Hi Quartz members!
Greetings from the US, where it’s been a divisive week as the Supreme Court ended affirmative action at universities, canceled a student loan forgiveness program, and protected a web designer’s First Amendment right to refuse to build wedding sites for gay couples. But if there’s one thing Americans can agree on these days (close your ears, Jay Powell) it’s that hosting a Fourth of July cookout is getting really expensive. Did you lay out a shocking amount for a family-size bag of potato chips this weekend? Let us know what you paid—and if it was worth it.
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🛵 What’s wrong with this pay scheme? DoorDash is offering delivery workers a new hourly pay option, but it comes with a major catch. Ananya Bhattacharya reports on what the new earnings model leaves to be desired.
🏓 Caution on the court. Pickleball is all the rage in senior communities—and an increasing source of injuries for people over 50. Julia Malleck looks at new research by analysts at UBS, who estimate that injuries from the sport may be responsible for up to $500 million in medical spending this year in the US alone.
📋 Run a better meeting. Quartz at Work has published tons of tips over the years for getting more out of group discussions. Gabriela Riccardi rounds up 10 of the best ways to create environments that actually encourage dialogue.
💻 It’s tricky. It may not be as widespread as Wordle, but The Password Game is fast becoming an internet sensation, both for the simplicity of its instructions and the winking commentary it offers on life in the digital age. Let Faustine Ngila introduce you to developer Neal Agarwal’s creation—and then test your cleverness, and patience, with password requirements.
👰 Seasons of love. Say what you will about The Bachelorette. The largely white, extremely heteronormative, arguably anti-feminist show has had incredible staying power in the US, where it just began its 20th season. In an engaging rundown of the show’s history and key moments, Michelle Cheng invites you to scroll through the evolution of a reality television juggernaut.
5 great stories from elsewhere
🙅♀️ Anti-travel. In a hot take, especially as the summer holiday season reaches its peak, Agnes Collard for the New Yorker says: To hell with travel! The author argues that a list of heavyweights—Socrates, Emerson, Pessoa— would agree that a sojourn in a new location is a fool’s errand. Collard then gets to a key part of her argument: How we define travel, and engage in it, matters. After a read, you may be convinced.
🛍️ Shein-fluenced. The internet was abuzz this week following a PR disaster involving Chinese fast fashion brand Shein and a gaggle of gullible influencers. The multibillion-dollar company, notorious for its record of labor violations, flew TikTokers to one of its hubs in Guangzhou to give them the old razzle dazzle. The influencers were soon singing Shein’s praises. Time documents the online backlash that followed.
🌪️ In the sand. Paleotempestologists study extreme weather events from the distant past. The science, which emerged in the 1990s, has drawn increasing interest as humanity faces the impacts of climate change. Nautilus brings the story of how core samples taken around the Atlantic basin have helped researchers get a glimpse of storms from as far back as 2,000 years ago, allowing us to better understand risks in the present day.
📱Yahoo boys. Richard, nickname Biggy, is a 28-year-old from Nigeria who poses online as a single mother from Wisconsin. His job: romance scammer. Some Nigerians see the profession as criminal, but in a nation where over 50% of young men are unemployed, others see the deceitful romeos as just trying to make ends meet. A longread from the Atavist takes us to the street of Lagos, a hub for so-called “Yahoo boys.”
📜Turn of phrase. If you’ve ever had a bee in your bonnet about the origins of phrases like “little did they know” and “add insult to injury,” a piece from Literary Hub will bring an end to your head scratching. An excerpt from The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words explains how several popular English idioms came to be.
What to watch for this week
These are some of the events our newsroom will be paying attention to in the week ahead.
- Monday: Wimbledon tennis play starts in London, Tupperware unpacks its quarterly earnings report
- Tuesday: The US celebrates its declaration of independence from England in 1776, while Rwanda commemorates the day in 1994 when forces secured Kigali and ended a genocide
- Wednesday: The two-day OPEC International Seminar begins in Vienna, featuring Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, the CEOs of Total and Saudi Aramco (the latter pictured above), and other key figures in the fossil fuel industry
- Thursday: Econ Twitter will be scrutinizing US initial jobs claims and the latest installment of the JOLTS report; Levi Strauss posts quarterly results
- Friday: China General Nuclear Power Group reports earnings
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, winning passwords, and treatises on travel. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Julia Malleck.