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 S6811 of the best TV shows to watch in August   This coming-of-age comedy about four friends on an Oklahoma reservation, made with an Indigenous cast and crew, has been acclaimed for its authenticity and its mix of wit and piercing realism. The third and final season picks up where the previous one ended, with Elora (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) in California, honouring their late friend Daniel's dream of visiting the state. They make their way back home, with their usual misadventures – they can steal with the best intentions – and the occasional encounter with a spirit. Sterlin Harjo, who created the show with Taika Waititi, told Variety earlier this year, "I wanted to make a show that was very culturally specific but could resonate with the world". He has accomplished that. His show joins Barry and Succession as another series whose creators chose to wrap up while it was still at its best.The endearing British series that became a global hit returns, picking up the blossoming romance between Charlie (Joe Locke) and his classmate Nick (Kit Connor), who came out as bisexual to his wonderfully supportive mother (Olivia Colman) at the end of the first season. Now Nick texts, with typical teenaged confusion, "Why is being out so complicated?" The new season promises to give us more about Charlie and Nick's friends, as well as a class trip to Paris. But the show, based on a webcomic and graphic novels by Alice Oseman, should retain its tone of matter-of-fact acceptance of its LGBTQ+ characters, as well as its warmth. The Guardian said the first season was "adorable", and Digital Spy, reviewing the second, called the series "the cosy comfort blanket of teen shows", adding "we don't mean that as a bad thing". In a television landscape where the troubled teens like those on Euphoria often dominate, who couldn't use a charming comfort blanket?
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S1How the Best Brand-Influencer Partnerships Reach Gen Z  Authenticity is among Gen Z’s most important values. They feel empowered to ask and answer their own questions in a variety of social forums on any topic — from beauty to health to home improvement to technology to science. And their view of authority has expanded from traditional sources, like academic institutions or reputable editorial voices, to perceived influence. The author offers five lessons for brands who want to tap into this era of influencers and make authentic connections with Gen Z.
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S2Yes, the Metaverse Is Still Happening  There’s still much hype around the metaverse. And although no one knows how things will shape out, the metaverse is happening and companies need to develop a strategy. Currently, large enterprises such as NVIDIA and Unity are investing heavily to lay the foundational infrastructure, while Roblox, Decentraland, and Sandbox are jockeying to be the preferred portal, and Web3 studios such as Touchcast and TerraZero are working with leading brands to expand their market share. Now is the time to discover the metaverse and its power to drive deeper connections, more effective collaboration, and enhanced personal productivity and fulfillment.
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S4Mastering the Art of the Request  Even the most effective leaders recognize how much is outside of their control, but one thing we all have agency over is how we communicate with others. Clearly articulated requests, the kinds that elicit real responses, don’t come naturally to most of us. As it turns out, there’s an art to the request — whether it’s directed at an employee who’s producing subpar deliverables or a colleague from a different department who hasn’t been pulling their weight on a collaborative project. Here’s why requests are so hard to make, what so many leaders are still getting wrong, and a handful of strategies for issuing requests that elicit concrete, actionable responses.
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S5How a Federal Ban on Ransomware Payments Could Help CISOs  The White House is considering a ban on ransomware payments, which could change the chief information and security officer (CISO) job. The ban would would elevate the cybersecurity conversation to the CEO, the CFO, and the board, and potentially end the practice of scapegoating CISOs when a breach happens. This is a significant shift: after Uber’s former chief security officer was convicted for his role in covering up a 2016 cyberattack, CISOs had more reason to worry of the personal liability that came with the job. Here’s how companies should prepare for this new landscape right now: prepare for the worst, make senior leadership own the cybersecurity conversation, and test their security posture and regularly audit internal processes and employee security training to pinpoint gaps in cyber readiness.
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S6AI Won't Replace Humans -- But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI  Karim Lakhani is a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in workplace technology and particularly AI. He’s done pioneering work in identifying how digital transformation has remade the world of business, and he’s the co-author of the 2020 book Competing in the Age of AI. Customers will expect AI-enhanced experiences with companies, he says, so business leaders must experiment, create sandboxes, run internal bootcamps, and develop AI use cases not just for technology workers, but for all employees. Change and change management are skills that are no longer optional for modern organizations.
