What I read this week...

Affirmative action, San Diego's housing success, and Taylor Swift's dominance

What I read this week…

• America wants a centrist party – in theory (WSJ Opinion)

• The case for a Democratic surprise on election night (FiveThirtyEight)

• Signal to roll out Snapchat-like "stories" feature (Axios)

• How Andreessen Horowitz’s LPs are feeling these days (The Information)

• Divisions in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire blur on his trading titan Alameda’s balance sheet (CoinDesk)

• Social Capital backs cancer test startup (Axios)

• Inside San Diego’s surprising success housing homeless people (LA Times)

• Asian American students face bias, but it’s not what you might think (NYT Opinion)

• The end of affirmative action would be a disaster (The Atlantic)

• How America turned against the First Amendment (The Verge)

• How a secret meeting put Hakeem Jeffries on track to replace Pelosi (Politico)

• Professional cornhole has a cheating scandal called BagGate (WSJ)

• How Taylor Swift went back to the past and turned ‘Midnights’ into her biggest album success yet (CNBC)

On Twitter…

Anoushka Vaswani @anoushkavaswani

There are only 22 public software companies with a 10B+ market cap right now but 213 software private unicorns 🤔

T Wolf 🌁 @Twolfrecovery

Even the Governor has realized throwing good money away after bad isn't the solution. He wants to see plans on #homelessness first. Because right now, we don't have a good one. #SanFrancisco

Sara Libby @SaraLibby

BREAKING: Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday he will halt a new round of homelessness funding until jurisdictions can "coordinate an approach that will deliver more substantial results."

Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA @GRDecter

Layoffs announced in the last day: - Lyft 13% of workers - Opendoor 18% - Stripe 14% - Chime 12% - Twitter 50% - Morgan Stanley (% unknown)

Connie Chan 🍒 @conniechan

Hardware + OS is a strong moat.

Joseph Carlson @joecarlsonshow

Apple is now worth as much as Meta, Amazon, and Google COMBINED.

Paul Graham @paulg

Any organization with a large, protected income will tend by default toward administrative bloat. It's the same in government, at Harvard, at Google. Unless you take explicit measures to avoid it, you'll overhire.

Paul Graham @paulg

And then you have a second problem: all the unnecessary people you've hired become a drag on the necessary ones. The unproductive people need to seem like they're achieving something, so they'll organize meetings to waste the time of the productive ones.

Sally Shin (sallyshin.eth) @sallyshin

Twitter has essentially replaced newswire services and become an important source during big events. It's also valuable because we get a front row seat of reactions to some of the most influential people in the world. I don't disagree there should be a premium tier for Twitter.