   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 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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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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S40A 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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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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S61See 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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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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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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S37"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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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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S60S41Not 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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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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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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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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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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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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S39S58Trove 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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S35S55Four 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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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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S33S53The 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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