fortune--2020-07-21--Bringing the joy to the revolution

Bringing the joy to the revolution

The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically changing the way Americans eat

This is the web version of raceAhead, Fortune’s twice weekly newsletter on race and culture. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.
This is how writer James Baldwin chose to begin an extraordinary address he delivered to schoolteachers in 1963. He was offering a powerful analysis of the racist society in which they operated and the unique role they needed to play in helping Black—then called Negro—children cope with the realities of American history. Challenge the narrative, he said. “I would try to teach them—I would try to make them know—that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him.” It is the job of the educated person to question the society around them, and not make peace with its cruelty or accept a subservient role for yourself. And give children what they need to meet the resistance that will come for them when they fight back, he implored.
Baldwin’s opening line, somehow delivered in his own voice, has been knocking around in my head for months now. We are living through a very dangerous time. For some of us, it has never not been so. Not ever.
How do humans survive a constant threat?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to feel joy in a dangerous time, not the desperate eat-a-pint-of-ice-cream-while-watching-Netflix brand of self-care, but the kind of joy that brings you out of yourself into something that feels like wonder, that makes you feel both bigger than yourself, but exactly like yourself, at the same time.
“Joy is a birthright. It’s a practice as much as it can be an experience,” Mia Birdsong, author of How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community, tells raceAhead. In a time of great danger, turning away from the work can feel like an indulgence. “But in a culture built on extraction and the commodification of people, labor, and time, marginalized people’s acts of joy are a form of rebellion and a deep affirmation of life, love, creativity, connectedness, and spirit—and it’s also healing.”
But you gotta work at it.
Shavone Charles understands this. The director of consumer communications and creative partnerships for VSCO, the photo editing software and creativity platform, has just launched #BlackJoyMatters, a new photo series and summer-long initiative, designed to celebrate Black joy. In a world that focuses on Black pain and images of battered bodies, joy is a radical act, she says.
“I’ve sat in front in front of and behind a screen during all of these really harsh news cycles and these really harsh, critical times filled with police brutality, taking in this unfiltered look at just how ugly the world can be to Black people,” she tells raceAhead. Those images as the prevailing narrative needed to be challenged. “We deserve to be happy. We deserve to thrive. We deserve to be human and just be live and celebrate all that we are. Inclusive of the trauma, but not exclusive of the trauma.”
Tapping her extensive network of Black creators, she asked them to take on the challenge of documenting joy. “If you think about James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, if you think about all these people, what did they do during these times?” She answers her own question: They wrote. They created. They told the truth.
“Joy is freedom. It’s resilience. It’s the sun coming back out after a storm,” she says, riffing on the theme. To build on Baldwin’s own framing, it’s also part of what reminds a Black child that they are fully human, bigger than the vision held out by those who would keep them small.
Charles herself is also a joyful (not just a business) case for diversity. Her story is powerful and instructive, so I’ll be posting a longer interview with her next week. But for now, she wants you to focus on your joy. “Go ahead,” she says. “Share your joy.”
Please do.
Birdsong has some tips. “So many of the adults I know, myself included, are affirming ourselves as students of joy, relearning and reclaiming it,” she says. “My teachers are my children, my dogs, my friends and kin, the little asshole juvenile squirrel that keeps eating my sunflowers, and the hummingbirds that visit my garden, among many others.” Moments of wonder and presence, humor and aliveness. “Last week I learned from a maple tree and the wind.”
I think Baldwin would approve.
To encourage a student to reshape a racist world is to invite them to consider themselves. “One of [a Black student’s] weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth,” he said. I believe joy is one of the most potent reminders of human worth.
Plus, it’s good for you, body and soul. Now, y’all have fun in joy school. Extra credit for just showing up.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Won’t you be my (anti-racist) neighbor? I had a fascinating conversation on this weeks’ Leadership Next podcast with Sarah Friar, the CEO of Nextdoor, the social platform for neighborhoods and communities. Friar, who grew up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, understands what it means when neighbors are at war. It’s part of the reason she’s been willing to take on addressing the racism that exists in communities around the U.S., and the way it plays out for Black people on the site. We also talk about the progress she’s making boosting gender and racial diversity inside her own company. Please listen, subscribe and share. I plan to post the interview on the Nextdoor app, to see if I make any new friends. I’ll report back.
Leadership Next
Latinx journalists to the Los Angeles Times: Do better, now The open letter directed to the Times’s owner and senior management, but the sentiments are universal. The paper has an ugly history of demeaning or ignoring Latinx audiences; Latinx journalists are woefully underrepresented in the newsroom and in leadership, yet the company serves an area in which 50% of its readers is Latinx. Click through for the clear and achievable demands from the new Latino Caucus, a group inspired by the paper’s Black Caucus, which was formed last month. Here’s one: “Stop treating Latinos as a minority group. The newspaper must center our stories — online, in images, podcasts and L.A. Times Studio projects.”
Los Angeles Times Guild
The number of voters who believe the U.S. is racist is now a slim majority A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds a growing support for the Black Lives Matter movement and a willingness to say that American society is biased and Black and Latinx people experience discrimination. Nearly 60% in the survey said that Black people face discrimination, slightly fewer said the same about Latinx people, a number which has doubled since 2008. A majority also favors the removal of Confederate monuments (but their destruction) and the right of athletes to express their views by taking a knee. The survey also shows a stark divide between Democrat and Republican respondents, but you knew that.
Wall Street Journal
Get serious about rooting out bias in AI The Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership has published a new playbook for anyone grappling with how to implement predictive and decision-making technologies responsibly. (Everyone should be grappling with this, by the way.) AI represents the largest economic opportunity of our lifetime, they begin, we have got to get this right. The playbook is thorough and I’m still reading it, but a couple of things jumped out right away. Think of datasets as living resources: Data gathering must be intentional and responsible, and important questions need to be asked around who benefits from the data being collected. And bias must be investigated and rooted out at every stage of an algorithm’s development.
Mitigating Bias in Artificial Intelligence
On background
Migos and James Corden know from joy So, the talk show host’s regular Carpool Karaoke segment is always silly, good fun. And this singalong drivealong bit with Quavo, Offset and Takeoff of Migos is instantly a classic because of, well, the unlikely chemistry they have with Corden. (Which includes their explanation of their “ad-libbed” noises on their songs.) It’s all fun and games until the foursome manage to pull of one of the most joyful versions of “Sweet Caroline” in history (also known as one of the whitest songs ever, according to Black Twitter.) Their version starts at the 12-minute mark. I think their earnestness is the most joyful bit, but I’m still in joy school, so don’t quote me.
Migos Carpool Karaoke
Documentary: Song of Lahore In 2011, a group of poor, traditional musicians in Lahore, Pakistan, who had been largely working in Taliban-imposed secret, posted a YouTube video of their cover of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five." It became a sudden, international hit. The surprised men were then invited to play with Wynton Marsalis and his orchestra at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. This extraordinary documentary explores the radical act that playing music in post-Taliban Pakistan had become, and how magnificently challenging cross-cultural team work can be. Don't miss this beautiful film. Trailer here, link to film on Amazon, below.
Song of Lahore
The complicated joy of pandemic babyhood The first photo in this series curated by NPR will make your heart soar. It’s sweet baby Ria Waiswa, nestled in her parents’ sheets, unaware of the pandemic outside their door. “Babies bring the hope of goodness and light, but 2020 has been a heavy year,” says her mother, Nairobi-based photographer Sarah Waiswa. “I am afraid about the type of world I have brought her into. I hope by the time Ria grows up, human beings will be kinder to each other.” Waiswa is one of 600 photographers who work with Everyday Projects — a global collective of image makers — to document the hopes and fears of parents welcoming newborns during this crazy time. Enjoy.
NPR
raceAhead is edited by Aric Jenkins.
Today's mood board
It's surprisingly hard photos of these three looking joyful. This will do, and this is NOT sponsored by Pepsi.


fortune--2020-07-21--How zoning laws exclude Black families from areas of economic opportunity

