I enjoy a story that gives a different perspective on headline news. Three recent illustrations:

While analysts examine the Iran nuclear deal’s impact on global geopolitics and investments, Schroeder’s “The Iran I saw” describes a local transformation shaped by an expanding cohort of young Iranian entrepreneurs, a growing number of Chinese expatriates fluent in Farsi, and the boom of software-enabled businesses.

Although all eyes are on Greece, the Financial Times’ “Latin lessons: China’s slowdown vs Grexit” claims that two larger forces might have more impact on the world economy in the nearer future: the collapse of commodity prices and the drop in Chinese imports.

The humanitarian crowd was largely absent from this week’s Financing for Development gathering in Addis. Yet Redvers’ “Aid: It’s complicated” argues that funding is the key entry point to bridging the deep-rooted and outmoded development/humanitarian divide.

My graph of the week is from Cham’s PhD Comics.

A useful companion article is Achor’s “Are the people who take vacations the ones who get promoted?” Its key messages: taking all your vacations brings you a higher chance of being promoted than not taking them all; resting your brain increases your creativity and is good for business; and your boss thinks that you are more productive if you are happier thanks to taking your vacations. So there you go: win-win-win!

Most papers and magazines offer summer reading lists. Bill Gates does too. And then there is Quartz staff who got annoyed by the lack of diversity of The New York Times‘ selection and offer alternative lists with African and Indian authors only.

My quote of the week is from Overbye in “Reaching Pluto, the end of an era of planetary exploration”: “None of us alive today will see a new planet up close for the first time again.”