The CEOs drawing a hard line on return-to-office policies

Throughout the past couple of years, many employers have been relatively lenient about office returns, even in stricter industries like finance and consulting. In response, employees have largely shown a preference for remote work.By July 2023, data from Kastle Systems, measuring entry swipes at office buildings, showed the average workplace occupancy among 41,000 businesses in the US sat at around 50%. In response to diminished attendance, some of the world's biggest firms have even been forced to slash their real estate footprints.

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Secondhand smoke may be a substantial contributor to lead levels found in children and adolescents, new study finds

Secondhand smoke may be an important but overlooked source of chronic lead exposure in kids and adolescents. That is the key finding of our recent study, published in the journal BMC Public Health.We analyzed national data on blood lead levels and secondhand smoke exposure in 2,815 U.S. children and teenagers ages 6 to 19 from 2015 to 2018. We looked at levels of lead and a nicotine metabolite – a substance known as cotinine produced in the body’s chemical process that forms when tobacco smoke is inhaled. Levels of cotinine indicate exposure to tobacco smoke.

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The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 50 years on

On a remote planet, the Guardian of Forever sits, a passageway through time to other realities, locations, dimensions. All of a sudden, Captain Kirk comes through the portal, with Spock close behind him, fresh from an adventure observing the beginnings of the Orion civilisation. There's just one problem: Dr Bones McCoy has no idea who Spock is – and neither does anyone else on the starship USS Enterprise. This scene, from an episode called Yesteryear, doesn't feature in any of the five core Star Trek series. The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise are modern classics that contain unending nostalgia for fans, but there's another early Star Trek show that many people overlook – Star Trek: The Animated Series. It ran for just 20 episodes. Its status, and specifically whether it's considered part of the "canon", is uncertain. But it has an important legacy, bringing animation in as a key part of the franchise as well as keeping Star Trek in people's minds during an in-between era, much like the one we're entering now.

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A Rom-Com Franchise That Needs to End

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is uncomfortable to watch, squandering whatever goodwill the series once had.In 2002, My Big Fat Greek Wedding became a genuine phenomenon. Written by and starring the then-little-known Nia Vardalos, the film made nearly 50 times its modest $5 million budget at the domestic box office, and remained in theaters for an entire year. As formulaic as the plot may have been—a woman falls for a man with a different background—the script was clever, coupling familiar romantic-comedy tropes with culture-clash humor. Clichés about the Greek American lifestyle blanketed the script, but they charmed thanks to an enthusiastic ensemble cast. As my colleague Megan Garber observed, the movie “was a big hunk of baklava: layered, nutty, shockingly sweet.”

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You Might Like

Archaeologists Unearth Four 1,900-Year-Old Roman Swords in Israeli Cave

Jewish rebels may have hidden the weapons away from the Roman army in the second century C.E.Archaeologists in Israel have discovered four Roman-era swords in a cave near the Dead Sea. Even at roughly 1,900 years old, the artifacts are “exceptionally well preserved,” according to a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which announced the find earlier this week.

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Heat pumps will cool your home during the hottest of summers and reduce your global warming impact

PhD Candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis, University of California, Davis Heat pumps can be used to both cool and heat homes. The 2022 federal Inflation Reduction Act provides financial incentives for installing one. SciLine interviewed Theresa Pistochini of the Energy Efficiency Institute and Western Cooling Efficiency Center at the University of California, Davis. She describes how home heat pumps work; how switching to a heat pump reduces your home’s environmental impact; and when to upgrade your heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

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Do unbiased jurors exist to serve at Trump's trials in the age of social media?

As trial dates approach for former President Donald Trump’s indictments, both he and prosecutors are already claiming it will be hard to secure an impartial jury. Special counsel Jack Smith has said Trump’s public statements risk contaminating the jury pool for the charges he will face in a federal court in Washington, D.C., related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

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Death and mourning in Ghana: how gender shapes the rituals of the Akan people

Gender has a significant impact on the socio-economic, political and religious experiences of Ghanaians. For Akans, the country’s largest ethnic group, descent is traced through the maternal line. Property is transferred in this line too. Mourning rituals are another area of life that’s shaped by gender in Ghana – as in many other cultures of the world.

