   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S69Astronomers Find a Massive Crater on a Tiny World Beyond Pluto   Astronomers just spotted a huge crater on a 500-mile-wide dwarf planet in the outer Solar System.Sometime in our Solar System’s past, a 500-mile-wide ball of rock called 2002 MS4 was peacefully drifting through the Kuiper Belt, minding its own business, when something smashed into its northern hemisphere.
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S1The Porcupine Dilemma: Schopenhauer's Parable about Negotiating the Optimal Distance in Love  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 is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that “even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist.” In consequence, we move through love in a clumsy dance of approach and withdrawal, trying to negotiate the optimal distance for that elusive, ecstatic feeling of spacious togetherness.
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S2Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden  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.“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden. No wonder Emily Dickinson spent her life believing that “to be Flower, is profound Responsibility.” No wonder Virginia Woolf had her epiphany about what it means to be an artist in the garden.The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them (public library). Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”
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S3How to Tap the Full Potential of Telemedicine  Telemedicine visits in the United States have fallen sharply since April 2020, but the end of the pandemic should not spell the end of telemedicine. It can play a valuable role in the delivery of health care. The key to tapping its potential is to bring many elements of the clinic to the patient. An array of new technologies and services is making that possible.
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S4How Brands Can Sell to Environmentally Conscious Nonconsumers  New research into how consumer attitudes about climate change affect their behavior and purchasing habits find that the largest segment is “Conscious Non-consumers” — that is, people who have changed their behavior to help the environment, but are not purchasing environmentally friendly products. For companies selling these products, reaching this segment of consumers can be a source of profits and impact. The research finds specific barriers that prevent this group from making sustainable purchases — and corresponding strategies to help overcome those barriers.
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S5How to Fight a Price War  Price wars—retaliatory cuts in prices to win customers—can devastate managers, companies, even entire industries. Yet they’re increasingly common in electronic and traditional commerce. Witness the great price battle of 1999 in the long-distance phone industry: after the dust cleared, AT&T, MCI, and Sprint all saw their stock prices dip by as much as 5%.
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S6How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight  Top-level managers know that conflict over issues is natural and even necessary. Management teams that challenge one another’s thinking develop a more complete understanding of their choices, create a richer range of options, and make better decisions. But the challenge–familiar to anyone who has ever been part of a management team–is to keep constructive conflict over issues from degenerating into interpersonal conflict. From their research on the interplay of conflict, politics, and speed in the decision-making process of management teams, the authors have distilled a set of six tactics characteristic of high-performing teams:
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S7Why boycotts eventually fall into 'the dustbin of outrage'  For the first time in six years, Target announced a sales drop: a decline of 5% in the April to June 2023 period, compared with the same time in 2022. During that time, the big-box retailer was also embroiled in a controversy over their collection of merchandise for Pride Month, which spurred consumer backlash and boycotts from some politically conservative shoppers.Coincidence? Perhaps not, said Christina Hennington, Target's executive vice president, on the company's Q2 2023 earnings call. She attributed the sales decline in part to a "strong reaction to this year's Pride assortment" that affected store traffic, and also cut the company's full-year forecast.
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S8Eight startling images of life under the Mafia  If you were a newspaper photographer working in Palermo at the height of the Sicilian Mafia's power, you had to get used to being woken up by telephone calls in the middle of the night. There's been a murder, your editor would tell you, before giving you an address so you could rush to the scene.More like this: - The most iconic photos of the American West - Photos that show landscapes few can see - Why 1960 was a turning point for Africa
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S9Ferrari review: Adam Driver's latest is 'stuck in the slow lane'  Adam Driver played an Italian industrialist with a resentful wife in House of Gucci as recently as 2021, but he does the same thing again in Ferrari, the first film in eight years to be directed by Michael Mann. This time it's Penélope Cruz rather than Lady Gaga who co-stars as his fiery other half, but the two films have much in common, not least the international cast delivering English dialogue in a variety of Italian accents that probably should have been confined to a Super Mario Bros movie. Maybe Driver felt that, with his surname, he had no choice but to play Enzo Ferrari, racing champion-turned car manufacturer.More like this: - Oppenheimer is 'a flat-out masterpiece' - Is Tom Cruise the last action hero? - The film that captured actors' AI fears
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S10Lindokuhle Sobekwa's powerful personal journey as a photographer in South Africa  Lindokuhle Sobekwa has been awarded South Africa’s 2023 FNB Art Prize. He becomes the first artist using documentary photography as his primary medium to win the prestigious competition. Born in Katlehong in 1995, Sobekwa began learning photography skills in 2012, through the Of Soul and Joy photography education programme in Thokoza township, where his family had moved. He knew, as a young boy, that he thought in images, visualising what he experienced. Encountering cameras, he realised there was equipment – a small machine, a perforated roll of clear plastic, and a chemical reaction – able to externalise his thought processes.
