Saturday links: imperial overstretch

The weekend is a great time to catch up on some longer items that we passed up on during the week. Thanks for checking in.

Investing

Ten manager search and selection tips.  (Enterprising Investor)

America’s banks are big, black boxes.  (The Atlantic)

Economics

How “free stuff” changes the market economy.  (FT Alphaville)

Economics may have reached “the stage of imperial overstretch.”  (Justin Fox)

Economists have been too disconnected from the lessons of history.  (Economist’s View)

Technology

The technology industry is on the cusp of some really cool stuff.  (Pando Daily)

How our cars are just becoming big, rolling computers.  (GigaOM)

Who controls our digital lives after we are gone?   (WSJ)

For all those engineers with founder envy.  (Pando Daily)

Companies

A profile of Charlie Ergen, CEO of Dish Network ($DISH).  (Businessweek)

A look at the long, drawn out decline of Nokia ($NOK).  (Pando Daily)

On the risk that Google ($GOOG) gets “fat and happy.”  (NYTimes)

Flying

Flying has never been safer.  (WSJ)

On the real danger of electronic devices on airplanes.  (Bits)

Global

Lativa on the other side of austerity.  (NYTimes, Economist, FT Alphaville)

The story behind the great Canadian maple syrup heist.  (Businessweek)

Medicine

Is lead to blame for the rise (and fall) in crime in the US?  (Mother Jones)

Just because he is a doctor doesn’t mean his is right:  the case of Dr. Oz.  (Slate)

On the enduring mysteries of anesthesia.  (The Atlantic)

Murder by smartphone: how hackers could mess with medical technologies.  (Vanity Fair via @longreads)

Sports

Major college football keeps growing.  (NYTimes)

Advice for all you new college football head coaches out there on how not to get fired.  (Freakonomics)

Books

Wonkblog’s books of the year including Plutocrats: The Ries of the New Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Cynthia Freeland.  (Wonkblog)

11 “must read” finance books, including Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy.  (Minyanville)

An excerpt from Kevin Dutton’s The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Kilers Can Teach Us About Success.  (Scientific American)

An excerpt from Zac Unger’s Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye: A Family Field Trip to the Arctic’s Edge in Search of Adventure, Truth and Mini-Marshmallows.  (Pacific Standard via Digg)

Mixed media

An oral history of Good Will Hunting fifteen years after its release.  (Boston Magazine)

On the importance of the “culture of the copy.”  (New Criterion via @epicureandealmaker)

Don’t write off the printed book just yet.  (WSJ)

How to think like Sherlock Holmes.  (Slate)

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