The Weekend Edition

To get things started this morning, we have some free association for you on social media (personal and for your business), Generation Z and fintech…

Are you worried about what a border guard can see of your social media profile? Or maybe you don’t want your boss (or underlings) to see certain photos you’re sharing with your BFF? Gizmodo has a good guide to “How to Make Your Social Media Accounts as Private as Possible,” which covers Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Note the qualifier here: “as private as possible.” The best way to maintain your privacy? Ditch social media entirely, if only because when a product is free, you’re the product that’s being sold.

Still insisting your company should be on social media? We could (and have) made impassioned arguments for why that’s not the case. But if you must — and if you’re in finance — go read Tearsheet’s “How finance brands use Instagram.” Hint: It’s not to publicize their earnings releases or the last transaction they closed, but to engage with retail customers and to recruit new talent.

And before we get off the subject of Instagram: Bloomberg has an interesting look at how “Instagram Killed the Retail Store,” suggesting that the kids in Gen Z are “rewriting the rules of selling fashion.”

While you’re on Tearsheet, go read about how “RBC is using video conferencing to bring the human touch back to banking,” which the site says (speaking the blatantly obvious) “could be a sign of an emerging consensus that digital banking may always require some form of human connection.”

Fintech drama: Then hop over to the New York Times’ Dealbook, where Nathaniel Popper has a great profile of Renaud Laplanche, the fintech entrepreneur who founded and led what was then the world’s largest peer-to-peer lender — Lending Club — to IPO and was ousted by his own board. He briefly plotted a hostile takeover, and now he’s back with Upgrade, a new platform that will compete head-to-head with Lending Club (where he still owns stock). It’s his first interview since he was booted. We’re going to be following this saga for some time.

Gen Z, by the way, is still not a “set” thing. The generation of kids that follows the millennials is generally accepted as being those born between 1994 and 2014, but we’ve seen date ranges shifted a few years in each direction. The New York Times had a nice piece a couple of years back that looks at the hallmarks of the “next big thing for market researchers, cultural observers and trend forecasters” (it defines them as kids born 1996-2010 against millennials born 1980-1995). Google recently released a paper headlined “It’s lit: A guide to what teens think is cool” including favourite technologies, pastimes, celebrities, and brands. What are the favourite brands of today’s teams? Youtube, Netflix, Google, Xbox and Oreos are the top five.

On, and speaking of tech: Android is now officially (by a hair) the world’s most popular operating system with internet users across the globe, edging out Windows with a 37.93% market share in March against Microsoft’s 37.91%, according to CNET.

Game of Thrones’ seven-episode seventh season is set to debut on 16 July. To whet our appetites, HBO has released a trailer. (watch, runtime: 1:32).

The best business drama we’ve read in a long time is Bloomberg’s recent take on the story of Guy Gentile, which it dubs “the Wall Street informant who double-crossed the FBI.” Gentile’s story isn’t as rare as you think: “He became one of the FBI’s 15,000 informants, or ‘confidential human sources,’ as the bureau calls them. The FBI has been using this tactic against stockbrokers and fund managers since at least 1992, when it created its first squad dedicated to Wall Street crime after the case against junk-bond king Michael Milken brought securities fraud into the mainstream. Informants are crucial to these cases, because tape recordings demonstrating wrongdoing cut through the complexity of stock market schemes for juries. And unlike agents, informants don’t require warrants to elicit evidence. Turncoats have driven some of the FBI’s biggest Wall Street investigations, like the landmark insider-trading cases against Raj Rajaratnam and Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors. Read “Bro, I’m going Rogue.”

The second-best business drama we’ve read in a while comes courtesy The Verge, which goes deep with “After the smoke clears: Inside Samsung’s quest for redemption.” It’s a deep dive into how the device maker worked to get past the self-immolating Note 7 debacle.

