Links for June 18th
Shipping containers, fantasy football/basketball, markets, Benjamin Franklin
Hello from the air. Hope you had a smooth week here. Some brief links.
Links
Kathryn Schulz wrote a whole piece about shipping containers, which basically revolutionized the world economy, but sometimes sink. Fun read!
Slightly surprisingly moving read here from Zak Cheney-Rice on friendship (specifically, male) and fantasy sports.
Another Odd Lots podcast with the short seller Jim Chanos about what’s going on generally with the market, and especially crypto.
Here is a nice renovation of an old apartment.
Light book commentary
Big reading week ahead, but in the one just past, as part of I guess this ongoing sideline of reading about the founding fathers, I’m almost finished with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. Anyway, Franklin was actually maybe a genius? (Publisher of America’s first novel, correct theorist of the nature of head cold contagion, inventor of lightning rods and terms such as “battery,” mostly free of appalling beliefs from which we recoil.) But anyway, here’s the bizarre sequence I can’t get over in this book: At one point in the years before the American Revolution, Franklin went to London on America business for what was supposed to be five months, and stayed… five years. Then he came back for two years, then returned for another TEN, while kind of platonically(?) taking up with another woman and her daughter (?), all while his family, including his wife (who would die while he was gone!), was like “um, hey?”
Also, I watched Only Murders in the Building super belatedly, and like everybody said, it was great, especially in just the flow and chemistry between Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.