What We’re Reading

Bathrooms:

In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled. “We went from two people per bathroom to one person per bathroom in the last 50 years,” says Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow. “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller.

Strategy:

When hunting caribou, Naskapi foragers in Labrador, Canada, had to decide where to go. Common sense might lead one to go where one had success before or to where friends or neighbors recently spotted caribou. However … The caribou are mismatchers and the hunters are matchers. That is, hunters want to match the locations of caribou while caribou want to mismatch the hunters, to avoid being shot and eaten. If a hunter shows any bias to return to previous spots, where he or others have seen caribou, then the caribou can benefit (survive better) by avoiding those locations (where they have previously seen humans). Thus, the best hunting strategy requires randomizing.

Branding:

Boeing Co. should rename its 737 Max to help deflect travelers’ safety concerns once the grounded jet returns to the skies, according to plane leasing-industry veteran Steven Udvar-Hazy.

The Max brand is damaged following two fatal crashes last year, and there’s no reason for Boeing to retain it, Udvar-Hazy, the founder and chairman of Air Lease Corp., said Monday at a conference in Dublin.

Growth:

US users spent 15 million hours on TikTok in 2018.

They spent 85 million hours on it last year. More time than they spent streaming Amazon Prime.

Driving:

Around the country, the American love affair with driving is cooling in ways that are changing how cities look and feel. Over the past three years, the average number of miles driven per person has hovered around 9,800 miles a year, roughly 2% fewer than at the 2004 peak. Driving is down in states with urban centers like California and New York and in some rural states such as Wyoming and Vermont.

Have a good weekend.