Brigadoon Daily Rundown = June 25, 2020

Katy Balls: How Boris Johnson plans to reset his premiership https://bit.ly/3dwTB9o

"There are even some MPs who have begun to ask whether Johnson is really up to the job for the full term."

4 futurists on how to be forward-thinking in a post-COVID-19 world: Long-term thinking is especially challenging during times of uncertainty — but futurists are especially good at it. The Hustle asked some prominent voices in the space for some words of wisdom. https://bit.ly/2VbYLkU

What are cobots capable of? An A to Z guide to the tasks that collaborative robots can perform. https://bit.ly/37XZKtW

China on the campaign trail: The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday released an ad slamming Trump, saying his trade policy, specifically his trade war with China, has hurt American farmers. The ad is part of a campaign in the six figures that will target swing voters nationally and in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Democrats said. See the ad here: https://bit.ly/31jwJaG

Political donors linked to China won access to Trump, GOP: WSJ reports, soon after Trump took office, people with ties to the Chinese state poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into his re-election bid to get close to and potentially influence the new president. The effort had early success in gaining access for those involved, helping them meet the president or top Republicans at fundraisers or at an internal GOP leadership meeting. https://on.wsj.com/3hU49CO

Prepare for a Biden landslide: National Journal reports, Trump's weekend rally in red-state Oklahoma, featuring empty seats, a canceled outdoor event, and a rambling speech that failed to land many punches against Biden, is a foreboding sign that his once rock-solid base is softening in the run-up to the election. Dealing with the triple threat of a pandemic, frayed race relations, and a battered economy, even some of the president's supporters are questioning whether he's up for the job. https://bit.ly/2NnNIAN

A crisis communications guru reveals his tricks of the trade: Thirty-year public relations veteran Edward Segal offered advice for companies navigating crises, such as working with journalists as opposed to ignoring them in hopes of avoiding a scandal. https://bit.ly/2YZ8XOE

"Social media has created an international echo chamber that can make it difficult to be heard or understood in a crisis"

Lessons on how futurists, like Amy Webb, cope with uncertainty https://bit.ly/2AW9dWQ

Joe Ryle: Why Conservatives should support a four-day week https://bit.ly/3hWHbLp

Miss Steerpike: Does Meghan have her eye on the White House? https://bit.ly/3hW2FId

"I know the Duchess of Sussex has political ambitions and I’ve been told that one day she wants to run for President." -- Lady Colin Campbell, the British socialite, speaking with the MailOnline.

Brigadoon Daily Rundown = June 24, 2020

Sweden’s COVID expert says ‘world went mad’ with lockdowns https://bloom.bg/37U3YD0

“It was as if the world had gone mad, and everything we had discussed was forgotten,” Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, said in a podcast with Swedish Radio on Wednesday. “The cases became too many and the political pressure got too strong. And then Sweden stood there rather alone.”

Denmark vows to create world’s first ‘energy islands’: Two islands will act as hubs, allowing the connection of several offshore wind farms. https://bit.ly/385epUt

The two offshore wind energy islands will be located in the North Sea and Baltic Sea and could help increase Europe’s share of renewable energy.

Harry Hoshovsky: West Africa and US strategy https://bit.ly/2Vcmt0n

How China has overtaken Japan in naval power and why it matters https://bit.ly/2NwtGnr

India is paying the price for neglecting its neighbors: Narendra Modi came to power promising to prioritize relations with countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. China is taking advantage of his failure to do so. https://bit.ly/31bmTYD

Ryan Ashley + Abby Bard: How America can maintain its alliances even during the coronavirus pandemic: Socially-distanced relationship maintenance is important, especially in the Indo-Pacific. https://bit.ly/2AY8V1E

Phoning it in: After decades of false starts in telecommuting, the pandemic has ushered in a real revolution. It’s great for collaborative technology developers, less so for office landlords. The next big clash between labor and capital over the fruits of productivity is also set to kick off. https://bit.ly/31b90tm

‘I’m tired of being the help’: In suburban Detroit, a cookout full of Democratic voters bubbles into outrage, frustration at being taken for granted—and certainty that 2020 is in the bag for Trump. https://politi.co/3fQl3Ao

Virginia Heffernan: COVID-19 and living through a new American revolution: The collective action we've participated in over the past few months is transformational in a way we haven't seen in decades—maybe even centuries. https://bit.ly/2NjTp2u

The daily number of new US coronavirus cases at the highest level since April.

The seven-day average of new coronavirus cases in the US soared 30% from a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.

How to understand Donald Trump's incendiary language — and how to combat it: Helio Fred Garcia has documented 12 kinds of communication that lead to acts of violence. Donald Trump has used all of them. https://bit.ly/3fIeboK

Helio Fred Garcia teaches communication, ethics, crisis, and leadership at New York University and Columbia University. His new book, "Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It," is being published this month.

PJ O’Rourke: Ignore the signal – listen to the noise https://bit.ly/2Z5Ew9n

The 2020 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies: Full list here: https://cnb.cx/316gmhO

Top 10:

1. Stripe    
2. Coupang
3. Indigo Agriculture
4. Coursera    
5. Klarna
6. Tempus
7. Zipline
8. SoFi
9. Neteera
10. Gojek

+ Many of these companies have an existing focus on health care, financial services, cloud connectivity, digital marketing and online distribution to consumers, and they have seen demand for their core products and services more than double during the economic shutdown.

+ Machine learning and artificial intelligence underlie much of the explosive growth.

