10 Weekend Reads
The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• I Went Shopping. When Did I Become an Unpaid Employee? This North American tipping culture really annoys me. How businesses fired the staff, handed me the scanner and still expected a tip. Hans Casteels: the customer once supplied the money and the business supplied the labor. Now we scan, bag, check out and troubleshoot for free… ( The Oncology Underground )
• Who’s Who at Jane Street: A guide to the management committee, decision-makers, founders, and notable alumni at the secretive trading house . The elite and elusive executives behind Wall Street’s biggest trading house love creating and cracking puzzles. But even as Jane Street breaks industry records, overtaking JPMorgan Chase & Co. last year for the top spot, the question of who wields power there remains one of its enduring enigmas. Jane Street insists it’s flat, collaborative and hierarchy-free. Max Abelson and Katherine Doherty name the people who actually run the place. ( Bloomberg )
• Backsliding On the paradox of willpower : Some people spend their whole lives fighting other people, or institutions, or fate. Then there are those of us whose greatest battles are waged against ourselves. Meghan O’Gieblyn on willpower, habit and the runner she passes each day on the bike path who can barely run at all. ( Harper’s )
• China’s bigger, better batteries : It’s the world’s fastest-growing power technology — and Beijing is dominant. Simon Mundy goes inside a production line pasting electrode slurry onto copper five microns thick, overseen by robots and AI inspection, to show how far ahead China’s battery industry has pulled. ( Financial Times )
• A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal : It gave Wall Street traders and analysts an unprecedented window on global markets/ Technology & Society. ( IEEE Spectrum )
• When Culture Becomes “Content” Can art still illuminate reality in an age of monetized attention, generative AI, and culture produced at limitless scale? Paul Chan makes the case. ( The MIT Press Reader )
• Penchants of the polymaths : The fathers of Islamic science hold lessons for students: breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way. On al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi, four Islamic polymaths whose circumstances could not have been more different, and the case that breadth beats specialization. ( Aeon )
• Why ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ Looks Like That : Some unique features of this project were its complicated score, recorded ahead of time, and its movements studied from ballet stars Tatiana Riabouchinska and David Lichine. Plus, Jones drew “almost 500” pose sketches (“as well as a further 1,500 unused roughs”) to guide his animators, whereas most films got 300. Maurice Noble’s design for the 1957 Chuck Jones cartoon, nearly 70 years on. ( Animation Obsessive )
• Coltrane’s Shadow : Mark Stryker on the Tiberi tapes, a Philadelphia tenor player obsessed with Coltrane at the moment Coltrane left Miles Davis and launched his own band in 1960. The legendary ‘Tiberi Tapes’ reveal new sides of the master, even to his biggest fans ( Tablet )
• Mark Gastineau doesn’t need your attention — or a gold jacket — anymore : “I’d have to believe that Mark singlehandedly made the sack a glamorous play and made the NFL start keeping the sack as a meaningful statistic,” Jets coach Joe Walton once said. “He brought attention to it like no one before.” The former Jets sack leader in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, with 145 arborvitae and not one branch out of place. ( The Athletic )
Video of the day : Why Long Island Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Omar Aguilar, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer of Schwab Asset Management, which runs more than $1 trillion across over 100 ETFs, mutual funds, and separately managed account strategies. He has held both the CEO and CIO titles since 2022
See How the U.S. Is Attacking China’s Control of Critical Minerals
Source: Wall Street Journal
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