Articles of the week
As Downtowns Struggle, Businesses Learn to Love Bike Lanes: From Manhattan to San Francisco, the need to rethink the urban core is encouraging business improvement districts to change their tune on prioritizing cars. (CityLab)
Homeowners Don’t Want to Sell, So Home Builders Are Booming: High mortgage rates are dissuading sellers, leaving new construction the only game in town; ‘there was no inventory.’ (Wall Street Journal)
Goodbye to the Prophets of Doom: The conventional wisdom about the global economy is that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. What if that isn’t true? (The Atlantic)
When Will Interest Rates Really Start to Matter? For the longest time pundits predicted interest rates would go higher yet they did nothing but go lower year after year. Then when rates hit 0% it seemed like everyone assumed we would experience lower rates forever…just in time for rates to rise higher than anyone thought was possible in such a short period of time. So it goes when it comes to the markets. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
The Case for Declining Core Inflation: We see four reasons to expect renewed declines in inflation this summer and beyond: 1) 9% pullback in used car auction prices we believe is only halfway done, 2) negative residual seasonality in the summer for CPI and PCE prices, 3) sharp deceleration in apartment rent list prices, and 4) significant progress on labor market rebalancing. (Goldman Sachs)
Chartflation: Five Charts Showing Inflation Isn’t as ‘Sticky’ as Feared: Leading inflation indicators point toward price pressures easing further. While we don’t think this is a direct market driver, with inflation continuing to weigh on sentiment, the clearing fog likely reveals a better-than-expected reality. (Fisher Investments)
The economy’s doomsday clock has been reset: Wall Street’s fearmongers were totally wrong about a recession. (Business Insider)
How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality: The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped. (New York Times)
Google’s AI Blunders Rival Xerox’s PC Mistakes: The “T” technology behind ChatGPT was devised at Google but languished there. Sound familiar? (Bloomberg)
How to spot an AI cheater: Students, lawyers and others are passing off writing drafted by artificial intelligence as their own. Alex O’Brien investigates the technological tools and critical thinking skills needed to identify if AI is the real author. (BBC)
The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn’t destroy humanity: The founders of Anthropic quit OpenAI to make a safe AI company. It’s easier said than done. (Vox)
Inside the AI Factory: As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging — and not going anywhere. (The Verge)
Is Rolex a Non-Profit? Answers to Your Burning Questions About the Rolex Watch Company. (Teddy)
Best Electric Vehicles of 2023 and 2024: We’ve selected the best electric cars you can buy today that include a wide range of SUVs, hatchbacks, sedans, and even pickup trucks. (Car and Driver)
Electric Vehicle Prices Fall as Automakers Raise Production: Ford, Tesla and other automakers are having to lower prices to lure buyers as the supply of battery-powered models begins to exceed demand. (New York Times)
A New Job for Electric Vehicles: Powering Homes During Blackouts: Some energy experts say battery-powered vehicles will increasingly help keep the lights on and support electric grids, rather than straining them. (New York Times)
The Last Place on Earth Any Tourist Should Go: Take Antarctica off your travel bucket list. All of these attractions are getting harder to find in the rest of the world. They’re disappearing in Antarctica too. The continent is melting; whole chunks are prematurely tumbling into the ocean. And more people than ever are in Antarctica because tourism is on a tear. (The Atlantic)
Yes, it’s hot. But this could be one of the coolest summers of the rest of your life. Heat waves like those in Texas and Europe are likely to get worse on the whole, not better. (Vox)
Ocean temperatures “much higher than anything the models predicted,” climate experts warn: “We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,” World Meteorological Organization director of climate services Christopher Hewitt said Monday. “This is worrying news for the planet.” (CBS News)
Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink: The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing. The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding. (Washington Post)
This is the hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers: This is the Siria Valley, a cluster of villages about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, in the Francisco Morazan department of central Honduras. The valley is also the hometown of a high concentration of people who, fleeing poverty and a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates, migrate to San Francisco, where they ultimately sell drugs, according to an 18-month investigation by The Chronicle. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Stephen Curry is too good to pretend his success is merely down to hard work: A new documentary on the four-time NBA champion shows a man driven by a grudge against those who doubted him. But there is more to his success. (The Guardian)
Money Isn’t Winning in MLB This Season. Is That Good or Bad for Baseball? The high-payroll Mets and Padres are flailing. The low-budget Rays, Diamondbacks, Orioles, and Reds are thriving. What’s behind MLB’s topsy-turvy standings? And what could it portend about the future of the sport? (The Ringer)
Shattered Nerves, Sleepless Nights: Pickleball Noise Is Driving Everyone Nuts: The incessant pop-pop-pop of the fast-growing sport has brought on a nationwide scourge of unneighborly clashes, petitions, calls to the police and lawsuits, with no solution in sight. (New York Times)
The Means of Gaming Production: Fed up with a toxic industry, video game workers are turning to a radical alternative. (Slate)
Peak TV Has Peaked: From Exhausted Talent to Massive Losses, the Writers Strike Magnifies an Industry in Freefall (Variety)
Turner Classic Movies Is a National Treasure: The channel has an astounding degree of control over a crucial part of American cinema. It should become a public resource available to all. (New Yorker)
How Hollywood appeases China, explained by the Barbie movie: Vietnam banned Barbie over a map featuring the nine-dash line. Here’s why that matters. (Vox)
The Impossible Story of the Bomb: Ever since its detonation in 1945, people have been grappling with the enormity of the atomic bomb’s power. This is the complex tale Christopher Nolan is trying to tell with ‘Oppenheimer.’ (The Ringer)
How Mission: Impossible Became the Last Great Stunt Franchise: Over the past 27 years, the Mission: Impossible franchise became the final stronghold for “real action.” (Inverse)
Ranking the Top 25 Set Pieces From the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise: A countdown of the best stunts, capers, and heists from the ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies, including ‘Dead Reckoning Part One.’ (The Ringer)
Where Johnny Cash Came From: The Man in Black grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, in a community of poor farmers working government land. (National Endowment for the Humantiies)
From Beatlemania to Taylor-mania: How the meteoric rise of The Beatles helps to explain Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, on pace to be the first tour ever to gross $1B. (SatPost by Trung Phan)
Taylor Swift Is Halfway Through Her Rerecording Project. It’s Paid Off Big Time: The remaking of Swift’s early discography, which includes her first six albums, has so far found success, with fans eager to listen to her new vocals, unpack its various easter eggs, and purchase new merchandise. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is expected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, which would give Swift the third-most No. 1 albums of any artist of all time, surpassing Barbra Streisand And Bruce Springsteen. (Time)
The point of Shania Twain is to let her be Shania Twain: Even if her current concert tour isn’t exactly what anyone might expect, the country-pop legend has defied odds for decades by doing exactly what she wants. (Washington Post)
How Drake won: The Canadian, biracial, Jewish, middle-class, former child actor has reshaped rap, pop, and the masculinity wars. (Vox)
Father and son drive for 2 days from Virginia to Niagara Falls to load up on ketchup chips Next year, they say they'll try a new flavour they just learned about — all dressed (CBC)