Bike and EV charging infrastructure are urgently needed for a green transition

The green transition is happening too slowly. We are in a climate emergency and it is clear that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning to more sustainable transportation.However, without sufficient infrastructure to enable electric vehicles (EVs) or cycling for commuting, these options will remain too inconvenient or unsafe for most. Canada’s climate obligations will not be met without these infrastructure changes.

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Watch Adult Wolves Bring 'Toys' to Their Teething Pups at Yellowstone

When they can’t bring food back to the den, the animals retrieve bones, sticks and antlers for their young to chew onâand biologists captured it on videoRaising a litter of teething wolf pups is no easy feat, but the wolves living in Yellowstone National Park are parenting pros. This spring, the park's biologists captured video footage of adult wolves repeatedly returning to their den with so-called "toys"âin the form of antlers, bones and sticksâto keep their little ones happy between meals.

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A Lost Edith Wharton Play Debuts on Stage for the First Time

Several years ago, two scholars dug up a 1901 script by Edith Wharton. The play, titled The Shadow of a Doubt, had been lost for more than a century.Now, for the very first time, audiences can see the show on stage: A new production debuted at the Shaw Festival in Ontario’s Niagara-on-the-Lake earlier this month.

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Shopping, showjumping and a notorious goldfish sex scene: the bonkers world of the bonkbuster

Jodi McAlister's novels are also published by Simon & Schuster, noted in this article as Jackie Collins' publisher.In May 2023, Conservative British weekly magazine The Spectator ran a piece revealing the “guilty pleasures” of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Allegedly, he likes listening to the music of Michael Bublé, watching Emily in Paris – and reading the novels of Jilly Cooper.

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The Atlantic Presents: SHORTER STORIES

