On a morning on which at least one of us overslept after the insanity of the week, this morning’s Weekend Edition is powered by coffee from Caffe Greco and Zooba’s hawawshi (with extra crispy bread). Yes, hawawshi is a breakfast food.

Glamor and ambition in a framework of absolute control. Or: The rise of Emirates as the world’s largest long-haul carrier: Malcolm Campbell asks if Dubai’s Emirates airline “running out of sky,” in an in-depth report for Bloomberg Businessweek. Tracing back the origins of the airline’s founding, Campbell writes about how Emirates “has grown from a two-plane operation at a desert airstrip into a force whose every movement rumbles through global aviation.” He says: “The airline’s growth is inseparable from that of Dubai, with both straining the laws of financial and physical gravity.”

Emirates has become the world’s largest long-haul carrier by never relaxing its grip — on employees, on airplane manufacturers, or on its own ambitions. The scope of Emirates’ reach from Dubai is vast: Two-thirds of the world’s population lives within the radius of an eight-hour flight. While the airline is adamant it never received subsidies since its startup grant, “there’s no question it’s operated in an environment that drives Western airlines mad with envy,” Campbell writes. “For starters, Dubai won the geographic lottery. From a fuel and flight-time perspective, the Persian Gulf is the most efficient place on the planet to connect Europe with Southeast Asia and Australia, and the U.S. with India. Strikes and protests aren't an issue — unions are banned, and rights to free speech and assembly are severely limited. Corporate and income taxes are nil. And then there are the advantages of being the favored corporation of an absolute ruler whose word is literally law. Unlike Heathrow Airport and Los Angeles International, where the rights of nearby citizens to sleep without jet noise must be respected, Dubai International Airport runs at full speed 24 hours a day, allowing Emirates to optimize connection times for a network that spans from Buenos Aires to Christchurch, New Zealand.”

President Tim Clark, who was been with Emirates since its founding in 1984, has a marked impact on the airline and its performance. His tenure as company president, Campbell writes, “has been defined by bold gestures, and he relishes recounting occasions when a seemingly doomed gamble went his way. He’s claimed credit for silencing naysayers who told him that reviving the Jet Age concept of an onboard bar, in Emirates’ case on the upper deck of the A380, would be an expensive folly that no passenger would bother using. (They very much do.) The same goes for the airborne showers in first class, requiring planes to take off with 2.2 metric tons of water.” However, as most viable routes are already heavily served, Emirates has been forced to go farther afield to keep growing, and Clark concedes that “Emirates’ emergence as a boundary-pushing titan of global aviation was an outcome of an era that may now be at an end.”

The airline is facing a number of new risks. Betting on the growth of what development economists call the Global South — the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America — “the airline is at risk if those emerging markets don’t, in fact, emerge.” Besides the tempered demand and economic prospects, US airlines are likely to challenge the Open Skies agreement that allows unlimited flights between the GCC and the US. US carriers Delta, American, and United, along with several industry unions, are already petitioning the incoming Trump administration to revisit the agreement. “Their argument, that deep-pocketed foreigners are threatening American jobs by flooding the market with subsidized capacity, was once seen in business circles as a long shot—but it happens to resonate precisely with President-elect Donald Trump’s stated view of the world. Similar efforts are afoot in Europe.” Campbell sounds an ominous warning, saying: “In the 70-odd years of large-scale commercial aviation, no airline has managed to stay on top for long. Pan Am was the last word in intercontinental glamor in its day, and its day came to an end.”

You can listen to the story being discussed on Bloomberg radio here (runtime 11:25).

Say it ain’t so… Nutella, our favorite snack of childhood (uhm, adulthood) contains cancer-causing chemicals, according to a warning by the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) back in May. Palm oil, which according to Nutella-maker Ferrero gives the chocolate- and hazelnut-flavored spread its smooth texture, is the primary culprit, The Independent reports. Particularly, a compound known as glycidyl fatty acid esters (GE), which are produced in palm oil when it is heated above 200°C. Dr Helle Knutsen, chair of Contam, the EFSA panel that investigated palm oil, said in May: “There is sufficient evidence that glycidol is genotoxic and carcinogenic, therefore the Contam panel did not set a safe level for GE.” The resulting consumer backlash has hit Nutella sales hard, despite the fact that palm oil is found in hundreds of household-name food brands including Cadbury’s chocolate, Clover and Ben & Jerry’s. Consumer boycott has caused a 3% dip in sales and Italy’s supermarket chain Coop removed the Nutella products that contain palm oil.

Ferrero has responded (as all concerned corporations do) with a marketing campaign designed to reassure consumers. It has also insisted on continuing the use of palm oil, saying that it does not want to degrade the quality of the product. “Making Nutella without palm oil would produce an inferior substitute for the real product, it would be a step backward,” said Ferrero's purchasing manager Vincenzo Tapella. Substitute oils, derived for example from sunflowers or rapeseed, could be used but would increase the cost of making the product substantially, according to Reuters. All of these revelations are leaving us to wonder: Is nothing sacred?

Swiping your card to pay is nothing like taking cash out of your wallet, and cashless payments are changing consumer behaviour, writes Tom Sandage for The Economist sister magazine 1843. The phenomenon has been observed since credit cards appeared in the 1980s. People tend to spend 12-18% more with credit cards, according to a study by Dun & Bradstreet. Transactions are felt even less with phones which we are always carrying: “It’s like a magic wand you can just wave to pay for stuff.” Economists expect this system of payments to boost spending even more. “Removing constraints on making payments subtly changes our consumption patterns, and the extra calories from all those vanilla lattes add up,” writes Sandage. Technology, as usual, can help. Apps could observe pattern changes by providing weekly summaries and analyses of our expenses, and notify us whenever there is a sharp rise. Fintech opportunity, anyone?

Is your friend just not into music? Maybe you simply don’t feel the beat? Scientists suggest it’s a disconnect between the areas of your brain that process sound (in the cortex) and the nucleus accumbens, a part of your brain’s reward network, according to a press release by McGill University, carried by EurekAlert. The condition is called specific music anhedonia, and 3-5% of the population has it. The idea of the study came from the assumption that everybody liked music, and it turned out to be indeed just an assumption, Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill and a co-author of the paper, said on WNYC Studios’ weekly podcast Soundcheck (15:33). “These findings not only help us to understand individual variability in the way the reward system functions, but also can be applied to the development of therapies for treatment of reward-related disorders, including apathy, depression, and addiction,” said Zatorre, according to the press release. Think you might have the condition? Take this questionnaire initially given to Barcelona University students.