Are you waiting until your 30s to have kids? You’re in luck: Kids are smarter when born to older moms. Conventional wisdom has it that it’s vastly better (for mom and baby) to have kids in your mid-to-late 20s than in your mid-to-late 30s. New research suggests that may not be the case: “Children born to the 35- to 39-year-olds did significantly better on cognitive testing than the children born to the younger mothers,” writes Peri Klass, an MD and one of the best health writers in the United States since the 1990s. What’s the catch? “Nowadays children of older mothers have, on average, better outcomes because of the characteristics of women who tend to have children at older ages.” They take better care of their health before and during pregnancy, tend not to be smokers are more likely to breastfeed. Read “Good News for Older Mothers.”

Today’s 40- and 50-year olds are going to be the first generation to work until the day they die. “We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.” Read “A world without retirement,” part of a truly excellent series from the Guardian.

Are you one of them? Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has pointers for you. Bourdain, whose dégustation of Cairo eats including pigeon we noted back in February, admits in a great piece for WealthSimple’s blog that “I didn’t put anything aside, ever. Money came in, money went out. I was always a paycheque behind, at least. I usually owed my chef my paycheque: again, cocaine. Like I said, until I was 44, I never even had a savings account.”

(If you’re a corporate comms type, we’d suggest read that last piece from WealthSimple closely — it’s a perfect example of blog content that has editorial authenticity to it, doesn’t include a hard sell for your product, and will prompt truly interested potential clients to stick around and learn more about you.)

From the National Geographic: “Cannibalism Study Finds People Are Not That Nutritious.” The bottom line: “While our ancient ancestors did practice cannibalism, eating other humans just couldn’t compare with taking down a mammoth.” In other words, any of us with ancestors who ate someone else’s ancestors probably did it for ritual reasons, not as a source of food. Just how many calories are in a human being, if you ate him / her from head to toe? The New York Times had a chat with the study’s author and he figures it’s about 125k, compared with about 3.6 mn from a mammoth (60 days’ nourishment for 25 people). The same group of 25 would have to eat two humans a day to stay nourished.

If you’re going to crack open a nice chianti and a side of fava beans, where should you start? “Dr. Cole found that human thighs come in at a beefy 13,350 calories, while the calves are about 4,490 calories. The upper arms are around 7,450 calories, and the forearms about 1,660 calories. Within the chest cavity beats a heart that is about 650 calories. There are also the lungs, which come in around 1,600 calories, and below them the liver sits at around 2,570 calories. The kidneys total about 380 calories together.”

And while you’re on National Geographic, those among you nostalgic for any one of the Jurassic Park movies should go read this piece, which notes that, “Thanks to an exquisite 75-million-year-old fossil, paleontologists have crafted the best-ever reconstruction of a tyrannosaur’s face.” (The second film in the Jurassic World trilogy — the reboot of Jurassic Park — is due out in June 2018, for those of you crossing the days off your calendar when you rise each morning.)_

Is the F-35 a USD 1 tn Mistake? The F-35 fighter was more to the US than its next hot new toy — for those unfamiliar with aircraft made famous by its vertical landing capabilities, we give you this gem of a demonstration (watch, runtime: 3:54). The plane was supposed to ensure the air supremacy of America and select allies for next 20 years. It was the top-level military hardware equivalent of the Swiss army knife: advanced sensory and maneuverability for better dogfights; stealth capability; fuel efficiency for long range missions; ground support. And it was meant to be one-size fits all — a core design which could be easily adapted to the needs of the Air Force, Navy and Marines. But the development of the jet, which began in the 1980s after Lockheed-Martin won a faceoff, is still ongoing. Cost overruns, late deliveries, and design flaws have caused many to doubt if the plane would ever be completed. The program could ultimately cost the US over USD 1 tn. Paul Barrett’s excellent feature for Bloomberg BusinessWeek looks into whether it will be worth it, and more importantly, why is the US adamantly clinging to the program to this day? (The story is a 30-minute read, so kick back and enjoy this one)

Why do we pretend to know far more than we do? People form their opinions based largely on the information provided by individuals closest to them, and try to generally avoid the arduous task of having to use critical thinking skills to verify facts, cognitive science professor Steven Sloman tells Vox’s Sean Illing. It’s physically impossible to be knowledgeable about or gain personal experience related to everything out there in the world, which means we need to rely on the knowledge and experiences of the people around us. Our brains are programmed, to a certain extent, to believe that we have a much deeper understanding of how things work than we actually do — a phenomenon cognitive scientists refer to as “the illusion of explanatory depth.” This is compounded, Sloman says, by our innate need to be proven right, which we tend to satisfy by gathering information and opinions that confirm our previously held beliefs, rather than by allowing for new information to shape and change our opinions.

