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 S15Liberal Suburbs Have Their Own Border Wall   The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.
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S16The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003  The new media technology was going to make us stupid, to reduce all human interaction to a sales pitch. It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and rapid spread through business, government, and education augured nothing less than “the end of reason,” as one famous artist put it, for better or for worse. In the end, it would even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven Americans on national television. The year was 2003, and Americans were freaking out about the world-altering risks of … Microsoft PowerPoint.Socrates once warned that the written word would atrophy our memory; the Renaissance polymath Conrad Gessner cautioned that the printing press would drown us in a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” Generations since have worried that other new technologies—radio, TV, video games—would rot our children’s brains. In just the past 15 years alone, this magazine has sounded the alarm on Google, smartphones, and social media. Some of these critiques seem to have aged quite well; others, not so well. But tucked among them was a techno-scare of the highest order that has now been almost entirely forgotten: the belief that PowerPoint—that most enervating member of the Office software suite, that universal metonym for soporific meetings—might be evil.
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S17A Very Tasty, Very Cold Experiment  During Japan’s sweltering summers, nothing hits the spot quite like a frozen orange. The popular treat tastes great when made at home. But it tastes even better when made 850 meters below the ocean’s surface. “A bit salty, but super delicious,” says Shinsuke Kawagucci, a deep-sea geochemist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.The frozen fruit was the product of a particularly tasty scientific experiment. In 2020, Kawagucci and his colleagues designed a highly unusual freezer—one built to operate in the intense pressure of the deep sea. The frozen orange, chilled in the depths of Japan’s Sagami Bay, was proof that such a thing is even possible.
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S2218 of the best books of the year so far 2023  "It is hard to imagine stories more skilfully paced and polished than these," writes The Observer of After the Funeral, praising the author Tessa Hadley's ability to create atmospheres that are "relatable, sympathetic, complicated". In the acclaimed British writer's fourth short story collection, a divorced couple bump into each other on the Tube; a teenager on holiday with her parents rebels; three middle-aged sisters reconvene uncomfortably at their seaside childhood home. These characters, as fans of Hadley's work will recognise, are often "mature survivors of the 1970s or children of those survivors… comfortably off, less comfortably self-aware", writes The Guardian, and Hadley is a master of complex – but unspoken – family dynamics, particularly between women. The Washington Post calls After the Funeral "a revelation for aficionados of the form, as vibrant and knowing as the best of Hadley's celebrated career." (RL)Acclaimed concert pianist Elsa M Anderson – a former child prodigy now in her 30s – walks off stage mid-performance in Vienna. Next, we meet her at an Athens flea market as she watches another woman, apparently her doppelganger, buying some mechanical horse figurines. There follows Elsa's strange journey across Europe, shadowed by this enigmatic woman. The Scotsman says of the novel: "Although it is a work of scathing intelligence, it packs a pianissimo emotional punch at the end." It is a "seductive" novel, according to The Times, and marks "a puzzling, pleasurable return" for the author. August Blue is "exhilaratingly surreal" says iNews and "holds the remarkable balancing act that is key to Levy’s writing: perfect precision at the sentence level combined with a dedication to exploring the slipperiness of reality", noting the author's "knack for masterful innovation unlike anything else in English today." (LB)
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S9The Best Messenger and Crossbody Bags  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDIf I’m out and about and I don’t have a bag slung across my body, I feel naked and unprepared. It’s like venturing into a dungeon without any health potions. What if I need ChapStick? Did I bring ChapStick? How can I fit my phone, keys, and face mask all in the truncated pockets of my jeans? Where do I put the cool rock I just found? Extra storage capacity is essential to my everyday carry, and being able to swing the bag around to the front and grab anything I need is crucial. Backpacks are better for heavy loads or all-day trekking, but for lightweight everyday needs, the best messenger bags are hard to beat.
