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 S69For minorities, biased AI algorithms can damage almost every part of life   Bad data does not only produce bad outcomes. It can also help to suppress sections of society, for instance vulnerable women and minorities. This is the argument of my new book on the relationship between various forms of racism and sexism and artificial intelligence (AI). The problem is acute. Algorithms generally need to be exposed to data – often taken from the internet – in order to improve at whatever they do, such as screening job applications, or underwriting mortgages.
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S1Strategy for Start-ups  In their haste to get to market first, write Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern, entrepreneurs often run with the first plausible strategy they identify. They can improve their chances of picking the right path by investigating four generic go-to-market strategies and choosing a version that aligns most closely with their founding values and motivations. The authors provide a framework, which they call the entrepreneurial strategy compass, for doing so.
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S2The One Number You Need to Grow  This finding is based on two years of research in which a variety of survey questions were tested by linking the responses with actual customer behavior—purchasing patterns and referrals—and ultimately with company growth. Surprisingly, the most effective question wasn’t about customer satisfaction or even loyalty per se. In most of the industries studied, the percentage of customers enthusiastic enough about a company to refer it to a friend or colleague directly correlated with growth rates among competitors.
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S3A Better Way to Map Brand Strategy  Companies have long used perceptual mapping to understand how consumers feel about their brands relative to competitors’, to find gaps in the marketplace, and to develop brand positions. But the business value of these maps is limited because they fail to link a brand’s market position to business performance metrics such as pricing and sales. Other marketing tools measure brands on yardsticks such as market share, growth rate, and profitability but fail to take consumer perceptions into consideration.
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S4How to Take Better Breaks at Work, According to Research  Taking periodic work breaks throughout the day can boost well-being and performance, but far too few of us take them regularly — or take the most effective types. A systematic review of more than 80 studies on break-taking outlines some best practices for making the most of time away from our tasks, including where, when, and how. It also offers tips for managers and organizations to encourage their employees to take more beneficial and more frequent breaks.
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S5How to Speak Confidently to Your Team During Chaotic Times  These days, many employees feel like they’re constantly receiving a stream of bad or confusing news that affects their work in unpredictable ways. When they only hear simple summaries from their leaders about issues they know aren’t so simple, teams can feel frustrated and even angry. Next time you feel you need to say something, but you’re not sure what to say, try these three strategies: 1) Recognize the power of “and” — it allows you to align two seemingly separate thoughts, such as “things are difficult and things will be okay.” 2) Teach the past to arm the future. Unpacking the past and connecting it to the present can help you create more certainty. 3) Adopt a more experimental mindset. This can help change feel less risky.
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S6When a Coworker Undermines You in a Meeting  Feeling undermined, unappreciated, or unsupported by a colleague when you’re both in the same meeting can lead to loss of trust, along with feelings of self-doubt and lack of confidence. But looking to see what you can do to help the situation, rather than dwelling on what someone is doing to you, can begin to ease tension and repair a dysfunctional working relationship. In this article, the author offers strategies to try when a coworker doesn’t have your back.
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S7How to Reskill Your Workforce in the Age of AI  By now, it’s probably clear to most of us that the Age of AI has arrived. Artificial intelligence applications promise to transform nearly every aspect of business, from analytics to product development to customer experience to pretty much everything else. What’s less clear is how we can best manage this potential. In particular, how do we organize and reskill our workforces to take advantage of both the automated and human skills that will be necessary to drive future success. To try to answer these questions, we invited Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School, to be our guest on “The New World of Work”. Raffaella’s research focuses on the managerial and organizational drivers of productivity and growth, and she is the co-author of the cover story in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review: “Reskilling in the Age of AI.” The conversation mainly focused on the reskilling challenge. Her underlying message is that companies need to adapt properly to the technology at hand. Do it right, and you can unlock opportunities for innovation and growth. Do it wrong, and you might stagnate.