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S7Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only Australasia’s largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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S8The Australian town where people live underground  On the long road towards central Australia, as you travel 848km (527 miles) north from Adelaide's coastal plains, is a scattering of enigmatic sand-pyramids. Around them, the landscape is utterly desolate – an endless expanse of salmon-pink dust, with the occasional determined shrub.But as you venture further along the highway, more of these mystery constructions emerge – piles of pale earth, haphazardly scattered like long-forgotten monuments. Every now and then, there is a white pipe sticking up from the ground next to one.
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S9Six companies making it easier for Africans to send money globally  Sending money in and out of Africa is a stressful task. For starters, it’s costly: Each transaction incurs fees of up to 8.46% on average, according to the World Bank, making it the most expensive region to send money. Internet scams and regulatory bottlenecks present further challenges, leading global fintech companies, including Wise, WorldRemit, and Mercury, to often cut African users off from their services.But cross-border payments are becoming increasingly critical. Think of the talented African workers in remote jobs, working for overseas companies while remaining on the continent. Or the African companies increasing their sales presence on the global stage. Or, most importantly, remittances: The African Development Bank’s president says the continent’s biggest financier is the African diaspora.
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S10The secret to becoming the world's biggest digital bank: A user-friendly app  In Brazil, the Nubank app is a one-stop shop for all things banking. Like most banking apps, it allows for online payments, loans, and money transfers (be it through wire transfer or Brazil’s popular instant transfer system, Pix). That seems standard now, but in Latin America, where in-person bureaucracy still is the norm for much of the banking experience, this was a profound disruption back when the app was launched in 2014. The Nubank app is available in Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia, but its Brazilian iteration continues to be at the cutting edge. It was a leader in introducing single-swipe credit adjustments and an in-app automatic investment option — which Argentina’s Mercado Pago went on to emulate thereafter. Overall though, Nubank’s appeal may just come down to its simplicity and user-friendliness.
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S11A Background 'Hum' Pervades the Universe. Scientists Are Racing to Find Its Source  Astronomers are now seeking to pinpoint the origins of an exciting new form of gravitational waves that was announced earlier this yearIn June, a new era in astronomy began with the apparent discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves, the ambient hum of spacetime ripples pervading the universe. That announcement came from a huge collaboration of researchers around the world. Groups in the U.S., Europe, India, Australia and China are each working on their own similar experiments and are pooling their data together to improve the result. With evidence for these never-before-seen gravitational waves now firmly in hand, all those disparate teams are now feverishly gathering more data for a grander goal: to understand exactly where this background hum is really coming from. Many experts suspect that the hum mostly emerges from pairs of supermassive black holes spiraling together in the gradual process of merging—but it could instead come from even stranger sources that might represent thrilling new branches of physics. “We’re right at the very beginning of the field,” says Chiara Mingarelli of Yale University, part of the U.S.-led collaboration, NANOGrav.
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S12Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded  “News deserts” have proliferated across the U.S. Half of the nation’s more than 3,140 counties now have only one newspaper—and nearly 200 of them have no paper at all. Of the publications that survive, researchers have found many are “ghosts” of their former selves.Journalism has problems nationally: CNN announced hundreds of layoffs at the end of 2022, and National Geographic laid off the last of its staff writers this June. In the latter month the Los Angeles Times cut 13 percent of its newsroom staff. But the crisis is even more acute at the local level, with jobs in local news plunging from 71,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020. Closures and cutbacks often leave people without reliable sources that can provide them with what the American Press Institute has described as “the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their daily lives.”
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S13S14The Fungi Economy, Part 1: Just Like Us, Trees Are Experiencing Inflation  Like us, plants and fungi have complex economies. By burning fossil fuels, we’ve been devaluing their currency.Meg Duff: The town of Petersham, Massachusetts is leafy. It’s green. It is not the business capital of anything. It’s not a place anyone associates with cutting-edge economic research. But there is a research forest here, where scientists study the economic dynamics of forest ecosystems. And at the edge of the forest, there’s a little greenhouse on a hill.