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S11S12S13Trans students benefit from gender-inclusive classrooms, research shows - and so do the other students and science itself  Across the U.S., legislators are debating how and when sex and gender should be discussed in the classroom and beyond. Specifically, these bills are considering whether anything beyond male or female can be included in library books and lesson plans. These bills are part of a larger debate on how to define and regulate sex and gender, and there are no immediate answers that satisfy everyone.Many of the bills draw on science to make claims about sex and gender. For example, Florida House Bill 1069, which legislates pronoun use in schools, assumes that all of a person’s sex markers – listed as sex chromosomes, “naturally occurring” sex hormones and internal and external genitalia at birth – will align as female or male “based on the organization of the body … for a specific reproductive role.” The bill claims that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.”
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S14S15Peruvian writers tell of a future rooted in the past and contemporary societal issues  The Aymara people of the Andean Highlands speak of “qhipa pacha,” a phrase that refers to the future as a direction one walks to backward. They believe in looking to the past as a way to understand what may come next.Last year, 13 Peruvian writers launched the Qhipa Pacha Collective, a literary initiative which “aims to recover the memory of our original peoples to build possible worlds.” These writers imagine futures that reflect Peruvian ideas and concerns about their past and present.
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S16Michael Oher, Mike Tyson and the question of whether you own your life story  What if you overcame a serious illness to go on to win an Olympic medal? Could a writer or filmmaker decide to tell your inspiring story without consulting you? Or do you “own” that story and control how it gets retold?Michael Oher, the former NFL player portrayed in the 2009 blockbuster “The Blind Side,” has sued Michael and Anne Leigh Tuohy, the suburban couple who took him into their home as a disadvantaged youth.
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S17S18Ukraine war: the implications of Moscow moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus  Russia is reported to have deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, a step that was much telegraphed earlier this year and recently confirmed by Poland. This move has caused concern in neighbouring countries and has affected security arrangements in Europe. Russia reportedly has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, with (as of 2023) 5,889 nuclear warheads compared to 5,244 deployed by the US. But size (or, more accurately, numbers of warheads) should not be important.
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S19A fruit fly has landed in your wine - is it OK to drink?  You pour a chilled glass of your favourite sauvignon blanc and are about to take a sip when a fruit fly lands in it. The fly is clearly dead. But given what you know about where flies hang out, you wonder if it’s safe to drink.Despite their salubrious sounding name, fruit flies (Drosophila species), eat food that is decaying. They inhabit rubbish bins, compost heaps or any place where food is present, including drains. Rotting food is rich in germs, any of which a fly can pick up on their body and transfer to where it next lands.
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S20Emergency contraception: here's what you probably don't know but should  Things don’t always go to plan when it comes to sex. Sometimes condoms break (or are even forgotten altogether) and daily contraceptive pills can be missed. Whatever the reason, if you need to prevent an unplanned pregnancy you might decide to use emergency contraception.There are three main options for emergency contraception: levonorgestrel tablets (known as Levonelle in the UK and Plan B in the US), ulipristal tablets (EllaOne in the UK and Ella in the US) and having a copper intra-uterine device (IUD – sometimes called the coil) fitted.
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S21The Blackening review: funny twists make up for a predictable plot  While booking tickets for new horror flick, The Blackening, I began to worry. There were so few showings! Was this Scary Movie for another generation of mind-numbed filmgoers? Could it somehow be worse? I felt uneasy as I watched characters drop the n-word throughout the introduction. When the post-title scene cut to a black woman in a wig my grandmother wouldn’t have been caught dead in, I sighed and prepared to be annoyed. Yet I soon found myself laughing out loud.The Blackening revolves around a group of African American friends reuniting in a cabin in the woods for the US public holiday Juneteenth. As the evening progresses, the group find themselves assaulted by game-playing murderers who are, weirdly, armed with crossbows.
