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 S66Kevin McCarthy Is a Hostage   The speaker’s abrupt impeachment probe against Biden is the latest sign that he’s still fighting for his job.As Kevin McCarthy made his televised declaration earlier today that House Republicans were launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the House speaker stood outside his office in the Capitol, a trio of American flags arrayed behind to lend an air of dignity to such a grave announcement. But McCarthy looked and sounded like a hostage, and for good reason.
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S1Research: How Cultural Differences Can Impact Global Teams  Diversity can be both a benefit and a challenge to virtual teams, especially those which are global. The authors unpack their recent research on how diversity works in remote teams, concluding that benefits and drawbacks can be explained by how teams manage the two facets of diversity: personal and contextual. They find that contextual diversity is key to aiding creativity, decision-making, and problem-solving, while personal diversity does not. In their study, teams with higher contextual diversity produced higher-quality consulting reports, and their solutions were more creative and innovative. When it comes to the quality of work, teams that were higher on contextual diversity performed better. Therefore, the potential challenges caused by personal diversity should be anticipated and managed, but the benefits of contextual diversity are likely to outweigh such challenges.
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S2How Large Language Models Reflect Human Judgment  Artificial intelligence is based around prediction. But decision making requires both prediction and judgment. That leaves a role for humans, in providing the judgment about which types of outcomes are better and worse. But large language models represent a key advance: OpenAI has found a way to teach its AI human judgment by using a simple form of human feedback, through chat. That opens the door to a new way for humans to work with AI, essentially talking to them about which outcomes are better or worse for any given type of decision.
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S3How Generative AI Can Augment Human Creativity  There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.
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S4McKinsey's Three Horizons Model Defined Innovation for Years. Here's Why It No Longer Applies.  In the 20th century McKinsey created a model called the Three Horizons to explain how businesses must invest in current products, incremental innovations, and breakthrough innovations. The framework relied on time as a guiding factor; it assumes that truly breakthrough innovations will take years to develop. Technology has made that assumption incorrect: Today innovations like Uber and Airbnb can be rolled out extremely quickly. Because established companies tend to move slowly and must invest resources in existing products, this means that unlike in the 20th century, attacking disruptors now have the advantage.
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S5How to Answer "What Are Your Salary Expectations?"  There are many interview questions that inspire dread in an interviewee — from “What’s your greatest weakness?” to “Tell me about yourself.” But one in particular is especially complicated: “What are your salary expectations?” If you go too low, you might end up making less than they’re willing to pay. But if you go too high, you could price yourself out of the job. In this piece, the author offers practical strategies for how to approch this question along with sample answers to use as a guide.
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S6What Is Psychological Safety?  What exactly is psychological safety? It’s a term that’s used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase “team psychological safety”: 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important? 3) How has the idea evolved? 4) How do you know if your team has it? 5) How do you create psychological safety? 6) What are common misconceptions?
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S7Not Getting Anything Done? Try This To-Do List Hack.  For several years, I’ve kept two to-do lists for work (one just wasn’t enough). One list contains tasks that require deep, focused work and demand a decent chunk of time. The other list is for quick and easy tasks — things that don’t require much brainpower. But because I tend to avoid administrative work, this second list builds up fast (as does my guilt for not crossing things off it).
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S8Is Organizational Hierarchy Getting in the Way of Innovation?  Technological advances and increasingly sophisticated ways of gathering and analyzing data are changing both the kinds of products and services companies can offer and are increasing competitive pressures. To meet the moment, this article argues that organizations may need to change the way they operate to innovate. Specifically, the authors suggest that companies should consider a version of RenDanHeYi. They outline the four key elements of this model and offer suggestions for whether, and how, to implement elements of it.
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S9People with Disabilities Are an Untapped Talent Pool  It is now accepted wisdom that increasing the diversity of your workforce in any dimension can improve both organizational culture and performance. But one group — people living with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities — continues to be overlooked by many companies. Luisa Alemany, associate professor at London Business School, has studied workplaces that do recruit and hire employees with disabilities and found that it can be a true source of competitive advantage. She explains four main ways this talent strategy benefits the firm. She’s the coauthor, along with Freek Vermeulen, of the HBR article “Disability as a Source of Competitive Advantage.”
