10 Weekend Reads – The Big Picture

• The Secret Battle for the Future of the Murdoch Empire: Rupert Murdoch, the patriarch, has moved to change the family’s irrevocable trust to preserve his media businesses as a conservative force. Several of his children are fighting back. (New York Times)

• The world’s emotional status is actually pretty good, a new global report finds: But which country comes first in happiness completely changes depending on how you measure. (Vox)

• The Man Who Saved the Skyscraper: Fazlur Khan and the idea that would turn architecture on its head. (Mental Floss)

• What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical equipment, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call anyone else. This huge network required billions of dollars worth of equipment: telephones, switches, cables, amplifiers, repeaters, and so on. All this equipment was built by AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric. But it was designed and developed by AT&T’s research arm, Bell Telephone Laboratories, better known as Bell Labs. (Construction Physics)

• Costco in Cancún. So here I am, in Cancun, on an all-inclusive vacation with my family through Costco Travel, and it feels like the world of the wholesale warehouse has somehow been extended down the East Coast to the Yucatán peninsula, all the way to the poor woman in a white polo with the laminated COSTCO TRAVEL sign, who’d been sent to meet us outside of the airport. (Paris Review)

• The spectacular rise and surprising staying power of the George Foreman Grill. This year marks the 30-year anniversary of the grill, officially known as the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine. After a slow start, it became an indelible part of ‘90s consumer culture and the world’s most popular product for cooking hamburgers, hot dogs, salmon, and just about everything else (Oprah Winfrey preferred it for bacon). Even after 30 years, tons of people still buy them. (The Hustle)

• Everybody get a star: Twenty years after its debut, Yelp has changed how we think about reviewing everything and anything (Eater)

• How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics: ‘A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien.’ (Politico)

• The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life: When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments. (Quanta Magazine)

• Corvette Bucked a Sports Cars Decline. Can It Thrive in an E.V. Era? The General Motors sports car, which enjoyed strong sales after a big design change, now has a hybrid version and may get a fully electric model that may turn off some gas-loving customers. (New York Times)