fortune--2020-07-17--Ted Sarandos was already co-CEO of Netflix

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In a letter to shareholders on Thursday, Netflix made official what had long been an informal reality: Chief content officer Ted Sarandos would also be co-CEO of the streaming behemoth.
Sarandos, a 20-year veteran of Netflix who pushed the company into original programming, will serve alongside existing CEO and cofounder Reed Hastings. Hastings, an engineer by training, is the Silicon Valley brain of an operation that has successfully merged algorithmic technology with a Hollywood content machine. While many assumed Sarandos would soon succeed Hastings outright, Hastings isn’t going anywhere—and he made as much clear in a call with investors later on Thursday. “To be totally clear, I’m in for a decade,” he said.
The anointment of a co-CEO isn’t about Hastings imminently leaving (though he did add that the move, alongside the promotion of chief product officer Greg Peters to chief operating officer, is “part of a long process of succession planning”). Nor is it about any failings of Hastings own leadership—Netflix is one of the most successful businesses of the modern age, and Hastings gets much credit from his peers for that. Rather, it underlines just how instrumental Sarandos has been in that success. And from a big picture perspective, it highlights the increasing shift from Netflix’s center of influence in Silicon Valley to the creative sphere of Hollywood.
Netflix’s market capitalization tops even that of Walt Disney, with a value of $230 billion compared with the legendary media conglomerate’s $218 billion. Sarandos’s 2012 gamble on the Norwegian crime dramedy Lilyhammer—and subsequently the megahit House of Cards—is a big reason why. It set Netflix on a path to become arguably the most dominant production house in show business, this past year earning the company more Academy Award nominations than any other studio. It’s accomplished the same feat with television’s Emmys. Sarandos also pioneered Netflix’s business model of purchasing multiple seasons from creators rather than ordering pilots first.
“While I saw streaming coming and pushed for it, Ted drove the revolution in our content strategy, which was way ahead of its time and has been key to our continued success,” Hastings said in a statement. “It was typical of his ability to see where the industry—and consumer tastes—are headed. He’s built an extraordinary team, attracting some of the most creative and best entertainment executives from all around the world.”
Gene Munster, managing partner at venture capital firm Loup Ventures, said the elevation of Sarandos to co-CEO alongside Hastings is a sign that Netflix will stay the course in terms of its direction. “Given the two have worked together for decades, the announcement is not a surprise and likely means little will change with the company’s strategy given [Sarandos] has been instrumental in building value over the past decade,” he said.
Sarandos will have his challenges. While Netflix once again topped expectations for its second quarter with 10 million new subscribers, the company also cautioned that growth would stall in the second half of the year as the initial shock of the coronavirus pandemic—which had lifted subscriptions—wore off. The guidance prompted its shares to plummet 10% in after-hours trading on Thursday following the earnings report. Sarandos and Hastings will also have to navigate an increasingly crowded streaming market with the additions of WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, alongside existing competition like Disney+ and Hulu.
Sarandos, 55, didn’t want to be a part of Netflix at first. A former video distributor executive, Sarandos was skeptical of Netflix’s business model—then focused on DVDs—and how it could compete with Blockbuster. “Part of Reed’s brilliance is his persistence, and so I eventually said yes, back in 1999,” Sarandos said in a statement.
Despite the early reluctance, Sarandos has been more public facing than his co–chief executive for some time. To some casual observers, he might have come off as the CEO already. While Hastings mostly stays out of the public eye, Sarandos frequents industry events, making connections with talent and their representatives with typical Hollywood flair.
Above all, Sarandos attributes his rise to co-CEO to his voracious appetite for movies and television. In his statement, he tells a story of his childhood in Phoenix, where his mother “always insisted on having cable TV and a little dish to get HBO” even if the family was struggling to pay phone or gas bills. In adolescence, he worked at a local video store to pay the costs of school tuition. “Watching films and TV all day, and hearing what customers liked, helped me understand people’s dramatically different tastes and moods as well as the value of a good recommendation,” he said.
“My journey to co-CEO of Netflix has been as a fan of great entertainment,” Sarandos added. “And that’s my commitment to Netflix members going forward: to keep pushing the boundaries of what a consumer-first company can achieve for people who love stories.”


fortune--2020-07-17--Coronavirus data and a dearth of trust

Coronavirus data and a dearth of trust

Will we see election chaos in Florida again with the Supreme Court ’ s felon law ruling ?

This is the web version of The Capsule, a daily newsletter monitoring advances in health care and biopharma. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Happy Friday, readers.
I had a fascinating conversation this morning with Doug Merritt, the CEO of data integrity and cybersecurity firm Splunk, about an issue that’s fundamental to health care in general and medical data specifically: Trust.
Health care systems can’t function without trust. That’s especially true during a pandemic when you have all sorts of contradictory information flying around.
Which is why the White House’s recent decision to begin re-routing local hospital data about COVID-19 from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) raised concerns about data integrity and that fundamental trust.
Merritt, whose company counts the CDC and HHS among its clients, thinks the move could make sense. But only if a new centralized database about COVID meets four critical criteria.
“After 16 years of being in business at Splunk, we’ve got four data leadership principles,” Merritt says. Those include: diversity of data; transparency of data, (perhaps the most important for trust); openness; and collaboration around data.
The White House has tapped Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir and the more obscure private firm TeleTracking to lead the new data aggregation project.
“My worry would be, are they going to follow those principles? Because if you manipulate source information or restrict access, you’re going to run into problems,” says Merritt. “It’s going to be so crucial for trust on a national and global basis that they manage this properly.”
Sounds like they’ve got their work cut out for them.
Read on for the day’s news, and have a great weekend.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Teva releases new digitally connected inhaler in the U.S. Generic drug giant Teva Pharmaceuticals has begun selling its ProAir Digihaler, a digitally connected product meant for patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), in the U.S. This particular inhaler comes with a sensor that can connect to a smartphone app in order to measure metrics such as medication inhalation, and should a patient choose, be shared with health care professionals who can share tips on the best way to use their inhalers. Basically, it sounds a bit like a glucose monitoring device for the lungs. (MobiHealthNews)
INDICATIONS
A new enzyme for CRISPR gene-editing. CRISPR gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna and her team at UC Berkeley continue to make waves in the field. A new study published in the journal Science finds that the team has discovered a new enzyme that can be used in the DNA slicing-and-dicing which makes CRISPR so promising. The difference is this enzyme is small enough to theoretically be targeted towards more specific genetic regions for editing compared to other CRISPR enzymes. (FierceBiotech)
THE BIG PICTURE
Drug overdose deaths jumped in 2019. Preliminary CDC data suggests that drug overdose deaths spiked 4.8% in 2019 after seeing a slight decline in the previous year. The record 70,980 deaths were driven by powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, among others, although cocaine and methamphetamine overdoses also rose last year. (CNN)
REQUIRED READING
The Q3 quarterly investment guide, by Fortune Staff
What Starbucks learned about COVID-19 from its China stores, by Beth Kowitt
Fauci expresses optimism on the COVID vaccine front, by Bloomberg
Sign up for other Fortune newsletters.


fortune--2020-07-17--How the White House can gain trust for its coronavirus data

Doug Merritt is a data evangelist. And he has thoughts on the Trump administration’s surprising decision to re-route coronavirus hospitalization data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). That announcement has raised concerns that the White House may be trying to take control of local hospital data about COVID-19 cases to downplay the surging pandemic.
Merritt is the CEO of Splunk, a data platform company which has clients including the CDC and HHS (the former is technically housed under the latter). His firm specializes in cybersecurity and other behind-the-scenes IT meant to improve complex technical operations on a large scale.
But as an executive who firmly believes in the collection, transparency, and communication of data, Merritt was struck by the sudden decision to essentially divert local hospital information about COVID-19 from the CDC to HHS, over which the White House has more direct control.
He doesn’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. But it would require adherence to a strict set of principles about data integrity to gain the public’s trust that the numbers aren’t being manipulated, he tells Fortune. CDC officials including director Robert Redfield have said they still have access to coronavirus data and that the agency isn’t being subverted.
“After 16 years of being in business at Splunk, we’ve got four data leadership principles,” Merritt says. Those include: diversity of data, since the more different sources you can bring in to a dataset, the more capability you have to interpret the data; transparency of data, which drives trust (without which data is meaningless); openness, so that everyone can have access to data; and, finally, collaboration around data.
“Different viewpoints are so important to actually find the right ‘ah-hah!’ moments around data,” Merritt explains on the final point.
The redirection of hospitals’ coronavirus data is being overseen by Palantir—co-founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel—and a lesser-known firm called TeleTracking for a data collection platform called HHS Protect. TeleTracking was given a $10.2 million contract that faced scrutiny, but HHS has pushed back on claims that this was a no-bid contract, according to the New York Times.
Irrespective of the backroom machinations, Merritt says that, “having a robust, centralized dataset, whether it’s HHS or the CDC, is great on the surface, as long as it follows those four principles of data integrity.”
“My worry would be, are they going to follow those principles? Because if you manipulate source information or restrict access, you’re going to run into problems. It’s going to be so crucial for trust on a national and global basis that they manage this properly.”
This new database is still in its early stages, but Merritt believes that moves such as making all of the raw local hospital data available to the public, so that epidemieologists, scientists, and other experts can come to their own conclusions about what it means, would go a long way towards establishing that trust.


fortune--2020-07-17--What is ‘Strike for Black Lives’ and when is it?

