fortune--2020-01-25--Inside New York City’s Chinese restaurant crisis

From 2016 to 2019, the number of Chinese restaurants in New York City dropped by 16% (from 2,969 to 2,493), or one in six, according to an analysis of Yelp data by the Chinese Hospitality Alliance Tea Talk (CHATT) and corroborated by the Museum of Chinese in America. Those numbers are roughly reflected by a 7% drop nationally, as 2014’s 46,757 Chinese restaurants fell to 43,638 in 2018. The American Chinese Culinary Federation now puts the national count at as low as 37,000, according to a Foreign Policy report.
In recent weeks, whenever he went on location-scouting trips in some of New York’s most popular neighborhoods for Chinese restaurants—including the East Village, Harlem, Midtown West, and Two Bridges, among others—Xuhui Zhang, Junzi Kitchen’s head of real estate development, routinely encountered an alarming urgency. “I would say more than 60% of these restaurants are selling or the owners are considering the possibility of selling,” he says. “The common reasons mentioned were upcoming retirement, long working hours, and diminishing sales.”
The crisis, though, is also an opportunity, not just to reshape the landscape and palate, but to unveil a joy shrouded for centuries: a truly Chinese approach to food in this country, free from American habits and the white gaze. Chinese cooking is an art again, and gastro-impressionists are everywhere. But just as a culinary renaissance is flourishing in the Chinese restaurants of Los Angeles—“knockout” mapo tofu lasagna, y’all!—an economic and even spiritual revolution is seizing young Chinese entrepreneurs in New York.
During low-key meetings at the Bank of China along Bryant Park and the China Institute in the Financial District, CHATT has gathered forces from 21 local restaurants—including Cafe China, Grain House, Junzi Kitchen, Little Tong, and MáLà Project—as well as four tea shops and half a dozen industry heavyweights, including Chowbus and Hall PR, all specifically to brainstorm and strategize for their futures. Cecilia Chiang, the godmother of Chinese restaurants in America, has addressed the group, as has her son Philip (the P in P.F. Chang’s). They talk about, for example, the economics of ghost kitchens with Zuul or delivery options with Uber. With so many closures, the pressure is on for young entrepreneurial chefs to expand just to make up the shortfall.
Fortune spoke with many of them and other major voices in the community to make some sense of these unprecedented culinary, cultural, and economic shifts.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The forbidding city
For generations, Chinese restaurants scraped by in hopes of getting ahead. What toll did that take?
Simone Tong, chef and owner of Little Tong (and soon Silver Apricot): It was survival. That’s why they had two menus: one for who they wanted to be, one for who they had to be.
Cecilia Chiang, James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award winner: They wanted green cards. They didn’t care if their food was good or bad. Dirty restaurants. Bad service. It was all golden dragons and red lanterns. So gaudy. So disappointing. So sad. And the saddest part is they never changed.
Two Asian men walk down narrow Doyers Street in Chinatown, New York City, circa 1945. Lawrence Thornton—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hannah Cheng, cofounder of Mimi Cheng’s: They didn’t have choices to do other jobs.
Wilson Tang, second-generation owner of Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the oldest restaurant in New York’s Chinatown: I can’t imagine much worse than working 100 fucking hours a week for, like, $60,000 a year and just, when you do the math, realizing that you’re making way, way below minimum wage. And I bet you a large portion of these places that are closing or in trouble are exactly that situation. They just barely get by.
Jason Wang, cofounder of Xi’an Famous Foods: There was no succession plan, because success was seen as not having to do it anymore. It wasn’t a business venture, per se. It was just a beginning. The business venture was to send kids to college.
Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food: The parents did what parents are supposed to do.
Cheng: You wouldn’t want your child to go into it.
Lee: You could always hand it off to the next wave of immigrants. Toisan to Hong Kong to Taiwan to Fujian. But now it’s pretty good in China. Why go into debt coming to America and buying a restaurant? You should read the classifieds in Chinatown newspapers where they sell restaurants. They’re very aggressive in letting you know why they’re selling. It’s very TMI. We divorced! Our family broke up! My wife wants to go back! Anything to communicate that it’s their fault and not the restaurant’s.
Laboring under illusions
As China’s middle class grows, America’s well of replaceable Chinese immigrants has suddenly run dry. Who is left to cook?
Chiang: It’s very hard to get good Chinese chefs in America. Most are not well trained. A lot of people said, “I won’t be a chef, because I saw what being a chef did to my father.”
Jack Tchen, historian: They were coolies. In Chinese: kǔlì, literally “bitter labor.”
Lucas Sin, chef of Junzi Kitchen: Even success in that situation doesn’t feel like success.
W. Tang: Success is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t personally think of myself as successful. I closed two restaurants [in 2018]. Nom Wah Tu in March and Nom Wah Kuai in September. And Fung Tu closed the year before. New York has changed, especially the labor pool.
Nom Wah Tea Parlor in New York’s Chinatown district. Courtesy of Nom Wah Tea Parlor
Wang: The backbone of the restaurant industry, of the city really—undocumented workers—has been removed or hurt.
W. Tang: If it’s not the Buildings Department, it’s the Health Department, or minimum wage. New York has made mom-and-pop operations really difficult.
Sin: Chinese restaurants’ habit of hiring from within the family—not just Mom and Pop and kids but also a cousin of a cousin of a cousin from Fujian—allowed an existence outside of the rules, the laws of physics of market forces. Now that’s gone, and market reality is hitting those Chinese restaurants hard.
Yong Zhao, CEO of Junzi Kitchen: Family is not going to report you for money under the table. But other employees might report you or blackmail you about it. Some takeout places are doing well, but they don’t want to expand for those reasons. So they’re stuck.
W. Tang: We’ve had a tough time keeping people. I think it’s the millennial situation. They don’t want to work hard.
Wang: Fast-casual is not so much about a new attitude or concept. It’s just the only model that works now.
Zhao: In China, the labor-cost rise also forced restaurants to change from the labor-intensive mom-and-pop store model to centralized food prep and production and restaurant chains. Both China and American Chinese restaurants have about 30% food cost, but a typical Chinese restaurant in China usually has 20% labor cost, which is less than the 30% or 35% labor cost in the Chinese restaurant in the U.S. market. What happened there will eventually happen here.
W. Tang: On a statistical level—away from crazy real estate—these models are still really strong outside New York. So for me, I’m looking elsewhere. [In 2019], I opened three locations in Shenzhen. And here, I have Philadelphia. And I’m looking in Florida, in Tampa.
Lee: You’ve gotta remember: There are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s combined.
The great leap downward
Widespread compromise has created an uncomfortable paradox: the faux authenticity of egg rolls and fortune cookies.
Tong: Lots of places serve what they think New Yorkers will like. That’s one of the least creative things you can do as a chef. Why not teach people to like something new? Why not expand what they like?
Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the Museum of Chinese in America: I never want to go out to eat Chinese food. Maybe August Gatherings. But the rest is so embarrassing. My husband sneaks around knowing I’ll be mad if I see the empty boxes from some random Combo #3 with egg roll in the garbage.
Amelie Kang, chef and owner of MáLà Project: When I finally got here, my roommates would eat Chinese food but as hangover food: greasy, quick, even guilty food.
Sin: You feel strange eating food that’s so close and so distant. But do you feel awful? There’s a wonder there for me. One of the best collaborations in food history—the Doritos Locos tacos at Taco Bell—is delicious. I hope I’d think that even if I came from a family that made tacos at home.
Cheng: You expected to go anywhere and order your usual: triple delight, moo shu pork, kung pao chicken. You didn’t even have to look at the menu. It was just there. Everywhere was the same. But until there’s variety, there can’t be authenticity. You can’t have an authentic clone.
Chiang: They all convey the same old thing. And people get sick and tired of the same old thing. They want something different, variety, but they didn’t get it.
Cecilia Chiang, who started the first upmarket Chinese restaurants in the U.S., at the Peninsula hotel, Hong Kong, May 22, 2004. Dustin Shum—South China Morning Post/Getty Images
Lee: I grew up in New York, and we’d go to Flushing, and I’d order beef and broccoli, and my mom would say, “Oh, don’t do that. It’s not Chinese food.” I’d be like, “What are you talking about? Of course it’s Chinese food. They sell it at Chinese restaurants.”
Anita Lo, the first woman invited to cook a state dinner at The White House: My father was from Shanghai, and my mother was ethnically Chinese from Malaysia, but I was born here. My father died when I was young, and my mom worked, so I was raised in a white household—white stepfather, Hungarian nanny. When I was 7, my family went to China, 1972 but pre-Nixon. The visa took, like, a year. And it gave us all FBI files. Everyone was on bikes and in Mao jackets. The food was awful. It was weird and nice to know that the Chinese food was better in America.
Sin: I actually love all that shrimp lo mein stuff because it’s foreign to me, having grown up in China. One of my favorites is Wo Hop. I’ll be waiting for a table there and talk to the staff in Chinese. And they’ll ask, in Chinese, “Have you been here before? This is not for you.” I joke that I brought my white girlfriend, so does that make it okay?
Rise of the creative clash
A generation of brash young chefs is breaking the cardinal rule of Chinese restaurants by defying uniformity.
Sean Tang, owner of Pinch Chinese: My parents are Sichuanese and Shanghainese but grew up in Taiwan with its Japanese and Fujianese influences. So they like a mix of those places, all over. My dad likes spicy food. My mom, not so much. And I have all that in me. I can be colorful. I’m not one shade. Is any New Yorker just one shade of anything? We live outside of these boxes. That’s the story of New York, of America. It’s not complicated. It’s human.
Lo: I don’t want to sound like an angry lesbian, although I am [laughs], but there was never room, even in New York, for me. I always felt pigeonholed. If you’re not making your grandmother’s recipe, you’re pigeonholed.
Tong: My grandmother was not a great cook, but she was known for one dish: kǎofū [braised wheat gluten], which is funny because it’s Shanghainese, and we were in Chengdu. Do you really think Chinese food cannot be better than whatever your grandmother made? That was the best of our creativity?
Chris Cheung, owner of East Wind Snack Shop: Growing up in Chinatown, you didn’t talk about the best restaurants. You talked about the best dishes.
S. Tang: I read a thing about how there are nine Chinatowns now. Even that is not as much as it could be or should be. We’re still discovering Chinese food in China, let alone interpretations of it here.
Sin: Creative Chinese cooking is at a place it’s never been before. Isn’t that the point of creativity?
Lee: It’s the same you’ve seen in the Chinese communities of Malaysia and Singapore, or even Vancouver and Toronto. Some of the most creative food scenes out there.
Making dumplings at Mimi Cheng’s. Nicole Franzen
S. Tang: We have a wine list because China is the largest consumer of wine.
Lo: I had a wine pairing when I did a state dinner for Xi Jinping at the White House in 2015.
S. Tang: They drink wine with dinner in China. That’s why you can’t find cheap French wine anymore. It’s not because it got better. It’s because China bought it all up and sent the price through the roof. Thanks, China.
Tong: Am I going to wear my grandmother’s qípáo? No. But that doesn’t mean I have to throw it away or hide it in a box forever. I can tailor it, transform it. That’s what food is: fashion. It changes six times a year but also comes in cycles. That’s why kung pao chicken will always be with us. It survives the fashions. Like jeans and a T-shirt.
Lee: General Tso’s chicken will stay the course. It’s sweet. It’s fried. It’s chicken. Who’s going to say goodbye to that? Chop suey is more deprecated, and that’s a good thing.
Sin: You could look down on it and condescend that it’s basic, greasy, not supposed to exist. But those “basic” places all have woks, fryers, steamers, hundreds of menu items—all with just four or five people. It’s not basic. It’s more efficient than we’ll ever know. I wonder, y’know, what if Steve Ells and the people who made Chipotle or Pret A Manger had interned at Hop Kee or Wo Hop?
Zhao: It’s not as simple as Subway, but people expect Subway prices.
Sin: A lot of canonical American Chinese dishes we take for granted have forgotten imperial roots. Egg drop soup is a good example. Looking into history, egg drop soup was a technical dish of the Cantonese imperial courts that showcased the chef’s finesse: a fine swirl of eggs that mimicked the gelatinous texture of a crystal clear stock fortified with roosters—whole roosters, old ones, the bones have better flavor—and Jīnhuá ham. And egg foo yong most likely comes from an imperial Jiangsu technique of cooking airy, cloud-like, egg whites and minced ham in a manner that makes it look like a confederate rose.
Lo: This happened in China, too. I used to go to Qingping Market in Guangzhou, like, the epicenter of SARS, a rural Tsukiji [the famed Tokyo fish market]. People would be killing chickens, eels, frogs. Once in the 1990s, I saw a woman just buy a sack of live cats. Now it’s gone, paved; there’s still some food stuff, but not really.
Tong: We’re not doing Chinese food from China, just Chinese technique. Why are recipes that already exist the only thing I can learn from Chinese food? Why can’t I learn to apply Chinese techniques in new ways?
S. Tang: Some people say we’re very authentic. Some say we’re inauthentic. Both groups are Chinese. What are ya gonna do? “Authentic” is just a way to say whether or not you like something that someone else made.
Wang: I love the confidence of DaDong, Tim Ho Wan, Gong Cha and all the bubble tea places. China is coming here.
Tong: It’s copy and paste. DaDong was a copy and paste.
S. Tang: I love DaDong in China. I’ve eaten there in Beijing and Shanghai. But here, I only ate once. I think they underestimated diners. They swung too hard towards palatable. Everything was so sweet because I think they thought that’s all Americans eat. I wish they had trusted diners more.
Zhao: I went to DaDong with Cecilia. Her dumplings were raw.
Sin: Ugh, I was there for those dumplings. But Haidilao! Dunhuang! They’re ballsy enough to try Flushing things in Manhattan now. Look at Szechuan Mountain House. It’s nice because I get bored of waiting for food writers or restaurant critics to discover the 7 train.
Mimi Cheng’s, in the East Village. Nicole Franzen
Lo: We don’t get to talk about our future, the future of Chinese food, except that in the future maybe old recipes from a different province will come to the East Village. To all the straight white establishment—I mean, just look at the James Beard people—our future isn’t ours unless they say so. Some people do get to control their future. Dan Barber does. I wonder why. But either way, our future is coming.
Tong: The Whitney Museum can say something is art even if nobody else believes it. I want to do that—be that—for Chinese food.
Wang: That’s the natural order, the progression of life in America: Everyone wants to be better. Everyone wants to be proud. There’s so much more pride now. We’re not cooking with more chili or less MSG or whatever. We’re cooking with more pride. You go to China now, and you see people dressing in Tang Dynasty–style clothes instead of jeans being the coolest thing.
Crazy niche Asians
What happens when the cuisines of China’s 56 ethnicities all take root across America’s 50 states?
Wang: There’s a thing—nóng jīa lè—peasant’s delight. It’s a bed-and-breakfast vibe, almost: people coming from the city to enjoy local rural flavors.
Cheng: Interest in Chinese regionalism is not the goal. It’s a platform.
