fortune--2020-02-21--What to watch (and skip) in theaters and on Netflix or Amazon this weekend

Whether you’re standing in the theater lobby or curled up in bed, deciding what to watch next is often the most difficult part of any pop-culture junkie’s day. And with dozens of films in theaters on any given weekend, plus virtually endless layers of streaming purgatory to sort through in search of your next binge-watch, there’s more out there—and tougher decisions to make—than ever.
Fortune‘s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into three distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.
SEE IT: ‘Ordinary Love’ (N.Y./L.A., expanding through next week)
An uncommonly elegant and intimate chamber piece about one couple in crisis, Ordinary Love accepts neither word in its title at face value, which is much to its point.
Put simply, there’s no such thing as “ordinary” when it comes to love, and tracing the ways in which two people can choose to share their lives, hearts, and rhythms only calls more attention to the presence of something extraordinary in any sustained act of intimacy.
Joan (Lesley Manville) and Tom (Liam Neeson) are long-time marrieds, and their daily routines reflect that most practiced of domestic partnerships, a sense that these two have long since learned to love each other’s similarities and differences in equal measure. They banter constantly, sharing little smiles even as they trade playful barbs; on their regular jogs, Joan keeps her headphones in, knowing Tom will inevitably end up making her laugh.
It never is just love binding people together, and Joan and Tom carry as well a soul-deep grief over the death of their daughter, years prior. They have few friends to speak of, and one senses these two have gradually cloistered themselves away, with the hermetic anguish of two people already sharing a sadness nobody else can fathom.
When Joan discovers a lump in her breast, she and Tom are soon forced to navigate the cold, clinical world of diagnosis and treatment. In and out of hospital waiting rooms, loitering in cafes and stairways, the pair struggle to find their footing as tests and procedures grow more invasive. Joan forms a bond with a fellow patient, Peter (David Wilmot), who once taught their daughter; he and his younger husband (Amit Shah) are dealing with an even more serious form of cancer. When Joan and Peter speak, they do so with a matter-of-fact candor and warmth that will be familiar to anyone who’s endured a serious illness, or spent too much time at hospitals. Ordinary Love is light with touches of human kindness, even in the face of cavernous pain. It’s a lot like life, in that way.
It comes as little surprise that the screenwriter, Irish playwright Owen McCafferty, drew inspiration from his wife’s own experiences with breast cancer, or that the directors are married to each other. Ordinary Love is a film of small moments, beautifully observed and unsparingly presented. It feels honest to its core, particularly in the compassion it displays for this couple’s efforts to return some sense of normalcy to their lives amid Joan’s treatment.
Take the scene where Joan, once her hair begins falling out in clumps, gazes into a mirror. Tom tenderly cuts and shaves her head, as Joan stoically smiling through the ordeal, for Tom’s benefit more than her own. Once alone, she gradually lets her brave face crumble, quietly reckoning with the terror and confusion of her ordeal. It’s staggering, the range of emotions Manville makes visible in this moment, the amount of access she allows us to Joan’s pain.
Ordinary Love‘s main appeal lies in those two lead performances, both masterclasses in how to isolate notes of beauty and grace within the mundane and minute. Manville’s abject courage in playing Joan, her commitment to charting the fullest measure of this woman’s heartbreak and resilience, is the furthest thing from ordinary. And Neeson, so gifted at conveying great depths of sadness within that physically imposing frame, tugs at the tear ducts in the part of a man struggling to reconcile his senses of anger and powerlessness with the overriding desire to be of service to the one he loves. There’s nothing ordinary about their love, these performances, and any film that employs such gentle wisdom in capturing both.
STREAM IT: ‘Hunters’ (Amazon Prime)
Al Pacino is ready to kill some Nazis. That’s the logline of Hunters, a buzzy new 10-episode series streaming on Amazon, and the only one most viewers will need to tune in.
The legendary actor—who’s been on a dramatic tear of late, with a scene-stealing cameo in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and a much meatier, Oscar-nominated turn in The Irishman—makes his TV series regular debut as Meyer Offerman, an Auschwitz survivor who’s since accrued significant personal wealth and used it to finance a squad of working-class vigilantes in 1977 New York. Their mission: to take on hundreds of Nazi officials who evaded justice after the fall of the Third Reich and are hatching a fiendish plot from within seats of American governmental power.
To carry out his righteous mission of vengeance, Offerman brings together an eclectic cast of characters, from a sharp-tongued woman in full nun regalia (Kate Mulvaney) to a politically incensed street fighter (Tiffany Boone). The newest addition to their ranks is Jonah (Logan Lerman), a Jewish teenager drawn into the fray after his grandmother is killed in her living room by a mysterious assassin.
There’s an audacious balancing of tones at work in Hunters, one that will alienate about as many audience members as it attracts. On one hand, the series (from first-time showrunner David Weil) is punchy and propulsive, overrun with toothsome dialogue and framed like a comic-book action fantasia. Jordan Peele executive-produced through his Monkeypaw Productions, but it’s to Quentin Tarantino that Hunters is more openly indebted, with its retro fetishism and cartoonish ultraviolence. Inglourious Basterds is a clear influence, though its sillier narrative gimmicks (title cards, a cutaway fantasy in which the Hunters are introduced as attendees at a faux bar mitzvah) owe something to Kill Bill. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, with its glamorous edge-of-’70s setting, comes to mind for more reasons than just the presence of Pacino, relishing in camp mustiness as he chews on lines like “This is not murder—this is mitzvah.”
But on the other hand, Hunters appears deadly serious about the righteous fury driving its protagonists’ mission, and it feels caught between translating its crew of Holocaust survivors into Jewish superheroes and acknowledging the bitter truth of their traumas. Flashback sequences to concentration camps feature a shocking amount of violence against Jewish prisoners, much of it heightened in a way that fits Hunters‘ graphic-novel aesthetic but feels infinitely queasier given the real historical context. The existential weight of Jonah’s time with the Hunters builds inside him to the point of crisis; with this storyline, Hunters seems at least fleetingly interested in exploring revenge’s corrosive qualities, presenting the vigilantes’ actions as ethically questionable and apt to leave them more haunted than whole. But when it strains to meditate on inherited trauma and violence as catharsis, Hunters grows far less compelling; its scripts simply lack the depth and nuance to carry out any level of psychoanalysis. Better, then, to take it as the genre exercise promised on the tin. When Hunters sticks to its guns (and knives, and bowling balls), it’s pulpy good fun, not quite Tarantino-esque but rather a tier beneath, like one of the cheesy marquee attractions that tend to be screening at his in-movie roadhouses.
SKIP IT: ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ (Netflix)
Sometimes, bad movies happen to good directors. Look at Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, or Oliver Stone’s Alexander; even the great Francis Ford Coppola made Jack. And bad movies won’t stop happening to the likes of Ang Lee and Gus Van Sant, despite their best intentions.
The Last Thing He Wanted—a Netflix original that premiered (to disastrous effect) at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—is almost impressively bad, and for such a fate to befall a director as unquestionably gifted as Dee Rees (Mudbound, Pariah) is certainly cause for dismay.
How could the project, a Joan Didion adaptation starring Oscar winner Anne Hathaway, have gone so terribly awry? Let’s start with the script (cowritten by Rees and Marcos Villalobos), which begins in a state of near-total incoherence and somehow meanders further from there, plunging into almost experimental territory with its choppily edited mess of ridiculous dialogue and hyper-dense plotting.
The opening scenes establish Hathaway as Elena McMahon, a hard-nosed reporter who walked out on a marriage and child to pursue her intrepid, globe-trotting career. A precarious assignment to cover the Reagan administration’s hush-hush gun-running to anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua quickly leads her and a colleague (Rosie Perez) to run for their lives. Once back in the United States, she meets up with her estranged father (Willem Dafoe), a dementia-afflicted arms dealer who enlists her to pull off one last job involving the Contras. Insanely, the professional ironies and contradictions this should stir up for Elena go more or less unaddressed.
Instead, The Last Thing He Wanted slathers on subplots and supporting characters, introducing a shady government type played by Ben Affleck, a menacing weapons dealer played by Edi Gathegi, and an expatriate played by Toby Jones. None of these characters make much of an impression, and their presence in the story only serves to further obfuscate its meaning, as Elena shoddily negotiates her way through a vast political conspiracy, albeit one that’s neither lucid or compelling. Eventually, the film so drifts as to tug the audience along with it, achieving a level of unaware self-parody by the end of its interminable two-hour length that’s about as impressive as what Tom Hooper accomplished in Cats for a different audience segment.
The essential paradox of Netflix is that, for all its expensive forays into prestige filmmaking, it still has next-to-no quality control over its original productions, focusing on upping its quantity of releases rather than taking pains to curate homegrown hits. This offers filmmakers a practically unparalleled amount of directorial control, conditions under which a veteran like Martin Scorsese might soar where a less seasoned but nevertheless talented filmmaker would struggle. The Last Thing He Wanted is a wholly embarrassing misfire—more for Netflix than any creatives involved, given the splashy debut they gave it at Sundance—and it is flagrant proof of the company’s enduring weaknesses as a content creator. Hacked to pieces in the editing room and waterlogged with first-draft screenwriting mistakes, The Last Thing He Wanted barely plays like a finished film; and that no one at Netflix sensed that in time to yank it off the festival circuit is altogether more alarming than anything Rees botched along the way.
This film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
The best of the rest:
On Amazon Prime, The Farewell is now streaming. One of last year’s best films, Lulu Wang’s film is a mournful, complicated, thought-provoking portrait of a young Asian-American woman navigating a widening chasm between herself, her more traditionally minded parents, and the family’s terminally ill grandmother. As Billi (Awkwafina) returns to China to take part in a family-wide scheme to say goodbye to her Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) without revealing the nature of the diagnosis to the matriarch herself, she feels increasingly conflicted, torn as to the morality of this decision despite it being fairly common practice in China.
What The Farewell isolates so incisively is a sense of cultural melancholia specific to the immigrant experience, a mourning for something lost in the process of existing between worlds. To Billi, a Chinese-born American immigrant, “home” is a foreign and disorienting concept. As a person of color, she is othered in New York and across an America that still constructs whiteness as normative. And as an immigrant not living in China, Chinese culture is out of reach as well, a distant land with traditions she was not raised in. Dislocation, a sense of not belonging, is a cornerstone of Asian-American identity for many, and Wang works it into the very fabric of her film, with touches of magical realism and a somber approach to the absurd.
Girl on the Third Floor hits Netflix this Saturday. A thoroughly gnarly directing debut by long-time indie horror producer Travis Stevens, it’s one of those gruesomely tactile frighteners, focusing on a flawed ex-lawyer (CM Punk) whose efforts to repair a decaying household are complicated by supernatural forces that make the house bleed, ooze, and in other ways groan with the weight of a haunted history. Ghosts of The Amityville Horror, mother!, and Eyes Wide Shut linger at the edges of the frame, but Stevens’s bold and luridly violent third act gives the movie a character all its own, while anchoring it firmly in a post-#MeToo moment of horror films charting the real monsters created by toxic masculinity.
Also streaming: Netflix comedy Gentefied, about a Mexican-American family living in the rapidly gentrifying area of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. And on Disney+, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is back for one more season of 12 episodes, aimed at providing the sense of an ending to fans of the truncated series, which abruptly went off the air six years ago.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Breaking Bad ended six years ago—but Better Call Saul and merchandise keep gaining steam
—How ’90s cult rock band Guided by Voices flourishes despite industry odds
—With Sonic the Hedgehog big at box office, Paramount catches “lightning in a bottle”
—Rob McElhenney on exploring misogyny and censorship in gaming with Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet
—Contagion writer, scientific adviser reflect on film’s newfound relevance amid coronavirus crisis
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-02-21--5 things Maria Sharapova always packs when traveling

