fortune--2020-01-13--What Was Carlos Ghosn Thinking in Pulling off His Great Escape? A Former Colleague Offers Clues

The story of Carlos Ghosn reads like a bestselling spy novel.
The former high-flying chief executive who ran two global automakers based in Tokyo and Paris simultaneously, and who salvaged Nissan from potential bankruptcy in 1999, also famously fled Japan in a musical instrument box in late December after being held for more than a year in jail and under house arrest on charges of financial misdeeds.
Ghosn spoke out last Wednesday from his new base of operation in his home country Lebanon for the first time since his dramatic escape, detailing what he calls the plot against him at Nissan.
Fortune spoke with a former associate of Ghosn’s who worked closely with him both at Nissan and Renault who agreed to lend insight into the former CEO’s outlook, his mindset, and what may happen next. The auto executive asked not to be named in order to speak freely about some sensitive matters about the Ghosn case and the company he left behind. (Neither Ghosn nor his associates responded to Fortune‘s attempts to reach him for comment.)
According to Fortune’s source, Ghosn’s primary interest is in clearing his name to cement his legacy as Nissan’s savior. Ghosn said as much on Wednesday at the press conference, telling the assembled he would welcome a new trial in Lebanon, or wherever he could find a jurisdiction that would treat him fairly—that is, in one of his home countries: Lebanon, France, or Brazil. In any case, it’s not clear how that could happen if Japanese prosecutors don’t agree to turn over their findings. Besides, the Japanese are turning up the pressure on the business tycoon, issuing through Interpol a “Red Warning” for Ghosn’s arrest, a move that may severely limit his ability to travel.
Furthermore, winning public validation may not be so easily attained for a millionaire who argues his finances were all above board. That ignores the fact Ghosn had to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraudulently concealing from investors the $140 million in retirement pay he was due; separately, the Japanese accuse him of not coming clean on millions more.
The consummate outsider
As a Brazilian boy growing up in Lebanon, Ghosn always felt like the outsider, this inside source told Fortune. That feeling didn’t change even once he began working in nationalistic France for one of the country’s top automakers. When Renault sent him to Japan in 1999 to defend the company’s 33% interest in the failing Japanese automaker, he arrived with a chip on his shoulder, the source said. Once again, during a two-decade span running the Nissan portion of the alliance, he steamed that the locals were reluctant to embrace him.
Although Japanese automakers these days routinely employ international staff, it’s hard to crack the cultural barrier that remains. “They’ll take your expertise, but it doesn’t mean they’ll accept you,” the source said.
Ghosn’s perception of being the outsider may ultimately have led to his downfall. The reason, according to the Fortune source, is because once he tasted success, his focus began to change. He began to isolate himself from some of his most trusted advisors, shunning those who told him “no.” Instead, he started to regard his own positive press clippings as the incontrovertible truth, a move, the source said, that ultimately blinded Ghosn to his own fallibility.
Former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn speaks during a press conference, his first public appearance since fleeing Japan for Beirut late last month in a stunning escape from justice. Photo: Marwan Naamani/dpa (Photo by Marwan Naamani/picture alliance via Getty Images)
In his first five years at Nissan’s helm, first as COO, then CEO, Ghosn proved himself an exceptionally skilled manager with an eye for detail and a focus on execution—and on the bottom line, the source says.
Under Ghosn’s leadership, the company went from a $229 million loss in 1998 to the most profitable automaker in the world in 2003. By 2004, the stock of both Renault and Nissan soared; Nissan shares in Tokyo nearly doubled. In 2005, Ghosn became the first executive to be named CEO of two companies simultaneously listed on the Fortune Global 500.
Nissan’s stock has dropped by more than one-third since Ghosn’s arrest in November 2018.
“CEO disease”
During his time in Tokyo, Ghosn’s cross-town arch-rival, Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe, was considered a visionary for launching the world’s first successful fuel-saving hybrid, the Prius, amid the global auto market’s inexorable march toward larger and thirstier SUVs—all the while posting consistent record profits for Toyota.
That Ghosn was christened with the moniker “Le Cost Killer,” grated on him by comparison, Fortune’s source revealed.
“It’s part of his ego that he built this incredible empire, which he arguably did. But what he didn’t do is lay a foundation to continue it. He constructed the [Nissan-Renault] alliance so it’s the Alliance starring Carlos Ghosn.”
In his press conference last week, Ghosn noted that the Nissan-Renault Alliance is functionally inert since his arrest. While a primary task of any chairman or chief executive is to put a viable succession plan in place, one never fully materialized at the Alliance. “He let go or pushed out anybody who could have challenged him as head of the Alliance, and who had credibility and good relationships within both Nissan and Renault.” While Ghosn named a successor at Nissan, he did not install a successor to run the Alliance as a whole.
A portrait of ousted Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn is seen on a publicity billboard in his support at a street in Beirut on December 6, 2018. JOSEPH EID—AFP via Getty Images
Fellow famous auto executive Bob Lutz put it differently in an interview with CNBC last week. He said Ghosn suffers from “CEO disease,” a “God complex,” in which he “believes himself to be infallible.”
“I know the profile,” Lutz told CNBC. “That type of personality does tend to pretty easily slip over the line and do things that the rest of us would not do, because they think they’re … so well-connected and of such vast importance to the economy that nobody would ever call them on it.”
The former insider Fortune interviewed cites “a bit of resentment” toward Ghosn among his former turnaround team. The charges “tarnish some incredible work people did,” the person says. Much, if not all, of that work has been overshadowed by Ghosn’s arrest and subsequent flight from Japan clouding the Nissan’s entire turnaround with a brush of impropriety.
The visionary
Around 2004, in order to overcome his reputation as a mere “cost killer,” Ghosn began restyling himself a visionary, the Fortune source says, hanging out with and listening to bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; and taking their advice over that of his own company’s engineers and product planners. He began replacing his top team in Japan with ruthless yes-men—some of whom he has now accused of plotting to bring him down, the source note. That’s also when he began fixating on his own press clippings.
Around the same time he laid plans for Nissan to launch the world’s first modern all-electric car to compete with and surpass the Toyota Prius, becoming known in the electric-car community as the father of the Nissan Leaf—all while other automakers were dismissing the market viability of electric vehicles.
It’s that legacy as a visionary Ghosn is now looking to defend, the source says.
After 2001 resignation of Nissan’s previous CEO, the late Yoshikazu Hanawa, who engineered Nissan’s alliance with Renault, and who ushered Ghosn into the corner office, Ghosn said no executive should stay on the job for more than 10 years. Ghosn himself stayed on for 19 years, until Nissan’s board threw him out after his arrest on charges of squandering the company’s money.
A party at Versailles
Prosecutors and former Nissan executives accuse Ghosn of misleading investors by failing to disclose up to $140 million of deferred income on Nissan’s financial statements, starting in 2010, after Japan passed new laws requiring the disclosure of executive pay. He is also accused of accepting homes around the world—in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, and Amsterdam—that went undisclosed on Nissan’s financial statements, as well as sending money to a Nissan distributor in the Middle East that was allegedly later funneled back to Ghosn and his family.
In his press conference, Ghosn also spent almost five minutes defending a lavish party held in Versailles, the French palace, from which pictures have emerged of entertainers costumed as Marie Antoinette and her entourage. The party coincided with his wife’s birthday, but Ghosn claims it was a corporate event for the 15th anniversary of the Alliance. He says copies of his corporate speech have disappeared, and the $50,000 payment from Nissan to Versailles for a room rental was a misunderstanding.
While the insider says he doesn’t doubt any of the charges against Ghosn, he believes Ghosn’s arrest and prosecution were motivated by a continuing sense of nationalism among Japanese executives. The Japanese officials, the source continued, felt threatened when Ghosn, under pressure from Renault’s French government owners, proposed further nudging the axis of power in the company’s alliance towards Renault—something more akin to a merger of equals. As evidence, he cites the lack of prosecutions of any Japanese Nissan executives (though Ghosn’s successor and primary accuser Hiroto Saikawa was also fired, in September, following an investigation into irregularities in his own pay).
(The Japanese have been rigorously defending the case, and its legal justification. Earlier this month, three days after Ghosn made his first appearance in Beirut, Japan’s Justice Minister Moriko Mori issued a statement saying, “our country’s criminal justice system sets out appropriate procedures to clarify the truth of cases and is administered appropriately, while guaranteeing basic individual human rights. Flight by a defendant on bail is unjustifiable.”)
The inside source sees other red flags. “Somebody had to fill out six forms to get this paid, even out of the CEO’s discretionary fund,” the insider says. “And where was the board? So many people would have had to be involved. There’s no conceivable way so many people could have not known.” So when opponents of the Alliance wanted to find dirt on Ghosn, he reckons, they knew just where to look. Ghosn made some of these very same claims at his press conference.
After his arrest, Ghosn was held in jail for 108 days, most of that time without charges and with limited access to his attorney. After he posted bail of $14 million, he was put under house arrest with his front door and all communications monitored, and very little communication allowed even with his wife, Carole. This week Japan also issued an arrest warrant for Carole Ghosn in connection with her husband’s escape.
In his escape, media reports have documented surveillance footage of Ghosn traveling across Tokyo wearing a baseball cap and a surgical mask, climbing into a musician’s “roadie” trunk with holes drilled in the bottom, and flying in the company of two American security operatives, one a former Green Beret also once convicted of fraud, to Istanbul and then on to Beirut.
Ghosn is a Lebanese citizen, and the country has no extradition treaty with Japan. After Interpol issued its “Red Notice,” the country has banned him from traveling, but has so far announced no additional investigation into his financial activity.
Life on the lam appears to be getting to Ghosn. His personal finances, the spark that started the Japanese investigation, has taken a hit. And now, he’s finding, that in his effort to clear his name, it’s generating fresh scrutiny on his entire career at the Nissan-Renault Alliance.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—How Nissan-Renault became a ‘masquerade of an alliance,’ according to Ghosn
—Investors see a 2020 recession coming—but think they’ll make money
—As investors shrug off Iran concerns, analysts find the complacency ‘disconcerting’
—Laws meant to close down tax havens and shut loopholes could have opposite effect
—What a $1,000 investment in 10 top stocks a decade ago would be worth today
Subscribe to Fortune’s forthcoming Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-01-13--Indie Movies, Diverse Performers Mostly Absent From 2020 Oscar Nominations