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S22New Alzheimer's drugs don't deserve the hype - here's why  A prominent childhood memory is of my grandparents living with and then dying from dementia. As is universal with dementia, there was a double blow: watching my grandparents lose their identity and seeing the suffering of those closest to them. Naturally, this makes me desperate for good news on treatment options for Alzheimer’s disease – the main cause of dementia. Enter three drugs (aducanumab (trade name Aduhelm), lecanemab (Leqembi) and donanemab) that remove amyloid, the protein thought to cause Alzheimer’s disease. Unlike their many predecessors, that also successfully removed amyloid from the brain, these drugs were the first to slow cognitive decline.
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S23Why Pope's message to young Russians not to forget 'great Russia of Catherine II and Peter I' has not gone down well in Ukraine  Pope Francis’s video speech to the All-Russian Meeting of Catholic Youth in St Petersburg, urging them to “not forget their heritage” has caused quite a stir. What struck a bitter chord internationally – and especially in Ukraine – about the remarks he delivered on August 25 was not so much its religious contents, but its tone-deaf praise of the heritage of “Mother Russia”, which he urged his listeners to never give up. You are the descendants of great Russia: the great Russia of saints, rulers, the great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire – educated, great culture and great humanity
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S24S25S26Winnie and Mandela biography: a masterful tale of South Africa's troubled, iconic power couple  Jonny Steinberg’s splendid 550-page biography, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, ends on a note of pathos with a poignant tale from Nelson Mandela’s deathbed.Four days from death in December 2013, Nelson is in an advanced state of dementia and refuses to eat. Graça Machel, his third wife, invites his estranged second wife, Winnie, to be with him, noting that she was “Nelson’s great love”, and it’s Winnie who feeds him. Winnie remarks to a friend:
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S27How our ancestors viewed the sky: new film explores both indigenous and modern cosmology  University of the Witwatersrand provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA.Something remarkable is happening in a remote part of South Africa’s Northern Cape province, in a semi-desert area called the Karoo. In the past 15 years 64 radio receiving dishes have appeared on the landscape. These constitute the MeerKAT telescope, a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), which will – when it is completed and fully functional in 2030 – be the world’s largest radio telescope.
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S28S29What a Labour government would mean for the right to roam  The Labour Party has promised to introduce a Scottish-style right to roam over the English and Welsh countryside if elected to government. How might that change your ability to enjoy the great outdoors and what lessons does Scotland offer?The debate over public access to the British countryside received fresh publicity in 2023 after a landowner in Dartmoor, a moorland in the county of Devon in southwest England, brought a legal challenge to the rights of wild campers to stay on his 1,619 hectare estate. While the landowner lost on appeal and the right to camp was restored, the right to camp still applies only to common land in Dartmoor National Park.
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S30Ukraine war: Australian-made cardboard drones used to attack Russian airfield show how innovation is key to modern warfare  Innovative design choices can have a massive impact in the theatre of war, so it is important to understand the principles behind their development. Recent use of low-cost cardboard drones by Ukraine, supplied by Australia, to attack targets in Russia is a good example of how this can work. Australia has been supplying Ukraine with 100 of the drones per month from March this year as part of an aid package deal worth an estimated £15.7 million, following an agreement struck in July 2021, according to the Australian Army Defence Innovation Hub.
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S31Rooftop renewables risk making the rich richer, as latecomers will struggle to access the grid  Many people are now becoming “energy citizens” by installing rooftop solar panels and other small-scale renewable energy projects in their properties. In theory, this is a “win-win”. Added renewable energy brings down the cost of energy, and by replacing fossil fuels, cuts planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. But there is concern that as more people install solar panels and other renewable projects, local electricity grids may become congested.
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S32World Cup kiss: feminist progress is always met with backlash, but Spain's #MeToo moment shows things are changing  Winning the women’s World Cup was a significant moment for Spanish football. Spain is now one of only two teams who are world champions in both the male and female competitions (Germany is the other). This momentous achievement cannot have been lost on Spanish football executives. For that reason, it is particularly incomprehensible that the president of the Spanish football federation kissed the women’s team player Jenni Hermoso on the lips in plain view of the entire world, turning what should have been a celebration into a reckoning.
