The Nigerian government remained the heavyweight champion of the world this week, knocking out jobs, power and affordable fuel. Diesel prices are currently trying to remind Nigerians that no matter what tinkering the honourable minister of state for swag tries with PMS, it still remains the riich mans fuel.
Speaking of champions, I woke up yesterday to news of the passing of Muhammad Ali, a true icon if there ever was one. I didnt witness him in his prime, but theres plenty lessons for me and our generation from his life and his big, big mouth. I’m glad he’s found peace, his unchainable spirit now rid of its old prison of a body. In other news, Nigerians you people can steal o.
I’ve got some great news to share over the coming weeks about TSW, I’m pretty excited. In the meantime though, enjoy the issue!
Tech Stuff
How To Light Up Nigeria: The noise of Nigeria is overwhelming. Traffic horns blaring, vendors hawking, politicians lying, pastors and imams calling people to worship, and underneath it all, the sound of Generators. What if there was a way to ensure we all have clean, stable power? This is the story of the Azura power plant project, another exasperating step in our quest for basic infrastructure after 50 odd years of a union. LINK
Robots Are The New Tailors: Decry it as sweatshop labor or praise it as “an escalator out of poverty,” low-wage sewing in faraway lands is going the way of the typing pool. The plummeting cost of industrial robots and the electronic cameras used for machine vision mean that serious automation is coming to even the cheapest sewn products. LINK
Meet the Sims: By far the best moment of Recode’s annual Code Conference was when Elon Musk took the stage and explained that though we think we’re flesh-and-blood participants in a physical world, we are almost certainly computer-generated entities living inside a more advanced civilization’s video game. I take by my worlds coolest guy title, this mofo’s crazy. LINK
Therano Places To Hide: Not long ago, Elizabeth Holmes was regarded as one of the US’s most successful female entrepreneurs, with a net worth of $4.5 billion, Forbes estimated.
This week Forbes cut that figure to zero. LINK
Business, Economic and Politics
Billion Dollar Balls: Over half a century (the company will celebrate its 50th anniversary in August) Vitol has never suffered an annual loss. Profits surged from just $22.9 million in 1995 to a record $2.28 billion in 2009, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. At its peak, Vitol’s return on equity, a measure of profitability compared with the money that partners have invested, was a geyserlike 56 percent. Even Wall Street pales in comparison; Goldman Sachs’s best ROE since going public in 1999 is 31 percent. This is the story of how Vitol stablished itself as the ultimate energy trader. LINK
How Mark Zuckeberg Crushed Google Plus: In Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built not just a business, but a company culture with the fervor of a messianic sect. So, in June 2011, when Google launched Google Plus, Zuckerberg put his company into lockdown. In an adaption from his new book on Silicon Valley, former Facebook employee Antonio García Martínez describes the war that followed. LINK
Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest: November’s US election promises to be an election where history reveals itself as merely an unreliable tool that misleads the future, with yesterday receding into myths and legend that only threaten the real and certain urgency of getting through the next 24 hours. It is a dumb process premised on the notion that all of us are broken-brain stupid, beginning each day via some kind of Memento mental reset driven by pig ignorance, and the buffoon Donald Trump couldn’t be paired with a better opponent in this regard. LINK
The Mythical Millenial: Corporations like LinkedIn and Oracle are now hiring an army of “millennial consultants” who charge as much as $20,000 an hour for their expertise on how to manage and market to young people, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. The consultant bonanza follows a trend that has been shaping the business world for the last few years — millennials, executives believe, are coming for every industry, and businesses that do not appease them risk being trampled by them. Yet there’s a glaring problem with these and other efforts to go after the younger among us: Millennials aren’t real. LINK
Good Reads
The Outsized Life Of Muhammad Ali: The only thing ordinary about the boxing career of Muhammad Ali was that he stayed too long and ended up damaged. Everything else was outsized: the upset victory in 1964, to win the title from Sonny Liston (“I’m King of the World!” he shouted to the reporters at ringside), the friendship (and falling out) with Malcolm X, the embrace of the Nation of Islam, the blaze of brilliant fights in the mid-sixties, then the draft, the acceptance of a potential jail term, the stripping of his title, the years in exile. Ali was not to be mistaken for a political leader or a thinker, but he had political importance as a symbol of refusal, of black pride. LINK
The Greatest Fight (Story) Ever: Time may well erode that long morning of drama in Manila, but for anyone who was there those faces will return again and again to evoke what it was like when two of the greatest heavyweights of any era met for a third time, and left millions limp around the world. Muhammad Ali caught the way it was: “It was like death. Closest thing to dyin’ that I know of. LINK
You Don’t Know My Name But: A former Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman was sentenced to six months in jail because a longer sentence would have “a severe impact on him,” according to a judge. At his sentencing Thursday, his victim read him a letter describing the “severe impact” the assault had on her. It’s the saddest thing I’ve seen this week. LINK
A Peoples History Of Dating: The point of Uni-style dating wasnt’t to get married. No woman expected to traipse down the aisle with her dance partner from last Saturday night, regardless of what they had done in the dark. The point was to compete. Students “rated” one another’s social credit; the better you rated, the more you dated, and the more you dated, the higher you rated. None other than the anthropologist Margaret Mead characterized college dating as “a competitive game” rather than a proper courtship ritual. Students weren’t playing for emotional keeps. The stakes were the admiration and envy of one’s peers. LINK
Other stuff
Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person: The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. LINK
Why Greek Statues Look Like Boys: Don’t pretend your eyes don’t hover, at least for a moment, over the delicately sculpted penises on classical nude statues. While it may not sound like the most erudite subject, art historians haven’t completely ignored ancient Greek genitalia either. After all, sculptors put as much work into penises as the rest of their artwork, and it turns out there’s a well-developed ideology behind those rather small penises. LINK
How To Have Difficult Conversations: Every person is at least 75% responsible for how others treat them. Our verbal and nonverbal actions limit or expand the options of others. But when we slip into patterns solely because we’ve failed to develop other response choices, we become predictable. If you are known for a tendency to avoid conflict, for example, others can generate conditions that will cause you to pull back, apologize, or walk away. You abdicate a portion of your 75% responsibility. But if we have a repertoire of replies and comebacks at our fingertips, we can opt out of predictable patterns. LINK
The Case For Wearing Deodorant: How men who appear low in masculinity can be more attractive to women. Wearing deodorant makes men who are seen as low in masculinity more attractive to women, new research finds. The boost to attractiveness was not seen for men whose faces are already perceived as being high in masculinity. The research underlines the fact that women are more sensitive to odours than men. LINK
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