The art of flash fiction thrives on desire: Readers are given a brief tale that leaves them wanting more. This feeling is also a vital component in the act of writing, illuminating the search for new ways of depicting the world. Our shorter stories this year are based on the theme of desire; some authors have decided it worthy of interrogation in and of itself, while others use it as a path to altogether distinct ideas. What results is a thrilling array of voices, with stories ranging from ancient eroticism to modern longing. In the beginning there was desire, and then there was … that’s for you to find out.It is Giza in the middle of the night and I’m wrecked by jet lag thinking about you and in the alley below the flat there is a chained-up dog barking. Bad pop music is blasting out by the pyramids and a gaudy light show plays over the Sphinx’s face and I am certain that when the world ends only the lights of Vegas will remain shining. Since I was a boy I’ve wanted to see the pyramids and there is a voice in me that says I’ve been waiting just as long to catch sight of you but if you did not know love is dead, which is to say so much for all these feelings! Everything is about sex except sex, which is about blah blah blah. I crossed a continent and an ocean and most of another continent and yet here in this desert city I feel like I’m home. Let me explain. There are boys and girls riding horses in the dirt streets and everyone is some shade of brown and the infrastructure here is barely holding together and this home of original empire has been breached and left to its own devices by so many invaders that it is clear Egypt is the original reservation of the world—and somehow in all this I am hopeful. Me and a friend are tracing the beauty that runs from this place of ancient sun to the Athenian peninsula with its Platonic aura still remaining and on to Rome, where the meeting of architecture and emperor was perfected, and still on from there until we find ourselves back in America. What my first glimpse of the Great Pyramid showed me was not a miracle structure of impossible stones but a dream shimmering some 4,500 years over the light-struck dunes. But … let’s get down to it, shall we? Let’s say for argument’s sake there is much good art and some great art and a thousand Great Pyramids’ worth of bad art, but the only art I give a fuck about is your ass. Am I being clear? Is this transmission doing its thing across time and space? Baby, am I … the best you ever had? A request: Don’t answer that. Another: Let’s do this like we’ve never done it, which is something I didn’t do even when I’d never done it. Innocence is a brave thing and almost no one in the age of Instagram has the courage for it. But also let’s do it like we have? Sweetheart, I’m supposed to write about longing, but here I am, writing about something else. Take note: That first kiss, like, my angle of approach, was off, and and and I am telling you! Since our first night together, I have been studying very diligently at the Royal Academy of Smooching. From here on it’s nothing but movie kisses worthy of deleted Indiana Jones scenes. Royal this, royal that. The fans turn slow overhead in the dim rooms of empire’s afterlife, and the shades of British accountants work through the heat and the day’s ledgers and their latest letter to Martha. If I correctly understand this book I mail-ordered from the back of a magazine in 1985, upon returning I am certain to be a master lover and the historians tracing the arc of my adoration for you will … maybe take note! Hieroglyphs are the GOAT of writing systems. Like, just look at that shit. It’s fucking sick. But also … maybe not so efficient. Even more than young men ready to die brilliantly and a willingness to enslave all and sundry to commit a pharaoh to eternity, an empire needs a good writing system. As indicated by an intensive Google search—I almost went to the second page—before it was the Great Pyramid of Giza in Arabic, it was the Pyramid of Cheops in Greek, and before that it was the Pyramid of Khufu in Egyptian, but we both know before that, it was called Pharaoh’s Love Shack in the first language there ever was. You could take your best girl there and get a strawberry shake and a side of mutton and later she might wear your gold-leaf letterman jacket, but only if you were the right kind of pharaoh’s son, which, you know, I am not. In the end it’s always your younger brother with the great traps and the hyenic smile who gets the girl, and you, you ugly brute, you get sent out to carve more arcane but strangely practical symbols into the timeless rock. Thoth, now there’s a true bro for a writer. A deity for language? For art and judgment? America, you absolute plebe, take note. Meanwhile, my friend the dog, who I am certain bears the dark and pointed visage of Anubis, is still barking down below, and with each hopeless yawp he gains my admiration. (In fact he reminds me of myself when I was that age.) Hear me out for real though: Only the losers are worth a writer’s time, and there are way too many winners in the world of American letters now. But—I have two questions for you. First off, did you know the pyramids were once covered in limestone, their walls pale and smooth and rising impossibly bright to the heavens? And two, do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? Jesus Christ on a velvet cross! As a true connoisseur of the high art of gaming, I can only say one thing: Baby, you’ve got me stun-locked. Speaking of spiritual masters, our tour guide is the truth and the light and the way in this city, with its many layers of time, you feel like you might be drowning. I see in him the hard-achieved irony won by way of pain, frustration, and the bewilderment of a high intelligence waiting for the world to, like, catch the fuck up. He leads us through his homeland with the sly smile and wink of a lesser god who is lesser only because he chose it. I said I was an American Indian and he put his hand on his head to indicate a feather and we both laughed. I have not thought about the Egyptian afterlife since I was but a young reservation boy in the Wild, Wild West but now here I am, thinking about feathers and hearts. This fine eve I would cut out my heart and place it upon the scales of judgment for a chance to strip you down and do things to you that would bring the UN to my doorstep. Whatever. I will go down like a true Hollywood gunslinger—shooting blanks—only to be resurrected once more by that pharaonic ass. I know, I know! I just wanted to say that word. Here’s another one: callipygian. That's Greek for “a great ass.” Say it in your best Pacino. We’ve got such a gumbo going here, this piece is surely a violation of the Great Literary Treaty of 20__. You remember the one, we traded irony for safety. Anyway. How about this: Is anyone as over the discourse as me, because I am terribly, murderously over it. Behind us only slaughter, ahead only more, and all these people—I need a term that fuses philistine and dilettante, somebody help me out here—can talk about is being offended. Well, this stupidity is harming me, and still there is still no legitimate talk about Indian Country and it’s pretty goddamn clear there never will be. But don’t worry, me and my peeps are used to it. We just throw up a jeep wave and crank up the volume. What I want to discuss, though, is how life lately looks like the barrel of a gun set to my temple. Maybe it’s in my mouth? You know, for variety’s sake. My love—can I say this, is it too soon, I don’t understand the rules, my sense of timing is appalling—maybe be my oasis and I’ll be yours? May we drink deeply from each other ’til the sun falls finally on our day. I kiss your neck a few times and feed you the gelato flavor of your own choosing and maybe … we eat some hot dogs? I don’t know. The guy driving me and my friend all over kingdom come has the most beautiful eyes I’ve seen. Second only to yours, of course! They are green and unguarded and he cannot speak a lick of this language of empire that is my only option and he has the genuine heart of someone from where I am from. He could be a cousin of mine. Did I tell you I once was a tour guide? I, too, took foreigners—some people call them Americans—through my many-thousand-year homeland and talked about the before times and if they liked me enough I got tipped! It was really something! An ex once told me she was tired of the Indian thing and, if you can believe it, that was the moment she became an ex! You said I could not compare you in any way to fruit but … I kind of like fruit. What if I said you were like a mango that was actually like a supernova I happened upon while perusing the night sky with the telescope of my bitter heart and there you were, a phenomenon of such scope and size one finds oneself tempted to use a parallel but nonetheless commensurate description such as: There you were, the smoking-hot gunner bitch on the back of the apocalyptic jeep at the edge of the world. (There’s a dog at her side. It’s me.) She wears designer sunglasses and always has a toothpick in her mouth, but she has a heart of—well, probably some kind of fruit. Being in the midst of one of the great, dry expanses of the world has me in a mood. I am thinking of a J.Lo track that, on occasion, comes up in my list of liked songs. When others hear it, they likely want to shake their asses to the sick beats, or discuss how dated the sound is, but when I hear it, my gaze, driven by the note of elegy threading through the song, drifts dramatically out to the horizon. There are pyramids out there, I am certain of it. They stand silent and implacable and contain still the fury and horror and religiosity of original vision, and all beauty begins with them and comes to us across time from them—I kid you not. At the end of the long hall of the mind they shimmer massively. I will put my hands on you. We will do the oldest thing.

