One of the best pieces of writing we’ve read in a long time is also exceptionally relevant to Egypt this weekend. Mark Warren’s “How the NYPD secures Times Square on New Year’s Eve” for Popular Science is feature writing at its best. You can hear the Brooklyn accents and the rhythm of cop-speak run up against the slur of under-dressed, inebriated revelers as Warren asks “How does the world's largest police department balance the security of the spontaneous masses with the freedoms that make us who we are? The counterterrorism cops of the NYPD take us deep inside their extraordinary operation.” In the wake of this week’s Palm Sunday bombings, this story should be on the reading list of anyone who thinks about the pointy end of the security equation.

Of wine and running: Whether you enjoy it over a meal or it’s your tipple of choice when, uhm, reveling, novice and intermediate connoisseurs of wine — oenophiles to the cognoscenti — will learn something from the New York Times’ “How to drink wine.” The long feature is divided into multiple sections, covering everything from fundamental types of wine to how to shop for it, how to order it at a restaurant, how to open a bottle and what wine goes best with which foods.

Then, while you’re on the Times’ site and before you refill your wineglass (you’re using one with a stem, not one of those useless and pretentious stemless glasses, right?), go read Gretchen Reynold’s “An Hour of Running May Add 7 Hours to Your Life.” Why should you lace up? A new study “found that, compared to nonrunners, runners tended to live about three additional years, even if they run slowly or sporadically and smoke, drink or are overweight. No other form of exercise that researchers looked at showed comparable impacts on life span.”

Whether they’re running Fortune 500 companies, three-person startups or established family businesses, execs across the US this morning are debating Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders. The letter touches on everything from artificial intelligence to why he insists it’s still “Day 1” for Amazon. The opening note to Amazon’s annual report is being taken as a lesson on how even an established giant can continue to innovate as if it’s a startup, and plenty of attention is being paid to his notion that you need to make decisions with only 70% of the information you’d like to have — and not be afraid to rapidly admit when you chose the wrong path. You can read the full letter here in Amazon’s SEC filing or catch coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider or CNBC.

Want to chuck it all and join the French Foreign Legion? Get accepted, serve three years with honor and it’s your ticket to French citizenship under the name of your choice. Aeon takes a look at the storied French fighting force, which is repositioning itself not as a group of ‘expendables,’ but as “an elite fighting force, to be compared with the British SAS or the US Navy Seals.” Go read “The legend of the Legion” in Aeon — it’s one part military history, one part psychological study, and well-enough written that you get to the end and wish there was more.

So if the Aeon piece isn’t enough, head back to 2012 and read the utterly inimitable William Langewiesche’s “The Expendables” for Vanity Fair: “The sergeant supervising the helicopter exercise had mastered the art of disciplining men without wasting words. He was a former Russian Army officer, a quiet observer who gave the impression of depth and calm, partly because he spoke no more than a few sentences a day. After one of the imagined helicopter landings, when a clumsy recruit dropped his rifle, the sergeant walked up to him and simply held out his fist, against which the recruit proceeded to bang his head.” From training to history and modern-day combat, Langewiesche has it all.

The Legion’s low-fi English-language recruitment site is here, by the way. Just sayin’.

If Langewiesche’s name looks as familiar as it is unpronounceable, it may be because he’s journalist and former commercial pilot who wrote “The Crash of EgyptAir 990” for The Atlantic magazine back in November 2001, ultimately suggesting that the pilot who crashed EgyptAir Boeing 767 from New York to Cairo into the sea either did so on purpose or was the worst pilot in history.

“Parents 'control' their children in one of 2 ways — and only one leads to happier kids” by Mic and syndicated to Business Insider makes for interesting reading if you’re wondering what your approach to parenting is doing for (or to…) your kid. Says the lead author of a recent study on the subject: “We found that people whose parents showed warmth and responsiveness had higher life satisfaction and better mental wellbeing throughout early, middle and late adulthood. By contrast, psychological control was significantly associated with lower life satisfaction and mental wellbeing. Examples of psychological control include not allowing children to make their own decisions, invading their privacy and fostering dependence.”

A masterclass in spotting BS business, when it’s worthwhile: The Financial Times’ Lucy Kellaway (who, we remind you, will be switching careers this fall — in her 50s) was delighted to hear that the University of Washington was offering a course entitled Calling Bullshit In the Age of Big Data. The course is designed for and limited to “spotting bullshit in numbers,” but Kellaway says there’s “an equal need for one spotting it in words, especially words used in business. Her suggested course begins with a definition: “bullshit means nonsense, usually of a puffed-up variety that pretends to be something it is not. Sharp eyes will spot at once the difficulty in applying this to corporate life — almost everything fits the description.” But there is a key rule one must stick to, Kellaway says: “the first rule about calling corporate bullshit is not to do it too assiduously or you will go insane. I have learnt to ignore 95 per cent of it, and of the remainder ask myself two questions: what is the quality? And: how damaging is it?” She gives three examples to illustrate the point.