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S105 Ways to Actually Move Forward on That Task You've Been Avoiding  It’s human nature to procrastinate — but it can be devastating for your future goals if you continually procrastinate on projects that are important but not urgent. In this article, the author offers five strategies to overcome procrastination on ambiguous but essential tasks: 1) Get clear on the vision. 2) Identify concrete steps. 3) Take (small) action. 4) Create forcing functions. 5) Limit competing distractions.
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S11Can Remote Surgeries Digitally Transform Operating Rooms?  Launched in 2016, Proximie was a platform that enabled clinicians, proctors, and medical device company personnel to be virtually present in operating rooms, where they would use mixed reality and digital audio and visual tools to communicate with, mentor, assist, and observe those performing medical procedures. The goal was to improve patient outcomes.
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S12When It Comes to Compensation, More Equity Isn't Always Better  Startups frequently compensate employees through a blend of cash and equity, such as stock options or restricted stock units, which may translate into ownership stakes. For prospective employees, assessing job offers with equity components can prove to be a complicated task. In fact, in a recent research study we found a clear and consistent pattern among participants evaluating offers that included equity compensation: They appeared to perceive that a higher number of shares translated into superior compensation. This led them to be more willing to sacrifice cash compensation when offered a larger quantity of shares, even when the underlying value remained the same. Call it the equity illusion.
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S13The alternative ivory sources that could help save elephants  My parents often talk about their safari honeymoon to the Serengeti National Park in 1972. Mum reminds me that they didn't have "fancy cameras with zoom lenses back then" and that the photos that adorn their album were taken on a basic camera. Among them, are herds of elephants close enough to make any wildlife photographer jealous.More than 1.3 million elephants roamed Africa at the end of the 1970s. Today, there are around 450,000. And as mum said upon our return to Serengeti 20 years ago: "It's nothing like it used to be." At least 20,000 African elephants continue to be illegally killed each year for their ivory tusks. In 1989, international trade in ivory was banned by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), but elephant populations have continued to suffer. A resurgence of demand from unregulated markets in Asia and Africa has been a significant driver.
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S14What a record-breaking hurricane looks like  As Hurricane Lee brought large swells and ferocious winds to batter the Caribbean islands, experts said the storm – which quickly and unexpectedly intensified into the highest category five strength – could be a sign of what's to come as the world's oceans warm up.The hurricane, which reached 160mph (258km/h) winds on Friday (8 September), was a category one storm on Thursday but intensified to a category five, increasing by 85mph (137km/h) in just 24 hours. The increase made the hurricane, which meteorologists dubbed "rare", the third-fastest rapid intensification in the Atlantic. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the definition of rapid intensification is a 35mph (56km/h) over a one-day period – which Lee greatly exceeded.
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S15AI image generators have a moderation problem  Logically uses artificial intelligence and fact-checking methods to help governments and social media companies tackle online harms. Recently, the company tested the limits of AI image generators on the spread of misinformation and disinformation during elections. The study, led by head of research Kyle Walter, found that more than 85% of the prompts tailored for election manipulation in specific countries were accepted. This interview, which has been edited for clarity and brevity, cites findings from the research paper.In the U.S., it’s primarily about election security and integrity — like stuffing ballot boxes, stealing them from election facilities, etc. These are the main narratives that drive a decrease in trust in the electoral process, resulting in threats to officials and to locations.
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S16Neuropeptide Y May Have Made Humans Smart and Overindulgent  A brain chemical may play a role in the development of our complex brain, as well as our inclination toward obesity and addictionLike many people, Mary Ann Raghanti enjoys potatoes loaded with butter. Unlike most people, however, she actually asked the question of why we love stuffing ourselves with fatty carbohydrates. Raghanti, a biological anthropologist at Kent State University, has researched the neurochemical mechanism behind that savory craving. As it turns out, a specific brain chemical may be one of the things that not only developed our tendency to overindulge in food, alcohol and drugs but also helped the human brain evolve to be unique from the brains of closely related species.
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S17Lethal Heat Is Spreading across the Planet  Since 1970 more than 350 weather stations have experienced at least one six-hour period of a potentially deadly combination of heat and humidity. Scientists expect these episodes will increase as temperatures riseDeadly heat is expanding across the hottest parts of the world. And with just another degree or so of global warming, large swaths of the planet — including every continent except Antarctica — will at least occasionally face conditions that test the limits of human survival.
