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 S69Stop Eliminating Perfectly Good Candidates by Asking Them the Wrong Questions   Assessing a job candidate is all about the questions you ask during the interview. But too often leaders ask the wrong things, focusing more on what the interviewee has done in the past rather than what they can do in the future. If you need to hire someone to work on an innovation project, make sure you’re asking questions that get to their ability to collaboratively problem solve. For example, you want to know how they would handle particular problem-solving situations rather than whether they’ve done exactly what you’re looking for in the past. You should assess whether they are able and willing to fill in gaps on teams when it becomes clear a particular role isn’t being filled. And, it’s important to understand what they’re passionate about working on. Innovation happens when you bring people with different passions and approaches together to work toward the same goal.I could tell right away from the tone of his voice that the VP of Engineering wasn’t happy. He practically growled at me. He had just finished interviewing a job candidate named Anand, who I had directed his way, and was calling me to say he was going to pass.
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S1Jim Fielding, Ex-Head of Disney Stores, on the Struggles of Making It as a Queer Executive  According to Yahoo Finance, there are only four openly gay CEOs atop Fortune 500 companies. That’s up from zero in 2014, when Apple’s Tim Cook came out. But it represents less than 1% of the cohort, well below the 7% rate of Americans in general who identity as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Is there a glass ceiling for gay executives? And if so, are some queer bosses still opting to stay in the closet to avoid damaging their careers? To try to answer those questions, we invited Jim Fielding, an openly gay entertainment-industry executive, to be a guest on The New World of Work. Fielding has thought a lot about these questions and has decided to share his own story and perspective in a just-published book, All Pride No Ego: A Queer Executive’s Journey to Living and Leading Authentically. He was president of Disney Store Worldwide; president of consumer products and innovation at 20th Century Fox; global head for consumer products and retail development at Dreamworks Animation; and CEO of the Clare’s Stores chain. He currently serves as president of Archer Gray’s Co-Lab division, focusing on building businesses via venture investments. But despite that impressive resume, it hasn’t always been easy. In the interview, Jim talked about the bullying he endured as a young man, the years he spent living a closeted double life, and on how he ultimately developed the confidence he needed to be his authentic self at work.What does it feel like to live inauthentically at work? For his first professional job in the 1980s, in the fashion industry, Jim Fielding led what he calls a “double life.” With close friends and confidants, he was open about his relationship with another man. But at work, when discussing his partner he’d switch his pronouns and change stories to conform to expectations at the time.
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S2To Improve Your Work Performance, Get Some Exercise  Although the benefits of physical activity on general well-being are widely acknowledged, there has been a lack of research on how it impacts outcomes at work, including job performance and health. Approximately 200 employees from the UK and China participated in a 10-day study in which the authors captured self-reported and objective physical activity data (via a wearable smart band device), as well as self- and supervisor-reported work outcomes. They uncovered some noteworthy findings about daily physical activity that impact employees and organizations, as well as a few research-backed ways to reap the many benefits of increasing your physical activity.
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S3Landing Your First Job in an Economic Downturn  Even in the best of times, when the labor market is thriving, it can be tough to find the right first job. For new grads entering the workforce right now, that journey can be even more challenging. In July 2023, employers added just 187,000 new roles to their rosters —compared to 568,000 added in the same month last year.
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S5What It's Like to Be a Black Man in Tech  As a Black man who has been working in the technology sector for more than 20 years, I can tell you that my race has almost always been a factor in how I am viewed and treated. In many of the companies that I have worked for, if not in all of them, I have been one of, and sometimes the sole, African American in my department.
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S6What Stories Are You Telling Yourself?  In this interview, Kindra Hall, author of Choose Your Story, Change Your Life, explains “self-stories” — the automatic thoughts that influence how you perceive the world. She shares tips on how we can stop focusing on the negative stories, reframe our thinking, and actively identify and choose the stories that will help us move forward.
