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 S69When so much at work has changed, why can't we shake presenteeism?   For many workers, Covid-19 altered our attitudes towards our jobs and how we do them. The conditions of the past three years catalysed a full re-evaluation of careers and values, and subsequently dislodged some staid traditions that have bogged down workplace progress.In the new world of work, many employees have received what they’ve wanted from their employers – new ways of getting things done including flexible hours, remote working and even shortened workweeks.
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S1Can the Construction Industry Be Disrupted?  Construction is often maligned as the industry that technology left behind. Industry observers routinely deride the lack of technological sophistication in the construction industry, and have pigeon-holed it as old-fashioned and lagging behind more forward-looking and purposeful industries such as manufacturing. But that view ignores where the industry has advanced — specifically, in information management systems that have created significant gains. Moreover, it fails to take into account why automation and robotics don’t work on jobsites, which is that they’re often a poor fit for the dynamic environments that bear little resemblance to factory floors. Understanding why some tech takes root and why some doesn’t, however, is essential to making smart investments in new tools and systems.
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S2How to Make Your Resume Match the Job Description  If you want to get hired in a competitive job market, submitting the same resume to multiple openings is usually a bad idea. For hiring managers and recruiters, a resume is your very first impression — and that impression alone can make or break your progress. To stand out from the crowd, you need to revise your resume to match each role you apply to.
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S4That "Dreaded" Commute Is Actually Good for Your Health  The overarching narrative, up until now, has been that commuting is a bad thing. Studies show that longer commutes lead to decreased job satisfaction and increased risk of mental health issues, while shorter commutes have the opposite effect. But despite a year of working blissfully from home, our job satisfaction and general mental health have continued to deteriorate. Why? A part of this is the result of fewer in-person interactions and “Zoom fatigue.” But the authors believe it or not, misplacing our commutes has also made a contribution.
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S5Research: When Leaders Disclose a Chronic Illness at Work  Living with a chronic illness (e.g., diabetes, cancer, depression etc.) is a growing reality many leaders face. But disclosing your illness when you’re in a position of leadership can feel fraught. In this article, the authors outline the findings of their research on chronic illness disclosure and offer a series of questions to ask yourself if you’re discerning whether to disclose or not.
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S8Investing in Your Company's Physical Risk Resilience  Extreme weather events, infrastructure and technology failures, and transportation accidents are on the rise globally. These physical threats often have cascading effects that reach all areas of a business. Organizational resilience, or the ability to anticipate, absorb, and recover from hazardous events, is now table stakes. When the C-suite prioritizes resilience, they set the business up for recovery in the face of these physical threats, saving time, resources, and revenue and making the organization more competitive. But the C-suite has historically prioritized the risks that have a direct financial impact on the bottom line, favoring investments with tangible financial returns. A simple ROI calculation won’t cut it for physical risk prevention and mitigation investments because they can’t be measured by increases in revenue. A financially sound business strategy requires a focus on return on resilience investment (RORI), which shows in monetary terms what damage was avoided, not what income was gained.
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S9How hunger can warp our minds  Diets are widely celebrated as the noble, often celebrity-endorsed, route towards improved health and wellness – and form the basis of a booming $250bn (£203bn) industry.One study of almost 2,000 overweight and obese people who wanted to lose weight found that those who actually managed to do so were nearly 80% more likely to have symptoms of depression than those who didn't.
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S10Water, not lithium, is the resource Latin America should worry about  As fires, storms, and heat ravage large swathes of the planet, the world seems to have ramped up its efforts to address climate change. At the heart of this drive is the emergence of “climate tech” — a loose category of innovations and technologies that aim to mitigate or avert a climate catastrophe. Though Latin America isn’t one of the world’s worst offenders when it comes to driving climate change, it has emerged as one of the world’s potential climate saviors. Consider the global push towards the electrification of the car: Many of the raw materials needed to create the batteries of these EVs will come in large part from Latin America. The region has close to 60% of the world’s lithium reserves, with Bolivia and Brazil being important providers of tin and graphite, both of which are also essential for battery components. Meanwhile, Mexico is (perhaps unexpectedly) looking to churn out millions of EVs to supply the world from its industrial heartland.
