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My grandfather was held at Bulgaria's most notorious gulag. This summer, I saw it for the first time. A Belene survivor crosses the bridge across the Danube that connects the town of Belene and Persin island in 2015. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images) This summer, Tana Ganeva traveled to Belene, Bulgaria's most notorious prison camp, where her grandfather was held in the 1950s. Bulgaria has effectively buried the history of its Communist-era gulags, where thousands were starved, tortured, and killed. Ganeva's grandfather attempted to escape Bulgaria four times, before making it to California. See more stories on Insider's business page. The island of Persin is a bird-watcher's paradise. Set on the Danube River, which divides Bulgaria and Romania, it's a nature park covered in wetlands and home to hundreds of rare bird species: the spoonbill, the pygmy cormorant, the corncrake, as well as herons, eagles, storks, and pelicans. Amid the natural beauty, it's jarring to consider that this was the location of a concentration camp where thousands of Bulgarian political prisoners were brutalized and killed from 1949 to 1953 - and in some cases for years after that. Though it's officially known as Belene after the quiet Bulgarian village that sits 750 feet away on the mainland, old-timers here call it by another name: the Island of Death.My stepgrandfather, Georgi Tutunjiev, was sent here at age 24 and spent four years and three months interred at Belene after someone (he suspected his ex-wife) told the authorities of his plan to escape the country. In his notebooks - he had planned to write a memoir about Belene but never did before he died in 2011 at 87 - he remembered the place as "brutal facilities for re-education," where he'd endured "indescribable physical and psychological abuse." He finally managed to escape Bulgaria in 1966 and settle with my grandma in California. In 1989, my parents and I left Bulgaria and joined my grandparents in California, thanks to the family-reunification policy. While many survivors of trauma shut down, my grandfather never stopped talking about the gulag. He seemed to have an unending loop of stories about Belene. For my immediate family, it could be exhausting, and we were alarmed to discover his extensive gun collection, which my grandmother gamely dismissed as a coping mechanism. But guests who came to the house were often riveted by his dark tales, which he mixed with his sense of humor. "Jeko! The Communistie shot you!" he'd shout at his terrier mix, and the dog would sprawl on his back, playing dead. An aerial view of Persin island. The gulag was known as Belene, after the nearby town. Tsvetomir Nikolaev I've come to the town of Belene on a brutally hot day in August for a tour of the Island of Death. I meet Nedyalka Toncheva, who works for the Belene Island Foundation, a nonprofit that organizes tours of the island, close to the bank of the Danube.We cross a rickety water bridge on foot and then jump aboard a Jeep driven by a 24-year-old Belene native named Peter. Toncheva, who is 35, is passionate and knowledgeable about the island's flora and fauna. Every few minutes, she tells Peter to stop the car to point out a roosting stork or a water eagle. She talks about her plans to make Persin a tourist destination comparable to Borovets, a ski resort with luxury hotels in the Rila mountains; or Koprivchitsa, a living museum honoring the Bulgarian rebels who mounted an uprising in 1876 against the Ottoman Empire.In the three decades since the fall of communism, Bulgaria has effectively buried the history of its many gulags, which operated mostly in the 1950s during the early, and most violent, days of Communist rule in the country. In Belene itself, many lower-level guards came from the village and a former mayor was also the gulag's first superintendent. It's not surprising that the village doesn't advertise its history.After 1989, survivors who had been forced to sign documents promising to never talk about the camps started speaking out. For a brief time, they became the subjects of documentaries and newspaper profiles. But soon, the consensus was that it was better to move on. An interior minister tasked with investigating the camps instead secretly ordered a purge of thousands of pages of documents - 40% of the government record. While Bulgaria's defeat of the Ottomans is central to the national identity, and much is made of the fact that Bulgaria saved its Jews during the Holocaust, the memory of the Communist era is more fraught. Georgi Tutunjiev, the author's grandfather, in around 1977. Tana Ganeva Peculiar for a tour, most of our stops lead us to what's not left of the camp. The shacks where prisoners slept have been razed - there's no trace of them.At the entrance, in what is now an open field, an inscription says, "To be human is to have dignity." From inside the camp - what would have been visible to the internees - the engraving says, "If the enemy doesn't surrender, he is destroyed." But no one I've talked to knows whether it's the original or has been recreated. There are a few abandoned, falling-apart buildings, but those were built in 1959, six years after the camp's official (but not real) closing, when it was converted into a prison, in part to kill rumors that it had operated as a secret gulag. Todor Zhivkov, the Communist premier who took power in 1954 and stayed on until 1989, reopened it in the 1980s to detain Muslims who refused to take on Slavic names in place of their own - a disastrous bid to assimilate them. I ask Toncheva whether there's a list of everyone who was held in the camp. I'm thinking of my grandfather and wondering whether there's any documentation. She tells me everyone who comes here for the camp asks the same question."There's no way to know, no list," Toncheva says, apologetic. "There's almost no proof the camp even existed."'Perfectly calculated by Satan himself'The first contingent of 300 men arrived at the Belene camp in the summer of 1949, five years after the 1944 Communist coup. My grandfather, then 24, arrived that first winter. A camp for women was founded on an adjacent island soon after.It was modeled after Josef Stalin's gulags in Siberia. Most of the prisoners had been dragged from their homes by the military police and sent here without trial. (Estimates vary, but 20,000 to 40,000 people were thought to be murdered by the Bulgarian Communist Party.) Even Stalin eventually warned them to scale down the killing of prominent oppositional figures or risk creating martyrs.The first wave of prisoners had to hack through the unpopulated island and build small shacks that were so crowded the prisoners didn't have room to lie down. In his history of the camp, Borislav Skotchev wrote that the island was dotted with towers manned by guards with machine guns. A survivor of Belene during a commemoration ceremony in 2015. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images) The men held here included the former leader of the Social Democrats, Orthodox priests (many in their 70s), and the mayor of Bulgaria's capital, Sofia. Tsveti Ivanov, the editor of the newspaper Svoboden Narod, or Free People, was sent to Belene after serving 10 months in prison. He was beaten so brutally that he got tetanus from his wounds and died in the compound. Much of what we know about the place comes from survivors' memoirs. They were fed a thin soup, sometimes with a handful of beans thrown in. Their bread ration - moldy or stale when it made its way to them - was small, and could be withheld by the guards as punishment. Sometimes they got tea. My grandfather told me that, in the winter, both the soup and the tea were given to them already frozen.When Toncheva takes us on a brief walk to go look at storks, the ground gives off wet heat, and brambles and thorns claw at us, as if the island is alive and doesn't want us there. I think of the people who had to work days and nights, in sweltering summers, devoured by mosquitoes. It's unbelievable that anyone survived.An internal CIA document described the grim situation of starving prisoners. "A frequent sight is that of a prisoner eating raw green leaves and roots," it said. "To be caught doing this, however, would result in 10 days in detention in a dungeon for such an offense." The lucky ones got packages from family, though those were often taken by guards. Many had little choice but to choke down the rotting carcasses of wild cats, killed and skinned for their fur by the villagers, or pick through horse dung for undigested barley. According to a CIA information report from March 13, 1952, during one brutal winter 30 prisoners died of cold or starvation."It was an Inferno circle, perfectly calculated by Satan himself," Liliana Pirinchiva, one of the female survivors of Belene, wrote in her memoir. "We were reduced to skeletons." A group of Bulgarian anarchists. Tsvetana Dzhermanova Then there were the guards, who brought an especially sadistic approach to their work. Some would chase packs of prisoners on horseback, letting their rifles off "as if we were a flock of sheep," wrote Stefan Botchev, a survivor. When he got a severe case of scabies, the mites burrowing into his skin, he was locked up in a shed alone because the guards didn't want him to infect the cows. He recalled seeing a beating so severe that a prisoner's spine was broken, turning him into a "reptile crawling on the ground."Kouni Genchev Kounev, the chairman of the Bulgarian Youth Agrarian Union who also survived Belene, recalled one especially brutal punishment, in which the guards would pull back a prisoner's head and strike him in the trachea. They called it the "sword stroke."Years later, Krum Horozov, a survivor, would draw water colors of the camp from memory - it's virtually the only visual documentation that exists. In 2011, six years before his death, Horozov wrote: "And when we die, which will be soon, who will remember what happened on that island in the 1950s, and will they know that people were sent there without a trial and sentence?"Lilia Topouzova, a historian in Toronto who writes about the history and the memory of the camps, recalls meeting Horozov at an academic conference; he was trying to give away copies of his drawings of Belene to university students, but they avoided him as if he were a pesky street vendor.The CricketAt 93, Tsvetana Dzhermanova is the last known survivor of the women's camp, which was known as Shturets, or Cricket. We're sitting outside her home in the mountain village of Leskovets, and she's talking so fast I wonder how she manages to breathe.She smiles and laughs a lot, and she reminds me of my grandfather, who also spoke with the speed of a motorboat, frantic to tell his story."I promised to outlive the Communistie, and here I am!" she boasts. (My grandfather also took an understandable delight at outliving the Communistie. "I survived the Communistie, but I won't survive old age," he once told me, when I was 25 and had no idea about either.) Tsvetana Dzhermanova. Tsvetana Dzhermanova Dzhermanova was an anarchist in the 1950s, and still is today. "That's my personal ideology," she says. "I'm not sure humans are evolved enough to make either anarchism or socialism work the way they should, but for me, anarchism is it. Because I value freedom, family, friendship, and love."When she first heard about anarchism as a teenager, she asked her mother what it meant. "Anarchists are the people all regimes persecute," her mother had replied. That sold her. Dzhermanova joined a village group. She had no designs on power (detesting it) and mostly spent her time reading anarchist literature and working on a community vegetable garden. She estimates that 800 anarchists from the town were swept up in a night and sent to the gulags."We sang songs while we worked," Dzhermanova tells me. "That helped." Last spring the sprightly nonagenarian made the three-hour trip to Belene to speak with a group of students about the camps. "They had no idea about this. They were really surprised," she says. "No one had ever talked to them about it, and they don't learn about it in school."'Out of Fashion'Toncheva and our driver, Peter, walk through a falling-down building that was constructed in 1959, in part to hide evidence of the camp. It's covered in bird shit. Plant life is taking over its rotted remnants, and old decayed furniture has been abandoned here and there. We talk about how nobody talks about the camp.Peter tells us that despite having spent almost his entire life roughly 750 feet from Persin, in Belene village, he learned about the camp only two weeks earlier, when Toncheva hired him as a driver for her tours."To think they only gave them bread and water, and made them work so hard," he says, shaking his head in disbelief. A crumbling building built on the site of Belene. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters As far as Toncheva knows, no one from her family was held here, but she remembers asking her grandmother about the island when she was a teenager and again after reading the memoirs of survivors. "Shhh. Don't talk so much about this," her grandmother would say. "You don't want to bring trouble."There are rumors of a mass grave near Persin. Mikhail Mikailev, the head of the Belene Island Foundation, wants to find it. But money for the equipment required to find and dig up the remains eludes this two-person staff.Unlike Peter and Toncheva, my parents, who were born in the mid-1950s and grew up in Bulgaria, tell me that in the 1970s and 1980s, all their friends in Sofia knew about Belene. "We all heard the stories," my mother says.But for the authorities, maintaining official denial was worth murder.In 1969, the celebrated Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov defected to the West, where he wrote about the regime's abuses. In one essay, Markov described traveling on a boat down the Danube and approaching Belene. "I remembered how, feet dangling over the edge of the boat, a youth with a guitar once sang a strange song: Danube, white river, how quiet you flow / Danube, black river, what anguish you know." A view of Persin island. Tsvetomir Nikolaev On a rainy afternoon in London, a man jabbed the tip of his umbrella into Markov's leg. Later, Markov noticed what looked like a small bug bite but didn't think much of it. A few days later he was dead, most likely poisoned by the Bulgarian secret service.Before my visit to Belene, I met Topouzova, the historian, over Zoom to talk about the erasure of the camps in Bulgaria's consciousness. While former generals wrote best-sellers, the owner of a prominent bookstore dismissed any interest in survivors' memoirs - they were "out of fashion," he had told her.It was gaslighting in its purest form. And it showed how we're all so prone to the "just world" fallacy, a phenomenon where if something is too horribly unjust, the human brain just kind of moves on. It's not all that hard to bury inconvenient truths."It turned out that aging men and women with fragmented memories of bygone violence did not make for the faces of change," Topouzova wrote in a recent paper titled "On Silence and History" for the American Historical Association. "The interned were rendered nonexistent - their experiences and memories fated to vanish along with the files." A pile of stonesNations define themselves by their monuments. The memorial in downtown Manhattan demands that we never forget the victims of 9/11. In the past few years, American activists have torn Confederate statues from their perches, signaling a break with the passive acceptance of the history of slavery. Yet grappling with unpleasant history isn't easy. It was only in 2018 when a museum honoring the Black victims of lynching opened in Alabama. The 1619 Project, which posits that the history of the United States is rooted in slavery, has spurred a massive backlash. School districts have banned children's books about Rosa Parks. Vaunted democracies are as likely to try to bury inconvenient truths as former communist states. At an exhibition in Sofia in 2009, Belene survivors look at images of the gulag's victims. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters In Bulgaria, there are monuments everywhere. From the smallest village to Sofia, the heroes of Bulgaria's uprising against the Ottoman Empire are eternalized in stone. In Plovdiv, a giant sculpture overlooks Bulgaria's second-largest city that honors "Alyosha," an everyman Soviet soldier who helped "liberate" Bulgaria in the 1940s - even though many Bulgarians see that period as Soviet imperialism, much like the Ottoman Empire's 500 years of occupation.The victims of Belene and the other camps have no such honor. The Belene foundation does the best it can. They helped organize an art exhibit, where Korozov's pencil drawings were tacked onto the walls of the decaying structures that had been erected to mask evidence of the gulag. A man places photos of famous victims of Soviet policy in front of the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2014. Hristo Vladev/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images There is one modest monument on the island. It's an abstract stone structure, and you'd have no idea what it was if you didn't already know the history. The original idea was to build a monument that listed the names of all the known internees, something like the Vietnam wall on the Mall in Washington. But the survivors and their families who pooled their resources to build it ran out of money, and no one, including the Bulgarian government, stepped in to help. (The survivors also hoped to open a museum and to recreate the shacks where they were held, but that hasn't happened either.)My grandfather's escape Dzhermanova, the 93-year-old anarchist - and eternal optimist, apparently - has hope that younger people will dig up the buried history.As for my grandfather, his ex-wife (or whoever it was who betrayed him to the authorities) was right that he wanted to escape Bulgaria.After his release from Belene in 1953, that resolve was so much stronger. "After 4 years and three months in the Island of Death, I became determined to go to my real home: America," he explained in his notebooks. The author with her grandfather and grandmother, Tsvetana Tutunjieva. Tana Ganeva As he detailed it, it would take four harrowing attempts. Soon after his release from Belene, he managed to make it into Yugoslavia during a "sabor" - a temporary loosening of borders so family and friends in the two countries could see each other. But he got caught and was thrown into a Yugoslavian jail.From there, he organized an inmate breakout after bribing the guard dog, Jeko, with his dinner. But he and the other prisoners were caught in the woods, and the Yugoslavian authorities gave them up to the Bulgarian authorities in exchange for 10 cows. "They weren't even very good cows - scrawny," he wrote.Several years later, he tried to cross Bulgaria's mountainous border into Greece, but he was caught once again.Finally, he made it into Austria and then Germany by clinging to the underside of a freight train. And then on to California, where he gave his new dog a familiar name: Jeko.Tana Ganeva writes about policing, prisons and criminal justice. She's currently working on a book about escapees from the Soviet bloc. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

My grandfather was held at Bulgaria's most notorious gulag. This summer, I saw it for the first time. A Belene survivor crosses the bridge across the Danube that connects the town of Belene and Persin island in 2015. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images) This summer, Tana Ganeva traveled to Belene, Bulgaria's most notorious prison camp, where her grandfather was held in the 1950s. Bulgaria has effectively buried the history of its Communist-era gulags, where thousands were starved, tortured, and killed. Ganeva's grandfather attempted to escape Bulgaria four times, before making it to California. See more stories on Insider's business page. The island of Persin is a bird-watcher's paradise. Set on the Danube River, which divides Bulgaria and Romania, it's a nature park covered in wetlands and home to hundreds of rare bird species: the spoonbill, the pygmy cormorant, the corncrake, as well as herons, eagles, storks, and pelicans. Amid the natural beauty, it's jarring to consider that this was the location of a concentration camp where thousands of Bulgarian political prisoners were brutalized and killed from 1949 to 1953 - and in some cases for years after that. Though it's officially known as Belene after the quiet Bulgarian village that sits 750 feet away on the mainland, old-timers here call it by another name: the Island of Death.My stepgrandfather, Georgi Tutunjiev, was sent here at age 24 and spent four years and three months interred at Belene after someone (he suspected his ex-wife) told the authorities of his plan to escape the country. In his notebooks - he had planned to write a memoir about Belene but never did before he died in 2011 at 87 - he remembered the place as "brutal facilities for re-education," where he'd endured "indescribable physical and psychological abuse." He finally managed to escape Bulgaria in 1966 and settle with my grandma in California. In 1989, my parents and I left Bulgaria and joined my grandparents in California, thanks to the family-reunification policy. While many survivors of trauma shut down, my grandfather never stopped talking about the gulag. He seemed to have an unending loop of stories about Belene. For my immediate family, it could be exhausting, and we were alarmed to discover his extensive gun collection, which my grandmother gamely dismissed as a coping mechanism. But guests who came to the house were often riveted by his dark tales, which he mixed with his sense of humor. "Jeko! The Communistie shot you!" he'd shout at his terrier mix, and the dog would sprawl on his back, playing dead. An aerial view of Persin island. The gulag was known as Belene, after the nearby town. Tsvetomir Nikolaev I've come to the town of Belene on a brutally hot day in August for a tour of the Island of Death. I meet Nedyalka Toncheva, who works for the Belene Island Foundation, a nonprofit that organizes tours of the island, close to the bank of the Danube.We cross a rickety water bridge on foot and then jump aboard a Jeep driven by a 24-year-old Belene native named Peter. Toncheva, who is 35, is passionate and knowledgeable about the island's flora and fauna. Every few minutes, she tells Peter to stop the car to point out a roosting stork or a water eagle. She talks about her plans to make Persin a tourist destination comparable to Borovets, a ski resort with luxury hotels in the Rila mountains; or Koprivchitsa, a living museum honoring the Bulgarian rebels who mounted an uprising in 1876 against the Ottoman Empire.In the three decades since the fall of communism, Bulgaria has effectively buried the history of its many gulags, which operated mostly in the 1950s during the early, and most violent, days of Communist rule in the country. In Belene itself, many lower-level guards came from the village and a former mayor was also the gulag's first superintendent. It's not surprising that the village doesn't advertise its history.After 1989, survivors who had been forced to sign documents promising to never talk about the camps started speaking out. For a brief time, they became the subjects of documentaries and newspaper profiles. But soon, the consensus was that it was better to move on. An interior minister tasked with investigating the camps instead secretly ordered a purge of thousands of pages of documents - 40% of the government record. While Bulgaria's defeat of the Ottomans is central to the national identity, and much is made of the fact that Bulgaria saved its Jews during the Holocaust, the memory of the Communist era is more fraught. Georgi Tutunjiev, the author's grandfather, in around 1977. Tana Ganeva Peculiar for a tour, most of our stops lead us to what's not left of the camp. The shacks where prisoners slept have been razed - there's no trace of them.At the entrance, in what is now an open field, an inscription says, "To be human is to have dignity." From inside the camp - what would have been visible to the internees - the engraving says, "If the enemy doesn't surrender, he is destroyed." But no one I've talked to knows whether it's the original or has been recreated. There are a few abandoned, falling-apart buildings, but those were built in 1959, six years after the camp's official (but not real) closing, when it was converted into a prison, in part to kill rumors that it had operated as a secret gulag. Todor Zhivkov, the Communist premier who took power in 1954 and stayed on until 1989, reopened it in the 1980s to detain Muslims who refused to take on Slavic names in place of their own - a disastrous bid to assimilate them. I ask Toncheva whether there's a list of everyone who was held in the camp. I'm thinking of my grandfather and wondering whether there's any documentation. She tells me everyone who comes here for the camp asks the same question."There's no way to know, no list," Toncheva says, apologetic. "There's almost no proof the camp even existed."'Perfectly calculated by Satan himself'The first contingent of 300 men arrived at the Belene camp in the summer of 1949, five years after the 1944 Communist coup. My grandfather, then 24, arrived that first winter. A camp for women was founded on an adjacent island soon after.It was modeled after Josef Stalin's gulags in Siberia. Most of the prisoners had been dragged from their homes by the military police and sent here without trial. (Estimates vary, but 20,000 to 40,000 people were thought to be murdered by the Bulgarian Communist Party.) Even Stalin eventually warned them to scale down the killing of prominent oppositional figures or risk creating martyrs.The first wave of prisoners had to hack through the unpopulated island and build small shacks that were so crowded the prisoners didn't have room to lie down. In his history of the camp, Borislav Skotchev wrote that the island was dotted with towers manned by guards with machine guns. A survivor of Belene during a commemoration ceremony in 2015. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images) The men held here included the former leader of the Social Democrats, Orthodox priests (many in their 70s), and the mayor of Bulgaria's capital, Sofia. Tsveti Ivanov, the editor of the newspaper Svoboden Narod, or Free People, was sent to Belene after serving 10 months in prison. He was beaten so brutally that he got tetanus from his wounds and died in the compound. Much of what we know about the place comes from survivors' memoirs. They were fed a thin soup, sometimes with a handful of beans thrown in. Their bread ration - moldy or stale when it made its way to them - was small, and could be withheld by the guards as punishment. Sometimes they got tea. My grandfather told me that, in the winter, both the soup and the tea were given to them already frozen.When Toncheva takes us on a brief walk to go look at storks, the ground gives off wet heat, and brambles and thorns claw at us, as if the island is alive and doesn't want us there. I think of the people who had to work days and nights, in sweltering summers, devoured by mosquitoes. It's unbelievable that anyone survived.An internal CIA document described the grim situation of starving prisoners. "A frequent sight is that of a prisoner eating raw green leaves and roots," it said. "To be caught doing this, however, would result in 10 days in detention in a dungeon for such an offense." The lucky ones got packages from family, though those were often taken by guards. Many had little choice but to choke down the rotting carcasses of wild cats, killed and skinned for their fur by the villagers, or pick through horse dung for undigested barley. According to a CIA information report from March 13, 1952, during one brutal winter 30 prisoners died of cold or starvation."It was an Inferno circle, perfectly calculated by Satan himself," Liliana Pirinchiva, one of the female survivors of Belene, wrote in her memoir. "We were reduced to skeletons." A group of Bulgarian anarchists. Tsvetana Dzhermanova Then there were the guards, who brought an especially sadistic approach to their work. Some would chase packs of prisoners on horseback, letting their rifles off "as if we were a flock of sheep," wrote Stefan Botchev, a survivor. When he got a severe case of scabies, the mites burrowing into his skin, he was locked up in a shed alone because the guards didn't want him to infect the cows. He recalled seeing a beating so severe that a prisoner's spine was broken, turning him into a "reptile crawling on the ground."Kouni Genchev Kounev, the chairman of the Bulgarian Youth Agrarian Union who also survived Belene, recalled one especially brutal punishment, in which the guards would pull back a prisoner's head and strike him in the trachea. They called it the "sword stroke."Years later, Krum Horozov, a survivor, would draw water colors of the camp from memory - it's virtually the only visual documentation that exists. In 2011, six years before his death, Horozov wrote: "And when we die, which will be soon, who will remember what happened on that island in the 1950s, and will they know that people were sent there without a trial and sentence?"Lilia Topouzova, a historian in Toronto who writes about the history and the memory of the camps, recalls meeting Horozov at an academic conference; he was trying to give away copies of his drawings of Belene to university students, but they avoided him as if he were a pesky street vendor.The CricketAt 93, Tsvetana Dzhermanova is the last known survivor of the women's camp, which was known as Shturets, or Cricket. We're sitting outside her home in the mountain village of Leskovets, and she's talking so fast I wonder how she manages to breathe.She smiles and laughs a lot, and she reminds me of my grandfather, who also spoke with the speed of a motorboat, frantic to tell his story."I promised to outlive the Communistie, and here I am!" she boasts. (My grandfather also took an understandable delight at outliving the Communistie. "I survived the Communistie, but I won't survive old age," he once told me, when I was 25 and had no idea about either.) Tsvetana Dzhermanova. Tsvetana Dzhermanova Dzhermanova was an anarchist in the 1950s, and still is today. "That's my personal ideology," she says. "I'm not sure humans are evolved enough to make either anarchism or socialism work the way they should, but for me, anarchism is it. Because I value freedom, family, friendship, and love."When she first heard about anarchism as a teenager, she asked her mother what it meant. "Anarchists are the people all regimes persecute," her mother had replied. That sold her. Dzhermanova joined a village group. She had no designs on power (detesting it) and mostly spent her time reading anarchist literature and working on a community vegetable garden. She estimates that 800 anarchists from the town were swept up in a night and sent to the gulags."We sang songs while we worked," Dzhermanova tells me. "That helped." Last spring the sprightly nonagenarian made the three-hour trip to Belene to speak with a group of students about the camps. "They had no idea about this. They were really surprised," she says. "No one had ever talked to them about it, and they don't learn about it in school."'Out of Fashion'Toncheva and our driver, Peter, walk through a falling-down building that was constructed in 1959, in part to hide evidence of the camp. It's covered in bird shit. Plant life is taking over its rotted remnants, and old decayed furniture has been abandoned here and there. We talk about how nobody talks about the camp.Peter tells us that despite having spent almost his entire life roughly 750 feet from Persin, in Belene village, he learned about the camp only two weeks earlier, when Toncheva hired him as a driver for her tours."To think they only gave them bread and water, and made them work so hard," he says, shaking his head in disbelief. A crumbling building built on the site of Belene. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters As far as Toncheva knows, no one from her family was held here, but she remembers asking her grandmother about the island when she was a teenager and again after reading the memoirs of survivors. "Shhh. Don't talk so much about this," her grandmother would say. "You don't want to bring trouble."There are rumors of a mass grave near Persin. Mikhail Mikailev, the head of the Belene Island Foundation, wants to find it. But money for the equipment required to find and dig up the remains eludes this two-person staff.Unlike Peter and Toncheva, my parents, who were born in the mid-1950s and grew up in Bulgaria, tell me that in the 1970s and 1980s, all their friends in Sofia knew about Belene. "We all heard the stories," my mother says.But for the authorities, maintaining official denial was worth murder.In 1969, the celebrated Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov defected to the West, where he wrote about the regime's abuses. In one essay, Markov described traveling on a boat down the Danube and approaching Belene. "I remembered how, feet dangling over the edge of the boat, a youth with a guitar once sang a strange song: Danube, white river, how quiet you flow / Danube, black river, what anguish you know." A view of Persin island. Tsvetomir Nikolaev On a rainy afternoon in London, a man jabbed the tip of his umbrella into Markov's leg. Later, Markov noticed what looked like a small bug bite but didn't think much of it. A few days later he was dead, most likely poisoned by the Bulgarian secret service.Before my visit to Belene, I met Topouzova, the historian, over Zoom to talk about the erasure of the camps in Bulgaria's consciousness. While former generals wrote best-sellers, the owner of a prominent bookstore dismissed any interest in survivors' memoirs - they were "out of fashion," he had told her.It was gaslighting in its purest form. And it showed how we're all so prone to the "just world" fallacy, a phenomenon where if something is too horribly unjust, the human brain just kind of moves on. It's not all that hard to bury inconvenient truths."It turned out that aging men and women with fragmented memories of bygone violence did not make for the faces of change," Topouzova wrote in a recent paper titled "On Silence and History" for the American Historical Association. "The interned were rendered nonexistent - their experiences and memories fated to vanish along with the files." A pile of stonesNations define themselves by their monuments. The memorial in downtown Manhattan demands that we never forget the victims of 9/11. In the past few years, American activists have torn Confederate statues from their perches, signaling a break with the passive acceptance of the history of slavery. Yet grappling with unpleasant history isn't easy. It was only in 2018 when a museum honoring the Black victims of lynching opened in Alabama. The 1619 Project, which posits that the history of the United States is rooted in slavery, has spurred a massive backlash. School districts have banned children's books about Rosa Parks. Vaunted democracies are as likely to try to bury inconvenient truths as former communist states. At an exhibition in Sofia in 2009, Belene survivors look at images of the gulag's victims. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters In Bulgaria, there are monuments everywhere. From the smallest village to Sofia, the heroes of Bulgaria's uprising against the Ottoman Empire are eternalized in stone. In Plovdiv, a giant sculpture overlooks Bulgaria's second-largest city that honors "Alyosha," an everyman Soviet soldier who helped "liberate" Bulgaria in the 1940s - even though many Bulgarians see that period as Soviet imperialism, much like the Ottoman Empire's 500 years of occupation.The victims of Belene and the other camps have no such honor. The Belene foundation does the best it can. They helped organize an art exhibit, where Korozov's pencil drawings were tacked onto the walls of the decaying structures that had been erected to mask evidence of the gulag. A man places photos of famous victims of Soviet policy in front of the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2014. Hristo Vladev/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images There is one modest monument on the island. It's an abstract stone structure, and you'd have no idea what it was if you didn't already know the history. The original idea was to build a monument that listed the names of all the known internees, something like the Vietnam wall on the Mall in Washington. But the survivors and their families who pooled their resources to build it ran out of money, and no one, including the Bulgarian government, stepped in to help. (The survivors also hoped to open a museum and to recreate the shacks where they were held, but that hasn't happened either.)My grandfather's escape Dzhermanova, the 93-year-old anarchist - and eternal optimist, apparently - has hope that younger people will dig up the buried history.As for my grandfather, his ex-wife (or whoever it was who betrayed him to the authorities) was right that he wanted to escape Bulgaria.After his release from Belene in 1953, that resolve was so much stronger. "After 4 years and three months in the Island of Death, I became determined to go to my real home: America," he explained in his notebooks. The author with her grandfather and grandmother, Tsvetana Tutunjieva. Tana Ganeva As he detailed it, it would take four harrowing attempts. Soon after his release from Belene, he managed to make it into Yugoslavia during a "sabor" - a temporary loosening of borders so family and friends in the two countries could see each other. But he got caught and was thrown into a Yugoslavian jail.From there, he organized an inmate breakout after bribing the guard dog, Jeko, with his dinner. But he and the other prisoners were caught in the woods, and the Yugoslavian authorities gave them up to the Bulgarian authorities in exchange for 10 cows. "They weren't even very good cows - scrawny," he wrote.Several years later, he tried to cross Bulgaria's mountainous border into Greece, but he was caught once again.Finally, he made it into Austria and then Germany by clinging to the underside of a freight train. And then on to California, where he gave his new dog a familiar name: Jeko.Tana Ganeva writes about policing, prisons and criminal justice. She's currently working on a book about escapees from the Soviet bloc. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

A Nation Of Snitches: DHS Is Grooming Americans To Report On Each Other Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute, “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.” - Professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler Are you among the 41% of Americans who regularly attend church or some other religious service? Do you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law? Do you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car? Are you among the 44% of Americans who live in a household with a gun? If so, are you concerned that the government may be plotting to confiscate your firearms? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the government and flagged for heightened surveillance and preemptive intervention. Let that sink in a moment. If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list. I assure you I’m not making this stuff up. So what is the government doing about these so-called American “extremists”? The government is grooming the American people to spy on each other as part of its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3 program. According to journalist Leo Hohmann, the government is handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.” As Hohmann explains, “Whether it’s COVID and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential ‘violent extremist’ and terrorist.” Cue the dawning of the Snitch State. This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, hyper-vigilant, technologically-wired age. For more than two decades, the Department of Homeland Security has plastered its “See Something, Say Something” campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas have lined up for grants to participate in the program. The government has even designated September 25 as National “If You See Something, Say Something” Awareness Day. If you see something suspicious, says the DHS, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone. This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government’s way of indoctrinating “we the people” into the mindset that we’re an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens. This is what is commonly referred to as community policing. Yet while community policing and federal programs such as “See Something, Say Something” are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security. The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing. After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States? The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears. You hype them up on color-coded “Terror alerts,” keep them in the dark about the distinctions between actual threats and staged “training” drills so that all crises seem real, desensitize them to the sight of militarized police walking their streets, acclimatize them to being surveilled “for their own good,” and then indoctrinate them into thinking that they are the only ones who can save the nation from another 9/11. Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted. This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality. This is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other. It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces from outside the country, they’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners. Community policing did not come about as a feel-good, empowering response to individuals trying to “take back” their communities from crime syndicates and drug lords. Rather, “Community-Oriented Policing” or COPS (short for Community Partnerships, Organizational Transformation, and Problem Solving) is a Department of Justice program designed to foster partnerships between police agencies and members of the community. To this end, the Justice Department identifies five distinct “partners” in the community policing scheme: law enforcement and other government agencies, community members and groups, nonprofits, churches and service providers, private businesses and the media. Together, these groups are supposed to “identify” community concerns, “engage” the community in achieving specific goals, serve as “powerful” partners with the government, and add their “considerable resources” to the government’s already massive arsenal of technology and intelligence. The mainstream media’s role, long recognized as being a mouthpiece for the government, is formally recognized as “publicizing” services from government or community agencies or new laws or codes that will be enforced, as well as shaping public perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime. Inevitably, this begs the question: if there’s nothing wrong with community engagement, if the police can’t be everywhere at once, if surveillance cameras do little to actually prevent crime, and if we need to “take back our communities” from the crime syndicates and drug lords, then what’s wrong with community policing and “See Something, Say Something”? What’s wrong is that these programs are not, in fact, making America any safer while turning us into a legalistic, intolerant, squealing, bystander nation. We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall, widening mass surveillance dragnet comprised of fusion centers, red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, terror watch lists, facial recognition, snitch tip lines, biometric scanners, pre-crime programs, DNA databases, data mining, precognitive technology and contact tracing apps, to name just a few. This is how the government keeps us under control and in its crosshairs. By the time you combine the DHS’ “See Something, Say Something” with CP3 and community policing, which has gone global in the guise of the Strong Cities Network program, you’ve got a formula for enabling the government to not only flag distinct “anti-government” segments of the population but locking down the entire nation. Under the guise of fighting violent extremism “in all of its forms and manifestations” in cities and communities across the world, the Strong Cities Network program works with the UN and the federal government to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. What this program is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale with the objective being to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who could be construed as potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats. The government’s war on extremists has been sold to Americans in much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was sold to Americans: as a means of combatting terrorists who seek to destroy America. However, as we now know, the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that has turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect. Similarly, the concern with the government’s ongoing anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup). This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming. For example, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists. These reports, which use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably, indicate that for the government, anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—can be labeled an extremist. Fast forward a few years, and you have the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which each successive presidential administration has continually re-upped, that allows the military to take you out of your home, lock you up with no access to friends, family or the courts if you’re seen as an extremist. Now connect the dots, from the 2009 Extremism reports to the NDAA and the far-reaching data crime fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies. Add in tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that identifies and tracks you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the circle, toss in the real-time crime centers which are attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs. If you can’t read the writing on the wall, you need to pay better attention. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion and globalization of the government’s powers, we’re not going to recognize this country five, ten—even twenty—years from now. As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, things will get worse, not better. It’s already worse. Tyler Durden Wed, 09/20/2023 - 23:00.....»»