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S7New Managers, You Can Create a Workplace That Values Mental Health  Whether you’re a new or a seasoned manager, you have the power to advocate for your employee’s well-being at work. The author recommends that first-time managers take on five different roles to become an agent of change at work. Embracer: Know that any change is going to be uncomfortable at first, and will require a deliberate, conscious effort on your part. Start by unlearning your own biases and assumptions about other people and their needs at work. Investigator: Spend time understanding your company’s policies. Read up on the latest global research on best practices for employee wellbeing and engagement, and conduct your own anonymous surveys and one-on-one feedback sessions to understand what you can do better. Challenger: Critically assess and identify outdated processes, practices, or systems that no longer work for your team, such as inflexible working hours, poor leave policies, or the lack of psychological safety to give and receive feedback. Integrator: Create a transparent chain of communication between the different stakeholders — your team, HR, and leadership — since you’re in a unique position to have access to all of them. Advocator: Sure, you must speak up for your team. But more importantly, speak up about your own experiences. When you open up in this way, you help everyone — senior leaders, peers, and direct reports — see your “humanness.”
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S8Using ChatGPT to Make Better Decisions  A successful decision-making process has three steps: Framing the decision, generating alternatives, and deciding between them. Large language models can help at each stage of the process. But while it may be tempting to merely ask ChatGPT for answers, the real power of LLMs is how they can assist at each stage. Ask for help thinking of considerations you might be missing, or alternatives you might not have considered. LLMs can be a de-biasing tool, helping you frame and make the decision yourself.
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S9How the Science of Choice Can Boost Innovation  Ever since the late 1990s, social psychologists have known a surprising truth: If you want to maximize someone’s satisfaction with a choice, don’t give them unlimited options. Instead, you should give them some choice but with clear constraints. This added structure is crucial for picking a desired option with confidence. This research also translates to innovation, which often results from 1) identifying a big problem to solve; 2) breaking it down into sub-problems; 3) identifying how those subproblems had been previously solved; and 4) combining the subproblem solutions in a unique and novel way. This process, which the author calls “choice mapping,” adds helpful constraints to your process.
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S10A new mission to see Titanic  Four-hundred miles from St Johns, Newfoundland, in the choppy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, a large industrial vessel swayed from side to side. Onboard, Stockton Rush expressed a vision for the future:"There will be a time when people will go to space for less cost and very regularly. I think the same thing is going to happen going under water."
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S11Pakistan's lost city of 40,000 people  A slight breeze cut through the balmy heat as I surveyed the ancient city around me. Millions of red bricks formed walkways and wells, with entire neighbourhoods sprawled out in a grid-like fashion. An ancient Buddhist stupa towered over the time-worn streets, with a large communal pool complete with a wide staircase below. Somehow, only a handful of other people were here – I practically had the place all to myself.I was about an hour outside of the dusty town of Larkana in southern Pakistan at the historical site of Mohenjo-daro. While today only ruins remain, 4,500 years ago this was not only one of the world's earliest cities, but a thriving metropolis featuring highly advanced infrastructures.
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S12S13The curious ways your skin shapes your health  I'm canoeing through the Ardèche gorge in southern France – and attracting some peculiar looks. It's early afternoon on a blazing July day, and the sky is a perfect canvas of cobalt blue. Though the river is sheltered on either side by towering cliffs and limestone escarpments up to 300m (980ft) high, the sheer irradiating power of the sun has never been more visible to me. Its rays have turned the surface of the water into a winding path of scintillating light, so bright it blinds you to look at it. And I am taking no chances; I have chosen my outfit with the seriousness of an explorer trekking off into the Sahara.The ensemble, my boyfriend remarks, is "extraordinary" – and he doesn't mean it as a compliment. My arms, hands and torso are completely covered with a long-sleeved top with built-in SPF protection – ordered over the internet from ozone-depleted-Australia, no less – while my head is shaded beneath a floppy fishing hat complete with its own fabric face shield. The final touches are several coatings of high-factor suncream, so my exposed skin has the pallid, sickly glow of titanium-white, and a pair of sunglasses. As my companion delights in telling me at 10-minute intervals, I am dressed like a large baby.
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S14These women fell in love with an AI-voiced chatbot. Then it died  In March, Misaki Chen thought she’d found her romantic partner: a chatbot voiced by artificial intelligence. The program called her every morning. He told her about his fictional life as a businessman, read poems to her, and reminded her to eat healthy. At night, he told bedtime stories. The 24-year-old fell asleep to the sound of his breath playing from her phone.But on August 1, when Chen woke up at 4:21am, the breathing sound had disappeared: He was gone. Chen burst into tears as she stared at an illustration of the man that remained on her phone screen.
