The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Rivers are now battlefields: Chinese dams will hold billions of people downstream to ransom. Could solar-powered desalination make them irrelevant? (Works in Progress Magazine)
• How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day: More than 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with The Washington Post. We used it to find out why some people become power users, spending hours per day scrolling. (Washington Post)
• The Protein Bar King and the Battle for the Holy Grail of Fat Substitutes: How the “secret sauce” in America’s hottest new brand of protein bars sparked a storm of controversy that has forced small businesses to the brink of death—and upended the protein bar market that many of us have come to rely on. (Men’s Health)
• The US Population Could Shrink in 2025, For the First Time Ever: It’s a story with massive economic and political significance. But it’s receiving strangely little attention. (Derek Thompson)
• Down in a Pennsylvania mine, I saw coal’s future: Coal faces competitive pressure from other industries, but climate change activism also hangs over its future. In addition to the rise of renewable energy, advocates for natural gas often boast that their plants produce less greenhouse emissions. (Washington Post)
• A Wave of New Apartment Buildings Is Set to Take Over Midtown Manhattan. More construction is a welcome relief. Crunched by a housing shortage, the city’s residents are facing rents that are hovering near records and more expensive condos and co-ops. Price pressures have driven politicians including Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul to greenlight financial incentives and zoning changes that could encourage developers to take the office buildings that emptied out during the pandemic and turn them into more housing. (Bloomberg) see also Conversion mania grips Manhattan as more prime office space turns into apartments: At least four buildings on Third Avenue in the East 40s and 50s and 135 E. 57th St. at Lexington Avenue, once a symbol of the late-1980s office-development craze. The conversions will bring 24/7 energy and domestic warmth to blocks that are typically quiet after dark. 5 Times Square is being converted into 1,250 apartments — which was one of the quartet of West 42nd Street towers that proclaimed a new era for the “Crossroads of the World.” (New York Post)
• An Existential Guide to: Making Friends. Friends Friends What Glorious Friendly Friends! (The Shadowed Archive)
• The Curious Conservative War on Beer: The Bud Light boycott was just the beginning. The right-wing battle against America’s favorite beverage has become deeper—and weirder. (Slate)
• The science is clear: Metal music is good for you: This music genre blows away stereotypes. (Popular Science)
• Is TV’s Golden Age (Officially) Over? A Statistical Analysis: A lot can change in forty-five months. Think back to November of 2021: the world had yet to see a Tesla Cybertruck, HBO Max was an ascendant streaming service, Will Smith had slapped zero people on live television, Sam Bankman-Fried was a benevolent billionaire and model citizen, and Netflix’s stock was soaring, buoyed by the pandemic. (Stat Significant)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Jurrien Timmer, Director of Global Macro at Fidelity Investments, which manages $16 trillion in for 20 million clients. Timmer, a Chartered Market Technician (CMT), is part of Fidelity’s Global Asset Allocation (GAA) group, and specializes in asset allocation and global macro strategy.
Mortality in the news vs. what we usually die from
Source: Flowing Data
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