Our global pandemic forced us to grapple with truths we always knew but too often ignored. One of those truths is the direct relationship between one’s housing and one’s health. They are inextricably linked.
Where a family lives often determines a family’s quality of life, and especially the quality of their health. Historically, racially discriminatory policies have denied Black people the opportunity to live in neighborhoods that give them access to not only quality jobs, schools, and other services, but also health care and wellness support networks.
Just as racism is embedded in the history of housing in America, racism is also reflected in the unequal health impacts the COVID-19 epidemic has had on communities of color.
Before the Fair Housing Act of 1968, federal subsidies, tax incentives, and racialized zoning encouraged investment in whites-only suburbs. Local laws systematized residential segregation through redlining and racial covenants and eliminated mixed-race public housing. For much of the early 20th century, Black people were pushed into neighborhoods that often lacked even the most basic amenities, such as sewer lines or paved streets. These policies, described in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, were fostered by federal, state, and local governments. We can still see their crushing legacy in the underserved communities prevalent in cities across the country, more than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act became law.
Plainly stated: The lack of affordable housing in neighborhoods of opportunity—which, because of our past racist housing policies, are still mostly white—plays a significant role in our country’s ongoing systemic racial inequalities. As an obstacle to economic advancement, the lack of affordable housing, and the health and economic challenges that come with it, falls disproportionately on people of color.
Mortgage credit plays a vital role in helping Black families build wealth. And Fannie Mae financed more than $20 billion in mortgages to borrowers who identified as African-American in 2019, including $3 billion for low-income African-Americans. But helping Black borrowers gain access to credit is only one link in a chain, and it is usually the final link. In fact, a mortgage is the last step in a process that has for decades prevented people of color from building wealth and economic stability.
While the pernicious housing practices of the past may have faded, what remains today are single-family zoning laws that have the de facto effect of limiting or prohibiting affordable, mixed-income dwellings in areas where economic opportunity is greatest. This modern-day redlining often excludes low- and moderate-income residents from successful neighborhoods, perpetuating the inequitable allocation of services, and further dividing communities by race and income.
This problem won’t go away by ignoring it. Communities need to be deliberate about creating neighborhoods that are mixed use, mixed income, and mixed race.
Until local zoning laws are adjusted, and local governments are willing to be deliberate about inclusive housing—in particular, income-inclusive housing—racial disparities will exist. And we won’t be able to build the affordable housing the country needs.
That said, I’m always energized to see examples of communities addressing these problems. Ironically, given the racial unrest stirred globally by the killing of George Floyd, one of those communities tackling these issues is Minneapolis, which last year created a 40-year comprehensive plan to make housing more accessible and affordable for all its citizens, especially citizens of color.
At Fannie Mae, we too have been focused on the supply challenge. But we can’t do it alone. Cross-sector collaboration is crucial to drive change. Our Sustainable Communities Initiative is helping address these challenges by cultivating partnerships in sectors adjacent to housing, such as employment, education, health, and wellness.
Additionally, the housing industry needs to push for programs that help developers build and refurbish quality low- and moderate-income housing in mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhoods. Low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs) are one way to achieve this. Since 2018, Fannie Mae has invested over $1 billion in hundreds of properties through both proprietary and multi-investor LIHTC funds. We also view the Rental Assistance Demonstration program as another important piece of multifamily affordable housing preservation.
Lastly, we can’t overlook the importance of homeownership education. We want to enable people of color to not only buy a home but keep a home. Having a firm understanding of the homebuying process is the key to longevity, which in turn will help people of color build wealth.
As a provider of mortgage credit, Fannie Mae is eager to responsibly finance an expansion of homeownership for Black families. We stand ready to build partnerships across the housing ecosystem to make the future of American housing fundamentally fairer—and healthier—than its past.
Jeffery Hayward is executive vice president and head of multifamily business at Fannie Mae.


fortune--2020-07-21--The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically changing the way Americans eat

Bringing the joy to the revolution

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In the last few decades, eating out has steadily become a staple of the American diet.
In fact, it’s become so core to our consumption habits that in 2014, the amount Americans spent on food eaten away from home—think restaurants or even lunch in school cafeterias—surpassed for the first time what U.S. consumers spent on food purchased at locations like supermarkets to be eaten at home.
Add that to the list of things that COVID-19 has thrown completely out of whack. In March, the USDA’s monthly sales of food figures showed that money spent on food away from home (FAFH) had dropped from $67.6 billion in February to $54 billion in March, a 20% decline, while sales of food at home (FAH) increased $62.9 billion to $79.3 billion, or 26%.
But the real shift came in April, when more states were in serious lockdown. Spending on food away from home plummeted 34% over the previous month to $35.7 billion. That’s less than half of what Americans spent on FAFH in December 2019.
Today, the USDA reported May figures, which showed a bit of a rebound. FAFH was up to $48.5 billion.
It’s still far too soon to get excited about any sort of recovery. May’s FAFH figure is still some $20 billion below where spending was in January. There’s clearly a long road ahead with many of the factors that have driven the current declines—working from home and kids out of school—still in play for the foreseeable future. And with COVID-19 cases surging in some states, it’s highly possible that June and July figures could see renewed drops.
A consumer survey from Jefferies last month also suggests that some of the pandemic trends are here to stay. Its survey found that about 70% of respondents expect to cook more at home and about 80% expect to eat the same or more at home post-COVID as they did during COVID-19. Nearly half of those surveyed plan to eat at restaurants less post-COVID, while most said they are cooking at home more now and ordering delivery or takeout less than they were two weeks ago.
The trends are likely to be compounded by a worsening economic landscape. Take the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009, during which the downturn interrupted the historic growth of food away from home as unemployment rose.
The current change in eating patterns has implications that extend beyond just spending—many of which we don’t yet fully understand. For example, food away from home is more caloric and has more saturated fats and sodium, according to the USDA. That means that a decline in FAFH could possibly result in healthier eating habits and better nutrition.
At this point what we do know for certain is that how we eat will never quite be the same.


fortune--2020-07-21--Europe’s giant new economic stimulus package boosts global markets

This is the web version of Bull Sheet, a no-nonsense daily newsletter on what’s happening in the markets. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good evening, Bull Sheeters. Fortune finance reporter Rey Mashayekhi here, filling in again this week for Bernhard Warner with a special PM edition of the newsletter.
Global markets continued to climb on Tuesday, with optimism over a coronavirus vaccine apparently the rising tide lifting all boats. There’s also a massive new European economic stimulus package to account for, as well as corporate earnings reports that, by and large, are exceeding expectations.
Markets update
U.S. 🌎
Despite giving up a decent chunk of their gains late in the afternoon, the Dow ended the day up 160 points (+0.6%) while the S&P 500 ticked up 0.2%. The Nasdaq gave back some of Monday’s gains and was down 0.8%.
ended the day up 160 points (+0.6%) while the ticked up 0.2%. The gave back some of Monday’s gains and was down 0.8%. Major companies that reported earnings today include Coca-Cola , United Airlines , Lockheed Martin , Philip Morris , and Snap . (More on corporate earnings later.) On Wednesday, all eyes will be on heavyweights Microsoft and Tesla .
, , , , and . (More on corporate earnings later.) On Wednesday, all eyes will be on heavyweights and . UBS will pay more than $10 million in fines to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for circumventing rules designed to give retail investors priority access to municipal bonds.
will pay more than $10 million in fines to the for circumventing rules designed to give retail investors priority access to municipal bonds. It appears increasingly unlikely that Congress will pass a new coronavirus stimulus package before the CARES Act’s expanded unemployment benefits expire at the end of July. While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she still hopes to pass a bill before the end of the month, her Republican counterpart, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, says a deal is more likely in early August.
Europe 🌍
The European bourses all notched upward Tuesday. London’s FTSE gained 0.1%, while Frankfurt’s DAX (+1%), the CAC 40 in Paris (+0.2%), and the pan-European STOXX 600 (+0.3%) all registered larger gains.
gained 0.1%, while Frankfurt’s (+1%), the in Paris (+0.2%), and the pan-European (+0.3%) all registered larger gains. At the heart of Europe’s optimistic markets was news that European Union leaders in Brussels have agreed a historic 1.8 trillion euro ($2.1 trillion) spending package that includes 750 billion euro ($865 billion) in grants and loans designed to aid the continent’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic .
leaders in Brussels have agreed a historic that includes 750 billion euro ($865 billion) in grants and loans designed to . Popular stock trading app Robinhood is reportedly canceling its U.K. launch, which would have been the startup brokerage’s first expansion outside of the U.S.
Asia 🌏
The major Asian indices all climbed on the news of positive COVID-19 vaccine trials and the EU’s stimulus deal. Tokyo’s Nikkei was up 0.7%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng climbed 2.3%, and South Korea’s KOSPI picked up 1.4%. On mainland China, Shanghai’s SSE Composite inched up 0.2%, while Shenzhen’s SZSE Component and SZSE Composite each gained 0.7%.
was up 0.7%, Hong Kong’s climbed 2.3%, and South Korea’s picked up 1.4%. On mainland China, Shanghai’s inched up 0.2%, while Shenzhen’s and each gained 0.7%. Chinese authorities are reportedly considering retaliation against the Chinese operations of European telecom firms Nokia and Ericsson , should the EU follow the lead of the U.S. and U.K. in banning the use of Huawei ’s 5G equipment.
and , should the EU follow the lead of the U.S. and U.K. in banning the use of ’s 5G equipment. The U.S.’s decision to add 11 Chinese companies to a trade blacklist, for their alleged role in human-rights abuses against China’s Uighur minority group, could force American companies like Apple and Ralph Lauren to recalibrate their supply chains.
Elsewhere 📈
Gold continued to rally to its highest levels in nearly a decade.
continued to rally to its highest levels in nearly a decade. The dollar fell.
fell. Crude oil climbed, with Brent closing at more than $44 per barrel.
As the world earns
At least some of Tuesday’s positive market performance can be attributed to corporate earnings reports that fared pretty well—at least compared to analysts’ dismal expectations.
Coca-Cola , for instance, gained 2.3% on the day, despite a 32% dip in profits that corresponded with a 28% decline in revenue last quarter. But Coke’s earnings per share still came in ahead of analysts’ targets, and its executives expressed optimism that the worst of the economic downturn is behind them.
, for instance, gained 2.3% on the day, despite a 32% dip in profits that corresponded with a 28% decline in revenue last quarter. But Coke’s earnings per share still came in ahead of analysts’ targets, and its executives expressed optimism that the worst of the economic downturn is behind them. Likewise, Lockheed Martin ’s stock climbed 2.6% after the defense contractor raised both its revenue and earnings guidance for 2020, even in the face of pandemic-related supply chain issues that are impacting the production of aircraft and missiles.
’s stock climbed 2.6% after the defense contractor raised both its revenue and earnings guidance for 2020, even in the face of pandemic-related supply chain issues that are impacting the production of aircraft and missiles. Snap, on the other hand, saw its stock plummet more than 10% in after-hours trading after revealing losses that swelled 28%, to $326 million. Still, the social media firm reported a 17% increase in both revenue and daily active users year-on-year, and its stock price was up roughly 50% for the year at Tuesday’s close.
All in all, publicly traded companies are outperforming analysts’ expectations for what was, by any measure, a dreadful quarter for the U.S. economy. According to Refinitiv, S&P 500 companies at large are reporting earnings that are 11.6% above expectations, compared to an average of 3.3% above estimates since 1994. And of the 58 companies in the S&P 500 that reported second-quarter earnings as of Tuesday morning, nearly 78% exceeded analyst targets—compared to an average of 65% since 1994.
Still, it appears part of that outperformance can be attributed to the low bar being set by analysts—whose blended year-on-year earnings growth estimate for S&P 500 companies in the second quarter is a remarkable -41.8% (and -36.2% without the notoriously volatile energy sector), according to Refinitiv. The blended year-on-year estimate for revenue growth in the second quarter, meanwhile, is -10.8%.
It’s easy to exceed expectations when they are exceptionally low in the first place.
***
That’s all for now. Have a pleasant evening and see you again tomorrow.
Rey Mashayekhi
@ReyM12
Rey.Mashayekhi@Fortune.com
Today's reads
Same old. With the news of Tapestry CEO Jide Zeitlin's abrupt departure from his position, there are now only four Black CEOs leading a Fortune 500 company. Fortune's Phil Wahba takes a look at the continued lack of diversity in corporate America's C-suites.
'Tis the season. Seeing how we're in the midst of earnings season, Fortune's Anne Sraders previews the upcoming reports of five companies from a diverse cross-section of industries to see what they may have to say about the direction of the U.S. economy.
Full speed ahead. This month, Tesla became the world’s most valuable automaker—overtaking Toyota—despite controlling only a couple of percentage points in global market share. On the eve of Tesla’s earnings report, Fortune digital editor Andrew Nusca recaps how, despite being hardly profitable, the Elon Musk-led firm has charmed Wall Street.
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. You can use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
Market candy
6.15%
That’s how much the S&P 500’s Energy sector gained on Tuesday—by far the most among the 11 industry sectors tracked by the index. For comparison, the second-biggest gainer was financials, which climbed 1.91%.
With oil prices on the rise again, energy companies were among the market’s biggest winners on the day. Chevron—which just announced a $5 billion deal to acquire Noble Energy—gained more than 7%, while ExxonMobil was up more than 5%. But Occidental Petroleum led them all, with shares up nearly 11% Tuesday.


