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We hope you’re enjoying Sunday Reads. Let us know what you think; we always love hearing from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🤑 Charged issue. The use of “buy now pay later” plans for internet shopping is growing fast, and some users say it’s giving their credit scores a boost. Laura Bratton looks at the circumstances where this makes sense, and the profile of consumers who might find BNPL to be more harmful than helpful.
🌍 Sending help, digitally. The telecommunications blackout that accompanied Israel’s initial bombardment of Gaza gave rise to a new kind of international aid effort: donations of electronic SIMs, the digital version of the physical SIM cards that connect mobile phones to the internet. In partnership with Egab, a journalism collective in the Middle East and Africa, Yasmin Shabana traces the origin story and ongoing efforts of the #ConnectingGaza campaign.
🎉 All the rave. One of the longest raves in world history took place 500 years ago in France. Julia Malleck takes things from there, with an explanation of modern rave culture, along with a bass-heavy suggested playlist, in this week’s Quartz Obsession (untz, untz, untz).
🚢 Shaking up shipping. The global push to diverse supply chains is redrawing the map of intra-Asian shipping routes. Mary Hui follows a fascinating effect of the world’s reduced reliance on China.
✨ Gemini primer. The artificial intelligence industry is moving so fast these days, you can be forgiven for finding it hard to keep pace. Michelle Cheng catches you up with what you need to know about the newest addition to the generative AI arms race: Google’s Gemini.
5 great stories from elsewhere
🙈 Ignorance is bliss. Had Jensen Huang known how hard it was, the billionaire founder of Nvidia says he never would have started his trillion-dollar company. Ben Cohen in the Wall Street Journal revisits the highs and lows of Nvidia’s history and shows why Huang’s statement isn’t so hard to believe.
🌃 Draining Hong Kong of its color. A crackdown on neon signs is perhaps a fitting visual development for a city suffering under a heavy-handed government. The New York Times’ Hannah Beech writes an elegy for a particular urban aesthetic, and for a city in unmistakable decline.
📺 So that’s why “The Americans” was so good. In Wired’s Backchannel, Laura Kipnis offers a profile of show creator Joe Weisberg, showing how his colorful upbringing, his time in the CIA, and a large dose of therapy afterward informed some of the most interesting television of the past decade.
📜 Philosophical forgery? A 17th-century philosophy text that once was the pride of Ethiopia may in fact have been faked. But to what end? In Aeon, Jonathan Egid examines the point, and disputed provenance, of the Hatäta Zera Yacob, and offers some thought-provoking questions about both.
🇺🇸 In appreciation. “All in the Family,” which aired on US network television for most of the 1970s, wasn’t just a product of an era that embraced honest discourse about American politics—it was a propeller of it. Siva Vaidhyanathan in The New Republic convincingly connects the work of Norman Lear, who died this week at the age of 101, to no less a purpose than the advancement of American democracy.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming week:
- Tuesday: It’s deadline time for negotiators at the UN’s climate summit to come up with an agreement. Plus, the US releases its latest inflation numbers...
- Wednesday: …followed by its next interest rate decision. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell is slated to give a press conference.
- Thursday: Costco reports earnings.
- Sunday: The 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, rave trivia, and faked philosophy. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.