Things I Learned

1. Japan does not have a foreign intelligence agency. (source)

2. Manhattan today has 600k fewer residents than it did in 1910. (source)

3. In virtually all favorite-color polls, blue is overwhelmingly selected as the favorite. The second place color — red or green, depending on the country — is typically at least 10 to 20 percentage points behind. (source)

4. North Korea played in the 2010 World Cup. (source)

5. There is no standardized and/or legal definition of the “sell-by” date on food. It is purely an inventory management tool. (source)

6. The share of wealth held by the top 10 per cent in the US, the UK, and Europe has been flat or falling for the past 15 years. (source; see also)

7. Chickens are unable to sweat. (source)

8. In order to encourage tax compliance, every receipt in Taiwan is automatically a lottery ticket. The lottery is drawn every two months, and consumers can win up to $300k. (source, h/t)

9. The amount of fabric in the average dress fell from 20 square yards in 1910, to 7 square yards in 1920. (source)

10. If you draw a straight line from the easternmost to westernmost points of the contiguous United States, and another from the northernmost to southernmost, the two lines do not intersect.1 (source)

11. No mammals have naturally green fur. (source)

12. White Castle is the oldest fast food chain in the US. (source)

13. 90% of Americans born in 1940 earned more than their parents did by age 30. Among those born in the 1980s, only about half did. (source).

14. The can opener was invented nearly 50 years after the can. Prior to that, cans were opened with a hammer and chisel, or by throwing them in the fire until they melted. (source)

15. There was a U.S. president whose first language was not English. (source)

16. The US imports more from Taiwan than it does from China. (source)

17. Among dual-income married couples in the US, about 30% of wives earn more than their husbands. (source)

18. The term “tank” for an armored vehicle originated as a British World War I code name intended to disguise the vehicles as water tanks. (source)

Corrigenda:

Thanks to those of you who sent in corrections to last month’s Things I Learned. Two corrections:

• Fact #10 meant to say “Xi Jinping’s salary is $22,000 a year,” not $22,000 a month.

• Fact #1 stated that the “the number of abortions in the US has increased since the repeal of Roe v. Wade.” As was pointed out to me, it was not “repealed” but “overturned.”

On This Day in Previous Editions

• (July 2023) (#4) The last time a US troop was killed from an enemy aircraft attack was 1953. (source)

• (July 2025): (#15) Ministers in the Singaporean government — i.e. the equivalent of cabinet secretaries — earn an average salary of $1.1 million per year, as their salary is computed by taking the average income of the top 1000 highest income earners in the country. (source)

• (July 2024) (#1) Town planning used to be an Olympic event. (source)

Things I Liked

• The design of the new Theodore Roosevelt museum in North Dakota.

• The Odyssey

• This article about Driscoll’s berries [feat. this fun fact: “Driscoll’s is now the second-highest-earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola”]

• This picture of the construction of the Sagrada Familia in 1906.

• The plans for Emirates new “U-Dream” headrest in economy class.2

Graphs I Liked

• The decline of fun

  

• Superhero fatigue

  

• “The wealthier you are in the US, the more likely your kids are to be employed by 27, until you get to the 90th percentile (about $250k a year in household income today), after which it goes downhill” (h/t, source)

  

Final Thoughts

I hope everyone had a nice July. For me, the beginning was consumed with July 4 festivities, the World Cup and such; the end was marked by a week-long trip to the UK, first to visit various friends in London and then to attend the wedding of a former colleague from my days at The Economist.3 One interesting difference between British and American weddings is that the groom apparently always gives a speech at British weddings, whereas speeches from either the bride or groom seem much less common at American weddings (I’m not sure I’ve ever heard one?).

Other things: I attended my first professional cricket match (I have many, many thoughts on how the sport can be improved); I learned a new card game, Mille Bornes, that I very much enjoyed; and I played in two tennis tournaments, one of which went well and one which did not.

Finally, this month marks exactly 3 years since the very first edition of this Things I Learned newsletter. Crunching the numbers, I seem to have learned 623 things since then. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed.

Things I Learned

1. The number of abortions in the US has increased since the repeal of Roe v. Wade. (source)

2. A total of 11 years transpired between the Wright brothers’ first human flight (1903) and the first commercial passenger flight (1914). (source)

3. A cow has just one calf a year. (source)

4. In the last week of June 2026, Paris, France recorded more days with a temperature above 104°F (40°C) than it did in the entire 147 year period 1872-2019. (source)

5. The name “Vanessa” was invented by writer Jonathan Swift as a pseudonym for his lover Esther Vanhomrigh. (source)

6. Elon Musk’s compensation from Tesla in 2025 (i.e., pre-SpaceX) was approximately 16 times the combined compensation of the next 400 highest paid CEOs that year (source).1

7. When gunpowder was first discovered in China, it was not intended for use as a weapon; it emerged from attempts by Taoist alchemists to create an elixir of immortality. It was only weaponized several hundred years after its discovery. (source)

8. The card game “Magic: The Gathering” was invented by the great-great grandson of James Garfield, the 20th president of the US. (source)

9. In the US, just 3.3% of (heterosexual) couples consist of a woman who is taller than the man.2 (source)

10. Xi Jinping’s salary is $22,000 a year. (source)

11. In the NYC subway, some lines are letters and others are numbers. This is because New York's subway was originally built by competing companies that used different track sizes and different naming systems. (source)

12. Profession is not a (federally) protected class in the US. It is generally legal to charge different prices to people based on their profession. [definitely not legal advice!]. (source)

13. A phonestheme is a pattern of sounds systematically paired with a certain meaning in a language. For example, the English phonestheme “gl-” occurs in a large number of words relating to light or vision, like “glitter”, “glisten”, “glow”, “gleam”, “glare”, “glint”, “glimmer”, “gloss”. (source; other examples).

14. Fewer than 4% of DSA members hold blue-collar jobs. (source)

From this Day in Previous Editions:

• (June 2025; #2): The word “forte”, as in one’s strong suit, is supposed to be pronounced like “fort”, not “for-tay”. (source)

• (June 2024; #4): The record of peasant revolts from 1500-1910 is 1 win, 6 draws, 71 losses. (source, h/t)

Special Feature! World-Cup-Themed Things I Learned

Since I’ve spent the better part of the past couple weeks watching the World Cup, here are some soccer related facts I have learned:

1. Only 8 countries have ever won the World Cup. (source)

2. 1968 was the first year that a soccer ball had its iconic black and white hexagonal look. The ball was designed this way because it was made by Adidas. (source).

3. The offsides rule in soccer is defined by reference to the second-to-last defender, where the last defender is often, but not always, the goalkeeper (source, h/t).

4. In the 1938 world cup, Sweden automatically advanced to the second round because their scheduled opponent, Austria, was annexed by Germany. (source)

5. Approximately one in five goals comes from a corner kick. (source)

6. “Soccer” was the more common name than “football” in the UK until about the 1960s.3 (source)

7. 73% of players on Morocco’s 2026 World Cup roster were not born in Morocco. (source)

Miscellaneous Things I Liked in June

• The New York Knicks.

• This collection of Americana-themed postage stamps by Ralph Lauren.4

• The contents of this “America250” time capsule, to which every state government / governor was asked to contribute items (the capsule is to be opened in 2276). Some of the more interesting contributions: a Claude AI prediction (California), a whalebone (Maine), a recipe card for the biscochito cookie (New Mexico).

• This letter from my great great uncle to my uncle, written almost exactly 50 years ago on the occasion of America’s 200th birthday:

  

Articles I Enjoyed Reading:

• Joe Wiesenthal’s list of reasons for why crypto is having its coldest winter to date.

• This piece (”The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now”) on how the aesthetics of logos that appealed to millennials differ from the ones that appeal to gen z.

• The Law of Averages, about the maritime origin of the concept of “average.”

• The advice about wedding gift giving/receiving at the end of this column.

• The wikipedia article on the last speaker of the cornish language.

• Baolian Wang’s “The $69 Billion Mirage: How an Accounting Rule Inflated S&P 500’s Q1 Earnings by 12%”.

• This article from The Economist on what sorts of things correlate with world cup soccer strength, ft. these two graphs:

  

Personal Updates

Quieter month than last, but some sporadic highlights: a trip to California for a wedding; traveling to Philadelphia to see France play Iraq in the world cup; a ride in an original 1925 Model-T Ford; a visit to the new costume exhibit at the Met; the engagement celebration of close friends; another unsuccessful trivia night at Farm.One; three (somewhat more successful) corporate softball games; a day spent on a farm feeding alpacas, collecting honey, and harvesting eggs from chickens. This month also marked the one-year anniversary of finishing my PhD, which feels like a lifetime ago. Some pictures to mark such things:

I hope everyone has a great July!!

Things I Learned

1. Wi-Fi is not an acronym and does not stand for anything.1 (source)

2. The cumulative net profit of the US airline industry from 1978 to 2025 was negative $37 billion. (source)

3. In the US, more people (~650,000) work in autism therapy than in mining and logging, telecommunications, or the US Postal Service. (source)

4. Kentucky Derby times have not improved since the 1960s (+ some interesting theories as to why).

5. Up until World War II, the majority of renters in NYC all moved at the same time on May 1st at 9am. (source)

6. 1967 was the first year that color movies overtook black and white in production. (source)

7. In imperial China, 3 percent was the maximum legal monthly loan rate; charging more was punishable by 40 to 100 blows with a light cane. (source)

8. The central opening hole in a CD was chosen to be exactly the size of a Dutch coin known as a dubbeltje. (source)

9. Meta earns 1 out of every 5 dollars spent in the global ad market. (source)

10. In 712 Harvard course offerings last year — roughly a third of all classes — every enrolled undergraduate received an A. (source)

11. The word boycott is named after the 19th century english captain Charles Boycott, who — after he refused to reduce the rent of his tenants by more than 10 percent — was shunned by his workers, local businessmen, and the local postman. (source)

12. Winston Churchill wrote a six-volume, 4700-page, 1.6-million-word history of World War II for which he won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. (source, h/t)

13. 80 per cent of the value of US currency is in $100 bills, 70 per cent of which are held overseas (source).

14. China used more cement in three years between 2011-2013 than the United States used over the course of the entire 20th century (source).

15. The font used for road signs in the US was developed by the US federal highway administration and is colloquially known as ‘highway gothic’. (source)

16. Approximately 40% of Supreme Court decisions are unanimous.2 (source)

From This Month in Previous Years

• (May 2025): White asparagus and green asparagus are the same exact plant; white asparagus is simply created by growing the asparagus without access to sunlight. (source)

• (May 2024): In 1912, Per capita Native American (indigenous) wealth in the US exceeded per capita white wealth (source, h/t).

