Newsbeat Radio

The Atlantic
America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.
The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.
But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject.
Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.
“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”
Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.
Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.
Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”
Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of...

Popular Science
On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg, 49, was crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, when a Volvo SUV traveling at 39 miles per hour hit and killed her. ­Although she was one of thousands of U.S. pedestrians killed by vehicles every year, one distinctive—and highly modern—aspect set her death apart: Nobody was driving that Volvo. A computer was.
A fatality caused by a self-driving car might not be more tragic than another, but it does encourage the wariness many of us feel about technology making life-and-death decisions. Twelve months later, a survey by AAA revealed that 71 percent of Americans were too scared to zip around in a totally autonomous ride—an eight percent increase from a ­similar poll taken before Herzberg’s death.
Self-driving cars are already cruising our streets, their spinning lasers and other sensors scanning the world around them. Some are from big companies such as Waymo—part of Google’s parent conglomerate Alphabet—or General Motors, while others are the work of outfits you might not have heard of, including Drive.ai or Aptiv. (Uber operated the Volvo involved in Arizona’s fatal crash and took its self-​­driving cars off the roads for about nine months afterward.) But what makes some of us so wary of these robotic chauffeurs, and how can they earn our trust?
To understand these questions, it first helps to consider what psychologists call the theory of mind. Put simply, it’s the recognition that other people have brains in their heads that are busy thinking, just like ours (usually) are. The theory comes in handy on the road. Before we venture into a crosswalk, we might first make eye contact with a driver and then think, He sees me, so I’m safe, or He doesn’t, so I’m not. It’s a technique we likely use more than we realize, both behind the wheel and on our feet. “We know how other people are going to act because we know how we would act,” explains Azim Shariff, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, who has written about this issue in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
But you can’t make eye contact with an algorithm. Autonomous cars generally have backup humans ready to take control if necessary, but when the car is in self-driving mode, the computer’s in charge. “We’re going to have to learn a theory of the machine mind,” Shariff says. What that means in practice is that self-driving cars will need to provide clear signals—and not just turn signals—to let the public know what that machine mind is planning.
One solution comes from Drive.ai, a company ­running self-driving vans in Texas. The bright-orange-and-blue vehicles have LED signs on all four sides that respond to the environment with messages. They can tell a pedestrian who wants to cross in front of the car, “Waiting for You.” Or they can warn them: ­“Going Now/Please Wait.” A related strategy is intended for passengers, not pedestrians: Screens in Waymo vehicles show car occupants a simple, animated version of what the autonomous vehicle is seeing. Those displays can also show what the car is doing, like if it’s pausing to allow a human to cross. “Trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable to somebody else,” Shariff says. “We engage in it because we can pretty easily predict what the other person will do.” All of which means that if the cars are predictable and do what they say they will do, people will be more likely to trust them. Sound familiar?
Communicating with the machine mind is important, but that doesn’t mean we want it to mimic exactly how humans think and act while driving. In fact, the promise of traveling by autonomous car is that silicon brains won’t do dumb things such as text and drive, or drink and drive, or rocket down the highway while upset after a breakup. (Cars don’t date.) “I believe that they have the potential to be safer” than regular cars, says Marjory S. Blumenthal, a senior policy ana­lyst at the RAND Corporation think...

Washington Post
The phones have turned on us. Our little pocket pals seduced us with cheap long distance, unlimited texts, endless apps. Now they beep and shudder and flash with strange numbers at all hours of the day. We answer, and our beloved iPhone (or Android, or bedside landline) impales our eardrum with a cruiseline ad. It tries to sell us a medical back brace. It threatens to jail us unless we wire our life savings to the IRS.
Spam bots nest in call centers on every continent, spewing out phone calls by the millions, saturating the communication networks. Spam and scams swarm through our phones like Hitchcock’s birds down the living-room chimney. There is no escape.
