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 S66'Chants of Senaar' Is 2023's Most Surprising Indie Game   Indie puzzler Chants of Sennaar is full of so many words, none of which the player can understand when the game starts. That’s because all of Chants of Sennaar’s languages are themselves the game’s puzzles, encouraging the player to become an amateur translator to progress.What begins as a simple task quickly turns into something much more complicated as more languages, cultures, and styles of speaking reveal themselves. Chants of Sennaar uses this core mechanic to great effect, turning an enthralling logic puzzle into a lesson on how the structure of spoken and written language impacts culture. It’s an ingenious trick that makes for one of the most surprising, and satisfying, indies of the year.
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S2Don't Eliminate Your Middle Managers  Organizations have long seen middle management as ripe for cutting whenever times get tight, and the current moment is no exception. The authors believe that this is a costly mistake. Human capital, they say, is at least as important as financial capital, and middle managers, who recruit and develop an organization’s employees, are the most important asset of all—essential to navigating rapid, complex change. They can make work more meaningful, interesting, and productive, and they’re crucial for true organizational transformation. But if managers are to fulfill this promise, leaders must reimagine their roles, push to more fully understand their value, and train, coach, and inspire them to realize their potential as organizational linchpins.
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S3 Our Guide to the Fall 2023 Issue  Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Top Takeaways: Research shows that innovators have a poor track record of predicting which of their own ideas will result in breakthroughs. This matters because some ideas that appear to be incremental at first eventually prove to be blockbusters. Discovery is a necessary first step, but it is not sufficient for assessing how promising an opportunity might become. Rather, taking more ideas to incubation gives both the company and the broader market a chance to learn about them and their potential. It also allows for unanticipated use cases to emerge.
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S4Leading AI Is Still Leading | Abbie Lundberg  Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Generative AI has consumed a lot of media and business oxygen this year, and rightly so. Not only are its capabilities novel and impressive, but it might be the biggest leap in the “consumerization” of information technology since the emergence of the iPhone in 2007. Anyone with a browser can create content, sound, and images with AI — artificial intelligence in the hands of the masses! Business leaders are eager to understand the impact, good and bad, that it will have on their organizations.
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S5 Protecting Society From AI Harms: Amnesty International's Matt Mahmoudi and Damini Satija (Part Two)  Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.At Amnesty Tech, a division of human rights organization Amnesty International, Damini Satija and Matt Mahmoudi leverage their expertise in technology and public policy to examine the use of AI in the public sector and its impact on citizens worldwide.
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S6Why are CEOs still so intent on taking worker attendance?  Employers have dangled all sorts of perks – free food, concerts and on-site yoga – to entice employees back to the office, with varying degrees of success. Now, some are taking a more drastic approach: tying in-person office attendance to employee performance reviews.Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they're now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don't comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
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S7Pain Hustlers review: Emily Blunt is 'the only reason to watch this'  Don't confuse the recent Painkiller, an earnest Netflix series about a fictionalised pharmaceutical company and the opioid epidemic, with the new Netflix film Pain Hustlers, which has a similar story about a different fictionalised company and a tone that goes for entertaining long before it turns earnest too. Why the creators of one of these projects didn't flinch and change the title is a good question.And while Pain Hustlers is a perfectly fine title, the film probably should have been called Liza Drake, the name of the sales rep played by Emily Blunt, who single-handedly almost saves this tone-deaf drama from itself. As the rags-to-riches heroine who finds herself in the midst of a morally compromised situation, Blunt creates a character who is engaging, smarter than she's given credit for, and hungry to improve her hardscrabble life as a single mother with an adolescent daughter. She makes the film watchable, but is the only reason to watch.
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S8US response to Gabon and Niger coups suggests need for a new West Africa policy in Washington  Recent coups in the West African nations of Gabon and Niger caught U.S. diplomats a little off guard. They also indicate Washington may need to reassess its policy in the region or risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to the new governments.Despite following similar overthrows of governments in Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad in recent years, the U.S official reaction to the coups in Gabon and Niger has come across to some observers as makeshift and uncertain.
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S9Antisemitism on Elon Musk's X is surging and dredging up many ancient, defamatory themes of blaming Jews  Since buying Twitter, rebranded as X, billionaire Elon Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has welcomed hatemongers to the platform, including one who recently coined the trending hashtag #BanTheADL. The ADL, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, was founded in 1913 during the trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager wrongly convicted of murdering one of his young workers. After Georgia Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, Frank was lynched. Since then, the ADL has aimed to fight antisemitism and secure “justice not only for Jews but for all people.”
