The weekend is here! Parents like to tell their children that hard work and ambition will carry them far, and sometimes that’s true. But a well-structured investment account may offer a more reliable path to prosperity than sheer determination. (New York Times)• 6 Economic Lessons from Books About Power, Propaganda, and Decline: What Tolkien, Canetti, Girard and more can teach us about discord, scapegoats, and the test of institutions. (Quanta Magazine)• Magical systems thinking: Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up.