From New York to New Delhi, cities are unwell
The pandemic didn’t end them as some feared but they have been permanently scarred.
A Tale of Five Cities
Cities are kind of like romantic partners. We love them so much that we overlook their imperfections. Despite the rats, the rent and the lack of personal space, city-dwellers around the world are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to enjoy the fruits of urban life, whether that's a New York bagel or a cheeky Nandos.
But everyone handles relationships differently, and some coping methods are better than others. Covid-19's arrival shook up some of the world's busiest hubs and eliminated the vibrant street life that made them shine.
In New York, pundits announced the city was "DEAD FOREVER." Having taken the subway to work this morning, I can assure you this is not the case — a woman even fell asleep on my shoulder, just like the old days. But there's something about this city that has been irrevocably changed by the pandemic. "New York suffered terribly from Covid-19 in 2020, worse than any other large city in the US and worse than any of the world's other superstar cities," Justin Fox writes. Adjusted for population, the city's annual mortality increase was the biggest since 1881. Although the rent is still sky-high and the spicy vodka pasta is piping hot, there's no easy way to recover from such trauma:
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And New York isn't the only city where the vibes have fundamentally shifted. In London, Therese Raphael writes "the pandemic has worsened long-festering problems such as a lack of affordable housing and widened inequalities in terms of both life expectancy and income." And yet the cost-of-living squeeze isn't stopping wealthy city slickers from hitting the pub. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, I guess:
Other megacities would prefer to forget Covid-19 ever happened. In therapy-speak, New Delhi is exhibiting the telltale signs "avoidance coping," by simply hitting the erase button on its collective memory, Ruth Pollard writes. After the delta wave roiled the city of 33 million, you'd think some things would have changed — health-care infrastructure and disease mitigation, for instance. But nope! And India's deadly pollution makes matters much, much worse:
Similarly, Hong Kong would like to pretend nothing has changed since Covid with its "Hello Hong Kong" drive to get tourists back. But Asia's world city is nothing like its pre-pandemic self. China's crackdown has silenced activists, ostracized news organizations and instilled fear in the general public. "This is far from a return to normality, and no number of dancing flight attendants can disguise it," Matthew Brooker writes.
In Rio de Janeiro, home to the famous Carnival, 16.7% of city dwellers were living in poverty by 2021, Mac Margolis writes — compared with 11.8% in 2019. Before Covid, the city had plenty of issues — slums, traffic jams, inadequate sewage. Mac called it "a dysfunctional metropolis, hollow at the core." Covid exacerbated those issues by pushing more people into poverty. All those parade spectacles can't hide what ails Brazil's signature city.
Although we're still willing to be romanced by cities, they're far from perfect. Maybe couples therapy would help.
Main Character Energy
So let me get this straight: WeightWatchers — a company that sells its own line of healthy food — is buying a telehealth company so it can prescribe Ozempic — a drug that makes people think less about food — to its customers, who buy their food. Cool, cool.
Perhaps its purchase of Sequence is just an act of self-preservation, as Lisa Jarvis suggests. Who needs a tailor-made diet when you can just inject yourself with prescription drugs? (Or so the thinking goes.) Some people are comparing WeightWatchers to Blockbuster, which Netflix made immediately obsolete. If the company were to get "Netflixed" by drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, it might slowly creep into irrelevance, joining the likes of Jenny Craig — who, by the way, is 90 years old. Shocking, I know.
Interestingly, WeightWatchers already hinted at its interest in weight-loss drugs with this blog post from February: "Like the plot of a 2000s teen movie, GLP-1 medications are like the main character who starts at a new school and becomes popular overnight." So WeightWatchers KNOWS it's no longer the main character! And it's doing something about it! While this seems like a savvy business move, jumping on the diabetes-turned-obesity med bandwagon doesn't come without risks. "If TikTok trends and Hollywood fads are any indicator, misuse of Ozempic is already wildly out of control. The weight-loss industry needs to be clear that these drugs are not a temporary life hack, but part of disease management," Lisa writes. Read the whole thing.
Telltale Charts
They say "Paris is always a good idea." But is it for Rishi Sunak? The UK prime minister is meeting up with French president Emmanuel Macron tomorrow in an "attempt to unthaw ice-cold relations," Lionel Laurent writes. It's the first time the leaders are meeting since 2018, which was 459,382 years ago. It was pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine war, pre-Emily in Paris, even! In that time, French trading patterns have shifted significantly, with the nation relying less on the UK and more on Germany.
The hedge-fund gods have been kind to Izzy Englander, founder of Millennium Management. Over the past 33 years, Aaron Brown writes, Englander's $58 billion asset empire managed to return an average 14% per year, solidly above the 11.1% total return of the S&P 500, losing money only in one year (2008, duh). Now, the firm is removing a "key-man provision," which let investors jump ship if the 74-year-old Englander were to retire.
Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.
