Things I Learned - April 2026
Hello and happy May. Here is what I learned in April 2026.
Things I Learned
Every Hollywood film released in India gets a mandatory interval. (source)
The obesity pay gap is (a) almost enitrely borne by women (b) significantly increases with the level of education. (source)
The two Supreme Court justices least likely to vote together — Elena Kagan and Samuel Alito — still vote together 61% of the time, excluding unanimous decisions. (source)
Jane Street, a trading firm with 3,500 employees and no CEO, earned more total profits last year than the world’s largest asset manager Blackrock ($13 trn AUM) and the world’s largest private equity firm Blackstone ($1 trn AUM) combined.1 (source)
There has not been a left-handed catcher in MLB since the 1980s. (source)
Virtually all the modern-day tropes about pirates are inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, rather than based on historical fact. Pirates rarely buried treasure or wore eye patches aboard ships; they were more likely to have crutches than peg-legs; and there are no written records of pirates keeping parrots as pets. (h/t, source, source, source, source)
Japanese consumption of Sake has declined by three quarters since the 1970s. (source)
The top 0.1% of traders on Polymarket — roughly 1,600 accounts — earn 58% of all profits on the platform. (source)2
George Washington was a redhead. (source)
On average, 20%–25% of U.S. mutual funds disappear during any given five-year period. (source)
“Low-background steel” is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s; it is typically obtained from scrapped ships and shipwrecks and is used as a material for particle detectors and geiger counters because it is not contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout. (source)
317 is the smallest natural number that does not have its own Wikipedia article. (source)
“Varsity” is a 17th-century British slang shortening of “university,” originating from an era when “er” was commonly pronounced as “a”. It was meant to distinguish athletes representing the university from those who represented the colleges in intramural play. (source)
On this Day in Previous Editions
(April 2025): The English word ‘much’ and its Spanish equivalent ‘mucho’ are etymologically unrelated. (source)
(April 2024): 72% of the US stock market is held in accounts that do not have to pay any taxes. (source)
Graphs I Liked
I enjoyed this chart from the NY Times showing how range is a smaller determinant of price for EVs than it used to be. (Good visualization of ∂2R/(∂P∂t)).
This full article on Japanese railways is well worth a read (e.g., “travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United States”), but I especially like this visualization of population densities as a function of distance from city center.4
The Growth of Horror
Checking in on South Korea
Observations
As most of my friends know, I am a big postcard writer so I enjoyed Elizabeth Passarella’s “The Case for Handwritten Letters.”
The stats in the first half of this article (“How Funerals Keep Africa Poor”) on African funerals are wild.
I was amused to see the New York Times commission a review of Air France’s new first class product, which, at an $11,000 ticket for a ~1485 word piece, comes out to something like $7.45 a word. Shame I wasn’t on that beat at The Economist.
I have been genuinely impressed by Starbucks’ effort and creativity the past couple month in trying out new business ideas. First there was a “High Protein” drinks menu (which is an amusing concept for a coffee shop); then a Devil Wears Prada 2 themed menu; and finally, a ChatGPT x Starbucks partnership for discovering drinks that match your vibe (and recommending outfits based on your drink choice as well?). To be clear, I don’t know if these are good ideas, but I generally think companies should experiment more, so I applaud their dynamism.
I enjoyed the wikipedia page on foreign language equivalents of the phrases “Once upon a time” and “happily ever after” (i.e. the traditional story-starting and story-ending stock phrases). For example, Koreans start stories with “Back when tigers used to smoke tobacco.”
Personal Updates
Since I usually devote this paragraph to personal updates, my miscellaneous highlights from the past month include: (i) a week spent in Jamaica (ii) the start of my corporate softball league (iii) watching a friend from my PhD teach his MBA class at Columbia Business School (iv) warmer weather (v) and a particularly expansive variety of social events including some housewarmings, a birthday party for a 4 year old, a chessboxing tournament (where I won a cool chess set), a baby shower, two NYC bar trivia league nights (we lost both), and two seders. There were also some definite lowlights this month, but such things happen. Until next time!
This comes out to something like $8M earnings per employee (Nvidia, by comparison, is less than half that).
51-58% depending on the sample.
Another fun line from the article: “Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters was sending so many engineers to orchestrate production that it convinced United Airlines to fly thrice weekly from San Francisco to Chengdu and Hangzhou, arguing it would buy so many first-class seats that the route would be profitable even if the rest of the plane were empty.”