Consumer Spending + EVs + Mickey Mouse + Burgers

US shopping centre vacancies rise to eight-year high: FT reports, increase comes on signs of faltering consumer spending and pressure from ecommerce.

58.4 percent market share for EVs in Norway: In March, fully electric cars made up nearly 60 percent of the new-car market in Norway, a world record. A recent increase in the electric sales coincided with deliveries of Tesla’s Model 3 and Audi’s e-tron. The country aims to end sales of all fossil-fuel vehicles by 2025.

David Perell: What did Gutenberg’s printing press actually change?

Book prices fell. The raw price of books fell by 2.4 percent a year for over a hundred years after Gutenberg.

In places where there was an increase in competition among printers, prices fell swiftly and dramatically. Competition works. When an additional printing firm entered a given city market, book prices there fell by 25%.

Extreme loneliness or the perfect balance? How to work from home and stay healthy: More and more people are working where they live, attracted by the promise of flexibility, efficiency, and no commute. But does this come at a cost to their wellbeing? http://bit.ly/2K3BH4J

How Disney grew its $3 billion Mickey Mouse business–by selling to adults: Apple, Gucci, Kate Spade, Uniqlo, L’Oréal, and Maybelline are just a few of the companies that sell Mickey-branded products for grown-ups. Here’s how Disney made adults fall in love with a cartoon character. http://bit.ly/2K9n3c2

Inside the race to build the burger of the future: Trump says Democrats and environmental wackos are waging a war on beef. But corporations, not politicians or activists, are leading the post-meat revolution. https://politi.co/2K3tgGx

The heart of a swimmer vs. the heart of a runner: Regular exercise changes the look and workings of the human heart. And researchers are discovering that different sports affect the heart differently. https://nyti.ms/2Uwmw7W

Plastic from Plants + Microplastic Pollution + WWC

Engineered microbe may be key to producing plastic from plants: Phys.org reports, with a few genetic tweaks, a type of soil bacteria with an appetite for hydrocarbons shows promise as a biological factory for converting a renewable—but frustratingly untapped—bounty into a replacement for ubiquitous plastics. Bioengineers in Japan have used PDC to make a variety of materials that would be useful for consumer products.

Microplastic pollution has contaminated American groundwater, the lakes, and rivers of the UK, the coast of Spain, the beaches of Singapore and the Yangtze River in China, studies from around the world have shown. While the health effects of the tiny plastic particles on humans are still undetermined, they have been shown to harm marine life – and to have been consumed by people in Europe, Japan, and Russia.

New York City school menus go meatless on Mondays: WSJ reports, the NYC mayor says the policy will improve the health of children and the planet; food trade group says the move will limit low-income youngsters’ access to protein.

The nation’s largest school district follows others, such as Los Angeles, in offering only vegetarian dishes on Mondays, saying the move will help the environment by cutting greenhouse gases. 

Women finally get their own World Cup soccer style: NYT reports, for decades, women’s uniforms were just derivations of men’s. Now, taking specific design cues, like ponytail-friendly necklines, comes the good stuff

Nike revealed the new home and away uniforms for 14 out of 24 competing teams, and for the first time since the brand began working with the WWC tournament in 1995, each one of them was made specifically for the women’s teams, not as derivations or extensions of kits made for men.