Tangled Up in Blue Screen

Everyone is in a blue state now...

Late last night, as I am wont to do, I was cruising the internet to determine what would be today's big headline: Trump’s Trumpian RNC acceptance speech or Biden’s decision about staying in the race. It turns out the answer is neither. What did it take to momentarily dislodge the relentless, breathless coverage of politics from its prime real estate everywhere from top news sites to the recesses of our sleepless unconscious? It would obviously take a lot. So try this on for size. Airlines grounded, passengers stranded at airports and unable to check into hotels because their systems were down, some airlines checking people in by hand, 911 services across many states not working, people cut off from their bank accounts, hospital systems crippled, surgeries delayed, Times Square billboards gone dark, major news organizations knocked off the air, retailers unable to take digital payments, global payment services experiencing widespread crashes, shipping hubs going nonoperational, packages delayed, entire businesses offline, false fire alarms being triggered, Maslow's hierarchy of needs toppled as even McDonald's and Starbucks are hamstrung, and computer users across the world being greeted with the dreaded blue screen of death message: An unsmiley face and the message, "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart."

Was this finally the alien attack we've all anticipated (and given the recent news, secretly craved)? Did a foreign adversary find a way to hobble much of the world? It turns out the disaster was more of an own goal. A software security company that is too big to fail like this pushed a bad software update and all hell broke loose. The Verge: What is CrowdStrike, and what happened? "The cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike brought down thousands of systems after pushing a faulty update to Windows machines." My first reaction to the news was to send gloating texts to all the lifelong friends I'd convinced over the years to switch to using Macs. My next move was to check my portfolio at my online brokerage because I hold a relatively large position in CrowdStrike. Sadly, that didn't tell me much since the site's news feed was down because of the outage. (On the plus side, this is the first good news in a while for Dems: The whole world is in a blue state.)

+ "The catastrophic failure underscores an increasingly dire threat to global supply chains: The IT systems of some of the world’s biggest and most critical industries have grown heavily dependent on a handful of relatively obscure software vendors." The most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen? Here's the latest from CNN and BBC.

+ The Atlantic (Gift Article): What the Microsoft Outage Reveals. "Why are we so bad at preventing these? Fundamentally, because our technological systems are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. These are not computer programs built by a single individual; they are the work of many hands over the span of many years. They are the interaction of countless components that might have been designed in a specific way for reasons that no one remembers. Many of our systems involve massive numbers of computers, any one of which might malfunction and bring down all the rest. And many have millions of lines of computer code that no one entirely grasps." (Feel better?) It's funny, my first thought when learning of the outage wasn't millions of lines of code, it was this guy.

+ Microsoft on CrowdStrike outage: have you tried turning it off and on? (15 times).

+ "Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys” and delete it. Boot the host." Here’s how IT admins are fixing the Windows Blue Screen of Death chaos.

+ Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts Friday due to the global tech outage. (In the end, the only things that will survive are cockroaches and fried dough.)

2

Insane Gershkovich Ruling

"Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter falsely accused by Russian authorities of spying, was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, after being wrongfully convicted in a hurried, secret trial that the U.S. government has condemned as a sham." Another good reason not to tolerate Putin or those who support him.

3

Close Encounters of the Third Place

You spend time at home. You spend time at work. For years, Starbucks' goal was to create a third place where you'd feel comfortable spending a lot of time (and buying coffee). But times change and so do corporate goals. These days, Starbucks is more interested in getting you in and out of the drive-thru or delivering coffee to your front door. These changes seem bigger than coffee (and I don't say that about much). Starbucks wanted to be the ‘third place.’ Now it’s speeding you out the door.

4

Weekend Whats

What to Reality: My wife and I have been searching for escapist content lately, and The Parisian Agency on Netflix is fitting the bill. "This reality series follows the Kretz family and their luxury property business as they help clients buy and sell fabulous homes in France and abroad."

+ What to Book: Taffy Brodesser-Akner's latest novel tracks the longterm impacts of a kidnapping on a wealthy family. Long Island Compromise. The book's opening scene was based on a real event that took place in Brodesser-Akner's neighborhood when she was a kid. She wrote an amazing piece about that event and how we all deal with trauma. If you missed it in yesterday's NextDraft, don't: Blunt About Trauma.

+ What to Watch: AppleTV's new show starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram is off to a very compelling start. Lady in the Lake is worth a try.

5

Extra, Extra

Parts of Speech: "His acceptance speech, which exceeded 90 minutes and stretched past midnight Eastern time into Friday, won him wide praise for its vivid recounting of last weekend’s assassination attempt yet switched gears into something resembling what most of his supporters see regularly on the campaign trail." From a media perspective, it was a tale of two Trump speeches — and long enough for both. (Shocking everyone in the media, it turns out that Trump is still Trump.) Meanwhile, the story that may never end: Democratic calls mount for Biden to end campaign, but he vows to fight on.

+ Bangladesh Student Protests: "The protests began this month on university campuses as students demanded an end to a quota system that reserves 30% of government jobs for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971." And things are getting out of hand. National curfew imposed in Bangladesh after student protesters storm prison.

+ Hunter Blatherer: "Attorneys for President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, citing the recent decision by a federal judge in Florida to dismiss the classified documents case against Donald Trump, filed a pair of motions in California and Delaware Thursday seeking to dismiss both federal criminal cases against him." (If Biden steps aside, do the Hunter Biden headlines stop?)

+ Throwing Out the Towel: WaPo (Gift Article): Thin, small and scratchy: How hotel towels got so bad. "It’s all about what they’re made of."

+ A Standup Guy: "Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy." Bob Newhart Holds Up.

6

Feel Good Friday

"What was your most thrilling first date? In 2016, two young Russians known for their extreme “rooftopping” adventures — where they attempt to illegally climb vertiginous landmarks like La Sagrada Familia and the Eiffel Tower — skipped the perfunctory happy hour cocktail and instead ascended China’s tallest incomplete skyscraper, the 1,957-foot-high Goldin Finance 117." This couple’s hobby? Illegally scaling the world’s tallest buildings together. This gives new meaning to Love is in the air.

+ Wind power generated more electricity than coal in the U.S. in March and April. Plus, China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week.

+ Worker pulls kitten from trash compactor, saves New Jersey cat's life. (In time, the cat will come to resent him.)

+ Springsteen's net worth soars past $1 billion. (And these days, we can use all the good billionaires we can get!)