The Weekend Edition

Think twice before running for the Parent-Teacher Association: Billed as “a mystery in six parts,” FRAMED tells the true story of a perky PTA mom in an affluent US suburb whose neatly ordered life came crashing down around her when police found a mind-altering substance in her car (parked in the school parking lot) that she swore had been planted. The LA Times piece is a Harlan Coben novel waiting to come to life, though we suspect it’s more likely that it will be optioned by Hollywood.

(Oh, and speaking of Harlan Coben, we can’t be the only ones delighted that Myron Bolitar is back in “Home,” which critics claim could be the best book yet in the Myron series — and which was released this past Tuesday. Writes the AP’s Jeff Ayers: “Coben knows how to play with readers’ expectations, and he’s crafted another suspenseful and twisty tale. Fans and newcomers alike will feel as if good friends have come home.” It’s in our TBR queue behind the final chapters of Too Big to Fail, which we noted last week, and Brent Schlender and RIck Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs. Char, you better be reading this one… )

And speaking of Jobs: “There is no such thing as simplicity, only the perception of simplicity,” says Ken Segall, who with Jobs was one of the minds behind Apple’s iconic Think Different campaign and the ‘i’ in all your Apple products. For Jobs, making his products simple to the public meant he had to obsess over every detail of the user experience, from the first ad you would see, to what the store you bought it in looked like, to the packaging, the opening of the box, reading of instructions and intuiting its functions, Segall tells Big Think. Not one of Apple’s products is actually simple: There’s years of research, engineering, and design done specifically and meticulously to make the product seem simple.

This is one of the best thought pieces on investor relations that we have ever read. It was in the New Yorker, not Fortune, the FT, the Journal or BI. It’s not a how-to and there’s precious little drama — it’s not the tale of the Enron meltdown or the near-collapse of the global financial system of 2008. Before starting to work on your next annual report, you’ll want to read “How should we read investor letters?,” John Lanchester’s review of Jeff Gramm’s book “Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism.”

The world is staring down the barrel of a veritable “tsunami” of mergers in the agricultural space, according to recent news. Biotech seed and agrochemical giant DuPont is looking to merge with Dow. Bayer has agreed to buy Monsanto, and Chinese giant ChemChina is nabbing Syngenta. “If these mergers all go through, the three biggest agribusinesses would sell 59 percent of the world’s patented seeds and 64 percent of all pesticides,” according to Vox. And while M&A might boost short-term profits, time and time again we’re told that mergers stifle competition and, in turn, innovation — if they don’t fail outright. In the agiri-business, that means no more “innovation needed to help farmers keep growing enough food to support a world population that will soon reach 9 bn” and develop seeds resistant to resistant to pests. Harvard Business Review came up with some hard proof that in August that, at least in the medical field, mergers certainly hurt innovation.

(The story piqued our interest as Egypt tussles again and again with ergot levels in wheat that resulted in a short-term boycott by global traders until we reversed the requirement at week’s end. Turns out, there’s work being done on creating ergot-resistant wheat. Plant researchers have identified sources of genetic resistance, but development of a completely resistant strain is still “a ways down the road,” according to Jim Menzies, a phytopathologist with Agriculture Canada.)

In fact, “superstar” companies are killing competition — and “using the darker arts of management to stay ahead” across in nearly every industry, according to the Economist in “The giant problem.” The ‘newspaper’ warns that concentration (and the tax practices to which it leads) could be do as much damage to the current world order the backlash against the industrial revolution was during its time.