Miscellaneous May Observations:

• I enjoyed these aerial photos of early NYC; as well as this photo of Cleopatra’s handwriting.

• Of the many post-mortems of Spirit Airlines, the best I came across was this one (“Why Did Spirit Fail While Ryanair Thrives”) by Ben Schlappig. Spoiler: it has nothing to do with “Americans being rich”.

• I was very sad to hear about the passing of John Sterling, the Yankees radio announcer. Among other things, Sterling had perfect attendance for 30 years, he called 5,060 consecutive Yankees games from 1989 to 2019, including ~3.0% of all games in MLB history and 28.7% of all games in Yankees history.3

Personal Updates

It was a busy May after a not-so-great April. I think my main accomplishment was completing my own version of a “75-hard” challenge4, where I committed to, for 75 consecutive days, (i) running 4 miles or biking 10 miles every day (ii) giving up alcohol.5 I started my challenge on March 12 and completed it on May 24; the final tally was 54 days of 4-mile runs (216 miles); 22 days of 10-mile bike rides (222 miles) + 49 other additional workouts (tennis, swimming, chessboxing, strength, baseball, etc). Two brief reflections:

• The no-alcohol component was much more challenging than the exercise component, mostly because of how ingrained drinking has become at so many social events. I did gain a deeper appreciation for how much mocktail culture has grown over the past decade, at least in New York City. I’m curious whether a similar trend has taken hold outside the United States..

• There is a lot of received wisdom out there that cutting alcohol “drastically” improves sleep quality. I’m always a bit skeptical of claimed large effect sizes in matters of personal health, so I wanted to test this out on myself (I think they call this “anecdata”, or “me-conomics”). At least according to my Oura ring data, I think my prior is validated?

  

Anyway, glad that’s done! Other things I enjoyed in May: a live cooking demonstration by J. Kenji López-Alt (including my first time trying pastrami dumplings); playing tennis at the US Open courts at Flushing; the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Running Challenge; my first in-person Yankees game of the season; the Knicks playoff run; a 3-day trip to Chicago. Lowlights: a very rainy memorial day weekend.

Have a happy June!

Things I Learned

1. Every Hollywood film released in India gets a mandatory interval. (source)

2. The obesity pay gap is (a) almost enitrely borne by women (b) significantly increases with the level of education. (source)

3. The two Supreme Court justices least likely to vote together — Elena Kagan and Samuel Alito — still vote together 61% of the time, excluding unanimous decisions. (source)

4. Jane Street, a trading firm with 3,500 employees and no CEO, earned more total profits last year than the world’s largest asset manager Blackrock ($13 trn AUM) and the world’s largest private equity firm Blackstone ($1 trn AUM) combined.1 (source)

5. There has not been a left-handed catcher in MLB since the 1980s. (source)

6. Virtually all the modern-day tropes about pirates are inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, rather than based on historical fact. Pirates rarely buried treasure or wore eye patches aboard ships; they were more likely to have crutches than peg-legs; and there are no written records of pirates keeping parrots as pets. (h/t, source, source, source, source)

7. Japanese consumption of Sake has declined by three quarters since the 1970s. (source)

8. The top 0.1% of traders on Polymarket — roughly 1,600 accounts — earn 58% of all profits on the platform. (source)2

9. George Washington was a redhead. (source)

10. On average, 20%–25% of U.S. mutual funds disappear during any given five-year period. (source)

11. “Low-background steel” is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s; it is typically obtained from scrapped ships and shipwrecks and is used as a material for particle detectors and geiger counters because it is not contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout. (source)

12. 317 is the smallest natural number that does not have its own Wikipedia article. (source)

13. “Varsity” is a 17th-century British slang shortening of “university,” originating from an era when “er” was commonly pronounced as “a”. It was meant to distinguish athletes representing the university from those who represented the colleges in intramural play. (source)

14. Half of Americans own an iPhone.3 (source)

On this Day in Previous Editions

• (April 2025): The English word ‘much’ and its Spanish equivalent ‘mucho’ are etymologically unrelated. (source)

• (April 2024): 72% of the US stock market is held in accounts that do not have to pay any taxes. (source)

Graphs I Liked

• I enjoyed this chart from the NY Times showing how range is a smaller determinant of price for EVs than it used to be. (Good visualization of ∂²R/(∂P∂t)).

  

• This full article on Japanese railways is well worth a read (e.g., “travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United States”), but I especially like this visualization of population densities as a function of distance from city center.4

  

• The Growth of Horror

  

• Checking in on South Korea

  

Observations

• As most of my friends know, I am a big postcard writer so I enjoyed Elizabeth Passarella’s “The Case for Handwritten Letters.”

• The stats in the first half of this article (“How Funerals Keep Africa Poor”) on African funerals are wild.

• I was amused to see the New York Times commission a review of Air France’s new first class product, which, at an $11,000 ticket for a ~1485 word piece, comes out to something like $7.45 a word. Shame I wasn’t on that beat at The Economist.

• I have been genuinely impressed by Starbucks’ effort and creativity the past couple month in trying out new business ideas. First there was a “High Protein” drinks menu (which is an amusing concept for a coffee shop); then a Devil Wears Prada 2 themed menu; and finally, a ChatGPT x Starbucks partnership for discovering drinks that match your vibe (and recommending outfits based on your drink choice as well?). To be clear, I don’t know if these are good ideas, but I generally think companies should experiment more, so I applaud their dynamism.

• I enjoyed the wikipedia page on foreign language equivalents of the phrases “Once upon a time” and “happily ever after” (i.e. the traditional story-starting and story-ending stock phrases). For example, Koreans start stories with “Back when tigers used to smoke tobacco.”

Personal Updates

Since I usually devote this paragraph to personal updates, my miscellaneous highlights from the past month include: (i) a week spent in Jamaica (ii) the start of my corporate softball league (iii) watching a friend from my PhD teach his MBA class at Columbia Business School (iv) warmer weather (v) and a particularly expansive variety of social events including some housewarmings, a birthday party for a 4 year old, a chessboxing tournament (where I won a cool chess set), a baby shower, two NYC bar trivia league nights (we lost both), and two seders. There were also some definite lowlights this month, but such things happen. Until next time!

Things I Learned

1. 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex. (source)

2. By total value in circulation, U.S. banknotes are ordered: $100, $1, $20, $5, $50, $10, $2. (source)

3. The average height for men worldwide is 5ft 7.5in. (source)

4. Age discrimination laws only apply to employees/applicants over the age of 40; there are no federal age-related discrimination laws for anyone under 40. (source)

5. The US Border Patrol is majority latino. (source)

6. The Boston Tea Party was a pro-tax revolt; it was in response to the British crown lowering taxes on the East India Company. (source)

7. Buddhism is the only major religion in the world with a falling number of adherents. (source)

8. According to the NHL rulebook (Rule 31.11), if the referees do not show up to a game, the teams mutually agree on players from each side to referee (as has happened multiple times in the 1980s!) (source)

9. At the start of World War II, the US army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size. (source)

10. France’s longest land border is with Brazil. (source)

11. 2025 was the lowest homicide rate the US has had in 125 years. (source)

12. Pinball machines were illegal in New York City from 1942 to 1976.1 (source)

13. The basketball term “alley-oop” — is derived from the French term allez hop!, the cry of a circus acrobate to leap. It only later entered basketball parlance after (i) first becoming popularized as the titular name of a prehistoric cartoon character (ii) then describing a football play involving a leaping grab. (source)

14. Road transport makes up 45 per cent of global oil demand (source)

15. The US is among the least concentrated stock markets in the world; of the 46 largest stock markets in the world, only three stock markets are less concentrated. (source).

16. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are (obviously) heavily anglicized versions of the gospels’ names; the names they would have most likely been called at the time in their mother tongues were Mattith-yahu, Markos (but would have been referred to as Yōhānān) , Loukás, and Yōhānān (but would have been referred to by his patronymic, Tou Zebedaion). (source)

On this Day in Previous Editions

• (March 2025)2 The word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer (”give us today our daily bread”) is a guess as to what the Greek word epiousion (ἐπιούσιον) means, since the word appears nowhere else. (source)

• (March 2024) The phrase “mother of all [___]” was coined by Saddam Hussein, to describe the Gulf War. (source)

Charts I Liked

• Over the past 30 years, animated films have gone from 3% of the American film market to ~20%:

• The Decline of the Trophy Wife

  

• Changing Diets

  

Articles I Liked

• Freddie De Boer’s (somewhat sad) article about recent trends in basketball.3

• Jesus Fernandez Villaverde on sequencing risk.4

• Not quite an article, but I was amused by this list of Bronx Science Alumni in “Sports”, which gives new meaning to the word “sport.”

Final Words

Sylvia Plath reportedly said “In March I’ll be rested, caught up and human.” I’m not sure I was any of those things this past month. But some highlights of my March included: (i) watching the World Baseball Classic (ii) the Raphael exhibit at the Met5 (iii) Project Hail Mary (iv) meeting Garry Kasparov.

Speaking of chess, the main hobby I took up this past month (and the previous one) is chessboxing. It’s more or less exactly what it sounds like — you alternate between chess and boxing. In official matchplay, the winner is the first person to win by checkmate or knockout, but the weekly sessions I do are mostly training. We switch every 5 mins or so for about 90 minutes; alternating between drills, sparring, tactics, blitz play, etc. I guess the point is that chess is harder when you’re out of breath and/or have sustained a headshot? Anyway it’s been quite fun and I hope to keep it up.

Chag Sameach to those celebrating Passover. Until next time!

Things I Learned

1. Leon Trostky was assassinated in Mexico City with an ice axe. (source)

2. Germany is the third largest economy in the world. (source)

3. The Chinese use a slightly different set of 7 colors to describe the rainbow: instead of green, blue, indigo, violet, they use green, light green, blue, and purple. (source)

4. The word “copper” comes from the name “Cyprus”, which was a major source of copper in antiquity. (source)

5. In the history of World Chess Championships, only a single game has ended in actual checkmate (1929; game 8). (source)

6. The wealth gap between the 1st and 2nd wealthiest person in the world is larger than the gap between the 2nd wealthiest and the poorest person in the world (source).

