How Four Americans Robbed The Bank Of England
Paul Brown | Longreads | 8th June 2020
Robbing the Bank Of England was easier than you might think, at least in the late 19th century. “The plan involved the forgery of bills of exchange, which are commercial checks promising payment after a certain date. New York banks required these bills to be authenticated by the issuer before they were accepted. The Bank Of England accepted them on sight, without verifying they were genuine. Instead, the bank relied on the apparent trustworthiness of the customer presenting the bills” (5,900 words)
Technical Excellence And Scale
Cory Doctorow | EFF | 4th June 2020
Scale is good. Monopoly is not. But the two go together. “Big tech companies are really good at being big. Whatever you think of Amazon, you can't dispute that it gets a lot of parcels from A to B with remarkably few bobbles. Google's search results arrive in milliseconds, Instagram photos load as fast as you can scroll them … When you're a monopolist, being good at bigness comes swith the territory. If being good at scale was a defense against antitrust claims, virtually every monopolist would be off the hook” (805 words)
A 1982 Basquiat painting just sold for $100,000,000. There’s never been a better time to start investing in art than now. Masterworks is upending the 276-year-old art industry by taking famous works of art public, allowing you to buy and sell shares just like trading stocks.The Gospel According To Peter Thiel
Tara Isabella Burton | City Journal | 6th June 2020
With a net worth of approximately $2.3 billion, Peter Thiel is “far from the wealthiest person in Silicon Valley”, but he may be the most influential. Alongside an early investment in Facebook, and positions in Airbnb and SpaceX, Thiel’s “more esoteric pet projects” include the Seasteading Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Center, the Center for Applied Rationality, and the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which funds anti-aging research. He also bankrupted Gawker, and helped elect Donald Trump (3,670 words)
Permanent Assumptions
Morgan Housel | Collaborative Fund | 4th June 2020
When everything seems to be changing in unprecedented and unpredictable ways, it may help to isolate a few fundamentals that never seem to change. Here are nine such, including this: “The world breaks about once a decade. There are so few exceptions it’s astounding. It can be economic, political, military, social, or a mix. But it breaks all time, in ways few see coming. The breaks aren’t as scary if you have a permanent assumption that they’ll keep happening and don’t preclude long-term growth” (850 words)
Come Hell And High Water
Mathew Lyons | Literary Review | 5th June 2020
What it was like to be a ordinary seaman in the early 19th century, when Britain’s naval power was at its height. “To join them was to enter another world, with its own laws — the thirty-six Articles Of War, read to them every Sunday, besides whatever strictures a captain thought fit to apply. The lowest of the low were the waisters, good for nothing but drudgery. Princes over all of them were the topmen, or Foremast Jacks, who went aloft to bend or reef the sails, even in the highest of seas” (980 words)
Video: The Soldier’s Tale | London Symphony Orchestra. Fragment of Stravinsky played by the LSO Chamber Ensemble under Roman Simovic (2m 30s)
Audio: The Wellness Phenomenon | Seriously. Claudia Hammond traces the idea of ‘wellness’ back to the counter-culture of California in the 1960s (57m 02s)
Afterthought:
“Writing is like paying myself a formal visit”
— Fernando Pessoa
