The Daily Top 5 List (Oct 8, 2020)

The biggest, most interesting things of the day:

5. Animal Planet: Python hunters catch biggest Burmese python on record in the Florida Everglades

4. Finance: Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine gets well-deserved profile in the Times.  The ex-lawyer and ex-Goldman banker produces the world's best finance newsletter, Money Stuff.  It's incisive, funny and always educational.

3. Awards: The 2020 Nobel Prize for literature goes to American poet Louise Gluck. Yale, where she's an adjunct professor, has a good profile of her work.

2. Business: Flurry off Financial M&A as rivals Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley continue to diversify their revenue streams away from volatile trading and advisory businesses. Goldman will acquire GM's credit card business for $2.5B, while MS will acquire asset manager Eaton Vance for $7b...also...years of easy money policies from the Fed have made the current economic crisis worse...but it's been great for billionaires

1. Politics: Remember "LIBERATE MICHIGAN"?...The FBI busts domestic terror plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer...Whitmer, Biden say Trump culpable...Trump blames everyone

The Daily Top 5 List (Oct-7-2020)

The biggest, most interesting things of the day:

5. Entertainment: It's a staple of many, if not most, films and I usually wait for it when watching any film: Movie titles said during the movie. Here's a great compilation of 'title drops'.

4. Health: The US Army's latest weapon is strategic napping. Prioritizing sleep for optimal combat performance.

3. Business: Will remote working be the norm? Several big companies certainly expect it to...This Harvard study touts the key benefits of WFM: higher productivity, lower turnover and organizational costs. OOTH, this Stanford professor warns a rushed and unstructured transition can reduce innovation and productivity. Regardless, here are some fascinating WFM statistics.

2. Politics: Kamala v Pence tonite!...Trump loses tax return subpoena appeal...To focus on SCOTUS nomination before election not stimulus deal...

...while Biden is riding high in polls with 27 days to go, particularly in key swing states...FiveThirtyEight crunches the numbers and estimates Biden has 84% chance of winning, Dems have 68% chance of flipping the Senate and 94% likelihood of retaining the House...

1. Science: The 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry goes to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their discovery of the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism (in only 2012!!). The CRISPR tool has quickly revolutionalized biology with its ability to change the DNA of plants and animals with high precision. Its applications are wide ranging, from producing new crops to curing hundreds of diseases...but also controversial with dangers of producing 'designer humans' (He Jiankui).

The Daily Top 5 List

The biggest, most interesting news of the day:

5.  The 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics goes to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez for work on Black Holes

4. Rock legend Eddie Van Halen passes away at 65 from from throat cancer. In memoriam:

3. When Don Jr is the voice of reason...WH outbreak grows

2. Dems going after big Tech...Powell calls for more stimulus...Trump ends stimulus talks, market tanks...

1. New CNN poll has Biden up by 16%, nationally...indicates 90% of voters have made up their minds. The poll was taken between Oct 1-4, after Trump's Covid-19 diagnosis.

TV Debates...Do They Matter?

History suggests they don't. The perception that debates are important to the democratic process is belied by a large study from HBS covering 61elections that show televised debates don't sway voters. They are great political theater and entertainment, but not much more. 

BUT there are exceptions (e.g., Nixon/ Kennedy) and last week's Presidential debate, which seems like a year ago now, was so chaotic it could be having an impact. Trump's performance was so jarring that Biden could be seeing a material post-debate bounce... 

A widely cited WSJ/NBC poll shows Biden up +14% nationally after the first debate-- a 6% jump. Over at FiveThrityEight, an average of 21 national and state polls shows a more modest 1.5% gain for Biden. And critically, Trump's poor showing seems to be have benefited Biden in the swing states. 

Polls are tricky and the news cycle moves so fast in the Trump era (Covid diagnosis/ hospitalization/ drive-by/ discharge) that any gains may be fleeting. But for now, at least directionally, all the polls point to a post-debate Biden bounce.

  

SNL's Timely Return

SNL kicked off its 46th season with a strong showing in front of a live studio audience, albeit smaller and masked. So much happened in the last 5 days that I wondered how it was going to handle that historic debate fiasco with Trump's Covid diagnosis... 

The show tackled both and didn't hold back in either the cold open or host Chris Rock's monologue. The opening debuted Jim Carrey's uncanny impressions of Biden, where he wistfully mused about science and karma coming together to send a powerful message about the Corona virus. 

 Weekend Update also didn't spare Trump, wishing him a "lengthy recovery".

There were other lighter, funny sketches that also worked. And Megan Thee Stallion's remix of Savage was mesmerizing.