Disney Is Ready to Roll Out New ‘ Star Wars ’ Sagas as One Story Ends

A lot about this year’s Oscar nominees, which were announced Monday morning, was in keeping with what many predicted would emerge from a chaotically short, but exciting awards season.
Best Picture nominations went to Ford v Ferrari (Fox), The Irishman (Netflix), Jojo Rabbit (Fox Searchlight), Joker (Warner Bros.), Little Women (Sony), Marriage Story (Netflix), 1917 (Universal), Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Sony), and Parasite (Neon).
None of those was a surprise.
Netflix’s contenders had dominated the conversation since early fall festival premieres. Tarantino’s Hollywood epic had been a critical darling from the moment its first frame debuted at Cannes. Little Women was a beloved addition to the mix starting at its first-ever FYC event last October. Joker racked up an 11 total nominations and is still going strong at the box office after a haul of $1 billion. Sam Mendes’s war saga 1917 exploded into the race in late 2019 and has earned most major wins and nominations since. Searchlight’s Jojo picked up steam of late as director Taika Waititi earned a DGA nomination. And the year’s most exciting potential spoiler, Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho, has seen his satire-thriller Parasite become the sixth-ever International Feature—previously known as Foreign Film—nominee to also earn a Best Picture nomination. (He also nabbed an Original Screenplay nom as well.)
Outside of a bummer snub for Lionsgate’s Bombshell, which did earn acting nominations for Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie, not a lot about the Best Pic pool offered an opportunity for shock.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t results over which fans and insiders may choose to grouse.
Once again, women were shut out of the directing category, as many had hoped to see Little Women’s Greta Gerwig in the mix, though she was honored with a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. But realistically, no other women directors had enough momentum to crack this year’s boys’ club nominees: Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Bong Joon Ho, Sam Mendes, and Todd Phillips.
Among the season’s other female contenders at large—Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers), Alma Har’el (Honey Boy), Lulu Wang (The Farewell) and Kasi Lemmons (Harriet)—ultimately only Gerwig had enough buzz to even just hope for Best Director kudos.
Har’el and Wang are interesting omissions as they also represent the overall snubbing of smaller art films in this year’s Oscar pool. Among those most egregiously absent—based on early predictions and reviews—are A24’s Uncut Gems and star Adam Sandler, The Lighthouse and costar Willem Dafoe (though the film did earn a cinematography nom), The Farewell, and Amazon’s Honey Boy, which had generated impressive grassroots buzz last fall for both Har’el and star/writer Shia LaBeouf.
On the snubbing front, some may also see Hustlers costar Jennifer Lopez as being overlooked, though now-frontrunner Laura Dern (Marriage Story) has dominated that race so intensely as of late, it likely won’t matter now against whom she’s competing.
And outside of Harriet Lead-Actress nominee Cynthia Erivo, a slew of other performers of color who many felt were deserving were also ignored: Dolemite is my Name’s Eddie Murphy, Us actress Lupita Nyong’o, Just Mercy’s Jamie Foxx, Waves’ Sterling K. Brown, and The Farewell’s Awkwafina (who just won the Globe), to name a few. By comparison, the 2019 Oscar-winners pool offered a decidedly diverse snapshot of talent as Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Rami Malek, If Beale Street Could Talk‘s Regina King, and Green Book‘s Mahershala Ali, three actors of color, dominated last year’s acting races.
As the Academy braces for the inevitable criticism to follow for some of the above results between now and the Feb. 9 telecast, others will likely choose to celebrate this year’s Best Picture nominee pool as one of the strongest—and in the case of Joker, Ford v. Ferrari, Once Upon a Time… and now 1917, best-performing—groups of movies in years.
And for Parasite fans, it’s the chance to hope for what could become the most thrilling, history-making Best Picture spoiler of all time.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Picard promises less tech, more humanity with “hope the dominant emotion,” according to Patrick Stewart
—When it comes to streaming media, Quibi made the most of CES
—Hulu will exclusively stream new FX series—and other updates from peak TV land
—How Neil Young’s eccentric online home was born
—Inside 1917: designing a World War I battlefield
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-01-13--How Freelancing Can Help Your Career

How Freelancing Can Help Your Career

Like any job, working as a freelancer is not always the best fit for everyone or something that can last forever. Although freelancing has become increasingly popular —28 percent of the American workforce freelanced full-time in 2019, versus 17 percent in 2014, according to a study from freelancing website Upwork and Freelancing Union, it is a career path that some are forced into due to layoffs or relocation.
And, yes, freelancing allows for flexible hours, the ability to work on multiple projects, virtually from anywhere. But there are some things it lacks that can’t be substituted. “I found working in a freelance capacity to be quite isolating, and I always craved the atmosphere and collaborative environment of an office,” says Freya Drohan, who worked as a freelance writer for two and a half years.
She was also troubled by the lack of financial security, and felt that her career development was stagnant. “I needed to re-enter a traditional role to keep learning from my superiors and co-workers,” she adds.
It’s no surprise, then, that many freelancers like Drohan often choose to move back to a full-time job after working on their own for a while. But it’s not an easy choice. For Austen Tosone, who freelanced as a writer, editor, and content creator for just under a year and a half, the freedom granted by that lifestyle was hard to give up.
While both women have moved back to a full-time position—Drohan is now a fashion and lifestyle commerce writer, and Tosone holds a beauty content director role at video editing and sharing app Jumprope—their experiences as freelancers armed them with tools that have helped their successful comebacks to the traditional job market.
Here are the lessons they took with them when going back to full-time work after a freelance stint.
1. Approach things in a timely manner.
When you work on your own, everything can feel more time-sensitive. “As a freelance writer, I learned how to get inventive and innovative with pitches,” says Drohan. “You’re ncompeting against other freelancers, in-house writers, and editors for the same slice of the pie, so if you think something is a potential story, you should pitch it in a timely manner.”
That timeliness doesn’t disappear once you work in an office again. “The learning curve of understanding how to really pay attention to the zeitgeist definitely helps me brainstorm for content ideas every day in my current editorial role,” she says. Plus, as a freelancer one has to be very organized about meeting deadlines, which is a very useful habit in the office where, as Tosone puts it, “you have other team members who are relying on you.”
2. Always be brainstorming new ideas.
It goes without saying that, freelancing often requires ongoing brainstorming regardless of the industry. That determination to come up with new and creative ideas is just as important when working full-time.“I’m a self-starter and take it upon myself to come up with new ideas to reach creators or for types of content I think we should be sharing,” says Tosone. Having this importance placed on brainstorming allows you to think outside the box more easily when fully employed.
3. Say yes as often as you can.
Every freelancer knows that each opportunity has the potential to lead to another while growing your knowledge. “Something I’ve learned over the past few years is to say yes whenever it was possible,” says Drohan. While a full-time job comes with certain outlined tasks, there are always new projects and experiences to jump on that can enhance your abilities and career. Saying yes to these opportunities, without overwhelming yourself or being taken advantage of, is a critical way to grow in your position.
4. Know your worth.
This may be the most important thing that can be brought from a stint freelancing, as it’s far too easy to forget where you’re standing within a company. “Now that I have established myself, I am firm about my story and day rate and confident with my experience,” says Drohan. “When it came time to renegotiate my day rate at my last ‘perma-lance’ position, I stood my ground and it paid off. This ensured that a small jump in my salary when I entered a new full-time role, when those two and a half years of hustle finally felt worth it.”
5. Balance your interests.
Often freelancers are juggling many things at once, a skill that can benefit you immensely when balancing your work and outside interests in a full-time position. “One big lesson that I’m still absorbing as I go back to full-time is that if you are still pursuing any of your freelance projects on the side, it can take some discipline to not let your brain go off and running on an idea for those projects during work hours,” says Tosone. Making quick notes to oneself that you can circle back on after work is useful so you won’t get distracted for during the workday.
6. Know how a business functions.
When you work by yourself, each aspect of running a business, from the creative to the analytical, is on you to understand and maintain. “Freelancing gave me an understanding of what it takes to run a company from cash flow to business expense, says Tosone.” At the end of the day, any place you work is a business and understanding how it functions gives you the ability to look at things from a unique angle and better help the company succeed.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—New hires are getting high pay but older employees aren’t getting raises
—What the best workplaces in the world have in common
—No, humanities degrees don’t mean low salaries
—The 4 main reasons people change careers
—Ready to jump at that great job offer? Read this first
Get Fortune’s RaceAhead newsletter for sharp insights on corporate culture and diversity.


fortune--2020-01-13--‘Picard’ Promises Less Tech, More Humanity: ‘Hope Is the Dominant Emotion,’ Says Sir Patrick Stewart