More than 10 billion robo-calls have been placed so far in 2019, by call-blocking company YouMail’s estimate — almost double the same period a year before. Another report by First Orion, the call-blocking and caller-ID tech company, estimates that nearly half of all cellphone calls will be scams at some point this year.
Assuming the plague ever subsides, how will we forgive our phones?
Press 1 to be transferred to the nightmare realm.
“It started off two or three a day. As time went by, it went to 50 or 60,” said Matt Briscoe, who switched cell-service providers last summer and brought home the telephonic equivalent of a roach-infested couch.
Briscoe, who runs a community newspaper in Corpus Christi, Tex., hears from far more spambots than humans these days. On March 11 alone, he declined 44 calls purporting to originate from the 704 area code in Albemarle, N.C. — which, given the prevalence of number spoofing, probably means the caller is anywhere but Albemarle, N.C.
“This thing is just buzzing in my pocket constantly,” Briscoe said, shortly before his conversation with The Washington Post was interrupted by his eighth spam call of the morning. “If it’s something that seems odd, I won’t answer. If I do, nine times out of 10, it’s: ‘Hello! Would you like to be connected to a health insurance specialist?’ ”
He has the voice down pat: the cheerful, soulless “Hello!” of a spambot inviting you into an abyssal call center from which you may never return. You’ve probably heard such a voice yourself.
If not, you will.
Press 2 and scream to disconnect this call.
When Cabot Phillips stepped into the elevator at his apartment building in Alexandria, Va., one evening last month, the elevator was talking.
“Excuse me, is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?” a muffled, presumably human voice said from inside the emergency speaker. Phillips had assumed the speaker was for the fire department. Now, as he ascended to his home, it seemed to be asking him in broken English for $299 in IT charges.
“Sir, you are illegible for your labor, okay?” the spam said.
“Dude, you’re calling an elevator,” Phillips said, and proceeded to his door. He later reflected, “I was hoping an elevator was still a sacred location for peace.”
Press 3 for desperate prayer.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam. Surely this is spam’s most powerful incarnation yet. Earlier outbreaks were at least contained to our email inboxes, or hampered by the relatively primitive telemarketing technology of the past century. Now spam teleports into our purses and nightstands and innermost lives, advertising gastric balloons, demanding debt payments, speaking languages we don’t understand. Spam dispatched by fly-by-night ministries even offers to pray for us.
If you plotted a graph of a phone call’s usefulness from Alexander Graham Bell’s first in 1876 until today, it would climb steadily through the 20th century, rocket skyward with the advent of mobile phones, and then take a U-turn and slap us around the ears with everything the machines have learned.
“We’ve returned right back to where we were in the ’80s,” said Jeffrey A. Hansen, an IT consultant who has testified as an expert witness in dozens of consumer...

Bloomberg
What can we learn from the case of someone who turned $100,000 in short-dated call options into a $2.5 million profit?
As detailed in MarketWatch earlier this month, trader Steve Oliverez was pretty sure the Republican tax overhaul was going to be approved by Congress. Working with a data set of one -- the 1987 tax overhaul -- he correctly surmised that passage would be bullish for stocks.
His gamble paid off. Oliverez took his winnings, bought a new house with cash and took the rest of the year off to celebrate, traveling throughout the U.S., Southeast Asia and Japan. Who wouldn’t want to buy a new home and travel the world for a year? One trade, a huge return -- time to open that options-trading account and get in on the winnings.
No. Don't.
Investors need to beware of how highlighting one person's one winning trade is an invitation to trouble -- and losing money. Focusing on a single outcome 1 versus a repeatable process raises more questions than it answers, including:
-- Are these trade results statistically significant?
-- Was this trade the result of luck or skill?
-- What is the long-term track record of this approach?
-- Is it a repeatable strategy?
Poker champion Annie Duke notes that professional card players call the focus on what just occurred “resulting.” In her book “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts,” she explains the problem with this approach. “Resulting” assumes “the quality of the outcome tells you about the quality of the decision-making.” It doesn’t.
Looking at a single big winning trade suffers from this same error.
