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 S2 Ask Sanyin: Why Can't We Get Meetings Right?   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.As a senior leader in my company, I find meetings are crucial for keeping tabs on what's going on and making decisions. But we seem to accomplish little, people are frequently unprepared, and they gripe about the time cost. How can I shift people's attitudes and run more effective meetings?
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S3Work 'love bombing': When companies come on too strong  They check in several times a day: texts, emails, phone calls. They lavish flattery and compliments, make it clear you're the one. You only met each other a few days ago, but the hours since have been a whirlwind of attention and promises.There's a term for this kind of behaviour: 'love bombing'. Generally, it's associated with dating, when a person heaps on praise and extends grand gestures, often to manipulate a potential partner to feel quickly indebted to them.
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S65Why You Don't Need to Be a Mega Star Wars Fan to Watch 'Ahsoka'  Ahsoka Tano has a long and varied history in the Star Wars saga. She’s been around for almost a decade, having been introduced in the animated Clone Wars movie. She grew up before our eyes in the seven-season Clone Wars series that followed, and in Rebels, she really came into her own. The same could be said for all the characters she encountered along the way.As Ahsoka continues her journey in live-action, she’s brought the cast of Rebels with her. Ahsoka will follow the title ex-Jedi, as well as Sabine Wren, Hera Syndulla, and Ezra Bridger, on a mission to defeat the fallen Empire’s last Grand Admiral. Much of this is carrying over from Rebels, which leaves fans with a question leading up to Ahsoka’s two-episode premiere. How much of Rebels should casual fans watch to get up to speed?
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S60David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero  In 1941, a couple from New York bought an undeveloped parcel of land in Beverly Hills for fourteen thousand dollars from the writer Dorothy Parker, the most fearsome wit at the Algonquin Round Table. James Pendleton, an interior designer and art dealer of Regency and Baroque pieces, and his wife, Mary Frances, who went by Dodo, craved a particular vision of California living. They imagined a landscape of eucalyptus trees and rose gardens, with a pool house suitable for high-life entertaining—a Xanadu escape from their place in Manhattan. The Pendletons enlisted the architect John Elgin Woolf, who designed homes for Cary Grant, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn, to create a one-level house—Dodo had a bad hip—in a coolly sumptuous style that would come to be known as Hollywood Regency.In 1967, Pendleton sold the house to Robert Evans, who, as the head of Paramount Pictures, went on to oversee a string of era-defining films: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” “Chinatown.” Evans led a life worthy of a film auteur’s attention—glamorous, accomplished, and more than a little sleazy. When he bought the house, which he called Woodland, he had been married twice; he would marry five more times. He became almost as well known as a host as he had been as a producer, throwing bacchanalian parties and entertaining such stars as Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski. In the nineteen-eighties, an addiction to cocaine and an association with a tawdry murder case helped bring his career, and the parties, to an end.
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S58"The Bee Sting," a Family Saga of Desperation and Denial  In "The Bee Sting," the fourth novel by the Irish author Paul Murray, twelve-year-old PJ Barnes ponders the downsides of resurrection. He recently saw "Pet Sematary," Stephen King's horror film about a graveyard that disgorges its occupants and sends them back into the world. "When things come back," PJ observes, "very often they come back different." The rule applies to his own father, Dickie Barnes, who has been working long hours on a building project in the woods; business at his auto dealership hasn't been the same since the 2008 market crash. Dickie returns to the house periodically, but he's almost unrecognizable, snappish one moment and catatonic the next. A friendly conversation with a local garda leaves him "death-white," his eyes "wide as plates," and emitting a noise like "a horrible croaking, or a reverse-croaking," as if "he's trying to suck in breath but he can't."The novel is about things coming back different, coming back weird. Its more than six hundred pages explore the eeriness of transformative change, and they are packed with literal and symbolic deaths. The first lines dispatch a handful of incidental characters: "In the next town over, a man had killed his family . . . When he had finished he turned the gun on himself." Murray handles his protagonists with comparable ruthlessness, introducing them only to rip their identities and projected futures out from under them. The book employs a rotating structure: the four members of the Barnes familyâPJ and his dad are joined by PJ's mother, Imelda, and his sister Cassâtake turns as narrator. Some of their metamorphoses are comic (the "clammy illicit flowerings" of puberty) and some are tragic (the downward slope of adult life) but what binds them together is a neck-prickling sense of defamiliarization. As with his celebrated second novel, "Skippy Dies," Murray intertwines registers from the lyre-strumming to the fart-ripping. ("Skippy Dies" was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010. "The Bee Sting" is long-listed for this year's Booker.) In "Skippy," Murray recounts a semester at a boy's boarding school in Dublin from a round of perspectives. At one point, a group of fourteen-year-olds try to communicate with their departed friend. "And even though it didn't work," one of them reflects, "it did sort of work . . . because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the whole picture, then it's like he comes to life."
