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: • Inside OpenAI’s Race to Catch Up to Claude Code: OpenAI is scrambling to catch up in the AI coding agent space, where Anthropic’s Claude Code has established a formidable lead. The competitive dynamics are fascinating. Why is the biggest name in AI late to the AI coding revolution? (Wired) • Traders Are Ditching Giant Hedge Funds to Set Their Own Terms: Some are eschewing multimillion-dollar pay packages and access to resources at big firms. (Bloomberg) • Why Tech Giants Are Ditching the Power Grid: Seeking power for data centers, Meta and other companies plan to use equipment that is expensive and polluting. It is the industrial version of what homeowners might do to get through a hurricane. Some technology companies are planning to rely on off-grid gas. (New York Times) • The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’: Tesla superfans are defecting en masse after what many called a “bait and switch”—when your most loyal evangelists turn on you, you’ve got a brand crisis, not just a PR problem. The EV manufacturer is supported by a robust online community. But Elon Musk’s politics and overblown hype about Full Self-Driving are turning some loyalists away. (Wired) • How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post: The Bezos era at the Post has entered a turbulent new chapter—layoffs, editorial shifts, and questions about whether billionaire ownership and journalistic independence can coexist. The billionaire newspaper owner, dissatisfied by years of losses, wants the newsroom to double productivity with half its budget. (New York Times) • Chinese Diplomacy in the Middle East War: Talking with Arabs, Voting with Russia China’s diplomatic efforts this week have been worth a post. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has been working the phones. (The China-MENA Newsletter) • What the war has done to Iranians: A civilian in Tehran chronicles a country trapped between bombardment and repression—too terrorized to move, let alone start an uprising. (New Yorker) • 23 Learnings on Building Community and Holding Space: A thoughtful distillation of what it takes to build real community—relevant reading for anyone managing teams, clients, or just trying to be more intentional about human connection. Re-composting learnings from failure, utopia, and everything in between (Wellness Wisdom) • Agents Over Bubbles. There is a weird paradox in terms of AI prognostication: on one hand, you don’t want to be the one to completely dismiss the most terrifying doomsday scenarios; who wants to be found out to be foolishly optimistic? At the same time, there is also pressure to give credence to the possibility that we are in a bubble, and all of this hype and spending is going to go belly up. Thompson argues the AI bubble narrative is overblown because agents represent genuine productivity gains, not just hype—a thoughtful counter to the skeptics, even if the timing is conveniently bullish. (Stratechery) • There are no psychopaths: Virtually everything you think you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on? (Aeon) Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bill Miller IV, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager at Miller Value Fund. Previously, he was at Legg Mason Capital Management covering specialty finance + consumer spaces with a focus on high-yielding securities. Miller competed in the Poker World Series Main Event. He began his career working for his father, famed investor Bill Miller III. Metaverse was a costly wrong turn, but it’s hardly the only money-burning technology misstep Source: Sherwood Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here. ~~~ To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.