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S18Candy Crush Is Complicated - Even from a Mathematical Point of View  Don’t be annoyed if you fail at a certain level of the popular game Candy Crush Saga; computers also have their problems with itHave you wasted hours playing Candy Crush Saga? You’re not alone. Since its 2012 release, it has been one of the most popular games on Facebook and on mobile devices. The application was downloaded more than 106 million times in the first half of 2023, making it the second most downloaded game app during that period (after a game called Subway Surfers).
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S19Mathematicians Solve 50-Year-Old Möbius Strip Puzzle  Möbius strips are curious mathematical objects. To construct one of these single-sided surfaces, take a strip of paper, twist it once and then tape the ends together. Making one of these beauties is so simple that even young children can do it, yet the shapes’ properties are complex enough to capture mathematicians’ enduring interest. The 1858 discovery of Möbius bands is credited to two German mathematicians—August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing—though evidence suggests that mathematical giant Carl Friedrich Gauss was also aware of the shapes at this time, says Moira Chas, a mathematician at Stony Brook University. Regardless of who first thought about them, until recently, researchers were stumped by one seemingly easy question about Möbius bands: What is the shortest strip of paper needed to make one? Specifically, this problem was unsolved for smooth Möbius strips that are “embedded” instead of “immersed,” meaning they “don't interpenetrate themselves,” or self-intersect, says Richard Evan Schwartz, a mathematician at Brown University. Imagine that “the Möbius strip was actually a hologram, a kind of ghostly graphical projection into three-dimensional space,” Schwartz says. For an immersed Möbius band, “several sheets of the thing could overlap with each other, sort of like a ghost walking through a wall,” but for an embedded band, “there are no overlaps like this.”
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S20Mysterious Moonquake Traced to Apollo 17 Lunar Lander Base  When they went to the moon, Apollo astronauts placed seismometers on the surface. Those instruments strikingly revealed that the moon experiences moonquakes, just as the Earth experiences earthquakes. In fact, scientists have since determined there are four types of moonquakes: Deep, shallow, thermal and the kind stemming from meteorite impacts. But a new look at thermal earthquake data recorded by instruments from the Apollo 17 mission has unveiled a fifth and unexpected type of moonquake—one that emanates from the Apollo 17 lunar lander base itself.
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S21The Ozone Hole Showed Humans Could Damage Earth and That We Could Heal It  The discovery of a hole in Earth’s protective ozone layer in 1985 led to a worldwide effort to heal it. But are there lessons that can be applied to today’s treaty talks on climate change?Earth’s ozone layer acts as a protective shield, absorbing and blocking harmful radiation from the Sun. In the 1970s, scientists began to worry that the ozone layer was being depleted by manufactured chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, commonly used as a refrigerant and in aerosols.
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S22Without Small Data, AI in Health Care Contributes to Disparities  Artificial intelligence systems in health care must be trained on the data of lived experience to prevent bias and disparitiesSeveral years ago, I attended an international health care conference, eagerly awaiting the keynote speaker’s talk about a diabetes intervention that targeted people in lower socioeconomic groups of the U.S. He noted how an AI tool enabled researchers and physicians to use pattern recognition to better plan treatments for people with diabetes.
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S23Climate Science Is under Attack in Classrooms  Schools are a growing battlefield in climate politics as conservative states reshape their curriculum to downplay people’s contribution to rising temperaturesCLIMATEWIRE | Political battles over climate change are increasingly being fought in the classroom.
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S24Our Oceans Are Threatened by Climate Disruption. They Could Also Provide Climate Solutions  Ocean temperatures have been off the charts this year, breaking heat records for the fourth year in a row. This summer, waters from Florida to Europe have baked in extreme marine heat waves of unprecedented intensity. As these become both more frequent and more potent, they will worsen destructive weather events such as hurricanes and put many marine species under tremendous stress, threatening the oceanic food web that ultimately supports billions of people.This catastrophe-in-the-making is yet another reminder that climate disruption is harming Earth’s oceans at an alarming, increasing rate. As we release more carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, nearly all the additional heat energy that gets trapped in our biosphere is absorbed by our oceans, with devastating consequences.
