Hi, Quartz members!
A fresh season of the Quartz Obsession podcast is underway, with four new episodes already available for your listening pleasure. Give them a spin and let us know what you think. We always love hearing from you!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
⛾ Reduce, reuse, rethink it? Starbucks is now allowing customers in the US and Canada to use their own cups for mobile and drive-thru orders, and providing them a 10-cent discount for doing so. It sounds helpful for the environment. For employees? Not so much. Laura Bratton lays out workers’ objections to the new policy, which seems to pit the company’s environmental goals against its efficiency objectives.
🧑✈ Model plane procedure. It wasn’t mere luck that allowed 389 people to quickly and safely exit Japan Airlines flight 516 just minutes before it caught fire following a collision on the ground at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Ananya Bhattacharya examines the legacy of a deadly 1985 crash that prompted the airline to put safety front and center—where it apparently has stayed ever since.
🌊 The market for mother nature. Melvin Backman breaks down a new paper in which Stanford economists Billy Ferguson and Paul Milgrom, the latter a Nobel Prize winner, suggest the market for water ought to work like the market for electromagnetic spectrum, in which companies can buy and sell radio wave frequencies. But liquid as it is, not everyone wants to see water turned into a tradable financial commodity.
🚢 Made where? With a Swiss propulsion system, Finnish automation controls, and Italian interiors, the first “made-in-China” cruise ship mostly wasn’t. Mary Hui suggests the high proportion of foreign technology in the Chinese vessel may be more strategic than it appears.
🚘 Another day, another recall. Sure, Tesla has issued a bunch of recalls over the years. But seeing the full list of Tesla recalls that Faustine Ngila compiled really drives home the point that Elon Musk’s electric vehicle brand has run into a lot of problems.
5 great stories from elsewhere
🤓 Middle-age statement glasses. Someone please update the stipple drawing for Jason Gay. The Wall Street Journal columnist has succumbed to the all-too-common temptation to purchase major eyewear in middle age. Jason, we see you (and your orange specs). And we appreciate you.
🤫 Do schools say it best when they say nothing at all? In the wake of a raging debate about the state of free speech on college campuses, Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues for the right—if not the all-out imperative—of universities to remain silent on matters when they can serve the world better as neutral incubators of free expression by others.
👩🍼Abetted by baby brokers. From 1968 to 2008, Guatemala’s adoption industry placed tens of thousands of babies with families in North America and Europe. In The Guardian, Rachel Nolan investigates how those children were procured, often from indigenous Mayan women who turned out to be victims of war crimes.
📣 X, Mark’s the spot. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is drawing plenty of public detractors these days. But count Mark Cuban among its defenders. The entrepreneur turned basketball team owner turned Shark Tank celebrity took to X this week to disagree with Elon Musk, among others, and defend DEI. (See the original thread here, and if your response is to wonder why there aren’t any women playing for the Dallas Mavericks, check out Cuban’s follow-up here.)
↔️ Who really took down Claudine Gay? The embattled academic was targeted by the right, but when it comes to Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard, “the dramatis personae were a liberal president, a liberal-leaning board, an overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty and a liberal student body,” Politico’s Michael Schaffer notes in a piece about how the left wound up doing the right’s bidding.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on:
- Sunday: Bangladesh holds its general election
- Monday: Nvidia holds a media event on consumer tech and robotics ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas
- Tuesday: CES officially begins; the US releases its latest trade balance
- Thursday: The latest US inflation data comes out; India’s Tata Consultancy reports earnings
- Friday: Name a bank and it probably reports earnings this day (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, to name a few)
- Saturday: Taiwan holds its presidential election
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, airplane safety cards, and statement glasses. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Heather Landy and Morgan Haefner.