fortune--2020-07-21--United expects to burn $25 million a day until fall—and that’s the good news

United Airlines Holdings expects to burn $25 million every day until at least October—and that’s the good news.
After the COVID-19 pandemic grounded most air travel this spring, United spent the past three months burning an average of $40 million a day, or about $1.2 billion a month. By mid-June, United was telling investors that it hoped to get its daily cash burn down to about $30 million in the third quarter—a goal that it now plans to improve upon, the company said Tuesday, as it reported its second-quarter results.
The rest of those results, for what United called “the most difficult financial quarter in its 94-year history,” were about as grim as expected. The airline swung to a second-quarter loss of $1.6 billion, or $2.6 billion on an adjusted basis, versus a year-ago profit of $1.1 billion. Revenues plummeted 87% from $11.4 billion a year earlier, to $1.5 billion.
“While this unprecedented crisis has been difficult for our team, we expect United produced fewer losses and lower cash burn in the second quarter than any of our large network competitors,” CEO Scott Kirby, who officially took over from predecessor Oscar Munoz in May, said in a news release.
As many as 36,000 United employees could lose their jobs after the end of September, after federal payroll aid expires, the airline warned workers earlier this month. More than 6,000 employees have so far accepted “voluntary separation packages,” United said Tuesday.
United is the second major U.S. carrier to report its second-quarter losses this month, after Delta last week and before American Airlines reports its results on Thursday.


fortune--2020-07-21--Immunity is complicated. But it’s critical during the pandemic

This is the web version of The Capsule, a daily newsletter monitoring advances in health care and biopharma. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Immunity is a strange concept.
You can become immune to so many things ranging from words to a pathogen. But that protection can be tenuous. And that’s a critical thing to keep in mind during a global outbreak.
Consider a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that coronavirus antibodies may be ephemeral.
“The antibody response is being closely studied by scientists worldwide for indications of how long-lasting immunity may be. While there’s little evidence to suggest reinfections are broadly occurring, health experts have yet to pin down specifics,” according to Bloomberg. “The latest findings raise concern that protection from reinfection may not last long in those with mild symptoms, which accounts for the majority of cases.”
Science is a process (I think readers have caught on to that by now and are probably sick of me saying it). But this is one of the key issues we all have to focus on. If immunity from coronavirus is a weak or temporary protection, we’re going to have to gird for a much longer fight against this thing.
On that note, I had a great chat with the CEO of diagnostics giant LabCorp this morning. Stay tuned.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
The robots that pack bread during the pandemic. My colleague Jonathan Vanian delves into a different aspect of digital health—the food supply chain, and how robots could help us all out. Bonus: These robots are making bread. "Two robots with mechanical arms cruised down a railing that ran between two sets of blue crates, each loaded with various loaves of bread. The robots needed to coordinate with each other so they didn’t bump into one another while they transported loaves from one set of crates to the other—a common task used for facilitating bread shipments," writes Jonathan. Read the whole thing here. (Fortune)
INDICATIONS
AbbVie sticks with its patent thicket strategy for a cancer drug. Biotech giant AbbVie is no stranger to protecting its patents. I wrote extensively about its efforts to maximize profits for Humira, the world's best-selling drug, right here. Humira is used to treat inflammatory conditions like arthritis, psoriasis, and a host of other diseases. The company is a master of forming so-called patent thickets that guard its drugs from competition by claiming steps in the manufacturing process are innovative and legally shielded (it's a battle the firm has won time and time again). The latest victory? The cancer drug Imbuvica, whose patent lifeline could be extended by nine years in part thanks to AbbVie's patent moves, according to I-MAK. (FiercePharma)
THE BIG PICTURE
What does a cognitive test actually mean? Testing a presidential candidate (or a president's) mental health is kind of troublesome. Judging people from the outside and claiming they have a mental health condition is pretty awkward (and a lot of psychiatrists and mental health professionals think it's straight up unethical). But President Trump's renewed claims about his mental acuity and fitness for office (an argument he's made many times before and used against political opponents, including Joe Biden) has brought this to the spotlight. Here's some more detail. (Fortune)
REQUIRED READING
There are now just 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, by Phil Wahba
How tech giants are handling the unprecedented mental health crisis during the pandemic, by Jonathan Vanian
Why Republicans need a convention and Democrats can lay low, by Nicole Goodkind
Sign up for other Fortune newsletters.


fortune--2020-07-21--Extra $600 unemployment benefit likely to expire before the next stimulus bill passes

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she hopes both parties can come to an agreement by the end of next week for the next stimulus bill. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy shared that sentiment Tuesday, but added he doesn’t see it passing Congress until August.
If Congress can’t pass a stimulus bill this week, it means the 17.3 million Americans currently receiving unemployment benefits are likely to see their $600 per week federal unemployment benefits lapse.
The CARES Act, which passed in March, set aside an additional $600 per week in unemployment insurance for jobless Americans on top of their state benefits. However that money only goes through the week ending Saturday, July 25. If Congress waits until August to pass an extension, those unemployed Americans could go a few weeks without that federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.
These Americans will still receive their state unemployment benefits, but in most states that only replaces a fraction of income. In New York State, for example, the maximum weekly benefit is $504.
Why isn’t Congress acting sooner? Republicans and Democratic leaders have both expressed an openness to some extension of the weekly federal unemployment bonus. But they have big disagreements on other areas of spending that are holding up the bill.
House Democrats would like to see the next stimulus bill provide more than $1 trillion to state and local governments to help offset their massive revenue losses. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has seemed resistant to the idea, calling it a “blue state bailout.”
Meanwhile, McConnell reiterated his goal this week of including immunity for businesses and organizations from coronavirus related lawsuits. That’s something Democrats have seemed less open to, arguing it could harm workers. On Tuesday McConnell went as far to say he wouldn’t put a bill on the Senate floor that didn’t have legal protections for businesses.
One bright spot: If Congress does pass another stimulus bill with an extension of the weekly unemployment bonus in some form, they could make it retroactive, giving unemployed Americans backpay for the lapsed period.


fortune--2020-07-21--What Trump means when he says he ‘aced’ his presidential cognitive test

