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 S62'Ahsoka's Two-Part Debut is Different from Other Star Wars Shows in One Major Way   Ahsoka Tano has never been one to follow the rules, and that isn’t changing now she has her own series. After almost four years of a standardized streaming release schedule, Disney+ tore up the rulebook mere days before Ahsoka’s release. Here’s what the new normal is, and when you need to tune in to watch Ahsoka as soon as possible. Ever since Loki Season 1, Marvel and Star Wars Disney+ shows have been released on Wednesdays. But on Friday, August 18, the official Star Wars Twitter account announced that Ahsoka would move to Tuesday evening.
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S1How to Say Goodbye: An Illustrated Field Guide to Accompanying a Loved One at the End of Life  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.“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Rilke wrote while ailing with leukemia. To comprehend the luckiness of death is to comprehend life itself. When a loved one is dying and we get to be by their side, it is a double luckiness — lucky that we got to have the love at all, and lucky, which is not everyone’s luck, that we get to say goodbye. Even so, accompanying a loved one as they exit life is one of the most difficult and demanding experiences you could have.How to move through it is what my talented friend and sometime-collaborator Wendy MacNaughton explores in How to Say Goodbye (public library) — a tender illustrated field guide to being present with and for what Alice James called “the most supremely interesting moment in life,” drawing on Wendy’s time as artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and her own profound experience at her beloved aunt’s deathbed.
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S2AI Can Help You Ask Better Questions -- and Solve Bigger Problems  Most companies still view AI rather narrowly, as a tool that alleviates the costs and inefficiencies of repetitive human labor and increasing organizations’ capacity to produce, process, and analyze piles and piles of data. But when paired with “soft” inquiry-related skills it can help people ask better questions and be more innovative.
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S3How to Make Great Decisions, Quickly  As a new leader, learning to make good decisions without hesitation and procrastination is a capability that can set you apart from your peers. While others vacillate on tricky choices, your team could be hitting deadlines and producing the type of results that deliver true value. That’s something that will get you — and them — noticed. Here are a few of a great decision:
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S4 Using Federated Machine Learning to Overcome the AI Scale Disadvantage  Our summer special report helps leaders gain a comprehensive view of risks, learn how to overcome market disrupters, and manage the analytical tools that provide predictive insight for decision-making.Our summer special report helps leaders gain a comprehensive view of risks, learn how to overcome market disrupters, and manage the analytical tools that provide predictive insight for decision-making.Deep pockets, access to talent, and massive investments in computing infrastructure only partly explain why most major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have come from a select group of Big Tech companies that includes Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. What sets the tech giants apart from the many other businesses seeking to gain an edge from AI are the vast amounts of data they collect as platform operators. Amazon alone processes millions of transactions each month on its platform. All of that big data is a rich strategic resource that can be used to develop and train complex machine learning algorithms — but it’s a resource that is out of reach for most enterprises.
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S5The rise of the Gen Z side hustle  Shola West, 22, works on the media-partnerships team at advertising firm OMD. She combines her full-time role with a part-time business: providing Gen Z career advice through freelance consultancy work. West, who is based in London, says her employer is aware – and supportive – of her side hustle. “At my interview, they made it clear I was welcome to have my personal brand on the side. My CEO recently commented on my LinkedIn post saying what I’d done was brilliant, even though it had nothing to do with my full-time job,” she says. “Their openness means it doesn’t feel like a 9-to-5: it’s a job that works with my passions.”
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S6Did Me Too change the workplace for Gen Z?  Like many women, I remember watching the Me Too movement mushroom as I scrolled through Facebook and Twitter in October 2017. While the hashtag #MeToo was first used in 2006 by black feminist activist Tarana Burke, who wanted to tackle sexual violence within her own community, it gained momentum following a viral tweet by actress Alyssa Milano after Harvey Weinstein’s crimes were exposed. Women around the world also began posting about how the misuse of power and privilege enabled sexual misconduct in the workplace.For many women in the workforce, the Me Too movement triggered conversations about the inappropriate (and often illegal) behaviours we’d encountered in our own careers, prompting a mix of anger, catharsis and, for some, painful re-lived trauma. But that wasn’t the case for Gen Z who were still children or teenagers. Born between 1996 and 2012, only the oldest, now workforce-aged, were in university, or applying for their first jobs, when #MeToo trended across social media and grabbed headlines.