Sir Patrick Stewart allayed any fears on Sunday that his return to the Star Trek universe via forthcoming CBS All Access sci-fi drama Picard was fueled by a need to reclaim past glory.
“I thought I’d said goodbye Jean-Luc Picard for good,” Stewart said during Picard’s panel presentation Sunday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif., during which he appeared alongside a team of creatives, as well as costars Isa Briones, Alison Pill, Evan Evagora, Michelle Hurd, and Santiago Cabrera.
“I was proud of the seven years we spent on Next Generation and on the movies,” he said. “Picard and I became melded. He never left me, so there was actually nothing strange about stepping into this role again. It’s been far easier than I expected.”
The ambitious, cinematic drama from executive producer Alex Kurtzman— premiering Jan. 23 on CBS’s streaming platform—sees Stewart’s beloved Star Trek: The Next Generation protagonist settled into a quiet life on Earth, 20 years after the events of the 2002 Star Trek feature Nemesis. The new Picard is still bereft by the death of his companion Data (Brett Spiner), a state of mind Stewart said was best represented by the addition of one particular costar.
“His having a dog was my idea,” said Stewart, an avid animal-rescue activist, of Picard’s canine companion, played by a pit bull named Dinero. “Picard is changed, troubled, disturbed, lonely and [racked] with feelings of guilt. To see him with a dog seemed so right. He’s looking for some form of comfort.”
Added Stewart: “Hope is the dominant emotion of everything we did on Next Generation, and on Picard, too.”
The less-tech-more-character tone of the series, which was previewed for critics and journalists, fuels what its writers said was an overt effort to not recreate the past.
“Star Trek has always reflected the fractures in our world, and our world is pretty fractured right now,” said Oscar-winning writer Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), who also serves as an EP and director on Picard. “Feelings of marginalization, not being open-hearted, nor having empathic eyes… they’re pervasive problems we all saw as rife for healing in the series.”
Added Picard EP/writer and novelist Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys): “For the technology that’s represented in the show, we tried to make it as self-evident as we could. It’s pretty light on techno-babble. I’d try to slip a little in, but then I’d be encouraged to take it out.”
Picard showrunner Kurtzman, who debuted in the Star Trek universe as the cowriter of J.J. Abrams’s 2008 feature Star Trek, emphasized the effects-heavy playground in which Picard’s creators are able to create, but also the responsibility he feels to ground the narrative as much as possible.
“In the golden age of streaming, we get to make movies on TV and we embrace the best of that,” said Kurtzman. “But when you watch any Star Trek show, it has to look different from the other series. So the first chapter of Picard spends a lot of time on Earth. I didn’t want to rush it. We need to see the condition of his life and watch him evolve.”
Picard is arguably the biggest swing yet taken by CBS All Access since its 2017 debut with Star Trek: Discovery and The Good Wife spinoff, The Good Fight. And they’re betting really big on Stewart’s return to TV: 10 days ahead of the series’ debut, the streamer announced it had already renewed the drama a second season, with a rumored third to follow.
During its presentation, CBS All Access touted other hot properties, both fresh and returning: the new Peter Sarsgaard true-crime drama Interrogation, premiering Feb. 6; the forthcoming fourth season of Robert and Michelle King’s Good Fight; and just-announced series from Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet (the Silence of the Lambs spinoff, Clarice), an animated variety show from Stephen Colbert, and an animal-rescue docuseries from Richard Linklater.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—When it comes to streaming media, Quibi made the most of CES
—Hulu will exclusively stream new FX series—and other updates from peak TV land
—How Neil Young’s eccentric online home was born
—Could Disney have more faith in X-Men spinoff The New Mutants than Fox did?
—Inside 1917: designing a World War I battlefield
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-01-13--Fact Checking Trump’s Recent Claims on Iran, Jobs, and the Environment

