The Weekend Edition

A QUICK NOTE TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS

We publish the Enterprise Morning Edition in English and Arabic from Sunday through Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and political news that will move markets each day. What you’re reading now is our Weekend Edition, which is light on news and heavy on stories to read, videos to watch, and podcasts to which you may want to listen on Friday and Saturday (that being the weekend for the vast majority of our readers). The Weekend Edition comes out each Friday between 9:00am and 9:30am CLT. We’re in beta and in English only right now.

We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup. Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

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DO YOU WANT TO READ OUR GCC EDITION? We recently launched the beta version of our Enterprise GCC edition, and are now publishing Sunday-Thursday at 3 am UTC/ GMT (7 am UAE, 6 am KSA, 5 am Cairo), give or take a few minutes. We’re in beta, after all. You can sign up via this link and may view the Enterprise GCC site online at gcc.enterprise.press. Comments, suggestions and criticisms are always welcome at editorial@enterprisemea.com.
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WHAT WE’RE TRACKING THIS WEEKEND

1st Cairo Law Firms Community’s Cup taking place tomorrow: Tomorrow, Cairo’s top law firms are “battling it out to the bare bone in a one day football tournament” at Pyramid Hills from 2:30 pm – 8:30 pm CLT. The tournament is being organised by Zulficar & Partners, and will feature players from Sharkawy & Sarhan, Matouk Bassiouny, Shalakany, Alliance and Zaki Hashem & Partners. A food stand on hand will be selling refreshments. We wish all the players luck — and a speedy recovery…. (H/t Firas El-S.)

SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

We interrupt our regularly scheduled weekend programming to bring you what’s either big news or the ultimate regional trial balloon: As longtime readers know, we have something of a moratorium on news in the Weekend Edition, but this report got us thinking: “The chairman of the Senate Appropriations panel on foreign aid, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., laid out his vision for a ‘Marshall Plan’ in an April 7 briefing with reporters following his trip to the region. As a preliminary step, he said he would work within his subcommittee on emergency funding of ‘multiple bns of USD for Egypt and several other countries.” Read: “Congress ponders ‘Marshall Plan’ for Egypt” in Al Monitor. (H/t Dina N.)

Remembering Zaha Hadid: Zaha Hadid, widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world, died on Thursday, 31 March. Hadid, an Iraqi-British national, was the first woman to win the Prtizker Architecture Prize and also the first to receive the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gold medal. “She was an extraordinary role model for women. She was fearless and a trailblazer — her work was brave and radical. Despite sometimes feeling misunderstood, she was widely celebrated and rightly so,” Amanda Levete describes her. The Guardian ran an obituary, describing in some degree of detail the evolution in Hadid’s designs and her constant struggle with design orthodoxy. Zaha Hadid was “just getting started,” The New Yorker’s Thomas De Monchaux writes, even though “her vision was unusually visible from early on.” De Monchaux says the “breaks and bends in her buildings were not, unlike those of many of her contemporaries, the result of a self-referential geometrical exercise, a cryptic narrative, or a default setting in the aerospace and animation software that architects have increasingly adopted. Instead, her moves were attuned to an anticipated visual experience—something like the forced perspective of a raked theater stage or the optical illusion of anamorphosis. Hadid’s pictorial and painterly work was a meditation on the tension between sight and insight. A Hadid building visibly strives, like all of us, toward some image of itself.” You can know more about Hadid by listening to the BBC documentary about her, “Zaha Hadid – Dream Builder” (run time 53:32). You can also view pictures of seven of Hadid’s “best” buildings here, including the Heydar Aliyev Center in Azerbaijan, and the full range of her work in the Zaha Hadid Architects website’s archive.

