Remember Libra, Facebook’s plan to create a global digital currency? Unveiled last June, it was immediately met with resistance from policymakers and central bankers around the world. So, the team went back to the drawing board, and today it re-emerged with a new vision—one that is a lot less audacious than the original. Here are the most substantial edits: A whole new plan for the...
“It’s my first global pandemic. How about you?” Jonathan Rothberg wanted to know. Rothberg is a high-energy biotech entrepreneur who has been trapped in quarantine on his super-yacht, the Gene Machine, since mid-March, when we first reached him by phone. The creator of a fast DNA sequencing machine and, more recently, a revolutionary cheap ultrasound…
If you’d told Areeba Imam a month ago that she’d become obsessed with Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, she wouldn’t have believed you. “I’ve never played video games before,” says the 23-year-old college student, who is currently hunkered at her parents’ home in northern Virginia as the pandemic tightens its grip on the US. “The only game…