The Weekend Edition

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. With Cairo’s unforgivable lack of Guinness and proper Irish stews, we’ll have to make do with local alternatives. We’re not entirely sure how hawawshi could fit in there, but we maintain it would be a good match.

Irish whiskey is equally lacking in Omm El Donia, but you can practically taste the malted barley in the New York Times’ Irish Whiskeys Rise Above the Annual Celebration. Think of it as a shopping guide (or a straight-ahead list) for the next time you’re abroad. On our list: Kilbeggan’s Connemara single malt. The folks at Kilbeggan have been making whiskey since 1757, but we’ve never gotten around to trying the Connemara.

If you’re not celebrating Paddy’s Day, one thing you should be doing is checking out the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF). It officially opens today and, for the next three weeks, will include local, regional and international music, theatre, dance, visual arts, literature and film by cutting-edge artists from Egypt, the Arab world, and beyond. The events take place in variable locations across downtown Cairo and run until 8 April. D-CAF’s stated aim is the revival and reclamation of Downtown Cairo as the vibrant cultural centre, capitalising on its unique architectural and social heritage. The festival’s program can be downloaded here.

And one final thing: Happy birthday, Papa.

Meet the guy who’ll ship you a full Irish pub in a sea container (or two): The Irish Pub Company (IPC) is in the business of designing and building complete interiors of Irish pubs all over the world. IPC expanded to include “assembling huge shipments of flooring, decorative glass, mirrors, ceiling tiles, light fixtures, furniture, signage, and bric-a-brac, as well as the obvious centerpiece: the bar itself.” Asked in an interview with Eater’s Siobhán Brett about essential components of an Irish pub, IPC founder Mel McNally says: “I think everybody recognizes that good stained glass makes a difference.” People continue to invest in the outsourced construction of the Irish bar because of a “desire for an authenticity, demonstrably, but not the kind that is expressly promoted,” Brett writes. She adds “it would seem that the achieving an overall sense of Ireland generated by the constituent parts is the priority, and is in itself enough…. Those in the business of fashioning and transposing it onto foreign parts are concerned with its accurate replication, facilitating a singular ambiance and atmosphere, both special and real, whatever the designation.”

This is the best investment disclaimer we’ve ever read — and it will make you chuckle, at the very least: “First of all, stock prices are volatile. Well, duh. If you buy shares in a stock mutual fund, any stock mutual fund, your investment value will change every day. In a recession it will go down, day after day, week after week, month after month, until you are ready to tear your hair out, unless you’ve already gone bald from worry. It will insist on this even if Ghandi, Jefferson, John Lennon, Jesus and the Apostles, Einstein, Merlin and Golda Maier all manage the thing. Stock markets show remarkably little respect for people or their reputations. Furthermore, if the fund has really been successful, you might be buying someone else’s whopping gains when you invest, on which you may have to pay taxes for returns you didn’t earn. Just try and find somewhere you don’t, though. Dismal.” Tap or click here to read the rest of it on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine or read this Wall Street Journal story, that on the back story and what happened to the author.

The conclusion: “Just so you know. Don’t come crying to us if we lose all your money, and you wind up a Dumpster Dude or a Basket Lady rooting for aluminum cans in your old age.”

Uyghur food is the “next big thing” in ethnic cuisine: Uyghur (pronounced: wee-grr) cuisine could be the “next big thing.” Yimamu Maimaiti, a partner in the first Uyghur restaurant to open in the Washington area, tells The Washington Post‘s Maura Judkis “Uyghur food is going to be the next big thing in the United States… Uyghur food is going to be in every corner in the world.” Judkis writes “Uyghurs are among the more than 50 ethnic minority groups in China, and many hail from the westernmost autonomous region of Xinjiang … Uyghur culture reflects this crossroads, and it is distinct from mainstream Han Chinese culture, particularly because Uyghurs are Muslim and speak their own Turkic language, also called Uyghur.” Their cuisine is not your typical Chinese food, either. Their most famous dish is the Uyghur lagman, which although it has some Chinese influence, comes with flavours more akin to Middle Eastern and Central Asian food. “The noodles for lagman, a beef stir-fry with green peppers and onions, are hand-pulled, dense and always a little chewy, and the same dough goes into manta, beef or pumpkin-stuffed dumplings that are traditionally served for very special guests. The length of the noodles may perplex some American diners: The goal is to have ‘Just one noodle’ fill an entire plate … The longer the unbroken noodle, the more talented the chef,” Judkis writes. She says: “go to a Uyghur restaurant and ask questions. They’ll likely be answered with a smile, maybe over a perfumey cup of rose tea.’”