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Thousands of union workers on July 20 are expected to participate in Strike for Black Lives, a protest intended to put a spotlight on racism and police brutality.
The strike is being organized by Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents nearly 2 million service workers. Mary Kay Henry, the international president of the SEIU, told Fortune that the strike is intended to highlight the economic plight of service workers, many of whom are people of color.
During the first two months of the coronavirus pandemic, her union was concerned about how essential workers were being treated on the front lines. Some lacked access to personal protective equipment, or PPE, that would help them avoid contracting COVID-19.
The death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd while in police custody “escalated the case we were trying to make” about the mistreatment of Black people.
“We hope to gain that corporations and governments will understand the need to dismantle racist policies and make sure every family has a living wage and is able to be healthy and safe,” Henry said.
Who’s participating in the strike?
Unions and civil rights groups planning to take part in the strike include the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the American Federation of Teachers, Fight for $15 and a Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, Greenpeace, MoveOn, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Ride-sharing drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft are also expected to join in.
Law enforcement unions will not participate. However, Henry said she hasn’t faced any pushback from them and that some unions representing correctional and probation officers “actually understand that there is systemic inequality that has to be addressed.”
When and where is the strike taking place?
The strike will take place at different times depending on the city and location. Some of the 25 cities include Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, and Houston. In Los Angeles, for example, workers will gather in cars as part of a caravan beginning at a local McDonald’s. They’ll then drive through the city, stopping by places like the University of Southern California, where organizers said they’ll “demand the nation’s second-largest school district and the university drop their use of the LAPD on campuses.”
For workers who are unable to strike, the organizers urge them to walk off their jobs at noon for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time initially believed that a police officer held George Floyd in a neck hold (since then, prosecutors have said the exact length of time is unclear).
During the strike, workers will also be asked to reflect on the deaths of other Black people killed by law enforcement, including Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain, organizers said. Workers who are not present for the strike will be able to watch on a live stream.
“That’s a way for people who are sheltering in place to witness what is happening in the country,” Henry said.
Why are the organizers singling out McDonald’s?
The strike’s organizers specifically cite McDonald’s as a company that needs to change its employment policies. Henry said it pays poverty-level wages to at least half of its workforce of over 800,000 who are people of color.
Bettie Douglas, a Black McDonald’s worker from St. Louis, told Fortune that while she’s been working at a local McDonald’s for 14 years, she feels she isn’t being paid as much as she deserves and is worried about contracting COVID-19 while at work. Douglas, who is 62, said she has “no benefits, no vacation, no 401(k)—no nothing but hard times.”
That said, Douglas said she doesn’t “have any hatred” for McDonald’s management and instead just wants the executives to “meet us at the table.” “I love McDonald’s!” said Douglas. “I work hard for McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s said in a statement that it stands with “Black communities across the globe” and has taken a number of measures to ensure the safety of its employees, like distributing “an ample supply of PPE with no supply breaks, including gloves and over 100 million masks, in addition to installing protective barriers in restaurants.”
“We are confident the vast majority of employees are covered with sick pay if they are impacted by COVID-19,” the company said in a statement. “To further show appreciation, franchisees have awarded bonuses and raises to employees and provided additional health and financial resources.”
What is the strike supposed to accomplish?
The strike is intended to put more attention on low-wage workers who risk their lives but struggle to pay their bills. Although major companies pledge support for the Black Lives Matter movement, they pay their workers low wages, fail to provide paid time off while sick, and, in some cases, fail to provide the necessary equipment to keep them healthy on the job, Henry said. “Most workers are infuriated by it because it’s so hypocritical,” Henry said.


fortune--2020-07-17--Welcome to the ‘cat bond’ market, where pandemics and hurricanes can mean big returns—or total wipeo

Welcome to the ‘cat bond’ market, where pandemics and hurricanes can mean big returns—or total wipeout

Last weekend’s tropical storm Fay, which brought heavy rain and high winds to much of the U.S. East Coast, was a record-breaker.
It’s not that Fay was particularly fierce—although six people were killed in flooding and rip tides and the weather system caused an estimated $400 million in damage. But Fay was the sixth named Atlantic storm of the 2020 and the third to make landfall in the U.S.
The hurricane season only began on June 1 and this is the first time there have been so many tropical storms so early in the year.
Fay seemed to confirm a series of predictions, put out by government, academic and private weather forecasters, that 2020 will be a busier-than-usual Atlantic hurricane season. For many, those prognostications are further evidence that 2020 is a cursed year: with the Covid-19 pandemic still raging, did we really need more Biblical plagues?
Cat bonds
But for a special breed of investor in an obscure corner of the market, the confluence of catastrophes spells opportunity: welcome to the cat bond market, where the risk of calamity is finely weighed and parceled out in tranches, and where a wildfire in the San Gabriel Mountains or a Category 5 beast churning up the Gulf Stream towards Miami, coming on top of a global pandemic, can make for a very profitable year—or a complete wipeout.
Catastrophe bonds, or cat bonds for short, have been around since the early 1990s. They were created after the insurance industry experienced debilitating losses from 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, and were designed so that insurers could further hedge their risk.
In essence, cat bonds are an alternative form of reinsurance. Insurance companies—or sometimes reinsurance companies, themselves looking for a backstop—issue a bond to cover the risk from one kind of catastrophe in a particular location for a certain number of years: a named tropical storm hitting Florida, California wildfires, U.S. earthquakes or European wind storms.
If that event occurs during the life of the bond and—importantly, for most cat bonds—if the insured losses are above a pre-specified threshold, the creditors forfeit their principal, which the insurance company can use to pay claims. In exchange for taking on that risk, the investors earn an unusually high interest rate—between about 7% and 12% for many bonds. Investors also like that cat bonds aren’t correlated to other financial markets—after all, movements in the S&P 500 don’t move the San Andreas Fault—so they were good for portfolio diversification.
What’s more, the investments are actually less risky than say, junk bonds, or many equities, says Shiv Kumar, the CEO of MMC Securities and president of GC Securities, both of which are part of insurance services firm Marsh & McLennan Companies. Expected loss ratios generally average in the low- to mid-single digit percentages, and the cases in which investors have lost their entire principal are relatively rare.
A banner year
Cat bond issuance was at record levels prior the COVID-19 pandemic. In all of 2019, $11 billion worth of cat bonds and related securities were issued. So far this year, $9.2 billion have been sold in 34 different transactions, according to data from Artemis, a company that tracks the market for what are known as “insurance-linked securities” (or ILS), of which cat bonds are one type. That puts 2020 on track to exceed the $13.8 billion issued in 2018, which the industry’s biggest year so far.
The start of the pandemic saw a flurry of cat bond trading, with more than $2 billion in bonds trading hands in March as hedge funds sought to take profits and use them to cover losses elsewhere in their portfolios, Kumar says.
Cat bond values held up well—an index of cat bonds was down just 1% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to a 20% decline in the S&P 500—and the market is supported by a number of specialized money managers, backed by pension funds and endowments, that only invest cat bonds and other ILS instruments, Kumar says. Issuance of new bonds has also remained strong since the pandemic began, with 17 bonds coming to market since March. This includes a $100 million bond issued by the New York City Metropolitan Transport Authority to cover the risk of severe flooding from a storm surge, like 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, or an earthquake.
Maren Josefs, a credit analyst at S&P Global Ratings who covers the cat bond market, says the large number of new bonds on offer reflects two factors: insurance and reinsurance companies needed to replace about $4.6 billion worth of existing bonds that matured in the second quarter of 2020. Additionally, losses—both in terms of business interruption coverage and life insurance from COVID-19, plus a fair number of natural disasters over the past few years—have left insurers and reinsurers with less capacity to absorb additional losses, so they’ve had to turn to the cat bond market.
Location, location, location
An unusually busy hurricane season is not, cat bond experts say, something to spook a market dedicated to wagering on disaster. “We do not expect a drop in new issuance due to the hurricane season forecast,” S&P’s Josefs says.
The frequency of storms, and even their severity, matters far less to cat bond investors than whether a storm strikes a populated area with high property values. “Catastrophes are like real estate, it is location, location, location,” says Karen Clark, the co-founder and CEO of Karen Clark & Company, a firm that licenses sophisticated loss models to insurers who issue cat bonds and funds that invest in them.
John Seo, co-founder and managing director Fermat Capital Management, a $7 billion fund that invests in cat bonds and other insurance-related instruments, notes that a busier-than-normal hurricane season has been forecast every year since 2006. The models cat bond investors use to gauge risk already “bake that in,” he says.
But COVID-19 actually increases the risks from hurricanes: fear of moving people into crowded shelters that could become breeding grounds for the infection might make it difficult to evacuate people from the path of storms.
As importantly, concerns about infection may make it more difficult for insurance companies to send loss adjustors into an area after a disaster or for clean-up and construction crews to come in and repair the damage. Past experience has shown that delays in processing claims can result in a big bump in overall losses. Clark says this could push insured losses past the thresholds at which they “attach” to a cat bond, causing investors to begin to lose their principal.
A bull market for cat bonds
Seo says that cat bond investors are demanding an extra .5% to 1% in coupon rates to compensate for this added risk. But what’s curious about the market at the moment, he says, is that cat bond yields have risen well past these levels. Josefs notes that Lane Financial’s index of cat bonds and other ILS security rates is up 25% in the first half of 2020.
The reason, he says, is more about simple supply and demand rather than concerns about impending Armageddon. With so many bonds coming to market, issuers are having to offer high coupons to fill their order books.
Those outsized yields, coming at a time when interest rates for almost everything else are at historic lows, are drawing more and more asset managers into cat bonds. Demand for cat bonds is especially strong in the secondary market, where existing securities trade hands, Seo says. Every morning he gets an email—the cat bond market is conducted entirely over-the-counter, with no centralized exchange—listing those offering to buy or sell bonds, and buyers currently exceed sellers by about 10-to-1, he says.
There are nascent signs the market might be starting to adjust. Christopher Grimes, an analyst who covers cat bonds for ratings agency Fitch, says that the coupon rates being demanded for some catastrophes—like a major hurricane hitting South Florida—have gotten so high that insurance companies are starting to pull out of the market. He notes that Florida Citizens Property Insurance pulled the issuance of a $200 million cat bond tranche in May citing investors seeking “irrational returns.”
Memories of Fay are already fading fast. But if the storm does wind up becoming a harbinger, and the forecast proves correct, expect plenty of action in the cat bond market this year. Trading in and out of particular cat bonds usually heats up in the day or two before storms make landfall, as investors use proprietary forecasting models to try to predict exactly where a storm might hit and what kind of losses it could cause.
The Covid-19 pandemic has hit insurance companies hard, with many unresolved issues over business interruption claims—and, with the tragic number of deaths, higher-than-expected life insurance claims.
The World Health Organization did issue a special kind of cat bond back in 2016 to help it deal with a future pandemic. That bond was triggered—wiping out the principal for some bond holders—by the year’s COVID-19. (The bond was what is called a parametric cat bond: it pays out if a certain event, defined in the bond’s terms, occurs, as opposed to having a trigger set to a dollar value of insured losses.) But for the most part, cat bonds have not been issued for pandemics. Kumar says this because, as COVID-19 makes clear, pandemics are not uncorrelated with other financial market losses and so the diversification advantage isn’t there.
But Seo, who has invested in WHO pandemic bonds in the past, thinks there could be a thriving market for cat bonds linked to pandemics and other unusual risks not currently covered by the market. The reason? He says investors already implicitly bear the risk of such catastrophes—whether it be a pandemic or a major volcanic eruption— tanking financial markets, but they aren’t receiving any compensation for it. What a cat bond does, he says, is make that risk explicit and allow investors to collect on it. So, for sophisticated institutional investors like pension funds and endowments, it bolsters their portfolio optimization metrics, Seo says.
Clark says that while cat bonds might be useful for mitigating future pandemic risk, the difficulty of modeling disease outbreaks and understanding the extent of losses, might cause problems for structuring the investments. They would almost certainly have to be parametric bonds, triggered by the event itself, rather than actual losses, she says.
In addition to pandemics, parametric cat bonds have been issued from time to time to cover unusual events—volcanic eruptions and even meteor strikes, Fitch’s Grimes says.
Why not? After all, futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard once said catastrophe and creation are twins. She wasn’t talking about the bond market, but she might as well have been.
This article has been updated to identify Shiv Kumar on first reference and to correct his title. It has also been updated to clarify that John Seo invested in, but did not lose money on, WHO pandemic bonds.