Resulting looks to me like a combination of several other behavioral problems: Availability bias (thinking that what comes easily to mind is representative) in what we read in online media; a degree of hindsight bias in the after-the-fact explanation as to why this was a good trade; some outcome-over-process focus as well. But perhaps the most important aspect of this is the survivorship bias: How many trades that were losers were not included in the discussion?
Some years ago, I pointed out how various lost-and-found trades are a classic example of survivorship bias. Two favorites are the lost EMC stock certificate and forgotten bitcoin purchase. In each case, the record of an investment was somehow misplaced. Many years later, when they were found, these positions had enormous gains.
Why survivorship bias? These big trade winners generate headlines, but the day-to-day run-of-the-mill wins and losses do not. Thus, you are more likely to learn about are the outsized gainers, with none of the offsetting losses provided for context. Let's cite a few headlines that you didn't see (because I made them up) to make the point:
-- Man Finds Worthless Lehman Brothers Stock in Attic
-- Woman Inherits 10 Million GM Shares Just Before Bankruptcy Filing
-- Misplaced AIG Shares Are Almost Worthless
-- Penny Stocks Found Under Mattress Lost All Value
OK, so these aren't real headlines, but they make the point. Yet, they reflect an important aspect of financial markets, or the fuller story about the vast majority of speculative trades. They are not newsworthy, and so a selection bias in what makes news means you never saw them. Some of the imagined events are no doubt true, but there is no reason that you would ever know about them.
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with speculating if done wisely and with eyes open. Take a small portion of your assets -- no more than 5 percent of your liquid net worth -- and dump them into a separate account. 2 Label it “speculative fund” and do whatever you want with that capital: become an angel investor, buy microcaps, trade options, whatever.
These sorts of accounts have several advantages: first, they are relatively small, so if the investments crash and burn, there is little harm done to your net worth....

The Atlantic
Jennifer Millar keeps trash bags and hand sanitizer near her tent, and she regularly pours water mixed with hydrogen peroxide on the sidewalk nearby. Keeping herself and the patch of concrete she calls home clean is a top priority.
But this homeless encampment off a Hollywood freeway ramp is often littered with needles and trash and soaked in urine. Rats occasionally scamper through, and Millar fears the consequences.
“I worry about all those diseases,” said Millar, 43, who has been homeless most of her life.
Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.
Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.
People in Washington State have been infected with the diarrheal disease shigella, spread through feces, as well as Bartonella quintana, or trench fever, which spreads through body lice.
Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio, and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.
Public-health officials and politicians are using terms like disaster and public-health crisis to describe the outbreaks, and they are warning that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population.
“Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in his State of the State speech in February, citing outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, syphilis in Sonoma County, and typhus in Los Angeles County.
“Typhus,” he said. “A medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”
The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California.
The diseases spread quickly and widely among people living outside or in shelters, helped along by sidewalks contaminated with human feces, crowded living conditions, weakened immune systems, and limited access to health care.
“The hygiene situation is just horrendous” for people living on the streets, says Glenn Lopez, a physician with St. John’s Well Child & Family Center, who treats homeless patients in Los Angeles County. “It becomes just like a Third World environment, where their human feces contaminate the areas where they are eating and sleeping.”
Those infectious diseases are not limited to homeless populations, Lopez warns: “Even someone who believes they are protected from these infections [is] not.”
At least one Los Angeles city staffer said she contracted typhus in City Hall last fall. And San Diego County officials warned in 2017 that diners at a well-known restaurant were at risk of hepatitis A.
There were 167 cases of typhus from January 1, 2018, through February 1 of this year, up from 125 in 2013 and 13 in 2008, according to the California Public Health Department.
Typhus is a bacterial infection that can cause a high fever, stomach pain, and chills but can be treated with antibiotics. Outbreaks are more common in overcrowded and trash-filled areas that attract rats.
The recent typhus outbreak began last fall, when health officials reported clusters of the flea-borne disease in downtown Los Angeles and Compton. They also have occurred in Pasadena, where the problems are likely due to people feeding stray cats carrying fleas.
