Hi, Quartz members! Checked out already for the holidays? Not us—not yet. We’ll be taking a break soon enough, but first we’ve got some dispatches from the world of innovation to send your way later this month.
👁️ Keep an eye out for: Our 2023 Innovators list, highlighting the people behind some of the most interesting advancements this year in business and society
👂 Keep an ear out for: The launch of a new season of the Quartz Obsession podcast, with each episode offering the fascinating backstory of an innovation we think you’ll love learning more about
Read, listen, and let us know what you think. We always love hearing from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
😿 The effect of noncompetes. As noncompete agreements fall out of favor, most of the focus has been on the workers (typically in high-paying jobs) who sign them and agree to a time out between employers. But a new paper finds that in US states with stricter enforcement of noncompetes, worker paychecks across the board are negatively impacted. Laura Bratton explains the findings.
🛰️ Starlink’s stellar growth. Amazon’s Project Kuiper is getting ready to start closing the gap, but the undisputed global leader in satellite internet service is Starlink, from SpaceX’s Elon Musk. Ananya Bhattacharya reports on Starlink’s rapid rise—especially in Brazil, its biggest growth market of 2023.
📈 Stock segments. Can you name all 11 sectors of the Standard & Poor’s 500? Catherine Baab-Muguira engagingly examines why broad indices like the S&P get broken down into sectors, and how it helps investors.
👴 Staying power. The number of US workers over 65 has quadrupled since the 1980s. Laura Bratton reports on the growing economic impact of older, working Americans.
💆 Threading the needle. Rooted in Chinese medicine, and increasingly covered by US health insurers, acupuncture is a global phenomenon. Eleanor Cummins tells you everything you ever wanted to know about this 2,000-year-old, multibillion-dollar art-slash-medicine-slash-industry.
5 great stories from elsewhere
⛐ What has happened at General Motors. As CEO Mary Barra hits the 10-year mark on her tenure, The Wall Street Journal takes stock of GM’s performance and sees the goal posts on electric and driverless vehicles moving further and further out.
🇨🇦 A good deal for Google. Canadian newspapers, broadcasters, and digital news outlets, which have been battling the tech giants even at the risk of effectively disappearing from the internet, will receive $100 million a year from Google in a government settlement over paying for online news. In NeimanLab, journalism professor Alfred Hermida neatly summarizes the deal and argues that Google is getting off easy.
🗣️ Gig worker slang. It’s good to be gacor and bad to be bon hanged. Rest of World’s glossary of delivery driver slang from various continents is also a window into the common frustrations of gig economy workers globally.
🌍 “There’s a lot of money in illegal migration.” The lament of a West African man deported from the Canary Islands in the early mid-aughts is the starting point of Ruben Andersson and David Keen’s illuminating investigation of migration profiteering in an excerpt, published in The Guardian, from their new book Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything.
🎓 The case for classical liberalism. In The Atlantic, University of Florida president and former US senator Ben Sasse critiques his Ivy League counterparts who went before Congress and had trouble condemning calls on their campuses for genocide against Jews. “While populists have always found the bashing of elites fashionable, this moment calls for something more constructive,” Sasse writes. And he largely delivers on that, indulging a bit in partisan talking points but also getting beyond them to provoke thought if not a change in opinions.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on in the coming week:
- Sunday: Voters in Chile will cast their ballots in a referendum on a rewrite of its dictatorship-era constitution
- Monday: The US releases its latest stats on business formation
- Wednesday: The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds its presidential election, and voters are hoping for another peaceful transition of power like they saw for the first time in 2019
- Thursday: Nike reports earnings, and the US will have a revised GDP update
- Friday: The US will publish its new home sales data
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, acupuncture appointments, and news from Canada. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.