fortune--2020-07-17--Police detain suspect in killing of dismembered tech CEO

A person was taken into police custody Friday in the killing of a 33-year-old tech entrepreneur found dismembered inside his luxury Manhattan condo, two law enforcement officials said.
The person in custody had worked as Fahim Saleh’s personal assistant, the officials told The Associated Press. The officials weren’t authorized to discuss the case and spoke on the condition of anonymity. One of them identified the suspect as 21-year-old Tyrese Haspil.
Information on a lawyer for Haspil and potential charges against him was not immediately available.
Saleh was found at around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday inside his luxury seventh floor apartment on the Lower East Side.
A relative called police after going to check on Saleh and making the gruesome discovery. Responding officers discovered a clothed torso, bags containing a head and arms and an electric saw in the living room, police said.
Investigators recovered security video showing Saleh exiting an elevator that leads directly into the full-floor, two-bedroom apartment earlier Tuesday afternoon, closely followed by a masked person dressed entirely in black according to another law enforcement official who was briefed on the case.
The video also shows a struggle between the two that ensued at the entrance to the apartment, said the official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Police believe that the relative may have interrupted the intruder before that person fled out a back exit.
The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide after an autopsy found the cause of death was multiple stab wounds to the body.
Saleh was the chief executive officer of a ride-hailing motorcycle startup called Gokada that began operating in Nigeria in 2018.
Saleh’s LinkedIn biography described him as a self-taught businessman who founded Gokada, building on his experience of first “seeing an opportunity in his parent’s native country of Bangladesh” and starting that country’s largest ride-sharing company. It said he also invested in a similar venture in Colombia.
“The headlines talk about a crime we still cannot fathom,” Saleh’s family said in a statement after his death. “Fahim is more than what you are reading. He is so much more. His brilliant and innovative mind took everyone who was a part of his world on a journey and he made sure never to leave anyone behind.”
Investigators had been exploring whether the killing could have been related to Saleh’s business dealings.
Apartments in the 10-story building where Saleh’s remains were found sell for more than $2 million. The building was completed in 2017 as part of a wave of gentrification in the neighborhood.


fortune--2020-07-17--Why brands should use TikTok—even if it’s at risk of being banned

TikTok is rumored to be the next casualty of growing tensions between the U.S. and China. The Trump administration is reportedly looking at banning the Chinese app over cybersecurity concerns, and major companies and government entities have warned employees against using the app on corporate-owned devices. This news comes at a time when brands are shelling out major cash to advertise on TikTok.
Even in the face of a potential ban, brands won’t be deterred and might even tell you that the rewards of TikTok make it worth the risk. For those on the fence, going all-in on sponsored campaigns now will drive sales and awareness—regardless of the fate of the app. In the worst-case scenario, TikTok is banned, but you had one last chance to make a name for your brand among users; in the best-case scenario, TikTok survives, and you’ve established a foothold there that will grow and thrive with the app.
TikTok is built for participation and engagement in a way that no other video sharing app is or was (sorry, Vine). So naturally, it didn’t take long for brands and creators to monetize the platform. Even with an uncertain fate, smart brands won’t shy away from it as an advertising tool. Of TikTok users overall, 65.3% are under 29, so to invest in campaigns on the platform is to invest in this audience’s buying power, which will only grow and mature as they do. As long as their favorite app still exists, reaching them there with ads is a no-brainer.
TikTok’s content is meant to be consumed and acted on immediately. The shelf life of an average meme or challenge on the app is roughly a week. Videos on TikTok don’t have the same evergreen value as their cousins on YouTube and Instagram—but they don’t need it! It doesn’t take long to make an impact: Last summer, Chipotle’s #GuacDance challenge ran for just six days and garnered 250,000 TikTok submissions and 430 million video starts, all resulting in a 68% increase in avocado usage. Brands that act fast to launch TikTok advertising will reap the benefits just as quickly. One viral campaign can lead to long-term brand recognition that could outlast the app itself.
With many brands boycotting advertising on Facebook, TikTok is in an even stronger position as a cost-effective and impactful channel for reaching younger audiences. The aforementioned under-29 crew has a strong presence on Instagram but isn’t using Facebook like it used to. A single low-cost micro-influencer campaign on TikTok could be all it takes for a brand to reawaken awareness among this group.
Let’s get real for a second: It’s more likely that TikTok will leave China before the U.S. bans it. But what if a ban does occur? As TikTok sings its proverbial swan song and brands go all-in on spending, where will budgets earmarked for the platform go? And what about the influencers who have made names (and millions) for themselves?
TikTok has incredible editing capabilities and visual effects, but its model isn’t proprietary—major platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram all have the resources to attempt to replicate it, and many will seize the opportunity. The majority of TikTok users likely already have a presence on these networks and may be a captive audience.
If influencers want to remain engaged with U.S. followers and brands, they will have no choice but to explore other platforms. Apps with robust video offerings such as Snapchat and YouTube could see an influx of new influencers looking to carry their TikTok success over to a new setting.
Brands should pay attention to user—and influencer—habits, but they also shouldn’t discount market activity. Snap’s stock jumped 6.5% following the announcement discussing the potential ban, indicating that Wall Street believes it may be well positioned to become the beneficiary of TikTok’s users and advertisers. With brands committing to a wholesale Facebook boycott (including Instagram), Snapchat could become that much more of a contender.
Of course, brands keeping their purse strings tight during the pandemic may elect to pause spending on TikTok entirely—and will end up paying for it in the form of stymied momentum. If a ban occurs, which is then reversed, the brands who gambled on TikTok pre-ban will have an edge over those who played it safe.
The ability to tap into the fastest-growing social platform geared specifically toward Generation Z makes TikTok a risk worth taking—despite the prospect of a national ban. And if TikTok is banned, those same risk-taking brands won’t waste time following their customers and their wallets to another platform. My advice is to take the risk.
Justin Kline is cofounder of Markerly, an influencer marketing technology partner and platform working with some of the largest consumer brands in the world.