How to invest in health care ?
Step one : Ask the right questions

Maria Sharapova rarely stops moving.
Ever since she became a professional tennis player at age 16, the 32-year-old Russian athlete has spent much of her life on the road. Although based in Los Angeles, Sharapova has spent the past six months living out of suitcases, training in Italy, and taking a break in November with her boyfriend, British businessman Alexander Gilkes, to vacation in Rwanda. The couple stayed at Bisate Lodge, a luxury hotel perched upon an eroded volcano cone; they went on safari and observed gorillas up close at nearby Volcanoes National Park.
“I’ve seen a lot of things, and I’ve been to many places, but at this place, for both us, we did not want to leave,” Sharapova says of the experience. “It was so beautiful, like time was standing still. Trekking to see the gorillas was one of the surreal experiences of our lives.”
Despite her trip to Rwanda, Sharapova mostly enjoys traveling solo. A fan of architect Frank Gehry—whose postmodern work includes the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum building in Bilbao, Spain—Sharapova spent years following Gehry’s work around the world.
“I would be in Prague, and I would see his building, and I would send a picture to my mom,” she recalls. “Then I would be in Düsseldorf and random cities where you see some of his work. And it kind of became like a little collection of his work that I would share with my mom and some of my social feeds.”
Given her extensive travels, Sharapova has honed her basic travel necessities to several must-have items.
Here, in her own words, are the five things she never travels without:
“My friend gifted this to me a few years ago, and I had never used eye masks before on my face, because I usually don’t like things on my face,” Sharapova says. “I’m usually a really good sleeper on the plane, but I like to be comfortable. I like a blanket; I like the whole thing, and I don’t like light. I tried this mask, and for some reason, I’ve just been the best sleeper on the plane ever since, especially on those night flights. So that’s definitely one of my tools I use when I’m sleeping on a plane. It’s just a really big help.” SRP: $50.
“I’m always inspired on the plane, and Simon has been on many different podcasts—I just listened to one the other day,” Sharapova says. “There’s something about his perspective that I think has obviously resonated for millions of people, because I think his TED Talk is, like, in the top three most-watched in their history. There’s a way that he speaks about leadership and purpose that’s very natural and really resonates with my own experience and in a way that I can use it in my own life.” SRP: $21.44 for the audiobook; $28 for the hardcover.
“Believe it or not, I love Ella’s baby food, actually in peach, which I eat a lot of during training and sometimes during matches,” admits Sharapova. “They taste really good, and they’re pureed, so they’re just easy to consume. When it comes to guilty pleasures—and I have a lot of them—I’m a little biased towards my candy company, Sugarpova. I do a lot of research. I go online. I find the local chocolate shop or the local fudge place. If I’m at the airport, and I find it at the store—like, we’re in Hudson News at the airport—I actually get two bags, and I ask the store managers or the clerks who are selling the candy. I’m like, ‘Have you heard of this company? How’s it doing?’ I ask all these questions. And then I say, ‘Would you like to try it? Because I’m the owner.’ So I usually buy two bags, and I give them one. And I take one for me because I’m like, ‘Okay, well, one for me, one for you.’” SRP: $10.34 for Ella’s Kitchen products; $3.49 to $12.99 for Sugarpova snacks.
“It’s honestly one of my favorite travel pieces, because I love how convenient it is,” says Sharapova. “It’s actually very spacious. Most of the time, I actually travel with a lot of bags, and most of the time, my carry-on is actually my tennis bag. Or I’m going somewhere for a few days of meetings, and I can just pack a carry-on, and I rarely get to do that. But you can tell when I’m in vacation mode. If you ever catch me twirling it around with those wheelies, then you’ll know—and that’s when I’m a happy girl.” SRP: $770.
“Skin in general after traveling can be very unpleasant, and I rarely travel with makeup on,” Sharapova says. “So there are two main reasons why I love this: one being that you usually look very strange when you are wearing a mask, and the best part about this mask is that it’s like a mask moisturizer—it doesn’t look like you’re wearing a mask. So you put on as many layers as you want. It might come off a bit creamy, but it kind of soaks into and blends into your skin, and it’s not noticeable at all. You don’t even need to wash it off after—or you can.” SRP: $120.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—The mental health benefits of cow cuddling
—Couples are including cannabis at their weddings. How you can, too
—These tailors show that custom suiting is no longer just for men
—The food scene in South Philly is more than just cheesesteaks
—The best travel destinations for every season of 2020
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-02-21--Tulsi Gabbard: How Democrats’ impeachment campaign helped Trump

Donald Trump must be defeated: Another four years of him as president would be a disaster. Unfortunately, as I warned, the Democrats’ hyper-partisan impeachment process has increased the likelihood that he will be re-elected. After Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, his approval rating reached the highest levels since he took office. And the risk that he will win in November is much greater than before.
This was entirely foreseeable.
For years I have stressed the need for our leaders to make decisions based on thoughtfulness and foresight—not just emotion, or what may “feel good” in a given moment. This is especially important in the area of foreign policy, as politicians’ desire to “do something” too often overrides careful consideration of the unintended consequences of the actions they take. Time and time again, their poor judgment has led to worse outcomes in the countries where we recklessly intervene, and for our own country’s national security.
An egregious lack of foresight also led to this counterproductive impeachment of Trump.
Those who wish to lead our country should have had the foresight to know that this result was inevitable. They need to understand that their decisions should not be dictated by what makes them temporarily feel good or look good, but rather by what will be good for the American people. Emotional gratification or political advantage should never determine one’s votes or actions.
I find it strange that the same people who loudly declare that Trump’s re-election would be an existential threat to our country nonetheless advocated for the very thing which has increased the chances he will be re-elected. If they really believed that a second Trump term would be such a devastating catastrophe, perhaps they should not have given such a priceless contribution to his re-election campaign.
I am not a genius; I simply had enough common sense to foresee that Trump would be acquitted. And I also used my common sense to predict that Trump would, upon his acquittal, use that as vindication. Unfortunately, common sense is not so common among politicians jockeying for power.
It’s no secret that some presidential candidates believed that being the earliest and most emphatic to demand Trump’s impeachment would profit them politically—and they were right. They did benefit politically by exploiting Democratic voters’ disdain for Trump. But their political gain has been America’s loss.
Of course we’ve all heard their talking points: “Sometimes you just have to do the right thing.” Do they believe that the right thing is to help Trump get re-elected—and now embolden him to act with impunity for the remainder of his tenure in office—even as they claim his re-election would destroy our country, our Constitution, our democracy, and our world?
They say, “We had to do this to protect our Constitution”—but if you increase the likelihood of destroying the country, how is that “protecting our Constitution”?
Some of my Democratic colleagues in the House have argued that this failed endeavor was still justified because Trump will go down in infamy as the third president to be impeached. But that will be cold comfort. While it may warm the heart of a self-serving politician eager for publicity and donations, a footnote in future history books will do nothing to comfort our children and our children’s children—who will have to live with the disastrous consequences of another four years of Trump in the White House.
Foresight means being guided always by what is in the best interests of the American people, not what may be in one’s political interest. It means getting past the shallow partisan divides that result in short-sighted thinking, and inflame the kind of tribal animosities that make it far more difficult to get even the most basic things done. That’s why I am running for president—to bring a new era of leadership that moves us beyond this destructive pattern. Because our children deserve better.
Tulsi Gabbard is the U.S. representative for Hawaii’s 2nd District and a Democratic candidate for president.
More opinion in Fortune:
—How to fix the broken corporate approach to addressing sexual harassment
—Robot surgery could be the future of health care in remote areas
—If we want to keep eating chocolate, we have to end deforestation
—7 economists on why the T-Mobile-Sprint merger should’ve been rejected
—WATCH: The double burdens that hold women back
Listen to our audio briefing, Fortune 500 Daily


fortune--2020-02-21--‘Breaking Bad’ ended six years ago—but ‘Better Call Saul’ and merchandise keep gaining steam