President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on the impeachment investigation and Democrats’ stance on Iran strained the truth on various fronts, from claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani to asserting that even Ukraine’s president said Trump did nothing wrong in withholding military aid.
In weekend tweets and interviews, Trump repeatedly left out important context or simply made stuff up.
To a core question — did the U.S. killing of an Iranian general avoid an imminent attack on U.S. interests? — there is no definitive answer more than a week after missiles flew. Trump and his officials said the U.S. attack achieved that result but have yet to prove it.
Trump over the past week offered distortion across the breadth of public policy. He declared clean-air achievements when the air has become dirtier.
He complained that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for peace in Ethiopia, when he had little or nothing to do with Ethiopia’s peace deal with neighboring Eritrea.
And in the midst of dangerous brinkmanship with Iran, Trump falsely accused President Barack Obama of opening the U.S. treasury to Tehran and handing over a fortune.
A look at the claims and reality:
Iran
TRUMP: “Where have the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats gone when they have spent the last 3 days defending the life of Qassem Soleimani.” — tweet Saturday.
TRUMP: “You know what bothers me? When I see a Nancy Pelosi trying to defend this monster from Iran … When Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want to defend him, I think that’s a very bad thing for this country.” — remarks Thursday at event on environmental regulations.
THE FACTS: That’s a misrepresentation.
Pelosi and other Democrats have questioned the strategy behind Trump’s order to kill Iran’s general, which was made without prior approval from Congress, pointing to potential consequences of heightened tensions that could endanger U.S. troops and lead to war with Iran. The Democrats haven’t defended Soleimani or spoken positively about him.
Following the military strike, Pelosi, for instance, called it a “dangerous escalation of violence” that put U.S. troops and diplomats at risk “by engaging in provocative and disproportionate actions.” She also criticized Trump’s “lack of strategy.” But Pelosi also made it clear at her news conference last Thursday that Democrats had “no illusions about Iran, no illusions about Soleimani.”
“He was a terrible person, did bad things,” she said.
Similarly, there is no evidence the Democratic presidential candidates defended Soleimani.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said that “no Americans will mourn Qassem Soleimani’s passing.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who questioned the timing of the military strike, called Soleimani a “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.” Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Ind., said if the U.S. has no plan, “taking out a bad guy is not necessarily a good idea.”
Last week, Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., was forced to apologize after he made a similar assertion as Trump, claiming that Democrats were “in love with terrorists.”
“I left parts of my body in Iraq fighting terrorists,” Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army pilot who lost both her legs while serving in Iraq, told CNN after hearing Collins’ initial remarks. “I don’t need to justify myself to anyone.”
___
TRUMP: “Iran’s hostility substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013. And they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash.” — address Wednesday.
TRUMP: “Iran now is not wealthy like it was when President Obama handed him $150 billion..” — remarks Thursday.
TRUMP: “They gave around $150 billion including $1.7 billion in the hard cold cash, can you imagine? No, no, can you imagine? $1.7 billion, $1.8 billion in cash.” — Toledo rally.
THE FACTS: There was no $150 billion payout from the U.S. treasury or other countries. The U.S. made a separate payment of roughly $1.8 billion to cover a decades-old IOU.
When Iran signed the multinational deal to restrain its nuclear development in return for being freed from sanctions, it regained access to its own assets, which had been frozen abroad. Iran was allowed to get its money back. The deal actually was signed in 2015, after a 2013 preliminary agreement. Trump has taken the U.S. out of it.
As for the $1.8 billion: In the 1970s, Iran paid the U.S. $400 million for military equipment that was never delivered because the Iranian government was overthrown and diplomatic relations ruptured. After the nuclear deal, the U.S. and Iran announced they had settled the matter, with the U.S. agreeing to pay the $400 million principal along with about $1.3 billion in interest.
The $400 million was paid in cash and flown to Tehran on a cargo plane, which gave rise to Trump’s previous dramatic accounts of money stuffed in barrels or boxes and delivered in the dead of night. The arrangement provided for the interest to be paid later, not crammed into containers.
___
TRUMP: “The foolish Iran nuclear deal financed Iranian aggression while allowing a quick path to nuclear breakout. That is what it did. And by the way it expires so soon. They can have nuclear weapons.” — Toledo, Ohio, rally Thursday.
TRUMP: “It’s close to expiring. In other words, if I didn’t terminate it, it expires in a very short period of time.” — remarks at White House on Thursday.
THE FACTS: The 2015 agreement is not about to expire. It imposes limits on Iran’s nuclear development for 15 years.
___
TRUMP: “The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.” — address Wednesday.
THE FACTS: That accusation comes without corroboration. The administration has offered no information supporting the contention that in regaining access to $150 billion of its assets that had been frozen abroad, Iran steered a chunk of that money to the missiles that hit the U.S. bases in Iraq.
“I doubt anyone has the insight into Iran’s budgetary mechanisms to say that this money was used for this purpose,” said Gerald Feierstein, a career U.S. diplomat who retired in 2016 as the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs.
“It’s a funds-are-fungible kind of argument,” he said. “I mean, if they have money, can you say that dollar went directly to buy a missile, as opposed to freeing up another dollar that went to buy a missile?”
Joseph Votel, who retired from the U.S. Army in March as the top military commander for the Middle East, said he was not aware of any specific intelligence on this question. “I don’t have anything that would particularly support that,” he said. “I’m not saying it did or it didn’t, but I don’t have details to demonstrate it one way or the other.”
As President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry said it was possible Iran would use some of the money being returned to it for malign activities. Whether it did in this case has not been established.
Iran has many sources of revenue, despite the severe pinch of sanctions. Oil sales to China and other countries dominate its exports. It also sells chemicals, plastics, fruits and more abroad.
Impeachment
TRUMP, on the House Intelligence Committee chairman: “He’s a corrupt politician, Adam Schiff. He’s corrupt. … He gave a sentence that he made up. He made it up, and it was not — it was not what was said in the conversation. That’s why I released the transcript, got approval from Ukraine.” — remarks Thursday.
TRUMP, referring to Pelosi: “Ask Crazy Nancy why she allowed Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff to totally make up my conversation with the Ukrainian President & read his false words to Congress and the world, as though I said it? He got caught!” — tweet Sunday.
THE FACTS: Trump is making up the timeline and exaggerating the episode.
Schiff, D-Calif., delivered what he called a parody of Trump’s remarks in the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s leader.
Schiff did so after the White House released a rough transcript of the call, not before, as Trump states. So people who read the official account knew Schiff was riffing from it, not quoting from it.
Though Trump took umbrage at having words put in his mouth by Schiff, the president routinely invents dialogue. It’s a staple of his rhetoric when he mocks political rivals. He did it Thursday night at a rally, making up a conversation he pretended he had — with Schiff.
___
TRUMP: “The President of Ukraine said I did absolutely nothing wrong, he said I had no pressure whatsoever. He didn’t even know what we were talking about.” — interview Friday with Fox News.
THE FACTS: That’s not an accurate representation.
While Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy initially said there was no discussion of a quid pro quo, he told Time last month that Trump should not have blocked military aid to Ukraine. Zelenskiy also criticized Trump for casting the country as corrupt, saying it sends a concerning message to international allies.
On that call discussing military aid, Trump asked Zelenskiy to investigate Trump’s political rivals in the U.S.
“Look I never talked to the president from the position of a quid pro quo,” Zelenskiy said. “But you have to understand. We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us. I think that’s just about fairness.”
It’s true that in early October, Zelenskiy had told reporters “there was no pressure or blackmail from the U.S.” But he did not state Trump had done “nothing” wrong.
In any event, Zelenskiy knew months before the call that much-needed U.S. military support might depend on whether he was willing to help Trump by investigating Democrats.
___
TRUMP, explaining why he initially held up military aid to Ukraine: “Why is it that the United States pays? And it affects Europe far more than it affects the United States. So why isn’t it that France, Germany, and all of those countries in Europe that are so strongly affected, why aren’t they paying?” — remarks Tuesday with Greece’s prime minister.
THE FACTS: He’s incorrect that European countries weren’t putting up aid for Ukraine.
European Union institutions have provided far more development assistance than the $204 million from Washington. Specific EU members, Japan and Canada also contribute significantly.
Since 2014, the EU and European financial institutions have mobilized more than $16 billion to help Ukraine’s economy, counter corruption, build institutions and strengthen its sovereignty against further incursions by Russia after its annexation of Crimea.
The U.S. is a heavy source of military assistance. But NATO also contributes a variety of military-assistance programs and trust funds for Ukraine. In most such cases, the programs are modest and NATO countries other than the U.S. take the lead.
Peace Prize
TRUMP: “I’m going to tell you about the Nobel Peace Prize, I will tell you about that. I made a deal, I saved the country and I just heard that the head of that country is now getting the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the country. I said, what, did I have something to do with it? Yeah but, you know, that is the way it is. ” Toledo rally.
THE FACTS: Trump did not save Ethiopia.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the prize in October after he fully accepted a peace deal ending a 20-year border war with neighboring Eritrea that saw some 80,000 people killed. Trump had no known involvement in the peace deal.
The prize also recognized Abiy, Africa’s youngest leader, for sweeping changes in Ethiopian society as he released tens of thousands of prisoners, welcomed home once-banned opposition groups, expanded freedom of expression and acknowledged his country’s past abuses.
Trump did agree to a request from Egypt’s president to mediate a dispute among Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over a proposed dam on the Nile River. That mediation continues.
Trump is known to express pique when he is not recognized in the manner he thinks is deserved. He mocked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg when Time magazine named her person of the year last month.
Jobs
TRUMP: “America lost 60,000 factories under the previous administration, 60,000. You wouldn’t believe that’s possible but I know it’s true. … No, it’s true. No, it’s true. … It’s 60,000 closed, gone. They are all coming back. They are all coming back.” — Toledo rally.
THE FACTS: It’s not true.
The U.S. has indeed lost roughly 60,000 factories but that’s since 2001, the start of President George W. Bush’s administration. It didn’t happen “under the previous administration.” And they’re not “all coming back.”
Construction spending on factories has declined since a recent peak in 2015 during Obama’s presidency. Factories cut 12,000 jobs in December, according to the jobs report Friday. Growth in manufacturing jobs decelerated sharply in 2019, to 46,000, down from 264,000 added jobs in 2018.
Veterans
TRUMP on the Veterans Administration: “For 44 years they try to get accountability. … I said, you know … I have an idea, such a great idea. You are going to go out private, you’re going to pick up a doctor, you are going to get yourself fixed up, we’re going to pay the bill, right? And you know what happened? And I said how — how brilliant is that? They say sir, we’ve been working on that for 48 years but we’ve never been able to get it approved. So I was very, very disillusioned but you know what I’m good at, getting things approved and we got it approved.” — to cheers at Toledo rally.
THE FACTS: He did not think up the idea and get it approved. Obama got it approved. Obama signed into law the Choice program that lets veterans go to a private doctor at public expense under some circumstances. Trump routinely ignores that and says presidents have tried to get it done for 44 years. He only expanded the program.
As for accountability, Trump claims that his law means bad VA employees are swiftly fired. But a report released in October by the VA inspector general found “significant deficiencies” in the accountability office established by the law, such as poor leadership, shoddy training of investigators and a failure to push out underperforming senior leaders.
Also at the rally, Trump claimed that “44 years” of failure preceded his success in getting the “right to try” initiative into law. That initiative, aimed at giving terminally ill patients more access to unapproved drugs, only goes back five or so years.
Cancer
TRUMP: “U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: The news came from the American Cancer Society, not the administration, and it does not reflect Trump’s record.
The group said the death rate from cancer has declined nearly 30% since 1991 and took its sharpest one-year drop in 2017. But the data did not reflect cancer-research spending under the Trump administration.
Trump proposed cutting spending at the National Institutes of Health but Congress ignored the effort and raised spending in a bill the president signed. That is not reflected in the cancer society report.
Environment
TRUMP: “We have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water on earth, and for our country the air is right now cleaner than it’s been in 40 years.” — remarks Thursday.
THE FACTS: No, air quality has worsened under the Trump administration. And it’s a stretch to say the U.S. is among the countries with the cleanest air. Dozens of nations have less smoggy air. Trump made the remarks as he proposed the latest enforcement rollbacks for the bedrock environmental acts credited with beginning the clean-up of U.S. air and water a half-century ago.
As to water quality, one measure, Yale University’s global Environmental Performance Index, finds the U.S. tied with nine other countries as having the cleanest drinking water.
But after decades of improvement, progress in air quality has stalled.
There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America in 2017 and 2018 than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when the U.S had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980, according to an AP analysis of EPA data.
A recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that deadly air particle pollution increased 5.5% in the United States between 2016 and 2018 after declining by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016.
“The increase was associated with 9,700 premature deaths in 2018,” the study by Karen Clay and Nicholas Muller said. “At conventional valuations, these deaths represent damages of $89 billion.”
The Obama administration set records for the fewest air-polluted days.
Trump’s proposal would greatly cut back on the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement that federal agencies consider whether a big construction project would hurt the environment before they approve the project. Other Trump proposals would roll back restrictions on major sources of air and water pollution, including coal-fired power plants and autos.”
Islamic State Group
TRUMP: “Three months ago, after destroying 100% of ISIS and its territorial caliphate …” — address Wednesday on Iran’s missile strike on two Iraqi bases.
THE FACTS: His claim of a 100% defeat is misleading as the Islamic State group still poses a threat.
IS was defeated in Iraq in 2017, then lost the last of its land holdings in Syria in March, marking the end of the extremists’ self-declared caliphate. Still, extremist sleeper cells have continued to launch attacks in Iraq and Syria and are believed to be responsible for targeted killings against local officials and members of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
U.N. experts have warned that IS leaders are seeking a resurgence. This past week, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the fight against the group was continuing in Syria.
Energy
TRUMP: “We are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil.” — address Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Trump’s declaration of energy independence is premature. The U.S. still needs plenty of oil from the Mideast.
The volume of U.S. oil imports from the Persian Gulf alone — 23 million barrels in October – would not be easy to make up elsewhere, at least not without major changes in U.S. demand or production.
Technological advances like fracking and horizontal drilling have allowed the U.S. to greatly increase production, but demand remains brisk and the country still imports millions of barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iraq and other countries. Moreover, much of what the U.S. produces is hard for domestic refiners to convert to practical use. So the U.S. exports that production and imports oil that is more suitable for American refineries to handle.
On energy more broadly, the U.S. is indeed close to parity on how much energy it produces and how much it consumes. In some months, it produces more than it consumes. But it has not achieved self-sufficiency. In the first nine months of last year, it imported about as much energy as it exported.
Military
TRUMP: “The American military has been completely rebuilt under my administration, at a cost of $2.5 trillion.” — address Wednesday.
THE FACTS: That’s an exaggeration.
It’s true that his administration has accelerated a sharp buildup in defense spending, including a respite from what the U.S. military considered to be crippling spending limits under budget sequestration.
But a number of new Pentagon weapons programs, such as the F-35 fighter jet, were started years before the Trump administration. And it will take years for freshly ordered tanks, planes and other weapons to be built, delivered and put to use.
The Air Force’s Minuteman 3 missiles, a key part of the U.S. nuclear force, for instance, have been operating since the early 1970s and the modernization was begun under the Obama administration. They are due to be replaced with a new version, but not until later this decade.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Donald Trump and the power of incumbency
—Congress confronts its powerlessness on Iran
—The wealthiest members of Congress—and how they made their millions
—USPS could privatize as early as next year
—2020 Crystal Ball: Predictions for the economy, politics, technology, and more
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-01-13--What Casper’s IPO Prospectus Tells Us About Its Business