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S25CDC Recommends Updated COVID Boosters for Everyone This Fall  Here’s what to know about the fall COVID boosters, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended for all people aged six months and olderThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended an updated COVID vaccine for everyone aged six months and older, following the advice of an advisory panel that met on Tuesday. On Monday the Food and Drug Administration approved a single dose of the updated Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for people aged 12 years and older and issued an emergency use authorization for their use in children six months through 11 years old. The vaccines could be available within a week.
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S26S27Disruption or Distortion? The Impact of AI on Future Operating Models  AI doesn’t have to be an existential threat to business models. Wharton’s Scott Snyder and co-author Hamilton Mann explain how to integrate AI in a way that reaps benefits for all stakeholders.The following article was written by Scott A. Snyder, a senior fellow at Wharton, adjunct professor at Penn Engineering, and chief digital officer at EVERSANA; and Hamilton Mann, group vice president, digital marketing and digital transformation at Thales.
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S28How Accountable Capitalism Can Help the ESG Movement  Experts at a Wharton LinkedIn Live event outlined how corporations, investors, and policymakers can marshal leadership, data, and more transparent processes to advance sustainability.Claims by corporations and investment managers that they incorporate or demand ESG (environmental, social and governance) values don’t always stand up to close scrutiny. Only “accountable capitalism” can ensure that all stakeholders in the ESG movement perform their roles, according to Witold Henisz, Wharton vice dean and faculty director of the ESG Initiative at the school, where he is also management professor. He shared those observations at a Wharton Executive Education LinkedIn Live event titled “ESG: Dispatch from the Front Lines of Accountable Capitalism” on August 22, 2023, which he moderated. (Watch the video.)
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S29Is ChatGPT a Better Entrepreneur Than Most?  In a new experiment, Wharton’s Christian Terwiesch finds out if ChatGPT can outperform MBA students in coming up with new products.In January, Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch gave his MBA final exam to ChatGPT. It passed with flying colors.
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S30How to succeed in your new job  Starting a new job can be really scary, but it doesn't have to be. Here's what career navigation expert Gorick Ng says are the keys to making a great first impression, plus what you can do to ensure your new workplace is a great fit long term.
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S31S32Serious Brain Trauma Starts Well Before Young Athletes Go Pro  Evan Hansen was born to play football. A strong, rambunctious kid, he started playing sports year-round as early as he could. “He was very selfless, always willing to sacrifice himself for the betterment of the team,” says his father, Chuck Hansen. As a fearless linebacker at Wabash College in Indiana, the young player made 209 tackles in his first three seasons, and was hit far more than that during games and practices. Two days after winning the second game of his senior year, Evan died by suicide.Searching for an explanation, Chuck Hansen pored through his son’s internet search history. One query popped out: “CTE.”
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S33The Apple Watch Now Lets You Answer Phone Calls by Tapping Your Fingers  For almost a decade, Apple has released an Apple Watch every fall. Each release is greeted like the turning of the leaves: welcome, but not necessarily mind-blowing. In 2022, the rugged Apple Watch Ultra (8/10, WIRED Recommends) was one of the biggest launches we’d seen in years. The Series 8 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), which also debuted last year, introduced skin temperature sensing—nice, but we’ve seen similar features on wearables like the Oura ring for years.For its tenth anniversary—in either 2024 or 2025—Apple is rumored to be giving its watch a complete revamp, and maybe even a new name (the catchy Apple Watch X). In the meantime, 2023 brought a few upgrades, including a faster processor, a new pink color, and a new feature called Double Tap that lets you play music and start and stop workouts with a little flick of your fingers.
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S34Apple's iPhone 15 Marks a New Era  Every new iPhone in the past few years may have felt like an iterative upgrade—slightly better camera here, slightly better performance there. But Apple's new iPhone 15 lineup is getting a few once-in-a-decade changes that make them stand out in a sea of visually similar iPhones. The company announced the new iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max at its annual September event in Cupertino, California. From the addition of USB-C to the removal of the ill-famed notch, here are all the top features of the new iPhone.If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.