Hey, Yankee, care for a taste of the ‘medicine’ Egyptians take every time they think about traveling? The European Union is scheduled to debate this coming week whether to require visas of American and Canadian citizens. Are they security risks? Perhaps, but that’s not what this is about, says Canada’s Globe & Mail. Instead, the European Commission has to decide by 12 April whether to “demand visas from countries who have similar requirements in place for one or more EU state.” Washington and Ottawa both demand visas from Romanians and Bulgarians (among others), despite their having joined the EU in 2007. The newspaper quotes an “EU source” as saying, “A political debate and decision is obviously needed on such an important issue. But there is a real risk that the EU would move towards visas for the two [Americans and Canadians].”

Don’t worry, poor First World Citizens: You can buy your way back to visa-free travel. Planet Money’s “Buy This Passport” (listening time: 20:16) looks at how St. Kitts and Nevis’ citizenship-for-investment program worked out. Not sure which passport to choose? The so-called Passport Index has got your back, ranking the world’s passports by the total number of countries to which passport holders enjoy visa-free access. Egypt hits the rankings at number 74, on par with India and Turkmenistan. That’s ahead of China, Vietnam and Cambodia, but behind Niger and Sao Tome and Principe.

How does mandatory military conscription affect crime and the labour market? It’s not clear, but the effects are close to negative, economists Randi Hjalmarsson and Matthew Lindquist write. “The findings show that military service increases the likelihood of future crimes, mostly among males from disadvantaged backgrounds and with a previous criminal history.” However, the analysis suggests the effects are “not large enough to break a cycle of crime that has already begun prior to service.” The only positive impact they found was that conscription for [males from disadvantaged backgrounds results in a] decrease in disability benefits and the number of sick days.” The conclude that the idea “that military service may be a way to straighten out troubled youths and build skills that are marketable in the post-service labour market” is not supported.

Britain’s most famous spy is still making waves from the grave as a previously unknown video of turncoat Kim Philby giving a lecture to Stasi thugs in East Germany came to light this past week. A dedicated Communist in his youth despite being born to an upper-class British family, Philby was recruited to spy for the Soviet Union at Cambridge and went on to build a career as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War before eventually being recruited to MI6, becoming a Soviet agent in place. Philby isn’t the only “writer who spied,” as the Economist puts it, with a blog post this week looking at the links between fiction writers and intelligence work, from Christopher Marlowe to Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.

It costs a lot to sell a lot of bonds: There is no conspiracy surrounding the price changes in bond issuance, Matt Levine explains, describing how bid-ask spreads affect the bond market. Selling bonds at a discount and having their prices rise after the issuance is normal — think of it “as being the price that the companies pay for immediacy,” Levine writes. The discount to fair value might be small, Levine writes, but there is a catch: “The way to sell tons of bonds at such a tiny discount to fair value is by marketing those bonds, using an investment bank to try to persuade investors to buy them and build a book of demand to take down all the new supply. And you have to pay the bank too.” He concludes that the “all-in cost of immediacy, for selling the entire amount outstanding of a brand-new bond, is about 0.83 percent for an investment grade bond, and about 2.58 percent for a high-yield bond.” Financial markets “are frictions” that involve moving money and middlemen “expending effort and skill and taking risk to do it,” Levine writes, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they’re compensated for it. Not every friction in financial transactions is a conspiracy. Sometimes, it’s a market.”

Exactly how much of an old-school tech geek are you? Take this Economist cover quiz and find out. The cover writes out the word “The Future of Computing,” with the message spelled out like a ransom note using characters from a variety of keyboards and on-screen fonts from throughout the history of computing. Be warned: Skip over the middle section of the story if you want to scroll down to where they’ve zoomed in on individual letters. With the competition date passed, the Economist has posted the answers in the middle of the contest (don’t get us started…). Not geeky enough for you? Head over to the Vintage Computing Reddit; they’ll get you started.