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President Donald Trump has been touting his mental stamina for years. Even before his 2016 election, Trump played up his intellectual acuity while downplaying that of his opponents, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
On a number of occasions, Trump questioned Clinton’s “stamina” on the campaign trail in 2016—an innuendo that led Clinton’s operation to assert her mental fitness. Clinton “lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face,” he said at one point.
He’s used the same line of attack against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in this year’s race—most prominently in an interview this past weekend in a lengthy interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace. Trump said he “aced” his most recent cognitive test and left his own doctors surprised by his mental capacity.
Wallace pushed back by pointing out that commonly available versions of these cognitive tests are not all that difficult to pass. Trump said that the final questions on the test are more complicated than the ostensibly simple ones at the beginning, and that Biden or Wallace would struggle to answer them. Wallace noted that the final questions on the test he himself took included correctly identifying a picture of an elephant and counting backward from 100 by seven.
It’s unclear exactly which test Trump took. But an assortment of cognitive exams including the Standardized Mini-Mental State Examination (SMMSE), a test for those with Alzheimer’s disease; the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) test, which Wallace referenced in his interview and follow-up segment on Fox News; and other common mini–mental status examinations are not particularly complicated.
That’s not to say they aren’t important when determining cognitive abilities. Questions range from redrawing shapes, remembering the order of numbers, and doing basic mental math on the spot, among other skills. These questions can help physicians determine if a patient is falling behind on a specific cognitive skill set and are commonly administered to people who may be at risk for, or show signs of, mental decline.
The situation is a bit more complicated for politicians, especially older ones. There’s no requirement for presidential candidates to release their medical records or take tests. That’s a voluntary task—but it becomes an issue when you have the two of the oldest presidential candidates sparring against each other. If elected again, Trump would be 74 years old on Inauguration Day; Biden would be 78. The risk of dementia increases dramatically with age, especially for people over the age of 65, according to the Mayo Clinic.
But it’s a sensitive issue from a medical ethics standpoint. Psychiatrists and other mental-health experts, who examine everything from depression to cognitive decline, have been wary about expressing opinions on politicians’ mental and cognitive health if they haven’t treated them personally. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) even issued an official statement about speculation on then-candidate Trump’s mental acuity in 2016, asserting that it would be unethical.
Trump, however, has played up the issue on multiple occasions by attacking his political opponents and touting his own mental faculties. The testing metrics he’s using, though? Acing them is impressive mostly for patients in active cognitive decline.


fortune--2020-07-21--We don’t have enough of the air filters capable of stopping the coronavirus

Public health agencies and regional governments around the U.S. and world are pushing managers of large indoor spaces to upgrade the filtration used in their heating and air-conditioning systems as a way to combat the spread of the coronavirus. But some HVAC industry leaders warn that supplies of the recommended filters, known as MERV-13, are insufficient to meet mounting demand—and will be for the foreseeable future.
“We’re 60 days out on our MERV-13 supply,” says Danny Miller, president of HVAC engineering firm Transformative Wave. “[If] this moves from a recommendation from the CDC to a regulatory requirement, frankly these guys are screwed, because the supply doesn’t exist right now. This is going to be a crisis.”
“There’s no way,” Rob Castor, vice president of sales for air filter manufacturer AAF International, says of the possibility of rapidly upgrading filters on air-handling systems nationwide. “It’s not going to happen.”
Under normal conditions, the higher-density MERV-13 filters are in demand only from industrial or medical facilities with specific air quality concerns, making up just about 5% of HVAC filter demand. Demand has increased by as much as 10 times, experts estimate. But filter supply is unlikely to keep up because of the high cost of increasing production capacity for what could be a short-term demand spike.
Terry Ritchie, national sales lead for filter manufacturer Trion, says wait times for MERV-13 filters ordered from his company have roughly doubled, from two weeks to four weeks, and he is confident the delays will get longer. Grainger, a major industrial supply wholesaler, reports that it has completely depleted its stock of MERV-13 filters on hand due to pandemic-driven demand.
Castor says some filter manufacturers have already begun “allocating” stock or only partially filling orders in order to distribute supply more evenly. He says AAF may have to begin doing the same soon.
“We’re trying to give [filters] to everyone we can,” says Castor, “But we’ve got to divvy it up.”
Others in the industry say they have not yet experienced filter shortages, including manufacturer Aprilaire and facilities management company C&W Services. According to industry leaders, organizations that had existing supplier relationships, such as building servicers or hospitals, may not bear the full brunt of shortages, which would instead fall on facilities such as malls and schools seeking the enhanced filters for the first time.
A shortage of MERV-13 HVAC filters could create a significant constraint on the ability of offices, retailers, and schools to reopen safely. That, in turn, could further constrain an already profoundly threatened U.S. economy.
A MERV-13-class heating and air-conditioning filter produced by AAF International. MERV-13-rated filters may reduce indoor spread of the coronavirus, but they are in short supply.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has recommended since early May that office buildings and other indoor spaces upgrade their air filters to MERV-13, based on guidance from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). The MERV filtration rating system measures a filter’s ability to remove small particulates from the air: The higher the rating number, the smaller the particles a filter can catch. MERV-8 filters are currently in wide general use but are not considered effective in removing the coronavirus from filtered air.
Guidelines recommending MERV-13 filters have taken on new urgency in recent weeks in part thanks to the growing acknowledgment that the coronavirus may be transmitted through the air, especially indoors, and concerns that it could be spread through large indoor spaces by heating and air-conditioning systems.
Those concerns led New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to announce on July 9 that malls in the state would be required to install MERV-13 filters in any HVAC system that can use them before reopening. A federal air quality committee also recommended upgrading systems to MERV-13 or higher earlier this month.
Filter manufacturers say they are doing everything in their power, including running double shifts at factories, to stave off shortages. But manufacturers told Fortune that the main constraint on MERV-13 supplies is a precursor material known as filter media. Machinery for creating MERV-13-class filter media is very costly, making major capacity increases financially risky for the firms that produce it, since the current demand surge may prove temporary.
Filter media producers sell their product in bulk to companies such as AAF who turn it into HVAC filters. But the media is also used for emergency respirators and for the masks that have become commonplace in the pandemic era. Some industry leaders say the increased demand for MERV-13 media for use in masks and respirators has exacerbated the shortage for HVAC filters.
Enhanced filtration is just one of a number of measures for mitigating the risk of indoor coronavirus transmission. Others include increasing fresh air flow into a building and enhanced disinfection of surfaces. Another option for increasing indoor air safety, according to C&W Services CEO Paul Bedborough, is bipolar ionization, which is a relatively simple upgrade for HVAC systems and can kill 99.9% of microbes using charged atoms.
But as with the combination of face masks and social distancing, these solutions are likely to work best in combination. A major shortage of climate-control filters capable of stopping the coronavirus would mean one less layer of protection for Americans who increasingly find themselves pressured to return to school, work, and daily life as the pandemic’s toll continues to mount.


fortune--2020-07-21--Slack board member and former Goldman Sachs executive launches a career development startup with her

Slack board member and former Goldman Sachs executive launches a career development startup with her daughter

Edith Cooper spent two decades at Goldman Sachs and serves on the boards of Slack and Etsy. But the executive’s newest venture is in partnership with a different kind of colleague: her daughter.
Jordan Taylor, 29, came to her mother with the idea for a career development platform that would make the kind of coaching that’s available to executives—like her mom—more accessible to people earlier in their careers. Today the mother-daughter duo are launching Medley, a service designed to meet that need. The startup has raised just over $1 million in funding from investors including Foundation Capital, Away co-founder Jen Rubio, former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, and Brightwood Capital founder Damien Dwin.
Cooper, whose most recent role at Goldman Sachs was global head of human capital management, cites her experience serving on the boards of Etsy and Slack since 2018 as preparation for the new venture. “Both [Etsy and Slack] are in categories that have come to be commonplace but were created and were big parts of that creation,” says Cooper. “At the core of the success of these companies is their ability to understand the dynamic of people and the dynamic of teams in a scalable way.”
The startup enters a space that includes some existing efforts to broaden the reach of career coaching, including the women’s network Chief, which is available to female executives at the VP level. Medley’s platform, which has run pilot programs for about 500 non-paying users, will charge $150 a month on a sliding scale to its first paying members. The target demographic is professionals in their late 20s and early 30s, who will be placed in small career development groups spanning industries with access to a shared coach.
The company’s $1 million funding round is notable for a startup with two Black female founders. In 2017, the most recent year for which this data from digitalundivided is available, only 34 Black women raised north of $1 million. That’s out of 368 deals for businesses founded only by women in that same year.
Taylor, a former consultant who developed the idea for Medley while attending Harvard Business School, shares more than a new business with her mother. She goes by her middle name, Jordan, but her full name is Edith Jordan Taylor. “She’s the person I look up to most in my life and someone who has succeeded against so much adversity and in her career,” Jordan says of partnering with her mom. “I knew I would learn so much.” Taylor is the startup’s CEO, while Cooper has the title of president.
In a Medium post, the pair write that they are both “Black women who have spent the majority of our lives in primarily white spaces.” Says Cooper: “We’ve always been women. We’ve always been mother-daughter. We’ve always been Black people. But [the launch of their startup] broadens the definition of the possible.”


