Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 25 July 2026
A research team has created functional textiles woven from living fungal mycelium — specifically from the parasitic species Cordyceps militaris — that can clean themselves, self-repair minor tears, and biodegrade completely when discarded. The material is not a concept sketch. It is a textile that has been tested, worn, and shown to respond to its environment.
The significance is not that someone has made fabric from mushrooms. That has been done before, mostly as rigid leather substitutes for handbags and sneaker uppers. What is new here is that the fungal organism remains alive within the textile. The researchers demonstrated that by introducing different microbial communities into the mycelial matrix, the material can be adapted for different purposes — antimicrobial wound dressings, self-deodorising athletic wear, or packaging that composts in weeks rather than centuries.
The fashion and textile industry is responsible for an estimated 10 percent of global carbon emissions and generates roughly 92 million tonnes of textile waste annually. Most "sustainable fashion" solutions have been incremental — recycled polyester, organic cotton, marginally better dyes. They treat symptoms. A living textile that eliminates the waste problem at the material level — because the garment literally returns to soil — treats the cause.
The technical challenge is durability. Living organisms need moisture and nutrients. The researchers solved this partly by engineering a dormancy cycle: the fungal cells can be dried to a quiescent state during normal use and reactivated with water when cleaning or repair is needed. Think of it as a garment with an off switch. When activated, the mycelium extends new filaments across damaged areas, effectively knitting itself back together.
There are limits. The material does not yet match the tensile strength of cotton or linen. It handles poorly in sustained high heat. Scaling production from laboratory to factory is an open question. But the principle — that a textile can be grown, not manufactured; that it can maintain itself, not be maintained; and that it can disappear when unwanted, not accumulate in landfills — represents a genuinely different paradigm.
This is not a billion-dollar startup announcement. It is a peer-reviewed proof of concept published by materials scientists. And that is precisely why it belongs in this space: the signal is loudest before the money arrives.
Source: New Scientist · 24 July 2026
Now — Communities build their own data collectives to bypass Big Tech: Across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe, communities of creators, farmers, and small-business owners are forming data collectives — cooperative structures that let members control how their data is collected, stored, and distributed. Rest of World reports that these collectives are emerging not from ideological opposition to technology companies but from exhaustion with the terms on offer. Participants discovered that their training data, transaction histories, and creative output were being harvested and monetised without meaningful compensation or consent. The immediate consequence is structural: if data collectives reach sufficient scale, they become alternative training sets for AI models — ones that come with negotiated terms, transparent provenance, and revenue-sharing agreements. That does not dismantle Big Tech. But it introduces a competing supply of the raw material on which the entire AI economy depends, and supply competition changes pricing power. Source: Rest of World · 24 July 2026
Soon — Supercooled organ preservation breaks the transplant time barrier — and forces a rethink of who gets saved: Researchers have successfully transplanted kidneys into pigs after preserving the organs in a supercooled state far longer than current cold-storage methods allow. MIT Technology Review calls it a "landmark achievement." The science matters because the global organ shortage is not primarily a supply problem — it is a logistics problem. Thousands of viable organs are discarded each year because they cannot reach a matched recipient in time. If supercooling extends the preservation window from hours to days, it transforms organ transplantation from an emergency relay race into a planned procedure. Within the next five years, the technique's migration to human trials will force health systems to confront a question they have avoided: when geography and timing no longer constrain who can receive an organ, the allocation frameworks built around scarcity must be redesigned from scratch. The ethical and political battles over who sits atop the new waiting list will be fierce. Source: MIT Technology Review · 24 July 2026
Later — California's Mojave solar project exposes the unresolved tension between clean energy and biodiversity: California has approved a large-scale solar installation in the Mojave Desert that scientists say will sever a critical wildlife corridor connecting mountain ranges used by desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, and kit foxes for thousands of years. Mongabay reports that the project's environmental review acknowledged habitat disruption but concluded the climate benefits outweighed the ecological costs. The case is a template for a conflict that will intensify globally: as nations race to build renewable energy infrastructure at emergency speed, they will repeatedly confront the fact that the land required for solar farms, wind installations, and transmission lines is often the same land that sustains the biodiversity those projects are meant to protect. The long-term implication is that climate policy and conservation policy — currently housed in separate ministries, governed by separate laws, funded by separate budgets — must be integrated. Until they are, every major clean energy project will face legal challenges, delays, and the accusation that it solves one crisis by deepening another. Source: Mongabay · 24 July 2026 ---