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S15S16Heat Waves Could Kill Off Human-Bred Mosquitoes  Rising heat could debilitate mosquitoes bred to slow the transmission of viruses such as yellow fever and dengueCLIMATEWIRE | Scientists have warned that some mosquito-borne diseases, like malaria and dengue fever, may spread into new territories as the world warms. So they started breeding special mosquitoes that could slow the transmission of viruses.
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S17Michael Sheen: The magic of a creative career  The city of Port Talbot in South Wales is known for a few things: a steel mill, a proudly working class population and a passionate commitment to the arts that produced Hollywood superstars Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. In this sweet, personal talk, actor Michael Sheen shares how he was also able to take advantage of all the city had to offer, why he's worried that a change in approach to arts education means that kids now don't get the same kind of chances -- and the steps he's taking to ensure that creative up-and-comers get the support and access they deserve. (With animations by Sam Orams and Sarah Klan.)
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S18The Best Dorm Gear for Heading Back to College  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 WIREDWhether you're an incoming freshman or returning to dorm life, picking the right stuff for college can be tough. On one hand, you want to have quality gear that won't let you down by midterms. On the other, the inevitability of crushing debt looms in the years to come, so you want to be frugal wherever possible.
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S19Eufy's Latest Smart Cleaning Bot Scrubs Most Floors Like a Champ  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've been testing a lot of multimodal cleaning bots lately. They’re very expensive and very imposing. They also tend to be very fast and accurate, with long battery life, great software, and huge docking stations, complete with clean and dirty water tanks to wash the mops.
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S20The O.G. Wearable Breast Pump Gains a Lot of Cool Tricks  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 remember seeing the first version of Willow’s wearable breast pumps at CES 2017. It was one of the buzziest devices to come out of the show, and while I was years from ever needing one, I was thrilled to see something that would make future motherhood a little easier.
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S21Fisker Shows Off 4 New EVs, Including a Pickup Truck and a Convertible  Fresh from letting us take a first drive in its Ocean midsize electric SUV as well as making its first customer deliveries of the car, Fisker has unveiled its EV lineup for the next few years.At an event in Huntington Beach, California, on yesterday night, the company revealed four new models that will be coming soon: the Alaska pickup truck, the Ronin sports car, a final design for its previously announced subcompact Pear, and a rugged iteration of the Ocean, the Force E.
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S22The Ghost of Privacy Past Haunts the Senate's AI Future  The recent burst of generative artificial intelligence is forcing the US Senate into a debate lawmakers have put off for years: privacy reform.While Americans' personal data is a commodity sold, traded, mined, and even "recycled," passing from second party to third party to digital banana stand, some senators believe your personal data is siloed off from the earth-altering AI work those companies, like OpenAI and Google, are testing, tweaking, and deploying daily.
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S23The 43 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now  Streaming services are known for having award-worthy series, but also plenty of duds. Our guide to the best TV shows on Netflix is updated weekly to help you know which series you need to move to the top of your queue. They aren't all sure-fire winners—we love a good less-than-obvious gem—but they're all worth your time, trust us. Feel like you've already watched everything on this list you want to see? Try our guide to the best movies on Netflix for more options. And if you've already completed Netflix and are in need of a new challenge, check out our picks for the best shows on Hulu and the best shows on Disney+. Don't like our picks, or want to offer suggestions of your own? Head to the comments below.
