Thursday aka Yung Friday
— Katy And Katie (@katyandkatie) November 19, 2015
Unicorn-valued mobile payment startup and Starbucks’ resentful pool boy Square looked all set to kick off the Great Tech Bust of 2015 with its IPO this morning. Jack Dorsey’s side-hustle wound up selling 27 million shares at $9, which triggered a $93 million gift to its last-round investors to make up the hilarious difference between $9 and the $18.56 IPO price it guaranteed them. Tech finance looked gloomy everywhere, with Dropbox, Snapchat, and Zenefits all getting written down by mutual funds and Lyft accidentally disclosing that it’s been buying every fifty cents of revenue for more than a dollar in marketing.
Then someone at IAC’s Match Group, which monetizes despair through online dating, realized that their IPO was also scheduled for today which meant that Tinder Chief Dudebro Sean Rad’s interview with The Evening Standard yesterday broke SEC quiet period regulations. So now Rad’s desperation to make it clear that he is a sex-having man who has definitely had sex, his despicable but vague threatening of Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales, and his fondness for… “I want to say ‘sodomy’?” are all officially aggregated in the permanent record at sec.gov.
A lot of people mocking Sean Rad, but the SEC’s Chartbeat is going nuts.
— Woke Jeff Jarvis (@ProfJeffJarvis) November 19, 2015
So how did it all turn out? Did the toxic tryhard and the part-time beardo finally crash the #tech party train? Well, Match Group is up more than $2 and Square is currently over $13. If you’re in any venture-financed field, make sure you take a moment to thank Jack Dorsey for handing out over $200 million today to keep the bubble intact. And happy International Men’s Day!
Also in Tech: Airbnb is getting sued for pirating an apartment. And who needs hackers when the Georgia Secretary of State’s office will just mail out discs containing the personal info of more than six million voters?
check your priv pic.twitter.com/nX9vhhDWwv
— Becca Laurie, PI (@imbeccable) November 19, 2015
Misc And Whatnot: In all the kerfuffle, it’s worth noting that Gawker can still blog with the best of them. Brian Feldman goes Macbook Pro, baby on the Vine election. Bonus Feldman: Nigella’s Bad Salad. “The Best Name in History” is the vanishingly-rare clickbait headline that under-promises and over-delivers. Jess Misener aggregated Genesis for The Awl and it’s actually (lol #actually!!!) very good I guess!? (But you’re still going to die alone.) Oh hey, has anyone checked on Chait recently?
If you believe in liberalism, the p.c. left’s rejection of liberal ideals is its defining feature. From the liberal standpoint, the liberal respect for individual political rights provides an essential guardrail against abuse. A liberal would predict that illiberal ideologies will liberally illiberalliby p.c. liberalpcblibbleabble ibblepc blibble blabble p.p.p.c.bibibibib
Ugh can someone restart him, I think he got jammed again.
A correction from the New York Times:
Correction: Carson aides say he needs weekly foreign policy briefings to “make him smart”; didn’t say he’d had them https://t.co/wEnleulrCs
— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) November 18, 2015
The undersea cookie monster featured in the fourth-ever Today in Tabs is all grown up and headed for space!
Thursday Reads: I’m out till Monday, so these ought to keep you busy.
- Elon Green in The Atlantic on America’s only full-time forensic pollen analyst. (Not that long!)
- Raffi Khatchadourian on AI researcher Nick Bostrom and the deluded transhumanists. (New Yorker long.)
- Rachel Syme wrote the “War and Peace” of selfies for Matter. (Seven chapters, 53 minutes, probably a million Takes next week.)
- Hannah Rosin: Why are Palo Alto’s kids killing themselves? (As long as high school, i.e. feels like it will never end.)
- Rare non-Canadian former Tabs intern Avery Edison has a podcast called Swings and Roundabouts and it’s wonderful. There’s a robot therapist, a gameshow called “Close That Tab!”, a heist, and a unicycle! (25 minutes you will not regret spending.)
Tinderman, Tinderman,
Says whatever he thinks he can
Talks to press in quiet time
SEC says it’s a crime
Swipe left! Here comes the Tinderman— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) November 19, 2015
Today’s Remix: Mike Snow, “Heart is Full (Run the Jewels Remix)”
Today’s Song: Savages, “T.I.W.Y.G.” (new Savages album coming in January.)
~I’m truly sorry tab’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union~
Potential Interns! ICYMI I’m bringing interns back for December and January. Get the details and how to apply here. The deadline is whenever I wake up on Saturday, November 28th. And there’s still one sponsor slot left for January, so if you were thinking about sponsoring don’t delay. Thanks to Fast Company, email, and Pocky.