better doing

Hammurabi’s Code and risk management. 

Shane Parrish writes about how the ancient code created aligned incentives between builders of buildings and their residents, which increased the odds of structures that didn’t collapse once the builder had moved on. | learn more

retail therapy

The future of retail in the age of Amazon. 

Retailers trying to compete the old away against Amazon are asking for trouble. Obviously, they need to find an edge in some other way. I expected to skim this article and archive it forever, but ended up reading it in […]

book recommendations

Hillbilly Elegy

JD Vance does a nice job of story-telling in this book about his hillbilly family and their cultural origins. He really gives a voice to his people that we “urban elites” are unlikely to have seen firsthand. Though I felt […]

big ideas

The acceleration of addictiveness. 

“What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they’re all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that […]

better doing

How to be more productive without burning out. 

In the business environment of today, it seems people are always pushing themselves to do more and work harder. Matt Plummer, founder of employee training company Zarvana, writes in the Harvard Business Review about his method for doing more with […]

better doing

The generalized specialist. 

“Should we generalize or specialize? This article explores how Shakespeare and Da Vinci excelled by branching out from their core competencies.” Side note: I’ve heard before that Shakespeare might not have been a real individual, but that doesn’t detract from […]

retail therapy

The last days of Target Canada. 

“Target pulled the plug on its massive Canadian expansion less than two years after opening. This is the incredible untold story of how it all went wrong.” | learn more