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.

Investing

A look at equal-weighted strategies.  (Financial Advisor)

De-stressing the balanced fund mandate.  (IndexUniverse)

John Gapper recommends five books on financial speculation including Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed.  (The Browser)

Finance

How Blackrock ($BLK) is changing capital markets.  (Institutional Investor)

The continued rise of Blackstone Group ($BX).  (Fortune)

The behind-the-scenes story of the FBI’s insider trading investigation “Perfect Hedge.”  (Bloomberg)

Technology

There is a limit to social sharing:  our ability to care.  (Technology Review)

An excerpt from William Poundstone’s Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?.  (WSJ)

Has the ‘app economy’ killed the mobile web?  (Both Sides of the Table)

Is the end of e-mail nigh?  (FT)

Economy

A closer look at the shipping industry awash in excess capacity and debt.  (FT)

How economic geography is adding to stagnation.  (Free exchange)

Why the world continues to build skyscrapers.  (FT)

Science

Causation in science is far more ambiguous than commonly thought.  (Wired)

Why pilot projects often fail.  (The Atlantic)

Weight Watchers has revamped its formula.  (Wired)

What makes identical twins different?  (National Geographic)

The science of how pedestrians behave.  (Economist)

Society

How Belgium came to dominate the world of beer.  (Economist)

On the economics of Baroque period art.  (voxEU)

Sweden’s bizarre tradition of watching Donald Duck cartoons on Christmas Eve.  (Slate)

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