Mimi Cheng’s cofounders Hannah (left) and Marian Cheng. Nicole Franzen
Sin: Chinese people have been cooking for at least 4,000 or 5,000 years. Think of all the recipes that have happened in that time. If we can make Chinese food better, all food can be better.
Kang: People used to think scallion or ginger were spices.
Sin: People think scallions are one thing. There are, like, at least a half dozen very different types of scallions.
Tong: Píxiàn dòubànjiàng, the fermented fava bean that’s so common in Sichuan food, it’s actually from Fujian.
Maasbach: Lots of “Hunanese” food was actually Cantonese.
W. Tang: Tim Ho Wan is owned by a Japanese company.
Wang: We use cumin, coriander, cardamom. Just like in the Silk Road days, it’s from India, not China.
S. Tang: Curry rice with a unique Cantonese interpretation is super popular in Hong Kong. Pasta is Chinese. Ramen is Chinese. The culinary history of China is so much older than China.
Lee: Chinese food in China has been evolving. It’s the American Chinese food that hasn’t. It’s more stuck here.
Lo: You go to China now, and everything is delicious. Ev. E. Ry. Thing. Here, for the most part, you can’t walk into a random diner and expect excellent food. In China, you can. I was just there for three weeks, all over, and there wasn’t one dud.
W. Tang: We opened three locations [in 2019] in Shenzhen. One in February, one in November, and one in December. Chinese food and Asian food in general has come to the forefront. I don’t know how long that will last. I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe it’s a fad. But you have to act when the opportunities are there. I’m a veteran. My skin is thick. I’m not super excited about what could happen. But you have to be aware of opportunities.
Nom Wah prides itself in being New York’s first dim sum restaurant. Courtesy of Nom Wah Tea Parlor
Kang: The customers are more accepting, open-minded, and educated.
Zhao: People learned the vocabulary: garlic chicken, scallion pancakes, dumplings, baozi, beef and broccoli. Maybe there’s a French way to make beef and broccoli. Or I guess a steak house technically serves that. But people know beef and broccoli is Chinese.
Wang: People’s tastes are changing, even in China. I was in Guangzhou looking for some milder seafood to eat, but everything was spicy because Guangzhou’s all about spicy right now.
Kang: Guangzhou now is all about Chaoshan beef balls. And dry pot is something new, even in China. But it also feels familiar. It’s like shítáng, like dining hall food.
S. Tang: I don’t say we’re authentic or classic. I’ll say we’re Chinese comfort food. Our ingredients, our flavors, textures, techniques, presentation, it’s all within your comfort zone if you like Chinese food. It can be familiar even if it’s new.
Sin: In China we ask, “Kǒuwèi?” “What’s your palate?” We recognize our diversity because diversity breeds excellence.
Critical condition
Chinese restaurateurs are sick of spoon-feeding white critics and foodies.
Zhao: There was an event in 2015—Chop Stick Nation—by Molly O’Neill from the New York Times. Jonathan Gold was there, too. Maybe 200 people. How many of those faces were Chinese? I can tell you: not many.
Tchen: It’s Pierre Bourdieu’s “Distinction”—judging taste as an act of social positioning.
Lo: Cultural appropriation wasn’t invented by Anthony Bourdain, and it wasn’t his fault, but it’s a lot of what he did. He told his straight white male audience of chefs, critics, fans, whatever, where it was okay to direct their straight white male approval.
Lee: What we eat is reflective of the society we live in.
Lo: It’s not really mean-spirited. But nobody tells them, “Whoa, calm down.” They don’t realize when they go too far. Sure, Pete Wells reviewing a taco truck is great. But I remember when the Times reviewed Jungsik and said it wasn’t Korean enough, as if Korean wasn’t allowed to be global. Meanwhile, Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] gets celebrated for adding lemongrass to French food, or EMP [Eleven Madison Park] does whatever it wants. I was so angry.
Xi’an Famous Foods is a chain of fast-casual restaurants based in New York City that serves authentic Western Chinese dishes. It found more fame with some media critics and consumers after becoming a favorite of Anthony Bourdain’s. Courtesy of Xi’an Famous Foods
Tong: People—even critics, reviewers, experts—talk about my rice noodles being Yunnanese as if there is any restaurant in Yunnan that serves my food. It’s confusing and frustrating. Can I not have my own creations? When I was at wd~50, I saw people welcome creativity. Nobody was calling Wylie Dufresne inauthentic.
Lo: I’ve never been authentic to anything other than myself. What else is there, really?
Zhao: The central idea of American prejudice is ethnic exoticism. Where is the modern creativity in that? Minorities should be doing minority things authentically in their own way, not as like a performance or show or historical reenactment. I have no interest in preserving my past or teaching others about my past in a way that blocks me from building my own future.
Tchen: People are making more sophisticated choices, but that doesn’t mean they know more about what they’re doing. There is still the equivalent of Chinese food snobbism of eating California rolls and calling it sushi. Being hip is not the same as being informed.
Maasbach: We have places like Goubuli. Amazing dumplings. But do you know what gǒu bù lǐ means? It means “Dogs Ignore It.” The name is always better in Chinese. In English it’s just like Golden Palace or Number One Asian Gourmet. It would be too weird for white people to see it called Longevity and Prosperity for All. There are two worlds apart even before you walk in the door.
Lo: You can try. You can sympathize or empathize, but you just cannot know or understand unless you’ve grown up as an other.
W. Tang: To this day, people don’t know what proper Chinese food is. It’s up to myself and other tastemakers to educate.
Lo: It’s annoying to have to educate people.
Inside Junzi Kitchen, self-described as a modern Chinese restaurant, with several locations in New York City. Courtesy of Junzi Kitchen
S. Tang: Growing up, I’d go to Chinese restaurants only, like, four times a year. With friends. Culturally, the restaurants haven’t done a good job of translating. We’d go to a dim sum place and—especially buns—my friends would have no idea what was inside. You’d ask the person pushing the cart, and they’d just say it was a bun. Maybe they’d say something like “meat.” It’s not daunting but still inaccessible, hard to access.
Zhao: Sweet-and-sour pork is a special food.
Sin: The original is called guō baō roù.
Zhao: You should share it and get one piece, maybe two pieces, that’s it. Now I see people eat it where the whole plate is theirs. I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to see that. Yes, it’s a traditional food, but it’s all wrong. It’s like watching someone eat half a Thanksgiving turkey at their desk on their lunch break.
Lee: I learned fortune cookies weren’t Chinese from reading The Joy Luck Club when I was, like, 14. That was mind-blowing. It was the confectionary equivalent of the truth about Santa Claus.
Cheung: You think duck tongue is a delicacy because you’ve never tried it before or you never saw it on a buffet? They sell that at the Shanghai Zoo as a snack. It’s like thinking ballpark nachos are a delicacy. I mean, sure, we ate egg rolls, but only as drunk food on Saturday night, the same as everyone else in Hop Kee at 3 a.m.
Chiang: In America, they add sugar to mapo to calm the spice. But that’s wrong.
Cheung: You know that’s always been the case, right? I’m sure you’ve gone to a Chinese restaurant and been really proud of yourself because there were a lot of Chinese customers there, so that meant to you that it was a legit place. But I hate to break this to you: They were eating something totally different from what you were eating. You eat, I dunno, beef and broccoli or General Tso’s. We don’t eat that. We eat haam daan juk beng [salted egg pork cake] and si yau gai [soy sauce chicken]. It was always two restaurants in one. That’s why the menu was so big. And that’s not even getting into the secret menus.
Lo: A standard greeting in China is “Have you eaten yet?” People here don’t know that, but maybe they’re starting to see it.
Mimi Cheng’s special dumplings for Lunar New Year. Courtesy of Mimi Cheng’s
The joy luck curve
The table is set for a brave new world as chefs create Chinese recipes that have never been tried before.
Wang: I think the Beijing Olympics changed everything. It introduced the world to the new China.
W. Tang: There’s a word for it: fùèrdài. It means “rich second generation.”
Zhao: People talk about China as an economy, as a power, as a dictatorship of Communists. It lacks humanity. They don’t see the people. They don’t recognize or acknowledge Chinese life. We are just a way to let them try new things. We were not allowed to be more than that. We were trapped in a way by their respect, by what they thought was respect.
Cheung: What’s happening now is that the Chinese restaurant is breaking out of the Chinese-American restaurant. It’s a kind of independence movement.
Tong: We’re liberated, not just free from Chinatown, but also free from China.
Lo: I had three days to put together 12 recipes for that White House state dinner for Xi Jinping and his wife in 2015. I’m known for these foie gras soup dumplings, but that doesn’t work for 250 people. And I don’t know a ton of Chinese recipes. But I put together something, and my chef de cuisine went to the White House to do tastings. Michelle Obama picked four. No pressure! And on the day, all 250 covers, four courses, went out and were done in 35 minutes. It was a weird blur. But it was me.
A spread of bings and noodles at Junzi Kitchen. Courtesy of Junzi Kitchen
Maasbach: With these new unapologetic places like Junzi, it’s almost like we’re repairing the racism. This is me wishing, but it’s almost like we can finally be who we really are, our full selves. Almost.
Wang: My goal is we’re doing very well in 100 years. That just wasn’t a dream Chinese restaurant people used to have.
Kang: A few years ago, if I wanted to go on a date, I wouldn’t pick a Chinese restaurant. Now I can.
S. Tang: We get that in online reviews a lot: great for a date. It’s interesting because it needs to be said, because the expectation is maybe that Chinese is not good for dates. It can be a backhanded compliment, like, “Your English is very good,” but I’ll take it.
Combo special
Chinese chefs are discovering the newfound power of taking a collective stance for innovation.
Tchen: Do you know why everything is handmade and hand-pulled here now?
Kang: Handmade is not as rare in China as in America.
Tchen: It’s because Chinese people are not about to go out to eat something they could make at home. Just like Americans don’t cook porterhouses at home. But as Chinese immigrants get busier in the American workforce, there’s less time to do all the handmade stuff at home. So hand-pulled noodles are something that will appeal to both Chinese and non-Chinese customers. The difference is that the non-Chinese customers don’t know what goes into it, really, or how it’s supposed to taste.
W. Tang: Success is different for different people. Maybe with the chef-driven places, the restaurant is a way to get a book deal or to go against Bobby Flay. Being open is not the same thing as being profitable.
Chiang: I was the first. But change takes more than one person. I’m happy for this new generation.
Zhao: A tree cannot make a forest. A thread cannot be a rope. There are a million ways to say this in Chinese. It’s always all about working together.
Sin: The supply is going down, but the demand is going up. Now is the time when we need to work together.
W. Tang: I’m cordial with all these folks you’re talking to, but it’s not like we’re going into business together or sharing trade secrets.
Wang: It’s still just my dad making the chili oil for all 15 locations. He has his secret recipe of 30 spices. I don’t even know what’s in it.
Father and son: Xi’an Famous Foods founder Jason Wang (left) and David Shi. Jason Wang
Zhao: It’s funny that Chinatown culture became about mystery and secrets. For us, I don’t care about that. Community is more powerful than secrecy. We grew up in the 1980s. Nixon was history. China has always been open for us. We want to be bigger than for everyone: We want to be by everyone. We can’t have a large company with only minority workers, only Chinese workers. Everyone makes pizza. Everyone eats pizza. We want to be like pizza. Nobody thinks they have to go to Italy to get real pizza. Nobody thinks only an Italian person can make good pizza.
Cheng: Every Italian family has their own meatball recipe. All these tweaks, all that variety. Breadcrumbs or not. What kind of breadcrumbs. That’s allowed. Chinese food should be like Italian food: sit-down, takeout, new, old, cheap, fine dining, normal across the spectrum.
Tong: People say, “Oh, I’ve already tried that.” “I’ve already tried hot pot.” “I’ve already tried rice noodles.” I laugh. Can you imagine anyone saying, “I’ve already tried pizza?” What good is it to be curious if your curiosity is so lazy or tired?
Lee: Korean food got to where it is by sneaking in as tacos. I saw a thing that scared me: bánh mì on ciabatta. That’s how you know you’ve really made it: insane bastardization.
S. Tang: Modern. Future. New. Whatever you want to call it, embrace it.
Chiang: When I came to San Francisco in the 1960s there was one or two major Japanese restaurants. Now they’re everywhere. But Chinatown is the same. I think Japanese people are more unified than Chinese.
S. Tang: White people know what unagi is now. And everyone is using shiso or uni in everything. But that took years—decades.
Sin: The Chinese in the U.S. are the Indians in the U.K.: the ultimate foreigner, the cheap go-to. But, man, that’s scalable. Peppercorn is as scalable as curry.
Wang: I call that the c-word. With chains, it becomes very washed down. You lose the soul of the food. We have 15 locations. All in the city. No marketing. No investors. It’s just us. But I was just in Boston yesterday looking for new locations. I’ll be in Philadelphia next week. I’m looking at L.A., D.C. My role models are Ray Kroc and Howard Schultz, but more the early years.
S. Tang: McDonald’s in Shanghai is phenomenal. The burgers look like the pictures. It can be done!
Zhao: We don’t have a secret to keep. We have to share the future together. All these old places that are closing, they don’t have a team. No marketing. No PR. A company needs a supporting corporation. CMO. CFO. COO. Structure. We just got $5 million from some of the same investors who backed Sweetgreen. We can have a burn rate. Better planning. Better growth. Big fish cannot get bigger. Better to be a small whale. We are a small Uber. There are lots of followers and not many leaders. Following doesn’t have big returns. Leading does.
Lo: When I read about how Junzi is approaching dying takeout spots, I thought this could be good or it could be carpetbagging.
Junzi Kitchen chef Lucas Sin. Courtesy of Junzi Kitchen
Sin: We’re in the age of Jason Wang and Wilson Tang. We have the stepping-stones laid by Jason’s dad, by P.F. Chang’s, by Panda Express. What’s the next step? What’s the next level? It feels like a continuation, a natural evolution, as opposed to a direct construction or elevation. In some ways we’re not trying to make it happen. It’s happening, and we’re just in business when it is.
Cheng: Rising.
S. Tang: Tides.
Sin: Lift.
Cheung: All.
Wang: Boats.
Sin: There used to be three jobs that your parents just wouldn’t allow: actor, prostitute, and chef. Now that list is down to one.
Lo: I hope in the future we’re treated like everyone else, which, y’know, I mean I hope we’re treated like straight white men are.
Cheng: I love that I opened because I was homesick and now I can go to Win Son for fàntuán [Taiwanese rice roll] breakfast.
S. Tang: I’m still homesick for my mom’s cooking, but I never would’ve dreamed that places like Little Tong, Ho Foods, and MáLà Project would’ve existed, would’ve been accessible. The thing about all those Golden Unicorn Wok King places was they gave you everything except an experience. It was for eating, not dining. Even today, Chinese dining feels a little foreign to me. I hope it won’t in 50 years. Or five years.
Tong: I opened in 2017, and now there are maybe eight other noodle places around me. People want to know the secrets of Chinatown? Here is the secret: The East Village is the new Chinatown. We can be anywhere now. We can do anything. Look how far our patience has taken us. It just takes time to develop comfort and comfort food. People might look at my food and think it’s not real Chinese food. Okay, but just not yet. It will be.
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fortune--2020-01-25--What is tech doing to protect the whistleblower’s identity? Not much, experts say