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S35Everything Apple Announced Today  Apple showed off an assortment of devices and software today during a media event at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. The new devices are the ones that typically show up in the fall: phones and watches. For the most part, we saw what we were expecting, though a couple features stood out from the usual iterative updates. Here's everything Apple announced.The big news is that the iPhone’s got a new hole. The iPhone now officially has a USB-C charging port. This change has been a long time coming, since a European Union ruling mandated that phones sold in the EU be sold with charging ports that use the ubiquitous standard. Finally, that day has come, though Apple did gloss over the change very briefly, pointing out that other devices like its MacBooks have already made the switch to USB-C.
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S36Covid Boosters Can't Outpace New Mutations. Here's Why They Still Work  Updated vaccines against Covid-19 are coming, just as hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus are steadily ticking up again.Today, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized new mRNA booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer, and a panel of outside experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to recommend the shots to everyone in the United States ages 6 months and older. Once Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Mandy Cohen signs off on the recommendations and the vaccines are shipped, people can start getting the boosters.
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S37Apple's $60 iCloud Service Is the Future of Apple  Just as Apple was wrapping up its annual presentation of a brand-new iPhone todayâa whole suite of them, plus a watchâthe company's senior vice president of marketing, Greg Joswiak, let slip that two new iCloud plans would launch on September 18. Somewhat remarkably, the in-person crowd of more than 300 Apple acolytes and members of the global press were more enthused by the new iCloud tiers than they were by the iPhones' new USB-C port.These are "iCloud+" plans, signifying a premium Apple service, the kind that might make your wallet wince. The first new iCloud+ tier offers 6 terabytes of cloud storage for $30 per month. The next option is double the price for double the storage: $60 for 12 TB.
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S38Devialet's Gemini II Wireless Earphones Cost Too Damn Much  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 WIREDIt’s obvious that exclusivity doesn’t come cheap. It’s obvious that “performance” is often not the only consideration when choosing, say, a new pair of true wireless in-ear headphones. But it’s equally obvious when the emperor’s new tailoring isn’t as complete as it might be.
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S39EV Mania Hasn't Killed Hunger for Hybrid Trucks  Last year, Ford sold more than 650,000 F-150 pickup trucks, making it the most popular vehicle in the US for the 46th year in a row. Couple that with Americans’ recent thirst for very big cars, and few things say “US of A” like a truck bed and a little blue oval. In 2022, the venerable champ got a futuristic makeover for the electric “Lightning” model and contributed to the surge of EV sales. But this year, Ford is hyping an F-150 variant that might feel like a step back, not forward: the hybrid model with both an internal combustion engine and an electric motor, which only takes over for certain features and under certain driving conditions.The global car electrification project—needed to eliminate carbon emissions from transport so the world can meet climate goals—and drivers’ unexpectedly healthy appetite for EVs is currently the biggest story in the auto industry. Like other automakers, Ford will have to follow the lead of policymakers, including in California and the European Union, who have pledged to effectively ban sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The industry is piling money into new models powered by batteries and the new supply chain needed to make them.
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S40The grand paradox at the heart of every black hole  When something falls into a black hole, where does it go, and will it ever come back out again? According to Einstein’s General Relativity, those answers are simple: as soon as anything physical — matter, antimatter, radiation, etc. — crosses over the event horizon, it’s gone. It can add things like mass, electric charge, and angular momentum to the black hole, but little else. It goes swiftly toward and eventually into the central singularity, and will never escape again.But our Universe isn’t governed by General Relativity alone, but also by quantum physics. According to our best understanding of quantum reality, there’s much more that needs to be considered. Not only are there other quantum properties inherent to the raw ingredients that go into making a black hole — baryon number, lepton number, color charge, spin, lepton family number, weak isospin and hypercharge, etc. — but the fabric of spacetime itself, which contains the black hole, is quantum in nature. Because of those quantum properties, black holes do not remain static, but rather evaporate over time: emitting Hawking radiation (and perhaps even more) in the process.
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S41Sobremesa: To live a better life, we should eat dinner like the Spanish  There is nothing so mind-expanding as staying with a different family for a while. It’s only when you spend a decent amount of time around different people, who are doing things differently, that you realize that your way isn’t the only way. For example, I grew up in a household where eating was largely utilitarian. Our family would gather, we would d have our dinner, and then we would d go back to whatever it was we were doing. We ate to live. It’s not that meal times were held in funereal silence, but my family just saw the dinner table as a place for dinner. But then, I stayed at Clare’s house.