When Breaking Bad, a series about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who turns to the meth business, debuted on AMC in 2008, it had no merchandise—not even a T-shirt. Twelve years later, creator Vince Gilligan finds himself gazing at a wall of Funko dolls in his Los Angeles office—not only of protagonists Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), but a goateed Gilligan himself.
“The idea of creating something that generated action figures delighted me to no end,” Gilligan tells Fortune via phone. “I probably bought most of the 100 or 200 of those that they made.” He’s tickled by them, he says, more than any other Bad products over the years—hazmat suits, chefs’ aprons, “blue sky” rock candy—all references to the Schedule II controlled substance made and sold by Walter and Jesse.
During its five-season run from 2008 to 2013, Breaking Bad resisted declining viewership and almost cancellation to become one of the most wildly popular shows on TV. Six years after its finale, bolstered by offbeat brand partnerships, restaurant pop-ups, a mezcal line, and a Netflix film sequel, the neo-Western set in Albuquerque is verging on the empire business.
The “Breaking Bad” hazmat suit costume on the racks at the Halloween Club store in Montebello, Calif., on Oct. 16, 2014. FREDERIC J. BROWN—AFP via Getty Images)
Gilligan and partner Peter Gould seem poised to ride this train as far as it will go. Although Breaking Bad might be history, prequel Better Call Saul, centered on Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman (a.k.a. Jimmy McGill), hit the ground running from a critical and marketing standpoint. The show returns for its fifth season via a two-night premiere Sunday and Monday.
“Our fans appreciate the cleverness of [Better Call Saul],” Linda Schupack, the president of marketing at AMC, tells Fortune. “They expect that from our marketing.”
Part of this, Schupack says, is achieved with videos that “break the fourth wall.”
TV and YouTube content
In 2017, Better Call Saul brought back the character of Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a Chilean-born meth kingpin who owns fried-chicken chain Los Pollos Hermanos. To tease his return in season three, AMC ran a late-night ad for the restaurant on local Albuquerque stations starring Esposito in character—and with no mention of the show.
“Fans loved it,” Schupack says, citing “all sorts of discussion on our social platforms.”
To tease the season five release date, Cinnabon’s Facebook page ran “archival footage” of an Omaha location opening. Part of Better Call Saul is a flash-forward in which Jimmy/Saul, the target of an international manhunt, relocates to Omaha and works at a Cinnabon under the name Gene Takavic. The character appears partly obscured in the video, which, AMC says successfully engaged Saul fans.
“Fans knew it was Gene from the show, and they solved the teaser to reveal the date,” Schupack says.
Odenkirk in character at a Cinnabon on “Better Call Saul” from the second season premiere. Ursula Coyote—Sony Pictures Television/ AMC
As far as the brand partnership with Cinnabon? “They got it. They’re hip. They turned out to be great partners,” Gilligan says. “They did not mind having, in a fictional sense, this dirty lawyer on the run from the law, working at one of their bakeries.”
“It turned out to pay dividends, hopefully, for both sides of the equation,” he says.
AMC also leverages throwaway Saul moments for YouTube content. A scene in which criminal fixer Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) brings a cheese sandwich to a drug deal in lieu of a gun led to “How to Make a Pimento Cheese Sandwich.” Other “training videos” include Gus in “How to Iron a Shirt,” lawyer and Jimmy’s girlfriend Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) in “How to Negotiate,” and cartel criminal Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) in “How to Make a Taco.”
“Tapping into [the show’s] unique voice is something our fans expect,” Schupack says.
And, she says, AMC has completed demolition of the fourth wall with a series of Los Pollos Hermanos stands in major cities.
Restaurant pop-ups
Three years ago, to herald the return of Gus, temporary Los Pollos Hermanos locations were erected on 6th Street in Los Angeles, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and in a parking lot in Manhattan’s Financial District. (The Thirsty Bird chicken restaurant in Sydney was also transformed into a pop-up Los Pollos.)
The sites featured various appearances by Odenkirk, Esposito, and Michael McKean (who plays Jimmy’s brother Chuck McGill), as well as chicken-costumed mascots and Jimmy’s beater car parked out front.
“We furthered the blur between the fictional Los Pollos Hermanos and an actual restaurant,” Schupack says. (The pop-ups didn’t offer fried chicken, selling small orders of curly fries instead.)
The “Better Call Saul” promotional Los Pollos Hermanos pop-up restaurant sits in a New York parking lot in 2017. Brad Barket—Getty Images for AMC
For season five, instead of reviving the stand-alone restaurants, Sony Pictures Consumer Products teamed up with Uber Eats and kitchen delivery network Family Style Inc. for a “virtual launch,” offering Pollo Tenders, Fring Fries, and Slaw Goodman for delivery. This, it seems, was a cost-cutting measure from the previous pop-ups.
“Little did I realize this could be accomplished without building an actual brick-and-mortar restaurant,” Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019.
The exception was The Breaking Bad Experience pop-up in West Hollywood, made to promote Netflix film sequel El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie and designed to look like an RV park meth lab. Kitchen staffers in hazmat suits served unsliced pizza, Heisenberger Sliders, and Loaded Saul-sa Nachos.
To wash it down, visitors could sip Dos Hombres, a mezcal developed by Cranston and Paul.
An alcoholic venture
In 2019, the actors each posted the same photo of two donkeys with the caption: “Soon.” They followed it up with a photo of themselves wading through a river: “Even sooner.”
During an appearance on The One Show, Anna Gunn, who played Walter’s wife, Skyler, spilled the beans: “I believe it is a nod to a mezcal tequila that they are bringing out, the two of them, called Dos Hombres.”
Cranston, Gilligan, and Paul behind the scenes on the set of “Breaking Bad” film “El Camino.” Ben Rothstein—Vinton Productions
Naturally, fans thirsting for a rumored Breaking Bad film—or any reunion between Cranston and Paul on-screen—felt somewhat let down by the news. But, the pair insisted, it was a passion project.
“We couldn’t get the idea out of our heads,” they said in a joint statement, calling themselves “two guys on a quest” for the perfect Mexican liquor.
Still, the pair were burying the lede: They had a film sequel in the can. A month after the mezcal news, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie was announced for an Oct. 2019 release.
A Netflix partnership
Gilligan owes part of Breaking Bad’s longevity to Netflix. “We were in a bit of trouble viewership-wise after about a year or two on AMC,” he says. “AMC was doing their very best to get the viewership up, but that world was in the midst of a change it didn’t realize it was undergoing.”
That change was the emergence of streaming. “Netflix saved us in that it allowed folks to catch up on Breaking Bad and binge-watch it,” he says.
Paul on set as Jesse Pinkman in a scene from Netflix’s “El Camino.” Ben Rothstein—Vinton Productions
“Netflix seemed to be the natural home for it given what Netflix had done for the original series,” Jeff Frost, president of production company Sony Pictures Television, tells Fortune. “They exposed it to this wide range of demographics and made it the cultural phenomenon that it is.”
In the Breaking Bad series finale, “Felina,” Walter heroically opens fire on a neo-Nazi compound with a machine gun in his trunk, enabling a once-enslaved Jesse to speed off into the desert. Gilligan wanted to make a stand-alone film to tell the rest of Jesse’s story, but AMC passed since it doesn’t make one-off films.
“With that in mind, I always want to ‘dance with the girl that brung ya,’ so to speak,” Gilligan says.
El Camino gave fans closure for Jesse, brought back deceased characters Walter, Mike, exterminator-burglar Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons), and Jesse’s girlfriend Jane Margolis (Krysten Ritter) in flashbacks, and stands at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
No ‘master plan’
No matter where the Breaking Bad property grows both in storytelling and in marketing scale, Gilligan tries to never “put the cart before the horse.”
“Our first thought, always, is to never do anything that would damage the Breaking Bad or the Better Call Saul brand,” he says. “But having said that, we’re always looking for fun and offbeat ways to give our fans the opportunity to own a little piece of the show.”
Gilligan outside the Los Pollos Hermanos pop-up hosted by AMC and Citizens Parking on March 30, 2017, in Los Angeles. JB Lacroix—WireImage/Getty Images
At times, Breaking Bad merchandise has earned less-than-kind reviews. A 2014 Vice article insisted that it “[cheapens] the show’s legacy,” saying that the T-shirts, candy, and dolls “encourage an afterlife of costume parties and dorm posters.”
But products aside, Breaking Bad–related shows and movies are where its legacy can be truly judged; critics say that Gilligan and Gould have stayed one step ahead of fans’ expectations.
“I was nervous about El Camino in concept but was reassured in its execution,” Donna Bowman, an A.V. Club writer who recapped Breaking Bad and now Better Call Saul, tells Fortune. “And a lot of people thought Better Call Saul was a terrible idea, giving a backstory to a character who didn’t need one, but they were wrong.”
“In some ways, Better Call Saul is better,” Alexander Zalben, the managing editor of Decider, tells Fortune. “Part of that is because they were still finding their way in the early episodes of Breaking Bad, [whereas] Better Call Saul knew itself immediately.”
With El Camino in the rearview mirror, Sony has “a lot of things in the works” for the Breaking Bad property, Frost says. “We’re going to make sure we give the audiences what they want.”
And as Gilligan gazes at an office wall of Breaking Bad knickknacks, the runoff of a show that seems to face limitless expansion into the 2020s, he admits he and Sony are basically winging it in the marketplace and that there was never a “master plan.”
“I’d love to pitch to Fortune magazine my great business acumen and my chess-master-like vision for the branding and the marketing of the show,” he says with a laugh. “We just kind of have fun with it and take it day by day, product by product, and company by company.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—How ’90s cult rock band Guided by Voices flourishes despite industry odds
—With Sonic the Hedgehog big at box office, Paramount catches “lightning in a bottle”
—Rob McElhenney on exploring misogyny and censorship in gaming with Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet
—Portrait of a Lady on Fire filmmaker Céline Sciamma on the female gaze and her ‘architecture of desires’
—Contagion writer, scientific adviser reflect on film’s newfound relevance amid coronavirus crisis
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-02-21--Private equity firms raised more money in 2019 than they ever have before

