK? Where the sector stands after a turbulent week. (Slate) 

• Déjà Vu? Why 2023 is Not 2008: But that is incomparable to the 2008-09 era, where every financial institution had consumed CDOs, where toxic sub-prime loans were securitized into ticking time bombs. In the run-up to the GFC, the Fed’s rate-hiking cycle caused the 2/28 variable rate NINJA loans to default en masse. While there might be some losses on long-term treasuries if they are marked-to-market, they are all “money good” if held to maturity. (The Big Picture)

• The good news: Anyway, the Europeans take a stake in First Boston and then, a decade later in the late 80’s, they buy the rest of the company, creating Credit Suisse First Boston. Then the combined entity swallows up Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette (DLJ, if you were there), an even more vaunted and famous name on The Street. It’s a fail from day one. The dot com crash happens followed a few years later by the financial crisis. CS is embroiled in scandals and losses for an entire decade from the twin crises and never really has a chance to succeed as a combined entity. It has always been a disaster but with a few great pieces. (TRB)

• Before Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed Spotted Big Problems: The bank was using an incorrect model as it assessed its own risks amid rising interest rates, and spent much of 2022 under a supervisory review. (New York Times)

• Small banks, big reach: Everything you wanted to know about US regional banks but were too afraid (bored) to ask. (Financial Times)

• As Winter Wanes, Prices Continue to Cool: Inflation is easing even more than headline data suggest. (Fisher Investments)

• The 10 Top US Cities Where a $100,000 Salary Goes the Furthest: Here are the top 10 US cities where a six-figure salary goes the furthest. (Bloomberg)

• In New York City, a $100,000 Salary Feels Like $36,000: After taxes and adjusting for the sky-high cost of living, a six-figure paycheck doesn’t take you as far as you might expect. (Bloomberg)

• Signature Bank’s Quirky Mix of Customers Fueled Its Rise and Hastened Its Fall: Foray into crypto set the stage for a deposit run that overwhelmed the New York lender in a matter of hours. (Wall Street Journal)

• Elon Musk’s Cost-Cutting Targets Put Pressure on EV Rivals: GM, Ford, Volkswagen face questions about efforts to slash costs for future vehicles. (Wall Street Journal)

• Volkswagen is developing its smallest, most affordable ID 1 EV starting around $20K: Volkswagen is preparing to launch its smallest, most affordable EV yet, tipped to be called ID 1, starting at around $20K. The VW ID 1 is expected to launch in 2027 and will sit below the recently revealed ID 2all concept. (Electrek)

• The Psychology of Overhead Aversion—and What It Means for Charitable Work: Philanthropy has always emphasized the enormous potential and impact of giving. Many of us believe in the power of giving to create meaningful change. In the United States alone, individuals donated close to $300 billion to charity in 2019. Even in the market of good intentions, however, it’s important to provide some economic incentives to drive organizations. (Behavioral Scientist)

• The biggest lie the rich ever told? That money can’t buy you happiness: New studies confirm that having more money can improve our wellbeing. So much for the story powerful people have always tried to push (The Guardian)

• The odds of a perfect March Madness bracket: 1 in 9.2 quintillion: Those odds improve to a slightly more “reasonable” 1 in 120.2 billion if you “know a little something about basketball.” For context: The odds of getting struck by lightning in your lifetime are 1 in 15,300, according to the National Weather Service. (Axios)

Wealthy Executives, Chinese Wealth, and Female Athlete Suicides

Tuesday morning articles

• Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing: Executives at companies can also have extensive access to nonpublic information about rivals, partners or vendors through their business. Buying or selling stock based on that knowledge may or may not run afoul of insider-trading law. (ProPublica)

• China’s Faith in All-Powerful Xi Shaken by Chaos of Covid Pivot: After imposing three years of sacrifice, Xi Jinping’s government let Covid tear through the population in two months. Moving on won’t be easy. (Businessweek)

• Bao Fan: Why do Chinese billionaires keep vanishing? The disappearance last month of technology industry dealmaker Bao Fan has rekindled interest in a recent Chinese phenomenon – vanishing billionaires. The founder of China Renaissance Holdings – with a client list that has included internet giants Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu – is seen as a titan in the country’s tech sector. (BBC)