Cairo has a flourishing Uyghur “Chinatown.” And no, we are not talking about the six or seven new-ish Chinese restaurants in Maadi. Uyghurs have reshaped the Ahmed Saeed street in Abbassiya as home away from home. “It’s home to a growing Chinese population and some say it’s Cairo’s own fledgling Chinatown. It may be off the beaten track for tourists but if you are looking to sample authentic flavours from the east, Ahmed Saeed is certainly the place to be,” according to CGTN. A BBC video report from 2012 shows how Ahmed Saeed street was starting to become Cairo’s own Chinatown and showed part of the process of making Uyghur lagman noodles (runtime 01:58). Miriam Berger raves about the lagman there in Roads & Kingdoms, but points out that “the main restaurants in Abbasiya now aren’t actually Uighur … They’re Hui, another mainly Muslim ethnic group with communities (and cuisines) in northwest China and dispersed and assimilated throughout the country.” She says the lagman dishes “arrive cooked al dente with onions and peppers and mixed with la jiao you, hot pepper-infused oil, and a hint of something sweet… For a moment, Cairo tastes of another world. I devour the experience fast.”

Do you love pizza? Like doing business? Then go read Domino’s atoned for its crimes against pizza and built a USD 9 bn empire. It’s great writing and easily one of the best examples of magazine-like design on the web.

Trading FX? You need to look at (international) trade data. With the greenback still overvalued against most currencies, currency investors are scouring for market where the USD is most likely to weaken. Stephan Kessler, head of research for the alternative strategy team at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been using trade-related data to evaluate the fair value of currencies instead of conventional methods such as PPP, which only compares prices of a similar basket of goods in two countries considering the nominal exchange rate while ignoring other economic data. Using trade data however is more reliable as it uses terms of trade and other trade-competitiveness indicators to examine the fair value of a currency, since the more competitive an economy is, the more valuable its currency. Read more on how trade data may carry useful signals for currency markets.

“Are your sperm in trouble?” Columnist Nicholas Kristof worries (quite literally) about the future of our species. As usual, it’s the fault of the human male. One of many troubling quotes he marshals, from the respected editor of the journal Endocrinology: “Semen quality and fertility in men have decreased. Not everyone who wants to reproduce will be able to. And the costs of male disorders to quality of life, and the economic burden to stop-ed-meds.net, are inestimable.

Policy uncertainty costs real money. That’s the conclusion of a Chicago Booth paper that tries to quantify the cost to markets of political risk. In a study of options prices from 20 countries, researchers found out that prices of options spanning disruptive political events are on average 5.1% higher than options that don’t overlap with a period of political risk. In weaker economies, where policy changes are more relevant after a political event, this risk margin could get to as high as 8%. How much does it cost economies? They estimated that insuring assets equivalent the S&P500’s total market value in 2014 against one month of policy uncertainty would cost as much as two Hubble space telescopes — or clean water for the entire planet plus two space ships. (Watch, runtime: 1:34)

