Longform journalism site Grantland is shutting down. A look back at some of the site’s more interesting articles led to this 2012 gem by Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen on how a country can go about increasing its share of medals:

• Olympic medals are unequally distributed. 65% of gold medals are won by 5% of the countries that participate.
• To win medals a country needs to increase its population. More people means more athletes to choose from.
• Countries could also import top athletes from other countries and quickly give them citizenship.
• In rare occasions exporting athletes can also help increase medals. Any country interested in winning gold medals in basketball might want their athletes to play in the NBA for a while.
• More money helps. It leads to more sporting infrastructure and education.
• Hosting the Olympics boosts medal chances, because in preparation for hosting, countries invest more in their athletes.
• This is also why countries do particularly well in the Olympics event four years before they are scheduled to host, as they already know by then that they will be hosting and have begun to invest in their sportspeople more.
• Countries benefit from focusing on their comparative advantages. Countries with long shorelines should focus on boating events, while those with high altitudes can hope for running medals.
• Specific sports can be strategically targeted. Taekwondo, which awards four medals per weight class, is a better bet than Basketball, which awards just one to an entire team.

The full article has some musings about the Olympic futures of China and India and has other interesting details. Read it here.

Source: Grantland

Matthew Shaer wrote about Adidas’ efforts to overthrow Nike’s dominant market position:

• Sneakers have gone from being casual footwear to several hundred-dollar fashion statements worn to weddings and Church.
• Nike has dominated. It has 62% of the market – compared with Adidas’ 5%.
• In fact, just one line of Nike’s shoes, the Jordans, has 20 times more market share than Adidas’ entire basketball selection.
• The domination is driven by an $8 billion endorsement budget that has led to the company sponsoring pretty much every major sports star in the United States.
• Adidas is trying to make a comeback. It can’t match Nike’s endorsement budget but instead of signing the biggest athletes it’s looking to sign younger, edgier athletes, who are blurring the lines between sportspeople and fashion models.
• It is doing so in part by giving shoe designers more freedom. Kanye West recently moved his line of shoes from Nike to Adidas due to his concerns about creative freedom.
• The 9,000 Kanye West shoes that went onto debut under Adidas retailed for $350…and were being resold for up to $5,000.

Read more about Adidas’ efforts to poach Nike’s employees, the executives at Adidas that are leading the charge, and what Nike thinks about all of this here.

Source: GQ

Joel Kurth wrote about why people in Detroit are hoping to attract squatters:

• When a community finds that a neighbour has left their house, they’ll seek to recruit a squatter to take their place.
• Not only do abandoned houses lead to lower neighbourhood property values, it’s possible that they could be burned down as arson has become a form of entertainment in crisis stricken Detroit.
• Another popular strategy is to place beehives on residential properties to dissuade troublemakers.
• Finding the right squatter is an art – you don’t want, for example, a drug dealer to move in. The best way to find a good squatter is to tap into the existing squatter network and find out if they know anybody looking for a house.

Read more here.

Source: The Detroit News

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Economist wrote about an atypical business:

• Many in Sri Lanka believe that names can shape destinies.
• Therefore, when a baby is born, or a business launched, an increasing number of Sri Lankans are going to “naming consultants” that provide guidance on the names to choose.
• At one such consultancy clients have to take a number and wait until they are called up. The service costs 500 rupees – about $3.56.
• The practice is so popular that in 1992 the President was told the country needed to change its name to “Shri Lanka” for good fortune. He went onto be assassinated and the country quietly changed its name back.
• The previous Sri Lankan President named an airline after himself so that his name would fly high in the skies. He was subsequently booted out of office in a surprise election defeat.
• The airline bearing his name continues to fly high though so the naming consultant was not wrong per se.

Read more about the industry here.

Source: The Economist

Jana Kasperkevic stepped into the world of wealth counsellors – those who provide therapeutic counselling to the rich:

• Wealth counsellors argue that being rich has become a taboo and that the therapy they provide help the wealthy deal with the unique pressures of being rich.
• For example, the wealthy feel assaulted by the media and movements such as Occupy Wall Street.
• Those in particular need of counselling are the ones that inherited their money – we usually use terms like “trust fund baby” and “spoiled brat” when we think about these people.
• The wealthy also have to wonder if their friends only care for them because of their money.
• And wealthy parents need help in knowing how to ensure that their children grow up to be good human beings.
• Therapy can involve “walk and talk” sessions through New York City’s battery park.

Read more about the one such wealth counsellor and other details here.

