10 Friday AM Reads

My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

• Hollywood and Big Tech Are Preparing for War: The studios and the platforms circle each other as AI scrambles the economics of content. The fight that will define the next decade of entertainment. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Bitcoin hits 20-month low as market sentiment sours: Price of world’s most actively traded digital asset falls below $60,000 amid shift by retail investors to AI-related stock bets. The risk-off mood reaches crypto. Another reminder that bitcoin trades like the speculative asset it is, not the haven its boosters promised. (Financial Times) see also Gold has erased all its 2026 gains: Gold just took a round trip: Prices dropped below $4,000 a troy ounce Wednesday back to where they were in early November last year. Investors are losing their taste for the precious metal. The safe haven wobbles as risk appetite and Fed expectations shift. A neat snapshot of a jittery week in markets. (Axios)

• SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic: The S&P 500 Inclusion Question and Investment Consequences! Damodaran on the index-construction puzzle posed by the new wave of $1T-class privates. Pure index-mechanics nerdery, in the best way. (Musings On Markets)

• Heckling from app-wielding bettors is wrecking golf: Wyndham Clark won the US Open despite phone-toting gamblers heckling him over their live bets. The harassment at the U.S. Open was the ugliest thing yet. The sports-betting era’s ugliest side effect, on full display. (Washington Post)

• Trump’s Iran War: The Midwife To A Renewable Energy Future: Complex systems can engender the opposite outcome of intentions. A contrarian argument that Mideast conflict accelerates the energy transition. Whether or not you buy it, Noema does big-think provocations well. (Noema) see also Iran Estimates $40 Billion Windfall From Reopening Hormuz With Gulf States: Deal to unblock global energy funnel gives Iran say in its future management, and route to riches. Tehran reportedly sees a toll-booth opportunity in the world’s most important chokepoint. Geopolitics as a fee business. (Wall Street Journal)

• America’s Most Talented Nepo Baby Has Two Michelin Stars to Prove It: When E.J. Lagasse, son of Emeril, took over his father’s famed restaurant, it seemed like the ultimate privilege. Two Michelin stars later, E.J., just 23, has shocked New Orleans, the food world, and all of nepo-dom by being the unlikeliest of things: deliciously legit. (GQ)

• How Did M.C. Escher Develop His Mind-Bending, Paradoxical World? A new exhibition at London’s Somerset House explores the Dutch artist’s penchant for the visual illusion. On the obsessive geometry behind the impossible staircases, pegged to a London show. A nice detour into how the trick was actually done. Note: I saw this shopw in Montreal, and it was fantastic! (Artnet)

• Sagrada Família Is a Miracle of Structural Engineering: Still underway in Barcelona after more than 140 years, Antoni Gaudí’s vision for an otherworldly church was only made possible by modern construction methods. Bloomberg on the math behind Gaudí’s basilica finally nearing completion. The building is the rare modern monument that improves your faith in long-horizon projects. (CityLab)

• Why older people are happier and what we can learn from them. Around the world, happiness tends to peak later in life. It has more to do with balancing priorities than elderly wisdom. The U-shaped happiness curve, revisited: contentment tends to climb after midlife. The lesson isn’t to wait it out, but to borrow the perspective early. (Psyche) see also A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits: The cultural discourse around avoiding alcohol never convinced me—and why sober up when the world is burning? Then life intervened. A wry weekend essay on losing a habit you weren’t trying to lose. The kind of personal piece The New Yorker still does best. (New Yorker)

• It Was Her First-Ever Audition Tape. She Landed a Lead on ‘The White Lotus’ Marissa Long, a 26-year-old first-time actress from Tulsa, has a major role on HBO’s obsessively guarded prestige series. She just can’t tell you who she’s playing, what happens or if she survives it. The lottery-ticket version of a Hollywood break. A fun behind-the-scenes on getting discovered the hard-and-then-suddenly-easy way. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Video of the day: The Samurai Who Became A Roman Citizen

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Carl Richards, a financial advisor who is also the creator of the Sketch Guy column, which ran weekly in New York Times for a decade. He hosts Behavior Gap Radio (1,300+ episodes) He co-hosts “Kitces & Carl — Real Talk for Real Financial Advisors” with Michael Kitces.” Richards latest book is Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches.”

Mistaking a Hiring Freeze for a Robot

Source: Apollo

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