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S14Oppenheimer Nightmares? You're Not Alone.  Seventy-eight years ago, 5:30 in the morning: a blinding flash, a boom, a shock wave, a crater. As the minutes passed, “a multi-colored cloud surged 38,000 feet into the air,” according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. July 16, 1945, marked the first deployment of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s humanity-altering creation known as “Gadget.” The resulting mushroom cloud remains one of history’s most iconic images. And yet, the explosion itself is hard for most of us to conceptualize. What I’ve always found most haunting is the countdown to detonation—when the decision has been made but the world has yet to change.Those inexorable, ominous seconds were the basis of a nightmare I had recently. It’s an old adage that nobody wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams, but perhaps we can make an exception for nuclear night terrors this summer. Poke around social media right now, and you’ll notice that scores of people are experiencing acute nuclear anxiety. (“Too many Oppenheimer dreams last night 😵💫,” reads one representative tweet.) My bomb dream happened last Sunday night. I was dead asleep, watching a missile carve an arc across the sky. I awoke just before impact, sweating, heart thumping, fists clenched. I did not get back to sleep.
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S10How Christianity conquered Rome through simple math  In 312 AD, Constantine the Great confronted his rival for the imperial throne, Maxentius. By all accounts, Constantine’s campaign was doomed. Maxentius not only boasted a superior force but also control of Rome itself. However, before the battle, Constantine received a vision. He saw in the sky the shape of a cross burning with light. Inscribed upon it were the words “By this conquer.”After consulting his spiritual advisors, Constantine ordered a golden cross built and marched his army with it as his standard. The battle was decisive. His forces swiftly broke through Maxentius’ cavalry and then his infantry, pushing the stunned soldiers into the Tiber River where they were slaughtered. In appreciation of his holy benefactor, Constantine converted and set the Roman world on the path toward Christianity. (That’s one version of the story, at least.)
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S8The Best VR Headsets and Games to Explore the Metaverse  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDVirtual reality was supposed to be the next big thing back in 2016, when the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive launched. It was the tech whose time had finally arrived. Or so we thought. As it turned out, VR was still a little too expensive and perhaps too alienating to take over the gaming world. Then there was the hype about the “metaverse,” and now we're seeing companies that invested heavily in VR starting to jump ship, so keep that in mind when you're looking at investing in a new headset.
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S6Wild Donkeys Are on the Vanguard of Ukraine's Ecological Recovery  Miracles were in short supply in Ukraine last spring. But on the Tarutino Steppe in the country's far southwest, two rangers witnessed something remarkable. It was early May and the pair had been tasked with monitoring a herd of kulans that had recently been reintroduced to the Tarutino Steppe. This wild Asiatic relative of the domesticated donkey, with its dusty blonde coat and a dark brown stripe tracing its spine, had disappeared from the region in the 19th century.The rangers had just begun their count for the day, and as they peered through their binoculars they discovered that the group, which was supposed to be 20-strong, had grown by one. Stumbling out from beneath its mother's shadow was a shaky-legged baby kulan, marking the first time the wild donkey had been born on the grassy plains for over a century.
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S7The Apollo Phantom V3 Electric Scooter Has Phenomenal Range  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDI'm often disappointed with a good chunk of electric kick scooters I test. Many of them just don't have a range that satisfies my needs. I frequently trek from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, into lower Manhattan for a meeting, around 15 miles in total. Hopping on a scooter is much faster and a lot more pleasant than the subway (especially in the summer), but it's not always guaranteed that I'll have enough juice to get home.
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S36'Strange New Worlds' Season 2 Finale Release Date Changed By Surprise Episode Drop  The Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds crossover happened early. Here's what that means for the rest of the season.Nobody expects the Starfleet inquisition! Because of a surprise episode drop at San Diego Comic-Con 2023, the final episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 will all air earlier than originally announced. And that means that the super-secret Season 2 SNW finale will also be bumped up by a full week. Here’s what happened at the SDCC Star Trek panel and why the early release of a big crossover episode changes the remaining episode schedule going forward.
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S13Photos of the Week:  Mountainside art in Switzerland, a derailed freight train in Pennsylvania, multiple wildfires in Europe and North America, a moon-bound rocket launch in India, Russian missile attacks in Ukraine, a music and tattoo festival in Ohio, a high-wheel bicycle race in Maryland, and much more Surfer Diana Lander rides a wave at Anare beach in La Guaira, Venezuela, July 18, 2023. #
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S12Understanding the octopus and its relationships with humans  While other octopus books study the animal's behavior in aquaria or tropical waters worldwide, Dr. David Scheel, a professor of Marine Biology at Alaska Pacific University, takes a unique approach in his first book, Many Things Under a Rock. He travels to extreme places in the Pacific Northwest where one may not expect these creatures to live, but they have for approximately 330 million years
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S23Kenya's logging ban has been lifted - it's a political decision and a likely setback for conservation  Kenyan president William Ruto has lifted a six-year ban on logging, despite public objections. Ruto said it would create jobs and boost economic growth. Lisa E. Fuchs has studied the Mau Forest Complex, one of Kenya’s most important – and most threatened – forests. She unpacks the implications of this decision.A logging ban is a political instrument. Its effectiveness depends mainly on two things. First, who is included and who is not, and why and how these actors will be supported to re-orient themselves sustainably. Second, the political will to implement it according to its intention.