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S11Nigeria's currency devaluation is a disaster for startups  In July, when Nigerian agritech startup Winich Farms shared its quarterly financial report with stakeholders, it reported all the figures twice. One version used the old official currency rate of around 460 naira per dollar, while the other featured the newer rate of 800 naira to a dollar. The company wanted to show its stakeholders how much it had grown during the quarter while revealing how much of that growth had been eroded due to Nigeria’s new foreign exchange policy.In June, the naira went into a tailspin after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) loosened its control of foreign exchange rates. In the past, CBN had followed a fixed foreign exchange policy that pegged the local currency at around 460 naira to a dollar. Under the new rule, CBN allowed the market to determine the daily exchange rates. This led to the naira’s official rate jumping to over 770 per dollar by mid-July.
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S12Over 100 days of internet shutdown in conflict-torn Manipur  Since May this year, the northeast Indian state of Manipur has been embroiled in an ethnic conflict between two local communities, the majority Meitei and the minority Kuki tribes. But until last month, the world — including Indians to a great extent — remained largely ignorant of the death and destruction, all thanks to a government-mandated internet shutdown that created an information vacuum.On May 3, internet services in Manipur were suspended. By July 4, over 140 people had been killed and 17 were missing in the state. More than 60,000 have been forced out of their homes. Even as broadband services resumed on July 25, much of Manipur continues to be without connectivity.
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S13Some Surprising Places Are at Risk of Devastating Urban Wildfires like Maui's  Hundreds of communities across the U.S.—many in unexpected places—are at risk from an urban wildfire like the one that tore through the Hawaiian town of LahainaThe fast-moving wildfire that roared down the west side of the in Hawaiian island of Maui, all but obliterating the town of Lahaina, stunned almost everyone. Few people, including long-time residents, had any hint that this tropical island could burn with such ferocity. Many other places are at risk of such a deadly and unexpected inferno.
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S14Here's How You Go Birding in the Middle of the Night  If you really want to challenging your bird identification skills, try using them at night, when bird calls are less than 100 milliseconds long.Jacob Job: Every night while you sleep, thousands, if not millions, of ghostly figures dart through the sky just above where you lie. They are Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Sora, Grasshopper Sparrows, Blackpoll Warblers, Long-billed Curlews. Some of them are flying just a few hundred miles. Some are nearly circumnavigating the globe.
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S15Chandrayaan-3 Makes Historic Touchdown on the Moon  The successful lunar landing of the Chandrayaan-3 mission makes India only the fourth country to achieve the featBENGALURU, India—Quiet moments of nail-biting tension gave way to cheers of joy in the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) mission control center as the space agency sent its lunar lander—and India—into the annals of history. On August 23 at 12:33 P.M. UTC India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission’s robotic lander, named Vikram, touched down on the moon near its south pole. Launched on July 14, Chandrayaan-3 was the result of ISRO doubling down on its bet on lunar landing after the unfortunate crash of its Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2019. With the spacecraft now safely on the moon, ISRO’s efforts have paid off, and India has become the fourth country to achieve a soft lunar landing, following the former Soviet Union, the U.S. and China.
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S16Tropical Forests May Be Getting Too Hot for Photosynthesis  Climate change is already making a small proportion of tropical tree leaves so hot that their photosynthetic machinery bakes and breaks, according to new research.The study, published on Wednesday in Nature, finds that even when the surrounding air is significantly cooler than the leaves themselves, some 0.01 percent of individual leaves can reach a critical temperature at which the enzymes required for photosynthesis go through a process called denaturation—the same type of irreversible change that egg proteins in cake batter undergo in the oven. “It’s put some really hard numbers to what we already know intuitively: that it is getting too hot for trees and for tropical forests,” says Stephanie Pau, a global change ecologist at Florida State University, who was not involved in the new research.
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S17The Hot Secret behind a Deep-Sea 'Octopus Garden'  Thousands of usually solitary octopuses gather to brood eggs in a special spot off CaliforniaThousands of deep-sea octopuses gather on the flanks of a seamount off California’s coast. But until recently, scientists weren’t sure why these otherwise solitary animals were congregating. New research suggests they are seeking warmth to help their babies hatch more quickly.