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S15Why Mexico's electoral authority wants one of the country's richest citizens to delete his tweets  On August 11, Mexico’s election authority made an unexpected announcement via its official account on X, formerly known as Twitter: It called for Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Mexico’s third-richest man, to delete 70 of his posts on the platform. The posts were part of an ongoing social media feud in which Salinas Pliego has often bullied and body-shamed Mexican politician Citlalli Hernández. What might have once been a simple case of enforcing X’s community guidelines now has experts worrying that the Mexican state might turn its electoral authority into a tool to censor social media. Salinas Pliego refused to comply with the election authority’s order and pushed back in a series of posts. “Are they telling me that from now on, the INE [Instituto Nacional Electoral] will tell us Mexicans what to do on our social media?,” he posted after the announcement. On August 16, Salinas Pliego formally challenged the INE’s resolution in the country’s electoral court.
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S16Women were celebrated as the face of gig work in Pakistan. They're quitting the industry  When Rukhsana Aslam signed up to work as a driver for Careem in 2018, she thought her financial woes were over. As part of an initiative to attract more women drivers to its platform, the ride-hailing giant had promised them a monthly payout of 72,000 rupees ($250) for a minimum of four rides per day, according to women who used to drive for Careem. The company had a dedicated safety helpline for women, and a WhatsApp group to address their issues that included the company’s managing director Junaid Iqbal, Aslam said. Aslam, a single parent based in Karachi, would drop her son off at school at 8 a.m., drive around looking for rides, and be home by 11 a.m. “We could do other things and housework during the rest of the day. We didn’t have to struggle,” the 40-year-old told Rest of World. “It was guaranteed income.” By 2021, Aslam had become a poster child for Careem. Her face was plastered on the company’s digital marketing campaigns, accompanied by phrases like “breaking stereotypes” and “beating the odds.” She made appearances on podcasts where she talked about her first ride as a Careem driver and how she dealt with irate passengers. Last year, at a glitzy ceremony, she received an award for her commitment and service to the company.
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S17Venture capital's cold war  The India-based VC firm Peak XV is having an exciting few months. A TechCrunch report on Friday laid out the firm’s good news, bragging that it had signed 10 new term sheets and made three exits since it split with the U.S.-based Sequoia Capital in June. By all accounts the firm is thriving, at least by the numbers, and it’s a perfect example of how the global venture capital game is fracturing.Startup funding is going through the same chaotic decoupling that’s roiling supply chains and semiconductors — and just like hardware, it’s mostly about the rivalry between the U.S. and China. As VCs in the U.S. pour money into the next generation of companies, China hawks in the U.S. government want to make sure those funds aren’t flowing to America’s enemies. At the same time, VCs want to put the money where it will have a chance to grow — and increasingly, that means looking outside the U.S.
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S18Evidence Undermines 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria' Claims  Fears of “social contagion,” used to support anti-transgender legislation, are not supported by scienceA recent study claiming to describe more than 1,600 possible cases of a “socially contagious syndrome” was retracted in June for failing to obtain ethics approval from an institutional review board. The survey examined “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” a proposed condition that attributes adolescent gender distress to exposure to transgender people through friends or social media. The existence of such a syndrome has been the subject of intense debate for the past several years and has fueled arguments against transgender rights reforms, despite being widely criticized by medical experts.
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S19Student Loan Debt Takes a Toll on a Vulnerable Population's Mental Health  Many young adults, facing the largest student loan burden in history, report depression, anxiety and an overhanging sense of dreadThirteen years ago, Melanie Lockert, now age 38, thought she wanted to become a university theater professor. She was thrilled to start her Ph.D. journey in performance studies at New York University. Midway through, however, she realized that she did not want to work in academia but preferred nonprofit art education. After graduating with a master’s degree in theater performance, she searched for a job in art education in New York City. With the Great Recession of the late 2000s in full swing, however, she couldn’t find work.
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S20ChatGPT and Other Language AIs Are Nothing without Humans  Language model AIs seem smart because of how they string words together, but in reality, they can’t do anything without many people guiding them every step of the wayThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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S21Quantum Physics Can Explain Earth's Weather  By treating Earth as a topological insulator—a state of quantum matter—physicists found a powerful explanation for the twisting movements of the planet’s air and seasWhile much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos.