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S33Ukraine recap: fallout from death of Yevgeny Prigozhin will be felt far beyond Moscow  Where were you when you heard that Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aircraft had crashed and he was presumed dead? For Ukraine watchers it was something of a surreal JFK moment. And, like the Zapruder tape, the video footage of the Russian mercenary group commander’s Embraer Legacy 600 private jet falling out of the sky is hard to forget.Within minutes of the visuals emerging, journalists and other commentators were scrambling to reach conclusions: was it a bomb on board? Had the aircraft been shot from the sky? The Wagner Group boss had been travelling with colleagues from Moscow to St Petersburg: had he met with Vladimir Putin? Had they buried the hatchet over his aborted “mutiny” in June? Wasn’t he supposed to be with his troops in Belarus? What about that video of him in Africa just days before? So many questions.
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S34S35Zuranolone for postpartum depression: Hope, hype or both?  While mothers with postpartum depression have always faced barriers accessing the care they need, things have been particularly bad since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, it was thought that up to one in five women would develop depression in the first postpartum year, but the stresses and service disruptions associated with the pandemic increased this to one in three. However, the pandemic also coincided with a period of significant innovation in treatment that may increase access to and effectiveness of care.
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S36S37S38S39Friday essay: traps, rites and kurrajong twine - the incredible ingenuity of Indigenous fishing knowledge  Standing on a ferry chugging across Sydney Harbour, it’s still possible to imagine the city as it was in 1788 – before the span of the bridge, before the marinas and yachts, before buildings were planted onto that sloping, rocky landscape. Pockets of bush still reach down towards the water, where gums and angophoras curl around sandstone coves carved out by the sea water.Ferries stop at Mosman, Manly and Milsons Point, where fishers share the wharf with boats and commuters. They perch on folding chairs next to white buckets of bait, or they plonk down on the wooden beams, rod in hand, their legs dangling over the edge as they sit.
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S40Labor's new Murray-Darling Basin Plan deal entrenches water injustice for First Nations  The federal government has struck a new deal with most of the states in the nation’s largest river system. The agreement, announced last week, extends the $13 billion 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan to rebalance water allocated to the environment, irrigators and other uses. negotiated a way to ensure there is secure and reliable water for communities, agriculture, industry, First Nations and the environment.
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S41'Emu Men': a new way to recognise and celebrate Indigenous fathers  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images of deceased people. All images featured in this article have been published with respective permissions.For many Indigenous peoples, this includes our biological father, adopted fathers, as well as our grandfathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, and more.
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S42S43S44Even if her leadership is now doomed, Annastacia Palaszczuk will still be a Labor legend in Queensland  Whatever fate awaits Annastacia Palaszczuk over the coming weeks, Queensland’s 39th – and only the second woman – premier will never lose her standing in the Australian Labor pantheon.Palaszczuk, the state Labor leader since 2012 and premier since 2015, is already Australia’s most successful female political leader. She was the first woman to lead an opposition into government in an Australian state or federal election, the first woman to attain three successive election victories in Australia, and the first head of a majority-female cabinet.
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S45Fewer of us are cycling - here's how we can reverse the decline  Rates of cycling are falling in Australia, a national report released today shows. More people started riding bikes early in the pandemic, but that hasn’t lasted. The percentages of people who cycle are lower now than in 2011.Less than one in six Australians report riding a bicycle weekly. Just over one in three have ridden in the past year.
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S46Here's what new 60-day prescriptions mean for you and your hip pocket  Andrew Bartlett is a member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, a previous director of Blooms the Chemist management services and remains a shareholder.From today, there are significant changes to how some common medicines are prescribed and dispensed in Australia. This means you could walk away from the pharmacy with 60-days’ worth of your usual medicine from a single prescription.
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S47S48S49Jokowi is right not to join 'BRICS' for now - but the alliance is still important for Indonesia  Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo travelled to Johannesburg, South Africa, on August 24 to attend the 15th BRICS summit, an informal grouping of five major emerging nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.Just before the summit, the BRICS group announced Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, would become members as of January 1 next year.
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S50S51S52S53Future diets will be short of micronutrients like iron -- it's time to consider how we feed people  Severe iron deficiency, also known as anaemia, affects nearly 50% of women of reproductive age in regions like South Asia, Central Africa and West Africa (in contrast to 16% of women in high-income countries). In New Zealand, 10.6% of women aged 15-18 and 12.1% of women aged 31-50 suffer from iron deficiency. The risk increases during the third trimester of pregnancy, and the iron status must be carefully monitored to ensure good health for both the mother and baby.