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S7#quittok: Why young workers are live-quitting on TikTok  Even years into the Great Resignation, workers continue to leave their jobs in droves. While plenty of employees are still sending off official resignation emails to bosses, younger workers are increasingly taking a different tack: live quitting.In July 2021, a clip of UK McDonald’s workers quitting mid-shift went viral – and now TikTok is awash with users sharing real-time footage of the moment they told their bosses ‘I quit’. Sometimes tense, often funny and nearly always compelling, these short video clips are attracting thousands – sometimes millions – of views on the social media platform.
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S8Why are TikTok creators so good at making people buy things?  TikTok may not be the first place that comes to mind to find the best cleaning supplies. Yet #cleantok is alive and well – as is #dogtok, #beautytok and others. Increasingly, consumers are turning to social media to discover products, spending money based on the recommendations of both high-profile influencers and casual creators alike.On #booktok, for example, creators share their book reviews and recommendations. Data shows users who promote certain books with the hashtag have driven sales of the titles they feature. The popularity of #booktok has also inspired devoted displays at major multinational book retailers; changed the way cover designers and marketers are approaching new titles; and this summer, even spurred a new publishing imprint from TikTok parent company ByteDance.
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S9Typhoon shelter chicken wings  Summer in Hong Kong marks the beginning of typhoon season. Cue the dense air, heavy storms and rain that can force umbrellas to break under their weight. Despite the intense downpours that typhoons bring, without them, an iconic Hong Kong dish would have never been born.It's called typhoon shelter crab, and it was created in the 1960s on fishing boats housed in Hong Kong's many typhoon shelters.
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S10How to make the perfect omelette  Joining a French restaurant kitchen is a baptism by fire. An apprentice has mere moments to make an impression, and, according to Yves Camdeborde, owner of Paris' four Avant-Comptoir restaurants, is frequently given a task whose outward simplicity conceals true technicity. To succeed is to garner favour; to fail is to show one still has much to learn. Such is the role, from corner bistros to Michelin-starred dining rooms, of the omelette.A French omelette, Camdeborde explained, stands out from versions where fillings are mixed right in with the eggs.
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S11Ridley Scott's Napoleon: Was the French leader really a monster?  It was the opening of his campaign, and the British veteran unleashed a salvo of shots at the French lines. That is to say, director Ridley Scott was promoting his latest film, due to be released in November. Napoleon promises to be an epic account of the rise of the emperor, played by Joaquin Phoenix, focusing on his volatile relationship with his first wife Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby).
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S12Shared parental leave has failed because it doesn't make financial or emotional sense  When shared parental leave was introduced in 2015 in the UK, the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government described it as a “radical” policy, suitable for modern lives and workplaces. By allowing parents to share up to 50 weeks of leave in the first year of their child’s life, it was vaunted as a way to encourage fathers to bond with their babies and enable mothers to return to work sooner, helping to close the gender pay gap.
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S13Can you cry underwater?  Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] someone is emotional, their eyes make extra tears to let people know they are unhappy, hurting or even overjoyed. Crying releases natural chemicals in the body like endorphins that produce feelings of happiness and reduce pain, and oxytocin, a hormone that helps people feel bonded with others and builds trust and love. A good cry can help you feel better.
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S14AI and new standards promise to make scientific data more useful by making it reusable and accessible  Every time a scientist runs an experiment, or a social scientist does a survey, or a humanities scholar analyzes a text, they generate data. Science runs on data – without it, we wouldn’t have the James Webb Space Telescope’s stunning images, disease-preventing vaccines or an evolutionary tree that traces the lineages of all life.To improve and advance science, scientists need to be able to reproduce others’ data or combine data from multiple sources to learn something new.
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S15S16Social media algorithms warp how people learn from each other, research shows  People’s daily interactions with online algorithms affect how they learn from others, with negative consequences including social misperceptions, conflict and the spread of misinformation, my colleagues and I have found.People are increasingly interacting with others in social media environments where algorithms control the flow of social information they see. Algorithms determine in part which messages, which people and which ideas social media users see.
