Brigadoon Daily Rundown = May 19, 2020

Tom McTague: The pandemic’s geopolitical aftershocks are coming: Western capitals aren’t just worried about the risk of a resurgence in coronavirus cases. https://bit.ly/2AwNML9

Robert Skidelsky: The unspoken reason for lockdowns: Governments cannot openly admit that the "controlled easing” of COVID-19 lockdowns, in fact, means controlled progress toward so-called herd immunity to the virus. Much better, then, to pursue this objective silently, under a cloud of obfuscation, and hope that a vaccine will arrive before most of the population gets infected. https://bit.ly/3dWkO5L

Niall Ferguson: Coronavirus: It’s a bug’s life in the city. They can keep it: Crowded metropolises have lost their luster in this crisis. https://bit.ly/2XaaEYt

Flash crash: A trading savant, a global manhunt, and the most mysterious market crash in history by Liam Vaughan review: The extraordinary story of the solo trader who triggered a $35trn market collapse — all from his parents’ home. https://bit.ly/2WGmF92

Private companies have put down strong roots in China: The pandemic and a more assertive Communist Party are testing their resilience. https://econ.st/2XabQep

Ahold Delhaize accelerates automation as coronavirus pressures workforce: The grocery giant moved up the timeline for the development of robotic technologies that can clean stores and process orders. https://on.wsj.com/36cGZlI

“Hyper automation is coming,” said Paul Daugherty, Accenture PLC’s group chief executive for technology. “We have now only automated 15 to 20 percent of what we can do.”

James Dyson interview: How he blew £500m on electric car to rival Tesla: The inventor spent a small fortune developing his idea. Then he scrapped it before the first prototype took to the road. He tells John Arlidge why. https://bit.ly/2yeJasl

Barron's: Inside the science and companies racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine https://bit.ly/36bPwFr

Steve Barrett: You will emerge from COVID-19 a better PR pro: Times of crisis are never pleasant to endure, but necessity is the mother of invention and experiences forged during tough times will inform careers moving forward. https://bit.ly/3bPV6yJ

Lee Richardson has proved the perfect fit as Liverpool’s performance psychologist https://bit.ly/3fULzcG

The man who has gone from the dugout at Chesterfield to a key part of the backroom team at Anfield.

Niki Lauda: The biography by Maurice Hamilton review — one of the bravest Formula One drivers: Nothing became the grand prix champion like his response to his horrific 1976 crash. https://bit.ly/2ZbCoPg

Brigadoon Daily Rundown = May 5, 2020

Microwave ovens:

90%: Share of households in the US that have a microwave oven

$750 million: US microwave oven market in 1976

$3.7 billion: US microwave oven market in 2006

Google enters upside-down world of renewable supply and demand: The internet giant plans to shift energy use depending on the availability of clean power, inverting the demand response paradigm. https://bloom.bg/2KZZwrE

Pandemic advertising got weird fast: Welcome to disastertising. https://bit.ly/2KWEkTn

The future of travel: our experts look at what lies ahead: The way we holiday is bound to change after the lockdown, but how? Get ready for social distancing on beaches, ‘cleanliness theatre’, and rocketing prices. https://bit.ly/2W42DVX

Coronavirus: That summer holiday could be yours if you climb every mountain: Britons longing to escape to the Continent after weeks of lockdown will have to negotiate complicated border controls. https://bit.ly/2yeRvMR

Croatia has backed the idea that those boarding a plane must show a ‘COVID-19 passport’

Rory Sutherland: Is this the end of commuting? https://bit.ly/35rrc26

Peter King: With so much unknown, NFL can expect imperfect 2020 season https://bit.ly/3deaDJt

Brigadoon Daily Rundown = May 1, 2020

Ian Bremmer: Some countries will implode: The political scientist and founder of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research, and consulting firm, warns of the consequences of the current crisis. https://bit.ly/3cYfbU8

Jim O'Neill: Blaming China is a dangerous distraction: Rather than applying a double standard and fixating on China’s undoubtedly large errors, we would do better to consider what China can teach us. https://bit.ly/3bNOjpQ

Only connect: Why Bucharest is world’s best for remote work https://bit.ly/35oe4uz

The COVID-19 death rate in deprived areas in England doubles that of better-off places.

