Food for Thought:

• BuzzFeed – The Science Behind The Claw Machine Will Enrage You.  Remember when all your childhood dreams were crushed when the claw didn’t work out in your favor?
• The Atlantic – The Try-Hard Generation.  Though Baby Boomers may criticize Millennials for being self-centered, careerist, and politically dispassionate, they are really just adapting to the world they live in today.
• NYTimes – SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines
• ProPublica – How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes.  Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures.
• The Atlantic – The Danger of Picking a Major Based on Where the Jobs Are.  In his new book, the Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that banking on a specialized degree’s usefulness is risky. After all, one reason some jobs are in high demand is that no one predicted that they would be.
• Bloomberg – Paying Student Loans Is Hard. Do It Anyway.
• WSJ – The Enduring Genius of the Ballpoint Pen.  A eureka moment involving a puddle and a marble gave the world the ballpoint pen—an invention that no high-tech writing gadget has yet to challenge
• AOM – The Winston Churchill Guide to Public Speaking

Business/Economics/Investing:

• WSJ – Tech Startups Woo Investors With Unconventional Financial Metrics — but Do Numbers Add Up?  Critics say the practice is inflating some companies’ valuations.
• WSJ – How Disney Milks Its Hits for Profits Ever After.  CEO Robert Iger’s love of ‘franchises’ spawns years of sequels, park rides, merchandise.
• BusinessWeek – Costco Moves the Metal.  Costco’s warehouse clubs have become big sellers of cars.
• WSJ – Money Isn’t Free, but Moving It Is Now Cheaper.  Payment startups disrupt traditional cash-transfer firms by offering nearly instantaneous, zero-cost services.
• WSJ – The Self-Driving Car and the Coming Revolution in Auto Insurance.  Google seems to be laying the groundwork to underwrite its own policies, displacing traditional carriers.
• FastCo – How Google Finally Got Design.  Google’s transformation into a company that creates beautiful software is the story of how tech itself has evolved in the mobile era.

Life/Culture/Art/Science:

• LE – Reclaim the Your Life From Tech with this Pepper Grinder.  This pepper grinder blocks wifi signals at the dinner table – let the ‘family supper’ begin again.
• WSJ – There’s LeBron, and Then There’s Everyone Else (Michael Jordan Included).  LeBron James’s performance so far in the NBA Finals is unlike anything the league has seen in recent times—including the reign of Air Jordan.
• Jalopnik – Porsche Cayman GTS: A Greatest Hits Album Of Performance Excellence
• Bloomberg – These Insane, Pimped-Out Vans for CEOs Redefine Commuting
• WSJ – Golf’s Latest Innovation Takes a Page From… Snowboarding?  Surfer Laird Hamilton has helped invent a new way to get to the next hole: the GolfBoard; ‘surfing the earth’.
• QZ – The scientist who designed the fake interfaces in “Minority Report” and “Iron Man” is now building real ones