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S59Robbie Robertson and the Greatest Songs Never Finished  The wounded sense of what might have been that’s hovered over the story of the Band since Robbie Robertson walked away from the group in 1976 swelled miserably this month with the surprising news that Robertson had died, at age eighty. It was a sombre moment even for those who had long since come to resent the guitarist-songwriter for his role in dissolving what some believe was one of the greatest ensembles of the rock era, a kind of North American Beatles. (Although the Band has been credited with helping forge the sound now known as Americana, four of its five members were from Canada.)That original group was never going to get back together. The pianist Richard Manuel hanged himself in a Quality Inn bathroom after the Robertson-less Band played the Cheek to Cheek Lounge, outside of Orlando, in 1986. Thirteen years later, the bassist Rick Danko’s heart gave out at age fifty-five, and, in 2012, the drummer Levon Helm succumbed to throat cancer. The multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, eighty-six, is the lone surviving member. But, in our minds and in our dreams, the Band played on. They’ve always been right there, immortalized on celluloid as they bid farewell in Martin Scorsese’s elegiac concert film, “The Last Waltz.” They’ve been there, too, whenever Bob Dylan’s thunderous 1966 and 1974 tours have been evoked, or when we watched “Easy Rider” or when the needle dropped on a record like their self-titled second album, a near-perfect collection of songs that—though it was released in 1969—sounds as though it might have been written while accompanying Matthew Brady as he made Civil War daguerreotypes.
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S30S53Word from The Hill: Date for Voice referendum to be announced on Wednesday  As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation’s politics team.In this podcast Michelle and politics + society editor Amanda Dunn discuss the news that the Prime Minister next Wednesday will reveal the date for the Voice referendum. They also canvass the Intergenerational Report, which gazes into the 2060s, as well as Labor’s national conference, that endorsed AUKUS. During the conference Anthony Albanese emphasised the importance of the party staying in office to bed down a long term agenda, with the message to the rank and file not to rock the boat.
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S49S70Netflix Just Dropped The Trailer For Zack Snyder's Long-Awaited Sci-Fi Space Opera  Zack Snyder has dabbled in seemingly every genre. He’s done a zombie heist movie, a four-hour superhero opus, an animated fantasy about owls, and a girlboss action movie. Now, he’s leaning hard into a genre he’s only flirted with before: science fiction. Snyder’s dream space opera has always been a hard sell. It began life as a “Seven Samurai in space” Star Wars movie, but the fact it included no existing Star Wars characters made it a poor fit for Lucasfilm. So Snyder took his 172-page screenplay to Netflix, where it was split into two movies: Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire, and Rebel Moon: Part Two — The Scargiver.
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S64These Are the Exciting Colors the iPhone 15 Might Come In  Yesterday, word got out that the iPhone 15 will likely ship with a high-quality braided USB-C cable in the box and today we’ve have news about the colors they’re supposedly going to match.Leaker “Unknownz21” (has anyone but me noticed leakers on Twitter/X love to use cat images as their avatars?) via MacRumors says Apple has been testing various colors for the iPhone 15, including pink/rose gold/blush gold, green, blue, yellow, orange, and a black/midnight/dark/basalt. The orange could be a new coral shade.
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S61You Only Need to Watch One Star Wars Episode Before 'Ahsoka'  Whether you’re intimately familiar with Ahsoka Tano or going into her new series blind, there’s a chance you know all about her falling out with the Jedi. As a padawan, Ahsoka was framed for terrorism and expelled from the Jedi Order, only to be reinstated when her master, Anakin Skywalker, cleared her name.The ordeal was covered in “The Wrong Jedi,” an episode of The Clone Wars that cleverly dealt with the series’ continuity issue and set Ahsoka on a brand-new path. It’s one of two Star Wars stories — along with the Rebels episode “A World Between Worlds” — that’s routinely cited as one casual audiences should watch to understand and appreciate Ahsoka.
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S48Junk fees and drip pricing: the underhanded tactics we hate yet still fall for  You see a fantastic offer, like a hotel room. You decide to book. Then it turns out there is a service fee. Then a cleaning fee. Then a few other extra costs. By the time you pay the final price, it is no longer the fantastic offer you thought. Welcome to the world of drip pricing – the practice of advertising something at an attractive headline price and then, once you’ve committed to the purchase process, hitting you with unavoidable extra fees that are incrementally disclosed, or “dripped”.