Private capital fundraising had a bombshell year in 2019.
A whopping $888 billion was raised across 1,064 private equity, venture capital, infrastructure, and real estate funds. This is the most private capital ever raised on an annual basis, according to a new PitchBook report. On average, institutional investors increased their allocations to private markets yet again by lowering their allocation to hedge funds and/or public equities.
Here are three intriguing takeaways from the report:
— Globally, private equity firms raised more money than they have in any prior year, closing on nearly half a trillion dollars. Blackstone’s $26 billion flagship vehicle that closed in 2019 marked the largest buyout fund ever raised. (Here’s what Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman told me about fundraising last year: “It’s harder when you get bigger, but it still is an out-of-body experience for me.”)
— Venture capital firms also had a big year, albeit fundraising figures fell slightly from 2018. U.S.-based funds in 2019 had a monster year for investment realizations and saw exit value more than double year-over-year, which will eventually turn into distributions to limited partners. And once those investors receive their cash, they will likely recycle it into new venture funds.
— Dry powder continues to accumulate. More than $100 billion in capital remains unspent in funds that are six years or older. As The New York Times noted, funds typically have five years to deploy what they get from their limited partners, or they lose the ability to spend it. They have agreed on alternative arrangements with their investors, which is a huge headache and creates more capital overhang.
Fundraising should remain robust in 2020, according to PitchBook. However, it’s not out of the question that fears of a looming recession could finally put a meaningful dent in the fundraising totals.
NO PLANS THIS WEEKEND? Well, I’ve got something for you. Frontline PBS released a new documentary on Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, exploring how he built an empire unprecedented in the history of American capitalism. The film covers worker safety, consumer “ecstasy,” surveillance concerns, and questions around regulation. As The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer notes in the documentary, “Everything that is admirable about Amazon is also something that we should fear about it.” Watch here.
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- IntelyCare, a Quincy, Mass.-based workforce management solution for post-acute facilities, raised $45 million in Series B funding and debt. Endeavour Vision led the round, and was joined by investors Kaiser Permanente Ventures and Generator Ventures.
- At-Bay, a Mountain View, Calif.-based cyber insurance company for the digital age, raised $34 million in Series B funding., Acrew Capital and Munich Re Ventures co-led the round, and was joined by investors including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Shlomo Kramer.
- Leanplum, a San Francisco-based customer engagement platform, raised $27 million in extension to its Series D round. Norwest Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures co-led the round, and were joined by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Canaan and Launchub.
- DSP Concepts, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based audio processing company, raised $14.5 million in Series B funding. Taiwania Capital led the round, and was joined by investors including BMW i Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund by Innovation Growth Ventures, MediaTek Ventures, Porsche Ventures and the ARM IoT Fund.
- Brace, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based digital mortgage-servicing platform, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Point72 Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including Crosslink Capital.
- OnSiteIQ, a New York-based visual documentation and risk assessment platform provider for construction projects, raised $4.5 million in Series A funding. Bullpen Capital led the round, and was joined by investors including Anthemis Group and MetaProp.
HEALTH & LIFE SCIENCES DEALS
- Q Bio, a San Francisco-based quantitative, clinically-relevant assessment of personal human health, raised $40 million in Series B funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round.
PRIVATE EQUITY DEALS
- Battery Ventures acquired GRAS Sound & Vibration, a Denmark-based manufacturer of acoustic-measurement microphones. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Battery Ventures made a significant investment in Tech Soft 3D, a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of software-development toolkits for companies that develop software for manufacturing and architecture, engineering and construction. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Great Hill Partners recapitalized One Inc, a Folsom, Calif.-based digital payments platform provider for the insurance industry. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHER DEALS
- Kronos, a Lowell, Mass.-based provider of cloud-based workforce management, and Ultimate Software, a Weston, Fla.-based provider of human capital management solutions, will merge to create a company valued at $22 billion.
IPOs
- EnVen Energy, a Houston-based energy company, withdrew plans for its IPO. Bain Capital Partners, Adage Capital Partners, and EIG Global Energy Partners back the firm. Citi, J.P. Morgan, Stifel and BMO Capital Markets are underwriters. It plans to list on the NYSE as “ENVN.”
FIRMS + FUNDS
- M33 Growth, a Boston-based venture and growth stage investment firm, raised $260 million for its second fund.


fortune--2020-02-21--Why the weather forecast is about to get a lot better

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Everybody complains about the weather, and now somebody’s going to do something about it.
All joking aside, predicting the weather is serious business. From agriculture to shipping to the utility grid, knowing the forecast can be worth billions of dollars. And there’s the matter of saving lives ahead of storms and floods, a growing concern as climate change roils the atmosphere.
In the U.S., the responsibility falls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Weather Service. The service relies a handful of supercomputers called Venus, Mars, Luna and Surge to run the massive climate models that help predict the weather over the next 10 days and chart the path of major storms. Well, they certainly were supercomputers at the time they were installed. Luna and Surge were among the 50 fastest computers on the planet five years ago. But with advancements in chip design and system architecture, they’ve been surpassed and now barely rank in the top 350.
So it’s time for an upgrade. On Thursday, NOAA announced that it had selected two new supercomputers from Cray that can each perform 12 thousand million million floating-point operations per second. That’s the number 12 followed by 15 zeroes, for those of you counting at home. Or, as we say in the supercomputer game, 12 petaflops.
That will triple the agency’s computing capacity and be good enough to rank in the top 20 fastest in the world, though the new weather predictors will need about a year of testing before coming online from offices in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. Including supplies and services, NOAA is spending $505 million on an eight-year contract overseen by a unit of General Dynamics. It seems like pocket change given the stakes.
Atmospheric sciences professor Cliff Mass at the University of Washington has long been a critic of the weather service’s modeling and computing shortfalls. So I called the good professor yesterday to ask for his thoughts on the latest super-boost to NOAA’s supercomputers. While he says that the new computers are “extremely good news” and “a huge improvement that they need,” Mass still believes that the government needs to get better organized around its weather modeling efforts.
To that end, acting NOAA administrator Noah Jacobs has been working to establish the Earth Prediction Innovation Center, or EPIC. Next month, the agency will issue a request for proposals to get EPIC going. The scope and details of the request should reveal how serious the government is about state-of-the-art weather forecasting, Mass says.
In the meantime, keep an umbrella handy. And have a great weekend.
Aaron Pressman
Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
Against the wind. Hackers got into the computers of MGM Resorts, one of Las Vegas’s biggest hotel chains, and stole personal information about almost 11 million customers. The purloined data included names, addresses, emails, phone numbers and dates of birth but not financial information. MGM said the attack was discovered last summer.
Don't let the sun go down on me. Testing new 5G mobile networks rolled out across the country, research firm Opensignal found Verizon had the fastest average download speed, but T-Mobile's network had the broadest coverage. Still, coverage was uneven. "All of the 5G speeds we see are fast by U.S. standards, but seeing a 5G icon on the screen is no guarantee of 5G," analysts noted.
Lightning strike. Speaking of mobile world, Sprint and T-Mobile amended their merger agreement to decrease the price paid to major Sprint shareholder Masayoshi Son. All other Sprint shareholders will get just over $10 per share in T-Mobile stock, but Son's SoftBank Group gets under $9 a share for its controlling stake. The renegotiation sets the companies up to close deal within weeks.
Have you ever seen the rain. Some regulatory challenges for Google: The New Mexico attorney general sued the company over allegedly tracking students through free Chromebooks. And the company is resisting demands for some documents being sought by almost every state AG investigating Google for antitrust violations, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Ain't no sunshine. About 300 Oracle employees walked out of their offices on Thursday to protest chairman Larry Ellison's fundraiser for President Trump this week.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The coronavirus outbreak has put a spotlight on working from home. It's also sometimes featured in the sustainability debate as a possible way to reduce traffic and the accompanying pollution. In a piece for the BBC, writer Meredith Turits explores some research that questions whether this assumption is true.
If sustainability is the future of the planet, then the remote jobs that seem like the future of work may not actually be. In fact, workers may end up back in offices.
Blame it on technology. Zero-emissions forms of transport such as electric vehicles are quickly becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous – even the gas-guzzling GM Hummer is going electric. Additionally, some places such as the Portland in US state of Oregon don’t allow new constructions to burn fossil fuels. With these improvements, which are on track to outpace innovation for individual homes, there could be a point at which it’s never more efficient to work from home anywhere in the world.
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few long reads that I came across this week:
Fast-and-loose culture of esports is upending once staid world of chess (NBC News)
Grandmasters and upstarts are reinventing the game online, becoming its most visible ambassadors and arguably its first entertainers.
The Great Google Revolt (New York Times Magazine)
Some of its employees tried to stop their company from doing work they saw as unethical. It blew up in their faces.
The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist (GQ)
They were an all-star crew. They cooked up the perfect plan. And when they pulled off the caper of the century, it made them more than a fortune—it made them folk heroes.
Being Kind to Animals Can Get You Into ‘The Good Place’ (Tenderly)
Saying farewell to a phenomenal series that taught philosophy alongside making us laugh — and taught that how we treat animals matters, too.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra: A big phone that takes amazing photos By Aaron Pressman
5 reasons the T-Mobile-Sprint merger should’ve been rejected—and will raise your phone bill By Nicholas Economides and six others
HTC CEO Yves Maitre on the company’s ‘new vision,’ virtual reality, and the rivalry with Facebook By Aric Jenkins
Udacity’s new, online A.I. course targets an important market: bosses By Jonathan Vanian
Facing falling enlistment numbers, the U.S. Army takes a new approach to recruitment: Mom and Dad By Nicole Goodkind
BEFORE YOU GO
A short, sweet video for the end of your week: Dolphins amaze with their swimming and jumping tricks, but they must start out learning from their parents, as you can see in this tweet from author and scientist Dr. Michelle Dickinson. Make sure you have the sound on.