Last month, the county announced another outbreak in downtown Los Angeles that infected nine people, six of whom were homeless. After city workers said they saw rodent droppings in City Hall, Los Angeles...

The Guardian
Consider the squishy. The point of the squishy, a palm-sized mass of polyurethane in the shape of a fruit or a croissant or a unicorn cat, occasionally scented with strawberry, is to squish. The point of the squishy is to be held in the hand of a person with energy that needs redirecting and for them to direct it into the soft heart of the squishy, to squeeze it into almost nothing in their palm, only for it to reinflate again, asking for more. In 1988 a TV writer called Alex Carswell threw a pen at a photo of his mother after a stressful phone call with his boss. It gave him an idea.
It was the “Age of Stress” – the Daily Mirror (among other newspapers) had identified it as “a killer” – and so the perfect time for Carswell to launch his “stress ball”. By the 1990s it had evolved from something squishy designed to be thrown into something squishy designed to be squeezed, and to be squeezed mainly by kids, who collected them in small scented families in their rucksacks. In a 2015 study of patients undergoing varicose vein surgery, those that handled stress balls reported feeling “less anxious”.
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“When you’re stressed, your body tightens up,” says Dr Kathleen Hall, founder of the Stress Institute, explaining why throwing or squeezing something feels good, “so a physical release helps to let go of some of that energy.” Carswell was not the first person to link a calming of the mind to a busy-ness of a hand – in 206 BC, the Han dynasty in China trained to stay mentally focused during combat by squeezing walnuts. The croissant squishy comes from an ancient place.
That repeated action led to fidget spinners becoming one of the most popular items bought on Amazon in 2017. They were not simply triangles of plastic; they were a stress-relief toy, a treatment for ADHD, an answer to smartphone addiction, a modern rosary – and the cause of moral panic, as teachers confiscated them as contraband. They were the stars of a growing anxiety economy.
Alongside products designed purely as medical aids, such as meditation apps, there is a thriving offshoot of lifestyle goods marketed through their anxiety-relieving qualities. Product innovation oriented around anxiety (encompassing stress, mood and sleep) spans nearly 30 different categories, including chocolate, yogurt, air fresheners, fabric conditioners and skincare. There is a company called Body Vibes which, for £30, will sell you a pack of anti-anxiety stickers that “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies”. Throw a squishy ball in the high street and you’re likely to hit something to cure your stress.
If the 80s were the age of stress, this is the age of anxiety, with 30% of Britons experiencing an anxiety disorder during their lifetime. “The NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, published in 2016, indicated that anxiety and depression affected about one in six people,” confirms consultant clinical psychologist Dr Nihara Krause, founder of youth mental health charity Stem4. This rise in anxiety coincides with a crisis in mental health care. And long waits for treatment often lead to more complications, and the problems multiply, a kind of silent mitosis, leading to even more pressure on the NHS as well as the patient. This has created a market for domestic anxiety cures that can be bought online, and fast.
“Because community services are cut,” says Krause, “there is little in the way of help for those who are unwell but don’t meet the threshold for acceptance to established services. And those who are severe can’t access help because specialist services are under-resourced. I am really keen on providing early intervention tools that are evidence-based and are therefore effective. Sadly there are a lot of products on the market that are not tested for their efficacy.”
Developed in the early 1990s by American engineer Catherine Hettinger, fidget spinners were designed as a calming tool, but when they went...

Collaborative Fund
The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are. There are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.”
– Jeff Bezos
You can ace the most prestigious grad school and then spend years in prison for insider trading. It’s happened. And the decision to risk everything on a trade that nets you a few percentage points is the kind of thing someone with half the IQ will look at and say, “How stupid are you?”
There are types of smart that have nothing to do with intellect. And there are types of stupid that have nothing to do with unintelligence.
Smart is the ability to solve hard problems, which can be done many ways. Stupid is a tendency to not comprehend easy problems. It’s also is a diversified trait.
