Food for Thought:

• WSJ – Trump’s America. There’s nothing irrational about Donald Trump’s appeal to the white working class, writes Charles Murray: they have every reason to be angry.
• WSJ – Christy Turlington Burns: From Supermodel to Activist.  After 500 magazine covers, Turlington finished a Bachelors in Philosophy from NYU.  A thoughtful look at her work to help impoverished women globally.
• NYP – ISIS is broke, and only accepting payments in US dollars
• New Yorker – The Digital Dirt.  How TMZ gets the videos and photos that celebrities want to hide.
• BEM – Why Millennials are Trending Toward Minimalism
• NYT – Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me.  How does one strain of Christianity in the US hold up when faced with terminal illness – a challenging reflection from a professor of religion at Duke.

Business/Economics:

• ZH – World’s Largest Hedge Fund In Trouble? Bridgewater Pure Alpha Loses Over 10% In Two Weeks – Wait, being levered and long fixed income at the end of a 30-year bull market can lead to loses?
• WSJ – IPO Market Dries Up as Investors Retreat.  Widespread anxiety prevents startups from going public.
• BoF – What’s Next for the American Department Store?  Changing consumer sentiment and over distribution of product has hit the department store model hard in the challenging US market. Can executives win back the magic through a series of ambitious new year initiatives?
• WSJ – Chasing Hot Returns in ‘Smart Beta’ Can Be Dumb
• WSJ – Break Up the Big Banks? Do This First.  The too-big-to-fail debate has moved beyond a simple argument over whether banks should be broken up just because of their size.
• SB – The Industrialist’s Dilemma Session 2: Ron Johnson, Enjoy.  How products and services are being delivered to customers is going through frame-breaking change, shared Enjoy CEO Ron Johnson. The capabilities of new channels to deliver great experiences through service and information is turning traditional retail on its head.

Culture/Tech/Science:

• WSJ – A Private-Jet Primer.  How to fly in style and look like a pro while doing so.
• WSJ – The Ignominy of Aston Villa.  The worst English soccer teams get dropped to a lower division each year.  There is one American learning this lesson right now: Randy Lerner. Lerner is the American majority-owner of Aston Villa. He also used to be the owner of the Cleveland Browns
• NYT – The Commute of the Future? Ford Is Working on It
• WSJ – Solutions for Stressed-Out High-School Students.   With growing evidence that students are suffering from the intense competition for college admission, schools around the country are rethinking everything from tests to classes to start times.
• The Atlantic – The Math Revolution. – Credit TP –  The number of American teens who excel at advanced math has surged. Why?