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S17The idea that imprisonment 'corrects' prisoners stretches back to some of the earliest texts in history  Prisons are places of suffering. But in theory, they aim for something beyond punishment: reform.In the United States, the goal of prisoner rehabilitation can be traced back, in part, to the 1876 opening of the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York. Purported to be an institution of “benevolent reform,” the reformatory aimed to transform prisoners, not just deprive them – though founder Zebulon Brockway, known as the “Father of American Corrections,” was notoriously harsh.
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S18S19Presidential pauses? What those 'ums' and 'uhs' really tell us about candidates for the White House  Nine. That is the number of “uhs” that former President Barack Obama uttered in a period of two minutes during a 2012 presidential debate. Other Obama “uh” counters, such as University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman, clocked him as using “uhs” and “ums” – hesitation markers known as “filled pauses” in linguistspeak – roughly every 19 words during one interview. By comparison, former President Donald Trump rarely uses them at all – as infrequently as once every 117 words.
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S20Israel's democracy protests: What happens next?  The massive pro-democracy protests that shook Israel since January 2023, when its right-wing government introduced so-called “judicial reforms,” have quieted down for a while. The country’s legislature is on a break. But the government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the most conservative in Israel’s short history, plans to continue its quest to erode the independence and power of the country’s Supreme Court. That will likely ignite further protest when the lawmakers reconvene. The Conversation’s senior politics editor, Naomi Schalit, interviewed political scientist and Israel scholar Dov Waxman about what comes next for Israel, its Jewish and Arab citizens, the Palestinians in the occupied territories – and the future of democracy in the country.
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S21Want to help Maui's animals after the wildfires? Send cash, not kibble  When disasters strike, people often evacuate with their pets, as long as it’s possible for them to quickly grab their dogs, cats or other kinds of companion animals. However, you may not have time to gather your animals during a quick-onset event like a wildfire, or your animals might be hiding.This is especially true for cats, because they can be skittish. There are other complications, such as evacuation by boat – which makes it harder to bring animals along. When owners flee without a leash or carrier, their animals might bolt at any stopover or shelter.
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S22Geoengineering sounds like a quick climate fix, but without more research and guardrails, it's a costly gamble - with potentially harmful results  When soaring temperatures, extreme weather and catastrophic wildfires hit the headlines, people start asking for quick fixes to climate change. The U.S. government just announced the first awards from a US$3.5 billion fund for projects that promise to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Policymakers are also exploring more invasive types of geoengineering − the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of Earth’s natural systems.The underlying problem has been known for decades: Fossil-fuel vehicles and power plants, deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices have been putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the Earth’s systems can naturally remove, and that’s heating up the planet.
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S23S24Why are 'photo dumps' so popular? A digital communications expert explains  It’s summer 2009. You’ve been to a “campout” with your school friends in someone’s back garden and taken a bunch of out-of-focus pictures on your digital camera. The next day, you dig out your trusty USB cable and upload the photos to your laptop, sharing every single one, without even vetting them, to a dedicated Facebook album. The likes and comments come rolling in – the campout is complete.It somehow feels too soon for a trend like this to come back around, but it has, and in a new form called the “photo dump”. A photo dump is the act of posting multiple pictures from either a specific time span (usually a month or season), or an event (like a holiday), to an image-based social media platform such as Instagram.
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S25The order in which you acquire diseases could affect your life expectancy - new research  More than 25% of adults in the UK have two or more long-term health conditions. This increases to 65% for people older than 65 years, and to almost 82% for those aged 85 or older. Our study assessed how a number of multiple long-term health conditions (psychosis, diabetes and congestive heart failure) develop over time, and what effect this can have on life expectancy. We chose these conditions because, together, they can lead to substantial reductions in how long someone lives.
