Tuesday's assorted links

Bologna face masks, hot desking, the good Corona, bottled water controversy, voting access

I realized that I have been in book acquiring mode for the past 2 months. Most of these were gifts from friends or books from the library. I’m excited to start some new ones. If you’ve read any of these, let me know in the comments!

Hello, everyone! Here are 5 stories that really caught my eye this week.

1. Oscar Mayer selling bologna-inspired facemasks may be the strangest example of horizontal differentiation I’ve seen.

2. Companies are cutting costs by having workers reserve desk space in offices, but it’s hurting employee morale.

3. Corona blaming glass shortage and inflation on rising beer prices.

4. In California, siphoning water from a national park requires only a single fixed fee regardless of how much water is taken.

5. A new index shows the difficulty of voting across different US states. Here’s the original website.

If one of these stood out to you, feel free to leave a comment! If you know someone who would love getting these links in their inbox, share this newsletter with them.

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Yesterday I looked back at the past year of writing an economics-themed newsletter. Find out how you can help grow this newsletter:

Year 2 of Monday Morning Economist starts today!

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I got ahead of myself last week and claimed we already finished 4 weeks! That makes me feel a lot better knowing that I was on track last week and that I’m only one book behind schedule this week! I’m still sitting at 3 books for the year, but I have about 20 pages left in one book. I’m hoping to be back on track soon.

One of the books I made some serious progress in last week was about the history of various games. I wrote about the topic last month when looking at Monopoly, and checked out the book from the library. It's All a Game looks at the history of various board games like chess, backgammon, and risk and how they have become the popular games we know about today. It reminds me a lot of the Netflix series, The Toys That Made Us.