fortune--2020-07-17--What to watch this weekend on Netflix, Hulu, and more

Between traditional television, video-on-demand releases, and a growing number of streaming services, it can be hard to keep up with what one should watch week to week. Fortune is here to help you keep track of new releases as well as the occasional older title worth checking out. Take a look at this weekend’s notable arrivals, a couple you may have missed earlier in the week, and what else is coming soon:
Netflix
Netflix’s “Cursed” is a reimagining of the Arthurian legend, told through the eyes of Nimue, a teenage heroine with a mysterious gift who is destined to become the powerful (and tragic) Lady of the Lake. Courtesy of Netflix
Cursed: This retelling of the Arthurian legend stars Katherine Langford as Nimue (also known as the Lady of the Lake) and arrives on the streamer July 17. The show is based on the young adult graphic novel of the same name by Tom Wheeler and Frank Miller.
Father Soldier Son: The documentary, which becomes available to stream July 17, follows an American military family over the course of a decade.
The Last Dance: The 10-part documentary on Michael Jordan, which originally aired on ESPN in April and May, comes to Netflix on July 19. Read Fortune’s May interview with director Jason Hehir here.
The streaming service also recently released Fatal Affair, a thriller starring Nia Long and Omar Epps, and Indian Matchmaking, which shows matchmaker Sima Taparia setting up clients in the U.S. and India.
Hulu
Freestyle Love Supreme performs at the Greenwich House Theater. Courtesy of Hulu
We Are Freestyle Love Supreme: The documentary was originally meant to come out last month, but it was postponed out of respect for Black Lives Matter protests. Now the feature, which focuses on the hip-hop improv group whose founders include Lin-Manuel Miranda, comes out on Hulu on July 17.
Amazon Prime Video
Absentia: The third season of the crime drama arrives on Amazon July 17.
On TV
Dakota Fanning and Luke Evans star in TNT’s “The Alienist: Angel of Darkness.” Kata Vermes—TNT
The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, the second season in the Alienist series, arrives on TNT via a two-hour season premiere on July 19, starting at 9 p.m. ET. Read Fortune’s interview with season two production designer Ruth Ammon here.
And if you’re seeking a harrowing trip to the beach for some reason, a five-week SharkFest kicks off July 19 on National Geographic and Nat Geo WILD.


fortune--2020-07-17--Uber reportedly seeks investors for Uber Freight

This is the web version of Term Sheet, Fortune’s newsletter about deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
Amid a pandemic, transportation companies are not so quietly changing.
Most recently, Uber has made notable moves: It acquired Routematch, an Atlanta-based company, in a deal that highlights the ride-hailing company’s desire to provide software for public transportation.
And in a move echoing that of Alphabet’s Waymo deal (in which Alphabet sought outside investors for a bet that counted among its more moonshot-y, money-losing ones), Uber is now reportedly in talks with investors about raising $500 million for Uber Freight, its unit connecting shippers with carriers. That would value the division at about $4 billion.
There were expectations that Uber could trim or eliminate its bets on self-driving cars and Uber Freight. As the pandemic sunk into the company’s core business of shuttling consumers to-and-fro, Uber has laid off workers and leaned into the food-delivery industry by acquiring Postmates earlier this month.
Investors are doubling down on trends that are accelerating as a result of the coronavirus. Could trucking logistics be one of them?
CRV: The 50-year-old venture fund closed its 18th fund with $600 million in commitments. The early-stage fund, per a Medium post, was raised “entirely during the current pandemic.” CRV capped the fund at $600 million despite heavy demand, saying it was important to show that it had discipline as an investor even as competitors increased fund sizes. Read more.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Vedantu, an Indian edtech startup, raised $100 million in Series D funding. Coatue led the round. Read more.
- Qumulo, a Seattle-based file data platform, raised $125 million in Series E funding at a valuation of over $1.2 billion. BlackRock led the round and was joined by investors including Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Kleiner Perkins, and new investors including Amity Ventures.
- BioAtla, a San Diego, Calif.-based cancer drug company, raised $72.5 million in Series D funding. Soleus Capital and HBM Healthcare Investments led the round and were joined by Cormorant Asset Management, Farallon Capital, Pappas Capital, Janus Henderson, Boxer Capital, and Pfizer Ventures.
- Cityblock Health, a New York-based healthcare service for marginalized communities, raised $53.5 million in extended Series B funding. Kinnevik led the round and was joined by investors including Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Alphabet. Read more.
- Puppet, a Portland, Ore.-based infrastructure automation company, raised $40 million in financing from funds managed by BlackRock.
- Gem, a San Francisco-based recruiting platform, raised $37 million in Series B funding. Greylock led the round and was joined by investors including Accel.
- Openpath, a Culver City, Calif.-based cybersecurity startup, raised $36 million in Series C funding. Greycroft led the round and was joined by investors including Okta Ventures, LPC Ventures, Allegion Ventures and Sentre. Read more.
- BlueVoyant, a New York-based cybersecurity company, raised $68 million in funding. Temasek led the round.
- Mori, a Boston-based company using silkworm cocoons as food preservatives, raised $12 million in Series A funding. Acre Venture Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Prelude Ventures, The Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, and ACCELR8. Returning investors included The Engine, Refactor Capital, Closed Loop Partners, Blindspot Ventures, and The Fink Family Foundation. Read more.
- Ergatta, a Brooklyn-based home fitness startup, raised $5 million in seed funding. Greycroft led the round and was joined by Mark Pincus (Zynga), Scott Dorsey (ExactTarget, High Alpha), Steve Simon (Indiana Pacers, Simon Properties, Simon Equity Partners), Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner (Flatiron Health).
- VideoPeel, a Lehi, Ut.-based video testimonial platform, raised $1.5 million of funding. Active Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Next Coast Ventures, and eonCaptial.
- Gemist, a Los Angeles-based digital jewelry brand, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the De Beers Group Ventures.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Dubin Clark & Company, invested in Affordable Water Heaters and Plumbing, a Valencia, Calif.-based provider of water heater replacement, repair and installation services. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Trivest Partners invested in Fortress Brand, a New York-based marketing agency. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Amynta Group acquired the surety operations of Aspen Insurance, the Insurance Segment of Aspen Insurance Holdings. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group, the circus operator, reached a new purchase agreement with secured lenders, replacing an earlier deal with shareholders TPG Capital and Fosun International Ltd. Read more.
BREAKUPS, HANGUPS, AND BANKRUPTCIES
- Leisure Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: LACQ), a SPAC, called off a deal to purchase Gateway Casinos & Entertainment, a Canadian gaming and casino operator to go public. Catalyst Capital Group backs Gateway. Read more.
IPOS
- Relay Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based oncology startup, raised $400 million in an offering of 20 million shares priced at $20, above its $18 to $19 range. SoftBank backs the firm. Read more.
- Berkeley Lights, an Emeryville, Calif.-based drug discovery and development platform, raised $178.2 million in an upsized offering priced above the expected range. It sold 8.1 million shares priced at $22 apiece. WRVI Capital (25.5% pre-offering), Sequoia Capital (15%) and Nikon (8.1%) back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “BLI.” Read more.
- Pandion Therapeutics, a Waterton, Mass.-based biotech developing engineered T cells for autoimmune diseases, raised $135 million in an offering of 7.5 million shares priced at $18, the high end of its previously stated range. Investors include Versant Venture Capital (15.9% pre-offering), Polaris Partners (14.7%) and Roche (14.2%). It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “PAND.” Read more.
- Trean Insurance Group, a Wayzata, Minn.-based specialty insurer, raised $161 million by offering 10.7 million shares (34% insider sold) priced at $15. The company posted revenue of $102.5 million in 2019 and income of $31.3 million. Altaris Funds and The Baker Family Trust back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “TIG.” Read more.
- CC Neuberger Principal Holdings II, a New York-based blank check company formed by CC Capital and Neuberger Berman, filed to raise $600 million. An affiliate of Koch Industries is anchoring the fund. Read more.
- HPX Corp., a Delaware-based blank check company, raised $220 million. It plans to target a business in Brazil. Read more.
EXITS
- Partners Group agreed to acquire a major equity stake in Rovensa, a Portugal-based provider of specialty crop nutrition, biocontrol and protection products, from Bridgepoint for about €1 billion ($1.1 billion).
F+FS
- The Carlyle Group is seeking to raise $2 billion for an Americas-focused growth fund, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- Yellow Wood Partners raised $425 million of $750 million targetted for its third fund. Read more.
PEOPLE
- Agent Capital, a life sciences investment firm, named Jacopo Leonardi as a partner. Leonardi was previously an operating partner at The Vistria Group.
- EQT added Carolina Brochado, a former Atomico and Softbank Vision Fund partner, to launch a new growth-stage investment fund, per TechCrunch. Read more.