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S10Looking for your 'calling'? What people get wrong when chasing meaningful work  I am connected to the authors of the Life Worth Living book. They have generously supported my pedagogical efforts in the classroom. I am not directly funded by them, however they did fund a post-doc in our department to aide me in teaching courses that would build upon the class I mention in this article. As a professor, I’m fortunate to teach a course called World Religions for Healthcare Professionals that prepares students for the spiritual and ethical issues they may encounter in their careers. But the class often boils down to life’s big questions: What makes life worth living, and how should we live? How do you find your “calling”?
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S11How evasive and transmissible is the newest omicron offshoot, BA.2.86, that causes COVID-19? 4 questions answered  The latest variant, or sublineage, of SARS-CoV-2 to emerge on the scene, BA.2.86, has public health experts on alert as COVID-19 hospitalizations begin to rise and the new variant makes its way across the globe. BA.2.86, nicknamed Pirola, is a highly mutated new omicron sublineage of SARS-CoV-2 that was first detected in Denmark in July 2023. The World Health Organization announced that, as of Sept. 6, 2023, BA.2.86 has been detected in 11 countries.
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S125 ways that college campuses benefit from diversity, equity and inclusion programs  For more than half a century, colleges and universities have relied on dedicated programs to attract students of color and support them. Today, those programs – known as diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs – are under attack. Students from marginalized identity groups – including Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian students, as well as first-generation students – perform better academically at schools with diversity programs, and graduate at a higher rate.
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S13S14What are strike funds? A labor-management relations expert explains  When people go on strike, their employers don’t pay them. That makes it hard for workers who have walked off the job to keep paying their bills. Union members have an advantage during strikes because they can get help with housing, food and other essential expenses through payments from strike funds.Members pay dues and fees to finance their unions. Every month, members of the United Auto Workers, for example, pay the equivalent of what they earn in two hours to their union. New members can also be required to pay a one-time initiation fee that’s much higher. The Screen Actors Guild’s initiation fee is US$3,000.
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S15What Arizona and other drought-ridden states can learn from Israel's pioneering water strategy  Arizona is one of the fastest-growing states in the U.S., with an economy that offers many opportunities for workers and businesses. But it faces a daunting challenge: a water crisis that could seriously constrain its economic growth and vitality. A recent report that projected a roughly 4% shortfall in groundwater supplies in the Phoenix area over the next 100 years prompted the state to curtail new approval of groundwater-dependent residential development in some of the region’s fast-growing suburbs. Moreover, negotiations continue over dwindling supplies from the Colorado River, which historically supplied more than a third of the state’s water.
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S16Wilko: what insolvency really means for the budget retailer and why its competitors are surviving (for now)  All 400 of Wilko’s shops are now expected to close over the next month, leaving 12,500 people without jobs across the UK. The budget retailer’s administrator PwC announced the news after it struggled to secure a rescue deal for Wilko to continue operating.After swooping in to rescue collapsed music chain HMV in 2019, Canadian businessman Doug Putman had hoped to do the same for Wilko. But his plan to rescue the company as a going concern – a business that will continue to operate and meet its financial obligations – was “hampered by the costs and difficulties thrown up by the need to overhaul Wilko’s supply chains”, according to news reports.
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S17African football fans won't be able to watch the big matches on TV - what went wrong and how to fix it  The sale of television rights is the prime source of revenue for footballing organisations worldwide, but is particularly critical to Africa. Yet the Confederation of African Football (Caf) keeps making headlines for sacking its broadcasting partners. It faces potential litigation for recently terminating a US$415 million deal with the Qatari-based beIN Sports, the second TV contract in four years that the governing body of African football has unilaterally scrapped. We asked sport communications and media expert Chuka Onwumechili to unpack why this is happening and what impact it has.TV rights are particularly critical because alternative commercial revenues such as sponsorships and merchandising are more limited in Africa.
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S18President Hassan is the face of Tanzania's reform agenda. But she needs to carry the country with her  After two years in power, President Samia Suluhu Hassan has consolidated her political base, opened up the media space and increased the number of women in public appointments. But Tanzania is not yet out of the woods. Years of failed accountability created the conditions for the rise of authoritarianism and the worrying absence of strong constitutional safeguards. The continued absence of these safeguards means that the risk of a backwards slide remains.
