Hi, Quartz members! This week, the Beatles dropped a new song with a little help from AI, but it’s still Taylor Swift’s economy. What’s on your playlist for sifting through the article recommendations in Sunday Reads? Let us know; we’d love to hear from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🚚 Moving on. Canada is seeing a noticeable rise in the percentage of immigrants who are picking up and relocating elsewhere—bad news for a country with an aging population, a declining birth rate, and a need for skilled workers. Ananya Bhattacharya provides a non-exhaustive list of why fewer Canadian immigrants are sticking around.
🏭 Emissions critical. More than half a billion metric tons of the carbon emitted globally in 2020 came from US industrial facilities owned by just 10 companies, according to a new analysis by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Clarisa Diaz has the data and is naming names.
🤑 Smart money? While the Federal Reserve is holding out for a soft landing for the US economy, the nation’s billionaire class is sounding rather panicky. Grete Suarez surveys the (impeccably manicured) landscape to see what has the likes of Jeffrey Gundlach and Stanley Druckenmiller so concerned.
📈 Caught a break. Speaking of billionaires, Bill Gross and Bill Ackman seem to have timed things right in calling an end to the bear market for bonds. Tim Fernholz considers their arguments that the “higher for longer” interest rate strategy has run its course.
📈 Mindset shifts. Maybe your team knows its goals and gets along. That still leaves plenty of room for improvement. In Quartz at Work, strategy consultant Andrew Atkins writes on four mindset shifts that can take a team’s performance from good to great.
5 great stories from elsewhere
💪 Outside help. United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain is getting loads of credit for playing hardball with Detroit’s Big Three and winning. But he didn’t do it all by himself. The Wall Street Journal highlights three clever labor activists from outside the auto industry who expertly strategized the union’s campaign.
🇿🇦 Authentic South Africa. A new generation of tour operators is showing travelers a side of South Africa that has nothing to do with safari tourism or poverty voyeurism. The Skift shows how these companies are making inroads, despite serious setbacks from the covid-19 pandemic.
✨ Waiting for a star to fall. This week brings the peak activity of the Southern Taurid meteor shower. Get the background from Live Science, then look up and enjoy the view.
📓 A teenager didn’t write this. But The Cut says what many of them are thinking: Homework tracking apps that invite grown-ups to monitor their kids’ progress at school are an occasionally helpful but mostly unwelcome development in modern family life, promoting obsessive parental surveillance and near-nightly arguments.
📹 Carry that weight. After sifting through enough Beatles footage to make an eight-hour docuseries that aired in 2021, Get Back director Peter Jackson was a shoo-in to make the video for the band’s new song, Now and Then. But initially he turned down the job. Jackson tells Esquire why, plus what made him reconsider, and how he ultimately crafted the time-machine-esque final product.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming week:
- Monday: OpenAI has its first developers conference, in San Francisco.
- Tuesday: Will Barbra Streisand’s 1,040-page memoir mention the Streisand Effect?
- Wednesday: A few earnings firsts—Kellanova reports its first earnings as Kellanova and not Kellogg; Arm reports its first earnings since its IPO in September.
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, effective mindset shifts, and Beatles trivia. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.