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If you type the words “who is” into a Google search box, as of this writing, the phrase “who is the whistleblower” appears as the first entry in a list of auto-completed, algorithmically-curated suggestions. Relating to an anonymous individual in the intelligence community who filed a complaint about the July 25 telephone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky, the search term is popular because Republicans contend that this mysterious person is a central figure in the impeachment trial.
But “who is the whistleblower” is more than just a Google-generated search suggestion. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, spits out the same top recommendation. Currently, a series of videos purporting to identify the whistleblower appears when that term is typed into Facebook’s search box. And the whistleblower’s identity can be found all over Twitter as well, linking to stories by a handful of news outlets, including the New York Post, claiming to have outed the anonymous figure.
But that’s just what happens when people actively search online for the whistleblower’s identity, information that they could also come across without trying. On Nov. 21, for example, after former President Barack Obama spoke at the Dreamforce tech conference in San Francisco, simply searching for “obama” on Google yielded a first page news result that included the alleged whistleblower’s full name and photo. And there’s the social networks, where the figure’s identity regularly appears in news feeds, scrolling by in news story and blog post headlines.
None of this, however, is illegal. In the case of Trump’s phonecall, the whistleblower is covered by a federal whistleblower law that covers intelligence officers and says the Inspector General shall not identify them without their consent. Other whistleblower laws offer broader protections, and though there’s no law that prevents the press or social media platforms from revealing the name, there are powerful ethical reasons for them not to.
According to Ken Paulson, the former publisher of USA Today who now heads the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, publishing the names of whistleblowers can harm society by deterring others from coming forward to report crimes and corruption themselves. Paulson adds there are a handful of other situations—notably in the case of stories about rape victims or juvenile offenders—where the press chooses not to identify individuals on the grounds that doing so would cause more harm than good.
“It’s terrible journalistic practice,” he says.
But these norms reflect the conventions of the traditional media. It’s unclear if the arrangements also apply to internet platforms like Google and Facebook, which don’t make editorial decisions in the same way as publications like Fortune or the New York Times—though some argue they should.
The companies’ lines
Paulson acknowledges the challenges confronting the tech sites, but suggests their failure to help protect the Trump whistleblower’s identity is a moral abdication. “In the end, this is all about values,” he says.
But evaluating the behavior of online platforms is tricky, in part because of the tremendous volume of content that users upload every minute to the sites. Google tells Fortune that 15% of queries requested every day are new, and that its rules have to be able to scale—even though the company already depends on algorithms that it constantly tweaks. The search giant also says it has no policy when it comes to ranking or removing search results that contain the whistleblower’s name.
Twitter also lacks rules to protect the whistleblower’s identity, as the public witnessed when President Trump retweeted the alleged whistleblower’s name at the end of December. However, if a user tweeted any private information about the whistleblower (or any person), like the person’s address or phone number, that tweet would violate its rules.
Meanwhile, both YouTube and Facebook say their community standards protect the whistleblower’s identity, but for years they have struggled with policing their services, historically allowing violence, pornography, and hate speech to disseminate to millions of users.
According to YouTube, videos, comments, and “other forms of content” that mention the potential whistleblower’s name violate the service’s rules, and therefore are subject to removal. Similarly, Facebook says it has had a “longstanding” policy that protects witnesses, informants, and activists.
“We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in debate,” a company spokesperson for Facebook tells Fortune.
Do the old rules still apply?
Some tech companies’ apparent reluctance to shield the whistleblower reflects a power shift in the media landscape, as the likes of Google and Twitter eclipse the influence of traditional outlets—while also ignoring journalistic conventions.
First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams recalls that, in 1971, a radio broadcaster named a whistleblower who was being protected by his client, the New York Times, in the Pentagon Papers case. The broadcaster, Abrams says, was ostracized by others in the media, and the whistleblower name largely remained a secret.
Today there is little indication that Silicon Valley companies exert a similar peer pressure on one other when it comes to respecting norms to protect whistleblowers.
Both Paulson and Abrams note that there could be a situation when naming the Trump whistleblower could be justified—namely if it was someone extremely prominent, such as Vice President Mike Pence, whose name carried immense news value.
This does not appear to be the case with the Trump whistleblower. Widespread exposure of his personal information could serve little purpose in the impeachment trial, but could create a chilling effect for others who speak out in the future.
Over the years, Congress has expanded the scope of whistleblower protection law, partly as a response to Americans’ diminishing trust in government. Yet there appears to be little appetite among lawmakers at the moment to expand the laws further to limit the sort of exposure that has befallen the Trump whistleblower. In any case, Abrams and Paulson say any such attempt would likely violate the First Amendment.
For now, future informants may take some comfort that reports about the Trump whistleblower’s identity do not appear to have echoed across most of the media. As such, some of the old rules appear to be still in place—even though the shield of anonymity they once offered has weakened.
“I think this is an area where one can distinguish between ‘the press’ and social media entities,” says Abrams. “I think the press is acting responsibly by not publishing the name, and I think social media is acting as it generally does by not passing judgment on what it releases.”
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fortune--2020-01-26--Berlin’s ‘ghost’ airport might finally open—billions over budget and 8 years late

