10 Holiday Sunday Readings

My sunday morning Look at the incompetence, corruption and policy failures:

• It messes up the closest thing to a sure thing in the stock market: Index funds are a great way to match market performance. So why do so many investors end up going short? (Wall Street Journal)

• Behind the celebrity-conversion industrial complex of the Catholic right: From Russell Brand to JD Vance to Candace Owens, what happens when the Catholic Church follows influencers—and their legions of followers—down the right-wing rabbit hole? (Vanity Fair)

• Elon Musk is a national security risk: Musk’s now-deleted post questioning why no one tried to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is renewing concern about his work for the US government — and the potential to inspire extremist violence. (via cable)

• To beat the heat, an Arizona man is giving away free water. His HOA fines him. David Martin is facing hundreds of dollars in fines for leaving a cooler of free water bottles in his driveway. (Washington Post)

• FBI: Americans lost $5.6 billion in cryptocurrency fraud last year: The FBI received nearly 70,000 complaints in 2023 from victims of financial fraud involving bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, according to the FBI. The most widespread scheme was investment fraud, which accounted for $3.96 billion in losses. a 45% increase in losses from 2022. (AP News)

• Hustlers Making $6,000 a Month Cheating Citi Bikes: The bike share program rewards users who help redistribute bikes around New York City. A few riders have figured out how to turn this into a profit. (New York Times)

• How a leading psychiatric hospital chain is hooking patients: Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found. (New York Times).

• Twenty years of microplastic pollution research – what have we learned? Microplastics come from multiple sources, including tires, textiles, cosmetics, paint and the fragmentation of larger items. They are widely distributed in the natural environment, with evidence of harm at multiple levels of biological organization. They are ubiquitous in food and drink and have been detected throughout the human body, with emerging evidence of negative effects. (Science)

• Russia’s Spy War in the Arctic: For years, Russia has used the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations before replicating them across Europe. (New Yorker)

• The House GOP is a circus. Chaos has only one source. Republicans have spent two years sabotaging the US House. Another two years would be ruinous. (Washington Post)

Be sure to check out our Master in Business interview this weekend with Kyla Scanlon. Her first book”In This Economy?: How Money and Markets Really Work” was just released this summer. Scanlon became known for coining the phrase “Vibesession”, hosts YouTube, podcast “Let’s Appreciate”, short daily videos about the economy and markets. She has been published in Bloomberg, New York Magazine, FT, NYT.

Twenty years of microplastic pollution research – what have we learned?

Source: Science

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To find out how these readings are assembled each day, please see this.

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