Hi, Quartz members!
As we kick off the final month of 2023, we’re thinking a lot about the year ahead:
💪 How many new things will we accomplish?
🛑 Which bad habits will we finally break?
🥐 And perhaps most importantly, what image will we choose to replace the enticingly flaky croissant that lives atop the Sunday Reads newsletter? (Or should we replace it at all? 🤔)
Let us know your 🥐 vote; as always, we’d love to hear from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
✨ Iconic. See that symbol there, to the left? You’re seeing it incorporated all over the internet. Michelle Cheng looks at the imagery associated with new features on Spotify, Zoom, Google, and elsewhere, and finds sparkles to be the unofficial emoji of the artificial intelligence industry.
⚠️ Level of concern. How panicked you’re feeling (or not) about climate change, the coming winter, or the logistics of your next vacation depend a lot on the amount of physical and psychological distance you maintain from these potentially stressful things. The Quartz Obsession succinctly explains everything you need to know about construal level theory.
👴 Memorable Munger. The spotlight always seems to drift to Warren Buffett, but Charlie Munger, his longtime friend and business partner, knew how to hold his own on a stage. Look back at just some of the witty utterances of Berkshire Hathaway’s Munger, who died this week at the age of 99.
📉 It’s an activist world after all. The fight between the Walt Disney Co. and activist investor Nelson Peltz has entered a new stage. Ananya Bhattacharya quickly catches you up on the fight so far.
🛰️ After the ISS. The International Space Station was only slated for a 15-year lifespan. But it’s 25 years old now, and showing its age. In Space Business, Mara Johnson-Groh looks at five possible successors proposed by a handful of nations and commercial partnerships.
5 great stories from elsewhere
👬 AI copilots? The recent drama at OpenAI captivated Silicon Valley. What effect did it have farther north, in Redmond, Washington? The New Yorker examines the increasingly complicated relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft.
😩 Good COP, bad COP. The Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC dropped a bombshell report—with receipts—on how the United Arab Emirates sought to make oil deals while hosting UN climate talks at the COP28 summit.
⚡ Energized. The future of fusion got a lot more exciting last month with the opening of the world’s largest experimental nuclear-fusion reactor. Multiple stories tall, the machine can heat plasma to 200 million degrees Celsius (360 million degrees Fahrenheit) to get the nuclei of hydrogen to fuse and create energy. The good folks at Science have the details.
👰 With this post, I thee wed. The average American wedding involves 14 vendors to handle various aspects of the big day—the flowers, the music, the catering, the hair styling, the cake, and so forth. Add one more to the list. The Wall Street Journal reports on the rise of the social media wedding concierge.
⛰️ The climb. A trio of American adventurers, with no supplemental oxygen or porters to help them, reached the top of Jannu in the Himalayas. The New York Times explains why experts see the feat as being even more impressive than summiting Everest.
🗓️ What to watch for
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the week ahead:
- Wednesday: GameStop reports earnings; the US publishes its latest trade balance
- Thursday: Microsoft holds its annual shareholders meeting; Lululemon is on the earnings calendar
- Friday: US jobs day
- Sunday: Egypt’s presidential election kicks off
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, folks quotes from Charlie Munger, and ISS retirement gifts. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.