KamaChameleon: What does Harris stand for?

The economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world. In the third and final installment of our series on dating apps, we look away from the west in places where the culture is changing fast. Some firms that struggle elsewhere are flourishing and homegrown alternatives even more so. And Wally Amos loved one thing more than any other chocolate chip cookies. He liked baking them, eating them, and selling them. Our obituary's editor celebrates the creator of the beloved famous Amos chain. But first.

Is your audio okay with all the background noise? We'll see. I don't know. It was just past midnight at a club in Chicago where I was for the Democratic National Convention. I was at an after party called Hotties for Harris. Yes, I know.

Charlie McCann writes for 1843, our sister magazine, and has spent this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

And it was basically like as if all the Internet memes about Kamala Harris had kind of come to life. People were sipping on coconuts. There was this DJ playing in front of a screen which had huge pictures of Kamala Harris dancing and pictures of Doritos falling down the screen. She loves Doritos. The point of the party was to encourage young people to vote. Oh, my God, Amanda. And one of these influencers was a guy called Chris Mowry who was this 22 year old from Georgia with very floppy blond hair who described himself as a raging liberal. It's almost like this type of energy would transcend people who are mainly very political. So when I talk to friends, a lot of my friends are not political, but when I talk to them, they're involved in, like, the memes. They're involved. They've seen a lot of the clips. Like, they've seen the merch. I also spoke to two sisters, both of them also influencers. I guess it runs in the family. I would say it's an opportunity because I do think that there are young voters out there who are excited about Brad Summer Nadia, who helped to organize the event. She focuses on content about, as she put it, reproductive health and periods. I think that was the opportunity of the DNC to show what does she care for? And we've already heard some of that. We've heard her talk about, you know, protecting abortions nationally, what she's going to sign. I think we'll hear a lot more in the next couple days. The idea of a bunch of Gen Z influencers throwing a party for Harris would have been unthinkable. Just a couple months ago, you know, as vice President, Harris was decidedly not hot. She was heavily criticized for rhetorical blunders, for mismanaging her office, for seemingly having a lack of authenticity. And yet, almost as soon as she replaced Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, she has become an overnight sensation.

Charlie, you sound like you've been having a lot of fun. Obviously, you've been in Chicago all week and at the DNC itself. What's the mood like there?

Yeah, this was my very first convention. I wasn't sure what to expect. I really felt that the mood was just electric. There were tens of thousands of delegates and party faithful who had flocked to Chicago to celebrate the nomination of Kamala Harris. People were saying they were excited about having a young candidate, a woman of color, somebody they felt who could really take on Donald Trump. And the other thing that they talked a lot about was just the vibe shift, if I can put it that way. Having been really quite uncertain about Biden's prospects against Trump, feeling, as some people put it, really, really depressed, and coming from an era in which Trump has so dominated the discourse, people really felt that Kamala Harris was offering something different.

So we've had a week of endorsements with big speeches from Obama and Oprah, but Harris finally spoke last night at the convention. How did she do?

Well, I was there on the ground watching it, And it was a bit like being at a concert, waiting for the headliner to come on stage. And you've been waiting for hours, and in this case, days. And when she finally strode on stage, tens of thousands of people who are packed into the stadium just start roaring and chanting, and they're going on from minute after minute after minute to the point that Kamala Harris couldn't even be heard. She's talking on a massive sound system. You couldn't even hear her speak. I think she did pretty well. I mean, this was an opportunity for her to really introduce herself to America. Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward.

Did you get a better sense of what she actually stands for?

Not really. She has started to sketch out sort of broad strokes of a policy agenda. We know that she stands for reproductive rights. She wants to bolster voting rights. In her speech, she did begin to address what a foreign policy might look like. So she said that she supports Ukraine in its war against Russia, and she notably also addressed the Israel Gaza conflict. And let me Be clear. I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called hamas caused on October 7. So she was quite light on detail, but she is starting gradually to reveal more of what a policy agenda might look like for her. But look, if you want to hear more about Harris's policy positions, I've been in Chicago with my colleagues who have been reporting on that very subject. So they'll be talking about that on Checks and Balance, which is out later today.

