Thursdays are all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. Wherever possible, free links for premium sites are used. You can check out last week’s linkfest including a look at the impact of USAID cuts in Africa.
Quote of the Day
"Somewhere along the way, the United States decided that the most sophisticated thing you could do with economic power was to financialize it and to create increasingly complex mechanisms for extracting value from existing systems rather than building new ones."
(Kyla Scanlon)
Books
- A Q&A with Erick Guerra, author of "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction." (bloomberg.com)
- An excerpt from “Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable” by Will Potter. (rollingstone.com)
Autos
- Why questions around Tesla's ($TSLA) FSD keep popping up. (theguardian.com)
- Hyundai Motor's “Metaplant America” needs workers. (bloomberg.com)
Crime
- Brandon del Pozo, "In a free society, people should know who is policing them." (theatlantic.com)
- Why do so many murders in the U.S. go unsolved? (nytimes.com)
- Why a longtime FBI agent was forced to retire. (lawfaremedia.org)
Longreads
- It's not just one thing that is driving global fertility rates lower. (npr.org)
- How the U.S. became an extraction economy. (kyla.substack.com)
- Americans of all ages are partying less. (derekthompson.org)
- How Valve conquered PC games. (on.ft.com)
- Good lucking trying to wean yourself off plastic. (theatlantic.com)
- On the underrated importance of humans' sense of smell. (quantamagazine.org)
- How a show about horrible people, 'It's Always Sunny in Philadephia' became a long-running hit. (nytimes.com)
- How the iconic Wrigley Building in Chicago came to be. (fastcompany.com)
