Today's 7

Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, starts at $1,999. Ars Technica's verdict is blunt: folded up as a phone, there is not a single way it beats a regular iPhone.

The most concrete complaint is the missing Face ID, with Touch ID moved to the power button on the upper right when folded, so left-handers can barely reach the side-mounted dock. Unfolded it is genuinely nice: the screen grows from 5.4 inches to 7.6 inches, and split-screen feels like two iPhones side by side.

My take: paying two thousand dollars for a phone I prefer not to hold closed does not add up.

A Munich official, explaining the city's driverless bus project, asked: what does it mean when the law is an experiment too?

Germany calls these Experimentierklauseln, experimental clauses: rules with an expiry date, a clear geographic or sectoral boundary and rigorous evaluation, after which the city decides whether to keep them. Hamburg let a hospital fly cancer tissue samples by drone, skipping federal aviation law for 18 months, and the results are now feeding into a federal draft.

What surprised me most is the mindset: uncertainty as an ally, and implementation first so you can find out what the policy should be.

The Sagrada Família took 144 years to build, and its main spire topped out this February, making it the world's tallest church. But when the author visited the Hospital de Sant Pau, he found the most ornate pavilion was not a ward but the administration building.

He was bored within half an hour: the more ornament, the more cognitive load, and what he liked best in the end were the orange trees.

My own feeling is that one gloriously weird building is plenty. A whole city like this would make me want to move.

In 1982, a live US-Soviet satellite TV link was cut off halfway through when the promoter Bill Graham decided the whole thing was a KGB trick and literally pulled the plug. Many of the people organising such exchanges also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain another way: through telepathy.

One detail in the book stopped me: one of Russia's first internet providers was founded in the 1980s with the help of Americans who had earlier sought out Soviet parapsychologists. In the USSR, telepathy was once studied as a legitimate science.

Put telepathy and the internet on the same line, and somehow it reads as a natural sequence.

A group of East African writers met in Nairobi to talk about how to get published, and the conclusion was: we need to be adopted by Ellah Wakatama. She is editor, agent, publisher and godmother rolled into one.

The earlier version of this was Chinua Achebe, who ran Heinemann's African Writers Series and pushed a generation of African novelists into Western readers' view. Now it is her turn.

What surprised me most was how she got into publishing: her seven-year-old daughter told her, we can't live with you because you're so unhappy.

The researchers who study happiness held a reunion of sorts. Thirteen pioneers (plus a few family members) brought a combined 600 years of experience and concluded that personal relationships contribute most to a happy life.

Money matters too, but only up to meeting basic needs; beyond that the returns diminish. What I liked better was another number: only about 10 percent of disposition is down to life circumstances, and as much as 40 percent to how you choose to spend your time.

So there is still hope for the naturally gloomy.