10 Weekend Reads – Overview

• Open your mind to unicorn meat: Entrepreneurs have invested billions in plant-based and lab-grown meats, and the possibilities are endless. (Atlantic)

• He pushed the New York Times to buy Wordle. Now he has to make the sport work. David Perpich, cousin of publisher AG Sulzberger, was the architect of the subscriber game pack, a cooking app, Wirecutter and sports media site The Athletic. (the wall street journal)

• The history of titanium: The earth contains a lot of titanium – it is the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there is more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it’s only recently that civilization was able to use titanium as a metal. (titanium dioxide has been used for a bit longer as a paint pigment). Because titanium bonds so easily with oxygen and other elements, it does not occur in metallic form at all in nature. One engineer described titanium as a “street walker” because it picks up anything and everything. (Building physics)

• Ranking of economic schools of thought: Who understood the inflation of the 2020s? (Noahpinion)

• In Search of Van Halen’s Brown M&Ms: Indentured Riders and the Meaning of a Modern Pop Star: The history of music is full of wacky stories with more or less truth. Maybe you have heard this one. (pile of snacks)

• Welcome to “Zombie Twitter” Elon Musk killed the one thing that made Twitter special. It’s been less than a year since he bought it, and Elon Musk’s Twitter is already well on its way to suffering a fate worse than death – uselessness. (Business Intern)

• Taleb as miseducator: People overestimate their understanding of almost everything, because they usually see manageable uncertainty and causally explainable outcomes, missing contingency and the possibility of something happening that is well outside their experience. (return of spirit, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

• Dream of Antonoffication | Pop music’s dullest prophet: In the history of pop, the place of the producer is clearer. A producer serves as a shortcut to the dominant sound of an entire era: George Martin and Eddie Kramer for the “studio as a musical instrument” experiments of the late 1960s; Quincy Jones for the clinically precise grooves of 70s and 80s R&B; Glen Ballard for the commercial drum machine and acoustic guitar landscapes of ’90s adult alternative; Babyface for the soft R&B textures of that decade; Max Martin for the Eurodance brilliance of 2000s teen pop. Each of these sounds is curiously detachable from the music itself, and certainly from the artists who make it. In fact, you could say that the producer first emerged as an important figure in the pop world in response to a need for an out-of-the-box, portable sound. (The drift)

• The men are lost. Here is a map of the desert. The strangeness has also manifested itself on the national political scene: in the 2016 Trump campaign fueled by 4chan, in the backlash of #MeToo, in amateur militias during Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic discussions of text threads took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Young men everywhere were trying out new identities, many of them ugly, all waving a desire to belong. It felt like a generalized identity crisis – like they didn’t know how to be. (Washington Post)

• The job of being a good co-worker brings in $22 million a year: Hard data is a way to measure employee performance. But soft skills too. They are the reason why a role player is now the highest paid player on his NBA team. (the wall street journal)