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S22Building Codes Save Money and Lives  As climate change increases the number and severity of natural disasters, an investment in updated building codes will save billions in repairsAfter Category 5 Hurricane Michael slammed into Mexico Beach, Fla., in 2018, there was a dramatic contrast in destruction: homes built at or beyond state building codes still stood, whereas many of those built before those stringent codes were enacted were simply gone.
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S23S24S25Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out against the Bomb She Helped Create  After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear physicist Katharine Way persuaded the world’s greatest physicists to contribute essays to a book opposing nuclear weaponsKatharine “Kay” Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive decay. But after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, she became increasingly concerned about the ethics of nuclear weapons. Way signed the Szilard Petition and worked to spread awareness of the moral responsibility surrounding atomic weaponry. Her efforts included co-editing the influential One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, and she remained an outspoken advocate for fairness and justice.
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S26Scientists Tried to Re-create an Entire Human Brain in a Computer. What Happened?  The Human Brain Project wraps up in September after a decade. It had notable achievements and a troubled pastIt took 10 years, around 500 scientists and some €600 million, and now the Human Brain Project — one of the biggest research endeavours ever funded by the European Union — is coming to an end. Its audacious goal was to understand the human brain by modelling it in a computer.
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S27S28How AI art could enhance humanity's collective memory  With data as his paintbrush, media artist Refik Anadol trains AI algorithms to visualize the disappearing wonders of nature. He gives a beautiful tour of his recent work -- imagery of artificial coral reefs, flowers, rainforests -- and ponders: Can we use AI to preserve our memories of the fading natural world?
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S29The 10 Best TVs We've Tested (and Helpful Buying Tips)  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 WIREDSaving up for a new screen? To help you navigate the dozens of seemingly identical TV models from Samsung, LG, Vizio, TCL, Sony, and other manufacturers, we've watched hundreds of hours of content on them and picked a few of our favorites. We've listed everything from the very best TV to the best budget set you can buy—and a few excellent choices in between.
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S30Meta Just Released a Coding Version of Llama 2  When Meta released Llama 2, a powerful artificial intelligence model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, last month, it made it possible for developers, startups, and researchers to play with the kind of AI that has enthralled the world for nearly a year.Today, Meta is following up with the release of Code Llama, a version of the model that has been tuned for programming tasks. The release could mean more developers getting a taste of AI-assisted coding. It could also inspire new ways of embedding AI into software. And it could help further establish Meta as the preeminent supplier of “open” AI tools.
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S31The Best Soundbars for Every Budget  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 WIREDYou probably already shelled out good money for a nice big TV and maybe a streaming gadget for your Netflix. But it doesn’t matter how large your screen is or how much it cost—the speakers in your TV probably sound awful.
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S32The Myth of 'Open Source' AI  ChatGPT made it possible for anyone to play with powerful artificial intelligence, but the inner workings of the world-famous chatbot remain a closely guarded secret.In recent months, however, efforts to make AI more "open" seem to have gained momentum. In May, someone leaked a model from Meta, called Llama, which gave outsiders access to its underlying code as well as the "weights" that determine how it behaves. Then, this July, Meta chose to make an even more powerful model, called Llama 2, available for anyone to download, modify, and reuse. Meta's models have since become an extremely popular foundation for many companies, researchers, and hobbyists building tools and applications with ChatGPT-like capabilities.
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S33The Last Hour of Prigozhin's Plane  At around 5:30 pm Moscow time on August 23, the Embraer Legacy 600 private business jet took to the skies. Launching from an airport near the Russian capital, the 13-seater plane, which has a white body and blue tail, has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the brutal Russian mercenary outfit Wagner Group.At 5:46 pm, once the plane was clear of Moscow—an area where location-tracking GPS signals are frequently blocked—receivers belonging to flight-tracking network Flightradar24 started picking up signals from the Embraer Legacy. For the next 34 minutes, Prigozhin’s plane was sending out data about its altitude, speed, and autopilot settings that allowed its movements to be tracked.
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S34Citizen Is Suspending Sales of Its New Wear OS Smartwatch  Citizen is temporarily suspending sales of its second-generation CZ Smart smartwatch, which it first announced at CES 2023 and subsequently launched on May 1. Although the smartwatch has been on the market for nearly three months, Citizen says it has “recently identified a technical issue that is negatively affecting the user experience.” The company’s statement, in an email, comes a few weeks after the watchmaker sent out test units to product reviewers, including myself. I have had a lackluster experience with the Gen-2 CZ Smart and have been cataloging the bugs I’ve run into. I shared my feedback with Citizen earlier this week. The issues include a laggy interface, poor battery life, inaccurate heart rate data, inaccurate sleep tracking, the watch freezing on specific screens, and Citizen’s proprietary YouQ features not working. The smartwatch starts at $350.