Inside the early days of China’s coronavirus coverup: The dawn of a pandemic—as seen through the news and social media posts that vanished from China’s internet. https://bit.ly/3d3hTYH

Artificial intelligence outperforms human intel analysts in a key area: A Defense Intelligence Agency experiment shows AI and humans have different risk tolerances when data is scarce. https://bit.ly/3d91Vwm

Brigadoon Daily Rundown = April 29, 2020

David Wallace-Wells: We still don’t know how the coronavirus is killing us https://nym.ag/3aQ7TAl

WP: Matthew Pottinger faced Communist China’s intimidation as a reporter. He’s now at the White House shaping Trump’s hard-line policy toward Beijing. https://wapo.st/35cFUcY

Time is running out for the West to stop China’s global takeover: For decades we have turned a blind eye to Beijing’s crimes and kidded ourselves it won’t take advantage of our weakness, says Edward Lucas. https://bit.ly/2W5ODK6

Ian Cowie: Why I’m walking away from China: The spread of the virus blame game has prompted Ian Cowie to start selling up. https://bit.ly/3f3nPmb

Daniel Drezner: Meet the new bipartisan consensus on China, just as wrong as the old bipartisan consensus on China. It would be great if everyone calmed the heck down. https://wapo.st/2ShFSvh

Joseph Nye: No, the coronavirus will not change the global order: We should be skeptical toward claims that the pandemic changes everything. China won’t benefit, and the United States will remain preeminent. https://bit.ly/3eZJYlt

Melanie Brock: Postcard from Tokyo: Life in surprisingly low-tech lockdown: While the Japanese have a great deal of resilience and are used to disasters, lockdown is testing their patience - and the old ways of working and studying. https://bit.ly/2zwzGcb

Robot dog 'spot' screens COVID-19 patients at Boston hospital: The four-legged robot is being used as a telemedicine platform, so healthcare workers can remotely triage patients. https://bit.ly/3aLxjPy

Who is likely to go without food in the looming supply crisis: IHS Markit has identified 12 'choke points' between farm and plate. Their analysts reckon one could get away with two or three or maybe even four that could be fixed with a rapid intervention (for example, no people to pick the crops, so wave large sums of money and enforce social distancing) under stress and risk of breakage. Anything more than four spells big trouble. https://bit.ly/2zzKiqJ

HBO Max is a branding disaster, and this ad proves it: It’s one thing to put HBO’s shows on a broader platform, but HBO Max is also diluting its brand. https://bit.ly/2Swjej5

You can say, “What we’re trying to do is preserve the quality and elegance of what HBO has been doing for 40 years and at the same time increase its output to a reasonable degree that doesn’t effect the quality and elegance and beauty,” as WarnerMedia Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt did to NBC’s Dylan Byers last year.

But the marketing for HBO Max so far is about as far from elegant and beautiful as it gets.

"AT&T is junking up Time Warner’s luxury product, HBO, and turning it into HBO Max. This is the equivalent of Hermès selling JanSport alongside Birkin bags.” -- NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway

Christina Paxson: College campuses must reopen in the fall. Here’s how we do it. It won’t be easy, but there’s a path to get students back on track. Higher education will crumble without it. https://nyti.ms/2YlPWae

Christina Paxson is the president of Brown University.

Alanis Morissette interview: ‘Female rage gets such a bad rap, but it’s part of being human’: For a generation of women, Jagged Little Pill was the album that spoke to them like no other. This year marks its 25th anniversary – but Alanis Morissette isn’t stopping any time soon. As she releases her ninth album, the original queen of angst talks to Charlotte Edwardes about young stardom, lessons learned and new motherhood at 45. https://bit.ly/2y7WZsA

Nicole Stott: What my spacewalk taught me about isolation: Feel as if you’re drifting in space? She knows what that’s like. https://nyti.ms/3bXbkqg

@CBCAlerts: MLB could resume by July 4 with minimum 80-game schedule. Possibility growing that games may occur in home parks likely without fans