Tim Cook, the iPhone, and the Secretive Archives That Help Run Apple
We shipped products that weren’t successful. We just got up the next day and put our head down and went on to the next thing.
Fascinating. I think people have forgotten that the iPhone was not an instant hit. Apple’s stock price only really started to climb around 2009, even though the iPhone was launched in 2007.
An Ugly House in a Spectacular Spot Gets a Modern Redo
Cool.
李录与比亚迪的故事 (Li Lu and the Story of BYD)
Fascinating story of how Li Lu invested in BYD and persuaded Warren Buffett to invest in 2008.
Why women, more than men, are abandoning rural Japan
Many smaller places have now established strategies to tackle gender discrimination
I was wondering why this was happening when I saw the title, and I was right. Gender equality is a major advancement in modernization.
…that the most important thing a student gets from an Ivy Plus education isn’t instruction or prestige or even connections. It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people.
This series of articles is worth a read:
Who got into the Ivy Plus schools?
We first show you a simple fact – applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are more than twice as likely to attend Ivy-Plus colleges, even among applicants with the same SAT or ACT scores
The Future of Highly Selective Colleges
Tests + lottery.
Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Offers to Buy Universal Music Group
As a music lover, I don’t want Bill Ackman to take over Universal Music.
This is an interesting site. Consumption (消费) is the most popular keyword in Chinese state media.
Mount Everest scam: Sherpas ‘poisoned’ trekkers in insurance fraud
Investigators say the scam involved multiple actors across the trekking ecosystem, including sherpas, trekking company owners, helicopter operators and hospital executives.
Wait, what? There are always surprises during the Everest season.
YouTube Is the World’s Largest Media Company
YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division).
The firm, which declared YouTube the “new king of all media” last year, is now valued at between $500 billion-$560 billion, far above any traditional media competitors. The closest would be Netflix, which has a market cap of about $409 billion as of writing.
Alphabet’s current market cap is $3.8 trillion. According to this estimate, YouTube accounts for about 15% of Alphabet’s total value.
This is pretty wild. The first reply in the thread cracked me up.
How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos
There are still many analog pictures of the cosmos waiting to be analyzed.
Extensive reading: The Biggest Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus
An array of 189 CCDs totaling 3.2 billion pixels, the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is the largest digital camera ever built. Over the next 10 years, it will repeatedly photograph approximately 20 billion galaxies.
抽象：数学的美感 (Abstraction: The Beauty of Mathematics)
Abstraction is truly beautiful. Reading this article reminds me of another one: How Writing Changes Mathematical Thought.
Why the U.S. Fertility Rate Has Hit a Record Low
In 2025, birthrates for women in their late 30s exceeded those for women in their early 20s for the first time.
The US fertility rate has also hit a record low. I wonder how many women in their late 30s are using IVF.
In Japan: Many Japanese Teens Giving Up on Getting Married and Having Children
Inside Trump’s Secret Plans for Iran
Did the NYT install a camera and a microphone in the White House?