CNBC Marathon revisits General Motors’ shift into the electric vehicle market. GM is one of the largest automakers in the world with a range of models falling under its four brands, Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, and GMC.
Chapters: 00:00 Why GM’s all-electric future is a big gamble (Published September 2021) 15:17 The rise of electric boats (Published April 2022) 27:13 Why GM says its Ultium platform will drive EV dominance (Published May 2022)
The automaker made its name selling gas burning cars but in January 2021, it made a stunning announcement. The company said it “aspires to eliminate tailpipe emissions from new light-duty vehicles by 2035.” This means that GM intends to stop selling gas-burning cars. General Motors says it wants to lead electric vehicle sales in North America by 2025, and vows that its new Ultium battery platform will drive that dominance.
Not only are cars going electric but so are boats. General Motors recently invested $150 million in one start-up, Pure Watercraft, to build an electric pontoon boat. And several others are working to bring their own battery-powered offerings to market. CNBC Marathon brings together the best of CNBC on YouTube.
“Roughly two and a half years into the pandemic, White House officials and health experts have reached a pivotal conclusion about Covid-19 vaccines: The current approach of offering booster shots every few months isn’t sustainable.
Though most vaccines take years to develop, the Covid shots now in use were created in record time—in a matter of months. For health authorities and a public desperate for tools to deal with the pandemic, their speedy arrival provided a huge lift, preventing hospitalizations and deaths while helping people to escape lockdowns and return to work, school and many other aspects of pre-Covid life.”
This week: why is Tate rejecting an archive of material relating to Francis Bacon, 18 years after acquiring it?
Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his recent scoop that Tate is returning a thousand documents and sketches said to have come from the studio of Francis Bacon to Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, who donated them to Tate in 2004. We then discuss the material with Martin Harrison, the pre-eminent Bacon scholar and editor of the catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon’s work published in 2016, and to Sophie Pretorius, the archivist at the Estate of Francis Bacon, who went through the Barry Joule archive item by item. Victoria Munro, the director of the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, discusses this still too-little-known photographer, and her documentation of immigration to the United States and the lives of queer women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Weißes Bild (1994), a painting by the late Luxembourg-born artist Michel Majerus, now on view at Art Basel—Aimee Dawson, acting digital editor, is at the fair and talks to Giovanni Carmine, curator of the Unlimited section, in which the painting appears.
Sophie Pretorius’s essay Work on the Barry Joule Archive is in the book Francis Bacon: Shadows published by the Estate of Francis Bacon and Thames and Hudson.
For more on the Alice Austen House Museum, visit aliceausten.org. The podcast My Dear Alice is out in the autumn.
A previously unidentified population of polar bears documented on the southeast coast of Greenland uses glacier ice to survive despite limited access to sea ice.
The thought of finding alien life has fascinated people since the time of the ancient Greeks—but developments in astrobiology could be about to turn this possibility into reality. How do you hunt for life beyond Earth—and might this be the decade when we find it?
Chapters: 00:00 – Is there life beyond Earth? 00:56 – How has the search for life evolved? 02:36 – What signs of life are scientists looking for? 03:48 – What are biosignatures? 04:28 – How to find intelligent life 06:03 – How telescopes today have improved our search 07:52 – Expanding the search beyond Earth
Read more of Alok Sharma’s coverage on the search for life in space: https://econ.st/3zw1Hxt
When travel writer and novelist Mary Morris was badly injured in an ice-skating accident, she feared that her life of adventure was over. But a quote from Thomas Mann convinced her otherwise: “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Thus began Morris’s three-year-quest — which does take her far, from Brooklyn to the jungles of India — to find a tiger in the wild. Like her much-lauded memoir Nothing to Declare, Morris’s latest book is a thoughtful, spiritual, genre-bending journey.
Soft Skull Press
Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria
By Noo Saro-Wiwa ’01JRN (2012)
Noo Saro-Wiwa spent her childhood in the United Kingdom, traveling back to her native Nigeria only on summer vacations. But when she was nineteen, her father, a journalist and activist, was killed by Nigerian police. Saro-Wiwa returned to her homeland to reckon with her father’s legacy and try to understand the history of the nation that killed him. Part memoir, part family history, and part travelogue, it’s an intriguing (and surprisingly funny) look at a very complicated country.
Mariner Books
Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am
By Julia Cooke ’13SOA (2021)
There’s nothing glamorous about flying these days, so it’s extra fun to tag along with Julia Cooke back to the 1960s, the golden age of air travel, when working as a Pan Am stewardess was peak cool. Cooke tells five such women’s stories, which run the gamut from the enviable (shopping sprees in Paris and beach holidays in the Philippines) to the unbelievable (evading the KGB in Moscow and smuggling a newsreel out of war-torn Pakistan).