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S26How rising interest rates are affecting UK businesses  From chip shops to tech start-ups, and even large, well-established companies, rising interest rates have had an impact right across the business world. After 14 consecutive base rate hikes by the Bank of England since 2021, this is causing particular problems for companies with a lot of debt. Read more: How Thames Water came to be flooded with debt – and what it means for taxpayers
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S27Africa is being courted by China, Russia and the US. Why the continent shouldn't pick sides  University of Johannesburg provides support as an endorsing partner of The Conversation AFRICA.Some three decades since the end of the Cold War, the world order is undergoing a structural transformation. At the heart of it is the challenge posed to the hegemony of the US. This is primarily being led by Russia and China which are discontented with Washington’s excesses across the global stage. The most recent example of this rebellion was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Fiona Hill, a British-American foreign affairs specialist, observed that the war was a “proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the ‘Rest’ against the United States”.
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S28Ticks are becoming a growing health risk in the UK - here's why  Earlier this year, the UK Health Security Agency confirmed a case of tick-borne encephalitis – a potentially deadly virus carried by ticks that causes brain inflammation. A British man is also said to have contracted alpha-gal syndrome after being bitten by a tick. This condition can trigger a fatal allergy to red meat.The ticks that carry these pathogens are already common in other parts of the world, including Europe and North America. But in light of these reports, many may be wondering whether ticks and tick-borne diseases are a growing risk in the UK.
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S29Faith Kipyegon: from walking to school in rural Kenya to setting world athletics alight  All eyes are on Faith Kipyegon at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary. That’s because the Kenyan 1,500 metre and 5,000 metre star broke three world records in less than two months on her way to Hungary.As expected, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are spearheading Africa’s hopes for medals, continuing their dominance in middle and distance running events. At the 2022 champs, Ethiopia finished second and Kenya fourth in the medal table. Between them they won 20 of the 28 medals lifted by African athletes.
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S30Chandrayaan-3: India hopes to land a rover on the Moon for the first time  As the name suggests, this is the third mission in a programme of Indian lunar exploration. Various problems affected the previous two Chandrayaan satellites, so officials at the Indian space agency will be hoping for a fully successful mission this time.So what will Chandrayaan-3 do? We already have some nice images of the lunar surface taken by the lander module camera, which shows the successful separation from its propulsion module – the part that stays in lunar orbit. But the main task for the lander and rover is to show that the ISRO can successfully perform a gentle landing on the Moon.
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S31S32To predict future sea level rise, we need accurate maps of the world's most remote fjords  Martin Jakobsson is Co-Head of Arctic and North Pacific Center at Seabed 2030, a project funded by the Nippon Foundation to map the entire global seabed.Understanding how glaciers interact with the ocean is akin to piecing together a colossal jigsaw puzzle. And on various icebreaker expeditions to some of the most remote fjords in northern Greenland, colleagues and I have showed that the shape of the seafloor is one of the key pieces of that puzzle.
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S33A billion people in Africa are at a climate risk blind spot  Disasters related to the weather or climate are becoming more common. Since 1970, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of weather-related disasters, causing economic damages that have surged a staggering 70 times over the same period. This worrying trend is expected to worsen as climate change causes floods, droughts and heatwaves to become more intense, frequent and longer-lasting.
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S34S35S36S37Our older population will triple in 40 years. But a social insurance model won't fix the aged care funding crisis  Preliminary data from the 2023 Intergenerational Report shows Australia’s population aged 85 and over is set to more than triple over the next 40 years. This will exacerbate existing strains on the aged-care system. The government will spend more than A$146 billion on aged care in the next four years. General tax revenue will cover that cost, mostly funded by individual income tax receipts. But the government is concerned general tax revenue won’t be enough to fund the expected growth in aged care, in the near future and longer term.
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S38Prices are up and the supply of things we need is in flux. How did we get here?  This is the second article in The Conversation’s series examining Australia’s cost of living crisis. Read the first article in the series here.Australia is in a cost-of-living crisis. We know that because the prices typical Australians pay for typical products have been climbing much faster than typical wages, as acknowledged in the standard briefing provided to members of parliament by Australia’s Parliamentary Library.
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S39A retiring NZ MP has suggested joining Australia - we should at least think about it (before saying no)  Big policy ideas usually don’t come up in parliamentary valedictory speeches – they’re for saying goodbye and thank you. So departing Labour MP Jamie Strange was the exception last week when he made a case for New Zealand and Australia becoming one country.The main problem, he joked, would be integrating the Australian cricket team. But he talked up the potential economic benefits, and the option does remain open under sections 6 and 121 of the Australian Constitution.
