Weekend Reads: Pulitzers, Papyri, and “Good Enough” Parenting

Over the past few years — and going back many decades — scores of remarkable stories have come to light thanks to the dogged efforts of investigative journalists. Most recently, a team of four Associated Press (AP) reporters — all women — won a Pulitzer for their “international investigation of the fishing industry in Southeast Asia that freed more than 2,000 slaves and traced the seafood they caught to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.” Their work is the subject of an AP book, Fishermen Slaves: Human Trafficking and the Seafood We Eat.

Last week, I read another feat of investigative journalism, this time by Ariel Sabar of The Atlantic. His lengthy article, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife,” is the backstory behind a “hotly contested, supposed ancient manuscript” that suggested Christ was married. (The discovery of the ancient papyrus scrap made headlines when it was announced in 2012.) It’s not often that Egyptology, the Vatican, an Ivy League institution, and popular fiction collide in a nonfiction narrative that stretches from the hallowed halls of Harvard Divinity School, to the former home of the East German Stasi, and on down to Florida. Sabar’s article, “a real-life Da Vinci Code,” also offers a cautionary tale for investors: beware the perils of confirmation bias, or seeking information that confirms your beliefs while avoiding evidence to the contrary.

Sabar’s sleuthing efforts remind me of something Tom Brakke, CFA, says about the best due diligence: It’s imperative “to crack the narrative.” That means asking more questions and following every lead, even when the trail goes cold.

Here are some other interesting reads, in case you missed them:

Investing and Financial Advice

• Here are five words of financial advice for new grads, courtesy of Morgan Housel and friends. I also really enjoyed Morgan’s piece, “Explaining Investing in Ways That Make Sense,” and what he learned buying a home. (The Motley Fool)
• Tren Grffin has a long-running series, A Dozen Things I Have Learned from [fill in the blank], and his most recent piece focuses on insights gleaned from Elon Musk. (25iq)
• I don’t often include Enterprising Investor posts, but once in a while there is something worth highlighting. Today it is: “The Investment Risk You’ve Never Calculated,” by my colleague Rebecca Fender, CFA. “Investment management professionals are trained to measure many kinds of risk,” she says. “Indeed, in the quest for performance, it is all about risk-adjusted returns. Any student of the markets can list off key risks, such as interest-rate risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, counterparty risk, and even tougher-to-quantify risks like geopolitical risk. The one we rarely speak about that has a significant impact on returns, however, is career risk, namely the potential to be fired from your organization for subpar investment performance.”
• What’s the value of a 1,109-carat, tennis-ball-sized diamond that’s roughly three-billion years old? It goes under the gavel at Sotheby’s London on 29 June. (The New Yorker)

And Now for Something Completely Different

• Why do we like one thing over another? Or as Louis Menand writes, what is it “that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ over ‘The Bourne Ultimatum,’ and Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of the same work?” I haven’t read Tom Vanderbilt’s book, You May Also Like, but I loved the review. (The New Yorker)
• “Business students with design thinking training can bring necessary sensitivity to the designers in the organizations in which they may serve, or when they are a co-founder with a designer,” writes John Maeda in “Is Business School the New Design School?” (TechCrunch)
• Here in the United States, we hear a lot about “supersizing” and “downsizing” and the effect that changing packaging and portion sizes has on food consumption. Brian Wansink, a professor of applied economics and management at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, has run hundreds of studies on eating behaviors and, it turns out, we are very much at the mercy of the cues in our environment. In a fascinating article, “Want to Eat Well? Forget about Willpower,” Wansink says most of us think we’re “master and commander” of our diets, when in fact “healthy eating has very little to do with willpower.” Here’s what does matter: plate size and color, visibility, placement, and surroundings. (TED)
• Are you a Star Wars fan? What do you think it’s all about? According to legal scholar Cass Sunstein, “‘Star Wars’ Is Really about Feminism. And Jefferson. And Jesus.” (Bloomberg View)
• For the runners among us, we hit the trifecta this week: “The 5K, Not the Marathon, Is the Ideal Race” (FiveThirtyEight), “How Exercise May Help the Brain Grow Stronger,” and “Closest Thing to a Wonder Drug? Try Exercise” (The New York Times)
• I had never thought about this before, but we humans are unique in the animal kingdom for our ability to make ourselves miserable. “Other animals certainly suffer when they experience negative events, but only humans can induce negative emotions through self-views, judgments, expectations, regrets and comparisons with others,” writes Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “Because self-thought plays such a central role in human happiness and wellbeing, psychologists have devoted a good deal of attention to understanding how people think about themselves.” For a long time, the emphasis self-esteem. Now it’s all about better understanding self-compassion, or how people treat themselves. “To understand what it means to be self-compassionate, think about what it means to treat another person compassionately, and then turn that same orientation toward oneself,” Leary writes. “Just as compassion involves a desire to minimise the suffering of others, self-compassion reflects a desire to minimise one’s own suffering and, just as importantly, to avoid creating unnecessary unhappiness and distress for oneself. Self-compassionate people treat themselves in much the same caring, kind and supportive ways that compassionate people treat their friends and family when they are struggling. When they confront life’s problems, self-compassionate people respond with warmth and concern rather than judgment and self-criticism.” (Aeon)
• I’m comfortable admitting I’m “the good enough parent.” That’s right, I’m not Super Mom by any stretch of the imagination. I recently learned we have British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott to thank for the concept of “the good enough parent.” As I was reading recently in, “Good Enough is Good Enough,” Winnicott apparently insisted that no child needs “an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pretty decent, usually well intentioned, sometimes grumpy but basically reasonable father or mother. Winnicott wasn’t saying this because he liked to settle for second-best, but because he knew the toll exacted by perfectionism — and realised than in order to remain more or less sane (which is a very big ambition already) we have to learn not to hate ourselves for failing to be what no ordinary human being ever really is anyway.” (The Book of Life)
• I’ve saved the best two nuggets for last. First, some thoughts on cooking: “Hope, for many these days, is thin on the ground,” wrote Sam Sifton last week in the What to Cook This Weekend email. “Cooking can help. I think it can. Just follow a recipe. The process is mindful and therapeutic at once, a form that allows you to get outside your racing thoughts and self in order to provide for others. And providing for others is good; it counteracts those who would take away from others instead.” (The New York Times)
• Second, the new season of the documentary Chef’s Table is now available. Of course, I’ve already watched the entire series and am priming myself for re-runs of my favorite episodes. (Netflix)

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image credit: iStockphoto.com/JLGutierrez