A few kinds of stupid prevalent in business and investing:
1. Intelligence creep: Not knowing the boundaries of what you’re good at, and assuming talent in one area signals skill in all others.
Dictators are never marketed as just good at politics. They’re portrayed as superhumans, masters of everything. Joseph Stalin was born Joseph Jughashvili, but changed his name to a word that translates to “Man of steel.” North Korea said Kim Jong Il shot 11 holes in one on his first round of golf, was an architectural master, and a music virtuoso.
An innocent version of this happens when you’re good at one thing, so you and those around you assume you should be good at all other things.
Take the investor who is gifted at, and made a lot of money doing, one kind of strategy (merger arbitrage) and then extrapolates that confidence into something they have no experience in (gold, macro, politics, predicting recessions). The odds of a disappointing outcome then round to 100. Of course they do – the kind of nuance and skill needed to, say, forecast global interest rates is not the kind you thing you can pick up in a year.
The important thing is most investors without big success in one strategy would never consider betting their portfolio on a new, disparate strategy. They’re more likely to stick to what they know. You need intelligence in one strategy to make you think, with confidence, that you’re good at all the other ones.
An important investing skill is defining what you’re incapable of and staying away from it.
2. Underestimating the complexity of how past successes were gained in a way that makes you overestimate their repeatability.
There’s a thing in biology called Dollo’s Law that says organisms can never re-evolve to a former state because the path that led to its former state was so complicated that the odds of retracing that exact path round to zero.
Say an animal has horns, and then it evolves to lose its horns. The odds that it will ever evolve to regain its horns are nil, because the path that originally gave it horns was so complex.
Dollo’s Law affects investors and CEOs with a unique kind of stupid.
There are things that, once lost, will likely never be regained, because the chain of events that created them in the first place can’t easily be replicated. If you realized how valuable those things are you’d be more careful about risking their loss.
Brand is one. Brands are so hard to build, requiring the right product at the right time targeted to the right users who want that one thing, produced in the right way by the right people, all done with consistency. Once lost it is nearly impossible to regain, because of odds of building a successful brand in the first place were so low. So when management cashes in brand equity for short-term gain, I want to shout, “Stop! This isn’t a factory that you can just rebuild when it’s broken. If you lose that brand it’s gone for good.”
Teams are another. Success is often personalized among one person, discounting how important members of their team were to a win. That one person will often marginalize their team, or go out on their own,...

It’s quite fashionable to hate email. Countless articles have been written decrying how awful it is. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to reinvent it. And the latest fad is just to give up — screenshots proudly showing six-figure unread message counts and articles about “inbox infinity” abound.
I’ve become quite the contrarian on this subject. I love email. It’s my secret weapon. Some of the best news I’ve ever gotten came in an email. As an adoptive dad, I caught my first glimpse of two of my kids through an email. I’ve closed deals, hired amazing talent, and connected great people via email.
I love Slack as well, but there is still nothing better than email for connecting with the world outside, and looping in members of your team to get things done.
I’m sure there are a lot of people who get more email than me, but I’m no slouch in that department. I’m the CEO of a 200+ employee company with 20,000+ customers. It takes a full time executive assistant and a full time Chief of Staff to keep my world in orbit right now. My email address is also not hard to figure out. In fact, I put it right on my LinkedIn page.
And yet, I get to Inbox Zero anywhere between 1–3x a week.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me how that’s possible, so I decided I’d take a little time on vacation and write this post. (Yep, sharing ideas like these are my idea of fun. 😂)
Slow the Fire Hose
People talk about the messages that appear in their inbox as if they have no control over them, and that’s not entirely true. The first thing you probably need to do is turn down the flow of messages.
Email is for messages, not for articles. There is VERY little content that I allow to flow into my inbox. Unsubscribe from all those blogs and newsletters you subscribed to. Follow them on Twitter, or drop them into Pocket. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, think about setting up a separate email account for this stuff. That isn’t an inbox; it’s your personal magazine.