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S54Australia tops the world for podcast listening. Why do we love them so much?  So begins the first ever episode of New York Times’ The Daily podcast, delivered by host Michael Barbaro in his now famous style. It arrived on Wednesday February 1, 2017 – less than a fortnight after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States.By the end of Trump’s term, it was wildly popular, reportedly attracting some four million daily downloads and referred to as the newspaper’s “new front page”.
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S55Gabon coup: Bongo's rule ended by failed promises and shifting alliances  Gyldas A. Ofoulhast-Othamot is not affiliated with any political organizations either in the U.S. or Gabon. However, in the two most recent presidential elections, as a private citizen of Gabon, he endorsed both Jean Ping (2016) and Albert Ondo Ossa (2023).The presidential election on 26 August was the sixth since the formal end of the one-party state in 1990. Like the others, it was contentious from the start.
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S56How J.R.R. Tolkien's novels were inspired by Medieval poems of 'northern bravery'  In a moment of distraction from the laborious work of marking an “enormous pile of examination papers”, J.R.R. Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. This became the first line of The Hobbit (1937). From this doodle Tolkien went on to write one of the world’s most popular fantasy adventure series, The Lord of the Rings (1954).
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S57Is Wegovy really a gamechanger for heart health? A consultant cardiologist gives his verdict  The weight-loss jab Wegovy has been hailed as an “absolute game-changer” after a new study showed that it relieved symptoms and improved the quality of life in people with a common form of heart failure.The participants in the trial had “heart failure with preserved ejection fraction”, a very common condition in which the heart stiffens, leading to breathlessness, fatigue and fluid retention. It is very hard to treat and doctors mainly focus on alleviating the patient’s symptoms.
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S58What Insects Go Through Is Even Weirder Than We Thought  “For me, it was a road-to-Damascus type of moment,” James Truman, an entomologist, told me, recalling an encounter when he was sixteen. “My family had a summer place, a trailer, on the shores of Lake Erie. I was walking through the trailer park when I looked up and I saw an insect up in a tree. It was a parasitic wasp, with an abdomen three inches long.” He thought, What the heck is that? That curiosity “caused me to get a book,” Truman said. It was “Field Book of Insects,” by Frank E. Lutz, first published in 1918, with detailed drawings by the scientific illustrator Edna Libby Beutenmüller. “I had always known I wanted to be a biologist, but I had flipped from one interest to another: birds, mammals, whatever,” Truman said. Then he was transformed. He knew he would study insects.Insects are small, sure, but they represent more than eighty per cent of animal species. They also have a special magic: most of them undergo complete metamorphosis. The ladybug begins life as a spiky black crawler; the garden tiger moth starts out life as an extravagantly furred caterpillar. Some fish and amphibians also metamorphose (mammals never!), but because insects have exoskeletons—their metamorphic transformation happens out of sight—when the adult creature emerges, fully formed, the effect can be as astonishing as Athena transforming a falling Perdix into a partridge, or Daphne being turned into a laurel tree.
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S59The Twilight of Mitch McConnell and the Spectre of 2024  The tape is painful to watch. Whatever you think of Mitch McConnell, it was simply a political car crash to see the Senate Minority Leader, during a press conference in his home state of Kentucky on Wednesday, freeze up and stare blankly from a lectern for more than thirty long seconds, even after an aide rushed to his side and asked gently, “Did you hear the question, Senator?” All the worse, the question to which he never responded was whether he would run again when his Senate term is up in three years. Ouch.McConnell, who is eighty-one years old, has experienced a precipitous and very public decline since falling at a Washington hotel during a fund-raiser last March—and suffering a concussion. So far, the senator has refused to provide detailed information about his medical condition; indeed, his office sought to quell concerns after Wednesday’s event by claiming he was simply “momentarily lightheaded.” A letter from Congress’s attending physician, a day later, pronouncing him “medically clear” to keep up his schedule was hardly reassuring, either. The latest incident, coming after a similar moment of incapacity at a Capitol Hill press conference earlier this summer, has made clear that something serious is afflicting the top Republican in the Senate. In six months, McConnell has gone from the G.O.P.’s feared power broker to a symbol of how quickly things can go wrong for America’s fragile gerontocracy: running the world one minute, frail and unable to parry questions the next.