How Zara’s Spain-based owner sets itself apart from struggling competitors: While global retailers struggle this year, Inditex, the owner of Zara, has set itself apart from its competitors, reporting an 8% y-o-y increase in 1H2016 net earnings to EUR 1.26 bn. Sales fared even better than profits, rising by 16% when you set aside FX gains. Amancio Ortega, the chain’s retired chairman, is currently the richest person in Europe and the second-richest person in the world, frequently surpassing Bill Gates at the top on days when the company’s share price soars. So what’s the secret to the fast-fashion retailer’s success? Bloomberg Gadfly’s Andrea Felsted attributes it to three factors. The retailer is capable of responding quickly to changing fashions, particularly “in periods of hot or cold weather, where others are left flogging winter coats during a heat wave.” The fact that Inditex makes around 50% of its inventory close to its headquarters in Spain enables it to hedge against the impact of a stronger USD, unlike rival H&M which sources 80% of its USD-priced clothes from Asia. Moreover, Inditex has a strategy of reinvesting in its online business and renovating its stores, while keeping prices stable has enabled, while “most retailers focus too much on cutting costs, and not enough on innovation.”

Get 60 hours of work out of a 40-hour workweek: “Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day,” a blog post by Georgetown computer science prof and prolific non-CS author Cal Newport, has worked-out really well for one of us the past week. The twist: Keep a task list to make sure you know what you need to be doing, then sit down with the calendar, as Newport suggests, and plan out your work day (or week) in full. The short piece is worth reading end-to-end. As Newport writes: “Using your inbox to drive your daily schedule might be fine for the entry-level or those content with a career of cubicle-dwelling mediocrity, but the best knowledge workers view their time like the best investors view their capital, as a resource to wield for maximum returns.”

(We took note a few months back of Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World,” which was the subject of thought-provoking reviews in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others.)

This blog post recommendation is brought to you by the Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless noise cancelling headphones. Throw in Apple’s new weekly My New Music Mix, updated automatically every Friday if you’re a subscriber, and you won’t hear the kid grumbling about her Friday morning Arabic lesson. Pro tip: Two local distributors we tried for the QC35 headset charge more than double what you’ll pay in even the EU, where electronics prices are more expensive than in the US or Canada. If you’re buying them locally, the wired QuietComfort25 are a much better deal (and slightly more comfortable)— if you don’t mind the wire. (And yeah, we know Sennheiser… but good luck finding them in Egypt, let alone a pair with noise cancellation.)

North Korea’s top-level internet domain only has 28 websites: Earlier this week, a North Korean tech administrator accidentally gave the world access to one of NK’s top-level internet domains, revealing that only 28 websites used the “.kp” domain name in question. By Wednesday, all the websites stopped functioning. The gaffe gave a rare glimpse into the few online sources of information available to the nation. The websites included those of the national airline, official bodies such as the maritime agency, and the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun, which included headlinessuch “Narcotic-related crimes increase among South Korean youngsters.” The “.kp” domain name also had its fair share of bizarre websites, including “friend.com.kp”, which appears to be some kind of social network, as well as “cooks.org.kp” for cooking recipes, and “korfil.com.kp” for a selection of North Korean movies. Only a few thousand North Korean citizens have access to the internet, while the rest of the country only has access to a closed national intranet called Kwangmyong, which was not revealed in the leak. The details of the domain name were uploaded to GitHub, and quickly made its way to Reddit, which capped the story thusly: “Bet NK has one less DNS administrator now.”

The books you love as a child can reveal a lot about your personality, children’s author Adam Gidwitz writes for Aeon. Harry Potter or any of the Cinderella adaptations both speak to a reader who longs for a parent’s recognition and love, or who feels undervalued by peers and figures of authority. Gidwitz taught a highschool classroom that read 1984 early in his career, which he says is successful as a teen novel because it captures a protagonist’s life that is “observed and constrained”, precisely the sentiments many angsty teenagers feel. He says bestsellers can unravel the “inner psychic landscapes of large swaths of the American public”, and that choosing to read certain books over others is “imagination therapy [which elicits] secrets that their readers did not know they kept.”

Is it time to ban large banknotes? Paper money makes it vastly easier to be a criminal. So much so that there’s serious discussion about discontinuing the USD 100 bill. If it’s that bad in Amreeka, how bad corrosive is cash here, where folks will routinely pay cash for an EGP 500,000 vehicle? This Saturday Essay in the Wall Street Journal adapted from the recently published book by Harvard professor Ken Rogoff — who some readers will remember as chief economist at the IMF at the turn of the century — makes the case that “paper money fuels corruption, terrorism, tax evasion and illegal immigration — so the U.S. should get rid of the USD 100 bill and other large notes.” Read: The Sinister Side of Cash. (We have an excellent listening recommendation on cash below, Listen to This.)

