Game Lindy

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Game, Set, Sell

Joel Drucker | Racquet | 1st September 2023

It was 1970. Philip Morris was poised to launch a new cigarette brand aimed at women. Richard Nixon was poised to ban cigarette ads from television. So Philip Morris looked to sports sponsorship for marketing possibilities, and saw a fit with women's tennis, where Billie Jean King was making waves. Good call. Virginia Slims wrote big cheques, and women's tennis conquered the world (8,500 words)

The Lindy Effect

Toby Ord | University Of Oxford | 23rd August 2023

The Lindy Effect holds that the longer something has been in business, the longer it will remain in business. It was coined as a rule of thumb for Broadway shows, and extended by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to the world at large. Ord seeks here to ground the conjecture in probability theory, claiming that "even things which are becoming less robust over time can display the Lindy effect" (8,200 words)

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