7. The last U.K. Prime Minister to complete a full term was David Cameron in 2015. (source)

8. Since 1960, average global life expectancy has increased by about 1 year on average every 3 years. (source)

9. Military conscription in North Korea lasts a decade. (source).

10. There were women gladiators. (source)

11. In 1870, more than half of all American men either owned or performed labor on a farm. (source)

12. Since the release of ChatGPT, America has: 7% more software developers, 10% more radiologists and 21% more paralegals than before. (source)

13. Tug of war was an Olympic event from 1900 to 1920. (source)

14. The importation of slaves from abroad was made illegal in the US in 1808, more than 50 years before the start of the civil war. (source)

15. Since 1970, the average federal income tax rate paid by the top 1% in the US has increased; as has the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 1%, which has more than doubled from ~19% to ~45%. (source; source)

On This Day in Previous Editions:

• (February 2025): Brunei is the only country in the world that has a non-contiguous working week, consisting of Monday to Thursday plus Saturday. (source)

• (February 2024): The mailing of people weighing less than 50 pounds (i.e., children) was occasionally practiced due to a legal ambiguity when the United States first introduced domestic parcel post in 1913. The children were carried along by mail carriers, but were not put in boxes. (source)

Articles I Liked

• Dithering, Part 1

• Were Classical Statues Painted Horribly?

Last Thoughts

This edition was a bit brief; I had hoped to feature some miscellaneous data explorations I’ve been working on but they will have to wait for March 31. Stray highlights of my last month:

• spending a week in London, where I paid a visit to the British Museum (several of my facts were from there, as well as some other ones that didn’t make it1). I very much wanted to see the Wes Anderson exhibit at the Design Museum, but couldn’t get my hands on tickets.

  

• A quick trip to Chicago to participate in a conference on AI in Asset Management.

• A talk with John Arnold.

• Learning how to play Mahjong.

• The video game lounge at Midway airport.

Lowlights

• a particularly poor showing at Odd Lots trivia (apologies to my teammates).

Until next time!

Things I Learned

1. Donald Trump’s mother grew up speaking Gaelic and only learned English later in school. (source)

2. Only 6% of camels have more than one hump. (source)

3. The options market in India is 3x larger than every other option market in the world combined, and accounts for roughly 80% of all options contracts traded worldwide (source; source).

4. There were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776. (source)

5. It is a disadvantage to serve in volleyball. The serving side wins just ~35-45% of points on average (compared to 57-70% in tennis). (source)

6. No nation has ever won the men’s World Cup while being led by a manager of a different nationality. (source)

7. The B in Oral-B stands for “brush.” (source)

8. A greenland shark typically does not become capable of reproducing until it is around 150 years old. (source)

9. Word spacing, i.e. putting spaces between words, was first invented by Irish monks in the 7th century (source).

10. While the American Revolution was fought under the banner of “no taxation without representation”, the tax rate in America under British reign was (a) lower than the tax rate after the Independence, and (b) was significantly lower than the contemporaneous tax rate in Britain. (source)

11. Tycoon is a Japanese loan word. It was a title for the shogun, meaning “great lord.” (source)

12. Less than half of UK households have a dishwasher. (source)

13. In the Odyssey, Homer never describes the Sirens’ bodies or gives any sense that they are physically alluring. (source)

14. Kikoman, the worlds largest soy sauce producer, was founded in 1603. (source)

15. The official/legal name of the city of Porto, Portugal, is “the Ancient, Very Noble, Ever Loyal and Undefeated City of Porto”. (source)

16. America is the only major country in which households hold more wealth in stocks than in property. (source)

17. 96% of vehicles sold in Norway last year were electric vehicles. (source)

18. Creditors did not lose money on aggregate in the FTX bankruptcy. The company ended up recovering more than 100 cents on the dollar for unsecured creditors. (source)

On this day in previous editions:

• (January 2025): The Graham cracker was invented by the temperance movement preacher Sylvester Graham as a purposefully dull cracker that would curb sinful desires, including the prevention of masturbation. (source)

• (January 2024): Ireland is the only country in the world with fewer people now than 180 years ago (source)

Things I Liked this Month

• The new word game Shuffalo from the New Yorker

• The new American Express passport feature.

• The personal finance app Monarch.

• The book Strangers.

• Marty Supreme.

• The Gilbert and Sullivan production of HMS Pinafore at Kaye Playhouse.

• The Divine Egypt exhibit at the Met. I particularly enjoyed the item descriptions; you can see some of my favorite ones below (e.g. “probably a coffin for an otter or mongoose”).1

  

Unfortunately I don’t have any fun reflections or other projects to share this month, which I’ll blame on (1) the incredible cold spell we’ve had in NYC (which apparently is in the top 5 longest cold streaks in the city’s history?) and (2) moving apartments.2 But I was able to squeeze in a number of indoor activities including a trip to Washington DC; performing the Gelilah at a baby naming ceremony; and a charity poker game I did quite poorly in.

See you next month!

Things I Learned

1. The vast majority of caviar is produced in China. (source)

2. (Good) King Wenceslas, of Christmas carol fame, was never a king in his lifetime. He was a duke who was posthumously made a king by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great to commemorate his piety, and hence is referred to as a king in song. (source)

3. Americans who make the median full-time wage ($63,128) are in the top 3% of global incomes. (source)

4. Almost every car in Turkmenistan is white; it is illegal to have a non-white car in the capital. (source)

5. Relative to their population, Jews were overrepresented in the US military in World War I by a factor of 1.6. (source)

6. The reason that, historically, almost all war elephants were male (while female elephants were used for logistics) is not because of their greater aggression, but because a female elephant in battle will typically run from a male. (source)

7. According to MPAA rules, a single use of the F-word requires a rating of at least a PG-13, while additional uses elevate a movie to an R. (source)

8. 6 percent of America’s school-age children are homeschooled. (source)

9. The Amish population in the US roughly doubles every 20 years, and (today) is eight times as large as it was in 1970. (source)

10. May 1 — “international labor day” — is the day of the year when the most people around the world have the day off work (not January 1!). (source)

11. Today’s 12 graders are now less likely to have had a sip of alcohol in the previous month than the 8th graders of the 1980s. (source)

12. One horse can generate about 15 horsepower. (source)

13. In the UK, the majority of individuals die holding more than 60% of their peak lifetime assets (source).

14. The Los Angeles Dodgers, formerly the Brooklyn Dodgers, got their team name from “Trolley Dodgers”, named after the Brooklyn pedestrians who dodged trolleys in the city as a game of chicken.1 (source)

15. Draftkings and Fanduels make four times as much profit from online casino games as they do from sports betting. (source)

16. 100% of flights to and from the world’s busiest airport (Dubai) are international. (source)

17. Men are significantly more likely to be struck by lightning; males account for some 80-90% of all lightning strikes, injuries, and fatalities. (source)

18. In 2024, the EU made more money from fines of US tech companies (€3.8B) than it did from incomes taxes on public internet tech companies (€3.2B). (h/t)

Things I Liked

• This man’s project to train an LLM using only 1800’s London texts.

• This guide to data visualization.

• My niece, who was born yesterday.

• This (blog-appropriate) notebook I received as a birthday gift (take notes!):

On this day in previous editions:

• (December 2024) The song “Sweet Caroline”, by Neil Diamond, refers to Caroline Kennedy. (source)

2025 Wrapped

End-of-year reviews (or “2025 wrapped”) are all the rage these days. As someone who likes to quantify things, I have been documenting such personal end-of-year stats for several years now. Continuing the tradition, here is my 2025 in review.

Professionally, 2025 was a bit of a whirlwind for me.

• From January - March: I worked for AQR (in Greenwich) as a Quantitative Sports Researcher.

• From March-September: I worked for The Economist (in London) as a financial journalist under the Marjorie Deane Fellowship.

• From September onwards: I joined Citadel (in NYC) as a Quantitative Researcher.

• All the while I was finishing up graduate school (in Chicago). I successfully defended my dissertation in April, received my PhD from the University of Chicago in June, and got my MBA as well (also from the University of Chicago)

So — by the numbers — let’s call it 4 jobs in as many cities; 2 degrees; and 1 single week off in between gigs (Sep 2-7). I won’t say too much about these experiences, in part because I already have to some degree, but I’ll simply note that these jobs aren’t quite as different as you might think. At the end of the day, it’s just taking data and explaining stuff in the world: sometimes it’s a stock price and sometimes it’s a batting average; sometimes the medium is a powerpoint and sometimes a witty article.

Some more of my year in numbers:

• Travel: I took 50 flights. I visited 11 countries (USA, UK, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, UAE, Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt) and 7 states. I spent 25 nights in hotels. I took 68 Ubers, 27 Lyfts, 9 Divvy bikes, and 5 Careems.

  

• Writing: I wrote 16 articles for The Economist, 12 blog posts for my personal blog, and 1 dissertation.

• Health: I went on 117 runs2, completed 37 indoor cycling (peloton) rides, and did 3 bootcamps. I slept an average of 6 hours and 55 minutes a night.

  

• Entertainment: I watched 7 seasons of television and 2 movies in the cinema. I read 6 books (and many econ articles). I played 6,026 games of chess and hit my peak (online) rating of 2253. Note: If you think that’s a lot of chess games (a) it is (b) I almost exclusively play with 1 minute time controls, so can often knock out as many as 40 games in 1 hour3 (c) I typically play when I need to procrastinate (or am otherwise stressed about something).

• Miscellaneous: I went to 2 weddings, 2 shivas, and I don’t remember how many birthdays. I made 3 mistakes: one professional, one personal, one financial.

Most of these numbers are improvements over last year’s, and some of the resolutions I had set for last year (pack less, improve my gift giving, do a better job staying in touch with long distance friends and family, etc.) I think I did well on. I did not do as good a job with reading books or writing (non-listicle) blog posts, but given how packed the year turned out to be professionally, I will give myself a pass.

For the coming year I have the same broad goals as last year (reading and writing more; go to more live events, etc) and some minor specific ones.4 But for more important things, I generally ascribe to the advice that you shouldn’t tell people what you’re working towards because it gives a premature sense of satisfaction that you should only get once you’ve completed it. One thing I have been thinking a lot about, however, is David Brooks’s discussion of eulogy vs. resume virtues: “The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful.” Since it was a busy year for my resume, I’d like to work on my eulogy virtues this coming year.

I hope everyone has a happy start to 2026!

