FT obituary: “Alice Munro was one of the generation who created modern Canadian literature, the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize (and only the 13th woman). Three times the winner of the Governor General’s Award, twice winner of the Giller Prize, she pulled her collection Too Much Happiness from consideration for the Giller in 2009 feeling a younger writer should have a crack. That year she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her whole body of work…Her compass looked small: it was not. “Any life can be interesting,” she said. You just have to be there.” The first sentence of a Munro story puts the reader absolutely there. Her aims were plain. “I want my stories to move people,” she said. She wished readers to be changed by her stories and over decades, we were — changed and vastly enriched.”
NYTimes: “There is a certain permeability between art and life, and pleasure in perceiving it: We take satisfaction in recognizing our lives in onscreen plot lines, as we thrill to real-life moments that feel “just like a movie.” But TikTok’s video-based format has wildly amplified the impulse to collapse the distance between the two and imagine yourself as an onscreen character. The app’s tools make it easy for people to film and edit footage of themselves, narrating their own stories in breezy narrative beats — making life look like an episode of television. The result is a perfect ecosystem for watching and being watched, where once-passive audiences are encouraged to see themselves as the writers, directors and stars of their own motion pictures.”
PwC: “Given the potential value at stake, the question then becomes how companies can make goal-setting a habit in their workforce. The answer is straightforward enough: help people see the benefits themselves, celebrate the small wins, use the right language, and don’t forget the prerequisites.”
Christopher Mims: “Over nearly 500 articles, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Here are five big lessons those blown calls and boneheaded pronouncements have taught me along the way…1. Disruption is overrated. 2. Human factors are everything. 3. We’re all susceptible to this one kind of tech B.S. 4. Tech bubbles are useful even when they’re wasteful. 5. We’ve got more power than we think.” On the first point: “In a world in which companies learn from one another faster than ever, incumbents have an ability to reinvent themselves at a pace that simply wasn’t possible in the past.”
Ray Dalio: “US exceptionalism exists because the US has 1) an exceptionally well-developed capitalist system that fosters entrepreneurship and companies building out and efficiently delivering products, which creates big wealth and opportunity gaps, 2) exceptionally well-developed rule of law so that disputes can be resolved and agreements can be enforced, though the fairness of rule of law is increasingly being challenged, and 3) exceptional immigrants who come to the US, usually via exceptional American universities, both of which are increasingly under siege. If you look at those companies that have produced ~95% of the innovations that in recent years have produced most of the US stock market and economic outperformance relative to other countries, it comes down to something like a million people, roughly half of whom are immigrants (out of a US population of 333 million people). As a corollary of this, the top 10% of Americans have 48% of the income, 71% of the wealth, and pay 76%, of the taxes, while the bottom 50% have 10% of the income, 1.5% of the wealth, and receive more money than they pay in taxes.”
FT: “The Sephora kids are not just on social media; they’re in the mall, scouring shelves for trendy make-up or luxury skincare that they have saved up their pocket money to afford. Generation Alpha — those born since 2010 — will have the greatest spending power in history, according to Mark McCrindle, who coined the term. By the end of this year, more than $5.39tn globally will be spent on them annually, and McCrindle forecasts this will increase by $10bn each year…Generation Alpha are the first to truly grow up with social media at their fingertips. They copy older influencers online by showing off their “hauls” of items purchased or given to them, posting “shelfies” (selfies of your beauty collection) or GRWM (get ready with me) videos, sometimes in school uniforms. “The root cause of this opportunity with this younger consumer cohort is the almost universal embrace of social media,” said Bernstein analyst Luca Solca.”
