Sunday Reads: Faux Coco and hello, Novo

Hi, Quartz members!

This week, we—and Tesla’s investors—kept an eye on the EV-maker’s stock, which has been the S&P 500’s worst performer this year. That’s good news for its overseas competitors. Palantir CEO Alexander Karp has more to say about US-China competition on other fronts, which he predicts is about to get “very real,” thanks to slowing GDP growth in China.

Here are our other favorite reads from Quartz and elsewhere from the past week to set you up for the week ahead. Happy reading!

5 things we especially liked on Quartz

👝 What’s in the bag? Chanel does not take kindly to anyone who encourages knockoffs of their iconic handbags. The iconic French luxury brand’s recent court victory over reseller What Goes Around Comes Around has redefined what, exactly, makes a fake bag fake. Melvin Backman takes a look inside. 

🍸 This one inflation trick that’ll make your waiter mad. Lower raises for service workers, then businesses will lower the prices of their cocktails, and the economy will get a lower interest rates-flavored treat. OK, it’s not that straightforward, but some Fed leaders think wage growth might be getting a little too robust in some industries.

🇲🇽 Move over China, Mexico exports are here. And the US would like first dibs, please. The world’s biggest economy is importing more from its southern neighbor than China for the first time in decades, as tensions with Beijing complicate things.

🍟 Hello, Novo Nordisk? Another fast food CEO is on the line. The Danish drugmaker’s blockbuster drugs Wegovy and Ozempic have been so successful that CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen is getting calls from worried restaurant executives asking for advice. Has Jørgensen been able to hide his own surprise from them?

🩺 Layoffs are coming for healthcare, too. Headlines about Big Tech and media companies cutting thousands of workers have made splashes across new sites, but Pfizer, Amazon, hospitals, and biotech startups are doing it as well. Quartz’s Laura Bratton lists the organizations that have handed out pink slips since January.

5 great stories from elsewhere

💌 Inbox hysteria. For The New Yorker, columnist Naomi Fry assembles and analyzes campaign fundraising emails like an epistolary novel. Her text of choice? The sometimes frenzied, sometimes fawning, always avant-garde campaign of Donald Trump. Taken as a whole, the emails compose “a fevered Surrealist cut-up”—and Fry’s steely gaze critiques them as a work of art.

♠️ Raise your bets. Ahead of the Super Bowl kickoff in Las Vegas this afternoon, Bloomberg’s Kim Bhasin and Randall Williams offer a fascinating look at why Sin City is working to reinvent itself as a sports mecca—and how the rising legalization of sports betting dealt it a good hand. The Sphere didn’t hurt, either.

🚌 That belongs in a museum. The legendary bus where Chris McCandless—the young man made famous by Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild—lived and breathed his last is no longer a difficult pilgrimage in Denali National Park. Cleaned up and safely displayed as a museum exhibit, Bus 142 represents humans’ spiritual ability to connect objects to people, and our somewhat curious fascination with one troubled young man. Eva Holland explores the obsession in Outside, where Krakauer’s first story about McCandless was published. Bring your own Eddie Vedder soundtrack.

🥛 Big Dairy digs in. Never has the definition of “milk” been so murky. With the entrance of plenty of plant-based alternatives to cow—almond, oat, soy, coconut, rice, flax, and hemp among them—the dairy industry is waging a turf war in legislatures, advertising campaigns, and more to protect its monopoly on milk. The Wall Street Journal’s Kristina Peterson splashes around the story.

👓 What might have been. Buddy Holly died 65 years ago in a plane crash that also claimed the life of the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, and the plane’s pilot. In a touching edition of his Substack Can’t Get Much Higher, Chris Dalla Riva provides a map of the over-hurried tour of the Midwest in winter, puts into context the careers of other famous musicians if they had died at 22, and, most of all, just wishes Holly could have lived, even just to write bad music.

🗓️ What to watch for this week

Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on:

• Sunday: NATO newcomer Finland is holding its presidential election runoff. Speaking of the military alliance, it will be running its biggest practice since the Cold War off of Norway’s Arctic coast.
• Tuesday: Norway will be getting another visitor: Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan, who wants to talk diplomacy. In the US, the latest inflation numbers will come out, along with earnings from Coca-Cola and Airbnb.
• Wednesday: Kraft Heinz hopes it will have a sweet treat for investors in its earnings. Outside of the US, Indonesia will vote for its next president in the world’s third-largest democracy—and generative AI is a concern.
• Thursday: Boeing competitor Airbus will post its latest quarterly results, along with Coinbase and Wendy’s.
• Friday: Data on new homes built in the US will be out.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, glasses of your milk of choice, and Buddy Holly favorites. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Susan Howson, Gabriela Riccardi, and Morgan Haefner.