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S8A new life for London's lost rivers  Though most visitors to London think only of the River Thames, the city is a myriad of waterways. Old maps show a skein of rivers and brooks that provided "blue corridors" traversing the city for centuries, providing both sources of food and recreation. But as London boomed, these waterways faded from consciousness – encased by walls, turned into polluted backwaters or simply covered over to run unseen beneath busy streets.But these "secret" rivers are imprinted on London's geography. Marylebone started life as St Mary by the bourne (an old name for a watercourse, in this case the Tyburn); while Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Westbourne and Holborn are all named by waterways that ran through them. Deptford was the site of a deep ford over the Ravensbourne, while Wandsworth is named after the River Wandle. East Ham and West Ham get their names from an old word for an area between rivers (hamm) – in their case, the Lea and the Roding. And while Britain's leading newspapers have left Fleet Street, the River Fleet still runs beneath.
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S9The place where no humans will tread for 100,000 years  I'm always upbeat on the way to interviews. To me they're the most enjoyable part of the storytelling process.But this time I feel different. A tour at Onkalo, which lies 450m (1,480ft) below the ground, to see tunnels hewn in the living rock to store highly radioactive waste for 100,000 years, suddenly makes me nervous.
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S10Shopee, the juggernaut that fended off Amazon  To open the Shopee app is to enter a whirlwind of promotions. The signature orange clashes with red banners blaring discounts; streaming previews lure the user into live shopping; various stores offer similar products, and compete intensely to reduce prices or delivery fees.For Shopee, the formula has worked. It’s the most visited e-commerce platform in Indonesia, the fourth most-populous country in the world. It has also conquered the majority of Southeast Asia, becoming a huge player in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and even as far as Taiwan and Brazil. (According to McKinsey, Shopee is particularly popular for its apparel and beauty products.) The app had already launched by the time Amazon attempted to enter Southeast Asia in 2017, and along with Alibaba-backed Lazada, has managed to box out the U.S. e-commerce giant from the region.
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S11The Colors of Stars, Explained  From dim red to brilliant blue, stellar colors span the spectrum—and reveal how much any star brings the heatI don’t really have a favorite time of year to stargaze; each season brings its own unique charms to the sky. But there is something special about summer, when the weather is milder and the Milky Way stretches high overhead, carrying a bright panoply of stars.
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S12S13S14How Wealthy UFO Fans Helped Fuel Fringe Beliefs  In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.
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S15How Archaeological Methods Are Helping Identify Victims of the Hawaii Wildfires  The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Fire devastates communities and families, and it makes identification of victims challenging. In the aftermath of the wildfire that swept through Lahaina, Hawaii, officials are collecting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons in the hope that this can aid in identifying those who died in the fire.
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S16S17ChatGPT Can Get Good Grades. What Should Educators Do about It?  With its ability to pump out confident, humanlike prose almost instantaneously, ChatGPT is a valuable cheating tool for students who want to outsource their writing assignments. When fed a homework or test question from a college-level course, the generative artificial intelligence program is liable to be graded just as highly, if not better, than a college student, according to a new study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. With no reliable tools for distinguishing AI content from human work, educators will have to rethink how they structure their courses and assess students—and what humans might lose if we never learn how to write for ourselves.In the new research, computer scientists and other academics compiled 233 student assessment questions from 32 professors who taught across eight different disciplines at New York University Abu Dhabi. Then they gathered three randomly selected student answers to those questions from each professor and also generated three different answers from ChatGPT. Trained subject graders, blind to the circumstances of the study, assessed all the answers. In nine of the 32 classes, ChatGPT’s text received equivalent or higher marks than the student work. “The current version of ChatGPT is comparable, or even superior, to students in nearly 30 percent of courses,” wrote study authors Yasir Zaki and Talal Rahwan, both computer scientists at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, in an e-mail to Scientific American. “We expect that this percentage will only increase with future versions.”