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S19African Literature in the Digital Age: new book traces the role of the internet, queers and class  The first book-length study of digital literature in Africa has attracted a lot of academic attention. African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Kenya and Nigeria considers the role of the internet and new media in finding and shaping new audiences for literature. We asked its author, former journalist, literature scholar, publishing editor of The New Black Magazine and associate professor of African studies, Shola Adenekan, about the book.The book came out of my own experience of the internet, especially my interactions with writers and thinkers who became acquaintances and friends through email listservs (electronic mailing lists) and social media platforms. This began around the turn of this century, when I was working as a journalist in London. I noticed a growing trend of literature being published online by African writers, on blogs, African-owned websites, MySpace, and later Facebook and Tumblr. I decided to set up a website – The New Black Magazine – to publish, and in some instances republish, some of the new ideas being espoused by these new voices.
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S20Jihadist groups threaten the conservation of a key west African world heritage site - new study  Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger share a biosphere reserve known as the WAP complex (W-Arly-Pendjari), which spreads across the borders of the three countries. The first part of this 3 million hectare Unesco world heritage site was declared in 1996 and it was extended in 2002. It’s intended to protect species that are highly threatened in the region, including elephants and cheetahs, as well as important wetlands.The three states signed an agreement in 2008 to manage the reserve’s natural resources together, for the purposes of local, national and regional development.
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S211973: a golden year for film that rewrote the rules of cinema  Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets burst on to cinema screens 50 years ago, a cacophony of soundtrack, film styles, religion and violence which firmly established the young filmmaker as cut from a different kind of cloth. Like every screen pioneer before him – from early film illusionist Georges Méliès to the 1950s’ French New Wave filmmakers – Scorsese was testing out a range of cinematic possibilities.
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S22The psychology of spot fixing - why athletes might gamble their careers  Fifa is reportedly investigating allegations of an illegal betting ring in Greece. Meanwhile the Bolivian Football Federation has cancelled two top-flight tournaments over reports of spot fixing. These country-level investigations follow numerous examples of professional footballers being personally investigated for breaking betting rules. In 2022, Reading defender Kynan Isaac was handed a 12-year ban for placing illegal bets.
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S23The dire state of British prisons - and what they could learn from Europe to get better  Prisoners and prison officers have long been familiar with the dire state of the UK’s prisons. The escape of Daniel Khalife from HMP Wandsworth in London now has many people wondering what life is like behind bars. The day before – and certainly overshadowed by – Khalife’s escape, a German court refused to extradite an Albanian man to the UK because of concern about the UK’s prison conditions. The man lived in the UK but was arrested in Germany, so Westminster magistrates court had requested his return.
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S24Daniel Khalife: escapes are just one symptom of a failing prison system  Following the recapture of escaped terror suspect Daniel Khalife, there will no doubt be an inquiry into the prison system and how an inmate managed to apparently strap himself to a van and be driven out under the noses of prison security. But whether another inquiry prompted by a prison escape will actually focus on the very many problems besetting the UK’s prison system is another matter altogether.This is the first time I’ve seen this much attention paid to prisons since I published my book on the failure of Britain’s prisons a decade ago. As a former governor of HMP Belmarsh and Brixton, as well as a former prisons inspector, I am intimately familiar with the reality behind the intrigue of a prison escape.
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S25People who grow their own fruit and veg waste less food and eat more healthily, says research  The rising cost of living is making it harder for people, especially those on lower incomes (who often have poorer diets), to afford to eat healthily. Despite this, households in the UK continue to waste a shocking amount of food – including around 68kg of fruit and vegetables each year.Food waste is not only damaging to your pocket, it’s also bad for the environment too. Globally, 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted every year, generating about 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions arise from unused food at all stages of the food supply chain, from production to decomposition.
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S26Jan Egeland remembers the secret negotiations that led to the Oslo accords - podcast  To mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), The Conversation Weekly is launching a three-part podcast series. Inside the Oslo Accords revisits the history and legacy of this landmark moment in the Israel-Palestine peace process, through interviews with some of the key negotiators involved at the time. The series is hosted by James Rodgers, reader in international journalism and Amnon Aran, professor of international politics, both at City, University of London in the UK.