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S18S19What's it like to be a giant sequoia tree?  Artist Ersin Han Ersin invites us to step inside a giant sequoia tree, peering through the bark into the tapestry of life within. Discover how his multisensory installations explore the concept of "umwelt," or the unique sensory experience of different organisms, and reveal the deep interconnectedness of humanity with the natural world.
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S20The Winds That Doomed Lahaina  Towering nearly 6,000 feet, the West Maui Mountains are a dramatic, defining feature of the Hawaiian island—verdant peaks surrounded by sparkling blue waters. But on August 8, they became deadly, helping to unleash hell on the town of Lahaina. Wind poured down the mountains like an avalanche, accelerating to 60-mile-per-hour gusts that got drier and drier as they descended. The winds sucked away the remaining moisture in already parched vegetation, turning the landscape into tinder. Then all it took was a spark.“When you get 60-mile-an-hour winds, the fact is you're not going to stop any fire, period,” says Jack Minassian, the Fire Science program coordinator at Hawaii Community College. “The only thing that stopped that fire was when it reached the ocean and ran out of fuel. The only thing you do when you have 60-mile-an-hour winds is just get people out of the way.”
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S21These Hearing Aids Are Big and Cheap--but the Audio Quality Is a Miss  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 WIREDThe race to the bottom in hearing aid prices has taken another leap with the arrival of earbuds from Linner Nova. While most over-the-counter hearing aids that have hit the market in the past year hover around the $1,000 mark, Linner’s Nova set can be yours for just $300.
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S22This Is the Greatest Electric Motorcycle in the World. But You Can't Have One  “The first time we ran the MotoE bike at Misano with our MotoGP test rider, Michele Pirro, I asked him: ‘Tell me what you think?’ He thought for a long time because he was trying to find something wrong with it, but at the end he told me: ‘I can say nothing. Everything is perfect.’”That’s how Ducati’s eMobility director, Roberto Canè, who has led the company’s first effort to make an electric motorcycle—developed for the single-make MotoE World Championship—describes the bike’s on-track debut. It’s high praise from someone whose day job is developing the motorcycles that currently dominate the highest echelon of racing. But even with this glowing report, it will be years before it’s possible to make an electric production bike that meets Ducati’s performance expectations.
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S23India's Lander Touches Down on the Moon. Russia's Has Crashed  Today, India's Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 am Eastern time, nearly six weeks after its launch. The craft includes a four-legged lander and a small rover whose purpose is to study the lunar regolith and look for signs of water ice during a two-week mission.But Russia's Luna-25 lander wasn't so lucky. On August 20, the craft malfunctioned, and it appears to have crashed while preparing for a landing planned for the next day. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, had intended to deploy Luna-25 for a yearlong mission near the Boguslavsky impact crater, where its eight scientific instruments would also have examined properties of the regolith and pockets of water ice.
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S24A Controversial Right-to-Repair Car Law Makes a Surprising U-Turn  In 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a law that began to answer that question. It required automakers selling cars in the state to build an “open data platform” that would allow owners and independent repair shops to access the information they need to diagnose and repair cars. Automakers countered, arguing that such a platform would make their systems vulnerable to cyberattacks and risk driver safety. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade association and lobbying group that represents most global carmakers, sued the state.Now, after some waffling, the Biden administration has backed Massachusetts voters. In a letter sent yesterday, a lawyer for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the American car safety regulator, told the Massachusetts attorney general’s office that the feds would allow the state to go ahead and enforce its law. “NHTSA strongly supports the right to repair,” wrote Kerry Kolodziej, the government lawyer.
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S25Is there a 5th fundamental force of nature?  Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic interaction as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces on one hand, and General Relativity describing the effects of gravity on the other hand. Wherever they’ve been challenged, from subatomic up to cosmic scales, they’ve always emerged victorious. And yet, they simply cannot represent all that there is.There are many puzzles that hint at this. We cannot explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the Universe with current physics. Nor do we understand what dark matter’s nature is, whether dark energy is anything other than a cosmological constant, or precisely how cosmic inflation occurred to set up the conditions for the hot Big Bang. And, at a fundamental level, we do not know whether all of the known forces unify under some overarching umbrella in some way.