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Martha's rule: second-opinion law can work - but only if organisational shortcomings are addressed

As things stand, hospital patients in England have no legal right to a second medical opinion. But that could soon change, as a campaign to give patients formal entitlement to an urgent second opinion is gathering momentum and gaining support from key figures, including those in government as well as the NHS England Ombudsman. The proposal, called Martha’s rule, is named after a young girl whose life might have been saved by it. In 2021, 13-year-old Martha Mills died following an injury she sustained while on holiday with her family. Martha was treated at King’s College Hospital in London, where she developed life-threatening sepsis. The inquest following Martha’s death found it was avoidable, and that she would have survived were it not for tragic failures in the medical care she received. These failures included doctors withholding important information about Martha’s condition from her parents and ignoring their concerns.

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IRS is using $60B funding boost to ramp up use of technology to collect taxes - not just hiring more enforcement agents

The IRS plans to use most of these new funds to step up enforcement and improve customer service for taxpayers. There’s been plenty of conjecture about what the added enforcement will look like and no shortage of fearmongering about the tens of thousands of new agents the IRS might hire.

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The Biggest Smallest Triangle Just Got Smaller | Quanta Magazine

Consider a square with a bunch of points inside. Take three of those points, and you can make a triangle. Four points define four different triangles. Ten points define 120 triangles. The numbers grow quickly from there â 100 points define 161,700 different triangles. Each of those triangles, of course, has a particular area.Hans Heilbronn, a German mathematician who fled his country before World War II and settled in England, thought of these triangles in the late 1940s when he saw a group of soldiers outside his window. The soldiers didn't appear to be in formation, which got him thinking: If there are n soldiers inside a square, what is the size of the largest possible smallest triangle defined by three of them? Heilbronn wondered how one might go about arranging the soldiers (or, for mathematical simplicity, points) to maximize the size of the smallest triangle.

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How to Negotiate with Powerful Suppliers

In many industries the balance of power has shifted from buyers to suppliers. Companies that have gotten into a weak position need to tackle the problem strategically, the authors argue. They should consider the following actions and implement the least-risky one that is feasible for their organization.

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Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate

The first question plaguing omnivorous, content-hungry humans with a spare hour or two is this: What should I watch? In recent years, a second question has come to dominate our evening streaming rituals: How do I watch it? Drenching your eyeballs in sweet television can be surprisingly tricky, requiring some amount of research to determine which streaming platform has whatever you want to watch and, crucially, whether you pay for it already. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and Hulu are still sometimes not enough to watch the most popular shows, especially if you want to see Idris Elba attempt to outfox plane hijackers (you’ll need Apple TV+ for that).Most evenings, I find myself stuck in this phase, during which time I am likely to cycle through something resembling the five stages of grief. There’s Denial (I swear I had a Paramount+ account); Anger (I cannot believe I have to pay for Paramount+); Bargaining (I promise I will cancel my subscription after the one-week Paramount+ trial period ends); Depression (I cannot believe I didn’t remember to cancel Paramount+ after the trial period ended); and Acceptance (Let’s just head to Netflix and watch Suits).

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Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

In the past decade, the author has watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into better competitors. Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. In almost every case, the goal has been the same: to cope with a new, more challenging market by changing how business is conducted.

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South Africa's great white sharks are changing locations - they need to be monitored for beach safety and conservation

South Africa is renowned for having one of the world’s biggest populations of great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). Substantial declines have been observed, however, in places where the sharks normally gather on the coast of the Western Cape province. Sharks congregate at these locations to feed, interact socially, or rest. In Cape Town, skilled “shark spotters” documented a peak of over 300 great white shark sightings across eight beaches in 2011, but have recorded no sightings since 2019. These declines have sparked concerns about the overall conservation status of the species.

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Three Differences Between Managers and Leaders

You’re probably counting value, not adding it, if you’re managing people. Only managers count value; some even reduce value by disabling those who add value. If a diamond cutter is asked to report every 15 minutes how many stones he has cut, by distracting him, his boss is subtracting value.

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Why Go With an Evil-Looking Orb?

