We often set aside articles that are longer, deserve a re-read, are broader in scope…or just for fun - for weekend reading. Below are some from this week - pour yourself a hot cup of coffee & enjoy...

• Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory produces twice as many vehicles per worker as its California plant (Inside EVs)

• Enjoy these idioms from different languages (Untranslatable)

• Billions of dollars are flooding into fusion. Everybody’s goal is the same: clean, endless power by the 2030s. Even if most of these projects fail, scientists say they’ll still push us closer to learning how to “bottle a star.” (The Conversation)

  • Chinese scientists creating a record-smashing magnetic field for use in fusion experiments (Gizmodo)

  • Japan, where a startup has pulled off a world-first test of a superconducting coil that stayed stable at fusion-level heat (Reuters)

  • France, the world’s largest fusion project has just entered a critical phase, with the final assembly of its reactor core (Slashgear)

  • United States, NVIDIA, General Atomics and a team of international partners have built a high-fidelity digital twin for a fusion reactor (Nvidia)

• How Moderna, the company that helped save the world, unraveled (Stat)

• How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers - and Misery: The “career funnel,” a phrase coined by sociologists Amy Binder and Daniel Davis, describes the mechanism behind the crowding of elite college graduates into three high-paying fields. (Mother Jones)

• The Venezuela Boat Strikes and the Justice Department’s Golden Shield: How the Office of Legal Counsel Helps the White House in its Summary Killings (Executive Functions)

• Just What the Doctor Ordered: When Dr. Phil signed off his talk show in 2023, he pivoted to MAGA media. It’s not working so well for him. (Slate)

• The Democrats Have a New Winning Formula - The affordability theory of everything (Derek Thompson)

• How to end your extremely online era: We live in a culture of watchers and appearers, of watchers and approvers, a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life, which isn’t that real but we, for some reason, pretend it is. (Tommy Dixon)

• The Running Movie: Liner notes for a lost sports film. Here’s a brief history of writer/director/runner Rob Nilsson’s “On the Edge” — a beautiful, offbeat, nearly forgotten cult film about an aging runner (Bruce Dern) who tries to stage a solo comeback, only to find community on the trail. (Mike Russell)

• Stock prices of companies with negative earnings have been outperforming stock prices of companies with positive earnings (Source: Apollo)
  

What are you reading or listening to?