Opinion | Watch What People Do, Not What They Say About the Economy | Women Buy More Cars, So Why Are the Designs So Macho? | Jennifer Doudna Believes Crispr Is for Everyone | Adam Neumann created a secretive billion-dollar startup to turn apartment living into a utopian fantasy. I was the first reporter to set foot inside.

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� � � � � � Opinion | Watch What People Do, Not What They Say About the Economy -     Have you heard that there’s a huge wave of organized shoplifting — coordinated theft by groups effectively looting stores — sweeping the United States? You probably have. A couple of years ago, Walgreens said that organized shoplifting was behind its decision to close several locations in San Francisco. In April, the National Retail Federation issued a dire report claiming that “organized retail crime” was responsible for almost half of the store merchandise that vanished in 2021. The putative shoplifting tsunami has been relentlessly hyped both by the usual suspects, such as Fox News, and by some politicians. My guess is that most readers didn’t notice the retail federation’s recent retraction of its April claims. Probably even fewer people noticed when The San Francisco Chronicle examined police records and found that they didn’t support Walgreens’s assertions; “maybe we cried too much,” the company’s chief financial officer told investors earlier this year. Data on shoplifting are flaky, depending a lot on retailers’ own reports. Was there really a surge in New York City, while shoplifting declined in the rest of the country? Maybe. What is clear is that the narrative of larcenous mobs sweeping through America’s stores wasn’t a depiction of reality; it was basically conjured out of some dubious data and a handful of videos. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Women Buy More Cars, So Why Are the Designs So Macho? - WIRED    It is very hard to think of an automotive design in recent memory so testosterone-fueled, so overtly male as Tesla’s Cybertruck. British car designer Adrian Clarke has described the EV’s styling as a “low polygon joke,” one “that only exists in the fever dreams of Tesla fans.” Indeed, on the initial reveal of the angular, sharp-edged, and aggressive Cybertruck concept, Paul Snyder, chair of the transportation design program at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, was incredulous: “What is going on over there?” Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, was, of course, unapologetic. “We want to be the leader in apocalypse technology,” he said in 2020 to Jay Leno. Clad head to toe in black, including black aviators, looking like a Matrix casting reject, he added that the truck bed was large enough to “mount a missile launcher.” Continued here � � � � � � Jennifer Doudna Believes Crispr Is for Everyone - WIRED    It’s been a monumental year for Crispr, the molecular tool scientists use to edit genetic material. This November, the United Kingdom authorized the first medical treatment using Crispr gene editing, giving people with sickle cell disease new opportunities to receive a one-time therapy to prevent episodes of terrible pain. This week, the US Food and Drug Administration is poised to make a decision about the therapy. What was once seen as a moonshot is already changing lives. Right now, though, it’s still a rarefied treatment. “It’s expensive,” Jennifer Doudna, the pioneering biochemist who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work on Crispr, told WIRED’s Emily Mullin at the LiveWIRED conference this week in San Francisco. The therapy is expected to be priced at over a million dollars a patient, which could make it inaccessible to many of the people who need it most. It’s also a complicated process. Patients have stem cells taken from their bodies, edited in laboratory settings, and then put back in. Doudna is optimistic for a future where Crispr-based treatments are far less invasive than they are now. “Maybe even a pill at some point,” she says. “Today that sounds a little bit fantastical, but I think it’s very achievable.” Continued here � � � � � � Adam Neumann created a secretive billion-dollar startup to turn apartment living into a utopian fantasy. I was the first reporter to set foot inside. - Business Insider    Matthew Sorrentino, a young life-insurance broker, was sitting in the coworking space of his Fort Lauderdale high-rise, Society Las Olas, when a 6-foot-5 man with long dark hair wandered over to ask how he liked the building. The man told Sorrentino he owned a lot of real estate. "I didn't know who he was," Sorrentino said. "I actually pitched him insurance. He was like, 'I don't know if they make policies big enough.'" In tech circles, there have been few figures more talked about in recent years than Adam Neumann, the controversial cofounder of WeWork who resigned in 2019 after accusations of self-dealing and misbehavior and a disastrous attempt to go public. Continued here

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