• Volkswagen’s Secret: History forgot the horrors endured by laborers on the automaker’s massive cattle ranch in the Brazilian Amazon. But a priest had recorded it all and made a call. (Washington Post)
• The Next Thing You Smell Could Ruin Your Life: Millions of people suffer debilitating reactions in the presence of certain scents and chemicals. One scientist has been struggling for decades to understand why—as she battles the condition herself. (Wired)
• The High-Schoolers Who Just Beat the World’s Smartest AI Models: Google DeepMind and OpenAI won gold medals at the math Olympics—but these American teenagers still got higher scores. Will this be the last time humans outperform AI? (Wall Street Journal)
• The Man With the Hot Hand: The dizzying rise, brief fall, and white-hot resurgence of Abstract’s 34-year-old Founder, Ramtin Naimi. (Colossus)
• Where are Vacation Homes Located in the US? As of 2023, the US has around 142.3 million housing units: roughly one home for every 2.4 people in the country. The vast majority of these homes – 127.5 million – are occupied. The remaining 14.8 million homes are vacant. Of these, around 4.8 million homes, or around 3.5% of the total, are vacant because they’re seasonal, or vacation, homes. (Construction Physics)
• Britain’s spies-for-hire are running wild: Lucrative, freewheeling — and largely unregulated — private intelligence and security firms are booming in the land of James Bond and John le Carré. (Politico)
• The Trump administration attack dog you should pay attention to: Bill Pulte started with viral cash giveaways, public family feuding, and meme stocks. Now he’s targeting Jerome Powell and Adam Schiff. (Vox)
• How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline: The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk. (The Atlantic)
• 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment: In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system. (New Yorker)
• Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug: We’re Never Going to Invent a Drug That’s Better Than Exercise. (Derek Thompson)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Erik Hirsch, Co-CEO Hamiliton Lane, which manages or advises on $958 billion in client assets. Previously, he was an M&A banker at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a municipal financial consultant with Public Financial Management, specializing in asset securitization, strategic consulting and sport stadium financings.