• Eli Lilly is slashing insulin prices, but hold your applause. The truth is that Lilly’s price cuts won’t cost it a thin dime in profits; it may even collect higher profits. Wall Street recognized that instantaneously: The price of Lilly shares rose on the day of the announcement and has continued to move higher ever since, gaining nearly 6% through Thursday’s trading. The price rollback still doesn’t bring Lilly insulin back to where it should be on an inflation-adjusted basis compared with the price of its key product, Humalog, upon its launch in 1996. (Los Angeles Times)

• The Misinformation Is the Point: There’s a Lesson for Fighting Misinformation Buried in the Fox News Drama; For Fox News, peddling falsehoods is good for the bottom line. (Slate)

• Retreat in Rodanthe: Along three blocks in a North Carolina beach town, severe erosion is upending life, forcing hard choices and offering a glimpse of the dilemmas other coastal communities will face. (Washington Post)

• Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong: A failure or unwillingness to carefully look at the data has led countless people to believe that the primary drivers of homelessness are drugs, mental health, poverty, the weather, progressive policies, or virtually anything and everything that isn’t housing. And while some, but not all, of the aforementioned factors are indeed factors in homelessness, none of them, not a single one of them, are primary factors. Because if you want to understand homelessness, you have to follow the rent. And if you follow the rent, you will come to realize that homelessness is primarily a housing problem. (Noahpinion)

• The Right-Wing Zealot Who Wrecked the Budget Process and Made Washington Dysfunctional: Grover Norquist’s 45-year-long reign of terror started with a simple pledge. (New Republic)

• Catholic group spent millions on app data that tracked gay priests A group of philanthropists poured money into a Denver nonprofit that obtained dating and hookup app data and shared it with bishops around the country, a Post investigation has found “A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country.” So many things about this are so wrong. (Washington Post)

• At center of Fox News lawsuit, Sidney Powell and a ‘wackadoodle’ email: In TV guest spots, the Trump-affiliated lawyer injected far-fetched and debunked claims of widespread fraud into the mainstream. Now the decision to keep booking her is at the heart of a $1.6 billion defamation case. (Washington Post)

• The election-denying Republicans who aided Trump’s ‘big lie’ and got promoted: In 2022, many Republicans who embraced election denialism were re-elected and, in some cases, elevated to higher office. (The Guardian)

• These young female athletes died by suicide. They all had head injuries in common: Females may be more susceptible to concussion, and they also have worse and prolonged symptoms after their injury than men, according to a review of 25 studies of sport-related concussion published in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine. (CNN)

NCAA Tournament Brackets, Federal Reserve, and the Pandemic

Monday morning articles

• Your NCAA Tournament Bracket Is a Business School in Disguise: What can you learn from the biggest upsets in college basketball? (Wall Street Journal)

• What CEOs Are Getting Wrong About the Future of Work—and How to Make It Right: To build better companies, leaders need to experiment more, quit ‘living in fear of opening Pandora’s box,’ says Wharton management professor Adam Grant. (Wall Street Journal)

• Why Job Reshoring Is Merely a Trickle: U.S. manufacturing can’t compete on cost, but it has a leg up in some areas. (Chief Investment Officer)

• Go West, young banker! From Manifest Destiny to Big Tech, Silicon Valley Bank is a case study in the how the West was spun. (Business Insider)

• A Fed tale as old as time: Banking crises are at the heart of the Fed’s origin story. We may talk endlessly about monetary policy. I can assure you that 25 versus 50 basis points and the terminal rate are not on the minds of Fed officials this week. (Stay-At-Home Macro)

• So You Want to Turn an Office Building Into a Home? Cities are eager to do this amid rising remote work. But it’s harder than you might think. (New York Times)

• Which Subscription Will You Cancel First? With retailers pushing them alongside streaming offerings, many Americans have signed up for more than they need. Let the cancellations begin. (Bloomberg)

• There’s a Psychological ‘Vaccine’ against Misinformation: A social psychologist found that showing people how manipulative techniques work can create resilience against misinformation. (Scientific American)