fortune--2020-07-17--Uber pledges to double company’s Black leadership by 2025

Uber Technologies Inc. pledged to double Black leadership by 2025, becoming the latest tech company to answer national calls for racial and economic justice with measurable goals.
Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi announced the target in a blog post on Friday. The ride-hailing company is also revamping its services to be more inclusive and equitable, while offering anti-bias training for riders and drivers. It will also tie executive compensation to diversity metrics and increase support for Black-owned businesses.
The moves are similar to those made by Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Google in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement.
The largest U.S. tech companies are still heavily white and male, although the percentage of Black employees has increased slightly in recent years, according to company reports analyzed by Bloomberg News.
San Francisco-based Uber increased Black employees to represent 9.3% of the total U.S. workforce, according to the company’s 2019 diversity report. But just 3.3% of leaders — those with a director title or higher — were Black.
Uber eliminated a quarter of its workforce in May in response to lower ride demand during the Covid-19 pandemic. That delayed the company’s 2020 diversity report to later this year, a spokeswoman said.
Khosrowshahi, an Iranian-born immigrant who has led Uber since 2017, said he’s optimistic the changes Uber is making will ensure people who work at, and with, the company will be treated equally. But he realizes sustained work on this is required.
“It is more important that we follow through, even after it feels like the outrage has cooled and business as usual has returned,” he wrote in the blog.


fortune--2020-07-17--Meet the Netflix new boss, same as the old boss

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.
There was a quaint time when Hollywood companies feared the encroachment of Silicon Valley on their domain. The time of fear is nearly over because the transition is complete. Netflix on Thursday promoted its content chief Ted Sarandos to co-CEO alongside co-founder Reed Hastings. The Northern California company now officially is a TV- and film-production outfit with good technology, a superior business model, and more-ruthless-than-average operators.
Sarandos has been running content for years, pumping first old then new productions into the mail-order-then-streaming engine the nerds up north built for him. If Sarandos stood out from his Hollywood peers, it was through how he trained agents and their clients to accept payment for their services rather than take a cut from the content’s performance. Other than when it suits promotional purposes, Netflix doesn’t report viewership. And it’s impossible to attribute revenue generated from a particular property. But it can promise a potential audience of closing in on 200 million subscribers. (Netflix certainly knows how buzzy titles drive signups and promote retention, and it spends accordingly on marketing.)
The company’s stock plummeted because of a light subscriber growth forecast after it reported earnings Thursday. That’s what healthy, happy, productive people in a pandemic call a success problem.
***
I belatedly noticed that at the end of May, TikTok executive Liu Zhen left the company, which media attributed to TikTok’s efforts to Americanize its management. Those include the hiring of ex-Disney bigwig Kevin Mayer as CEO. Liu worked at Uber before TikTok parent Bytedance and is a cousin of Didi Chuxing president Jean Liu.
***
Fortune‘s Jen Wieczner has written a great explanation of fintech’s role in the PPP program.
***
Watching this hilarious yet tragic video, I couldn’t help thinking about Trump apologist Peter Thiel’s 2016 plea that people take the reality TV star seriously but not literally. It’s clear that many people have taken his downplaying of the importance of wearing masks, never mind the miraculously disappearing coronavirus, seriously and literally. The results are obvious.
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam.lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Feeling grateful, doubling all payments. The unknown hacker or hackers who penetrated Twitter's security did not steal user passwords, so you do not need to reset yours, Twitter says. The FBI says, what the heck happened? Ace security reporter Brian Krebs says he already has sources pointing to a 21-year-old hacker in the U.K. as the possible culprit. Meanwhile, in the next big hack/a hack that hasn't become public yet, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday issued an emergency directive warning about a major vulnerability called SIGRed in Microsoft's Windows server software.
You send $1,000. Hey Siri, are you cementing the dominance of big tech companies? The European Union opened an antitrust probe of digital voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Google's Assistant. The concern seems to be over interoperability with smart home devices and apps. “We see interoperability is of the essence if this market is to remain open and contestable,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.
I send back $2,000. Even $1.5 trillion companies have to stay lean and mean. Despite its booming stock price, Microsoft is trimming its ranks. The software giant cut about 1,000 jobs, or less than 1% of its workforce, this week, Business Insider reports.
Only doing this for the next 30 minutes. On Wall Street, some good news, as cloud banking software developer nCino started trading after its IPO and nearly tripled in price. The 195% one-day gain was the largest for any U.S. tech company going public since the Internet bubble, Renaissance Capital reports. Wait, I thought this was supposed to be good news. Hmm.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Writing a novel isn't easy. OneZero columnist Angela Lashbrook found a semi-low-tech way to help. She bought a “portable word processor” called the AlphaSmart that has a keyboard and a six-line greyscale screen. It doesn't do much besides let her write.
The AlphaSmart gives me the perfect amount of power over my environment. Because it isn’t connected to the internet, I’m not tempted to check Twitter when a scene gets particularly tough. But I’m not chained to it, either; if I want, I can get up and walk into the other room where I’ve stashed my laptop. Once I’m sitting at the AlphaSmart, though, I might as well get to work. It’s either that or stare into space.
“I wrote so much of my first book on the AlphaSmart, and it really became part of my creative process,” says Alexis Henderson, author of The Year of the Witching, which comes out on July 21. She says she appreciates that the AlphaSmart is distraction-free and that the device’s simplicity, as well as its lack of a cursor, forces her to keep moving forward instead of going back and fiddling with what she’s already written. “I love that I can just throw it in my tote bag and go to the park. I’m kind of forced to write, because if I bring only my AlphaSmart, there’s nothing else that I can do except write.”
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few long reads I came across this week:
Google’s secretive ATAP lab is imagining the future of smart devices (Fast Company)
The consumer-electronics research arm has been quiet for years—but it’s also been busy. Its new mission: Make Google hardware as smart as Google software.
This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave (OneZero)
Patricia Crowther’s ex-husband coded her cave maps into one of the first hit adventure games in the 1970s, and she had no idea.
How to Plan a Space Mission (The New Yorker)
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists learn what it takes to leave the Earth behind.
The Last Reporter in Town Had One Big Question for His Rich Boss (New York Times)
His newspaper has withered under a hedge fund. His industry was in turmoil even before a pandemic. But Evan Brandt won’t stop chronicling his town.
The Man Whose Surveillance Camera Sparked a National Uprising (Level)
Rashad West went from hardworking teen to college athlete to restaurant owner by the age of 26. Then he single-handedly proved that George Floyd was not resisting arrest.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Democrats tweet the most, but individual Republicans get more engagement: How social media use differs across the aisle By Danielle Abril
T-Mobile just added a free feature that gives extra protection against robocalls By Aaron Pressman
Abigail Disney slams Disney World’s reopening as coronavirus cases spike in Florida By Aric Jenkins
What U.S. companies should consider following the bombshell EU Privacy Shield ruling By David Meyer
Are you willing to pay for news? The future of journalism may depend on it By Jennifer Hoewe and Brett Sherrick
Are people really fleeing cities because of COVID? Here’s what the data shows By Jeff John Roberts
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
British Airways is retiring all of the Boeing 747s in its fleet, as one of the most iconic aircraft in history slowly disappears from our skies. You may have thought this was a recent phenomenon, but Quartz's David Yanofsky wrote his great ode to the plane, The 747 is going extinct, back in 2014! I only took two trips on a 747 but one of them was on Air Force One, so that's pretty cool. Fare thee well, 747, and if forever, still forever, fare thee well.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com