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a painting famous for being famous. That’s Phil Edwards’ argument in Vox, in which he claims that an influential essay in the nineteenth century and the painting’s theft in 1911 (it was returned to the Louvre in 1914 transformed the painting “from art fan highlight to worldwide heroine.”

Wait, what? My kid isn’t going to learn cursive? If your child goes to one of the handful of schools in Cairo that have (or say they will soon be) adopting the U.S. Common Core curriculum, they may well be the first generation of kids to have started the “neurological metamorphosis already underway as we adapt to new technology: Typing, which has replaced cursive in Common Core, the New York Times writes in a review of Anne Trubek’s “The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting,” which argues that “the decline and even elimination of handwriting from daily life does not signal a decline in civilization, but rather the next stage in the evolution of communication.” Never mind that “students who take notes by hand outperform students who type, and more type these days,” as the Wall Street Journal (paywall) notes. (The same study made something of a splash. See The Atlantic and Scientific American.)

Cue the forces of The Establishment: “I’m Banning Laptops From My Classroom,” a top law professor writes for the Journal. For parents of tweens and up, it’s hard to disagree with his logic. Try this link for more on why the Common Core is killing cursive, and this for the reaction against the move.

And while we’re on the subject of banning screens, it may be time to limit junior’s screen time. Don’t let the standard hyperbole in the New York Post’s headline turn you off: “It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies” raises issues worth considering. At least one Cairo-area school has recently hosted the documentary Screenagers (watch the trailer, run time 2:50), and if it’s not appearing anywhere near you soon, the New York Times’ interview with the film’s director, and MD named Delaney Ruston is worth a read.

Bad writing (of a different form) is killing your company, the Harvard Business Review argues. “A hidden source of friction is slowing your company down Your workers are complicit in it. So is your management. And it’s driving everybody nuts. It’s bad business writing,” writes Josh Bernoff, the author of the blog (and book) Writing Without [the excrement of a male bovine]. The iSheep among you will thrill to his example of good business writing. The crux of it: Managers and above spend as much as 25.5 hours a week reading, and “it’s to commit to a culture of clarity. It could make a big difference in how smoothly your business runs — and it could make your day a lot less annoying.”

** Want to invest in startups — but don’t know where to start? Our friends at the Cairo Angels are hosting “The Angel Ticket” in collaboration with Germany’s GIZ next week. The event is specifically designed for individuals who are interesting in investing in startups, but need an orientation to the scene in Egypt. The event will include a panel on startup opportunities headlined by startup guru Con O’Donnell, Endeavor Egypt’s Mohamed Rahmy and Flat6Labs’ Dina El Shenoufy. A second panel on early-stage investing features Cairo Angels founder Hossam Allam, Delta Shield Chair Neveen El Tahri and KI Angels founder Khaled Ismail. The event runs 6:30-9pm at the Nile Kempinski Hotel on Tuesday, 27 September. The only way to attend the event is by registering through super-cool Egyptian startup Eventtus, whose founder is the only Egyptian we can think of who’s shared the stage with both US President Barack Obama and Facebook Evildoer Mark Zuckerberg. Click that last link to register for next week’s event — seating is very limited — or watch Mai Medhat with Obama, Zuckerberg and others, runtime 5:23)

** The late Mohamed Hassanein Heikal called out bad writing wherever he found it — and wasn’t shy about calling a spade a spade. Today, on the occasion of the great man’s birthday, the Mohamed Hassanein Heikal Foundation for Arab Journalism is announcing the creation of an annual prize in his name. The Heikal Prize for Arab Journalism will make two annual awards of EGP 250k each 23 September: one for News Story of the Year and one for Investigative Story of the Year. Applicants must be Arabs under the age of 40 writing for print or digital newspapers, magazines and other publications. Good journalism has never been more important to our country, our region or our world, and it is refreshing to see the Foundation step up and offer such a generous award. Read the full announcement here; we’ll have the application procedures here for you when they become available later this fall.