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S24Ask Ethan: Is LK-99 the holy grail of superconductors?  Our lives, in the modern age, are dominated by the technologies of electronics and electrical energy. Our worldwide need for large amounts of continuous power underscores the need for increased efficiency across the board: from energy generation to transmission to consumption. In every step of that process, energy loss is a problem, as the very act of pushing electrons through a current-carrying wire is an energy-losing proposition, owing to the electrical phenomenon of resistance. There’s only one physical circumstance where current can be transmitted with no resistance: when your material is superconducting. Superconductors today have a wide variety of applications, from MRI machines to particle accelerators to magnetic fusion devices and many, many others.At present, however, the only known materials that superconduct do so under extreme conditions: very low temperatures. The “holy grail” of superconducting research is to find a material that would superconduct under normal conditions: at room temperature and ambient pressures. If we could discover one and implement it on a wide scale, we could eliminate all the problems of energy loss and stray heat: problems that every consumer and device manufacturer must presently reckon with. In late July of 2023, a claim that a new material — known as LK-99 — is, in fact, that long-sought-after room temperature superconductor. But is it real? Lots of you have written to me about it, including Rob Chapman-Smith and Clint Sears, who’ve asked:
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S25Argue smarter, not harder, with Harvard's former debate coach Bo Seo  Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion and author, believes that our public conversations are in a state of crisis. In his book, Good Arguments, Seo aims to foster a culture of productive conversations instead of divisive disputes, emphasizing the need for training in argumentation, the importance of format in debates, and nurturing relationships beyond differences.
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S26Why evolution is the Picasso of science  Esteemed biologist Michael Levin explores a captivating biological perspective on evolution — one that’s hard for engineers to come to terms with. In their work, making random changes to a system usually makes things worse, not better. But evolution, on the other hand, doesn’t just produce specific solutions to specific challenges; instead, it creates what Levin calls “problem-solving machines.” These machines are made up of hierarchical biological hardware with incredible adaptability, capable of tackling various challenges without assuming specific environmental conditions.
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S27With "thanabots," ChatGPT is making it possible to talk to the dead  Since its public launch last year, the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT has simultaneously wowed and frightened the world with its deep knowledge, its surprising empathy, and its undeniable potential to change the world in unforeseen, possibly miraculous or calamitous, ways. Now, it’s making it possible to digitally resurrect the dead in the form of “thanabots”: chatbots trained on data of the deceased.Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an AI program called a large language model. Trained on more than 300 billion words from all sorts of sources on the Internet, ChatGPT responds to prompts from humans by predicting the word it should use next based on both its training and the prompt. The result is a stream of communication that’s both informative and human-like. ChatGPT has passed difficult tests, written scientific papers, and convinced many Microsoft scientists that it actually can understand language and utilize reason.
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S28The case for "dusking": In a world of light and noise, embracing the dark can be healing  Watching dusk fall can be an act of resistance — against the absurd idea that every second must be spent usefully, against thinking in black and white, against the addiction to growth that dominates our lives. A short hour of producing or consuming nothing, not chasing likes or responses. Simply sitting and watching darkness rise, lines blur, and daily life as it unravels.Dusking, it is called. A verb stemming from a time when people preferred to leave the lights off as long as possible and wait for darkness in the early evening. It was a way to save energy but also, most importantly, a communal end to the day. A tiny rite of passage in which work was released and rest began.
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S29S30S31S32Cortana, once a flagship feature of Windows phones, is slowly being shut down  Microsoft is working to cram its new ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat service into every product it makes, and starting this fall it will be a built-in feature of Windows 11. It makes sense, then, that Microsoft is also working to shut down its last stab at an automated virtual assistant—the standalone Cortana app in Windows 10 and Windows 11 is going to stop working this month, and Microsoft is pointing users toward Bing Chat and Windows Copilot instead.
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S33S34S35Jeanette Epps will finally go to space six years after being pulled from flight  NASA confirmed on Friday that Jeanette Epps, a former CIA technology intelligence officer selected as an astronaut in 2009, will finally launch into space in early 2024 on a SpaceX flight to the International Space Station. The crew assignment comes six years after NASA pulled Epps from what would have been her first spaceflight, just months before her scheduled launch to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
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S36"Absurd": Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale  Google resisted pleas to extend the lifetime of Chromebooks set to expire as of this June and throughout the summer. Thirteen Chromebook models have met their death date since June 1 and won't receive security updates or new features from Google anymore. But that hasn't stopped the Chromebooks from being listed for sale on sites like Amazon for the same prices as before.
