Sunday Reads: A dyeing art, buy vs. lease

Hi, Quartz members!

Missed any of our other newsletters this week? Space Business looked at the lay of the land for US spaceports, The Memo from Quartz at Work shared the secret for sticking with long-term projects, and the Quartz Obsession had bushels of information about the global wheat trade.

What’s your favorite Quartz newsletter? Let us know; as always, we’d love to hear from you!

5 things we especially liked on Quartz

🎯 Targeting Tesla. What will it look like as labor organizers put Tesla more squarely in their crosshairs? Ananya Bhattacharya finds a case study in Sweden, where the company doesn’t manufacture cars but is nonetheless coming under unique pressures from union supporters.

🧫 A dyeing art. Textile chemicals are a dirty business. Enter the pigment-producing microbes developed by Colorifix, an Earthshot Prize finalist. Clarisa Diaz explains how DNA sequencing helps turn petri-dish denizens into palettes of color, with chemical-free technology.

🤖 Noted. Artificial intelligence is generating all kinds of ancillary markets, including the business—or is it art?—of data labeling. Michelle Cheng offers a peek into a new industry that’s already developing some substantial pricing power.

🚘 Is it better to buy or lease? Car Coach Reports contributor Lauren Fix lays out the conditions you ought to consider when shopping for a car these days, in the latest installment of our Your Wallet video series.

🧠 Wrap your head around this. While chips are getting more powerful, the processing skills of human neurons are a siren call in certain corners of the AI industry. Let Faustine Ngila introduce you to the potential wonders of synthetic biological intelligence.

5 great stories from elsewhere

👪 The family Bankman-Fried. “Can any parent see their child clearly?” In an essay for The Wall Street Journal, Katie Roiphe asks what many of us wondered during the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was supported in court by his Stanford law professor parents, Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman.

📈 Was Buffett just talking his book? A leak of IRS data obtained by ProPublica raises questions about the timing of at least three stock sales from the personal portfolio of Warren Buffett, who has strict rules about when anyone working for his Berkshire Hathaway holding company can trade stocks that are also held by Berkshire.

👩‍💻 RIP Jezebel. The feminist website that lost the backing this week of its corporate parent (G/O Media, which also owns Quartz) changed the discourse for women on the internet, and internet discourse in general. Former Jezebel writer Erin Gloria Ryan offers a thoughtful obituary in Rolling Stone.

🐢 A bayou tale. The alligator snapping turtle is a fascinating species in and of itself. Layer in the captivating story of a family of poachers, the context of old-school Cajun culture, and the dramatic twists and turns accompanying a federal regulator’s attempts to step in, and you have a Texas Monthly article that keeps you reeled in from start to finish.

📉 Out of Africa? After growing seventeen-fold in seven years, the amount of capital pouring into African tech startups has started to recede. Is it a rational correction causing no more than a blip in a longer trend line, or the beginning of a major retreat by investors? Alexander Onukwue weighs the arguments in Semafor.

🗓️ What to watch for this week

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

• Monday: The Web Summit starts in Lisbon under new leadership
• Tuesday: Liberia has a presidential runoff; Apple supplier Foxconn reports earnings
• Wednesday: Two huge retailers release their latest financials: Target in the US, and JD.com in China
• Thursday: Another double whammy for key earnings reports: Walmart in the US, and Alibaba in China

Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, pigment-producing microbes, and curiously timed stock trades. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.