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S26Why you should always lie to election pollsters  Some critics have long viewed polling as an attack on democracy, potentially poisoning that source of democratic legitimacy, voting. In 1996, a journalist named Daniel S. Greenberg wrote a column in The Baltimore Sun that effectively summed up his problem with what he called “the quadrennial plague of presidential election polling.” Greenberg was hardly a crank. He was a veteran journalist who had helped transform science reporting at Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and who published the Science & Government Report. He knew of polling’s prediction failures, but that wasn’t really what bothered him about what he characterized as an “infestation of polling moving deeper into the electoral system.” Greenberg’s critique focused on polling results that “are easily confused with political reality, producing bandwagon effects, heartening the leaders and disheartening the laggards.” Polls can make it seem as if an election is over long before Election Day, undermining “the historic role of campaigns… to educate the voters about candidates and issues.” Polling encourages candidates to alter their personae or issues based on “voters’ anxieties and fears,” leading to governance by polling. Worst of all, in Greenberg’s view, were deceptive push polls, which under the guise of a conventional poll try to influence voters through deceptive questions, spreading “political poison.” (Push polls were the primitive predecessors to Cambridge Analytica’s efforts.)
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S27The brain's appetite control center is larger in obese people  Obesity is known to increase the risk of developing dementia. Exactly why is unclear, but research published over the past few years shows that being overweight or obese is associated with reduced gray matter volume throughout the brain, and this may contribute to cognitive decline. Now, a new study shows that the volume of the hypothalamus — a brain region that controls appetite and satiety, among many other bodily functions — is significantly increased in people who are overweight or obese. The findings, published in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical, are in line with evidence from animal studies linking inflammation of the hypothalamus to a high-fat diet, but they do not determine whether the observed changes are a cause or an effect of obesity.
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S28The biggest story ever told  The biggest story ever told is the cosmic story, the story that includes all others. Through our diligence and curiosity, we have uncovered parts of this story, the epic narrative that started 13.8 billion years ago in the event we call the Big Bang, the time when time began.We hardly ever stop to think about all this, busy as we are with our daily affairs. But as I argue in my new book out this week, we should. In The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future, I retell the cosmic story with a new focus, not just of particles interacting, galaxies and stars forming, and space expanding, but of our understanding that our planet is a rare oasis in a hostile Universe and that life is precious.
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S29Mary Shelley's mother's grave: A place for reading and love-making  In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explains: “It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.” She is answering an oft-asked question—the nineteenth-century equivalent of “What’s a nice girl like you doing writing gross stuff like this?”—and the fact that she begins by mentioning her parents is a sign of how greatly they figured in her sense of self.Yet only one of Mary Shelley’s parents lived to see Frankenstein published. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant feminist best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died shortly after giving birth to Mary, a fact that haunted her daughter for the rest of her life. Baby Mary, however, was not the fatal agent: It was the physician, one Dr. Poignand, who removed the placenta piece by piece with unwashed hands, and who transmitted the puerperal fever that killed Wollstonecraft Godwin days after giving birth. (In light of her daughter’s creative output, it’s worth mentioning that puerperal fever was then often transmitted by doctors proceeding directly from autopsies to births.)
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S30S31Report: Microsoft is "experimenting" with working AI into bedrock Windows apps  Microsoft’s efforts to put new AI-powered features into Windows 11 will pick up steam this fall when Windows Copilot is officially released, but the company isn’t stopping there. According to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft is in the early stages of experimenting with new features for built-in Windows apps like Photos, Snipping Tool, and even Paint, which all fall under the broad heading of “AI.”
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S32These Pompeii victims choked on ash while covering themselves with garments  In the 1870s, archaeologists made plaster casts of those who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, pouring the plaster into the voids left by decomposed bodies. The casts can still be viewed today and have proven especially useful to scientists keen to learn more about the actual cause of death of these victims. Was it asphyxiation, choking on the thick clouds of ash? Body evaporation from the extreme heat? A slower form of dehydration? Or some combination of all three?