• The Battle of Bakhmut: Is the End Game Approaching? The battle has blooded the Russians (both Army and Wagner forces) in a way that they have not experienced since the Second World War. According to some reports, their slow, methodical and frankly, unnecessary, campaign for Bakhmut has resulted in over ten thousand Russian casualties. It has also resulted in significant casualties for the Ukrainians, who have had to balance defending here to attrit the Russians, defend in other locations while also building the quality and quantity of forces for the offensives to come in 2023. (Futura Doctrina)

• The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic: A new analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs. (The Atlantic)

• Why Fairleigh Dickinson Over Purdue Was the Biggest NCAA Tournament Upset Ever: The Knights entered the game as one of the worst teams to make the tournament in two decades. They exited as a stone-cold legend. (Wall Street Journal)

Sneakers, Silicon Valley Bank, and The Big Lebowski

Friday morning articles

• Inside New Balance’s Plans to Topple the Global Sneaker Hierarchy The $86 billion global sneaker market has a new major player. Here’s how it happened. (GQ)

• Wine, Skiing, and Loans: How Silicon Valley Bank Became Startups’ Best Friend Founders and investors say the bank opened doors—and offered perks—no other bank would. Now companies may face a funding gap. (Wired)

• Crypto Bank Had a Boring Collapse, Also Silicon Valley Bank: Elsewhere in boring maturity mismatches and a lack of deposit diversification. (Money Stuff)

• “Hell Is Coming”: How Bill Ackman Predicted the COVID Market Crash—And Made a Fortune: In February 2020, the infamous short seller woke up in a cold sweat when he realized the pandemic might spell pandemonium on Wall Street, as Liz Hoffman writes in her forthcoming book, Crash Landing. “We need to either sell everything,” he told his top lieutenants, “or put on a massive hedge.” (Vanity Fair)

• Inside the Suspicion Machine: Obscure government algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world. Here, for the first time, we reveal how one of these systems works. (Wired)

• The Backlash Against ESG Faces Its Own Backlash: Pension funds in red states say culture-war policies are interfering with the market and could cost retirees and taxpayers billions. (Institutional Investor)

• Why Poverty Persists in America: A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem. (New York Times)

• Can a Better Technology Dethrone the Gas Stove? While culture warriors and foodies panic over their favorite kitchen appliance, the induction range—all the rage in Europe—is still waiting for America to fall in love. (Businessweek)

• The Fight Over Penn Station and Madison Square Garden: How the effort to renovate midtown Manhattan’s transit hub has been stalled by money, politics, and disputes about the public good. (New Yorker)

• The New Anarchy: America faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop. (The Atlantic)

• How One Guy’s Car Blog Became a $1 Billion Marketplace: Bring a Trailer is where obsessives buy, sell and geek out over classic cars. The company pops open its hood after 100,000 auctions to explain why. (Wall Street Journal)

• I Asked an Algorithm to Optimize My Life. Here’s What Happened: I spend all day making decisions, and they’re not always good ones. Could an algorithm do a better job of deciding what’s best for me? (Wired)

• ‘The Big Lebowski’ Turns 25: “People Didn’t Get It,” Jeff Bridges Recalls The Dude looks back — and shares his behind-the-scenes photos — from the Coen brothers’ beloved take on L.A. noir. The film has inspired legions of fans, an annual festival and even a religion, but it wasn’t an instant hit in 1998. (Hollywood Reporter)

Silicon Valley Bank Issues Continue

Thursday morning articles

• Dissecting Goldman’s gory $2.25bn SVB equity issue Well that escalated quickly. (Financial Times)

• Whose Fault is it Anyway: It has been 872 days since a bank failed in the United States. This was the longest streak on record. We’re now at day zero. Silicon Valley bank went down on Friday. Signature Bank last night. These are the second and third largest bank failures in history behind Washington Mutual during the GFC. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Three Million U.S. Households Making Over $150,000 Are Still Renters: High cost of homeownership and a tight housing market drive demand for rental properties. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Silicon Valley Turned on Silicon Valley Bank: The fallout threatens to engulf the startup world—and has exposed a new set of vulnerabilities for the banking system. (Wall Street Journal)

• The End of Silicon Valley Bank—And a Silicon Valley Myth: We are still learning exactly how much of this industry’s genius was a mere LIRP, or low-interest-rate phenomenon. (The Atlantic)

