Hello hello hello! Hope you had a great summer break and the fall, despite the rain/floods, is off to your desired start. Loads to share, I’ll just get right to the goodness you came here for.

Articles

• Ever wondered exactly how self-driving cars work? Wonder no more with this course from Apollo (A Baidu company). Self-driving cars, as a core part of our transportation system, are inevitable. Retirement homes are providing the best use cases and test grounds.

• The Economist shares an account of a future where companies have no employees but they could have just reported on this fulfillment center for JD.com that delivers 200,000 orders a day with just four employees who service the robots. The gig economy, as it is today, provides a glimpse into what that employee-less future might look like.

• On declaring that I would take the summer off, a subscriber sent me this fantastic article, by William Deresiewicz, on solitude and leadership. I read it a few times over the summer.

• Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are selling us on meatless meat burgers and a future with less emissions from cow flatulence. The thing is, fake meat started with the Tang dynasty (AD618-907) and the tradition is still alive in China today. Instead of pushing processed meat, isn’t the solution just to eat less meat?

• This Wired article on what it takes to recover a lost cryptowallet Pin is pretty epic.

• ‘Elder abuse’ doesn’t get as much coverage in the US as it should. We also don’t hear much about predatory guardianship, brilliantly covered in this New Yorker article (longread).

• You can’t find an ethical phone anywhere. No matter how hard you try. 

• I’m a big fan of Oscar Health, a new kind of health insurance company. This analysis, after Oscar’s $375M monster round of funding, is an insightful look at a fascinating company designing a new user experience for healthcare.

Books

• I got into cities this summer. Even the best piece of fiction I read - ’Exit West’ by Mohsin Ahmed - touched on cities, labels and a little fantasy. It’s a book for the times and, like his other bestseller ’How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia’ is a reflective and human book for these (seemingly) inhumane times.

• I’m working on a book on the future of cities and so I’ve been reading a lot of books about this organic thing we call a city. The better books I read include Aerotropolis by Kasarda and Lindsay (where I learned a lot about why Chicago’s O'Hare airport is where it is and why there isn’t a real third airport in the Chicagoland area), 'How Cities Work’ by Alex Marshall (with a focus on how the three legs of the city stool - politics, economics and transportation - shape the city), 'The Works: Anatomy of A City’ by Kate Ascher (a teardown of how The Big Apple actually works and what, beyond the people, makes it tick). I’ll share the classic reads on the city next time.

I’m pretty certain you have some great recommendations from your own summer readings, please share those! There’ll be a few issues between now and the end of the year, the monthly cadence won’t allow us get through the content in a decent time frame.

Have a great week!

Seyi