They helped put rap on the map. Then the law caught up with them. Mario Rosemond (center top) and his brother Jimmy (second from left) clawed their way from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the music industry. Then it all came crashing down.Gary Reyes/Oakland Tribune Staff Archives; Janette Beckman/Getty; Johnny Nunez/WireImage; KMazur/WireImage for Interscope Records; Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG/Getty; Dakarai Akil for InsiderThe incredible saga of the Henchmen brothers, hip-hop's forgotten mogulsThe first time in eight years that Mario Rosemond heard his name, it filled him with terror. Almost as much as the men surrounding him with machine guns. It was March 2019, and Rosemond was living in Mexico under an assumed identity. Born in Haiti and tossed out on the streets of Brooklyn as a teenager, he was on the run from the FBI, for his role in a cocaine-trafficking empire run by his younger brother, Jimmy. But the Rosemond brothers were no ordinary hustlers. As founders of Henchmen Entertainment, rap's most notorious management firm, Jimmy and Mario had made millions the legit way: by deftly cultivating artists such as The Game, Salt-N-Pepa, Akon, Sean Kingston, and Gucci Mane. During their meteoric rise in the 1990s, Mario had kept a low profile, the Wall Street-trained numbers guy who quietly managed the company's fortunes. Jimmy, five years younger, served as Henchmen's flashy and intimidating front man, the self-described "gangster manager" of hip-hop. "They figured out how to go from the streets to the boardrooms," says Skee, one of rap's most influential producers and DJs. "They have that respect." But according to the Feds, Jimmy never left the streets at all. "Rosemond styled himself a hip hop mogul, bringing the music of the streets to a wider audience and expanding opportunities of artists," as the Justice Department put it. "In reality, his image as a music impresario was a cover for the real Jimmy Rosemond — a thug in a suit who flooded those same streets with cocaine, and shuttled drugs and money from coast to coast."Arrested in 2011, Jimmy was convicted of running a massive drug empire and of ordering the murder of Lowell "Lodi Mack" Fletcher, an associate of 50 Cent who was gunned down in the Bronx. Some in the rap world also suspected him of masterminding the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur at Quad Studios, igniting the bicoastal rap feud that led to the murders of both Tupac and Biggie Smalls. Now serving two life sentences in federal prison, Jimmy continues to maintain his innocence, claiming he served as the "fall guy" for the drugs and violence that plagued the music industry. "That dark force that we grew up on, that Joker character, that nemesis of good," he tells me on a recent call from prison. "Unfortunately, I became that in the music business, and to reporters, and eventually to prosecutors who felt they needed to rid the business of me."Jimmy Rosemond was arrested in 2011 and received two life sentences on charges of drug running and murder for hire.AP NewsroomIt was Jimmy's arrest that drove Mario to flee to Mexico. Faced with having to testify against his brother, Rosemond pulled a Saul Goodman. He paid $50,000 to be smuggled down to Cuernavaca, where he adopted a new identity: Tommy Davis. Leaving behind his family and friends, he spent eight years living with "my head on a swivel," as Mario puts it, always on the lookout for anyone who might recognize him. He kept a low profile. He learned Spanish, steered clear of serious relationships, and went to church on Sundays. "You're not trusting nobody," he says.It didn't help that Cuernavaca had become a battleground, with one of Mexico's fiercest cartels erupting in an internal war. Driving to the gym, Rosemond would pass the corpse of a freshly butchered gangster on the side of the road. A friend he knew got shot dead by the cartel, and his roommate, a steroid-jacked Colombian, had been kidnapped for three days before managing to escape. It was a dangerous place to be living on the lam.The moment Rosemond's past caught up with him felt nightmarishly surreal. He was doing his laundry in the courtyard of his apartment building when he spotted five armed men climbing the fence. "We're looking for Mario Rosemond," one of them told him in English. "Yo no sé," Mario stammered in Spanish. "Mi nombre es Tommy Davis."Then they threw a bag over his head, and everything went dark.Today, four years later, Rosemond's life still hangs in the balance. "It's kind of hard even speaking on it right now," he tells me. "Because I don't know what the endgame is." We're talking over breakfast at a Friendly's near Rahway, New Jersey, a universe away from Rosemond's takedown in Cuernavaca. At age 64, dressed in blue jeans and a blue polo, he comes across as less urban gangster than suburban grandad. It's a status he has earned by spending his days babysitting his 2-year-old grandson. The only sign of his hip-hop past are the tattoos on his right arm memorializing his late mother and sister. Whatever choices he has made in life, he says, it was always his family that drove him. "I don't have too many people in my circle," he says. "It's family." Now, as he awaits sentencing for participating in a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, he's sharing his incredible saga for the first time, from his meteoric rise in Brooklyn to his inglorious fall in Mexico.Jimmy (far left) and his son Jimmy Jr. with Mario (far right) and their mother, Andrea. "I don't have too many people in my circle," Mario says. "It's family."Courtesy of Leeann HellijasMario's working-class parents migrated from Port-au-Prince to New York City when he was 7. Constantin was a carpenter; Andrea got work as a nurse. "Like every immigrant family," Mario says, "they wanted a better life." The family settled in Vanderveer Estates, a housing project of 59 rundown buildings that sprawled across 30 acres of East Flatbush. Quiet and intellectual, Mario tried to provide an example for his four younger siblings, especially Jimmy. But their home life was troubled. Constantin, an abusive womanizer, "would beat us with anything and everything," Mario recalls. At age 16, after Mario stepped in to stop his father from assaulting his mother, Constantin told him there wasn't room for two grown men in the house and threw him out. "My parents worked hard to keep us out of the street," Mario says. "And, you know, the street always come and get you."Mario tried street life himself, joining a gang of petty thieves called the Jolly Stompers. But after a high-school guidance counselor helped him secure a Wall Street internship, Mario learned how to build a fortune the old-fashioned way. "Legal money, not having to worry," he says. "I learned how people really got rich." The Masters of the Universe, he realized, did it by keeping a low profile. "When you're in the background, nobody knows about you," he says. "They don't know that you're actually running things. They don't know that you're watching everything."But while Mario worked to ascend the ranks of Wall Street and started a family of his own, Jimmy remained behind in Brooklyn, where he hung out in the projects. With his father out of the picture and his mother working two jobs, Jimmy "had to fend for myself," he tells me. "I had no guardianship, so the streets is what adopted me." At 10, he fell in with a local Jamaican gang called the Untouchables. At 13, he owned his first gun. At 18, he landed in Rikers Island on a firearm charge. Jimmy considered Rikers "gladiator school." He studied the Black Panthers, converted to Islam, and learned his trade from the city's most experienced drug dealers. Despite "everything that I know better," he says, "this is the only family I had." Jimmy worked his way up to become, as he later boasted, "the biggest drug dealer in Brooklyn."In 1992, after the cops busted down his door looking for drugs, Jimmy approached his brother Mario with a proposition: Let's start a music-management company. For Jimmy, as he later put it, music was a way to create a "hideout" for his drug money. "I didn't know anything about the music business," he said. "I don't care about the music business. But one of the fascinations of being a gangster or a drug dealer is you want to rub shoulders with guys who have money, or guys of your stature, and you look at entertainers as those guys."Jimmy (left) with his client, The Game. He got into the music business, he says, to create a "hideout" for his drug money.Johnny Nunez / Getty ImagesJimmy was hitting up his brother at a vulnerable moment. Mario was just out of Rikers himself, where he was sentenced to spend every weekend for 18 months for — unwittingly, he claims — cashing stolen checks for a friend. Out of a job and unemployable on Wall Street, with a young daughter to support, Mario was a sharp-enough businessman to spot an opportunity. Plus he loved music, and had been DJing at clubs under the name Mr. Slick. With the popularity of rap on the rise, emerging artists and producers needed someone to represent them — someone who could navigate the treacherous waters of the music industry.To gather all the top talent in one place, Jimmy and Mario organized a conference called "How Can I Be Down?" Held in Miami Beach in 1992, the event attracted a Who's Who of hip-hop's early moguls: Russell Simmons, Benny Medina, Lyor Cohen, Chris Lighty, Mona Scott. While Jimmy worked the crowd, Mario practiced the skill he had learned on Wall Street. "I was just a fly on the wall, so no one really pays attention to me," he recalls. "As opposed to my brother, he wanted to be a front man. That's why in the music business we worked so well."That fall, the brothers proved their prowess by engineering one of the biggest rap songs of the year. Salt-N-Pepa, the pioneering female rap trio from New York, were on their fourth record and in need of a hit when Jimmy hooked them up with Mark Sparks, a producer friend. Jimmy had zero experience in music, but it didn't matter. "I was young enough to where I trusted my ears," he tells me. Released in September 1993, the resulting single, "Shoop," became a runaway hit, topping the rap charts and going gold in only two months.The brothers engineered their first hit: Salt-N-Pepa's 1993 single "Shoop."Paul Bergen / Getty ImagesThe brothers quickly followed up with another hit, "Tell Me," by the R&B duo Groove Theory. The band's cofounder Bryce Wilson remembers Jimmy as a small, geeky guy in glasses. "He didn't present himself as a gangster. Jimmy was a nerd," Wilson tells me. "But he was extremely loyal and extremely unselfish and would do whatever it takes to make things happen." He was also a canny businessman. Jimmy hit on a groundbreaking idea: He and Mario would sign rap producers instead of artists and make them stars in their own right. "What I understood was the real estate of the music," Jimmy says. "Everything else you're selling in music is intangible but the publishing." All they needed for their management company was a name. Jimmy wanted something that evoked his personal history, his move from Rikers to rap. "He was bringing the street into the music business," Mario says. The kid who fought his way out of the projects rebranded himself as Jimmy Henchman, and he dubbed their new enterprise Henchmen Entertainment.Jimmy and Mario have a lot in common: intelligence, loyalty to those who deserve it, no time for those who don't. They also share a way of speaking, punctuating their comments with the occasional mmm-hmm, as if preaching to themselves, a looping call and response. When I ask Jimmy what he learned from the street that he took into the music business, the convicted drug dealer delivers a gospel on integrity. "If you're known to be a thief, that's how they're gonna deal with you," he tells me. "If you're known to be trustworthy, they get to trust in you more. So it applied the same way in the music business. People buy into the person."With Jimmy as the public-facing godfather and Mario the calculating consigliere, the brothers styled themselves as hip-hop Corleones. Adopting the name Henchman not only bolstered Jimmy's reputation but also helped him dodge the cops, who were after him on gun charges. "They don't know where he is," Mario recalls, "because he's Jimmy Henchman now."The company's 15 or so employees also used the Henchman name, even printing it on their business cards. Mohammed "Tef" Stewart, a friend from Brooklyn who joined the team, became Tef Henchman, a title he wore with the same pride he took in Jimmy. "Henchman was his name," he later testified, "and it felt like we were under him." The new moniker helped them get into clubs, score meetings, and ward off trouble. "It was like a free pass," Mario says, "because everybody knew we had muscle." Only one member of the crew refused to use the new handle: Mario. "I didn't want no part of that name," he tells me. He had a motivation for playing it safe. He wanted to protect his 12-year-old daughter, who was living with his ex-wife in New Jersey.But on November 30, 1994, the Henchmen name became etched into the history of hip-hop. Jimmy had agreed to pay $15,000 to have the industry's hottest rapper, Tupac Shakur, stop by Quad Studios in New York and record a track with the Henchmen artist Little Shawn. Mario had known Tupac since the '80s and felt a kinship with the introspective young artist. "He was down to earth, a quiet, quiet, quiet dude," Mario says. "He didn't even have any bodyguards. He would be by himself. He was a regular kid."That night, Mario recalls, he was back at Henchmen's headquarters, opting for the quietude of the office over the scene at the studio. Then his phone rang. It was Jimmy, sounding agitated. Tupac was late, and with the rap stars Puff Daddy and Biggie Smalls milling around the studio, Jimmy was losing not only time and money but something even more dangerous: face. Jimmy wanted Mario to track down his old friend and get him to the studio.Mario called Tupac. "Yo, dude, where you at?" he asked. Pac said he was uptown making drops with a DJ, but promised to show up for the studio gig. "I'm gonna be there, man," he promised Mario.A few hours later, Mario got another, more alarming call from his brother. "Yo," Jimmy said, "Pac just got shot!" Suspicion immediately fell on the Henchmen brothers. Tupac's manager, Freddie Moore, called Mario and accused him and Jimmy of setting Tupac up. "Yo, somebody shot my man five times and y'all guys didn't know about it?!" Moore shouted.On the night Tupac was shot in 1994, he was supposed to record a track with the Henchmen artist Little Shawn.Al Pereira / Getty Images"Dude, do me a favor and think about this," Mario replied. "'Cause me, I start trying to think logic: If we wanted him dead or if we wanted him hurt, wouldn't we have done the record first? If he's dead, that would've been the last song. You know, my artist would be blowing the fuck up!"The police found no evidence linking Jimmy to Tupac's shooting, which ignited a deadly war between the East Coast and West Coast branches of rap. And Jimmy continues to claim, against all evidence, that Tupac accidentally shot himself with his own gun. "I look guilty as fuck to anybody who's standing around, right?" Jimmy tells me. "But this guy never was shot up — he shot himself." Still, with the police looking for him on gun charges, Jimmy wasn't taking any chances. As Tupac lay bleeding in the lobby of the studio, Jimmy slipped away.Mario is cagier about Jimmy's involvement in the shooting. "If he did do that," he tells me, "that would have been stupid." When I ask Mario if he thinks Jimmy is innocent, he laughs. "I didn't say he's innocent," he says. "I'm saying I believe he's innocent."Not long after the Tupac shooting, Mario was at his home in Plainfield, New Jersey, when the police came crashing through the door, guns drawn. They were looking for Jimmy.Avoiding drama is what had driven Mario from Brooklyn in the first place. But the streets had followed him to the suburbs. Luckily, his daughter wasn't there to see the cops raid his home, looking for her uncle. The experience left Mario more resolved than ever to stay out of his brother's affairs. "From that experience, I stay squeaky clean," he insists. "'Cause that would put my daughter and family in danger."In the rap community, Tupac's shooting only served to burnish Jimmy's reputation — especially after Pac recorded the diss track "Against All Odds," vowing "to pay back Jimmy Henchman in due time." Jimmy was thrilled. "He puts me in that record," he says, "that's what give me notoriety." But Mario was far from pleased. "It made Jimmy more famous, and for him, he loves that, right? For me, I hate it, because now it brings more light to you."With his gun charges still looming, Jimmy began working out of his car to evade the police. "Mario was in the office, so I was able to move around," he says. With more clients, more hits, and more money pouring in, the brothers made themselves indispensable to those around them. "Flush with cash, we was able to do things for folks," Mario says. With their reputation growing, they began attracting more and more top stars, from Brandy to Junior Mafia. They'd make deals, settle beefs, lend money with interest. When I ask Mario what happened when someone didn't make a payment, he dismisses the idea as unthinkable. "Everybody always did," he says.But Jimmy could run for only so long. In 1996 he was arrested in Los Angeles and sent to prison. Mario kept Henchmen running while Jimmy was behind bars, but by the time his brother got released three years later, he felt increasingly concerned. "It was hot up here," he says. "My brother, some of the moves he was making at that time, I didn't necessarily agree. Now, more so than ever, the street is definitely in the office." To protect his family, he decided to put some distance between himself and his brother. "I'm gonna go to the West Coast," he told Jimmy. "And I'm gonna start my own thing." In 2001, at the age of 43, Mario moved to Los Angeles and built a new life far from the troubles back home. He started an adult-film company called Joy Ride ("it was just as a business thing"), bought a palatial house in the Hollywood Hills, and started a new family. For a guy who always wanted to live the quiet life, it felt as if he had finally found some peace.But back in New York, Jimmy didn't stray far from the streets. Through his management company ­— now called Czar Entertainment — he continued to manage top artists. He brokered a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis that became the highest-grossing bout in history, with over $100 million in revenue. He even branched out into politics, holding a free concert in Haiti with Wyclef Jean and Akon to raise awareness about the country's plight. But the generosity came with a price. "Jimmy was always there for the people," says Garland "Ghetto" Cyrus, who ran Czar's record distribution in the South. "He was just a guy that you couldn't cross."Jimmy organized a free concert for Haiti with Wyclef Jean. "He was always there for the people," one employee recalled.THONY BELIZAIRE / Getty ImagesJimmy's tough-guy approach to the music industry erupted into open violence when he signed one of his biggest artists: The Game. A member of G-Unit, the pioneering hip-hop group that included a young 50 Cent, The Game had ties to Violator Management, a rival music company whose offices happened to be directly across from Czar's on West 25th Street. Violator had a powerhouse roster, including Mariah Carey, LL Cool J, and Missy Elliott, and it didn't take The Game's defection lightly. In February 2005, when 50 Cent went on Hot 97 radio to throw The Game out of his group and dismiss him as "gone," an outraged Jimmy dispatched The Game and the Henchmen soldier Tef Stewart to the station with a small crew, according to Stewart. When they arrived, they were greeted with gunshots. The two sides clashed again the following year at the annual Mixtape Awards at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. As Jimmy fled the scene, one of his soldiers shot up a white Bentley belonging to a member of G-Unit.Then, in March 2007, a G-Unit associate named Lowell "Lodi Mack" Fletcher took the feud too far. As he was leaving Violator's office, Fletcher spotted a 14-year-old boy wearing a Czar sweatshirt outside Jimmy's office. Racing across the street, he pushed the kid against a wall, slapped him, and threatened him with a gun. The boy turned out to be Jimmy Rosemond Jr.When he got the news, Jimmy Sr. was enraged. "I just couldn't believe somebody would do that," he tells me. "The kid was only 14, he looked like he was 12. Then I found out it was these clowns. They crossed the line with my son." After Mario learned what had happened, he urged Jimmy to stay cool. "I passed word that he need to chill on that," he recalls. "I told him revenge is best served when it's cold."Fletcher was sent to prison for assault and endangering a child, but that didn't satisfy Jimmy. War broke out on the streets of New York. Tef Stewart's barbershop was burned down. The Henchmen suspected a G-Unit associate. Stewart later testified that he and others in Jimmy's crew bombed the associate's bulletproof truck with Molotov cocktails. Then, in 2009, Fletcher was released from prison for the assault on Jimmy's son. Two weeks later, as he stepped off a train in the Bronx, someone burst out of the shadows and gunned him down, shooting him five times in the back with a .22-caliber handgun. The feud over Jimmy's music business had turned fatal."I need you to help me out," Jimmy told Mario. It was the spring of 2011, and Jimmy had called his big brother in distress. By then, Jimmy was allegedly the biggest drug trafficker in the music business. With a dozen underlings at his command, he ran what the Feds later called "a large bicoastal narcotics-trafficking organization," moving thousands of pounds of coke. Now, the lieutenant who ran the operation, Khalil Abdullah, had been arrested, and Jimmy wanted Mario to make sure a coming payment got handled. "He could only trust me," Mario says, "because money, lots of money, is coming down."Czar Entertainment had become both a nexus and a cover for the trafficking enterprise. Cocaine would be wrapped in plastic, slathered in mustard, packed in musical equipment boxes, and sent from Los Angeles to a rehearsal studio in New York. Once the drugs were retrieved, the equipment boxes would be sent back to LA, loaded with millions in cash. Jimmy and his henchmen used burner phones, encrypting their messages and emails. With so many artists coming and going on various projects, no one was the wiser as contraband-filled road cases shipped through Interscope Records, the label co-founded by music legend Jimmy Iovine. (Interscope denied any involvement in the drug enterprise.)Until now, Mario had determinedly stayed out of Jimmy's underworld. He was remaking his life in LA, and he wanted nothing to do with the streets he had left behind. But there was one problem for Mario. "He'll do whatever for his family and for his people," says his friend DJ Skee. "He's extremely loyal to a fault." So when Jimmy asked him for help, Mario couldn't say no. "That's how I got back in," he tells me. He made sure the drug money "got to where it's supposed to get," he says.But the brotherly favor put Mario in the crosshairs. A few months later, he got a late-night call from a neighbor, the only other Black guy who lived in his ritzy Hollywood Hills development. The Feds had busted down the guy's door by mistake, looking for Mario. It was only a matter of time before Mario found himself in custody. And that meant, as he saw it, there was only one choice. He called up a loyal contact in the Henchmen network. "They busted down my man's door looking for me," Mario told him. "What do you have in your trick bag?""We gonna need 50 grand," the guy replied. "I'll go to Mexico and set it up for you."He called his daughter to say goodbye. "I'm in trouble," he told her. "I gotta get outta here." The guy said he would spread the money through a decentralized network of people who could smuggle Mario across the border. In the meantime, Mario couldn't go home. "This place don't exist anymore," the guy told him. Another handler picked him up and took him to a hotel, the first of three he'd be staying at over the next few days until they could get him to Mexico. From this moment forward, Mario was on the run — just as Jimmy had been for years.To get his phony identity, Mario slipped an envelope containing $5,000 in cash to a contact at the Department of Motor Vehicles. When his new ID was ready, the contact called him from a burner phone and told him what day to come by the DMV. When Mario arrived, he snaked around in line until the contact lit his red light, signaling him to come over. That's when Mario was handed an authentic California driver's license with his new identity: Tommy Davis. When I ask how he felt about the random name he was given, Mario chuckles. "Didn't make no difference to me," he says.Once he was over the border, however, Mario would lose what mattered most to him: his family. It would be too risky to speak with them again. He called his eldest daughter back in New Jersey to say goodbye. She was in her 30s, with a family of her own. "I'm in trouble," he told her. "I gotta get outta here." All he could do was listen to her cry as he explained that he didn't know when he'd be back. Then he told his two little kids in Los Angeles. "Daddy's sorry, but he has to go take care of something," he said. "It's just like when I go out and travel for business. So you're not gonna see me for a little while." He ate his last meal at Crustacean in Beverly Hills, ordering his favorites: crabs, garlic noodles, and the mango lobster appetizer.The next morning, he got instructions to go to a nearby supermarket, where a black Suburban would be waiting to pick him up. He took one duffel bag of clothes and another filled with $50,000 in cash — enough, he hoped, to last him wherever he was going in Mexico. During the drive south, Mario called Jimmy on his burner phone. They had to be vague, since the Feds could be listening. "Yo, dude," Mario said. "Man, you should really make this move with me, Jimmy.""I can't go with you," Jimmy replied. "Because the two of us together is gonna bring too much heat." But he too had an escape plan. "I'm working on something," he said. "Based what I'm working on, maybe someday I'll be able to come and see you."Mario's driver zipped them through the border patrol at San Ysidro without Mario needing to show his new ID, and then handed him off in Tijuana to his next liaison, who checked him in to a hotel. "Be at the airport at 8 a.m.," the man told him. Once there, Mario went to the specified counter where the attendant, who was on the take, issued him a ticket under his Tommy Davis alias. His destination: Mexico City. Mario's mouth went dry. He didn't speak Spanish, didn't know a soul in Mexico, and had no clue where he would be sent. "I was thirsty cuz I was nervous," he says. "I'm like, 'What am I walking into?' 'Cause I don't know nothing. But I trusted my man, you know, I trust him with my life. I don't have a choice."Living on the run in Cuernavaca, Mario changed apartments every six months. "I was never attached to anything," he says.GummyBone / Getty ImagesAfter arriving in Mexico City, Mario called a number he'd been given. An athletic Colombian guy pulled up outside with his Mexican fiancée in the passenger seat. "Welcome to Mexico City, man," he told Mario with a smile. The Colombian had been on the run from trouble in San Diego for 15 years. Mario didn't ask why, and the guy didn't inquire about Mario's predicament. They drove 50 miles south until they came to the hillside town of Cuernavaca and the apartment Mario would share with the couple. From there, he was on his own.As he adjusted to his strange new life in Mexico, Mario went to an internet café each day, checking the news from back home. On June 21, 2011, scanning the New York Post, he saw a headline: "Fugitive hip hop talent agent Rosemond charged with running drug ring." The story was accompanied by a photo of Jimmy in handcuffs, escorted by two agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They had busted him on his way out of the W Hotel in Manhattan. The complaint, which mapped Jimmy's vast trafficking network, revealed that he'd been brought down, in part, by two DEA informants in his organization. One was his longtime friend Tef Stewart. The other was his top lieutenant, Khalil Abdullah.The news got worse. The next day, Jimmy was indicted on an even more serious charge: murder for hire. The Feds accused him of recruiting a crew of hitmen to kill Fletcher in return for $30,000 of cocaine. When I ask Mario whether he considers Jimmy capable of murder, he dodges the question. But he isn't shy about disparaging how the killing was handled. "It sounded like some Keystone Cop-type of stupid," he goes on. "It wasn't planned out properly. Like I said, justice is best served when cold." He doesn't seem bothered by the murder, which he takes as a given: "Everybody knew somebody was gonna get dead." It's the sloppiness that irritates him. "I'm always calculated about things," he says.With Jimmy behind bars, Mario felt even more in danger of getting busted — or killed. Living on the run in Cuernavaca, he calculated his every step. Rule No. 1: Stay off the phones. If he had to make a call, he made it from a phone booth at a local convenience store. Rule No. 2: Change apartments every six months. "I was never attached to anything," he says. This included girlfriends. As one of the few Black men in Cuernavaca, he says, he attracted more than his share of attention from the Mexican women. "I was exotic to them," he tells me with a laugh. But he could never risk being himself. "You can't have a meaningful relationship with anybody," he says.But as the years passed, the dream of returning home slipped away. He would make a quick call now and then to let his family know he was alive, but he couldn't let them know anything about his location or situation. His $50,000 was dwindling, and he didn't have a way to drum up more money. So he worked out twice a day, and went to church to pray, and hoped for something to change.Then one day, after eight years on the run, something did. Mario, normally so careful and meticulous, acknowledges he had gotten sloppy. Tired of his life as Tommy Davis, alone in Cuernavaca, he had started calling home more often, and took fewer precautions to cover his tracks. "I got lazy," he says. At first, as he was in the courtyard doing his laundry, he thought the men he spotted scaling the fence were Mexican Federales. He tried to play it cool when they confronted him, but they ordered him to lie face down on the ground and pointed their weapons at him, freckling him with red laser dots. Oh, my God, he thought. I'm gonna die today. They're gonna kill me. It was only after a long, silent ride in the back of a pickup truck when his hood was removed — and he found himself staring into the eyes of a US Marshal at the Mexico City airport. He still doesn't know who ratted him out.Mario was headed back to New York to face the drug-trafficking charges he'd evaded for nearly a decade. But he felt as though his arrest had actually released him from the prison of his assumed identity. Tommy Davis was no more. All that remained was Mario Rosemond."It was a relief," he says. "Cuz no matter what anyone say, a double life is the most difficult thing to keep."After his arrest, Mario spent a year in federal prison in New York before he was released to live with his daughter's family in New Jersey, where he's now awaiting sentencing. He will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, which could send him away for five years to life. But Mario, who spends his days taking care of his grandson, isn't running anymore. "I'm at peace now," he tells me outside his daughter's home. "I'm ready to pay for my bad deeds and then go on with my life." One of the reasons he's sharing his story with me, he says, is to discourage others from following his path. "Dealing with any kind of illegalities, it ain't worth it," he says. "I've had all the money that I could possibly have, right? No matter how smart you think you are, the government has enough people on their payroll to outsmart you. It can go for a month or it can go for years, like for me. But sooner or later it catches up to you. So I would like to tell the younger generation coming up to try to do it a different way."NFL star Jim Brown and the actor Michael K. Williams lobbied to secure a presidential pardon for Jimmy. "Let's get this guy home for Christmas," Donald Trump told his staff.Arturo Holmes / Scott Olson / Al Pereira / Getty Images While Mario awaits his sentencing, Jimmy is trying to get free with the help of an unlikely ally: Donald Trump. In 2020, a month before Trump left office, Jimmy enlisted celebrity friends, including the actor Michael K. Williams and the NFL legend Jim Brown, to try to secure a presidential pardon. During a call with Brown on December 18, 2020, according to affidavits filed by Jimmy's attorneys, Trump told his staff, "Let's get this guy home for Christmas."Last August, a federal judge ruled that Trump's "vague" comments did not constitute clemency. Jimmy is now hoping Trump will win reelection in 2024 so he can make good on his remark. "My hope would be that a guy like Trump would be in charge," Jimmy says. "People have this misconception about Trump, especially in the Black community."While Jimmy serves out his prison sentence, the brothers remain close. "I'd ride or die for him," Mario says.Courtesy of Leeann HellijasIn the meantime, Jimmy's legacy as a music mogul lives on. Fourteen years after the murder that landed his father in prison, James Rosemond Jr. is now a manager himself — representing one of the top artists in hip-hop, Ice Spice. "It feels like some sort of redemption," Jimmy says. "I'm able to rest a little better at night because he's doing so well."Both Jimmy and Mario tell me their bond is tight as ever. "I'd ride or die for him," Mario says. When he was extradited from Mexico, he and his brother spoke by phone for the first time in years. Jimmy, who isn't known for accepting responsibility for his actions, offered his older brother an apology."Sorry I got you into this, man," Jimmy told him.Mario was having none of it. They'd been through too much — two immigrant kids from a broken home who grew up in the projects, clawed their way to the top of the music industry, and helped transform hip-hop into one of the most influential and lucrative art forms in the world. Above all, they were brothers. And brothers stick together to the end. "It's all good, man," Mario told Jimmy."What am I going to tell him?" he says now. "Yep, it's all good."David Kushner is a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. His new book is "Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

