All of the members of the Thai soccer team, and their coach, have been rescued. The Wild Boars spent more than two weeks trapped in a cave before dozens of divers and hundreds of volunteers saved them. [New York Times]
Recode Daily: Investing in vaper wares like Juul could be lucrative. But some Silicon Valley VCs draw the line at vice.
Plus, Trump announces his Supreme Court pick in primetime; what HBO’s new boss really said about the company’s plans under AT&T; the winner of the World Cup is ... Apple.
There’s money to be made on funding innovations in cannabis, firearms and pornography. Juul, a startup that makes e-cigarettes that teenagers are gaga for, is raising $1.2 billion in a round that would value the company at $15 billion — on par with companies like Lyft or Snap. But some Silicon Valley VCs have ethical limits, in some cases, even “vice clauses.” What’s wrong with investing in sin? [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
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President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court is Brett M. Kavanaugh. The drama-focused president revealed his choice for the seat vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in a prime-time TV address to the country. A politically connected member of Washington’s conservative legal establishment, Kavanaugh, 53, is a federal appeals court judge, former aide to President George W. Bush and onetime investigator of President Bill Clinton. His selection sets up an epic confirmation battle and would potentially cement the court’s rightward tilt for a generation. [Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman / The New York Times]
Change is coming to HBO now that it is part of the AT&T corporate family. At a town hall meeting with HBO staff, AT&T exec John Stankey, who now runs all of the media empire formerly known as Time Warner, said he wanted “more” from them. But contrary to some reports, Stankey didn’t say he expected HBO to become a content mill, or that it should try to match the volume of video competitors like Netflix have started to pump out. You can read his comments, in depth, for yourself. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Iranian officials are facing a public backlash after shaming a teenage girl for dancing on Instagram — the only Western social media tool still available in Iran. After posting clips of herself dancing in her bedroom, 19-year-old Maedeh Hojabri was quietly arrested and her page was taken down, leaving her 600,000 followers in the dark about where she had gone. Last week, Hojabri appeared on Iranian TV and sobbingly admitted that dancing is a crime. Since her televised confession, scores of Iranians have posted videos of themselves dancing in protest; thousands more have created supportive posts on their Instagram pages. [Thomas Erdbrink / The New York Times]
Top stories from Recode
On this episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, Recode’s Kara Swisher, her son Louie Swisher and Recode Radio producer Eric Johnson talk about Sandbox VR, a new virtual reality arcade installation south of San Francisco that they visited together.
This is cool
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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