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S33S34IBM team builds low-power analog AI processor  Large language models, the AI tech behind things like Chat GPT, are just what their name implies: big. They often have billions of individual computational nodes and huge numbers of connections among them. All of that means lots of trips back and forth to memory and a whole lot of power use to make that happen. And the problem is likely to get worse.
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S35S36S37"Project Moohan" is Google and Samsung's inevitable Apple Vision Pro clone  Poor Google. The company is about to get lapped in the AR/VR space by Apple's Vision Pro headset, despite dabbling in the AR/VR/XR space for over a decade now. A new report from Business Insider details how Google has fallen so far behind, telling the familiar modern-Google story of a rudderless company with constantly changing priorities and absentee leadership. The report describes employees who were "frustrated" at Google's lack of progress when the Vision Pro was unveiled and provides a glimpse of what Google's current (again, constantly changing) plans for an AR product are.
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S38You can now train ChatGPT on your own documents via API  On Tuesday, OpenAI announced fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo—the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT—through its API. It allows training the model with custom data, such as company documents or project documentation. OpenAI claims that a fine-tuned model can perform as well as GPT-4 with lower cost in certain scenarios.
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S39S40A Parade of Listless Vessels  A debate without Trump only underscores how impotent the other candidates have made themselves.The Republicans’ first primary debate dangles on the calendar like one of those leftover paper snowflakes slapped up on the mini-fridge. It feels like a half-hearted vestige—it’s late summer, five months before the first votes are cast; precedent calls for a lineup of haircuts on a stage. And for the most part, the qualifiers will oblige, except for the main haircut—former President Donald Trump, barring some last-minute fit of FOMO that lands him in Milwaukee en route to his surrender to authorities in Georgia.
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S41Not Illegal, but Clearly Wrong  The biggest problem with Hunter Biden’s access-peddling business may have been that his father, the president, thought it was fine.Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to convert the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden into a special counsel ensures that Democrats will be fielding uncomfortable questions throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. They would do well to think before they speak. Asked one such question in a television interview in May, President Joe Biden insisted, “My son’s done nothing wrong.”
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S42Diamonds Are for Girls' Best Friends  As marriage rates decline, the diamond industry is turning its eye to platonic relationships.“It is one of my love languages to gift,” she says, looking lovingly at the woman to her right, after wiping a tear from her eye. The two are filmed in black and white, and one is wearing a diamond-pendant necklace that shines particularly brightly in the muted setting. Usually the giving of diamonds is associated with lovers making the leap into marriage. But here, in an ad for Jared jewelers, two long-lost sisters describe how, after meeting for the first time, they chose to honor the occasion with diamonds.
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S43Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI  One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.Self-driving cars. Saucer-shaped vacuum cleaners that skitter hither and yon (only occasionally getting stuck in corners). Phones that tell you where you are and how to get to the next place. We live with all of these things, and in some cases—the smartphone is the best example—can’t live without them, or so we tell ourselves. But can a machine that reads learn to write?
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S44The Death of an Indispensable Person  Carmen Ayala, caretaker for Adele Halperin, the subject of The Atlantic’s September 2023 cover story, has died. She was 81.What do you call a person who’s central—indispensable—to the happy functioning of your family, yet is in no way tied to it by blood? And how do you describe the grief when that person is gone?
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S45What People Keep Missing About Ron DeSantis  The governor has used the power of government to raise money for politics while working to hide that behavior from public view.By this stage in the presidential campaign, much has been made of the severely conservative politics of Ron DeSantis. Voters have also become well acquainted with what a clumsy campaigner he is. But those two facts have perhaps eclipsed a third essential characteristic of the Florida governor: the astonishing sweep of his (apparently legal) corruption. DeSantis has demonstrated a prolific ability to use the power of government to raise money and reap other perks while working to shield that behavior from public view.
