Sree Sreenivasan (sreenet.substack.com)

CEO, @Digimentors • co-host @NobelPrize Peace Conf • prof @uniluiss • ex-CDO @nycgov @metmuseum @columbia • • #NYTReadalong

[Sree Sreenivasan (sreenet.substack.com) @sree]

The midterms look promising, but I have full confidence the Dems can screw this up. So I wrote out some advice for the party. My latest newsletter, please share and subscribe: https://t.co/rvIlYRlvcF

Cameos by @hakeemjeffries @bryancurtis @byjoelanderson @SenSchumer @TheDemocrats @hiddenbrain @BarackObama @davidhogg111 @Leaderswedeserv

[Zhuo Chen | Katrina @SouthernM46171]

Amazon's India story is ultimately a lesson in what foreign capital can and cannot buy in the country.
India welcomes the money, the technology, and the operational expertise. What it doesn't offer is control. Foreign investment rules block inventory ownership, cap seller concentration, and create a regulatory environment that tightens every few years in ways that consistently benefit local incumbents. Amazon spent over a decade building workarounds, and each rule change made those workarounds more expensive and less effective.

The deeper problem is structural. Reliance can combine physical retail, online delivery, telecom infrastructure, and streaming into a single ecosystem because all those assets sit under one roof with no foreign ownership constraints. Amazon wanted to build something equivalent but couldn't — not without surrendering the control that its entire operating model depends on. When Bezos had the chance to invest in Reliance as a minority partner, he passed. He believed Amazon could still win India on its own terms. It couldn't.

This is the pattern India has refined across sectors: let foreign players develop the market, absorb the losses, and educate consumers — then watch as local conglomerates with government connections and regulatory flexibility consolidate the gains. Amazon is not the first company to learn this, and it won't be the last.

#Amazon #India #FDI #Ecommerce #Flipkart #Reliance #IndiaEconomy

[Raj Goyle @RajGoyle]

This had real bite. I told my daughter to go to bed and she invoked the EO below to overrule me and watch until the end. Elections have consequences.

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

The meltdown at ‘60 Minutes’ has transfixed the media world this week, as Bari Weiss fired deeply respected staffers and correspondents, installed broadcast-news outsider Nick Bilton as the show’s executive producer, and sparked a messy standoff with Scott Pelley, who grilled his new boss and accused Weiss of “murdering” the show — all before being shown the door himself. A pointed termination letter, along with a stream of good-bye emails, statements, and rebuttals, have laced the saga with claims of insubordination, incompetence, and bias toward the Trump administration.

To Steve Kroft, who spent three decades at ‘60 Minutes’ before retiring in 2019, the show, “as the audience has known it, no longer exists.”

“They’ve made it clear — they being the new management, Bari Weiss and David Ellison — that they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want,” he says. Kroft is not sure, precisely, what 60 Minutes will look like when it resumes: “It seems almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of a show they can put on in September.”

Read our full interview with Kroft: https://t.co/sXA4ZxtxhV

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔UC Berkeley's computer science department just posted its worst failure rates in years. 35.3% of CS 10 students got F's in spring 2026, up from under 10% in prior semesters. Professor Dan Garcia says the primary driver is a "vast increase in academic dishonesty" through LLMs. Students use AI to complete assignments, never learn the material, then fail exams. His office hours, once full, are now empty.

My Take
Companies are firing experienced engineers while the pipeline that produces new ones is being gutted by the same technology. Students use AI to bypass the hard part of learning, show up to exams without the understanding, and fail. One professor discovered a student's linear algebra class had an "open AI" policy for homework and exams. That student then couldn't do basic linear algebra in the next course.

Both ends of the workforce are eroding at the same time. Senior engineers are getting cut to fund AI spending. Junior engineers are graduating without the skills because AI did their coursework. And the companies spending trillions on these tools haven't connected those two facts yet.

Hedgie🤗

[Mark Warner @MarkWarner]

It seems there is an entirely different set of rules for Republicans and Democrats.

[Sree Sreenivasan (sreenet.substack.com) @sree]

Can we separate the art from the artist? Should we watch "Michael," the new movie? Watch/read my conversation with the fab @cjfarley.

Share your thoughts, please.

https://t.co/JvtEjmQSMo

[Gabe Einhorn @EinhornGabe]

NYC has more bodegas than Walmart has stores in the entire United States.

13,000+ bodegas.
4,600 Walmarts.

The bodega is the only retail format that survived Amazon, COVID, and rising rents.

Tell me where else in America you can get a sandwich, a phone charger, a lottery ticket, and life advice at 3 AM.

[Sree Sreenivasan (sreenet.substack.com) @sree]

To me, 1978 is a year I remember. To Gen Z and younger folks, might as well be 1878. This @Timberland ad ran in @TfL The Underground.

[Hemani Bhandari @HemaniBhandari]

Mohammed Riyazuddin, 61, a mattress shop owner who gave all his mattresses and bedsheets away in the rescue operation during the deadly blaze killing 21 people.
His quick thinking and courage saved many lives. "Aaj sab kuch de dijiye humne," he told @htTweets

[AJ+ @ajplus]

“Ireland didn’t qualify for the World Cup, but you know who did? The Ivory Coast.”

This Irish pub flipped its flag to support Ivory Coast at the World Cup.

[Jim LaPorta @JimLaPorta]

Factual thoughts….@ScottPelley and @mhenryschuster were embedded with my Marine infantry unit in 2009—it was incredibly violent in Helmand. They told our story well. Years later, my unit suffered multiple suicides, they came back to cover that too. I wrote him when I was hired.

