10 Weekend Reads – The Big Picture

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of BeanBox coffee, grab a seat on the settee, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• Jony Ive on Life After Apple: The mastermind behind Apple’s most iconic products reveals how his design philosophy guides collaborations at his creative collective, LoveFrom. (Wall Street Journal)

• Bitcoin mining in the crypto crash — the mining companies’ creative accounting: Bitcoin miners used to be ruthless economic agents, in it for the money. They knew how volatile crypto was, so they sold their coins as soon as they mined them to cover power bills and other business expenses. As some point, miners’ business model changed from selling bitcoin to holding bitcoin — and borrowing against it. (Amy Castor)

• Quitting Elon Elon Musk’s former fans have lost faith in the idea of the billionaire genius. (Vox)

• At The Tipping Point: This paper is an attempt to draw an accurate map of rapidly changing territory. But more importantly, it’s an exploration of how businesses and individuals can flourish amidst increasing chaos. (KCP Group)

• Investing in Influence: Companies invest billions of dollars in political influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and other means. However, as with other intangible assets, political capital tends to be overlooked by the market. We show how investors can earn excess returns buying undervalued political capital. (Sparkline Capital)

• When Netflix and HBO Turned on Each Other, They Forged a New Era of Television: The defining rivalry of the streaming-TV era began with an insult and a sneak attack. An exclusive adaptation from It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO. (Businessweek)

• The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water: We’re being packaged and sold a bottle/can/box of lies on water. (Vox)

• Plywood Gourmet: How thousands of restaurants speedily, messily, and probably permanently took over the street. The mass extemporaneous construction of alfresco structures probably represents the speediest reshaping of the built environment in the city’s history. (Curbed)

• How to Win at Wordle (Without Cheating) Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game. (Quanta Magazine)

• A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan: He’s in his eighties. How does he keep it fresh? (New Yorker)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with financial historian Edward Chancellor. He is currently a columnist for Reuters Breakingviews and an occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal and MoneyWeek. In 2008, he received the George Polk Award for financial reporting. Chancellor is the author of “Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation.” His new book “The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest” is a nominee for FT’s 2022 Business Book of the Year.

The Stock Market Has Risen After Every Midterm Election Since 1950

Source: Forbes

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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.