This article originally ran in Term Sheet, Fortune’s newsletter about deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress startup, has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange and list its shares under the symbol “CSPR.” While I thoroughly enjoyed all the jokes such as “Casper isn’t spooked by IPO woes” and “Could investors ghost the Casper IPO,” what I took away is that marketing really is a core component of the business.
The company has spent $423 million in marketing since 2016. For every $1 it spent on marketing, it brought in $3 in revenue. More than 73% of its gross profit last year went to sales and marketing costs.
Casper has dominated marketing. (The word is mentioned 170 times in its prospectus.) It has spent a significant amount of capital on promotions such as napmobiles, a cruise around Manhattan, and a hotline that helped people fall asleep. I once even attended an extravagant, formal Casper-sponsored dinner … for famous dogs.
In 2017, Casper CEO Philip Krim told me the company’s tried to take a non-traditional approach to marketing. “The best thing we can do is have people see one of our ads and think, ‘Oh, that’s fun and tongue-in-cheek,” he said.
But what the prospectus tells us is that Casper’s marketing strategy is somewhat of a double-edged sword. The company relies heavily on influencer marketing to spread the word about its mattresses. Under the risk factors section of its S-1, Casper notes that “the use of social media and influencers may materially and adversely affect our reputation or subject us to fines or other penalties.”
In other words, Casper has used people with robust social media followings to test and market its mattresses, but many of the influencers are acting independently. Casper does not regularly monitor what the influencers post, and if the company was to be held responsible for the content of those posts, they “could be forced to alter our practices, which could have material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”
Some other notes from the IPO prospectus:
— Casper is not yet profitable. It generated $358 million in 2018 revenues, and posted $92 million in losses over the same period.
— It generated $312 million in revenue in the first 9 months of 2019. (That’s below its previously projected revenue goal of $556 million for 2019.)
— Casper slowed its operating cash consumption in 2019 to $29.7 million in the first three quarters of the year, compared to $44.9 million over the same period of the previous year.
In the private markets, Casper raised a total of nearly $340 million in funding from investors including IVP, Lerer Hippeau, Target and New Enterprise Associates. It was last valued at $1.1 billion.
Casper’s biggest challenge is to create a suite of sleep products that keep customers coming back. Right now, only 16% of Casper’s customers who have bought a product through the company’s website or stores have returned to purchase another product. I was speaking with some friends yesterday who recently bought a Casper mattress, and they said, “This is going to last us years before we go back to buy another one.”
Although it’s describing itself as “the pioneer of the sleep economy,” the truth is that a lot of people still see Casper as primarily a mattress company. They don’t immediately think about Casper’s glow light, weighted blanket, or nightstand, which are part of its suite of products. Ironically enough, there’s always more marketing to do.
NOT REALLY AWAY: After Steph Korey came under fire for her management style in an article published by The Verge, she apologized and stepped aside. Now, a month later, The New York Times reports that she isn’t going anywhere after all.
Korey will return to her role, this time as co-CEO alongside Stuart Haselden, who had been recruited from Lululemon.
The members of Away’s board reportedly say they feel as if they fell victim to management by Twitter mob, as the Times puts it. Away is disputing The Verge‘s reporting and has brought on the lawyer Elizabeth M. Locke—you may remember her from the defamation case against Rolling Stone for a story about a supposed gang rape at the University of Virginia, which she won. It’s not clear whether Away plans to sue.
“Frankly, we let some inaccurate reporting influence the timeline of a transition plan that we had,” Korey told The New York Times. “All of us said, ‘It’s not right.’”
Josh Wolfe, co-founder of venture capital firm Lux Capital, spoke out on Twitter about the situation. He said this may be the start of “pushback to unfair backlash,” adding, “Many boards and CEOs will have to balance carefully the distinction between acting swiftly and diligently because the FACTS say so versus acting swiftly because an amplified MOB says so…”
Read more.
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Allbirds, a San Francisco-based maker of everyday wool shoes, is raising up to $75 million in Series D funding, according to Fast Company. The round is being led by Baillie Gifford and Fidelity. Read more.
- Bigfoot Biomedical, a Milpitas, Calif.-based developer of automated insulin delivery systems for people with Type 1 Diabetes, raised $45 million in Series C funding. Abbott led the round, and was joined by investors including Quadrant Capital Advisors, Senvest Capital, Janus Henderson, and Cormorant Asset Management.
- ToursByLocals, a Canada-based online marketplace for private tours, raised $33 million in funding, from Tritium Partners.
- Lightnet, a Bangkok-based blockchain remittance company, raised $31.2 million in Series A funding. Investors include UOB Venture Management, Seven Bank, Uni-President Asset Holdings, HashKey Capital, Hopeshine Ventures, Signum Capital, Du Capital and Hanwha Investment and Securities.
- DrChrono Inc, a Sunnyvale, Cali.-based developer of a health record platform for medical practices, raised $20 million in funding, from ORIX Growth Capital.
- Jolt, a London-based edtech offering a flexible business school alternative, raised $14.1 million in funding. Balderton Capital led the round.
- Sensome, a Paris-based manufacturer of connected medical devices, raised $9 million in funding from Kurma Partners, Idinvest Partners, BNP Paribas Développement, Paris-Saclay Seed Fund, and Asahi Intecc Co.
PRIVATE EQUITY DEALS
- Arcapita acquired a controlling interest in Waste Harmonics, a Victor, N.Y.-based provider of outsourced waste management consolidation services. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Cobepa S.A. made an investment in Precision Orthopedics, a Maryland-based provider of integrated orthopedic surgical care services. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
IPOs
- Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state oil giant, raised an additional $3.8 billion from exercising its greenshoe option for a total raise of $29.4 billion from its IPO. Read more.
- Schrodinger Inc., a New York-based predictive molecule-discovery software platform maker for biopharmaceuticals, filed for an $100 million IPO. The firm posted revenue of $66.7 million and loss of $28.4 million in 2018. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and David E. Shaw back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “SDGR.” “Read more.”
- Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Group, one of Saudi Arabia’s largest private healthcare operators, is ramping up for an IPO next month, Bloomberg reports citing sources. Read more.
EXITS
- WindRose Health Investors sold Trust Healthcare Consulting Services, a Springfield, Mo.-based provider of outsourced coding and health information management consulting services, to The Carlyle Group and Cannae Holdings. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- KPS Capital Partners agreed to purchase the IKG business, a Channelview, Texas-based manufacturer of steel and aluminum bar grating products, from Harsco Corporation (“Harsco”, NYSE: HSC) for $85 million.
PEOPLE
- Canaan Partners promoted Colleen Cuffaro and Byron Ling to partner, and Hootan Rashidifard to principal.
- Venrock promoted Racquel Bracken and Ethan Batraski to partner and named Todd Graham as a vice president.
- Levine Leichtman Capital Partners named Andrew Schwartz as a partner.
IF YOU LIKE THIS EMAIL...
Share today’s Term Sheet with a friend.
Did someone share this with you? Sign up here. For previous editions, click here.
For even more, check out Data Sheet, Fortune's daily newsletter on the latest in tech news. Sign up here.


fortune--2020-01-14--Exclusive: Precision Health Firm Color Just Scored a $75 Million Funding Round

Facebook Criticized For Deleting Posts Supporting Iranian General Killed By U.S .

This is the web version of Brainstorm Health Daily, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top health care news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Color (the health tech and precision genomics firm), is ramping up its ambitions. And it’s getting a boost from a $75 million funding round led by T. Rowe Funds and Viking Global Investors, the company tells Fortune.
“This raise is driven by a big step up in our business (more than a seven-times contract growth) with improved profitability, so we are focusing on scaling what is now a sustainable business and continuing to develop our platform,” Color CEO Othman Laraki tells Fortune in an interview.
“This strategy is what played out in 2019—focusing on using genetics not just for selling tests for tests’ sake,” he continued.
Color has been trying to differentiate itself from other digital health firms, and particularly those with a focus on the genetic testing space, by pointing out how much value it places on genetic counselors. The company has won grants in a collaboration with the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) “All of Us” initiative, which seeks to provide de-identified genetic and health data, and software solutions, from one million people to the federal government. And linking people with counselors is a key part of the strategy.
Color declined to comment on the record about the valuation associated with the $75 million funding round. (It was also a bit coy about whether or not there are IPO plans in the near future, alas.)
The firm does has a relationship with Apple (some employees at the tech giant can receive free genetic tests).
Much of this coincides with with ongoing JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week. Stay tuned.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Livongo, Dexcom partner up on a major diabetes initiative. Consolidation is the name of the game in health care. And digital health is no exception. Case in point: Livongo (a diabetes-and-chronic-condition focused firm we've covered many a time) and Dexcom (a more long-standing med tech-focused firm we've covered many a time) are teaming up. The collaboration will link Dexcom's continuous glucose monitors for diabetes with Livongo's platform for patients. Basically, this is adding more ammunition to Livongo's underlying health data platform by giving it, well, more health data.
INDICATIONS
AbbVie gets a boost for its followup to the world's most lucrative drug. AbbVie is likely cheering results from a new study that bodes well for its historically best-selling drug. With generic competition for Humira, a $20 billion per year phenom, expected just around the corner in 2023, AbbVie wants to pump up its portfolio (and particularly in the inflammatory disease space that Humira has dominated for nearly two decades). Well, AbbVie's hopeful Humira successor Skyrizi whooped a competitor from Swiss drug giant Novartis, according to the company. (FiercePharma)
THE BIG PICTURE
The Affordable Care Act takes political center stage, again—but with a twist. The debate over U.S. health care policy continues to roll on in increasingly confusing ways. Here's a simplified version of what's happening: The Trump administration and House Republicans are suing to repeal the entirety of the law; Democratic attorneys-general are asking the Supreme Court to immediately take up this disputed case; and the administration has asked for the Supreme Court to not take up the case until after the 2020 election (although it is still pushing for repeal of the entire law). Here's a more detailed explainer on what's going on.
REQUIRED READING
WeWork Is Hitting the Brakes in New York and London, by Bloomberg
California Labor Law Pushes Uber to Change Fare Structure and App Features, by Lizette Chapman
7 Companies Founded in the Last 10 Years That You Now Can't Live Without, by McKenna Moore and Ross Kohan
Would You Share Your Salary With a Friend? Should You? by Kristen Bellstrom
Sign up for other Fortune newsletters.