Smoke billowed over the check-in desk and departure monitors, enveloping the massive red metal flying carpet art installation suspended above the Terminal 1 entrance hall at Berlin’s nearly-complete new airport.
In the otherwise empty hall, about 10 workers looked on as one controlled the smoke machine producing the plumes. After a few minutes, a piercing fire alarm sounded, and the airport’s smoke-sucking extractors roared.
This run-of-the-mill safety test hadn’t worked in times past. (In one instance, evacuation instructions in German and English were drowned out by the noise of the smoke fans.) But the success of the mid-December test is just one indication that the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport—infamous for its thousands of defects and numerous false starts—is maybe, finally, ready to open.
On Nov. 29, officials announced that Berlin’s “ghost airport” will begin operating on Oct. 31, 2020, more than eight years late and billions of dollars over budget. The commitment is firm but—given the airport’s bleak history—necessarily hedged.
“We are pretty sure that our finalization procedure of the terminal is on track,” said Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, the CEO of the airport’s parent organization, Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg (FBB).
Workers test the smoke alarm system in the new—and much delayed—Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Steven Perlberg
“We are pretty sure”
I met Lütke Daldrup, a tall, red-haired city planner with thick black glasses, at the airport on a chilly Friday in December, just days after he announced—to the surprise of the German public—that this time the new airport will actually open. Berliners can be forgiven if they don’t believe him: Lütke Daldrup, a long-time developer in Berlin and Leipzig, where he was responsible for a 2005 BMW plant, is the fourth executive to hold the top job since the project’s launch.
Developers broke ground on the new airport in 2006, but major problems began to emerge in earnest in May 2012, when the initial grand opening was cancelled due to the faulty fire safety system. Executives originally planned to deal with the problem by stationing 800 workers with cell phones throughout the terminal as a human evacuation infrastructure, but the ribbon-cutting was scrapped altogether after more technical flaws emerged—escalators that were the wrong size, poorly-installed cables, a shortage of check-in desks.
And that was just the start.
Year after year, delays mounted, executives cycled through, and the saga became a national disgrace and a punchline. It has also destroyed political careers, namely that of Klaus Wowereit, the former beloved mayor of Berlin once thought of as a potential rival to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The project’s former technical director was convicted on corruption charges tied to the project. On a deeper level, the debacle has called into question Germany’s international reputation for engineering efficiency and competence.
Lütke Daldrup doesn’t appear to spend too much time thinking about all that. He knows how to stick to his talking points. The 63-year-old executive took over the role in 2017, and later that year announced that the airport would open in Oct. 2020. For now, he’s standing by it. “I have a track record as a building expert, and I have a track record as an expert in public service,” he said. “I know how to handle the political and media pressure.”
“We are pretty sure that our finalization procedure of the terminal is on track,” said Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, the CEO of the airport’s parent organization, Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg, in November 2019. Gregor Fischer—Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Original sin
That pressure is rooted in what some believe to be the project’s original sin—that the airport was structured as an entirely government-run, government-owned entity. FBB is owned jointly by the federal government, Berlin, and Brandenburg, the state encircling the capital. From the start, development has faced political interference, allegations of bribery, and persistent red tape.
The original expected cost of €2.8 billion ($3.1 billion) has ballooned to more than €7.3 billion ($8.1 billion). The government spends millions of euros every month just to keep the unopened building up and running. And it has become a literal case study in how not to handle a public infrastructure project. Researchers from Berlin’s Hertie School of Governance wrote in 2015 that “ignorance and unfounded optimism of sponsors and FBB management trumped thoughtfulness and appreciation of risk.” They concluded that “the possibility of failure was not taken seriously and the extent of the problems that eventually surfaced were inconceivable.”
Construction of the Berlin Brandenburg airport began in 2006 and is scheduled to be completed in October 2020. Ralf Hirschberger/picture alliance—Getty Images
If Lütke Daldrup can meet his self-imposed deadline, it will be something of a lukewarm triumph. Some in the industry thought the airport would never open. One Lufthansa executive privately predicted in 2018 that it would be “demolished and rebuilt.” But Lütke Daldrup stressed that after understanding the thousands of problems ahead of him, he set a reasonable timeline for the future.
“We have reliable building permits since 2017. We have the expertise of the [inspecting company] TÜV Rheinland on the project for three years now, who do the testing and look whether everything works properly,” he said. “Last summer, we had a big functional test of all technical equipment working together, and we had a very good test result. Therefore, we are pretty sure that the timetable is reliable and secure.”
The airport still requires the necessary final approvals that have dogged the process for years. In May, Der Spiegel reported that inspector TÜV Rheinland still had found more than 10,000 defects with the airport.
Training runs
In the meantime, every Berliner seems to have a favorite airport fun fact. Maybe it’s that all of the flight information monitors burned out after they were left on for years; they cost half a million euros to replace. Or perhaps it’s that Air Berlin, which planned to make the new BER its hub, went out of business as it waited for the opening. Or maybe it’s that the national rail company Deutsche Bahn has for years sent empty trains back and forth to the airport on weekday nights for what are known as “Belüftungsfahrten”—or “ventilation drives,” required to prevent dampness and mold.
Even the president of the state of Brandenburg sees the airport saga as a teachable moment. “I think people can learn a lot from us, and we have learned a lot on this airport,” said Dietmar Woidke, a social democrat who has led the region since 2013. “You have to trust the people with whom you are working,” he said. In Woidke’s view, airports should be owned by governments—but not built by them. “That’s the difference,” he said.
Now with just a few months until opening, Germans are wondering if the airport drama is really over. “Of course there is a risk, but I think the current management of the airport has a good understanding and they are realistic in what they are doing,” said Heinrich Großbongardt, a German aviation expert and former spokesperson for Boeing. He estimated that there was about a 90% chance the airport meets its Halloween opening day pledge.
For Berlin’s aviation infrastructure, the opening can’t come soon enough. Two Cold War-era airports currently serve the city: Tegel in the west and Schönefeld in the east, with the latter adjacent to the new site. Tempelhof Airport, known for the 1948 Berlin Airlift, ceased operations in 2008. The airfield is now a public park. On a recent tour, a Tempelhof guide noted that Berlin has a “long history of unfinished airports.” The Nazis were unable to complete that massive airport before losing the war.
For all the trouble that’s accompanied BER’s development, a fundamental question remains: whether it can actually meet Berlin’s growing demand. In 2018, a record 34.7 million passengers traveled through the city’s two existing airports—12.7 million at Schönefeld and 22 million at Tegel. BER, for its part, will open with a capacity of up to 27 million passengers. It will replace Tegel and subsume nearby Schönefeld into a single complex, making BER the only Berlin airport. Officials say that the combined entity can keep up with the flow of passengers, and by 2040 with expansions will be able to handle 55 million passengers a year.
Still, despite its size, aviation experts don’t expect BER to become a major international transfer center—mainly because the country already has plenty. Frankfurt and Munich, for instance, are primary hubs for German airline giant Lufthansa. But Berlin will still likely be home to new direct long-haul flights to destinations in North America and Asia, which the city’s two current airports are barely equipped to handle.
Lütke Daldrup touts BER’s “modern infrastructure,” which can handle such routes. “We do not have very much in Berlin nowadays with our old infrastructure,” he said. “It’s very important for the region and it will give us new imports and economic development.”
After so long, what wider economic benefit the new airport will bring to the region remains to be seen, apart from relieving Berlin’s Cold War-era airports from the deluge of tourists arriving on Europe’s many budget airlines. But some already see the project falling short of the high hopes that Berliners had in the early 1990s, when conversations about a new airport began shortly after German reunification. Following decades of bifurcation, Berlin’s leaders hoped they could lure back major companies—banks, factories, airlines—and refashion the capital into a global industrial center like it was in the 1920s.
“For me, the whole thing is an example of the whole story of failed expectations of the 1990s,” said Hanno Hochmuth, a historian at the The Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam. “The times of big money and big industry in Berlin are over. Today, Berlin lives on culture, tourism, and politics play a significant part.”
Woidke, the Brandenburg president, said that while he is confident the new airport will make the region more attractive for companies and travelers, the eventual opening will be a staid affair. There’s no reason to celebrate. “If Mrs. Merkel comes, she will get a coffee, and that’s all,” Woidke told me. “I will be glad when it finally opens, but I’m not in the mood to party.”
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fortune--2020-01-26--When grief and work mix, there are no easy answers

