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:

• Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity: How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished: Watterson’s way of speaking about these things occasionally veers into the self-important register of grievance, the eternal complaint of someone for whom things-as-they-are never satisfy because things-as-they-were always seem better. But there’s no denying the conviction with which he fought the fight, even before he had the name-brand authority he’d later earn, even back when it really looked like he was going to lose. And he came very close to losing some of his biggest battles with the syndicate. (The Republic of Letters)

• Ken Griffin’s Billions and Billions The hedge-fund titan is an unabashed big spender, from pièds-a-terre to politics. “When I was in college, I wanted to be in private equity,” he said. He named one of the titans of that field: “Henry Kravis—that was the mission.” I pressed him to cite someone who had influenced him in the world of hedge funds—the investment firms that emerged in the nineteen-fifties with trading strategies designed to offer wealthy clients exclusivity, higher returns, and lower risks. Griffin dodged the question with a feeble joke. Early in his career, he said, whenever he told someone that he worked at a hedge fund, the response “was, literally, ‘Do you use shrubs or bushes?’ ” (New Yorker)

• Is Lloyd’s of London the world’s oldest podshop? No. But it’s sort of a bit like one: The 94 syndicates for which we have data in 2025 are not exactly individual firms. In fact, they have no legal identity whatsoever. Instead, they are bits of cordoned-off capital, which are used as conduits by 54 different managing agents to both compete and collaborate to write Lloyd’s of London insurance policies on behalf of underlying members. (Financial Times free)

• Leave It to Beaver: Everything is bigger at Buc-ee’s. Clearly Buc-ee’s is more than just a large gas station. It has come to symbolize Texas, the world-conquering juggernaut. As Steve Bannon said recently, Texas is “where the future is being built.” Or as Abbott put it in 2024, at the grand opening of the Luling location, “Beaver and Buc-ee’s are now icons across the United States. They spread Texas hospitality, great barbecue, and Beaver Nuggets wherever they go.” A lifelong Texan, I came to realize that I needed to see the future for myself. I needed to eat some Beaver Nuggets. (The Baffler)

• How trust funds made the modern world In progress we trust: In fact, trusts are everywhere. In the parts of the world which use law derived from English law, they are as important a legal concept as contracts or negligence. Nearly all shares in Britain are traded on the basis of trusts. Every home jointly owned by a couple involves a trust. They play just as important a role in America, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong and Singapore, whose legal systems are also derived from English law. For much of their history, trusts have been an instrument of social and economic progress. They allowed married women to own property when the rest of the law prohibited it. England’s rich tradition of clubs and societies owes its origins to the institution of the trust, which enabled much greater freedom of association in the early modern and industrial period than in other European countries. The London Stock Exchange and the insurance marketplace Lloyd’s were both originally trusts. (Benedict’s Substack)

• Is spontaneity a luxury good? On line culture, algorithmic curation, and the death of wandering. On how schedule density, family logistics, and overcommitment have made spur-of-the-moment plans a class marker. Useful read whether you have kids or not. (Your Brain on Money)

• Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?: Tim Ferriss looks at his own sales data and the broader category trends for how-to nonfiction. The early evidence is hard to argue with; Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future (Tim Ferriss)

• Samurai City: Works in Progress on how Edo became the largest city on Earth by 1700 — a samurai-administered megalopolis with surprisingly modern logistics. Pure delight for urbanism nerds. For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city. (Works In Progress)

• “You Killed the Car” A Ferrari and a distinctive Highland Park home combined for an iconic scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This adapted excerpt from a new book details how it all went (crashing) down. (Chicago Mag)

• Cracking stories, Gromit: Wallace’s long-suffering canine companion to tell all in memoir: After ‘bottling everything up for a long time’ the faithful pet, who has remained silent for many years, will spill the beans on the pair’s ‘pet hates and fur-vent passions’ Gromit is getting a memoir. The Guardian plays it straight, which is half the joke. (The Guardian)

Video of the day: How Ashton Kutcher Outsmarted Silicon Valley

Be sure to check out our Master’s in Business this week with Seth Klarman, CEO and portfolio manager of The Baupost Group. Founded in 1982 with $27 million in seed capital, over the past four decades, Baupost has grown to $22 billion, with annual net returns of over 20%. The legendary investor is known for his patient, risk-averse, and contrarian approach to finding deeply discounted securities across equities, distressed debt, and real estate.  He is the author of Margin of Safety (1991) and the editor of the 7th edition of Security Analysis (2023).

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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

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