Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from Forbes, The New York Times, Mother Jones and The Washington Post.
Microsoft has been not so secretly courting Alan Mulally. He should decide soon.
It must feel pretty good to be Alan Mulally these days. Passed over for the top job at Boeing a decade ago, Mulally found career redemption at Ford, where he is widely admired for turning the carmaker around without a government bailout. Now, at age 68, there's flattering talk of a possible Third Act for Mulally: running Microsoft.
We were going to take a Jalopnik team photo here. We better go soon.
It is easy to drive past Willets Point, the 62-acre tangle of auto shops, car parts and grease-covered mechanics tinkering with automobiles, that sits hard by the Unisphere of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.Passing by is far easier than driving through: The streets that cross each other at odd angles here in the glossy shadow of Citi Field look as if they had been blasted by land mines. They are pooled with dark, oil-slicked water or rutted with knee-deep holes that suck in a car's tires. The chalkboard scrape of chassis meeting pavement sounds through the air here with the regularity of a bell tolling the hour.
Sure it does.
You can blame a lot on man-made climate change. Worsened violence in Syria. Bigger wildfires. Bad health. The totalitarian hell and political repression in The Hunger Games franchise.
Just read it.
The air is so clear the mountains in the distance look almost fake, as if added digitally. The desert floor is runway-flat, with a few Joshua trees popping up randomly, like lost cowboys. The dominant feature is the sky, preposterously vast, beckoning test pilots, rocketeers and would-be space travelers.
Mulally's Dance With Microsoft Is Unfair To Ford