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S35The 52 Best Movies on Disney+ Right Now  In the game known as the streaming wars, Disney+ came out swinging, bringing with it a massive library of movies and TV shows—with new ones being added all the time. Watched everything on Netflix? Disney+ has a seemingly endless selection of Marvel movies and plenty of Star Wars and Pixar fare, too. Problem is, there’s so much stuff, it’s hard to know where to begin. WIRED is here to help. Below are our picks for the best films on Disney+ right now.For more viewing ideas, try our guides to the best films on Netflix, the best films on Amazon Prime, and the best shows on Apple TV+.
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S36The Killer App for Threads Is the Web  Threads, the text-based social network that Meta recently launched as part of Instagram, is finally on the web. Earlier this week, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg shared that Threads for the web would be “rolling out over the next few days.” That rollout has begun; some users already have access to the web version.It’s the next phase for the new social app, which launched in early July as a bare-bones text-threading app. Similar to X, the company formerly known as Twitter, Threads allows people to post text updates, “heart” or like others’ posts, repost them, and reply in a Thread.
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S37The Best Early Labor Day Deals on Firepits, Grills, and Couches  Autumn is fast approaching, and with it comes Labor Day—a herald to the end of summer. We've rounded up several early Labor Day deals and end-of-summer sales on furniture and outdoor gear. Be sure to check out our Best Early Labor Day Mattress Sales roundup as well. We also have a big list of back-to-school deals with more discounts that are worth your while.Updated August 24, 2023: We've added new sales from Solo Stove, Sur La Table, Our Place, and more.
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S38Trump's Prosecution Is America's Last Hope  Donald Trump was arrested in Georgia tonight for his role in what prosecutors christened "a wide-ranging criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election. Trump and 18 othersâhis former lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and his ex-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among themâhave been formally accused of 41 state-law felonies. The case is brought by Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia. Willis is not the first local prosecutor to charge a United States president with a felony, but she is the first to accuse one of trying to steal an election.Among charges such as filing false documents and conspiracy to commit forgery, Trump is personally accused of trying to browbeat and suborn felony acts from high-ranking Georgia officials, including the chief elections supervisor, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. Officials were pressed by Trump and other "co-conspirators" to take action to "decertify the election" and "unlawfully appoint presidential electors," prosecutors claim. Together, the charges opened the door for Willis to pile on additional counts of racketeering. Filed under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the charge would ask jurors to consider whether Trump and other defendants were involved in a single criminal undertaking. A conviction under RICO does not require that the defendants all know one another, or be involved at the same time, so long as they're all working toward a single corrupt goal.
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S39The entire quantum Universe exists inside a single atom  If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate the Universe until it revealed the answers in a way you could comprehend them. When any two quanta of energy interact — irrespective of their properties, including whether they’re particles or antiparticles, massive or massless, fermions or bosons, etc. — the result of that interaction has the potential to inform you about the underlying laws and rules that the system has to obey. If we knew all the possible outcomes of any interaction, including what their relative probabilities were, then and only then would we claim to have some understanding of what was going on. Being quantitative in precisely this fashion, asking not only “what happens” but also “by how much” and “how often,” is what makes physics the robust science that it is.Quite surprisingly, everything that we know about the Universe can, in some way, be traced back to the most humble of all the entities we know of: an atom. An atom remains the smallest unit of matter we know of that still retains the unique characteristics and properties that apply to the macroscopic world, including the physical and chemical properties of matter. And yet, an atom is a fundamentally quantum entity, with its own energy levels, properties, and conservation laws. Moreover, even the humble atom couples to all four of the known fundamental forces. In a very real way, all of physics is on display, even inside a single atom. Here’s what they can tell us about the Universe.
