Stay ConnectedAI needs more power, faster than America has ever built it. Power Play is a six-part investigation from Quartz into the bottlenecks, the fixes, and the economics at the core of AI development.
Hosted by Marco Pimentel. Reported by Jackie Snow, Catherine Baab, and Joseph Zeballos-Roig. All six episodes are out now.
After the release of a great film, it seems natural to us now that they'd want to make another. But this was not always the case. Now that Hollywood seems to almost compulsively turn successful films into franchises, reboots, and cinematic universes, are there good reasons to keep making sequels?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Photo by Eric Helgas, styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2144841
Athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics had prosthetics perfectly designed to help them run, jump, or swim as the events required. Now the technology behind those prosthetics is coming to everyday people who need it—and, possibly, to people who don’t. Augmenting able bodies for super-human functions: What could go wrong?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2141719
They tried to kill disco, but it will never die. The stubbornly upbeat genre came out of an economically turbulent moment—one to which we see a lot of parallels today. So what is it about a crisis that just makes us want to dance?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Episode art by Eric Helgas, styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2138049
Fish sticks are more than just an easy way to get kids to eat healthy food. They’re the ocean’s little problem solvers, swimming in to solve a seafood glut after World War II, and to help working parents in need of cheap and easy meals. Now fish sticks might even help solve our latest challenge: an epidemic of global overfishing.
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2133871
It’s the stuff of Bollywood dreams, come to life—the big fat Indian wedding has withstood the test of time, economic turbulence, social reform, and even modern technology. But when you factor in pent-up pandemic demand, can India’s $50 billion industry possibly keep it up?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Episode art by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2130303
Google docs has revolutionized the way we work, and now it even functions as a tool for social sharing and political dissent. This is all because the world shifted from saving files locally to storing them in the cloud. But does life in the cloud present risks we aren't thinking about enough?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2127812
As more people aren’t sure whether or when to have kids, a growing number of them are turning to egg freezing, a relatively new and expensive procedure that could help women become parents outside their biological bounds. But how realistic is any promise of parenthood entirely on your terms?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Photo by Eric Helgas, styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2122021
Puffer jackets have been worn by outdoorsmen, rappers, the military, luxury shoppers, and—eventually—everyone. Today, the market is still heating up. But as puffer jackets are worn by more people around the world, the difference between high- and low-end options can be increasingly difficult to parse. Are North Face jackets worth their price tag? Does "puffiness" automatically equal warmth? What do puffers from Prada and Uniqlo have in common?
Sponsored by Alumni Ventures
Photo by Eric Helgas; styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi
Transcript: https://qz.com/2118817
A podcast so nice we're doing it (at least) twice. In season two, Kira and Quartz journalists from around the world dig into the fascinating backstories behind everyday ideas, and what they tell us about the forces changing the way we live and work today.
We learned a lot over the course of season 1. Here are some of our favorite nuggets of information.
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