At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their seats so they could listen in.
Notes:
Interesting! This feels anachronistic to me, but it’s worth remembering that a lot of technologies (or capabilities, I guess, since this was hardly a video-enabled Zoom meeting) are shown to be feasible well before they become common, or even well-known.
Dubbed the “corridor of death,” Roosevelt Boulevard has been named the most dangerous street in the city (and among the most dangerous in the nation). In 2021, 24 crashes resulting in deaths or serious injuries took place there. Residents “want to get across the street to the pharmacy to get their medication or get across the street to the supermarket,” Latanya Byrd, whose niece and three nephews were killed in a crash on the boulevard in 2013, said in a video produced by Smart Growth America. “It may take two, maybe three lights, for them to get all the way across.”
Notes:
We’ve got several streets like this here in Milwaukee, and while some have been changed, recently, to make them safer, to upgrade the pavement and sidewalks and bike lanes, etc, there’s also a strange volume of complaints any time anything changes, even when an area is known to be a dangerous death trap.
MCM, Coach, Longchamp, Tory Burch, and Bao Bao by Issey Miyake consistently appear in the top spots on Xiaohongshu when users search for college student handbag recommendations.
Priced between 1,000 RMB and 5,000 RMB ($140 and $700), these bags appeal to young consumers eager to experience luxury during their university years, or as they transition to their first jobs.
However, this demographic, which is emerging as a growth driver for aspirational brands, remains sensitive to cost, typically choosing entry-level luxury options.
Notes:
Luxury goods have been on a tear in China for the past decade or so, though there’s been murmuring that this enthusiasm may have peaked for the time being, as the country experiences its first real, persistent drop in growth (across many metrics) since the turn of the century.
As some stimulant seekers have flitted from cigarettes to the candy-colored menagerie of vapes (and back to cigarettes again), they have picked up Zyn, a brand of nicotine pouches produced by Swedish Match, a subsidiary of Philip Morris International that last year sold Americans about 350 million cans of the product.
The packets, which do not contain tobacco, are frequently discussed as a potential smoking-cessation tool, though some Zyn users were never regular cigarette smokers or vape users to begin with. Some say they have gotten hooked on the nicotine buzz delivered by Zyn, which comes in flavors that read like conference room tea offerings: wintergreen, cinnamon, chill. A single pouch is intended to last around 30 minutes.
Notes:
Yet more evidence, if such evidence was necessary at this point, that what we think of as tobacco companies are actually nicotine companies that are fixated on coming up with new (and freshly appealing to young people) ways to market and move more of this addictive substance.
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