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S46Zero Lead Is an Impossible Ask for American Parents  Families can spend thousands and still not totally eliminate lead from their children’s lives.Over the past eight months, I’ve spent a mind-boggling amount of time and money trying to keep an invisible poison at bay. It started at my daughter’s 12-month checkup, when her pediatrician told me she had a concerning amount of lead in her blood. The pediatrician explained that, at high levels, lead can irreversibly damage children’s nervous system, brain, and other organs, and that, at lower levels, it’s associated with learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other developmental delays. On the drive home, I looked at my baby in her car seat and cried.
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S47Hundreds of Wildfires Rage Across Greece  Firefighters and volunteers across Greece have been battling devastating wildfires for five straight days now, struggling to contain blazes driven by hot, dry conditions and gale-force winds. Reuters reports that a Greek official says that more than 350 wildfires have erupted since Friday, “including 209 in the last 48 hours.” Thousands of residents and tourists are being evacuated by land and by sea, fleeing the fires that have killed at least 20 people so far. A Greek flag flutters in the wind during a wildfire in Chasia, on the outskirts of Athens, Greece, on August 22, 2023. #
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S48The Internet's Next Great Power Suck  In Facebook’s youth, most of the website was powered out of a single building in Prineville, Oregon. That data center, holding row upon row of refrigerator-size racks of servers filled with rows of silicon chips, consumed huge amounts of electricity, outstripping the yearly power usage of more than 6,000 American homes. One day in the summer of 2011, as reported in The Register, a Facebook exec received an alarming call: “There’s a cloud in the data center … inside.” Following an equipment malfunction, the building had become so hot and humid from all the electricity that actual rain, from a literal cloud, briefly drenched the digital one.Now Facebook, or rather Meta, operates well more than a dozen data centers, each much bigger and more powerful than the one in Prineville used to be. Data centers have become the backbone of the internet, running Amazon promotions, TikTok videos, Google search results, and just about everything else online. The thousands of these buildings across the world run on a shocking amount of electricity—akin to the power usage of England—that is in part, if not mostly, generated by fossil fuels. While the internet accounts for just a sliver of global emissions, 4 percent at most, its footprint has steadily grown as more people have connected to the web and as the web itself has become more complex: streaming, social-media feeds, targeted ads, and more.
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S49Bama Rush Is a Strange, Sparkly Window Into How America Shops  When taking inventory of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls at the University of Alabama typically get bogged down in the jewelry. Clothes for the week-long August ritual colloquially known as Bama Rush tend to be simple: Imagine the kind of cute little sleeveless dress that a high-school cheerleader might wear to her older cousin’s outdoor wedding, and you’re on the right track. If you had to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row in the stifling late-summer heat, you too would probably throw on your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and call it a day. The jewelry, by comparison, piles up—stacks of mostly golden rings and bracelets, layers of delicate chain necklaces, a pair of statement earrings to match every flippy miniskirt.On #BamaRushTok, the informal TikTok event that has coincided with actual sorority recruitment at UA since 2021, a subset of the roughly 2,500 prospective sisters documents the experience in real time for an audience of millions. These missives frequently take the form of a long-standing internet staple: the outfit-of-the-day post, or OOTD. In their videos, the girls offer an update on the secretive rush process, plus an exhaustive—or, as the week wears on, exhausted—accounting of everything they’ve put on their bodies for the day ahead, sometimes including details as small as hair accessories or as invisible as perfume. The result is a rapid-fire onslaught of brand names local and global: Kendra Scott, Free People, the Pants Store, Cartier, Target, David Yurman, Enewton, Louis Vuitton, Shein, Francesca’s, Dior, Lululemon (not to be confused with Lulu’s, which is also popular).
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S50A Very Public Execution in Russia  A plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary chief who led a short-lived mutiny two months ago, crashed today in a sparsely populated area northwest of Moscow. According to Russian media, Prigozhin and at least one of his top commanders are dead. As is always the case with breaking news, there is much we don’t know, but the sight of Prigozhin’s jet falling out of the sky suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin has conducted a public execution of a man who was once a trusted friend but later provided the greatest challenge that the Russian dictator has ever faced.Here’s what we do know. The aircraft was one of Prigozhin’s personal business jets. The plane, a widely used Embraer Legacy 600, took off from Moscow and likely was headed toward St. Petersburg, Prigozhin’s base of operations. It was flying at 28,000 feet before it plunged to earth, according to flight-tracking data. A second jet, also believed to belong to Prigozhin, then turned around and landed safely in Moscow, but Russia’s aviation ministry has confirmed that Prigozhin and the Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin were listed as passengers on the crashed jet.
