Hi Quartz members!
It was a busy week on the space beat, and Quartz senior reporter Tim Fernholz has a trio of pieces we’re featuring here in case you missed them. Also, if you haven’t checked out the landing page for The Root’s hip-hop anniversary project, celebrating the genre’s 50 years of music and influence, this is the place. (We’re featuring one of Quartz’s contributions to the series in today’s Sunday Reads.) Enjoying this newsletter? Let us know; we’d love to hear from you.
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🧓 Forget the generational divides. When you stop thinking about workplace behavior as a function of age, there is much to gain. Gabriela Riccardi talks to the Wharton School’s Mauro Guillén, whose new book The Perennials argues there are specific personal benefits to being part of a post-generational society.
🌓 The new geopolitics of space. India’s safe landing this week of a robotic explorer dispatched to the Moon sent a message back to Earth: India has fully emerged as Russia’s replacement among 21st-century spacefaring powers. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has more work to do to convince the FAA that SpaceX’s Starship is ready to fly again; and in this week’s Space Business newsletter, Tim Fernholz examines the co-dependencies between SpaceX and the US government. Not yet a subscriber to Space Business? Sign up here.
🎤 Advanced hip-hop class. Julia Malleck’s interview of Emmett Price III, dean of Africana studies at the Berklee College of Music, applies a global lens to the commercialization of a grassroots genre and reveals just how nuanced the market is. Says Price, “Gangsta rap in the mid-‘80s is going to sell a whole lot of units to make a whole lot of money because folks can sit in the suburbs and feel like they understand what gang violence is all about without having to engage in it. And then folks can be in Japan or England and feel like they understand what’s going on in America.” Find the complete Q&A here.
🚢 The wind beneath its wings. Cargo ships are notorious oil guzzlers. But the wind-harnessing technology on Mitsubishi’s Pyxis Ocean, which was chartered by Cargill and will sail from Singapore to Brazil, offers a glimpse at a greener future for ocean vessels. Ananya Bhattacharya explains the promise of WindWings, with special sails designed by the engineering firm spun out from British sailor Sir Ben Ainslie’s 2017 America’s Cup team.
🫙 Party trick. The food-storage containers invented by chemist Earl Tupper in the 1940s didn’t take off right away. But when Brownie Wise, a single mother with an eighth-grade education and a serious entrepreneurial streak, began recruiting women to sell the products at parties hosted in their homes, a global brand was born. Gabriela Riccardi traces Tupperware’s history from quaint startup to international business empire to unwitting meme stock, in this week’s Quartz Obsession. (You can sign up to receive more Quartz Obsessions, featuring deep dives into new trends, forgotten histories, and other preoccupations of curious minds.)
5 great stories from elsewhere
👽 X-Files IRL. When Oumuamua, a massive interstellar object, entered our solar system in 2017, scientists couldn’t figure out what was causing it to speed up. One Harvard professor, Avi Loeb, had an unconventional hypothesis: aliens. In fact, departing from many in the scientific community, he believes that the extraterrestrials have already already paid us a visit. The New York Times discusses Loeb’s fame, and his critics.
👁️ Myopic times. About 90% of all high schoolers in Taiwan are nearsighted, similar to rates for young people in South Korea and Japan. Myopia is now increasing in prevalence globally but many countries are unprepared to treat the condition. Wired delves into the scientific effort to understand the causes of myopia, and Taiwan’s efforts to get the treatment right.
🐦 Chirp equality. Male birds across species have long been viewed as the dominant singers, while female bird song tends to be lesser or unnotable. But research shows this narrative, which dates back to Charles Darwin, isn’t true. The lyrebird, native to Australia, is one of the species helping to debunk that myth, bioGraphic explains.
💰 Wealth woes. Apparently rich Americans don’t feel that rich. One survey found that a whopping 25% of people making over $175,000 a year—the top 10% income bracket in the US—see themselves as “very poor” or “poor.” That feeling may to a large extent be affected by where you live, according to Bloomberg. An interactive tool in the story, “Where would you feel richer?” shows how far your salary would stretch in different metro areas.
🖼️ Burn it all! Many TV shows and movies on our screens these days appear to feature the destruction of famous art, observes Jonah Siegel for Public Books. Drawing a line from the biblical story of Daniel and the metal statue all the way to The Last of Us, a popular zombie TV show, Siegel puzzles out what scenes of gleeful ruination can tell us about the times we’re living in.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be watching next week:
- Monday: It’s the 100th anniversary of the March on Washington, the first hearing for Donald Trump’s election interference case, and BYD’s earnings day
- Tuesday: Earnings from HP and Best Buy
- Wednesday: The US releases some updated GDP stats, Salesforce earnings
- Thursday: UBS is set to announce updates to its Credit Suisse merger
- Friday: A Texas law eliminating mandatory heat breaks for construction workers goes into effect
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, climate disaster photos, and unique hotel site reviews. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy, Julia Malleck, and Morgan Haefner.