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S21Marketing When Budgets Are Down  The general rule of enterprise finance is that marketing budgets drop like a stone at the first sign of trouble and rise like a feather once the environment is more settled. In mid-2023 we’re far from a settled state — projected GDP growth in western markets is depressingly flat, inflation is proving to be rather stubborn, and those disruptions just keep on coming. It’s tough to see a significant increase in marketing budgets in the near term. Gartner’s annual survey of hundreds of CMOs charts the evolution of marketing spending over recent history, offering guidance for how enterprise leaders can deliver results and build the capabilities to fuel growth in a time of less.Marketing’s digital transformation brought with it unprecedented growth, both in the scope of the function and in its spending power. New channels, new technologies, and new capabilities demanded new levels of investment. But the good times couldn’t last forever, and the pandemic ushered in a new, more austere era as budgets flatlined. This placed chief marketing officers (CMOs) under pressure to reduce spending on previously sacrosanct parts of their portfolio, such as marketing technology.
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S2S5What would happen if we stopped fishing?  As Stephen Palumbi looked around the deep blue water, he had the eerie impression that something wasn't right. It was the summer of 2016 and Palumbi – a professor of marine sciences at Stanford University – was on an expedition, scuba diving to assess the state of an obscure patch of reef in the Central Pacific.What he and his fellow researchers found was a forgotten world of astonishing abundance – grazing herds of plump parrotfish, eight-metre- high (26ft) forests of branching corals, humphead wrasse the size of baby rhinos… and sharks. So many sharks. "You couldn't look in any direction without seeing one or two," he says.
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S34Can "Coral Probiotics" Help Solve a Major Planetary Crisis? An Expert Explains  Supermarket shelves abound with yogurt and other products chock-full of probiotics — “good bacteria” — meant to cultivate our inner microbial life. Though the evidence around these products is mixed, broader evidence shows that microbes do have outsized effects on our bodies.Other organisms also nurture rich assemblages of influential microscopic life. And for the tiny colonial animals that manufacture the world’s coral reefs, these associations play a particularly important role: Corals rely on their microscopic algal partners — and a horde of others — to thrive. In fact, the most obvious sign of dangerous stress for a coral is bleaching: the whitening that happens when the coral jettisons its colorful algal partners that the otherwise transparent animal relies on for food.
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S18Claude Glass as Night Song  i hadn’t failed until i watched your back trembling in the dark window. turning away to pick up the fallen comforter, i wanted to say, don’t look at me like this— backfiring with want as the dark turned you sharp. those days, light a commodity to save, i kept looking into the windows of dark rooms to watch you next to me. you, tidying your hair in the reflection, bright against the jumble of construction— i held on to you out of the corner of my eye. some sanctuary. i wanted your chest beating in my chest, so i couldn’t look at you. what mortality— turning away at beauty to preserve my exit. and what worship— to paint you with my back to you. to watch your reflection like a wound.
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S24Is This the End of Bibi?  Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel longer than anyone in the history of the state, longer than F.D.R. was President of the United States. And yet, for all his electoral success, he has always been a known quantity. Twenty-five years ago, during Netanyahu’s first term, I spoke with his predecessor and fellow Likud member Yitzhak Shamir. “Bibi?” Shamir said. “He is not a very trustworthy man.” He added, “I don’t believe he believes in anything. He has a huge ego. People don’t like such people. I don’t like him.” Not long after, I spoke with Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader who had lost to Netanyahu in 1996. Peres was furious with Netanyahu’s determination to undermine the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. His general assessment of Netanyahu’s amoralism and cynicism was much like Shamir’s. “Netanyahu’s only consideration is his own coalition,” Peres said. “He’s always worried about losing power—that is always his first priority.”On the same reporting trip to Jerusalem, I discovered that the cliché is true: No man is a hero to his director of communications and policy planning. David Bar-Illan, a former concert pianist and editor of the Jerusalem Post, was without illusions about Netanyahu even as he pledged abiding loyalty to him. When I asked Bar-Illan how Netanyahu won the ultra-Orthodox vote despite his rigorously secular life style, Bar-Illan said, “Finessing his being secular was nothing compared to other things, like adultery. One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa—but a married woman! With a shiksa, even the rebbes do it. But a married woman! Now Bibi’ll go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, maybe he’s gone to the Western Wall, or he’ll say the phrase ‘With God’s help.’ But he’s not fooling anyone.”