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S40S41Ecological grief and uncontrollable reality in Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City'  Much has been written on the grief in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, with the director himself being candid enough to describe the film not only in terms of grief, but as being centred chiefly around death. Anderson also notes, however, that the concept for the film was how we contend with things outside of our own control. Set in a fictional desert town in 1950s America, Asteroid City follows a father and his children to a Junior Stargazer convention, only to have the event “spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.”
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S42S43Reimagining time will help employers better support workers with disabilities  Despite the fact that people with disabilities are entitled to equality under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the provincial Human Rights Codes, they continue to face systemic barriers in accessing employment, education, transportation and housing. Individuals with disabilities are under-represented in the Canadian labour market. Only 60 per cent of people with disabilities are employed in Canada, compared to 80 per cent of those without disabilities.
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S44S45S46Beginning of the end: how Elon Musk's removal of the block function on X could trigger its hellish demise  On Saturday, X (formerly Twitter) chairman Elon Musk tweeted he would be removing the microblogging platform’s block function. It would remain intact for direct messages, but would otherwise become obsolete.This is the latest in a series of controversial and often confusing moves from Musk since he took ownership of the platform in October 2022. Why does Musk want to block the block function? And what might the consequences be for users, and indeed the future of the platform?
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S47Camp David summit turns attention to North Korea, as well as China  While China’s relationship with the region and the world is a constant focus of attention and scrutiny, world leaders have also been closely watching North Korea, particularly for its steadily increasing ballistic missile capability. It was the primary focus of last week’s trilateral summit held at Camp David between US President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
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S48Why do we make violent art - and what does it say about the artist?  The sensationalised media coverage of the recent suspected mushroom poisonings in regional Victoria expanded last week, to include children’s scribblings on a wall. The pictures, which comprised stick figures, rudimentary drawings and text that referenced death and dying, were removed last year from the former home of the woman who cooked the lunch. Drawn by her primary-school-aged children, and photographed long ago by the tradesman who cleaned the wall, they included tombstones, swords and the words “I am dead” and “You don’t long to live”.
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S49S50S51Briefly Noted Book Reviews  The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I. S. Berry (Atria). This crackling début thriller is narrated by a C.I.A. spy, a self-described “aging threadbare bureaucrat” stationed in Bahrain in the wake of the Arab Spring. The novel begins with a series of bombings targeting Westerners. These are blamed on the Bahraini opposition, but the station chief suggests that the spy’s informant, who has become a friend, was involved. No one is beyond the spy’s cascading suspicions, not even a Bahraini mosaicist with whom he is romantically entangled, and whom he approaches with a caution usually reserved for his work: navigating an affair is “not so different, after all, from the delicate give-and-take dance with an informant, an unending alternation between obeisance and control.”Temple Folk, by Aaliyah Bilal (Simon & Schuster). These nine short stories follow Black American Muslims who drift toward and away from their faith, judge one another for immodesty, wrestle with upended family lore, and reflect with ambivalence on the impact the Nation of Islam has had on their lives. A woman visiting Egypt questions whether to continue wearing the hijab, another enters into a puzzling and intense online romance with a devout Albanian, and another is haunted by visions of her dead father as she prepares his eulogy. Built largely around vignettes, Bilal’s stories depict characters who serve as sensitive guides to matters of apostasy, racial prejudice, and gender roles.
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S52Debate Me, You Coward!  Debate me. For three hours. At a time, venue, and decibel-level of my choosing. You bring your mountains of studies, data, and other so-called evidence, and I will bring my refusal to acknowledge those things. Oh, and a faulty microphone for you to use.What’s the matter? Scared you might lose just because I’ve constructed this scenario to insure that you absolutely will?
