Even by recent crazy-news-week standards, this has been a crazy news week. I hope President Trump makes a complete recovery from COVID-19–and that the sight of this pandemic racing through the Trump administration and its Senate allies snaps some people out of denial.

In addition to what you see below, Patreon readers got a preview Wednesday of some of the stories I’m working on this month.

9/30/2020: The basics of recruiting for a young company, Ascent

The startup conference that gave me an excuse to head up to NYC last October moved online this year like every other event. My first panel had me quizzing Lever CEO Nate Smith and Facet CEO Robert Sweeney about how startups can find and recruit talent quickly–without falling into the “culture fit” trap that often serves to erase diversity. Yes, the panel itself was not a great example of diversity–but the next one I did for Ascent made up for that. 

9/30/2020: Facebook’s “Real Oversight Board”: Just Fix These Three Things Before The Election, Forbes

This post about an effort by outside groups to push Facebook into making three relatively modest changes to its policies blew up a little on Twitter. As you can see from its page-view total, that did not equate with people actually reading the piece. 

10/1/2020: Why New York and Other Non-Bay Area Cities are Primed to Take Over the Startup & Venture Scene, Ascent

I led a discussion with Allison Williams of Newark Venture Partners, Sydney Thomas of Precursor Ventures, and Peter Boyce of General Catalyst about the potential for cities outside the Bay Area to attract more startups and startup funding. I enjoyed the hell out of this panel, aside from one clock-management mistake: I should have dropped the question about Amazon HQ2 to leave enough time for my closing question about startup-friendly policies.

10/3/2020: AT&T shelving DSL may leave hundreds of thousands hanging by a phone line, USA Today

This piece started with an e-mail from a reader of the USAT column on broadband unavailability that I wrote in July; asking AT&T about his neighborhood getting shut out of future digital-subscriber-line installs led to the revelation that AT&T would stop selling its oldest (and slowest) form of broadband to new customers. There’s also a tip in this piece about expanded availability for Verizon’s LTE Home Internet–a fixed-wireless service that may now be able to rescue the couple I covered in that earlier USAT story.