The San Francisco bagel famine broke for a short time in 2011, when four former Dartmouth students started an outfit called Schmendricks. (The name means ‘‘stupid person’’ in Yiddish.) They decided to follow tech start-up protocol — ‘‘to A/B test our way to a perfect bagel,’’ says Dan Scholnick, one of the schmendricks who not at all stupidly kept his day job as a venture capitalist. By November 2011 they had a product ready to take to beta. So Schmendricks posted an announcement on Facebook and Twitter and placed a sign in front of Faye’s Video and Espresso Bar, across the street from Bi-Rite Market, a sort of Dean & DeLuca of San Francisco. Then, on the appointed morning, they showed up with four dozen bagels — and found a line stretching down the block. The bagel columnist for J., a Northern California Jewish weekly, described the product as ‘‘everything you could ever want.’’ But the glory didn’t last. Before Schmendricks opened a storefront, its bagel disappeared. ‘‘We were never going to grow the way a top-tier tech company is going to grow,’’ Scholnick told me, stating the obvious. Besides, after months of hand-rolling, Schmendricks’ primary baker discovered she had a gluten intolerance.

America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges.

Stock prices will always be far more volatile than cash-equivalent holdings. Over the long term, however,
currency-denominated instruments are riskier investments – far riskier investments – than widely-diversified stock
portfolios that are bought over time and that are owned in a manner invoking only token fees and commissions. That
lesson has not customarily been taught in business schools, where volatility is almost universally used as a proxy for
risk. Though this pedagogic assumption makes for easy teaching, it is dead wrong: Volatility is far from
synonymous with risk.

My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising.

So here you go. Eight minutes of reading about reading. These are the tricks that work for me. Thanks to my boss Pedro for reminding me to finally write this.