The controversial crypto project Worldcoin asks people to look into a shiny orb to have their irises scanned. It’s a bit on the nose.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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The Man Who Became Uncle Tom

Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Josiah Henson’s life had inspired her most famous character. But Henson longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements.“Among all the singular and interesting records to which the institution of American slavery has given rise,” Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote, “we know of none more striking, more characteristic and instructive, than that of JOSIAH HENSON.”

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Photos of the Week:

The World Tango Championship in Argentina, devastating floods in Greece, a scene from the 80th Venice Film Festival, a cricket game in Afghanistan, a light festival in South Africa, a buffalo police patrol in Brazil, a muddy mess at the Burning Man Festival, and much more This picture taken on September 2, 2023 shows a player scoring a try during the Water Rugby Lausanne by jumping into Lake Geneva from a floating rugby field. The match was part of a three-day tournament organized by the LUC Rugby that gathered more than 240 players in Lausanne, Switzerland. #

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What Is This Mysterious Golden Orb Scientists Found on the Ocean Floor?

After bringing the four-inch-diameter blob to the surface, researchers still only know that it is "biological in origin"Scientists are baffled by a mysterious blob they found on the ocean floor, deep underwater off the coast of Alaska.

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Teen's death after eating a single chip highlights risks of ultra-spicy foods

Harris Wolobah, a healthy 14-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, tragically died last Friday, hours after eating a single ultra-spicy tortilla chip seasoned with two of the hottest peppers in the world.

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The MonsterVerse comes to Apple TV+ with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters teaser

Major film franchises expanding into streaming television is officially a trend: Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, and now Legendary Entertainment's MonsterVerse, which brought together Godzilla, King Kong, and various other monsters (kaiju) created by Toho Co., Ltd into the same fold. There have been four feature films thus far, with a fifth slated for a 2024 release, plus the animated series Skull Island, which debuted on Netflix earlier this year. And now we've got the first teaser for Apple TV+'s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which picks up where the 2014 film Godzilla left off.

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Can Poland Roll Back Authoritarian Populism?

Next month’s election is a crucial test of whether the country’s autocratic ruling party can be checked at the ballot box.In Poland, next month’s parliamentary elections may be the opposition’s last, best chance to stop the country’s slide into autocracy. Along with Hungary, Poland once counted as a paradigmatic success story for a postcommunist transition to democracy. But also like Hungary, that reputation started to sour when far-right populists surged to power in the 2010s.

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Grattan on Friday: Transport Minister Catherine King struggles to find a landing strip amid Qatar turbulence

A few days ago, the furore over the government’s rejection of Qatar Airways’ bid for more flights into major cities was all about cheaper tickets and additional seats.Now the issue has doubled back to become, apparently, at least in part about the mistreatment of the Australian women who were hauled off a flight in 2020 and subjected to invasive body searches, after a newborn was found abandoned in Doha Airport.

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This Week in Books: Sylvia Plath Continues to Fascinate

Sylvia Plath lived only to the age of 30—this year marks the 60th anniversary of her death. When you consider all that has been written about her, and the writers still thinking of her, the shortness of her existence is shocking. Like the condensed imagery in her poetry—that unforgettable black shoe—her life, unpacked, reveals so much about the times in which she lived, about the forces working against her ambitions. We have an essay this week by the Brazilian writer Rafaela Bassili about Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, which also turns 60 this year, and how it helped form Bassili’s perceptions of the United States as a place of both promise and peril. The essay reminded me of my own recent encounter with Plath.In her article, Bassili references Heather Clark’s voluminous 2020 biography, Red Comet. Every reviewer of this book admitted to having the same preconception: How could there be anything new to say? The outlines of Plath’s life have been sketched out over and over again, from her years as a prodigy to her mental illness to her tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes to that final, famous suicide. So many Plath biographies have been published that Janet Malcolm even wrote what can only be called a metabiography, The Silent Woman, which explores the fights among those who have tried to interpret Plath’s life. But Clark, despite these odds, delivers something fresh.

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How the 'Wild Beasts' of Fauvism Took the Art World by Storm

A new exhibition examines the short-lived movementâand sheds new light on its women membersIn 1905,Â Henri Matisse andÂ AndrÃ© Derain worked together in the small Mediterranean town of Collioure. There, the two artists created some of the first works of an audacious, albeit short-lived, movement: Fauvism.

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