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S53Talking to Conservatives About Climate Change: The Congressional Climate Caucus  Even in a summer of record-breaking heat and disasters, Republican Presidential candidates have ignored or mocked climate change. But some conservative legislators in Congress recognize that action is necessary. Their ideas about how to tackle the problem, however, depart from the consensus that is dominant among Democrats. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who represents Iowa’s First District, is vice-chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus and a former head of the Iowa Department of Public Health. “Where there’s difference among individuals is with what urgency people believe there needs to be change. I believe that having rapid change without having affordable, available energy is not a solution,” she tells David Remnick. Miller-Meeks extols innovation in the private sector but feels that mandates on electric vehicles would drive up costs too much for rural consumers. With a goal of reducing fossil-fuel consumption, she says, environmentalists need to reconsider their desire to remove hydroelectric dams to restore river habitats, and their opposition to nuclear-power generation. They should expedite mining for copper, uranium, and rare earth minerals, despite the environmental risks. “You have an Inflation Reduction Act which on one hand says you need to domestically source minerals,” she notes, “yet we won’t allow permitting.” More broadly, she feels that the alarms sounded by environmental scientists have failed to convince the public. “Every time we advance that there is a crisis and there is doom, and it doesn’t materialize, scientists, and we as political leaders, and people who are advancing policy, lose credibility.”By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S54Millions Expected to Watch World Lying Championship  SAN FRANCISCO (The Borowitz Report)—Millions are expected to watch two legendary prevaricators face off for the world lying championship this Wednesday night.The event is being characterized in some quarters as a generational struggle, as a fifty-four-year-old upstart seeks to wrest the crown of mendacity from an aging but still dangerous seventy-seven-year-old.
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S55A Photographer's Frank, Tender Portrait of Her Parents' Final Year  The old couple lies belly up on a white duvet, linked at the hands like a pair of chained paper dolls. Their slack faces have the look of Greek masks: slits for shut eyes and black sockets for nostrils, mouths turned down like sickle moons. Is this eternal rest or an afternoon nap that just resembles it? The portrait appears midway through "Till Death Do Us Part," a tender, visceral series of Bob and Mary Behrens, octogenarians from Texas in the sixty-seventh year of their marriage. The photographer, their daughter Becky Wilkes, captured the shot a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, during what turned out to be the final year of her parents' lives.The Behrenses were born a mile apart, in 1931. They met in high school, through the Catholic Youth Organization, and wedded in their early twenties, after Bob served in the Korean War. He made a career at the telephone company Southwestern Bell, working his way up from installer to executive. She bore four children, got a graduate degree as a young mother, and taught fifth grade in Houston. In retirement, the Behrenses earned real-estate licenses and volunteered at a hospital in WacoâMary manning the gift-shop register, Bob pushing gurneys in the E.R.âbefore ending up there as patients. Bob was admitted in January, 2020, with congestive heart failure. Shortly after, Mary suffered a stroke. For a few weeks, they healed in adjacent suites, but, while Mary improved, graduating to an independent-living unit, Bob deteriorated and was moved to hospice care. Then came COVID. Wilkes, who'd been visiting the hospital with her siblings, made a prompt decision to relocate their parents to her own home. Her brother and sister drove them over with some of their belongings, and that night Bob ate his first full meal in weeks, tomato soup and a grilled cheese.
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S56What Kind of Artist Was Wayne Shorter?  One thing that emerges in Dorsay Alavi’s three-part documentary “Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity” (out on Amazon Prime this Friday) is that the late, great jazz saxophonist and composer was, not to put too fine a point on it, a nerd. Born in Newark in 1933, he grew up a devotee of comic books and fantasy movies, and, with his older brother, Alan, created a theatre of cosplay in a nearby vacant lot, which, he recalls in the film, served sometimes as the Sahara Desert and sometimes as Mars. He was a precociously talented child, although that talent initially expressed itself not as musicality but as a prodigious gift for art. When he was twelve, he won an art contest and was accepted to Newark Arts High School. He copied images from comic books, then started drawing comics himself. A surviving specimen seen in the movie is impressive in its elaborate and intricate artistry but, most of all, in its sheer copiousness.Shorter was also a movie buff, and it was cinema, curiously, that awakened his musical vocation. He began cutting school to go to the movie theatre, where, between features, there was often live music, sometimes by notable jazz bands. When he was hauled before the vice-principal, the woman, with Solomonic wisdom, decided not to punish but to encourage him, and sent him to music class. At fifteen, Shorter started to play the clarinet; a year later, he switched to tenor saxophone. He says, in the film, that his talent more or less took him by surprise. Praised in front of the class by a music teacher as the only student to get a perfect score on an exam, he had an intuition: “Better not ignore this.”
