Food for Thought:

• Medium – Common Core Math is Not the Enemy. Why you hate it and why we need a new perspective in education.
• MM – Screw Finding Your Passion.  Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?”  – This is spot on though a little PG-13 on the language.
• NYT – The Law School Debt Crisis.  Lowest tier law schools are purposefully targeting at-risk students – leaving many with outrageous loan balances and limited prospects for employment
• NYT – ‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.  We are all Ira Glass now.
• Slate – No More Pencils, No More Books.  Artificially intelligent software is replacing the textbook—and reshaping American education.
• LifeHacker – Top 10 Skills You Need at Work That Have Nothing to Do with Your Job

Business/Economics/Investing:

• GaveKal – How indexation killed growth.  When index funds make up a majority of ownership in the stock market, have they created a new series of unanticipated issues?
• CBI – The Increasingly Crowded Unicorn Club In One Infographic.  Silicon Valley is not in a bubble, keep saying it and it come true.
• WSJ – It Costs What to Trade a Bond?
• FastCo – How Failed JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson is Redeeming Himself with Enjoy.  The former Apple retail guru was severely humbled after flaming out at JC Penney.  Only a start-up could save him.
• BI – Hedge fund manager David Einhorn has scored the ultimate victory.  Justice finally has its day for the crooked management at St. Joe’s, it only took Greenlight 9 years to make a profit…

Life/Culture/Science:

• BB – How an F Student Became America’s Most Prolific Inventor.  Lowell Wood broke Edison’s patent record and helped bring down the Soviet Union
• QZ – I’m an iOS developer, and there are two main reasons I’m giving up my Apple Watch
• BI – Slack, the $2.8 billion startup that wants to kill email, really is reducing work email
• Economist – Fear Itself.  A mental illness caused by trauma may be one of the first to be understood in physical terms.

Weekly Geek Out – 

Kudos to WGW for introducing me to 99 Percent Invisible .  99PI is a phenomenal podcast that I have been listening to non-stop for the last 3 weeks or so.  Focusing on architecture, design, and science, each 15-20 minute segment is like a hybrid of Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Nye, the science guy.

This week is called War and Pizza – Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powdered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday convenience. These standard products were made to meet the needs of the military.  Inside the hidden military origins of most of the stuff in the grocery store.