Happy New Years! Settle in for some thoughts about the coming year, and the year that was:
• All The Ways That Crypto Broke in 2022: Fast forward a year, and the primary topics of conversation among even the most devout of the crypto faithful were more likely to be about Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto co-founder of the fallen FTX empire, or whether they’d ever retrieve the coins trapped on bankrupt exchanges and lending platforms after a series of big digital-asset collapses. (Bloomberg)
• Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade: Turf wars. Protection money. Scientology. And my boss, a man who’s half-convinced he really is Santa. (Curbed) Celebrating Pele, the greatest player in World Cup history. see also The Mysterious Bah Humbug Toward Christmas Shopping: No matter how you measure it, US holiday spending has fallen since the 1990s. Are we burned out on giving gifts? (Bloomberg)
• 9 Science Stories That Restore Our Faith in Humanity: A river’s “gut” revived, snake-saving social media, an intragalactic donut, and more success stories of the year. (Scientific American)
• The 23 Best Places to Go in the U.S. in 2023: From the American West to vibrant islands in the Caribbean. (Condé Nast Traveler)
• Elon Musk and the Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight Trackers: Lost in the chaos is just how successful Musk has been at suppressing that real-time flight data on the internet. In so doing, he’s taking aim at an incredibly valuable source of information—which has helped researchers, journalists, and experts with everything from tracking Russian oligarchs to investigating the fate of missing aircraft to tracking down international hitmen. Musk isn’t the only one trying to keep this type of information out of the public’s hands. (Wired)
• This is what a tech market looks like in: Over the past six months, Rest of World visited eight of these tech markets and districts across the world — from the sensory barrage of Akihabara in Tokyo to the rain-spattered, rowdy SP Road in Bengaluru… (Rest of World) see also The year tech giants fell to earth: From Twitter to NFTs and FTX, 2022 has been a bad year for tech. (Grid)
• For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age: A panel of experts has spent more than a decade deliberating on how, and whether, to mark a momentous new epoch in geologic time: our own. (New York Times)
• 8 unanswered questions from the Jan. 6 committee report: They include how pipe bombs got to the DNC and RNC headquarters, and how much Trump and his allies knew ahead of the attack. (Grid)
• 2022’s extraordinary cosmic revelations and moments in space exploration: This year, humankind glimpsed the universe in ways that were never before possible, and space missions took unprecedented leaps forward in unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. We witnessed the first mission to the International Space Station funded entirely by space tourists. A new space-based internet service played a key role in the war in Ukraine. And there were historic launches of spacecraft and technology by NASA and its international partners that could one day be used to land humans on Mars. (CNN)
• He’s the Bad Boy of Chess. But Did He Cheat? An American teenager, Hans Niemann, defeated Magnus Carlsen, the world’s best chess player. Then Mr. Carlsen accused his opponent of cheating. It’s either overdue justice or paranoia. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Michael Lewis. We discuss Season 3 of his podcast Against the Rules. We also delve into the 30th anniversary of Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, and his new audio recording of the book. He is also the author of Undoing Project, Moneyball, Flashboys, The Big Short, and so many others.
YoY change in “homes for sale” searches on Google Trends
Source: @conorsen
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