Possibly the strangest monetary phenomenon in the world: Somalia, quite possibly, has the world’s strangest monetary phenomenon, JP Konig argues on his blog. Konig calls its currency, the Somali shilling, an “orphaned” one as it exists without a central bank. Although the Central Bank of Somalia and the national government ceased to exist when a civil war broke out in 1991, Somali shilling banknotes continued to be used as money by Somalis. On top of the existing banknotes in circulation Somalis also accepted a steady stream of counterfeits that circulated with the old official currency. This is not new news. William J Luther writes “Somalis found it profitable to contract with foreign printers and import forgeries. The exchange value of the largest denomination Somali shillings note fell from [USD] 0.30 in 1991 to [USD] 0.03 in 2008. However, the purchasing power eventually stabilized at the cost of producing additional notes.”

Konig says the story is worth revisiting again now because Somalia’s newly restored central bank, assisted by the IMF, is on the verge of reprinting printing banknotes after a quarter century absence. The more striking part is that the system, which ran without a central bank and a large proportion of counterfeit currency worked. “Old legitimate 1000 shilling notes and newer counterfeit 1000 notes are worth about 4 U.S. cents each. Both types of shillings are fungible—or, put differently, they are accepted interchangeably in trade, despite the fact that it is easy to tell fakes apart from genuine notes. This is an odd thing for non-Somalis to get our heads around since for most of us, an obvious counterfeit is pretty much worthless. The exchange rate between [USD] and Somali shillings is a floating one that is determined by the cost of printing new fake 1000 notes. For instance, if a would-be counterfeiter can find a currency printer, say in Switzerland, that will produce a decent knock off and ship it to Somalia for 2.5 U.S. cents each (which includes the cost of paper and ink), then notes will flood into Somalia until their purchasing power falls from 4 to 2.5 U.S. cents… at which point counterfeiting is no longer profitable and the price level stabilizes.”

A big problem facing the central bank and IMF now is what to do with the old, counterfeit notes already in circulation. “According to the IMF mission chief Mohammed Elhage, the IMF is in the midst of trying to determine at what price it will convert old notes for new official ones. So rather than repudiating counterfeits, the normal route taken by central bankers, the CBS will buy them up and cancel them.”

Practicalities aside, the situation in Somalia raises a fundamental economic question that has never been satisfactorily answered, Konig argues; why is fiat money valuable? “One famous answer to the riddle of fiat money is that governments use force to ensure that fiat money is valued. But this can’t be the case in Somalia: it hasn’t had a government since 1991, yet shillings continue to be accepted. A second answer is that once money is valued—say because it a central bank has been pegged to an existing store of value like gold—then once the central bank disappears and the anchor is lost, those orphaned notes will continue to have value by dint of pure inertia and custom. This theory certainly seems to fit Somalia’s experience. The last theory is that when a central bank is destroyed, the money it issues will quickly become worthless… unless citizens expect a future central bank to emerge and reclaim the orphaned currency as its own.” Koning, who believes that “introducing a new paper currency is a bad idea,” says the second and third theories seem to fit the data.

Lebanon’s Pablo Escobar? BBC News’ Pop Up has started to make edgy documentaries a la Vice News. One particularly interesting one that caught our eyes recently was about one of Lebanon’s supposedly biggest narcotics kingpins. BBC says narcotics are grown in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley with impunity. “Backed by armed militiamen, the country’s [redacted] lords have become untouchable. Benjamin Zand visits one of the biggest [redacted] lords, and finds out how the civil war in neighbouring Syria means the farms have been able to flourish.” The documentary also touches on how consumption of narcotics is regulated in the country (runtime 17:30).

Still haven’t made plans for the Easter and Sham El Neseem long weekend? The New York Times has got your back with its 36 Hours in Cyprus. Also on the list of places we’d like to explore: Fez.