Whether you’re into foreign policy or just like spy novels, you need to read Alex Finley’s How the CIA Forgot the Art of Spying for Politico Magazine, which argues that the “new, more militarized way of gathering” that come into fashion thanks to the ‘Global War on Terror” needs to be re-thought. We need more James Bond, she argues, and less Jason Bourne. “It was in a CIA station in Europe in 2005 that I realized how much was changing about American spycraft. But why, I asked him, was he so eager to go [to ‘The War Zone”] in person? My colleague had no military background. In Europe, we were free to walk the streets while still contributing to fighting the war on terror. Over there, he would be separated from his family for a year, living in a shipping container on a compound surrounded by fortified walls and barbed wire, the target of mortar-shooting terrorists. His answer: In 20 years, when CIA officers looked back, serving in the War Zone in the early 2000s would be like having served in Europe in the 1980s. The Cold War had been formative for the officers who preceded us. And the global war on terror would be the defining conflict of our generation. He needed to be in the middle of it.”

Are Facebook likes are the first “digital drug” to dominate our culture? The same thing applies to Facebook likes. “It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use … A post with zero ‘likes’ [isn’t] just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed,” writes Adam Alter for The Guardian, in an extract adapted from his book “Irresistible.” “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture,” says web developer Rameet Chawla.

It’s the same psychological trick at play in video games: “Video games are governed by microscopic rules,” says Bennett Foddy, who teaches game design at New York University’s Game Center. He talks about text that pops up or sound that is emitted when you move the cursor, tools that are used to hook players in. “A game must obey these microscopic rules, because gamers are likely to stop playing a game that doesn’t deliver a steady dose of small rewards that make sense given the game’s rule.” Remember the Candy Crush Saga craze? It was those effects that made people so caught up in the game, and not the rules — and that earned its developer more than USD 2.5 bn so far. “When you form a line in Candy Crush Saga, a reinforcing sound plays, the score associated with that line flashes brightly, and sometimes you hear words of praise intoned by a hidden, deep-voiced narrator” writes Alter. Another trick allows you to recharge to play more — who wants to end on a losing note? “You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.”

Is puberty before age 10 a “new normal”? If you have a pre-teen. Heck, even if your kid just turned six — and especially if yours, like ours, is a bright, sensitive girl — you want to read this story in the New York Times.

We are re-thinking our opposition to the Oxford comma. From Quartz: “A Maine court ruling in a case about overtime pay and dairy delivery didn’t come down to trucks, milk, or money. Instead, it hinged on one missing comma. Delivery drivers for local milk and cream company Oakhurst Dairy have been tussling with their employers over whether they qualify for overtime. On March 13, a US court of appeals determined that certain clauses of Maine’s overtime laws are grammatically ambiguous. Because of that lack of clarity, the five drivers won their appeal and were found eligible for overtime. The case now can be heard in a lower court. The profoundly nerdy ruling is also a win for anyone who dogmatically defends the serial comma.” (Read)

Explorers find a long-lost mythical city in the depths of the Honduran jungle — only to return home with its curse: Aided by advanced LIDAR technology and armed with a lot of gusto, a team of brazen explorers ventured into the belly of the Honduran Mosquitia Jungle — one of the earth’s last unexplored regions — to find what they believe is an ancient city that had long been dismissed as a legend. It took scientists more than 500 years of trial and error to penetrate these remote parts of the Honduran rainforest to locate the White City, or what they came to call the City of the Monkey God, only to find evidence that this once wealthy and majestic hub had been abandoned by its people after it was ravaged by disease, author Douglas Preston, who was a member of the expedition, writes in the New Yorker. But it wasn’t until they returned home that they knew for certain that they had been correct, when around half the expedition began falling ill to the curse of the lost city, a parasitic flesh-eating disease known as Leishmaniasis that they had contracted from sandfly bites, National Geographic says (we’ll avoid making your guts churn on this fine Friday morning with a description of the disease but you can tap here for more info).