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S40Why we must replace the American nuclear family with a "postgenerational" society  In theory, the sequential model of life, with people entering and exiting stages in an orderly and predictable way, became widely adopted around the world at the same time that governments, the media, Hollywood, and the major religions promoted the idea of the nuclear family, consisting of parents raising their children until they finished their education and left the household to start their own families. At the lowest socioeconomic levels, both parents would work, leaving children with neighbors or bringing them with their older siblings. In a development dating back to German unification in the 1870s, women higher up in the social hierarchy were told to stay home and devote themselves to the three k’s of Kinder, Küche, Kirche — children, kitchen, and church. Companies in most countries, from Japan all the way to the U.S., discouraged or outright prevented married women from working outside the household. By the 1950s, the American nuclear family consisting of two parents, at least two kids, a TV, a washing machine, a car, and a dog had become the standard to emulate around the world, given the growing prosperity of the middle class.The rosy notion of the nuclear family belies a reality of struggle and despair. Its emphasis on “growing up” leads to the enormous pressures placed on children to prepare for achieving as adults everything from a stable romantic relationship to professional success. Moreover, the nuclear family has contributed to social inequality because, predictably, not every group in society is in a position to live up to the ideal prototype. “We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children,” argues New York Times columnist David Brooks in a recent Atlantic piece. “We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options,” and ultimately “liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.” He is referring to the painful fact that the ideal of the nuclear family is far from realized among the poor and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities.
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S41The medieval mapmaker remembered for the wrong map  If you know one thing about 12th-century Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, it is that he is the author of this wonky world map, which is often included in modern atlases as a prime example of medieval mapmaking skills.That invites comparisons that do him no favors. Among the hyper-precise maps in today’s atlases, al-Idrisi’s looks like a child’s drawing. His Europe is sketchy, his Asia amorphous, and his Africa manages to be both partial and oversized. Plus, the map is a planisphere — the projection of a sphere onto a flat (and typically circular) plane — which creates the mistaken impression that al-Idrisi was a flat-Earther of the Discworld variety.
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S42Beyond the Copernican principle: A radical idea rethinks humanity's place in the cosmos  There are ten billion trillion planets in the visible Universe where life might form. Given that spectacularly large number, most people would argue that we cannot be the only intelligent self-aware creatures in the cosmos. And from that conclusion, there sometimes comes a profound sense of our insignificance. How can we humans matter at all in the face of such a vast Universe brimming with planets and, potentially, life?That conclusion is, however, just as profoundly misguided. This is the major thrust of my colleague and fellow 13.8 writer Marcelo Gleiser’s new book The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future. Gleiser has written a broad and sweeping argument for a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves and our cosmic setting with equally fundamental consequences for the future (if we are to have one). Here, I want to focus on one particular point that lies at the heart of his argument.
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S43Hell freezes over as Apple supports right-to-repair bill  Somewhere, ol' Beelzebub is putting on his thickest coat because Apple has endorsed a right-to-repair bill, suggesting hell has frozen over. In a letter dated August 22, Apple showed its support for California's right-to-repair bill, SB 244, after spending years combatting DIY repair efforts.
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S44S45For Nvidia, it's AI or bust as it reports a record-breaking quarter  On top of Wednesday's news that Nvidia earnings have performed far better than expected, Reuters reports that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expects the AI boom to last well into next year. As a testament to this outlook, Nvidia will buy back $25 billion of shares—which happen to be worth triple what they were just before the generative AI craze kicked off.
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S46S47S48S49Zoom's CEO thinks Zoom sucks for building trust, leaked audio reveals  Earlier this month, Zoom announced a surprising decision to require some of its employees to return to the office, where they were expected to work more effectively. Now, leaked audio from an internal Zoom meeting shared with Business Insider has revealed that Zoom CEO Eric Yuan called employees back to the office because he believes that "remote work didn't allow people to build as much trust or be as innovative."
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S50Barnacles could hold key to finding wreckage of Malaysia Airlines MH370  It's one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation history. In March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport en route to Beijing and lost communication about 38 minutes into the flight. Military radar tracked the aircraft as it veered off course before the signal (and the plane) disappeared somewhere over the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean.
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S51California deploys AI-powered wildfire detection systems  California's main firefighting agency, Cal Fire, is training AI models to detect visual signs of wildfires using a network of 1,039 high-definition cameras, reports The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. When it sees signs of smoke, it quickly warns firefighters of emerging threats. During the pilot program, the system has already detected 77 wildfires before dispatch centers received 911 calls—about a 40 percent success rate, according to the NYT.
