Weekend Briefing No. 610
Books or Bread -- Playing God Costs $2,000 -- Costco’s Radical Simplicity
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
3,500,000 — Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl achieves the biggest album opening week since electronic sales tracking began in 1991, moving 3.5 million units (3.2 million in pure sales plus 300,000 from streams) and dethroning Adele’s 25 from the top spot.
17 — Din Tai Fung generates an average of $27.4 million in annual sales per US location, making it America’s top-earning restaurant chain despite having just 17 locations—nearly triple the per-store revenue of high-end competitor Nobu.
9 — Coca-Cola’s 7.5-ounce mini cans already account for over 9% of sparkling soft drink sales in large stores, prompting the beverage giant to launch single-serve versions in convenience stores nationwide this January at $1.29 each to capture budget-conscious and health-conscious consumers.
Books or Bread
When forced to choose between burning books and feeding children, which matters more? A father in Gaza faces this impossible calculus after crowds loot UN warehouses for flour, creating a brief surge of “dark joy” amid escalating war. With only mud ovens available for baking and no fuel except paper, his wife suggests sacrificing a book or two from his 200-volume library—each one inscribed by friends, some now dead, carrying memories of cafés and summer evenings before the siege. He refuses and searches desperately for cardboard instead, finding streets swept clean by other hungry families doing the same, until a shopkeeper’s generosity saves both his books and his conscience from an irreversible choice. The Paris Review (4 minutes)
Playing God Costs $2,000
For the price of a decent laptop, anyone can now rewrite the code of life. CRISPR gene editing technology allows scientists to engineer heat-resistant coral, resurrect extinct species, and create organisms that clean pollution—but it also risks catastrophic unintended consequences in ecosystems we barely understand. Researchers racing to save coral reefs from climate-driven extinction face a moral paradox: engineering nature to survive our failures might represent an even greater failure than letting it die naturally. Yet with 70% of Atlantic reefs projected dead by 2040 and Caribbean corals already “functionally extinct,” the question shifts from whether we should play God to whether we can afford not to—even as escaped genetically-modified zebrafish colonize Brazilian rivers and edited chestnut trees mysteriously shrivel, proving our divine powers remain worryingly imperfect. Noema (12 minutes)
Newsletter Deep Dive
Every week, you draft, edit, and send your newsletter to thousands of subscribers, and then…nothing. No clicks. No replies. No indication that anybody is actually reading anything. You’re shouting into the wind. But the best newsletters don’t just shout louder, they whisper something worth hearing. With a few simple changes, you can turn your newsletter into one of your greatest assets. Get a free, personalized audit with tailored recommendations from newsletter experts. Enter your email, and the Future Forest team will respond in a few days. Future Forest (Sponsored)
Costco’s Radical Simplicity
What if the secret to building a $230 billion empire is refusing to squeeze extra profit from a bottle of ketchup? Costco caps markups at 14% and hasn’t raised its hot dog price in 47 years, deliberately passing 89% of supplier savings to members instead of shareholders—a strategy so counterintuitive that CEO Jim Sinegal compared price increases to heroin addiction. The warehouse giant maintains just 3,800 products versus Walmart’s 100,000, accepts “intelligent loss of sales” by refusing to stock every size, and even owns chicken processing plants to keep rotisserie prices low. This obsessive focus on member value over short-term profits has created an unbreakable flywheel: massive volume drives supplier discounts, which drive lower prices, which drive loyalty (93% renewal rate), which drives more volume—making Costco’s model nearly impossible for competitors to replicate. Acquired Briefing (14 minutes)
Your Jeans’ Global Journey
A garbage truck’s worth of clothing gets dumped or burned every single second worldwide. ThredUp’s massive automated warehouse—complete with AI pricing, 360-degree photography, and a 100,000-square-foot hanger conveyor system—processes millions of secondhand items annually, yet that’s barely a dent in the crisis. What ThredUp can’t sell gets baled and shipped to sorting hubs in Pakistan, then re-exported to markets like Ghana’s Kantamanto (which burned down in 2025, killing two people) or Chile’s Atacama Desert, where illegal dumping created a pile visible from space. Despite innovations like textile-to-textile recycling that can transform old shirts into new ones, less than 1% of clothing actually gets recycled this way because the process remains too expensive and complex to scale—meaning your closet cleanout will likely circle the globe before ending up as microplastic pollution in the ocean. Youtube (11 minutes)
Bollywood vs. AI Deepfakes
Your favorite celebrity’s face can now be hijacked in five minutes using free AI tools. Bollywood power couple Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai are suing Google over YouTube videos showing AI-generated content of them in sexually explicit scenarios, fake romantic entanglements, and fabricated drama—but their lawsuit goes further by demanding YouTube prevent these videos from training other AI models, which could exponentially multiply the misinformation. India has no explicit personality rights laws, leaving celebrities vulnerable as channels like “AI Bollywood Ishq” rack up 16.5 million views creating fake love stories using simple text prompts through tools like X’s Grok AI. The couple argues that once AI platforms learn from biased, defamatory content, they’ll perpetuate false narratives indefinitely—turning today’s deepfake into tomorrow’s accepted “truth” across the internet. Reuters (8 minutes)
Gen Z Picks Stocks Over Homes
What if an entire generation decides houses are a worse investment than their Robinhood account? Gen Z’s homeownership rate sits at just 16%—the lowest ever for first-time buyers—as influencers flood social media urging young people to rent and invest instead of stretching for overpriced homes. The math reveals why: investing a $60,000 down payment plus $13,500 annually in rent savings could yield $354,000 in a decade at 9% stock returns, nearly matching the $305,000 equity from buying a $400,000 home that appreciates 4% yearly. A JPMorgan report shows 37% of 25-year-olds now use investment accounts versus just 6% in 2015—a sixfold increase fueled by zero-commission apps, crypto hype, and meme stocks—fundamentally reshaping how the first digitally native generation builds wealth and creating a lasting competition between housing and stock markets for their savings. WSJ (8 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
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Weekend Wisdom
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. - John Maeda
I really resonate with the Books or Bread section. It's a stark reminder of the humanitarian crises hapening. Such profound insight into human struggle and resilience. Thank you for writing this.