Oddly enough, the flesh-eating disease is not native to the land, but one of many pathogens that 15th century European explorers brought to the South American shores when they set out to discover the New World, whose people had no immunity or any form of genetic resistance to these diseases. It was through trade at first, then conquest and enslavement that those new diseases began to travel from the shores and into the mainland, wiping out entire populations in their path. “Anthropologists have documented that between 1518-1550, almost 90% of the native people of Honduras died of disease,” Preston says. “Europe’s Black Death at its worst carried off 30-60% of the population.” Science was able to cure the modern-day explorers, albeit painfully, and most of them said they would definitely go back, including lead archaeologist Chris Fisher as well as Preston, who recently published his book about the journey. “No great discoveries are made without some risk,” Preston said.

DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK — Firestone and the Warlord: Another hit by PBS Frontline, the film takes a look at the strange tale of the American household-name tire company mired in a civil war in Liberia and the debate still waging about its level of complicity in mass murder. Firestone had been operating a mn-acre rubber plantation (leasing it at USD 0.06 an acre) since 1926, and has largely shaped US agenda and policy in Liberia from that time on. That relationship wouldn’t really hit the spotlight until convicted warlord Charles Taylor’s insurgency took steam in 1990 and took over the plantation. Abandoning their workers to Taylor’s child soldiers, the American managers of the plantation (who fancied themselves Antebellum Southern gentry, to hear some of the local workers tell it) fled. As Liberian rubber produced the highest quality latex in the world, declining profits led the company to try and get back in, pulling no stops in reaching an agreement with Taylor where they paid “taxes” and tolerated his use of sections of the plantation as a military base. It did this with the aid of senior US diplomats. Note the scene in the image above of the US ambassador telling Taylor that they (the embassy) worked for Firestone (minute 53:32). The company is still the largest private-sector employer in Liberia, according to the documentary.

The issue of complicity runs constant throughout the film, a debate we feel was put to rest when it ran footage of Taylor at his trial testifying that his arrangement with Firestone was his best source of FX during the conflict in Liberia. His use of it as a base had caused the deaths of over 40 employees. The company always maintained that it stayed for the benefit of the workers. Its official statement to Frontline was that it was “proud” to have preserved a key economic asset of Liberia. Among the funniest parts of the documentary was hearing the managers defend the company. The debate gets interesting when raises interesting questions on corporate personhood. No one really blames civilians for having to deal with a soldier parked in his backyard. But pulling on that thread would take us down another tangent. We’ll just let you make up your own mind. Watch (runtime: 1:25:41).

The boy who cried Literally — or how we literally overuse and misuse “literally”: Just like “like,” the other (figurative) stab in the back of the English language that had been ticking us off these days (years) is the excessive misuse of the word literally. We’re looking at you. You know who you are. In reality we’re all (again, quite figuratively speaking) probably guilty of this. So much so, it’s got scions of pop culture like HuffPost and others like the poor editors of the Independent ranking the word as one of the English language’s most overused words and phrases. This one writer at the Harvard Crimson took off on a whole diatribe about it. To her credit, she literally traced some examples going back to 19th century literature, and even nailed the great F. Scott Fitzgerald for his description of Jay Gatsby: “He literally glowed?” Her and all the others complaining have put the word in the most endangered words list, as it has clearly begun to lose its meaning from a cultural standpoint.

We’re not going to insult you like the rest and run a Webster Dictionary refresher of the definition of the word. We’ll only leave you with this warning from College Humor (watch, runtime: 2:08) on the very real dangers of this misuse. Just like the boy who cried wolf, no one came to help to him when he was literally in danger. The moral of the story: if you keep using “literally” when you mean “figuratively,” you will be stabbed by a vagrant and die. Think about that, if the sanctity of words doesn’t concern you.

The story behind one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous artworks, The Three Dancers, is fascinating. The piece, part of the Tate collection, at first glance appears to be “a joyful celebration of joie de vivre.” However, Tateshots says the “picture is more complicated than it first appears. What seems to be an exuberant celebration of life is, in fact, a savage dance of death echoing traditional European engravings. This is a painting about raw emotions: lust, guilt, and grief.” You can watch a narration of the story behind The Three Dancers here (runtime 02:14).