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“I have often said, despite my misfortune, I had an incredible set of fortunate circumstances happen to me.”
If you knew Nation Hahn’s story, you might be surprised to hear him say these words. In 2013 his wife, Jamie Kirk Hahn, was attacked and killed by their longtime friend. Two years later, at the trial, Hahn testified against that friend, who was sentenced to life in prison. And through it all, as Hahn mourned his wife and made sense of his losses, he was the subject of intense media interest and scrutiny.
The misfortune that Hahn experienced is extreme. Still, he acknowledges his fortune—especially when it comes to work. At the time of his wife’s death, Hahn, then 27, worked at a small design and communications company. His employer didn’t have a bereavement policy “but decided to go all in on creating a safe and supportive space,” Hahn said. He took three months off work, then slowly returned to the office and his duties.
“They allowed for a very slow on-ramp back to work,” Hahn explained, “months and months of on-ramp, working 20 to 30 hours a week, where they gave me room to be inconsistent, as I wove my way through grief and also through efforts to memorialize Jamie.”
Hahn trained for a half-marathon in his late wife’s honor, joined the boards of several nonprofits, supported other causes she believed in, and coordinated various volunteer efforts and days of service in Jamie’s name. His efforts later earned him a spot on Southern Living magazine’s “Southerner of the Year” list.
“I worked really hard, but it wasn’t work for pay,” Hahn said. “I understand how privileged I was to do that.” Thanks to his employer’s flexibility, Hahn was allowed “to really and truly lean in on grief and to understand bereavement in its fullest form,” he explained. “For me, that was ideal.”
This is the kind of awareness and understanding that psychotherapist, writer, and grief advocate Megan Devine supports. Just as there’s not one right way to grieve, there are multiple ways to approach returning to the workplace after the death of a loved one. Grieving employees may return to the office and want their coworkers to acknowledge the loss. Others would prefer not to talk about it, and some people might decide to take extended time off or to quit their jobs.
“Some people do need the distraction of work. They need something outside of their own personal sphere to focus on in order to survive—and I don’t just mean financially—I mean emotionally, intellectually,” Devine said. “There are also people who go back and are like, ‘I can’t believe I have to do this.’”
Devine knows how difficult it can be to face work after loss. In 2009, her partner of five years, Matt, died in an accidental drowning. Devine quit her private practice as a psychotherapist, and the publishing company that she also worked for put her on leave, keeping her insurance and other benefits intact. It was an optimal situation, one that she wishes every grieving person could experience.
“I was privileged in that I didn’t have to go right back to work,” she said. “Not everyone has that option. So it’s not like there’s a binary of you choose to quit work, or you go back and bury yourself in work. Because there are a lot of people who would love to not go back, but have to.”
For the employees who do return to work after the death of a loved one, there’s plenty to navigate, including how to interact with coworkers, how to talk (or not talk) about the loss, and, in some cases, how to adjust to the cognitive effects of trauma. Experts like Devine say it’s beneficial for companies to have a policy in place—not only for bereavement, but for handling grief.
“This is my personal bandwagon in the corporate world,” Devine said. “We have bereavement policies, but we don’t have grief-in-the-workplace policies, and we should.”
Devine tells companies that “the time to talk about how we should handle loss on our team is before the loss happens. The same goes with our wider culture: The time to have conversations about how you like to be supported, or don’t like to be supported by your friends and family, is before you need it.”
We have bereavement policies, but we don’t have grief-in-the-workplace policies, and we should. Megan Devine
Discussions on how to best support bereaved workers should happen at the HR level, Devine says. She recommends identifying a point person—either an HR representative or a boss— to get in touch with the employee ahead of returning to work. “Together, they can assess the employee’s level of comfort in coworkers addressing their loss,” Devine explained. “The point person can then communicate with the team about what that employee needs.”
“If you’re looking at revenue, productivity, the bottom line—that’s actually really efficient.”
In her 2017 book, Option B, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg advocates for better bereavement and grief support in the workplace—and makes the financial case for doing so. Sandberg, who lost her husband in 2015, noted that just 60% of private sector workers get paid bereavement time, and usually only a few days. When they do return to work, grief can interfere with their job performance—something she experienced firsthand.
“The economic stress that frequently follows bereavement is like a one-two punch,” Sandberg wrote. “In the United States alone, grief-related losses in productivity may cost companies as much as $75 billion annually. These losses could be decreased and the load could be lightened for people who are grieving if employers provided time off, flexible and reduced hours, and financial assistance.”
For people who do return to the office after loss, work will be markedly different. Interacting with coworkers may be difficult, caring about seemingly small problems might be challenging, and it will likely be harder to concentrate on tasks than usual.
“People who are grieving have to find a way to give themselves space to fully experience the range of human emotion,” said Hahn. “One of the things I’ve realized is that if you’re a relatively high achiever who works hard and cares about work, finding yourself unable to perform at the same level for a period of time—or even finding yourself not wanting to perform at that level for a certain period of time—feels wholly uncomfortable.”
Devine says it’s normal for grieving people to have trouble remembering things or concentrating on tasks. Still, she acknowledges, “it’s a shock, especially for highly productive, intelligent, efficient people.”
The cognitive effects of grief are temporary, Devine added. “But it lasts much longer than you would think. It’s not something you spring back from.”
In Option B, Sandberg recalls sitting in on meetings where she made multiple mistakes, caught herself rambling, and in one case, nodded off. Still, “I returned to work to work the next day. And the next day. And the days after that,” she wrote. “But on so many of those days, my grief prevented me from thinking clearly. In the middle of a meeting, an image of Dave’s body on that gym floor would flash before my eyes. It was like augmented reality—I knew that I was in a Facebook conference room, but it felt like his body was there too. Even when I was not seeing his image, I was crying constantly. Lean in? I could barely stand up.”
Hahn, Devine, and Sandberg all stress how important it is to be patient—whether you’re the one grieving or you’re working alongside a grieving coworker. With time, the effects of loss will fade, and addressing the situation early on will benefit everyone involved.
“Everyone’s grief journey is different,” said Hahn, “and that includes their experience with work.”
For those mourning a major loss, it can take years to fully reconnect with work. Once that shift happens, though, many people find themselves drawn to more fulfilling or impactful jobs.
In 2015—two years after his wife’s death—Hahn joined EdNC.org as its chief growth Officer. “I was able to finally find a work project that felt both connected to the issues that Jamie and I cared about but also felt like something I could make my own,” he said, adding that his role at EdNC is “also something that could be shaped profoundly by the experience of grief.”
Devine returned to clinical work five years after losing her partner. Since then, she’s written the book It’s OK That You’re Not OK and runs Refuge in Grief, an online community and grief resource. “I came back because I’m good at what I do, and I knew I could make things better for grieving people,” she said.
Returning to the office and taking on more fulfilling work carries its own challenges. It’s common for people to feel guilty as they experience success, knowing their deceased loved ones no longer get that opportunity. “It is almost every day that I look at what I’ve built in this business and know that it’s only here because Matt’s dead. I never forget that,” said Devine.
Still, she added, it’s important for grieving people not to punish themselves for achievements post-loss. “I have a beautiful life, and Matt’s dead. Both of those things are true.”