Watch sixteen of Egypt’s best schools go head to head on Egypt’s first edutainment program, Al Abakera, launching tonight at 7pm CLT on Al Kahera Wal Nas and then running every Friday and Saturday in the same time slot. Al Abakera is a regional TV game show that blurs the line between education and entertainment — a competition that encourages team work, aptitude, school pride and that focuses on the good coming out of our educational system. The show aims to mix fun with knowledge and talent. The first season will see 128 students compete and showcase their capabilities on regional television to win the title of champion. Program sponsor the National Bank of Egypt is ponying-up EGP 40 mn prize money to fund the development of the school system as well as scholarships and university aid for the best students. Watch the trailer here (run time: 0:44)

People of the Delta: This 2015 coming-of-age story takes place in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The construction of the Gilgel Gibe III Dam, which is being constructed by Italian firm Salini Impregilo, the same firm behind the construction of the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam, will only exacerbate droughts and tribal infighting over scarce resources. According to a 2015 National Geographic report, “the filling of the reservoir behind Gibe III Dam on the Omo River is holding back the flows needed by some 200k indigenous people in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya to sustain their food production and livelihoods.” The film does not directly address the impact of the dam, but definitely addresses the already stressed environment in which its people live. It blurs the line between documentary and fiction with subtlety, features gorgeous cinematography, and effectively raises global awareness of this group of indigenous people and their daily struggles to try to survive on their ancestral lands.

Viewer advisory: The film features its cast in traditional attire; their concept of being fully covered differs from our own. The film is best viewed in 1080p HD, which may need to be selected manually from the HD icon. (Watch, running time: 29:22)

The technological disruption facing major oil and gas companies: The Economist produced an original series, The Disrupters, exploring how major industries – from music and cars to hospitality – are currently being disrupted by the latest wave of digital innovation. The series covered the energy sector and how, in the past eight years, the value of the biggest oil and gas companies has halved. Villages in Germany are showing how they’re using subsidies to expand their reliance on renewable energy sources and even large oil gas companies are adopting new strategies to respond to the disruption. Statoil, for example, aims to become the most carbon efficient oil and gas producer in the world. It is using pioneering technologies on its Sleipner gas rig that allows it to separate carbon dioxide and pump it underground making extraction less carbon intensive. It has also developed the world’s first floating wind turbine. Germany’s E ON has taken a bolder move, breaking the company in two and spinning off its fossil fuel arm to focus on renewables (runtime 14:48).

We are a world that’s fast losing its attachment to cash, so The BBC’s is asking who wins in a cashless economy? Harvard economist Ken Rogoff tells presented Lina Yueh a cashless economy would increase the power of central banks to intervene during economic slowdowns and would reduce tax evasion. Another winner is transparency, as cashless transactions are traceable, making it easier to uncover criminal activity. However, there are some warnings that we don’t yet understand the consequences of getting rid of cash altogether. There could be issues of “trust” between the citizens and the government that could make the migration away from cash more challenging. To conclude, Yueh says the economy, the government, and banks win from going cashless, but cybercriminals probably do too (runtime 23:00).

Gimlet Media’s Surprisingly Awesome podcast looks into how most of the world’s citizens, who don’t have standard addresses, receive mail. They mention the case of Lebanon, which had its mail delivery infrastructure destroyed during its civil war and got a pretty new mail service, LibanPost. An initiative by Canada Post to help Lebanon set up a proper mail delivery system failed, but LibanPost is now experimenting with a new system that would move people from the “unaddressed” to “addressed” column by assigning everyone an eight-digit code called NAC, based on latitude and longitude. Mongolia is doing something simpler, instead of the cumbersome and hard to remember eight digits, Mongol Post will use a three word phrase using technology from what3words. One thing we wished they delve deeper into is how the current informal systems work (runtime 44:11).