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S52S53Ramaswamy and the Rest  The epigraph for the first 2024 Republican presidential debate came from Vivek Ramaswamy. “It is not morning in America. We’re living in a dark moment,” he said, midway through the melee in Milwaukee. He seemed to speak for every candidate on the stage during a dour and punchy evening on Fox News.Ramaswamy was a fitting messenger for the mantra, because the debate was his coming-out party. He was, if not definitively the winner of the debate, clearly the main character. No candidate was so eager to get in the mix on every issue, none so ready with quips, none so eager to land a blow on rivals, and none so likely to be the target of blows himself.
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S54S55Magical Thinking in Milwaukee  Donald Trump’s rivals struggled to show they were equipped to take him down. In fact, few even tried.One couldn’t help but pity the dutiful campaign staffers and surrogates who trickled into the spin room in Milwaukee last night. They arrived with an unenviable task: to convince reporters that their respective candidates had won the first debate of the Republican presidential primary.
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S56Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Republican Debate  In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.
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S57What Bradley Cooper's Makeup Can't Conceal  If you haven’t heard about the controversy surrounding Bradley Cooper’s nose, you’ve made better choices than I have. (Well, until now.) Here’s the short version: Maestro is a forthcoming biopic about the renowned Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein. The film stars Cooper, who also co-wrote and directed it. Last week, the trailer for the film was released, revealing that the actor’s nose had been … enhanced for the screen. Outraged social-media users and the websites that write about outraged social-media users quickly turned on the movie, creating such consternation that Bernstein’s own family felt compelled to publicly defend Cooper and his creative choices.First off, this debate isn’t really about the nose. It’s about a non-Jewish actor playing a famous Jewish figure. Few people would have complained if a Jewish performer—whether with a noticeable natural nose or a fake one—had been cast in this role. Rather, the problem was casting a non-Jew and then accentuating his features in a stereotypically Jewish fashion. At a time when Hollywood is obsessed with representation, such a casting decision compounded by the attempt to disguise it felt like a cartoonish affront to the entire enterprise. Cooper’s artificial nose is not anti-Semitic, but it is understandable why many found it off-putting. Something need not be bigoted to be a bad idea, especially in an industry that today claims to take care to avoid evoking stereotypes of minority groups. That the studio did not anticipate the fuss over Cooper’s prosthetic suggests an institutional blind spot.
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S58When Wealth Fixes (Almost) Everything  The status-obsessed characters of And Just Like That are discovering the limits of throwing money at their relationship problems.Throughout the original run of Sex and the City, the comforts of wealth often smoothed out the roughest conflicts—especially in romantic relationships. Friends and lovers alike papered over their transgressions by purchasing jewelry, planning overseas trips, and paying for extravagant dinners. And in true New York City form, the most meaningful gifts didn’t come in diamond but in brass, silver, nickel, and steel: house keys.
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S59What Happens When the Heat Repeats?  Two years later, the intertidal zone of the Pacific Northwest coast is still recovering from a devastating heat wave.For two years now, scientists, shellfish managers, and tribes have been working to understand how the heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021 affected the places where the ocean and land meet. That heat wave was like nothing in memory. Temperatures soaring as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit buckled roads, melted power cables, and scorched forests. By the time the heat subsided, 650 people had died in the U.S. and Canada, and dead and dying shellfish and other marine critters littered beaches, cooking in their shells. Red algae were bleached white. Cockles tried to escape the heat by digging out of the sand, only to be greeted by more heat from the sun. Mussels gaped in an attempt to cool off. Tide pools became tubs of hot water. An estimated 1 billion marine animals perished in Canada alone.
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S60The Mercenary Always Loses  In 2019, a Russian foreign-policy hand told me that his country had intervened in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad for reasons that were, he said, “pedagogical.” Putin had watched the Bush and Obama administrations insert themselves into Iraq, Libya, and Syria, leaving messes in each. Now he would teach America how to intervene right: swiftly, decisively, and without sermonizing about “democracy,” “human rights,” and suchlike twaddle. The chief instructor in this master class would be Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s cook”—not for some cool James Bond–like reason, such as a preference for sharp throwing knives or an ability to make a mean polonium soufflé, but because before Prigozhin headed Putin’s paramilitary Wagner Group, he ran an actual catering business.Prigozhin appears to have been fired from that teaching job. Yesterday his private jet went down north of Moscow, and Russian authorities assure us that Prigozhin was on it. That he was still available to die under these circumstances was a minor miracle of survival: In June, he led the most significant coup attempt against a Russian leader since the end of the Cold War. It was generally assumed that Putin would kill him. Instead Prigozhin remained alive and unpoisoned—and, most amazing, still active in the Wagner Group’s core mercenary business in Africa.