fortune--2020-01-26--Retired NBA star Kobe Bryant dies in helicopter crash

Kobe Bryant, the 18-time NBA All-Star who won five championships and became one of the greatest basketball players of his generation during a 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, died in a helicopter crash Sunday. He was 41.
Bryant died in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, California, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press. It was unclear if family members were on the helicopter. The crash happened around 10 a.m. near about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Allen Kenitzer said it was a Sikorsky S-76 and it was not known what caused the crash.
Bryant retired in 2016 as the third-leading scorer in NBA history, finishing two decades with the Lakers as a prolific scorer with a sublime all-around game and a relentless competitive ethic. He held that spot in the league scoring ranks until Saturday night, when the Lakers’ LeBron James passed him for third place during a game in Philadelphia, Bryant’s hometown.
“Continuing to move the game forward @KingJames,” Bryant wrote in his last tweet. “Much respect my brother.”
Bryant had one of the greatest careers in recent NBA history and became one of the game’s most popular players as the face of the 16-time NBA champion Lakers franchise. He was the league MVP in 2008 and a two-time NBA scoring champion, and he earned 12 selections to the NBA’s All-Defensive teams.
He teamed with Shaquille O’Neal in a combustible partnership to lead the Lakers to NBA titles in 2000, 2001 and 2002. He later teamed with Pau Gasol to win two more titles in 2009 and 2010.
Bryant retired in 2016 after scoring 60 points in his final NBA game.
Bryant looms large over the current generation of NBA players. After James passed Bryant on Saturday, he remembered listening to Bryant when the superstar came to speak at a childhood basketball camp.
“I remember one thing he said: If you want to be great at it, or want to be one of the greats, you’ve got to put the work in,” James said. “There’s no substitution for work.”
James later teamed up with Bryant on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team in Beijing.
“He had zero flaws offensively,” James said. “Zero. You backed off of him, he could shoot the 3. You body him up a little bit, he could go around you. He could shoot from mid-range. He could post. He could make free throws. … He was just immortal offensively because of his skill set and his work ethic.”
Bryant was a basketball superstar for his entire adult life. He entered the NBA draft straight out of high school in 1996 after a childhood spent partly in Italy, where his father, former NBA player Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, played professionally.
The Lakers acquired the 17-year-old Bryant in a trade shortly after Charlotte drafted him, and he immediately became one of the most exciting and intriguing players in the sport alongside O’Neal, who had signed with the Lakers as a free agent. Bryant won the Slam Dunk Contest as an upstart rookie, and the Lakers gradually grew into a team that won three consecutive championships.
Bryant and Gasol formed the nucleus of another championship team in 2008, reaching three straight NBA Finals and eventually winning two more titles.
In 2003, Bryant was charged with attacking a 19-year-old employee at a Colorado resort. He had said the two had consensual sex. Prosecutors later dropped the felony sexual assault charge against Bryant at the request of the accuser.


fortune--2020-01-26--Ready guest one: Atari-themed hotel deal punctuates the gaming pioneer’s turnaround

Atari has put its name on a lot of products beyond video game systems over the years, but its next licensing deal could, literally, be its biggest.
The company that arguably started the home video game industry has signed a partnership that will result in eight or more Atari-themed hotels around the U.S., the first of which breaks ground in Phoenix, Ariz. later this year, CEO Fred Chesnais tells Fortune.
Planned features for the hotels range from arcade bars to fine restaurants, with a smattering of augmented and virtual reality tech in between. Select locations will also feature e-sports studios, facilities that will be able to both host and broadcast live events to fans via the Internet.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” says Chesnais. “I always wanted to make an amusement park, and hotels could be the first step.”
The Paris-based video game company is partnering with Arizona-based GSD Group and True North Studio on the deal. “We envision it to be the next evolution in the gaming and e-sports world,” says Shelly Murphy, GSD Group’s founder. “From the second you hit the door you have an immersive entertainment experience.”
The surprising move is part of an ongoing effort to revitalize the Atari brand name. Founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972, the company has been bought and sold numerous times through the years, at times balancing on the precipice of becoming nothing more than nostalgia. In 2013, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and was $37.7 million in debt. Chesnais, an Atari employee from 2001 to 2007, bought the company for a mere 400 euro, or $443 in 2013.
According to Chesnais, he spent his four years back at Atari working on the company’s survival, swapping debt for equity, and licensing its name out to everything from casino products (ranging from slot machines to scratch games in Europe and Africa) to blockchain to speaker hats.
He also changed the organizational structure of the company, retaining what he calls the core of Atari, the brand and its intellectual properties, but outsourcing development and distribution of products to third parties, helping Atari to operate with a smaller staff. At its height, Atari had 3,000 employees. It now consists of just 20 people, relying instead on a roster of contractors and strategic partners that includes AMD, Kingston, Arcade 1 Up, and others.
The strategy has worked. According to Chesnais, Atari is officially in the black, and in its most recent earnings release, it reported a gross profit of $10.4 million.
Deals like Atari’s hotel arrangement demonstrate how successful licensing out its nostalgic brand has been. As part of the deal, the company will receive an up-front payment of $600,000 as well as 5% of the revenue from the hotels, which are planned for Austin, Texas; Chicago; Denver; Las Vegas; San Francisco; San Jose, Calif; and Seattle.
Targeted at both business travelers and families, the Atari hotels may have not see significant occupancy challenges. “This is for everybody… to come and experience something that is vintage and retro and nostalgic,” Murphy says. “It’s almost Atari meets Disney meets e-sports meets augmented reality/virtual reality.”
Though no foundations have been poured yet, it’s clearly a next step towards rebuilding Atari’s image, which Chesnais says he has been focused on over the past two years. Specifically, Atari has been bulking up its gaming credentials, with a big focus on Roller Coaster Tycoon, a legacy title that has found new life on mobile devices, PCs, and the Nintendo Switch. The company has also mined other classic games, such as Asteroids and Missile Command, in both downloadable collections for game consoles and standalone plug-and-play devices.
The Atari VCS is scheduled to launch this spring. Courtesy of Atari
As Atari looks to its future, the company hopes to blend the nostalgic with the advanced in the Atari VCS, in a new game console it’s scheduled to launch this spring. A modern game machine that’s a fusion of PC and traditional console, the VCS has already racked up 10,000 pre-orders, at prices ranging from $249 to $389. The system outputs video in 4K resolution, runs the classic Atari games (of course) and lets users import libraries from the Steam and Epic Games digital distribution services to play on televisions. (One VCS machine at CES had Fortnite up and running.) It can also be used to stream content via Netflix and other services.
“We’re a little bit PC; we’re a little bit game system; we’re a little bit stream box,” says Michael Arzt, chief operating officer of Atari Connected Devices.
The VCS is a gamble for Atari, especially with both Sony and Microsoft bringing new game consoles to market this fall that could dampen its sales. Chesnais says that’s not a big concern, though, since even though they’re making a game system, they’re not chasing the same customer.
“Our core market is not the gamer who’s going to buy the PlayStation or the Microsoft machines,” he says. “We’re looking for someone who wants to have a casual experience in the living room on the big screen; someone who wants to do more than play games; someone who wants to have access to the internet and browse Amazon without having… a clunky experience.”
That casts a wide net, but it also may lack sufficient focus. If the VCS fails to catch on with consumers, though, it won’t necessarily be fatal for the company, Chesnais says. “It would be a disappointment if it didn’t work, but it’s not life threatening,” he says. The company’s lean staffing makes it easier to move on to Atari’s next big thing.
And what that may be is anyone’s guess—but Chesnais, inspired by his company’s resurgence, has no shortage of ideas. “Now’s the time to work on some Atari game shows,” he says. “Now’s the time to work on some feature films based on our properties.”
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fortune--2020-01-26--Diddy calls out Grammys for not respecting black music ‘to the point that it should be’