A first-generation Mexican American student navigated higher education alone and graduated from college in his 30s since his parents weren't interested. The author as a kid.Erasmo GuerraMy parents are migrants from Mexico and had little interest in my attending college.With no emotional or financial support, I didn't graduate from college until I was in my 30s.I've finally framed my degree, and I'm learning to celebrate my achievement on my own.Annual move-in days on college campuses across New York City have always left me in a funk.When I lived in uptown Manhattan, I had to endure the street closings near Columbia University. Whenever I went down below 14th Street, I faced the cheerful NYU volunteers, wearing purple T-shirts that read "Welcome Ambassadors" and directing frazzled parents unloading the family SUV.These days, I'm living down in the financial district, so I contend with the double-parked vans from which someone's sweaty dad single-handedly carries a mattress down the street and into one of the many Pace University dorm buildings.Witnessing this annual migratory phenomenon leaves me melancholy because it's a stark contrast with the long and lonely journey through college that I navigated alone.I'm a Mexican American kid from the US-Mexico borderMy family didn't have a tradition of going to college; my parents were first-generation migrant workers. My dad dropped out of the ninth grade so he could enlist in the Army and escape the harsh labor of working the land. My mom was pulled out of school in the fifth grade and put to work in the cotton fields to help with the family finances. Her immigrant mom had a chronic illness, and the extra money my mom made helped pay the medical bills.I was sensitive to what my parents had suffered and didn't want to add to their burdens. With our family struggles, I knew I had to figure out the college thing on my own. And I did — sort of.I was accepted into the US Military Academy at West PointI accepted an offer to enroll at West Point because the school gave each student a full ride. But I didn't calculate the high personal and emotional cost of being there.Countless other new cadets arrived without their parents, but as a person of color who still hadn't come to terms with his sexuality, I felt especially alone. I also wasn't prepared for the trip home during Christmas break, when I found out that my mom sold everything I had left in my room. She gave away all of my civilian clothes and every trophy I'd earned at the speech and drama tournaments throughout high school. I had to buy new clothes just to get through the holiday.Before the academic year was done, I dropped out of the academy.I spent the next decade getting into — and then dropping out of — one college after anotherI never had the financial resources and emotional support required to finish a degree.Some years I didn't even start school. I had to forfeit an acceptance to Columbia because I didn't have the money for the tuition deposit. When I got accepted to NYU a few years later, I deferred matriculation until I could find the money. It never arrived. Each time, financial-aid officers pressed me to take out school loans, but I refused because I didn't want the debt.The bigger problem, I now think, was that I never asked for help. Why did I think a teenager — or even someone in their early 20s — had to figure it all out himself?The year I turned 30, I applied to a small liberal-arts college downtownI was accepted into a small school. I finally took out a dreaded student loan to make up the balance of the high-priced tuition not covered by the partial scholarship I'd received. Years later, I graduated a decade "late" — 10 years older than most of my fellow classmates.My family didn't show up for graduation.Earlier this year, as graduation season echoed across the country with the pop of Champagne corks and confetti cannons, I was back home in Texas visiting my mom, and I asked her where she'd put my college diploma. I had expected her to have it displayed on a wall somewhere, but she pulled it out from under a pile of domestic clutter, still in the heavy cardboard mailer that the school had sent it in 20 years earlier."I'm taking this back," I said, shoving the document into my suitcase.As college dorms reopened in New York this month, I decided to frame my diplomaI live with my partner now. We went to the same school at the same time but didn't meet until five years after graduation. I asked him whether he would be interested in framing our diplomas and hanging them in our house. He agreed.Instead of feeling bad about the long and lonely road it took to get my education — and the 20 years it took to pay off the school loan — I realized that, in my emotional exhaustion, I'd forgotten what I'd accomplished. I could literally reframe the experience as a testament to tenacity and not giving up on myself.I did that.And rather than getting caught up in my feelings about college move-in day yet again, I'm determined to move on. Now, every morning when I sit down to work in a nook of our apartment, I glance at our diplomas on the wall as the sun comes up and blazes on the downtown buildings.Maybe next year, in the spring, I'll throw myself that graduation party I never got.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

GU is a fast-fashion brand targeting Gen Z with stylish, affordable clothing. I visited the store and found some of the trendier pieces, like cargo pants, quite approachable. I went shopping at GU to see why it's become popular among Gen Zers.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/Insider GU is a fast-fashion brand targeting Gen Z with stylish, affordable clothing. The brand's first store opened in New York City last fall.  I visited the store and found some of the trendier pieces, like cargo pants, quite approachable. GU is one of the latest cool-kid brands, carrying the trendy cargo pants and cropped tops beloved by Gen Z. GU is a sister brand to Uniqlo, a fast-fashion company that's become popular in the US for its dressy-casual basics like tees and slacks. Most recently, Uniqlo's mini shoulder bag went viral on TikTok and was named the hottest product of the year so far. Japanese retailer Fast Retailing Group owns both companies.GU has grown to nearly 450 stores in Asia but didn't enter the US market until it opened its Soho store in October 2022. From September 2021 to August 2022, GU's sales totaled $1.7 billion which made up about 11% of Fast Retailing's revenue, Retail Dive reported.Much like Uniqlo, GU carries basics like logo-free t-shirts, simple sweaters, minimalist shoes, and dress pants. However, GU's prices are slightly cheaper than Uniqlo's. For example, a men's open-collar shirt costs $19.90 at GU, while a similar style goes for $29.90 at Uniqlo.GU's Soho location is the only store in the US and right now the only way US customers can shop the brand. I wanted to check it out for myself, so I visited to see why it's become popular among Gen Zers. The GU store is located at 579 Broadway in Soho.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderGU's tagline is "Tokyo to Soho," so it makes sense that the brand would place its first store in Manhattan's trendiest, shopping-centric neighborhood. The storefront featured two windows on either side of the door.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe displays were simple. Two mannequins displayed some of the latest products for fall.I was immediately greeted by an employee who was stationed at the front of the store.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe store seemed pretty well-staffed. I noticed at least four employees out on the floor, which from my experience working in retail, is normal for the size of the store. On the left was the women's sectionJennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe newer styles were displayed at the front of the store.And the men's section was to the right.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThese men's grandpa sweaters were $39.90 and made from a nylon-polyester blend. Some of the latest fall fashions were displayed on mannequins between the two sections.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe fashions were simple — most styles were in solid colors and pieces were layered together. I spotted women's cargo pants in three different colors.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThey looked like the pants I've seen on teens around the streets of New York this summer. Then there was a rack of women's cargo pants on sale.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderI assumed they were from the summer season because they came in a lightweight white denim, as well as light- and dark-wash denim.There were several pairs of jeans and cargo pants for men.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe men's denim came in light and dark washes, as well as light and dark grays. They were priced at $39.90 per pair. I also found GU's chef pants, which are a loose, straight tapered style inspired by the pants chefs wear.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe chef pants style has become popular on TikTok, perhaps thanks to the success of Hulu's hit show "The Bear."The middle of the store featured a rainbow wall of socks that led to the dressing rooms.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderSocks came in ankle and crew lengths. The store also carried dress shoes and sneakers for $39.90.  Before I got to the dressing room, I walked into a section with more women's clothing.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThere were sports bras for $19.90 and leggings for $29.90. There were also several sale racks leading to the dressing rooms.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderMost of the clothing in the sale section were women's styles. An employee asked me to take five pieces at a time and pointed me to an open dressing room.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThere were several shoppers in the store, but the dressing rooms weren't too busy. I was able to get into a room right away. Inside, the dressing room was well-lit and spacious enough to change comfortably.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe mirror was a little dirty and I wished it was wider. To start off, I chose two faux leather shirts, a pair of slacks, cargo pants, and a two-piece sweater.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThere were plenty of hooks to hang my clothes. As I try clothes on, I like to organize everything by what I still have to try, what I liked, and what I didn't like. First, I tried on the white denim cargo pants.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderI haven't been into the cargo pant trend but I was surprised by how much I liked these. The slightly baggy style made them really comfortable, but they also weren't so oversized that they overwhelmed my frame. I could also see them dressed down for weekends and dressed up with a blazer or sweater for work. Next, I tried the tucked wide pants and a layered two-piece sweater.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThe tucked wide pants were $29.90 and the layered sweater was $39.90.I was not a fan of the sweater. While I could see the design they were going for, it looked awkward on me. Perhaps my arms weren't long enough, but the sleeves were severely bunchy. I really liked how the pants looked in the front, but when I turned around, the fabric bunched in the wrong places around my butt. I noticed there are some significant fit differences between pant styles at GU.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThese slacks were a size small, but the white cargos were a medium, yet both fit me well.I quickly learned that the best way to find the right fit is to look at the tag. In fine print next to the letter size is a waist measurement. Both of these pants had a 26 inch waist, despite being a whole size apart. Next, I tried a faux leather button-down shirt.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderI really liked the olive color of this shirt, but the fit was a little weird for me. It's supposed to be oversized, but the sleeves were just an inch too long and bellowed at the wrist. I appreciated the concept — I could see it in the pages of a fashion magazine. But the fit didn't suit me and I couldn't justify spending $39.90 on it.I also tried the same shirt in black, but it felt like something I could find in a lot of other stores. Next, I tried a pleated mini-skirt and a ruched pinstripe dress.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderI actually liked the mini-skirt more than I expected. I was grateful for the shorts attached inside — there's no way I could wear a skirt that short in New York City without worrying about train station breeze. But ultimately, I decided the school-girl look is just not my style as a now 30-year-old. I'll leave the super-short skirts in my twenties. The dress was also a cute design, but the shape was too boxy. The waist floated around my actual waistline, and the neckline hovered above my chest. I tried on a high-neck cropped shirt I found in the sale section for $4.90Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderGU calls the shirt a "bra-feel" t-shirt because it has padding inside. I was surprised to see what was essentially an entire bra attached to the front interior — much more support than I expected. I liked the top, but the bra was too tight in a size small, so I decided to look for a medium. The white cargo pants inspired me to go back and grab more cargos to try on.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThere were two different cargos towards the front of the store. There was a parachute cargo pant on sale for $29.90 and a "pull-on" cargo pant priced at $39.90. Both were baggy and oversized, so it was a little tricky to tell the difference. I also grabbed another pair of the white cargo pants, but in the light-wash denim, and headed back to the dressing rooms.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderI was curious to see how all the styles and fits compared. Instead of paying attention to the letter size, I grabbed the sizes with 26-inch waists. I ended up with mediums in the pull-on and denim cargos and smalls in the parachute pants. I didn't hate the baggy cargos, but wasn't sure they were my style.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderWith a fitted top, the cargo pants kind of looked cool. But as much as I've been embracing more wide-leg pant styles, I wasn't sold on the cargo look. Next, I tried the parachute pants. I liked them best in black.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderAgain, I was surprised that these cargos didn't look awful on me. And I liked that in black, the fabric almost looked like a wide-leg dress pant. But ultimately, I decided to hold off on buying a pair. I'm not sure the pants are suited for my personal style, and I'm not one to conform to a trend just because everyone else is wearing it. I didn't like the denim cargo pants — the acid wash evoked a costume interpretation of parachute pants from the '80s. I headed to the register to purchase the white cargo pants and lime green bra top.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderThere wasn't a line, so I went right up to the register. The employee was so quick at ringing me up, I was still pulling out my credit card by the time they had everything in the bag. My total came to $34.80, plus 10 cents for the paper bag.  GU successfully converted me from cargo-skeptic to cargo-tolerant.Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/InsiderI had written off cargos as a trend only for Gen Z, but I don't totally hate them. The super baggy style isn't for me, but I can understand the overall appeal of cargos.  They're comfortable pants and have a cool street-style vibe. After my store visit, I could see why GU is becoming popular. It's a one-stop-shop for basics like tees, jeans, sweatpants, and sweaters, but also offers some trendy pieces at affordable prices. That said, I did notice some ill-fitting styles and lower-quality fabrics at GU, which is to be expected for a fast-fashion company. While large brands like Shein, H&M, Zara, and Forever 21 are typically the ones called to question for unethical labor practices and overproduction which contributes to landfill waste, these issues are widespread throughout the industry. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

A decline in third places (bars, parks, coffee shops, pools) is exacerbating the US loneliness crisis. If we build them, people will come together. Researchers, developers, the US surgeon general, and elected officials alike are beginning to form a new kind of adage: If you build it, they will come together.Arantza Pena Popo/InsiderIn her 20s, Sara Hoy made close friends in her Central Pennsylvania hometown through an organization called Third Place. The group, named after what sociologists call any social setting that's not home (the first place) or work (the second), was led by a local church leader and sought to help young professionals build community.In her 30s, Hoy joined the Peace Corps in Moldova, and then worked in Korea and Sweden. By the time she came home six years later, most of her Third Place friends had started families, and the sense of community had faded. So when she heard about Culdesac, a buzzy new $170 million car-free community opening up outside Phoenix, she applied to live there, even though she'd never been to Arizona. In May, Hoy became one of the first residents to move in.Now 40, Hoy lives alone in a studio apartment. She was prepared to feel what millions of Americans feel today: lonely. "I've been through that before living in other places and knowing what I needed to do is put myself out there, introduce myself to neighbors," she said. Culdesac's design, she says, has made that easier.The development is centered on shared spaces for its 1,000 residents: a plaza, a gym, a grocery store, a restaurant, a coffee shop, coworking space, and shaded courtyards. There's weekly bike karaoke along with art fairs and all sorts of other programming to get neighbors to meet up. Culdesac's founders were inspired by multigenerational Egyptian farming villages, Erin Boyd, the head of government and external affairs, told me. Walkable, tightly knit communities might be new to suburban Arizona, but they're "actually a very old way of living," she said.Culdesac, in short, is an experiment to save one of the most endangered aspects of American life: a place to hang out.Third spaces, which include bars, parks, coffee shops, libraries, and even sidewalks, have been in decline for decades. Racism, classism, the climate crisis, overpolicing, a car-based economy, and the privatization and rising costs of amenities have all narrowed access to them.We're also going to third places less often — working longer hours to compensate for wage stagnation and spending less time with one another. For decades, Americans reported spending about 6 ½ hours a week with friends. But from 2014 to 2019, it suddenly dropped by 37%, to four hours a week. (2014, not coincidentally, was the year smartphone ownership in the US passed 50%.) Instead, we spend much more time online, alone. Instagram, Twitch, and podcasts are the new, placeless third places. We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke. In today's biggest shows — "Succession," "Superstore," "Industry" — work is all-consuming, and life beyond it is an afterthought or, in the case of "Severance," wholly inaccessible.The dwindling of places to spend time together is a catastrophe for our communities and for us, exacerbating what US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls an epidemic of loneliness. One in five Americans reported feeling lonely or socially isolated often or all the time in 2018. One study found the rate of loneliness among young adults rose almost every year between 1976 and 2019. In a 2019 YouGov poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends at all. And being lonely and spending a lot of time alone are associated with bleak health outcomes, including significantly raising the risk of premature death, especially from a stroke or coronary artery disease.The good news is that more people are seeing loneliness, in part, as a design flaw in the built environment. Researchers, developers, the surgeon general, and elected officials alike are beginning to form a new kind of adage: If you build it, they will come together.3rd places at a priceHow did we get so scattered? Well, cars, for one. As American cities were reshaped around the car in the early 20th century, streets became a lot less welcoming. Cars also brought suburbia, sprawl, highways that slashed through neighborhoods, and an environment that made it easier to isolate yourself in a private vehicle than walk, bike, or take mass transit.Racial and class segregation have also long shaped and limited access to public places. In New York, the predominantly Black residents of Seneca Village were forcibly displaced to clear the way for the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800s. In Washington, DC, exclusive zoning around Rock Creek Park further separated the city's Black and white residents. In Los Angeles, three Mexican American neighborhoods were destroyed to make way for Dodger Stadium in the 1950s.Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, places some of the blame on the government's decadeslong disinvestment in America's downtowns. "Downtowns were a real place where people connected," he told me. "My sense of identity was very much connected to the localness and to the local identity of the place that I grew up in," which was Wethersfield, Connecticut. Now Murphy thinks both local governments and the federal government should help revitalize downtowns, because "it was government's decision to support unrestrained globalization and online commerce that emptied" them out. The recent rise of remote work has only worsened the problem, further emptying downtowns as businesses abandon offices in droves.Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, told me the "privatizing of space" — or when businesses become the only (and cost-prohibitive) third places — also has a lot to do with both rising isolation and income inequality."If you look at most major American cities, you see pretty extreme segregation between wealthy communities and poor communities," Smith said. "Wealthy people live in places where they can have big gated houses and their own swimming pool and their own private park." Meanwhile, lower-income and "even middle-class families find themselves living in places where there aren't enough trees, there aren't enough public spaces," she added, "whether it be the local swimming pool or the local park."When wealthier folks move into lower-income neighborhoods, that gentrification also attracts pricier retail, restaurants, and other amenities that many longtime residents can't afford or don't feel comfortable using. Sweetgreen, Soho House, and SoulCycle are third places only to some. As Leslie Kern, an urban scholar and author, put it, "If your greasy spoon isn't there anymore and now it's a $5 or $6 cup of coffee, instead of a $1 or $2 cup with free refills all day, that's a big barrier." Community-oriented developments like Culdesac, which will offer only market-rate apartments, are also exclusive.The more things to do, the more people come, the more comfortable people are, the more they interact.For a time, malls and their food courts served as relatively effective third spaces, says Kern. Though they were privately owned bastions of commercialism, all kinds of people could hang out in them, without needing to spend money. They had heating, air conditioning, and bathrooms. But Hot Topic is no longer a hot topic — as the retail apocalypse continues, malls have been dying in droves.For the few free-to-affordable third places that remain, says Kern, "there's a lot of pressure" on them "to address, in some way, a lot of challenging social and economic problems." The result: Café workers are fired for feeding homeless people, teens are barred from Chick-fil-A, and older people are limited to 20 minutes at a McDonald's table.There might be less pressure on private spaces, experts say, if there were attractive and accessible parks, community centers, and other public places.Building for social connection"Does the government have a role to play in making sure that every small town has a pub or a local restaurant?" Murphy says. "Maybe not. But we should at least be exploring those questions."In July, Murphy introduced legislation to form a national strategy to combat loneliness. The bill would create an Office of Social Connection Policy to advise the president and federal agencies on boosting social infrastructure and developing national guidelines for preventing loneliness, and send $5 million a year for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the prevalence of loneliness.Murphy also wants to see funds from the 2021 infrastructure bill support more vibrant downtowns and concentrated development, rather than sprawl. And he wants to use tax policy "to help the bottom lines of small retailers, instead of padding the pockets of the big quasi-monopolistic retailers."Urban planners have also gained a lot of knowledge about the types of places that foster social connection, and the types that don't. "What we call parks look like parking lots with some grass on them, perhaps a baseball diamond. That's not the kind of park that draws people in," Tayana Panova, a researcher who studies the built environment's effects on mental health, told me. "We need parks that have amenities and assets that make it desirable for people to go there." A third space of dreams isn't a barren field. It also includes pools, benches, art, fountains, playgrounds, and food stands — things people gather at. As the climate warms, shade and water are increasingly necessary in outdoor spaces. Culdesac, situated just outside the hottest major city in America, won't have any asphalt and is maximizing shade to cool the neighborhood.The more things to do, the more people come, the more comfortable people are, the more they interact. Mitchell Reardon, the director of urban planning at the Canadian design firm Happy Cities, pointed to a 2014 study his firm did in Seattle called "the lost-tourist experiment." An actor pretended to be lost on two different street corners, one beside a long blank wall and nothing else, and one next to a bunch of shops and cafés. The "tourist" did their best to look confused and waited for a stranger to volunteer to help them get oriented. On the street with shops, people were four times as likely to stop and offer help than on the street with the wall. One person on the bustling corner even asked the tourist on a date."It's really important for people to have space to have a spectrum of participation, to kind of passively observe, actively observe, dip your toes in actually getting involved, and then being fully involved," Reardon said. "The fundamental rule of public space is that what attracts people most is other people."New York City has fewer than 1,200 public toilets for its 8.5 million residents.Urban designers have also found that communities need to be part of the process of designing their shared spaces to ensure they're used. Smith told me she recently visited a new community space in Rochester, Minnesota, where a group of immigrant women had been deeply engaged in designing the place. "When they were celebrating Eid, they wanted to celebrate it in one of these public spaces because they had been in on it from the beginning," she said.Another surefire way to get more Americans to hang out: Legalize public drinking.As Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer who's a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, noted, public drinking is widespread and celebrated throughout Europe. In Germany, they have a term for the beer you drink as you walk to the next bar, a "wegbier." The US already has regulations around unruly or antisocial behavior that could result from public drinking, Reardon, another proponent of legalized public drinking, said. So it's counterproductive to stop responsible drinkers from enjoying themselves in parks, at street fairs, and in other public places.People also might go to more places if they had more places to go — public bathrooms. "The key to harmonious living among many people that are not related is lots of toilets," Ghodsee said. "And they knew that in the ninth century," pointing to an architectural drawing from AD 820 of the ideal Benedictine monastery that was full of toilets.The US, however, has largely neglected this most basic amenity. There are an average of eight public toilets for every 100,000 people in the US, but access to facilities varies widely. New York City has fewer than 1,200 public toilets for its 8.5 million residents. It's a dire situation, and a group of city-council members recently introduced a bill to build another 3,100 toilets in the next 12 years. By contrast, countries like the UK and Switzerland have many more public toilets per capita. Some even double as public art.People are also willing to pay a premium to live in walkable neighborhoods with lots of third places. Homebuyers in the biggest US cities pay 35% more to live in walkable areas and renters pay 41% more. An overwhelming majority of people say they want to live within an easy walk of amenities like shops and parks and near public transit, a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors found.Some developers, Culdesac included, are also responding to these demands and building their own 15-minute cities. In Houston, the developer Concept Neighborhood is building a $350 million walkable community with 1,000 homes "around lifestyle-enhancing public infrastructure including transit, trails, bike lanes and parks," according to its website. Another developer is transforming a former strip mall in Austin into a car-light, mixed-use development adjacent to a new light rail.There are all kinds of ways to combat loneliness, from individual lifestyle changes to national public investments. The surgeon general has called for a multipronged approach, including investing in paid family leave and accessible mass transit; training healthcare providers to address social disconnection among patients; and reforming digital safety rules. The first pillar of his approach, though, is bringing people together through social infrastructure. Fundamentally, society needs places where people aren't alone.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

A decline in third places (bars, parks, coffee shops, pools) is exacerbating the US loneliness crisis. If we build them, people will come together. Researchers, developers, the US surgeon general, and elected officials alike are beginning to form a new kind of adage: If you build it, they will come together.Arantza Pena Popo/InsiderIn her 20s, Sara Hoy made close friends in her Central Pennsylvania hometown through an organization called Third Place. The group, named after what sociologists call any social setting that's not home (the first place) or work (the second), was led by a local church leader and sought to help young professionals build community.In her 30s, Hoy joined the Peace Corps in Moldova, and then worked in Korea and Sweden. By the time she came home six years later, most of her Third Place friends had started families, and the sense of community had faded. So when she heard about Culdesac, a buzzy new $170 million car-free community opening up outside Phoenix, she applied to live there, even though she'd never been to Arizona. In May, Hoy became one of the first residents to move in.Now 40, Hoy lives alone in a studio apartment. She was prepared to feel what millions of Americans feel today: lonely. "I've been through that before living in other places and knowing what I needed to do is put myself out there, introduce myself to neighbors," she said. Culdesac's design, she says, has made that easier.The development is centered on shared spaces for its 1,000 residents: a plaza, a gym, a grocery store, a restaurant, a coffee shop, coworking space, and shaded courtyards. There's weekly bike karaoke along with art fairs and all sorts of other programming to get neighbors to meet up. Culdesac's founders were inspired by multigenerational Egyptian farming villages, Erin Boyd, the head of government and external affairs, told me. Walkable, tightly knit communities might be new to suburban Arizona, but they're "actually a very old way of living," she said.Culdesac, in short, is an experiment to save one of the most endangered aspects of American life: a place to hang out.Third spaces, which include bars, parks, coffee shops, libraries, and even sidewalks, have been in decline for decades. Racism, classism, the climate crisis, overpolicing, a car-based economy, and the privatization and rising costs of amenities have all narrowed access to them.We're also going to third places less often — working longer hours to compensate for wage stagnation and spending less time with one another. For decades, Americans reported spending about 6 ½ hours a week with friends. But from 2014 to 2019, it suddenly dropped by 37%, to four hours a week. (2014, not coincidentally, was the year smartphone ownership in the US passed 50%.) Instead, we spend much more time online, alone. Instagram, Twitch, and podcasts are the new, placeless third places. We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke. In today's biggest shows — "Succession," "Superstore," "Industry" — work is all-consuming, and life beyond it is an afterthought or, in the case of "Severance," wholly inaccessible.The dwindling of places to spend time together is a catastrophe for our communities and for us, exacerbating what US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls an epidemic of loneliness. One in five Americans reported feeling lonely or socially isolated often or all the time in 2018. One study found the rate of loneliness among young adults rose almost every year between 1976 and 2019. In a 2019 YouGov poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends at all. And being lonely and spending a lot of time alone are associated with bleak health outcomes, including significantly raising the risk of premature death, especially from a stroke or coronary artery disease.The good news is that more people are seeing loneliness, in part, as a design flaw in the built environment. Researchers, developers, the surgeon general, and elected officials alike are beginning to form a new kind of adage: If you build it, they will come together.3rd places at a priceHow did we get so scattered? Well, cars, for one. As American cities were reshaped around the car in the early 20th century, streets became a lot less welcoming. Cars also brought suburbia, sprawl, highways that slashed through neighborhoods, and an environment that made it easier to isolate yourself in a private vehicle than walk, bike, or take mass transit.Racial and class segregation have also long shaped and limited access to public places. In New York, the predominantly Black residents of Seneca Village were forcibly displaced to clear the way for the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800s. In Washington, DC, exclusive zoning around Rock Creek Park further separated the city's Black and white residents. In Los Angeles, three Mexican American neighborhoods were destroyed to make way for Dodger Stadium in the 1950s.Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, places some of the blame on the government's decadeslong disinvestment in America's downtowns. "Downtowns were a real place where people connected," he told me. "My sense of identity was very much connected to the localness and to the local identity of the place that I grew up in," which was Wethersfield, Connecticut. Now Murphy thinks both local governments and the federal government should help revitalize downtowns, because "it was government's decision to support unrestrained globalization and online commerce that emptied" them out. The recent rise of remote work has only worsened the problem, further emptying downtowns as businesses abandon offices in droves.Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, told me the "privatizing of space" — or when businesses become the only (and cost-prohibitive) third places — also has a lot to do with both rising isolation and income inequality."If you look at most major American cities, you see pretty extreme segregation between wealthy communities and poor communities," Smith said. "Wealthy people live in places where they can have big gated houses and their own swimming pool and their own private park." Meanwhile, lower-income and "even middle-class families find themselves living in places where there aren't enough trees, there aren't enough public spaces," she added, "whether it be the local swimming pool or the local park."When wealthier folks move into lower-income neighborhoods, that gentrification also attracts pricier retail, restaurants, and other amenities that many longtime residents can't afford or don't feel comfortable using. Sweetgreen, Soho House, and SoulCycle are third places only to some. As Leslie Kern, an urban scholar and author, put it, "If your greasy spoon isn't there anymore and now it's a $5 or $6 cup of coffee, instead of a $1 or $2 cup with free refills all day, that's a big barrier." Community-oriented developments like Culdesac, which will offer only market-rate apartments, are also exclusive.The more things to do, the more people come, the more comfortable people are, the more they interact.For a time, malls and their food courts served as relatively effective third spaces, says Kern. Though they were privately owned bastions of commercialism, all kinds of people could hang out in them, without needing to spend money. They had heating, air conditioning, and bathrooms. But Hot Topic is no longer a hot topic — as the retail apocalypse continues, malls have been dying in droves.For the few free-to-affordable third places that remain, says Kern, "there's a lot of pressure" on them "to address, in some way, a lot of challenging social and economic problems." The result: Café workers are fired for feeding homeless people, teens are barred from Chick-fil-A, and older people are limited to 20 minutes at a McDonald's table.There might be less pressure on private spaces, experts say, if there were attractive and accessible parks, community centers, and other public places.Building for social connection"Does the government have a role to play in making sure that every small town has a pub or a local restaurant?" Murphy says. "Maybe not. But we should at least be exploring those questions."In July, Murphy introduced legislation to form a national strategy to combat loneliness. The bill would create an Office of Social Connection Policy to advise the president and federal agencies on boosting social infrastructure and developing national guidelines for preventing loneliness, and send $5 million a year for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the prevalence of loneliness.Murphy also wants to see funds from the 2021 infrastructure bill support more vibrant downtowns and concentrated development, rather than sprawl. And he wants to use tax policy "to help the bottom lines of small retailers, instead of padding the pockets of the big quasi-monopolistic retailers."Urban planners have also gained a lot of knowledge about the types of places that foster social connection, and the types that don't. "What we call parks look like parking lots with some grass on them, perhaps a baseball diamond. That's not the kind of park that draws people in," Tayana Panova, a researcher who studies the built environment's effects on mental health, told me. "We need parks that have amenities and assets that make it desirable for people to go there." A third space of dreams isn't a barren field. It also includes pools, benches, art, fountains, playgrounds, and food stands — things people gather at. As the climate warms, shade and water are increasingly necessary in outdoor spaces. Culdesac, situated just outside the hottest major city in America, won't have any asphalt and is maximizing shade to cool the neighborhood.The more things to do, the more people come, the more comfortable people are, the more they interact. Mitchell Reardon, the director of urban planning at the Canadian design firm Happy Cities, pointed to a 2014 study his firm did in Seattle called "the lost-tourist experiment." An actor pretended to be lost on two different street corners, one beside a long blank wall and nothing else, and one next to a bunch of shops and cafés. The "tourist" did their best to look confused and waited for a stranger to volunteer to help them get oriented. On the street with shops, people were four times as likely to stop and offer help than on the street with the wall. One person on the bustling corner even asked the tourist on a date."It's really important for people to have space to have a spectrum of participation, to kind of passively observe, actively observe, dip your toes in actually getting involved, and then being fully involved," Reardon said. "The fundamental rule of public space is that what attracts people most is other people."New York City has fewer than 1,200 public toilets for its 8.5 million residents.Urban designers have also found that communities need to be part of the process of designing their shared spaces to ensure they're used. Smith told me she recently visited a new community space in Rochester, Minnesota, where a group of immigrant women had been deeply engaged in designing the place. "When they were celebrating Eid, they wanted to celebrate it in one of these public spaces because they had been in on it from the beginning," she said.Another surefire way to get more Americans to hang out: Legalize public drinking.As Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer who's a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, noted, public drinking is widespread and celebrated throughout Europe. In Germany, they have a term for the beer you drink as you walk to the next bar, a "wegbier." The US already has regulations around unruly or antisocial behavior that could result from public drinking, Reardon, another proponent of legalized public drinking, said. So it's counterproductive to stop responsible drinkers from enjoying themselves in parks, at street fairs, and in other public places.People also might go to more places if they had more places to go — public bathrooms. "The key to harmonious living among many people that are not related is lots of toilets," Ghodsee said. "And they knew that in the ninth century," pointing to an architectural drawing from AD 820 of the ideal Benedictine monastery that was full of toilets.The US, however, has largely neglected this most basic amenity. There are an average of eight public toilets for every 100,000 people in the US, but access to facilities varies widely. New York City has fewer than 1,200 public toilets for its 8.5 million residents. It's a dire situation, and a group of city-council members recently introduced a bill to build another 3,100 toilets in the next 12 years. By contrast, countries like the UK and Switzerland have many more public toilets per capita. Some even double as public art.People are also willing to pay a premium to live in walkable neighborhoods with lots of third places. Homebuyers in the biggest US cities pay 35% more to live in walkable areas and renters pay 41% more. An overwhelming majority of people say they want to live within an easy walk of amenities like shops and parks and near public transit, a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors found.Some developers, Culdesac included, are also responding to these demands and building their own 15-minute cities. In Houston, the developer Concept Neighborhood is building a $350 million walkable community with 1,000 homes "around lifestyle-enhancing public infrastructure including transit, trails, bike lanes and parks," according to its website. Another developer is transforming a former strip mall in Austin into a car-light, mixed-use development adjacent to a new light rail.There are all kinds of ways to combat loneliness, from individual lifestyle changes to national public investments. The surgeon general has called for a multipronged approach, including investing in paid family leave and accessible mass transit; training healthcare providers to address social disconnection among patients; and reforming digital safety rules. The first pillar of his approach, though, is bringing people together through social infrastructure. Fundamentally, society needs places where people aren't alone.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

