The second installment of the birthday preprint trilogy appears online today in ChemRxiv. This exciting contribution represents the culmination of a long and arduous research journey. By way of background, much of our lab’s work in alkene functionalization has strategically employed removable bi- and tridentate directing auxiliaries to control regioselectivity and stabilize key alkylmetal intermediates in catalysis. Achieving analogous reactivity with simple, monodentate functional groups has proven to be a significant challenge. In this manuscript, we report that electron-deficient olefin (EDO) ligands dramatically promote reactivity in directed 1,2-diarylation of simple alkenyl amides, offering a strong platform for future development of challenging alkene functionalization reactions of ubiquitous alkene starting materials. Congrats to the authors, Joe, Roman, Van, and Malkanthi, as well as our spectacular collaborators from BMS, Steve and Martin. Great work, team! For a link to the manuscript, click here.