fortune--2020-02-21--Taliban’s ‘reduction of violence’ deal to start tonight, U.S. says

The countdown to the signing of a peace agreement between the Taliban and the United States to end the 18 years of war in Afghanistan will begin on Friday night, when the seven-day “reduction of violence” promised by the Taliban will go into effect, a senior U.S. State Department official said. The deal will be signed on Feb. 29.
The official did not specify the exact hour when the reduction of violence will commence. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the deal and its details.
After the seven-day reduction of violence, the long sought-after peace agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban will be signed on Feb. 29 in Doha, Qatar, paving the way for a withdrawal of U.S. troops and intra- Afghan negotiations, the official told The Associated Press. The Taliban had set up and maintained a political office in Doha in recent years, following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that toppled their regime, which had harbored al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the peace agreement will also lead to an eventual permanent cease-fire. The deal also envisions guarantees from the Taliban that Afghanistan will not be used to attack the U.S. or its allies. It provides for the phased withdrawal of American and other foreign forces from the country over 18 months.
“We are preparing for the signing to take place on February 29,” Pompeo said in a statement issued Friday. “Intra-Afghan negotiations will start soon thereafter, and will build on this fundamental step to deliver a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire and the future political road map for Afghanistan. ‘’
But the road ahead is fraught with difficulties.
“The only way to achieve a sustainable peace in Afghanistan is for Afghans to come together and agree on the way forward,” said Pompeo in his statement.
It’s still not clear who will represent Kabul at the negotiation table for the intra-Afghan talks, considered a key pillar in finding a lasting peace in the war-torn country. The Afghan election commission earlier this week declared President Ashraf Ghani the winner of the presidential elections held in September but his rivals quickly denounced his win.
The Taliban have refused to talk to Ghani’s government and also denounced the election results, saying they will talk to government representatives but only as ordinary Afghans.
Pompeo’s statement did not say who would represent Kabul but only that “’intra-Afghan negotiations will start soon” after the signing in Doha “and will build on this fundamental step to deliver a comprehensive and permanent cease-fire and the future political road map for Afghanistan.”
Germany and Norway have both offered to host the intra-Afghan talks but no venue has yet been set. There was also no immediate comment from President Ghani.
The Taliban issued their own statement Friday on the reduction of violence deal.
“Both parties will now create a suitable security situation in advance of agreement signing date, extend invitations to senior representatives of numerous countries and organizations to participate in the signing ceremony, make arrangements for the release of prisoners, structure a path for intra-Afghan negotiations with various political parties of the country and finally lay the groundwork for peace across the country with the withdrawal of all foreign forces,” the Taliban statement said.
The Taliban added that they will not allow “the land of Afghanistan to be used against security of others so that our people can live a peaceful and prosperous life under the shade of an Islamic system.”
Under the terms of the ‘’reduction in violence” — which covers all of Afghanistan and also applies to Afghan forces — all sides have committed to end attacks for a seven-day period. For the Taliban, that includes roadside bombings, suicide attacks and rocket strikes.
U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who has led the negotiations with the Taliban since September 2018, has been instrumental in the latest developments.
The peace deal also calls for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, most of whom are being held in jails run by the Afghan government. Although the U.S. has already discussed the prisoner release with government representatives, there has been no public announcement about it from Ghani’s government.
If the peace deal is signed, President Donald Trump can claim to have taken a first step toward meeting his 2016 campaign pledge to withdraw American troops. But if it fails, Trump could be painted by his Democrat adversaries as being naive and willing to sacrifice the security of U.S. soldiers and interests for the sake of political expediency.
The Pentagon has declined to say whether the U.S. had agreed to cut its troop levels in Afghanistan to zero. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said if the seven-day truce is successful and the Afghan peace talks begins, the U.S. would reduce its troop contingent “over time” to about 8,600. There currently are about 12,000 U.S. troops in the country. During any withdrawal, the U.S. would retain the right to continue counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, which have been focused mainly on an Islamic State group’s affiliate and al-Qaida, according to Pentagon officials.
Yet the spokesman for the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Suhail Shaheen tweeted that the Taliban expect a complete withdrawal. In a Pashto language tweet, he said, “based on the agreement with the U.S., all international forces will leave Afghanistan and the invasion will end and no one will be allowed to use Afghan soil against others.”
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the developments. The U.S.-led military alliance has some 16,000 troops in Afghanistan helping to train the country’s security forces, but it could draw down on its operation to accommodate any firm peace agreement.
“This is a critical test of the Taliban’s willingness and ability to reduce violence, and contribute to peace in good faith,” Stoltenberg said in a statement. “This could pave the way for negotiations among Afghans, sustainable peace, and ensuring the country is never again a safe haven for terrorists.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—What happens to leftover campaign funds when a candidate drops out of the race?
—Europe wants business to share its data and open up A.I. systems for scrutiny
—America’s heading for a tax on the middle class
—Angela Merkel is on her way out. Meet her potential replacements
—How the 2020 election could influence your personal finances
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-02-21--A Trump-tied investor set off an Equinox boycott. What about the tampon startup he backs?

