Thursdays are now all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s linkfest including a look at the weak link in the vaccine production process.
Quote of the Day
"If you change the channel then you change what gets bought."
(Benedict Evans)
Book excerpts
- An excerpt from "Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed From Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas" by Marc Levinson. (wsj.com)
- An excerpt from "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside" by Xiaowei Wang. (vox.com)
- An excerpt from "The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" by Virginia Postrel. (wsj.com)
- An excerpt from "A Walk Around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (And Know Nothing About)" by Spike Carlsen. (thedailybeast.com)
Women in tech
- How Alicia Boler Davis helped guide Amazon ($AMZN) through the pandemic. (fortune.com)
- A profile of Maddie Stone who works in Google's ($GOOGL) Project Zero to squash cyber exploits around the globe. (wired.com)
- A Q&A with Ellen Pao on why the big social media companies are happy with the status quo. (nybooks.com)
- Twitter's ($TWTR) head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde, is dealing with the most controversial issues surrounding speech and politics. (politico.com)
Profiles
- A profile of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell who has by all accounts outperformed expectations. (nymag.com)
- A profile of Uber ($UBER) CEO Dara Khosrowshahi who in addition to dealing with the pandemic is having to defend the company's business model. (ft.com)
Environment
- Off the coast of southern California are hundreds of thousands of barrels of banned pesticide DDT. (latimes.com)
- This Kansas community was devastated by a tornado. It built itself back up with a focus on sustainability. (washingtonpost.com)
- Why it's getting harder, and more expensive, to mine gold. (bbc.com)
Longreads
- Amanda Mull, "Americans have no common conception of the pandemic, which means you can’t assume that someone you’ve trusted for years isn’t about to expose you to a deadly disease, or even that you live on the same plane of reality." (theatlantic.com)
- Doing something new is hard, in large part because we judge the first version way too harshly. (paulgraham.com)
- Scrabble had its moment in the early 2000s and how it lost its opportunity. (si.com)
- The pandemic could kill off waiting in line. (theatlantic.com)
- The pandemic has only encouraged some drivers to attempt the Cannonball Run. (gq.com)
