Weekend Reading #318

This is the three-hundredth-and-eighteenth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 7th June 2025

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What we’re thinking and doing

Note: I’ve been travelling this week, so this is a shortened version as there hasn’t been much time for reading or listening. But plenty time for thinking. No time for typo checking so apologies in advance. DC

My first time in U.S. since 2011 as I have been in New York for a conference hosted by Tom Morgan and his Leading Edge group. It has been a wonderful week of hanging out with people in person who I have met and gotten to know online over the last years plus many great new people too! It may be obvious to say this by now but there is absolutely nothing that can match meeting in real life. Online communication is highly efficient but full connection is rarely made over the internet. So, hello to all my new friends and readers if you just joined our newsletter!

I found New York thriving and buzzing like never before. What a city! Compared to the streets of London, the positivity and can-do attitude of Americans is a note to behold. A recent phenomenon I’ve noticed is that for anyone outside of America, America has been reduced to politics. It’s team red or team blue or Trump or TDS. This is quite ridiculous. America and every country for that matter is not about its politics but rather its people who live their lives day to day. And I can assure you most people are too busy getting on with the day to day to worry about politics. 

As I’ve been mostly offline of X this week you realise that in real conversations politics barely features because it’s not important. Outside of America all anyone has to reference is what they are fed online. All the faux outrage is just pretty dumb.

Anyway, now that the philosophising is over, we can talk about Elon and Trump. Neither can afford for this to get out of hand so a truce is likely in my view.

Markets wise we keep going. Dollar down, tech up. Circle, the stablecoin operator, IPO-ing up 168% on day one. We are in a retail bubble and as Soros said before he started doing politics, we rush to buy it. Coreweave with another crazy week too. We’ve written about this type of market frenzy before. It’s lasts until it doesn’t but always longer than you think. DC

What we are watching.

On the plane over I started watching Mobland, the latest Guy Ritchie show. All the favourites are in it - Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren. It’s fantastic and if I don’t sleep (highly unlikely) I’ll continue on the way back this evening. DC

We managed to watch the most recent Joker film, Folie à Deux, which according to the reviews, was a bit of a flop, and fortunately (for the film), we have to disagree with the reviews. It was most definitely not your typical villain origin story, as the introspective exploration of Arthur Fleck’s past, and the consequences of him ultimately trying to renounce his Joker identity (and the backlash against him from his supporters who were enamoured with the idea of the Joker rather than him as an individual) make for lots of post-film ruminating. Suffice to say, that the film was a “flop” was probably more a function of intellectual indolence, because by any objective standard it was pretty well made – certainly more so than the review ratings indicate. EL

What we are reading.

Ever seen a star getting ripped to pieces by nothingness itself? Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we now have a chance to see a supermassive black hole consume a hapless wandering star. Described as a “Tidal Disruption Event”, now named AT2024tvd (not the most intuitive name for something this significant), the discovery was made as the telescopes observed a burst of energy resulting from the black hole literally ripping the star apart. What makes this particularly interesting was that the supermassive black hole was not located in the centre of the galaxy as is usually the case, but rather offset from the centre by 2,600 light years, making it the first TDE observed that isn’t from a black hole located in the galaxy’s centre from a “roaming” black hole, which would otherwise be invisible unless a star was consumed. Thankfully we’re looking at this from so far away (600m light years away) – wouldn’t want to even start imagining what it’d be like to have a star ripped apart, much less the planets and their atmospheres.

In other news, the ongoing story of the UK falling to pieces continues, with Thames Water now facing what is probably its last hope before the prospect of nationalisation or some form of government intervention, as Silver Point and Elliott put forward a £10bn restructuring and equity re-injection proposal to save it. The two firms and their allies control £12bn out of Thames Water’s £16bn regulated debt, making them the effective owners of the company. KKR’s withdrawal from a previous attempt to bail the utility out leaves Thames Water with little alternative, though with this proposal still sitting with the regulators, its future as a private company remains pretty much uncertain. If nationalised, it adds one more thing to the list of Labour’s tally of nationalisation – whatever one may make of that growing tally. EL