Thursdays are all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s linkfest including a look at the surge in illegal cactus trafficking.
Quote of the Day
"Americans tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about nearly any drinking at all."
(Kate Julian)
Finance
- A closer look at the so-called '$113 million New Jersey deli.' (nytimes.com)
- A big profile of Chamath Palihapitiya, the 'pied piper' of SPACs. (newyorker.com)
Big Tech
- Adam Pressman, "If YouTube were a stand-alone entity, that would make it the world’s fourth-largest seller of digital ads, after its parent company, Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon." (fortune.com)
- How Amazon ($AMZN) Prime distorts prices and whole industries. (mattstoller.substack.com)
- A company's relationship to the cloud should change as it grows. (a16z.com)
Sports
- The Olympics are going to get disrupted: the story of pro swimming. (outsideonline.com)
- A bit profile of Kevin Durant, the epitome of the modern pro athlete. (nytimes.com)
- MLB is overrun with strikeouts. What can be done about it? (espn.com)
- The story of how one man came to change the core of the bowling ball. (wired.com)
Tulsa Race Massacre
- The Tulsa Race Massacre 100 years later. (wsj.com)
- What the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed. (nytimes.com)
- What it would mean to re-build 'Black Wall Street.' (bloomberg.com)
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was just one example of the destruction of black-owned businesses. (barrons.com)
- Why did it take so long for Tulsa to become common knowledge? (vox.com)
- 60 Minutes on the Tulsa Race Massacre. (cbsnews.com)
Longreads
- Think tanks used to be a respected part of the policy ecosystem. Now they are largely a part of the partisan divide. (foreignpolicy.com)
- A first-hand account of what it is like to participate in a Psilocybin clinical trial. (independent.co.uk)
- In the Internet era, anthropologists can us understand human behavior. (ft.com)
- Why does walking help us think? (lithub.com)