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S18Stuart Kauffman: The "adjacent possible" -- and how it explains human innovation  From the astonishing evolutionary advances of the Cambrian explosion to our present-day computing revolution, the trend of dramatic growth after periods of stability can be explained through the theory of the "adjacent possible," says theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. Tracing the arc of human history through the tools and technologies we've invented, he explains the impact human ingenuity has had on the planet -- and calls for a shift towards more protection for all life on Earth.
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S19The Elvie Breast Pump Is Wildly Overpriced  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 WIREDI see Elvie pumps everywhere. My fellow moms rave about it on Instagram. I find it on store shelves frequently. It sounded like the newer, cooler version of the Willow pumps, which I've known about since launch.
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S20The Anticlimactic Death of the Streaming Wars  Maybe A League of Their Own was doomed to strike out. A passion project in all senses of the word, it was a reboot hell-bent on showing the queer lives in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that never made it into the 1992 movie. More succinctly, it was the kind of reimagining (long-form, prestige-y, tapping into an existing niche fanbase) that often only gets a shot thanks to a deep-pocketed streamer. It got to play one season. Last spring, Amazon Prime Video renewed it for a truncated second one. Last Friday, that plug got pulled; Amazon pointed the finger at the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes.Abbi Jacobson, the Broad City star who co-created the series, hit Instagram to say that blaming the cancelation on the strikes was “bullshit and cowardly,” but the fact remains: The show’s life on Prime Video is over. Amazon also canceled the second season of the William Gibson adaptation The Peripheral, despite having renewed it back in February. Hollywood is a ruthless business, no matter which network or streamer a show calls home.
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S2128 Best REI Labor Day Deals on Tents, Sleeping Bags, and Outdoor Gear  Summer is winding down, which means great deals on outdoor gear. The REI Labor Day Sale runs from August 25 through September 4, and other retailers like Backcountry are joining in on the discount bonanza. It's the perfect time to get some new gear, like tents, sleeping bags and pads, or some merino wool for those increasingly cool nights in the outdoors. We've rounded up the best Labor Day outdoor deals right here, and we'll continue adding more over the next week. Be sure to check our other Labor Day deals coverage for more, including the Best Early Labor Day Deals, the Best Labor Day Mattress Deals, as well as the Best Back-to-School Deals.
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S22In a World of Fakes, Trump's Real Mug Shot Matters  For months, Etsy has become littered with a new genre of T-shirt: the Donald Trump mug shot. And they’re available in two main styles: Guity AF and Not Guilty. The shirts are adorned with photos of the former US president appearing as if he’d just been booked, but until very recently, they’ve been fakes—most of them unconvincing ones. Etsy sellers have been uploading them to the platform since at least March, as Trump has been indicted for numerous alleged crimes. Even Trump’s own campaign released a fake mug shot T-shirt to raise money.But yesterday, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate was finally subjected to the criminal tradition of a mug shot in Georgia, where he has been indicted on charges relating to attempts to overturn 2020 election results in the state. It’s the fourth indictment against Trump, who now faces 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions. Trump maintains that he committed “no crime.”
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S23The Best Back-to-School Deals on Laptops, Backpacks, and Earbuds  Summer is Fading away, and school is almost back in session (for some, it's already started!). We scoured the internet for the best discounts on gadgets and gear for teachers, students, parents, and anyone else in the market for back-to-school fare. Be sure to check out our Best Dorm Gear guide for additional recommendations and gift ideas, plus the Best Student Discounts and Best Teacher Discounts. For more deals, read our guides to the Best Early Labor Day Sales, Best Labor Day Mattress Deals, and Best REI Labor Day Deals.