The first case Kellaway cites is from a 2008 Pepsi rebranding document that said “the Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations.” Kellaway calls this “grade A, unadulterated BS. But on the second question — whether it was damaging — the answer is no. Pepsi changed its logo and carried on selling its brown sugar-water around the world willy-nilly.” The second case is of a document from Deliveroo, on its preferred language for describing the people who deliver takeaways to customers. The memo bans “employees”, replacing it with “independent suppliers,” and forbids “pay” and “hiring” preferring “invoices” and “onboarding” instead. On the bullshit quality measure, Kellaway says it is tame. However, on the measure of harm, it is egregious, as Deliveroo knows that “if people used the ordinary words ‘employee’ and ‘hire,’ they might make the mistake of thinking they were due ordinary things like holidays and sick pay.”

Kellaway saves her best example for last. “The third example comes from Jim Norton, who has the delightfully bullshitty title of chief business officer, president of revenue at Condé Nast.” Norton outline a new strategy in a memo that began with “‘Team’ and proceeded with a stream of corporate nonsense about playbooks and journeys and wide arrays of differentiated solutions,” and created a plan he calls “Condé Nast One.” Kellaway’s verdict: “for companies to claim themselves ‘one’ is standard bullshit — it is a cliché and a lie, given the inevitable number of vested interests in any organisation. If Mr Norton were in the motor trade or banking, I might let this pass. Yet Condé Nast publishes Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, where standards of editing are so exacting that one of the latter’s editors has written a whole book based on the correct placement of a comma.”

When failure to compete on the executive management level leads to failure to compete on the pitch: Arsenal FC is in crisis. This season has been the esteemed English football team’s worst since its legendary manager Arsene Wenger took over the club 19 years ago. The club has been on an impressive losing streak for its away games, going down 10-2 on aggregate in its Champions League matches with Bayern Munich (the worst loss by an English team in the competition’s history) and most recently 3-0 to bottom-three Premier League team Crystal Palace. All this despite boasting one of the best selections of world class superstars, including Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil, and Hector Bellerin. The losses have seen calls by fans for the club not to renew Wenger’s contract reach a fever pitch. Even worse, their star player, Sanchez, has been fanning the flames of speculation that he is leaving the club, with reports of interest in him coming from rivals Chelsea and Manchester City. Arsenal is currently outside the qualification places for Europe’s elite Champions League, a competition in which it has played every season for the past two decades.

While fans hold Wenger primarily responsible for the losing streak, many have taken the view that the board of directors’ business and financing strategy is being the club’s dysfunctionality. At the heart of the problem: bn’aire US sports mogul Stan Kroenke. Arsenal had been financially strapped, something the board felt would be resolved if they sold a majority stake to Kroenke, often described as an absentee landlord. This came despite Alisher Usmanov, who owns more than 30% of the London club, offering to underwrite a rights issue he said would have provided Wenger with the money to try and buy the very best players, according to Bloomberg. Usmanov also called for an overhaul of Arsenal’s commercial operations. Arsenal’s full-year revenue of about USD 434 mn is about 30% less than rival Manchester United, which generates more commercial income from jersey-sponsorship rights and its branding. Other cost saving measures adopted by the club including a wage capped for players at GBP 150K per week, which has impeded the club’s ability to buy new players and retain vital ones. Recently Arsenal made an exception for Sanchez offering to double his pay if he renews his contract.

But perhaps one of the biggest issues that have been raised is how the board has set the bar low for the team and its manager. So long as Arsenal remain in the top-four (a difficult feat for the team this season), Wenger has been able to keep his contract, something which Arsenal fan Piers Morgan has rightfully noted would never happen to other Premier league managers (yes, this is the only time in which we will actually listen to the man’s blathering). The leadership vacuum has opened the door for Wenger to take full control at the club and effectively set his own contracts. Wenger has refused to so far disclose whether he is staying next season or leaving. Either way, these problems on the pitch cannot be resolved until the problems with the board and the business are addressed.

Kicking Qatar around on a long weekend: If you’re into thrillers and crime capers, go read Jon Gambrell’s fantastic “Qatari pays USD 2 mn to try to free royals abducted in Iraq,” which uses US Justice Department documents to “shed new light on the opaque world of private hostage negotiation in the Middle East in a case that now involves hackers, encrypted internet communication and promises of millions of dollars in ransom payments.” Near center stage: A Greek shoe salesman. If you prefer your dose of anti-Qatar sentiment straight up, head over to the Toronto Star, where Mohamed Fahmy (of ‘Marriott Cell’ fame) writes of terrorist financiers who are “strolling freely in Qatar’s malls and posting photographs of their expensive cars flanked by rare falcons and tigers.” Their social media handles, he notes, are @binomeir ‎and @khalifasubaey.

