Does the Blue Check Stay, Though?

Image: News Binding

💬 If you said “wait, this sounds familiar”… You’d be right. Dorsey co-founded the social media giant in 2006 and served as CEO until 2008 before being pushed out of the role. He returned to lead Twitter in 2015.

🤔 What’s going on?... Per Dorsey’s statement, "I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.” But there may have been something else at play, too.

• Dorsey was simultaneously running two public companies – Twitter and Square – which drew the scrutiny of at least one activist investor, who questioned what they perceived to be a lack of focus on leading the social giant and pushed to replace him.
• @jack managed to hang on after reaching a deal with the firm, but it was announced that a board committee would be formed to “evaluate the CEO succession plan.”
• Another thing to note – the tech mogul will remain CEO at Square, and has expressed his undying love for bitcoin numerous times (just check his Twitter bio). Some analysts speculate that Dorsey’s departure is mostly about freeing up time to focus on big crypto moves at Square.

🐦 Looking ahead... Twitter is in the midst of transitioning from an ad-based social network, focused on text, to a subscription-based platform centered around smaller communities and multimedia – and they’ve set some aggressive growth goals.

• The company aims to increase its monetizable daily active users by ~60% and at least double its annual revenue by the end of 2023.

🎁 Negotiators in Vienna resumed talks yesterday over reviving Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers following a five-month hiatus.

Let Us Tell You A Tale

Once upon a time, there was a company called Keepsake Tales. Created to help every child celebrate what makes them one-of-a-kind, they were loved across the globe for their super customized, plot-based tales where your child is the champion of their own story.

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And what’s even worse? When kids aren’t represented in the stories they read, it’s hard to feel included in society.

👆 This fact is what inspired Keepsake Tales to come into being.

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Working more hours does not always make a country more productive; Image: WSJ

The reason? Some experts believe improving employees’ work-life balance will offset the lost hours of productivity, as workers will be more focused during their remaining time on the job.

📜 Background: In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Standards Labor Act, which required employers to pay overtime to employees who worked over 44 hours per week. (It was amended two years later to the standard 40-hour workweek that we know today.)

🌏 Around the world… Between 2015 and 2019, Iceland tested the concept of a four-day workweek without reducing worker pay and found productivity and service provision stayed the same or improved in a majority of trial workplaces.

• Japan recently unveiled plans to recommend companies permit their staff to work four days, while Spain and New Zealand have also announced similar government-funded experiments.

📸 The big picture: More and more companies are looking into a four-day workweek, but they’re still a tiny part of the U.S. economy. Online job marketplace ZipRecruiter contains 4.5 times as many postings mentioning four-day workweeks this year compared to 2016, per Bloomberg – but all together, they still represent just 0.6% of all postings.

In Living Color

Image: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26791-x

🧬 How it works: The scientists started by engineering E. coli bacteria to produce living nanofibers, then bundling those fibers together with a few other ingredients to create the type of ink used in a conventional 3D printer.

Once they found the concept viable, the team bioengineered other microbes besides E. coli:

• One was a material that secreted an anticancer drug called azurin when in the presence of certain chemicals.
• Another material trapped and stored an environmental toxin called Bisphenol A without assistance from other chemicals or devices.

👁️ Looking ahead… The researchers say their concept could be tweaked to produce microbes that create exact copies of themselves, meaning the ink could literally be ‘grown’ in a jar and result in building materials capable of self-healing.

Images: Reuters

Mouhammad Fada Diouf, a Senegalese immigrant living in Spain, was enjoying an afternoon with his friends when a 72-year-old man fell into the nearby Nervion River.

🏊🏿 A man, a plan, a canal: Mouhammad immediately dove into the muddy river and swam over to the man, holding him above the surface for 15 minutes until a rescue boat arrived.

• “Nobody was able to help him,” Mouhammad shared after the incident. “He was in a bad situation so I decided to save him, to help him, because I know how to swim.”

What's Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2021?

A) Cheugy
B) Vaccine
C) Metaverse
D) Delta

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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No link found!

B) Vaccine