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: • Red and Blue America Have Found Something to Agree on: Flock Cameras Must Go: Liberal Asheville and conservative Oconee County both voted to drop the AI license-plate readers — more than 100 local governments have paused or ended contracts this year. A national backlash against AI-enabled license-plate readers is uniting Trump country and progressive strongholds alike. ‘Nobody wants to be surveilled…doesn’t matter what your political leaning is.’ (Wall Street Journal) • Was Silicon Valley Always Like This?: Nitish Pahwa revisits Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish and the forgotten voices who warned of impending trouble amid the 1990s internet optimism. As A.I. doomerism takes off, I tracked down the author of Cyberselfish to chat through her decades-old critiques of tech bros. (Slate) see also A brief history of AI executives calling for regulation: The industry is in a panic, but it’s been claiming to want legal guardrails for years — with few meaningful results. (The Verge) • The day Warren Buffett saved Salomon Brothers ‘Our name was rat poison’ When Buffett arrived at Salomon that morning he faced three sets of overlapping and intertwining problems: Find out the true nature and cause of the crises; convince regulators to let Salomon keep doing business; and figure out who would run the bank, after its CEO, president, and vice-chair had all resigned in the last 48 hours. Richard Dewey on Sunday, August 18, 1991 — Buffett with a firm to rescue. (Financial Times) • The surprising new way to find friends and true love? Your Costco card: USA Today on the warehouse club as community and dating scene. (USA Today) • There Are Over 1 Million N.Y.C. Street Signs. Here’s How They Are Made:. From Cornelia Street to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the 46 workers in this Queens building bring to life the words and symbols that guide the city. (New York Times) • Rules of relevance: we explore how such “learned blindness” can become a major source of market risk in periods of rapid technological and geopolitical change. It may not be changes in the data that trigger market volatility ahead, but a change in the lens through which investors interpret that data. (Carlyle) PDF • “There is no such thing as a ‘sense of humor’ in the Criminal Code”: Russian stand-up comedians on surviving war and censorship: Russian stand-up comedy has changed dramatically over the past four and a half years of full-scale war. In early 2026, a Russian court sentenced comedian Artemy Ostanin to five years and nine months in prison for a joke about a legless Jesus. Within the stand-up community, the case was seen as a warning: anything said onstage can lead to very real trouble. Venues now ask performers in advance to keep their shows “apolitical,” while comedians themselves remove potentially risky material from acts or hide it behind hints and innuendo. Some comedians left Russia during the mobilization but later returned after finding that they could not afford to remain in exile. The Insider spoke to stand-up comedians who live and perform in Russia. They described what can be joked about today, how fear and self-censorship have changed the scene, and why even audiences are no longer always interested in political humor.. (The Insider) • The Quaalude Comeback: A Once ‘Extinct’ Drug From the 70s Makes a Resurgence: Mattha Busby on the return of “ludes” — whose 1984 elimination was the one unequivocal success of the war on drugs. (The Guardian) • The Most Crucial Step to Better Sleep Is Also the Most Straightforward: Smart mattresses and sleep trackers aside, experts say that the key to feeling well-rested is to simply stick to your bedtime. Michele Ross on the metric the mattress upgrades and sleep scores overlook — when you actually go to bed and wake up. (GQ) • Impossibility Is a Myth: The Fence goes long on the proposition. Sacha Jafri sold an artwork for $62 million dollars in 2021 at an auction. But the money never changed hands. What happened? (The Fence) Video of the day: The Apple Ad That Broke Microsoft Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Glen Kacher, founder and CIO of Light Street Capital. He launched the firm in Palo Alto after stints working with Julian Roberts at Tiger and Roger McNamee at Integral. His Mercury funds returned 45.7% in 2023, 59.4% in 2024, and 37.3% in 2025 — the best three-year stretch of any of the “Tiger Cubs.” He describes the firm as “the Silicon Valley Home Team, 100% focused on tech opportunities.” Joining the dots between big AI Source: Financial Times Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here. ~~~ To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.