And I guess this might be a hard question to answer when you've just been in a pop concert type situation, but do you think the party will really unite around her now?

Yes, I think it absolutely will. Most factions of the party united around her pretty quickly. Almost within a day of Biden selecting her as his successor, there was this question about how Muslim Americans might respond to her candidacy. Over 40,000 dead.

Over 40,000 dead from the river to the sea.

There were pro Gaza protests organized in Chicago during the convention, and There were about 30 uncommitted delegates who were promising to cause a bit of a scene if she didn't come forward and more robustly evince sympathy for Palestinians. In the end, though, the protests were nowhere near as big as the organizers said they would be, and the uncommitted delegates didn't cause a scene in the slightest. I think she has managed to placate that wing of the party for now. And you can see this from delegates like Ramiel Cabra, a Palestinian delegate from Washington state who I met. When I met him, he was wearing a keffiyeh round his neck. And he told me that he thought that he could hear in her rhetoric that she was more sympathetic to Gazans than Biden was. The beautiful thing about the Democratic Party.

Is that they, you know, we call.

Ourselves the big tent party. And I feel that there's room for.

Us to have those conversations at the convention. Kamala Harris is really preaching to the converted. So I guess the question is, can she actually unite America around her now and how will this go down with voters? Do you have any sense of that?

Yeah. So the Democratic Party faithful clearly adore her, but it remains too early to tell, I think, whether the convention will boost her standing in the polls. The Economist model at the moment gives Harris a 1 and 2 chance of victory. So the race is really neck and neck. You know, I think one thing to watch out for as election day draws closer is whether she does unveil more of a governing agenda. But when I spoke to Harris's fans at the Hotties for Harris party, they weren't really that bothered by her lack of a governing agenda. The reality we're in is that it's her or Trump and we've lived under four years of Trump. We know that what that could be. We know the progress that we've seen reversed. It's like her or Trump. It's all well and good to campaign as the anti Trump candidate, but at some point we do need to know what Kamala Harris stands for.

Charlie, thank you so much. Go home and get some sleep.

Thank you Rosie.

Over the past two weeks, we've looked at how in the Western world people are growing disillusioned with dating through apps, why the biggest businesses are in trouble, and what young people are trying instead.

Ore Ogunbi reports on Africa and is also our part time dating correspondent.

But in other parts of the world, the trajectory of dating apps looks a little different. According to our Brazil correspondent Anna Lancres, a liberal and open society, there is fertile ground for these dating apps.

In 2023, Brazil had the fourth largest number of dating app downloads in the world. Brazilians adore social media, according to gwi, a market research firm based in London. They spend an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes a day swiping and scrolling. That's more than citizens of any other country. And dating apps fit right into the bigger picture, especially the incumbents we've already spoken about in earlier episodes. In Brazil, many people use the apps to supplement their already very busy social lives. Here's Jessica. She says she's super sociable and spends a lot of time hanging out with friends and going out in Sao Paulo. But she uses Bumble because the intention there is more specific than just hanging out with friends. And there's another aspect of Brazilian culture that helps dating apps do well. According to one recent global study, Brazilians really like getting frisky between the sheets. 82% of adults say that they have sex at least once a week, which is second only to Greece. That's Fernando. He says. Tinder, in theory, is meant to help you find a romantic partner, but at the end of the day, he says, people just want to have sex. Apps like Grindr, which is for LGBT people, are also thriving in Brazil, even more so than in other places. According to a report by business of apps, 6% of Grindr users are Brazilian, which is double the share of Americans and triple the share of Britons. Since I moved to Brazil in January, this is actually one of the things that has surprised me the most. It's a country that's full of contradictions. On the one hand, it's a country where prudish evangelicalism is growing very fast and where voters elected a far right social Conservative president in 2018. But at the same time, in the country's biggest cities, there's generally a very relaxed attitude to sex.