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S24Ask Ethan: Why will the Milky Way and Andromeda collide?  Of all the galaxies in the Universe that lie beyond the Milky Way, none looms larger than our “big sister” in the Local Group: Andromeda. Andromeda has more stars, more mass, and a larger physical extent than the Milky Way in all three dimensions. It spans a larger angular extent in our sky than six full Moons all lined up next to one another, and despite its location some 2.5 million light-years away from us, it’s actually moving in our direction, setting up a collision that should happen 4 billion years in our cosmic future. Another 3 billion years later, the greatest galactic merger in our Local Group’s history will be complete, leaving just one behemoth of a galaxy at its core: Milkdromeda.But why is this happening? After all, not only is the Universe expanding, but the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, too! How could these two seemingly paradoxical points both be true: the expanding Universe is accelerating, but Andromeda is heading toward us and is destined for a collision-and-merger with us? That’s what Robert Asselta wants to know, writing in to inquire:
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S25Anxiety evolved to help us -- what went wrong? A neuroscientist explains.  Anxiety is a feature of evolution, not a bug. That doesn’t make it less uncomfortable, though. The good news is that we can harness it to our benefit, says Wendy Suzuki, a neuroscientist and the author of “Good Anxiety.” By tapping into what she calls the six “superpowers” of anxiety, we can redirect these uncomfortable feelings into positive outcomes.Suzuki explains the neurological root of anxiety, including how the amygdala automatically activates when we are scared or stressed. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex — the rational, executive function center of the brain — shuts down when we need it most.
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S26Biohacking our way to health  Developmental biologist Michael Levin proposes an alternative approach to regenerative medicine: one that involves communicating with cells to trigger changes in tissues. He envisions a future where biomedicine relies less on chemistry and looks more like behavioral science.By leveraging the native competencies of cells, Levin thinks researchers can achieve complex outcomes without micromanagement. He demonstrates this through the regeneration of frog legs by simply nudging cells toward the regenerative state.
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S27Bushido: The Japanese samurai code for kamikaze pilots and businessmen  Soga Tokimune stood panting. Blood dripped from his fist into a growing pool at his feet. He held his sword loosely and low and stared at Gorōmaru. Behind Tokimune lay the slashed and mutilated corpses of ten samurai. Tokimune had moved with such speed, that the Shogun’s retainers — men with decades of training and swordsmanship — had fallen like the easily dispatched henchmen of a computer game. But now, Tokimune stood before Gorōmaru, Lord of the Samurai. Gorōmaru was known across all of Japan for being huge, strong, and undefeated with the sword. Tokimune gathered his breath and raised his sword. Gorōmaru smiled.The Revenge of the Soga Brothers is not a story about a fight between samurai. Tokimune was there to seek revenge for the murder of his father. Gorōmaru was there to protect his liege lord. This was about honor. This was about bushido.
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S28Human "rewilding": To have a better life, live like a hunter-gatherer  The concept of human rewilding offers novel ideas about addressing the impending threat of global climate change and future pandemics, using evidence of how humans best lived and adapted through periods of climate instability, guided by perspectives from today’s Native communities and the observations of anthropologists.As I learned through trial and error, a fully rewilded lifestyle seems preposterous and dangerous to most of my peers and family members. Debating its merits has thus become a regular occurrence in my life, and some themes have emerged. At one skills gathering, I met a photographer who pressed me to admit that a lot of rewilding practices don’t scale. “Earth’s 7.2 billion people can’t hunt and gather anymore,” he said. “There isn’t enough quality habitat, and there are too many of us to live in ecological balance.”
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S29S30S31S32New genetic analysis of  In 1991, a group of hikers found the mummified remains of Ötzi the Iceman emerging from a melting glacier in the Alps—likely murdered, judging by the remains of an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder. The mummy's genome was first sequenced in 2012, whereby the world learned that he likely had brown eyes, type O blood, blocked arteries, Lyme disease, and lactose intolerance. That first genetic analysis also determined that Ötzi was descended from Steppe Herders hailing from Eastern Europe who migrated to the region some 4,900 years ago.
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S33S34S35S36S37Hands-on with Cherry MX2A switches: A lot less wobble, a little more confusion  For 20 years, Cherry's patent on mechanical switches made it the only player around. That patent's expiration around 2014, though, released the floodgates and allowed countless copycats and switches with varying levels of modification to the cross-stem design to pour in. Typically, consumer choice is a good thing, and there are companies making switches that offer much different (sometimes better) experiences than the switches Cherry makes.