fortune--2020-07-21--What ‘Lights Out’ gets wrong about GE

What ‘Lights Out’ gets wrong about GE

The book Lights Out, written by Wall Street Journal reporters Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, and which Fortune recently excerpted, gets some critical things wrong about General Electric and its former CEO, Jeff Immelt. I know—I was there.
But one of those mistakes deserves direct refutation. In their chapter focused on the events of the global financial crisis in September and October 2008, the authors erroneously assert that GE knew it was having problems issuing short-term debt—or commercial paper—but did not communicate that information to investors.
They write: “On Sept. 14, a Sunday, GE’s investor relations department issued a letter reiterating that the company was in healthy condition and maintaining that its commercial paper programs continued to be ‘robust’ and that ‘we are not raising external capital and have no need to.’
“But the very next day, Immelt showed up at [former Treasury Secretary Hank] Paulson’s office in the evening to again sound the alarm about potential problems at GE. He told the Treasury Secretary that the commercial paper operation was getting worse and that GE was having a hard time selling debt that lasted longer than overnight.”
The paragraph immediately above is completely untrue. Immelt’s meeting with Paulson was about tax reform, not GE’s ability to roll short-term paper. GE was having no problem issuing commercial paper at the time of the meeting with Paulson.
Lights Out’s apparent source for its misinformation seems to be Paulson’s book on the financial crisis, which indeed puts the meeting with Immelt in September. But Paulson acknowledges in his book that he based his recollections of conversations on calendar entries and telephone logs that did not record subject matters and, in view of all that was happening at the time, it’s understandable he got the dates wrong. GE told journalists when Paulson’s book came out in 2010 that he had the wrong dates for his meeting with Immelt.
Paulson was actually referring to conversations in October 2008 when Immelt was discussing with him and others (e.g. Sheila Bair, then the chair of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) the difficulties that the U.S. government had inadvertently caused for GE by initially excluding the company from the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, or TLGP. That would have left GE as one of the few issuers whose debt was not guaranteed by the government. This decision was later reversed.
Based on Paulson’s book, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched a thorough investigation of GE’s disclosures during that period. The SEC closed the investigation without taking any action against GE.
It should be noted that the Lights Out authors never asked Immelt about this serious and erroneous assertion about GE’s disclosures despite opportunities to do so during a three-hour interview in December 2018.
Another item from the chapter further illustrates issues with Lights Out. The authors write that on Sept. 11, 2008, Immelt had dinner at a fancy Hollywood restaurant with director Steven Spielberg, Universal Studios president Ron Meyer (GE owned NBCUniversal at the time), and Stacey Snider, then the CEO of DreamWorks. This never happened, even though the entertainment gossip site Deadline reported otherwise. Immelt was in Los Angeles for meetings with GE’s corporate audit staff, investors, and NBC executives—none of which were held at a fancy Hollywood restaurant. The night of the 11th, he had dinner with the GE audit staff.
Sheffer is the former head of communications at GE and today a consultant to Jeff Immelt.


fortune--2020-07-21--Study: COVID-19 antibodies don’t last very long, raising risk of lost immunity

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Recovering from COVID-19 may not offer much lasting protection from future infections for those with only mild cases, according to a report that suggests caution regarding so-called herd immunity as well as the durability of vaccines.
The correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine outlined research on antibodies taken from the blood of 34 patients who had recovered after suffering mainly mild symptoms that didn’t require intensive care. Just two needed supplemental oxygen and received an HIV medication, and none were on a ventilator or getting Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir.
The first analysis was done on antibodies taken an average of 37 days after symptoms began, with a second after about 86 days, or less than three months. The researchers found that antibody levels fell quickly, with a half-life of about 73 days between the two time frames. The loss of antibodies occurred more quickly than with SARS, an earlier type of coronavirus infection.
The antibody response is being closely studied by scientists worldwide for indications of how long-lasting immunity may be. While there’s little evidence to suggest reinfections are broadly occurring, health experts have yet to pin down specifics. The latest findings raise concern that protection from reinfection may not last long in those with mild symptoms, which accounts for the majority of cases.
Further studies will be needed “to define a quantitative protection threshold and rate of decline of antiviral antibodies beyond 90 days,” according to the researchers led by F. Javier Ibarrondo, from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. The brief report was in the form of a correspondence published in the journal.
While the protective role of antibodies against infection isn’t fully understood, they are generally considered a good representation of some protection against infection in general, according to the report.
A recent study from King’s College London showed that the level of antibodies may drop to a degree that makes them undetectable as soon as three months after infection. However, the body also mounts other forms of immunity responses, including from so-called T-cells, which appear to play a role in protecting against reinfection with COVID-19.
In Sweden, the nation’s top health authority said on Tuesday that people who have had the virus are likely to be immune for at least six months after being infected, whether they’ve developed antibodies or not. In new guidance, the Swedish Public Health Agency said it’s now considered safe for individuals who’ve been infected to come into contact with people in high-risk groups.


fortune--2020-07-21--LinkedIn is the latest in a long line of companies to lay off workers during the coronavirus pandemi

LinkedIn is the latest in a long line of companies to lay off workers during the coronavirus pandemic

LinkedIn is laying off 960 employees, joining a growing list of companies that have laid off workers during the coronavirus pandemic.
Ryan Roslansky, CEO of the business-focused social-networking service, announced the layoffs in a LinkedIn post saying that the cuts come out to 6% of the company’s “employee base.”
The layoffs were concentrated in LinkedIn’s “talent solution” business unit, which is responsible for the company’s hiring and recruiting tools, among other job-related services. Roslansky said that unit continues to “be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously.”
LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, does not plan on further job cuts for the time being, he wrote.
“This is painful to go through as an organization, but a company with a vision as bold as ours will have to make difficult decisions,” Roslansky said. “And since our vision is more important than it ever has been given all that’s going on in the world, I’m confident we’ll emerge more resilient and stronger than ever.”
As the economy continues to struggle amid the COVID-19 outbreak, numerous companies have announced major corporate restructurings and layoffs.
In May, for instance, ride-hailing service Uber laid off around 3,700 employees while Airbnb eliminated roughly 2,000 workers. American Airlines recently cut about 5,100 jobs as fewer people are traveling now.
The U.S. leisure and hospitality industry has also taken a massive hit with overall jobs in that sector down 41% year over year in May to 9.8 million.


fortune--2020-07-21--Walmart will be closed on Thanksgiving for first time in decades

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The COVID-19 pandemic, which has already transformed the way Americans shop, is set to upend yet another retail tradition: the Black Friday long weekend.
Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, said on Tuesday that it would be closed on Thanksgiving Day this year to thank employees for their hard work during the current pandemic, which has given Walmart a big sales boost. The last time Walmart closed on Thanksgiving was in the late 1980s, according to a spokeswoman. The company says it will release more details of its Black Friday plans at a future date.
As the biggest grocer in the country, Walmart has long been open on Turkey Day largely to sell food for panicked last-minute cooks. In recent years, Walmart and rivals including Target, Kohl’s, and Best Buy have started their Black Friday doorbuster deals—aimed at bringing shoppers to stores—on Thursday late afternoon or early evening, rather than on, well, Friday.
Walmart disclosed the news as part of an announcement of another round of bonuses for store workers: The retailer will be doling out $300 for full-time hourly workers and $150 for part-time hourly and temporary workers. Other employees will also get bonuses for a total of $428 million, Walmart said.
The company, deemed essential at the height of the lockdowns this spring because it sells food and cleaning products, saw business soar in the first quarter as consumers stocked up. Walmart and peers like Target have given employees bonuses to keep them motivated at a time of higher infection risk and, increasingly, the possibility of being verbally abused or worse by some customers.
Walmart last week said shoppers would be required to wear masks in its stores, a move that most retailers have adopted four months after the pandemic first struck and at a time a spike in new infections in big swaths of the U.S. could send retail spending back down.
In recent years, in-store shopping over the four-day Thanksgiving Black Friday has waned, as more spending has gone online. Last year, visitor traffic in stores was down 4%, continuing a yearslong trend. While it’s still a major shopping weekend, scenes of hordes stampeding inside as stores open their doors at the crack of dawn are a thing of the past.
With COVID-19 already prompting many retailers to limit the number of people who can be in a store at once, in-store Black Friday doorbusters are unlikely to be the norm this year. Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette, for one, recently said that the department store’s Black Friday business will be geared more toward online in 2020, and other retailers are likely to follow suit.


fortune--2020-07-21--4 ways businesses can adapt to a changing supply-chain environment