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Ursula von der Leyen pursues technological sovereignty for Europe, Glossier abandons its Glossier Play brand, and Lola examines its ties to a controversial investor. Have a wonderful weekend.
– The man behind the menstrual products. Remember the kerfuffle that happened in August when Stephen Ross—investor, real estate developer, and billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphins—hosted a glitzy Hamptons fundraiser to support President Trump’s re-election campaign? The event kicked up a storm of negative publicity for Ross-backed companies like Equinox Fitness, SoulCycle, and Momofuku, who faced outrage from liberal-leaning customers who felt misled and betrayed by brands they thought shared their values.
Now, another one of Ross’s investments—Lola, a seller of organic tampons and other feminine care products—talks to our Fortune colleague Maria Aspan about its relationship with his RSE Ventures. It’s the first time the company has commented publicly on the matter.
Unlike some Ross-backed companies, which actively attempted to distance themselves from him, Lola has not put out any public statements about the president or their investor. Lola co-founder Jordana Kier says the company did not consider trying to buy out Ross’s stake directly or asking another investor to do so. However, she tells Maria that might change in the coming year, as the company seeks to raise a Series C round of investment. “That is an opportunity, and the moment where a bigger investor will want to come in to clean up the cap table” by buying out smaller investors, she says. (A spokesperson for RSE Ventures declined to comment on the firm’s investment in Lola.)
All sorts of startups are increasingly facing scrutiny over whether their investors share their values, or their politics. This is particularly complex for Lola, which has become involved in policy, especially the effort to repeal various states’ sales taxes on tampons and other menstrual products. “It’s a feminist objective—and one that serves Lola’s business purposes—but also one that has garnered some bipartisan support,” writes Maria. While Lola’s branding as “reproductive care for women, by women” brings to mind the more vocal stances of companies like The Wing or Glossier, it has declined to take a similarly public position on issues like access to abortion, which tend to split along partisan lines.
The questions about the sources of startups’ funding—and the motivations of the people behind it—are not going away any time soon. Nor is the reliance of direct-to-consumer companies and other startups on that private money. So I don’t doubt that we’re going to see more companies wrestling with how to think and talk about these kinds of controversial relationships. And for companies like Lola, which lead with feminist principles and a clear sense of mission, the stakes for getting it right are very, very high.
Kristen Bellstrom
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was produced by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Hearing from Hill. Rep. Katie Hill gave her first sit-down broadcast interview since resigning from Congress (although she's certainly been vocal on Twitter since then!). The former congresswoman says that her identity as a bisexual woman "sensationalized" the scandal she was part of, and that she has grown to object to the term "revenge porn." "It implies A) that there's something to be taking revenge for," she said. "That the woman maybe did something wrong in the first place. And pornography also could imply that ... it was consensual, and it's not." ABC News
- Seeking sovereignty. Europe is sick of relying on foreign tech companies—from Apple to Huawei—for its phones, cloud infrastructure, and more. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is leading a generations-long effort to develop "technological sovereignty." "We want to find European solutions in the digital age," she says. Margrethe Vestager is also involved in the ambitious proposal that will start with greater scrutiny of today's tech giants. New York Times
- Stone's sentence. Roger Stone was sentenced to three years and four months in prison yesterday for "impeding a congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election." U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued that sentence; she has overseen most of the cases connected to the special counsel's investigation into Russian interference. Before announcing the sentence, Jackson said that Stone "was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president."
- Playing along. A year ago, Glossier launched Glossier Play, its flashy, color-forward makeup brand, the opposite of Glossier's core natural-look products. Despite the fanfare and brand power, sales haven't kept up. CEO Emily Weiss says that the company will pause the sub-brand, absorb some products into the main Glossier, and discontinue the product glitter gelée in part out of sustainability concerns about glitter. "It was a really constructive learning process for us," Glossier investor Kirsten Green said. "Do we wish we could learn things cheaper? Yes." Business of Fashion
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- No labels. A Google artificial intelligence tool, the Google Cloud Vision API, will no longer use "gendered labels" when it automatically identifies faces, landmarks, and other things in photos; that means "person" instead of "man" or "woman." "Given that a person's gender cannot be inferred by appearance, we have decided to remove these labels," Google wrote in an email to developers who use the tool. Business Insider
- Equality issue. Time published a special project devoted to Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington. Along with a virtual reality experience that recreates the march, the issue includes Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade writing about learning from their daughter Zaya's gender identity, what intersectionality means to Kimberlé Crenshaw 30 years after she coined the term, and writer R. Eric Thomas on what Whitney Houston's version of the National Anthem taught him about America. Time
- Doctors' orders. As coronavirus brings parts of Asia to a halt, what does that mean for the professionals fighting the virus? This piece brings us into the home of a doctor couple, Eunice Chan and Pierre Chan, who are both treating patients in Hong Kong. "There’s no more hugging, no more kissing," says Eunice Chan of caring for her three daughters. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
Elizabeth Warren buys full-page ad slamming Sheldon Adelson in his own newspaper day after debate CNBC
By the book: Sally Rooney New York Times
The end of Miss America Jezebel
American women won the right to vote after the suffrage movement became more diverse. That’s no coincidence Time
PARTING WORDS
"Winning is my self-care."
-Activist Jess Morales Rocketto, political director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, chair of the Families Belong Together coalition, and co-founder of Supermajority, on taking time for herself amid political battles


fortune--2020-02-21--Valuation: How Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway—and what might happen when he leaves