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S38S39The First GOP Debate Makes It Obvious Where the Republican Party Is Headed  On Wednesday night, the 2024 campaign season officially began, and it was the weirdest season opener in recent memory. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, did not show up. And even though the contenders on the stage likely have no chance of winning the nomination, the debate was important, in that a lot was revealed about the future of the party.Nikki Haley came across as the reasonable, truth-telling candidate. She got nowhere. Newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, offered an updated and shinier version of Trumpism. On this week’s Radio Atlantic, we talk with Atlantic staff writers McKay Coppins, reporting from the debate, and Elaine Godfrey about why Ramaswamy popped, why Ron DeSantis didn’t, and what all of that means for the future of the party and the culture of politics.
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S40Photos of the Week: Smoky Skies, Lazy Day, Mug Shot  Wildfires in Greece and Canada, paddleboarding in Maine, an anti-terror exercise in South Korea, flooding in Southern California, migrating flamingos in Turkey, a weigh-in at London Zoo, a T-Rex race in Washington State, and much more People hold hands during a community paddle out for those affected by the Maui fires, organized by nonprofit Na Kama Kai, at Kuhio Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 19, 2023. At least 115 people are known to have died in what was the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century. #
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S41The New Old Age  What a new life stage can teach the rest of us about how to find meaning and purpose—before it’s too lateThis article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
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S42Iran Will Keep Taking Hostages If the Money Keeps Flowing  Those of us who have survived Iran’s prison system rejoice when hostages are freed. But we also worry about what our governments trade away.The first time I saw Siamak Namazi was while I was in my cell in Evin Prison, in Tehran. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the longest-held American hostage in Iran was being kept only a few hundred meters away from where I crouched on stained and threadbare carpet, my eyes fixed on a dusty wall-mounted television screen. I didn’t understand Farsi back then, but I knew Amrika, and had come to recognise the word jasoos, too, given the abandon with which the term was thrown about the interrogation room.
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S43You've Had a Good Run, Liam Neeson  In Retribution, the septuagenarian plays a man stuck in a vehicle he can’t escape—an apt metaphor for his late-career pivot to action films.About 15 years ago, Liam Neeson picked up a cellphone and growled a haunting, threatening monologue that changed the course of his career. Playing the hardened ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills in the movie Taken, Neeson warned the men who’d kidnapped his teenage daughter about his “very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” It was the beginning of a surprising renaissance for the esteemed actor. In his mid-50s, he became an action star, headlining a long run of cheaply made, typically European-set thrillers in which he played gun-toting men in leather jackets with, well, murderous skills.
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S44Trump's Mug Shot Gives His Haters Nothing  Donald Trump dropped in for a photo op in Georgia last night—not the usual kibbitz on the hustings for a former president, but a killer visual to end the week with: a mug shot.And just like that, Trump was restored to his accustomed place in the Republican dogpile: everywhere. It was hard to look away, even if you wanted to. Former presidents do not go and get fingerprinted and mug-shotted and perp-walked every day, even the one former president who takes his arraignments in gift packs of four.
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S45The Raunchy Teen Comedy Gets a Queer Twist  The bawdy new film Bottoms marries the boisterousness and misanthropy of its predecessors, with mixed results.In the puberty-addled cinematic universe of the teen sex comedy, no carnal-minded pursuit is too implausible. High schoolers steal alcohol from other people’s houses, lose their parents’ prized possessions, drive across the country, lie about their ages, fall for undercover vampires, and get wildly intimate with baked goods.