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S57The Hidden Archeologists of Athens  In Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel “The Names,” an American businessman living in Athens can’t quite bring himself to visit its most iconic monument. “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” he says. “It daunted me, that somber rock.” He prefers “to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring”; when he catches sight of the Acropolis from odd angles, he finds its exalted reputation forbidding. “The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations,” he observes.Today, most tourists have no such hesitancy: in the summer, as many as twenty thousand visit the Acropolis each day. And yet, after millennia of human habitation, Athenian history isn’t confined to a few famous spots. Over the last two centuries, as the city has grown from a sleepy village to a sprawling capital, new ruins have been continually discovered. Greek national law requires so-called rescue excavations before the construction of new houses, buildings, subway lines, sewer systems, or almost anything else; although these are faster and less comprehensive than the research excavations conducted for purely archeological reasons, they can still reveal the locations of shrines, wells, walls, roads, and cemeteries, as well as smaller artifacts, such as oil lamps, toys, and loom weights. Collectively, all of this material constitutes a kind of secret history of the city.
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S58What is a "Termination-Level Transition"? Why Earth May Be Headed to a Climate Crossroads  Since 2006, the amount of heat-trapping methane in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising fast, and, unlike the rise in carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane’s recent increase seems to be driven by biological emissions, not the burning of fossil fuels. This might just be ordinary variability — a result of natural climate cycles such as El Niño. Or it may signal that a great transition in Earth’s climate has begun.Molecule for molecule, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂, but it lasts slightly less than a decade in the atmosphere compared with centuries for CO₂. Methane emissions threaten humanity’s ability to limit warming to relatively safe levels. Even more troubling, the rate at which methane is increasing in the atmosphere has accelerated recently. Something like this has happened before: sudden surges in methane marked the transitions from cold ice ages to warm interglacial climates.
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S5925 Years Ago, a Visceral Action Thriller Saved Marvel's Dying Brand  In the late-’90s, a leather duster and shades-sporting action hero proved superhero movies could still work. Bolstered by impressively choreographed action sequences, a horror-tinged tone, and a distinct urban grunge, this anti-hero and his vampire-hunting exploits proved the perfect antidote to the increasingly inane comic book adaptations that abounded by the mid-’90s. Now, 25 years after he arrived on-screen, this mysterious figure might offer some insight into how superhero movies can find their way again.In the summer of 1998, a year after Batman & Robin almost murdered the comic book movie, Blade presented an unapologetically dark tone and brutal protagonist played with effortless cool by Wesley Snipes. Often cited as an overlooked comic book gem, Blade was Marvel’s first modest theatrical hit, coming before the X-Men movies and Sam Raimi’s Spiderman trilogy, and making a worldwide total of $131 million.
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S60How Old Is Ahsoka? The Character's Star Wars Timeline, Explained  Disney+’s latest series, Ahsoka, has elicited two different reactions from fans. Some are delighted to see a legacy character finally get the spotlight she deserves after 15 years of appearances across four shows, while others merely see her as an obscure cartoon character who briefly appeared in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. So just who is Ahsoka Tano? Her story is rich and varied, spanning all the most important parts of the Star Wars timeline. Ahsoka has lived many lives, and anything from her past could come up in Ahsoka, so we’re going to briefly cover it all.
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S61You Need to Play the Best Wrestling Game of the Past Decade ASAP  A good pro wrestling game is hard to pull off. By very nature, many of them attempt to replicate an art that is scripted, while pretending it’s not. This often puts players in frustrating situations that feel nothing like a real pro wrestling match. But that’s where WrestleQuest, a new turn-based RPG, comes in. It gives players a wacky experience that has all the drama of a WWE match, while sprinkling tons of personality and nostalgia throughout. It’s made for pro wrestling fans, finally delivering a worthwhile experience that blows the WWE 2K games (and that god-awful AEW game) out of the water.
