Crypto News: The app formerly known as Twitter

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X does not mark the spot.
Southern states are far too hot.
Dinosaurs are worth a lot.
Female bankers deserve a shot.

Bobbi: Why do you go by Drake?

Drake: Because it's shorter. You know, people with two syllables are way less successful than people with one.

There are many quotable lines from the viral interview Drake (nee Aubrey Graham) gave 25-year-old TikToker Bobbi Althoff — recorded from bed, of all places — but the excerpt above is especially pertinent, given how much we're talking about the importance of names on the internet as of late:

A black-and-white logo that makes even Clipart look highbrow.

Elon Musk's decision to sunset the bird app's original identity, Twitter, and replace it with "X," the everything app that will supposedly define the "future state of unlimited interactivity," is obviously controversial. But Musk's best — and perhaps only — defense comes from his fellow Canadian, Drake: X is shorter than Twitter. Maybe apps with two syllables are way less successful than apps with one!

This is a novel theory. As it stands, many popular apps are multisyllabic: Face-book, Linked-In, In-sta-gram, You-Tube, Tik-Tok, Snap-Chat, Whats-App, Redd-it, G-Mail, Spot-if-y, Ven-mo, etc. Society has yet to encounter The Drake of Apps. X could be it! Or maybe it's Threads — Mark Zuckerberg's challenge to (apologies to Prince) the App Formerly Known As Twitter. Threads is, of course, one syllable.

Then again, maybe there will never be a Drake of Apps: "The promised land of a US super app has been elusive to companies bigger, richer and smarter than X," Dave Lee explains. He has a point: Nobody is doom-scrolling on Meta or Alphabet. They're doom-scrolling on Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube — the "family of apps" that Meta and Alphabet own — because consumers have never wanted nor needed their entire digital lives to be locked inside a single square centimeter on their phone.

Plus, it's not like X has a lot going for it these days: Musk, in an attempt to relive his PayPal glory days, has stripped the product to its bare bones. "Gone are many of Twitter's users, half of its advertisers, 80% of its employees and its operational stability," Dave says.

As Matt Levine writes: "If you traveled back in time two years and said 'two years from now, Twitter will no longer exist, and you will be able to choose between a Twitter-like service called 'X' run by Elon Musk and a Twitter-like service called 'Threads' run by Facebook, which by the way will be called Meta, I'm not sure it's obvious that X is the winner there?"

Which brings me back to Drake: He isn't successful because he changed his name. He's successful because he's sold over 170 million records and won five Grammy Awards. Two-syllable entities can still make it big. You'd think someone named Elon would know that.

After looking at this chart, you could not pay me to move to the microwave that is metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, which as Mark Gongloff notes has endured a record 24 consecutive days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit this year. But there are still plenty of people who are willing to risk death to move to the place, which will likely have the prestigious honor of appearing in an AI-generated Buzzfeed listicle — "America's Least-Habitable Cities" — in 2050 if not sooner. Phoenix's Maricopa County has gained more people since 2010 than any other US county, and the pace has only increased since the pandemic, Mark writes.

Joining Phoenix on that list, inevitably, will be cities from Florida, Texas and Georgia, which all boast a "year-round presence of unpleasant and sometimes destructive insects," Jonathan Levin writes. Heat domes are dangerous not just because they increase the risk of droughts and dust storms, but because they attract a variety of creepy crawlers, from cockroaches to termites. "To a large degree, the livability of these states depends on the availability of pest control almost as much as it does on air conditioning," Jonathan argues.

Which would you prefer: Rats or roaches?

"This summer has been the hottest in recorded human history. It may also be the coolest summer we'll ever enjoy again," Mark writes. The swarm of data (and mosquitos) is evidence that migrating to glorified hotboxes is unwise, to say the least.

Do you think dinosaurs knew that their bones would be worth something 65 million years after they went extinct? And that there would be a hierarchical pricing scheme that determined how much their decaying skeletons would be worth? This week, a winged pteranodon skeleton will be auctioned off at Sotheby's, where it's estimated that it will fetch up to $6 million, Chris Bryant writes. But the Rolls-Royce of dino parts is from the T-Rex (which is also the best dino nugget shape, and no this is not up for debate). "What really drives the price for these types of specimens is: Do you recognize the name?" Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's head of science told Chris.

Making the money printer go brrr need not be a job only for men, but it still mostly is: "Before the appointments of Hafize Gaye Erkan in Turkey and Michele Bullock in Australia, only 22 women were leading central banks out of a total of 186," Andreea Papuc writes. It's a statistic that needs to be carefully addressed: "Any impulse to make the women who are brought in scapegoats while they clean up others' messes — in the event of policy missteps — would be an affront and narrow-minded," she argues.