1. James Fallows shares the questions he would ask about Southwest Airlines’ meltdown last week, bringing his experience covering the airline since his time at the Texas Tribune in the 1970s. He covers the impact of deregulation and discusses whether Southwest’s point-to-point route model created more issues. But he points directly at corporate incompetence and greed for being the likely culprits: “Modern air travel is complex on a level rivaling the D-Day invasion. And modern first-world airlines have geared themselves up for that challenge. It appears that one of them did not—despite receiving billions of dollars in public aid during the pandemic, despite having spent billions on stock buybacks that benefited only their shareholders, despite very generous pay for its executive leadership…”
2. The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe recaps a successful and busy year in space exploration. The James Webb Space Telescope has provided breathtaking images, Artemis I successfully took Snoopy around the moon, and the Dart mission was a breakthrough for planetary defense. I hope we continue to learn more in 2023.
3. The Nation’s Dave Zirin is one of the best writers about the impact of sports and society on each other, and he shares a recap of an especially troubling 2022. We saw the all-too-successful sportswashing results from the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the Men’s World Cup in Qatar, and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund’s financing of a new world golf tour. The Biden Administration’s efforts to free WNBA star Brittney Griner was great December news, but her ordeal exposed significant issues. As Zirin explains, “Far from uniting with one voice, most of the sports media ignored her plight, and many athletes and the media followed suit. The disrespect and erasure she endured seemed all too familiar to the marginalized communities that saw themselves in Griner. It also reflected how women’s sports are marginalized more generally.”
4. Scott Galloway offers some predictions for 2023 in his No Mercy, No Malice newsletter. You may have heard some of these on his Prof G podcast or on Pivot with Kara Swisher. He discusses the economy, technology trends, and hopes that we have reached the peak of idolizing tech billionaires. (I also hope for that last one.)
5. Jason Kottke shares how Our First Closeup Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Numbers Pastel Drawing. He explains, “On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew within 6,118 miles of the surface of Mars, capturing images as it passed over the planet. The image data was transmitted back to scientists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quickly render a photograph from it. They determined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imaging data as a series of numbers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pastels from a nearby art store, and do a paint-by-numbers job with the pastels on the data grid.”
Be First to Comment