Why stop with Qatar? Here’s a kick for Turkey, too. The New York Times takes a deep dive “Inside Turkey’s purge,” explaining that “as the ruling party expands the ranks of its enemies, life in a fragile democracy becomes stranger and stranger.” The opening character in the drama: A medical doctor arrested at 6am and dragged off to detention for the crime of having opened a bank account at the wrong bank down the street after moving into a new neighborhood.

If a 94 year old can revolutionize battery technology for the second time, what’s your excuse for not being creative? The guy who co-invented the battery in your smartphone, laptop and tablet at age 57 is back at age 94 with a discovery that could turn the energy and automotive industries on their heads. The University of Texas at Austin professor and his team have “filed a patent application on a new kind of battery that, if it works as promised, would be so cheap, lightweight and safe that it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles.” The New York Times’ “To be a genius, think like a 94-year-old” is a data-driven meditation on creativity and age in a youth-obsessed culture.

Because emojis aren’t enough of a curse, Google wants to take the creativity out of drawing. The company has rolled out a new site on which you can sketch approximations of, say, a slice of pizza and have Google turn that into an image of a proper slice. Or a circle with dots on it into a cookie. A box with circles into a car. Try out AutoDraw.

Speed-reading tips for your holiday book: Don’t “say” words aloud inside your mind while reading and cut distractions that make you re-read sentences, writes Tim Adams for The Guardian. Read in blocks, not in individual words and sentences. The idea was conceived by American teacher Evelyn Wood in the 1950s has been revived just in time for the age of information overload in which we live.

Alternatively: Try tech. There are now apps that claim to make you read faster. “The apps generally use a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), in which individual words, or blocks of two or three words, appear one after the other in the centre of your screen.” With it, you can read 300, 500, or 1,000 words per minute, and choose the rate at which words appear.” The app Spreeder, for instance, uses this technology. The problem with these methods is that the rhythm of the language is lost in the process. “While it is true that you don’t receive any fresh information in the spaces between words, the research suggests that the millisecond pauses are crucial for cognition: they are our brain’s tiny spaces for reflection,” writes Adams. Studies also show that trying to read more than 600 words per minute means comprehension falls below 75%. “A lot of our lives can be scanned and scrolled and skipped, but reading remains a more immersive kind of act, dependent on detail.”

There’s more than Amazon behind the meltdown of retail in the United States over the last two years, and if you’re doing retail in Egypt, you need to read this: Bankruptcies, store closures and liquidations in retail in the U.S. are partly due to online shopping, writes The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. “There have been nine retail bankruptcies in 2017,” according to Thompson. “J.C. Penney, RadioShack, Macy’s, and Sears have each announced more than 100 store closures,” and Ralph Lauren will close its flagship Polo store on Fifth Avenue. Online shopping is getting more popular, not just for books and music: Clothing is now the largest e-commerce category. Shopping has gone mobile, too. “Since 2010, mobile commerce has grown from 2 percent of digital spending to 20 percent.”

Retail is also collapsing in the US because Americans built too many malls. The number of malls grew over twice as fast as the population growth in 1970-2015. “So it’s no surprise that the Great Recession provided such a devastating blow: Mall visits declined 50 percent between 2010 and 2013.” They’re still falling. The third reason is a change in lifestyle, as people are going to restaurants and traveling rather than shopping.

We were fans of the “Fearless Girl” statue that was erected in front of the Wall Street Bull as part of a campaign to get more women on corporate boards. The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino made us view things from a different perspective; she says “there’s an infantilizing undertone that is often present in the discussions of women’s ambition happening right now.” Tolentino says this is part of a larger problem of infantilizing female ambition, which could be seen to include seemingly benign symbols such as Tory Burch t-shirts and bracelets emblazoned with slogans like “Bold” and “Ambitious.”

She quotes novelist Elisa Albert, to whom ambition “is a quality that arises organically from both vanity and a genuine wish to do good work; it’s also something she regards as alien and horrific. ‘So you got what you wanted and now you want something else,’ she writes. ‘You probably worked really hard; I salute you. . . . But if you have ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people, you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.’”

Ambition, Tolentino writes, “will always be complicated for women, and not just because of external impediments: it is an imperfect drive, enacted in imperfect circumstances, that inevitably leads to imperfect things.”Tolentino says Fearless Girl, which depicts an elementary-school student staring down the Bull, is “dismaying, and revealing, that this message is most easily conveyed through a figure of a girl—her skirt and ponytail blown back in the breeze, cheerfully unaware of the strained, exhausted, overdetermined future that awaits her.”