The New Yorker published a long-lost satirical short story called The I.O.U. by F. Scott Fitzgerald that mocks what could be now labelled “fake news” from the 1920s. The I.O.U. is a story about a narrator, the story’s protagonist, who is about to publish a nonfiction book about a man communicating with his dead nephew in the spirit world, when he meets the nephew in question on a train as he was given “the most intelligent-looking” passengers a copy of the book to review. The story’s opening paragraph includes the lines, read by the narrator: “All the columnists and communists (I can never get these two words straight) abuse me because they say I want money. I do — I want it terribly. My wife needs it. My children use it all the time. If someone offered me all the money in New York I should not refuse it. I would rather bring out a book that had an advance sale of five hundred thousand copies than have discovered Samuel Butler, Theodore Dreiser, and James Branch Cabell in one year. So would you if you were a publisher.” Thu-Huong Ha writes in Quartz: “Fitzgerald’s story is well timed for today’s atmosphere of media distrust, where the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurred by presidents and publishers alike.”

This exchange between the narrator and the “dead nephew” stands out in particular:

“It is fiction!”

“In a sense—” I admitted.

“In a sense? It is fiction! It fulfills all the requirements of fiction: it is one long sweet lie. Would you call it fact?”

“No,” I replied calmly. “I should call it nonfiction. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.”

How to raise a feminist daughter, according to a feminist: Best-selling author Chimamanda Adichie has an actual manifesto guiding parents on how to raise their daughters to be feminists and steer clear of reinforcing the harmful idea that women are inferior to men. Before any of our readers begin to fret that raising your daughters to be feminists means she’ll spend her days burning bras and will swear off men for the rest of eternity, let’s just take a minute to clearly define feminism.

“Feminist: The person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes,” Adichie told the audience at her TED Talk, We Should All Be Feminists. (Readers who are well-acquainted with pop culture will recognize this excerpt from her speech from Beyoncé’s 2013 song, Flawless.) In her book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Nigeria-born Adichie encourages parents to understand that “raising a girl to believe that she is inferior to a man, but that the man is expected to be good to her” does not count as feminism and still places women in a subordinate position. She also encourages parents to reject gender stereotypes, such as the belief that women should be likeable and not speak their minds, lest people think they are “rude” or “mean.” There are important lessons to be learned and passed on to girls at an early age, particularly in being able to identify situations that go against feminism, Adichie tells NPR’s Audie Cornish on an episode of All Things Considered. “By the time we are older, it’s much more difficult to unlearn things that we’ve learned, which is why there are so many women who ― even though ideas of gender are bad for them, stifle them ― they kind of still go along with it because that’s what they know.”

One of our favourite podcasts is back for a new season: Wendy Zukerman’s Science Vs podcast started its new season on 9 March. Science Vs, for the uninitiated, is a Gimlet-produced show that uses scientific evidence to take on fads, trends, and the opinionated mob to find out what’s fact, what’s not, and what’s somewhere in between. The new season started with a double bill with one episode looking into the impact of immigration and its impact on the job market and crime rates (runtime 46:34). The other episode was a bit different; it looked into acne and tried to get down to “the bottom of what works and what doesn’t” when trying to get rid of acne. Zukerman looks into the role of diet, stress, and hygiene in acne treatment and speaks to experts on the matter (runtime 47:17). If you’re in the mood for some binge-listening, then we also recommend the previous season’s episodes on whether organic food is actually better for you and the environment and the one that looks into the impact of fracking.

Without public key cryptography, we would not have the internet as we know it, economist Tim Harford says on his BBC-produced 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy podcast. We use cryptography every time we send a work email, buy something online, or use a banking app. Harford tells the story of public key cryptography – and the battle between the geeks who developed it, and the government which tried to control it. It all started with scientists who managed to turn the Diffie–Hellman theory into a practical technique called RSA encryption “Some mathematics are much easier to perform in one direction than another. Take a very large prime number … then take another. Multiply them together. That’s simple enough and gives you a very, very large ‘semi-prime’ number. That’s a number that’s divisible only by two prime numbers. Now, challenge someone else to take that semi-prime number a figure out which two prime numbers were multiplied together to produce it. That, it turns out, is exceptionally hard. Public key cryptography works by exploiting this difference” (runtime 09:10).