[Mojo Story @themojostory]

What was meant to be a family trip to support an elderly father undergoing treatment in Delhi turned into a devastating nightmare on Wednesday, when a fire tore through the Flourish Stay bed-and-breakfast in South Delhi's Malviya Nagar, claiming the lives of eight members of a single family.

Vivek Agarwal, a chartered accountant from Gurugram, had travelled to the capital to be by the side of his 80-year-old father, Radhe Shyam Agarwal, who is receiving treatment at Max Hospital. Accompanying him were his wife Tarjani, daughters Jivisha and Varya, and four other relatives.

The family had booked two rooms at the guesthouse and were having breakfast when the fire broke out. Within moments, what began as an ordinary morning turned into a catastrophe. None of the eight family members survived.

The tragedy has left behind a heartbreaking reality: the sole surviving member of the immediate family is Vivek's 80-year-old father, who now faces the unimaginable loss of his son, daughter-in-law, granddaughters, and close relatives while battling his own health challenges.

[Narges Mohammadi | نرگس محمدی @nargesfnd]

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Marjane Satrapi, the acclaimed Franco-Iranian artist, filmmaker, and author of the internationally celebrated graphic novel Persepolis who died at the age of 56.

Marjane Satrapi was a fearless voice for feminism, human rights, and freedom. Through her work and public engagement, she consistently advocated for women’s rights, standing in solidarity with the people of Iran and amplifying the message of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement on the global stage.

According to a statement from her family, Marjane Satrapi “died of sadness” a little more than a year after the passing of her husband, Mattias Ripa, a producer, actor, and screenwriter, who died on April 8, 2025.

Marjane Satrapi leaves behind a powerful cultural, artistic, and moral legacy. Her courage will continue to resonate far beyond her lifetime.

Narges Foundation
4 Jun 2026

#MarjanSatrapi

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 This Is Not A Normal Campaign Ad.

Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and other progressive candidates are running as a team and asking New Yorkers to vote for the entire slate.

Their message is simple:

Elect all of us, and we’ll take on billionaires, landlords, and corporate power together.

🔥 That’s what makes this ad interesting.

They’re not selling individual candidates.

They’re selling a governing coalition.

Now New York voters get to decide whether they want a team…

or a check on one.

[Sarah Bahr @smbahr14]

The 34th Street station stop outside Madison Square Garden got a paint job! 🏀 #Knicks #NBAFinals

[Variety @Variety]

Fired "60 Minutes" journalist Scott Pelley says CBS News boss Bari Weiss is lying when she says there was an effort to "find a way back" for him.

"At no point did anyone in the meeting suggest there could be steps taken by either side that would lead to a resolution. Weiss and Tom Cibrowski were openly hostile from the start. 'Firing' was raised by Cibrowski in the first 15 seconds. No CBS executive, at any time, suggested 'a way back.' To say so now is disingenuous. And they know it. In fact, Weiss, Cibrowski and Nick Bilton refused to answer my questions. I asked Weiss a number of questions about why she fired the entire senior staff of '60 Minutes' a few days before and without cause. 'I'm not answering that question,' she said... These executives cannot gain the trust of the staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for and reveals contempt for what journalists do."

https://t.co/UNDmIyCPBt

[Sree Sreenivasan (sreenet.substack.com) @sree]

Important health news from @UrbanGkz via @url_media

How close are we to curing Sickle Cell Disease?

The Big Idea: Two new gene therapies, Casgevy and Lyfgenia, could effectively cure Sickle Cell Disease, a painful and often fatal condition that cuts Black Americans' life expectancy by 20 years. The FDA approved both treatments in 2023, and early results are genuinely stunning.

Meeting The Moment: Clinical trials showed nearly 97% of Casgevy patients had zero pain crises for a full year after treatment. One 21-year-old New Yorker received Lyfgenia in 2024 and has been symptom-free ever since.

The Stakes: The cure exists, but it costs up to $3.1 million per patient. In the first quarter of 2025, only 12 people total had completed treatment. The science finally caught up, now can access?

Full story: https://t.co/Z4kmk55xRv

[Brinda Adhikari @brindaadhikari]

I worked at CBS News for almost 6 years. It was a place that frequently drove me crazy bc of how resistant it was to change. How difficult it was to get things done bc you had to fight so many people and their “Cronkite and Murrow would roll over in their graves if they saw” mentality.

For those who think Scott Pelley was part of the problem, you are wrong. Yes he could be rigid and a stickler for certain traditions. But I will tell you now the Gen Z people I worked w all loved him. Like me, they forgave a lot of his boomer ways bc we were in awe of investigations he did using hidden cameras exposing snake oil salesmen hurting Americans; showing us how Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people; the pain of rural Americans waiting for half a day to get affordable healthcare in a parking lot of a mobile clinic; his searing interviews w survivors of mass shootings.

Yeah he was old fashioned in some ways. I used to tease him bc he always had trouble pronouncing Beyoncé’s name.

But he was willing to be pushed. He was open to new ideas. The fact that someone like me and someone like him got along so well is proof of that. The guy made me a better thinker and a better journalist.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

"Late Kakistocracy" is that phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of ppl who will work for it, and so the folks who aren't qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified

[Siddharth Prabhakar @Sidprabhakar7]

Yet to read but Kudos to @rachelchitra for doggedly pursuing the Air India crash story.
It's the cover story on Caravan's June edition.