1. US botched the response to COVID-19, McChrystal says: Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal is about to have a new book out, and it has a big takeaway: We're not doing a great job of protecting ourselves. "Risk: A User's Guide," out Oct. 5, takes a look at how leaders approach and handle risk. McChrystal has found they focus more on the likelihood that something will or won't happen and less on what to do when even the unlikely happens.
2. Forget COP26 boasts — decarbonizing takes thousands of tiny, boring steps: Truly green companies redesign their products rather than buying offsets or planting trees. Brooke Masters writes: "Stunts and pious pledges won't save the planet. Manufacturers and retailers must rethink their entire design, manufacturing, and sales processes. Those that have are discovering that change is either very expensive or an unglamorous, iterative process that involves thousands of tiny improvements. Neither makes for good press releases."
3. Gap and Benetton once ruled fashion—and their success ultimately led to their demise: With the announcement this summer that Gap would close all its stores in the UK and Ireland, and with Benetton no longer at the frontier of cool, the idea of these brands once being so dominant seems fairly strange. New successful fashion brands are likely to mix online with brick-and-mortar retailing and make sustainability a core part of their offering.
4. Ancient footprints push back the date of human arrival in the Americas: Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age's glaciers melted.
5. How Pappy Van Winkle became wildly expensive: Maybe Pappy Van Winkle became a household name when Anthony Bourdain first drank it in a 2012 episode of The Layover. He proclaimed, "If God made Bourbon, this is what he'd make."
Chef Sean Brock may have stoked the flames when he touted the Bourbon at his acclaimed restaurant, Husk, in Charleston, South Carolina.
Wine Enthusiast writes that the fact of the matter is, there wasn't just one thing that turned Pappy Van Winkle into an impossible-to-find unicorn. As more people started to talk about it, Pappy became famous for being famous.
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