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S42Study: U.S. dietary recommendations for protein intake are too low  The amount of protein that the federal government recommends Americans eat is based on decrepit data, ignores the varied needs of certain groups, and is generally too low, a team of researchers with Abbott Nutrition and the University of Illinois argue in a paper published earlier this year in the journal Nutrients.Much of our nutritional knowledge has changed in the last 40 years. Dietary cholesterol was once thought to raise blood cholesterol and lead to heart disease. Gathered evidence now shows it doesn’t. Consuming more calcium was once considered a great way to reduce the risk of bone fracture. It isn’t. And eating a low-fat diet was once claimed to ward off obesity. But this doesn’t work without reducing calories.
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S43In business and life, "allostasis" underpins success and happiness  In the late 1980s, two researchers — one a neuroscientist, physiologist, and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and the other an interdisciplinary scholar with a focus on biology and stress — observed an interesting phenomenon. In the vast majority of situations, healthy systems do not rigidly resist change; rather, they adapt to it, moving forward with grace and grit. This observation is true whether it is an entire species responding to a shift in its habitat, an organization responding to a change in its industry, or a single individual responding to a disorder event in her life or an ongoing process such as aging. Following disorder, living systems crave stability, but they achieve that stability somewhere new. Peter Sterling (the neuroscientist) and Joseph Eyer (the biologist) coined the term allostasis to describe this process. Allostasis comes from the Greek allo, which means “variable,” and stasis, which means “standing.” Sterling and Eyer defined allostasis as “stability through change.” Whereas homeostasis describes a pattern of order, disorder, order, allostasis describes a pattern of order, disorder, reorder. Homeostasis states that following a disorder event, healthy systems return to stability where they started: X to Y to X.
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S44iOS 17 hits supported devices on September 18  CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple's annual release cadence is like clockwork: Each September brings new iPhones as well as a new version of iOS for new and old iPhones—at least, those that are still supported. iOS 17 didn't get a mention during the show, but the official website is up with a September 18 date.
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S45S46macOS 14 Sonoma will release on September 26, weeks earlier than usual  While new iOS releases always come out in September, Mac owners usually need to wait nearly a month to get the same improvements for their laptops and desktops. But the wait will be much shorter this year—Apple says that macOS 14 Sonoma will be available on September 26, just over a week after iOS 17 releases to the public on September 18. It will be the first update since 2018's Mojave to release in September rather than October.
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S47This student-built EV just set a new world record for 0-62 mph  There's a new world record for the fastest 0 to 62 mph (0–100 km/h), courtesy of a team of students at the Academic Motorsports Club Zürich and the Swiss universities ETH Zürich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The team did so with a scratch-built EV, designing everything from its chassis to its circuit boards, and bested the existing record—set last year by students in Stuttgart, Germany—by more than a third.
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S48S49S50RIP to the Microsoft Surface Duo's support window, an unmitigated disaster  RIP to the Surface Duo 1. As spotted by Windows Central, Microsoft is killing off support for its first self-branded Android phone. The device was an unmitigated disaster, and now the "three year" update plan, which only featured two exceedingly late major OS updates, means the Surface Duo will go down in history as the worst-supported premium Android phone ever. The $1,400 device never ran a current version of Android.
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S51S52The physics of saltwater taffy  When San To Chan successfully defended their PhD thesis, they received a gift of saltwater taffy to celebrate and couldn't help being intrigued by the taffy's unusual consistency: somewhere between a solid and liquid. That led to experiments investigating the taffy's rheology—how it deforms in response to applied forces—and how the ingredients and taffy-making process contribute to that rheology. The results are described in a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.
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S53Coca-Cola embraces controversial AI image generator with new "Y3000" flavor  Coca-Cola has taken a fizzy leap into the future of AI hype with the release of Coca‑Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar, a "limited-edition" beverage reportedly co-created with artificial intelligence. Its futuristic name evokes flavor in the year 3000 (still 977 years away), but its marketing relies on AI-generated imagery from 2023—courtesy of the controversial image synthesis model Stable Diffusion.
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S54From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist  In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.