You don’t need to run much to benefit a lot. Cooler temperatures are coming our way, with the mercury set to peak at a daytime high of 30°C on the Six of October long weekend. If you’re anything like us and find your thoughts shifting to running in cooler temps, use this as a bit of extra motivation to lace-up and hit the streets: Running as little as 8-10 km a week can “substantially improve” your health, the New York Times’ fantastic Gretchen Reynolds writes in answer to a reader’s question. “even with such skimpy mileage, runners generally weighed less and had a lower risk of obesity than people who jogged fewer than five miles per week or (more commonly) not at all. These runners also were less likely to experience high blood pressure, cholesterol problems, diabetes, strokes, certain cancers and arthritis than the barely- or nonrunners.”

Really, Zuckerberg, curing all diseases? Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, announced last Wednesday that they aim to “cure all disease in our children’s lifetime” — or at least be able to diagnose and manage them so that they are no longer harmful. To that end, the couple has pledged USD 3 bn to be spent over a decade through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to tackle in its initial phase four kinds of diseases: heart disease , cancer , infectious disease and neurological disease like stroke. The money will go into basic scientific research, roping together some of the brightest minds in health today, in addition to ramping up efforts to promote increased funding for health.

It is hard to imagine a more noble cause, and to call it ambitious would be a major understatement. But many in the scientific community are not biting, with some seeing this as misleadingly simple and just another Silicon Valley soundbite, according to Vice: Motherboard. For one, the money is not nearly enough. The US National Institutes of Health spends USD 32 bn a year on health research and hasn’t managed to stamp out all disease, nor would it claim to, says Jim Woodgett, director of research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. The scope of the endeavor is also simply too large. Cancer comes in such wide varieties and effects unique individuals in so many different ways. Diseases also evolve and do not wait for a cure. New challenges, in the form of drug resistant bacteria and the Zika epidemic make this declaration even more ethereal than practical. Then there is the human factor itself. Efforts to eradicate polio have been met with armed resistance in some areas, and you can’t get everybody to stop smoking and eat healthy assuming their environment offers them a choice. While it is in bad form to criticize such an endeavor, it is always important to put challenges in perspective.

Activity monitors that track your exercise movements and count your steps may actually hinder your efforts to lose weight, a recently-published study conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed. The 500-person experiment had found that dieting adults who were those trackers for 18 months lost around 8 pounds, while those without them weighed around 13 pounds less. The New York Times explains that the results have more to do with “the tangled relationships between exercise, eating, our willpower and our waistlines.” Those wearing the trackers may have been quickly de-motivated when they saw that they hadn’t reached their daily goals, while those without them were able to self-monitor and self-motivate themselves. “People may have focused on the technology and forgotten to focus on their behaviors,” said University of Pittsburgh’s John Jakicic.

A Hong Kong website tracking deaths to help you find cheaper rent: If there’s something strange, in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call? In Hong Kong, that would be tech startup spacious.hk and not ghostbusters (although from the looks of it the latter would do well there), because it could mean cheaper rent. The company has been capitalizing on Chinese superstitions and tragic events to help expatriates and young Chinese residents unfazed by a possible spiritual presence to find cheaper apartments. The company tracks and plots out real estate where tragic deaths have been reported in the local media and police reports and overlays it on a map of Hong Kong – giving potential tenants and owners an insight into cheaper apartments, according to Vice: Motherboard.

Feng shui, the Chinese philosophical system of harmonizing everyone with the surrounding environment to help generate good luck, remains a potent cultural force developers in Hong Kong factor into their projects, so much so that the Hong Kong government has admitted to spending mns worth of GBP’s in order to rebalance the feng shui of its construction projects. That, mixed with a pathological fear of ghosts, has been driving prices down on properties where deaths have occurred. For instance, a gruesome double homicide in J Residence, one of Hong Kong’s most luxurious residential buildings, back in 2014 saw the apartment’s price drop by half. The belief is so powerful, realtors often spread rumors about deaths in properties pitched by rivals. With the insane rental prices of Hong Kong it is not surprising that spacious.hk’s braver visitors have used the haunted house overlay some 5,000 times a month.

