Case Study on Investment Filters (Warren Buffett)
Alice Shroeder left a managing director position at Morgan Stanley to spend nearly six years with exclusive access to Warren Buffett and 250 other people close to him, speaking with him and sifting through his internal files before publishing Snowball, a definitive biography on Buffett. Here is an interview by her, giving us a little more detail into his research process and method of thinking.
The World Only Cares About What It Can Get From You
Every person you meet is a bleeding gunshot victim, and you're the guy to solve it. A cold take (tweet?) becomes unexpectedly empathetic as you read. The world's relentless demand for what you can offer isn't cold transactionalism, it's a cry from people who are quietly suffering and need someone with real skills to stop the bleeding.
How to Fix Your Entire Life in 1 Day
Your New Year's resolutions failed — again — Dan Koe argues it's because you're trying to change your actions when you should be changing your identity. In this 170-million-view thread, he makes the case that all behavior (including your self-sabotage) is goal-oriented, and that discipline is just fear with better PR. He gives you a one-day "psychological excavation" protocol designed to rewire what you're actually optimizing for — no vision boards required.
Is “Anna Karenina” a Love Story?
Tolstoy's book isn't a love story — it's a warning against the myth and “cult of love.” Sparked by Joe Wright's 2012 film adaptation, which played up the romance, the essay contends that Tolstoy was thinking about love as a kind of fate or curse — a way the universe hands out happiness and misery at random.
Where are the Matriarchies?
Drawing on cross-cultural data from 93 preindustrial societies, evolutionary anthropology, and chimpanzee politics, this piece traces the answer back to some uncomfortable fundamentals: anisogamy, caregiving asymmetries, and the male incentive to convert status-seeking into reproductive success. Modern conditions — outsourced childcare, the demographic transition, shrinking families — may be rewriting the old playbook, even as a small cohort of ambitious men still dominates the top.
The Florida Sugar Barons Worth $4 Billion And Getting Sweet Deals From Donald Trump
Trump asked Coca-Cola's CEO why American Coke doesn't use real cane sugar, didn't like the answer, and speed-dialed his Palm Beach neighbor — 81-year-old sugar baron Pepe Fanjul. Months later, Coke announced a new U.S. cane sugar line, and the Fanjul family's $4 billion empire (Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals, the world's largest cane refinery) stands to be a prime beneficiary. Forbes traces how decades of bipartisan political courtship — and nearly $1 million in inaugural donations — have positioned this Cuban exile dynasty for their sweetest deal yet.
How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s
Patrick Drahi bought Sotheby's in 2019 for $3.7 billion — not because he was a serious collector (Artprice ranked him 252nd globally) but because owning an auction house sounds good in an obituary, and because he saw a cost structure ripe for demolition. The "wizard of debt" who built Altice on leverage promptly extracted over a billion in dividends while shedding a quarter of the workforce, even as his telecom empire cratered and Altice USA shares fell from $30 to $2.50. Now employees wonder if Drahi's endgame is to automate Sotheby's into a frictionless platform—stripping out the specialists, the institutional memory—and turn taste into algo-optimized margin.
Marco Rubio Is Rebooting the Neocons for the MAGA Era
As Trump's secretary of state and national security adviser, Rubio has pulled off a remarkable rebranding act, wrapping hawkish interventionism in MAGA packaging and steering U.S. foreign policy from "America First" isolationism toward old-school regime change — most visibly with the capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro. He's done it by mastering the one rule that eluded his predecessors: in Trump's court, loyalty is the only currency. The question isn't whether Rubio has remade U.S. foreign policy — it's how long the prince lets his minister keep doing it.
The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai
Daniel Kinahan threw a wedding at the Burj Al Arab so lavish it doubled as a Super Cartel summit — van Gogh thieves, Camorra operatives, and a DEA informant all mingling under the chandeliers. While his co-conspirators from that 2017 bash now rot in Dutch supermax cells, Kinahan remains untouched in Dubai, running a billion-dollar cocaine empire that controls a third of Europe's trade and earning comparisons to the Yakuza and Los Zetas. A $5 million U.S. bounty sits unclaimed, because apparently Dubai's tolerance for narco-royalty knows no bounds.
Global Doughmination: Breaking Down Domino's Pizza
In 2009, Domino's ran ads admitting its pizza tasted like cardboard — then quietly became a logistics and tech company that happens to sell pizza, compounding at rates that made it one of the best-performing stocks of the 2010s. Tom Monaghan stumbled into the business in 1960 for $900, nearly bankrupted it through reckless franchising in the '70s, then rebuilt with military discipline: the 30-minute guarantee (a marketing stunt that forced operational excellence), "fortressing" (clustering stores to crowd out rivals and shrink delivery radius), and a franchise model so airtight it scales from Michigan to Mumbai.
Extras:
Ray Dalio on the world order, The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, a garage with 16,000 annual reports, Excel forever, the Erfurt latrine disaster, China's smartest are choosing manufacturing, America’s debt balance in context, why flights are hitting more turbulence, Cuba at Trump’s mercy, Benin's coup that started with a stolen Sprite, Marco Rubio's neocon reboot for MAGA, AI's labor market impact: reality vs. hype, what no Oscar speech will tell you, Pokemon!