Sunday Reads: Online uprisings, postpartum dads

Hi, Quartz members!

This week, we published our third annual ranking of the best companies for remote workers. Hats off to Whatnot and Hiro Systems, which topped our lists of large and small employers, respectively. And on Quartz at Work, Job van der Voort, CEO of the HR platform Remote, helpfully teased out the key differences between good managers and good remote managers.

Got a remote work strategy we need to know about? Anything else you want to share? Get in touch! We’d love to hear from you!

5 (more) things we especially liked on Quartz

🧶 A good yarn. When Dave Bryant and Mike Jackness bought the website Knitting.com for $80,000, neither knew anything about the finer points of the fiber arts—but they quickly learned a lot about the online knitting community, which staged an uprising over the corporatization of their digital domain. Julia Malleck stitches together the controversy at Knitting.com and its relevance to the recent and much higher-profile boycotts of Etsy and Reddit.

🏥 A captive workforce. In the fourth and final installment of our Merchants of Care series about the global migration of nurses, Aurora Almendral investigates the Florida-based recruitment agency helping nurses from the Philippines find positions at US hospitals, and then trapping them in their jobs with exploitative labor contracts.

👨‍🍼 Postpartum dads. The world has become better attuned to the depressive disorder common in new mothers. Far less acknowledged is that postpartum depression also affects an estimated 10% of new fathers, and may be more widespread than that. Quartz contributor Brianna Holt examines what the medical community is learning about PPD in men and how parental benefits from their employers can help.

🇺🇸 Chipping in. “Throughout my career, I’ve not been a strong believer in industrial policy generally,” US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen recently said at a Fortune magazine roundtable. Tim Fernholz explains what changed, and why Yellen is suddenly on board with the US government taking a strong hand in the transition from fossil fuels and the return of US chip manufacturing.

🛒 Snack attack. No, the global snack market is not crumbling in the face of weight-loss management drugs—not yet, and maybe not ever, if the industry’s defiant strengthening through diet fads from Atkins to the gluten-free movement is any guide. But Wall Street is suddenly concerned. Which other industries need to watch their back in the age of Ozempic? Ananya Bhattacharya games it out.

5 great stories from elsewhere

📦 The only games in town. Why is the ad experience on Google and Amazon so terrible for consumers? Slate explains the dynamics of the garbage internet and what the US government can do about it.

⚖️ Drug of choice. The crown jewel of pharma giant GSK, the Shingrix shingles vaccine, is a triumph of smart corporate strategizing—and the main thing standing in the way of the world’s first vaccine for a far more deadly disease. ProPublica shows how tuberculosis patients lost out as GSK followed the money.

🗽 Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to…me? An influx of Venezuelans, West Africans, Afghans, and other asylum seekers arriving in New York City—with many sleeping on sidewalks awaiting resettlement services—is testing New Yorkers’ widespread support for immigration. The New York Times chronicles the sudden change in sentiment.

🤖 Without a trace. Artificial intelligence is a prime vector for misinformation. Wired delves into the chief technology meant to help us spot deepfakes and bot interferences, and finds that digital watermarks are not yet up to the task.

🐙 Support for cephalopods. As the National Institutes for Health considers new regulations for cephalopod research, Ars Technica recounts the octopus’s fast rise in the public’s consciousness, and the resulting interest in rules protecting these intelligent animals in lab settings.

🗓️ What to watch for this week

Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming week:

• Monday: Annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group are held in Morocco, marking their return to the African continent for the first time in 50 years.
• Tuesday: PepsiCo releases quarterly earnings. Will the Ozempic effect get mentioned on the conference call?
• Wednesday: Strap up your sandals—the Birkenstock IPO arrives.
• Thursday: The latest US inflation data is released.
• Friday: Big banks kick off their earnings season: JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and PNC all report.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, opinions on industrial policy, and digital watermarks that work. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.