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S60The Political, Metaphysical Melodrama of "Dragonwyck"  F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood novel, "The Last Tycoon," is an admiring roman à clef about the visionary studio boss Irving Thalberg, who, in his early twenties, had more or less invented the producer-centric studio system. The novel, drawing on Fitzgerald's time working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, includes a sardonic depiction of an assistant producer named Jacques La Borwits, an obsequious yes-man who's always wrong. He's based on another boy genius, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was a twentysomething writer and producer at M-G-M when he and Fitzgerald butted heads. (Mankiewicz offended Fitzgerald by rewriting his dialogue; he saw its literary merit but thought it was ill-suited to performance.) In Fitzgerald's working notes for the novel, he wrote, "La Borwitz. Joe Mankâpictures smell of rotten bananas."Perhaps if Fitzgerald, who died in 1940, had lived longer, he'd have changed his mind, because Mankiewicz was soon to distinguish himself from Thalberg in one crucial regard: he became a director. What's more, his directorial début, "Dragonwyck,"âproduced in 1945 and streaming on the Criterion Channel starting September 1stâimmediately showed him to be one of Hollywood's most original filmmakers. It was a time when directorial débuts had begun to matter, thanks to the enormous impact of Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane." (That movie was co-written by Mankiewicz's older brother Hermanâthe "Mank" of David Fincher's recent bio-picâwho had brought Joseph to Hollywood in 1929, when he was nineteen.) In the wake of "Citizen Kane," a generation of youngish filmmakers, though firmly ensconced in the industry, made highly personal films that, in many cases, set the tone for their entire career.
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S61Virtual-Reality School as the Ultimate School Choice  It’s 6 A.M. A little girl, who looks to be about ten years old, hits the button on her alarm clock. She eats a bowl of cereal and brushes her teeth and hair before going to school. In class, she takes notes while her teacher, Mrs. Marty, gives a lesson. Then everyone puts on spacesuits and helmets, and the class relocates to outer space.This is the vision for a new kind of education sold in a promotional video for Optima Academy Online, an all-virtual school that was launched in 2022. The little girl, like most of her classmates and teachers, spends a good part of her day in a Meta Quest 2 headset—a set of one-pound white goggles that extends in a single band across her eyes. She wears the headset on and off for about three hours, removing it to read a book, eat a sandwich, and hot-glue some sort of tinfoil art. Her classmates are scattered across different towns, and her teachers live all over the country. In the video, the little girl doesn’t have a single in-person interaction.
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S62Star Wars Is Stealing a Brilliant Trick From an Underrated Sci-Fi Franchise  Before Marrok turned to the dark side of the Force, did he spend some time stuck in a video game?. In Ahsoka Episode 3, “Time To Fly,” the mysterious helmeted Inquisitor gets a few more lines of dialogue, which only puts fuel on the fire of fan theories that Marrok is actually some pre-existing Star Wars character in disguise. We’re still assuming he’ll turn out to just be some guy, but if Marrok really is a Starkiller, or Evil Ezra, or some other Star Wars deep cut, the entire thing will be a not-so-subtle reference to Tron: Legacy.In “Time To Fly,” Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), unblinkingly orders Marrok around, saying, “Form up on my wing and wait for my signal.” Marrok responds with a husky “As you wish.” This seems to be the voice of longtime Star Wars voice actor Sam Witwer, who voiced Maul in both The Clone Wars and Rebels, as well as the character Starkiller in the non-canon games The Force Unleashed.
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S63S64'Baldur's Gate 3's Big Controversy Misses the Real Problem With Janky Games  Gamers have had enough. They’re tired of seeing big-budget games like Diablo 4 nickel and dime them via microtransactions. They’re heartbroken to see franchises like Overwatch become a shadow of their former selves. They’re disappointed to know hyped games like Cyberpunk 2077 often don’t resemble what they were pitched in trailers. Blockbuster games on the whole seem to be in a crisis, but few are feeling the casualties as much as PC gamers. 2023 has seen a slew of high-profile yet barely playable games like The Last of Us 2 and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor released on PC. Baldur’s Gate 3, the dense new RPG by Larian Studios, isn’t just bucking the trend for PC games: it’s being hailed as an all-time classic, a seminal moment for the medium that everyone should learn from.Reviews on Steam laud the game not just on its own merits, but in comparison to the industry. One popular review on the platform isn’t even directed at players, but rather at game developers who, in their estimation, aren’t giving fans what they actually want. “Just a polished game with unlimited hours of fun,” the Steam user declares after denouncing the evils of battle passes, microtransactions, and DLCs.
