10 Weekend Reads – The Big Picture

• How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche: More than 100 million people visit the retailer for their groceries — and gas and TVs and gold bars and pet coffins — but saving money may not be the only motive. (New York Times)

• Politics and your portfolio: How the election could impact your money: Politics don’t matter for your portfolio if you’re one of many people investing to build wealth over a long period of time. (OptimistiCallie) see also Politics & Investing

• Buy, Pose, Post: a semi-triumphant return of physical media. We used to seek out content. Now content seeks us out. This is defined by the digital interruptions in our life. Despite this, however, every data point we have suggests that younger generations are revolting against the intrusive reality. People have pushed back against the unneeded intrusiveness practically since push notifications started appearing on phones back in 2010 and 2011. (Posting Nexus)

• Why is New York shrinking? Over the past three years, the population has declined by almost 500,000. On a ranking of the country’s contracting cities, New York handily takes the top spot, shrinking by 400,000 more than the next on the list (Chicago). New York City is 6% smaller than in 2020, the most severe decline in the largest 50 US cities over this horizon, after San Francisco (-7%). (Financial Times)

• The Myth Of Simple Truths: “It would be a wonderful world were the Simple Truth Thesis true. Our political task simply would be to empower those who know the simple truth, and rebuke the fools who do not. But the Simple Truth Thesis is not true. In fact, it’s a fairytale—soothing, but ultimately unfit for a serious mind. For any Big Question, there are several defensible positions; it is precisely this feature that makes them big. (3 Quarks Daily)

• USPS Text Scammers Duped His Wife, So He Hacked Their Operation: The Smishing Triad network sends up to 100,000 scam texts per day globally. One of those messages went to Grant Smith, who infiltrated their systems and exposed them to US authorities. (Wired)

• New Painkiller Could Bring Relief to Millions—Without Addiction Risk: The medication initially known as VX-548 blocks sodium channels in nerves, blocking pain signals before they reach the brain. (Scientific American)

• The New York Times’ Ezra Klein problem. The show is a commercial home run for the New York Times as well, which has cemented itself as one of the biggest players in audio, producing three of Apple’s top 10 podcasts. Whether the paper will admit that The Ezra Klein Show is a success, however, is less clear (This is fascinating). (Semafor)

• Infiltrating the Far Right: The threat from domestic terrorism is rising, but, with Republicans decrying the “deep state,” the F.B.I. is cautious about investigating far-right groups. Vigilantes are leaping into the fray. (New Yorker)

• Risking His Own Extinction to Rescue the Rarest of Flowers: Carlos Magdalena, whose botanical adventures have shades of Indiana Jones, was a driving force in saving the world’s smallest water lily and finding the largest one. He has been called the “plant messiah.” (New York Times)