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S55S56'Come Out and See the Stars'  When I was a child, my father took me to the river—the mighty Ohio—so I could walk on water. It was January 1977, the second-coldest winter on record in Cincinnati. Twenty-eight days below zero led to a river freeze 12 inches thick. The river became a bridge between regions we have named Ohio and Kentucky, the North and the South. The Ohio froze more commonly in the 19th century than in the 20th, and the last time was more than 40 years ago. Given climate change, it is unlikely to freeze ever again. But I will always remember the sight of that formidable river transformed into a wintry walkway, and the sense of the impossible becoming possible.I felt a closeness with that bridge of a river, but I didn’t learn until later that this was a river with a history of bearing enslaved Black people to freedom. On another January day, one of the coldest on record, in 1856, Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman in Kentucky, tried to escape with her family across the frozen river. The Garners were not alone in making a bid for freedom that January night. Nine other enslaved people also escaped in what newspapers disparagingly called a “stampede of slaves” down the “ice bridge” of the Ohio River.
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S57Slouching Toward 'Accept All Cookies'  When everything we do online is data to be harvested, resignation is easy. But there’s a better way to think about digital privacy.We are all shedding data like skin cells. Almost everything we do with, or simply in proximity to, a connected device generates some small bit of information—about who we are, about the device we’re using and the other devices nearby, about what we did and when and how and for how long. Sometimes doing nothing at all—merely lingering on a webpage—is recorded as a relevant piece of information. Sometimes simply walking past a Wi-Fi router is a data point to be captured and processed. Sometimes the connected device isn’t a phone or a computer, as such; sometimes it’s a traffic light or a toaster or a toilet. If it is our phone, and we have location services enabled—which many people do, so that they can get delivery and Find My Friends and benefit from the convenience of turn-by-turn directions—our precise location data are being constantly collected and transmitted. We pick up our devices and command them to open the world for us, which they do quite well. But they also produce a secondary output too—all those tiny flecks of dead skin floating around us.
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S58Three Simple Rules for Protecting Your Data  The more you conceptualize the internet as a real place, the more intuitive it becomes. Consider physical analogues to your online behavior as much as possible: You may be perfectly comfortable reading a newspaper or watching a movie in public, but you’d probably think twice before sharing your private medical information or details about your love life with a stranger. By that same logic, you may want to focus on protecting health and dating data more than on safeguarding less intimate information.Much of your online privacy is out of your control. But you do have power over how much personal information you willingly share with companies and the world. Don’t share anything publicly on social media that you wouldn’t want being seen by your boss, your parents, or your children. Think twice about giving online retailers your zip code or birth date in exchange for a onetime discount. Your personal information is valuable to other people; don’t give it away for cheap.
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S59America Gave Up on the Best Home Technology There Is  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.Until last month, I hadn’t kept a landline phone at home since 2004. I deemed it so useless that for a while I even used the digital phone service that came with my cable subscription as a fax line instead. I did eventually hook up a home telephone in 2013, but only briefly, on a lark: It was a Western Electric 500 that I’d bought for my daughter at a vintage shop. The device was just a curiosity, and a way to re-create the lost catharsis of “hanging up” a call. Even then, the home telephone was long dead.
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S60The Answer to Starlink Is More Starlinks  Elon Musk has become a national-security problem that the government can’t solve. Maybe private industry can.The U.S. government faces a dilemma. Starlink, a private satellite venture devised and controlled by Elon Musk, offers capabilities that no government or other company can match. Its innovations are the fruit of Musk’s drive and ambitions. But they have become enmeshed with American foreign and national-security policy, and Musk is widely seen as an erratic leader who can’t be trusted with the country’s security needs. In other words, the United States has urgent uses for Starlink’s technology—but not for the freewheeling foreign-policy impulses of its creator.
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S61The Problems That Marriage Can't Fix  Rather than explore the complexities of building a life together, Netflix’s The Ultimatum too often touts matrimony for matrimony’s sake.As a woman in my 30s, I am often besieged by a peculiar kind of sponsored content in my social-media feeds. Posts from the jewelry company Brilliant Earth implore me to pick a favorite engagement ring so that the brand can digitally “drop a hint” to my significant other. To quote an ancient Twitter proverb, I would rather eat a denim jacket. But despite my personal aversion to letting a corporation telegraph my hypothetical desire to get engaged, I can’t seem to look away from Netflix’s The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On—a reality series in which people hoping to tie the knot essentially let the show shape the trajectory of their nuptials.
