Thursdays are all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s linkfest including a look at the growing business of longevity.
Quote of the Day
"In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much."
(Anne Lamott)
Books
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An excerpt from "Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature"
by Dan Sinykin (newrepublic.com) - An excerpt from "The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos" by Mark Chiusano. (nymag.com)
- An excerpt from Richard C. Cytowic’s book "Synesthesia." (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
Business
- The big consulting firms have, at the very least, an image problem. (bloomberg.com)
- Families are complicated. Family businesses even more so. The case of Estee Lauder ($EL). (wsj.com)
- Why the market for heart valve replacement is growing. (herbgreenberg.substack.com)
- A profile of Richard Dyke, the Maine businessman who brought assault-style guns into the mainstream. (propublica.org)
Entertanment
- Andrew Trees, "But the beauty of Netflix was that it could keep track of all of those films for me until the queue itself became a kind of biography of the various phases of my life." (thesmartset.com)
- How Siskel & Ebert changed the nature of film criticism. (newyorker.com)
- A profile of André 3000 on the cusp of his return to music. (gq.com)
Longreads
- The war in Ukraine is being fought in the electromagnetic spectrum. (nytimes.com)
- Beef contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than any other food product. (projects.apnews.com)
- Drones have disrupted the nature of deep-sea prospecting. (bloomberg.com)
- CTE isn't just an issue for professional football players. (nytimes.com)
- Fossil reconstructions are by definition, man-made. (undark.org)
- Little was known about the Canada jay until Dan Strickland came along. (hakaimagazine.com)
- A history of the jungle gym, i.e. monkey bars. (npr.org)