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S63Taika Waititi's 'Thor 5' Could Fix a Marvel Problem -- If It Actually Happens  No one’s really clamoring for a new Thor movie right now. The God of Thunder returned for his fourth solo adventure in 2022, but Thor: Love and Thunder was a disappointment from top to bottom. One of its few redeeming qualities came in the form of its villain, Gorr the God Butcher; Christian Bale’s portrayal cleverly subverted the image of the burly comic-book villain, depicting Gorr as waiflike and eerie. Love and Thunder may have been a dud, but it’s rare among Marvel Cinematic Universe movies in featuring a memorable antagonist. If the Thor saga is going to soldier on, it needs to retain that feature. As the director of Love and Thunder and its predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi understands what a Thor film needs. Regardless of how you may feel about his latest MCU effort, the filmmaker has a solid grasp on Thor’s ongoing journey. Waititi’s not officially returning for a fifth Thor — Thor 5 isn’t even officially in the works — but he still has a few ideas about Thor’s next adventure. In Titan Books’ upcoming Love and Thunder book (via ScreenRant), Waititi spoke about a hypothetical Thor 5, and what it would need to do to prove its worth.
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S64iPhone 15 Will Come With the Highest Quality USB Cable Apple Has Ever Made  Out of all the iPhone 15 rumors, I hope to god this one about Apple including a braided USB-C cable in the box is true.And not just any ol’ braided USB-C-to-USB-C cable — but one that matches the color of the iPhone 15. At least that’s what the latest leaks claim. Twitter/X user “Majin Bu,” who has a track record of sharing information about unreleased Apple products, an Apple collector named “Kosutami,” and MacRumors are all reporting that color-matched USB-C-to-USB-C cables are coming with the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro models.
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S65Russia's First Moon Mission Since 1976 Just Crashed in a Major Setback  Russia’s Luna-25 lander met an untimely end this weekend, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos.Luna-25 crashed on the Moon sometime on Saturday afternoon (Moscow time) after something went drastically wrong with its engine. The Russian lunar lander had been neck-and-neck with India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander in the race to become the first spacecraft to land near the Moon’s south pole. With Russia’s contender out of the race, India has a clear shot on Wednesday — but also a grim reminder that space is hard.
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S66Marvel Just Explained a Lingering Cliffhanger From 'Loki's Season 1 Finale  Loki Season 2 isn’t like any other Marvel series. It quite literally exists outside of space and time, exploring the twisted halls of the Time Variance Authority and the Citadel at the End of Time. That continues in Loki Season 2, which is trying to bring some of that strangeness to the real world.In one of Marvel’s more unusual marketing campaigns, Loki is coming to a fast-food restaurant near you, and in doing so, it reveals what happened to Sylvie after the events of Season 1. McDonald’s has launched a new “As Featured In” ad series, which highlights movies and TV shows the brand has appeared in. Everything from Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels to The Office has been included, and Loki Season 2 is a centerpiece of the promotion.
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S67It's Geoffin' Time! How to Watch and What to Expect at Gamescom ONL 2023  As the busy fall season looms ahead for video games, Gamescom Opening Night Live promises, once again, to provide a wide array of updates and announcements. The Cologne, Germany-based event seemingly gets bigger every year, and host Geoff Keighley has already given a good idea of a few games to expect, including a fresh look at Mortal Kombat 1. If you’re hoping to catch all of the reveals, here’s how to watch Gamescom Opening Night Live 2023, and what to expect from it.
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S68Covid-19 May Increase the Risk of This Common Chronic Condition in Those With No History of It  Those with a Covid-19 infection were more than twice as likely to develop high blood pressure compared to those with the flu.Three years into the ongoing pandemic, our understanding of Covid-19’s long-term effects continues to unfold. While we’ve known that patients with preexisting conditions like high blood pressure and asthma were at higher risk for more severe symptoms and death, we’re now learning how those without preexisting conditions fare after recovery. New research suggests a bout with Covid-19 may exacerbate the development of high blood pressure, even in those with no history of it.
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S69S70The 5 Best EVs From Monterey Car Week  Monterey Car Week isn't just about classics — cutting-edge EVs from Acura, Lamborghini, and Lexus also made their splash. Here’s what caught our eye. On the ground, you can smell the money at Monterey Car Week. There are more vintage and modern Ferraris, Bugattis, and Lamborghinis in one place than you’ll ever see in person anywhere else on Earth.
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