Hi, Quartz members!
It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, and we are so very thankful for your readership. What are you feeling thankful for this year? Let us know; as always, we’d love to hear from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🔍 What Google pays for Safari searches. A talkative expert witness in court revealed Apple’s cut of the arrangement between the two tech giants. Ananya Bhattacharya shares the details.
🌌 Tracking the future of space. The US Space Force’s new tech accelerator announced the inaugural cohort for a program focused on detecting threats in space. Grete Suarez lists out the startups that made the cut.
🛬 Only 30 of the world’s 5,000 airlines fly the Boeing 737 Max. Ethiopian Airlines, surprisingly, is about to join them again. Faustine Ngila explains why Ethiopian returned to the Boeing model, four years after a Max crash killed 157 people en route from Addis Ababa.
🍏 Is Apple still a growth stock? It certainly trades like one. But in this video from our Quartz Smart Investing series, Interactive Brokers chief strategist Steve Sosnick makes the case that the company no longer behaves like one.
🟧 The “it” factor. For more than 100 years, Cheez-Its have captivated the palates of snackers. In this week’s Quartz Obsession, Morgan Haefner delves into the history, and big business, of a tiny cracker.
5 great stories from elsewhere
💄 Cracks in the foundation? The Wall Street Journal looks at the succession planning process causing a rift in the family that has controlled Estee Lauder for three generations.
🏈 Brutal sport. It isn’t just professional football players who get chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). With powerful storytelling and equally powerful statistics, The New York Times shows the vulnerability of youth athletes to brain injuries.
🥫 A condensed story. The French have their béchamel, and Americans have their Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. The former may be fancier, but it’s the latter you’ll find on Thanksgiving tables around the US this week, most likely in a green bean casserole. Salon has the story of how a can of condensed soup became a holiday staple.
📼 Time to rewind. The New Yorker brings on nostalgia with a piece about the disruptive power of the cassette tape. “The two most consequential innovations in the tape player … were the boom box and the Sony Walkman personal stereo. One allowed you to externalize your musical taste, the other to internalize it. (Indeed, a Walkman was often the best defense against the sonic assault of a boom box.)” Yep, we remember it well.
📕 Sticking with it. It took James Joyce 17 years to write Finnegans Wake—which was about a decade less than it took a book club in California to read it. The Guardian speaks with devoted readers who have pushed through one of literature’s most inscrutable works, one book club meeting at a time.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming (short!) week, at least in the US:
- Monday: Results from Argentina’s presidential run-off; Zoom earnings
- Tuesday: Nvidia releases earnings
- Thursday: Thanksgiving holiday in the US
- Friday: Black Friday kicks off the holiday shopping season in the US (if you haven’t already succumbed to Christmas creep)
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, space startups, and boxes of Cheez-Its. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.