This Gen Z couple splits a tiny microstudio in the East Village for $1,300, and both say it has nearly everything they could want. Elana Wallach and her partner Luis Cortorreal split a tiny microstudio in the East Village.Luis Cortorreal A Gen Z couple each pay $650 a month for a microstudio they split in the East Village. With such little space, they've made it their own with dozens of posters and a tiny kitchen. They say looking out over bustling St. Marks Place makes the apartment even more special. Elana Wallach, 22, and her partner Luis Cortorreal, 25, paid just $700 for a room in a two-bedroom apartment in Baltimore. When they were looking around Manhattan this summer, though, nothing came close to that price and they decided they needed to downsize.Even most studios and one-bedrooms in Manhattan were well out of their price range, said Wallach, a fashion designer and recent college graduate who works at a fabric store.After some debate with Cortorreal, a graphic illustrator from Queens who was concerned about living in such a small space, the two decided to move into a fifth-floor walk-up microstudio in the East Village that measures about 100 square feet.The two split the $1,300 a month rent for the microstudio, which has one bed, a small kitchen, closet space, and an "upstairs" loft section where they keep winter clothes and other items like a sewing machine. They also have a fire escape that overlooks the main stretch of St. Marks Place, a bustling street with lots of nightlife. They share communal bathrooms with about a dozen tenants from other microapartments in the building.The couple pays $1,300 total for the microstudio.Luis CortorrealUltrasmall apartments are an increasingly popular option for New Yorkers trying to beat skyrocketing rents. Alexander Bruni, a senior agent at Union Square Property Management who has rented out microstudios to clients including Wallach and Cortorreal, told Insider the most popular rental videos he posts to his TikTok are of microstudios, with some videos attracting over 2 million views. He said dozens of people have contacted him about these tiny apartments in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, which shows people are "always looking for very affordable housing in the city," he said."I had people reach out to me out of the blue and ask me, 'Do you have a $1,200 apartment?' But I don't usually get that so often," Bruni said. "Nobody wants to have to spend many thousands of dollars, but people do also understand that if you want to live comfortably and happy and not be super depressed in your apartment all the time, you might have to spend a little bit to get what you want."Wallach and Cortorreal.Elana WallachWallach said she loves the microstudio more than her more spacious Baltimore two-bedroom."There's a difference between living somewhere that's big and kind of rundown and grimy, maybe not appealing to look at or be in, but it's sort of the opposite of that, where it's really small and condensed but everything in here we think is really nice," Wallach said.Both partners said that sharing such a small space has helped their relationship."I feel like we can be more of ourselves when we're not living around roommates," Cortorreal, who works as a waiter in Jersey City, told Insider. "We hold ourselves accountable for certain things that happen in the apartment, just the upkeep of everything and just being able to express ourselves in every way.""I don't think the apartment has really impacted our relationship whatsoever, and as a matter of fact, as soon as we made it work, it's nice because we sort of acknowledged that the space is not even a problem anymore," Wallach added.The decorated walls of the apartment.Luis CortorrealThey live in the same microstudio building as the content creator Axel Webber, who gained over 7.7 million likes on TikTok for posting videos about living in a 95-square-foot microstudio. Wallach and Cortorreal said they have just about everything they need in the space."We've invested just about everything that we need into the space, and it's not like we're buying any other pieces of furniture since there's really no more space to fill," Cortorreal said.By the entrance is a desk with a TV that they swap out with a computer whenever they work from home. The apartment has two small closets where they hang their clothes. The couple "splurged" on the kitchen by spending $120 on a kitchenette and camping stove to accompany the sink and refrigerator already there, though that was their only major purchase, she said.They customized their tiny kitchen.Luis CortorrealThe two spent a week decorating their walls with all sorts of posters — three to four boxes worth — that they'd accumulated over the past few years. Most of the wall space is covered by colorful prints, magazine cutouts, and reproductions of famous paintings.Wallach said they both just started new jobs and make a few thousand dollars a month, but they don't have any plans to move."We have these other leads that we can go to, and now we have jobs and can move to a bigger apartment, and he's like, 'I'm going to stay here, it's really nice,'" Wallach said, noting less than a quarter of her income goes toward rent. "Just a week of working will cover my rent, so the last three weeks of me working, I can spend on whatever."The microstudio looks out onto St. Marks Place.Luis CortorrealDespite little space, Wallach said she found a way to design clothing on a dress form in a corner of the apartment, as well as cut fabric in the center of the room.The couple also has a bowtie-wearing cat who doesn't move around much, Wallach said.Living in the center of the East Village means she can stroll out and get a bagel and orange juice every morning while also being a short walk from local bars and entertainment venues. And the constant noise and commotion on St. Marks gives Wallace a certain peace of mind, she said."The fact that things are always happening on St. Marks just set me at ease in a really special way that I've never really felt anywhere else," she said. "Since we don't have a living room, St. Marks is sort of an extension of the living room, so I don't really mind going out in my pajamas and slippers or whatever I'm wearing."Do you live in a tiny apartment or house? Contact this reporter at nsheidlower@insider.com.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Amazon Fresh is undergoing changes to make its stores more attractive to shoppers. Insider found hyped discounts, odd end caps, and bad coffee. Amazon Fresh has operated grocery stores for three years, but the chain has yet to win over many shoppers.Alex Bitter/Insider It's been three years since Amazon introduced Amazon Fresh, its second chain of supermarkets. But the stores haven't caught on with consumers, leading Amazon to make some changes. I visited an Amazon Fresh store in Maryland to see what might be rubbing consumers the wrong way. Expanding its grocery business has been a goal of Amazon's for years. But it's proving to be a tough nut to crack, even for one of the biggest names in retail.The latest example of that challenge came in early August, when Amazon said it would revamp some of its Amazon Fresh supermarkets, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The coming changes include Krispy Kreme donut stands, a wider range of items on shelves, and brighter color schemes for store decor. The chain has also cut back on staff. In July, Amazon Fresh laid off employees at its stores, the Washington Post reported.August marked three years since Amazon opened the first Fresh store in the US. In that time, Amazon has built a network of 44 Fresh stores, according to its website. But along the way, Amazon has closed some Fresh stores. It has also canceled some Amazon Fresh store openings.I decided to visit one near my home in Washington, DC to see what Amazon had spent the last three years building — and whether I could see myself shopping there on a weekly basis."Our goal is to build a best-in-class grocery shopping experience where Amazon is people's first choice for selection, value, and convenience," Molly McWhinnie, Amazon spokesperson, told Insider."While the largest brick and mortar grocery retailers in the U.S. and globally have operated for a half century or more, it's still just Day 1 for us, and we remain committed because we believe when we find the right mix of offerings for customers we'll be able to make their lives even easier," McWhinnie said.Are you an Amazon Fresh employee with a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at abitter@insider.comI went to an Amazon Fresh location in Chevy Chase, Maryland, right on the border between Maryland and DC.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis particular store opened in August 2021 and was among the first Amazon Fresh stores in the same metro area as Amazon's HQ2, which is across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia.I immediately saw these two ads plugging deals at this store.Alex Bitter/InsiderOne touted cheap baguettes, while the other gave me Costco vibes with its promise of a whole roast chicken for under $5.This particular store is half a block away from a Metro station and several bus routes, as well as just off of busy Wisconsin Avenue.Alex Bitter/InsiderThat means it's easy to get to and sees a lot of commuters looking for groceries on their way home.It's also across the street from a Whole Foods, the other Amazon-owned grocery chain.Alex Bitter/InsiderThe area is a great example of how much competition Amazon Fresh faces: Within a 10-minute drive of this store, you can find two Whole Foods stores, Wegmans, Giant, Safeway, Target, a local neighborhood market, and a planned location for German discount grocer Lidl.Technically, I went in the side entrance, which required going up these stairs to get to the store itself.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis was the entrance nearest to the Metro stop, so lots of people use it.Around back was the main entrance, which was more welcoming.Alex Bitter/InsiderThe main entrance doesn't face a major street, though there is a sign on a nearby busy roadway directing shoppers to the store.There are seven spots reserved for curbside pickup at this Amazon Fresh store.Alex Bitter/InsiderThe signage also suggested that Amazon Flex drivers can also use these stalls.After walking up the stairs inside of the side entrance, I saw this bank of self-checkout kiosks.Alex Bitter/InsiderAmazon is reportedly adding self-checkout kiosks to some Fresh stores after years of trying to get shoppers to use its Just Walk Out technology.I also saw these packs of bottled water.Alex Bitter/InsiderThey were sold under the Happy Belly brand, one of several Amazon store brands that I encountered on this trip.There was also brand-name water sitting right next to it.Alex Bitter/InsiderIt wasn't clear how much these packs of Nestlé water were.In what would become a theme of this shopping trip, I noticed a bright "Sale" sticker on this cooler.Alex Bitter/InsiderInside the cooler were packs of chicken breasts.Nearby were these pre-packaged beef burger patties.Alex Bitter/InsiderEach one had a "30% off" sticker attached, making them just under $4 a pack.Good thing there was so much packaged meat: These cases for meat and seafood were completely empty.Alex Bitter/InsiderI remember seeing meat in these cases last time I came to this store several months ago.On many of the end caps were more "Sale" signs.Alex Bitter/InsiderAt most grocery stores, end caps are prime real estate that brands use to promote new products or special deals. At Amazon Fresh, though, they seemed like regular old shelf space.Not all of them were well-stocked or contained a logical mix of products.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis end cap contained a mishmash of chips, soda, and crackers. Some of the end caps were mostly empty.Alex Bitter/InsiderMaybe the sale went well and they just couldn't restock fast enough?Other parts of the store were better-stocked, such as the baby diaper section.Alex Bitter/InsiderThere were products from big names like Pampers as well as those from newer brands like The Honest Co.Some of the sales weren't what they first appeared to be.Alex Bitter/InsiderFrom a distance, these boxes of mac n' cheese appeared to be two for $4.A closer look revealed a lower price on the shelf tags than the one indicated on the big sign above.Alex Bitter/InsiderThe shelf tag suggested that these were just $1 each, not $2.There were also ads on the wall for Amazon's own-brand products.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis ad for Aplenty chips was in the baking aisle, for some reason.I also saw this TV that was playing ads for name brands like Tostitos.Alex Bitter/InsiderIt seemed odd to me to have ads playing on a TV in a supermarket instead of, say, those brands putting up flashy displays of their products.As I looked around, I noticed more sales and discounts than the last time I visited this store.Alex Bitter/InsiderThese Amazon-brand kettle chips, for instance, were $1.99, down from $3.49.There were discounts on both Amazon-branded products as well as name-brand ones.Alex Bitter/InsiderThese packs of La Croix sparkling water were marked down to $3.09 each from $4.39.One thing I needed to buy was oat milk, so I headed to the dairy section.Alex Bitter/InsiderThe milk selection was similar to what you'd find in a regular supermarket.Next to the milk, I found this kiosk where you could ask Alexa for help.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis is an in-store version of Amazon's home assistant.You could ask Alexa about sales in the store, or even where the bathroom is.Alex Bitter/InsiderI didn't need one, but it's an often-overlooked amenity in most grocery stores.I found a few different kinds of oat milk and made my choice.Alex Bitter/InsiderThere was a much larger selection of almond milk, including an Amazon brand.On my way out of the milk section, I walked by this freezer full of Whole Foods-branded ice cream.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis was one of several items from Whole Food's 365 brand that I noticed in this Amazon Fresh store.I found more signage promoting low prices as I moved into the produce section.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis sign advertised two pounds of bananas for 99 cents.Most basic produce was well-stocked.Alex Bitter/InsiderThere were plenty of bananas, though these ones weren't free like the bananas across the river at HQ2 in Arlington. There was plenty of seasonal fruit.Alex Bitter/InsiderWith fall approaching, Amazon Fresh already had a robust selection of apples.But some of the signage in the produce section needed updating.Alex Bitter/InsiderSpring was long gone by the time I saw this sign during my late August visit.I picked up an eggplant after being tempted by the price cut.Alex Bitter/InsiderFresh eggplants were marked down to 99 cents a pound from $1.99.Next to the produce selection was a lane for those using Amazon's Dash carts.Alex Bitter/InsiderMost people I saw in this store were using regular carts or baskets, but two or three were using Dash carts.Dash carts require you to log in using a QR code from the Amazon app.Alex Bitter/InsiderOnce logged in, customers can place items directly in the cart, which identifies what they are and keeps track of which products they've selected. The cart automatically charges a customer's Amazon account at the end of the trip.This Amazon Fresh location appeared to have the older version of the Dash cart. Amazon unveiled an updated model last year with more space for purchases, Supermarket News reported at the time. Not far from the Dash cart lane was this customer service counter.Alex Bitter/InsiderIf you don't feel like shopping in a store, you can always order groceries and pick them up here.There were also these pickup lockers for Amazon purchases, and to the right, a kiosk for returning items.Alex Bitter/InsiderAmazon can ship your order to a locker like this one as an alternative to delivering it to your home.But the returns kiosk was full when I walked by.Alex Bitter/InsiderDuring my half-hour visit, I noticed two people stop by this kiosk carrying an Amazon box, suggesting that this is a popular service at this location.As I moved toward self-checkout, I saw plenty of prepared foods.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis hot bar reminded me a bit of Whole Foods.There was also space for the roast chickens I had seen advertised outside, but unfortunately, there weren't any to buy.Alex Bitter/InsiderMy plans to compare Amazon Fresh's roast chicken with one from Costco were foiled.There was space for a selection of hot sandwiches, but those were also not available.Alex Bitter/InsiderI was visiting the store just after 2 p.m. on a weekday, so it's possible it was wiped out from the lunch rush.I decided to pick up a mid-afternoon snack to test out some of the prepared food offerings, starting with this espresso machine.Alex Bitter/InsiderI opted for a small beverage, which cost $1.49.After a few taps on this screen, I got it to dispense a mocha.Alex Bitter/InsiderThis espresso machine gave me plenty of beverage choices, from espresso drinks to chai teas.I also decided to pick up a slice of pizza.Alex Bitter/InsiderI bought a single slice just to try it out.With groceries and a snack in hand, it was time to check out.Alex Bitter/InsiderI opted to use one of the self-checkout stations near the side entrance.The self-checkout looked pretty standard, aside from a couple additions.Alex Bitter/InsiderOn the right side of the card reader was a device to read your palm in case you were paying using Amazon One. There was also a small refrigerator with sodas, which you could place your groceries on top of before checking out.With checkout done, it was time to try the pizza and mocha.Alex Bitter/InsiderIt was a sunny day, so I decided to sit outside.The pizza had flavor, but the crust was dry.Alex Bitter/InsiderI wouldn't rush back for another slice, but it wasn't awful, either.The mocha was worse: It barely tasted like anything.Alex Bitter/InsiderI couldn't taste any coffee, so into the trash it went after a couple sips.Overall, the pizza and mocha weren't the satisfying snack I had hoped for.Alex Bitter/InsiderA lot of grocery stores are expanding their ready-to-eat meal selections to compete with restaurants, according to the Wall Street Journal.But between the sub-par items I tried and products like the roast chicken being unavailable, it seems like Amazon Fresh's prepared food offerings need work.I probably won't be shopping regularly at Amazon Fresh based on my visit there.Alex Bitter/InsiderAmazon has definitely stepped up its discounts at this Fresh store since the last time I visited. But I can find similar deals at stores where I already shop, and those stores generally have a wider selection of items and do a better job of keeping things in stock.Overall, I don't see any clear advantages to shopping at Amazon Fresh as opposed to other grocery stores in the area.Alex Bitter/InsiderWhole Foods is known for its quality standards, but what is Amazon Fresh known for? As one Los Angeles shopper told Bloomberg in August: "It just feels soulless." Maybe that will change once Amazon revamps more Fresh stores.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Many brands use 65 inches as their flagship size to show off their top displays. Here are the best 65-inch TVs right now. When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn moreThe best 65-inch TVs include options from brands like LG, Samsung, Sony, and Hisense.Steven Cohen/InsiderWhen deciding on a new TV, size is one of the most important factors to consider. Many brands use 65 inches as the flagship size to showcase their best TVs, and we think this option is perfect for buyers who want a big-screen display that can still fit in most living rooms. The best 65-inch TV for your needs will vary depending on your budget and viewing habits, but there are several great options to choose from. Many top display models are available in 65 inches, including some of the best OLED TVs, and there are plenty of budget-friendly options as well. The best 4K TVs are particularly suited for 65 inches, as this display size really shows off all the detail you get with an Ultra HD screen. You can also find 65-inch 8K TVs, but the benefits of 8K are nearly impossible to see unless you go with something larger. Through a combination of hands-on testing and expertise informed by a decade covering the home entertainment industry, we've selected the best 65-inch TVs you can buy. Our picks cover every display type and budget, so you're sure to find something here to suit your needs.Our top picks for the best 65-inch TVBest overall: Samsung S95B - See at Walmart Samsung's S95B OLED is the best 65-inch TV you can buy when it comes to balancing top-notch picture quality with a highly competitive price tag. Best for home theaters: Sony A95K - See at Best BuyBuyers who want the most accurate 65-inch TV for watching movies in a home theater should have Sony's premium A95K OLED high on their list. Best midrange: Hisense U7H - See at Walmart Hisense's U7H delivers better contrast and a brighter picture than most other 65-inch TV in its price range. Best on a budget: Hisense U6H - See at Best Buy The 65-inch U6H delivers advanced image features like quantum dots and local dimming without breaking the bank.Best with high brightness: Samsung QN90B - See at AmazonThe Samsung QN90B can't quite match the infinite contrast ratio of an OLED, but its QLED panel delivers vibrant HDR imagery that pops even in bright rooms. Best designer display: Samsung Frame - See at Amazon Samsung's Frame TV isn't the best 65-inch TV for image performance, but it's a favorite among design-conscious buyers who want a matte-screen TV that blends seamlessly in their living room like a hanging piece of art. Best OLED for wall mounting: LG G2 - See at Best Buy The LG G2 also blends well in a living room with its virtually gap-less wall mount, and though it doesn't mimic the look of canvas like Samsung's Frame, it delivers better overall picture quality thanks to its OLED panel.Best overall: Samsung S95BThe S95B uses quantum dots to product rich and bright colors.Steven Cohen/InsiderResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: QD-OLED, 120HzBacklight: N/AHDR formats: HDR10, HDR10+, HLGSmart TV platform: Tizen OSPros: Excellent price for 65-inch model, QD-OLED panel with infinite contrast and bright colorsCons: Smart TV navigation can lag a bit, doesn't support Dolby Vision, harder to find in stockSamsung's 2022 S95B remains the best 65-inch TV you can buy. For a street price of around $1,600, there simply isn't a better TV out there with this level of performance at this size. But you'll have to act fast to snag this model since Samsung is phasing it out to make room for newer, more expensive 2023 OLEDs. Unlike OLED TVs from LG, the S95B uses quantum dots to enable brighter colors. Coupled with the TV's infinite contrast ratio, the S95B's quantum dot filter leads to gorgeous high dynamic range (HDR) images and an impressive peak brightness of around 1,030 nits. You'd have to pay around $1,000 more to get a 65-inch OLED that delivers better picture performance than this.And though it's disappointing that Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision, which can provide a more finely-tuned HDR image, the S95B's standard HDR10 capabilities are so strong that we don't think most people will notice a difference. The TV also upscales lower resolution content well, though it can't quite match the picture processing you'd get on a high-end Sony display. Whether you're watching 4K movies in a dark room or just flipping through cable channels in a bright living room, the S95B looks fantastic. The smart TV interface is solid as well, though it's not as snappy as we'd like. On the plus side, Samsung's operating system is the only smart TV platform that currently supports Xbox Game Pass, so you can stream high-end games without a console. Really, the S95B's only big downside is its dwindling availability. Since this is a 2022 model, it's getting harder to find in stock. Samsung has a new 2023 TV with very similar capabilities, called the S90C, but it's usually more expensive. However, if you can't find the S95B, we recommend the S90C as our next top pick. Read our Samsung S95B OLED 4K TV review.Best for home theaters: Sony A95KSonyResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: QD-OLED, 120 HzBacklight: N/AHDR formats: HDR10, Dolby Vision, HLGSmart TV platform: Google TVPros: Sony's image processing delivers unrivaled picture accuracyCons: Pricier than similar OLEDs, new 2023 model is launching soonSony's A95K OLED is built for home theater enthusiasts. It's expensive, but the TV matches or exceeds the Samsung S95B's picture performance in nearly every way. It's the ideal choice for shoppers who are willing to pay a premium to get the best movie-watching experience in a dark room.What sets the A95K apart from other high-end TVs is Sony's proprietary picture processing powered by the company's "Cognitive Processor XR." Though that sounds like marketing jargon, this advanced processor does actually make a difference when it comes to optimizing the TV's images. The improvements can be subtle outside of side-by-side comparisons, but the A95K has an edge over virtually every other display on the market. Its HDR tone mapping is also more accurate than Samsung's, and it supports Dolby Vision so you'll get superior high dynamic range performance.  The display complements its high-end picture with a premium design that features a unique stand that can either be attached to the front or back of the TV so you can choose to hide it from sight. On the downside, the stand's low profile means you can't put a soundbar in front without blocking the display.The A95K's smart TV performance is strong as well. Powered by Google TV, the display integrates seamlessly with an existing Google account and offers reliable streaming access to tons of apps. The A95K also comes with a webcam that can be used for video calls and gesture controls, which is a cool extra perk. Buyers considering the A95K should keep in mind that a new 2023 version of this TV, called the A95L, is set to hit stores in mid-October. The new model boasts similar specs but Sony says it can deliver a 200% jump in peak brightness. That's a substantial upgrade. The 65-inch A95L costs $3,500, while the A95K goes for around $2,800. We'll need to get hands-on with the A95L before offering a full judgment, but if your budget allows, you might want to wait for the new model. Read our Sony A95K OLED 4K TV impressions.Best midrange model: Hisense U7HAmazonResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: QLED, 120HzBacklight: Direct-lit with local dimmingHDR formats: HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, HLGSmart TV platform: Google TVPros: Local dimming and quantum dots for great price, solid brightnessCons: Blooming around bright objects, picture degrades from an angleYou can find plenty of 65-inch TVs in the $700 price range, but few deliver all the picture quality perks that you get with Hisense's U7H. The QLED display uses quantum dots for wide color and local dimming to enable better contrast control than a lot of other displays in this price range. With peak brightness at around 1,000 nits, the U7H gets plenty bright and delivers great HDR performance. It supports all of the major formats, including both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Contrast is also solid thanks to the TV's local dimming feature which enables it to adjust brightness across specific zones. Black levels aren't as good as they are on an OLED TV, however, and there's a bit more blooming around bright objects than you'll see on pricier QLED models. But considering its low price, it's hard to find too much fault with the U7H's picture performance. It even manages to pack in a 120Hz panel with high-frame rate gaming and variable refresh rate capabilities.However, the U7H has mediocre viewing angles. Contrast and colors distort when viewed from the side, so the U7H isn't the best 65-inch TV for viewers who plan to sit off-center from their display. We recommend going with an OLED TV or one of Samsung's high-end QLEDs, like the QN90B, to get better off-axis quality.  The U7H is a 2022 TV model but it remains an excellent buy at a street price of around $640-$700. Hisense just released a new 2023 model, called the U7K, which uses a Mini LED backlight that could provide even better contrast. The new TV carries a retail price of $1,050 but it's sometimes on sale for under $800. If you can find the U7K for around the same price as the U7H, we recommend snagging the newer model.Best for budget buyers: Hisense U6HHisenseResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: QLED, 60HzBacklight: Direct-lit with local dimmingHDR formats: HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, HLGSmart TV platform: Google TVPros: Incredible value for the money, one of few TVs in this price range with local dimming and quantum dotsCons: 60Hz panel, viewing angles aren't great, dimmer screen than more expensive TVsHisense's U6H is proof that you can still snag a great 65-inch TV on a budget. Though there are some performance tradeoffs compared to our more expensive picks, the U6H delivers incredible value at this size.Like the U7H, this more budget-friendly option also uses a QLED display with local dimming and quantum dots. It has fewer dimming zones, however, so contrast control isn't as precise. This means you're more likely to see blooming, and black levels won't be as consistently deep. The U6H also has limited brightness compared to high-end QLEDs, so it's not as good for rooms that let in a lot of light. But at a peak of around 600 nits, the TV can still deliver highlights with just enough pop to start showing off the benefits of high dynamic range content. And thanks to its quantum dot filter, it delivers an expanded range of colors when watching HDR programs. You'll just want to be watching those programs from a centered view since, much like the U7H, colors and contrast fade when seated off to the side. However, this level of off-axis performance is the norm for TVs in this price range.It's becoming increasingly hard to find 65-inch TVs with the U6H's level of performance and budget-friendly price. Similarly priced competitors typically cut local dimming to save on costs, which leads to a big drop in contrast and black level performance. For a current sale price of under $500, there simply isn't another 65-inch TV that balances price and performance quite like the U6H. But if you're willing to spend a bit more, you should also consider Hisense's newer U6K. The 2023 version has similar specs but now uses a Mini LED backlight which should deliver even better contrast.Best for high brightness: Samsung QN90BAmazonResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: QLED, 120HzBacklight: Direct-lit with local dimmingHDR formats: HDR10, HDR10+, HLGSmart TV platform: Tizen OSPros: Peak brightness of around 2,000 nits, minimizes glare and reflections wellCons: Minor blooming and vignetting visible, some lights can cause scattered rainbow effect on screenThe QN90B is one of the brightest 65-inch TVs you can buy. Other top displays in this guide top out at around 1,000-1,350 nits of brightness, but the QN90B beats them all with a whopping peak of 2,000 nits. This incredible brightness gives the TV some key benefits over dimmer displays.For one, high brightness is handy for combating ambient light so you can watch TV during the day in rooms with lots of windows. And at night, that incredible brightness delivers fantastic HDR performance with highlights that really pop in a dark room. This makes the QN90B a great choice for both average living rooms and dedicated home theater spaces. But while the QN90B's contrast performance is top-notch for a QLED, it's still not on par with the pixel-level dimming of an OLED. You'll see some mild blooming and vignetting in dark scenes that can cause halos around bright objects or crushed shadows. But these flaws aren't as pronounced as they are on cheaper QLEDs, like the Hisense U7H and U6H.Off-axis viewing is also much better on the QN90B thanks to an "Ultra Viewing Angle" layer that Samsung applies to the panel. On the downside, this layer and the TV's anti-glare coating can cause a streaking rainbow trail to appear when certain types of light hit the screen from some angles. So while the QN90B is fantastic at reducing typical glare, the tradeoff is an occasional rainbow reflection.Samsung's new QN90C model for 2023 uses a different type of screen, so it's not prone to this rainbow issue. It typically retails for more than $2,000, however, while the QN90B is often available for $1,600. In general, we still think the QN90B is the better value, but the QN90C is a good buy if you're willing to spend extra to avoid any side effects from the QN90B's screen filters.Best designer display: Samsung Frame TVAmazonResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: QLED, 120HzBacklight: Edge-litHDR formats: HDR10, HDR10+, HLGSmart TV platform: Tizen OSPros: Matte screen mimics look of canvas, comes with mount to attach flush to wall, magnetic bezels can be swapped for different stylesCons: Lacks local dimming, peak brightness limited compared to Samsung's top QLED modelsThe Samsung Frame TV is perfect for buyers who want a 65-inch display that can blend seamlessly into their living room decor. Built with an emphasis on design, the TV features interchangeable bezels and a matte screen that can make it look like a piece of art hanging on your wall.The bezels come in different styles that magnetically attach to the display. The Frame also comes with a Slim-Fit Wall Mount that lets you hang it flush against your wall. And unlike most TVs, the Frame uses a separate One Connect Box to house all of its ports so you just need one cable running from the display. If you need to connect a cable receiver, streaming device, or gaming console you simply hook those up to the TV's external box, which gets rid of all those unsightly wires on your wall.  The screen itself features a matte finish rather than the glossy look of most modern TVs. This helps to reduce reflections and gives the Frame a canvas-like appearance. The Frame also has an "Art Mode" which lets it display paintings, photos, or other images when not in use as a TV. Built-in motion sensors can be activated so the Art Mode turns on when the TV senses that someone is in the room. You can use your own images or have the Frame cycle through art from Samsung's Art Store (subscription required).But while the Frame's design is high-end, its picture quality is a mixed bag. The QLED panel offers wide color support but brightness is limited compared to Samsung's top QLEDs. It also lacks local dimming, which results in the worst contrast and black level performance of any 65-inch TV in this guide. The Frame isn't geared toward wowing you with high dynamic range imagery. Instead, it's meant to appeal toward buyers who want a 65-inch display that can serve as both a design piece for their living room and a TV for casual viewing. And in that sense, it excels.Best OLED for wall mounting: LG G2AmazonResolution: 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160p)Panel type: OLED, 120HzBacklight: N/AHDR formats: Dolby Vision, HDR10, HLGSmart TV platform: LG webOSPros: No-gap wall mount included, infinite contrast ratio, wide viewing angles, bright for an OLEDCons: Doesn't include a stand, 2023 model gets even brighter (for more money)Those who want a design-focused 65-inch TV that also manages to deliver top-notch home theater performance should look no further than the LG G2. Like the Samsung Frame, it has a uniformly thin profile and comes with a flush wall mount so you can hang it on your wall with virtually no gap. But unlike the Frame, the G2 uses an OLED panel for superior picture quality with much better contrast, black levels, and viewing angles. You do miss out on the Frame's matte screen, separate connection box, and interchangeable bezels, but the jump in image performance is substantial.And despite not using quantum dots like high-end OLEDs from Sony and Samsung, the G2 can get just as bright as the S95B and A95K. Color volume isn't as wide, but brightness caps out at a around 1,000 nits. But while the G2 looks wonderful on a wall, it's not a top pick if you plan to put it on an entertainment console. It doesn't even come with a stand, so you'd have to buy one separately which adds to the cost. At a current street price of around $2,000, the G2 is still a solid value for what you get, but you're better off going with the less expensive S95B if you want a 65-inch OLED that comes with a stand. Buyers should also keep in mind that LG has a new 2023 version of this TV, called the G3. It has a similar design and feature set, but can deliver an impressive 40% jump in brightness. That makes the G3 one of the brightest OLEDs you can buy. However, the 65-inch G3 costs around $600 more than the G2, so we still think the G2 is the better overall buy for most people. Read our LG G2 OLED 4K TV review.How we test 65-inch TVsSteven Cohen/InsiderTo pick the best 65-inch TVs for our guide we used a combination of hands-on testing and research bolstered by a decade worth of expertise covering the home entertainment product industry. When we test displays we evaluate them for general picture clarity, contrast performance, HDR peak brightness, color, off-axis viewing, smart TV interface, and value for the money. Brightness is measured using an X-Rite iDisplay Plus colorimeter. Other objective display capabilities are evaluated using test patterns found on the Spears & UHD HDR Benchmark 4K Blu-ray disc. To get a sense of real-world performance, we also watch scenes from movies and TV shows with clips specifically selected to emphasize a display's black levels, highlights, color capabilities, and upscaling. Our demo material includes a mix of 4K, 1080p high definition (HD), and standard definition (SD) content from streaming devices, cable TV, and Blu-ray discs. The best 65-inch TVs will also have excelllent smart TV features, so we test overall navigation speed and app stability, as well as voice search, digital assistant integration, and extra perks like game streaming support. 65-inch TV FAQsThe S95B's HDR10 performance is top-notch, with peak brightness that bests other OLED displays in this price range.Steven Cohen/InsiderIs it worth buying a 65-inch TV?If you have the space for it, we think 65 inches is the ideal size to consider when shopping for a new TV, especially a 4K model. Many brands use 65 inches as their flagship size to show off their top displays, and this size is great for delivering big-screen immersion without taking up too much room.How much should you spend on a 65-inch TV?Exactly how much you should spend on a 65-inch TV depends on what your viewing needs are. The best 65-inch TVs range in price from around $500 to more than $3,000. You can also find cheaper entry-level 65-inch TVs for under $400, but we generally recommend paying a bit more to get one of the options we highlight above.Buyers shopping for a midrange 65-inch TV should expect to spend $500-$1,000. You can find 65-inch QLED TVs in this price range that still offer advanced picture quality features, like local dimming, and good brightness performance that can reach 600-1,000 nits.Buyers who want an upper-midrange or high-end 65-inch TV should be looking to spend $1,000-$3,000. You can find advanced 65-inch QLED TVs that deliver up to 2,000 nits of brightness in the $1,000-$2,000 range, while top 65-inch OLED TVs with infinite contrast ratios tend to sell for $2,000-$3,000.  How far should you sit from a 65-inch 4K TV?The benefits of a 4K screen become most noticeable when you sit at a distance of around one to 1.5 times the size of your TV. At that distance, you'll be able to see the extra detail that 4K resolution offers compared to a 1080p high-definition screen. For a 65-inch 4K TV, the ideal viewing distance should be between 5.4 and 8.1 feet from your TV.    You can of course sit further away and still enjoy a 65-inch 4K TV, but that range will yield the best level of visible detail. Otherwise, you'll want a bigger screen to get the full benefits of 4K.  Should you purchase a 65-inch 8K TV?Though some brands do sell 65-inch 8K TVs, we don't recommend buying one in this screen size. 65 inches just isn't big enough to really show off the benefits of an 8K resolution screen when viewing it at a reasonable distance. A 75-inch or larger 8K TV is much better suited for highlighting the additional detail you get with 8K resolution, but even then the benefits are subtle. In general, we recommend saving money and going with a 4K model if you want a 65-inch TV.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

