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.
Finance and Investing
The complete guide to ETF taxation. (IndexUniverse)
Five good questions on the difficult topic of money for Dan Ariely. (Above the Market)
A look at the origins and growth of Groupon ($GRPN). (SAI)
Why Apple ($AAPL) spends so much on its supply chain. (Bloomberg)
The protest movement will eventually re-shape the banking regime. (The Psy-Fi Blog)
Economics
The largest economy in the world isn’t the US or China it is the “black market.” (Foreign Policy)
The US needs to reboot its “killer apps.” (Newsweek)
How the shale gas revolution is changing the US economy. (Businessweek)
What if middle-class jobs disappear? (American)
Who killed Horatio Alger? (City Journal)
We know the state of the housing market affects consumers the question is how exactly? (FT Alphaville)
Education
The way we teach foreign languages, math and science are wrong. (Freakonomics)
On the (positive) effect of sports on cognitive development in children. (voxEU)
The death of preschool. (Scientific American)
Society
Nate Silver breaks down the 2012 presidential election math. (NYTimes)
How scientific fraud is like a Ponzi scheme. (The Atlantic)
20 years of gadget reviews. (WSJ)
The code of the Winklevii. (Vanity Fair)
What is the return on investment in cold cases? (Freakonomics)
How to rewire your brain from wanton spending. (Newsweek)
Books
On the need for a “better version of capitalism.” An excerpt from Mike Mayo’s Exile on Wall Street: One Analyst’s Fight to Save the Big Banks from Themselves
.* (WSJ)
The physics of an economic crisis. An excerpt from Emanuel Derman’s Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
.* (Reuters)
Seth Godin’s Fall 2011 reading list, including Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
.* (Squidoo via Farnam Street)
Sports
Why the Williams College football team hasn’t issue the #50 for for decades. (SI via The Browser)
The NCAA is on its last legs having decided to allow schools to “pay” players. (Grantland)
The Longhorn Network may be the undoing of college sports. (Businessweek, SportsBiz)
The golden age of marathoning. (The Science of Sport)
Food and drink
In search of the perfect Old-Fashioned. (Slate)
How the Apple took over the planet. (Salon via The Browser)
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