“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.” — Warren Buffett, Fortune, 1999
Capital allocation is a term that’s as important as it is poorly understood. Businesspeople love to chuck it around, but very few know what it means. As for investors, they may understand it in theory, but most are so obsessed with short-term earnings and growth rates that they give it almost no weight. This is unfortunate, because for both businesspeople and investors capital allocation is the key to building great wealth. Every financial data point emanates directly from the wellspring of capital allocation. Earnings, cashflow and growth rates are like the waves you see on the ocean’s surface; capital allocation is the deep-sea groundswell that produces them.
Capital allocation is in fact simple to define: It’s what managers decide to do with the cash available to them. If a company has good allocators, even a mediocre business will prosper. If a company has poor allocators, the best business in the world will eventually founder. No one understands and illustrates this better than Warren Buffett, who 55 years ago bought a struggling New England textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway, and later turned it into the world’s sixth-most valuable company simply by dint of capital allocation.
I own Berkshire for my clients, and the story of how Buffett transformed Berkshire is both a good case study in capital allocation and a good way to show why the stock is attractive today.
The birth of Berkshire as we know it
Buffett was a young and hungry stock picker running a series of small hedge funds from his hometown of Omaha when, in 1962, he stumbled upon a struggling, publicly traded New England textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway. Over the previous 15 years, Berkshire had been vitiated by lower-cost competition; it had lost all but two of its mills and 80% of its employees. However, it was cheap: Its stock was selling at a wide discount to both its net worth, or book value, and its current assets less its current liabilities, or net working capital.
Buffett began buying Berkshire shares on the open market and became so intrigued with the bargain that in 1964, he bought a controlling interest in the company through his investment partnership. Soon after, however, Buffett realized that he had made a poor capital-allocation decision—making Berkshire “the dumbest stock I ever bought,” he would later tell CNBC. Although Berkshire was cheap, it was cheap for a reason: It continued to be hammered by low-cost competition. While the inventory was indeed worth something, there was little hope that the business would ever be consistently profitable. It was a classic “cigar-butt” investment, the kind that Buffett’s Columbia Business School teacher, Ben Graham, favored. It was good for only a few puffs—there was no lasting value in it.
Showing the adaptability he remains famous for, instead of trying to sell Berkshire, Buffett installed new management and instructed them to squeeze the company hard for cash. No more would Berkshire’s capital be allocated to looms and mills. “I’d rather have a $10 million business making 15% than a $100 million business making 5%,” Buffett told his new managers, according to Roger Lowenstein’s masterful biography, Buffett. “I have other places I can put the money.”
Those “other places,” of course, were in fact one place: the stock market. Buffett didn’t close the last Berkshire mill until 1985, but by the late 1960s it was clear that the company’s future lay not in the textile business but in the capital-allocation game. In 1969, Buffett closed his various investment partnerships. Those who wanted to remain invested with him took Berkshire shares in lieu of cash, and the modern-day Berkshire Hathaway was born.
Buffett began using Berkshire’s assets to buy other cheap stocks, and the proceeds from those winners to buy still more. The Berkshire machine really got going, however, when Buffett began buying insurance companies—not as shares in the open market but as wholly owned Berkshire subsidiaries. As a pure profit proposition, an insurance company faces prospects no rosier than a textile company. Both industries are characterized by commoditization, low barriers to entry and high capital requirements. However, Buffett understood something important about the industry before nearly anyone else did: Until the claims come due, insurers can invest the premiums they’ve taken in. With so-called long-tailed business, there can be decades between taking in the cash and paying out the claims. The resulting “float,” as it’s called—the cash generated by premiums yet to be paid out—can prove exceedingly valuable in the hands of a good capital allocator. Every year an insurance company must pay out claims, but every year it takes in new premiums, thus ensuring a sort of perpetual-motion machine of cash flow.
For more than 50 years now, Buffett has invested this float with uncanny acumen, growing and changing as an investor in a remarkably fluid way. Although he began as a deep-value investor drawn to bargain-basement stocks like Berkshire Hathaway, under the influence of his partner Charlie Munger in the 1970s Buffett began to buy higher-quality businesses with long and durable economic futures. Coca-Cola with its global brand, for example, remains a core holding. More recently, Buffett has come to understand that technology franchises can possess similarly sustainable economic characteristics; Apple is now Berkshire’s largest publicly traded holding by a factor of two (see my “An Evolve-or-Die Moment for the World’s Greatest Investors” from the Dec. 1, 2018 issue of Fortune).
Warren Buffett in a 1995 portrait. (Photo by James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images)
Since Buffett took control of Berkshire, its book value, or net worth, has increased 19% a year and its stock value 20% to 21% annually—but these numbers don’t begin to convey the enormous wealth Buffett has created. One thousand dollars invested in the S&P 500 in 1965 would be worth nearly $200,000 today, but that same $1,000 invested in Berkshire would be worth 130 times more—$26.4 million. Donald Othmer, a college professor originally from Omaha, invested $50,000 along with his wife in an early Buffett investment partnership and received Berkshire A shares worth $42 a share in 1970. When the Othmers died, they left an estate valued at $750 million—and that was 20 years ago. Assuming the estate had remained invested in Berkshire, that initial $50,000 would have grown 100,000 times over, to $5 billion.
Underperforming, and underpriced
For investors who want to make capital-allocation decisions today, however, this is ancient history. The pertinent question is: At their present price of $225 a share, are Berkshire Hathaway shares worth investing in today?
Yes, slow and steady Berkshire has as usual played tortoise to the market’s hare, so as the market has bounded ahead over the last three years, Berkshire’s stock has materially trailed. As a result, the excellent collection of businesses that Buffett has assembled are now essentially available on sale. I’m confident that double-digit share gains lie ahead for patient investors, even if we assume—as investors increasingly do—that Buffett will not be around much longer to make decisions.
To value Berkshire we must first understand it—and as an operating entity, Berkshire Hathaway is almost as misunderstood as the concept of capital allocation. Most people think of Berkshire as either a collection of publicly traded securities or as an insurance company. While both are partly true, over the last twenty years or so Buffett has concentrated his capital-allocation energies not on fractional shares in the open market but instead on buying entire businesses that Berkshire can own and operate outright. Today, it is ironic that Berkshire is primarily what it was when Buffett bought it in 1964—an old-line industrial company.
Wholly owned manufacturing companies are today Berkshire’s single-biggest reporting segment, accounting for 35% to 40% of the company’s operating profits. There is no single dominant business here: Berkshire owns companies that make aerospace components, metal-cutting tools, industrial lubricants, household paint, insulation and carpet. Unlike the legacy textile business, however, these companies have been purchased only after passing Buffett’s capital-allocation test as quoted atop this column: They all have a long-term sustainable advantage over their competition. For some, like aerospace company Precision Castparts, it is a dominant market position, which gives the company economies of scale and market power; for others, like Duracell, it is a brand that allows them to charge premium prices; for others, like carpet-maker Shaw, it’s status as a low-cost producer, which allows Shaw to sell commodity goods at a lower price.
Apart from manufacturing, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad accounts for 25% of Berkshire’s operating profit and is the company’s single biggest profit generator. Talk about a business with sustainable competitive advantages: Bought in the wake of the financial crisis a decade ago, Burlington is the largest freight network in the nation, has a de facto monopoly position in much of its western corridors, and moves freight at a material cost advantage to trucks. The railroad falls into one of Buffett’s favorite investment categories: a “call,” or option, on an enduring trend. If you believe as Buffett does that the American economy will continue to grow, owning a railroad is the perfect way to play that growth—it’s a call on the growth of American business. (For a wonderful read on the changing dynamics of the railroad business around the time Buffett bought Burlington, see this 2013 Fortune article.)
A Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train travels through downtown Bakersfield, Calif. BNSF accounts for 25% of Berkshire Hathaway’s operating profit. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)
Electrical utilities, which represent another 15% of Berkshire’s operating earnings, are another monopoly-based call on the slow, steady growth of electricity usage. At 89, Buffett remains intellectually vigorous and is no mossback when it comes to alternative energy; fueled by tax credits, Berkshire’s utility assets are rapidly moving to wind and solar generation.
Taken together, the railroad, utilities and manufacturing segments generate a full 75%-80% of Berkshire’s operating profits. The other 20%-25% of earnings come from service businesses—car dealerships, wholesale distributors like McLane, and furniture, candy and kitchenware retailers like the Pampered Chef. All have some sort of “moat,” or edge over their competition.
Ironically, Berkshire’s smallest segment in terms of operating earnings is the one that drives much of Berkshire’s value: Insurance, which accounts for only 10% of operating profit but generates $125 billion of float. This float underpins much of Berkshire’s publicly traded securities portfolio, which when added together with the company’s cash is worth roughly $320 billion today, net of all taxes and contingencies.
What it’s worth
Because Berkshire has so many moving parts—more than 50 operating subsidiaries and hundreds of sub-subsidiaries—I try to keep it simple by dividing the company in half: Active, wholly owned operations like Burlington Northern on the one hand and the more passive cash and securities on the other. For the operating businesses, I assign what I consider to be fair-value multiples of earnings; I mark the cash and securities to market—that is, I simply take their market value.
As you can see in the accompanying two tables, Berkshire Hathaway is undervalued whether you look at it as a snapshot or (as I prefer) a motion picture that flows into the future. From the snapshot, you can see that when the cash and investment portfolio are backed out at market value, Berkshire is trading for only 12 times its operating businesses’ estimated 2019 cash earnings. That’s far too low a price: The S&P 500 average trades at 20 times 2019 earnings, and Berkshire’s collection of “moated” businesses are far above average.
Berkshire is also undervalued when analyzed as a dynamic, growing enterprise. Assuming the wholly owned businesses grow 6% to 7% a year, we can assign fair-value multiples to what the operating businesses should earn in 2023. I assume Berkshire’s railroad and utilities deserve the highest multiples because they are the best businesses: regulated monopolies immune to competition. The manufacturing and services segment deserve healthy but lower multiples—someone can always outcompete Duracell or the Pampered Chef—while the insurance business is not worth much as a profit-making concern. Its value resides in the float it generates for investment purposes, which is captured in the cash and securities lines.
Working through the math gets you to a fair value of $340 per class B share in 2023, about 50% above today’s quoted price of $225. Because it will take roughly three years to hit that price, the annualized gain should be in the mid-teens. That’s twice the broader market’s 7% to 8% historical return and thus highly attractive.
One of the reasons for the stock’s current underperformance is that many investors gripe that Buffett is not aggressively deploying Berkshire’s $120 billion in cash. As a longtime Buffett-watcher, I can tell you this complaint has been lodged many times, and every time Buffett either finds a large and lucrative acquisition, or prices come down and he finds several acquisitions at a cheaper price. He is being patient, in other words—another hallmark of a good capital allocator.
The other knock on Berkshire and its stock today is that, with Buffett turning 90 this summer, the master will not be around much longer. I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument: Although Buffett has appointed good understudies and has a (secret) succession plan, how do you replace Mozart? With Salieri, that’s how—an inferior musician. On the other hand, Buffett has been planning for Berkshire after Buffett for decades, precisely by buying durable, long-dated businesses that can outlive any single manager—even him. “We’re creating a Fort Knox here,” he said in 1998 when announcing yet another insurance acquisition. Brick by brick, business by business, he has made Berkshire a fortress with many, many moats.
It’s likely that nobody will duplicate Buffett’s capital-allocation skills, but that’s not necessarily a problem for Berkshire. Buffett has long resisted major stock buybacks at Berkshire because he’s confident in his ability to reinvest the cash, but his lieutenants will likely not be so sure. Buffett has raised the prospect that, after he’s gone, his successors may return massive amounts of capital to shareholders via both buybacks and dividends. This is no surprise: Buybacks are Capital Allocation for Dummies—you’re not doing anything particularly smart with the cash, but you’re not doing anything stupid, either. If Berkshire used all its available cash and equivalents to buy back stock, the share count would shrink by roughly 20%, and each share would in turn be 20% more valuable.
Who knows? His successors may even spin off Buffett’s many acquisitions, unraveling the great tapestry Buffett has woven over the last half century from a broken-down textile business. This collection of exceptional businesses may well be worth more on their own than as a complicated, somewhat opaque whole. Buffett has acknowledged this more than once, using as he often does equal parts intelligence, clarity and humor.
“If I die tonight, I think the stock would go up tomorrow,” he told shareholders at the Berkshire annual meeting in 2017. “There’d be speculation about breakups and all that sort of thing, so it would be a good Wall Street story.”
Adam Seessel is a portfolio manager at Gravity Capital Management LLC, a registered investment adviser. Certain of the securities mentioned in the article may be currently held, have been held or may be held in the future in a portfolio managed by Gravity. The article represents the views and belief of the author and does not purport to be complete. The information in this article is as of the publication date, and the data and facts presented in the article may change.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Inflation is at historic lows, so why do things seem so expensive?
—America’s heading for a tax on the middle class
—How Apple defied the odds to post the biggest quarterly profit ever
—How Blackstone became the world’s biggest corporate landlord
—WATCH: Biggest investing opportunities and risks for 2020
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-02-21--As coronavirus cases overwhelm China’s hospitals, those with other problems are told to leave