In this article, we discuss long-term returns of Keith Meister’s activist targets. If you want to see more stocks in this selection, check out Long-Term Returns of Keith Meister’s 5 Activist Targets. Keith Meister has risen to become one of the most feared and revered activist investors on Wall Street. Having mastered his trade as a […] In this article, we discuss long-term returns of Keith Meister’s activist targets. If you want to see more stocks in this selection, check out Long-Term Returns of Keith Meister’s 5 Activist Targets. Keith Meister has risen to become one of the most feared and revered activist investors on Wall Street. Having mastered his trade as a right-hand man of billionaire and activist investor Carl Icahn, he started his hedge fund Corvex Capital in 2011 with the help of $250 million from George Soros. Assets under management in Corvex Capital doubled by 2013, benefiting Meister’s opportunistic investment strategy. The strategy focused on investing in stocks in particular situations in addition to value investing. Nevertheless, the aggressive approach that Meister had learned from Icahn’s philosophy has allowed him to succeed on Wall Street in recent years. As an activist investor, he always looks for highly undervalued stocks that can generate significant value through activism. The strategy entails pushing for company management changes or asset sales to unlock underlying value. In some cases, the activist investor calls for the sale of the business or divestments of some units. Meister’s style of activism has earned him a legion of fans and critics in the financial media and corporate boards. nevertheless, he is also a respected activist investor in the fund community because of the value he always generates from his plays. Some of Meister’s activist targets have included CenturyLink, where he pushed for a management shakeup with the appointment of new CEO. He also partnered with old pal Icahn to make for a sale of Energen Corporation to unlock shareholder value. Nevertheless, Corvex Capital is a fundamentally driven hedge fund that only uses activism as a last-resort tool. Meister has always strived to avoid activism or proxy fights and often prefers to be amicably invited into boards. His engagement with MDU Resources is a perfect example of how activism can sometimes take a back seat and still unlock strategic moves that involve asset sales or spinoffs. Keith Meister of Corvex Capital In the most recent past, Meister has scooped up shares in tech giants Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) to benefit from the artificial intelligence boom. After acquiring a 13.1 million stake in Amazon stock, the e-commerce giant surged by 23%, generating significant returns for the activist investor. Meister has also invested in Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:EDR) and Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:UBER) as part of its diversification strategy. While Meister has been posting solid returns over the years, the assets under management in the activist hedge fund have declined. Assets have wavered from a peak of $9.1 billion in 2015 to about $1.8 billion in the second quarter of 2023. Over the past three years, Meister has delivered an average of 2.70% annualized return with a gain of 30.7% since 2013. Our Methodology Meister is one of the most respected activist investors given his success in acquiring stakes in companies and pushing for drastic changes aimed at unlocking value. With a gain of over 30% since 2013, Meister is always looked upon when it comes to stock activism. We have compiled a list of some of Meister’s biggest Stock activism plays on wall street and the returns his actions generated. We have ranked the stocks based on the activist investment SEC filings. 16. AboveNet Long Term Returns: 54.41%   S&P 500 Returns: 7.99%   Activist Investment: 2011  AboveNet provided high-bandwidth telecommunication circuits for large corporate enterprises and communication carriers. Activist investor Meister confirmed a 6.7% stake in the company in 2011 and reiterated that it was highly undervalued despite its strong competitive position, loyal customer base, and robust cash flow. As part of his activism in the company, Meister pushed for a merger of AboveNet with Zayo Group Holdings as one of the ways of unlocking value. He expected the merger to create synergies and help the combined company enjoy scale advantages in the connectivity industry. In 2012 a deal was struck that saw AboveNet acquired by Zayo Group for $2.2 billion, representing a 13% premium. Meister is believed to have made a $100 million profit from the transaction just as his activist investor hedge fund was starting. 15. Ralcorp Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:RAH)  Long Term Returns: 25.97%   S&P 500 Returns: 17.61%   Activist Investment: 2012 Ralcorp Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:RAH) manufactures food products, including breakfast cereal, cookies, crackers, and chocolate snack foods. Before ConAgra Foods’s acquisition in 2012 for $90 a share, it was one of the hottest prospects on Wall Street. Meister took a 5.1% stake in the company in 2012 and alleged that the company suffered from poor governance and misaligned incentives. The activist investor also embarked on a proxy fight, insisting it was a wrong move to spin off the company’s Post cereal business. The activist investor had suggested the company put itself up for sale or line up some serious acquisitions as one of the ways of reinvigorating its prospects and generating shareholder value. Following his appointment to the board, Meister pushed for a merger between the company and ConAgra Foods, insisting it would create synergies and scale advantages in the food industry. In November, a $6.8 billion deal was struck that saw ConAgra acquire Ralcorp Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:RAH), and was completed in January. Meister allegedly made a profit of $300 million from the deal. 14. ADT Inc. (NYSE:ADT) Long Term Returns: 6.85%   S&P 500 Returns: 31.57%   Activist Investment: 2012 ADT Inc. (NYSE:ADT) provided electronic security interactive home and business automation. It also offered alarm monitoring services. Meister disclosed a 5.02% stake in the company in 2012. At the time, the activist investor believed the company was fundamentally undervalued and ought to have taken advantage of the low-interest rates to acquire 45% of outstanding shares. Meister worked his way into the company’s board and pushed for stock buybacks as one of the ways of unlocking shareholder value. The activist investor had also criticized the company’s conservative approach to debt, calling its capital structure indefensible. Nevertheless, barely a year later, Corvex Capital sold off most of its ADT Inc. (NYSE:ADT) holdings for about $450 million and walked away with a remarkable 20% return on its investment. ADT agreed to be acquired by an affiliate of certain funds managed by Apollo Global Management for $42 a share in 2016 for $6.9 billion. 13. Corrections Corp of America Long Term Returns: -23.44%   S&P 500 Returns: 53.11%   Activist Investment: 2013 CoreCivic, Inc. (NYSE:CXW), the new name of Corrections Corp of America, is the leading provider of high-quality services for corrections and detention management in the nation. The company works with state and federal criminal justice systems to supervise individuals in states of incarceration. Activist Investor Meister declared a 9.9% stake in the company in 2013 and expressed plans to engage the board and management to explore ways to unlock underlying value. Following the investment, the hedge fund, in partnership with Marcato Capital Management, tried to convince management to convert the company into a real estate investment trust for tax purposes. Meister also pushed for a merger with GEO Group, another private prison that had successfully converted into a REIT. The merger was expected to create synergies and scale advantages. The company budged under pressure and confirmed in September 2013 that it would convert into a REIT and start paying a special dividend. Meister saw his activism pay off as CCA increased its quarterly dividend by 6% to $0.54 a share in 2014, affirming booming businesses under the REIT structure. In 2016 the company changed its name to CoreCivic, Inc. (NYSE:CXW) to reflect its diversified range of services. 12. CommonWealth REIT Long Term Returns: 64.04%   S&P 500 Returns: 30.74%   Activist Investment:  2013 CommonWealth REIT was a real estate investment trust that owned and operated office buildings across the United States. Meister disclosed a 6.3% stake in the REIT in 2013, making his first activist play in the real estate sector. At the time of the investment, the activist investor believed the company had a substantial property portfolio but was undervalued and suffered from poor governance. Meister waged a proxy battle, first criticizing a plan to issue 27 million shares of new stock to raise $450 million to retire some of the company’s debt. He insisted that such a move would only dilute existing shareholders and lower net asset value. Meister and Related Cos merged to push for a deal to acquire the company for $25 a share, which they said was a superior offer. The two activist investors also launched a proxy fight to remove the entire board, insisting they were not independent and had failed to act in the best interest of shareholders. In 2014 they got their wish as shareholders voted to remove the entire board and elect a new slate of directors. In 2014 Meister engineered a sale of the company to Equity Commonwealth, another REIT, for $2.6 billion or $26 a share, with Meister ending up with a profit of $300 million from his investment in the company. 11. TW Telecom Inc (NASDAQ:TWTC) Long term Returns: 56.58%   S&P 500 Returns: 32.54%   Activist Investment: 2013 Headquartered in Littleton, Colorado, TW Telecom Inc (NASDAQ:TWTC) was a business telecommunication company. It has since evolved to become a leader in delivering hybrid networking cloud connectivity and security. Activist investor Meister first acquired a 6% stake in the company in 2013 and intends to engage the board and management on various strategic initiatives to unlock value. Backed by a loyal customer base, robust cash flow, and strong competitive position, the activist investor believes TW Telecom Inc (NASDAQ:TWTC) was highly undervalued and termed it a prime acquisition target. Therefore he pushed for a share buyback program to return value to shareholders while also pushing for a potential merger with other telecom providers. In 2014 Meister pushed for the acquisition of TW Telecom Inc (NASDAQ:TWTC) by Level 3 in a deal that valued the company at $5.7 billion. He made a profit of about $400 million from his investment. 10. Signet Jewelers Limited (NYSE:SIG) Long Term Returns: -23.58%   S&P 500 Returns: -1.03%   Activist Investment:  2014 Signet Jewelers Limited (NYSE:SIG) is one of the world’s largest retailers of diamond jewelry, with brands in the US and Canada. Through Corvex Management, Meister acquired a 6.26 million share of the specialty retailer in 2014 for a 7.8% stake. The acquisition came amid a strong belief that the stock was undervalued and offered an attractive investment on the upside. The hedge fund engaged the management on various strategic alternatives, including leveraging credit receivables, optimizing capital structure, and accelerating mergers and acquisitions to unlock value. In 2017, Signet Jewelers Limited (NYSE:SIG) reached a deal to acquire R2Net, owner of JamesAllen.com, for $328 million as it sought to accelerate its customer-first omnichannel strategy. 9. Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (NYSE:FNF) Long Term Returns: 12.67%   S&P 500 Returns: 10.79%   Activist Investment:  2014 Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (NYSE:FNF) is an insurance company that provides various insurance products across the United States. It offers title insurance, escrow, and other title-related services, including trust activities, trustee sales guarantees, recordings and conveyances, and home warranty products. Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (NYSE:FNF) was targeted by activist investor Meister in 2014 as he acquired a 7.6% stake and started pushing for its sale or spinoff of non-core business. The activist investor got seats on the board and helped push for the sale of the company stake in Remy International, an auto parts manufacturer, to BorgWarner for $1.2 billion. The deal helped reduce the company’s debt and improve efficiency in the remaining businesses. With the blessing of Activist Investor, Meister Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (NYSE:FNF) reached an agreement to spin off its majority-owned subsidiary Black Night Financial, into a publicly traded company. In 2018 Meister pushed for acquiring rival title insurance company Stewart Information Services Corp for $1.2 billion as the Activist Investor insisted it would help create shareholder value. 8. American Realty Capital Properties, Inc.   Long Term Returns: 384.52%   S&P 500 Returns: 109.34%   Activist Investment: 2014 American Reality Capital Properties (ARCP) was a real estate investment trust that owned and operated single-tenant commercial properties across the US. In 2014, activist investor Meister confirmed a 7.1% stake in the company. He waged a proxy battle inside the company, believing that the company, with its loyal tenant base, was in a position to pay a strong dividend yield. The proxy war sought to address the company’s accounting challenges and management turnover. Meister also pushed for the REIT to partner with a more giant REIT or private equity firm to provide core resources stability and credibility. Some potential buyers that Meister eyed included Blackstone Group, Starwood Capital Group, and Realty Income Corp. In 2015 ARCP reached a deal to sell its Cole Capital business for $700 million with the blessing of the activist investor. In 2016 the REIT changed its name to Vereit Inc (NYSE:VER) and focused on portfolio diversification, balance sheet improvement, and operational excellence. The activist investor approved the changes. 7. Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P)  Long term Returns: 39.13%   S&P 500 Returns: 21.45%   Activist Investment:  2016 Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P) is a music streaming company that offers personalized playlists. It also operates as an internet radio company. In 2016 activist investor Meister confirmed a 9.9% stake in the company as he sought to push for the sale of the company to unlock value. With the massive stakes in Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P), he got the right to nominate four candidates for the board. Being part of the management team, he believed the company was better off merging with a larger media or technology company to compete better against Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. In 2017 he engineered a sale of a 19% stake in the company to Sirius XM for $480 million and received an additional $200 million. In 2019, Sirius XM Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:SIRI) acquired the company for $3.5 billion or $10.14 a share, creating one of the largest audio entertainment companies with over 100 million listeners. 6. The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB)  Long Term Returns: -51.15%   S&P 500 Returns: 10.79%   Activist Investment: 2016 The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) is an energy infrastructure company that operates through Transmission & Gulf of Mexico, Northeast G&P, West, and Gas & NGL Marketing Services segments. As a natural gas pipeline operator, it is engaged in the processing and transporting of natural gas and natural gas liquids in the US. Meister confirmed a 10% stake in the company in 2016 but was forced to resign from the board in June after questioning the abilities of CEO Alan Armstrong and failing on an ouster motion. He suggested ten new directors for the board that will act as placeholders until the company selects the best permanent directors. The proxy battle between the hedge fund manager and the energy infrastructure company ensued when The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) was an acquisition target of pipeline competitor Enterprise Products Partners. Meister insisted that the company was better off partnering with a larger energy company or a private equity firm to address various challenges, from regulatory scrutiny to litigation risk and shareholder lawsuits. In 2017, The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) budged under pressure from the activist investor and agreed to add three new independent directors, two nominated by Meister. In 2018, the company acquired all outstanding units of Williams Partners, its limited partnership subsidiary, for $10.5 billion. It also agreed to sell certain assets in the Four Corners area to Harvest Mainstream for $1.125 billion as part of a push to unlock value. Click to continue reading and see Long-Term Returns of Keith Meister’s 5 Activist Targets. Suggested articles: 11 Best Weight Loss Stocks To Invest In 20 Countries That Watch the Most TV 11 Most Profitable Biotech Stocks Today Disclosure: None. Long-Term Returns of Keith Meister’s Activist Targets is originally published on Insider Monkey......»»