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Whether you’re Johnson & Johnson or a family-owned restaurant, the pandemic has disrupted supply chains (and suppliers) the world over. And in times of disruption, business owners are having to pivot and adapt on a moment’s notice.
Longtime supply-chain experts Kathy Wengel, the executive vice president and chief global supply-chain officer for Johnson & Johnson, and Mary Long, the managing director of the Global Supply Chain Institute’s Supply Chain Forum at the University of Tennessee, have both weathered their fair share of supply-chain challenges.
But to survive a crisis that’s impacting all businesses, whether big or small, Long and Wengel outlined a few key strategies to help owners adapt during a Q&A hosted by Fortune.
Scenario planning
With the amalgamation of a bunch of worst-case scenarios happening for many businesses right now, one tool business owners can use to navigate uncertainties is to do scenario planning, says Long.
“In the five years that I led my supply-chain team at Domino’s [Pizza], we never shut down a store for lack of food. To do that, we were dealing with other extreme events: extreme weather events, other things, not the combination of everything [like the pandemic],” she said. “But scenario planning really helps a lot to set up: What are the plausible best-case scenarios and plausible worst-case scenarios?”
The challenge, she says, is to think through how well-positioned the business is for “taking advantage of a best-case scenario or mitigating a worst-case scenario, and being really honest about that so you have a clear picture of opportunities and risk,” she said.
Plus, the age-old adage of “knowledge is power” seems to ring true for supply chains as well: “Always make sure you have choices. What’s your preferred route, what’s your plan B, plan C, and how much are you willing to pay for executing on those choices?” Wengel notes. “Do that strategy work upfront, and then you’ll suddenly find you have more choices than your competition when you actually need to use them.”
Focus on what your customer needs right now
When there are 101 things to do, prioritizing can be overwhelming. But in a time when pretty much every business is pivoting to adapt to new challenges, it’s key for suppliers to meet those new needs too.
“No matter how big the business is, and whether we’re in a global crisis or not, the relentless focus on your customer, on what their needs are, and how they are changing is the key to success,” notes Wengel. That might mean shifting focus from one product or service to another that’s more pressing for your customers, she suggests.
Pandemic or not, the ability to know your customers’ needs—”How are they shifting? How are you part of a solution that helps make their lives better?”—is crucial, Wengel says. If supply chains have shut down or your customer is postponing the launch of new products, “be able to take those and be very self-reflective and realize you can’t push your organization or just your idea to your customers, you have to respond to how their needs evolve.”
That’s what Johnson & Johnson has had to do during the pandemic too. Wengel notes that when demand “doubled overnight” for fever-reducing medication Tylenol, the company had to pivot and focus on producing more of the basic version of the medication. To “help people get the best resource they need, we had to reflect and say, ‘We can’t do everything. Let’s go where our customers need us to go,'” she said.
Draw on past experiences
While it may be easy to feel like a fish out of water during the pandemic, every business owner has faced hurdles in the past—and those like Long point out it’s key to draw on past experiences (and how you dealt with them) to know how best to act in the moment.
“That’s one of the big things that’s come out of this; the agility I’ve seen is going to people who are good at pattern recognition,” Long said. “We’ve all had past experiences, but…you’re able to tap into that and say, ‘Huh, what I learned there can apply here,’” she said.
Track your metrics
The maelstrom of challenges and events surrounding the pandemic has forced business owners to think about how their business needs to adapt in the near term. But Long and Wengel suggest it’s important to think about your post-pandemic supply strategy (whether as a supplier or buyer) now.
“One of the things I’ve learned…[is] it is really, really good to collect your stories, the positive stories and feedback, in a really disciplined way,” notes Long, and “collect your metrics that support that story.”
The unfortunate reality about times of crisis is that “there are different criteria in crises than in ongoing day-to-day,” notes Wengel. And “if you’re selling into bigger markets, the risk that what you did in that crisis is there, it’s there the next week, it’s there the next month, but then people change,” Wengel says.
While those experiences and results you’ve delivered “do have value…you’re going to have to keep earning that value and being able to pivot your value proposition right through those different times,” Wengel adds.
To ensure you keep delivering what your customers need, Long and Wengel suggest tracking the criteria—from quality to cycle time to price elasticity—is key. “The more you know about what those are, the more you can tailor what you’re doing to how a company will look at it,” says Wengel.


fortune--2020-07-21--There are now just 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500 as Tapestry boss resigns

And then there were four.
The list of Black CEOs heading a Fortune 500 company got shorter on Tuesday when the chief executive of Coach and Kate Spade parent Tapestry left the fashion company after less than a year on the job.
In a press release, the company attributed CEO Jide Zeitlin’s abrupt departure to unspecified “personal reasons.” A Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday morning says the company’s board had opened an investigation into Zeitlin’s personal behavior after a woman alleged that he posed as a photographer in 2007 to lure her into a romantic relationship. In a statement to the WSJ, Zeitlin acknowledged photographing and engaging in a relationship with the woman, saying, “I felt compelled to resign today because I do not want to create a distraction for Tapestry, a company I care deeply about.”
With Zeitlin’s resignation, there are only four Black CEOs remaining on the Fortune 500: Marvin Ellison at home-improvement retailer Lowe’s (No. 44), Kenneth Frazier at pharmaceuticals maker Merck (No. 69), Roger Ferguson at financial services company TIAA (No. 81), and René Jones at M&T Bank (No. 438). In all, there have been only 18 black CEOs on the Fortune 500 lists since 1999. The peak was six in 2012.
Last month, as Black Lives Matter protests swept the country, Zeitlin wrote about his experience as a Black man and Black CEO in very personal terms. He had been on Tapestry’s board for 14 years.
One consolation for those alarmed about the lack of diversity in corporate America’s C-suites: Joanne Crevoiserat, Tapestry’s CFO since early 2019 and a respected former operations chief at Abercrombie & Fitch, will take the reins on an interim basis. Meanwhile, Andrea Shaw Resnick, the company’s head of investor relations, will serve as interim CFO, as she had in 2016 when the company was looking to fill that job on a permanent basis.
Including Crevoiserat, there are now 36 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Crevoiserat will be Tapestry’s third CEO in the past year.
She will have her hands full at a time of high turnover in the company’s top ranks and an uneasy market for upscale goods: Tapestry continues to struggle with integrating the acquisition of Kate Spade three years ago, a task made all the more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic and related store closings. And while its Coach brand is holding its own, Tapestry’s Stuart Weitzman is also struggling.
Tapestry will report its quarterly results on Aug. 13, numbers that are likely to reflect the ongoing, intense pressures from the pandemic. The company didn’t get specific but said in its press release that they have “exceeded internal expectations” from both a revenue and profit point of view. Tapestry also said it had done less discounting to entice shoppers, helping improve its gross profit margin.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Zeitlin’s departure and a statement from the former CEO.


fortune--2020-07-21--Ford and VW electric vehicles could be delayed by legal dispute between battery suppliers

Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG warned a swirling legal dispute between two South Korean battery suppliers could threaten their plans to start producing electric vehicles in the U.S.
The dispute between SK Innovation Co. and LG Chem Ltd. could undermine Ford’s intention to make an electric version of the F-150 in Michigan from 2022 and VW’s efforts to build battery-powered cars in Tennessee the same year. In filings with the U.S. International Trade Commission, the carmakers warn the U.S. against banning imports of components SKI needs to manufacture batteries that LG Chem says were developed using stolen trade secrets.
“To avoid a catastrophic supply disruption,” lawyers for VW said in a May filing, the trade commission should allow SKI to fulfill its contract to produce batteries in Georgia even if it finds that the supplier violated trade rules. “Any remedial orders should seek to avoid collateral damage to SKI’s existing customers,” they said.
The commission is considering an order that would block SKI from importing components for its batteries, which would be made at a plant that is under construction. A trade judge said in February that LG Chem should be declared the winner in the dispute as punishment for SKI destroying key evidence. The trade agency is reviewing the judge’s findings, with a final decision due in October.
LG Chem says it will be able to fulfill Ford and VW’s battery needs, but the automakers disagree.
The electric F-150 is a key aspect of the $11.5 billion investment in battery-powered vehicles that Ford has pledged through 2022. The U.S. automaker said in a May filing that it decided to source batteries from SKI after periodic meetings over several years with both of the South Korean companies. LG Chem had supplied batteries for its electric Focus car that launched in 2012.
Lawyers for Ford said the company has expended “significant resources and man-hours” testing SKI’s batteries and incorporating them into its production processes since the company won the F-150 contract. The automaker has 300 employees dedicated to the program at its assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and warned that a ruling could also impact jobs within its supply base and dealer network.
“Such threat to U.S. jobs is especially untenable given the skyrocketing unemployment rate and the millions of Americans who have recently lost jobs due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Ford said.
Reuters reported on the filings earlier Tuesday.