fortune--2020-07-17--How WFH can hurt women’s careers

How WFH can hurt women’s careers

This is the web version of the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Greta Thunberg demands more action on climate, Michelle Obama launches a podcast, and WFH could be hazardous to women’s careers. Have a wonderful weekend.
– WFH WTF. With many of us now months into this global work from home experiment, I’m betting you may not even have to click through to this new Harvard Business Review story to answer the question implied in its headline: “Why WFH isn’t necessarily great for women.”
The authors, who include former Australian PM Julia Gillard and London Business School prof Herminia Ibarra, list a slew of reasons our current home office set-up may be disproportionately dinging women’s careers: Working from home can cause an increase in family conflict, a lack of access to informal networks, and a diminished likelihood of being tapped for key assignments, among other hazards. But what jumped out at me is a more forward-looking concept, which the authors dub “a new form of presenteeism.”
The collective wisdom among future-of-work types right now is that many companies will ultimately shift to a hybrid model, where not every employee comes into the office every day. So, some people will go “back to normal”—spending many of their days in the office or traveling for work— while others will just come in for some face time occasionally, or not at all. And given what we know about the uncertainty of schools and childcare this fall (yes, that again!), it seems likely that most working parents, and particularly working moms, will end up in the latter camp.
The HBS authors wonder whether this new hybrid workplace will leave women “out of sight and mind,” and exclude them from those unplanned, informal meetings that we all know are critical to the office hierarchy. They ask: “Will the new environment exacerbate existing disparities, with women likely to be only in the formal, official channels of communication and left out of the myriad subsets of conversations that shape decisions?”
In many offices (including Fortune’s own!), this shift from remote to in-person is already underway. At the moment, those venturing into the office remain in the minority at many companies—but what will happen when that dynamic changes? The HBS story notes that companies must be wary of creating “two tiers of employees”—with the higher status and the perks going to those with the ability to be physically present.
How to avoid that dangerous pitfall? The authors stress the importance of using data (rather than assumptions) to assess the situation, calling on employers to “examine the gender distribution at home and in the less-crowded office, ensuring an equal amount of flexibility and ‘hybrid’ access for everyone.”
Sure, that’s a start. But it’s also up to all of us to remember the downsides of our current WFH situation—the isolation, the difficulty of being left out of essential conversations, the way work so easily bleeds into the rest of our lives… When (and if!) we all make it back to the office, it’s on us to do our part to make sure our remote colleagues aren’t left behind.
Kristen Bellstrom
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- The threat of stereotypes. Stereotyping pregnant women is dangerous, a new study found. When women who are pregnant fear that they will be judged as less devoted to their careers or unable to do their jobs, they're more likely to suffer physical workplace accidents. Fortune
- A true crisis. In a new open letter to EU leaders, Greta Thunberg and three scientists demand immediate, specific action to address climate change—comparing inaction on climate to leaders' immediate responses to the coronavirus. "It is now clearer than ever that the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis," they write. Elle
- Listen up. It's always been "the Michelle Obama Show," but now it's official. The former first lady is starting a podcast through an exclusive deal with Spotify, covering topics across relationships and health. Fortune
- Inside football. Fifteen women who worked for the Washington football team say they were sexually harassed by team employees. The club said it will conduct a "thorough independent review" of the claims. Washington Post
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Snowflake CMO Denise Persson joins the board of directors at ON24.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Lasting legacy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's legacy may be determined by how she helps Europe through the coronavirus crisis. Germany is at the helm of the EU's rotating presidency through the end of 2020, putting Merkel at the center of the continent's recovery. New York Times
- Money-makers. Joe Biden has raised $242 million from big-ticket donors to take on President Trump. Two of his top contributors, giving more than $500,000, are Laurene Powell Jobs and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who once ran for governor as a Republican. New York Times
- Disney on Disney. Abigail Disney has weighed in on Disney's reopening of Disney World as coronavirus cases rise in Florida. "I can't imagine they are able to protect their employees and all their customers," she said. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves hospital and is 'doing well' at home Guardian
The new nanny novel is a political statement Vogue
Who’s afraid of Ziwe Fumudoh? Vulture
PARTING WORDS
"If you believe that Black Lives Matter, I challenge you to also believe and fight for Black mental health."
-Marah Lidey, co-founder and co-CEO of Shine


fortune--2020-07-17--How ‘The Alienist: Angel of Darkness’ returns viewers to the Gilded Age while setting up new stories

Alienist fans have something to look forward to this weekend when the second season, The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, premieres on TNT. Like the first season (2018), this installment is based on the novels by Caleb Carr and takes viewers back to the Gilded Age in New York City, where Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl), and John Moore (Luke Evans) are investigating a new grisly case.
This season, like its predecessor, was shot in Budapest and was a large production with an international team working behind the scenes to recreate a very specific period in American history. While the crew had some holdovers from the previous season to work with, they also had to create some new sets and work with a new atmosphere, season two production designer Ruth Ammon tells Fortune.
Daniel Brühl, Dakota Fanning, and Luke Evans star in TNT’s “The Alienist: Angel of Darkness.” Marc Hom—TNT
“The first season left us a fairly substantial backlot, and one of the great things about that was it had sat in the weather for almost a year of rain and snow and sun, so it built up a lot more character into the set,” Ammon says, adding that despite that, they had to weave some new locations into the mix.
Then there was the fact that while the first season of The Alienist was more of a nighttime story, and a lot of action in Angel of Darkness actually takes place in daylight, raising some questions about maintaining tonal similarities throughout the series in a new setting.
“How do we create scary moments, shadowy moments in the middle of Central Park, or in the middle of a street?” Ammon says. She wound up pitching historic areas like Gansevoort Market as the “underbelly” and using some “architectural elements to cut out the sunlight.”
Gansevoort Market, seen here in concept art, served as something an “underbelly” in the new season of “The Alienist.” Pixoloid
Some of the new sets viewers will see include Sara Howard’s detective agency as well as Newspaper Row (Ammon’s favorite), the Lying-In Hospital, and Cyrus’s Oyster Bar. The fresh locations help with telling new stories this season, which Ammon tried to be mindful of, especially when establishing the detective agency.
“In the first year, [the characters] were in a temporary hiding spot, 808 Broadway, and it was kind of a rundown, sleepy area. In this new season, we see Sara has left her work at the police department, and she’s ventured out on her own to establish a new detective agency, which was unheard of at the time,” Ammon says.
To illustrate the character’s independence, the production team created a bustling business district. (Ammon points out that office buildings had started to rise by the mid-1800s.) They built out signage, window treatments, and also established “businesses slanted toward business,” such as those selling men’s business clothing, typewriters, office supplies, and barber services.
“So all these things were slanted to men in offices in buildings and Sara being the lone female in this picture,” Ammon says.
Fanning, Brühl, and Evans in “The Alienist: Angel of Darkness.” Fanning’s character, Sara Howard, strikes out on her own, establishing a private detective agency. Kata Vermes—TNT
At one point in the new season, characters attend a lavish ball—the type of event typical of the Gilded Age, which often served as a way for women to one-up their friends, Ammon says.
“It was really like the beginning of the step and repeat,” she says of the balls from that era, referring to red carpet and similar publicity events held today. “The reporters would line up on the street, and there would be lines of carriages and people walking down the red carpet, and being photographed in these costumes, going into these balls. And they’re ridiculous costumes—clearly people had a lot of time.”
The ball seen in this season of The Alienist has a garden follies theme. “One, it was based on—I think it was a Vanderbilt—in the Waldorf-Astoria where she brought in the entire outdoors indoors,” Ammon says, adding that they heightened the colors and “vulgarity” of it, while also largely basing some elements on the English-style gardens Marie Antoinette brought to Versailles.
The event serves as a contrast to some of the more macabre imagery seen on the series, though there is still plenty of that while the characters try to solve an infant kidnapping and stumble across a trail of murder.
“We all would have to step back and reset ourselves to deal with the specific macabre of it all,” Ammon admits, while adding that figuring out how to reveal certain plot details in a respectful manner involved collaborating with other members of the crew, such as the director and director of photography. “It’s important to show it. It’s important to show it in the right tone.”
Ammon has worked on a variety of productions over the years; her TV credits include series like NBC’s Heroes and CBS’s Without a Trace. But working on the second season of The Alienist stood out to her because of how much creativity, research, and overall collaboration was involved in the world-building.
“We would put these pretty detailed packets together that told of each environment. A lot of 3D models and actually models like digital reality models that you could walk through,” she says. “When we had the production meetings, our illustrations showed what the environment was. Was the street busy? How many carriages? What kind of horses? What kind of carriages? What kind of street vendors?”
“Newspaper Row,” as illustrated by concept art for “The Alienist: Angel of Darkness,” is one of the new locations that was created for this season. Pixoloid
Ammon’s team also worked closely with the visual effects crew, helping by doing everything from designing buildings that could be used in postproduction to discussing how to move through a set or which camera angles to use.
“Truly for me, it was one of the most collaborative experiences—and not just on an intellectual level, but on an actual practical level where we had to view and touch and see things together,” she says. “And that was tremendously rewarding.”
The Alienist: Angel of Darkness will have a two-hour series premiere Sunday, July 19, on TNT at 9 p.m. ET.


fortune--2020-07-17--TIAA CEO Roger Ferguson on racism: ‘I’ve been mistaken for a waiter’