As the United States and its allies scramble to reduce dependence on Chinese critical mineral supply chains, the global hunger for rare earths is financing armed groups and poisoning communities in Myanmar's borderlands. Rest of World reports that mines in Kachin and Shan states — often controlled by ethnic armed organisations or military-aligned warlords — operate with no environmental oversight, contaminating water sources and farmland. The bitter irony: Western "clean energy" supply chains are underwriting a dirty war. Source: Rest of World · 24 July 2026
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's abrupt dismissal of his defence minister and commander-in-chief has triggered sustained street protests and a domestic political crisis at the worst possible moment — while the country is fighting a full-scale war. The BBC reports that commentators believe Zelensky has been politically damaged by the move, with public trust in wartime leadership shaken. The reshuffle exposes the longstanding tension between civilian political control and military command that has simmered throughout the conflict, and raises questions about whether Ukraine's democratic institutions can absorb internal upheaval without compromising the war effort. Source: BBC World · 24 July 2026; The Conversation Global · 24 July 2026
Nigeria has issued its strongest regulatory ultimatum yet to Morocco's flag carrier, Royal Air Maroc, over persistent customer service failures — lost baggage, stranded travellers, and unpaid fines. The airline has defended itself, but the dispute exposes a broader pattern: African governments are increasingly willing to use aviation regulation as leverage against foreign carriers that treat the continent's passengers as second-tier customers. Source: The Africa Report · 24 July 2026
A convoy of Russian armoured vehicles has been tracked on a new route from Lomé, Togo, through Burkina Faso to Bamako, Mali — after Guinea refused to admit a sanctioned cargo ship. The Africa Report's investigation shows how the successor to the Wagner Group is adapting logistics in real time to circumvent international sanctions, using sympathetic Sahelian governments as transit nodes. Source: The Africa Report · 24 July 2026
Japan's Seven & i Holdings — the world's largest convenience store operator — has walked away from investment talks with Żabka Group, Poland's dominant convenience chain. Bloomberg reports the deal's collapse comes even as Seven & i continues searching for growth beyond a saturated Japanese market. The failure matters because convenience retail is one of the few consumer sectors where Asian operators hold genuine global advantages in logistics, supply chain, and format innovation. If Seven & i cannot close deals in Europe, the globalisation of Asian retail convenience — long predicted, never quite delivered — remains an aspiration rather than a strategy. Source: Bloomberg · 24 July 2026
A coalition of governors and attorneys general has filed suit in a Rhode Island federal court, alleging that the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA are withholding $740 million in emergency funding to pressure Democratic states into complying with the administration's most controversial policy changes. The lawsuit argues the federal government is using disaster relief as a coercive tool — conditioning aid on political compliance. If the suit succeeds, it establishes a legal firewall between emergency management and partisan leverage. If it fails, the precedent invites every future administration to do the same. Source: Fast Company · 24 July 2026
With the Washington Peace Accords stalled, the DRC has sent a senior diplomat to Europe armed with a document signed by the FDLR — the Rwandan Hutu rebel group that has long been Kigali's justification for intervention in eastern Congo. The move undermines one of Rwanda's core arguments with Western partners, shifting the diplomatic balance in a conflict that has killed millions and drawn in a dozen nations. Source: The Africa Report · 24 July 2026
US intelligence assessments have concluded that Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as Iran's supreme leader, is significantly more inclined to pursue a nuclear weapon than his predecessor, who had issued a religious edict against it. Regime hardliners argue a bomb is necessary to prevent future attacks on the Islamic Republic. The finding recalibrates every assumption underlying Western Iran diplomacy. Source: Times of Israel · 24 July 2026 ---
In Liberia, a country where civil war destroyed most institutional memory — libraries burned, government records lost, oral traditions severed — a loose network of young people is using TikTok, podcasts, and social media to reconstruct and preserve national history that no official body has bothered to protect.
