Saturdays are all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s linkfest including a look at how Amazon conquered the world and what comes next.
Quote of the day
“Edison’s life should be a durable lesson in the power of creative teamwork. Instead his surname has become an eponym for individual genius, whether heroic or hyped.” – Derek Thompson
Book excerpts
- An excerpt by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell from "The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life." (longreads.com)
- An excerpt from "Do Dice Play God: The Mathematics of Uncertainty" by Ian Stewart. (lithub.com)
- An excerpt from Azra Raza's "The First Cell and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last." (wsj.com)
- An excerpt from "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman. (lithub.com)
Companies
- 48 years after its founding, FedEx ($FDX) is at an inflection point. (wsj.com)
- Is Peloton ($PTON) a viable business or more of a cult? (thecut.com)
Sports
- NBA players are chronically sleep deprived. (espn.com)
- A profile of the enigma that is Eli Manning. (si.com)
- How the baseball card industry has tried to adapt to a new age. (theatlantic.com)
Longform
- Rana Foroohar on the parallels she sees between the Dotcom Boom and what we are seeing today in tech. (ft.com)
- Why is a billionaire buying up land on Grand Cayman when it is increasingly at-risk of extreme weather? (nytimes.com)
- Michael Lewis profiles Art Allen who had been the lone oceanographer inside the U.S. Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue division. (finance.yahoo.com)
- Why the wealthy rarely just kick back and relax. (nytimes.com)
- There is still no scientific evidence that glyphosate (Roundup) causes cancer in humans. (slate.com)
- How fly fishing became the new hot thing. (nytimes.com)
- People REALLY hate to change out toilet paper rolls. (wsj.com)
- An oral history of hard shell tacos. (melmagazine.com)