How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare: Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic writes a fascinating look at the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that’s very much for grown-ups: EVE Online. The game has over 500k active players and has been in continual operations since 2003. The game has now spawned a history book, Empires of Eve, focusing largely on an 18-month war that took place within the game called the The Great Eve War which involved “50k people. It took about two years to fully resolve.” The game requires an incredible amount of planning and coordination outside the game, and tends to attract some interesting players. The author of Empires of Eve says “The people who play, and the people who succeed at the game, are genuinely brilliant. When you talk to the leaders who run these organizations [the in-game empires] you’ll ask them casually… what do you do for a living? And this one woman said, oh, I run a nuclear reactor up in Portland. Another guy was like, oh, I run an international shipping and logistics company… somewhere out there, there is a corporation in EVE that is run exclusively by Fortune 500 CEOs.” (Read How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare and go here if you want to play a 14-day trial of EVE Online without charge)

Is nothing safe in this economic climate? The price of the vanilla bean has more than tripled in the past year as output has slipped and quality took a hit. A prolonged price slump led to smaller global harvests, causing farmers in Madagascar, which supplies half the world’s beans, to take short-cuts in the process that creates “the aromatic qualities prized by consumers,” according to Bloomberg. Growers in Madagascar started harvesting more pods sooner and vacuum packing them instead of curing and drying. “But because the beans were so immature, they hadn’t fully developed the compound — vanillin — responsible for all the flavor and aroma.” So as lower quality beans hit the market, prices have soared, with higher-end vanilla costing USD 250 per kilo. “There’s a limit to what people will pay for natural vanilla and we’re nearing that point,” said Josephine Lochhead, president of vanilla company Cook Flavoring.

Are our jobs really safe from AI? A Japanese AI nearly won a literary award for a novel it wrote, Natalie Shoemaker writes for Big Think. While people usually feared manual labor jobs and services would be the first to be wiped out by automation, it seems with a tad of human guidance, the sphere becomes far bigger. The team that created this literary AI was led by Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor at Future University Hakodate. His team acted as a guide for the AI, deciding things like the plot and gender of the characters. They also helped select prepared sentences, which the AI then used to autonomously “write” the book. To give you a sense of what the AI came up with: “I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement,” and “The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.”

Are you surprised to learn that Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate Amreeka’s USD 19 tn in debt in eight years is not exactly feasible? How about that it’s “mathematically impossible,” “nuts,” and “absurd”? Those are the words economic experts used to describe the economic plan in a Marketplace story. “If Trump eliminated every government function except for paying out Social Security and Medicare bills, it wouldn’t get him very far, he’d still have [USD] 16 [tn] worth of debt to eliminate,” said Glenn Kessler, who writes the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column. The Trump campaign has posited that selling oil from government lands could generate offsetting revenue. “In that case, the U.S. would have to sell as much oil per year as Saudi Arabia does … for a hundred years.” The amazing Planet Money podcast has a compelling (and humorous) look at the various and sundry promises made by presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle. Twenty-two economists (right-, left- and center-leaning) graded the economic proposals of U.S. presidential candidates and basically hated every one of them except to tax carried interest in private equity transactions just like any other source of income. (Read their summary here, or listen to episode here.)

Guess what? “We’re More Honest With Our Phones Than With Our Doctors.”

And on the topic of health: Men lose their minds rather faster than do women, the Wall Street Journal (paywall) tells us, saying that on “most cognitive tests, older women outpace their male counterparts.” The good news? Researchers know what slows cognitive decline in men and women alike. The bad news? You’re not going to like it: Eat fewer carbs, more healthy fats and exercise every day.

“This essay got a high-school senior into 5 Ivy League schools and Stanford”: High school senior Brittany Stinson had received acceptance letters last week from Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Cornell, as well as Stanford, which has a lower acceptance rate (4.69%) than any of the previous Ivy League schools. The key to her success was a 655-word ode to American membership-only retail firm Costco Wholesale, in response to a Common Application admissions essay that asked applicants to share something that was so meaningful that their lives would feel “incomplete without it.” Read the full essay here.