The words “productivity” and “efficiency” are often used interchangeably in business strategy. But new studies have found that businesses and business leaders must adopt a “productivity” rather than “efficiency” mindset if they want to remain in the game, Michael Mankins argues in a piece for HBR. “Continuing to wring out greater profits through efficiency has become the managerial equivalent of attempting to squeeze blood from a stone,” he says. But what exactly is the difference? The article defines efficiency as “doing the same with less,” whereas productivity is defined as “doing more with the same,” which means that where the efficiency mindset would entail reducing manpower during periods of slow growth for example, a productivity mindset demands better utilization of existing resources to propel growth.

…and why does productivity now have more weight? A good look at the S&P 500 sees earnings growth running “nearly three times the rate of inflation over” the 1990s and 2000s but beginning to slow as of the end of 3Q2015, suggesting that “today’s business environment requires a different worldview.” HBR and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s interviews with 300 senior executives from around the world complemented the findings of a comprehensive Bain & Company study into workforce productivity, which found that there are ways to “unleash” a company’s productive power by limiting what is known as “organizational drag.” In other words, removing the obstacles in the way of productivity that consume valuable time and over time “limit employees’ ability to innovate and do deep work,“ according to Divinge. Those include slow and lengthy decision making processes, drained or unenthused employees that could be toxic to others, constant interruptions during the work day, and meetings that tend to run longer than they should, to name but a few. HBR’s studies found that a company loses an average 20% of its productive capacity each week — which translates into more than a whole day out of the five-day workweek.

“Most employees want to be productive, but the organization too often gets in their way” and talented employees are too often placed in roles that limit their effectiveness, suggesting that caution must be taken to employ your “star players” where they can really make an impact. That alone isn’t enough though. “Virtually every employee can bring more to their job, but many don’t invest the additional ingenuity and creativity that they could” because they are uninspired, even though an inspired employee is 125% more productive than one who is just satisfied. The best companies, according to HBR, are over 40% more productive than others and the difference is in their adherence to those “fundamental tenets.”

No, our personalities aren’t set in stone by the time we’re eight: For decades, developmental psychologists have been embroiled in debate over the extent to which any given individual’s personality is malleable, and the age at which basic personality traits become evident. Some research suggests that key traits, including self-esteem, are determined during our first decade. However, it has become increasingly evident that personalities shift a great deal well beyond the age of 10 (or 20 or 30, for that matter), and it is often for the better. “Many studies…show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age,” NPR’s Christopher Soto writes.

This natural process can take years or decades to unfold, pushing researchers to look into how much success someone actively working towards personality change will find, and how fast changes can be observed. A recent analysis of studies zoning on neuroticism found that, in around three months and with the guidance of a therapist, individuals can lower their neuroticism by half of the amount it would take natural personality development over the course of 40 years. (Go figure, psychologists are recommending you get help from other psychologists.) “Therapy, this analysis found, seems to be especially effective at decreasing neuroticism, a trait that ‘not only disposes you to anxiety and other negative emotions, but to spending lots of time ruminating about all those feelings,’” Melissa Dahl writes for New York Magazine. The main caveats: For starters, neuroticism can simply be part of a bigger issue, such as depression or anxiety, which makes it difficult to determine whether the research found actual changes in the trait. A key distinction to note at this point is that changes in behavior are not always indicative of changes in personality. It is possible for a person to become more self-aware and begin exerting effort in controlling one’s behavior, despite their underlying personality traits pushing them to behave differently.