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S51Yevgeny Prigozhin May Have the Last Laugh  Initial reports suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, has been killed. Although confirmed details are scant, his private plane has allegedly crashed or been shot down, an event that many have interpreted as an assassination. Prigozhin probably knew to stay away from windows in high buildings, so it seems plausible that Vladimir Putin took him out at 28,000 feet instead.Coup plotters rarely die of old age. Prigozhin sealed his fate in June when he launched a failed mutiny against Putin, which fizzled hours after it began. No dictator can afford to tolerate that kind of disloyalty: Every moment that Prigozhin lived made Putin look weaker, a dictator seemingly forced to accommodate a man who had directly challenged him, simply because Russia needed the Wagner Group for its disastrous war of attrition in Ukraine.
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S52Prigozhin's Death Heralds Even More Spectacular Violence  Vladimir Putin’s Russia has long been a land of mysterious deaths. In 1998, soon after he had been appointed head of the security services, Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentarian who believed in bringing democracy to Russia, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had learned too much about the Chechen wars that Putin used to propel himself to power, met the same fate in the stairwell of her apartment building in Moscow. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin’s presidency, was killed by an assassin only steps away from the Kremlin. Other critics barely survived. In 2020, Alexei Navalny, organizer of the only truly national anti-Putin political movement, fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow after being poisoned.All of these victims were Putin’s formal opponents, people who spoke or wrote in opposition to the kleptocracy he built. Since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a different class of victims—members of the Russian business elite who were perhaps insufficiently loyal or insufficiently keen on the war—have also begun to die in strange circumstances. In the year and a half that has passed since February 2022, two gas-industry executives were found dead with suicide notes. Three Russian executives were killed, alongside their wives and children, in what appeared to be murder-suicides. The body of the owner of a resort in Sochi was discovered at the bottom of a cliff. Another executive was found floating in a pool in St. Petersburg. Others have fallen out of windows or down staircases in Moscow, India, the French Riviera, and Washington, D.C.
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S53The Book-Piracy Problem  A conversation with Damon Beres and Gal Beckerman about the ethics of using books to train AI, and whether bots can create real literatureThis 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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S54How to defuse catastrophic thoughts | Psyche Guides  is a cognitive behavioural therapist and clinical psychologist, specialised in rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT). She is currently a junior assistant professor and researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy and is pursuing her clinical and research interests in eco-psychology and the psychological impact of climate change. She has published research on maladaptive cognitions, depression, eating disorders, and psychological wellbeing.You are getting into your car one morning, about to embark on a long drive, and you hear on the radio that there’s heavy traffic along your route. Suddenly, you’re preoccupied by the thought that you are going to get into a terrible car crash.
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S55Four Bodies Found in Colonial Williamsburg Belonged to Confederate Soldiers /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/4a/f0/4af09eb7-136b-43c9-9902-b2dba0582639/burials.png) Researchers are trying to identify the men who died after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862Last year, the skeletal remains of four Civil War soldiers were unearthed in Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg. Archaeologists said they belonged to men who fought in the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862. But the soldiers’ identities—and the side they fought for—were a mystery.
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S56How Maui's Wildfires Threatened Endangered Birds /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/64/86/64865dec-43af-46fb-8530-688054c57c41/gettyimages-1615596736.jpg) Conservationists battled back flames to prevent them from reaching roughly 40 'akikiki in captivityOnce, the rainforests of Kauai were filled with 'akikikiâsmall, unassuming songbirds with gray feathers. But when humans arrived on the Hawaiian islands, they brought with them mosquitoes carrying avian malaria. With no immunity to the disease, 'akikiki and other native songbirds began to die off. The species' population crashed in the early 2000s, and today, the situation is so dire that scientists estimate just five 'akikiki exist in the wild in Kauai.