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Dear Therapist: I Feel Tremendously Guilty for Not Taking Care of My Aging, Alcoholic Mother

I am the adult child of an alcoholic mother, and now I am a mother myself. I love my mom, and we have a very close (albeit tumultuous at times) relationship. My upbringing wasn’t by any means all bad. My family was incredibly dysfunctional and maybe a little toxic, but also loving and supportive in our own weird way.Still, my life has been defined, influenced, and certainly scarred by my mother’s drinking, behavior, and mental-health issues—denial being chief among them. In my late 20s, I gave up trying to help her and went about the business of breaking out of the chains and cycles of my family. Distancing myself from my mother and family was heart-wrenching, but I am living a healthy, positive, and deeply fulfilling life because of what I did.

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Indigenous rangers are burning the desert the right way -

Co-Chairperson of the Indigenous Desert Alliance and a Regional Land Management Coordinator at the Central Land Council, Indigenous Knowledge Even though it’s still winter, the fire season has already started in Australia’s arid centre. About half of the Tjoritja West MacDonnell National Park west of Alice Springs has burnt this year.

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Should We All Be Eating Like The Rock?

Some researchers say Americans should eat double or triple the protein recommended by government guidelines.This 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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#GirlMaths: a seemingly innocent and fun way to justify expenses that can have serious financial consequences

These shoes are perfect, made for me! I have to get them! But really, I should be paying off my car loan instead. I can’t justify this purchase. Or can I …?We all know this feeling, this tension between what you really want to do and what you really should, or shouldn’t, do. What you are experiencing is cognitive dissonance.

