Brigadoon Daily = September 24, 2020

Hotels are closing as tourism plummets. This company is turning them into affordable housing: Repvblik takes unused commercial spaces and lets people live in them.
Fast Company

A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? The Guardian asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for them from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace.

Ford, just admit it: You’re a truckmaker now
Fortune

CNBC: Google will try ‘hybrid’ work-from-home models, as most employees don’t want to come in every day

+ Most Google employees want to return to the office at some point, but not every day, according to a recent Google survey of its employees’ desires for post-pandemic work.

+ The company said it is working on ‘hybrid’ models for future work, including rearranging its offices, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Time Magazine Wednesday.

+ It also comes as Silicon Valley companies compete on flexible work options for existing and prospective talent.

FT: City of London abandons plans for widespread return to office

Peloton gets wake-up call with Amazon Prime bike scare: After a surge in demand from homebound fitness buffs, Peloton faces a raft of challenges and potentially stiff competition from heavy hitters. Sarah Halzack

FT/McKinsey business book of the year shortlist announced - click here.

What can business learn from Netflix’s ‘no rules’ culture? Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s ‘No Rules Rules’ offers a radical take on corporate culture.
FT

Brigadoon Daily = September 23, 2020

At NYU, explaining an unraveling world through basketball: A professor thought he had created a class that could explore society’s fissures through a single sport. Then the pandemic struck, and basketball became more relevant than ever.
NYT

The cheating scandal that ripped the poker world apart: Mike Postle was on an epic winning streak at a California casino. Veronica Brill thought he had to be playing dirty. Let the chips fall where they may.
Wired

Why sport is at the heart of Englishness: Robert Colls’ This Sporting Life explores a nation’s passion, from foxhunting to football.
FT

College athletes should get paid. The pandemic proved it. Football was always about the money. Now the players deserve some.
Joe Nocera

Notre Dame’s game at Wake Forest on Saturday has been postponed after positive COVID-19 tests landed 13 Fighting Irish players in isolation and another 10 in quarantine.

Wine buying secrets from concierges and rare bottle specialists

Wine Enthusiast

Despite a changed television landscape, the Emmys had a familiar feel
Economist

With a clutch of awards for “Succession” and “Watchmen”, HBO reigned supreme.

LAT: ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ TV’s little engine that could, pulls off feel-good Emmy sweep

Another day not at the office: Will working from home be 2020's most radical change? During the lockdown, millions started WFH – and most of us don’t want to go back. In just a few months the landscape of work, family, and city life has altered dramatically - but are all the changes positive?
Andrew Anthony

Brigadoon Daily = September 22, 2020

Study: Electronics could stop 40% of big truck rear crashes: AP reports, safety features such as automatic emergency braking and forward collision warnings could prevent more than 40% of crashes in which semis rear-end other vehicles, a new study has found. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group supported by auto insurers, also found that when the rear crashes happened, the systems cut the speeds by over 50%, reducing damage and injuries.

Google’s genius $49/mo course is about to replace college degrees: “In our own hiring, we will now treat these new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles.”
Alan Trapulionis

How to sell to college students when campus is closed: Brands like Aerie and VS Pink relied on in-person student events and campus ambassadors to drive sales. Can they replicate that success online?
BOF

In conversation with Duke Stump: As the former first CMO of Lime, he was tasked with unlocking the potential of a new wave of urban travelling, and internally “inspiring folks to see how vision and purpose is intrinsically linked to financial success”.  In this interview, Duke spoke about the power of a great story and why honesty and vulnerability beats perfection every time.
Sonder & Tell

Where founders go all-in: How a secretive poker event became the must-do for the tech elite.
Shifted

How practical wisdom helps us cope with radical uncertainty: The stress of uncertain pain outsizes the stress of certain pain. These were the results of a 2016 study, published long before the uncertainty of Pandemic 2020 was running the world show. In the study, participants with a 50 percent chance of receiving a shock were more stressed than those with a one hundred percent chance of receiving a shock. In other words, it wasn’t just the possibility of a shock that caused stress—it was its uncertainty. 
Yael Schonbrun + Barry Schwartz

Have big cities had their day?
Rory Sutherland

Brigadoon Daily = September 21, 2020

Why ‘carbon neutral’ is the new climate change mantra: Becoming carbon-neutral -- also known as climate-neutral or net-zero -- is now a legal requirement in some countries, while European authorities are adopting legislation to become the first net-zero continent. Even oil companies are getting in on the act.
Bloomberg

Its electric grid under strain, California turns to batteries: When demand exceeded supply in a recent heatwave, electricity stored at businesses and even homes were called into service. With proper management, batteries could have made up for an offline gas plant.
NYT

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s advice for living
Ruth Bader Ginsburg

What we can learn from Ginsburg’s friendship with my father, Antonin Scalia
Eugene Scalia

The uncertain future of corporate HQs
Richard Florida

Why ‘hybrid’ working spells trouble for companies: The looming split between home and office will be tough to pull off.
Pilita Clark

What the death of coffee shops tells us about Silicon Valley: The tech community needs physical places to meet, program, pitch, make deals, and brainstorm.
FT