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My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Messing Up the Closest Thing to a Sure Thing in the Stock Market: Index funds are a great way to match the performance of the market. So why do so many investors end up falling short? (Wall Street Journal)
• Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex: From Russell Brand to JD Vance to Candace Owens, what happens when the Catholic Church chases influencers—and their legions of followers—down the rabbit hole of the right? (Vanity Fair)
• Elon Musk Is a National Security Risk: Musk’s now-deleted post questioning why no one has attempted to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris renews concerns over his work for the US government—and potential to inspire extremist violence. (Wired)
• To beat the heat, an Arizona man offers free water. His HOA is fining him. David Martin faces hundreds of dollars in fines for leaving a cooler containing free bottles of water in his driveway. (Washington Post)
• FBI: Americans lost $5.6 billion last year in cryptocurrency fraud scams: The FBI received nearly 70,000 complaints in 2023 by victims of financial fraud involving bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, according to the FBI. The most rampant scheme was investment fraud, which accounted for $3.96 billion of the losses. a 45% jump in losses from 2022. (AP News)
• The Hustlers Who Make $6,000 a Month by Scamming Citi Bikes: The bike-sharing program rewards users who help redistribute bikes around New York City. A few riders have figured out how to turn that into profit. (New York Times)
• How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients: Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found. (New York Times).
• Twenty years of microplastics pollution research—what have we learned? Microplastics arise from multiple sources including tires, textiles, cosmetics, paint and the fragmentation of larger items. They are widely distributed throughout the natural environment with evidence of harm at multiple levels of biological organization. They are pervasive in food and drink and have been detected throughout the human body, with emerging evidence of negative effects. (Science)
• Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic: For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe. (New Yorker)
• The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source. Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Kyla Scanlon. Her first book “In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work” was just released this Summer. Scanlon became known for coining the phrase “Vibesession,” hosts YouTube, “Let’s Appreciate” podcast, daily short-form videos about economy and markets. She has been published at Bloomberg, New York Magazine, FT, NYT.
Twenty years of microplastics pollution research—what have we learned?
Source: Science
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The post 10 Vacation Sunday Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.
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