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Watch the Trailer for 'Rustin,' Which Spotlights the Man Behind the 1963 March on Washington

The new film dramatizes Bayard Rustin’s efforts to pull off an event of unprecedented scaleTo mark the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Netflix just dropped the first trailer for Rustin. The biopic, which opens in select theaters on November 3 and begins streaming on November 17, chronicles the life of Bayard Rustin, the man behind the 1963 march that changed the course of the civil rights movement.

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The Blurb Problem Keeps Getting Worse

Publishing has come to depend on fawning endorsements, but not every title can be electrifying, essential, and revelatory.If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another. During the Renaissance, Thomas More’s Utopia got a proto-blurb from Erasmus (“divine wit”), while Shakespeare’s First Folio got one from Ben Jonson (“The wonder of our stage!”). By the 18th century, the practice of selling a book based on some other author’s endorsement was so well established that Henry Fielding’s spoof novel Shamela even came with fake blurbs, including one from “John Puff Esq.”

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Woman's mystery illness turns out to be 3-inch snake parasite in her brain

A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman's team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.

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What Your Insurer Is Trying to Tell You About Climate Change

Having worked for decades in conservation nonprofits, Beth Pratt, who lives high in the Sierra Foothills in Midpines, California, understands how climate change is putting her home at ever greater risk. Her community is experiencing what she calls “climate whiplash”: forest fires, record heat, massive snow dumps, mudslides, rockslides, and even a tornado.When Pratt, now 54, bought her 1,400-square-foot house in 1999, she thought the setting was ideal: on a big lot near Yosemite National Park. As recently as a decade ago, she told me by Zoom one recent morning, she didn’t particularly worry about wildfires—a problem that now plagues her area with disturbing frequency. Pratt said she has been forced to evacuate three times.

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Talking the AI Talk

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.AI was not always the hottest thing in tech. Now corporate America is leaning into its use of the term.

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TB research shows a good diet can cut infections by nearly 50%

Madhukar Pai reports that he has no financial or industry conflicts. He serves as an advisor to the following non-profit global health agencies; World Health Organization, Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, Geneva, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Stop TB Partnership.For centuries, we have known that tuberculosis is a social disease. It thrives on poverty and social factors such as malnutrition, poor housing, overcrowding, unsafe work environments and stigma.

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How cartoonist Bruce Petty documented the Vietnam War - and how his great satire keeps finding its moment

After seven decades as a visual satirist provoking Australia as it is and might be, Bruce Petty passed away at 93 on April 6 this year. His career as a political cartoonist started with a trip to London in the late 1950s, then a stint at young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon paper in Sydney, the Mirror.

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Woman With Paralysis Can Speak By Thinking With a Brain Implant and A.I.

The experimental interface allows the patient to communicate through a digital avatar, and it’s faster than her current systemAfter Ann Johnson suffered a stroke 18 years ago, she became paralyzed and lost the ability to speak. Now, with the help of a brain implant and artificial intelligence, she is able to communicate verbally again through a digital avatar.

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The Most Believable Reality TV Is Set on Mars

Stars on Mars—a show about celebrities solving made-up problems in space—gets one thing about astronaut missions very, very right.The astronauts arrived at the Mars base one by one, dressed in faded orange spacesuits. After they walked through a pressurized chamber and removed their helmets, they were blasted in the face with some sort of decontaminating mist. When the cyclist Lance Armstrong walked in, one of his comrades was in awe. “The fact that we have an astronaut is so crazy,” Ariel Winter, an actor who appeared on Modern Family, told another contestant, who was visibly confused. Winter had mistaken this Armstrong for Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who died in 2012.

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New York Is Full

Since last spring, roughly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City. This is a city of immigrants, welcoming to immigrants, built by immigrants. People who were born abroad make up a third of New York’s population and own more than half of its businesses. Yet the city has struggled to accommodate this wave of new arrivals. Migrants are selling candy on the subways, sleeping on the streets in Midtown, waiting for spots in homeless shelters. Families are struggling to access public schools, legal aid, and health care. They are vulnerable to predation and violence.It is a humanitarian crisis. The city has scrambled to accommodate these new residents, but Mayor Eric Adams says that New York is officially overwhelmed. “We have reached full capacity,” he said bluntly at a press conference last month. “We have no more room in the city.”