fortune--2020-01-14--JPMorgan Trading Surge Helps Fuel Most Profitable Year Ever

JPMorgan Chase & Co. just posted the best year for any U.S. bank in history.
Fueled by a rebound in trading, especially in fixed income, the company said profit jumped 21% in the fourth quarter, pushing annual earnings to a record $36.4 billion. The announcement led off this week’s round of industry profit reports on a high note, though analysts are predicting results for 2020 will come back down to earth.
Fourth-quarter fixed-income trading revenue came in $1 billion higher than analysts predicted as the bank benefited from an active final few weeks of the year and gains in securitized products and rates. It marked a stark comeback from last year’s fourth quarter, when wild market swings kept clients on the sidelines and JPMorgan’s bond-trading unit posting its lowest revenue since the financial crisis.
“They are really hitting it out of the park,” said Alison Williams, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “The other key positive, which looks more sustainable, is that interest income looks like it’s stabilizing. That was a big worry last year.”
Shares of the company, which have surged 38% in the past 12 months, advanced 1.7% to $139.56 at 9:43 a.m. in New York.
Still, after the best year for bank stocks in more than two decades, investors are starting to question how much longer the era of record profits can go on. Analysts at UBS Group AG last week cut their outlook on shares of JPMorgan to neutral, citing a “high bar for further outperformance.”
Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Piepszak said the record results don’t necessarily mean the bank has reached a peak. Growth can continue thanks to initiatives including a national branch expansion, plans to boost market share in the fast-growing credit-card business, a push into China and the company’s strategy of hiring investment bankers in geographies and sectors where the bank is “under-penetrated.”
“We certainly don’t think this is as good as it can be,” Piepszak said on a conference call with journalists. “We continue to see opportunities across the franchise.”
JPMorgan, which plans to host an investor day next month, didn’t provide any annual targets for 2020. But the company said it expects net interest income to fall to around $14 billion in the first quarter. It also said expenses would rise to roughly $17 billion in the three months through March. That would be the highest in more than 6 years.
The biggest U.S. bank generated $4.95 billion in trading revenue in the quarter, a 56% increase that was better than analysts expected. That marked the best fourth quarter for the firm’s trading desks in more than a decade.
Last year, JPMorgan elevated bond veteran Troy Rohrbaugh to head of global markets, where he oversees all of fixed-income and equity trading. He’s been critical in decisions to invest in electronic and mobile trading improvements across asset classes.
“While we face a continued high level of complex geopolitical issues, global growth stabilized, albeit at a lower level, and resolution of some trade issues helped support client and market activity towards the end of the year,” Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said in a statement.
In December, Piepszak told investors to expect better performance for the last three months of 2019, thanks to gains in the fixed-income business. The bank’s overall profit in 2019 topped the previous industry record, set by the company in 2018.
It was the best year for the corporate and investment bank since at least 2011, when the bank started reporting under its current structure.
Other Highlights:
Fourth-quarter net income rose to $8.52 billion, or $2.57 a share, from $7.07 billion, or $1.98, a year earlier. That beat the $2.36 average estimate of 23 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
The firm’s consumer-banking unit posted a 3% increase in revenue as investments to open up branches in new states started to yield returns.
Net charge-offs surged 21% to $1.49 billion from $1.24 billion a year earlier.
The bank generated $14.2 billion of net interest income, bringing the full-year metric to $57.2 billion, slightly below the bank’s guidance of $57.5 billion.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Forget policymakers. Greta Thunberg and her allies are targeting CEOs
—Investors see a 2020 recession coming—but think they’ll make money
—The Carlos Ghosn affair: A look inside the motivations of a fugitive CEO
—What $1,000 in 10 top stocks a decade ago would be worth today—Laws meant to close down tax havens and shut loopholes could have opposite effect
Subscribe to Fortune’s forthcoming Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-01-14--Fortune Gets a Bold Redesign, With User Experience in Mind

This is the web version of Business x Design, a newsletter on the power of design. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
This space is usually reserved for discussion on how businesses use design. But this time Fortune has some design news of its own.
This week we will launch a new website, mobile app, and video hub. We’ll also debut a bold redesign of Fortune’s print magazine, starting with the February issue.
The new website is the culmination of months of effort by Fortune’s digital team. We think you’ll find it quicker, cleaner, and easier to read and navigate.
The app, available for iOS and Android, will offer real-time feeds of Fortune articles, analysis, and videos—from print and digital alike—in a far more dynamic format than the magazine-only app that we’ve offered to date.
The video hub will bring you hundreds of hours of footage, including exclusive interviews with business leaders as well as access to thought-provoking sessions from our extensive conference portfolio (including, it must be said, Fortune Brainstorm Design).
As for the magazine, we’ll feature more stories in each issue and sport a completely new look, all published on premium paper stock.
In this newsletter, we often discuss user experience. Fortune’s aim with these changes is to deliver a dramatic improvement across the board. What won’t change: Our commitment to thorough reporting, sharp writing, thoughtful commentary, and exclusive access to the world’s leading executives, investors, and experts.
We hope you’ll like the new Fortune. But we also know good design combines smart prototyping with empathetic responses to user feedback. So send us yours. What do you like? What do you hate? What else can we do to make Fortune more valuable to you?
Before I go: In last week’s newsletter, I misstated the dates for our Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore. The correct dates are March 25 and 26. Check out the updated speaker list and register here.
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
@ClayChandler
Clay.Chandler@Fortune.com
VISION, EMPATHY, SCALE
This edition of Business x Design was curated by Margaret Rhodes.
Courtesy of Casper
"Sleep Economy." Casper, the mattress startup synonymous with the VC-fueled bed-in-a-box phenomenon, has filed paperwork to go public. The company leads its pitch by declaring itself a “pioneer of the Sleep Economy,” and teases new wares, from tracking devices to sleep supplements to “products that promote the ideal ambience for sleep.” It’s a grandiose claim for a company that sells mattresses and pillows. Of course, Casper didn’t invent this kind of rhetoric. WeWork tried very hard to sell itself as a tech company, rather than a coworking space; Away positions itself as a travel brand, not just a line of suitcases. The question now is whether investors will keep buying it. [New York]
Seeing in 3-D. A new development in machine learning enables neural networks to better detect three-dimensional shapes. Previously, this was a weak point in computer vision: Machine-learning models that could understand two-dimensional patterns would fumble over irregular geometries. Given that the physical world is made of irregular and asymmetrical geometries, this new algorithm—rooted in physics, and coming out of the University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm AI Research—signals promise for many real-world applications of AI, from autonomous vehicles to drones to geographic climate data simulations. [Quanta]
Best in show. This week, the design industry received notable recognition from the science and tech community: The Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education will go to David Kelley, founder of design consultancy IDEO and Stanford University’s d.school. Kelley coined the phrase “design thinking,” or the idea that design goes beyond the physical, and that it has the power to change both business and daily life. And then he showed the world how to practice it. As he told Fast Company, back in 2009: “I really do believe I was put on the planet to help people have creative confidence.” [National Academy of Engineering]
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
High-Tech Fitness Offerings Are the Newest Luxury Hotel Must-Have by Chadner Navarro
Forget Policymakers. Greta Thunberg and Her Allies are Targeting CEOs Now by Christiaan Hetzner
Every Company is a Digital Company by Alan Murray and Katherine Dunn
When it Comes to Streaming Media, Quibi Made the Most of CES by Chris Morris
‘They Must Scale Up:’ Greenpeace Ranks China’s Tech Giants on Renewable Energy by Naomi Xu Elegant
DISCUSSION
Netflix, once an unlikely contender at awards shows, just swept up 24 Oscar nominations—more than any other studio. That Netflix should have a strong presence during awards season is no surprise; the streaming platform has invested heavily in original movies, attracting high-profile directors like Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach.
Netflix also has a unique ability to promote those directors. Any studio can do this; marketing departments have always given select movies a push. But Netflix doesn’t just pay for billboards—its recommendation model means that its platform is both the ad campaign and the movie theater. And now that Netflix is gaining critical mass, that design influences not only what gets made, but who sees it. In a recent roundtable hosted by The Hollywood Reporter, Lulu Wang, the up-and-coming director behind The Farewell, describes the implications of the recommendation model from the point of a creator:
“One thing we sometimes don’t talk about with these bigger streaming platforms is that it’s a different business model. They’re building their brand, and when you are an established filmmaker, you are a brand that they want to partner with to help build their own brand. But with newer filmmakers, newer voices, you don’t have a brand.”
And then there’s the user experience. In an AIGA Eye on Design article aptly titled, “Netflix’s UX Design is Keeping Us Up at Night,” journalist Madeleine Morley unpacks the various design mechanisms Netflix uses to keep you locked into watching whatever it plays next. Besides playing host to a ton of content, the site skips opening credits, quickly gliding from one episode to the next, and from one show to another algorithmically recommended movie. As Morley puts it:
“ In this new era of television...technology has given way to an artful new way of storytelling, but also the inability to look away from it. Automatic play has stripped away the moment of cognitive pause that we all need to make a reasonable decision. Now, nothing breaks us from total immersion.”
If you consider both points—that Netflix is putting its weight behind certain shows, and then leveraging design and basic psychology to make it harder to stop watching said shows—it casts a different light on the current boom in content. We think we can watch whatever we want, but there's still a studio—and now an algorithm—playing into those choices.


fortune--2020-01-14--Facebook Criticized For Deleting Posts Supporting Iranian General Killed By U.S.