Things I Learned

1. Not all societies kiss. The Hadza (in Tanzania), the Mehinaku (in Brazil), and the Inuit (in the Arctic), among others, do not (source)

2. The median GPA at Harvard is above 3.83. (source)

3. The first digit of a credit card identifies its network. All American Express cards start with 3; all Visa cards start with 4; all Mastercards start with 5; and all Discover cards start with 6. (source)

4. One in five cars sold is electric. (source)

5. A century ago, the average french citizen ate approximately 3 loaves of bread a day. (source)

6. The dial of a watch or clock refers to its face, not the parts that move (which are the hands). (source)

7. England was in recession for half the years between 1300 and 1800. (source)

8. Money in Canada is vertical. (source)

9. NYC taxicabs were originally painted red and green. They were only required to be painted yellow in 1967. (source)

10. Among the largest 10 hedge funds in the world, the average leverage is 18x. (source)

11. There are 300 billion pennies in circulation. (source)

12. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century philosopher behind modern utilitarianism, invented many new words including: international, marginalize, exhaustive, infra-, percentage, and unaffordable. (source)

13. The 1990’s pop hit song Macarena is about a woman named Macarena who cheats on her boyfriend, Vitorino, with two of his friends while he is away serving in the military (source)

14. Time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has been on the decline since. (source)

15. Two words I learned this month: an “ennead” is a group of nine; and a “madrigal” is a type of vocal music where each of many voices sings a different melody at the same time (source, source).

16. The word “rain check” originates from baseball; in the case of a cancellation, ticket holders were issued a literal piece of paper called a rain check that gave them admission to the rescheduled game. (source)

17. Steam takes up 1,700 times the volume of the water that created it (source).

18. None of the ~54 settlements in Greenland are joined by road (source).

19. In the UK, it is illegal to drink alcohol in view of the pitch at soccer matches. (source)

Corrigenda

In my reflections on my time on The Economist in last month’s issue, I wrote that “If you’re ever unsure if no one is reading your articles…observe what happens when you write something with a minor ambiguity or mistake.” True to form, I did receive a minor correction. One of my facts last month stated that “Before the discovery of oil in 1960, the primary industry in Dubai and the rest of the UAE was pearl-diving. (source)”. While pearl diving was the primary pre-oil industry in 6 of the 7 emirates (including in Abu Dhabi, where pearl-diving made up some 95% of that emirate’s income), it was not the primary one in the emirate of Fujairah, which was separated from the pearl banks of the Persian Gulf by the Hajar Mountains. Thank you to the reader who corrected this!

Things I Liked this Month:

• Various examples of interactive journalism, including the FT’s piece on Neom, the NYT’s piece on Penn Station, and the Pudding’s piece on democracy.

• The names — Wartenberg Kagan, Augustus B. Sage, Peter van Alfen, etc. — mentioned in this article about the American Numismatic Society.

• This tweet.

• Thanksgiving

On This Day in Previous Editions:

As a new feature to this newsletter, each month I will feature one fact from a previous same-month edition of Things I Learned, as a service to my more recent subscribers.

• (November 2024): Pakistan is an acronym: it is an amalgamation of the groups Panjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. (source).

• (November 2023): In South Korea, roughly 2% of GDP is spent on private tutoring. (source)

Finally

I know birthdays are a good occasion to reflect on the year, but I’ve decided I will save my full year-end review for next month. For now a couple minor comments:

• I’ve been told 31 is not a cool age to celebrate (I guess because it’s not a round number?), but I have noticed that 3.1 is exactly the length (in miles) of a 5k. Since I also read this delightful article earlier this year about a woman who ‘walked her age’ when she turned 58 (that is, she decided to take 58 walks with friends, each one at least 5.8 miles long) I have decided to steal that idea. This year, I would like to do a 3.1 mile journey with any/all of my friends, on any form/mode of transportation they choose.

• There are many notable November 30 birthdays, including Winston Churchill, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, etc. The three I am most proud to share a birthday with are Magnus Carlsen (my favorite chess player), Mr. Krabs (no explanation needed), and Bo Jackson (almost certainly the most talented athlete in history).

• When I turned 20, I made a list of 30 things I thought it would be good to do by the end of age 30. I did not do particularly well at this list — I have not, for example, skydived, run a marathon, or visited every MLB stadium — but I’m currently working on a new and improved list of things to do over the next decade.

Misc. Photos from November:

Very busy month! Weekend trips to Boston and New Haven, a baby shower, a book party, a gala, several birthdays, an alumni celebration, and a 10k turkey trot (I came 5th). Some photos:

Things I Learned

1. Halloween is illegal in Iran. (source)

2. Every year since 1930, more people have arrived in America than have left. (source)

3. The reason taking a cap off a pen makes it wet again is because it draws out ink from the reservoir through suction. (source)

4. Before the discovery of oil in 1960, the primary industry in Dubai and the rest of the UAE was pearl-diving. (source)

5. Whales breastfeed. (source)

6. The reelection rate in the U.S. Congress (i.e. the percentage of incumbent members who run for and win reelection to their seats) is 96%. (source)

7. Ferrero, the manufacturer of Nutella, consumes a quarter of global hazelnut production.1 (source)

8. The word “gossip” originally referred to a close friend or relative invited to a birth, who would help the mother during labor. Because such events were often filled with idle conversation, it later took on its modern meaning. (h/t, source)

9. Only about 15% of US men are taller than 6 ft. (source)

10. China has fewer foreigners than Berlin. (source, source)

11. During Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game — the highest scoring game in NBA history — 28 of his points were underhanded free-throws. (source)

12. US military spending, measured either as a percent of GDP or as a percent of total government spending, has consistently trended downwards over time, and is currently the lowest it has been in 60 years. (source, source)

13. More Americans played pickleball last year than baseball. (source)

14. The country with the world’s most oil reserves is Venezuela, well above Saudi Arabia, and with nearly as much as Russia, the USA, and Canada combined. (source)

15. While you cannot trademark a recipe, you can trademark the specific shape or configuration of a food product.2 (source)

16. The little metal wire cage that fits over the cork of a bottle of champagne is called a muselet.3 (source)

17. A Waymo cannot get a ticket. (source)

18. There are no weight divisions in sumo wrestling. (source)

Things I Liked this Month

• Art Deco

• The trivia at Farm.One in Prospect Heights, where one of the rounds is “taste-based,” i.e. you have to guess the plant based on the taste of it.

• All of the FT’s excellent coverage of the First Brands fiasco.

• Game 7 of the World Series.

• Many of the tributes to Daniel Naroditsky, whose passing is a great loss to the chess community.

Some Belated Reflections on The Economist

As many of you know, I spent the summer at The Economist as a Marjorie Deane Fellow in financial journalism. Six months of journalism hardly makes me an authority on the profession, but enough people have asked how I found the experience that I thought a short post-mortem was warranted. I was also inspired by Arjun Ramani’s excellent reflection on his own time there, and wanted to write something in a similar spirit.4

Like Arjun, I had never seriously expected to be a journalist. Prior to The Economist, my journalistic background was limited to (i) briefs forays at a high school/college periodicals and (ii) early blog posts that I don’t think anyone read. By the time I started my PhD, my relationship with journalism was primarily as a devoted consumer of carefully curated finance newsletters (Money Talks, Alphaville, Unhedged, Markets A.M., etc.) which I hoped might spark an idea for a great academic paper.

The great academic paper never came; the opportunity at The Economist fortunately did. I saw a posting for a Marjorie Deane Fellowship; applied with an article that I spent far too much time trying to rewrite in the style of the magazine; and one (somewhat involved) interview later I was pleased to learn I received the offer. On March 18, I showed up at the Adelphi offices in London and began my 6 month fellowship.

Some scattered reflections:

• I understand why so many journalists describe their job as ideal. The job, quite literally, consists of reading widely, talking to people about what they do, and writing what you think about the world. Most of us already do a version of this for free.

• I was often asked whether I got to choose what I wrote. The answer is (mostly) yes. Every week or so I would pitch a handful of ideas to my editor, and he would choose one or two. Occasionally I was asked to write on a particular topic, but even then I had the option to decline.

• A common bit of advice you hear in academia for finding paper ideas is to read the news to find topics that journalists/practitioners are talking about, but academics aren’t. At The Economist, I was doing a sort of reverse arbitrage: take topics that were getting traction in academic circles, and write them up for the popular press.

• That approach comes with two challenges. The first is that there are many topics that academics care about, and the public doesn’t (e.g., convenience yields). Learning how to write in a way that convinces readers something is an important topic is an underrated skill. The second challenge is that many topics popular in academia are simply not newsworthy. A lot of my discussions with my editor involved him asking “Why now? why this week?” I often struggled to come up with a good answer.

• The most unnatural adjustment was adapting my writing style to that of The Economist. I’m not referring to the witty and droll “voice” of my articles (which I mostly owe to my witty and droll editors), but more to the overall posture of articles. Perhaps due to graduate school, I was used to a very clinical style of writing: investigate an issue methodically, hedge frequently, don’t express an opinion, don’t bring in politics, don’t use adjectives, and certainly don’t tell people how to think. Of course, none of that really works at a publication like The Economist.

• The new writing style was so unfamiliar to me that, at the beginning of my internship, I started maintaining a separate copy of how I would write each of my articles as if I were writing it for my personal blog. I would sometimes send this version of an article to my family instead of the published ones. (Not sure they read either version).

• A big part of journalism is talking to people. Many of my fellow correspondents would speak with 5-10 sources a week. Most of these conversations weren’t for a specific article, but rather to get a sense of what people in industry were thinking. I was very bad at this, not only because my network was much smaller, but also because I was so used to obtaining information by reading papers.

• Interviewing is its own craft. Plenty of smart people do not answer questions directly (sometimes because they can’t, sometimes because they won’t), and learning how extract useful information or guide a conversation is a skill.

• I gained a deeper respect for journalists who write regularly and frequently — Matt Levine, Matt Yglesias, Robert Armstrong, Spencer Jakab, etc. I understand that many such publications are operations involving more than one person, but writing on schedule (which includes idea generation, research, writing, fact checking, etc.) is harder than it looks.

• If writing seems like a lot of work, editing is more. This was something I didn’t really appreciate going in. My first week on the job, I asked a coworker what topics my editor writes on. When she responded that he doesn’t write, I asked (earnestly) what he did the other days of the week. Little did I know! Editors curate sections, solicit ideas, babysit discuss articles with writers, edit the articles, coordinate with graphics teams, illustrators, fact checkers, layout team, newsletter writers, etc., all on a weekly schedule and responding in real-time to the news. The editors regularly worked 10+ hour days, much more than the writers.

• On that note, I found the editing process at The Economist to be quite exceptional. I know from experience that it is easy to be a lazy editor, where passable writing makes it through with a few tweaks. It is much harder to cut several hundred words while improving clarity and preserving substance. If my writing was ever any good, it owed as much or more to my editors as to me.

