Murdoch and Trump divorce? Eh, more like a trial separation
Murdoch won't be finished with Trump until Fox News start to hammer away at the former president.
The rebound from COVID-19 created a huge tailwind for the world’s largest companies by revenue. Aggregate sales for the Fortune Global 500 hit $37.8 trillion, an increase of 19%—the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history. Walmart landed at No. 1 for the ninth straight year, trailed by Amazon, which reached its highest ranking ever.
Chinese energy giants State Grid, China National Petroleum, and Sinopec rounded out the top five. For the first time, revenues from Global 500 companies in Greater China (including Taiwan) exceeded revenues from U.S. companies on the list, accounting for 31% of the total. The corporations that make up our annual ranking of the world’s largest companies also reaped record-busting profits in 2021. But this year’s turmoil has confronted the leaders of the Fortune Global 500 with a new set of crises—many of them political as well as economic.”
Interactive – Visualize the Global 500 – “Each year a whole host of factors—the global economy, trade policies, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate upheaval among them—push and pull at the Global 500 rankings. To help you quickly see how each country is represented on the list, we put the Global 500 on a world map. Now you can see each company’s location, revenue and profit at a glance. We also invite you to take a look at how each Global 500 company has moved around in the ranks over the past two decades.”
A shimmering city of dragon 🐉 and snake 🐍 oil
Minecraft has a lot to answer for. This week’s reveal of more ‘detailed’ plans for Saudi Arabia’s vast Megastructure/EcoCity/Groundscraper adds more confusion and improbability to what was already the stuff of fevered dreams. The renders are lovely, albeit ominously modelled on video game environments, but when you see the plan described in stark black and white – ‘Saudi Arabia reveals 170-kilometre-long mirrored skyscraper to house nine million people‘ – it all just starts to evaporate.
That’s not to say that the region doesn’t have an impressive track record with massive infrastructure projects, but the complexities and quandaries raised by the various NEOM projects – The Line (the aforementioned shiny groundscraper), Oxagon (a vast floating business park), and Trojena (a sort of ‘wellness wonderland’ rendered by ILM), you have to question exactly who is conning who. Are the consultants stringing along the Saudi royal family by promising them more than anyone can deliver? Are the Saudis playing a giant practical joke by promising the world’s beleaguered billionaires some kind of hi-tech sanctuary? Or is it just the architects, clearly having way too much fun while fervently hoping that the cheques will clear and no-one wants any detailed drawings. Imagine the plumbing.
There are clearly antecedents in the hyperbolic realm of hysterical urbanism – Corb’s crazed Plan for Algiers, Stanley Tigerman’s spiky Urban Matrix, Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist inhabited highway across Manhattan, Bucky’s bonkers Dome over New York, or Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay plan. For our money, the most prescient predecessor is Superstudio’s The Continuous Monument, an ‘apparently endless framework of a black-on-white grid … extend[ing] across the earth’s surface in a critique of what Superstudio saw as the absurdities of contemporary urban planning’. Absurdities indeed. The Italians were at least partly joking. This lot, it would seem, are not.
Instead, we’re told that this desert realm is ripe for transformation, using largely theoretical projects (a Hyperloop!) and bottomless reserves of money, which will presumably not spring forth from bottomless wells for much longer, and a workforce that would be the world’s largest and most imperilled. At 500m in height, the 170km-long structure offers up a potential 170km2 of solar panels. How far would that go towards off-setting the cost of constructing and running such a place? These are silly questions. Saudi Arabia is clearly seeking to wrest the title of Simulation Cityaway from Dubai, regardless of the cost. Shame it’s not going to be fuelled by snark, because there would be a surplus.
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Some other things. Related, Faux Mountains is a gazeteer of artificial landscapes created through the ages / Tanya Gold on ‘a story of two St Ives: ‘It is cursed and confused by its raging beauty’‘ / beautiful concept art by Debbie Tsoi / art by Kirsty McIntyre / art by Vaskange, including this never-ending zoom / ultra-detailed work by Jeremy Encio / A Brief History of More Than 30 Formats Music Has Officially Been Released On / Outside Left magazine / a collection of Bad Film Scenes / the new DeLorean concept imagines a world where the company existed throughout the 90s and 00s / an interview with sculptor Corin Johnson at Autre/ music by Our Solar System / music by Whispered the Rabbit / Stepping Out of the Slate, quirky experimental music gadgets from Yamaha Design Lab (via Gearnews).
