Week of August 27, 2018

A few things of note from around the Internet this week…

Power

Initially, the game that activist investors play is impressive. But, spend any amount of time investigating and they’re overwhelmingly just a bunch of greedy, white men (seriously, Google Paul Singer and check out that lineup) that are obsessed with power.

Throughout our conversations, Bush returned to a theme that consumed him. He talked about how investors like Singer—financiers who take the assets built by others and manipulate them like puzzle pieces to make money for themselves—are affecting the country on a grand scale. A healthy country, he said, needs economic biodiversity, with companies of different sizes chasing innovation, or embarking on long, hard projects, without being punished. The disproportionate power of the Wall Street investor class, Bush felt, dampened all that, and gradually made the economy, and most of the people in it, more fragile.

Cubes

Kids these days:

Harvey

Bryan Washington looks back at Hurricane Harvey:

More than a few essayists and pundits broached the question of why Houstonians didn’t prepare for a storm, but the question answers itself: We did. The city rallied for a coming storm, not the storm that came. The city’s recent history with flooding ranged from the pedestrian to the catastrophic, but a Harvey hadn’t happened before. And had there actually been an evacuation, considering that some areas saw nearly ten inches of rain in under two hours, we’d have created six killing lanes across multiple highways and feeder roads. There was simply no way of “preparing” for it—unless, of course, we’d all heeded the scientists and meteorologists and journalists ruing global warming’s effect on our Gulf for years.

Future

Stephen Curry doing his part to make the world a little bit better for our twin girls and all little girls growing up today.

I want our girls to grow up knowing that there are no boundaries that can be placed on their futures, period. I want them to grow up in a world where their gender does not feel like a rulebook for what they should think, or be, or do. And I want them to grow up believing that they can dream big, and strive for careers where they’ll be treated fairly.

Rage

Another chapter in the incredibly length book about the broken American education system.

Rohit Chopra, a former Education Department special adviser, put it to me this way: “The most important thing to remember” about the federal student loan program, he said, “is borrowers are not the customer. Borrowers are the product.”