Sean “Diddy” Combs called out the Grammy Awards for dissing rap and R&B stars in its major categories in a blazing speech that earned him a standing ovation from Beyoncé, Jay-Z and several other music industry players.
At the end of his 50-minute speech Saturday night at Clive Davis’ white-hot pre-Grammys gala, where Combs was honored, the music mogul demanded change and said he was happy to be involved in making a difference.
“So I say this with love to the Grammys, because you really need to know this, every year y’all be killing us man. Man, I’m talking about the pain. I’m speaking for all these artists here, the producers, the executives,” he said. “The amount of time it takes to make these records, to pour your heart into it, and you just want an even playing field.”
Over the years, the awards show has been criticized when top performing acts like Beyoncé, Kanye West, Eminem, Mariah Carey and others lose in major categories, including album of the year and best new artist. The rap and R&B stars often fall short of their pop, rock and country counterparts.
“In the great words of Erykah Badu, ‘We are artists and we are sensitive about our (expletive).’ We are passionate. For most of us, this is all we got. This is our only hope,” Combs continued. “Truth be told, hip-hop has never been respected by the Grammys. Black music has never been respected by the Grammys to the point that it should be.”
Rap, particularly, has had a longstanding losing streak at the Grammys, which celebrates its 62nd show Sunday. Only two rap-based albums — Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” — have won album of the year. Last year’s Grammys marked the first time a hip-hop song was awarded song and record of the year when Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” achieved the feat. And only four rap acts have been named best new artist, including Hill, Arrested Development, Chance the Rapper and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.
Questions loomed heavily over the Grammys’ voting process this week after the academy’s just-ousted CEO, Deborah Dugan, claimed that the awards are rigged and filled with conflicts of interest.
“So right now with this current situation, it’s not a revelation. This thing been going on, and it’s not just going on in music, it’s going on in film, it’s going on in sports, it’s going around the word,” Combs said. “And for years we’ve allowed institutions that have never had our best interest at heart to judge us. And that stops right now.”
The 50-year-old ended with a stern message: “I’m officially starting the clock — y’all got 365 days to get this (expletive) together.”
Combs, a three-time Grammy winner, earned the 2020 Grammy Salute to Industry Icons Award on Saturday night. He dedicated the prize to classic albums that didn’t win the top Grammy Award: Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” Prince’s “1999,” Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” Missy Elliott’s “Da Real World,” Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle,” Kanye West’s “Graduation” and Nas’ “Illmatic.”
Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, received an all-star tribute from artists he’s worked with, including Lil Kim, Mase, Faith Evans and Carl Thomas. The performance transformed the Beverly Hilton Hotel into a hip-hop jam session, with some people even dancing on top of chairs, including Usher, Wiz Khalifa and Combs himself.
Davis’ annual gala, a not-so-easy event to get invited to, was jam-packed with well-known guests from a range of fields, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Michael Douglas, Naomi Campbell, Cardi B, Berry Gordy, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Joni Mitchell, DJ Khaled, Smokey Robinson, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Trevor Noah, Billy Porter and Wolfgang Puck.
Beck kicked off the multi-hour event with an energetic performance; others who hit the stage included Carlos Santana, Chance the Rapper, John Legend, Khalid and Cynthia Erivo, who sang Janet Jackson songs in tribute to the performer.
Jackson, who didn’t receive an award but was honored for her musical achievements, said she’s happy to still have a career in music.
“When I was getting dress this evening I thought about it and I said to myself, ‘I’ve been in this industry for 47 years,’” the 53-year-old said. “That’s a long time but I still enjoy going to work and I feel very blessed my journey ahead of me.”
Though Cyndi Lauper wasn’t honored Saturday, she also owned the show with an explosive performance of her classic hit song, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” alongside singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile. She took off her shoes, leaving the stage to sit on top of a table where Jamie Foxx, Usher and others were sitting.
“Wait, stop, you’re (expletive) dead,” Lauper told the crowd in the middle of her performance. “You’re in the music industry. Where the (expletive) is your lungs?”
She won over the crowd, which fully participated by dancing out of their seats, singing along and — yep — having fun.
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fortune--2020-01-26--‘The new rule of thumb is $3 million’: Retirement planners have some sobering advice about how much

‘The new rule of thumb is $3 million’: Retirement planners have some sobering advice about how much you’ll need to save

Diddy calls out Grammys for not respecting black music ‘ to the point that it should be ’

For decades, many savers have had a big, round goal in their heads for their retirement future: A million bucks.
It does have a nice ring to it. Presumably, if you reach millionaire status, your golden years should be very comfortable indeed.
“It’s an easy frame of reference for people,” says Dr. Wade Pfau, professor at The American College of Financial Services and co-director of the New York Life Center for Retirement Income. “A million dollars: It sounds like you’re rich.”
Well, hold on a minute.
Let’s do the math. Most financial planners suggest a retirement withdrawal rate of 3-4% annually, to ensure a gentle enough glidepath that you won’t outlive your money.
On a retirement kitty of a million dollars, that means $30-$40,000 a year. Does that really sound like a luxurious future, of clinking champagne flutes on white-sand beaches?
These days, not so much. And that means the million-dollar retirement goal, that many of us dream of, badly needs an update.
So what goal should we really be working towards, to ensure real retirement comfort—and hopefully a little extra? Back to the calculator. If $30,000 or $40,000 annually “probably isn’t going to cut it” for your retirement dreams, says Pfau, what will? Does the idea of $60,000-$80,000 a year lower your blood pressure a little?
In that case, using the 3-4% annual withdrawal rate, you are staring down the barrel of another figure: Two million.
“The $1-million rule hasn’t been adjusted for inflation, and hasn’t been corrected for steep reduction yields from interest-bearing vehicles like bonds,” says Ian Weinberg, a financial planner with Family Wealth & Pension Management in Woodbury, N.Y. “Today people probably need to readjust their thinking. A more realistic figure is two million and above.”
Easier said than done, of course. While the 1% have been enjoying huge wealth gains, especially after stock-market records and the Trump administration’s tax reform, the vast majority of others have been struggling with stagnant wage growth for years, and seen their total share of wealth decline.
The current number of U.S. households with a net worth over $1 million is 11.8 million, according to a report by research firm Spectrem Group. That’s about 3% of the U.S. population.
If at all possible, setting a higher retirement goal for yourself makes eminent sense for multiple reasons. One is medical: A 65-year-old couple retiring in 2019 can expect to pay a whopping $285,000 in healthcare costs throughout retirement, over and above what insurance covers, according to Fidelity Investments.
Another is inflation. Although we have been blessed with relatively low increases in recent years, “even low inflation can build up over a long retirement,” says Pfau. “Even at 3%, which is the long-term historical average, the cost of living doubles in 23 years.” So if every $5 gallon of milk is going to cost $10 by the time retirement rolls around—well, that changes your calculations.
Everyone’s number is different
To be sure, there is no blanket answer for retirement goals, since everyone’s financial circumstances are wildly different. If you reside in a lower-cost location, have a modest cost of living, and live in a paid-off house, for instance, then your needs will be lower, especially with Social Security helping out.
On the other hand, for those in higher-cost locations with bigger dreams for retirement, like frequent travel, even $2 million may not be enough. “The new rule of thumb is $3 million,” says financial planner Thomas Balcom of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Fla. “Many are looking to hit the $4-5 million mark these days,” says advisor Nate Wenner of Edina. Minn.
Oof.
That’s the bad news. But there is some good news. If you still have some career runway, there are a few things you can do to help get there, says Pfau.
Take full advantage of your employer’s 401(k) match, if you have one. If you have been operating at a 10% savings rate, try for 15%. Consider taking on more equity risk in your portfolio, if you have enough time to weather any market corrections, since bonds and cash are yielding almost nothing.
On the expense side, cutting back now can pay dividends in the future. Since most Americans’ wealth is locked in their homes, downsizing and/or moving to a lower-cost location once the kids have left the nest—for instance, to a state without income taxes—may be worth considering.
The harsh reality, of course, is that for most people a million-dollar retirement is unattainable. But even so, taking action on both spending and saving to get as close to that number as you can is a smart move.
Sighs financial planner Elizabeth Miller of Summit, N.J.: “A million dollars isn’t what it used to be.”
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fortune--2020-01-26--How Portland’s star seafood chef stays sustainable