Ever thought of what happens when there is a medical emergency on a plane? That’s the subject of travel writer Natalie Paris’ piece for The Telegraph. Cabin crew are trained on a number of basic medical emergencies, but they sometimes they need to call out for a doctor among the passengers — imagine the panic on board. And if necessary, they can seek expert advice from doctors on the ground. This little detail: Cabin crew “are taught how to keep passengers from panicking by talking in a calm but authoritative voice.” Medical emergencies on flights worldwide are estimated to happen 44,000 times per year, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Media Center, which correlates with emergencies happening in about 1 out of 600 commercial flights.

3D printing was always a cool scientific development, but it has reached new heights: San Francisco-based 3D printing company Apis Cor successfully printed an entire house in Russia in just one day, with the total cost slightly surpassing USD 10,000. A whole (albeit small) house in 24 hours. Take a minute to let that (and the fact that it usually takes more time than that to get a hold of a plumber in Egypt) sink in (watch, runtime 6:46).

Teletext peaked between 1981 and 1983, when Time Inc. invested USD 25 mn in the technology, before dying out by 1984. Cecilia D’Anastasio tracks the history of Teletext, a service to transmit text with colorful designs to the television, for Vice’s Motherboard. It started out as a means for transmitting text about news headlines and lifestyle, with users able to navigate through “pages” of text. "It was almost like Twitter," said Jim Pensiero, former news editor at Time Teletext. "Superficial. Not Pulitzer-prize-winning journalism," he added. "We were on the frontier trying to wrestle the beast onto the ground." The service quickly turned to — of course — gaming. By late 1982, Time Teletext service had reached 5,000 households in California and Florida. But soon after, the trend slowed down and died away quickly. Users were disappointed by the deteriorating quality of the service, especially how it became overpriced. "The whole basis for Time moving into teletext was using the straight news and lifestyle content represented in magazines like People," said Bob Spielvogel, former editor at Time Teletext. "It was disconcerting for them to see that what they thought was ancillary, bonus stuff turned out to be the main draw." It was Game Over for Teletext.

By Aly El Shalakany

In Egypt, we like to keep things simple – the second we have an economic slump, we know we need to attract investment and that, ladies and gentlemen, means we need a new investment law. Who doesn’t like a new investment law? It just makes sense.

In the 1970s, Sadat wanted to liberalize the economy and to kick-start a shift from a more socialist command economy to a hybrid capitalist system where the private sector would grow rapidly and eventually take the lead in economic development. The problem was that Egypt’s legal framework was not very conducive to investment. A complete overhaul of the Egyptian legal system and the creation of new administrative and regulatory bodies that could accommodate the private sector overnight was simply not possible. We needed a quick fix.

As a result, the first investment law was born.

To continue reading Aly El Shalakany’s column, Deja Vu All Over Again, please click here.

Among the most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week:

• Hussein Abaza is appointed chief executive officer of CIB. (press release, pdf)
• Dances With Dogs, a Youm7 video about a street child. (Youtube)
• The full text of the draft bankruptcy act. (Al Borsa)
• Adele kisses the hand of a veiled fan. (Youtube)
• Five things to watch as oil prices fall. (Financial Times)
• Egypt’s economy shows signs of life. (The Economist)
• Enterprise’s special Weekend Edition on the 1980s. (Enterprise)

Radioactive boars roaming Fukushima: Forget about radiation for now, one of the other big problems stopping residents from returning to Japan’s towns vacated after the Fukushima nuclear crisis six years ago are wild boars, according to Reuters. The animals, known to attack people when enraged, descended from surrounding hills and forests into the vacated towns (runtime 01:32). "It is not really clear now which is the master of the town, people or wild boars," said Tamotsu Baba, mayor of the seaside town of Namie. The New York Times notes that this wild boar invasion is also affecting food, saying the wild boars “carry with them highly radioactive material.” Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura writes: “wild boar meat is a delicacy in northern Japan, but animals slaughtered since the disaster are too contaminated to eat. According to tests conducted by the Japanese government, some of the boars have shown levels of radioactive element cesium-137 that are 300 times higher than safety standards.” She adds “the city of Soma last year set up municipal incinerators specially designed to burn carcasses and filter out radioactive cesium.”