Sunday Reads: News on Threads, unusual perks

Hi, Quartz members!

It’s been another devastating news cycle this week. Our simple wish for you this Sunday is some thoughtful reading, with a bit of quiet time to attend to it. As always, we’d love to hear from you.

5 (more) things we especially liked on Quartz

🪡 Threading the needle. Meta never intended for Threads to become a news site. But in the wake of the attack on Israel by Hamas, journalists are flocking to the platform anyway. Ananya Bhattacharya shows how Meta has moved away from news, and how the news keeps showing up at its doorstep.

₿ Where did the money come from? Tim Fernholz explains how terrorist groups like Hamas leverage the anonymity of cryptocurrencies, crypto mining, and defi protocols to finance their lawlessness.

❗ Yes, ketamine therapy. Surf lessons, ketamine therapy, pet adoption bonuses? In Quartz at Work, Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza details the unconventional new perks that select workplaces are now offering their employees.

💸 Everything you ever wanted to know about ETFs. The first US exchange-traded fund appeared on the scene 30 years ago, but the $9.2 trillion ETF market is still a mystery to many of us. With updates from Susan Howson, Walter Frick’s classic Quartz Obsession explains all.

👓 Smarter glasses. Another day, another attempt by a big tech company to make smart glasses a thing. This time it’s Microsoft, which filed a patent on Oct. 5 for a design incorporating a swappable battery and internal charge storage. Will that be enough to win over the masses? Faustine Ngila weighs in.

5 great stories from elsewhere

🇺🇸 The end of Pax Americana. In his Noahpinion newsletter, Noah Smith writes a eulogy for the US’s decades of peacekeeping influence since World War II. Some may quibble with its premise, but it’s a compelling addition to a narrative that’s also being espoused by The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, among others.

💅 #NotAllGirlbosses. While the internet was pummeling millennial female founders presiding over toxic workplaces, another cohort of women running companies managed to evade criticism. Elizabeth Segran writes in Fast Company about why some female founders fared better than others.

👁️ Neighborhood surveillance. Lam Thuy Vo leads an investigation for The Markup into the potentially problematic relationship between Amazon’s Ring and Neighbors apps and local police departments around the US.

👨‍⚖️ Reliably disturbing. In ProPublica, Duaa Eldeib has a harrowing story about how the “lung float test”—used by some medical examiners to determine if a baby ever breathed or was stillborn—is resulting in murder charges for women. This is despite serious concerns about the efficacy of the test, and a refusal in many jurisdictions to even admit it as evidence.

📉 A derivative plot. A sideways bet against US shopping malls has Carl Icahn claiming that the market for credit-default swaps, the instruments he used to place his wager, is rigged. In the Wall Street Journal, Ben Foldy lays out the allegations, and the realities of a market that can still feel like the Wild West years after the 2008 financial crisis first put it in the crosshairs of regulators.

🗓️ What to watch for this week

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

• Monday: Disney celebrates its 100th birthday.
• Tuesday: Chinese technology company Baidu plans to show off major updates to its Ernie bot at its annual conference in Beijing.
• Wednesday: Tesla, Netflix, and the semiconductor giant ASML all report earnings.
• Thursday: Taiwan Semiconductor and American Airlines share their earnings updates.
• Friday: A convention for Twitch live streamers kicks off in Las Vegas.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, unusual benefits, and good real estate bets. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.