• The editors spend a lot of time thinking about how to structure the magazine as a whole, what articles work well together, and what issues should go what week. I often wondered whether such planning was necessary, and how much quality would suffer if the magazine just used the best (non-overlapping) articles each week.

• A weekly schedule may seem infrequent from the outside, but it is quite rushed. For a magazine to appear in bookshelves on Friday, it must be sent to the printers by Thursday noon, which means final drafts must be in Wednesday evening at the latest, and so first drafts should be really be in by Tuesday to allow for fact checking / editing. Since planning for the subsequent week’s issue happens on Friday afternoon, there isn’t all the much time to research/write.

• I was surprised by how frequently correspondents rotate beats (countries, topics, sections, etc.). I still don’t really understand this and am not convinced it’s efficient. That said, the “beats” at The Economist are very broad: I wrote about everything from retail investing to sovereign wealth funds to the airline industry to the economics profession.

• The charts produced by The Economist are, in my view, the best of any publication. A couple of common questions: (1) I only partially produced my own graphs — I would send a mock-up, and the graphics team would turn it into something far better; (2) no, The Economist does not typically rely on a built-in theme on top of a standard coding language the way ggplot does. The workflow resembles a wsywig system in which the graphics team can upload data to an in-house program and select the graph type, with a lot of labeling done in Adobe ex post.

• If you’re ever unsure if no one is reading your articles — and for a publication with no bylines and no online comment section, I often wondered this! — observe what happens when you write something with a minor ambiguity or mistake.

• What the The Economist does best is (a) big picture articles that provide a new/ useful/clever/humorous framing on a well known issue or (b) deep dives that explain why something in the world is how it is. A couple examples from my colleagues: teflon capitalism, how walmart took over the world; the economics of superintelligence, factory work is overrated. I would have liked to write an article like this (and a leader, a special report, a podcast, etc.) but I suppose that will have to wait for my return to journalism.

• I was sometimes asked what article I was most proud of. I think it was my article on student debt, not because it was my best article (it wasn’t), but because it was an article I took on without any prior knowledge of the issue and had to learn from scratch. In general, I found it very hard to judge the quality of my own articles, if only because I was sufficiently tired of them by the time I submitted them.

• Einstein observed that people love chopping wood, because “in this activity one immediately sees results.” Journalism feels much the same. To write something on a Wednesday and see it on a newsstand on Friday was an immensely gratifying experience.

There’s lot more I could say, but one of the many lessons I’ve learned from my experience is to keep my writing brief. I’ll simply end by saying (once more) it’s a fantastic job, and the publication is currently hiring a finance writer if you or anyone you know is interested.

Miscellaneous Photos from The Economist

Finally

That’s all from me this month, the highlights of which were a trip to Chicago, placing first in my age group in the Shelter Island 5K race, attending a tennis retreat with friends in upstate New York, and meeting Bryan Cranston.

Have a happy November (my birthday month 👀).

Things I Learned

1. 35% of men in Medieval England1 were named John. (source)

2. In the US there are more private equity funds (19,000) than there are McDonalds (14,000).2 (source)

3. The word “sniper” originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India in reference to shooting a type of bird called a snipe, which was considered extremely challenging to hunt due to its alertness, camouflaging color, and erratic flight behavior. (source)

4. Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff was named Donald Regan. (source)

5. The modern baseball lasts an average of 2.5 pitches before being taken out of play. (source)

6. The stethoscope was created in 1816 because its inventor, Rene Laennec, felt uncomfortable placing his ear directly on a woman’s chest. (source)

7. In the first half of 2025, OpenAI spent more on marketing and equity options for its employees than it made in revenue ($4.5 bn vs $4.3 bn). (source)

8. The word “meander” comes from the river Maeander in southwestern turkey, that was celebrated in antiquity for its numerous windings. (source)

9. Americans consume 103 lbs of chicken per capita, triple the amount they consumed in 1965. (source)

10. Afghanistan is the world’s only state not to have any elections whatsoever.3 (source)

11. Harrods, the London department store, was the first commercial establishment to have an escalator. (source)

12. In 1965, a 25 year old American woman had a 80% chance of being married. In 2025, a 25 year old American woman had a 20% chance of being married. (source)

13. October is the only month that features games from all major sports leagues (MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA).

14. Secret ballots — i.e. voting privately — did not exist in the US before 1872. (source)

15. According to the main founding legend of Korea, its history began when a deity told a bear and a tiger to spend 100 days in a cave eating only garlic and mugwort, a herb. The tiger quit. The bear lasted and the god turned her into a woman as a reward. She bore him a son, Dangun, who founded Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom, in 2333BC. (source)

16. 40% of all electricity consumption in Virginia comes from data centers. (source)

17. The Philadelphia City Hall was the world tallest (inhabitable) building from its construction until 1908. (source)

18. 34% of American families take home more than $150,000 each year, compared to just 3% of British households. (source)

Things I Liked

• This twitter thread with “words that are poetic when you think about them”, including: skyscraper, spellbound, bullseye, firefighter, motherland, adorable, etc.

• Kurt Vonnegut on buying an envelope.

• The wikipedia page on transpositional puns.

• Lemony Snicket’s advice on writing thank you notes.

• These pictures of the 7 train in Queens when it was first built.

• Gael Monfils’s retirement note to the tennis community.4

Postscript

The only big news for me this month is that I officially started a new job,5 and am now in NYC full time. I unexpectedly find myself missing London. Unfortunately that also means I’m no longer writing articles for The Economist , but I will do my best to make it up with facts and such.

Things I Learned

1. American college sports generate more revenue than the English Premier League and the NBA combined. (source)

2. Kim Jong Un weighs 310 pounds. (source)

3. The phrase “first-rate” was originally a naval term: a “first-rate” ship was any ship with more than 100 guns.1 (source)

4. Google searches for the word “vegan” peaked in 2020 and have been in decline since. (source)

5. In the US, 1% of the workforce is laid off every month, nearly 10 times the rate in Germany. (source)

6. Amtrak will let you attach your own private car to one of their trains, and they charge you per a mile. (source, h/t)

7. No European had eaten a tomato until the 16th century. (source)

8. On both Instagram and Facebook, significantly more time is spent watching third party videos than consuming content from friends. (source)

9. The famous Wall Street “Charging Bull” was neither commissioned nor approved; it was simply dropped there one day. (source)

10. Nowhere in the Bible is premarital sex explicitly condemned. (source)

11. In the US, there are more billionaires over the age of 100 than under the age of 30. (source)

12. From 1808 to 1815, Rio de Janeiro served as the capital of the Kingdom of Portugal, making it the the only city outside of Europe to have been a European capital. (source, h/t)

13. 79% of grades at Harvard are in the A range (up from 33% in 1985). (source)

14. Medically-assisted dying now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada, more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined. (source)

15. The name Alfred means “elf counsel”. (source)

16. The “at-home” day was a social custom in Victorian England where women of gentle status would receive visitors on a specific day of the week. (source)

17. Some trees have genders, including holly, persimmon and ginkgo. (source)

18. Over the past 5 years, the stock of Build-a-Bear Workshop — a company that went public in 2004 — has outperformed every single stock in the S&P500, including Nvidia, Palantir, and Tesla. (source)

Graphs This Month

• jokes on you since in three months I’ll be 31

• NYC is the only city to have recovered from COVID-induced remote work shift

• Derek Thompson explains why:

  

• homeownership and serial killings aren’t the only things in decline

  

Some of the Articles I Wrote This Month

• Economist Disagree About Everything. Don’t They?

• Ivy League Universities are on a Debt Binge

• The McWages Index: Which Countries Earn the Most Big Macs?

• Do Consultants Make Good CEOs?

  ft. lots of cool (since I made them) graphs:

Some Observations on the UK/London

Saturday marked the end of my 6 months living in the UK (as I explain in the next section). To that end I figured I would share some minor observations I had from my time there. Take with obvious grains of salt.

• There is lots of nationalistic branding on groceries/produce (British milk, British eggs, British cheese, etc.). I feel like the US has a reputation for national chauvinism but we don’t really do that type of branding on our groceries?

• There is a big appliance deficit. Some obvious (air conditioning is more or less nonexistent); some less so: dryers for clothes are rare, dishwashers/laundry units take longer and are lower quality, etc. However, kettles boil much faster in the UK (apparently this is because they draw more power than US ones).

• Bank holidays — similar to Federal holidays in the US — are unnamed; they are simply referred “bank holidays.” This is bizarre! In the US we have too many people we want to honor with federal holidays, leading to contentious votes; you would think the UK would have found some people to honor!

• Trash cans in the street are much rarer in the UK than in the US; sometimes I would have to walk 3+ blocks to find one. Someone told me this was due to bomb concerns but I’m skeptical this is the whole reason. Anyway, I didn’t find the streets to have all that much more trash so I guess it’s not that big a deal?

• The tube/subway in London is very well functioning (lack of air conditioning notwithstanding); it was far more frequent, cleaner, and suffered fewer delays than any US subway system I’ve been on. And the behavior of riders (ranging from noise levels, to food consumption, to general etiquette) was better as well.

• Four observations on money and payment systems: (1) Everything is much better integrated with apple pay and cards than in the US. I did not need to take out cash in 6 months. (2) the majority of people still use debit, not credit cards (3) as many people know, the British don’t use anything like Venmo; they use direct bank transfers that requires you to enter a sort code and account number (the more surprising thing is that they all swear this is more convenient than Venmo, which it definitely is not) (4) Tipping at restaurants is more-or-less non-existent, which is great, but there are some strange surcharges (e.g. you pay extra to eat in vs. take out).

• I didn’t quite realize how big of a thing “pub culture” is in the UK. I had assumed it was just what they call happy hour. But every day in summer the pubs in London are absolutely packed; beers are by far the modal drink (compared to wine/cocktails in the US); and the ‘price of a pint’ is an extremely salient issue in the UK. Another thing I found interesting: almost every pub in London is located on a corner (which is not at all true in the US). I wonder if this is some artifact of zoning policy.

• Things I saw less of in the UK than in the US: (1) Pepsi (2) people running shirtless (3) people taking Ubers (4) dogs in parks (5) (free) wifi in cafes (6) vanity license plates (7) customizable / “design-your-own”-bowl/salad/wrap lunch places.

• I am amazed at how many places are either closed or close early on sundays, not because I hadn’t seen it before, but because I assumed this would be the first victim of globalization.

• The industrial organization of grocery stores in London is very interesting: there are a couple very large supermarkets spread out, but for most groceries people go to very small versions of the larger chains (sainsbury local, tesco express, etc) that seem to be where most people get their groceries. Compare this to NYC where the only comparably-small-sized stores are unaffiliated bodegas.