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S46The Mug Shot Is a Warning  Donald Trump’s booking photo was supposed to be an exercise in humility. He turned it into a threat.The Greek myth of Medusa takes many forms, but the most common is this: Medusa was a woman who, having angered the goddess Athena, was made into a monster. Athena punished Medusa by turning her hair into a writhing tangle of serpents, and then by ensuring that anyone who looked into Medusa’s eyes would be turned to stone. In shaping their story of a gaze made violent, the creators of that early democracy were prescient about the man who has tried to destroy ours. Donald Trump’s head may be covered in spray rather than snakes, but he is a Medusa all the same, reconfigured for the age of mass media: Once you look at him, your fate is already sealed.
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S47A Crush Can Teach You a Lot About Yourself  A handful of years ago, some friends and I were all in the midst of a romantic drought. It had been so long since we’d felt excited about anyone that we started to worry that the problem was with us. Had we simply grown incapable of that kind of feeling? We imagined that our jaded little hearts might look like peach pits, shriveled and hard.This was the era, though, when we started using the phrase glimmer of hope. Glimmers came whenever we felt a giddy kick of affection—maybe for a friend of a friend, or the bartender at our favorite place, or the pottery-class buddy at the next wheel over. The hope was that these crushes—which were rarely communicated to their subjects—signaled that our hearts might someday soften up and become, once again, hospitable to life. Anytime we glimpsed a light at the end of our tunnel of romantic numbness, we’d text one another: Glimmer of hope!!!!
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S48The Women Writers Who Destroyed Their Own Work  How the French writers Marguerite Duras and Barbara Molinard first met is unclear, but their friendship was one of such mutual admiration that it now seems a fated union. Different though their lives were, the two women shared an important characteristic: In their fiction, they both offered intimate depictions of the misogyny they suffered. This was unusual, even shocking, for women writers at the time.By the mid-1960s, Duras was a prolific writer and an acclaimed filmmaker within the French intellectual class. No one knew Molinard. In her 40s, she began to write short fiction and did so with an unusual fervor, sometimes working for weeks without pause. To this day, little is known about Molinard precisely because she did not wish to be known. She went to great pains to ensure this, destroying nearly every page she wrote.
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S49Is Salsa Gazpacho?  My obsession with salsa, gazpacho, and the line between them began with a joke. A friend had, or so her husband reported, faced her nearly empty refrigerator one night and in a moment of panicked hunger started eating salsa for dinner. Only salsa. No chips. Just spoon straight in the jar. “Did she add water and claim it was gazpacho?” I asked.She had not. But could she have? The suggestion is not absurd. Salsa is an oniony, peppery, tomato-based food. Gazpacho, too, is an oniony, peppery, tomato-based food. Pace, one of the most popular salsa brands in America, has in fact provided a recipe for transforming its picante sauce into gazpacho. And the cookbook author Mark Bittman once proposed an even simpler strategy: Start with a fresh salsa, chill, and maybe puree—voilà, soup!
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S50This Week in Books: I Want to Know What Love Is  Enormous developments in neuroscience over the past two decades have allowed researchers to peer into the human mind as never before. But it’s not always comfortable to learn about the mechanistic workings of our emotions. Certain feelings that were once endowed with as much mythology and fascination as the ancients granted the waxing and waning of the moon are now understood to be simple chemical reactions in the brain. Love, in particular, has inspired a lot of recent curiosity from scientists (more than half of the research papers about romantic love since 1953 are from the past 10 years) and defensiveness from those who don’t want this most human and effervescent of sentiments pinned like a butterfly to a board.In an essay this week, Sophia Stewart looks at Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, In Defense of Love: An Argument. Rosenbaum is bothered by the way love has been “stolen away from the poets” and placed firmly in the domain of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. The emotion, he frets, has been brought down from the realm of the ineffable—a sensation with textures, a cause for awed reverence—and made just another thing to be classified.
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S51The 2024 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet  No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination. Donald Trump’s lead appears prohibitive, but then again, no candidate has ever won his party’s nomination while facing four (so far) separate felony indictments. (Then again, no one has ever lost his party’s nomination while facing four separate felony indictments either.) Ron DeSantis has not budged from his position as the leading challenger to Trump, but his support has weakened, encouraging a large field of Republicans who are hoping for a lucky break, a Trump collapse, a VP nomination, or maybe just some fun travel and a cable-news contract down the road.