• Fiscal Justice Investing Is Changing the Municipal Bond Market: A new generation of investors is imbuing that traditional sense of purpose with an awareness of those who have been historically underserved. (Worth)

• Meta gives up on NFTs for Facebook and Instagram: Meta is moving on from more crypto projects, even though NFTs / digital collectibles were once pitched as part of its ‘metaverse’ future. (The Verge)

• How fake sugars sneak into foods and disrupt metabolic health: Artificial sweeteners and other sugar substitutes sweeten foods without extra calories. But studies show the ingredients can affect gut and heart health. (Washington Post)

• Inside the Bro-tastic Party Mansions Upending a Historic Austin Community: They have swimming pools, dozens of beds, and at least one stripper pole in a backyard school bus (you read that right). Locals say they’re turning a vulnerable community into a “theme park” for hard-partying tourists. (Texas Monthly)

• Physicists Are Searching for Signs of a Second ‘Dark’ Big Bang to Solve a Major Mystery: Dark matter in the universe might be so mysterious because it has a completely different origin to the rest of the cosmos, a new theory proposes. (Vice)

• Brett Goldstein Faces Life After ‘Lasso’ The Apple TV+ show’s breakout star is preparing to play a Marvel movie god when he’s not working on the hit streaming series “Shrinking.” But what he’s really after is human connection. (New York Times)

Silicon Valley Collapse and Kenny Omega

Wednesday morning articles

• Bank Runs, Now & Then: The Panic of 1907 would probably be more famous if it wasn’t overshadowed by the Great Depression just a couple of decades later. It lasted 15 months and saw GDP decline an estimated 30% (even more than the Great Depression). Commodity prices crashed. Bankruptcies exploded. The stock market fell 50%. The unemployment rate went from 2.8% to 8%. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• A Reverse Minsky Moment: Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse will make all the headlines, but what happened in the bond market deserves a lot of attention. The 2-year yield collapsed over the last two days to an extent only seen around historical events. Since 1990, the only other times we saw a decline of this magnitude was after the 9/11 attack, when Lehman Failed, when the TARP vote failed, and this week, when SVB failed. (Irrelevant Investor)

• How the Weekend-Long Freakout Over Silicon Valley Bank Ended: And why the worst bank failure since 2008 happened in the first place. (Slate)

• Profit margins are becoming a key controversial issue in the inflation discourse: Why are companies still charging high prices for stuff? (TKer)

• How ‘Excuseflation’ Is Keeping Prices — and Corporate Profits — High: One-off disruptions can provide cover for companies to keep prices high. (Bloomberg)

• Yale Invests This Way. Should You? Yale University’s endowment has earned spectacular returns in hedge funds, private equity and other ”alternative assets.” Investors hoping to mimic the school need to understand what has made it successful. (Wall Street Journal)

• Waluigi Effect (mega-post) In this article, I will present a mechanistic explanation of the Waluigi Effect and other bizarre “semiotic” phenomena which arise within large language models such as GPT-3/3.5/4 and their variants (ChatGPT, Sydney, etc). This article will be folklorish to some readers, and profoundly novel to others. (LessWrong).

• They Swore the Ferrari Purosangue Would Never Exist. It Does, and It Howls: Through snow and mud and mountains, the first SUV from a brand that famously said they’d never make one is a $393,000 speed machine. Here’s what it’s like to drive (Businessweek)

• The haters and conspiracy theorists back on Twitter: Hundreds of accounts that were recently allowed back on Twitter have been spreading abuse or misinformation, a BBC investigation has found. (BBC)

• Elon Musk Is Spiraling: One Elon is a visionary; the other is a troll. The more he tweets, the harder it gets to tell them apart. (The Atlantic)

• The Oscars Got This One Right: Everything Everywhere All at Once got its fairy-tale ending. (The Atlantic)

• How Winnipeg's Kenny Omega became the biggest wrestling star that most Canadians All Elite Wrestling star speaks to Front Burner ahead of his TV debut in Canada (CBC)