So in Brazil, existing dating apps seamlessly blend into the culture. But in other places, new apps are being created specifically to fit different sets of values. In more conservative societies, apps are popping up that say that their aim is the end game, finding a partner for marriage and having kids. And most people appear to be on the apps looking for exactly that. Let's start with China, where app developers are capitalizing on concerns over low fertility rates and population decline. We checked in with Jhao Chen, who's a producer on our weekly China podcast, Drum Tower.

It used to be that parents and village matchmakers would set you up with peers whose background your family approves of. But as more young adults flock to big cities and gain new perspectives, the pursuit of an ideal match now rests more in the hands of themselves. Dating apps are new to China. People have been using the sites since the early 2000s. While the country's government has cracked down on most parts of the tech sector, it has mostly allowed dating apps to thrive. So I'm about to register on one of the most popular dating apps called Seoul. Seoul is actually an anonymous dating app and it aims to match users with similar interests and backgrounds. It has 30 million monthly active users, and the company claims that nearly 80% of their users are Gen Z. Wow. So you enter the page, it says Seoul, and the tagline is interesting. Seoul freely meets. It's asking that I pick a profile photo and they give you about eight options. They all look like anime characters. There's this anime girl with white hair wearing what looks like a bear hat. There's also another anime looking girl wearing a pumpkin and she looks like a witch. So I think I'm going to go with the witch one. The focus here is on emotional, serious and meaningful connections, not just on appearances, etc. Key to this is a test they give you when you sign up. Seven questions. First one says, do you prefer to be identified as someone who is soft hearted or someone who's determined and not easily backs down? All of this tries to eliminate people you might find on other apps. People looking for one night stands, people who are not very serious. Or serial cheaters. There's clearly demand for people wanting to meet potential partners who match criteria they have for a long term relationship. There's one other app, it's called Love of Ivy League. And one of their biggest selling points is in order to register as a user, you have to verify your diploma at a government website so that you can confirm whoever you're talking to. If they say they're from Harvard, they have to be from Harvard.

In China, dating hasn't been a taboo subject for some time. But in other places, particularly in majority Muslim countries, even the very concept of dating still is. Anne Hannah, who writes for our digital team, says that is still largely the case in Pakistan. Traditionally, in Pakistan, marriages took place within extended families, and that still happens in a lot of cases. One of the reasons for that, for example, is to keep money within the family unit. The country still has one of the highest rates of cousin marriages in the world, with 65% of people married to a cousin or a close blood relation. But there are signs that that is slowly changing and society is becoming more liberal. We can see now in big cities that the online dating market is slowly catching on. In 2023, the country was responsible for the sixth largest share of worldwide downloads.

Of dating apps, a minimum achievable number. I want Muzz to have 3 million active users in Pakistan. That's my goal.

That was Shahzad Yunus, the CEO of Muzz, a Muslim dating app that's trying to capitalize on Pakistan's changing society.

We unashamedly listen to and try and respect and serve the quirks of how Muslims find a life partner.

And the app has also catered its marketing to the communities that it's trying to target. In Pakistan, a recent billboard that attracted quite a lot of attention was one that told people to leave their cousins and find someone else.

We just launched a TV campaign that went viral in Pakistan. We were really touching on the experience of women in the Rishda process, the matchmaking process, which can be a little bit horrible and unpleasant for women. They feel very objectified, very judged, and we just wanted to comment on that and say this cannot be the way.

Interestingly, Muzz hasn't had success in all places with large Muslim communities where dating is still considered taboo and governments might have objections to certain things. But regardless, the company aims to reach those markets which it says it's prime to cater to. So it's not all bad news for dating apps, but the next stage of their growth, especially outside of America and Europe, will probably look a bit different than the last as the apps adapt to the evolving dating habits of the world. I hope you've enjoyed our three week series on dating and for the single Pringles, still searching for that special one. Wherever you're looking, I hope you find your very own perfect match.

