The weekend is a great time to catch up on some of the reading you skipped during the week.  We hope you enjoy this set of long-form links.

Quote of the day

Jennifer Szalai, “Finance has given the future over to mathematics and supercomputers, which, like any other prosthetic god, bring with them the temptations of both recklessness and complacency.”  (Lapham’s Quarterly via The Browser)

Investing

J. J. Abodeely, “Truly successful managers, advisors, and investors will embrace the unknown. They will leave behind the large and traditional for the small and maverick.”  (Value Restoration Project)

How investors can develop a “latticework” of relevant models.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

What is “impact investing” and is it a new asset class?  (Economist)

What if ‘peak oil‘ isn’t a peak but a plateau?  (WSJ)

Ray Dalio speaks.  (The Reformed Broker)

The New America

What a waste:  America’s lost decade.  (Bloomberg)

Thinking about a world where jobs are scarce.  (Understand Society)

How to survive in the new world of work.  (Economist)

Technology

Meet the new wave of hackers trying to change the world.  (NYMag)

How home prices killed the first Internet boom.  (Ryan Avent)

On the online poker exodus from the US.  (Businessweek)

Global

China is getting old, fast.  (beyondbrics)

Riding the rails, very quickly, from Shanghai and Beijing.  (Vanity Fair)

Young Russians once again want to emigrate.  (Economist)

Science

The surprising science of how to count a crowd.  (Popular Mechanics via The Browser)

Human biases are really hard to fix: a NFL case study.  (The Frontal Cortex)

Can we have free will if our decision making is largely unconscious?  (Nature)

Originality is hard.  Remixes “copy, transform and combine.”  (GigaOM)

Education

On the importance of grit in education.  (NYTimes also Information Processing)

California is slowly but surely privatizing the university system.  (Economist)

A look at the teenage brain.  (National Geographic)

The NCAA is in the business of athlete exploitation.  (The Atlantic)

Mixed media

Zooey Deschanel is a surprisingly polarizing figure.  (NYMag)

Thanks for checking in with Abnormal Returns. You can follow us on StockTwits and Twitter.