Silicon Valley Bank Crisis, and 4 Day Work Weeks

Tuesday morning articles

• Canada, other governments hustle to stop Silicon Valley Bank crisis from spreading Shares in several U.S. banks sell off hard as government takes over another bank (CBC)

• American workers aren’t returning to the office like their international counterparts—here’s why: Even as people got vaccinated and Covid restrictions eased over the years, U.S. office occupancy remains stagnant around 40% to 60% of pre-pandemic levels, Meanwhile, office attendance has returned to 70% to 90% in Europe and the Middle East, and around 80% to 110% in some Asian cities, meaning some workers are spending more time in the office now than pre-Covid. (CNBC)

• World’s Largest Four-Day Work Week Trial Finds Few Are Going Back: And about one in six employees in the study said no amount of money would convince them to return to five days a week. (Bloomberg)

• Burned Out, More Americans Are Turning to Part-Time Jobs: The number of people working part time rose by 1.2 million in December and January—most were people who chose it. ‘25 hours is the new 35.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• Institutional Investors Are Using Reddit to Make Investment Decisions. Here’s Where They Lurk. And it’s not just Reddit — digital media from newsletters to TikTok are also playing a role. (Institutional Investor)

• Are Defined Benefit Pension Funds Still Useful Recruiting, Retention Tools? Essential to public sector employees, a pension fund is a forgotten benefit for most workers in the private sector. (Chief Investment Officer)

• How Gas From Texas Becomes Cooking Fuel in France: Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe is importing U.S. natural gas like never before to heat homes, generate electricity and power factories. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Fed-Up Copywriter Who Helped France Finally Embrace #MeToo: An Instagram account calling out powerful men has spurred dismissals for harassment. (Businessweek)

• Closing Out the Search Bar: What would it mean to replace the click economy and its cornerstone, the search bar, with something like a conversation? (Slate)

• Colds Haven’t Changed. So Why Do They Suddenly Feel So Bad? We all forgot how nasty colds are. (The Atlantic)

• World in Photos: From Ukraine and Beyond, One Year of War: A curation of photographs from twelve months of war. (Grid)

• Bono and the Edge Take Dave Letterman Back to the Start in ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ Trailer: ‘ The documentary, Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman, arrives on March 17.’ (Rolling Stone)

Daylight Savings, Inflation and Markets

Monday morning articles

• Why the Debate Over Daylight Saving Time Rages On: It’s time to change our clocks, again. These maps reveal why making daylight saving time permanent is more controversial than it seems. (CityLab)

• The Fed’s Inflation Goal Is Completely Arbitrary: Despite its widespread acceptance, there’s a strong case that we should understand it as a product of history — and relegate it to the dustbin accordingly. (FiveThirtyEight)

• Why the Economy Seems Weird: Understanding inflation, interest rates and recession risks requires going back earlier than the 2000s. (Wall Street Journal)

• Markets Are Telling Investors Two Things at Once: There are several decent answers as to why—and none of them point to an easy time for investors. (Wall Street Journal)

• Even Wealthy Landlords Are Skipping Payments on Office Buildings: Commercial real estate gave investors a long-term fixed asset to love. But rising interest rates and remote work will bring more defaults to downtowns near you. (Businessweek)

• Instagram Founder Says the Time Has Come for a New Social Network: Kevin Systrom is betting that technological shifts and discontent with current offerings give his news app, Artifact, an opening. (Businessweek)

• How to log off: Sick of spending all your time staring at your devices? Here’s how to strike a healthier balance. (MIT Technology Review)

• Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief: Conservatives tend to believe that strict divisions are an inherent part of life. Liberals do not. (Scientific American)

• How to Find Joy in Your Sisyphean Existence: Life is full of boring, futile, absurd tasks. You’ll be happier if you can laugh at it all. (The Atlantic)

• Trees Across the U.S. Are Sprouting Leaves Earlier Than Usual This Year: Spring is arriving almost three weeks ahead of schedule in some areas because of warmer temperatures. (Wall Street Journal)

• Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump: Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president’s election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.  (New York Times)

• Aaron Judge’s free agency: How a small inner circle and a 3 a.m. phone call kept him a Yankee. (The Athletic)

