On Clubhouse, there is something for everyone: rooms on pop culture, feminism, cricket, music, gaming, and even religion and prayer. That variety is among the many reasons the invitation-only social audio app has taken off in India, where users of different ages, backgrounds, interests, and even languages are coming together to discuss anything and everything, including topics the government would prefer they avoid.

Since its May 21 debut on Android, Clubhouse has found millions of takers in India, which accounted for the majority of the US-based app’s downloads in the first half of June. But experts remain polarized about Clubhouse’s future. Will it join the big leagues with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, whose entrenchment in users’ social habits is at least somewhat offset by hate speech and other challenges that come with scale? Or will Clubhouse follow the same fate as Foursquare, a once wildly popular social geolocation app, since cut down to size.

It all depends on what the app does from here.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

In the span of seven months, between January and August 2020, more than 175,000 Covid-19-related crowdfunding campaigns were posted from the US on GoFundMe, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform for social causes.

Among those campaigns, 43% raised no money at all—a big change from pre-pandemic times, when only about 3.5% of campaigns produced no donations, according to a study to be published in the academic journal Social Science and Medicine in August.

Although it’s hard to say why any individual campaign might fail to get traction, researchers found two elements were typically linked to more successful campaigns: They originated in areas with higher income, and they were launched by people with higher education levels.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

A Covid-19 variant that likely wreaked havoc during India’s second wave has now spread to 80 countries.

The Delta variant, or B.1.617.2, which was first identified in India in October 2020, has now become the dominant strain in the UK, currently accounting for more than 90% of cases there.

In the US, too, the number of Delta variant cases are rapidly rising, up from 10% of the total Covid-19 cases last week to 20% this week. According to a Financial Times analysis, the delta variant accounts for more than a third of new cases each day in the US.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

The Covid-19 pandemic made access to mobile phones and mobile internet more important. Yet the gender gap for mobile phone ownership and mobile internet use in sub-Saharan Africa remained largely unchanged in the past year.

Compared to 2019, women in sub-Saharan Africa were just as unlikely to own a mobile phone last year as they were the year before, and only slightly more likely to be able to access the internet using one. These dismal statistics are from the latest Mobile Gender Gap Report by GSMA, an organization that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide.

The findings are based on a GSMA survey of more than 9,000 people from eight low-and-middle-income countries.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

At least since 1996, the US Federal Reserve has used monetary policy with the aim of keeping inflation at 2%—a number that Ben Bernanke, the former Fed chair, made an explicit policy target in 2012. And it isn’t the only central bank in the developed world to shoot for 2%.

The Bank of Canada has the same target, as do Sweden’s Riksbank, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank. The Bank of England is so devoted to its 2% target that its governor must write a letter to the chancellor of the Exchequer if inflation moves more than a percentage point in either direction. Andrew Bailey, the current governor, sent such a letter in May, pointing out that weakened economic activity during the pandemic had caused prices to tumble in the 12-month period ending February.

But why did these banks uniformly gravitate to the 2% figure? And where did that number come from?

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

In the halls of Brussels, Hungary’s far-right government is increasingly at odds with the European Union. But on the soccer field, Hungary is hosting some of the most important matches of the European Championship. It’s the latest example of geopolitics colliding with the global sports industry in a way that some activists argue is becoming unsustainable.

Hungary faces a backlash over discrimination

In Budapest, one of the host cities of this year’s Euros, two flashpoints have emerged on and off the pitch.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Debate has raged about whether digital addiction is a real affliction or something akin to a strong habit. As the evidence has accumulated, however, doctors and psychiatrists are increasingly confident classifying our digital devices as addictive, not unlike cigarettes or gambling.

Now economists are weighing in. This June, a team of economists from Harvard, Stanford, and New York universities released a white paper entitled, simply, “Digital Addiction” that used economic methods, such as small payments, to analyze people’s “digital self-control problems.”

The researchers recruited about 2,000 American adults who installed an Android app allowing them to limit screen time. Participants were given self-control options that were difficult to override, as well financial incentives ($2.50 for every hour that blocked Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube). Users reduced screen time for those services by 22 minutes per day over 12 weeks.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, is living up to its name. The tech company will launch a four-day work week next year, becoming one of the most prominent names in business to embrace the forward-looking practice as part of its post-pandemic reality.

Deliberately or not, the New York-based company is all but taunting its competitors to follow its lead: less time spent working for the same pay is a perk that’s tough to beat.

What makes the formula work for employees is pretty self-evident. Who isn’t exhausted by the pressure to fit family, friends, exercising, caregiving, and general life administration into the two days that currently serve as our standard weekend? Companies, however, may still need to be convinced of a compressed work week’s viability and necessity.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Practically every business in my town is hiring, or at least trying to. Just walking down the street, you could get four part-time jobs—and you’d need about that many to make a decent living. This is the case in many places across the United States, as an apparent labor shortage looms. But at every business that hasn’t been forced to close while awaiting help, someone is still there, keeping things humming along while desperately searching for reinforcements. In many cases, it’s a middle-manager with little or no control over the one thing that would make hiring easier: offering better pay.

I was that middle-manager at two jobs in a row a few years ago, when the unemployment rate in my state was comparatively low, and low-paying jobs were plentiful. I had a significant amount of autonomy in both jobs—I was the event manager at a wedding venue and then a music venue—but I had limited power to influence the wages of the part-time staff I hired and supervised. Workers in those positions earned little, even though the businesses would come to a crashing halt without them.

After all, somebody has to arrange all of the tables and chairs for that 300-person wedding (a couple of times that person was me, by myself). Without security guards, concession workers, and the like, that rock show you want to attend isn’t going to happen. But for some reason, offering better compensation often isn’t the first thing that businesses try. One venue I worked at tried to inspire people to work there for reasons other than money, by making the job seem “cool.” They really milked it, putting up a billboard near the building that said something like, “Now hiring ROCKSTARS.” (The billboard remained up for years and years.)

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.