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S52What Trump Brings Out in Americans  Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.If you could pose one earnest question to any of the Republican candidates, what would it be? (No insults disguised as questions allowed.)
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S53What DVDs Gave Us  Sadness about the end of Netflix’s movie-by-mail service is about more than just nostalgia.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.
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S54Inside the blind iris | Psyche Films  Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.Experimentation meets skilled artistry, stylish filmmaking and what seems to be a robust production budget in Inside the Blind Iris. Commissioned by Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, the piece follows the acclaimed UK dancer and choreographer Botis Seva as he moves from a mundane outside world into a black-and-white factory of peculiar funhouse spectacles, including a door opening to reveal a wall of eyes and a massive hand reaching into view from the beyond. These images are paired with the jerky, street-inspired dance moves of an accompanying ensemble, representing troubled memories in the surreal terrain of his mind. They move amidst another dramatic dance – one of light and shadows that summons the masters of German expressionist cinema.
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S55The Man Behind Nintendo's Mario Is Retiring After Nearly Three Decades /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/68/a8/68a89aef-bfa7-46d2-97c6-891e55677867/gettyimages-833919084.jpg) In 2019, Charles Martinet became the holder of a Guinness World Record: most video game voiceover performances as the same character. Since the 1990s, he has been the voice actor behind Nintendo’s Mario, appearing in more than 100 games.This week, Nintendo announced that Martinet’s decades-long reign as the Italian plumber known for saying “It’s a-me, Mario,” among other catchphrases, is coming to an end.
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S56S57'Rare' Clouded Leopard Kitten Born at the Oklahoma City Zoo /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ea/a2/eaa2fd4e-d610-4bc1-b54d-f5e8f0e25460/366718768_618004730453575_3680291518760144099_n.jpg) Keepers hope the young male will have his own “little cloudies” one day, helping maintain the vulnerable species’ captive populationA clouded leopard kitten born last month at the Oklahoma City Zoo is “eating, sleeping and growing,” the zoo announced on Facebook. Once the young male grows up, he’ll become an ambassador for his vulnerable species and for wildlife conservation more broadly.
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S58Ospreys Breed in Ireland for the First Time in More Than 200 Years /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b1/33/b133597a-de08-4f7f-9dad-edaf0ca6fccf/adult_osprey_pictured_in_fermanagh_c_giles_knight.jpg) The birds were driven to local extinction in the 18th century, but the new chicks provide hope for a comeback amid reintroduction effortsA pair of ospreys has successfully bred in Ireland for the first time in 200 years, according to a statement from local conservation organization Ulster Wildlife. The birds produced at least two—possibly three—chicks at a confidential location in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
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S59See How Photographers Reimagine Old Master Paintings /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/74/83/748373e9-f894-47fb-ab06-c114305762dc/art-04_ven.jpg) “Art About Art” bills itself as a thoughtful, whimsical exploration of the connections between past and presentAs the Princeton University Art Museum undergoes renovations, its old master paintings remain behind closed doors. Still, even in storage, such works are the inspiration behind a new show, which opened on August 19: “Art About Art: Contemporary Photographers Look at Old Master Paintings.”
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S60S61New Codes Could Make Quantum Computing 10 Times More Efficient | Quanta Magazine  The quantum bits â qubits â that power quantum computers are notoriously buggy and require clever error-correction strategies to stay on track.Last week, new simulations from two groups reported that a rising class of quantum error-correcting codes is more efficient by an order of magnitude than the current gold standard, known as the surface code. The codes all work by transforming a horde of error-prone qubits into a much smaller band of "protected" qubits that rarely make mistakes. But in the two simulations, low-density parity check â or LDPC â codes could make protected qubits out of 10 to 15 times fewer raw qubits than the surface code. Neither group has implemented these simulated leaps in actual hardware, but the experimental blueprints suggest that these codes, or codes like them, could hasten the arrival of more capable quantum devices.
