Weekend Reading, Watching and Listening Recommendations (January 29, 2021)

Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse; Why a U.S.-China Space Race is a Good Thing; How Amazon's Super-Complex Shipping System Works; Satyajit Ray: India without Elephants

1. Read: What's Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse. The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads. [via WIRED]

2. Read: Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Some scientists are serious about resurrecting zeppelins for low-carbon travel [via Medium HT my colleague Arturo Ardila Gomez]

3. Read: The Inequality Virus: Bringing together a world torn apart by coronavirus through a fair, just and sustainable economy [via OXFAM HT my colleague Shievani Upadhyaya]

4. Listen: Your Face Could Be Your Ticket: Face mapping and other tracking systems are changing the sports experience in the stands and on the court. In part-three of this latest series on facial recognition, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review jump on the court to unpack just how much things are changing.

5. Listen: Satyajit Ray: India without Elephants. India’s greatest film-maker  about whom the director Akira Kurosawa would remark, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon."

6. Watch: How Amazon's Super-Complex Shipping System Works

7. Watch: Why a U.S.-China Space Race is a Good Thing

8. Chart of the Week: Where Dams Have Reached "Alert" Age