Good morning, Quartz readers!
Meetings between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries have always been tense, but next week’s US-China summit comes at an especially fraught time.
Donald Trump will meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at his private Mar-a-Lago club with his fledgling presidency in upheaval. The White House and the Republican party are riven with infighting, key initiatives have stalled, and investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election have undermined his legitimacy.
A need to rebound from these setbacks may be one reason Trump has promised a “tough” discussion with Xi. He is sure to be coached by hardline China advisor Peter Navarro, who believes China is full of cheating thieves, intent on global domination. After Trump’s allegations that China had stolen jobs and a way of life from America’s middle class on the campaign trail, the stage seems set for a clash. Sensitive topics could include the trade imbalance, China’s over-production of steel, North Korea’s increasing militarization, and Beijing’s insistence that it control the South China Sea, in defiance of international law. American CEOs are worried that the wrong move could destabilize the relationship and harm the US economy.
Yet despite the tough talk, the Trump White House just issued a new China trade report that was little different from the one Barack Obama put out in 2016. And Trump has backed down from confrontation with Xi before, reversing his threat to develop closer US relations with Taiwan—a liberal self-governing island which China considers a province—after Beijing’s state media suggested China could arm the US’s enemies.
In fact, so far, the Trump administration’s one real break with past US policy on China has been to get less tough, not more: It declined to join various allies in signing a letter last week criticizing Beijing for torturing human-rights lawyers. Perhaps, unlike with some of his foreign partners, Trump understands that in upsetting China, he would have a lot to lose.—Heather Timmons
Some things on Quartz we especially liked
This week on Quartz we covered fascinating changes occurring across the globe. From Tokyo, Isabella Steger writes about a new bi-monthly newspaper that serves Japan’s community of social recluses. In China, Zheping Huang discovers that the hottest new boy band is actually five women who have embraced an androgynous aesthetic. Hannah Yi has a video from Kansas City, Missouri, where the Hallmark corporate office houses one of the oldest corporate art collections in the US, including works by Picasso and Dali. Neha Thirani Bagri writes about a clandestine university in Iran that has been educating Baha’is, a persecuted minority, for over 30 years. And in the United States, where the past 25 years have seen both booms and busts, Christopher Groskopf & Dan Kopf mapped where American income has grown the most and least.
It’s been a busy week for our style and fashion writer Marc Bain, who lays out the steps for creating a minimalist wardrobe, a simple solution to make putting together a coherent outfit easier. He writes about the exhaustive research by the team behind the 1980s wardrobes on TV spy thriller The Americans, and the design thinking behind the wildly stylish and idiosyncratic clothes of another show, Legion—FX’s mind-bending adaptation of the Marvel comic about a mentally unstable superhero. We’re just a little obsessed with Legion; Adam Epstein also writes about the transfixing soundtrack of the show, which attempts to interpret the main character’s powerful, fractured psyche into external sound.
Meanwhile, we continue to watch the trends driving change in the marketplace. Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, a consulting firm that specializes in product innovation and design, advocates adopting a circular mindset to design products that can be reused and an economy that is not wasteful. Jenny Anderson writes about the generational shift driving millennials to hold more traditional views about women’s roles at home than their parents. Thu-Huong Ha argues that America’s pernicious obsession with multitasking has led to a boom in audiobooks. And technology ethicist David Ryan Polgar writes about how we are beginning to lose our humanness online as our digital interactions become ever more mechanical and bot-like.
And finally, Michael Tabb, who last summer deconstructed Olympic gymnast Simone Biles’ somersaults, demystifies the physics of the quadruple jump, the hardest move in figure skating.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Finding James Comey. Pure fun but also educational: Ashley Feinberg of Gizmodo explains how, from nothing but an offhand public comment by the FBI director about his private Instagram account, she was able to track down both it and his secret Twitter username, using a weakness in Instagram’s privacy rules. An object lesson for anyone who thinks private means private, and for FBI people who think they know all about security.
Remembering Robert Silvers. The New York Review of Books collects tributes to Silvers, who died last week after 54 years as its editor. These reflections by luminaries of the literary world on a man they clearly regarded as a giant bring to mind the lines from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem: “And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew / That one small head could carry all he knew.”
What the future of cars will do to us. Venture capitalist Benedict Evans thinks out the long-term impacts of cars becoming (a) electric and (b) self-driving. His main conclusion: It will remake our cities, as the economic calculus that brought about parking garages, big-box stores, buses, large power stations, and car ownership itself gets turned on its head.
The bitcoin hacker who fought in Syria. Early bitcoin developer Amir Taaki vanished from sight about two years ago. Now Taaki has resurfaced in his native Britain, and reveals to Wired’s Andy Greenberg that he was on the frontlines of Syria’s civil war, fighting for the anarchist YPG group against ISIL. He went from wielding AK-47s to joining the YPG’s economics committee, spreading computer—and bitcoin—literacy, but now fears imprisonment at home.
The deportation sickness. Hundred of refugee children in Sweden are falling prey to a mysterious, coma-like state dubbed uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome. As Rachel Aviv writes in the New Yorker, it began emerging in the early 2000s, among children whose families had been denied asylum. “I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in,” a doctor tells Aviv. “They are like Snow White.”
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