Be selective on marketing. There are 10–15 brands that I have a strong connection with who I’ll let into my inbox because I actually want to hear from them. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident they will find a way to get my attention in another channel.
Kill non-essential or duplicate email notifications. Every app and service that we use is pinging us with notifications. But a lot of time, they are non-essential, or the same alert also comes as a push notification on your phone. Either change the settings in the app, or put in some email rules to kill those.
Be an aggressive unsubscriber. When you get unsolicited email you don’t want, always click unsubscribe if the link is there. Most unsub systems work with 1–2 clicks.
I know people who have followed these four tips and killed an astounding 80% of their incoming messages.
Kill the Notifications
I’m decently responsive to important things in my inbox, but the only way I got there was to massively reduce the noise, so I could hear the signal.
Turn off all the app notifications. Email shouldn’t generate banners, unread badges or sounds. Trust me, you won’t forget that your inbox exists; you don’t need any reminders to check it. Give yourself the space to do focused work and then tap your email app when you’re ready to triage your inbox.
Use the VIP feature if it’s helpful. I have my direct reports and my board members on the iOS Mail VIP list, so I get a notification on my phone if one of them emails. However, the more that our urgent stuff moves to Slack or texting, the less valuable this has become.
Free yourself from feeling obligated to respond to everything. I’m sure I miss emails from real people that go into spam, but I also get a lot of “asks” from people I don’t know. Given that I’ve committed my time to family, company and non-profit work, spending time and attention on those is breaking my commitments to others. These emails are like people who show...

Vogue Business
Despite the recent profits warning, Apple is bolstering its investment in experiential retail, with expansive flagships, and classes and workshops in every store. "When you are serving digital natives, the thing they long for more than anything is human connection."
Big companies have created a "tragedy in retail" by becoming remote from their customers and staff.
Ahrendts urges retailers to rethink their approach: "You can’t just look at the profitability of one store or the profitability of one app or the online business. You have to put it all together: one customer, one brand.”
Angela Ahrendts stands on the snowy steps in front of the former Carnegie Library in Washington, DC. This noble construction, built between 1901 and 1903, and once filled with books, will soon become an Apple store – and something more. Alongside $1,250 iPhones and $130 Apple Pencils, the space will play host to creative workshops, sketching tours of the neighbourhood and author readings that will be live-streamed to other stores around the world.
This is retail, but not as we know it.
As chief executive of Burberry from 2006 to 2014, Ahrendts, 58, proved that a bricks-and-mortar store could appeal to the millennial generation. On London’s Regent Street in 2012, Burberry unveiled what was then hailed as the store of the future: a 44,000-square-foot space of smart mirrors and simulated rain showers.
“We bought 10,000 iPads and put them in the stores and everyone thought that was so revolutionary,” says Ahrendts. “For us it really wasn’t rocket science, we had targeted the millennial consumer and we knew that was the best way to talk to them.” Then, five years ago, she left London for Silicon Valley – and since then has been dreaming up a new vision for retail at one of the world’s largest technology companies.
Retail has never been so in need of reinvention. Since 2017 almost 10,000 stores in the US have closed their doors. Some analysts predict that by 2022 one in four US malls could be out of business. Although 2018 showed some signs of improvement, the twin threat remains: retailers around the world need to find a way to both compete with online shopping and to attract younger, more demanding customers.
It’s easy to look at Apple’s grand new fleet of flagships and be dazzled by their surfaces: the Foster + Partners-designed Champs Élysées store boasts floor-to-ceiling glass, trees in the courtyard, and a preserved carved wooden staircase connecting hyper-modern rooms. But the real difference, Ahrendts claims, is much more fundamental. Apple stores show a vision for retail in the way they help Apple build long-term customer relationships, the way they are financially accounted for and the way they connect a network of 70,000 employees across the globe.