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'So many things to consider': how to help school leavers decide what to do next

As we pass the half way mark in term 3, many students in Year 12 will be thinking more and more about their future. Universities and TAFEs are having open days and no doubt, teachers, friends and family will be asking, “what are you going to do next year?”

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Wildfire smoke is an increasing threat to Canadians' health

Air quality in Canada has improved over the past several decades, and Canada’s air is among the cleanest in the world. But that progress is threatened by smoke from wildfires, which are becoming more frequent and more intense with climate change. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season is the worst on record, with more than 5,800 reported fires and over 15 million hectares burned to date.

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Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

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.“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote as he bridged his young science with ancient Eastern philosophy to reckon with the ongoing mystery of what we are.A century later — a century in the course of which we unraveled the double helix, detected the Higgs boson, decoded the human genome, heard a gravitational wave and saw a black hole for the first time, and discovered thousands of other possible worlds beyond our Solar System — the mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness,” capable of music and of murder. Each day, we eat food that becomes us, its molecules metabolized into our own as we move through the world with the illusion of a self. Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the “same” person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced. Each day, we find ourselves restless miniatures of a vast universe we are only just beginning to fathom.

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Analogue's supercharged modern-day Game Boy now glows in the dark

If you've been on the fence about the Analogue Pocket, the modernized FPGA-powered Game Boy clone that will play all of your old cartridges, maybe the company's newest limited-edition release will push you over the edge. Analogue is releasing a glow-in-the-dark version of the Pocket, with all the same features as the original but a new green luminescent casing that recalls every cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark toy I ever had.

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What Adults Forget About Friendship

Just catching up can feel stale. Playing and wasting time together like kids do are how you make memories.Rachel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship. When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”—a name combining each of their first initials—that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.

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Apple plans biggest iPad Pro update since 2018

Apple's iPad Pro is set to get its biggest redesign since 2018, according to a new report. Slated for a launch next year, it will seek to turn around recent years' slow tablet sales.

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Learning from failures: Support for scientific research needs to include when things don't work out

The cellular processes involved in gene regulation can be unexpectedly complicated. The expression of genes — the when, where and how much of gene activity — underlies all of biology, but is surprisingly poorly understood. Biological complexity — the gloriously complicated and convoluted living world around us — is driven by regulation and specificity.

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The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues | Quanta Magazine

One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I perched precariously on a ladder painting the window frame of my house, there it was again!What's going on here? I'm not deliberately protruding my tongue when I do these things, so why does it keep making appearances? After all, it's not as if that versatile lingual muscle has anything to do with controlling my hands. Right?

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Business schools must step up on sustainable investing education

Sustainable investing takes into account environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors alongside traditional financial components. While this form of investing has existed for a long time, ESG has become a hot-button issue due to recent politicization and widespread public misconceptions around what it really entails. ESG investing examines quantitative and qualitative non-financial data on companies. This includes environmental issues like carbon emissions, pollution and resource use; social issues like employee treatment and relationships with communities; and governance issues like diversity of corporate boards, business ethics and transparency.

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The new spreadsheet? OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses

On Monday, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Enterprise, an AI assistant aimed at businesses that offers unlimited access to GPT-4 at faster speeds. It also includes extended context windows for processing longer texts, encryption, enterprise-grade security and privacy, and group account management features.

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Forgotten Winnie-the-Pooh Sketch Found Wrapped in an Old Tea Towel

A rediscovered drawing of the iconic children’s book character and his friend Piglet could sell for thousands at auctionFor decades, an original Winnie-the-Pooh sketch had been hiding in a cellar, wrapped in an old tea towel and forgotten in the back of a drawer. Now, the rediscovered sketch could sell for thousands.

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