Samsung makes lots of great TVs for all budgets. Here are our top picks, including colorful 4K displays and the company's latest flagship 8K set. When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.The best Samsung TVs include OLED, QLED, and Crystal UHD models designed for every budget.AmazonIf you're shopping for the best TV, Samsung should be among the top brands you look at. The company is one of the most popular display manufacturers around, and the best Samsung TVs deliver an excellent balance between picture quality and smart features. Buyers can choose between OLED, QLED, and LED models, and Samsung even sells 8K TVs for the sharpest image you can get.All Samsung TVs use the same operating system (OS) with easy access to all of the best streaming services. And every Samsung 4K and 8K TV supports high dynamic range (HDR) using the HDR10 and HDR10+ formats. On the high-end, Samsung's best OLED TVs and QLED TVs deliver a premium home theater experience with high contrast and industry-leading color volume for a bright, vivid picture. Meanwhile, Samsung's Crystal UHD LED TVs only offer basic picture performance. They're not the best 4K TVs you can get, but Crystal UHD TVs still deliver reliable streaming. To help you narrow down which Samsung display is right for you, we rounded up the best Samsung TVs on the market right now. Our picks are based on a combination of hands-on testing and a decade worth of expertise covering home entertainment products.  Note: Since the TV industry uses 65 inches as its flagship size, our picks focus on 65-inch models. But all of the TVs we recommend are also available in other sizes.Our top picks for the best Samsung TVsBest overall: Samsung S95B OLED 4K TV - See at WalmartThe S95B 4K OLED TV might be a year old, but it still delivers the best balance between image performance and price of any display that Samsung sells. Best high-end OLED: Samsung S95C OLED 4K TV - See at AmazonSamsung's S95C is the brand's latest and greatest 4K TV, and it offers the most impressive brightness, color, and gaming performance we've seen on an OLED.Best high-end QLED: Samsung QN90B Neo QLED 4K TV - See at AmazonThe 2022 QN90B remains one of the best Samsung TVs you can get with a QLED panel and Mini LED backlight for high contrast and expanded colors. Best midrange QLED: Samsung QN85B Neo QLED 4K TV - See at AmazonThough performance isn't on par with the more expensive QN90B, Samsung's QN85B delivers impressive high dynamic range picture quality for the money. Best budget: Samsung CU7000 Crystal UHD 4K TV - See at Best BuyThe CU7000 delivers decent performance for budget TV shoppers who favor the Samsung brand, but you can get better picture quality from similarly priced TCL and Hisense TVs.  Best for your wall: The Frame QLED 4K TV - See at AmazonBuilt to look like a piece of art hanging on your wall, Samsung's Frame TV is a QLED display and a gorgeous design piece in one. Best 8K: Samsung QN900C Neo QLED 8K TV - See at AmazonMost people don't need an 8K TV, but if you have the cash to spare, there's no denying how impressive Samsung's QN900C is.  Best overall: Samsung S95BBest BuyResolution: 4K Ultra HDRefresh rate: 120HzPanel type: QD-OLEDBacklight: N/A (self-illuminating pixels)Sizes: 55 and 65 inchesCheck out our Samsung S95B reviewPros: OLED with quantum dots for rich colors and infinite contrast ratio, wide viewing angles, similar performance as 2023 models for a lot less moneyCons: Not as bright as QLED TVs, only two sizes to choose from, risk of burn-in in extreme casesThe S95B might be a year old, but it's still the best Samsung TV you can buy for the money. The display uses an OLED panel with quantum dots, which gives it better color performance than a regular OLED while maintaining an infinite contrast ratio. And it pulls this off at a lower street price than similar options from Sony and LG. Like all Samsung 4K TVs, the display supports the HDR10 and HDR10+ high dynamic range formats, and it looks stunning when playing compatible movies and TV shows. Highlights sparkle from the screen and the S95B produces deeper, more precise black levels than any of Samsung's QLED TVs. And though Samsung's high-end QLEDs also have solid viewing angles, the S95B's OLED screen is even better. You can sit far off to the side of the TV without seeing any major loss in image quality. But while the S95B is bright for an OLED, at a peak of around 1,050 nits, it still can't match the 2,000-nit peak of Samsung's top QLEDs, like the QN90B. However, since the S95B's pixel-level dimming enables much better contrast control than a QLED's backlight, we think this dip in brightness is a more than acceptable tradeoff. Best high-end OLED: Samsung S95CSteven Cohen/InsiderResolution: 4K Ultra HDRefresh rate: 144Hz with PCPanel type: QD-OLEDBacklight: N/A (self-illuminating pixels)Sizes: 55, 65, and 77 inchesCheck out our Samsung S95C reviewPros: Samsung's brightest OLED, 144Hz panel for high frame rate PC gaming, thin design with One Connect Box, comes in a 77-inch screen sizeCons: Pricey compared to the similar S95B, risk of burn-in in extreme casesWhen it comes to the best image performance you can buy, the S95C is the current king of Samsung's 4K TV lineup. It takes everything we love about the S95B but pumps up the brightness, dials up the refresh rate, and packs it all in a thin, flat design. But given its high-end performance, it also comes in at an equally high-end price. Using Samsung's second-gen QD-OLED panel, the S95C manages to deliver a 30% increase in peak brightness over the S95B, with a max of around 1,360 nits. This can make specular highlights and colors pop with a bit more intensity, while still offering perfect black levels. The TV also supports a 144Hz refresh rate versus the 120Hz rate you'll find on typical high-end TVs from other brands. This means you can connect a gaming PC or gaming laptop to get incredibly smooth gameplay, so long as your computer is powerful enough to output 144 frames per second. And unlike the S95B, the S95C has a uniformly slim profile. Though the S95B is technically slimmer at its thinnest point, that TV protrudes out toward the bottom to accommodate all of its video ports. The S95C, however, uses a separate One Connect Box to house all of its HDMI ports, so the panel can maintain a profile of just 0.4 inches all the way down. Though we think the older S95B is still a better overall value, the S95C is the best pick for buyers who want high-end OLED performance and design, but don't mind paying top dollar to get it.Best high-end QLED: Samsung QN90BAmazonResolution: 4K Ultra HDRefresh rate: 120Hz Panel type: Neo QLED LCDBacklight: Mini LED with full-array local dimmingSizes: 43, 50, 55, 65, 75, and 85 inchesPros: Brighter than OLED models, Mini LED panel with full-array local dimming, no burn-in riskCons: Contrast can't match an OLED, some blooming visibleThough we do favor OLED TV tech for its superior contrast, QLEDs are still great TVs, especially if you need a really bright screen in your living room. Samsung's QN90B is easily one of the best QLED TVs on the market.Part of Samsung's "Neo QLED" series, the QN90B uses quantum dots for expanded color and a Mini LED backlight. That latter feature is missing from Samsung's standard QLED TVs. In conjunction with full-array local dimming, the TV's Mini LEDs enable it to produce deep black levels with better contrast and brightness control than a regular LED TV. The QN90B's dimming still isn't as precise as an OLED like the S95B, so you will see some minor blooming and haloing around bright objects. But, compared to cheaper QLED models, the QN90B gets remarkably close to OLED-level contrast while delivering nearly double the peak brightness of the S95B.The TV's high brightness capabilities make it an especially good choice for living rooms that let in a lot of ambient light. And though OLEDs still have an edge when it comes to viewing angles, the QN90B has some of the best off-axis image quality we've seen on a TV of this type. If you don't want one of Samsung's OLED TVs, the QN90B is an excellent QLED alternative for buyers who crave an extra-bright display and never want to think twice about burn-in. Best midrange QLED: Samsung QN85BSamsungResolution: 4K Ultra HDRefresh rate: 120Hz Panel type: Neo QLED LCDBacklight: Mini LED with full-array local dimmingSizes: 55, 65, 75, and 85 inchesPros: Solid HDR performance, Mini LED backlight, good viewing angles for a QLED, no burn-in riskCons: Not as bright as Samsung's top TVs, fewer dimming zones than the QN90BBuyers on the hunt for a great QLED TV that's a bit cheaper than the QN90B should consider the QN85B. Though brightness and contrast aren't quite as impressive, the QN85B still boasts quantum dots and a Mini LED backlight. This is an upper midrange set that's perfect for buyers who want to save a little cash without sacrificing HDR quality. The S95C and QN90B can both get brighter, but make no mistake, this model is no slouch. You still get about 1,000 nits of peak brightness, which is the standard that a lot of HDR content is designed for, and is enough to deliver a punchy image in a living room that lets in a lot of light. Contrast and black levels are strong, but this set has fewer dimming zones than the QN90B, so blooming is a bit more noticeable. And like the QN90B, the TV has solid viewing angles, which isn't something you see in a lot of QLED models from other brands. However, since this is a 2022 model, buyers should keep in mind that this TV will become harder to find as the year goes on. And that's a shame since the rest of Samsung's midrange QLED lineup fails to deliver this kind of performance for the money. Best budget: Samsung CU7000TargetResolution: 4K Ultra HDRefresh rate: 60Hz Panel type: LED LCDBacklight: Edge-litSizes: 43, 50, 55, 58, 65, 70, 77, and 85 inchesPros: Affordable, tons of screen size optionsCons: Lacks wide color support, no local dimming, mediocre viewing angles, 60Hz rather than 120HzSamsung excels at high- and upper midrange TVs, but its lower midrange and entry-level offerings tend to be a bit overpriced for what you get. At least, compared to more value-friendly options from TCL, Hisense, and Vizio. Though you can get more bang-for-your-buck from one of those companies, the CU7000 is a solid budget pick for anyone who's set on sticking with the Samsung brand.The CU7000 uses a regular LCD panel with an edge-lit LED backlight, and it's missing all the step-up picture quality features you'd find on QLED and OLED models. This means the TV isn't capable of a wide color gamut, and black levels won't be as deep or uniform across the screen. The display is also one of the dimmest options in Samsung's lineup. It technically supports HDR10 and HDR10+ processing, but it's just not capable of showing off the true benefits of those formats.On the plus side, the TV does support full 4K resolution for a sharp, clean image and it plays standard dynamic range content in high definition just fine, so HD cable channels and live TV streaming services will look exactly like they're supposed to. Viewing angles are mediocre, however, so you'll want to sit to the center of the screen to get the best image. This is a fine entry-level display for casual viewers who just want a capable smart TV and don't care about paying extra for better picture quality. But keep in mind, if you're willing to venture outside of Samsung's lineup, you can find TVs with better contrast and color performance, like the Hisense U6H, for around the same price.Best for your wall: Samsung FrameSamsungResolution: 4K Ultra HD (43 inches and up)Refresh rate: 120Hz (55 inches and up) Panel type: QLED LCDBacklight: Edge-litSizes: 32, 43, 50, 55, 65, 75, and 85 inchesPros: Unique art-frame design with matte-finish screen, hangs flush on wall, quantum dots for wide color support, customizable bezel optionsCons: Brightness and contrast can't match Neo QLED and OLED TVsSamsung's Frame TV is an excellent choice for anyone planning to wall mount their display. The unique TV is built to look like a piece of art hanging in your living room.The Frame comes with a black border by default, but you can pay extra to get different bezel colors for the exact picture-frame look you want. Options include white, brown, teak, red, beige, and more. The add-on bezels magnetically snap onto the display for simple installation. Like Samsung's S95C OLED, the Frame TV uses an external One Connect Box to house its video ports, which enables the panel to maintain a 1-inch profile from top to bottom. When paired with the included slim-fit wall mount, the TV can be hung flush on your wall just like a framed work of art.The display itself uses a matte finish which prevents reflections and helps to give the screen a more canvas-like appearance. When you're not watching TV, you can have it enter "Art Mode," which will cycle through various paintings and photographs that you can pull from Samsung's Art Store (subscription required) or from a USB drive. A built-in motion sensor can even toggle the Art Mode to only activate when people are in the room.While the Frame's unique design is its main selling point, the TV also benefits from using a QLED panel, albeit without all the bells and whistles that Samsung's best QLEDs have. The Frame can't hit the same peak brightness levels of our high-end picks and it lacks local dimming for precise contrast control, but it does have wide color support. We don't recommend this TV for anyone focused on the best picture quality, but it still delivers a nice enough image for casual HDR viewing. The Frame is really geared toward people who want the best Samsung TV that can double as an attractive design piece hanging in their living room, and in that sense, it excels. Note: The 32-inch Frame TV features a Full-HD 1080p screen rather than a 4K panel.Best 8K: Samsung QN900CAmazonResolution: 8K Ultra HDRefresh rate: 144Hz with PC Panel type: Neo QLED LCDBacklight: Mini LED with full-array local dimming Sizes: 65, 75, and 85 inchesPros: 8K resolution provides high pixel density, one of Samsung's brightest TVs, great local dimming performance with Mini LEDsCons: 8K content is still virtually non-existent, benefits of 8K versus 4K are subtle The QN900C is the absolute cream of the crop of Samsung's 2023 QLED TV lineup. It's an 8K TV, which means it boasts four times the total number of pixels as a 4K display, and it uses the company's most advanced Mini LED backlight system. The results are undeniably impressive, even if we still think 8K resolution is unnecessary for most people.During our testing, the QN900C hit a peak of nearly 2,300 nits in Filmmaker Mode, which makes it one of the brightest TVs on the market from any brand. High dynamic range highlights really sparkle, allowing HDR content that's graded with peaks beyond 1,000 nits to come through with extra punch. The TV's local dimming also works exceptionally well to keep black levels deep with minimal blooming. Samsung's OLED models still have an edge here, but the QN900C comes closer to OLED-quality in a dark room than any of Samsung's other QLED TVs. Viewing angles are also great for an LCD-based display, with only small shifts in color and contrast when viewing from the side.   But while the TV's 8K resolution means it has the potential to provide a sharper image than a 4K TV, there really isn't any 8K content to play. Outside of a few YouTube videos, any movies or shows you can watch right now are limited to 4K or HD resolution. This means the TV will simply upscale these videos to 8K. The QN900's upscaling does look good, especially on large screen sizes where the higher pixel density of its 8K screen can give it a cleaner appearance, but we just don't think the TV's resolution is worth the extra money to most people. The QN900C is the best looking QLED TV that Samsung has on offer this year, but it's not a huge leap over much cheaper 4K models like the QN90B. And despite having 4K resolution, we think Samsung's OLED TVs provide better overall picture quality thanks to their superior contrast. However, if you're really set on buying an 8K TV, this is the Samsung model to get.Samsung TV FAQsSteven Cohen/InsiderWhat kind of TVs does Samsung make?Samsung sells a variety of TVs and the brand's lineup can be best broken down into three categories: OLED, QLED, and Crystal UHD.Samsung's OLED TVs use organic light emitting diode panels that are capable of self-illuminating pixels. This means that they don't need a backlight and can produce perfect black levels and an infinite contrast ratio. Samsung OLEDs also use quantum dots which gives them an expanded color range. On the downside, OLED TVs are technically susceptible to burn-in in extreme cases, and even the best models can't get quite as bright as top QLED TVs.Samsung's QLED TVs use LCD (liquid crystal display) panels with LED backlights and quantum dots. They can't produce the pixel-level contrast and deep black levels of an OLED, but the best models can get brighter and there's no risk of burn-in. Top Samsung QLEDs, branded as Neo QLED, also incorporate Mini LEDs with full-array local dimming, which enables them to get a lot closer to the contrast performance of an OLED. Finally, Samsung's Crystal UHD TVs use entry-level LCD panels with LED backlights. These displays lack the color, brightness, and contrast capabilities found on Samsung's OLED and QLED sets. This series is meant for casual buyers who just want a basic smart TV and don't care about advanced picture quality.Does Samsung still sell HDTVs?  You can still find some older Samsung HDTVs in stock at several retailers, particularly in smaller screen sizes, but the company only has one notable HDTV model in its current lineup: the 32-inch Frame TV.HDTVs in 32-inch screen sizes and smaller can still offer decent value for buyers who just want a cheap, compact TV for casual viewing. But given how affordable entry-level 4K TVs have become, we generally recommend avoiding HDTV models that are larger than 32 inches. Are Samsung TVs better than LG TVs?Samsung and LG both make some of our favorite TVs, and it's difficult to say that one brand is actually better than the other. Instead, they both have key pros and cons depending on your needs and which specific TV models you're looking at.When it comes to LCD-based models, the best Samsung TVs are branded as QLED while LG's are branded as QNED. There are some differences in the panel technology each uses, but they're similar in overall capabilities. Samsung's high-end QLEDs, however, have an edge over LG's best QNEDs thanks to their higher brightness and better local dimming performance. Both companies also sell OLED TV models, and it's here where the competition gets tougher. Samsung's OLEDs use quantum dots, which gives them an edge in color performance over LG's OLEDs. But, LG's top OLED, the G3, uses Micro Lens Array technology to give it a boost in peak brightness. LG also has more OLED models and sizes to choose from, with options for more budgets. And no matter what type of TV you get, it's important to remember that LG's mid- and high-end TVs support Dolby Vision, while Samsung's support the competing HDR10+ format. Both high dynamic range formats offer similar capabilities, with scene-by-scene control over contrast and color, but Dolby Vision is used on more streaming services and 4K Blu-ray discs. What smart TV interface does Samsung use?Samsung uses a proprietary smart TV interface that's built using the Tizen operating system (OS). Unlike other interfaces such as Roku OS, Android TV, Fire TV, or Google TV, you won't find Samsung's Tizen platform on any other smart TV models or streaming devices. For many years, Samsung's Tizen OS featured a pop-up screen that displayed apps across a horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen, but Samsung updated its interface in 2022. Now, Samsung smart TVs use a full-screen homepage that organizes your favorite services and presents you with content recommendations. There's also a Gaming Hub section that lets you access cloud services like Xbox Game Pass, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Amazon Luna. Samsung's smart TV interface works well across its lineup of TVs, though it's not the smoothest OS we've used. Even high-end models, like the QN90B and S95B, are prone to some hiccups and slight lag here and there when navigating through menus and content libraries. Most buyers should be satisfied with Samsung's smart TV performance, and there are no major services or features missing. But if you prefer a different interface with slightly snappier navigation, we recommend checking out our guide to the best streaming devices for other options. Are Samsung TV's prone to burn-in?Samsung's QLED and Crystal UHD TVs are not susceptible to burn-in, but the company's OLED models can experience this issue in extreme cases. Burn-in occurs if a static image is left on an OLED screen for hours on end — the CNN or ESPN logo in the corner, for example — which can cause a faint, ghostly image to get stuck on the screen.Though Samsung OLED buyers should be aware of this risk, OLED TVs have built-in measures to prevent burn-in, including automatic pixel-shift modes and pixel-refreshers. Publications like Rtings have done long-term tests with many OLED TVs, including Samsung's models, and while results do show that burn-in is possible, the tests show that people with regular viewing habits don't need to worry about it. As long as you don't plan on watching CNN all day long, burn-in shouldn't be a factor when deciding whether or not to buy an OLED TV. But if you're someone that tends to watch just one cable channel for several hours every day, you're better off getting one of Samsung's QLED or Crystal UHD models so you don't have to think twice about burn-in. Do Samsung TVs support Dolby Vision?Even the best Samsung TVs are missing Dolby Vision support. However, Samsung TVs do support a similar format called HDR10+. Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are both dynamic metadata high dynamic range formats. This means that compatible movies and shows can include specific instructions for how your TV should handle HDR contrast and color on a scene-by-scene basis. This is in contrast to the standard HDR10 format, which is a static metadata format that can only include one set of instructions for an entire video, rather than scene-by-scene details. In practice, Dolby Vision and HDR10+ can deliver a more refined HDR experience with video quality that better matches the specific capabilities of your TV.Though Dolby Vision and HDR10+ both offer similar capabilities, Dolby Vision is supported on more streaming services and 4K Blu-ray discs, which makes it the more desirable of the two formats. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Full House Resorts, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript August 9, 2023 Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Full House Resorts Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is […] Full House Resorts, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript August 9, 2023 Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Full House Resorts Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Lewis Fanger, CFO of Full House Resorts. Please go ahead. Lewis Fanger: Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter earnings call. Before we begin, we did post some slides on the website. So if you go to investors.fullhouseresorts.com you’ll see that bronze banner. And if you hover over company info, you can go to the presentation section and find some of the slides that we’ll discuss today, including a bunch of current photos of some work going on at Chamonix. As always, before we begin, we remind you that today’s conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we’re making under the Safe Harbor provision of federal securities laws. I’d also like to remind you that the Company’s actual results could differ materially from the anticipated results in these forward-looking statements. Please see today’s press release under the caption Forward-Looking Statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results. Also, we may make reference to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of those measures, please see our website as well as the various press releases that we issue. And lastly, we’re broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today’s earnings release as well as all of our SEC filings. And with that said, ready to go, Dan. Dan Lee: All right. It’s kind of a complicated quarter, so I’m going to figure out where to start. But we’re busy these days and the business kind of falls into four categories. One is still ramping up the temporary. This was its first full quarter of operations, and it did well and it is getting better. The table games is starting to be a bigger factor, and we’re still hiring more dealers. We now rank third in the state and table games as of the July numbers that came out yesterday. Our steakhouse should arrive in late September. It’s disappointingly late. It’s basically a large diner. It’s coming in seven trucks, and they’re trying to line up the permits to bring these oversized trucks from Florida to Illinois. And it’s got to be assembled and opened. So it probably doesn’t get open until sometime in the fourth quarter. The sports book should be up and running in September. So we’re still pulling it together and still hiring people, but the trends are pretty good and it’s profitable. So it’s going very much the way most successful new casinos go. Second big task is completing construction of Chamonix in Colorado. It’s pretty unusual for a company our size to undertake two things at the same time, but we didn’t pick the timing in Illinois, and that’s how it ended up. And so we’re preparing for it to open on December 26. So it’s not only completing the construction, which is a job in half, but also preparing for the opening. Along those lines, we made some pretty good progress with the staff, the high-end restaurant, which we intend to be one of the best, if not the best restaurants in the entire State of Colorado. We’ve done a deal with Barry Decadence from Barry’s Prime Down at Circa. They used to run the 9steakhouse at the Palms. And before that, Barry was with REO, which is Charlie Palmers Company and was Manhattan and he moved to Las Bases, opened the one at Mandate quite a few years ago. But this is a guy who’s had Michelin Stars before. He knows how to run high-end restaurants and high-end restaurants in casino setting. So we’re excited to have them as part of the team. It’s an outside chef deal, very much like most of the restaurants at Bellagio, where they get a percentage of revenues and percentage of profit for running it, but it’s our restaurant, but they’re motivated to make it their restaurant as well. We have pretty — a small part of the overall business, but [indiscernible] pretty important, we have a prominent jewelry store on the property. We have a consultant from Santa Fe, who’s got a successful business there called Rock & Feather, and she’s helped them pull together how to make our jewelry store special. And in terms of new hires, we just hired Brett Modell, who I think, started work actually today. And that’s a pretty important hire. He’s Director of non-gaming operations. Recognize that this is a high-end hotel that we’re building here. And our team there has not operated a lot of this high-end stuff before. And so we needed somebody with that experience and Brett grew up in New York City, but he’s actually fluent Mandarin. He’s fully American his wife is from China, but he trained at Wynn Macau in Macau and then he helped open casinos in Vietnam and Nepal. He worked for Aman Resorts for a while in Bhutan. Aman is probably the highest end hotel chain that’s out there. And after working in China, he was running a hotel in crested view, which is where we found him. And he and his family were relocating to our part of Colorado, and we’re excited to have him on board and he can make sure that the hotel, the spa, the meeting and space, the food and beverage, all lives up to the expectations that the high-end customers expect. So he’s an important hire, and he starts today. So then the third thing, of course, is we have an existing company with existing properties, and that’s had some challenges. And in particular, in this quarter, the Silver Slipper had some cost issues. The payroll went up quite a bit and the revenues didn’t and that had an impact on the bottom line, and we’re getting that back under control. We’ve got a freeze on any was we’re looking at staffing numbers and we’ll get it under control. At in Tahoe, there was a huge winter in Tahoe and the snow has been gradual going away that caused the people to delay their return for the summer and the summer is pretty important up there. And now we’re in the heart of it, and it’s doing better, but in the second quarter that affected it. It’s an off-season quarter for the Tahoe property, and so it was down. In Colorado, the construction of Chamonix has been affecting Branco Billy’s for quite some time. That continues to be the case. [indiscernible] banalities because of Chamonix doesn’t have any parking. We try to operate Valley parking as best we can, and we shuttle from an outside lot, but all of our competition is on-site parking. And we don’t — we also don’t have an on-site hotel. We have a Battenberg two blocks away. All of that will change when Chamonix opens. But at the moment, Bronco Billy’s is making money in the summer, but it wasn’t in the second quarter. And then Rising Star and Indiana is doing okay, especially considering that there is a competitor that didn’t exist a year ago. And that’s the Churchill Casino at Sharp Park and I think Deco it’s a mature market. So when somebody adds a casino in a mature market like that, it becomes a market share game, and I think we’re holding our own. Then the fourth task that we’re busy with is, frankly, designing the permanent American Place. We’re incorporating a lot of what we’ve learned from the temporary. We’ve learned quite a few things. We haven’t started construction yet. There’s no — but we are actively designing it, which cost some money, but it’s — now there’s a lawsuit out there from the Potawatomi tribe, who is a competitor of ours to our north, and they filed a whole bunch of lawsuits not against us, but against the city and the state, that may end up delaying our start of construction and financing. I think ultimately, the suits will end up being resolved and everything go forward. But at the moment, it’s something — it just happened last week. We thought this soup was pretty much gone, and they had appealed something and the appellate court sent it back to a lower court. And so that puts it back into flux a little bit. And so that’s on the permanent. There’s a bunch of unusual stuff because we have a lower tax rate in Indiana than most of the other casinos because we’re the smallest one, and there’s — there’s a progressive tax rate in Indiana. There is an amount of free play that you’re allowed to deduct every year. We have found it makes sense for us to sell our free play to guys in a higher tax bracket, and we’ve done that every year for about five years now. And we did that this year in the first quarter for $2.1 million. We did it last year as well for $2.1 million, but it was in the second quarter last year. So looking at the year-over-year high results that kind of affects it. Generally, we’ll do it early in the year as possible because you never quite know during the pandemic year, for example, when we were closed for three months, fortunately, we had sold the free play before that period because with everybody being closed for three months, we might not have sold it for as much as we were able to sell it for. And so then on the sports books, Churchill got out of the online sportsbook business in the second quarter of last year. And when they did that, they had paid us an upfront fee plus a percentage of the revenues. The upfront fees of these deals go into deferred revenue when they pulled out of the deal that accelerated the unamortized deferred revenues, there was about $1 million of revenue and income in last year’s second quarter. Now one of those sports books that they backed out of, we now have a deal with a new company who paid us a new upfront fee and is paying us on a regular basis. But the big number there is the sports book operation in Chicago, where we repaid $5 million upfront, which again is deferred revenue. And we will receive a minimum of $5 million a year from that. And that starts in the middle of August, whether the sports book is actually up and running or not. But we do expect them to be up and running pretty soon. And if they’re very successful, we will get more than $5 million a year. But the minimum of $5 million starts in mid-August, and that’s by far the biggest of these. So Illinois, Indiana and Colorado, in Indiana, each casino has allowed three websites. In Colorado, each casino is out of one website, but we actually have three licenses. So we end up with three there as well. And there’s quite a few small casinos in the state, each of which gets a license. In Illinois, there’s, I think, 13 total casinos, if I remember correctly. And each gets one website. And of course, the population of Illinois is much bigger than either Colorado or India, actually bigger than Colorado and Indiana combined. So each website is worth much more. So that’s why our agreement in Illinois at the very important and coming on stream in a month and a week, I guess next week. Then there was some accounting issues and not unusual in a new casino, you find, you start up and then you’ll find some little things. And so for example, our progressive our slot machines, a number of them have a progressive type jackpot on them. You don’t start those at zero, you could have started them at something else because it’s not very exciting to look at a progressive jackpot at 0. And that amount, when you open, would be a charge to preopening costs and it’s a liability. And so I forget whether it’s a debit or a credit on the old T accounts. But it’s — there was about $300,000 that we missed. So we took that charge in the second quarter. We have a new finance person who helped us discover that. And we moved him from rising sun, and we think we have everything straight down now, but that was a little bit of a surprise for us. We do continue to have training costs in Illinois because we are trying to hire more dealers, and we we’re on our own dealer school, and we pay dealers their wage in order to go to the dealer school, we will also pay relocation costs to get dealers. And we’re gradually getting there. We have enough dealers now to operate 30 games on Saturday night, we’re allowed to have 50. And as people get more experience, we can also increase the table limits right now, we go to $5,000 a hand. One of our key competitors have got to $20,000 a hand. We don’t want to do that until we have our experienced dealers. And so that’s going on. And then I guess that’s the main unusual stuff. All of this stuff is going to get cleared up in the next few quarters. And a year from now, now we should be pretty mature at both of the new properties and generating a lot of free cash flow. So if we go to the presentation we put online that Lewis mentioned everything I just said, I meant to be kind of a summary, but I guess I went into a little more detail than a summary. But on the presentation that’s online, it notes that our revenues increased 34%. That’s really the temporary, which is most of that, in fact, more than all of it. Adjusted EBITDA declined, but a good chunk of that is the timing of the free play, the $1 million that I mentioned from the deferred revenue and the temporary actually made $4.1 million despite that accounting charge I mentioned. There’s a couple of other small accounting charges, it was closer to 4.5% to 5% if you back out the accounting charges. Which is — it’s not where we expect it to mature at, but for the first full quarter of operations, that’s respectable. And then we start getting sports guns here shortly. And part of the reason for my comfort with the results in Illinois is the next few slides. If you look at admissions, they’ve been trending up very nicely since April. Now when we first opened, you get a lot of tourists coming into town, what Mike Edson used to refer to as Lucky loose. People come in and look at the casino, but they don’t gamble a lot. And over time, you build a mailing list and you start replacing tourists with gamblers. And so since April, we’ve had a steady trend of admissions going up — and you can see, as a result, on the next slide, you can see our slot coin-in. Likewise, is steadily going up. And our table games drop steadily going up. Now on table games, it’s also affected by the fact that we are offering more tables at any given time, and we’re operating them more hours of the week than we had before, and we are also allowing larger bets over time. And so if you if you had these charts on the same scale, you’d see that table games drop is actually growing faster than the slot coin in, and that’s a result of adding more tables over time. And so a lot of our growth is coming from tables at the moment, but we’re continuing to show growth in slots. Slots will always be the preponderance of the business here, but tables are going to be meaningful in some of the markets, they’re not very meaningful. So going way back when we opened this is on Slide number 8, we had 28 table games by middle of May, we were at 36%. By now, we have 48, but we don’t have enough dealers to operate all 48. So we have about 30 open on weekends. But of course, we pull people from potential ships during the week in order to have more tables open on weekends. So as we hire more dealers, it helps how many tables we have open on a weekend, but it also helps some new tables we can open during the week. Generally, we — our table games or $15 minimum bet we might have during some times of the week $110 table as kind of a loss leader out there. But generally, we’re a $15 minimum table and up. And as mentioned in July, we were third in the state, which is pretty good for a place that’s only been open a few months. And then we expect to extend our week and table games hours to 4 a.m. Currently, it’s closed at two, and so we’re picking that up. The guest database, you can see, has been building. We’re now at about 40,000 people in our database. That’s pretty important. We started at zero. And this allows us eventually to be more efficient on our marketing costs. We are still spending quite a bit of money on marketing and advertising, getting our brand out, letting people know we exist and so on. But over time, we gradually are already being more targeted and that will continue to be more targeted as we have a more — a bigger debt base. It’s almost like — we were talking about the advertising agency. It’s like showing up at a lake in Wisconsin to go fishing, you’ve never been there before, and you don’t really know where the fish are. And so you end up going out in different places and dropping your bait. And over time, you start to realize that certain bays, certain death, certain areas have more fish and you start going back to those areas more and more. And that’s effectively what happens when you open a casino in a market where you haven’t been before. You gradually figure out who gambles and who doesn’t gamble and how to incentivize the people who actually gamble. So that’s Marketplace. On Chamonix on Page number 10, we show the original renderings of the project. It’s very large by Cripple Creek standards. I remind myself sometimes that it’s about 10% of the size of the casinos we built in Las Vegas 20 years ago, but is — we’re also a small company. So this has a pretty big impact on us. And — it’s $250 million. It’s a very high-end casino, 300 guestrooms. I remember Steve Wynn, when he opened the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, it had 500 guestrooms. And it was doing $100 million a year of income 25 years ago, 35 years ago, right? So if you get the right people and the guestrooms, you can make a lot of money. I mentioned the steakhouse. We’ve got a rooftop pool on spot, a nice parking garage and opens December 26. We’ll be having playnits that construction will get turned over to us early in December, and our employees will be practicing and doing playnits. And then we’ll send the employees home for Christmas with their families and open the day afterwards. So — like most families, I find you get together with your family and you all see a great Christmas and the day after Christmas was like, what the do we do now and you end up doing something else. Well, hopefully, we’re there something else. So we hope that we can have a lot of people there. And then we’re planning a significant party on December 31, which is both kind of an opening party and obviously, New Year’s Eve celebration. Page number 12 shows the front of the facade and all that fancy brick work is actual brick. Some of our competition one in particular use like a brick veneer, which is now peeling off. So ours looks really nice. We did spend the money that has some pretty fancy brick work which fits very well with the old buildings in town and then the hotel — a lot of the hotel rooms are in that glass thing up on top, which is designed to kind of meld in and reflect the clouds in the mountains and kind of masked the size of what the building really is. That one square rectangular building you see in front, the one story building has got a ladder leaning against it. That’s a jewelry store. And when we get the cities permission, it closed Second Street because this building squat right across Second Street. One of the commissioners said they didn’t want a big gap in the facade along the street. They thought that would take a wave, and there was some suggestion that we could take an old street car and put it there. There’s an old car at the street that uses tourist information both. We didn’t want to do that, but we said we’d build a jewelry store there that’s the size of a street car. So that’s what that is. Jewelry scores go very well with casinos. People will win money and then they have to bring home and voluntary jewelries someone wants called it. And so we think the jewelry store will be a nice amenity and it fits very well. And it was important to the city in order to get permission to close Second Street. So we addressed it in a good way. The high-end restaurant is those windows to the left. You can see a chimney there. That’s because where there’s valet pickup, where you have an outdoor fireplace that keep you warm while you’re waiting for your car. This is a cold climate and the main Valley entrances behind the jewelry store. The parking garage is on the back of the building. The next page shows the main part of the casino, the table games part. The other those tall windows will be shaded and they have curtains on the inside because you don’t want a lot of daylight into the casino, but we wanted the outside to look Regal. So we put these windows on the outside, but on the inside, they will not bring in a lot of light, but it looks right on the outside. The next page shows… Lewis Fanger: Dan, really quick. And then on Slide number 13 as well, important thing is just to see those blue warnings there. That’s existing probabilities. And so some of you that have never been to town often ask us how — just how tightly are they integrated. The answer is very tightly. You won’t have to leave the Bronco casino to go into the Chamonix casino. As you can see there, they’re essentially attached. Dan Lee: Yes. It’s a lot like going from Tomorrowland to fantasy land at Disneyland. I mean — it’s a different theme. You have to go through an arch in one direction and says, welcome to Bronco Billy’s, the other direction is as well from Chamonix. Your points are good from one to the other, but it has a different theme. Chamonix has more modern European sophisticated effect the tagline is European elegance with Colorado Comfort. And Bronco Billy’s is more WildWest historic Cripple Creek, like a lot of the casinos there are. On Page number 14, this is the back of the property. This is our parking garage, you can look down the back Quentin’s garage and it drops right down on the back of the casino. There’s some decorative stuff that goes up on this bare concrete that’s not up yet. But otherwise, it’s pretty far along. And as you can see, the sola there. we could use it if we could get occupancy permits and so on, except that the elevators from the parking garage go into the back of the Chamonix casino. And so I can’t use the garage to help Bronco Billy’s in the next few months because there’s not an easy way to get from those elevators into Bronco Billy’s. Page number 16 shows the table games pit. This is what I mentioned earlier, the big window on the outside, well, that’s one of those on the right in Tennessee, and that will get curtains. But the table games pit are quite elegant, very intricate molding going in here. To the left, you can see that steel door that’s closed, that would normally be open. That’s a fire door that goes from the new building, which is Chamonix to a historic building. And the very first historic building will also be partial, we have to have a firewall in between. And if you go through that and keep going, you end up in Bronco Billy’s. I’m not sure why Lewis included a public restroom other than. Lewis Fanger: Just, you can see that they look quite nice. That’s… It’s quite nice. Yes. Dan Lee: They’re better when they actually have toilet, but the finishes are quite nice. Page number 18, the escalators, which are in, they’re covered to protect them during construction, but there’s a set of escalators that goes up to the meeting space on the second floor. And we have significant surface parking space that you access of the second floor. And — and so that’s going to be pretty important. Moldings are going up on the meeting room space. We have a nice skylight there as well. And we’ve got on Slide number 19. Slide number 20 is the main ballroom, which is large by Colorado standards. And this is an important difference between us and Monarch, for example, we have pretty significant meeting space, Monarch really doesn’t. Ameristar does. And I think it’s important to helping Ameristar fill in the midweek and it’s going to be important for us midweek as well. And so we have a very nice meeting space that. Our site — I mean, Monarch did a nice job and they have a nice casino, but they’re in a very narrow lot. We’re not. We sprawl out better. And that allowed us to have a meeting room space that’s not wedged into a hotel tower. And that’s important for [indiscernible], even if you have entertainment or you have some function. And so that’s important. You see the meeting courtyard. This court courtyard actually serve several purposes. One is those are meeting rooms of the left. And obviously, we could have a high to party outside and so on, if it’s a nice day, which it often is there. And — but that’s also a quarter from the surface parking lot going those doors at the back and you’re right at the top of the escalators that feeds you down to the casino. And so it works very well. Next page is one of our guest rooms. Not all of our guest rooms have both the shower and bathtub, but quite a few do. That’s the shower behind the glass door in the back and a nice freestanding bathtub in the front, and toilets are in every case, in a water closet and nice stonework and so. Page number 24 shows we have quite a few rooms like this where there — you can see the headboard or where the bed is eventually going to go that sofa there is actually a Murphy bed. And that thing pulls down from the wall and that sofa kind of holds out of the way and supports the bed. And so it’s a pretty cool Murphy bed arrangement. So this room can be rented to a couple that went the extra space is kind of a sitting area or if you rented it to 2L couples traveling together, they have two coin-sized beds. So pretty nice room. And then Page number 25 is a picture of part of one of the suites. And number 26. We have two of these two story suites, there’s an upstairs, downstairs element, which is pretty cool and a lot of glass, a lot of views of the mountains and the gold mine and historic town, every room in our place or almost every room in our place has a nice view the handful that don’t, we’ve actually put nice patios on them, so you can at least sit outside, and that will be popular with people who might want to be able to smoke because you can’t smoke in the building in Colorado, but you could have a patio where you could. And then you can see on number 27, when I said we closed and bridged across Second Street, well, this is looking down second street. And this is the view from one of our suites. And then our pool deck, it’s a rooftop pool deck. Now the pool will be heated and open year-round, as is not uncommon at ski areas in places like Colorado. We have a pretty high-tech insulated cover that goes over it at night to try to reduce the heat loss, but the pool is as much an advertisement because from the competing casinos that you see in the background, that’s the Century Casino with the yellow ones there. And to the left of that is Triple Crown. They’ll be looking at the steam rising off our pool. It will be kind of visible throughout the town. And it’s one of those hey, look, they have a pool up there. There’s a pool that. And one wall of the pool that’s kind of in the foreground is actually plexiglass. So you could actually, from certain angles, see people actually swimming in the pool. And it’s not a huge pool, but it’s enough to give it a pull deck and the pull deck be a great place for events and parties and could even be — and if you have a warm summer day, you could turn it into a kind of almost a night club out there. So the pool is pretty important. We opted to let it be outside, let this team go off it. Pretty common at ski areas, whereas both Monarch and Ameristar have indoor pools on their highest deck, which is when the weather is nice, I’d much rather be outside. And frankly, if you want to have a polar plunge, we have a son, a couple of Sonos, not far from the pool and you can get warm a go jump in the pool in February — that’s always right. So then Page number 29 is just segment results. Lewis Fanger: You don’t need to go over the rest of the… Dan Lee: And we’ve already talked through it, I guess, and on that, I think I’m ready to take any questions. Right, if I missed anything? A – Lewis Fanger: No. We’re ready for questions, operator. Q&A Session Follow Full House Resorts Inc (NASDAQ:FLL) Follow Full House Resorts Inc (NASDAQ:FLL) We may use your email to send marketing emails about our services. Click here to read our privacy policy. Operator: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] One moment please, I will poll for questions. Our first question comes from Jordan Bender with JMP Securities, please go ahead. Jordan Bender: Good afternoon, thank for taking my question. I want to start on the funding for the permanent casino in Illinois. So I guess looking at my model at least, it looks like you’ll need to raise the permanent funding sometime in the middle of next year. I was just trying to get an update on when you guys are thinking about that timing as well as kind of the optionality behind the sources of where that money could come from. Thank you. Dan Lee: Well, we’ve always said that, that would be roughly the timing we’ve looked at our existing bonds become callable in February. And so refinancing the bonds gets a lot cheaper from February on, that’s still seven months away. The bond market has its ins and outs. It’s not a great bond market today. It’s not a horrible one. And we now have this lawsuit that came back again, and that will be something that factors into it. The fact is on our license, there’s no deadline of when we have to be open. And there are some limitations on how long we can operate the temporary. It’s possible that could be revisited. We would like to move forward as quickly as possible. We think the permanent makes quite a bit more than a temporary. We are continuing to refine the design, as I mentioned. But you’re not wrong in saying you’d like to finance it in the middle of next year, but if somebody says, “Well, it’s going to cost you 20% interest or something, then you’d say, well, maybe that’s not the best way to do it. We do still have a standby facility with a large private equity firm that’s there. It’s kind of expensive. We hope we can do it cheaper than that some other way. We think our stock at these prices is extremely cheap. And so that would probably be the most expensive way to do it. And so I can pretty much assure you there’s no issuance of equity being contemplated. And not pretty much, I can assure you that there’s no issuance of equity being contemplated. We could do a REIT deal as they have for the downtown project where a REIT provides most or all of the financing. And of course, the — once we get Chamonix open, we should be generating quite a bit of free cash flow. And so the longer it takes us, the easier the financing is. Now we would still like to move sooner rather than later. But delays aren’t all bad because it does make the financing easier. And so that’s where it is. I mean I don’t have an answer, but we have really a year to figure it out. So… Jordan Bender: Okay. Great. And then just turning to Colorado, the property historically has done about 10% to 20% margins just given the year, is that property ramps up, is it fair to assume that it should exceed that 20% margin? I guess how should we think about what the ultimate margin profile of that property looks like in fully ramped? Thank you. Dan Lee: Yes. I think we can have pretty high margins there as Monarch does. The gaming tax rate in Colorado is a progressive rate, but it caps out at 20%. And — so for regional gaming properties, it’s actually a pretty acceptable tax rate. Also, in general, if you’re the leading property in a market, if you’re the best property in a market, you usually have better margins. You don’t have to market quite as much. And I remember one time a long time ago, the CFO of MGM called me up when I was at Mirage Resorts and wanted to know what we spent on advertising. And I went and looked up the number and it was like $5 million. And he said, that’s not possible. MGM spends $30 million. And I said, well, does that include all the billboards for Sage Roy? I said, well, it’s a good question. Let me go check. And I went back to us, I said, yes, the preponderance of that is actually the billboards for Sage Roy. That’s still not possible. I said, “You know what, we had a volcano that was a really big attraction in a ton of palm trees, and they had a second plastic lion on their front door that nobody wanted to walk through. So of course, you have to spend money on marketing, and we didn’t. And so we will have, by far, the best property in Cripple Creek, and I think the best property in Colorado, one of the best properties in the Midwest. And I think that I’m not right away. It takes a while to get there. But long term, that will play into good margins and a great return. Lewis Fanger: A little more color for you, too. Another way to think about it is over in in Mississippi with Silver Slipper. Before we had that hotel, what you would see is a casino that would largely die out at 7:00 p.m., 8.00 p.m. really earlier than that midweek, maybe a little bit later than that weekend. But largely because you had people that didn’t want to drive home an hour on the roads and be too tired or drunk or all the things that we don’t want them doing either. And so when you have all of a sudden 300 rooms attached, you end up getting much better utilization out of a lot of your existing assets, whether they be the slot machines, the restaurants and all that other jazz. And so the margins, you should see a pretty meaningful move just from that alone. Jordan Bender: Great. Appreciate it. Thank you. Dan Lee: Yes. Monarch does not break out Reno from Black Hawk, but you can look back to when before they got Black Hawk opened, and it’s — and at what they were earning in Reno and so on, they only have the two properties. And it’s pretty clear they’re making at least $100 million a year there, and they have 500 [indiscernible]. Now they are an hour west of Denver, we’re in our west of Colorado Springs, but they have significant competition as well, including Ameristar. And we kind of don’t really — I mean the Golden Nugget has bought the Wildwood and is doing some minor fixing up, and it has 100 rooms in kind of a Hampton n-type hotel. They’re a good operator. I expect they’ll fix it up better. And so down the road, we’ll have better competition. But that’s five years away. We’re going to have a big lead on anyone else. And it’s not easy to assemble land in Cripple Creek. It took us years. So for somebody else to try to assemble something that would compete with us will not be easy. So I think we’ll be the leading casino there for quite some time. Jordan Bender: Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Lewis. Operator: Next question comes from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group, please go ahead. Ryan Sigdahl: Good afternoon, guys. You’ve covered a lot. So I’m going to ask two more specific questions here, both related to the temporary, but curious how much the cost burden is related to the dealer school in totality. I get it’s necessary, but curious of that cost. And then second, a lot on the revenue side, but curious how the margins have trended over the past couple of months and then into July with the ramp-up in revenue. Dan Lee: Yes. The dealer school is not huge. It’s probably including the people we’re paying to actually be trained and their instructors. It’s like $30,000 to $50,000 a month. But there’s other training of other job titles as well. But the dealer school is something. It is a drain, it’s not huge. The margins will get better. One of the main things driving it is we’ve still got a pretty robust advertising and marketing campaign. And as we get a bigger database and get more focused, we’ll be more efficient with the marketing. And so — I mean, listen, we’re comfortably profitable in our first full quarter of operations. And a lot of casinos are not. I mean I can tell you back when Liveris open in Lake Charles, the first full quarter of operations, it didn’t make much money at all, and then it’s made $100 million a year ever since. Bellagio, the first quarter of operations was so-so, and everybody is like the same question you’re asking me now, and Bellagio has done $400 million a year of income for 25 years now. And so we’re off to a good start No, the revenues aren’t where we expect them to be. The profits aren’t where we expect them to be. The margins where we expect them to be, but they’re okay and trending in the right direction. I should also mention, you’ll notice — I realize investors primarily look at EBDIT, which is appropriate in this industry. But sometimes newspaper reporters get caught up with the net income and operating income that accountants and their delusional craziness make us point be more prominent because the temporary is operating for three years, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we’re depreciating over three years. Now some of that will probably have ongoing value like the parking lots and so on. But that’s why you see such a large depreciation charge over the three years. Now for tax purposes, it’s not yet clear how fast we can depreciate it. But when we close it in three years, we’ll get an abandonment charge. So if you noticed a very big jump in depreciation, that’s because accountants take a very conservative assumption that the stuff like, for example, the restaurant stuff restaurant equipment and all this stuff, they just assume after three years, it’s worthless. And it probably is not worth us. And we have two air stream trailers that are mounted in the middle of the casino floor that are like food trucks. And it turns out they’re pretty popular. And so one of the things we’ve done is said, “Hey, let’s keep using those trailers, they’re not going away. So they’re going to be in the permanent and yet we’re, I believe, depreciating them over three years currently, which is a very conservative approach. Lewis Fanger: Maybe helpful to give you a little bit more there. So right now, the EBITDA margins are running in the high teens. One of the things that Dan hinted out is we are spending quite a bit more on marketing. One of the things that one casino should do, but one of the things that we had been hearing from players that had not gone into our facility is that they would see pictures of the tent and think why would I want to go to that, I’ll wait until you have the real thing. Now I think what anyone would tell you once they go inside the doors is it is unbelievably beautiful on the inside, not what you would expect from looking at on the outside. And so we’re spending a little bit more to try and drive more players into the building itself, trying to build up that database. And that’s going to be extended here for a little bit of time. There’s a new ad campaign that’s getting ready to roll out. So you at least see that for another quarter. But the — maybe the right takeaway for you guys is that the trends are all there. They’re upward. If you look at the month of July, we did $7.8 million or $7.9 million of gaming revenue in the month, that was up about $1 million from the prior month. And so the trends are there, and we’re feeling pretty good. Dan Lee: We recognize most of the casinos in the state have operated for 20 years. Rivers has operated for, I think, 12 years. And the only other recent one is the one in Rockville that’s been open a year longer than us, Rexford. And for us, all already after only a few months, we’re number three in table games and number six or number seven overall is pretty remarkable, given that everybody else is like a 20-year head start on this. Lewis Fanger: I’ll give you one more data point, and I’ll shut up. The — if you take the first full month of Rivers Casino is annualized the first full month of gaming revenue, you would have gotten to a number that was around $409 million or so. If you were to look a year later and look at the actual trailing 12 month of revenues, it was like $406 million or something. But once you cross that point, you start to see some pretty big increases in that overall revenue line today, as you probably know, it’s doing close to $600 million a year in gaming revenue. Now they’ve gotten more positions since then as well. But even in those early years, you saw a pretty meaningful upward move in overall gaming revenue. That’s no different than what we’ll have here. It’s been a pleasant surprise to see how well, how quickly we’ve gotten to number three for the table games revenue line. And the slot business always takes a little bit longer because you need that database, you need the free play to go out. And so that’s why we’re so focused on marketing and making sure that database builds up. Ryan Sigdahl: Great. Thanks, Dan, Lewis. Good luck, guys. Lewis Fanger: Thank you. Operator: Next question comes from Chad Beynon with Macquarie, please go ahead. Chad Beynon: This is Sam on for Chad. Thanks for taking the questions. I was hoping you guys could speak to any consumer trends or change in the promotional environment that you saw during the quarter and into August? Dan Lee: Yes, we’ve got so many big things going on that, that almost seems less important. But certainly, on the Silver Slipper, the property complains about the competitive impact they’re getting from a competitor down the road. But when we really got into the numbers, it was more of our own costs being up. And so we’re trying to get that more under control. Now I’m not saying that it is in a competitive environment, I believe it is. But does that mean there’s a recession in Mississippi, but it’s hard for us to know. And then like in Indiana, the revenues are a little soft. Is that a recession? Well, you get a new casino across the river in Boone County, that’s probably more important. And so I don’t see anything that I can point out and say that’s a recession. I would call on the clip side, our contractor in Illinois is telling us that construction costs have not come down. And so there’s a cytome that’s been hoping for a recession because maybe construction costs would get lower. You could argue that we would benefit more from a recession because of what it would save us in construction costs going forward. And — but the short answer is we’re probably the wrong people to ask. We’ve got so many things going on. It’s hard for us to tell. Somebody like Penn National has got 25 casinos all over the country and doesn’t build much. It’s probably a better company to ask that question, too. Chad Beynon: Fair enough. Lewis Fanger: Yes. I was going to say, like, if you look at Silver Slipper in particular, and to Dan’s point, we do have a little bit going on. Our admissions are down, but we also have a ’21 and over policy today that we didn’t have a year ago. You have to enter the casino to go to the buffet as an example. So you would expect admissions to be down. Wind per admission is up. But again, the denominator is down, so you’d expect that number to go up as well. Rated play seems to be pretty solid. We are seeing more rated players these days versus unrated players. So maybe some of the froth of the unrated play is going away, but it feels like the rated customer is still hanging in there for what it’s worth. Chad Beynon: Okay. Good to hear. I guess for a follow-up, any updates on the strategy for your remaining sports betting skins and potentially any future iGaming ones that you might acquire in the states that you operate? Dan Lee: We have one still outstanding, which is in color. Indiana, one of the Churches ones in Indiana, and we have been looking for somebody to take it on. We haven’t found anybody yet in terms that make sense to us. If iGaming comes to the states we’re in, and I think it will eventually, we will look at whether we do a similar thing with outside parties kind of writing on our license or do we take it up ourselves. And it’s quite possible we’ll do both. In other words, if gaming is legal in a state and we have three skins, we might keep one for ourselves and licensed others. Most of you know this. We didn’t get into the sports betting business ourselves because as a small company, you can end up upside down on that if one of the teams in the Super Bowl is from a market we’re in, but the other team is not, we would be out of balance. And we could move the line, but then we would not be providing as good a terms to our customers as our competition. And so we decided early on to leave it to people that have more experience in that field and just take a percentage of revenue. And that’s a reflection that there are certain games and notably the Super Bowl and basketball merged madness that are a very large part of the sports betting business. So you tend to have a lot of concentration on those events. In iGaming, where you’re allowed to play a slot machine online, that’s a large number of independent statistical events that’s the normal business we’re in. We’re comfortable with that. And you can lease or buy the software that allows you to run that website, the games themselves are owned by the slot companies, and they’ll license those pretty readily. We would have to hire people who specialize in marketing websites, but there’s a lot of those people available. So it is a business we could do on our own, but it’s not yet legal in any market that we’re in. So if it becomes legal, it’s a business we’d look at pretty seriously. And we don’t — it’s also not something you don’t have to be giant like you don’t have to be a draft Kings or find to make money in it. I mean we do have mailing list in each of these markets. And so you go to people and say, “Well, if you can’t come in, if you’re one of the 40,000 people in our database in Illinois and you can’t come in or you ended up in the hospital or you ended up in a nursing home or you’re on vacation, but you still want to play your slot game we have a way for you to do it. And so having that database of a physical casino gives you a market to advertise to. And you can go the other way around two and say, look, when you gamble online, you’re accumulating points that allows you to come and get a stay at our hotel. So we would — we don’t have to be a giant market share for it to be a profitable business for us. And so if it does become legal in the markets we’re in, we would probably try to do it in a financially responsible way. Chad Beynon: Okay. Great. Thanks for the color, Dan and Lewis. Operator: Next question comes from Edward Engel with ROTH MKM. Please go ahead. Edward Engel: Hey, thanks for taking the question. On the dealers in Bocian, just curious if you have any time line when you could be closer to being able to operate 40 to 50 tables on the weekends. Could that happen by the end of the year? Or is that kind of just an issue goes on progression? Dan Lee: We’re probably a month away to be able to have 40 to 50 tables in a week. We’re getting there. So recognize that the — where we are, the people who had dealer experience were already well embodied at rivers in the [indiscernible]. And so we’ve had to reach out and be creative. So we are paying relocation costs for dealers who are experienced and might live in the middle of Wisconsin or something, and we’re training dealers from scratch, and we are getting there. And by the way, we’ve learned from that in Colorado. So we’re trying to get ahead of the game in Colorado. But in Colorado, the existing dealers at existing casinos are looking at our building, which kind of is pretty impressive in the town and drilling over the tips that they make at our casino. So it’s probably an easier task. But even there, we are reaching out to dealers who might work at tribal casinos in Oklahoma and New Mexico, and so on. And so we’re trying to be ahead of the game, so we make sure we have enough dealers to operate the full table game pit when we open in December. Edward Engel: Helpful, thanks. And then for winter sport, the Serta Sportsbet opened in September, just curious if there’s kind of any marketing events planned and I would assume that would be on their expense some rain yours? Dan Lee: Well, the online — the in-house circuit place, we share the income from it. And we haven’t really worked out the details, but we would certainly publicize it and have some sort of event, but I don’t think it would be particularly expensive. So… Edward Engel: Helpful, thank you. Dan Lee: Yes. I mean we’d be silly to open it and not publicize it, but it’s not $1 million marketing cost. So Probably have time for one last question. Operator: Time for all the questions, and it comes from John DeCree with CBRE. Please go ahead. John DeCree: Hi, Dan. Hi, Lewis, thanks to squeeze in me here. Maybe two questions. And just to circle back to the topic today, which is the margin at Lachegan. I wonder if you could speak to where you think you can get the margin to at the temporary. And in that outlook, what’s kind of the order of operations? Is it more cost normalizing on labor, preopening and marketing and some of the things that you’ve talked about? Or is the bigger driver of getting that margin up really the additional revenue that you’d expect as the facility continues to ramp? Dan Lee: A little bit of both. I mean, as the revenues continue to go up, and you can see from the numbers, the number of admissions are going up, the revenue per admission is going up. That affects our gaming tax, of course, higher revenues, the higher gaming tax, but it doesn’t really affect the payroll very much. You have the same number of security goes. The slot machines are — the revenues on the slot machines could go up 50%, and our payroll probably wouldn’t go up 10%. And then on the marketing side, you gradually get more efficient. I mean marketing never goes to zero. But right now, we’re trying to tell people in this new campaign that you can’t judge a book by the cover. If you looked at the outside of the tent, you got to come inside and look at it. So there’s that. And actually, in my last question, I want to point out that one of the challenges in Illinois is the way the regulatory system works is they go through lots of different checks and balances and so on. And all of a sudden, they’re likely to say, okay, you can open the sport book. And so I didn’t want to give the impression that we would have a great big party on the operated sportsbook. It’s like literally you open the sportsbook and then you figure out how to advertise to people that you have it open. And so there will be some cost involved. I think the person who asked the question kind of says is they’re going to be a marketing event. There’ll be some marketing dollars. I don’t know if there’s necessarily an event. But it — this all takes time. You also — the other thing that happens in any new casino is you tend to have quite a bit of turnover. And you’ll open — I can’t remember when we opened Bellagio, we had 10,000 employees. And within months, you lost 1/3 of them, and it’s because they find that they didn’t really want to wear high heels all evening and serve cocktails or they didn’t really want to be a dealer or they didn’t really want to be a wait or whatever it is. And so those people leave and you have the recruiting and training costs to replace those. And then some portion of those leave and you have recruiting and training costs to replace those. And so it takes a few iterations before you kind of normalize into a stable workforce. And so even at the Silver Slipper, we have about — out of about 500 employees. It’s about 300 who are with us year in, year out, who have lots of tenure with us and they’re happy and we’re happy and they’re the core and there’s like 200 that turns over every year or two. And so we’re trying to figure out that core. And in the meantime, you do incur additional costs with recruiting and training and so on. And so over — it’s all part of the maturation. I think if you had total access to all the data in the entire industry, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a casino whose margins reached their highest point in their first full quarter of operations. Just it’s never the case. Your margins, in fact, sometimes you have no margin in your first quarter operation. And two years later, you get to kind of a normalized margin. And in this case, normalized margin is probably 30% in Illinois. And that’s — it’s not higher than that because of a very high tax rate there. And with the gaming tax in Colorado, it could be higher than that. John DeCree: That’s a good point, Dan, on the time to get to stable margins. I appreciate that color. Maybe a more detailed question, just to sneak one in to the extent you guys can comment as you spoke to the database a little bit as that ramps up. Curious if you could give us any insight into kind of your rated play mix at the property now and at least maybe some primers, how has that ramped over the last, call it, quarter and maybe where is it relative to what you’d expect at stable or some of your other operations to kind of give us some insight as to how much more runway you have to really get that database working for you? Dan Lee: Well, we’re already in the high 60s in Illinois. Some other markets were in the 80s. John DeCree: For rated play? Dan Lee: Rated play versus total play. But that doesn’t — what am I trying to say, as you attract more people, you get more rated players as well and recognize that the 40,000 people, that’s the total names we have. Eventually, you start to figure out some of those names don’t come back, right? And other ones come in all the time. And so you — even within the 40,000 people, you start to figure out, well, there’s 10,000 of these people that are pretty important. It’s like any other business, 80% of the revenues come from 20% of the customers. And so you keep getting smarter and smarter at figuring it out. And we have customers at some of our properties who are with us more than 100 days a year, they’re in our casino. And you gradually learn who they are and what they like and what appeals to them and what’s important to them. And a lot of times, they’re either independently wealthy are retired, and it’s just what they do for their entertainment. And — but until you know who those people are, you’re flailing around a little bit. And — but that’s part of the normal maturation of a new casino. So just like any other new business, I suppose, I mean, if you open a clothing store just because somebody came in and bought a tie, it doesn’t mean you’re going to see them every month. I don’t know if does anybody buy ties anymore. But any way, you get the deal. John DeCree: Thanks, Dan. Appreciated. Thanks, Lewis. Lewis Fanger: I think we’re done. Dan Lee: Okay. Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody. We’re very busy. And over the next six months, this will all normalize out. And we’re very excited to get Chamonix open and then eventually to get going on permanent, but we’ll get going when the time is right. So thank you. Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. 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Olaplex Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:OLPX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript August 8, 2023 Olaplex Holdings, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.03 EPS, expectations were $0.05. Operator: Greetings. Welcome to Olaplex Holdings, Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the […] Olaplex Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:OLPX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript August 8, 2023 Olaplex Holdings, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.03 EPS, expectations were $0.05. Operator: Greetings. Welcome to Olaplex Holdings, Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Patrick Flaherty, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin. Patrick Flaherty: Thank you, and good morning. Joining me today are JuE Wong, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Eric Tiziani, Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, I would like to remind you that management will make certain statements today, which are forward-looking, including statements about the outlook of Olaplex’s business and other matters referenced in the company’s earnings release issued today. Each forward-looking statement is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in or implied by such statements. Additional information regarding these factors appears under the heading Cautionary Note regarding forward-looking statements in the company’s earnings release and in the filings the company makes with the Securities and Exchange Commission that are available at www.sec.gov and on the Investor Relations section of the company’s website at ir.olaplex.com. The forward-looking statements on this call speak only as of the original date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements. Also during this call, management will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which management believes can be helpful in evaluating the company’s performance. The presentation of non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. You will find information regarding these non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the company’s earnings release. A live broadcast of this call is also available on the Investor Relations section of the company’s website at ir.olaplex.com. Additionally, during this call, management will refer to certain data points, estimates and forecasts that are based on industry publications or other publicly available information as well as our internal sources. The company has not independently verified the accuracy or completeness of the data contained in these industry publications and any other publicly available information. Furthermore, this information involve assumptions and limitations, and you are cautioned not to give undue weight to these estimates. With that, I will turn the call over to JuE Wong. JuE Wong: Thank you, Patrick, and good morning, everyone. As outlined in our press release issued this morning, we had a challenging second quarter. Net sales of $109 million were below our expectations of modest sequential improvement from the first quarter and adjusted EBITDA was $36.7 million or a margin of 33.6%. With weaker-than-expected results in the second quarter coupled with our updated assumptions for the remainder of the year, we are reducing our guidance for fiscal 2023, expecting net sales in the range of $445 million to $465 million. Overall, our business continues to be negatively impacted by competition, a more promotional environment, and misinformation related to our brand. Despite these headwinds, we are continuing to invest by increasing efforts on upper funnel marketing designed to build brand equity and expanding our focus and support for the important professional community. Let me take a step back and walk through the perspective of what drove the revision to our full year outlook. Earlier this year, we announced that we are approaching 2023 as a reset year to build a stronger and more resilient foundation to position Olaplex for long-term growth. The prestige haircare category which Olaplex revolutionized in 2014 has evolved into a healthy and vibrant category, but with more competition. In order to support our future growth, we must continue to amplify our investment and expand our marketing and educational capabilities. And to that end, we initiated an integrated full funnel marketing approach this year to build brand awareness, increase consideration and drive conversion. And beginning in the second quarter, we invested heavily in upper funnel and other creative marketing activity aimed at building long-term equity around the sign and emotional connections associated with the Olaplex brand. When we introduced annual guidance earlier this year, our visibility was limited as there was uncertainty regarding how shifting market dynamics will impact the business. We anticipated that trends will stabilize in the second quarter and sales demand will rebound in the second half of the year as our increased investments in sales, marketing and education began to yield returns. We also expect it to benefit from new product introductions and new distribution gains. However, we have now seen a weaker sales trend persists since our first quarter earnings call in May through June. While our loyal customers remain highly engaged with Olaplex, we believe a continuation of negative factors have impacted the business. We recognize that these factors are having a particularly negative impact on the performance of our professional channel and views of the brand with some members of the stylist community. As a result, we are revising our forecast for the balance of the year using this recent trend as the run rate for the business. We recognize that it will take a sustained and balanced approach to investing in marketing, education, innovation and brand-building activations to grow the business. Several key assumptions have changed in this new outlook. First, demand slowed as trends weakened in our Professional and Specialty Retail channels due to slower sellout and some customers rightsizing their inventory position. Second, while we are beginning to see some positive early indicators from our upper funnel market campaign, we are not yet experiencing the list that we were anticipating across the business, and we expect that this activity will begin to deliver stabilization on an absolute basis rather than growth during the second half of the year. And third, given our updated view on our trend line, we believe it is prudent to lower our expectations for consumer demand associated with new product introductions and new distribution gains. Eric will provide more details on our outlook later on in the call. We believe we made progress towards achieving stabilization. Based on data from a third party, we have seen a lift in awareness and positive opinion of Olaplex following the start of our upper funnel marketing campaign in June. Similarly, olaplex.com has experienced increased traffic and improved conversion after the campaign launch. And because that channel tends to act as a leading indicator, given its close proximity to the end consumer, we believe the messaging, content and creative assets of the campaign are resonating. And as we balance selling activities with demand, we believe the months on hand inventory positions at our major accounts on our core items are in a much better place relative to their targets. We have worked to normalize inventory levels with this partners in response to slower than originally planned sales and decisions from this partners to lower overall month-on-hand levels than previously carried. To put this in context, in the first half of 2023, net sales, all selling declined 44% overall, while sell out at key accounts are down approximately 26%. Some of this difference can be attributed to the lapping of previously communicated prior year one-offs, namely our 1-liter pipeline launch, Ulta pipeline in Q1 of 2022, and the impact of our July 1, 2022 price increase. The remainder of the difference between sell-in and sell-out can be attributed primarily to discontinued customer destocking actions in response to our lower demand. Our team is focused on executing and improving our sales trend through brand building and education activations that we believe are the strongest levers to engage loyal users and bring new and lapsed customers to Olaplex. We are increasing the amount of investment for this year and are adjusting the mix of that investment as we test, learn and optimize our initiatives. We are raising our expectation for marketing, inclusive of sampling and certain sales and marketing payroll to increase to a range of $80 million to $85 million in 2023 compared to our previous expectation of $70 million and up from $40 million in 2022. With this change, we are increasing aspects of our new brand campaign, re-purposing some of the upper funnel out-of-home activations towards media and connected TV and focusing more efforts on improving our standing with the Pro community. As we adjust our plans for the year, we continue to make progress against our 4 key priorities. These are accelerating investments in sales and marketing, increasing and evolving our educational assets, reasserting our position with our Pro and Specialty Retail partners and improving our approach to PR. Let me now walk you through the progress we made on this initiative during the second quarter. Beginning with sales and marketing. Year-to-date, we invested approximately $40 million of the planned $80 million to $85 million investments for the year. In May, we kicked off an integrated full funnel creative campaign titled Strength Starts Inside, featuring paid media, digital, social, connected TV, audio and out-of-home activations. With this campaign, we intend to amplify our scientific authority by highlighting how Olaplex build strength from the inside with our patented bisamino technology as well as strengthening emotional connections with our community of Pro’s and customers who aspire to bring out their own inner strength. And in June, we generated excitement of our 9-year anniversary as a company by celebrating National Olaplex Day. To celebrate this milestone, we hosted events with our professional ambassadors and activated fully branded guerilla street sampling teams near local Sephora and also Ulta Beauty doors in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Turning to education. We continuously look for new and better ways to inform stylist and consumers about the superior performance of our iconic products. In that vein, we are implementing a more active and engaged approach to field education and are establishing our own internal retail field sales team. You may recall that during the fourth quarter of last year, we deployed a pilot of a third-party field sales team trained by Olaplex and following positive results, expanded the program to 400 Sephora and Ulta Beauty doors during the first quarter. This progress has demonstrated the impact we can have in driving in-person education with consumer and beauty advisers. An internal retail field team is not only more cost efficient than engaging with a third party, but we believe that we will have even better control of training on the Olaplex brand. Our third priority is to reassert our position with our Professional and Specialty Retail partners. The Professional community remains as the foundation of our brand and its core to maintaining our credibility in the category. We know it is critical to address and solve the issues we are facing in that channel by increasing our visibility and investing more to deepen engagement with stylists. To that end, the team is implementing new and incremental full 360 activations to show our support for the Pro audience driven primarily by participating in high visibility distributor-led events, stylist appreciation days and in-store activities. In addition, we continue to increase in-person and virtual sales contracts and training with our new field sales managers and expanded education team, both in North America and in internationally. We piloted and expanded data-driven programs to help our distributor partners target and secure new Olaplex salons and are advancing our key opinion leader program by adding new salons and cultivating relationships with existing partner salons. For Specialty Retail, we are continuing to partner with our key accounts to expand CRM campaign and education content. We also introduced new visual merchandising, reflective of our new brand campaign and made progress on international expansion. Our fourth priority this year is to build out and enhance our PR capabilities. With a focus on strengthening our global reputation, scaling influencer, marketing and delivering growth in earned media value, our PR assets are aimed at telling the story of our brand and educating consumers about our technology. We are broadly distributing content in partnership with our brand ambassadors, focus on Olaplex and hair health, via digital and social channels. We intend to continue to develop the Olaplex Scientific Advisory Board program, which consists of a group of medical and scientific experts who will help guide us on ways to develop educational content that underscores the safety and scientific capability of our products. We also continue to actively defend our brand against allegations that claim Olaplex product caused hair loss. In July, the court granted Olaplex’s motion to sever and dismiss the claims. As a result, all 101 plaintiffs are currently dismissed without prejudice. Turning to our progress on investing in our people and building out our team. I am pleased that J.P. Bilbrey has joined our Board in the newly created role of Executive Chair. J.P. joined us about a month ago, bringing extensive experience with growing and evolving global consumer brands after having served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Hershey Company and currently serving on the Board of Directors of Tapestry, Elanco Animal Health and Colgate-Palmolive. It is a testament to the opportunities ahead of Olaplex that we could attract a leader of its callable and credentials. J.P. will be valuable in addition to the Olaplex team and we are thrilled to welcome him to the board. I look forward to partnering with him and receiving his guidance on ways to implement best practices and processes as the company scales. In summary, while it is a challenging period for Olaplex, we continue to be confident in the long-term opportunities for this business. The prestige haircare category is in its early stages of growth, and we are an industry leader, offering fully differentiated sign with our patented bisamino technology. We believe we can reach new customers and reclaim users as we invest in our marketing model and develop within the international markets and we believe we have a compelling multiyear innovation pipeline that enables us to expand our product offering. With that, I will now pass it over to Eric to cover our second quarter results in more detail and provide additional information on our revised outlook for 2023. Eric? Eric Tiziani: Thank you, JuE, and good morning, everyone. Net sales in the second quarter declined 48.2% to $109.2 million. This was below our expectation of modest sequential improvement in absolute dollars from $113.8 million in the first quarter as our Professional and Specialty Retail channels experienced slower demand and some customers further rightsize their inventory positions in response to current trends. We also lapped 2 challenging comparators from Q2 2022. First, we lapped an approximately $22 million net sales impact in the second quarter of 2022 from the introduction of 1-liter size offerings in the North America Professional channel. Second, in the second quarter of last year, we experienced some pull forward in demand of approximately $10 million as some Professional customers chose to buy ahead of our announced price increase, which took effect on July 1 last year. By channel, the Professional channel sales declined 61.2% to $40.9 million versus a 32.7% increase last year. Our Direct-to-Consumer channel sales were down 6.4% to $38.5 million compared to growth of 19.3% a year ago. And Specialty Retail sales decreased 53.7% to $29.8 million following an increase of 68.5% in the prior year period. Moving down the P&L. Adjusted gross profit margin was 72.7%, down 250 basis points from 75.2% in the second quarter of 2022. Approximately 320 basis points is related to higher inventory obsolescence reserve. 230 basis points related to promotional allowance and 110 basis points from inflation on product costs, with the remainder from deleverage and inflation in our warehousing and distribution costs. These more than offset the benefit of favorable channel mix as the overall mix shift to Direct-to-Consumer drove plus 350 basis points as well as the price increase we took from July 1, 2022, which contributed 100 basis points of favorability. Adjusted SG&A grew 73.4% to $42.2 million from $24.4 million in Q2 2022. The $17.8 million increase in adjusted SG&A from prior year is primarily the result of a $14.1 million increase in sales and marketing expense, including the upper funnel marketing campaign that launched during the second quarter as well as an increase in payroll attributable to workforce expansion and other related expenses. Adjusted SG&A excludes $3.5 million related to a onetime settlement with a former distributor in the United Arab Emirates, which allowed us to establish a partnership with another distributor in the country. For the first half of 2023, we have spent $40 million in sales and marketing against our updated $80 million to $85 million full year investment. Adjusted EBITDA declined 72.4% to $36.7 million versus $133.1 million in the second quarter of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 33.6% compared to 63.1% a year ago. Adjusted net income decreased 78.5% year-over-year to $21.2 million or $0.03 per diluted share from $98.8 million or $0.14 per diluted share in the 2022 2nd quarter. Turning to our balance sheet. Inventory at the end of the first quarter was $128.5 million, down from $132 million at the end of the first quarter. We continue to make progress on efforts to lower our inventory levels as the sequential reduction was driven by lower inventory levels of core SKUs to match a lower sales forecast, which more than offset building inventory of new SKUs as we prepare for product launches this year. Turning to cash flow. During the first 6 months of 2023, we generated $71.1 million in cash from operations. As we shared in past calls, we anticipate another year of healthy cash generation as we have a highly profitable business model and improve our working capital position, primarily through lower inventory. We ended the quarter with $378.4 million in cash and equivalents, which is generating interest income at around 5%. Long-term debt, net of current portion in deferred fees, was $651.7 million. Now turning to our financial outlook. As JuE mentioned earlier in the call, we are revising our guidance for 2023. Let me walk you through our revised guidance and assumptions for the remainder of the year, starting with the top line. For fiscal year 2023, we expect net sales in the range of $445 million to $465 million, down from the previous range of $563 million to $634 million. At the midpoint of both ranges, this represents a reduction of approximately $144 million, which can be broken down into 3 primary buckets. First, the combination of weaker-than-expected results in the second quarter and our assumption of lower baseline demand in the second half of the year amounts to approximately $60 million. Second, we are no longer assuming baseline demand improvement in the second half of the year and now believe the investments we’re making will first deliver stabilization of baseline sales on an absolute dollar run rate basis. The removal of this lift amounts to approximately $50 million. Third, while we still expect to benefit from the impact of new product introductions and new distribution gains, we are lowering these assumptions by approximately $35 million compared to our original assumptions given recent sales trends. With this new outlook, second half 2023 net sales at the midpoint are now expected to be $232 million versus $223 million in the first half of 2023. We expect to experience the addition of holiday kits in the second half of the year which is a benefit relative to the first half of 2023. Given that our holiday kits are sold to Professional and Specialty Retail customers, primarily in the third quarter, ahead of the winter holidays, we expect net sales in the third quarter to be higher than the fourth quarter of 2023 on an absolute basis. For the same reason, we anticipate sequential improvement in sales on an absolute dollar basis in the third quarter versus the second quarter of 2023 for both the Professional and Specialty Retail channels. Conversely, we expect our Direct-to-Consumer channel to decline sequentially on an absolute dollar sales basis in the third quarter due to timing as we shipped inventory in Q2 ahead of a major customer promotion in July. In the third quarter, from the perspective of year-over-year net sales growth rates in order of magnitude, we expect Specialty Retail to be the most pressured followed by Direct-to-Consumer and Professional. Specialty Retail faces the most difficult comparison from a year ago when the channel experienced robust growth due to incremental distribution and a higher sell-in of holiday kits. We now anticipate 500 to 600 basis points decline in gross margin for the year compared to our initial assumption of 300 to 400 basis points of contraction. The primary driver of this is deleverage from lower sales volumes on our fixed warehousing costs as well as the actions we are taking to work through excess inventory. This more than offsets the positive impact of cost savings and price increases implemented in the second half of 2022. In the medium term, as we work through higher cost and inventory obsolescence impacts and as baseline demand improves, we believe that we can return closer to our historical adjusted gross margin levels in the mid-70% range. Given the lower net sales forecast against our expectations for increased operating expenses, which includes increasing our sales and marketing investment for the year, as JuE previously discussed, we now expect more adjusted EBITDA margin deleverage than our prior assumption. For 2023, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $161 million to $176 million or a margin of 36.2% to 37.8%. This compares to our previous range of $261 million to $322 million or a margin of 46.4% to 50.8%. We continue to expect interest expense to be $40 million and adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 20% for the year. In conclusion, despite our disappointment with this weaker outlook, we are reminded of the pillars that make Olaplex a unique brand and a great business. We are a science-led company, and with our commitment to making people feel more confident with healthier, more beautiful hair, we have built an industry-leading brand that enjoys trust and credibility from a highly engaged community of professional stylists and consumers. We are driving a synergistic omnichannel strategy and have the support of our customers who view us as a strategic partner of choice for the future. And our highly profitable model and strong cash generation afford us the opportunity to invest to improve our performance and capitalize on the long-term growth opportunities ahead of us. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator? Q&A Session Follow Olaplex Holdings Inc. Follow Olaplex Holdings Inc. We may use your email to send marketing emails about our services. Click here to read our privacy policy. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Susan Anderson with Canaccord Genuity. Alec Legg: Alec Legg on for Susan. Just a question on your sellout comments. You said it was down about 26% at key accounts. How much do you think is driven due to misinformation driving demand down versus tougher comps and then also, I believe there should be some headwinds from the sell-ins of those 1-liter bottles, which extends the need for consumers to replenish? Just any details there? Eric Tiziani: Eric Tiziani here. I’ll take that. So that’s right. What we disclosed on the call that our net sales decline for the first half of the year was 44% against a minus 26% consumption decline at our key accounts. And that difference is partly explained by the one-offs from the prior year in sell-in. So the 1-liter launch that you just mentioned in the first half of last year, Ulta pipeline shipments from Q1 of the prior year and some impact from pricing pull forward in Q2 of last year as well, all of which we previously disclosed. And while there’s some ins and outs, the remainder of that difference between net sales decline and the consumption decline can primarily be explained by what we’ve seen as further customer inventory rightsizing and as JuE mentioned earlier, we believe that based on current sales, our inventory position on core items at key accounts is in a much better place going into the second half of the year. This is, of course, dynamic. You also asked of the minus 26%, how much is being driven by these headwinds that we’ve talked about. So competition, misinformation and a higher promotional environment, we’re not really breaking that minus 26% out in that way, just to say that those continue to be the primary headwinds that the business has been facing. Alec Legg: And then a follow-up on the marketing spend. So you’ve been investing heavily in that this year. I guess, what type of ROIs are you seeing? And then is it primarily top of funnel, just to build awareness or are you also spending fairly equally or just how to think about spending on retention? JuE Wong: This is JuE, and I will take that. So we have always said, right, the category that we have created is now more attractive. And therefore, in order for us — you can’t build on the awareness for the category. We really need to step up on our investment in upper funnel as well as to support our Pro community. So we will continue to test, learn and optimize on our initiatives and it is an integrated full funnel investment approach. So we will look at the mix. And as things work, we will start to figure out what is best to count increase, whether it’s in consideration, whether it’s in conversion or continue with the upper funnel, which is building brand equity and brand awareness. Operator: Our next question is from Andrea Teixeira with JPMorgan. Andrea Teixeira: JuE, can you comment on the exit rate of the consumption number you quoted, the consumption decline of 26%. I understand this is the first half, I guess, first half of last year. So I was hoping to see if there is any improvement there in terms of consumption or conversely, if things go worse as you progress the quarter. And then related to your investments, especially [indiscernible] salons and increased awareness of the brand, how — can you comment a bit on — at this point, I think you’ve been through about 8 months of the campaign where you get a sample — your samples — number three after service. Like wondering if you can give us an idea how that converted? And lastly, on the shelf space, can you talk about — I understand that part of the decline in guide was expectations for a modest shelf space growth. So I was wondering if you can comment on how are you feeling about before the back wall. If there is anything we should be aware of in terms of negotiating with the quarter next year. JuE Wong: Well, thanks, Andrea, for the question. It’s a 3-parter. So what I’m going to have is Eric to answer on the consumption first and then I’ll kick the investment in the salon and Pro and the shelf space question. So Eric? Eric Tiziani: Thanks, JuE. Andrea, so on the exit rate, you’re right. The number that we quoted, the minus 26% was the consumption decline at key accounts for the first half of the year. We did say on the call that we saw some deterioration in that number in the second quarter. So it was moderately worse in the second quarter than the first quarter. And what you see in our outlook and our updated forecast is we’ve taken that second quarter absolute dollar sales run rate and use that to project forward a new baseline level of demand for the back half of the year. That’s a key assumption change. We’re now focused on using the investments we put into the business to stabilize that sales trend in the back half of the year so that we can get them to a point where we can rebound to growth in the future. So that’s just a comment on the exit rate, and I’ll turn it back over to JuE. JuE Wong : Thanks, Eric. And Andrea, to answer your question on the investment in salon professional standpoint, as we have always stayed true to the course and this is why you are seeing us going into the field sales team with our own team members, where it’s not only more cost efficient, but we can also really communicate our message much more directly and also train our own people in stores. We are seeing positive impact that’s why we are moving into this direction. But it is still early for us to kind of say when everything is tracking, and we are working toward, as you have heard us say, on the back half towards stabilizing the business so that we can look at continue — as we go into the new year with a better foundation and a more resilient Olaplex, as we have mentioned. These — both the salon channel and which is the Pro channel and our retail channel are very supportive of our integrated full funnel approach so you have seen that in conjunction when we do all of this out-of-home activation, there is also people in store that help support traffic that’s being driven in there, and there’s also visual merchandising that conveys the same message. So that is a 360 approach when the customers see it in out-of-home, in the billboards, then they go into a store and are being intercepted by a sales beauty adviser that knows about the brand and then seeing the same visual being expressed at our shelf space. Your other question regarding shelf space, we obviously cannot speak on behalf of the retailers, but I can tell you, we have top-to-top meetings where we continue to be able to show them the equities of Olaplex. We are still per numerator, the brand that drives the most new customers into the category. We are in the top 5 ranking in terms of haircare prestige brands in all the channels that we are in and we continue to score high on all the equities that is a brand that consumers trust that we are — addresses damaged and repair hair, that we are also a brand that is represented by science and technology. When you have all that called equities and when you have meetings, top-to-top, these are considerations that they take and my last — my point about driving new customers into the space, into the category, that’s a powerful type of driver for both the retailers and our professionals because awareness is primarily what they need from a brand so that fit it into doors will materialize into conversion. Operator: Our next question is from Bill Chappell with Truist Securities. Bill Chappell: One question on gross margin. Just trying to understand, I mean, I think some of the pressures that you’ve talked about are in near term or short term as you work out inventory and obsolescence. Do you have a pretty good visibility? I mean when they will pop back? And as we look at the first quarter of 2024, should some of these things go away based on kind of your sales forecast? To feel like that some of the noncash or short-term type stuff should go away pretty quickly. So any color there? Eric Tiziani: Yes, Bill, I’ll take that one. We continue to believe that we can return to a normalized adjusted gross margin in the range of the mid-70% and as you point out, some of the challenges we’re facing in our gross margin in 2023 are near term and we believe more temporary issues depressed in 2023 due to deleverage from lower sales on some of our fixed costs like warehousing as well as what we cited as impacts from working down higher inventory levels. That includes the impacts of providing for inventory obsolescence risk as we have in the first half of the year. So when you normalize — when we get through stabilization in the second half of the year and return to growth, we see those tailwinds returning and are confident in an adjusted gross margin range in that mid-70s, which, of course, then gives us the ability to continue investing back into the business. Bill Chappell : Got it. Just to clarify. So margins — gross margins will, I guess, trough next quarter and then maybe improve sequentially as you move to the fourth quarter? Eric Tiziani: So as we mentioned in our guidance color, we now expect adjusted gross margin for the full year to be that minus 500 to 600 basis points versus last year. So it’s a similar trend in the second half of the year that we’ve seen in the first half of the year. And as sales normalize and as we get through 2023, we believe we’ll have less of these temporary headwinds and return into that adjusted gross margin level of the mid-70s. Bill Chappell: And then just a follow-up to a question we’re getting in, what gives you confidence that this is a good number in terms of sales for this year? I’m trying to understand kind of on consumer takeaway, where that fell this past quarter versus your expectations. I mean, we all knew it was going to decline. There’s a lot of noise out there, but just trying to understand how much worse and what you saw intra-quarter and even as we went into July that kind of gives you confidence in the updated guidance. Eric Tiziani: Yes, Bill, I’ll take that one. We thought it was important to share quite specifically the changes in our key assumptions from our prior guidance to this guidance, which, as we mentioned, we’re, number one, the change in the assumption on baseline level of demand and this new approach to forecasting the back half based on just the run rate we’ve seen in absolute sales in the second quarter. The second one was a more prudent view around the fact that it’s going to take time for our marketing investments, particularly those upper funnel investments to show a lift. We believe it’s going to help us stabilize the trend in the back half of the year, and we’re very confident that it continues to be the right thing to do for the long-term trajectory of the business. And then the third change in the assumptions that we cited were around the impacts of our new innovation and new distribution in 2023, which we continue to be very proud of and believe are going to be drivers of growth into the future. It’s really a call down that is more related to the overall headwinds that the brand is facing. So we believe taking this run rate from the second quarter into the second half of the year, assuming stabilization with the green shoots that JuE mentioned on the call about where we see our investments working, particularly olaplex.com, which is where we’re driving a lot of traffic from our marketing investments, we believe, could be a leading indicator for that inflection point for the business. Bill Chappell: And just to clear about how July were shaping up or any improvement there? Eric Tiziani: We’re not commenting, Bill, on any intra-quarter trading. We’ll just say that all the trends we’ve seen to date have been reflected in the outlook that we’ve provided. Operator: Our next question is from Dana Telsey with Telsey Advisory Group. Dana Telsey: As you think about the haircare category, any updates on the performance of the haircare category and how it’s done, how it’s performed relative to your own performance? And with the updated guidance, are there any adjustments that are being made in terms of new product introductions or expectations on performance? JuE Wong: Thanks, Dana. This is JuE, and I will take that question. In terms of the haircare category through [Circana], that really looks at the distribution that we participate in. It has shown that the category is up 14% and obviously, you have seen that. We are reporting in Q2 that is that our Q2 is down from the last quarter. But what is encouraging to see that is that, that 14% is not an increase based on 1 or 2 brands, but a collection of brands because as we have mentioned, we have seen a lot more competition coming into the space. And then what happens is because Olaplex is the driver of new people coming into the category, you have a lot of people who are not familiar with the Prestige haircare category that is exploring and treasure hunting. And this is where we believe through our increased investment — I mean, I emphasize again, it is a category that we created in such a way that we know that the new normal here for us is to really focus on the communication, the investment and the support of the Pro community, and we have been doing that and we are double clicking on it. And we believe that as this category grows, we are leading it and we can participate in it despite the current headwinds that we are seeing from the increased competition, from the promotionality in the business as well as some of the misinformation that is circulating in the market space. The other question that you have regarding new product innovation, we are very intentional in terms of how we innovate and support our R&D launches. And that is because any time we launch something, it has to meet 2 high box. One, it is definitely going to add to our technology in such a way that it depends on the technology that we have to really drive performance. The second is that we participate in segments that are large but yet not cannibalizing the products that we have. So a good example is when we launch a clarifying shampoo or a purple shampoo, it does not cannibalize our existing shampoo and conditioner. So those are the very intentional strategy that we put behind our launches. And so innovation will continue to be a part of our growth but again, we emphasize, it’s not about just piping in innovation for revenue but piping in innovation that truly speaks to our technology and speaks to the segment we participate and lead in. Dana Telsey : And just one follow-up on inventory levels. How are you thinking about inventory planning through the balance of the year given the levels of demand for Q3 and Q4? Eric Tiziani: Dana, I’ll take that one. So in terms of our own inventory levels, we continue to make sequential progress quarter-to-quarter in terms of bringing those inventory levels down to where we want them to be. We’re not there yet, but it’s very much a high priority and key focus for the team. So we’re managing our production schedules. We’re managing our inventory purchases very closely with our strategic suppliers and we expect to continue making progress on bringing those inventory levels down through the year, matched with our current forecast and ongoing outlook for demand. So job is not done, but we’re making good progress every quarter. Operator: Our next question is from Rob Ottenstein with Evercore ISI. Rob Ottenstein: Robert Ottenstein from Evercore. A couple of follow-up questions. Number one, the DTC business, I think you mentioned in the prepared remarks that, that benefited from some shipments to a large customer, if I recall right. Can you confirm that? And then maybe if you could back out those extraordinary shipments what the DTC business would have done? Eric Tiziani: Rob, I’ll take that one. So yes, we did mention that the Direct-to-Consumer channel was benefiting in the second quarter from 2 primary things. One, strength in our olaplex.com business, I’ll come back to that. And the second was shipments related to a key e-commerce customer related to a key promotion that was running in July. So that was normal course in terms of phasing of those shipments. I’d say past that on an underlying basis, the Direct-to-Consumer channel is the one that performed actually better than our expectations in both sell-in as well as sell-out. So that’s a channel where we’ve seen stronger trends. And it’s a channel where we’ve actually been directing quite a lot of our investments both in lower funnel activities, and we’re seeing very good rollouts in those activities as well as our upper funnel activities driving to olaplex.com as an example. Rob Ottenstein: Okay. And then did — so it was down 6% if it wasn’t for the shipments, would it have been down 15%, down 20%? Just trying to get an order of magnitude. Eric Tiziani: So we’re not supplying specific numbers on that, but you’re directionally in the right place, I would say. And I’ll just reiterate there that the sell-out, the consumption levels at Direct-to-Consumer were strong, and this is not a channel where we’ve been dealing with any material customer inventory rightsizing. So what you see in selling is, aside from this one impact from the shipments related to this promotion is very representative of the sell-out as well. Rob Ottenstein: So the sellout would have been minus 6% roughly? Eric Tiziani: Again, sell-in, sell-out, and Direct-to-Consumer are staying very close to each other. So we’re not giving a number, but directionally, that’s correct. Rob Ottenstein: Okay. So that is — it sounds to me like the strongest confirmation of the health of the brand and the business. Is that fair? Eric Tiziani: I think that’s fair. And JuE, I don’t know if you want to add to that. But this is why we especially called out olaplex.com as a leading indicator and a green shoot that we’re continuing to support and invest behind. JuE Wong: Absolutely. Nothing more to add than the fact that it is gratifying to see that because they are the closest to the end consumer at olaplex.com. So that content, that messaging, all that creative is definitely resonating. Operator: Our next question is from Jonna Kim with TD Cowen. Jonna Kim: I just wanted to get a little bit more color on the Professional channel. I know you talked about it, but do you think it’s more of a function of stylists being more frugal or competition? Just what you’re seeing in that channel? And just another point, you talked about it a little bit, but how does the muted demand change or not change your new product launches for the year? JuE Wong: Jonna, I’ll take that question on the Pro and the demand piece of it. Yes. In our prepared remarks, we did mention that our loyal customers in the Pro channel continues to be highly engaged with us. They are the ones who continue to really support us, talk to their clients about us and other stylists about us. But we also believe, as we mentioned, that the continuation of some of those negative factors have impacted them and especially to some stylists that are in the mix where they are hearing some of those misinformation. So what we have done, as you have seen, is that we believe that in order for us to continue to be successful in this area, we need to continue to invest in an integrated full funnel marketing. And as we have said before, for the professionals, the #1 thing they want is for brand to grow and build an awareness so that it can drive clients do their studios. Some of them are single — many of them rather are single payroll entity. So that really helps them to kind of look at new client acquisition on their part and their own clients who see the brand and basically said, “Look, I want to continue, can you please continue having the Olaplex treatment in my services with you.” So with the Pro, we are double downing on that. We are also making sure education, helping them address any kind of product knowledge, how to use the product better, how to really allow their clients to not use a product because they feel like they need to cut some of the time and they need more time, rather to use our product, we have been able to secure information for them and how to use for them that we can still benefit from our products in a shorter time? And then just very quickly, in terms on the demand, we are believing that the Pro channel, while they will have the challenge of having some of their customers coming in between services, leading it a lot longer, but the over-the-counter sales on retail, it’s an area where they can really improve on and we are spending efforts in terms of education, training to help them look at retail as part of their revenue generating short. Operator: We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back to JuE Wong for closing comments. JuE Wong: Well, thank you, everyone, for your time. We look forward to speaking with you at our next earnings call. Thank you. Operator: Thank you. This will conclude today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you again for your participation. Follow Olaplex Holdings Inc. Follow Olaplex Holdings Inc. We may use your email to send marketing emails about our services. Click here to read our privacy policy......»»

