Gideon Lichfield

Camilo José Vergara came to the US from Chile to study in 1965, and in the 1970s, he began taking photos to document the decay of inner-city neighborhoods. His favorite area was Harlem in New York, where he has returned to stand in exactly the same spots again and again, recording the changing storefronts and the rise and fall of buildings. (A good archive of some of his work is at Invincible Cities.)

Evolution can sometimes produce some rather weird results.

For the past several years, a Canadian company called D-Wave Systems has been selling what it says is the largest quantum computer ever built. D-Wave’s clients include Lockheed Martin, NASA, the US National Security Agency, and Google, each of which paid somewhere between $10 million and $15 million for the thing. As a result, D-Wave has won itself millions in funding and vast amounts of press coverage—including, two months ago, the cover of Time (paywall).

This evening Jews around the world are celebrating the first night of Passover. One of the staples of the seder, the festive meal, is haroset (also spelled haroseth, charoseth, kharoset, jaroset if you’re Spanish-speaking, and any number of other variations). It’s a sweet, apple-based mush that is supposed to represent the mud or mortar with which Israelite laborers built bricks during their enslavement in Egypt.

The talk of Wall Street this week wasn’t an IPO, or a market crash, or multi-billion-dollar rate-fixing settlement. It was a book: Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, the story of a group of traders and technologists who built their own exchange, IEX, in an attempt to short-circuit the high-frequency trading (HFT) firms that skim hundreds of millions of dollars out of the markets in tiny increments using millisecond advantages. (Here’s an excerpt from the book, and our own story about IEX, from last year.)

The language we speak can have a powerful influence on how we think about time—and even how we conduct business. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new working paper from Harvard Business School.

Even if they find Malaysia Airlines flight 370 by the time you read this, few mysteries will have gripped the entire planet for two weeks like the fate of this one missing plane. But there’s another mystery that we just got a little closer to unraveling.

The US has promised Russia ”very serious” consequences if it annexes Crimea after this Sunday’s referendum—the outcome of which is a foregone conclusion—on joining Russia. But how serious?

With tensions rising over Crimea, Russia yesterday blocked a number of opposition websites. One of them is the blog of Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader currently under house arrest, who is known for publishing documents about official corruption online. In response to the censorship, he published what he says are his blog’s traffic statistics (link in Russian) for the past 12 months, showing 20 million unique visitors (note that it’s not possible for us to verify this independently). Assuming most of them are from Russia, it’s a not-insignificant chunk of the country’s population of 143 million—good reason for the authorities to be worried:

Good morning, Quartz readers!

When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, I was living in Jerusalem, covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before that I’d spent two years in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My work involved trying to gain the trust of groups of people who were sometimes out to kill each other. I was circumspect and maybe a little paranoid. I got good at compartmentalizing.

The virus that was used a couple of months ago to steal 40 million people’s credit-card details from American retailer Target was, it was recently revealed, called “Kaptoxa”—which, as English-language news outlets are helpfully explaining, is Russian slang for “potato.”

Ariel Sharon died yesterday, and his last major political act was to evict my cousins from the Gaza Strip.

Good morning, Quartz readers!

This story has been updated.

It clearly looked like a climbdown. This week Russian president Vladimir Putin announced the release of a bunch of high-profile political prisoners—oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, two members of punk band Pussy Riot, and a crew of Greenpeace activists.

Meet Jim Knight. He is—or was—the chef at The Plough, a pub in the bucolic English village of Great Haseley, Oxfordshire (not to be confused with The Plough in Langford, Bedfordshire, which has a similar Twitter handle). Earlier today, he was apparently informed that his services were no longer required.

This is an Arabic translation of a letter to the leaders of the Syrian opposition forces, in response to a spate of kidnappings of journalists. The letter, signed by the heads of 13 news organizations (among them David Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media, which owns Quartz) urges the forces to “to assist in identifying those groups currently holding journalists and take the steps necessary to bring about their release.” The translation is by Naziha Baassiri, provided courtesy of Syria Deeply. The English original is here.

This week we were reminded of how often the future turns out less bright than it looked.

Anything that stops Iran building a nuclear bomb, even temporarily, ought to be a good thing, right? The deal reached in Geneva, in which Iran agreed to scale back its uranium enrichment program in return for a partial lifting of sanctions, has been hailed as a breakthrough—particularly in US-Iran relations, which have been sour since the 1979-1981 US embassy hostage crisis. Yet it has invited harsh criticism from three quarters: US Republicans, Israel, and Iran’s Arab neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia.

Conferences are a booming business—Quartz held its own Next Billion gathering last week—and your company may pay thousands of dollars to send you to a big-name event. How do you make sure it’s worth the money and convince your boss to let you go next time? We turned for advice to a conference veteran: Yossi Vardi, often described as the tech guru of Israel. At 71 years of age, and with experience in over 70 different companies (either as a founder, manager or investor), Vardi has been to more than his fair share of conferences and also hosts the DLD Tel Aviv Digital Innovation Festival.

Last year, just as the Chinese government’s new administration was heralding its commitment to stamping out corruption, profiles of the personal wealth and connections of top leaders—one by the New York Times, the other by Bloomberg—exposed the hypocrisy of that goal. The Communist Party has since denied visas to new journalists, blocked the New York Times’s and Bloomberg’s websites, and generally created headaches for foreign media.

Good morning, Quartz readers!

If conference calls and even Skype conversations never feel quite the same as sitting in a room with someone, it’s because we communicate a vast amount of extra information with every part of our bodies, from the arch of our eyebrows to the movements of our feet. Researchers have devoted a lot of time to studying body language, and Quartz turned to some academic papers to compile these explanations about the impact of various body positions.