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S50Megan Rapinoe Answers the Critics  The retiring soccer star on her detractors, the U.S. team’s role in the global game, and taking penalty kicksOn Sunday, Spain won the FIFA Women’s World Cup. It was the end of a tournament and, for the U.S. women’s national team, the end of an era. This was the last World Cup featuring Megan Rapinoe, a player inscribed in the history of the game for both her goals and her activism. Rapinoe, who will retire later this year, has starred in so many important games for her country that it’s hard to imagine her absence on the pitch.
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S36S52In one chaotic day, Thailand sees one PM elected, one ex-PM sent to jail. Where does the country go from here?  More than three months after Thailand’s national elections – and many anti-democratic manoeuvres in parliament – the country finally has a new prime minister, Srettha Thavisin. But, given the chaotic nature of Thai politics, this was perhaps not even the biggest news of the week. Hours before the partially military-appointed Thai parliament elected Srettha to the post, one of the country’s most prominent political figures, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, returned from his self-imposed exile of more than 15 years and surrendered to authorities over longstanding corruption charges.
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S28S40S37Unpacking the invisible, gendered labour of women coaches  Despite a positive shift in sport culture towards prioritizing athletes’ mental health and well-being, the crucial work of coaches in supporting athletes — and the resulting emotional toll — remains taken for granted.Referred to as emotional labour, this often-overlooked part of coaching requires coaches to manage their emotions in order to influence or mediate the emotions of their athletes.
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S68Microsoft's Xbox Series X Wraps Customize the Console in Seconds  If you’re tired of your Xbox Series X just looking like a black box, Microsoft has some official wraps to customize your console into something that’s a little more eye-catching. There’s no shortage of third-party skins from companies like dbrand that can dress up your Xbox Series X, but Microsoft’s is easy to take on and off and doesn’t require much precision. The Starfield-themed wrap gives the console a sci-fi makeover, while the two camo options are more artsy.
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S50S56A brief history of pregnancy tests - from toads and rabbits to rosewater  Today, knowing if you are pregnant is usually straightforward – you pee on a stick and then wait for the lines to appear. Tests for women to use themselves at home were first marketed in the 1960s. They work by detecting the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in urine – which is produced primarily by cells in the placenta during pregnancy. Blood tests can tell you the answer a mere 11 days after conception and urine tests a few days later. Of course, a positive pregnancy test doesn’t necessarily lead to a baby – one in five will end in miscarriage. Yet that positive test is often seen as the start of a journey into parenthood.
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S39S33Can I take my child out of school to go on a holiday?  As the school term stretches on, many parents might be tempted to take their children out of school. Perhaps they want to beat the crowds at the snow or enjoy off-season prices at the coast. Maybe they just need a break. But what are the rules around taking your child out of school in term time? And is it a good idea?
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S32Champagne is deeply French - but the English invented the bubbles  In 1889, the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne produced a pamphlet promoting champagne at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, claiming that Dom Pérignon, procurator of the Benedictine Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668, was the “inventor”, “creator” or discoverer" of sparkling champagne.The story of a blind monk having an epiphany, accidentally happening upon the secret to effervescence, was seductive. It combined divine revelation and French winemaking expertise to produce a national symbol deeply rooted in the French landscape.
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S34A male character on Heartstopper has an eating disorder. That's more common than you might think  Vivienne Lewis is a Clinical Psychologist working with people of both genders with eating disorders. She has recently written a book to assist health professionals and trainees working in this field called Eating Disorders – A practitioner’s guide to psychological care. Season two of the series Heartstopper on Netflix brings out an issue that is often hidden – male eating disorders. Centred on two teenage boys in love, the show helps bust the common perception that eating disorders are only seen in girls and women.
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S41S66Microsoft May Have Just Saved Ubisoft's Game Pass Competitor  Microsoft recently made huge progress in its efforts to acquire Activision Blizzard by winning its case against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, but there are still holdouts on the deal. One of the biggest is the U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority which took steps to block the acquisition earlier this year over concerns the deal would hinder innovation in the industry and the future of cloud gaming.But in a surprising turn of events, Microsoft has announced a new deal with Ubisoft that aims to address the CMA’s biggest worries surrounding the Activision Blizzard acquisition. While it could lead to Microsoft moving past yet another roadblock, Ubisoft comes out as an unexpected winner as it gains the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard’s catalog of games — which is a saving grace for the company’s fledgling streaming service Ubisoft+.
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S45Russia has declared a new space race, hoping to join forces with China. Here's why that's unlikely  Richard de Grijs is the Executive Director of the International Space Science Institute–Beijing (ISSI-BJ). ISSI-BJ is an international, politically neutral platform for the exploitation of space science data and the preparation for future space-borne scientific missions.This week, the Russian space agency Roscosmos had hoped to return to the Moon after an absence of nearly 50 years. Instead, on Saturday it lost control of its Luna-25 lander. The agency explained the spacecraft “switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface”.
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