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S27Inside the Oslo accords: a new podcast series marks 30 years since Israel-Palestine secret peace negotiations  The photo marking the moment is so enduring because it once seemed so unlikely. President Bill Clinton towered over two other men as he encouraged them to shake hands. Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), were smaller in stature than Clinton. To their separate and warring peoples, though, they were giants who seemed then to be on the verge of creating an historic agreement.That was September 13, 1993. That picture, taken on the White House lawn after secret negotiations in Oslo, is remembered now perhaps as a time of great hope, but also as the start of a process that ultimately did not succeed.
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S28S29S30S31S32What can you do to speed up your metabolism?  Our metabolism is the force inside our bodies that mysteriously decides whether to convert the food we eat into a burst of energy, or extra kilos on the scales. A “slow” or “sluggish” metabolism is often the first thing we blame when we struggle to lose weight.
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S33Can self-help books help with depression? I spoke to readers to find out  For millions of readers around the world, self-help books offer a discreet, affordable way to access an array of psychological insights and therapeutic techniques.Take a moment to browse your local bookshop or department store, and you’ll find books addressing everything from shyness and burnout to worry, weight loss and “the common cold of psychiatric ailments” – depression.
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S34S35How term limits for Australian political leaders could build a stronger democracy  King George III reputedly said of the inaugural US president, George Washington, on learning the American had declined a third term of office, that he was “the greatest character of the age”. George III marvelled at Washington because, despite entreaties that he continue as president, Washington had voluntarily ceded power. He had resisted the temptation to become a quasi monarch.By relinquishing office after two terms (eight years), Washington established an important and influential precedent in the fledgling American republic. His presidential successors faithfully abided by that precedent until Franklin Roosevelt, amid the exigency of the second world war, successfully stood for a third and then fourth term of office in 1940 and 1944 respectively.
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S36Canada's digital nomad program could attract tech talent -- but would they settle down?  Over the summer, the Canadian government unveiled its Tech Talent Strategy, which aims to attract global tech workers to come to Canada. Promoting Canada as a destination for digital nomads is one of the four key pillars of the strategy. Though full details are yet to be revealed, only a well-calibrated policy — attuned to the changing conceptions of work and employment — can help Canada develop a high-skilled workforce and prevent unintended consequences.
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S37How zinc-ion batteries may solve our renewable energy storage problem  Hotter summers, drier forests, rising waters: climate change is not just a threat to our future, it’s hurting our world right now. While there are many ways human activity has brought about climate change, global electricity generation sources are among the leading culprits. Despite small upticks in the supply of wind and solar power, we have not yet reached a point where we are able to dislodge the fossil fuels that are entrenched in the power mix of many countries.
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S38People with dyslexia can bring unique strengths and advantages to the workplace  Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in the world, and up to 15 to 20 per cent of the population has a language-based learning disability. If you don’t have dyslexia yourself, you likely know someone who does.Dyslexia is characterized by difficulties with reading, writing and spelling. Like other learning disabilities, people with dyslexia process information and learn differently.
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S39We urgently need $100bn for renewable energy. But call it statecraft, not 'industry policy'  This week, a diverse group of organisations called on the Australian federal government to establish a A$100 billion, ten-year policy package to turbocharge Australia’s green energy transition. Proposed by groups including the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Australian Conservation Foundation, Climate Energy Finance, Rewiring Australia and the Smart Energy Council, the Australian Renewable Industry Package (ARIP) would dwarf the government’s existing commitments.
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S40Astronomers have discovered a rare 'polar ring galaxy' wrapped in a huge ribbon of hydrogen  Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, from giant, slowly rotating ovals and fast-whirling spiral disks to faint ball-shaped blobs and dwarf irregulars. Most large, bright galaxies – including our own Milky Way – are orbited by a gang of much smaller dwarf galaxies.Most of this we know from optical images, whether taken with small backyard telescopes or much bigger dedicated ground- and space-based telescopes that reveal the light from billions of distant suns. However, as we are discovering, what happens beyond the bright disk of stars may be even more interesting.
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S41S42S43Female genital cutting remains a taboo subject in Pakistan, preventing real progress from being made  The experiences of survivors are the only sources of information we have to understand its prevalence. There are no national statistics or governmental efforts to counter the practice or this lack of awareness. Open conversations are difficult because women’s bodies are treated as a source of shame or taboo. Otherwise, Pakistan risks being left behind in achieving one of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, the elimination of female genital cutting by 2030.
