TGIF: 3 Things to Read This Weekend (Week 17)

Three things, one frame each. No “thought leaders.” No “10x your income.” Reading time below the fold.

1. The financial one — Matt Levine on private equity’s accounting trick

Matt Levine, Money Stuff, this Tuesday’s edition. He explained — in the only way he can, which is patiently and with the right amount of mockery — how PE firms mark their illiquid holdings. Short version: they value them at whatever keeps the LP happy and the management fee flowing. There’s no market, so the mark is whatever the PE firm says it is. The IRS, the SEC, and your pension fund all participate in this fiction.

The piece doesn’t tell you what to do about it. It tells you what’s actually happening. Most financial writing tells you what to feel. Matt tells you what’s real and lets you decide. Worth the 22 minutes.

2. The career one — The New York Times on managers who track keystrokes

The NYT ran a feature on the rise of “productivity surveillance” software in white-collar jobs. 31% of US employers now monitor screen time, app usage, and keystrokes. The piece interviews workers who have started padding their keystroke counts with manual typing exercises during slow periods.

Two takeaways: one, read your employee handbook for “monitoring” disclosures before you assume you’re not being watched. Two, the productivity gains from this surveillance are not measurable. The CEO believes in it because it makes the company “feel like” it’s working harder. The workers respond by performing the work of being watched. Net productivity: neutral. Net misery: high.

If your company runs this software and you didn’t know — that’s also data.

3. The off-topic one — Aeon on why we feel bad on Mondays

This isn’t about Mondays. It’s about how we’ve globally agreed that two specific days per week are for “rest” and that this distinction is recent (industrial revolution recent), arbitrary, and probably bad for our mental health. The piece argues for what some philosophers are calling “asymmetric rest” — taking a Wednesday off instead of a Saturday, or two half-days instead of one full one.

I’m not going to suggest you renegotiate your week. But the piece reframes why the gap between Sunday night dread and Friday afternoon relief is so predictable. It’s not you. It’s a calendar invented in 1908.

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That’s it. Three things. Not “13 underrated reads.” Not “the only newsletter you need.” Three.

If you read them and one of them changes how you think about something this weekend — that’s a successful TGIF. If none do, the next one is in 7 days.

— Mr. Chicken