From the $75,000-a-week "townhouse" to the giant water park, Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas is set to sail as a one-of-a-kind experience. The Icon of the Seas during sea trials next to an early rendering of the ship.Royal Caribbean International As a travel reporter, I have sailed on four ships each from separate cruise lines. Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas could be different from any vessel I've been on. These are the amenities on the Icon of the Seas that I haven't seen before. I've sailed on my fair share of cruise ships during my tenure as a travel reporter with Insider. But if Royal Caribbean fulfills everything it has promised with the Icon of the Seas, this upcoming mega vessel could be unlike any ship I've traveled on before.The soon-to-be world's biggest cruise ship's amenities, long list of dining venues, and new-to-industry staterooms are already making it a standout vessel.And I think other cruisers might already be agreeing with me: Royal Caribbean saw its largest booking day ever when reservations opened in late 2022 for the ship's upcoming sailings. Michael Bayley, the cruise giant's CEO, later crowned the $2 billion vessel as the "best-selling product in the history of our business" in a call with investors.Now, the Icon of the Seas maiden voyage in late January is almost sold out with only a handful of accommodations left starting at a little over $4,670 per person, according to Royal Caribbean's booking page.Here's how the brand's next ship could compare to the four I've sailed on before.Over the last two years, I've had both the pleasure and displeasure of traveling on the Celebrity Cruises' Apex, Royal Caribbean International's Wonder of the Seas, Margaritaville at Sea's Paradise, and Norwegian Cruise Line's Prima.The pool deck on the Norwegian Prima.Brittany Chang/InsiderI loved some and really (really) disliked other cruise ships. But at least these experiences have given me something to compare the Icon of the Seas to.To preface this, different cruise lines cater to different travelers — so it might not be fair to compare the Icon of the Seas to the Celebrity Apex or Margaritaville at Sea Paradise.Margaritaville at Sea Paradise's 5 o'Clock Somewhere Bar and Grill.Brittany Chang/InsiderCelebrity actively targets Gen X customers while Margaritaville looks for fans of the franchise and Jimmy Buffett. Unfortunately, I can't sugarcoat how I feel: I found both vessels boring. However, the Apex's modern and fashionably designed spaces made it one of the sleekest ships I've been on.An outdoor lounge on the Celebrity Apex.Brittany Chang/InsiderUnfortunately, while Margaritaville's cruise could have been kitschy and fun, I noticed branding and quality issues with the Margaritaville cruise when I traveled on its inaugural sailing in 2022.In comparison, Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas and Norwegian's Prima were designed to appeal to families.The mini-golf course on the Norwegian Prima.Brittany Chang/InsiderThe same goes for Royal Caribbean's next behemoth ship. The Prima had standouts like a flashy mini-golf course, great food, a go-kart track, and a virtual-reality arcade. The latter two will be the amenities to beat.The Norwegian Prima's go-kart course.Brittany Chang/InsiderWhen I was invited on its inaugural sailing in 2022, I was surprised to say it was the first time I've genuinely enjoyed being aboard a cruise ship.The Wonder of the Seas similarly won my heart with its peaceful park, boardwalk, exciting water show, and colorful pool deck.The Boardwalk neighborhood on Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas.Brittany Chang/InsiderAfter cruising on its non-revenue sailing for media and travel agents, I quickly called it the best cruise vessel I've been on so far.Despite these two high-water marks, I have a feeling the Icon of the Seas will cruise by both to win the hearts of traveling families when it begins revenue cruises in late January 2024.The Icon of the Seas under construction.Brittany Chang/InsiderAt 1,198 feet long, it'll also be the largest cruise vessel in the world. That's plenty of space to include amenities unavailable on the four ships I've been on. Both the Wonder of the Seas and the Prima have water slides. But the Icon of the Seas' water park will overshadow any predecessors.The Icon of the Seas under construction next to an early rendering of the ship.Brittany Chang/Insider, Royal Caribbean InternationalIts "Category 6" water park will have six slides, including what the cruise line says will be the tallest at sea.One of the Prima's most exhilarating activities was its freefall dry slide that drops travelers down 10 decks in just seconds.The walkway leading up to the Drop dry slide.Brittany Chang/InsiderWhile the Icon won't have the exact same "Drop" slide, it could have a more anxiety-inducing activity: the Crown's Edge. This rope-and-obstacle course that could leave its brave participants dangling over 150 feet above the sea. The Icon of the Seas has the typical pools, surf simulator, rock-climbing wall, and mini-golf course.An early rendering of the Icon of the Seas.Royal Caribbean InternationalThese are nothing new to the cruise industry. So to set itself apart, the ship will one-up its pools by including seven of them. These aren't your typical rectangular swimming pools surrounded by perfectly symmetrical lounge chairs.A rendering of the infinity pool.Royal Caribbean InternationalOne will be the largest at sea, according to the cruise line, while the other will be an infinity pool suspended over the lower outdoor decks.Any drinkers out there? Get excited for the swim-up pool bar.As for food, all of the ships I've sailed on have the typical buffets and premium steakhouses.People at the buffet on the Wonder of the SeasBrittany Chang/InsiderNorwegian's food hall was one of the best dining experiences I've ever had on a ship. Think of it as a more organized buffet. It felt like I had nearly limitless food options.But I have no doubt the Icon of the Seas will be able to emulate this same feeling: The ship will have 40 restaurants, bars, and nightlife venues.A rendering of the Icon of the Seas.Royal Caribbean InternationalI'm particularly excited for the grab-and-go sushi counter. And for those who crave the luxury of the Celebrity Apex, the Icon of the Seas will have a few dining venues that could compete with the more adult-friendly cruise line.A rendering of the Empire Supper Club.Royal Caribbean InternationalOne the Icon's specialty restaurants will include the art deco-esque Empire Supper Club, an eight-course menu with luxuries like caviar, wagyu, and beverage pairings. Maybe eating caviar at sea will make me feel more connected to the ocean? Unfortunately, I've been disappointed by Royal Caribbean's accommodations before.My balcony stateroom aboard Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas.Brittany Chang/InsiderMy $1,400 stateroom aboard the Wonder of the Seas was the most boring space aboard the ship. At least it had plenty of storage. But it already seems like the rooms aboard the Icon will be flashier than its predecessor.A rendering of the Ultimate Family Townhouse.Royal Caribbean InternationalThe new ship will have 28 different stateroom categories including the one-of-a-kind Ultimate Family Townhouse for $75,000 a week.Cruise ship suites have been getting more luxurious. But few will compare to the Icon's Ultimate Family Townhouse.The three-floor Ultimate Family Townhouse will be an expensive getaway for families with children.Royal Caribbean InternationalNothing screams flashy and fun like a three-floor family mansion at sea "townhouse" complete with its own slide, theater, and terrace.For traveling families who don't have $75,000 to drop, the ship will also have options like the family infinite ocean view balcony stateroom.The family infinite ocean view balcony stateroom under construction next to its early rendering.Brittany Chang/InsiderHere, children will have their own hideaway aboard the ship, complete with bunk beds, a chalkboard, and two bedside televisions. Of course, I won't know for sure if the Icon of the Seas will reign supreme over the previous four ships I've sailed on.The Icon of the Seas during sea trials next to an early rendering of the ship.Royal Caribbean InternationalBut if the unique swimming pools, exhilarating water park, and diverse dining options live up to their hype, I have a feeling this will become my go-to cruise ship recommendation when it sails in 2024.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