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
Roger Ferguson, CEO of TIAA and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, is one of only four black CEOs on the Fortune 500 list. He sat down with Fortune’s Susie Gharib this week for a frank conversation about race relations in America. You can watch the interview here, but this is what he had to say on why he was speaking out now on the topic:
“I think it is really important that everyone understand that even African Americans who have lived and benefited from the American dream, who are, as I am, beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, we have had our moments as well. Racism is not a class-only issue although there are class overtones, it has everything to do with what you look like.
“I’ve been mistaken for a waiter, I’ve been asked to pick up someone’s spoon at a social event, I’ve been watched when I go into retail outlets the way any African American might be, I’ve seen people step aside when I come by. Racism is not something that only happens to poor, uneducated black people, it happens to everybody.”
Ferguson is hopeful the current global movement may mark a turning point.
“America has been having ebbs and flows around racism from the beginning. I don’t expect us to have a sudden epiphany this year that’s going to make 2021 better. But I am looking forward to continuing to have real and honest dialogue and carry it through the full year.”
And since it’s Friday, some feedback. Genworth CEO Tom McInerney wrote in after my post mentioning growing fears of a second wave of economic effects from COVID-19, saying his company “has determined we will extend our U.S. work remotely status to January 1, 2021 from September 8, 2020” for its 3,000 employees, and that even after that the company will “allow employees to work primarily from home if that is their choice.”
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Barr burn
Attorney General William Barr has lashed out at Disney and a host of U.S. tech giants for compromising their principles in their dealings with the Chinese authorities. From Barr's speech: "American companies must understand the stakes. The Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report. But if Disney and other American corporations continue to bow to Beijing, they risk undermining both their own future competitiveness and prosperity, as well as the classical liberal order that has allowed them to thrive." Bloomberg
Netflix Co-CEO
Netflix's stock price was decimated following the announcement of chief content officer Ted Sarandos as co-CEO, alongside Red Hastings. Sarandos will hang onto his content role, but Hastings says they have really been partners for decades, and the change just formalizes that situation. Netflix's results were pretty solid, though it warned of less growth in the second half of the year. Fortune
Russian hack
Government officials in the U.S., U.K. and Canada have blamed a Russian hacking group for spying on organizations involved in coronavirus vaccine development, allegedly in order to steal intellectual property. The group, known as "Cozy Bear" or APT-29, has a long history of hacking governments and political parties—you may remember them from the attacks on the Democratic National Committee back in 2016. Wall Street Journal
Twitter hack
Twitter says the extraordinary attack on its systems—via social engineering, the attackers managed to hijack high-profile users' accounts for the purposes of a cryptocurrency scam—did not result in the theft of users' passwords. "Currently, we don’t believe resetting your password is necessary," the company said. Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
747 retirement
British Airways is the world's largest operator of the 747-400 jumbo jet—or, it was. Now, due to the massive pandemic-related downturn in travel, it's immediately retiring every one of the 747s in its fleet. That's 31 planes, or around a tenth of the total fleet. Spokesman: "It is unlikely our magnificent 'queen of the skies' will ever operate commercial services for British Airways again due to the downturn in travel caused by the Covid-19 global pandemic." Fortune
Privacy Shield
After yesterday's bombshell striking-down of the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield data-sharing agreement, what does the court's decision mean for U.S. companies operating in the EU? Here's a rundown of the impacts, which depend on what sort of legal basis those companies are using for their EU-to-U.S. personal-data transfers. Fortune
Calculating unemployment
Fordham University finance professor John Finnerty reckons the headline unemployment rate in the U.S. undershoots the true scale of the problem. He explains in a piece for Fortune that the error is down to misclassifications by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Finnerty: "Correcting the misclassification error would have increased the headline unemployment rate by almost one full percentage point in March, almost five percentage points in April, about three percentage points in May, and about one percentage point in June." Fortune
Saving news
Jennifer Hoewe and Brett Sherrick, assistant professors at Purdue University's Brian Lamb School of Communication, write for Fortune that paying for news is the only way to save journalism at "a time when access to accurate information could not be more important." They write: "Good journalism is expensive. In order for the press to operate in a capitalist-driven democracy, people must pay for the content that fulfills their goals of being well informed." (P.S.: If you're not a Fortune subscriber yet, here's the link.) Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-07-18--Veterinarians are turning to virtual visits to care for Fido

At 8 years old, Cowboy is normally a rambunctious Papillon with bad table manners.
But about a month into a statewide shelter-in-place order in New York, something strange happened. He started limping and his back legs looked paralyzed. It was 9 p.m. on a weekday, and he was looking up at his owner, Whitney Casey, with concerned eyes that indicated, “You better figure this out, lady,” she recalls. Having recently attended her own virtual doctor’s visit, she took to Google to find similar care for Cowboy.
“I was alone and worried, ‘How am I going to get access to anyone?’” she says. “It was disturbing.”
Casey found Fuzzy Pet Health, which offered her the option to text or video chat with a veterinarian. Within 20 minutes, she had an answer: Cowboy was having an allergic reaction to a generic brand of flea medicine, and it would likely clear up in 24 hours. The guidance calmed Casey and gave her a sense of security during the coronavirus pandemic.
Casey is among a growing number of pet owners turning to virtual pet care as they hunker down at home. The relatively nascent industry is seeing a rise in demand as vets see visits to their physical offices decline. Meanwhile, some states are loosening regulations to allow for more virtual care, making it easier for new tech companies to drum up business.
“We doubled in size in three months,” says Deb Leon, CEO of WhiskerDocs, a company providing virtual vet care to clients through large employers. “It was a boom.”
Data from mobile analytics firm App Annie shows that downloads of virtual vet apps rose in mid-March—around the time several cities imposed shelter-in-place orders—with some apps’ daily downloads jumping 40%. And with pet owners and vets establishing new habits during the pandemic, companies and experts expect telemedicine for pets to only continue to grow even after the crisis is over.
PetPro Connect, an app that some vets use to provide virtual care, became the 15th most downloaded medical app in the U.S. on May 20 and 21, according to App Annie. That’s up from its normal rankings, which were below 300 prior to mid-March.
The app, owned by pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, waived additional transaction fees during the pandemic, aiming to help connect vets and pet owners on its service. Some vets use it for virtual visits, while others started curbside service, allowing pet owners to wait in the parking lot while they watch the vet visit over video.
“Overnight, hospitals came flooding in to learn about the platform,” says Andrew Gillies, associate director of Boehringer Ingelheim digital health customer experience in the U.S. “During the early days of the pandemic, the team probably did over 1,200 demos and calls about PetPro Connect.”
Fuzzy Pet Health, a San Francisco–based pet health care startup that offers pet products, health records management, and virtual vet visits, similarly saw a rise in demand, both from pet owners and vets. The company received more than 100 applications from vets, saw a nearly 15% increase in monthly customers, and experienced a 75% increase in usage of its wellness tools that help people track the trends of their pet’s health over time.
The increase in customers, usage, and purchase of its products is helping the company grow its revenue 30% month over month since April. To date, the company has logged more than 750,000 virtual visits with 12 on-staff veterinarians and more than 100 contract vets.
Zubin Bhettay, Fuzzy’s founder and CEO, says that for the past few months, shelters have been clearing out as more people adopt. But because of that, a lot of new pet owners don’t have a vet—a problem that commonly existed even pre-pandemic.
“What we saw with COVID was more pet parents looking for advice and trying to get answers around basic information,” Bhettay says. “People are trying to learn how to better care for their pets, and that’s exciting.”
Though virtual vet care often can help pet owners with quick questions about general care, changes in behavior, or whether a situation should be deemed an emergency, there are some limits. Current state laws allow virtual pet apps and services to provide guidance about health concerns. However, most states restrict virtual providers from prescribing drugs or offering a diagnosis.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, 16 states have started to allow some form of virtual pet care, even if just temporarily, according to Roger Redman, president of the American Association of Veterinary State Boards. “Now that the pandemic has hit, addressing telemedicine and telehealth has come to the forefront,” Redman says. “I would think most states have it on the front burner and are trying to sort through what it will look like moving forward.”
John Howe, president of the American Veterinary Medical Association, estimates that use of telemedicine by vets has gone up by 20% since the outbreak of the coronavirus, and he doesn’t expect that to stop. “We anticipate that telemedicine will continue to enjoy more integration into veterinary practices than existed prior to COVID-19 even as we move toward the ‘new normal,’” says Howe. “Many veterinarians with whom we have spoken, that have chosen to implement it during COVID-19, say they will continue to include it as a service offering in their practices.”
For Airvet, a Los Angeles–based tech startup that connects pet owners to vets at hospitals and private practices, the loosening restrictions and rise in demand for virtual care came at an opportune time. The company started offering services in January, just prior to the coronavirus-related city shutdowns. Between mid-March and June, the company’s revenue jumped by a factor of seven. Airvet also secured $14 million in funding last month and is expecting to double its 15-member team within the next few months.
“When COVID hit, we saw not just an explosion for us but in the industry,” says Brandon Werber, founder and CEO of Airvet. Some animal “hospitals were forced to shut down. Telemedicine was the only way to treat clients.”
Several virtual care services are finding that once a pet owner starts using virtual pet care, they often stick with it for the sake of convenience. Casey is a prime example. She says she’s already started ordering products from Fuzzy Pet Health, given the new level of anxiety Cowboy has developed since Casey has been home so often. Meanwhile, Cowboy has already had a couple of other incidents that alarmed Casey.
“It just feels reassuring to know there’s someone you can quickly text,” she says. “I wouldn’t go back to the vet unless I needed to.”


fortune--2020-07-18--Why is there a coin shortage in the U.S.?