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S44S45CDC greenlights two updated COVID-19 vaccines, but how will they fare against the latest variants? 5 questions answered  On Sept. 12, 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the newly formulated COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans ages 6 months and up, hours after its expert advisory committee voted 13 to 1 in favor of recommending the vaccines. The CDC’s broad recommendation comes one day after the Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s and Pfizer’s updated mRNA vaccines that target a previously dominant variant of the omicron family called XBB.1.5. The updated shots will be available to the public within days.
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S46How TikTok's dating story time trend offers a glimpse into the sometimes weird world of modern romance  In the ever-evolving realm of social media, TikTok has emerged as a dynamic platform that has reshaped how we engage with content and share our personal romantic stories. Within this vibrant ecosystem, one phenomenon has caught romance raconteurs’ attention: dating story time. The #DatingStoryTime hashtag has transformed into a virtual stage where users narrate their dating experiences, weaving a colourful tapestry of narratives that mirror the complexities of modern romance.
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S47Peter Polites maps war, migration, familial love and gay identity from mid-century Greece to western Sydney  A popular image of modern Greece is of glittering, blue seas dotted with islands of idyllic beauty. Another is of the ancient Acropolis towering above Athens, cradle of Western civilisation. But when I think of Greece, I also think of its violent and traumatic history, in particular the series of wars and conflicts throughout the first half of the 20th century that left the country in ruins. In quick succession, events such as the Greek Genocide, the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the second world war and the Greek Civil War inflicted untold damage on the country, decimating the population through death and mass migration. Amongst those who fled their homeland were my parents. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Greeks, they migrated to Australia in the wake of this relentless turmoil.
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S48S49We just blew past 1.5 degrees. Game over on climate? Not yet  July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded. And now we know something even more alarming. This week, the European Space Agency announced the July heat pushed the global average temperatures 1.5℃ above the pre-industrial average.The ominous headlines seemed to suggest we’d blown past the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of holding warming to 1.5℃ – and around a decade earlier than expected.
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S50S51S52S53Why China's real estate crisis should make the global travel industry nervous  Once upon a time – in 2019 – tourists from China were among the best-traveled in the world. They collectively spent more than US$250 billion abroad – nearly twice as much as their nearest competitors, the Americans – and logged more than 150 million departures on international flights that year.The COVID-19 pandemic shook the Chinese travel industry, as it did the world’s. But despite the easing of pandemic restrictions – and a global tourism rebound – Chinese tourists have been slow to return to the global skies. The reason, interestingly enough, could be found in the very land and houses Chinese planes fly over.
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S54S55S56Devastatingly low Antarctic sea ice may be the 'new abnormal', study warns  For most of us, Antarctic sea ice is an abstraction – something far away we may have seen on a documentary. But the radiant white sheets of ice floating on the seas around the snowy continent are a crucial component of Earth’s climate processes.Sea ice insulates the ocean, reflects heat, drives currents, supports ecosystems and protects ice shelves. It also has an annual seasonal cycle – some of the ice melts, then freezes again.
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S57Olivia Rodrigo's Star-Making "Guts"  Last month, Billboard published a gloomy survey of record-label executive sentiment about the state of the music industry. Many of those interviewed lamented one unsettling shift in particularâa shift that the label executives themselves were no doubt complicit in creating. They noted that it had become near-impossible to "break" new stars. The sources explained that they could successfully sign loads of new talent and even create digital-era hits that generate millionsâif not billionsâof streams. The bigger challenge, though, was to find young artists who could break through the noise of the Internet and create the sort of genuine, lasting fandom that turns them into household names and sells out arenas. "Each person I talk to in the industry is more depressed than the person I talked to before them," one manager said. Given the nature of streaming, and of the TikTok algorithm in particular, the music business has never seemed more gameableâbut the ability to create a viral smash on TikTok has also, perversely, led to an oversaturated landscape in which everything feels especially fleeting.One rare exception to this dispiriting paradigm shift is the twenty-year-old former Disney star and vocal powerhouse Olivia Rodrigo. Rodrigo became a bona-fide pandemic-era success with her début single "Drivers License," from 2021, a piano power ballad that is both sweeping and finger-snappy, a post-breakup rumination rendered with unusual clarity. It's a song that deeply satisfies the core requirement of great pop musicâand pop music's youthful fansâwhich is to make the mundane feel cinematic: "Yeah, today I drove through the suburbs / And pictured I was driving home to you," Rodrigo sings.