fortune--2020-07-21--The robots that pack bread during the pandemic

During the pandemic, robots are the literal breadwinners.
As Samir Menon, the founder and CEO of robotics startup Dexterity, told Fortune, the “coronavirus took us a bit on a wild ride.” Dexterity, a roughly two-and-a-half-year-old startup that’s raised $56.2 million in funding from investors like Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners, specializes in software that makes industrial robots, like mechanical grippers and machines that pick-and-place items, more capable.
Among the customers that have relied on Dexterity’s technology during the pandemic is Bimbo Bakeries, which produces some well-known baked goods via brands like Sara Lee, Oroweat, and Boboli. Because Dexterity is working with Bimbo Bakeries, the startup has been deemed an “essential business,” since the food supply chain needs to continue operating unperturbed amid the lockdowns.
In an online demonstration from its Redwood City, Calif. headquarters last week, Menon showed Fortune an example of how robots outfitted with the company’s technology help prep pre-packaged loaves of bread for delivery to places like grocery outlets.
For the demonstration, two robots with mechanical arms cruised down a railing that ran between two sets of blue crates, each loaded with various loaves of bread. The robots needed to coordinate with each other so they didn’t bump into one another while they transported loaves from one set of crates to the other—a common task used for facilitating bread shipments.
Dexterity demonstrates how its software helps robots pick-and-place loaves of bread.
Using computer vision technologies, a robot could recognize when one empty crate on its right side lacked enough bread loaves, triggering its mechanical arm to pick up a bread loaf from a crate on its left side. The robotic arms can figure out how much pressure is needed to apply to a particular object, which is helpful so they don’t smash a spongy material like bread when they grip it. The software also helps the robot decide to gently lower the bread and other objects into a crate instead of dropping it carelessly into a container, which Menon described as a sort of Achilles heel for some pick-and-place machines.
Although Dexterity’s software helps the robots map out their surroundings so they can maneuver autonomously throughout a facility, Menon said the robots are typically affixed to a railing so that people can rest assured the machines won’t suddenly go somewhere they aren’t supposed to.
“It’s important for them to feel comfortable,” Menon said regarding humans who work alongside the robots.
Menon said that companies are currently using Dexterity’s technology at a few unspecified facilities on the “east and west coasts” of the U.S. He declined to comment on the number of robots that have been outfitted with Dexterity’s software at the Bimbo Bakeries facilities nor other facilities.
Dexterity is a young company, so it’s still refining its technology for customers. During one demonstration for Fortune, a robotic arm installed with the startup’s software dropped a glass measurement cup onto a table instead of gently placing it down, and while the beaker didn’t break, it was a definite no-no. Menon noted prior to that particular demonstration that translucent objects like glass containers are a “bane of any computer-vision” technology.
Still, as long as the pandemic rages on, it’s likely companies with big supply chains like Bimbo Bakeries will continue turning to companies specializing in robotics in order to run their deliveries without too many hiccups.
“We feel grateful to be actually shipping bread,” Menon said.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Deepfakes strike again. Outlets like the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel published editorials from a person named Oliver Taylor, who Reuters reported appears to be a deepfake and not an actual human. It’s unknown who created Taylor, but the report said his stories “reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs.” Unlike other deepfakes, the manipulated photo of Taylor doesn’t show any obvious distortions, like an elongated earlobe, that may tip people off that it’s a fake. But Reuters interviewed experts who noticed some flaws that led them to believe the photo was a deepfake. “The distortion and inconsistencies in the background are a tell-tale sign of a synthesized image, as are a few glitches around his neck and collar,” digital image forensics pioneer Hany Farid told the publication.
South Korea’s ‘Untact’ plans. South Korea is pushing heavily into A.I. as part of its “untact” initiative, which Bloomberg News described as “a future where people increasingly interact online and companies replace humans with machines to immunize themselves against the effects of rising wages and a rapidly aging workforce.” The advent of COVID-19 has amplified the country’s efforts to beef up on technologies like robots and self-driving cars that could “reduce the need for person-to-person contact,” the report said. The initiative is also intended to “reduce South Korea’s reliance on China as an export market” and to help “raise an army of 100,000 specialists in AI.”
Where’s the consent? Multiple federal lawsuits were filed against Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft for allegations that the tech giants trained their facial-recognition technologies with datasets that contained photos of people who never consented to have their visages used for those purposes, among other issues, CNET reported. “The lawsuits, filed in California and Washington state courts where the companies are based, seek class-action status, as well as monetary damages and restraint of defendants' activities pertaining to the database,” the report said.
Possible hope in a massive dataset. Over 100,000 people have registered to take part in a project by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to accumulate more participants for clinical trials related to potential COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, Oracle, who is helping with the effort, said. The organizers behind the project, known as the COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network, hope to eventually have millions of volunteers.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Accenture has chosen Sanjeev Vohra to be the consulting firm’s global lead of applied intelligence, replacing Athina Kanioura, who is leaving to another unspecified firm. Vohra previously oversaw business strategy and investments for Accenture as its growth and strategy lead for technology.
The University of California, Santa Cruz has picked Adwait Ratnaparkhi to be the executive director of the institution’s new master’s degree program in natural language processing (NLP). Ratnaparkhi was previously the director of voice and NLP research at Roku and a senior director of research at Yahoo.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Image recognition fail? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper about the popular ImageNet dataset and possible problems during the data collection and curation phase that may impact the quality of image-recognition technologies trained from the giant corpus of photos. One of the problems: Photos within ImageNet that contained multiple objects were often labeled to describe only one object by the human annotators, which could “lead to the selection of images with multiple valid labels or even to images where the dataset label does not correspond to the most prominent object in the image.”
As VentureBeat described in a report about the research, the authors “conclude that it can be difficult for human annotators who are not experts to accurately label images in some instances. Choosing from one of 24 breeds of terriers could be difficult unless you’re a dog expert, for example.”
FORTUNE ON A.I.
A.I. can help solve America’s education crisis—By YJ Jang
Startup Graphcore takes on Nvidia with latest A.I. chip—By Jeremy Kahn
How chatbots are helping in the fight against COVID-19—By Jonathan Vanian
Meet Dubsmash, the video service stealing some of TikTok’s thunder—By Danielle Abril
BRAIN FOOD
Deep learning don’t come cheap. In order for deep learning to be more widely adopted, the computing costs associated with the software needs to drop. That’s one takeaway in a Wired article about new research describing how progress in A.I. partly depends on an ever-increasing amount of computing power.
From the article:
AI’s appetite for computation has risen remarkably over the past decade. In 2012, at the beginning of the deep-learning boom, a team at the University of Toronto created a breakthrough image-recognition algorithm using two GPUs (a specialized kind of computer chip) over five days. Fast-forward to 2019, and it took six days and roughly 1,000 special chips (each many times more powerful than the earlier GPUs) for researchers at Google and Carnegie Mellon to develop a more modern image-recognition algorithm. A translation algorithm, developed last year by a team at Google, required the rough equivalent of 12,000 specialized chips running for a week. By some estimates, it would cost up to $3 million to rent this much computer power through the cloud.
Update July 21, 2020: A Dexterity spokesperson clarified that that the startup's customers are using its technology at unspecified locations on the East or West coast, not specifically Bimbo Bakeries.


fortune--2020-07-21--These 5 companies report earnings this week—and may provide clues about where the economy is headed

Earnings for what’s expected to be one of the most dismal quarters in a while are underway, and so far, it’s not necessarily all doom and gloom: investors “breathed a sigh of relief during the first week” of earnings as the S&P 500 “recorded a price gain of 1.2%” through last week, CFRA’s Sam Stovall wrote in a note Monday.
But a big lineup this week could further give investors a peek into the progress of the recovery and strength of big trends emerging from the shutdowns.
“In some ways, it will be good to know how debilitating a lot of the shutdowns were on the off chance there are further shutdowns or closures. We’ll at least know, alright, who are the winners and losers?” Wells Fargo Investment Institute’s senior global market strategist Sameer Samana tells Fortune.
As investors try to separate the haves and have-nots for Q2, here are a few key companies reporting this week that analysts are closely watching as bellwethers for bigger underlying economic trends.
Consumer spending (Chipotle, American Express)
Spending patterns have been in flux during the coronavirus crisis, and some strategists are watching credit card providers and restaurant chains for cues as to how spending is changing.
American Express reports earnings on Friday, and analysts expect a roughly $0.2 hit to earnings per share on revenues of over $8.2 billion, according to S&P Global data.
Those like Samana are looking for “insight into spending patterns and how good the credit is: are people continuing to pay their bills?”
When looking at card issuers’ earnings, those like Samana are watching total levels of spending. But where that spending is, is important too. Amid the shutdowns, has it skewed away “from travel [and] restaurants?” That’s especially key for American Express, as a “material portion of Amex’s billings (roughly 30%) are related to the travel and entertainment industry, further exposing the company to some of the most affected industries,” Morningstar’s Eric Compton wrote in a June note.
Plus, looking at the creditworthiness of cardholders and how much the company sets aside for defaults is also a key metric. In the 1st quarter, American Express set aside $2.6 billion for losses.
Meanwhile, how consumers are spending in restaurants has undergone a complete transformation during the pandemic, too.
Chipotle, for one, has been able to weather the pandemic with its investments in its app and website, and now plans to further ramp up drive-thru for pickup orders. The food chain reports on Wednesday, and consensus sees Chipotle earning roughly $0.36 a share on over $1.3 billion in revenue, according to S&P Global data.
And with cases on the rise once more in many states, Wells Fargo’s Samana is “willing to bet that for the foreseeable future, consumers will continue to favor … ordering things that are delivered [and] pickup as opposed to sit down when it comes to restaurants,” he notes.
Strength of work-from-home spending (Microsoft)
Where might companies be spending during the pandemic? On the cloud.
Microsoft, which reports 2nd quarter earnings on Wednesday, has thus far been “a rock of Gibraltar in this market and it speaks to the cloud spending trend,” notes Wedbush’s Dan Ives. And while Ives concedes that enterprise spending overall “has ticked down given tighter budgets,” the proportion dedicated to cloud as companies scramble to go digital “has steadily climbed higher, and that’s ultimately good news for Microsoft,” he tells Fortune.
“I think investors are watching Microsoft’s result and guidance carefully because of its overall barometer for enterprise cloud spend,” Ives says. He believes this quarter will be key in showing that the shift in moving workforces to the cloud (a.k.a. work from home) isn’t “just a one quarter blip.” In fact, Ives, like many analysts, sees work from home as being the new normal, and projects that of the roughly 33% of workloads currently on the cloud, “we believe that’s going to 55% in the next two years.”
Consensus estimates have Microsoft reporting roughly $1.38 earnings per share, and $36.5 billion in revenue, according to S&P Global data. Microsoft’s cloud computing service, Azure, is expected to grow roughly 55% year over year, notes Ives. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own capex is expected to increase this quarter as well (Ives estimates by 3% to 5%).
But a key point for analysts like Wedbush’s Ives is that “tech continues to be getting a bigger proportion of a lot of enterprise dollars, especially on some of these digital transformations that happen globally,” he notes.
Confidence in travel (American Airlines, United Airlines)
For those like Wells Fargo’s Samana, “Probably the best indication of consumer confidence and how well the reopening is going has to be travel. That’s a place where I think confidence has been most shaken—when are people willing and able to get on a plane?” he notes.
Airlines have obviously been hard hit by the pandemic, and many of the big players face an uphill battle even as travel rebounds.
“The question in my mind [is], how bad is the topline?” asks aerospace analyst Burkett Huey of Morningstar. Legacy U.S. airlines United Airlines and American Airlines report on Tuesday and Thursday respectively, and analysts are estimating some grisly numbers: earnings are expected to be down roughly $7.76 EPS on over $1.4 billion revenues for American, while United is expected to take a $9.25 hit to EPS, with revenues of nearly $1.4 billion, according to S&P Global data.
But “Seeing how quickly an airline can right-size to a new level of demand is going to be pretty critical,” as business travel likely faces longer-term headwinds than leisure travel, Huey suggests to Fortune.
Apart from finally seeing those rough numbers in earnings, analysts like Huey are going to be keyed into what management for the airlines say about bookings. But he notes that “With things changing so rapidly, the most recent news on what the demand environment looks like is going to be 10 times more important than the demand environment over the last quarter,” says Huey.


