9 Things for your Memorial Day weekend | 23 May 25
News from the past week, and a few other things.
On this Friday before Memorial Day weekend I bring you a mixture of boring (but interesting) and fun items. In the midst of grilling hot dogs, watching the Indy 500, or taking some time to reflect on the U.S. military members who died while serving our country, here are a few other things to think about or watch.
First, the boring stuff…
1. Meet the ‘Stealthy Wealthy’ Who Make Their Money the Boring Way
Behind a paycheck, the largest source of income for the 1% highest earners in the U.S. isn’t being a partner at an investment bank or launching a one-in-a-million tech startup. It is owning a medium-size regional business. Many of them are distinctly boring and extremely lucrative, like auto dealerships, beverage distributors, grocery stores, dental practices and law firms, according to Zidar and Zwick.
Their analysis of anonymized tax data from 2000 through 2022 suggests the importance of such business ownership to the U.S. economy has grown. The share of income that ownership generates has increased to 34.9% in 2022 from 30.3% in 2014 for the top 1% earners.
It has increased even more at the topmost levels. The top 0.1% highest-earners saw 43.1% of their income come from such business ownership in 2022, compared with 37.3% in 2014. (The minimum income threshold in 2022 to qualify for the top 0.1% of earners was $2.3 million, according to Zidar.
2. Jamie Dimon Says Tariffs Might Inflict More Economic Pain Than Investors Realize
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday he didn’t think the full impact of tariffs had passed through to the broader economy and warned that the stock market could slump as companies reckoned with the new costs for goods and supplies.
3. Klarna’s losses widen after more consumers fail to repay loans
Klarna’s net loss more than doubled in the first quarter because more consumers failed to repay loans from the Swedish “buy now, pay later” lender as concerns rose about the financial health of US consumers. The fintech, which offers interest-free consumer loans to allow customers to make retail purchases, on Monday reported a net loss of $99mn for the three months to March, up from $47mn a year earlier. The company, which makes money by charging fees to merchants and to consumers who fail to repay on time, said its customer credit losses had risen to $136mn, a 17 per cent year-on-year increase. Klarna has focused on growing aggressively in the US in recent years, signing partnerships with merchants including DoorDash, Walmart and eBay. The push into America has raised concerns about the group’s vulnerability to a US recession.
NOTE: Here’s an article I shared back in early April on this topic:
Wall Street is hungry for loans. Enter: Burrito bonds
One way to understand today’s financial world is that everything is a cash flow. There’s a $14 trillion market in which loans are sliced, packaged, and sold to investors, who collect the repayments. Most are mortgages, but recent deals have tapped into payment streams for home heat pumps, private jet leases, and IP addresses. It’s all “a bit spicy,” even for the Janus Henderson executive who does this for a living. The partnership announced last week between DoorDash and Klarna to offer installment loans for food delivery is the latest effort to turn normal commerce into Wall Street-bound cash flows. Takeout bonds — say, Non-Amortizing Culinary Holdings Obligations (NACHOs) — will feed a growing appetite from private credit funds, which have raised billions of dollars and are running out of things to buy. Buy-now-pay-later loans make sense for big purchases, where they are cheaper than credit-card balances that might be carried for months at huge interest cost. But people who need to spread their sushi dinner over a few paychecks might not be able to afford the sushi at all, and we’ve added another one-click option to obscure that fact.
4. A Fire Sale of Portland’s Largest Office Tower Shows How Far the City Has Fallen
After Digital Trends moved out of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in Portland, Ore., the technology publisher didn’t hold back about why it left.
The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with “vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.” They were “starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,” according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit.
Two years later, the city’s biggest office tower stands more than half empty. U.S. Bank, the largest tenant whose parent company’s name is on the building, pulled most of its employees out last year after more than a century in the city.
The 42-story tower was recently put up for sale. The building affectionately known as Big Pink because of its pink-hued Spanish granite and pink glazed glass has an asking price of about $70 million, according to brokers. That is more than 80% below what the owners paid for it a decade ago.
Many cities across the U.S. are starting to recover from what has been one of the worst office downturns of the past 75 years. Businesses leased more office space during the first three months of 2025 than in any quarter since 2019. That turnaround stretches from New York to San Francisco, after companies summoned workers back to the office and their return boosted local businesses.
But Portland’s commercial real-estate market shows few signs of recovering from the fallout of the pandemic, rise in homelessness and the state’s botched experiment with drug decriminalization. Unitus Community Credit Union and Wells Fargo are among the big companies that have left Portland or are downsizing their space in the city. Many are landing in the surrounding suburbs.
Portland’s first-quarter office vacancy rate at 35% was the highest among the 25 largest central business districts in the U.S., according to real-estate firm Colliers. The city budget is under pressure, in part because property-tax collections are hurt by the declining value of office buildings.
Some recent news has been more encouraging. Public safety has greatly improved of late and the number of violent crimes are down. Oregon’s legislature last year ended the state’s permissive drug laws. Apple no longer has metal shielding on its downtown store that had become a symbol of the city’s decay.
The new mayor, Keith Wilson, is considered pro-business, and a new county district attorney, Nathan Vasquez, is viewed as tougher on crime. But for now, companies keep leaving.
5. Hack of Contractor Was at Root of Massive Federal Data Breach
Failures in cybersecurity practices at a software company that helps federal agencies manage investigations and FOIA requests allowed two convicted hackers to delete databases, according to internal documents.
Opexus, which is owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo and provides software services for processing US government records, was compromised in February by two employees who'd previously been convicted of hacking into the US State Department.
The investigations found that the employees, twin brothers Muneeb and Suhaib Akhter, improperly accessed sensitive documents and compromised or deleted dozens of databases, including those that contained data from the Internal Revenue Service and the General Services Administration. The brothers have since been terminated.
…and now the fun stuff!
6. Universal’s $7 Billion Theme Park Sparks Arms Race With Disney
For about $7 billion, Universal’s parent, Comcast has built the first major U.S. amusement park to open in over two decades. It is trying to feel like the theme park of the future. The company invested in the highest-end technology to create immersive experiences and rides that make Walt Disney World’s Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean seem like museum pieces. Universal secured over 160 patents in developing the park. The goal in the theme park arms race is vacation-destination supremacy. The new park sits on a 750-acre site and is part of an effort to transform the existing Universal Orlando Resort into a weeklong destination, said Mark Woodbury, chief executive officer of Universal Destinations and Experiences, the division of Comcast NBCUniversal that operates the company’s theme parks around the globe.
7. The improbable rise of chessboxing
The first chessboxing bout took place in Berlin in 2003, organised by a Dutch performance artist, Iepe Rubingh. Five years later a breakaway British faction got going. Chessboxing’s popularity has steadily risen despite this split, helped by a surge in online chess during the covid-19 pandemic and a hit TV show, “The Queen’s Gambit”.
On the Saturday morning before the Scala fight a dozen chessboxers gather at Islington Boxing Club, the British home of chessboxing, to exert both their minds and bodies. Four boards are set up beside a boxing ring. Training consists of rounds of chess alternating with intense exercise or sparring. The challenge comes from attempting a cerebral activity while fighting for breath. A pounding heart, let alone a few punches to the head, can leave you disoriented. The training session features tips like ensuring you take your turn in chess just as the next boxing round begins, so your opponent’s clock is running when you return to the board, where some 80% of matches are decided. “The boxing impacts the chess and vice versa,” Mr Paterson says.
8. How Elite Athletes Train Their Eyes to See the World in Slow Motion
Elite athletes are using a cutting-edge technique to improve their performance—and it’s catching on with weekend warriors, ambitious kids and others looking for a competitive boost.
It’s called sports vision training, and it promises to improve the speed and accuracy required to blister a fastball, pilot a fighter jet or even level up your Little League game.
The training uses arcade-style games, virtual reality and other tools to strengthen the muscles around the eye and hone the link between the eyes and the brain.
The same techniques are used to rehabilitate people who experience vision problems after a concussion, according to Dr. David Putrino, a professor in the department of rehabilitation and human performance at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
The goal of sports vision training is to improve how well someone can see and make decisions based on rapidly changing information, according to Dr. Daniel Laby, a New York City-based ophthalmologist who said he has worked with Major League Baseball teams, including the New York Yankees, and sees more than 1,000 professional athletes and other clients annually.
9. Ted Gioia’s picks
NOTE: Ted Gioia is a fascinating person whom I regularly follow. He graduated from Stanford and Oxford, worked at McKinsey and BCG, was a jazz musician, and is now a culture critic, music historian and author of the Substack The Honest Broker. I appreciate his vast knowledge and perspective of society. Below are some items he recommends:
The rise of "dopamine culture" and the decline of pop culture in America
New pod: The rise of "dopamine culture" and the decline of pop culture in America
First, I discuss the Ted Gioa's argument that pop culture is being turned into a virtual casino of the mind that is better at producing reward-seeking behavior than quality art.
Then, I talk to @skornhaber about his long Atlantic essay "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" and what he identified as the four horsemen of the pop culture apocalypse
1. Stagnation: the economics of pop culture nostalgia, the staggering challenges of making big original movies, and the algorithmic and private-equity dynamics elevating old music over new music
2. Cynicism: how an obsession with identity has flattened creativity in the visual arts and beyond
3. Isolation: e.g., bands and bars slowly being replaced by music that people make alone in their rooms with computers for an audience of ... people listening alone in their rooms with computers
4. Attention rot: it's not easy aiming for quality in a world where ppl are losing the capacity to pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds
Finally, I ask: If every decade is inevitably considered a golden age of something in culture ... what will the 2020s be known as the golden age of?
The Ultimate Film Studies Watchlist
Foundations of Film seeks to give a comprehensive guide for film studies to all interested in the field. Episode one features a watchlist of 20th-century cinema to begin your journey and offers the basic tools for cinematic reference.
St. James Infirmary | River Eckert | Live Outside | Playing For Change
Enjoy a melody for the heart of New Orleans with a sensational performance of "St. James Infirmary” Live Outside by 15-year-old prodigy River Eckert. River's raw talent and soulful rendition serve as a powerful homage to the indomitable people and resilient spirit of New Orleans.
If you like the one above, then you’ll like the one below too. Amazing.
Dark Blues on 3-String Shovel Guitar • "GRAVE INTENT"
Justin Johnson plays some blues on his shovel guitar (which is exactly what you think shovel guitar would be).
The Red Clay Strays - Ramblin' (Live At The Ryman)
An American country rock band from Alabama. What a voice the lead singer has.
If you liked the one below, then you’ll really like “Wondering Why,” which put them on the charts, and has some of the best lyrics I’ve heard in a while.
Enjoy your weekend!
The Curator