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S37Voyager 2 phones home and says everything is cool  NASA lost contact with its Voyager 2 spacecraft—the second-most distant object ever built by humans and flung into space—nearly two weeks ago due to an errant command sent to the probe. This caused Voyager to point its antenna slightly away from Earth.
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S38S39Photos of the Week:  Widespread flooding in China, a horse cart race in India, drone training in Ukraine, a wildfire in the Mojave National Preserve, a water polo match in Japan, a trampoline championship in England, a flooded St Mark’s Square in Venice, an air show in Ireland, and much more A member of the Crane Valley Hotshots works to light a backfire as the York Fire burns in the Mojave National Preserve on July 30, 2023. The York Fire has burned over 70,000 acres, and has crossed the state line from California into Nevada. #
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S40What Happens When a Carnival Barker Writes Intellectual History  Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it. In the past several years, controversies over race, gender, and campus leftism have ripened in part due to his publicity. Often the so-called antiracists, trans activists, and tenured radicals at the center of the controversies are self-discrediting. All Rufo has to do is quote them or post their videos on his Twitter feed—a teacher fanatically devoted to a trendy form of social justice, say, or someone preening about their identity. Even those who find their behavior outrageous often find Rufo’s tactics distasteful as well. (Many of his targets strike me as mentally unbalanced.) But the thing about shit-stirrers is that even if they are distasteful or loathsome, they’d be out of work if there were not already raw material to stir.Rufo’s new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is in this context surprisingly hygienic. It is not about the raw material but about the manufacturers of the porcelain vessels in which it is found. He curates a gallery of activists, academics, and Communists active in the mid- and late 20th century, and he describes how their ideas slowly took over campuses, HR departments, and leftist political circles. These figures are well known, and it is ethically refreshing to see him focus his revilement on public figures in full command of their rhetoric and ideas, rather than on possibly disturbed nobodies.
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S41The Surprising Profundity of The Righteous Gemstones  Danny McBride’s show about a flawed evangelical family is goofy on its face but unusually eloquent on the subject of forgiveness.Though it uses the register of low comedy rather than moody character study or tragicomic caper, HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, which follows a family of materialistic and vaguely corrupt religious showpeople, is prestige TV in the classic mold. Like Succession or Better Call Saul, it centers on a richly flawed antihero as he builds his empire, and, in the process, studies the workings of American power and money. The popularity of these shows has led some critics to suspect that closely attending to such protagonists—especially when they are lent the glamour of handsome, high-budget production values—doubles as a form of subtle approval. In applying this storytelling model to a specifically Christian milieu, though, Gemstones upends it. Its characters are also flawed, and also vividly rendered. But for their bad behavior, they expect—and are granted—absolution, a worldview that foregrounds how strange and arbitrary the act of forgiveness is in the first place.
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S42A Strike Scripted by Netflix  The writers are trying to roll back changes that the streaming service already made a new normal.Three months into the Hollywood writers’ strike, there is at last some sign of movement. When the writers walked off the job on May 2, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the organization representing the studios) ended negotiations, and no talks have happened in the 14 weeks since. But on Tuesday, the AMPTP informed the Writers Guild of America that it wanted to meet “to discuss negotiations,” as the guild told its members. That meeting is supposed to happen today.
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S43Putting Trump on the Couch  A new novel from the psychiatrist famous for Listening to Prozac imagines a Trumplike president’s sessions with a shrink.This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
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S44A Movie About an Affair That Breaks With Convention  The queer drama Passages makes poignant observations about power, desire, and the psychological contours of creative life.The protagonist of Passages, an incisive new romantic drama from the director Ira Sachs, is a man obsessed with perfecting others’ movements, even as he struggles to control his own. The story opens on a Paris film set, where a director named Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski) critiques an actor’s stiff entrance into a party scene. “This is just a transition moment, but we are turning it into a huge drama moment, because you’re not able to make some fucking simple steps down the staircase!” Tomas yells, arms motioning up and down the threshold his actor can’t seem to cross with sufficient finesse.