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S58S59"Dumb Money" Is Clear About Money but Vague About Politics  Complex abstractions are hard to convey in movies, but "Dumb Money," Craig Gillespie's new drama based on the true story of the buying frenzy for GameStop stock and the havoc it created in the finance world, does an unusually good job of it. Gillespie peppers the dialogue with a handful of key termsâ"selling short," "short squeeze," "margin account"âwhich the movie both depicts in action and invites viewers to research for themselves. He also neatly organizes the story into three distinct zones, which parse the abstractions all the more clearly: the small-time purchasers of shares in the video-game retailer GameStop, the Wall Street big shots whose wisdom the small-timers defy and whose businesses they threaten, and the lone individual who sparked the showdown: Keith Gill (Paul Dano). Gill was a social-media influencer who, under the pseudonym Roaring Kitty, advocated for the stock on his YouTube videocast. (He delivered the same message on Reddit under the pseudonym DeepFuckingValue.) At the time, he was working in an unglamorous backwater of financial services, as a broker at MassMutual, and he had an axe to grind with Wall Street. As the film's protagonist, Keith is the source of both its main strengths and its weaknesses: his exploits and passions give "Dumb Money" an appealing energy, even as his temperament and mind-set go largely unexamined.The reason that the buying frenzy Keith had engendered caused trouble was that a number of institutional investors were selling GameStop short. Short selling is a way of betting that a stock price will fall: instead of buying shares in anticipation of eventually selling at a higher price, a short seller borrows stock and immediately sells it, contracting to buy it back at a later date; so long as the stock falls, this yields a profit. In "Dumb Money," the short sellers are represented by perhaps the biggest and most brazen of them, Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), the founder of a New York-based hedge fund called Melvin Capital. When the story starts, GameStop is trading at $3.85 per share; Gabe believes that it will go even lower, but then Keith begins his pushback to drive the price back up.
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S60How a Culture War Over Race Engulfed a School District  On a warm morning in August, 2021, a black Dodge Caravan pulled up to Foxboro Elementary, in North Salt Lake, Utah, and Isabella Tichenor got out, excited for the first day of school. Isabella, who went by Izzy, was ten, and wore overalls that were fashionably pre-ripped at the knees; she loved dancing and playing four square. In a photo that her mother, Brittany, took that day, Izzy stands with her seven-year-old sister, Addison, and their six-year-old brother, Jaxson, all of them captured mid-laugh. “It was a good day,” Brittany told me. But, about a week into the new school year, Brittany noticed that Izzy had become quiet. She asked about Izzy’s new teacher. “Mommy, I don’t think she likes me,” Izzy said. She explained that the teacher wouldn’t look at her, and that she never greeted her in the morning, as she did other students. Brittany asked if Izzy was the only Black student in the class. “I think so,” Izzy said.Brittany had also grown up in Utah, where the Black population is less than two per cent. Classmates started calling her the N-word in the first grade. She suffered from what she has come to recognize as depression, and sometimes struggled to get out of bed. When she graduated from high school, she gravitated toward work that rewarded her knack for numbers—cashier jobs, then positions in accounting. Izzy, the result of a short-lived relationship, was born in 2011; she had dramatic eyebrows and a mole on her forehead. At three or four, she began screaming inconsolably in grocery stores and other public spaces, unprovoked. At times, she was so overcome with anxiety that she couldn’t speak, and clapped her hands at Brittany, trying to get the words out. Brittany believed these were signs that Izzy was autistic. After Addison and Jaxson were born, Brittany moved around the Salt Lake region, placing the children in different schools, but the assessment of Izzy, who also had dyslexia, was always the same: she was behind in math, reading, and writing. In an evaluation conducted in 2017, when Izzy was six, her first-grade teacher noted that she was “withdrawn” and “depressed.”
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S6165 Years Ago, a Quirky Sci-Fi Classic Created The Perfect Movie Monster  Science fiction monsters are rarely elegant. While we all love menacing aliens in films like Independence Day or Alien, the vast majority of monsters, no matter how iconic, all end up feeling sort of similar. They have scary limbs. They have claws. Or jaws. Or pincers, or maybe the occasional tentacle. But then there’s the blob, from The Blob. In 1958, a strange independent film, one that’s more about ‘50s teenagers being dorky than it is about space aliens, accidentally gave us the best idea ever for an alien monster. Although The Blob predates most of our post-eighties shorthand, modern readers can still think of it as Happy Days meets a very slow episode of Stranger Things. Or imagine George Lucas deciding to give a bit of sci-fi flair to American Graffiti.
