Hi, Quartz members! This week we shared a dispatch from London, where we recently convened a roundtable of sustainability leaders and asked: Will the path to corporate sustainability be purpose- or compliance-led?
What other big questions would you like to see us pose to the business leaders we encounter in our reportorial travels? Let us know; we’d love to hear from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🧑‍⚕️ How to take your diversity efforts off life support. In Quartz at Work, contributor Joel Davis Brown offers sound advice for reviving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging efforts. He also makes a very solid argument: If your company’s DEIB efforts are flagging now, maybe they never had life breathed into them properly in the first place.
📉 This isn’t a fiscal panic blog. But senior reporter Tim Fernholz argues that the US needs to raise tax revenue, and quickly. The country’s indebtedness is in no small part due to stimulus spending approved during the pandemic. But an even bigger reason, a new analysis finds, is the tax cuts enacted under the Bush and Trump administrations.
🔦 Spotlight on Dimon. Even when it’s another big bank announcing a change in CEO, in this case Morgan Stanley, all eyes turn to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, banking’s elder statesman for more than a decade now. Grete Suarez explains why Dimon isn’t going anywhere—at least not for the next three and a half years.
🖥️ How much better can video calls really get? A lot, if you trust the vision of Cisco Webex. Michelle Cheng examines the software company’s newest features to improve video-calling connectivity, and asks what technology can do next to combat the dreaded Zoom fatigue.
🧳 Workcationing. Home swaps, travel apps, and hybrid work schedules are melding. Contributor Brianna Holt introduces you to a new breed of businesses brokering trips that are part work, part leisure, and all taken care of pretty easily.
5 great stories from elsewhere
🇨🇳 China’s malaise. For the New Yorker, Evan Osnos returns to Beijing and finds that the city he moved away from in 2013, the year Xi Jinping became president, looks very different now. “To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from motion to stagnation,” he observes, in an intriguing read about what this might mean for both China and the rest of the world.
🇨🇦 Canada’s disaster. The fires that have burned 45 million acres from Nova Scotia to British Columbia have altered the country and greatly increased the carbon emissions it added to the atmosphere this year. Davis Wallace-Wells catalogs the damage in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
👟 The appeasement before the fall. In 2013, Kanye West promised that his new design deal would “redefine the limits of Adidas.” It appears it did, if by limits he meant how much toxic behavior the sneaker brand would be willing to put up with from him over the next decade. The New York Times’ Megan Twohey sorts through the wreckage of a collaboration that took way longer to fall apart than it should have.
🧑‍⚖️ Sam Bankman-Fried is so fucked. Pardon the language. But this is exactly how Elizabeth Lopatto opens a gripping article in The Verge about the former crypto king’s defense in the court case determining what he knew when about the collapse of FTX.
🏗️ Do as he says, not as he does. Thomas Heatherwick, in his new book Humanise, asks the world to demand more of its designers and architects. But ought not Heatherwick—responsible for the disastrous Vessel in New York’s Hudson Yards and bland developments from London to Tokyo—be among those held to account for the design folly he’s ostensibly fighting? In the Guardian, architecture critic Oliver Wainwright deliciously contrasts the precepts of Humanise with the Heatherwick projects that violate them.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming week:
- Monday: Apple is hosting an online “Scary Fast” media event, and a Mac announcement is expected.
- Tuesday: The latest US consumer confidence numbers come out.
- Wednesday: Bitcoin turns 15 years old.
- Thursday: Quarterly earnings for the following companies drop: Apple, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk (maker of Ozempic), Shell, Starbucks, Square, and Crocs.
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, Morgan Haefner, and Susan Howson.