Finally..

On Friday I completed my 6-month fellowship at The Economist (and officially moved to NYC). I am exceedingly grateful to all my colleagues at the publication for their support and patience throughout my time there. I ended up writing ~17 articles on various topics. Next month, I’ll try write my reflections on what it is like to write for the magazine (similar to those by my predecessor, Arjun Ramani). I of course would have loved to stay for longer, but I’m starting a new job in New York next week.

For now, if you or anyone you know might be interested in financial or economic journalism, you can apply to be my replacement. Job posting is here, applications due October 15, no journalistic background required. I can’t recommend it enough, and I’m more than happy to chat further with anyone if they have questions.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a happy September! Since I still count September as part of the “summer”, this month I’ll be working on knocking as many items as possible off this summer bucket list (so far I’ve done 22/50).

Things I Learned

1. The Jell-O shot was invented by Tom Lehrer. (source)

2. From 1868 until 1913, 90% of all federal revenue in the US came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine, and tobacco (source

3. Paid toilets are illegal in the state of New York (source)

4. There is no technical definition of a “weed.” (h/t)

5. In 1950, Spain was poorer on a GDP-per-capita basis than Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and was roughly equal to Colombia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama. (h/t, source)

6. Rats exist on every continent except Antarctica (source)

7. 47% of U.S. grandchildren live within 10 miles of a grandparent. (source)

8. You are permitted to bring a live lobster through TSA, so long as (a) it is in a clear plastic container (b) it is visually inspected by a TSA agent. (source)

9. The average South African woman weighs more than the average South African man (h/t, source).

10. Among English town names, anything ending in -caster, -cester or -chester was a Roman fort; -bury and -borough are Saxon forts; if it ends in -by it was settled by vikings; -ford is a river crossing. (source)

11. The serving size of Pam cooking spray is a unit of time (1/4 second spray) (source)

12. Europe has more heat deaths per year than the United States loses to gun deaths (source)

13. Recorded music was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. (source)

14. In 2008, the largest bank in the world was Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). (source)

15. Ministers in the Singaporean government — i.e. the equivalent of cabinet secretaries — earn an average salary of $1.1 million per year, as their salary is computed by taking the average income of the top 1000 highest income earners in the country. (source)

16. In all marriages with a 14-year age disparity, the younger party is a woman 85% of the time. (source)

17. Tennis balls have only been yellow since 1972, changed (in part) at the request of David Attenborough who had trouble seeing white balls. Before then, tennis balls were either black or white depending on the surface. (source)

Articles I Liked

• What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets?

  • Or, if you don’t want to read the article, and just want to search the density of various words, use this link. But I promise the article is cool.

• What was it like to live in 1776?

  • Very dark (literally)

• Reflections from Spain

• Why are young adults in the English-speaking world so unhappy?

• If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good For Everything, Should We All Be On Them?

• Our Favorite Pools (NY Times)

Articles I Wrote

Some articles I wrote include1:

• How To Escape Taxes on Your Stocks

  • ft. this graph (+ more graphs in the article)

  

• The Deeper Reason for Banking’s Retreat

  • ft. this graph (+ more graphs in the article)

    

• Market Beating Stock Strategies Don’t Last

  • Technically not an article I wrote this month, but thanks to the Chicago Booth Review for their writeup / coverage this month of my paper with Stefan Nagel on real-time forecasting of return-based anomalies (I promise it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds, as the writeup makes clear!):

  • ft. this graph

    

3 Things I Enjoyed at Airports in India

I recently returned from an enjoyable trip to Udaipur, India. I have lots of observations from my trip there but I wanted to highlight three interesting things I saw at airports there.

• First, at both Delhi and Udaipur Airport there were dedicated Yoga areas. I was not aware that Yoga was a thing one did at airports, and it was cool to see. (Of course, too much yoga crossed with aviation can be a bad thing)

  

• Second, as an avid chess player, I was very excited to see a giant chessboard at the Udaipur airport (so much so that I asked a then-confused onlooker to take photograph of me in front of it). What I particularly enjoyed was the national chess-patriotism/pride evident in the sign behind it, where they congratulate Vishy Anand and Gukesh for their chess world championships. I felt a little bit bad for the omission of Praggnanandhaa, who is also an extremely gifted chess player but has not won a world championship. I was trying to think of what the equivalent would be in other countries; I guess we did put a basketball court in Indianapolis airport around the NBA all star game?

• Third, this sign announcing “best security screener of terminal 1” raised a lot more questions for me than it answered: how do they measure the best security screener (most people processed? most people pulled aside? most successful catches?); how autocorrelated is performance across months? (does the same person tend to win?); How does it differ across terminals (why is the award terminal 1 specific)? etc etc. Anyway I tried asking a security official some of these questions, and I’m not sure he understood my question due to the language barrier — his answer was (I think) that they have a separate dry-run where they evaluate people on simulated bags/screens. I’m not sure I believe this — seems very inefficient. I tried emailing Delhi airport, who referred me to the Indian police force, who have not gotten back to me.

  

That’s all from me this month. I hope everyone has an excellent August!

Things I Learned

1. A little over 20% of people tip on Uber rides. (source)

2. The word “forte”, as in one’s strong suit, is supposed to be pronounced like “fort”, not “for-tay”. (source)

3. In South Korea, camera phones are legally required to emit a shutter sound when taking pictures, even when the phone is set to silent or vibrate mode. (source)

4. Mary is mentioned more times in the Quran than in the bible (and is the only woman mentioned by name in the Quran) (source).

5. The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers maintain the world's only strategic reserve of maple syrup. The reserve is designed to hold 133 million pounds of maple syrup, and acts as a buffer to stabilize prices. (source)

6. Half of American college students don’t earn a bachelor’s degree. (source)

7. Before he became a painter and television personality, Bob Ross served in the US Air Force for 20 years. (source)

8. Republicans are more likely to have tattoos than democrats. (source)

9. Since 1985, fully 28% of stocks have fallen at least 95% from peak to trough. Of these, 1/6 of them completely regained their peak value. (source)

10. Because MI6 is a secret organisation, the chief is the only member of staff who is “avowed”, or publicly named. (source)

11. James Madison was 5'4''. (source)

12. There are four countries with capitals that are not on their mainlands: Denmark, Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, and UAE. (source)

13. Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham features only 50 unique words; he wrote it to win a $50 bet with his editor that he could not write an engaging children's book with a vocabulary of 50 words (it is now the all-time fourth best-selling hardcover children's book in the United States). (source)

14. In 1951, only one Italian child in nine attended school past the age of thirteen. (source)

15. First class men were more likely to die on the Titanic than third class women or children (source)

16. Marrying a first cousin is legal in Britain. (source)

17. The United States Postal Service creed — “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” — is a direction translation from Herodotus’ Histories, referring to the courier service ("Chapar Khaneh”) of the ancient Persian Empire. (source)

18. In Italy, you need a doctor’s permission before joining a gym or running a marathon. (source)

19. It takes 12 minutes for a missile to pass between Iran and Israel. (source)

20. The word ‘bourse’ for stock exchange derives from from the Van der Beurze family that ran an inn in Brussels that hosted the world’s first commodity exchange (source)

Articles I Enjoyed

• Will Jesus Christ Return in an Election Year?

• I Was a Juror on a Murder Trial

• In Taxicab Geometry, Pi Equals 4 and Circles Aren’t Round

• 6 Reasons Service On US Airlines Is Inconsistent, Often Bad

• (So) What If You Miss the Market’s N Best Days?

Articles I Wrote

[N.B. if you want a “gift link” to any of these articles just reach out to me].

• Can Trump end America’s $1.8 trn student-debt nightmare?

  • ft. these graphs:

    

• The dream scenario for prediction markets

  • ft. this paragraph

    

• Who are the World’s Best Investors?

  • ft. this thing I learned: “Only 28 of Vanguard’s 267 mutual funds can trade both bonds and stocks”

Personal News

The highlight of my month was that I finally graduated from my PhD program at the University of Chicago. 6 years is quite a long journey, and I’ll do a follow-up post soon on this blog with my broader reflections on graduate school — apologies in advance for interrupting the regularly scheduled fact-listicles.

Have a great second half of 2025.

Things I Learned

1. The TSA considers peanut butter to be a liquid. (source)

2. Jane Street, the world’s most profitable trading firm, has no CEO. The company is informally led by a group of 30 or 40 senior executives. (source)

3. White asparagus and green asparagus are the same exact plant; white asparagus is simply created by growing the asparagus without access to sunlight. (source)

4. Both violent crime and property crime peaked in the US in 1991. (source)

5. Coney Island used to display premature born babies in incubators as a tourist attraction. (source)

6. Canadians make up a quarter of all foreign visitors to the US (source)

7. Berkshire Hathaway originated as a textile manufacturer, dating back to 1839 (source).

8. From 1983 to 2023, the percentage of American 30 years old who were married dropped from 80% to 45%.1 (source)

9. Coconuts and potatoes can be mailed unwrapped through the US postal service, so long as you write the destination and return address either directly on the product or on a label affixed to the skin or husk. (source)

10. In the US, there are 62 times as many corporate bonds as there are stocks. (source)

11. Emirates was the first airlines in the world to introduce a personal entertainment system on its commercial aircraft, which it did in 1992. (source)

12. The largest private landowner in New York City is Columbia University (source)

13. In the US, it is not possible to copyright a recipe (i.e a list of ingredients); however you can apply to copyright a recipe if it “is accompanied by substantial literary expression.” (source).

14. In Saudi Arabia, charitable giving or fundraising without government approval is illegal (source.)

15. Virginia has the highest U.S. vanity plate penetration rate. (source)

16. More people take the MTA subway in a given day than fly domestically in the US. (source)

17. John Wilkes Booth was a fairly famous actor even before he shot Lincoln; many American households would have already known who he was, and his older brother was considered the most famous American actor of his era. (source).

Articles I Liked

• The Pour-igin of Species

• How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics

• Notes on Tunisia

Articles I Wrote

• Buy the dip: the trend that keeps stocks from crashing ft. this graph:

  

• What the failure of a superstar student reveals about economics ft. this graph:

  

Lastly…

I recently returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia, where I was visiting a friend in Riyadh. I wanted to jot down some quick notes.

• Saudi Arabia is very hot. I was there in May — before the heat of the summer — and virtually every day was above 100 F. Most of the events the country puts on (tennis matches, concerts, etc) all pause during the summer months. The country has done a fairly good job at installing an air conditioning apparatus (far better than the UK, where I basically have yet to find an apartment with AC). We made a short trip to Jeddah, where the beachfront offered a nice way to cool down, but I suspect the temperature will be a major obstacle to the Kingdom’s broader goals.