Al Jazeera reports on how these digital archivists, many of them in their twenties, are interviewing elders, digitising surviving documents, and creating short-form content that reaches audiences the formal education system cannot. They work without institutional funding. Some started during COVID lockdowns. None waited for a government grant or an NGO invitation.
What makes this remarkable is not the platform. It is the act of defiance embedded in it. Liberia's post-war governments have shown little appetite for historical reckoning. The establishment — political elites, international NGOs, the diplomatic community — has preferred a soft amnesia. These creators reject that. They are building a counter-archive, one sixty-second video at a time, challenging official narratives and forcing uncomfortable conversations about accountability, identity, and the country's future.
The tools are consumer-grade. The phones are cheap. The internet connections are unreliable. But the impulse — to use whatever technology is available to go around the structures that prefer silence — is unmistakable. They are not asking permission from the gatekeepers of Liberian memory. They are replacing them.
In a country ranked among the world's poorest, where the median age is 18 and formal institutions remain fragile, these young people have spotted something nobody else bothered to see: that the gap between official history and lived experience is not a void — it is an opportunity. And they are filling it with the only resources they have: curiosity, a phone, and the stubborn belief that a nation that forgets its past cannot build its future.
Source: Al Jazeera · 24 July 2026
Billionaire collectors Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen are lending masterpieces to a major Whitney Museum exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein, following the Pop artist's biggest auction year in a decade. Artnet reports that the show's loan list reads like a roll call of American mega-wealth. The convergence of market heat and institutional ambition raises an old question in a new register: when the same collectors who set auction records also furnish museum exhibitions, the line between cultural patronage and price support blurs. Lichtenstein's dots have never been more valuable. Whether that makes them more meaningful is a different question. Source: Artnet News · 24 July 2026
Singapore's government has introduced parkour classes for citizens over seventy as part of a national ageing-well strategy. Monocle reports that the programme, which focuses on balance, spatial awareness, and controlled falling, is yielding measurable results in fall prevention — the leading cause of injury-related death among the elderly worldwide. The image of a seventy-five-year-old Singaporean vaulting a low wall is startling. The logic behind it is impeccable. Source: Monocle · 24 July 2026
Aeon revisits the concept of *antropofagia* — the Brazilian modernist movement that proposed "devouring" foreign cultural influences and transforming them into something distinctly Brazilian. Rooted in Oswald de Andrade's 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, the idea deliberately inverted colonial fears of cannibalism. The essay argues the concept is more relevant than ever in an era when cultural globalisation often means homogenisation. A reminder that the most creative response to imported culture is not rejection but digestion. Source: Aeon · 24 July 2026
An Aeon video essay tours the personalised homes of Queens, New York City's most diverse borough, where a trained architectural eye can spot references to Venetian streetscapes, Chinese temples, Greek columns, and Caribbean colour palettes — all on a single block. The film argues that vernacular architecture, shaped by immigrant communities with no access to architects, is among the most honest record of human migration ever built. Source: Aeon · 24 July 2026
La Nación profiles seven restaurants in Córdoba, Argentina, that are pushing culinary boundaries without the Buenos Aires hype machine. Some are new; others are established. All share a commitment to local ingredients and technique over imported trends. In a country where the capital dominates every cultural conversation, Córdoba's quiet gastronomic ambition is worth noting — and tasting. Source: La Nación · 24 July 2026
Allan Basbaum has spent half a century mapping the nervous system's pain pathways — searching for the places where chronic pain begins and where it can be interrupted. Aeon's long essay profiles his career as a story about scientific patience in an era that rewards speed. His work has directly influenced modern pain management, yet he remains largely unknown outside neuroscience. The piece is a quiet meditation on what it means to dedicate a life to a single question. Source: Aeon · 24 July 2026 ---