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S45Doctors Suddenly Got Way Better at Treating Eczema  Up until a few years ago, Heather Sullivan’s 14-year-old son, Sawyer, had struggled with eczema his entire life. When he was just a baby, most of his body would be covered in intensely itchy rashes that bled and oozed when he couldn’t help but scratch. His family tried steroid creams, wet wraps, bleach baths, and all of the lotions. They tore up their carpet and replaced their sheetrock in hopes of eliminating triggers. At 15 months, he went on cyclosporine, a powerful immunosuppressant usually given to organ-transplant patients. It cleared him up, but the drug comes with potentially dangerous side effects over time. Doctors, Sullivan recalls, were “just appalled that my child would be on this amount of medicine at this age”—but his eczema came roaring back as soon as he went off it.When a new eczema drug called Dupixent finally became available to Sawyer a few years ago, his turnaround was fast and dramatic. Within a week, his itchiness and redness started calming down. He felt and looked better. The condition that had dominated their lives began to fade into the background.
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S46Reading in the Dog Days of Summer  This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The last book I read may be the perfect summer novel, one that almost seems engineered to hit every pleasure center in the brain: Ingredients include a feel-good romance, a bucolic setting, a narrator slowly spilling a story full of bittersweet nostalgia under a beating sun, afternoon swims in a lake, and lots of ripening fruit. I’m thinking of Ann Patchett’s newest novel, Tom Lake. The book was one of my contributions to our summer reading list, which we updated this week with some new titles that are out this month.
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S47The Next Big Abortion Fight  Republicans are trying to make it harder to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio. Will voters go along?For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.
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S48You're Probably Drinking Enough Water  If you’re a healthy person worried about hydration, odds are, you’re getting plenty. But no one can say exactly what the right amount is.As recently as the 1990s, Jodi Stookey, a nutrition consultant based in California, remembers hydration research being a very lonely field. The health chatter was all about fat and carbs; children routinely subsisted on a single pouch of Capri Sun a day. Even athletes were discouraged from sipping on fields and race tracks, lest the excess liquid slow them down. “I can’t tell you how many people told me I was stupid,” Stookey told me, for being one of water’s few advocates.
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S49The Problem With 'Why Do People Live in Phoenix?'  In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, America’s hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heat—a monthly average of 102.7 degrees in July—has been brutal. One woman was admitted to a hospital’s burn unit after she fell on the pavement outside her home, and towering saguaros have dropped arms and collapsed. Over the past month, hospitals filling up with burn and heat-stroke victims have reached capacities not seen since the height of the pandemic.“Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” You might ask that question to the many hundreds of thousands of new residents who have made the Arizona metropolis America’s fastest-growing city. Last year, Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, gained more residents than any other county in the United States—just as it did in 2021, 2019, 2018, and 2017.
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S50Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine  Allies can be exasperating. But try being invaded by your neighbor and lectured by everyone else.“The history of all coalitions is a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies.” Thus said Winston Churchill, who knew whereof he spoke. This summer of discontent has been one punctuated by complaints: from Ukrainian officials desperate for weapons, and from Western diplomats and soldiers who think that the Ukrainians are ungrateful for the tanks, training, and other goods they have received.
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S51When Alabama Killed Jimi Barber  Elizabeth Bruenig on what happens now that, after a year of botched procedures, the state has executed a man without incidentThis 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.
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S52Don't think twice | Psyche Films  At the age of 24, John Fudge took a violent fall while climbing the white cliffs of Dover in the south of England, splitting open his head and losing consciousness. The extent of his injuries wasn’t revealed until decades later, when doctors decided to perform a brain scan after John slipped into a deep depression. The results revealed extensive brain damage, including a progressive form of dementia. Ten years on from his diagnosis, John’s wife Geraldine compares his brain to an oak tree, its limbs of knowledge being slowly trimmed away, causing John great mental anguish. His only relief comes when he’s able to live in the moment, such as when he plays guitar and sings – his musical abilities being an as-yet untrimmed branch. Don’t Think Twice offers an insight into John’s life, including visits from Jon, a young volunteer who joins him for music sessions at home. An affecting and unusually honest portrait of dementia, the UK director Harry Shaw leaves his viewers to find relief and peace, like John, in the musical moments tucked in between difficult realities.Psyche is a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.
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S53S54Grappling With Climate Change and Overtourism, Italy Is Betting Big on Train Travel /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a8/cf/a8cf8d3e-1925-46f0-bb37-bc633cf52df7/orient_express_la_dolce_vita_train_exterior.jpg) Italy has announced a host of new trains designed primarily for tourists—who are swarming the country in increasingly unmanageable numbers.The project will introduce trains that carry visitors to “well-known destinations and destinations outside the classic circuits” alike, according to a statement from Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane (FS), Italy’s state-owned railway operator, per Google Translate.
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S55California's Waves Are Getting Bigger With Climate Change /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/fd/53/fd53f552-5cdc-4370-a2a6-a7fbdfb36fb1/gettyimages-1246145447.jpg) Storms that produce massive swells are also occurring more frequently as the planet warms, a new study suggestsWaves along California's Central Coast are getting bigger as human-caused climate change warms the planet, according to a new study published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
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S56S57A Mysterious Portrait Was Discovered Beneath a René Magritte Painting /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/84/28/842854da-5af9-4fc3-a630-4714755c8555/magritte_painting.png) Researchers found the image using infrared reflectography, and they think it may depict the artist’s wife, GeorgetteRené Magritte's art is famously enigmatic: The Belgian Surrealist is best known for paintings like The Treachery of Images, a depiction of a smoking pipe with the caption that reads, "This is not a pipe." From hooded lovers to food with eyes, Magritte made art meant to disrupt and distort.
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S58DNA Links 42,000 Living People to Enslaved and Free African Americans Buried in Maryland /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/8e/48/8e48521f-50fd-4be0-8232-6c14da9d4ae3/catoctin_furnace_850.jpg) The research, initiated by the local African American community, could be a roadmap for future genealogy studiesA first-of-its-kind DNA analysis has connected 27 free and enslaved African Americans buried in a Maryland cemetery to their 42,000 living relatives. The new research opens up a “historical gateway,” for Black Americans whose ancestors were stolen during the transatlantic slave trade, their family histories lost over the centuries of enslavement, reports Scott Maucione for NPR. The team published their findings Friday in the journal Science.
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S59Aurora Borealis Could Dazzle the Northern U.S. This Week /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ff/41/ff41d481-d2b9-45d0-ba84-70a354a11a47/gettyimages-1420788703.jpg) The current forecast from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, says the glowing display could be visible as far as Madison, WisconsinThe northern lights could be visible from the United States this Thursday, treating people at northern latitudes to a fantastic glowing display, according to a forecast from the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
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S60How Working with Competitors Made Jio a Telecom Giant  Jio Platforms’ unique experiment of co-opetition with global tech giants combined with its local prowess allows it to address an enormous market of price-sensitive customers. Thanks to its sheer scale, innovation, and unique collaborations, it can offer integrated solutions for retail, grocery, fintech, medical, agricultural, e-commerce, and e-payment needs, in addition to telecom services and home entertainment — at affordable prices. The resulting knowledge, access, business possibilities, and even entertainment opportunities could transform the lives of over one billion people in India. In this article, the authors unpack why Jio has been so successful and what lessons we can learn from its evolution.More than a traditional telecom business, India’s Jio Platforms is proving to be a disruptor. Jio was launched as a “freemium” service, offering free internet services to price-sensitive Indian customers to increase the adoption rate and scale up the market. Previously, Indian customers, whose average income is about $150 per month, had never had access to such a high-speed internet — bundled with so many apps and digital solutions — at such low prices.
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S61The Power of Being a Heretic: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Critical Thinking, Emotional Imagination, and How to Rehumanize the World  Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.When the Inquisition persecuted Galileo for advancing the rude truth that Earth is not the center of the universe, the charge against him was heresy — the same charge on which Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for her crusade for political reform. We have had many words for heretics over the epochs — rebels, radicals, freethinkers — but they have always been the ones to dislodge humanity from the stagnation of the status quo, to illuminate our blind spots, dismantle our unexamined biases, and jolt us out of our herd mentality. Without those devoted to seeing reality more clearly and possibility more wildly, we would still live in a world haunted by superstition and governed by dogma.The power and dignity of this most courageous human mindset is what the pioneering classicist Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928), who brought the culture of Ancient Greece to the modern world, explores in her magnificent essay “Heresy and Humanity,” found in Alpha and Omega (public library) — the out-of-print essay collection that gave us Harrison on the art of growing older, published just as humanity was being dehumanized by its first World War.