The Apple vision
Since 2015, Apple has opened a series of high-profile flagships to promote its brand, each requiring, in the company’s words, “substantially” more investment than its typical stores. “We are now opening fewer, larger stores so that you can get the full experience of everything that’s Apple,” Ahrendts explains as we pick our way past Carnegie Library’s historic pillars and through concrete and rubble to where a hard-hat brigade are inserting beacons into the walls.
“We don’t talk a lot about it but there are thousands of beacons behind those walls,” she remarks. These location-aware sensors connect with the Apple Store app on iPhones, sending visitors a greeting when they arrive in store, and prompting them to skip the cash register and pay for purchases via the app as they approach the accessories area. (They must opt-in on the app to access these features.) “As we renovate every store we update all of the technology. We don’t want to be gimmicky, but stores need to become living, breathing spaces, not just two-dimensional boxes.”
That is now coming to life at Carnegie Library. “A few years ago I sent...

Mel Magazine
While chasing a 2017 story about medical tourism and Slovakian stem cells that had already taken me to hospital facilities in Bratislava and Vienna, I wound up partying on a 283-foot yacht floating in the French Riviera. As I watched intoxicated rich people having expensive fun in their cheap white shower slippers — first rule of yacht club is there are no shoes on the yacht, which are instead piled in a big heap at the yacht’s entrance — I began to wonder, “How could anyone spend their whole life doing this?”
Then, almost on cue, seated at a table on the rear deck with Lindsay Lohan and her entourage, I spotted a dude who had, in fact, spent his entire life doing this. Alex Jimenez was a professional yacht influencer, and he was hard at work.
I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I just saw an open chair next to a lanky guy wearing a loose polo shirt and a flat-brimmed Yankees hat, and sat down in it. As everyone else gradually made their way toward the raucous festivities taking place on the foredeck, Jimenez struck up a conversation with me. He remarked that I seemed both thoughtful and decidedly out of place.
“I’m working,” I said. “I never stop working. All I can think about is work.”
“Hey, me too,” he replied. “I’m working right now.”
“I used to feel all messed up about my career,” he continued. “I was a short-haul truck driver in the Bronx, and I guess I caught the yacht bug. I’d go to a bookstore, grab a table and read everything I could about yachts. Then, on the very first weekend after I downloaded the Instagram app, right after Instagram became a thing you could download, I went to a luxury boat show and took some of pictures of the yachts. I added some hashtags, and pretty soon I had 800,000 followers. But the quantity doesn’t really matter to the folks who pay me, it’s the quality. Influential people follow me, Gulf state princes and Russian moguls who might actually be able to buy these yachts.”
Wait, what?
When Jimenez said that he was working, I assumed he was “working” the same way Lindsay Lohan was — that is, “working the crowd.” He looked important enough, wearing an expensive, custom-made watch with all of the wheels, ratchets and levers exposed.
“Nah, I’m nobody you’d know,” he assured me. “I’m here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It’s just a small part of the hustle.”
The yacht hustle, I soon learned, was the all-consuming passion of Jimenez’s life. He went from a guy who took Instagram pictures, always head-on yacht shots run through one of the generic filters, to a guy that yacht brokers paid to stay on their yachts in order to mention that said yachts were docked in a port and available for sale or charter. He was helicoptered from yacht to yacht, and slept in the smallest guest cabins.
“The yacht we’re on right now used to be a cruise ship that they retrofitted,” he told me. “You can sleep a dozen or more people on here, and the decks can fit a bunch more, but it’s all kind of crowded.”
I mentioned that the bathrooms were both tiny, and with a hundred or so people aboard the yacht, already rather foul.
“Yeah, that’s just how it goes,” he said. “It’s an endless party, especially on the yachts that are 200 feet and up, the so-called ‘superyachts.’ Conditions are cramped, everyone’s out of their mind on some substance, and the bathrooms are being used for who knows what. There’s a kitchen and a big dining area, but good luck getting food out of there when you really want it. You’re not on here to eat a sit-down meal, even though they usually have nice dining rooms. The bars on each level are the focal points of these things.”
We took a walk around the yacht while people boozed and bumped into each other, their words...