10 Thursday AM Reads

My morning train WFH reads: • Will AI Make Companies Outsource More, or Less?: Noah Smith on how AI might redraw the boundaries of the firm — Coase for the model era. A genuinely interesting question most coverage skips. (Noahpinion) • We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America: A data-driven case that the supermarket squeeze is worse than the headline CPI suggests. More grist for the sentiment-versus-numbers debate. (New York Times) • Reverse Engineering the Met’s Bobby Bonilla Deal: My own July 1 tradition: the math behind baseball’s most famous deferred-payment contract. A cautionary tale about hubris, fraud, misunderstanding risk, and all sorts of other amusing and fun BeFi issues. I went deep down the rabbit hole on this one, and it led to some astonishing findings… (The Big Picture) • UBS Global Wealth Report 2026: nearly 1 million new millionaires. Global personal wealth rose 10.8% last year, the fastest pace in years, yet median wealth fell in most markets (Quartz) • Mega takeovers drive record $2.8tn in dealmaking: Companies and investors turn to M&A as they adjust to economic shifts driven by the rise of AI. (Financial Times) • Remote Work Is Making It Harder for Grads to Find (and Keep) Jobs: New research argues that frustration among employers over remote work may be leading them to cut back on hiring young workers (Wall Street Journal) • Decision Fatigue: Why You Feel Exhausted Without Having “Done” Anything Physically: The brain is just like any other muscle. It gets tired. On why choosing all day drains you as much as labor. A tidy explainer with practical implications for how you structure a workday. (Facile Things) • Even the Internet’s Favorite Pool Guy Doesn’t Know How to Fix the Reflecting Pool: Algae blooms, peeling paint, and a host of fixes from hydrogen peroxide to nanobubblers have made it hard to diagnose what’s wrong with the Reflecting Pool—let alone how to clean up the mess. A funny, telling sidebar to a story that refuses to drain. (Wired) • Trump’s second-term windfall: $1.4B in crypto earnings: The president’s latest financial disclosure underscores how central the cryptocurrency industry has become to his business empire. Disclosures reveal a staggering crypto haul. The through-line of this week’s reads: the presidency as a revenue center. (Politico) see also Trump’s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History: The Times tallies the scale of presidential self-enrichment against the historical record. Read it with this week’s crypto and mining-deal stories. (New York Times) • European Soccer Fans Marvel at the Splendor of America’s Suburbs: World Cup visitors discover the cul-de-sac, the strip mall, and the enormous parking lot. A charming outsider’s-eye view of American sprawl. Dutch fans in Missouri see a nation that is risky and expensive, but vast and bountiful: ‘Everything is three times the size’ (Wall Street Journal) Video of the day: The Genius of Mechanical Time Be sure to check out our Master’s in Business next week with McKeel Hagerty, CEO/Chairman of Hagerty Specialty Insurance. He transformed a family specialty-insurance agency into an enthusiast-driven platform focused on collectible cars, events, valuation data, and auctions. HGTY is now a public company that insures everything from classic cars to boats, trucks, tractors, and military vehicles for over 2.8M collectors. Record labels no longer dominate which artists get radio airplay Source: Bloomberg Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.