• The majority of Saudis I encountered wore a Thobe or Niqab (including, for example, every Uber driver). This attire is far more than I had seen in other places in the Middle East, though I gather this is fairly common in gulf countries. And other Arabs in Saudi, including Egyptians, wear western clothes. Wearing t-shirts was fine, but I did not see anyone wearing shorts (and one tourist I saw got told off for wearing shorts).

• The Kingdom is going through an immense construction phase as part of Vision 2030. Virtually every horizon is scattered with cranes all constructing megaprojects (amusement parks, malls, complexes, etc). The contrast between the construction projects and the literal desert on every horizon is striking.

• Many parts of life are still gender-segregated, including gyms, some restaurants, and sections of the subway. On public transit, though, the separation isn’t strictly between men and women, but rather between single men and women or families. For example, men can ride in the “women and families” car if they’re accompanying relatives

  

• There’s a large number of ex-pats in Riyadh, especially European and Americans. Some are affiliated with diplomatic missions; others are there for business. Many find the 0% personal tax rates very appealing. Almost all live on these self-contained compounds in the city, many of which have pools, gyms, private security, etc.

• Snapchat is very popular in the country, including among adults.

• Bottled water is extremely plentiful and very cheap. Lots of places, including many restaurants, provided it for free. When it was sold it was ridiculously cheap (~10c).

• The e-governance of Saudi Arabia is pretty impressive. Digital alerts to all citizens, automatic resolution of car crashes through insurance systems, etc.

• The police drive Lucid Motors cars:

  

• The Saudi weekend is Friday and Saturday. Sunday is a workday.

• On every flight I took in, out, and within KSA, they played an Arabic prayer over the PA.

• Saudi (Arabic) coffee is yellowish-brown color.

• Although alcohol is technically illegal (more so than in, e.g., Dubai, where tourists can have it at hotels), it is pervasive, especially in expat and diplomatic communities. The police have a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Most of the alcohol is, apparently, not official labels, but stuff closer to moonshine. Nonalcoholic beers are fairly common at the supermarket.

• It’s amusing seeing certain western / NYC-coded brands in Riyadh. The most surreal one I saw was NYC-brunch-favorite Sarabeths, with Saudis queued up outside. It reminded me of a Jake Anbinder tweet I saw a while back, “‘We had brunch at Riyadh Sadelle’s’ sounds like a Woody Allen bit”.

I have many more thoughts on the country, Vision 2030, stray observations, etc., but those are best left to longer conversations than to short bullet points. And I’m hoping to do some more travel notes as I continue to explore more places this summer.

Next week I’ll be graduating from my PhD, and will probably interrupt the regularly scheduled ‘Things I Learned’ for a post reflecting on graduate school.

Wishing everyone a pleasant June.

Things I Learned

1. Barack Obama is the only US president post-2000 to drink alcohol; Trump, Biden, and W. Bush all maintain strict sobriety. (h/t)

2. The English word 'much' and its Spanish equivalent 'mucho' are etymologically unrelated. (source)

3. Rolls Royce generates ~1% of UK GDP. (h/t, source)

4. Major League Baseball is the only American industry — or sports league — with a judicially created exemption from federal antitrust law, dating to a 1922 ruling that baseball was not interstate commerce. (source)

5. The Vatican has more Bloomberg terminals than the UK treasury. (source)

6. At the start of 2025, America held 4.2% of the world’s population, half of its economy, two thirds of global stock-market value, and 9 of the 10 most valuable public companies. (source)

7. Ciabatta was invented in 1982. (source)

8. The reason Air France’s logo is a winged seahorse is that at the time (1933) of the merger creating Air France, there was widespread disagreement as to whether airplanes or seaplanes were superior, and the logo was designed to reflect that. (source)

9. Medicaid paying people to stay at home to take care of relatives accounts for 12% of all private sector jobs in NYC (h/t, source).

10. The first time a weekend was observed by a company in the US was in 1908, and it was not mandated until 1940. (source)

11. In the past 30 years, just 6 unique teams have won the English Premier League. (source)

12. The name "Wendy" was invented by J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan in 1904; it did not exist as a common name before. (source)

13. Richard Nixon's daughter and Dwight Eisenhower's grandson are married to each other. (source)

14. In the history of the papacy, no pope had visited the Arabian peninsula before 2019. (source)

15. Cappuccinos are named after the light brown color of the hooded robes word by friars and nuns of the Capuchin order. (source)

16. In the US, municipal solid waste — i.e., the technical term for what most people think of when they hear the word garbage (kitchen wastebasket, curbside trash can, etc) —accounts for, at most, 3% of the nation’s waste stream. (source)

Some Useless Data Analysis

As some of you know, I enjoy sports statistics (so much so that I spent some time during my PhD working for the New York Yankees). I particularly enjoy thinking through statistics that don’t mean anything, whether that’s how to weight different types medals in the Olympics, how frequently gimmicky sports promotions pay out, or (my personal favorite) how many players “hit their weight.” I saw a tweet this week that reminded me of this sort of statistic:

Naturally, I wanted to examine this claim a little bit more systematically. So I did what anyone procrastinating doing necessary life admin on a Sunday morning would do: I pulled Retrosheet play-by-play data using R, calculated each player’s batting average as of each date, and plotted the results:

Obviously, there is a sharp cutoff at the end of April, since the threshold-to-beat jumps 71 points from April 30th (0.430) to May 1 (0.501). Since sports are about superlatives, we might ask what is the maximum date a player has reached while maintaining a batting average larger than the corresponding date. Note that this is a little tricky to answer, because it depends on the minimum number of plate appearances we require a player to have. (To see this, note that at the extreme, a player that has one at-bat all season and obtains a hit will have a batting average of 1.000, and so will “last” up through September 30 (0.930). But this isn’t an “everyday” player.)

Among “everyday” players — which I choose to define as having averaged at least two plate appearances per game their team has played up until that point — the furthest player is not Aaron Judge in 2025, who is going into the last day this month with a batting average of 0.412 (i.e. April 12). Rather — and to no one’s surprise — it is Barry Bonds, whose incredible 2004 season had him batting 0.472 on 92 plate appearances through April 30:

In his defense, Aaron Judge is going into the last day of April with 136 plate appearances, and no other player has “hit their date” with more than 121 plate appearances. In fact, since 1980, only 16 players have ever reached as high a batting average (0.412) on as many plate appearances (136), and the soonest into the season one of those players achieved that was May 20. In that sense, Judge is in a league of his own.

Some Personal News

The highlight of my April was that I successfully defended my dissertation at the University of Chicago 🥳. I guess the immediate change is that I’m now “Dr. Marrow,” which, for now, has mostly materialized as my selecting a different title in the drop-down menu when booking flights. I have many reflections on the PhD (in a post soon to come), but for now I’ll simply express my gratitude to everyone who put up with me along the way, starting with my advisors:

Things I Learned

1. The tendency of women to live longer than men is true in most mammals, not just humans. (source)

2. The word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer (”give us today our daily bread”) is a guess as to what the Greek word epiousion (ἐπιούσιον) means, since the word appears nowhere else. (source)

3. The first president whose voice we have a recording of is Benjamin Harrison, in 1889 (recording here). (h/t)

4. Lemons don’t exist naturally. They are a hybrid of a bitter orange and a citron, created through crossbreeding, and first brought to Europe around 200 AD. (h/t, source)

5. In its initial years, basketball had no dribbling; players would only pass the ball from a standing position. Dribbling only arose in 1897 when the Yale basketball team noticed that the rules only said you could not run while “holding” the ball, and proceeded to exploit this loophole. (source)

6. The verb ‘to don’, as in ‘to wear’, is a contraction of ‘to do on’, and the verb ‘to doff’, as in ‘to doff a cap’, is a contraction of ‘to do off’. (source)

7. Lie-flat business class did not exist until March, 2000 when the first such seat was unveiled by British Airways on it’s London-NYC route. (source)

8. A President’s first year address to Congress is not called the “State of the Union”, since the President has not been in office long enough to have real updates. Instead, the first year address is called the “Year One Joint Session Address”. (source)

9. Only male narwhals have tusks. (source)

10. In medieval Europe, Paradise was usually regarded as a place in Asia that exerted an influence on neighboring territories, rendering them unusually rich in gold, jewels, and spices. (source)

11. South Carolina still executes convicts on death penalty by firing squad. (source)

12. Carcinization is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans independently evolve to look like crabs (i.e., it is the tendency of nature to keep “reinventing” crabs). (source)

13. The reason there is a dot on the letter “i” was to avoid confusion back in the days when m was written “ııı” and n was written “ıı. (source)

14. The downward sloping relationship between income and weight in developed countries — i.e. that wealthier individuals tend to have lower rates of obesity — is almost entirely driven by women. In most developed countries, the relationship between income and wealth is flat or even upward sloping for men. (source)

Articles I Found Interesting

• How Much Would You Need to be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island for 1.5 Years and Do Nothing but Kill Seals?

• Great rail journeys: last call for the slow train across Tanzania

• 30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything

Graphs I Liked

• Not quite a graph, but I learned that early in his career Dr. Seuss did a painting of the abduction of the Sabine women (8th century BC). (h/t)

  

• Most popular meats consumed, a chimera chart

• Since I think this is my first ever(?) Things I Learned where I did not have one finance/economics fact, I feel the need to throw in at least one chart. I’m accustomed to thinking of stock returns as fairly normally distributed, but it seems they’re fairly skewed.

  

• Some shameless self-promotion here, but I was proud to have this graph I made on tennis longevity featured in a popular tennis blog I follow. (I also made an interactive/dynamic version).1

  

Finally…

As I announced in the previous newsletter, my big personal (professional?) news this past month was moving to London to start as the Marjorie Deane fellow at The Economist2, writing about business, economics, finance, etc. So far I’ve had one short article published, and I’m now working on a longer, more exciting (for me, at least) one. I’m always eager to hear (a) ideas for articles (b) London suggestions, so please please send them my way if you have any. As always, feel free to get in touch.

Anyway, London is an interesting place. I’ve been mentally collecting a bunch of observations about British culture/society; at some point I’ll probably write them up.

Things I Learned

1. In the US, you must be under the age of 31 to become an air traffic controller. (source)

2. Flamingos get their color from eating shellfish. (source)

3. Two thirds of all train trips in the entire country take place in the NYC area. (h/t, source)

4. Wagering on the outcomes of papal conclaves was automatically punishable by excommunication from 1591-1918, and was illegal in the US from 1961-2011. (source)

5. As of 10 years ago, the world’s largest purchaser of caviar was Lufthansa Airlines, which accounted for 5% of global caviar demand. (source)

6. Brunei is the only country in the world that has a non-contiguous working week, consisting of Monday to Thursday plus Saturday. (source)

7. In 1900, railroads accounted for 63% of total U.S. stock-market value. (source)

8. The line chart, pie chart, bar chart, and area chart were all invented by the same person, William Playfair (who had some other cool adventures as well). (source)

9. The average US resident will eat about 270 eggs this year. (source)

10. The largest space impact in human history occurred in Siberia in 1908 when an asteroid exploded with 1,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, incinerating 770 square miles of forest. Due to the remoteness of the region, only 3 people died. (source)

11. Roughly a third of global trade is invoiced in US dollars despite not being destined for the US. (source)

12. A philatelic cover is an envelope prepared with a stamp and address and sent through the mail delivery system for the purpose of creating a collectible item. (source)

13. Until 1956, French schoolchildren were served wine during lunch (source)

14. The Superbowl halftime show in 1975 was a “Tribute to Duke Ellington” concert. (source)

15. The 1667 agreement in which the Netherlands ceded control of Manhattan to the British was done in exchange for the Indonesian isle of Pulau Rhun, in order to preserve the Dutch nutmeg monopoly. (source)

16. Veterans represent 6% of the population but 30% of civilian federal employees (source).

Corrigenda

• In last month’s post I wrote than only 5 other horror movies, beyond Silence of the Lambs, had been nominated for Best Picture. The number is actually 6 (The Exorcist, Jaws, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, Get Out).1

Graphs I Liked

• Weights of Offensive Linemen in the Superbowl

• Average number of words in Oscar speeches

  

• Apparently men seem to pay down student loan debt much more quickly than women(?)

  

• The (fairly nonlinear) percentage of children going to public school by household income

  

• Software Development Job Postings on Indeed.com in the US2

  

Articles I Liked

• A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

• Ancient Rome Was So Polluted With Lead That IQs Dropped

• 50 Years of Travel Tips

• Was Harvey Weinstein thanked more often than God at the Oscars?

• India’s Most Reliable Retirement Plan: Selling Grandma’s Jewelry

Finally…

Some professional news: I’m pleased to announce that I have been awarded the Marjorie Deane Fellowship in financial journalism at The Economist, where I’ll spend a couple months writing on topics in financial markets and the economy. If you’re in London or NYC and would like to grab coffee (whether or not we’ve met before!) please feel free to reach out.

Things I Learned

1. 15% of all Uber ride bookings either begin or end at an airport (source).

2. There were cuneiform spreadsheets (source, h/t)

3. Mr. Potato Head was the first toy to be advertised on television. (source)

4. KLM, the Dutch national airline, flies to twice as many destinations in the U.K. as does British Airways (source and source).

5. Viviparity is a phenomenon found in plants where they reproduce through live births, essentially forgoing the use of seeds to spread new descendants and instead growing a child plant right away, while still attached to its parent plant. Mangroves are one example of this. (source)

6. Hugo Boss was the primary supplier of uniforms for the Nazi army. (source)

7. The world’s largest human gathering in history — with 400 million people in attendance — is a festival called Maha Kumbh Mela that commemorates a legend in which demons and gods fight over a pitcher carrying the nectar of immortality (source).

8. From 2010 to 2014, life expectancy in Syria fell from 79.5 to 55.7. (source)

9. The Graham cracker was invented by the temperance movement preacher Sylvester Graham as a purposefully dull cracker that would curb sinful desires, including the prevention of masturbation. (source)

10. Delta involuntarily bumped exactly 1 passenger in 2024. American Airlines bumped 13,200 (source).

11. Pandas, the most popular data analysis library for the most popular coding language (Python), was invented at the hedge fund AQR. (source)

12. In the 1850s, the US suffered large fires (i.e., those destroying 20+ buildings) once every two weeks. Over the same period, England, with a similar population size, suffered them in its provincial towns once every two or three years. (source)

13. 25% of the New York City’s MTA — roughly 22,000 employees — make 6 figure salaries. (source).

14. The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) is the only horror movie to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Only 5 other horror films have ever been nominated. (source)

15. The average margin of victory is 12.2 points in the NBA, 3.5 points in the MLB, 2.3 points in the NHL, and 11.1 points in the NFL.

16. Denmark, South Korea, the UK, and the US are the only countries in the OECD to tax estates. (source)

17. The northern and southern hemisphere are artifacts of the earth’s geometry (the equator), while the Western and Eastern hemispheres are entirely human-made, arbitrary designations. (source)

    1. Also, Africa is the only continent with land in all four hemispheres.

Graphs I Liked

• Defense Spending as % of GDP and Distance of Capital From Moscow

• Inflation Expectations by Political Party (note the huge jump, by party, around the 2024 election)

  

• Median lifespan by wealth bracket

  

• Number of men’s tennis players with a 1 handed back-handed to make it to at least the third round of a grand slam tournament.

  

• Talk about a big divergence!

Finally…

I usually keep this final section as a floating category, e.g. for personal news, summaries of my year, stray thoughts, etc. Today I wanted to highlight an obituary I came across. I didn’t know this person (he’s friend of a friend) but I found it particularly moving, not only because aspects of his life were strikingly similar to mine, but also because the tone, sentiment, and attention to detail captured exactly what I would hope for in my own obituary. More broadly, obituaries (and eulogies) are a literary form I haven’t encountered often, at least at my age. This one stood out as exceptionally well written in that it conveyed the character of a person I had never met.

OLD JEWISH MEN

BHIF: Old Jewish Men loses a friend...

Welcome to BHIF for Friday January 10, 2024. Baruch Hashem (Thank God) It’s Friday is The Old Jewish Men weekly roundup where we get to all the crap that actually matters in the world. Obituary winners. Matchmaking. Market watch. Marketplace finds. Complaint of the week. Joke of the week. You get the picture…

Read more

2 years ago · 75 likes · 17 comments · oldjewishmen

Some other articles I enjoyed reading this month

• Syria flooded with Pepsi and Pringles as rulers open economy

• 15 Years Ago I Made a Prediction. Here’s How it Turned Out.

• 40 bad ideas (and a few good ones)

• How Taiwan Became a Bond Market Superpower

  • Ft. this fact: “Taiwan…has invested a ton in US bonds. A ton. Its holdings of foreign exchange reserves…and overseas fixed income securities together total $1.7tn. That’s more than 200 per cent of the country’s GDP, more than five times the size of the entire domestic Taiwanese bond market, and roughly the equivalent of all of Pimco’s fixed income funds. In fact, it’s not much less than the net holdings of Taiwan’s much larger neighbour across the strait, Mainland China…”

Things I Learned

1. In 1870, the population of Idaho was 29% Chinese. (source)

2. The song “Sweet Caroline”, by Neil Diamond, refers to Caroline Kennedy. (source)

3. The median age of a US home is 40 years old. (source)

4. Babe Ruth hit more homers in Jimmy Carter's lifetime than any currently active player. (source)

5. The Great Pyramid of Giza, built in 2250 BC remained the world’s tallest structure for 3500 years until the construction of the Lincoln Cathedral in 1311. (source)

6. Out of the 13 presidents of South Korea, only one has not been impeached, imprisoned, overthrown, or assassinated. (source)

7. Wojtek was a brown bear who was enlisted as a private in the Polish Army during World War II and eventually rose to the rank of corporal. (source)

8. In the US the majority (81%) of eggs sold are white; whereas in Europe the majority of eggs sold are brown. (source)

9. There is no evidence that cell signals from a phone not on airplane mode interfere with aircraft signals. (source)

10. The oldest bond in the world — issued to rebuild a dike outside of Utrecht, Netherlands — is 400 years old, and pays €13.61 a year. (source)

11. The busiest domestic airline route in 2024 was Atlanta - Orlando. The busiest international airline route was Hong Kong - Taipei. (source)

12. BYU requires students to be clean shaven. (source)

13. Global revenue generated by the gaming industry is 7x larger than the revenue generated by recorded music, and is larger than the global revenue generated by the music and movie industries combined (source).

14. The “Jeb” in Jeb Bush is an acronym for his name, John Ellis Bush. (source)

15. Popcorn is not served at the Cannes Film Festival. (source)

16. The best selling single (physical copy) of all time is Bing Crosby’s "White Christmas. (source)

17. The reason that Arkansas and Kansas are pronounced differently is that Arkansas took the French pronunciation and Kansas took the native Algonquian pronunciation of the same root word. (source)

A Couple Graphs I Liked

• Prevalence of vices in top live action films

• US Department Store sales as a percentage of total US retail sales

  

• Per capita consumption of meat and fish, Japan

  

My 2024, Wrapped

Last year, I started doing annual “wrapped” of my year. This was an interesting year for me, full of ups and downs. Here are some of the numbers behind it:

• Travel: Excluding transit, I visited 11 states and 4 countries (UK, US, Egypt, Netherlands). I took 44 flights. I spent 14 nights in hotels and 5 in AirBnBs.

• Entertainment: I wrote 15 blog posts, watched 5 films at the movie theater, attended 2 live concerts (Gracie Abrams, Bruce Springsteen), and went to 4 major league sporting events (NFL, NBA, MLB x2). I once again played [redacted] number of games of online chess, 97.1% of which were bullet (i.e. ≤1-minute time control).

• Health: I went on 129 runs, 35 spinning rides, 5 bootcamps, and 4 swimming workouts. I slept an average of 6 hour 54 minutes a night.

• School: I took 2 classes and TAed 1 class. I released two papers — one coauthored, and one dissertation paper.

• Other: I attended one wedding, two shivas, and ten birthdays.

Last year, I wrote that “I hope to get out, exercise, and read a little more” in 2024 relative to 2023. I read fewer papers and only slightly more books, but I certainly got out more and exercised more. Next year, I hope to actually read more, write some more blog posts, and develop some new skills (suggestions welcome). In terms of new year’s resolutions, I’m trying to work on my gift-giving skills, reduce the amount I pack when I travel (including eliminating checking bags), and keep in touch with extended family and long distance friends more often.

I remain grateful to all who subscribe to this newsletter, especially those that have sent in facts, given feedback, or reached out to meet up and chat. Personally/professionally, I’ll have some exciting news to report on the horizon for 2025, so stay tuned. Until then, have a happy new year 🥳!