The news agenda may not feel very August like, but we still have a summer sale until Monday. You can subscribe to the economist for 20% less and get unlimited digital access to all our reporting, podcasts, newsletters and events. Search Economist subscription to find the offer.

There came a time when Wally Amos was rather fed up with managing talent.

Ann Roe is the Economist's Obituaries editor.

He'd done very well at the William Morris Agency. He'd signed the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Simon and Garfunkel. But when he branched off on his own, he found it was much more difficult. He had very few clients and those he did have sometimes wouldn't pay his commission or broke their ankles or walked out of auditions or were otherwise annoying. So he began to think, why am I here? Why don't I represent something I really love and believe in? And what that thing was turned out to be cookies. It was rather surprising. They were quite a change from what he'd been doing before. Very small, but on the other hand very obedient and biddable and individual in the way when he baked them himself, as he did for therapy, really in the evenings, it used to be lovely to arrange them in rows and admire them and then eat them still warm from the oven. It took him back to his aunt Della's kitchen in Harlem. He'd lived with her after his parents divorced when he was 12, and that comfort feel of a warm cookie in his hand was something he always remembered and wanted to share. So after a while of that he decided that he would set up a shop and he had a $25,000 loan which came from Marvin Gaye, Helen Reddy and some really top tier acts that he had helped in the past, and he opened the little place where he was baking all the cookies himself in the bag and his young son Sean was balancing on a milk crate to sell them in the front. He found to his surprise that people absolutely loved cookies and he couldn't sell enough of them. In his first year the shop made $300,000. So he went on and became bigger and bigger and had to get other people to make them for him. By 1981 the takings had reached $12 million a year and he had outlets all over the country and abroad and he was a completely intrepid promoter of the cookies. In fact, now that he no longer could bake them himself, but had given his recipe to others, all his life was spent promoting them. So he would dress up in his standard gear, which was a Panama hat and a gauzy Indian shirt, and besides that, his smile, which was almost constant because he was so full of joy at spreading the love of cookies. Whenever a new outlet opened, he would have a block party and invite several of the stars he knew. In the mid-1980s, the fashions began to change and taste began to alter. He found that his revenues were tailing off. He tried to improve things by selling off equity, but in the end, he had to hand over the whole company. He had not only lost the the company, but he'd lost the use of his own name, which was Famous Amos, which had been blazoned over the shop in Sunset Boulevard and was always part of his Persona. He tried to go into other fields, he tried to go into muffins, and nothing really seemed to catch fire. And it was not until 1999 that he was invited back by the Keebler company, which was then the fifth owner. And he was told that he could be Famous Amos again if he promoted these cookies. And he decided he would, on the condition that they took them back to the standard they'd been at when he was running the company, because in the meantime, they'd gone through an awful lot of permutations with the different donors and they no longer tasted the same. It seemed that caramel colouring had been added and low quality vanilla, because he always insisted that he used as natural and good ingredients as he could possibly find. Many people tried to crack the recipe. They never did manage it, but he kept it in his head. He was sure that he would not promote the cookies again until they were exactly right. And so he did that for several years, until he decided it was probably better to leave cookies alone and go into retirement in Hawaii. In Hawaii, he set up a little shop which made gourmet cookies. And besides that, there was a room beside the shop in which he kept a lot of donated books and children were invited to go in there and read. And on the Saturdays, he himself would go in and sit in a rocking chair and read to them for hours. He had become a very strong advocate of literacy. He himself had come to reading pretty late in childhood and his mother had never learned to read. So he decided in the end that he would become a spokesman for literacy everywhere he could, and carried that on for some years. It linked in very nicely, he thought, with his love of cookies, because both cookies and reading were reaching out and bringing joy and nourishing people. And in that sense, he found his latest initiative in life was just as satisfying as his first.

Ann Rowe on Wally Amos, who has died aged 88. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Lanyuk. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta Martin McFarlane, with extra production help this week from El Nasuts and Kunal Patel. Tomorrow on the Weekend Intelligence, we're going to chronicle the largest and most devastating conflict anywhere in the world. Join us for Sudan, the war the world ignores.