Fortune Gets a Bold Redesign , With User Experience in Mind

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’s in favor of free speech. But after the Trump administration imposed new sanctions against Iran last Friday, his company has been removing posts on Instagram that support Iranian Major Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. missile strike on January 3.
Facebook’s policing of pro-Soleimani posts has led critics to question Facebook’s interpretation of U.S. sanctions law. The law bars U.S. companies from providing “material support” to organizations on the sanctions list, which can mean tasks such as providing communications equipment, moving money or providing lodging.
The guidelines outlined on the State Department website do not specifically mention banning speech.
In April, after the U.S. labeled the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization, Instagram shuttered Soleimani’s personal account. Experts say that closing the account fulfilled Instagram’s legal obligations and that deleting posts that support him isn’t required.
“U.S. sanctions laws do not, in my judgment, require Facebook to take down posts supportive of Soleimani,” says Rodney Smolla, a free speech scholar and dean at Widener University’s Delaware Law School in Wilmington, Delaware. “If Facebook’s interpretation of the sanctions laws were correct, the laws would be in grave tension with First Amendment free speech principles.”
A Facebook spokesperson defended the company’s handling of the pro-Soleimani posts. “We review content against our policies and our obligations to U.S. sanctions laws, and specifically those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the IRGC and its leadership as a terrorist organization,” she says.
Internally, Facebook and Instagram define support “as content that encourages the actions of sanctioned parties and individuals and/or seeks to help further the actions of sanctioned parties and individuals.”
Last week, trade group International Federation of Journalists sent a letter to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri after several Iranian journalists said Instagram had silenced their reporting in the days after Soleimani was killed by removing posts with information about him. They called Instagram’s actions “unprecedented in the history of social networks” and “against global standard principles including freedom of speech and media,” according to a news release.
Facebook’s policy is in contrast with rival Twitter, which said that it welcomed free expression, as long as users don’t violate Twitter’s content rules. A Google representative declined to comment.
Other technology companies have vacillated in how they interpret their legal requirements. Over the weekend, GoFundMe removed and then reinstated two fundraisers for the Canadian victims of the Ukrainian plane that Iran shot down shortly after takeoff on January 7.
Also, Apple removed some apps tied to Iran in 2017. The following year, Slack deactivated some accounts with links to Iran.
Smolla says that social networks are free to remove posts that violate their internal rules. However, he argued that Facebook shouldn’t use sanctions as its justification.
“Facebook’s actions do not serve the American or international interests in encouraging dialogue and discourse,” Smolla says. “Our First Amendment is grounded in the faith that rational discussion, over the long haul, will tend to dissipate violence, not encourage it. Facebook’s actions are likely to cause more harm than good.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Greenpeace ranks China’s tech giants on renewable energy
—Sex tech steals the spotlight at CES
—Why there are so many scooters in Los Angeles
—What a $1,000 investment in 10 top stocks a decade ago would be worth today
—Best of CES 2020? Tech sites’ opinions differ wildly
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-01-14--Privatized Water Is Hurting the Poor and Thirsty

This is the web version of raceAhead, Fortune’s daily newsletter on race, culture, and inclusive leadership. To get it delivered daily to your inbox, sign up here.
Before starting at Fortune, I studied and reported on, broadly speaking, international affairs.
While reporting from the UN, which I covered for a few years, one thing I’d hear often was the reiteration that water is a basic human right. It was only later I learned how hard advocates had to work to make sure that guaranteed access to clean water (and sanitation) became a global priority. In 2010, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution enshrining clean water and sanitation as fundamental rights. The Human Rights Council soon followed suit. Clean water is, in fact, sustainable development goal (SDG) number six, part of the very set of goals that corporations are increasingly using to benchmark their own sustainability work.
Considering water is necessary for survival, ensuring access to water should be a given, right?
Well, as with many other essential rights, there’s still a lot of work to do. In 2017, 785 million people could not access water within a 30-minute trip, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Around two billion people had no option but to draw from contaminated water sources.
And incredibly, in lots of emerging economies, the urban poor have unreliable service from public water sources—but live next to communities with fully functioning water and sanitation infrastructures. Just a few meters away, they’re still off the grid. And private water purveyors are almost always more expensive than public solutions. (It’s worth noting that SDG six also specifies the importance of affordable water.)
All indications suggest water insecurity is going to get worse. Thanks to climate change, population growth, and a number of other factors, clean water is on track to become even more scarce: By 2025, says the UN, half of the global population will live in water-stressed areas.
As the situation grows more dire, the New York Times has a story, in the starkest terms, on how “business” interventions are making things worse, and at scale.
Countries—largely in South Asia, the Middle East, South America, and sub-Saharan Africa—have turned to privately-owned water tankers in an effort to fill the gap, instead of investing in long-term and systemic solutions.
The Times describes it as “another phase” in the long-developing move towards water privatization. It’s a must-read.
In parts of Nepal, the reliance on such tankers has opened the door for some ugly dealings, a potential harbinger of things to come elsewhere. “Greedy, uncompromising and fearful of being knocked from their perch, some tanker operators even conspire among themselves to fortify the conditions that contributed to their emergence in the first place. Locals tell tales of frequent underhand deal making, pipeline sabotage, and egregious environmental destruction,” writes the Times’s Peter Schwartzstein.
In some cases, the water supply is of “poor quality,” and at prices around 10 times that of “government-supplied pipeline water.” It’s a telling tale of how “tanker shenanigans” are actually worsening the water shortage conditions, usually taking advantage of the most desperate and underserved.
Meanwhile, investments in water aren’t translating into a guaranteed right to water for many populations. Like other SDGs, goal six will require a doubling of efforts to be accomplished in time: In May 2019, a report of the UN Secretary-General noted that most countries were “unlikely to reach full implementation of integrated water resources management by 2030.”
And the failure to address the issue is costing businesses money, too. But, ahead of 2030, here, here, and here are resources for companies looking to be smarter about tackling the looming water crisis.
Tamara El-Waylly
tamara.elwaylly@fortune.com
Ellen McGirt curated and wrote the blurbs in this edition of raceAhead.
On Point
Some good Oscar news While there is still a lot to process from the Oscar announcements yesterday, we wanted to flag three important nominations to celebrate. One is St. Louis Superman, a documentary short from MTV Documentary Films that follows the life of Ferguson activist and battle rapper Bruce Franks Jr. Franks won a seat in Missouri’s House of Representatives and served two terms. The second is Hair Love, the utterly wonderful short animated film from former NFL’er-turned-filmmaker Matthew Cherry, which was kickstarted into a pick-up from Sony Pictures Animation. The five-minute film tells the story of an African-American father trying to do his daughter’s hair for the first time. Both are worth rooting for. Finally, Barack and Michelle Obama’s film production company scored an Oscar nod their first time out of the gate. What? More on that below.
CNN
If you want to stop predatory sexual behavior, start in middle school Elizabeth Miller, the director of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, has spent two decades studying the kinds of attitudes that allows gendered violence to be the norm. Her latest clinical trial, published in JAMA Pediatrics on Monday, offers a promising solution: Talk to boys, in very specific terms, about boundaries, respect, and consent, while explaining how damaging degrading actions and words can be. The program she evaluated is called Coaching Boys Into Men; middle grade students who went through the program were more likely to intervene when they observed problematic behavior as bystanders, and of those who were dating, 76% had lower odds of abusing their partner than their peers.
HuffPo and JAMA
W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert takes a giant step for women The W.N.B.A. and its players’ union have announced a tentative new agreement, which would double player salaries and provide rich maternity benefits. While it’s a big win for the athletes, the ripple effects will be felt far outside women’s basketball. “What we have here is a multidimensional pay structure as well as benefit structure,” Engelbert told the New York Times. “We’ve really gone all out here. We’re making a big bet on this league, a big bet on women, and that in professional sports, that the W.N.B.A. can lead the way.”
New York Times
BlackRock centers climate crisis in their latest manifesto to executives Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s largest fund manager, has made waves with this annual letter in the past. This year, he says, “In the near future—and sooner than most anticipate—there will be a significant reallocation of capital,” as the firm puts climate-driven sustainability issues at the center of their investment decisions. It’s a line in the sand that inspires as much skepticism as hope. “BlackRock remains waist-deep in fossil fuel investments and the world’s top backer of companies that destroy the Amazon rainforest and ignore the rights of indigenous people,” says environmental group Extinction Rebellion. BlackRock manages nearly $7 billion in assets, including big oil producers.
The Guardian
On Background
The Korean feminist you never knew you loved Alex Sujong Laughlin debuts in Zora with this bio of the artist Na Hye-sok, who challenged deeply sexist Korean society at a time of massive change—the 1919 Korean independence movement and first-wave feminism. Laughlin describes the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan during the period 1910 to 1945. “The Japanese sought to wipe out thousands of years of Korean culture by forbidding the use of the Korean language even in private homes and by forcing Koreans to assume Japanese names,” she explains. Assembly, free speech, art, and culture, were also extinguished. Na marched, organized, and was imprisoned. And then, like all great feminists do, she launched a radical magazine with a little help from some of her feminist friends. “They believed the work of liberating the Korean nation was inextricably linked with liberating women from the Confucian gender roles,” she writes.
Zora
Call to action: Help me build a guidebook for mental health in the workplace This is the plea from “sanity correspondent” Tanmoy Goswami, writing in The Correspondent. “I was a business journalist for over a decade before joining The Correspondent, so I tend to automatically snigger when I hear about companies that claim to put the welfare of their employees ahead of growth, profit, and valuation.” Okay, ouch. But go on. “[W]hat we really need is a deep, structural change in corporate culture that reimagines how and why business is done,” he says, a humane workplace that doesn’t drive people to illness and stress. What are your best ideas on how to build this?
The Correspondent
Quote
"I wonder how people starve to death
When God bless the land that lacks the harvest
The stone's equality, but they homes are poverty
And the whole world ignores the robbery"
—Nas, “Shine on”


fortune--2020-01-14--World War I Takes the Pop Culture Spotlight After Years of Being the ‘Neglected War’