fortune--2020-07-21--Damn the profits, Elon, and full speed ahead

This is the web version of Data Sheet, a daily newsletter on the business of tech. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
This is Fortune digital editor Andrew Nusca, filling in for Adam.
For years onlookers have compared Amazon, the famously profit-averse retailer (until it wasn’t), with Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric automaker.
It’s not difficult to see why. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has long maintained that investing in future growth is more important than hitting quarterly earnings targets, much to Wall Street’s chagrin. Amazon’s market value ballooned well before its actual revenues ever held a candle to that of rival Walmart; today, at 26 years old, Amazon has jumped every other company on the Fortune 500—our signature list of U.S. companies ranked by annual revenue—except one: Walmart.
Some could argue that Elon Musk has held similar sway over the Street. This month, Palo Alto-based Tesla became the world’s most valuable automaker (at the moment, worth some $304 billion), overtaking Toyota, even though Tesla controls just a couple of percentage points in market share for global car sales. In 2019, Tesla sold 367,500 vehicles globally; the same year, Toyota sold almost 2.4 million in the U.S. alone, and 10.74 million globally.
But growth potential is a hell of a drug.
On Wednesday, Tesla is set to release its next quarterly earnings report, and though Wall Street analysts are mixed on the broader narrative, they seem to agree that the company will record expectations-beating deliveries despite the economic effects of the novel coronavirus.
J.P. Morgan, July 5: “We are raising our estimates and price target to account for Tesla’s better than expected 2Q production and deliveries report…We remain Underweight-rated on TSLA shares, on what we see as lofty valuation coupled with high investor expectations and high execution risk.”
Barclays, July 6: “While we still believe TSLA is fundamentally overvalued, we see nothing to prevent the shares moving higher in the coming weeks and urge our bearish friends (perhaps emboldened by a ~$1,400 stock price) to remain in the shelter of their caves.”
Despite a pandemic-stained market that has proven exceedingly difficult for all automakers, some are even calling on 17-year-old Tesla to eke out a fourth straight quarterly profit so it can join the S&P 500, something Amazon took 11 years to accomplish.
Well, I’m here to tell you, Elon: Don’t do it. It’s still too early.
Green shoots aside, Tesla is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Its successful foray into international expansion, courtesy of its two-year-old Shanghai plant, comes at the expense of profit margins, which are thinner outside the U.S. At home, auto industry sales have plummeted as America fails its coronavirus test. Meanwhile, Tesla’s only domestic plant—in Fremont, Calif.—has reopened in defiance of state closures.
It’s likely that Tesla will fail at its stated goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles in 2020, something the company has promised each year since 2018. Given the broader environment, that’s hardly Tesla’s fault. Though the temptation is strong to notch another milestone and join the S&P, it’s clear that 2020 won’t be a banner year for most businesses—nor should it.
So damn the profits, Elon, and full speed ahead.
Andrew Nusca
@editorialiste
andrew.nusca@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
I'm coming out, I want the world to know. As lawmakers have largely ignored the rise of the gig economy, it's been left to the courts to sort how many laws apply to such workers. The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Amazon's independent contractors who make home deliveries are engaged in interstate commerce and thus can't be barred from suing under minimum wage and other labor statutes by mandatory arbitration clauses. Expect more lawsuits soon. Across the pond in the U.K., where Uber is fighting in court against drivers who want to be classified as employees, some drivers now allege the company is also violating data protection laws.
Got to let it show. There's growth and then there's hyper-growth. For San Francisco startup NextDoor, which bills itself as the uber-local social platform, growth during the pandemic has been at hyper, hyper speed. CEO Sarah Friar, on the July 21 episode of Fortune's podcast Leadership Next, says the number of active users has been growing by 80% per week.
There's a new me coming out. The economic costs of the pandemic continue to roil the tech industry. Some 536 startups have laid off a total of over 70,000 people, tracking web site Layoffs.fyi says. Among larger companies, Microsoft's LinkedIn is cutting almost 1,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, as revenue from its hiring-related services has plunged.
I'm completely positive. Speak of pandemic-induced plunges, smartphone sales dropped 25% in the second quarter from 2019, according to Counterpoint Research. The low-end Apple iPhone SE was a rare "bright spot," with one-quarter of its sales going to Android switchers, the firm said. Sales of Samsung's new Galaxy S20 line were 38% lower than sales of last year's flagship, the Galaxy S10.
Time has come for me to break out of this shell. On Wall Street, things were bad but not nearly as bad as analysts had feared for IBM. Quarterly revenue dropped 5% to $18.1 billion, but that was $400 million more than the average analyst forecast. "The economic recovery is looking to be longer and more protracted than we might have hoped for back in March,” CEO Arvind Krishna said. IBM shares, which had been down 6% this year, gained 3% in morning trading on Tuesday. Elsewhere, eBay confirmed the rumors and sold its classified ad business to Norway's Adevinta for $9.2 billion.
(Today's headline explainer video, courtesy of the great Diana Ross.)
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
There's been a renewed bout of hype around OpenAI’s app that seems to write like a human. This update, dubbed GPT-3, has seemingly written its own songs, stories, and even press releases. MIT Technology Review editor Will Douglas Heaven warns GPT-3 isn't as smart as it appears, however.
It’s also no surprise that many have been quick to start talking about intelligence. But GPT-3’s human-like output and striking versatility are the results of excellent engineering, not genuine smarts. For one thing, the AI still makes ridiculous howlers that reveal a total lack of common sense. But even its successes have a lack of depth to them, reading more like cut-and-paste jobs than original compositions.
Exactly what’s going on inside GPT-3 isn’t clear. But what it seems to be good at is synthesizing text it has found elsewhere on the internet, making it a kind of vast, eclectic scrapbook created from millions and millions of snippets of text that it then glues together in weird and wonderful ways on demand.
ON THE MOVE
Former Amazon exec Greg Greeley is out at Airbnb, where he had been head of the Homes division since 2018. Longtime Apple vet Hiroki Asai is joining Airbnb, meanwhile, as head of marketing...Longtime TV exec Lindsay Gardner is leaving T-Mobile, where he worked on the carrier's home cable project called TVision...The brains behind the Google Pixel phone's incredible camera app, Marc Levoy, has left the Googleplex and joined Adobe where he is said to be working on a mobile phone camera app.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Why the world’s most valuable unicorn is shunning a U.S. IPO By Naomi Xu Elegant
What is confidential computing, and why are cloud companies so interested in it? By Jonathan Vanian
How Ford cars are getting closer to self-driving with Intel’s Mobileye By Aaron Pressman
Malls are dying, but Nordstrom has no intention of being dragged down with them By Phil Wahba
Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin to trade on public stock market for first time By Jeff John Roberts
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Sure, sure, you say your A.I. app can write convincing press releases, very impressive. But next year, a much more challenging—and splashy—display of A.I. prowess is coming. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Monday announced the first ever "Indy Autonomous Challenge," which will pit self-driving racing cars against each other in an October 2021 event at speeds that could approach 200 miles per hour. Zoom zoom.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com


fortune--2020-07-21--Can these Dr. Seuss decals help digital collectibles catch on?

For generations, kids collected stickers, comic books, and baseball cards. But for many of those raised in a digital world, such pastimes seem quaint or obsolete—raising the question of how you collect in the age of the Internet, where everything is easily copied.
A company called Dapper Labs believes it has the answer and, on Tuesday, it announced its latest stable of digital collectibles in the form of Dr. Seuss decals. Starting next year, kids and others will be able to buy digital packs of stickers featuring characters from The Cat in the Hat, The Grinch, and other famous works by Seuss.
According to Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou, families will be able to store the Seuss offerings—like those pictured below—in an online sticker book, and also sell or trade them.
The decals are being launched with the backing of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
What makes the decals distinct—and not just pixels on the Internet—is that Dapper Labs will use technology called blockchain to assign a unique digital identity to each one. Blockchain, which is the technology that underpins Bitcoin, creates a tamper-proof record of transactions.
For practical purposes, this means a family will buy and unwrap a digital pack of cards, and treat each card as an authentic and limited collectible. Dr. Seuss Enterprises has yet to announce a price for each pack, but the goal is to make the cards accessible to everyone. In some cases, though, there will be rarities for sale—perhaps a Cat in a gold hat.
“This will change of how people think and interact with digital culture,” Gharegozlou said in an interview with Fortune.
Digital collectibles first gained attention during the Bitcoin craze of late 2017 when Dapper Labs launched “Crypto Kitties“—a short-lived fad that saw a handful of unique digital cats sell for over $100,000 before interest (and the cat market) dried up.
Meanwhile, other digital collectible startups—including a venture backed by the Winklevoss twins called Nifty Gateway—have made a foray into the fine art market, but such initiatives remain highly niche.
Gharegozlou believes, however, that the digital collectible market is poised to take off, in part because of recent initiatives between Dapper Labs and sports leagues including the NBA and UFC.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune: