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Hollywood studios and screenwriters struck a tentative deal... After almost five months, the historic writers’ strike could be coming to a close. But actors have yet to reach an agreement.
...and Canadian autoworkers ratified a new contract with Ford. The carmaker averted a strike up north, even as the US strike is starting to take a toll.
The Biden administration earmarked $1.4 billion to improve rail safety. The funds will support 70 projects across 35 states in the US.
Amazon is investing $4 billion in the AI firm Anthropic. It’s a coup for the startup and ChatGPT rival, as the Wall Street Journal reported, and marks a ramp-up in the AI competition among tech giants.
NASA retrieved soil from deep space for the first time. The samples, collected from asteroid Bennu, landed in Utah after a seven-year journey and may hold information about how the Solar System formed.
A new rare earth magnet factory in the US can’t elude China
The US is making a major investment in rare earth magnets—used in electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, and iPhones—to reduce its reliance on China. But Washington’s $94 million bet on E-VAC Magnetics to build and operate a major rare earth permanent magnet factory in the US won’t do much to temper Beijing’s sway over the critical industry. E-VAC’s parent, a century-old German company named Vacuumschmelze, has significant exposure to China.
🇨🇳 Roughly one in four Vacuumschmelze employees are China-based
🏠The company has production facilities there as well
🧲 It is a minority owner of a China-based joint venture with Zhongke Sanhuan, China’s largest producer of rare earth magnets
E-VAC’s China exposure aside, there’s also the challenge of Vacuumschmelze’s long history of operating losses. Quartz’s Mary Hui explains.
Quotable: A Pebble in the pond
“We really believe in a fundamentally different approach of going one by one, going slow and steady, going person by person, and creating a really great community for them, not putting a bunch of blue checks into a new product...” — Gabor Cselle, a former Google and Twitter product manager, in an interview with Quartz about building a Twitter alternative called Pebble.
Pebble, formerly T2, only has about 15,000 users, but that’s intentional. The co-founders of this new social media platform have wanted to move slowly and not break things. Quartz’s Scott Nover spoke with Cselle and another of Pebble’s co-founders, Sarah Oh, a former Twitter human rights advisor, about how they plan to compete with their old employer. Read the full interview here.
El Niño will help one unassuming industry—snow plowing
El Niño, a natural climate pattern which warms the Earth, will bring a mild and wet winter for many. But others will see the opposite: a prolonged, colder winter, with a lot of snow.
The snowplowing services industry is banking on another high year of high revenues. The US snowplowing services sector estimates it will take in around $25.6 billion in revenue in 2023, continuing a trend of increasing costs for plowing and de-icing.
Quartz’s most popular
🪡 Luddites saw the problem of AI coming from two centuries away
🤑 Rupert Murdoch steps down from Fox and News Corp. with a screed against “elites”
🚄 Florida’s $5 billion new Brightline route marks a big push for US investment in high-speed rail
🥕 Instacart goes public while slashing minimum pay rates for gig workers
🥤 Coke is launching a new drink “co-created” with AI
đź’´ Traveling in cashless China just got easier for foreign tourists
Surprising discoveries
Flamingos landed in the northern US state of Wisconsin. It’s the first time the species, which is usually seen along the Gulf Coast states, has been spotted in the state.
The teaser for Squid Game’s reality competition is here. The Netflix series maybe shouldn’t be made into a franchise where 456 people compete for $4.56 million?
We almost had an AI Hans Zimmer soundtrack. When a Disney director used AI to make a track, he described it as a “7 out of 10,” adding, “but the reason you go to Hans Zimmer is for 10 out of 10.”
A child’s shoe from 2,000 years ago was found in Austria. Its laces were still intact.
Silkworms were genetically modified to make spider silk. The material is six times tougher than kevlar.
Correction: In last Friday’s Daily Brief, we made a typo: 8 million annual riders are expected on Brightline’s high-speed rail line between Miami and Orlando, not 8 billion. Not the whole Earth’s population. Not 22 million riders a day, which would be the entire state of Florida. Our hopes for more high-speed rail in the US are big, but not THAT big.
Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, flamingo pics, and Hans Zimmer compositions to talk@qz.com. Reader support makes Quartz available to all—become a member. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner and Julia Malleck.