10 Weekend Reads

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• The Texas Miracle Texas Democrats broke the map. Texas Republicans broke themselves. Make no mistake: Blue Texas is a seismic event in American politics. I know this because I can count, and because Republicans have always said it would be, when they were not too busy gloating that it would never happen. ​Talarico’s Senate win handed Democrats the chamber and ended three decades of unbroken Republican rule; Gina Hinojosa took the governorship from Abbott. Cruz said “if Texas falls, everything changes.” It fell. (Mother Jones)

• How to Spot a Market Bubble: How valuation, easy credit, speculation, and impossible growth expectations create financial manias. An expensive market by itself is not a bubble. Prices can be uncomfortably high for years without crashing, as long as buyers pay cash, banks stay rational, and expectations stay grounded. Polymath Investor opens with Scott McNealy’s 2002 confession that Sun at $64, ten times sales, required 100% of revenue for ten years with zero costs just to pay investors back; it went below $5. An expensive market alone is not a bubble. Their “Four-Cylinder Ignition Rule”: extreme prices, reckless borrowing, frenzied crowd gambling and impossible growth math, all at once. (Polymath Investor)

• AI Has Taken Over Every Corner of the Market: This week’s stock selloff shows how the industry has become deeply embedded in pensions, debt markets and the broader economy, touching everyone’s wealth. (Bloomberg free)

• The unlikely queen of the bagel business: She’s taught dozens of entrepreneurs around the world how to make bagels — and money. Katherine Laidlaw on Beth George, 63, the “bagel whisperer” who has trained dozens of operators around the world in making bagels and money. Opens in a Toronto back kitchen where a $1.5k oven repair on a $40k machine is the difference between one shop open and two. (The Hustle)

• Exactly how Apple Music used sound to build its new brand identity: For its rebrand of Apple Music, TBWA\Media Arts Lab set out to visualise sound. The result involved months of experimentation, a surprising amount of oil, and a renewed appreciation for showing your workings. (It’s Nice That)

​• Silicon Valley’s ‘In-Flight Magazine’: Colossus Gives Moguls the Coverage They Crave: Tech’s corner offices have no love left for the news media, so a lushly produced oversize print quarterly is giving them the coverage they want instead. A venture capitalist’s glossy quarterly wants to be The New Yorker for tech billionaires. (San Francisco Standard)

• Why hasn’t there been a major financial crisis in recent years? Since the 2008 crisis, and the subsequent sovereign crisis in the Eurozone, we have yet to see another financial crisis happen on a scale that had a lasting market and macroeconomic impact. Why? We examine why the post-GFC era has seen fewer financial crises. Explanations include the reforms made after 2008 to avoid a repeat, the lower proportion of financial assets held by the banking system, as well as the speedier reaction of policymakers when wobbles have occurred. Henry Allen, Peter Sidorov and Camilla Siazon, Deutsche Bank Research: a 19-page look at why the post-GFC era has produced fewer crises, and which vulnerabilities might produce the next one. (Deutsche Bank Research)

• The Afterlife of Pi: Russell Samora’s scrolling history of pi’s digits and the random walk, from a pi obsessive in 1853 through Pearson’s 1905 “problem of the random walk” in Nature, to a billion digits generated in 4.2 seconds today. (Pudding)¸

• Deskilling the body: We are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. (Aeon)

• The Brain Injury That Made a Middle School Teacher a Musical Genius: When Ed Freytag suffered a brain injury in a motorcycle accident, it unlocked a rare musical talent. (New York Times)

Video of the day: Michael Mauboussin Master Class — Moats, Skill, Luck, Decision Making and a Whole Lot More (Acquired)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776. Berry also hosts After Earnings, Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.

Global crude oil flows through the 2026 Hormuz closure

Source: Oil Flows 2026

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