Cookie Monster and Siri are back in this behind-the-scenes video from Apple (read: viral marketing stratagem) shot during the making of the Cookie Monster iPhone 6s ad that many, many of you clicked on a few weekends back.

WATCH THIS

The trailer for the much-anticipated BFG movie is out (run time 2:23), and we can’t help but feel a little heartbroken. Call us old fashioned (or just old) but some of us sort of miss the almost chicken-scratch quality of the original Quentin Blake drawings that adorned Roald Dahl books.

LISTEN TO THIS

Season 2 of Serial is over: Sarah Koenig wrapped the second season of her podcast, Serial. As with the first, more successful, season, Koenig did not give her clear-cut verdict on the case, especially since it has a court martial scheduled for August. She did, however, wrap both viewpoints on the issue and looked to pinpoint what was Bergdahl’s fault, and what was not, stressing that incidents like Bowe Bergdahl’s “desertion” are a fact of war. Koenig looked for accountability, more than blame; she said “during the search for Bowe … people were seriously injured in ways that messed with their lives, messed with their families… Punishment is very different from blame, blame is more delicate … it can be slippery.” (Run time 01:05:04)

From specks to battleships: How did we go from tiny bags of chemicals to the vast menagerie of creatures we see around us? Radiolab’s most recent episode explores how life “got bigger” with life evolving from tiny microbial form to larger, more complex organisms. The Radiolab team dig deep to explore “one of the most underrated mysteries of all time,” a “story of one cosmic oops moment that changed the game of life forever.” (Run time 30:47)

The New Yorker Radio Hour, Episode 24: Larry David, Amy Poehler, and Randy Newman: This week, the New Yorker’s Radio Hour returns with three separate, on-stage interviews from its 2014 New Yorker Festival, featuring comedians Larry David, Amy Poehler and singer-songwriter and pianist Randy Newman. Though if you’re like us, you’re listening for Larry David’s segment of the hour, which runs from the start of the podcast until the 17:50 mark.

… Fans of the Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator may not find much here in the way of new revelations about his career, but even for those familiar with David’s bumpy start to his life as a writer and stand-up comedian, it’s still fun to listen to again, such as his parents’ rock-bottom expectations for his success, “My mother wanted me to be a mailman,” David says. He also touches on the episode of Curb which engendered the most hate mail, as well as why he continued with his career in stand-up, despite not seeming to enjoy all its aspects. On stand-up: “You find, the best aspect of your personality, the person you want to be, the person you love – a person you love comes out of you, as opposed to the guy you can’t stand throughout the day.” (Listen, running time: first 17:53 minutes for the Larry David segment, 58:18 total)

SOMETHING THAT MADE US THINK

Economics vocabulary is “a dumpster fire,” Noah Smith explains in a Bloomberg View column. Take “investment,” for example, “Most people think this means buying some financial assets, such as stocks or bonds. That’s basically a form of lending … Economists call that ‘financial investment,’ but the kind of investment they usually talk about is business investment, meaning a company’s purchase of capital goods. Since companies use debt to buy capital goods … this kind of ‘investment’ is actually a type of borrowing. So economists use the same word to mean both borrowing and lending.” Citing a number of other examples, Smith warns that “as jargon creates a greater and greater disconnect between what economists really believe and what the public thinks they believe, the chances grow that the discipline will suffer a Humpty-Dumpty-like fall in prestige and influence.”

HEALTH

The scientific proof that chocolate calms you down is here: While rich in antioxidants that boost endorphins, a newly released clinical trial from Australian researchers at Swinburne University of Technology tells us that “demonstrates the positive effects of cocoa polyphenols on mood,” said lead author Matthew Pase. Polyphnenols are molecules that slow cell damage. The polyphenol sparking scientific interest in chocolate is resveratrol. Resveratrol reduces inflammation, keeps bad cholesterol from congealing, and also increases the growth of blood vessels.  The researchers gave 72 group members a dark chocolate mix to drink for 30 days with 500 mg, 250 mg, or 0 mg of cocoa polyphenols. They hoped to learn about the effects of polyphenols on both mood and cognitive functions, but only saw results in mood. The group members who ingested 500 mg of polyphenols a day reported an increase in calmness and contentedness throughout the study period.  However, there is a catch. The calm feelings came only from dark chocolate. Milk and white chocolate have much lower concentrations of polyphenols, so they can’t mellow you out. Secondly, participants rated their own moods. Self-reported mood is a tricky barometer for a study because it’s subjective.