Two TV shows in our video queue to try this weekend: Better Call Saul (one season on Egyptian Netflix, three in most other markets), the Breaking Bad prequel, and The Leftovers (two seasons on iTunes, season three in progress), billed as a dark, edgy drama set three years after the completely unexplained disappearance of 2% of the global population.

Toshio Fukushima and his sons are the fifth- and sixth-generation in their family to run their confectionary in Tokyo where they mainly make and sell the traditional Japanese delicacy known as wagashi. Made from a mix of local ingredients such as white kidney beans and red azuki beans, sugar, and fruit, wagashi’s “sweetness is well controlled in order to make the most of the original flavors” that go into the mix. On top of being a treat for your taste buds though, the wagashi are quite the feast for the eyes. “Our job is to express evocative images of nature that appeal to the sense of sight through wagashi.” Guided by an old handbook written in 1867 and tools that have been passed down through their family, the Fukushima’s make some 200 different shapes and types of wagashi all year-round that “vary in look and taste and express the seasonal changes or flowers,” like the Japanese ume blossoms in January and daffodil blooms in spring. These treats are best enjoyed with a cup of green tea, the experts say. Watch the full clip here (runtime 3:01), but be warned that it is dangerously mouthwatering.

How to kick your “um” habit to the curb: Verbal fillers like “um,” “ah,” or “so” are common in both our everyday vernacular and in high-stakes situations like job interviews or public speeches. We tend to stay away from allowing ourselves to take a (silent) moment to gather our thoughts for fear of appearing ill-prepared or just downright dumb. “In some cases, the phrases are used to signal that you are about to say something and that the person listening should not interrupt, or that you are going to say something you want to emphasize,” linguistics expert Emily Tucker Prud’hommeaux tells The New York Times’ Christopher Mele. It’s not quite fair to point the finger of blame solely at people under 30 whose speech is littered with “like” — people of all ages tend to use different fillers as verbal crutches. While there is a bit of a research gap on the fillers used by certain demographics, anecdotal evidence suggests that “‘like’ is used heavily by the younger generation, ‘so’ by those in their 30s and ‘uptick’ or ‘upspeak’ — ending a declarative sentence in such a way that it sounds like a question — by women in their 20s and 30s.”

So how can you stop using them? As with most other habits, the first step is realizing that this habit actually exists. One communications expert recommends recording yourself speaking and listening to the recording later on. She says that, by assessing your verbal behavior later on — when the immediate pressure of getting your point across succinctly is no longer there — you will be able to identify which habits you have adopted and just how annoying they actually are. From there, your awareness of the issue will likely translate into greater prudence and selectivity in your speech.

In defense of the indefensible: Comic Sans. Nobody is entirely sure why the worldwide web suddenly came together and collectively decided that Comic Sans is the devil’s handwriting, but Mashable’s Christine Erickson says two graphic designers actually started a “Ban Comic Sans” campaign in 1999 in hopes of pointing out its amateurish look and the fact that it has no place in professional projects. Regardless of your personal opinions on the font, Comic Sans’ perceived ugliness is actually an asset. A study run by Princeton University psychologists found that, on average, students who received handouts in “ugly” or difficult to read fonts such as Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva did better on their exams than those who received the same handouts in more aesthetically appealing fonts. Essentially, the uglier fonts required more focus from the students to be able to decipher the information, which resulted in them digesting and retaining the information better. “When you get something in these fonts — it’s ugly, difficult to read, and it attracts your attention. When you have your attention, then you actually start trying to understand what it says,” Tim Harford tells Business Insider (runtime 1:22).

What do we really know about the minds of animals? Evidence of brain functions and responses show various animals do have minds as we might define them, argues an Economist article the newspaper has run on Medium. “No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other,” reads the piece. Animals do communicate too. The birdsong you hear is the marking of territory or a mating ritual. Santino, a chimpanzee in Sweden, used to hide piles of stones to throw them at visitors who annoyed him. “Santino could remember a specific event in the past (being annoyed by visitors), prepare for an event in the future (throwing stones at them) and mentally construct a new situation (chasing the visitors away).” The bottom line? “Animals might well think in ways that humans cannot yet decipher because they are too different from the ways humans think — adapted to sensory and mental realms utterly unlike that of the human, perhaps realms that have not spurred a need for language.”

DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK – Frontline’s Secrets of the Vatican: Pope Francis I is visiting Cairo on 28 April. His liberal views — including his humane approach to issues from refugees to backing off same gender relations — have made him a hero to many. He is an especially staunch critic of capitalism (he named himself after St. Francis D’Assisi, who gave his fortune to the poor). To understand his zeal and the need for his reforms is to look into the quagmire of Vatican politics that plagued his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI and pushed him to resign. No other documentary we have seen better explores this world, which has been largely shielded from the outside world. Disclaimer: this is not the Da Vinci Code, or any of the hogwash conspiracy theories, so if that’s your thing, then this isn’t for you.

Three issues threatening to upend the credibility of the Catholic Church come into play here: same gender relations (our annoying spam filters push us to find these substitute terms) and its prevalence in the church; the abuse of minors scandals; and the allegations of corruption by the Vatican bank. Interviews with former priests, journalists, child abuse survivors, and former senior officials of the church dive deep into these three issues and the resources expended by the powerful Vatican Curia — the internal state bureaucracy — to keep them from getting out. The film also looks into how Pope Benedict XVI attempted to reform the Curia and clean up house. Largely due to the intransigence of the bureaucracy (an issue we here we know too well) and scandals on all three issues reaching a fever pitch, these reforms had failed and a disillusioned pope resigned.

Beyond the scandals the film tries to two underlying contradictions. The first is how an organization meant to deal with spiritual matters handles the very earthly responsibilities of running the organization. The second is how institutions’ propensity to protect themselves from change end up harming the overall mission. You can watch the full documentary here (runtime: 1:25:38).

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

• What Enterprise readers expect of business and the economy (1Q2017 Enterprise Reader Poll)
• President Abdel Fattah El Sisi on Fox News (Youtube)
• Amr Adib commenting on Youssef El Houssieny being assaulted by an alleged Ikhwani in Washington, DC (Youtube)
• America and Egypt need each other (The National Interest)
• President Abdel Fattah El Sisi leads the Egyptian delegation out of the Arab Summit while that guy from Qatar is nattering on. (Youtube)

Tom Cruise is coming to Egypt. Or at least a sound stage made up to look like Omm El Donia. The Scientologist is apparently to take on the role originally held down by Brendan Fraser in a reboot of The Mummy, reports that bastion of journalism and good taste known as the Sun. The film is due out on 9 June (so don’t expect it in theaters during Ramadan) and the Sun helpfully includes a 15 second thriller. Forgive us for not being up to watching it.

Istanbul through cat eyes: In her new documentary film Kedi (Turkish for cat), Istanbul-born director Ceyda Torun tries to tell the story of a fast-changing city through the eyes of one of its most important inhabitants: the street cats of Istanbul (watch the trailer, runtime 2:00). For thousands of years, the people of the city cared for the cats that roam its streets. Even during Ottoman times, “many houses were constructed with cat doors,” according to CityLab, and “the pious cared for cats through local charitable foundations” known as vakif, says The Economist. Istanbul, a port city and an ancient trade hub, is home to hundreds of thousands of cats from all over the world who most probably made their way in as stowaways on cargo ships. “But as Istanbul has grown from village to town to crowded megalopolis” the space for its street cats and the people who continue to care for them has dwindled in direct proportion.

Torun trails the lives of seven of the city’s street cats and their caretakers to explore the impact of the city’s expansion and gentrification on people’s relationship with it, with each other, and the creatures that live around them. “Today in Istanbul we are divided into mental, cultural and political ghettos,” Elif Shafak writes in The Spectator. “This city of earthquakes and fires has become the site of greedy expansion and gentrification without proper urban planning.” Torun herself admits after her research that the less greenery and soil there is in the city as it “is flattened and paved over, the more inhospitable it becomes to the cats” and the people.

And speaking of cats: The guy with the most influence over the videos that make it big on BuzzFeed thinks this is the best internet video ever. Yes, it involves cats.