PicoBlog

Welcome back trailblazers! I’m Simi Shah, and every other week, I dive deep into the journey of a trailblazing South Asian leader. Remember to find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Apple, and Spotify! To kick off Season 5 🥳, I catch up with Kal Penn, Actor, Author, and former White House Staffer. Listen Now Kal jumpstarted his acting career in the early 2000s with performances in The Namesake and Harold & Kumar franchise.

Hi friends, I hope your summer is off to a good start! We had a milder than usual spring here in the Phoenix area, with plenty of rain and even a superbloom throughout my part of the Sonoran Desert, offering a slow onramp into these summer months where the heat gets increasingly intense. But we’re now properly in it, with temperatures in the high 90s and low 100s and hotter heat to come, which means I’ve slid into my summer schedule, where I get up very early in order to run and exercise while I still can.

In the late 1990s, a group of distinguished investment bankers and economists, including Nobel laureates, founded Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that espoused a revolutionary investment approach based on complex mathematical models based on identifying and exploiting pricing discrepancies between related financial instruments. The fund's managers believed that these spreads would eventually converge, allowing the fund to generate significant profits. However, their hubris ultimately led to their downfall, as the fund's spectacular collapse in 1998 highlighted the limitations of even the most sophisticated financial models when faced with the unpredictability of human nature.

Reading Time: 9 “Do you Yahoo?” Minutes It looks like tech IPOs are coming back. That’s a good thing for the next wave of adtech, martech, and the venture capitalists that back them. Instacart went public last week with a decent debut raising $660 million. The stock price popped to $40 but has since trickled downward –25% to ~$30/share. Next up to enter the public arena was Klaviyo opening at $36.

Damned if you do damned if you don’t. That was my reaction to recent paparazzi pictures of Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock departing the clinic of Dr Neil A Gordon, who specialises in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery. The news platform—that had splashed the images across its homepage, because quite literally nothing more important is going … ncG1vNJzZmikkaq%2FprrEpaCzmZKawamvy5qppGajqq%2B0wMCcomebn6J8sXuUbmSjnZ6jtqex0WaYp6GjqbyvecCgnKKml2Kur7CMmg%3D%3D

When it comes to choosing a base in Tokyo after arriving at Haneda airport, many international tourists opt for places in central Tokyo like Shinjuku for its convenience of access to the city center. I’ve previously written a post about Shinbashi, which is another pretty central city. #45 Shinbashi as a choice to stay in Tokyo· February 19, 2023 However, today I would like to propose an alternative to these central locations.

I've always been fascinated by dreams. The fact that human beings conjure up alternate realities for themselves, with unspoken and implicitly understood rules and laws about the world, completely ridiculous things which seem genuinely real and which you don't even question until you wake up, is something that is mind-boggling when you think about, but is also so prevalent since the dawn of time that we don't stop to think twice about it.

Maybe Baby is a free Sunday newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $5/mo, you’ll gain access to my weekly recommendations, my monthly Q&A column, & my weekly podcast. Maybe Baby is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you! Good morning! My current petty dilemma is I can’t decide whether to join a coworking space I toured the other day because I’m not sure if I liked it or if it just smelled good, and there is a non-zero chance I was just smelling the cologne of my tour guide.

The Shop: Quest Bookshop Midtown East, Manhattan: 240 E 53rd Street My bookshop quest has finally led me to Quest Bookshop. This spiritual themed shop sits on a surprisingly eclectic block of Midtown East, next to the building of the NY Theosophical Society, who own and operate the store. Quest has all the stuff you would expect in a shop like this: incense, sage, statues, meditation pillows, and books! Being a highly secular type, I am perhaps not qualified to judge the selection here— topics include Hinduism & Buddhism, Christianity, and a whole shelf on Aleister Crowley.