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S61Good News for Your Sad, Beaten-Up iPhone  In a surprising turn, Apple has acknowledged that maybe not everyone needs a new phone every year.On Saturday, my wife delicately removed the phone from my hands. It was making me seem a little crazed, she said. I had been on it all day. Closing on a story, refreshing Slack, scrolling through social media, checking my email. I had just texted a friend to recommend an accessory for a vacuum cleaner; it felt like it demanded my urgent attention, the way everything else on the screen did. “i got a horse hair attachment for thr vacuum it js so amazjng,” I had typed, just like that.
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S62The GOP's Dispiriting Display  This 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.The first GOP primary debate confirmed the end of the old Republican Party and squelched any hope for a normal presidential election in 2024.
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S63Efforts to expand the lifespan ignore what it's like to get old | Psyche Ideas  is emeritus professor of psychology at the Claremont Graduate University. He served as an aide in a mission hospital in South Africa and as a volunteer at a hospice organisation in Los Angeles.Everyone dies sometime. But when and how? Those questions become more salient as birthdays roll by. It has been said that wherever old people gather there is an ‘organ recital’ of malfunctioning body organs and parts. I, too, have a recital.
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S64'The Outsiders' Musical Is Coming to Broadway /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b1/3b/b13b678d-b3ca-4365-9a07-81968ea3ce1d/the-outsiders-4_52723117532_o.jpg) The “greasers” from S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders will arrive at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater for previews starting March 16, with an official opening scheduled for April 11, reports Playbill’s Andrew Gans.Based on Hinton’s novel and the Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation of the same name, the musical follows Ponyboy Curtis, Johnny Cade and their fellow greasers as they navigate the turbulence of adolescence and their conflict with the “Socs”—short for “Socials,” their upper-class rivals—in 1960s Tulsa.
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S65This 8,000-Year-Old Village on Stilts May Be the Oldest of Its Kind in Europe /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/20/b6/20b6ef43-d0b2-42a2-9b5c-9a0bba9f8706/nikolas_linke-01707.jpg) Archaeologists unearthed the settlementâwhich had tens of thousands of defensive spikesâbeneath a lake in AlbaniaArchaeologists have discovered the remains of a nearly 8,000-year-old village built on stilts above a lake in the Balkans. Though they're still awaiting the results of dating tests, they suspect it may be the oldest known settlement of its kind found in Europe, per Live Science's Tom Metcalfe.
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S66How Color-Changing Hogfish Use Their Skin to 'See' Themselves /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/08/b4/08b48f94-b447-4070-9893-0f38b1be386a/gettyimages-883223342.jpg) Light-sensitive proteins in the fish’s skin could play a role in monitoring how they camouflage, researchers theorize in a new studyLike a chameleon, a hogfish can quickly change the color of its skin. These reef-dwelling creatures can toggle between appearing white, reddish-brown and spotted at the drop of a hat, both for camouflage and for social signaling.
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S67S68What a Contest of Consciousness Theories Really Proved | Quanta Magazine  Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science of consciousness, a dominant theory has yet to emerge. More than 20 are still taken seriously.It's not for want of data. Ever since Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, legitimized consciousness as a topic for study more than three decades ago, researchers have used a variety of advanced technologies to probe the brains of test subjects, tracing the signatures of neural activity that could reflect consciousness. The resulting avalanche of data should have flattened at least the flimsier theories by now.
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S70Simone Weil on Love and Its Counterfeit  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.Albert Camus, a Nobel laureate himself and friend of many titanic natures, considered Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) “the only great spirit” of the epoch. Before she died a death of solidarity in an English sanatorium, refusing to take more food than her compatriots in Nazi-occupied France were rationed, before she enlisted to fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War, the twenty-six-year-old Weil took a year’s leave of absence from her university teaching post to labor incognito in two car factories in order to better understand the plight of the working class. “Although I suffer from it all,” she wrote to one of her students, “I am more glad than I can say to be where I am… I have escaped from a world of abstractions.”
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