They just missed the opportunity to help us out during Eid: Google launched Google Trips this past Monday. No need to print your hotel booking for confirmation, address and phone number or search through your e-mail: Google Trips will let you package information for your trips (hotel bookings, nearby attractions, restaurants — everything). The app can also create itineraries for your trip for the top 200 cities in the world, depending on length of stay and can suggest nearby places to visit or restaurants, Fortune says. Warning: Google Apps / Google for Work / Google Cloud (whatever the [redacted] they’re calling their corporate mail and productivity suite these days) doesn’t yet support the product. Try to create a trip and all you’ll get is “Failed to create trip. Try again later” sans explanation.

US government gets behind self-driving cars: US Federal auto safety regulators have officially bet on driverless cars as the path to safer highways after the US government issued guidelines titled the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy last week. The Obama administration is promising strong oversight, but kept enough vagueness to signal to automakers that the door for driverless cars is wide open, writes Cecilia Kang for the New York Times. Tesla has sold thousands of driver-less cars with an Autopilot feature, but has been struck with the fallout from the death of a Florida driver who had the feature engaged. A similar incident occurred in China. Tesla plans on updating the car’s software within the week, CEO Elon Musk announced. Meanwhile, Uber began testing driverless cars in Pittsburgh, Google has been testing self-driving cars in its hometown and rivals including Apple are also exploring similar technology.

Could AT&T’s AirGig be the future of wireless tech? The new experimental Project AirGig under development by AT&T Labs aims to introduce low-cost, multi-gigabit wireless internet speeds using power lines, the company announced in a statement. While still experimental, the technology would basically piggyback off existing power lines by transmitting millimeter wave signal along the cables, not through them, according to Forbes. AT&T is aiming to compete with Google Fiber’s 1 gigabit per second connection, which is expensive, needs new infrastructure, and is only available in certain urban areas. Part of the project involves patent-pending low cost plastic antennas that can be used to transmit 4G LTE and 5G connections. Unfortunately, field testing won’t begin until next year so the widespread availability of the service could still take a few years. Judging by 3G service in Egypt and bickering between MNOs and the NTRA in Egypt over the 4G licenses, we can expect multi-gigabit connections in Egypt right around never.

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• iPhone 7 ad: Morning Ride (Apple, Youtube)
• Coverage of government panels at Euromoney (Enterprise, day one | day two)
• Egyptian-American actor Rami Malek Wins an Emmy for ‘Mr. Robot’ (acceptance speech, Youtube)
• Clinton press poolers clash with Egyptian leader’s security (Politico)
• The Simple Solution to Cairo’s Traffic (CGP Grey, Youtube)

Three-time Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Edward Albee passed away earlier this week at age 88 after a short illness. Celebrated writer of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, “The Zoo Story”, “The Death of Bessie Smith”, and “The American Dream,” Albee was, in critic Hilton Als’ words, “the youngest of the three artists who reshaped the architecture of the postwar American theatre—Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller completed the trinity, and were more than a decade older than their younger colleague—Albee didn’t make work that believed only in the story…or [believe] that telling the story led to anything as trite as catharsis.”

Back in January, three American military contractors were kidnapped in Iraq by Shia militiamen. When they were released, two of them say, they found they were second-class citizens: “…the elation of their release was dampened when the U.S. forces that retrieved the men from Iraqi interlocutors draped an American flag over Frost, who is white, and told him, ‘Welcome home!’ There was no such gesture for the two Arab-American veterans, who’d been singled out for extra torment by their captors because they were Muslims working for the U.S. government.” The two men were Egyptian-Americans Waiel El-Maadawy and Amr Mohammed, and this is their story.