ENTREPRENEURS

Uber and ArabNet Digital began receiving applications for the 2016 UberPITCH in Cairo and Alexandria. UberPITCH allows successful applicants to pitch their idea to several investors, in a seven-minute journey around the city. One winner from each city will be selected and sponsored by Uber at Arabnet Digital Summit 2016. The prize will include the production of a one-minute video to pitch their startup, exhibition space, branding, and match-up sessions with key industry leaders. To qualify, the startups must have less than 25 employees, be a digital startup that is more than 12-months old, and have received less than USD 2 mn in investments. Other participating cities: Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Doha, Manama, Amman, Beirut, and Casablanca. Our question: Where can you get in Cairo or Alex in seven minutes, if it’s not a Friday morning?

TECH

Could scientists have cracked the code on a new state of matter? A new paper in Nature Materials by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Cambridge shows that physicists were able to catch a glimpse of the predicted “quantum spin liquid” and the fermions that come with it. Let’s decode that from geek speak into something we can all understand: quantum spin liquid is a phase where electrons begin to break apart and behave a little strangely. In the presence of Majorana fermions, this creates patterns so hard to predict that until now scientists weren’t even sure what they looked like.  The researchers say say the Majorana fermions could eventually have some major quantum computing applications.

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

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

• The Panama Papers: Meet the power players (ICIJ)
• Photos from an abandoned resort town show how terrorism destroyed tourism in Egypt (Getty Images via Gizmodo)
• Behind the Panama Papers: The full story of the Mubarak sons’ tax-sheltered company (Mada Masr)
• Breakdown of new electricity prices starting in July (Al Borsa)
• How to lock down your Mac, iPhone and online accounts if you expect trouble ahead (Macworld)

ON YOUR WAY OUT

Being a woman in the United States will cost you more than USD 430k over the course of your professional lifetime, according to analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. That’s the price women pay due in large part to the gender pay gap, at least in the US, Bloomberg reports. And the situation becomes even more dire for women of color, with the gap being widest for black and Hispanic women in Washington, where it is an astounding USD 1.6 mn to USD 1.8 mn over a four-decade career.

A new form of virtual currency is now rivaling Bitcoin: It has recently been revealed that Ethereum, a new form of virtual currency, has seen its value climbing 1,000% over the last three months, with the value of one individual Ether increasing from USD 1 to USD 12, and the value of all existing Ether increased to over USD 1 bn, more than any other virtual currency other than Bitcoin, which last week had an outstanding value of USD 6 bn. Ethereum is the latest virtual currency to run a blockchain platform, the database concept that Bitcoin introduced which stores and shares transactions among a distributed network of computers without requiring any central authority or depository. However, it has an extra edge over Bitcoin with a new programmable transaction functionality. “Two people, for instance, could program a bet on a sports game directly into the Ethereum blockchain. Once the final score came in from a mutually agreed upon source-say, The Associated Press- the money would be automatically transferred to the winning party,” explained the New York Times. This function, along with the help of a battle within the Bitcoin community, has seen dozens of functioning applications built on Ethereum, and some corporate giants, such as IBM, JP Morgan, and Microsoft, are now experimenting with it. “Bitcoin is still probably the safest bet, but Ethereum is certainly No. 2, and some folk will say it is more likely to be around in 10 years,” Stanford computer science researcher Joseph Bonneau said. “It will depend if any real markets develop around it. If there is some actual application.”

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