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February 13, 2021
After a winter hibernation, I'm restarting my weekly newsletter and website. Please hold your applause and comments until the end.
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The break gave me time to recharge and rethink what I want to do with this whole "writing on the internet" thing now that I'm officially late to the newsletter trend recently popularized by Substack and other platforms -- who really wants to subscribe to yet another mailing list? So it's a question worth asking: what incremental value do I think I can deliver to you, busy 21st Century Sentient Being?
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My strength lies in curation, which is actually a less impressive skill than you might think, but it's difficult to fake, making it increasingly important in this age of infinite (and questionable) information. If I'm being honest, curation is a brute-force function of inputs, e.g., read a lot of high quality writing. This is my only true competitive advantage: I'm willing to sit and read for hours a day.
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More likely than not, I probably read more than you do. And if I read more than you, I'm probably better at identifying worthwhile stories. Again, it's just the math of the inputs above -- it also means I read a lot of garbage too! So let me continue to do the hard discovery work for you while you do more important things. Life's too short to read low quality "content" or scroll your bottomless social feeds. I'm here to help.
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End Notes will continue to aggregate some of the best writing you'll come across, with a focus on evergreen stories uncorrelated to the 24/7 news media complex so you can read them at your leisure.
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No New Posts on Eric's Two Books This Week :(
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Stories Worth Sharing
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Department of Failed Incentives
Ranjan Roy (Substack)
Published in May 2020
Medium read
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"If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You'd net a clean $8 profit per pizza [insert nerdy economics joke about there is such a thing as a free lunch]."
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Life Lessons
Morgan Housel (Collaborative Fund)
Published in September 2020
Short read
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"Something can be factually true but contextually nonsense. Bad ideas often have at least some seed of truth that gives their followers confidence. Tell people what they want to hear and you can be wrong indefinitely without penalty."
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Stuff You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know
Ryan (Krueger & Catalano)
Published in March 2019
Short read
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"I read a 44-page disclosure from a different bank/brokerage firm updating customers in this rising rate environment...I was rubbing my eyes at the designed-to-be-ignored-legalese, but then I saw it…Allow me to enlarge the font: Interest rates are established periodically and may seek to pay a rate as low as possible based on prevailing market and business conditions. Pardon?????"
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The Crime Beat
Michael LaPointe (The Paris Review)
Published in May 2019
Medium read
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"He was drawn to the growing phenomenon of gambling ships. Gambling was illegal in California, but state law only extended three miles out from the coast. Seafaring entrepreneurs built massive ships equipped with casinos, anchored them just a little over three miles from shore, and declared themselves beyond the law. The puritanical “three-mile limit” became known as a kind of membrane that you could puncture with a liberating water-taxi ride to the ships. The Johanna Smith set sail in 1926, and it was joined by the Monte Carlo and La Playa when the 1932 Summer Olympics brought the sporting crowds to Los Angeles."
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Animal Spirits
Cecilia D'Anastasio (Wired)
Published in April 2020
Long read
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"And those cards aren’t just valuable for their rarity or historic authenticity. As play formats are announced or new cards proliferate, veteran cards are organically reactivated. Players are constantly reaching back into the still-living archives of Magic and plucking out old cards for their new decks, which makes those cards hot commodities in a constantly fluctuating market. (Of course some cards are simply rare and thus valuable. There are 572 Magic cards on a “Reserved List,” a catalog of cards that Wizards of the Coast promises will never be reprinted. On that list is the famous Black Lotus, one of which sold for $166,000 at a 2019 auction)."
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