🇺🇸 Kyle Tharp with an intriguing breakdown of this year’s top political conversations, based on social media engagement.
Brief thoughts:
- DOGE feels like an eternity ago
- Jimmy Kimmel’s ousting was so brief but inordinately impactful.
- No King’s Protests are having a real type of influence.
📚 An adorable and seasonally appropriate poem from my current read, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency:
🤣 At the intersection of tech and business
💬 Ten pages into Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and absolutely captured by this man’s prose:
Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man’s eyes. Lovely dimes, the loveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride.
💬 Christmas is such a generous season, which always makes me think of one of my favorite passages in Paradise Lost:
Well we may afford Our givers their own gifts, and large bestow From large bestowd, where Nature multiplies Her fertil growth, and by disburd’ning grows More fruitful, which instructs us not to spare.
Watched: Eternity 🎥
See my low-stakes and spoiler-free review here // bradley-andrews.com
📊 Matt Stoller published a very insightful warning on potential anti-trust issues with the WBD acquisition by Netflix. However, I am not entirely convinced of his argument, which seems to neglect the drastic change in how audiences consume content, the value most people find in Netflix, and the intensity of competition in the streaming space (most people don’t have $ for all of them and find the multiple subscription model very fatiguing). Nonetheless, it’s worth the read and I will be chewing on the data for a bit.
🫶 When the Chipotle worker gives biiiiig scoops
🚊 If you live in NYC, then you should live in constant readiness—or fear—of Kareem Rahma from Subway Takes appearing and asking you for your own unique/controversial opinion. In case you don’t have one, here are some of mine for free:
- Sidewalks should have a slow and fast walking lane.
- Calling a hotdog “a glizzy” is hilarious, but should be illegal outside of Washington DC.
- If you are using your phone in public, other people have the right to look at your screen.
- All two-factor authentication is fake and should be optional rather than forced.
- The drinking age in America should be 18, not 21.
- We need to build public playgrounds for adults.
- We need remunerations for people who were told they’d need to know cursive.
- Going to the movies and/or a restaurant by yourself is a form of therapy.
- Kraft Mac and Cheese is better than 99% of restaurant Mac and Cheese.
HMU if you want more or feel free to comment your own on this post. Stay ready friends ✊
🫶 When you’ve officially become a regular somewhere because the workers know your order
🌲🏢 Yesterday, I learned that REI closes on Black Friday and pays their 14,000+ employees to spend time outdoors and in nature instead. It’s called #OptOutside and it is not an insignificant gesture by the brand. Much respect!
Thanks to @jinscho for bringing it to my attention.
📚 Recently procured seasonal reading
✍️ Click here to read some of my thoughts on the new NBER paper regarding collusion and common leadership in Silicon Valley:
As an MBA student, the NBER paper reinforces something that I have discovered again and again; while capitalism will always be a very imperfect system, it’s best possible form is when it conforms closest to a game. Meaning, when it is allowed to be playful, highly competitive, and free from both arbitrary rules and bullies. I’ve said it before, but I will say it again: being pro-business requires that one also be anti-monopolist.
💬 From Dorothy Day:
What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.
📵 A new paper in NBER found that two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before.
Most intriguing is that there was a period of “withdraws” during which disciplinary actions rose before adjusting.
🦅 It’s that time of year! California’s favorite bald eagles are prepping for egg-laying season & you can livestream their nest 24/7 at this link. A strangely mesmerizing annual activity for me; probably helps that their nest is in the San Bernardino mountains & reminds me a bit of home.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Salvo: a simultaneous discharge of two or more guns in military action or as a salute : the release all at one time of a rack of bombs or rockets.
💿 The CD collection expands! Great finds from Fireplace Records in Hyattsville, MD.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Niveous: snowy or resembling snow
📉 A favorite professor of mine is raising the alarm regarding “Buy Now, Pay Later” providers, who are in for serious disappointment if/when the economy contracts. It’s mind-boggling that such tenuous and sketchy models of financing are allowed in 2025.