10 Columbus Day AM Reads

My back-to-work-because-Columbus-Day-is-no-longer-a-market-holiday morning reads:

• If you think grocery prices take a big bite out of your paycheck in the US, check out the rest of the world: What’s more, it’s important to note that food prices in the U.S. — relatively speaking — are the cheapest in the world, and have been for a long time. This is the case whether measured in terms of disposable personal income or in terms of percentage of household expenditures.  (The Conversation)

• The Family That Went Against the Grain—and Built a Billion-Dollar Company: It was a side hustle. Now it’s a tortilla empire. Siete Foods did it in seven steps. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Group Chats Rule the World: They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection. (New York Times Magazine)

• Meet the Birkin Bag of the Book World: Collectible, Covetable and Priced to Match Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more. But that’s just the beginning of this family-run company’s ambitions. (New York Times)

• The big idea: should we be thinking about luck differently? We tend to focus on good or bad fortune, successes and failures. But what about the fact you’re here at all? (The Guardian)

• This Homemade Drone Software Finds People When Search and Rescue Teams Can’t: British Mountain Rescue workers have developed an automated drone system that can scour a landscape far quicker and more thoroughly than human eyes. (Wired)

• Will the ‘SmartLess’ Podcast Be the Biggest Role of Their Careers? Started during the pandemic, this venture is the first step in a media empire being built by the actors Sean Hayes, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman. (New York Times)

• The Searchers Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab: In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet. I’m willing to say this because I’m not a scientist and I don’t work in media relations for NASA. But all evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don’t find conditions for life on the moons near us, we’ll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we’ll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things. (Washington Post)

• Strange and wondrous creatures: plankton and the origins of life on Earth: Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse. Earth would have no complex life of any kind. (The Guardian)

• Exploring the Nick Saban butterfly effect, 400-plus job changes later: ‘You better be prepared’ The speech he gave rocked the football world, particularly the lives of 423 coaches and staffers whose jobs would be impacted by the coaching dominoes that would begin to fall from his retirement. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend — Live from FutureProof in Huntington Beach, California! — with Joe Lonsdale of 8VC. He is a successful serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist,  co-founded Palantir Technologies, founded Adapar, a wealth management platform, and Opto, a private market investment platform.

See the Ocean Heat Fueling Hurricane Milton, in One Chart

Source: New York Times

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