The five largest US stocks (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook) are now worth a combined $6 trillion, equal to the COMBINED market value of the next 24 largest companies. https://bit.ly/3fW3C1z

Space.com: Why some physicists really think there's a 'mirror universe' hiding in space-time https://bit.ly/3fRXas5

What happens if you turn space-time upside-down?

Safiya Pomell: Why brands are polluting our feeds https://bit.ly/2YuwBne

Challenges, hashtags, memes, TikToks, videos, likes, retweets, shares, and breaking news. I don’t know about you but for me, going on social right now can sometimes feel like information overload.

How to plan before leaving town to work remotely: If you’re thinking of moving indefinitely or permanently to do your job from a distance, consider these factors. https://on.wsj.com/2AZqyhr

Barcelona's El Liceu opera house reopened on Monday with a concert to an audience of 2,292 potted plants. The event took place a day after Spain's three-month state of emergency came to an end. It was the work of Spanish conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia, who said the inspiration came from a connection he built with nature during the pandemic: "I watched what was going on with nature during all this time. I heard many more birds singing. And the plants in my garden and outside growing faster. And, without a doubt, I thought that maybe I could now relate in a much more intimate way with people and nature." https://bit.ly/2Ypj0NO

The Kennedy Center announces that most scheduled programming through the end of 2020 is being canceled.

The curse of genius: We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why, asks Maggie Fergusson, are so many brilliant children miserable misfits? http://bit.ly/2XPhpy4

Brigadoon Daily Rundown = June 23, 2020

H I Sutton: India’s submarines make strategic move to dominate Indian Ocean: The Indian Navy is discretely building up its submarine capabilities. The most visible aspect of India’s programs are new nuclear-powered submarines that are being built, but beneath the surface there are other strategic steps to help ensure its Navy’s dominance of the Indian Ocean. The Navy is also reinforcing its presence in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, close to the strategically vital Strait of Malacca. https://bit.ly/3hQAcDv

One-fifth of Earth's ocean floor is now mapped: The initiative that seeks to galvanize the creation of a full map of the ocean floor says one-fifth of this task has now been completed. When the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project was launched in 2017, only 6% of the global ocean bottom had been surveyed to what might be called modern standards. That number now stands at 19%, up from 15% in just the last year. https://bbc.in/3doBwdp

Spending on renewable power is set to overtake oil and gas drilling for the first time next year as clean energy affords a $16 trillion investment opportunity through 2030, according to Goldman Sachs.

Who’s in the running to be Joe Biden’s Vice President? Here are 12 women who have been under consideration by Biden, and why each might be chosen — and might not be. https://nyti.ms/2Nn6hVO

Global advertising faces double-digit decline this year: report: The global advertising industry is expected to decline nearly 12% this year as the coronavirus pandemic batters businesses around the world, a report on the sector said on Monday. While the overall hit to economies from the pandemic is expected to be worse that the 2008 financial crisis, the report from ad agency GroupM, a unit of holding company WPP, showed, said this year’s advertising decline, excluding US political advertising, would still only be modest. https://reut.rs/3eszI4t

The hardest-hit parts of the industry are expected to be television advertising, which has long been losing ground, and “out-of-home” (OOH) advertising such as billboards, as people stay indoors.

TV advertising is expected to decline 17.6% this year, while OOH will drop 25%, when excluding political ads, GroupM said.

Michael Strain: Remote work won’t work: Slack, the online messaging company, will allow most of its employees to permanently switch to remote work. So will Twitter. Facebook envisions up to half of its workforce eventually working remotely. Nationwide will close offices around the country this fall, moving many employees to parament telework. “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” according to the CEO of Barclays. I’m skeptical. https://bit.ly/2zSk57o

Brigadoon Daily Rundown = June 22, 2020

Walter Hudson: Geoeconomic strategy in the COVID era: In the wake of coronavirus and debates over “decoupling,” the United States needs a new approach to national security: one based on geoeconomics, not geopolitics. https://bit.ly/37OJMCi

Martha Gill: The behavioral scientists do more harm than good: If it wasn’t clear then, it certainly is now. Among the biggest mistakes ministers have made in the coronavirus crisis has been to listen to behavioral scientists. The idea that early restrictions would create “behavioral fatigue” in the public, who would then start breaking the rules, led the government directly to a fatal delay in imposing lockdown. https://bit.ly/3dsia77

Michèle Flournoy: Treat China’s border clash with India as a clarion call: The confrontation is yet another example of Beijing testing the limits. https://on.ft.com/3en43kU

Economist: China’s next move in the South China Sea: Is it about to claim the skies above it? https://econ.st/3dpD6vM

Economist: Who runs the world? As America gets tired, China gets busy. https://econ.st/313mPdc

The COVID-19 economic slump is closing down coal plants: This year, coal usage has dropped in the US, and renewables now generate more electricity. To some experts, the financial crisis is a clean energy opportunity. https://bit.ly/2AYa7Sv

Nation’s cancer chief warns delays in cancer care are likely to result in thousands of extra deaths in coming years: Because of the pandemic, some cancers will be found later when they are harder to cure, he says. https://wapo.st/3hPXTfo

You’ve got five appetites — not just one: The trick to satisfying them is to eat like an orangutan, not a labrador, says Michael Odell. https://bit.ly/37PkjZD

More than 30 years after their split, Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys (almost) open up https://wapo.st/2V6UZJA

Al Hunt: Looking forward to pro sports after COVID blackout: The return of professional sports — even only on television — after four months of darkness is a needed respite for this sports-crazed country… unless the continuing threat of COVID-19 forces a longer shutdown. https://bit.ly/37S7f5I