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S11Researchers attempt to create dark matter  Not to sound depressed, but we live in a dark universe. Despite the brilliance of a night sky in the high desert of the American Southwest, those billions and billions of stars and galaxies are just a tiny fraction of the matter in the cosmos. An unknown substance called dark matter is five times more prevalent than the familiar matter of atoms.And despite decades of effort, no direct evidence for the existence of dark matter has been found, leading scientists to think broadly about what dark matter might be. Now, using a powerful particle accelerator, researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) have attempted to create a very light form of dark matter and recently published their results.
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S27PlayStation Access Controller Release Date, Price, and Customization Options  In 2018, Xbox released the Adaptive Controller. As the first dedicated accessibility controller for modern gaming consoles, it helped normalize the need for more accessibility design in the games industry. For five years the Adaptive Controller has remained the only accessibility controller, but that is changing this year as Sony enters the space. The PlayStation Access controller will give PlayStation gamers new freedom in how they play and let many disabled gamers play on PlayStation for the first time ever. Here is what you need to know about the PlayStation Access controller.
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S33Here's Exactly What Can --  Some biobanks link biospecimen data to other collected data, such as sexual behavior, medical history, weight, diet, and lifestyleImagine you agreed to be part of a new and exciting long-term research study to better understand human health and behavior. For the past few years, you’ve been visiting a collection site where you fill out some questionnaires about your health and daily activities. Research assistants take your height, weight, and some other physical characteristics about you. Because you agreed to contribute your genetic data to the study, you also provided a saliva sample during your first visit.
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S28'Barbie' Continues 2023's Most Concerning Hollywood Trend  Two of the most anticipated movies of the year hit theaters this week: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The films themselves couldn’t be more tonally or narratively apart from each other, which is why their simultaneous release has become such a point of obsession online. In the case of Barbie, there’s no studio comedy this year that has had as much excitement behind it or promotion dedicated to it.As distinct and purposefully weird as Barbie looks, though, the film itself is just the latest addition to one of this year’s most surprising trends. The film, which isn’t just co-produced by Mattel but was made under its executives’ reportedly intense supervision, is as much a piece of brand marketing as it is a playful new comedy written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. It isn’t the first 2023 movie that has been made for and with a specific brand in mind, either.
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S4S20Why Is Tracy Chapman at the Center of a Country-Music Controversy?  The response to Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car” raises questions about the relevance of race to certain news stories.Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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S3557 Years Later, Star Trek Is Finally Going To Conquer The One Genre It's Never Tried  Since September 8, 1966, the Star Trek franchise has seemingly tried out every single genre on the planet. Yes, Trek is contained by science fiction, but within all of the franchise, there is a huge range of genres — from whodunnits to romantic comedies to spy stories and political thrillers, horror, adventure, westerns, family dramas, and very often, straight-up Shakespeare. The amount of things inside of Star Trek is staggering. And yet, the Final Frontier has never, in 57 years, not once, attempted a musical. Until now. As revealed at San Diego Comic-Con 2023, the penultimate episode of Strange New Worlds Season 2 will be a full-on musical.On Saturday, July 22, at the Star Trek panel in Hall H of San Diego Comic-Con, one of the worst-kept secrets in the world of Trek rumors was finally confirmed. For a long time, cast members and creatives — from Akiva Goldsman to Christina Chong — have been teasing something big, and for Star Trek, groundbreaking. Earlier this season, Chong told Inverse that, “Episode 9 this year was something I'd pitched from day one of getting the part.” So, if you're excited about the musical, thank La’an herself! Here’s the trailer for “Subspace Rhapsody,” which isn’t the season 2 finale of Strange New Worlds, but kinda feels like it could be.
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S29S19The Women's World Cup Is About More Than Soccer  This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The FIFA Women’s World Cup is about more than just soccer. Here’s a guide to getting into the game.
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