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S65Amazon's Most Underrated Epic Fantasy Series is Finally Getting Interesting  The Wheel of Time is the type of show designed to go on for years: adapted from the Robert Jordan novels of the same name, the Prime Video series has decades of lore to mine, and a loyal fanbase that goes back to the ‘90s. Jordan’s massive world comes with its own appeal on the page, but translating it to the screen is another thing entirely — and The Wheel of Time learned that the hard way in its first season.That said, the series wasn’t without its merits. Take away its epic scale, and The Wheel of Time is essentially about power: who can wield it, and who will destroy themselves trying. Magic in Jordan’s universe is literally called “the One Power,” and it’s inherently gendered. Women are the only ones able to access it at will, while men are cursed with madness for attempting the same.
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S66'Ahsoka' Episode 3 Easter Egg Reveals a Heartbreaking Star Wars Twist  Hera Syndulla has lost a lot in life. Her great love, Kanan Jarrus, gave his life for her and the rest of her crew, and now her other de facto family member, Ezra Bridger, is MIA. But she does have one thing to hold to: Jacen, the son she had with Kanan. In a bittersweet moment in Ahsoka Episode 3, we see Hera discuss Jedi training with Jacen, knowing full well she’s already lost two Jedi. However, a closer look at the scene reveals a hidden Easter egg that paints it in a new light. Jacen may have never met his father, but he’s definitely heard stories of him. Kanan Jarrus is a hero on Lothal, where there’s a mural dedicated to him and his compatriots. And now we know Jacen personally idolizes his father in a very tangible way.
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S67'Starfield' Review: A Compelling and Occasionally Maddening Spacefaring Epic  For every drab mining outpost full of penny-ante goons, you’ll stumble upon a phosphorescent fungus forest, a ritzy zero-gravity casino, or an interstellar school bus full of sixth graders eager to interview a real-life starship captain.The wonder of discovery is everywhere in Starfield. Say you’re just minding your business, scanning for minerals when some snake-worshiping wiseguy takes a pop at you. You could choose to off his entire crew and commandeer his vessel. You might not need a new spaceship, but hey, why not? Point that ship in any direction, and you’ll find countless stories big and small — a far-flung trading crew who got fatally ill from the cargo they were hauling, a galaxy-spanning conspiracy to conceal hideous crimes.
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S68How Long Is 'Starfield'? Hours to Beat and New Game Plus, Explained  In a year full of massive, highly anticipated, big-budget video games, Bethesda’s Starfield still stands out in terms of hype and sheer scope. As the first game in Bethesda’s signature first-person RPG style since 2015’s Fallout 4 — and the developer’s first new IP in 25 years — Starfield has an unfathomable amount riding on its success. Even before the game launched, it was clear Bethesda would spare no expense to bring its next massively anticipated adventure to life.When Bethesda boasted in 2022 that Starfield would include “over 1,000 planets all open for you to explore,” players naturally started wondering, just how big is this game? And how many sick days will I have to use to play it all? With Starfield launching on September 6 and early access available for premium edition players on August 31 or September 1 (depending on where in the world you live), we finally know just how long it will take players to explore the depths of its expansive universe.
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S70'Super Mario Bros. Wonder' Is Already Impossible Not to Love  From the moment I sat down in front of Super Mario Bros. Wonder at a recent Nintendo event, I was enthralled. As Mario ran from left to right, he was greeted by talking flowers, bouncing blocks, and a level of whimsy absent from the many grim AAA titles released this year.It got even better when I grabbed the elephant power-up, first revealed during June’s Nintendo Direct. Controlling Mario as he smacked enemies with his trunk and splashed water on irritated Goombas brought me back to my childhood of playing Super Mario Sunshine with a less talkative FLUDD. Even though my time was brief with the first new 2D Mario game in more than a decade, I came away convinced it will live up to the series’ storied history.
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