Getty Research Institute
Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks
By Meyer Schapiro ’24CC, ’35GSAS, edited by Daniel Esterman ’65CC (2009)
Meyer Schapiro is known as one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished art historians. But in 1926 and 1927, he was still a Columbia graduate student, studying abroad in Europe and the Middle East. The letters that he wrote to his then fiancée, Lillian, as well as the notebooks that he kept, are ripe with budding observations on art and politics and represent a fascinating time capsule of intellectual life nearly a century ago.
St. Martin’s Press
Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
By M. R. O’Connor ’08JRN (2019)
Technology has made wayfinding — “the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us” — almost obsolete. But before GPS, or even written maps, humans purposefully traveled great distances across the earth. Journalist M. R. O’Connor draws on disciplines from neuroscience to anthropology to explore how they did it. Her findings are fascinating, and so is her journey to reach them, which takes her to the Arctic tundra, the Australian outback, and the islands of the South Pacific.
Jonglez Publishing
Secret Brooklyn: An Unusual Guide
By Michelle Young ’12GSAPP and Augustin Pasquet (2019)
Michelle Young, an adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia, is the founder of Untapped New York, a website dedicated to the secret corners and hidden gems of America’s biggest city. So it’s no surprise that her guide to Brooklyn is equally full of treasures — things like the world’s oldest subway tunnel and a museum built into the hallway of a Williamsburg apartment building. It’s an indispensable resource for visitors and residents alike.
Sarika Bansal
Tread Brightly: Notes on Ethical Travel
Edited by Sarika Bansal ’12SIPA (2021)
Editor Sarika Bansal is a true citizen of the world: she has lived on five continents, speaks four languages, and has traveled extensively. So she’s more than qualified to ask tough questions and offer wisdom about how to travel ethically. The essays and photos in her collection tackle topics like the ecological implications of cruise ships, the ways that study-abroad programs and “orphanage tourism” impact communities, and the role that privilege plays in exploration. It’s a timely wake-up call, with plenty of thoughtful ideas for the future.
Ecco
The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty
By Vendela Vida ’96SOA (2015)
One of the most alluring elements of travel is self-reinvention, an idea central to Vendela Vida’s captivating, mind-bending thriller. Upon arriving at her hotel in Casablanca, Vida’s heroine is robbed of her passport and all her belongings. Strangely liberated by the crime that stripped her of her identity, she starts posing as a famous film star, which takes her on a series of mysterious adventures. Vida’s writing is full of fun twists, and any armchair traveler will delight in her portrait of the sunbaked Moroccan city.
Kyle Books
Italy for the Gourmet Traveler
By Fred Plotkin ’80JRN (2014)
There are plenty of good reasons to travel to Italy, but for most people the food is high on the list. And Fred Plotkin — an expert on Italian opera and cuisine — is the consummate guide. He has tips on the best restaurants, gelato stands, markets, wineries, and olive-oil distilleries, from the bustling centers of Rome and Milan to tiny villages off most tourist-trodden paths. Plotkin is working with travel-guide guru Rick Steves on a new gastronomic guide to Italy, out in 2023. Until then, this fifth edition remains an excellent resource.
Seal Press
Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents
By Elisabeth Eaves ’99SIPA (2011)
Elisabeth Eaves lives by the notion that you can “go off into the world and let it carry you along.” Her memoir chronicles fifteen years of truly globe-spanning travel — from the busy streets of Cairo to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Almost every new place comes with a romance, but Eaves is clearly reluctant to settle down with any of the men she meets. It’s a journey that will speak to anyone who craves the unknown and fears the mundane.
Our new issue is now online, featuring David Trotter on Sylvia Townsend Warner, @debfriedell on Jane Roe, @kitchenbee on our palm oil dependency, Thomas Meaney on Lea Ypi, Jacqueline Rose and Sam Frears watching ‘EastEnders’ and a cover by Naomi Frears:https://t.co/xaTOjYd3Vrpic.twitter.com/Yb7PUJjfdx
The cover image shows plants growing at altitude on Altar Volcano in Chimborazo, Ecuador. Extreme altitudes pose challenges for most forms of life, and flowering plants are no exception. But flowering plants have been found growing as high as 6,400 metres above sea level. In this week’s issue, Michael Holdsworth and his colleagues reveal a molecular mechanism that helps plants to adapt to the extremes of altitude. The researchers studied a range of plants, representing four diverse clades of flowering plants — thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), tomato, poppy and the grass
Brachypodium distachyon. They found that plants use genetic adaptations to adjust their sensitivity to atmospheric oxygen, whose partial pressure decreases with altitude. By decoding the ambient oxygen level, the plants are able to sense the altitude at which they grow and optimize internal biochemical processes.
Boomers Daily 