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S62How to Strengthen Your Relationship with a Career Sponsor  In the best sponsorship relationships, sponsees adopt a proactive stance, making clear who they are and what they need. But many can’t do that, especially if they come from underrepresented groups, because of barriers, some personal and some structural, that they confront in the workplace. In this article the author, an expert on sponsorship programs, describes three strategies that sponsees can use to overcome those barriers.Behind the most productive sponsorships often stand savvy sponsees — industrious junior talent who spot opportunities for sponsors to unleash tactical support and advocacy.
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S63How AI Will Transform Project Management  Only 35% of projects today are completed successfully. One reason for this disappointing rate is the low level of maturity of technologies available for project management. This is about to change. Researchers, startups, and innovating organizations, are beginning to apply AI, machine learning, and other advanced technologies to project management, and by 2030 the field will undergo major shifts. Technology will soon improve project selection and prioritization, monitor progress, speed up reporting, and facilitate testing. Project managers, aided by virtual project assistants, will find their roles more focused on coaching and stakeholder management than on administration and manual tasks. The author show how organizations that want to reap the benefits of project management technologies should begin today by gathering and cleaning project data, preparing their people, and dedicating the resources necessary to drive this transformation.
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S64Why Conflicting Ideas Can Make Your Strategy Stronger  In a volatile, uncertain world, successful strategies are those conceived as portfolios of options rather than as roadmaps. But to successfully create and communicate such strategies, managers must embrace incompatible and misaligned ideas, communicate multiple and conflicting narratives, and share ideas as they think of them as opposed to the traditional sequence of thinking then sharing. To enable this, leaders need to foster a culture in which people can disagree without being punished for it.
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S65From Dumb Money to Saw X: 10 of the best films to watch in September  Denzel Washington's son, John David Washington, can be seen this month in The Creator, but Washington Sr hasn't given up on action movies himself. In The Equaliser 3, the 68-year-old returns as Robert McCall, the retired government agent who was played by Edward Woodward in the 1980s TV series, and by Queen Latifah in the recent CBS reboot. Washington's ultra-violent version of the character is now living quietly on Italy's idyllic Amalfi Coast, but his sojourn ends when the Mafia target some of his new friends. Dakota Fanning co-stars as a CIA agent, having appeared in another of Washington's action movies, Man on Fire, in 2004. "It was so beautiful to watch them together on the set, just talking, laughing," the film's director Antoine Fuqua, told James White in Empire. "She's like a daughter to him, he loves her. It was very easy with those two."A wildly acclaimed biopic from an Oscar-winning documentary maker, Roger Ross Williams, Cassandro stars Gael García Bernal as Saúl Armendáriz, a gay Mexican wrestler who is paid to lose all of his matches in humiliating style. But at the end of the 1980s, his trainer (Roberta Colindrez) encourages him to develop an empowered new persona, Cassandro, a character who is feminine, flamboyant, and willing to defeat his opponents. He changes both his own life and lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) in the process. Carlos Aguilar of IndieWire says García Bernal is "irresistible" in a "fabulous" film: "Glowing with García Bernal's magnetism, Cassandro balances the triumphant exaltation of Armendáriz's singular evolution as a trailblazer with the obvious, still not entirely eliminated bigotry that made his trajectory so significant and groundbreaking in the first place."
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S66And Just Like That Series 2 finale: How the Sex and the City sequel became the ultimate 'cringe-watch'  At the opening of the finale of And Just Like That series 2, for a mere 70 seconds, fans finally got what they had been waiting for: the long-awaited cameo from Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall.Filmed as a phone conversation between Samantha and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the scene saw the inimitable Ms Jones call to say she wouldn't be able to make her surprise flight to New York after all. She wished Carrie well, and in another pleasing throw-back for avid Sex and the City viewers, made reference to the time she crashed Soho House New York pretending to be a British woman called Annabel Bronstein.
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