Hi Quartz members!
This week, we published the first three pieces in a new investigative series called Merchants of Care. With support from the Pulitzer Center and in partnership with Type Investigations, Quartz traveled the world to meet nurses involved in the global migration of care workers from poor countries to rich ones, which only accelerated with the onset of the covid-19 pandemic.
Our questions: How vulnerable are foreign care workers when they arrive in new jobs far from home? What happens to the vulnerable health systems they leave behind? And how much are rich countries like the US and UK to blame?
What we discovered:
- Indian brokers are taking the shine off the dreams of migrant nurses
- An exodus of nurses has caused a “medical brain drain” in Nigeria
The fourth and final piece in the series drops on Monday. Visit our site then for a look. Have any feedback for us on the series, or anything else? Please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.
5 (more) things we especially liked on Quartz
🍏 Apple of AI. Funny that Apple seems to be missing from a lot of the chatter around artificial intelligence, when Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft seem eager to talk about it at every turn. The irony is that, since 2017, Apple has been the industry’s most active buyer of AI and machine learning companies. AI reporter Michelle Cheng has the data and the details.
🪞 So you’re a narcissist. That’s not necessarily a terrible trait in a leader. Writing in Quartz at Work, contributor Diana Gasperoni explains why a touch of narcissism can be good for business. But she also shares where you should draw the line between, say, exuding confidence and having a full-blown personality disorder.
🚩 A red flag for green hiring. Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year, $132 billion of investments have been announced in projects tied to the transition away from fossil-fuel energy. But who’s going to do all the work? Clarisa Diaz and Michelle Cheng round up the latest projections from LinkedIn, which expects that by 2026, the number of openings for green jobs will outstrip the supply of workers suitable for the roles.
👷 Thinking beyond “hot strike summer.” Labor battles are clashing with climate change in all kinds of ways: Electric vehicles are at the middle of the United Auto Workers fight with Detroit’s Big Three, while Hollywood studios ordered the trimming of shade trees along picket lines to keep striking writers and actors baking in the California sun. Quartz contributor Adam Met wants to know: What is the labor movement’s long game on climate change?
🎮 Meme, myself, and I. Three years after he first invested in GameStop and catalyzed a movement among retail stock traders on Reddit and Discord, Ryan Cohen has taken over as the video-game retailer’s CEO. As tech reporter Scott Nover points out, this means there’s no longer anything standing in the way between Cohen’s vision and GameStop’s outcomes, except for the execution of the business for which Cohen himself is now responsible.
5 great stories from elsewhere
😬 TMI. You may have noticed your LinkedIn connections waxing philosophical lately, or even posting about their personal lives instead of just talking about work. What gives? Business Insider confirms that the site has definitely taken a turn for the weird, and suggests that the evolving meaning of “professional” has something to do with it.
🦠 Bite by bite. A giant problem—plastic waste—could be tackled through a teeny-tiny solution. It all dates back to a discovery in 2001, when a group of scientists in Sakai, Japan, found bacteria breaking down a particular kind of plastic, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), in a landfill. The Guardian delves into the mission to harness microbes and their plastic-busting powers.
😁 Say cheese. An increasing number of celebrities and laypeople are choosing to get veneers—and there’s something deeply unsettling about it. As The Washington Post writes, the cosmetic surgery’s aesthetically “beautiful” results belie its physical cost. And while the trend is not likely to last forever, damage from the procedure is usually permanent.
🎵 Take note. Imagine that you could invest in a snippet of a particular song you love. It would mean you not only could enjoy listening to it, but also pocket some cash in the process. That’s the premise of JKBX, a startup that sells music “royalty shares.” Set to debut this year, Wired has a hunch that it may generate the next big meme stock.
🩸 That sucks. If you want to monitor the health of an ecosystem, you need to get your hands on some leeches (with the proper precautions of course). That’s what researchers are doing in Kunming, China. Grow details how scientists are using the little bloodsuckers to gauge which other animals are lurking about in the wild, with a goal of making some “biodiversity soup.”
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming week:
- Tuesday: Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial starts in New York City
- Wednesday: Google releases its newest Pixel devices
- Thursday: The US reports its latest trade balance numbers
- Friday: US jobs numbers will be out
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, Scott Nover, and Morgan Haefner.