Pulp and Paper, Silicon Valley, and Pickle Ball

Friday morning articles

• Who's behind Canada's new pulp-and-paper powerhouse, and where's the money coming from? Paper Excellence is Canada's biggest pulp producer and one of its biggest lumber suppliers (CBC)

• The age of the Silicon Valley ‘moonshot’ is over: Big Tech’s cost-cutting and layoffs are another nail in the coffin for the industry’s most ambitious and costly projects. (Washington Post)

  • Rupert Murdoch’s deposition in $1.6 billion defamation case is ‘a nightmare’ for Fox News, legal experts say: First Amendment scholars say defamation case against Fox News is “unusually strong.” (Grid) see also Fox stars privately bashed election fraud claims the network pushed (Axios) see also What Fox News Hosts Said Privately vs. Publicly About Voter Fraud (New York Times)

• You Are Not a Parrot And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. We go around assuming ours is a world in which speakers — people, creators of products, the products themselves — mean to say what they say and expect to live with the implications of their words. This is what philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett calls “the intentional stance.” But we’ve altered the world. We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text.” (New York Magazine)

• All You Touch and All You See: ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ at 50: A half-century ago, Pink Floyd unleashed a classic that still lingers on the Billboard charts and in college dorms to this day. But what’s the legacy of the blockbuster album? What’s legacy, anyway? (The Ringer)

• The Matter with Things: Dr. Iain McGilchrist discusses his most recent book which brings together neuroscience, psychology and philosophy into a unified vision. (Beshara Magazine)

• How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled: The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German élite. But a reporter discovered that behind the façade of innovation were lies and links to Russian intelligence. (New Yorker)

• The Satellite Hack Everyone Is Finally Talking About: As Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, a network used throughout Europe—and by the Ukrainian military—faced an unprecedented cyberattack that doubled as an industrywide wake-up call. (Businessweek)

• Pickleball’s latest court? The prison yard. It’s conquered local parks and cable television. Now, with the help of one obsessed player, one of America’s fastest-growing sports is spreading to state prisons. (Washington Post)

• How Will the Universe End? Big Freeze, Big Rip, Big Crunch, Bounce or vacuum decay? Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack about the five ways that scientists think the universe could come to an end. (Quanta Magazine)

• The covid response showed the U.S. how to solve childhood hunger. Why are we backtracking? Special pandemic aid programs pushed child hunger to historic lows, even as schools and businesses closed — and many U.S. kids could now face a “hunger cliff” as these covid-era measures end. (Grid)

• A Basic iPhone Feature Helps Criminals Steal Your Entire Digital Life: The passcode that unlocks your phone can give thieves access to your money and data; ‘it’s like a treasure box’ (Wall Street Journal)

• This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk: Almost half of products cleared so far under the new federal biofuels program are not in fact biofuels — and the EPA acknowledges that the plastic-based ones may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment. (ProPublica)

• The man who launched the vaccine wars: Andrew Wakefield is still trying to fool the medical establishment. (UnHerd)

• The Everyday People Spreading Political Propaganda Online for Fun and/or Profit: Most of these individual digital propagandists’ bot accounts take advantage of online anonymity (although some—especially those seeking ad revenue—did automate social media profiles that used their real names). They all depend to some degree on bots, sockpuppets, or other automated features of the web, including trending and recommendation algorithms. And definitionally, they all engaged in at least some inherently political work. The influencers are not those who use bots simply to sell regular commercial products, they are all using digital tools to sell political ideas. (Slate)

• ‘They should be charged’: Thousands of nurses obtained fake diplomas and provided care without proper training: More than 7,600 aspiring nurses cheated the health care system and obtained fraudulent nursing degrees from three South Florida nursing schools, according to federal authorities, in a scheme health care professionals say could undermine trust in the profession.  “I’m in South Florida. It’s a hotbed of fraud, whether it’s identity fraud, or PPP fraud, and health care fraud, but this is something that we have not seen before,” (Yahoo)

• Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing For Apocalypse: Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire. (Vanity Fair)

• Russell Wilson’s first year with Broncos: ‘Too much influence,’ too few wins in disorganized disaster: Seven months earlier, in February 2022, Wilson punctuated his growing frustration with Carroll and general manager John Schneider by making the most fateful power play in the history of the franchise. (The Athletic)