Good morning!
The Crazy Math Behind Facebook’s $22 Billion WhatsApp Deal, Using a Flip Phone in 2014 and More #Mustreads
Plus, Uber’s running PR battles and T-Pain’s real voice.
Asa Mathat
Here is some content, brought to you by Re/code. The week is not yet over, but soon it will be:
- Matt Levine’s finance column at Bloomberg View is an essential guide to understanding the industry, written in straightforward prose with sharp insight. Yesterday he penned a great piece on high-speed traders; the day before he helped explain the convoluted accounting treatment of Facebook’s $22 billion WhatsApp deal.
- The Cut’s Allison Davis used a flip phone for a week. And it wasn’t as bad as you might think! Sure, doing without Google Maps is tough, the camera sucks and there’s no calendar. But it’s also a great way to avoid email and, weirdly enough, it makes people think you’re cool. Who knew, making it impossible for people to get in touch with you makes them like you more.
- Yesterday, we linked to an anonymous, first-person account of an Uber driver in LA Weekly. The alt-newspaper published a follow-up later in the day, explaining how within a span of six hours Uber’s PR found a driver whose story they could use to get some positive press in LA Weekly, and how this isn’t something unique to Uber.
- T-Pain was one of the four or five most successful pop music artists of the mid-2000s. He wasn’t the first to use AutoTune, but he made it his signature style and became an icon for it. Unbeknownst to a lot of people, however, he has a great a voice! Watch him perform some of his best songs in a Tiny Desk concert at (the freshly redesigned) NPR Music.
- From NJ.com, a video of two bears wrestling on a lawn and on the street in suburban New Jersey.
If you see any stories you’d like to send our way (or have any questions/comments about stories we’ve recommended), feel free to shoot an email to noah@recode.net.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
