Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.

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FTX

Congressmembers Tried to Stop the SEC’s Inquiry Into FTX by David Dayen (The American Prospect)

A bipartisan group of House members back in March urged the SEC to lay off FTX earlier this year, about 8 months before the exchange collapsed and dragged billions in customer deposits with it. [Link]

Despite Boasting Of Big Profits, FTX And Alameda Lost $3.7 Billion Before 2022 by Jeff Kauflin (Forbes)

A bankruptcy court filing claims that the trading business which Sam Bankman-Fried funded with the assets of his exchange FTX lost almost $4bn in 2021. [Link]

Social Media

Facebook’s Most Popular Posts Were Trash. Here Is How It Cleaned Up. by Jeff Horowitz (WSJ)

After years of seeing spam posts of one kind or another reach the furthest across the company, Facebook has finally taken real steps to crack down on ways to turn down amplification of those kinds of posts. [Link; paywall]

Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook by Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Colin Lecher (The Verge)

Meta’s Pixel service has been capturing tracking data including names, addresses, income, filing status, refund amounts and more. [Link]

Elon Musk Embraces Twitter’s Radical Fact-Checking Experiment by Carl Miller (Wired)

One novel approach to moderation that new Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been pushing is a feature that adds context and details from other users instead of simply deleting posts. [Link; soft paywall]

Sports

From 1966 to now: the evolution of World Cup football by John Muller (The Athletic)

A data-fueled and very detailed look at the evolution of World Cup tactics from the mid-1960s through today. The only constant in the sport of soccer, it seems, is action and reaction as different tactics are replicated and adjusted. [Link; paywall]

Sports media organizations are doubling down on betting by Max Tani (Semafor)

Evolving norms around sports gambling is creating a complicated dance between media organization management and their writers. [Link]

Heroism

Army Veteran Went Into ‘Combat Mode’ to Disarm the Club Q Gunman by Dave Phillips (NYT)

A profile of the man who saved lives at the Colorado Springs nightclub attacked last week; the man charged the 300 pound rifle-armed murderer without a weapon and ended up completely incapacitating them. [Link; soft paywall]

Batteries

Engineers solve a mystery on the path to smaller, lighter batteries by David L. Chandler (MIT News)

A new solid state lithium battery developed at MIT offers the chance for much higher capacity than the current generation of batteries. Specifically, the researchers identified the cause of dendrites, which disable current versions of solid state batteries. [Link]

ESG

SEC Charges Goldman Sachs Asset Management for Failing to Follow its Policies and Procedures Involving ESG Investments (SEC)

An SEC order reported this week has meant fines for Goldman, which mislead investors in a few funds about ESG selection criteria and procedures related to those criteria. [Link]

Vaccines

I lost my child to flu. Trust me, you need a shot. by Zachary Yaksich (Voices For Vaccines)

A moving call for parents to vaccinate themselves and their children against the seasonal flu, which kills tens of thousands of people per year including the author’s six year old daughter. [Link]

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Have a great weekend!