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S62'Mirage' Is a Classic Assassin's Creed Experience, for Better and Worse  Within seconds, my hands recognize that I am playing an Assassin’s Creed game even before my eyes do. The familiar feeling of holding down a button and pushing my protagonist forward to parkour across rooftops instantly activates my muscle memory and I just act. It transports me to the early entries in the franchise, devoid of any RPG bloat. Which is exactly what Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s developers at Ubisoft Bordeaux are going for.The newest entry in the franchise, set to be released October 5, is a back-to-basics moment for Assassin’s Creed. After spending almost four hours with Assassin’s Creed Mirage it is safe to say Ubisoft is on track to accomplishing that goal. This is mostly for the better, but not without several flaws that are also a holdover from the original formula.
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S63'Ahsoka' Theory Reveals How Episode 5 Will Completely Rewrite the Main Character  Ever since Ahsoka Tano made her live-action debut, fans have complained that Rosario Dawson’s take on the character didn’t quite feel like the spunkier Ahsoka they remembered from The Clone Wars and Rebels. Maybe it’s her performance, maybe it’s how the costume translated from animation into live-action, but something about her just felt... off. These complaints only intensified once she began interacting with her old friends from Rebels, who felt like they had come out of a different, more light-hearted show. However, there might actually be a genius explanation for this complaint, and if so, it will be spelled out in Ahsoka Episode 5.
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S64Audi's Future Work Model Is Driving Change In the Auto Industry  The automotive industry is undergoing unprecedented change as the electric and digital landscape unfolds alongside evolving consumer preferences for more efficient and convenient vehicles. Demand for electric vehicles is growing faster than ever before, with experts predicting that sales in the United States could reach up to 40-50% of total passenger car sales by 2030.The rising demand for EVs means that the automotive industry will need to completely rethink the customer experience, including the showroom floor, the in-car experience, and the service bay.
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S65'Assassin's Creed Mirage' Ditches the Franchise's Most Controversial Feature  After three entries in the open-world RPG genre, Assassin’s Creed is looking to return to the franchise's roots with Mirage. Set in 9th-century Baghdad and telling the origin story of Valhalla’s Basim, Mirage brings back a focus on stealth and parkour. But Narrative Director Sarah Beaulieu says one of the franchise’s most controversial story elements won’t be making a comeback in Mirage — the adventures of the modern-day Assassins.
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S67S68How to Romance Andreja, 'Starfield's Best Companion  There are plenty of paths to pursue in Starfield, from exploring every planet to becoming a notorious smuggler. When you aren’t trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, you can also fall in love. While Starfield’s romance options are nowhere as complex (or overtly horny) as Baldur’s Gate 3’s romances, one companion stands out amongst the rest — Andreja. Here’s how to win her heart and settle down together amongst the stars.
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S69'Ahsoka' Director Teases a Brilliant Villain Twist  As Ahsoka reaches its halfway point, you’d be forgiven for wondering when the series’ Big Bad is going to show up. Much has been made of the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), who’s been stuck in a distant galaxy for a decade. The bulk of the series has been focused on the search for Thrawn, and while his presence looms large over Ahsoka, his absence is starting to get distracting.The series’ latest episode, “Fallen Jedi,” picked up the slack by pitting Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) against Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson). After weeks of occasional badassery, Baylan was finally able to unleash the full scope of his power. His duel with Ahsoka was the irrefutable climax of the episode, but it’s the conversation they have before locking lightsabers that really made an impression.
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S70The Goriest Superhero Show is About to Repeat a Fatal Franchise Mistake  The Boys has gone from a no-holds-barred satire of superhero franchises and the comic book movie churn to a franchise in and of itself. Prime Video’s answer to the MCU became such a success it now has a slew of spinoffs, including The Boys Presents: Diabolical and the upcoming Gen V. But just how far will this go? A concerning quote from an Amazon executive suggests this show could fall in its predecessors’ footsteps, despite the showrunner’s initial plan. In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Amazon executive Vernon Sanders speculated on the future of The Boys as a franchise, mentioning series showrunner Eric Kripke. "I will say this: Eric has had a vision for what this all leads to for years now, and we've been in an ongoing conversation about what comes next," Sanders said. "So, it's probably premature to talk about that beyond saying we believe in Eric, and if Eric is interested in continuing the story, we'll be the first ones in line to really work with him on what that is.”
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