The fifth course to land on my table at Erizo, a restaurant celebrating its first year in Portland, Ore., comes on an oversize metal tray filled with ice, five dishes of chilled seafood each cradled in elegant seashells representing the shellfish within: clams, crab, and oysters.
The clams are horseneck—Oregon’s most common clam—maligned for their tough texture and more often used for bait than fine dining, though you would never know from this version served with green bamboo. The crab comes tossed in a custardy complementary sauce of acorn barnacles, which hitch a ride to the kitchen aboard enormous surf mussels (used for Bolognese over gnocchetti pasta in the following course). The oyster is actually only the bivalve’s adductor muscle, taken from oysters too old for selling as is. The bodies become oyster sauce, and just this piece comes to Erizo, where it is paired with wasabi and kelp barbecue sauce.
Sustainability is an ever-changing spectrum. For people like Erizo chef Jacob Harth, who says he is committed to the highest levels of sustainability, widely published standards like the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch don’t go far or move fast enough. Every item served through the 20-course tasting menu meets Harth’s own exacting standards—and works toward his goal of taking pressure off the region’s strained star fisheries, decimating invasive species, and highlighting native ingredients that need attention to survive.
Chef Jacob Harth of Erizo, named one of Eater’s “Young Gun” chefs in 2019 for his work at single-catch, sustainable seafood restaurant Erizo. Justin Katigbak
Being sustainable, in the seafood business, often means that a fishery is simply not overfished or causing detriment to the environment. At Erizo, it more often means that using those fish dynamically improves other fisheries, whether by collecting and serving invasive species, providing an outlet for bycatch (otherwise unsellable species caught in pursuit of different seafood), or using up the scraps that would otherwise go to waste.
The commitment means sourcing goes beyond calling a distributor, or even doing the fishing himself (of which he does a fair amount). Harth worked with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to identify an invasive species of sea snail and get a license to harvest it. Harth works directly with fishermen to find bycatch like the giant Pacific octopus and wolf eel, which crawls into crab pots and tries to eat the profitable shellfish. Wolf eel, which Harth often smokes, once fed the region’s indigenous people but has no commercial fishery today.
For the fishermen, bycatch is a problem: Dogfish, for example, are so rampant that lingcod or black cod fishermen could pull up all their lines and find that’s all they’ve caught—and then they lose money taking each one off the hook and throwing it back. “We’re trying to provide an outlet for that,” Harth explains, adding that he thinks it’s one of the best fish for frying fish-and-chips style. He serves it with a celery tartar sauce.
“Everybody wants salmon and halibut,” Harth says. “The fish stocks never have a chance to recover.”
The Erizo team, out at sea. Emily Joan Greene
Harth has already received national-level attention for his unique, groundbreaking effort: Eater named him to its “Young Guns” list of promising culinary stars and national Best New Restaurant list; Serious Eats covered Erizo in its Portland guide; and Bon Appetit ran a piece about the “trash fish” it serves.
Inside Erizo. Dina Avila
Locally, Harth hasn’t felt as big of a connection. “We don’t have a huge seafood market here; there’s no culture for it here,” he says, noting the city’s inland location as a factor. Even though most of what he serves comes from nearby—up to an hour’s drive away—Harth says it’s been a challenge to get local patrons to appreciate the seafood that surrounds the city. The majority of his clientele has been made up of tourists.
Furthermore, a $125 tasting menu (plus $75 for wine) in Portland is a high-priced meal for locals to stomach, even if similar in New York City might cost more than double that. But Harth reiterates this isn’t just entry-level seafood.
Familiarity breeds enjoyment, meaning people like what they know, an effect sometimes called mere-exposure. Just by knowing of something, people like it more. This puts a spot like Erizo—introducing people to more than a dozen types of seafood each night—at a disadvantage. The uninviting names of the creatures don’t do much to help the appeal: monkey face eel, gaper clam, and chub mackerel. These are Patagonian toothfish before its Chilean sea bass makeover, mahi-mahi when it was still called dolphin, and slimehead fish before it found the name orange roughy.
Bycatch on ice. Emily Joan Greene
But if anything, these fish take more effort and expense to source and more labor to prepare than more prominent species. The experience and Harth’s cooking are definitively luxury, and some of the more recognizable species on the menu reflect that: abalone, sea urchin, and Dungeness crab.
The flip side of the mere-exposure effect is that the more you know of or try, the more you enjoy. Harth recognizes that part of what Erizo is doing is serving as a showroom for these local foods, and that if the restaurant keeps doing what it has been trying, it can bring sustainable seafood to more audiences beyond the Pacific Northwest.
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fortune--2020-01-27--The Grammys go on, despite Kobe Bryant tragedy and Recording Academy trouble

Hundreds of Amazon workers challenge company on climate practices despite risk to jobs

This is the web version of the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Two women are set to deliver the Democrats’ State of the Union response, Coco Gauff is knocked out of the Australian Open, and the Grammys decide the show must go on. Have a productive Monday.
– The show must go on. It was a solemn night for the Grammy Awards as the music industry gathered in the L.A. Staples Center, the home of Lakers legend Kobe Bryant, who died along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others in a helicopter crash on Sunday.
But the awards went on nonetheless, with 18-year-old Billie Eilish sweeping the four most prestigious awards—album, record and song of the year, and best new artist. She won five in total, and the evening seemed to officially anoint her as music’s biggest new star. Michelle Obama also won a statue for her audiobook for Becoming, and Lizzo captured the prizes for best pop solo performance, best urban contemporary album, and best traditional R&B performance.
The ceremony followed a week that saw ousted Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan in a drawn-out battle with her former employer, the organization behind the awards. The Recording Academy said an assistant had accused Dugan of bullying, a charge she denies. Dugan responded by filing an EEOC complaint saying she had been suspended for uncovering misconduct and corruption in the institution. Among her claims: that she was harassed by the Recording Academy’s general counsel and that Neil Portnow, her predecessor as CEO, had been accused of rape by an artist. (Portnow denies the allegations.)
Not ideal circumstances for an awards show. Dugan herself had said she hoped not to taint the ceremony—it’s “about the musicians and the fans,” she told the L.A. Times—and for the most part, the Grammys did what the Grammys do. But there are reports that we missed out on one performance—a surprise from Taylor Swift, who appears to have pulled out amid the Dugan controversy. The icing on the cake: Swift was apparently planning to perform “The Man,” her song about gendered double standards and life as a woman in the spotlight.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Ready to respond. The State of the Union is coming up on Feb. 4, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will deliver the Democrats' response. Whitmer is known for her efforts to expand access to health care; Sen. Amy Klobuchar mentioned Whitmer on stage in a recent debate. (You may remember Klobuchar struggling to recall Whitmer's name!) Rep. Veronica Escobar (D–Texas) will deliver the Democrats' Spanish-language response. CNN
- Rest in peace. Leila Janah was a serial entrepreneur, known for her efforts to end global poverty and as the founder and CEO of the machine learning training data company Samasource. She died at 37 from the cancer Epithelioid Sarcoma, her company said. Read about Janah's legacy here: TechCrunch
- The beauty in surrogacy. Girls Who Code CEO Reshma Saujani writes about her journey with surrogacy. After several miscarriages, she turned to a surrogate to have her second child. "I entered the surrogacy process to have a son, and what I found was a sister, a family, and a renewed belief that people are fundamentally good," Saujani writes. Vogue
- A forgotten warehouse. Puerto Ricans last week called for the resignation Governor Wanda Vázquez after a warehouse of supplies meant to help residents recover from Hurricane Maria two years ago was found unused. "I respect the constitutional right of citizens to demonstrate," said Vázquez, who herself replaced a governor forced to resign last year, after she fired three officials because of the discovery. CNN
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Eve Tahmincioglu will join the Economic Policy Institute as communications director.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Trump vs. CA. The Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding for some health programs from California if the state does not stop requiring all private insurers to cover abortions. The announcement is also being seen as a warning to other states, including New York, Oregon, Washington, which have the same requirements. New York Times
- Game, set, match. Tennis phenom Coco Gauff won her Australian Open match against reigning champ Naomi Osaka on Friday, but Gauff was knocked out of the tournament by Sofia Kenin on Sunday. "I really didn’t think I would be such a favorite," Gauff said, after the stadium chanted, "Here we go, Coco, here we go." NBC News
- On the record. NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly interviewed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and after she asked about the treatment of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, Pompeo shouted at Kelly and asked her to point to Ukraine on a map. The State Department then released a statement accusing Kelly of lying about the exchange. NPR
- An American scandal. American Dirt is Oprah's book club pick, a highly anticipated novel about a Mexican mother and son who flee for the United States border that sold for seven figures in 2018. But author Jeanine Cummins is now the story, accused of exploiting the experiences of migrants—a criticism not helped by a book party that featured barbed wire decorations and Cummins's barbed wire manicure (it resembles the cover of her book). "Voices of color, and women’s voices have been hijacked for a very long time ... but I don’t feel like I’m responsible for the problem," Cummins said at a recent book event. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
(Almost) everything you know about the invention of the vibrator is wrong New York Times
Endorsement: Elizabeth Warren Des Moines Register
New Nancy Drew comic celebrates beloved sleuth’s 90th birthday by killing her Polygon
PARTING WORDS
"If you’re a working woman, you need a wife."
-An anonymous CEO and mother who wrote a viral job listing searching for a "household manager/cook/nanny"


fortune--2020-01-27--Hundreds of Amazon workers challenge company on climate practices despite risk to jobs

The Grammys go on , despite Kobe Bryant tragedy and Recording Academy trouble

Hundreds of employees are openly criticizing Amazon‘s record on climate change despite what they say is a company policy that puts their jobs at risk for speaking out.
On Sunday, more than 300 employees of the online retail giant signed their names and job titles to statements on blog post on Medium. The online protest was organized by a group called Amazon Employees For Climate Justice, an advocacy group founded by Amazon workers that earlier this month said the company had sent letters to its members threatening to fire them if they continued to speak to the press.
“It’s our moral responsibility to speak up, and the changes to the communications policy are censoring us from exercising that responsibility,” said Sarah Tracy, a software development engineer at Amazon, in a statement.
Amazon said that its policy on external communications is not new and is in keeping with other large companies. It said the policy applies to all Amazon employees and is not directed at any specific group.
“While all employees are welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics, we do enforce our external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing solutions to these hard problems,” according to an Amazon spokesperson.
Amazon, which relies on fossil fuels to power the planes, trucks and vans that ship packages all over the world, has an enormous carbon footprint. And its workers have been vocal in criticizing some of the company’s practices.
Last year, more than 8,000 staffers signed an open letter to CEO and founder Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon cut its carbon emissions, end its use of fossil fuels and stop its work with oil companies that use Amazon’s technology to locate fossil fuel deposits.
Amazon said in a statement that it is passionate about climate change issues and has already pledged to become net zero carbon by 2040 and use 100% renewable energy by 2030.
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