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The coronavirus outbreak has created a new nationwide shortage: coins.
A growing number of businesses, including Kroger, Walmart, and CVS have had to stop giving change in coins. Many are asking customers to use cards or exact change whenever possible, while some smaller businesses and franchises have stopped accepting cash all together.
The shortage is especially troubling for people who are unbanked and rely on cash for everyday purchases. Cash-only businesses are also suffering.
Cary Whaley, vice president at Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), a trade group for small banks, views the issue as a circulation problem rather than a shortage.
“A lot of folks shifted the way they paid” after the coronavirus outbreak, he said. “They weren’t paying in cash, so they weren’t taking it to restaurants and banks and getting it into circulation.”
The coin shortage is just the latest shortage for a nation reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. Previously, consumers had to deal with a lack of toilet paper followed by a shortage of meat and poultry caused by the closing of meat processing plants.
Here’s what you need to know about the coin shortage.
How did the coin shortage happen?
The problem is two-pronged: The U.S. Mint significantly reduced its production of coins after implementing safety measures to protect its employees from the coronavirus. Consumers are also depositing fewer coins at U.S. financial institutions, according to the Federal Reserve.
Because of coronavirus fears, many people have switched to using credit cards and mobile payments to avoid handling money. Meanwhile, the shutdown also forced some businesses to close that would normally help keep coins moving.
“With establishments like retail shops, bank branches, transit authorities, and laundromats closed, the typical places where coin enters our society have slowed or even stopped the normal circulation of coin,” Michael White, a spokesman for the U.S. Mint, said in a statement.
On June 15, the Federal Reserve said it would start capping the amount of coins it allots to banks and financial institutions. The measure is expected to be temporary and based on institutions’ historical orders.
When will the coin shortage end?
The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Mint along with other financial groups are working to fix the problem. But it’s unclear when the shortage will end.
“We feel like we’re making progress,” Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, said in June at a House Financial Services Committee hearing. “It’s been something that we’ve been working on.”
On June 30, the Fed announced that a task force would create a plan to deal with the problem. The task force, comprised of leaders from big banks, associations, the Fed, and the Department of the Treasury, had its first meeting on July 10 and is expected to share a list of recommendations in early August.
Some of the questions the group is mulling over: “Did the pandemic throw a curveball, and do we need to rethink the way coins are stored or delivered? Are there ways to streamline the supply chain to get coin out now? How do we alter the supply chain to push coin out?” said ICBA’s Whaley, who is on the task force.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Mint returned to full production in mid-June and expects to produce 19.8 billion coins by the end of the year—7.4 billion more than last year.
What should consumers do in the meantime?
While the Fed works to improve coin inventory and the U.S. Mint churns out more coins, there is one big part of the problem that still needs addressing: consumers.
Whaley said consumers should consider depositing their coins at a bank or spending them at a local business to get coins back in circulation. “If they’ve got coin in a rainy-day fund, I can’t think of a better rainy day than where we are right now,” he said.
The challenge will be the biggest for businesses, which are running short on coins and may not be able to get their full order of coins from banks. But some businesses are finding ways around the problem. Kroger, for example, is giving customers digital change on a customer loyalty card, which can be redeemed on their next trip to the store.
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fortune--2020-07-18--John Lewis, lion of civil rights and Congress, dies at 80

John Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, died. He was 80.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Lewis’ passing late Friday night, calling him “one of the greatest heroes of American history.”
“All of us were humbled to call Congressman Lewis a colleague, and are heartbroken by his passing,” Pelosi said. “May his memory be an inspiration that moves us all to, in the face of injustice, make ‘good trouble, necessary trouble.’”
Lewis’s announcement in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer — “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” he said — inspired tributes from both sides of the aisle, and an unstated accord that the likely passing of this Atlanta Democrat would represent the end of an era.
Lewis was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that had the greatest impact on the movement. He was best known for leading some 600 protesters in the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
At age 25 — walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat — Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. His skull was fractured, and nationally televised images of the brutality forced the country’s attention on racial oppression in the South.
Within days, King led more marches in the state, and President Lyndon Johnson soon was pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. The bill became law later that year, removing barriers that had barred Blacks from voting.
“John is an American hero who helped lead a movement and risked his life for our most fundamental rights; he bears scars that attest to his indefatigable spirit and persistence,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said after Lewis announced his cancer diagnosis.
Lewis joined King and four other civil rights leaders in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. He spoke to the vast crowd just before King delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech.
A 23-year-old firebrand, Lewis toned down his intended remarks at the insistence of others, dropping a reference to a “scorched earth” march through the South and scaling back criticisms of President John Kennedy. It was a potent speech nonetheless, in which he vowed: “By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy.”
It was almost immediately, and forever, overshadowed by the words of King, the man who had inspired him to activism.
Lewis was born on Feb. 21, 1940, outside the town of Troy, in Pike County, Alabama. He grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools.
As a boy, he wanted to be a minister, and practiced his oratory on the family chickens. Denied a library card because of the color of his skin, he became an avid reader, and could cite obscure historical dates and details even in his later years. He was a teenager when he first heard King preaching on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at Alabama’s segregated Troy State University.
He ultimately attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He began organizing sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests while traveling around the South to challenge segregation.
Lewis helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was named its chairman in 1963, making him one of the Big Six at a tender age. The others, in addition to King, were Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Negro American Labor Council; James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality; and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. All six met at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York to plan and announce the March on Washington.
The huge demonstration galvanized the movement, but success didn’t come quickly. After extensive training in nonviolent protest, Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams led demonstrators on a planned march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, on March 7, 1965. A phalanx of police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge.
Authorities shoved, then swung their truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback, sending many to the hospital and horrifying much of the nation. King returned with thousands, completing the march to Montgomery before the end of the month.
Lewis turned to politics in 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council.
He won his seat in Congress in 1986 and spent much of his career in the minority. After Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Lewis became his party’s senior deputy whip, a behind-the-scenes leadership post in which he helped keep the party unified.
In an early setback for Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Lewis endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton for the nomination. Lewis switched when it became clear Obama had overwhelming Black support. Obama later honored Lewis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and they marched hand in hand in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack.
Lewis also worked for 15 years to gain approval for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Humble and unfailingly friendly, Lewis was revered on Capitol Hill — but as one of the most liberal members of Congress, he often lost policy battles, from his effort to stop the Iraq War to his defense of young immigrants.
He met bipartisan success in Congress in 2006 when he led efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court later invalidated much of the law, and it became once again what it was in his youth, a work in progress. Later, when the presidency of Donald Trump challenged his civil rights legacy, Lewis made no effort to hide his pain.
Lewis refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, saying he didn’t consider him a “legitimate president” because Russians had conspired to get him elected. When Trump later complained about immigrants from “s—hole countries,” Lewis declared, “I think he is a racist … we have to try to stand up and speak up and not try to sweep it under the rug.”
Lewis said he’d been arrested 40 times in the 1960s, five more as a congressman. At 78, he told a rally he’d do it again to help reunite immigrant families separated by the Trump administration.
“There cannot be any peace in America until these young children are returned to their parents and set all of our people free,” Lewis said in June, recalling the “good trouble” he got into protesting segregation as a young man.
“If we fail to do it, history will not be kind to us,” he shouted. “I will go to the border. I’ll get arrested again. If necessary, I’m prepared to go to jail.”
In a speech the day of the House impeachment vote of Trump, Lewis explained the importance of that vote.
“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us ‘what did you do? what did you say?” While the vote would be hard for some, he said: “We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”
Lewis’ wife of four decades, Lillian Miles, died in 2012. They had one son, John Miles Lewis.


fortune--2020-07-18--The Goya boycott isn’t an example of cancel culture—it’s the free market at work

Nikki Haley and former Walmart U.S. president Bill Simon : Coronavirus makes the case for bringing manufacturing back to America

In the past couple of weeks, Hispanics have found themselves in the spotlight, starting with the visit of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and President Trump’s promise to sign an executive order to provide Dreamers with a path for citizenship. Then came the controversial Hispanic Prosperity Initiative ceremony. The content of this initiative, which seeks to bolster education and economic opportunities for Hispanic Americans, was overshadowed by the hullabaloo caused by the statements of Robert Unanue, the CEO of Goya, as one of the ceremony’s speakers.
After Unanue said we were all “truly blessed…to have a leader like President Trump,” social media erupted with negative reactions. Perhaps you have encountered trending hashtags such as #Goyaway or #BoycottGoya, accompanied by pictures of Goya products in the trash, along with oaths to never buy these products again.
This call for action has been labeled by critics as an example of “cancel culture.” But is it actually—or is this simply the market in action? In my opinion, we are not seeing cancel culture play out in this instance, but what I have coined “alignment culture.”
A primary characteristic of cancel culture is its binary nature. Once an individual or entity is targeted, cancel culture seeks to deplatform, remove, or silence the perceived transgressor, or some combination of the three.
Alignment culture, on the other hand, emerges in scenarios in which it is possible to convey contrasting opinions. The ultimate goal of alignment culture is to prove who has more power in a market scenario. It also offers the opposition an opportunity to push back and seeks to compel a party to amend or walk back a statement to one that aligns with the opinions of a given market segment. Boycotters are clearly stating which opinions they are willing to tolerate.
Within this alignment culture clash, two “competitors” emerge. One side finds the statements of Unanue unacceptable, exhibited in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Julián Castro’s denunciations of Unanue’s opinion and encouragement of a boycott of Goya products. On the opposing side, there are those who stand behind the supposed offender, echoed in figures like President Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Marco Rubio supporting Unanue and endorsing Goya products.
In the case of Goya, the low cost and variety of their products yields few barriers to being targeted by alignment culture. Here, consumers can readily signal their support or dissent for Unanue’s statements by radically changing demand for Goya products. Had such controversial statements been issued by the president of a luxury automobile company, for example, it seems unlikely that we would see social media posts of people trashing their high-end sedans (or buying more of them). When the costs of signaling through market participation are high, it is more likely that cancel culture will prevail and seek to have its demands met by way of social pressure.
Within alignment culture, the goal of the participants is to prove who is “right.” In the alignment culture arena, competitors seek to demonstrate their leadership, organizational capacity, and power to influence and control markets.
Alignment culture participants understand very well the potency of radical modification to demand as a means of signaling political statements. Could such a strategy be extended to supporting candidates in the upcoming presidential election? It remains to be seen.
Liliana Gomez Fernandez is an economist and policy consultant.