L&L Holding Company has unveiled an eye-catching, oversized drawing by famed American artist Sol LeWitt, which now adorns a prominent central wall in the triple-height lobby of 425 Park Avenue, L&L’s art-filled Plaza District office tower. The original artwork, titled “Bars of Color within Squares,” features geometric configurations, vibrant colors... The post L&L Holding Company Unveils Massive Drawing by Acclaimed Modern Artist Sol LeWitt in Lobby of 425 Park Avenue appeared first on Real Estate Weekly. L&L Holding Company has unveiled an eye-catching, oversized drawing by famed American artist Sol LeWitt, which now adorns a prominent central wall in the triple-height lobby of 425 Park Avenue, L&L’s art-filled Plaza District office tower. The original artwork, titled “Bars of Color within Squares,” features geometric configurations, vibrant colors and isometric perspectives that create a sense of volume, making it appear to pop from the wall.  At 39 feet tall by 13 feet wide, the massive piece is easily visible to all passersby on Park Avenue.  L&L in collaboration with Lord Norman Foster worked with Paula Cooper Gallery to procure the artwork.  The installation was handled by dedicated artists and craftspeople from LeWitt’s estate, who adhered strictly to specifications left by LeWitt prior to his passing in 2007.  To further pay homage to LeWitt, L&L partnered with Sensory Interactive to curate a digital tribute to illuminate the three ornamental fins perched atop the 897-foot tower.  The display draws inspiration from the geometric shapes and an array of colors associated with LeWitt’s work, as well as by 425 Park’s signature diagrid design, creating an elegant marker on the Midtown skyline. “From the outset, art and design have been integral elements in shaping the experience of 425 Park Avenue,” said L&L Chairman and CEO David W. Levinson.  “A visionary in every sense of the word, we were drawn to Sol LeWitt for the dramatic effect that his artwork has on the places and people that surround them.  With this prominent and permanent new home at 425 Park Avenue, LeWitt’s work will serve to inspire building occupants and captivate passersby for decades to come.”  L&L has woven art throughout the Lord Norman Foster-designed tower.  The Diagrid Club, 425 Park’s ultimate amenity and wellness center, features an immersive installation by Japanese avant-garde sculptor, painter and novelist, Yayoi Kusama.  “Narcissus Garden,” which was first shown on the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, consists of more than 400 spheres with highly-polished, reflective and mirrored surfaces that present moments of both movement and stillness.  At the base of the tower, L&L is working with world-renowned chef and restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten to conceive and operate a new restaurant named Four Twenty Five.  The restaurant’s cocktail lounge will feature a 24-foot painting by celebrated abstract artist Larry Poons titled “Hunch.” Completed by L&L in 2022, 425 Park Avenue is the first full-block office development to open on the world’s most famous commercial boulevard in half a century.  At street level, 425 Park boasts a 45-foot tall grand lobby accented by stone flooring, interior glass walls, modern lighting and state-of-the-art elevator systems.  The structural expression of 425 Park gives it a unique identity that features a vast expanse of column-free space and soaring glass that allows natural light to flood its workspaces.  To view “Bars of Colors within Squares” and the LeWitt-inspired digital display, please click here. The post L&L Holding Company Unveils Massive Drawing by Acclaimed Modern Artist Sol LeWitt in Lobby of 425 Park Avenue appeared first on Real Estate Weekly......»»

Wonder Lofts, the historic condo conversion of the famed Wonder Lofts building in Hoboken, NJ, has officially unveiled its 14,400 square feet of world-class indoor and outdoor amenities, completing one of the most unique lifestyle opportunities found on New Jersey’s Hudson River Gold Coast. The boutique package of recreation and... The post First Look: Five Star Amenities Unveiled at Wonder Lofts, the Historic Condo Conversion of Hoboken, NJ’s Wonder Bread building. appeared first on Real Estate Weekly. Wonder Lofts, the historic condo conversion of the famed Wonder Lofts building in Hoboken, NJ, has officially unveiled its 14,400 square feet of world-class indoor and outdoor amenities, completing one of the most unique lifestyle opportunities found on New Jersey’s Hudson River Gold Coast. The boutique package of recreation and social spaces, expertly designed to incorporate the property’s industrial past, includes a second-floor residents’ lounge with a large, elegant living room that opens to a lushly landscaped, outdoor terraced patio and garden with seating areas.  A floor-to-ceiling brick, double-faced fireplace separates the living room from an open concept dining room and entertainment kitchen, and an adjacent billiards and game room.  Families appreciate the building’s children’s playroom, complete with padded floors, bean bag seating, toys, and books, as well as a fully equipped children’s art center ideal for fostering individual and group creativity and fun. A full gym equipped with the latest cardio and strength training equipment and a separate fully equipped yoga/flex studio will keep residents healthy in body and mind. There is also a screening room with couch seating and video gaming capability. The building also boasts a two-story lobby with an attended concierge, a large residents lounge with fireplace and co-working/study area, a secure onsite parking garage with electric car charging stations, a pet grooming area, large secure package delivery room and abundant bike storage.  When venturing outside, residents are greeted by an awe-inspiring rooftop with stunning 360-degree views of the Manhattan skyline, all of Hoboken and beyond.  The appointed space boasts a beautifully landscaped patio lounge featuring an infinity-edge swimming pool with lounge chairs, a circular outdoor bar underneath the restored water tower, gas barbeque grills, and abundant dining and lounge seating areas with a fire pit. “The remarkable array of indoor and outdoor amenities at Wonder Lofts redefines the resident experience, seamlessly merging historic charm with contemporary luxury befitting Wonder Lofts’ illustrious legacy,” said Robert Fourniadis, Senior Vice President – Residential of Prism Capital Partners, which developed Wonder Lofts in partnership with Parkwood Development and Angelo Gordon. “With the amenities now completed, prospective buyers visiting the property can fully grasp the unparalleled allure of the Wonder Lofts lifestyle.”  Wonder Lofts’ collection of newly constructed three-and four-bedroom luxury residences perfectly blends restored historic charm with contemporary finishes and functionality. Each home within Wonder Lofts features an open floorplan with suburban-sized designer kitchen with center island that opens to a spacious living room, primary bedrooms with a large walk-in closet, luxurious en-suite bathroom with large walk-in-shower, soaking tub and dual sink vanity, large windows, a Latch smart home entry system and abundant storage.  Other features found in many of the homes include a half-bath located off the great room, multi-functional den/home office, and a separate laundry room with custom cabinetry.  Each home comes with deeded parking in an on-site secure parking garage and private outdoor space.  Premium materials and contemporary finishes found through the residences are highlighted by 7.5-inch-wide white oak hardwood plank floors, custom white kitchen cabinetry framed with oak trim, elegant white Calcutta Laza kitchen countertops, top-of-the line kitchen appliances including a built-in Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezer, Wolf gas range, oven and microwave drawer, and Bosch dishwasher, and in many homes, an undercounter wine/beverage refrigerator. The in-residence laundry room is equipped with a Bosch washer and a Bosch dryer.  Bathrooms include custom wall-hung oak cabinetry with off-white Glacier honed marble countertop. Remaining homes are priced from $1.9 million to $3.5 million. Steeped in Tradition, Curated for Modern Living   Design touches of the original Wonder Bread factory, which once produced freshly baked bread from the 1910s to the 1960s, have been preserved in the contemporary redesign.  The original brick detail, archways, high ceilings, large windows, a smokestack, and a water tower were all meticulously restored, and such modern additions as a façade of glass and light grey aluminum add to and accentuate the restored original structure. The community also includes a newly constructed five-story building located across the street which is home to fifteen three- and four-bedroom condos, several of which include private yards.  Owners there have access to all the amenities of the main building, including the rooftop infinity pool. The Center of it All Wonder Lofts is located in the heart of Hoboken, bringing within easy reach all that the dynamic, family-friendly hamlet on the Hudson River is known for. With its tree-lined streets dotted with historic brownstones; an eclectic offering of neighborhood shops, restaurants, and nighttime haunts; numerous parks, a beautifully landscaped waterfront featuring majestic Manhattan skyline views; and proximity to Manhattan enhanced by PATH and Ferry service, this pedestrian-friendly town has matured from a convenient commuter starting point for singles and couples to a nesting ground for growing families. For more information on Wonder Lofts, visit www.WonderLoftsLiving.com or call 201-526-4040.    Wonder Lofts owes its breathtaking blend of industrial history and modern elegance to a team of professionals including two award-winning and renown design firms, Hoboken-based MVMK Architecture + Design who served as the project architect, and Manhattan-based Workshop/APD who served as the interior designer. These firms collaborated with an ownership team consisting of Prism Capital Partners, Angelo Gordon, and Parkwood Development and its exclusive sales and marketing agent CORE in creating the vision of a wonderful community that is now a reality. The post First Look: Five Star Amenities Unveiled at Wonder Lofts, the Historic Condo Conversion of Hoboken, NJ’s Wonder Bread building. appeared first on Real Estate Weekly......»»

In this article, we will take a look at the 12 stocks with biggest upside potential according to analysts. To skip our analysis of recent market trends, you can go directly to 5 Stocks with Biggest Upside Potential. The stock market has been in constant turmoil during the last few years. The markets were severely […] In this article, we will take a look at the 12 stocks with biggest upside potential according to analysts. To skip our analysis of recent market trends, you can go directly to 5 Stocks with Biggest Upside Potential. The stock market has been in constant turmoil during the last few years. The markets were severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic especially in the first half of 2020. As signs of recovery started to pop up and market sentiment started improving, the global economy was sent into another challenge with the onset of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The situation for stock markets was further exacerbated with the interest rate hikes implemented by central banks across the globe to curtail inflation. Growth companies and companies working on disruptive technologies were hit hardest by the market conditions as the cost of capital rose significantly in a short period of time. Catherine Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) that invests in domestic and foreign equity securities of companies that are working on “disruptive innovation”, lost nearly 67% of its value in 2022. The top three holdings of the ETF are Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), Coinbase Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:COIN), and Roku, Inc. (NASDAQ:ROKU), respectively. Even in times of such prevalent despondency, there are plenty of good options to invest in the stock market. The biotechnology sector, especially clinical stage biotechnology companies, are a good bet in the short to medium term, according to analysts. Majority of the stocks on our list belong to biotechnology companies that are working on novel therapies for the treatment or prevention of rare diseases. Some of these companies are in the late stage of product development with the potential to be the first to produce viable therapies for their respective diseases. The biotechnology sector has also faced slashed valuations within the rising interest rate environment. SPDR S&P Biotech ETF which emulates the S&P® Biotechnology Select Industry Index, lost more than 8% of its market value during Q1 2023. After such a dismal performance in the first quarter, the sector has recently been on an uptrend with a recovery of more than 9% as of July 25. Analysts are bullish about the prospects of companies in this sector, especially the ones that have made it onto our list of 12 stocks with biggest upside potential according to analysts. Our list of stocks with biggest upside potential includes Vir Biotechnology, Inc. (NASDAQ:VIR), AbCellera Biologics Inc. (NASDAQ:ABCL), Iovance Biotherapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:IOVA), and Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:APLS), among others. Copyright: belchonock / 123RF Stock Photo Methodology We used stock screeners to shortlist companies with upside potential based on average analyst target price estimates of more than 50%. We further filtered the list to remove companies with market capitalizations of less than $1.0 billion as these companies aren’t generally widely covered by leading wall street analysts. We also filtered the companies which had been covered by less than 5 analysts in the last 90 days. The remaining stocks on the list were ranked based on the upside potential according to average analyst target price estimates. 12 Stocks with Biggest Upside Potential According to Analysts 12. Replimune Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:REPL) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 24 Upside Potential as of July 20: 139.04% Replimune Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:REPL) is a clinical stage biotechnology company focused on the  development of a novel class of tumor-directed oncolytic immunotherapies derived from its RPx platform. The lead product candidate of Replimune Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:REPL) is RP1 which is based on a proprietary new strain of herpes simplex virus engineered and genetically armed with a fusogenic protein. On June 6, Replimune Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:REPL) released initial data from a Phase 1/2 trial evaluating RP1 for the treatment of cutaneous malignancies in patients who have had a kidney, liver, heart, lung, and/or a hematopoietic cell transplant. RP1 showed meaningful anti-tumor activity. On June 15, JP Morgan analyst Anupam Rama raised the price target on Replimune Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:REPL) shares $50 from $38 and maintained an ‘Overweight’ rating for the shares. The target price represents a potential upside of nearly 134% based on the share price on July 20. 11. Kymera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:KYMR) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 14 Upside Potential as of July 20: 147.79% Kymera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:KYMR) is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing novel small molecule therapeutics that selectively degrade disease-causing proteins by harnessing the body’s own natural protein degradation system. To date, Kymera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:KYMR) has used its proprietary targeted protein degradation platform, called Pegasus, to design novel protein degraders focused in the areas of immunology-inflammation and oncology. On June 30, Truist analyst Srikripa Devarakonda initiated coverage of Kymera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:KYMR) with a ‘Buy’ rating a price target of $50 per share. As of Q1 2023, 14 of the 943 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long Kymera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:KYMR) shares, for a total value of $503 million. Mark Lampert’s Biotechnology Value Fund / BVF Inc was the largest hedge fund shareholder with ownership of 4.74 million shares valued at $140 million. 10. Zai Lab Limited (NASDAQ:ZLAB) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 21 Upside Potential as of July 20: 159.88% Shanghai, China-based Zai Lab Limited (NASDAQ:ZLAB) is a commercial-stage, global biopharmaceutical company focused on medicines for oncology, autoimmune disorders, infectious diseases, and neurological disorders. The product portfolio of Zai Lab Limited (NASDAQ:ZLAB) comprises of five commercialized products, including Zejula® for ovarian cancer, Optune®, Qinlock®, NUZYRA®, and VYVGART®. In addition, its product pipeline includes potentially global best-in-class and/or first-in-class therapies, including 13 in late-stage development. As of March 31, Zai Lab Limited (NASDAQ:ZLAB) shares were held by 21 hedge funds with the total shares held by these hedge funds valued at $251 million. Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global was its largest hedge fund shareholder with ownership of 2.33 million shares valued at $78 million. 9. Hesai Group (NASDAQ:HSAI) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 13 Upside Potential as of July 20: 160.33% Shanghai, China-based Hesai Group (NASDAQ:HSAI) is a leading light detection and ranging (LiDAR) solutions provider. Its LiDAR products are used in passenger and commercial vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle fleets as well as last-mile delivery robots and logistics robots. Hesai Group (NASDAQ:HSAI) has established partnerships with leading automotive OEMs, autonomous vehicle, and robotics companies worldwide, covering over 90 cities in 40 countries. The shares of the company started trading on the NASDAQ on February 10, 2023, and have since lost nearly 53% of their value. On May 24, Hesai Group (NASDAQ:HSAI) released its financial results for Q1 2023. Its revenue increased by 73% y-o-y to $63 million. It shipped nearly 35,000 LiDAR units during the quarter, an increase of 403% y-o-y, by utilizing its in-house manufacturing facilities. 8. Pliant Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLRX) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 32 Upside Potential as of July 20: 170.51% Based in South San Francisco, California, Pliant Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLRX) is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on discovering and developing novel therapeutics for the treatment of fibrosis. The lead product candidate of Pliant Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLRX), bexotegrast, is an oral small molecule dual selective inhibitor that is in development in the lead indications for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Bexotegrast is currently in Phase 2a trial for primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) while the company is planning a Phase 2b trail in IPF for the drug. On May 18, Canaccord Genuity analyst Edward Nash initiated coverage of Pliant Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLRX) with a ‘Buy’ rating and a price target of $48 per share. As of Q1 2023, Pliant Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLRX) shares were held by 32 prominent hedge funds with the total value of shares held by hedge funds valued at $539 million. David Kroin’s Deep Track Capital was the largest hedge fund shareholder on record with ownership of 3.4 million shares valued at $91 million. 7. Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RCKT) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 24 Upside Potential as of July 20: 173.79% Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RCKT) is a leading late stage biotechnology company focused on the development of genetic therapies designed to correct the root cause of complex and rare childhood disorders. Clinical programs of Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RCKT) include multiple gene therapies targeting Fanconi Anemia, Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-I, Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency, Danon Disease, and Infantile Malignant Osteopetrosis. On June 8, Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RCKT) announced that the FDA had granted Fast Track and Orphan Drug designations to the company’s gene therapy candidate for the treatment of plakophilin-2 related arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. On May 5, Chardan Capital lowered the price target on Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RCKT) shares to $61 from $63 but maintained a ‘Buy’ rating for the shares. 6. Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:APLS) Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 42 Upside Potential as of July 20: 178.75% Waltham, Massachusetts-based Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:APLS) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of therapies for treatment of debilitating diseases by controlling complement, part of the body’s immune system. The company is exploring programs across ophthalmology, nephrology, hematology, and neurology by targeting the C3, the only target in the complement cascade that addresses all three pathways that can drive disease. Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:APLS) received FDA approval of SYFOVRE (pegcetacoplan injection) in February 2023 for the treatment of geographic atrophy. EMPAVELI, for the treatment of Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria, is the other commercial product of the company. On May 4, Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:APLS) released its financial results for Q1 2023. Its revenue increased by 212% y-o-y to $45 million while net loss increased by 30% y-o-y to $178 million. As of Q1 2023, Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:APLS) was the most commonly held stock out of the 12 stocks with biggest upside potential according to analysts. Its shares were held by 42 of the 934 prominent hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey with a total value of $2.0 billion. Click to continue reading and see 5 Stocks with Biggest Upside Potential According to Analysts   Suggested Articles: 20 Most Popular Gin Brands in 2023 Lee Ainslie: Washington Commanders and Other Investments 12 Best Low Volatility Stocks to Buy Now Disclosure: None. 12 Stocks with Biggest Upside Potential According to Analysts is originally published on Insider Monkey......»»

Dow's Longest Win-Streak In 6 Years Shrugs Off Recession-Signaling Yield-Curve Collapse Ever so quietly under the covers of a quiet summer week, US Macro data surprised to the downside, with the biggest weekly drop since Feb 2019... Source: Bloomberg But that didn't disturb the equity market melt-up (except for Nasdaq but more on that later). This was The Dow's best week in 4 months (best 2-weeks since Oct '22), Nasdaq's 3rd weekly loss in last 5 weeks. The Dow is up 10 days in a row (managing to hold on with a 0.01% gain on the day!!) - its longest winning streak since Feb 2017... With the Nasdaq rebalance taking place, we look back at the performance of our ups-versus-downs basket pairs trade with the up-weights outperforming the down-weights (dominated by the Magnificent 7 stocks) by around 5ppts... Source: Bloomberg It was quite a week for 'most shorted' stocks with the opening 30 mins every day either a pukefest or buying-panic... Source: Bloomberg Some of the lipstick came off the un-profitable tech stocks pig this week... Source: Bloomberg Bank earnings dominated the early week with MS outperforming and Citi not so much... Source: Bloomberg Tough week for some of the big-tech firms... Treasuries were mixed this week with the short-end underperforming (2Y +8bps, 30Y -2bps)... Source: Bloomberg The yield curve flattened (deeper inversion) this week, having reversed from the pre-FOMC levels... Source: Bloomberg The dollar bounced back to its best weekly gain since Feb '23... Source: Bloomberg Crypto was basically flat on the week with Ripple the only standout... Source: Bloomberg In commodity-land, crude managed gains, but copper was ugly; gold was slightly higher and silver down... Source: Bloomberg NatGas ripped higher to its first positive week in over a month... Finally, as Goldman points out, there is an increasing bifurcation between optimism on main street (AAIIBULL) and optimism on wall street (GS sentiment score)... While the two were on relatively the “same page” over the last four years, retail is much more positive than professional traders. And the decoupling between the decade-old regime of global liquidity and US equities continues to widen... Source: Bloomberg Probably nothing, right? Tyler Durden Fri, 07/21/2023 - 16:00.....»»