10 Weekend Reads

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads: • The box that built globalisation: Containers have transformed ports, cities and trade. Now the revolution is reaching a limit. Alice Hancock on how shipping containers transformed ports, cities and trade — and why the revolution is now reaching a limit. (Financial Times free) • Anthropic’s ‘First Lady’ Took a Winding Road to the Top: Before Cami Clark became a quiet key counselor to her husband, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, she founded her own startups and crossed paths with Jeffrey Epstein. Cory Weinberg on the ascent. (The Information) see also Even Claude Is in the Dark About Dario Amodei’s Wife—and Her Influence at Anthropic: Cami Clark—who started what she called a ‘revolutionary porn company’ where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein—keeps a low profile but is a key adviser to the AI chief. Its coming IPO could top trillions. She is a key strategic adviser and sounding board for the AI chief. She introduced Amodei to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who became an early investor in Anthropic’s $124 million Series A round. (Wall Street Journal) • The smorgasbord in the age of Ozempic: In buffets and Ozempic menus, sampling menus and share plates, the same hope emerges: to circumvent satiety. But so too do the same anxieties, the same guilts and thrills, the same moralizing tensions between seeking pleasure and wielding self-restraint. Thea Applebaum Licht on the smorgasbord in the age of Ozempic. (Cabinet Magazine) •The Brains Who Powered China’s Surprising AI Leap: University lab nurtured the computer scientists who are using ingenuity and imitation to chase down Anthropic and OpenAI; ‘they know perfectly how to monetize their work.’ How Chinese AI startups are closing the capability gap with OpenAI and Anthropic through a mix of ingenuity, state support, open-source sharing and distilling from U.S. models — despite restricted access to advanced chips. (Wall Street Journal) • To Get Better At Investing, Start By Getting Better At Being Wrong: How Not To Invest explains why avoiding bad forecasts, misleading numbers, emotional decisions, and unnecessary risk might be the smartest path to long-term wealth. (Finimize) • The Great American AI Rebellion: America hates data centers. That’s going to be a problem for AI. Derek Thompson on stacking facts rather than conjuring grand theories — writing down what you know is true, lining the dominoes up, and letting the pattern show itself. Twenty minutes on why Americans really hate data centers. (Most of AI’s builders are clueless about why). (Derek Thompson) • The Animator Who Inspired Cartoon Network: “UPA was a huge deal for us.” You saw its influence in Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls and more. UPA had been the studio to beat during the ‘50s: its flat, modern style swept mid-century animation. That style returned on Cartoon Network. One exec called the look “UPA revival.”1 But UPA’s design was only one element borrowed by these later shows. Just as critical was the animation — that is, the way this stuff moved. And one particular UPA animator had an outsize impact on Cartoon Network. His name was Robert Cannon. Although he didn’t live to see the UPA revival projects, his ideas were all over them. “One of my favorite animators.” Animation Obsessive on the artist whose style became a network’s DNA — the influence hiding in every 90s kid’s visual memory. (Animation Obsessive) • The End of the American Middle East Iran and the Last Gasp of a Failed Order: The years ahead promise further discord. Israel and Iran have a shared interest in keeping the Middle East in a state of lawlessness and violence, and the United States has few means of holding back either of them. Israel hopes to expand its de facto borders, including by annexing as much as possible of historic Palestine, and to impose its writ by force across vast swaths of the region. And assuming that the Iranian regime does not collapse any time soon—which it appears highly unlikely to do—an emboldened Tehran will hope to defend and expand its regional influence by bogging Washington down in the kinds of endless, borderless “gray zone” conflicts in which it has always thrived. (Foreign Affairs) • Marc Jacobs Reveals What Comes Next for His Brand: José Criales-Unzueta sits down in the SoHo showroom with a designer who opens by declaring, “All I’ve ever been is a fashion victim” — and then clarifies that he does not mean it as a bad thing. In his four decades in fashion, Jacobs has weathered personal storms and professional crises, coming back stronger each time. In a revealing interview, the great American designer holds forth on his LVMH sale, past scandals, and exactly—or maybe not so exactly—what his next chapter will mean for his runway collections. (Vanity Fair) • I coached Roger Federer and Pete Sampras. This is what made them different. It was exactly what he told me the previous year. You have to be able to manage the highs and the lows, because you know they’re going to come. I think Roger was the maestro at that. Paul Annacone, who had Sampras from 1995 to 2002 and Federer from 2010 to 2013, on what separated two players at the top of the same sport. (The Athletic free) Video of the day: Why Taylor Swift Caused an Economic Boom… And FIFA Didn’t… Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Alex Morris of TSOH Investment Research. He is the author of “Buffett and Munger Unscripted: Three Decades of Investment and Business Insights from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meetings.” The book was named one of Amazon’s “Best Books of 2025.” To write it, he reviewed every Berkshire annual meeting from 1994 through 2024 — 100s of hours of video covering more than 1,700 shareholder questions over 31 years — after Berkshire released the meeting archives. Current Covid Epidemic Trends (Based on Rt) Source: CDC Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here. ~~~ To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.