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S62America Has a Private-Beach Problem  Accessing the least-crowded section of New York’s Lido Beach requires either money or insider knowledge. Anyone staying at one of the hotels on the beach can walk through the lobby, and those living in the adjoining town can waltz in through a separate gate using a residents-only electronic access code. Everyone else, though, has to come in through a public entrance half a mile away and walk over the sand.In theory, some portion of every beach in the coastal United States is reserved for collective use—even those that border private property. But exactly how big that portion is varies widely, and in practice, much of the shore is impenetrable. Simply figuring out which patches of sand you’re allowed to lie on requires navigating antiquated laws and modern restrictions that vary by state—not to mention vigilante efforts from landowners intended to keep people out. Lido Beach is a classic (and absurd) example: Like the rest of the New York coast, it’s technically open to everyone up to the high-tide line, but actually reaching that public strip is difficult without trespassing on private land. A trip to the ocean has never been more confusing.
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S63Lauren Groff Has Written a New Gospel  In her new novel, The Vaster Wilds, the writer tells the story of a girl escaping a colonial outpost and finding herself enveloped in the natural world.At some point during the winter of 1609–10, in Jamestown, Virginia, the starving English settlers are said to have begun eating one another. Meanwhile, back in London, the King James Version of the Bible, arguably the greatest work of prose in the English language, was receiving its final edits; it went to the printer the following year. Lauren Groff’s haunting new novel, The Vaster Wilds, doesn’t mention the King James Bible by name, or that its completion coincided with the horrors at Jamestown. But the confluence of these two events hovers in the background. The novel is set in and around the colony just before and during the Starving Time, as it came to be known, with flashbacks to London—and it has a biblical dimension of its own. The same two extremes of human experience are on display: both high spiritual striving and colonialism in all of its unhinged depravity. Think of the book as Groff’s marriage of heaven and hell.
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S64Is Racial 'Color-Blindness' Possible?  “True color-blindness isn’t easy. It takes familiarity and practice,” one reader argues.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.
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S65The Only Way to Stop Trump  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.Eminent legal scholars think the Constitution makes Donald Trump ineligible for office; critics of the idea worry that using the Fourteenth Amendment will create an uncontrollable political weapon.
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S67Goodbye to All Those Tattered iPhone Cords  Some annoyances in life are unavoidable: the creak in your knees as you age, the tax code, Pete Davidson. Others are foisted on you by corporations hell-bent on leveraging their market power for financial gain. The iPhone cord is the latter.For more than a decade, Apple’s Lightning cable has been something like the avocado of consumer electronics: wildly expensive relative to its shelf life. The proprietary cords that power the world’s billion-plus iPhones turn into a fraying mess before they stop working altogether. There goes another $19 straight to the world’s most valuable company, and another scrap for the e-waste junkyard. Back when the Apple Store website let customers leave reviews, the Lightning cable notched a whopping average of 1.5 stars out of five. (One representative comment from 2016: “Probably the worst charging cable I have ever used. Breaks easily and is way to [sic] short. And in some cases it even just decides to stop working even though there’s no wire damage.”)
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S68S69The Met's Free Children's Studio Is Finally Here /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a5/95/a595ab81-49e9-4a27-8c0d-c92afb2aa36c/81ststudio_2.jpg) Called 81st Street Studio, the sprawling play space encourages interactive engagement with art and scienceAn eight-foot-long guitar. An interactive light table. A thermo-chromatic wall that changes color based on temperature. These are just some of the sights that greet visitors to the 81st Street Studio, the new free children's space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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S70The Asteroid Hit by NASA Seems to Be Moving Strangely, High School Students Find /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/06/81/068149cf-a0f5-455d-8a30-0cf2327ae634/all_dimorphos_dart_0401930040_12262_01_iof_imagedisplay-final.png) After the DART spacecraft made contact with Dimorphos last year, the space rock’s orbit is declining more than expected, according to preliminary researchNearly a year has passed since NASA deliberately crashed a $300 million spacecraft into an asteroid. In a first-of-its-kind feat, the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) craft slammed into the space rock Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour on September 26, 2022. Dimorphos orbits another asteroid called Didymos, and while neither object posed a threat to Earth, the feat showed the world that NASA could nudge an asteroid and alter its trajectory—an action that might come in handy if a planetary defense scenario were to materialize in the future.
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