Source: The Guardian

Via: Slate

The Economist wrote about a program that Romania has that the elite are exploiting to reduce prison time:

• Romania’s law used to grant reduced prison sentences if prisoners published serious academic works while there. Checks were in place to prevent abuse.
• In 2013 a loophole was introduced and now publishing pretty much any book will lead to an extra month of freedom.
• This has led a flurry of prisoners to publish multiple works, substantially reducing their jail time.
• One pop singer wrote a book about dental stem cells, while a former government minister wrote a book that consisted mostly of pictures.
• Prisoners can’t use computers, and must handwrite everything.
• In practice elites hire ghostwriters and then smuggle the written works into prison cells. The jailed then re-write the book in their own handwriting.
• Politicians – many who have seen former colleagues exploit the loophole – have little reason to push for change, knowing that the law may come in handy someday.

Read more about the agency pushing to fix the law, some of the other works that have been published by these prison scholars, and other details here.

Source: The Economist

Fresh from a conference on Beeronomics, David Zilberman wrote about the role that beer has played in our history:

• Humans may have learned to make beer from grain and water before learning how to make bread.
• We can thank beer for the Pyramids. Ancient Egyptian labourers were paid with the beverage.
• Holland and Belgium owe their independence to beer. When fighting Spain, they used a tax on beer to raise revenues, while Spain used a tax on silver. Beer won.
• Between 1870 and 1950 the poor in the United States drank local unpasteurized beers while the rich enjoyed uniform brews. Nowadays the opposite is true with the rich increasingly opting for craft brews.

Read more about the history of beers and the science of beeronomics over here.

Source: The Berkeley Blog

Via: Chris Blattman, Marginal Revolution

In a wider article about how a fixed internet landscape translates poorly into a world of fluid international borders, Rosie Cima had some fascinating bits of information about famous domain suffixes such as “.ly” or “.me”:

• Countries are able to make money from domain names ending with certain letters. For example .uk is overseen by the United Kingdom, .jp by Japan, and .se by Sweden.
• This can be lucrative. Tuvalu, a country, managed to get .tv assigned to it. The country now makes $2.2 million a year from websites ending with .tv – 10% of the government’s budget.
• Montenegro got .me and has made $15 million since 2006. Facebook, for example, owns fb.me
• .io belongs to the British Indian Ocean territory and is expected to do well because it’s memorable, and is an area under stable British rule.
• Unstable countries can create complexities. .sy belongs to Syria. After western countries imposed sanctions on the country during its ongoing civil war, companies paying the government for that domain such as art.sy were found to be violating those sanctions.
• Similarly, .ly which belongs to Libya, and is used by several major websites such as bit.ly, has been a mess since Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown. Not only were sanctions imposed for a while, there are now two competing governments who claim to be in charge.

The full article focuses on Libya’s experience, websites that have had troubles because of their domain names, some of the ethical questions that the domains raise, and a broader history of the internet. You should read it here.

Source: Priceonomics

When men provide sperm donations for a sperm bank they’re given pornography to help the process along. Zach Schwartz took a look into the sorts of considerations that go into finding the right material:

• The owners normally have to go out and buy the porn themselves. Asking employees to buy it could be deemed sexual harassment.
• The porn is selected to encourage donors to quickly finish their business and prevent them from lingering.
• In the past the materials exclusively featured Caucasian couples. Nowadays sperm banks have to provide a wider range of materials featuring different ethnicities and even sexualities.

Read more here.

Source: Vice

Anna Fifield had a fascinating piece on the latest trend in South Korean cooking shows. Having men cook:

• Korea arguably has a food obsessed culture. To say “how are you?” in Korean you ask “have you eaten?”
• Individuals post YouTube videos of themselves eating so that others who are alone around the country can eat along with them.
• In the traditional Confucian culture men are not expected to cook. Those who try maybe chased away by grandmothers with an old saying that translates to them losing their manhood at the stove.
• The latest generation sees nothing emasculating about men cooking. Indeed top cooking shows now have male stars that attract a considerable female following.
• It isn’t just about the sex appeal. Some women try to watch the show with their boyfriends and husbands in the hopes of encouraging them to cook.
• For others there’s something appealing, in troubled economic times, about top sexy male chefs using what are usually every day ingredients to make world-class meals.
• One of the more popular shows, called “Please Look After My Fridge” has chefs go to celebrity homes and try to whip up a meal with the contents of their fridges.

The full article is well written, has many more interesting points, and is worth a read. You can find it here.

Source: The Washington Post