If you enjoy reading novels or watching movies set during World War II, you’ve had a steady bounty of prize-winning fiction and Hollywood blockbusters to choose from.
In just the past decade, there have been books about a blind girl who takes refuge in a seaside French village and prisoners of war forced to labor in the jungles of Burma, along with movies about the blood-soaked siege of Stalingrad, the heroic rescue of Allied troops stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk, Allied troops recovering priceless stolen art, English mathematicians breaking Nazi codes, a king working through his stutter, and a prime minister guiding his nation through its darkest hour, among plenty of others.
But if World War I is your thing, pickings have been slimmer—until recently. The 100th anniversary of the conflict, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, has coincided with a handful of pop culture offerings about the Great War over the past few years. There’s Sam Mendes’s new Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated drama 1917, Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, Daniel Mason’s 2018 novel The Winter Soldier, and a just-released concept album by the English band Field Music, Making a New World. The war was also a storyline in season two of Downton Abbey in 2011, and a plot point in the 2017 Wonder Woman movie.
The centenary has brought attention to a war that occupies comparatively little space in the American popular consciousness, though its aftereffects continue to resonate. There were technological advances such as portable X-ray machines, and social changes that included women in the U.S. winning the right to vote. How European powers divvied up the Middle East after the war, establishing new countries and drawing borders without regard for political or religious history, helped foment the still precarious geopolitics of the region. Yet the Great War is largely an unfamiliar one.
British soldiers lined up in a narrow trench during World War I. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“It’s the neglected war,” says Susan Craig, an independent historian in New York who was part of a loose consortium of peers that tweeted and blogged daily updates about the war 100 years after the fact. For Americans, “It’s not as popular as the Civil War, certainly, and it’s not as popular as World War II.”
There are a few reasons why. The First World War was a distant conflict for most Americans: about 4 million U.S. troops served during the war, compared to 16 million in World War II. With a decisive victory over Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, World War II combatants came home as heroes—a status that has endured. “Everything is so fixated on that Greatest Generation narrative,” Craig says. “That narrative swamped everything else for a while.”
The rationale for the Great War was also less clear-cut than for World War II, which offered starker contrasts, and higher stakes. “The Second World War was about countries uniting to fight the tyranny of the Nazis; it seemed like the only option to save humanity,” Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who cowrote the screenplay for 1917, recently told Variety. “But with the First World War, the motivations are obscure. It was partly for profiteering, partly because empires were starting to lose their stakes abroad.”
Some of the best-known cultural depictions of the Great War came from people who experienced it: the 1929 novels All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, for example. Later, the satirical 1963 stage musical (and a subsequent film adaptation) Oh, What a Lovely War, and Rowan Atkinson’s 1980s British sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth, helped cement a popular image of World War I as a bungled conflict that ran soldiers through a meat-grinder with no strategic purpose.
“All that starts in the 1960s when there was a backlash from the left, really,” says Alan Wakefield, head of First World War and early 20th century at the Imperial War Museum in London. “People who had an anti-establishment line to toe looked back into First World War literature and picked up on the war poets, and put their own spin on this idea of lions led by donkeys, something that really fed into a narrative against the class system in the U.K.”
That was essentially the image Field Music’s David Brewis had in mind when the Imperial War Museum asked if the group would create a performance piece as part of a program exploring the aftermath of a war that he didn’t know well. “I studied it in high school in the way you see things at high school: you pay a bit of attention, you find it interesting, but you don’t think too deeply about it,” says Brewis, who visited a branch of the museum with his brother and bandmate, Peter Brewis.
From left to right: Field Music’s Peter Brewis, Andrew Lowther, David Brewis, Kevin Dosdale, and Liz Corney. After doing a commissioned project for the Imperial War Museum in London, the group has released the WWI-inspired “Making A New World.”
After that, Field Music took on the commission, and the project expanded into Making A New World as the band researched the topic and wrote songs. The album is a 19-track collection that traces post-war developments from the moment the guns fell silent on Nov. 11, 1918. There are songs about returning home, about the pioneering doctor whose work on skin grafts to treat disfigured soldiers later had applications for gender-reassignment surgery, and about how bandages intended for field dressings were rebranded as sanitary pads for women. One track, “Money Is a Memory,” notes that Germany only finished paying reparations for the war in 2010.
“We were surprised to the extent that the war shaped so much of the 20th century,” Brewis says, citing the first military use of tanks, aircraft, and chemical weapons, and the artistic and social upheavals that followed the war. “In some ways, things have changed a lot. But in some ways, we are still very much living in the world shaped by that conflict in that time.”
Some of those technological innovations figure in The Winter Soldier, Daniel Mason’s novel about a Viennese medical student who enlists and is assigned to a remote field hospital in the Carpathian mountains. Mason had intended to set the novel in 1920s Vienna until he began doing research for his protagonist’s backstory. “I realized as I wrote that there were few places that put medical training in such a dramatic context as World War I, particularly as the armies were so unprepared for the casualties that would come,” says Mason, a physician on the faculty at Stanford University, who spent 14 years working on the book amid other projects.
His unfamiliarity with World War I, especially beyond the popular image of trench warfare on the Western Front, was liberating as a storyteller. “It was as if I had stumbled across this world (particularly that in the East) that was new to me,” Mason writes in an email. “So my reading had a constant feeling of discovery, which was quite compelling—the medicine, the different cultures, the geographies, all were new.” Like Brewis, Mason was struck by parallels between World War I and the present, particularly in how the world changed in the 14 years he spent working on the novel. At the risk of oversimplifying, he says, “Now the lessons of the war seem even more pressing: it is an example of how diverse, multiethnic, culturally rich civilizations living in relative peace and prosperity can suddenly and precipitously fragment into nationalism and bloodshed.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Disney is ready to roll out new Star Wars sagas as one story ends
—With Joker laughing it up at the Oscar, Sony teases Jared Leto’s Morbius
—Indie movies and diverse performers mostly absent from 2020 Oscar noms
—Picard promises less tech, more humanity with “hope the dominant emotion,” according to Patrick Stewart
—When it comes to streaming media, Quibi made the most of CES
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-01-14--Why Microsoft Is Leaning Into E3—and Sony Is Bowing Out—Amid ‘Marketing Hype War’

When Sony announced it would not be attending E3 2019, it surprised a lot of people, but the general assumption was it would return in 2020 as the launch of the PlayStation 5 neared. That’s not going to the case.
Sony, for the second year in a row, will skip the annual video game trade show, saying it did not feel “the vision of E3 2020 is the right venue for what we are focused on this year.” That could present an opportunity for Microsoft—and the company wasted no time to capitalize on it.
“Our team is hard at work on E3, we look forward to sharing with all who love to play what’s ahead for us,” said Xbox chief Phil Spencer on Twitter. “Our artform has consistently been propelled by the cross-section of creativity and technical progress. 2020 is a milestone year in that journey for Team Xbox.”
After dominating sales charts with the PlayStation 4, Sony is hoping for a repeat performance with the PlayStation 5, which is scheduled to launch later this year. The company has taken a rather unusual approach in showcasing the console’s features so far, though, spilling technical details to certain media outlets, but eschewing major showcases. (At CES, for example, it only showed off the “new” logo for the machine – which was the same as the PS4, only with a 5.) Many expect Sony to hold its own media event in the coming months, where it will fully unveil the device.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is courting gamers where they congregate. It announced details of its next generation system, then called Project Scarlett, at E3 last year. It unveiled the design of that console in December at the Game Awards, which shattered viewership record with over 45 million livestreams (a 73% jump from 2018). And it will presumably be the only major console company showing off a next generation system at E3, which has long been the nexus of the video game world.
That not only lets Microsoft show off its own next generation games to the most avid gamers (E3 began allowing the general public in several years ago), it gives other publishers a chance to showcase their games on Xbox Series X, which could affect buyers’ decisions in the holiday period.
“We’re in a marketing hype war right now,” says PJ McNealy, CEO and Founder of Digital World Research. “Right now, it’s all about positioning the Xbox Series X against the PlayStation 5. From the future of the company standpoint, the PS5 means a heck of a lot more to Sony’s future than the Xbox does to Microsoft’s future. But this will give Microsoft an opportunity to grab the spotlight.”
E3 has been the launch pad for virtually every major console launch in the industry over the past 25 years. And Sony’s showcasing of the PS4 in 2013 was widely credited with the system’s early success. The show, however, has faced challenges in recent years in meeting the desires of its member companies. Activision and Electronic Arts, among other companies, have not hosted booths at the show in recent years, either.
More must-read stories from Fortune :
—Greenpeace ranks China’s tech giants on renewable energy
—Sex tech steals the spotlight at CES
—Why there are so many scooters in Los Angeles
—What a $1,000 investment in 10 top stocks a decade ago would be worth today
—Best of CES 2020? Tech sites’ opinions differ wildly
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.