Liu Zi’ao was awaiting surgery in a Wuhan hospital to treat the tumor pressing on his spinal cord when, suddenly, he was told to leave. The novel coronavirus had plunged the central Chinese city’s health-care system into crisis, and all resources were being diverted to contain it.
In the month since, the 25-year-old former acupuncturist has been turned away from hospital after hospital as he seeks treatment. Because his right leg has atrophied, he’ll need an ambulance to pick him up if one agrees to admit him. But there are few spare ambulances, hospital beds or doctors at the epicenter of the outbreak that’s infected over 75,000 people.
He’s been downing Oxycontin — addictive, powerful opioids — to manage his excruciating chronic pain, but the pills are running out. “I don’t know what I will do,” said Liu.
Liu is one of a growing number of Chinese patients with urgent medical conditions unrelated to the coronavirus epidemic who have become collateral damage as China struggles to gain control of an outbreak that’s now claimed over 2,000 lives.
In Hubei, the province of 60 million that Wuhan is the capital of, medical facilities are still facing severe shortages in dealing with the surge in virus patients. Almost all medical personnel, equipment and resources have been channeled into fighting the outbreak, leaving other patients in limbo.
Chris Wang’s 56-year-old father has kidney failure and requires dialysis twice a week. But his usual sessions at the Third People’s Hospital of Hubei have been canceled because the hospital, and its rooms equipped with dialysis machines, have been commandeered by government officials in charge of the outbreak response, he said.
“It’s understandable that the government needs the hospital beds for virus patients, but it doesn’t make sense to take the dialysis rooms because these patients can die if they don’t get dialysis on time,” said Wang.
A woman who answered the hospital’s hotline said it can’t admit dialysis patients at the moment because the hospital has been taken over for coronavirus treatment.
Doctors look at a lung CT image at a hospital in Yunmeng county, Xiaogan city, in China’s central Hubei province, on Feb. 20, 2020. STR/AFP via Getty Images
While most marked in devastated Hubei, where the novel coronavirus first took hold, a shortage of non-virus medical care is also emerging across China — even in its most prosperous cities.
This crisis puts a spotlight on a health-care system that was already uneven, with care in rural areas lagging that of big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. In recent years, China has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its medical system in a bid to drag down drug costs and waiting time, but the current epidemic brings those persistent inequalities into sharp relief.
Over 23,000 doctors and nurses have been sent from hospitals around the country to Hubei to shore up the virus response at the epicenter, leaving some hospitals with fewer medical staff in provinces like Guangdong and Jiangsu.
And a fear of exposing medical staff to the highly infectious pathogen is causing some hospitals to turn away all new patients in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, even if those patients need urgent care for cancer or renal failure.
There is no comprehensive data on how many patients are in this quandary, and it is difficult to estimate how many preventable deaths have resulted from the abrupt withdrawal of non-virus medical care since the disease’s spread began.
Still, interviews with doctors, patients and social media discussion point to an emerging crisis that could leave a deadly trail even after the outbreak ebbs. The epidemic, which has shut down large swathes of China’s economy, is extracting untold human suffering across the country.
Pawn Sacrificed
Posts from desperate patients begging for help and accounts of citizens taking their own lives because they could not get medical care are trending on social media in China, where anger is already simmering over the government’s slow initial response to the outbreak.
On Sunday, Wuhan designated six hospitals for patients in critical condition unrelated to the virus, and another 15 hospitals that can take emergency non-virus cases. In the city of 11 million people, 46 hospitals with nearly 19,000 beds are devoted to virus care, with converted stadiums, office buildings and schools also providing thousands more beds for infected patients.
National health officials have also publicly urged local hospitals throughout the country not to neglect patients unrelated to the outbreak.
But resources, especially in Hubei province, are stretched thin.
Wuhan Union, where Liu Zi’ao was hospitalized before the outbreak, is one of the six that’s supposed to be taking critical patients unrelated to the virus, but a doctor there says the hospital is already overwhelmed and does not have enough physicians.
All junior doctors in his department have been sent to the frontline to treat infected patients, and he is also on call for virus work, said the doctor, who did not want to give his name as he was not authorized to speak publicly.
“It’s impossible to care fully for patients in need now. Those with milder symptoms can talk to doctors online, but critical cases which need surgery — there’s really no way out,” said the doctor. “What can we do?”
Wuhan Union’s head of communications did not answer multiple phone calls. Health authorities in Wuhan and Hubei did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A deep exhaustion has taken hold among medical professionals on the ground, hundreds of whom have been infected themselves while caring for patients. A shortage of medical equipment and protective gear has meant that many work without adequate safeguards.
The death of Li Wenliang, one of the doctors in Wuhan who was censured by officials after raising an early warning on the virus, ignited a wave of grief and anger across China earlier this month.
One doctor in Wuhan who specializes in treating diabetes patients became infected with the virus in January. She believes she contracted it after treating diabetes patients who work at the wet market where the pathogen is suspected to have originated.
“Sacrificing non-virus care for the moment is the only option in a situation where there are no good options,” she said, declining to give her name as she was not authorized to speak publicly. “Wuhan is losing a pawn to save a castle and that’s the only thing that’s feasible because the virus is just too infectious.”
Patients Turned Away
Outside of Hubei province, fear of the virus’ spread has meant that some top-tier public hospitals in other parts of China are turning patients away. In some hospitals, most non-urgent surgeries have been postponed, according to doctors.
There’s also been a drop in patients themselves going to hospitals, even in parts of China where there aren’t widespread infections, according to doctors working in cities like Shenzhen and Zhongshan. The new coronavirus is seemingly more infectious than SARS, which claimed almost 800 lives globally 17 years ago.
In Shanghai, a 75 year-old man who gave his surname as Zhong is suffering from a tumor in his abdomen and multiple cysts in his liver. His feet are too swollen to fit into his shoes, he has no appetite, and he needs to go to the toilet dozens of times a day. While a doctor that saw him on Feb. 7 suggested immediate surgery, five top-tier hospitals in the city have since refused to take him out of fear of the virus’ spread.
“We’ve tried everything that ordinary people can possibly do but still he cannot be admitted to a hospital,” said Zhong’s daughter, who declined to give her name out of fear of reprisal. “Seeing my father suffer at home makes my heart ache.”
Some hospitals are now trying to expand the use of online platforms to help non-virus patients. Beijing’s municipal health committee on Saturday ordered all patients, except for emergency cases or those with fevers, to register online and secure appointment slots before visiting hospitals in person.
Wuhan Tongji hospital has developed an app that is available on Android smartphones through which doctors can advise patients and suggest drugs they should buy from online pharmacies.
For those with conditions beyond the remit of online consultations, there are few options besides hoping that the outbreak comes under control and medical resources can be freed up again. While additional cases of new infections in Hubei seem to be on a downward trajectory, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was cited by state TV has saying that the epidemic is on a “positive trend,” it is unclear if a turning point in the outbreak has been reached.
For Liu Zi’ao, the 25-year-old with a spinal cord tumor, there is nothing to do but wait.
“No hospital will take me although I have been calling different hospitals for weeks,” he said. “For now, I can only stay at home and wait. But I don’t even know what I am waiting for.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—20 maps charting the rise of the modern megacity around the globe
—Coronavirus misinformation is fueled by government mistrust in China
—In China, oil won’t be the only energy sector battered by the coronavirus
—Europe wants business to share its data and open up A.I. systems for scrutiny
—Fortune Explains: Tariffs and trade wars
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-02-22--The Middle Eastern ice cream poised to swarm social media

When eating the ice cream sold at Republic of Booza in Brooklyn, you’ll find yourself chewing it.
That’s the thing about booza, the Middle Eastern sweet treat that distinguishes itself from more commonly known ice cream and gelato by being denser and creamier and boasting an elasticity that allows it to truly stretch in form: It certainly looks like ice cream and might even slightly taste like it, but it doesn’t feel like it when actually eaten.
At Republic of Booza, patrons can choose from a total of 17 rotating flavors on any given day. But only one resembles the original treat, still served at Bakdash, the ice cream shop in Damascus, Syria, that opened in 1885 as the very first booza shop in the world.
Famed ice cream parlor Bakdash was founded in Damascus in 1885. Pistachio-covered booza is its most well-known product. Sally Hayden/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
That original flavor is qashta, which translates to “candied cream.” Although Republic of Booza’s claims to fame are the creatively delicious modern-day flavors it serves in booza form, the basic process to prepare them is not unlike that of qashta.
It starts with milk, cream, and sugar, which are then mixed with two ancient ingredients: sahlab, a ground orchid root predominantly found in Lebanon, and mastic, a resin released by the bark of a tree that grows exclusively on Chios, a Greek island. “We actually import [the mastic] directly from the Chios Mastiha Growers Association, a consortium of farmers that are certified,” says Michael Sadler, one of the four co-owners of Republic of Booza. The concoction is then put into a freezer drum but, instead of being churned out as ice cream, it is taken and alternately pounded with a three-foot-long wooden pestle and stretched by hand to achieve the elastic consistency for which the dessert is known.
Inside Republic of Booza in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Noah Fecks
One thing makes itself apparent while talking to Sadler: Given the part of the world where the treat originated and the historical time period loosely associated with its first appearance, definitive information about the origins of booza are hard to unearth.
Here is what we do know: Booza was likely first developed over 500 years ago in the Levant region, which at the time encompassed modern-day Syria, parts of Greece, southern Turkey, and Lebanon. Even the official name of the stuff is up for contention, as some in Turkey refer to it as dondurma. Booza does, however, seem to be the most widely used term. “The best sort of hypothesis that we found is that it was an Arabization of the Turkish word for ice,” explains Sadler. “It probably goes back to some dialect that was being spoken in this area that is now between present-day Turkey and present-day Syria.”
According to Sadler, what makes booza even more special is its ability to be a “vehicle for flavor,” thanks to two major aspects involved in its preparation. The first is sweetness. “It requires less sugar than regular ice cream to achieve its final consistency,” Sadler says. “That means that it doesn’t have to be super sweet; it’s not just destroying [your palate], which opens up more possibilities to explore different flavors and nuances that would get lost in something that was just a sugar bomb.”
The pounding and stretching involved in the preparation of booza, and the fact that consumers can experience its elasticity while eating it, could prove social media gold. Noah Fecks
The second aspect is temperature, which allows creators to play around with flavors. Whereas conventional ice cream is usually served around zero to five degrees Fahrenheit and gelato around five to six degrees Fahrenheit, booza’s ideal temperature is higher, reaching 12 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit. “At ultra-cold temperatures, the spectrum of taste gets distorted,” Sadler explains. “Booza’s temperature showcases all the nuances, the full depth of flavor of what is going into it that often gets lost when you have a ton of sugar and ultra-cold temperatures.”
As a result of said characteristics, Republic of Booza has produced the likes of salted Oreo (a riff on a more traditional cookies-and-cream), black walnut miso butterscotch, Mexican hot chocolate, cranberry sauce sorbet, and more. “People are used to flicking through and everything being superficial, just the picture and a couple of words,” he says. “Now people are looking for things that offer substance, that have a tradition.”
Booza with a side of Vietnamese iced coffee cake from MeMe’s Diner in Brooklyn. Noah Fecks
As delectable and interesting as the flavors might be, it is the visual properties of booza that render it—at least at first glance—a striking product. Sadler and his team are opposed to using the term “stretchy,” finding “elastic” to be more suitable., but that’s what booza also is: a stretchy ice cream that looks awesome in photos and videos—valuable currency in the 21st century.
“I think the spectacle is certainly a very beautiful product, it’s photogenic. I think that attracts people to it as a hook,” Sadler says. “But at the same time, there is something very much of-the-moment about it. People love ice cream, and there is this incredible style that’s been around for hundreds of years and nobody ever knew about it in the States. I think that concept has really resonated.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—The most anticipated books of 2020, according to Goodreads
—Cabo’s newest luxury resort favors tranquility over nightlife
—The magic of the wedding industry’s most exclusive conference
—High-tech fitness offerings are the newest luxury hotel must-have
—The best travel destinations for every season of 2020
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.