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S57S58Trove of Rare Renaissance Books Could Fetch $25 Million at Auction /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/37/20/3720ad09-3c14-4a64-95d9-a42cc985d0b7/230801_sothebysbooks_129.jpg) For the last six decades, American bibliophile T. Kimball Brooker has been collecting rare books—including more than 1,300 French and Italian texts from the 16th century.Now, he’s decided to part ways with his beloved trove of Renaissance titles. This fall, Sotheby’s will begin auctioning Brooker’s library, which is expected to bring in more than $25 million, according to the auction house. The individual books will range in price from $200 to $600,000.
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S59S60S61See the Rare, Spotless Giraffe Born at a Tennessee Zoo /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/e2/30/e2308c48-6f7a-408e-a079-7d5d1c6e362e/369207387_672387538255569_8992068995289502454_n.jpg) The baby might be the only all-brown giraffe on the planet, as the last one on record was born in 1972A rare, patternless giraffe was born last month at a family-owned zoo in Tennessee—and experts say she may be the only completely brown giraffe alive on the planet, report Emily Hibbitts and Clarice Scheele for WJHL.
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S62The AI Tools Making Images Look Better | Quanta Magazine  It's one of the biggest cliches in crime and science fiction: An investigator pulls up a blurry photo on a computer screen and asks for it to be enhanced, and boom, the image comes into focus, revealing some essential clue. It's a wonderful storytelling convenience, but it's been a frustrating fiction for decades â blow up an image too much, and it becomes visibly pixelated. There isn't enough data to do more."If you just naïvely upscale an image, it's going to be blurry. There's going to be a lot of detail, but it's going to be wrong," said Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at Nvidia.
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S63How the Pandemic Changed Marketing Channels  The pandemic undoubtedly changed how marketers approach channel strategy, and there is no single route to success. With more channels than ever, marketers need to map which channels add clear value and forget the rest. It can be tempting to enter a channel because your competitors are there. But with limited customer time and attention, marketers must strategically determine in which channels they can have the greatest impact. The authors look at five post-pandemic channel strategies gleaned from The CMO Survey and offer analysis on how marketers can operationalize these trends.The Covid-19 pandemic pushed companies to quickly adapt and respond to new customer requirements. One of the ways this dynamic was most apparent was in the marketing channels companies adopted to engage with and sell to customers.
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S64Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work  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.Three years after he became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. The writings he left behind — about the key to strength of character, about creativity as resistance, about the antidotes to the absurdity of life, about happiness as our moral obligation — endure as a living testament to Mary Shelley’s conviction that “it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”Camus addressed his views on writing most directly in a 1943 essay about the novel, included in his altogether indispensable Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library).
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S65 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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S66Work '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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S67'It brings out the worst in everyone': Why some workers are competing for their jobs  In May 2020, Frances got a call from her boss informing her she would need to re-apply for the job she currently held. The US-based publication she worked for had lost much of its advertising revenue due to Covid-19, and now restructuring was underway. Redundancies loomed.“I was a team of one, so my role would either survive, or get cut,” says Frances, now 28. “I had to make a case for my position in a presentation to the publishers, showing how much revenue it could generate and why they should keep it.”
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S68Can AI help Gen Z workers make up lost ground?  Gen Z has had a hard landing into the workforce. Starting jobs amid the global pandemic, many of these new workers have missed out on gaining essential hard- and soft skills usually gleaned by working alongside older colleagues.However, as the first truly digital generation, their innate fluency with technology could help them make up some of that ground – especially as AI becomes a hugely important part of the modern workplace.
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S70Why you rarely believe celebrity apologies on social media  At a recent concert in the European country of Georgia, rock band The Killers found themselves in the middle of a decades-long political conflict. On 16 Aug, lead singer Brandon Flowers invited a Russian audience member on stage and asked the crowd to treat the fan as a "brother". The request was met with immediate boos and even walkouts; the backlash continued after the show.The next day, the musicians issued a swift social media apology via X, formerly known as Twitter. They wrote, in part: "We recognise that a comment, meant to suggest that all of The Killers' audience and fans are 'brothers and sisters', could be misconstrued. We did not mean to upset anyone and apologise."
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