The idea that governments should own AI companies — ensuring that the profits of machine intelligence are shared with citizens — has gained traction in policy circles from Latin America to the Gulf. Rest of World's analysis punctures the fantasy. State ownership of AI firms risks weakening the oversight and accountability mechanisms that democratic societies depend on. When the regulator and the regulated are the same entity, scrutiny collapses. The piece examines case studies where state-owned technology enterprises became instruments of surveillance or patronage rather than public goods. The conclusion is uncomfortable for both left and right: neither pure market solutions nor state ownership solve the governance problem. What is needed is structural separation between AI development and AI oversight — a principle most governments have not yet accepted. Source: Rest of World · 24 July 2026
Chinese companies are selling vapes containing nicotine analogs — chemicals like 6-methyl-nicotine that are structurally similar to nicotine but fall outside existing regulatory definitions. Wired reports that Big Tobacco studied these compounds for decades but never marketed them, deterred by unknown health risks. Chinese manufacturers, operating in a looser regulatory environment, have no such hesitation. The compounds may be more potent than nicotine itself. The regulatory gap is not a bug; it is the product's business model. The story is a textbook case of how technical ingenuity, unmoored from ethical guardrails, exploits the lag between innovation and regulation. Source: Wired · 24 July 2026
Stockholm-based e-scooter company Voi Technology posted second-quarter revenue of €68.8 million, a 47 percent year-on-year increase. The unlisted company has been quietly building what many of its flashier rivals failed to achieve: a sustainable unit economics model in European urban micromobility. While Bird went bankrupt and Lime retrenched, Voi focused on regulatory compliance, city partnerships, and operational efficiency. The result is a company that may be approaching profitability in a sector littered with casualties. Source: Di Digital · 24 July 2026 ---
10,000,000,000,000
$10,000,000,000,000
That is the estimated cumulative economic loss the 2026 El Niño could cause globally by 2032, according to projections cited by Wired. The figure accounts for agricultural disruption, infrastructure damage, health costs, and productivity losses across affected regions. For context, this single climate event's projected economic toll exceeds the GDP of every country on Earth except the United States and China.
The number matters because it reframes climate risk from an environmental concern to a financial one. Insurers, central banks, and sovereign wealth funds that have treated extreme weather as a tail risk must now model it as a base case. The 2026 El Niño is intensifying faster than any predecessor, and its effects are already visible: Asia's rice belt is drying, commodity markets are repricing staple crops, and disaster costs are compounding across hemispheres.
Ten trillion dollars is not a prediction of apocalypse. It is a price tag on inaction — the cost of treating each extreme weather event as an isolated surprise rather than a feature of a changed climate system. The number should haunt every finance minister who still treats climate adaptation as a discretionary budget line.
Source: Wired · 24 July 2026; Carbon Brief · 24 July 2026
In perspective
That is the estimated cumulative economic loss the 2026 El Niño could cause globally by 2032, according to projections cited by Wired. The figure accounts for agricultural disruption, infrastructure damage, health costs, and productivity losses across...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Researchers have built textiles from living fungal mycelium that can repair themselves, clean themselves, and decompose into soil when you no longer want them. It sounds like science fiction, but it's published research with working prototypes. And that is exactly what breakthroughs look like before the rest of the world understands what just happened.
The fashion industry accounts for ten percent of global carbon emissions and dumps 92 million tons of textile waste every year. Those kinds of numbers have led us to blame consumers, demand bans, moralize about fast fashion, and design campaigns that make people feel guilty for buying a t-shirt. None of it has worked. Emissions are rising. The waste mountains are growing. Guilt is not a scalable solution.
But a material that is grown rather than manufactured, that maintains itself, and that literally disappears when discarded — that solves the problem on an entirely different level. Not by asking people to consume less, but by making the consequences of consumption fundamentally different. That is the difference between regulating away the harm and building it away.
I have always believed more in builders than in regulators. Not because rules are unnecessary, but because the best solutions emerge when someone engineers a material, a product, or a service that makes the old problem irrelevant. Fungal mycelium in a lab coat isn't glamorous. But that is how the future actually begins.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai