Food for Thought:
- NY Times – Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection. Having personally been on the leading edge of the ‘achievement-culture’ demographic, I am blown away by how much the ‘table stakes’ have increased even more in the last 10-15 years. This was easily the most thought provoking article of the week and should force you to really think through how you are structuring life for your kids.
- AP – Rio’s waters are so filthy that 2016 Olympians risk becoming violently ill and unable to compete
- NYMag – ‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen
- HuffPo – How Successful People Work Less and Get More Done
- WSJ – Windows 10 or OS X? A Mac User Falls For the PC Again. With a simpler interface and new features, Microsoft’s Windows is more like Apple’s OS X than ever before.
- HP – The Company that Owns Cheerleading – Varsity Brands. This is eye opening – a must read if you let your kids engage in competitive cheer leading.
- NY Post – $4B LaGuardia plan unveiled: ‘Tear it down and rebuild it’ Thank Goodness!
- NY Post – Daughters inherit $20M, but there’s a catch. These are some unique terms for a trust.
- WSJ – They’re Back! How to Cope With Returned College Grads. A parental war plan: test interviews on, family Netflix off!
Business/Economics/Investing:
- WSJ – The Only Six Stocks That Matter. Amazon, Google, Apple and just a few other firms account for the bulk of Nasdaq Composite gains this year; that worries some analysts. If you think you are diversified sitting in an S&P 500 etf, this will make you reconsider that thesis.
- Business Week – Distressed Denim: Levi’s Tries to Adapt to the Yoga Pants Era. Levi Strauss may have invented jeans, but it never saw yoga pants coming. Inside the effort to win back the hearts, and butts, of shoppers.
- NY Times – Netflix Refines Its DVD Business, Even as Streaming Unit Booms. Netflix has achieved massive productivity gains in its legacy DVD rental business – check out the machines that can sort and open thousands of letters automatically.
- MF – Lei Zhang’s Lecture at Columbia Business School (Hillhouse Capital). Yet since he was seeded by David Swesen of Yale Endowment with $20 million in 2005, he has achieved a ~40% compounded annual return (28x not adjusting for inflation), making him one of the best performing investment managers.
Life/Culture/Art/Science:
- SI – The Birth of a League. A 10-team organization with zero soccer-specific stadiums at the start, Major League Soccer now has 20 franchises, 13 of them playing in homes of their own, with payrolls that have tripled. As the league plays its 20th season, key figures recall the kickoff campaign.
- QZ – A new “game-changing” Ebola vaccine is confirmed as 100% effective if taken early
- NY Times – IBM Discloses Working Version of a Much Higher-Capacity Chip
- NY Times – Using Algorithms to Determine Character
- Slate – The Timepiece That Will Change Everything. It’s not the Apple Watch. It’s a Swatch..
- Guardian – ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’ The psychologist and bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow reveals his new research and talks about prejudice, fleeing the Nazis, and how to hold an effective meeting.