Greetings Loyal Readers - We send our best wishes to you for a safe and happy festive break.

We will be offline next Friday and look forward to reconnecting with our New Year's Reads.

We wish everyone insight, rest and good cheer.

• Top 25 News Photos of 2023 A look back at some of the major news events and moments of 2023 (The Atlantic)

• The Robber Barons of Prison Tech (Slate)

• The NYT is now a gaming company that offers news: Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games (Vanity Fair)

• Why Americans' 'YOLO' spending spree baffles economists (BBC)

• How Phil Knight, Charles Koch And Other Aging Billionaires Are Making Sure Their Money Doesn’t Go To Uncle Sam (Forbes)

• RIP Goldman Sachs. When I started out at Goldman, it was the most feared firm on Wall Street. Those days are gone for good (Business Insider)

• Red vs Blue: The Life-and-Death Cost of Political Power: New research shows widening gaps between red and blue states in life expectancy (American Prospect)

• User Data Has Become a Favorite Police Shortcut: Investigators increasingly use warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases - and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime (Businessweek)

• The Spy Who Dumped the CIA, Went to Therapy, and Now Makes Incredible Television (Wired)

Good Podcast Series: The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

 

Media Subscriptions that we willingly pay for:

•     The New York Times (With NYT Daily, Cooking & Wirecutter)

•     The Atlantic Magazine

•     The Globe & Mail

•     Sam Harris - Making Sense Podcast

 

Free Posts that we like

•     Letters from an American - An historian contextualizes current events with a solid historic perspective.

•     Fareed Zacharia GPS

•     Huberman Lab

•     Wiser Than Me

 

What are you reading or listening to?