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S62The Porcupine Dilemma: Schopenhauer's Parable about Negotiating the Optimal Distance in Love  Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that “even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist.” In consequence, we move through love in a clumsy dance of approach and withdrawal, trying to negotiate the optimal distance for that elusive, ecstatic feeling of spacious togetherness.
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S63How Generative AI Will Change Sales  Sales teams have typically not been early adopters of technology, but generative AI may be an exception to that. Sales work typically requires administrative work, routine interactions with clients, and management attention to tasks such as forecasting. AI can help do these tasks more quickly, which is why Microsoft and Salesforce have already rolled out sales-focused versions of this powerful tool.
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S64Are You Frustrated with Your Team's Ability to Solve Problems?  Often when you feel like your team isn’t working together to effectively problem solve, it’s because you don’t understand various team member’s problem-solving styles. The author, who has studied how people make decisions for 30 years, has identified five archetypes she calls problem-solving profiles. Adventurers are optimistic, confident and tend to go with their gut reactions. Detectives like to follow the data. Listeners are more collaborative and want to solicit others’ input. Thinkers are cautious and like to identify multiple paths forward. Visionaries pride themselves on seeing pathways that other’s don’t. Understanding your team’s problem-solving profiles will help identify tensions you may be feeling, reduce friction and modify behavior to get your decision-making back on track.
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S656 Strategies for Leading Through Uncertainty  It seems that any given week provides ample reminders that leaders cannot control the degree of change, uncertainty, and complexity we face. The authors offer six strategies to improve a leader’s ability to learn, grow, and more effectively navigate the increasing complexity of our world. The first step is to embrace the discomfort as an expected and normal part of the learning process. As described by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, leaders must shift from a “know it all” to “learn it all” mindset. This shift in mindset can, itself, help ease the discomfort by taking the pressure off of you to have all the answers.
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S66The Great Resignation is 'over'. What does that mean?  In the US, 47 million people quit in 2021, and 50 million more in 2022, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The continued exodus was so significant that in May 2021, Anthony Klotz, then-associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, coined the term ‘Great Resignation’ to put a name to the trend.The Great Resignation was unprecedented – and particularly striking against a backdrop of incredible global uncertainty. Now, however, economists say it’s over.
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S67Rava upma: warm and savoury semolina  For millions of Indians, a day can start or end with a plate of warm rava upma, savoury semolina grains cooked to a tender, fluffy consistency. A classic rava upma is made from semolina, salt, vegetables and a South Indian-style seasoning of mustard and black lentils, and served with yogurt, pickles or bananas as accompaniments. A drizzle of ghee simply elevates this dish to a whole other level. Given how easy it is to put together upma, it appears at the family table as a practical dish that suits the rhythm of work-life balance.It's also popular outside of the home. "One plate upma, one filter coffee without sugar, please!" is a typical breakfast and dinner order in restaurants and bustling tiffin houses across South India.
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S69Meg 2: The Trench review: Ben Wheatley's sequel is 'plain awful'  The sequel to the 2018 hit The Meg raises one of the timeless questions about cinema: when is a film so bad it's good – hilarious in its crumminess – and when is it just plain awful? Meg 2: The Trench definitely falls in the terrible category, and it didn't have to be that way. The Meg knew exactly what it was: a formulaic movie with Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor, a diver battling a megalodon, a giant prehistoric shark previously thought to be extinct. The movie had no more or less ambition than to be a slick commercial adventure, and while it wasn't great it fulfilled that goal well enough to have earned more than $530m (£420m) worldwide.More like this: - Oppenheimer is a flat-out masterpiece - 'Joyous' Barbie breaks the mould - A big disappointment from Wes Anderson
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