Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On a bright day in the flats of San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles, the busiest restaurant around is a Panda Express tucked into a shopping center dominated by a Walmart. Running a fast-food operation isn’t like other restaurants — here, we dive into the big picture, the tiny systems, and the daily struggles of…
New Line Cinema/youTubeOrcs.Albert Edwards has central banks in his sights again. Societe Generale’s bearish strategist wrote a note to clients Thursday going back to what he calls, “my favorite pastime — kicking the Fed.” This time Edwards said that the Fed and other central banks have waited too long to raise interest rates, allowing companies to…
Updated Nov. 11, 2015 7:31 p.m. ET Facebook FB -0.44 % is experimenting with new advertising approaches for its Instant Articles platform after publishers encountered challenges generating ad revenue because of restrictions imposed by the social network. Instant Articles, which Facebook rolled out to all iPhone users last month, allows media companies to publish content…
Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!” So what happened to email? What happened to us?…
Europe’s central bankers used to dismiss core inflation, a measure of price gains that excludes food and energy, as a fixation of economists who don’t eat or drive. But less so now. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi singled it out on Thursday, saying it’s “somewhat weakened.” Mark Carney last week said the gauge is important to watch…
In past eras, a father would monumentalize his love for his daughter with an exotic menagerie, or some sort of obelisk. Today, our elites create money-losing startups for their beloved kids. Ken Lerer is among the most influential people in the digital media business. He co-founded The Huffington Post, and helped facilitate its massive sale…
Bloomingdale’s has been criticised for a Christmas advert which implicitly encourages men to spike women’s drinks when they aren’t looking. The ad, which appeared in the store’s Christmas catalogue, shows a man staring at a woman with a sapcation reading: “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.” It has been criticised on Twitter…
Goldman Sachs seems worried about bond-market liquidity. In a note to clients Tuesday, Charles Himmelberg and Chris Henson at Goldman Sachs dissect the recent decline in dealer inventories of investment-grade corporate bonds. This sounds arcane and boring, but their analysis is one of the most important and troubling things we’ve read about bond-market liquidity. Now,…
Comcast is one of the most hated companies in America. What’s worse is that it can’t stop doing infuriating things. This week in Reasons Comcast Sucks, an apparent hack led about 200,000 customers accounts showing up for sale online. Comcast says it was not hacked. Rather, the company is “blaming the incident instead on unsuspecting…
he rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied…