Food for Thought:

1. Economist – How to make sense of 2016. Liberals (read pro-free markets, not US politics) lost most of the arguments this year. They should not feel defeated so much as invigorated
2. MRP – How to Lose Friends and Still Influence People.  It’s quality, not quantity, that counts when it comes to digital friendships. Here’s how to conduct a social media cull.
3. NYT – Saudi Royal Family Is Still Spending in an Age of Austerity
4. ProPublica – What Facebook Knows About You.  Facebook is buying data from data brokers to better analyze who you are and serve ads to you.
5. Tennessean – Eating Nashville, the year in review.  Nashville dining put on quite a show in 2016.

Business/Economics:

1. WIC – 2016: Far Better Than Expectations. Now What? Down over 2,000 points in mid- January to 15,450, the Dow Jones Industrial Average enters 2017 flirting with 20,000 – Far Better Than Expectations. Now What?
2. Stratechery – Alexa – Amazon’s Operating System
3. WSJ – Clients Want Hedge Funds but Not Their Big Bets.  Institutional investors discourage the high-stakes punts for which hedge funds became famous.
4. The Atlantic – What RVs Say About the American Economy.  Sales of mobile homes are a good data point for inferring the mood of consumers.
5. FCC – All of 2016’s top mobile apps are owned by either Google or Facebook

Culture/Tech/Science:

1. 538 – The 52 Best — And Weirdest — Charts We Made In 2016
2. Economist – Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
3. WSJ – A Vineyard Gets Its Ducks in a Row, and Visitors Flock In.  The 1,000 birds at South Africa’s Vergenoegd Wine Estate were employed to eat snails. Now they parade for tourists who are not necessarily fans of the wine
4. NYT – 85-Year-Old Marathoner Is So Fast That Even Scientists Marvel
5. BI – Rockets rookie shows off his unconventional underhanded free-throw form in an NBA game for the first time