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 S63S56Ebrahim Raisi Has Blood on His Hands   Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations invited me to a roundtable discussion it will be hosting Tuesday with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. As a longtime member of the council, I wrote back to decline the invitation and published a brief statement about why I believe that Raisi, a man who ought to be behind bars for mass murder, must not be accorded this legitimacy.Last year, a court in Sweden found a prison official guilty of war crimes in one of the worst atrocities ever committed in the history of modern Iran. That verdict directly implicated Raisi, who was a central enforcer of the policy of exterminating prisoners of conscience, which resulted in thousands of executions carried out over about five months starting in July 1988. This judicial finding mirrored the result of an earlier prosecution in Germany, where a court ruled that Iran’s top leaders were responsible for the state-sponsored assassination of four regime opponents in Berlin in 1992.
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S48The 18 Best Portable Chargers for All of Your Devices  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 WIREDPortable devices have a Murphy’s law–like ability to run out of power at the least convenient moment: as you step on the bus, right in the middle of an important meeting, or just as you get comfortable on the couch and press Play. But if you keep a battery-powered portable charger handy, all those situations are in the past.
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S65The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, September 17, 2023  By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
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S62Cake Yazdi: Iranian yoghurt cake  In the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, masterful yoghurt-makers balance sweet and tart in a creamily decadent fermented yoghurt, and preserve and its byproduct of whey. Iranian author, business owner and yoghurt expert, Homa Dashtaki, lies at the heart of the operation, sealing jars of this timeless kitchen staple with a label embellished with an illustration of a white moustache.In her recent cookbook, Yogurt and Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life, Dashtaki uses her lifelong relationship with yoghurt and whey to tell the story of her culture, faith and relationship with food through her recipes. She emphasises sustainable food production and a battle against wastefulness, instilling these ideals into her 12-year-old yoghurt and whey business, The White Mustache, named for the facial hair of Dashtaki's earliest kitchen companion: her father.
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S61The Key to Inclusive Leadership  Inclusive leadership is emerging as a unique and critical capability helping organisations adapt to diverse customers, markets, ideas and talent. For those working around a leader, such as a manager, direct report or peer, the single most important trait generating a sense of inclusiveness is a leader’s visible awareness of bias. But to fully capitalize on their cognizance of bias, leaders also must express both humility and empathy. This article describes organizational practices that can help leaders become more inclusive and enhance the performance of their teams.
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S70Libya floods: why cash is the best way to help get humanitarian aid to people affected by disasters  The heavy rainfall that hit Libya during Storm Daniel caused two dams and four bridges to collapse in the coastal city of Derna, submerging most of the city in floodwater and claiming thousands of lives. As you watch the disturbing scenes of this disaster on the news, you might wonder about the best way to help. Sending that blanket in the closet you have never used or those painkillers in the cabinet you overbought last time you had a headache might seem helpful.
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S55The Quest to Build a Better Birdhouse  The classic wooden ones aren’t quite cutting it. Conservationists are now turning to 3-D printing and augmented reality.In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely inside.
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S64S57How to Conduct an Effective Job Interview  The virtual stack of resumes in your inbox is winnowed and certain candidates have passed the phone screen. Next step: in-person interviews. How should you use the relatively brief time to get to know — and assess — a near stranger? How many people at your firm should be involved? How can you tell if a candidate will be a good fit? And finally, should you really ask questions like: “What’s your greatest weakness?”What the Experts Say As the employment market improves and candidates have more options, hiring the right person for the job has become increasingly difficult. “Pipelines are depleted and more companies are competing for top talent,” says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best. Applicants also have more information about each company’s selection process than ever before. Career websites like Glassdoor have “taken the mystique and mystery” out of interviews, says John Sullivan, an HR expert, professor of management at San Francisco State University, and author of 1000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent. If your organization’s interview process turns candidates off, “they will roll their eyes and find other opportunities,” he warns. Your job is to assess candidates but also to convince the best ones to stay. Here’s how to make the interview process work for you — and for them.
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S53An Untold Story of the Nazi-Soviet Pact  My mother survived Hitler’s crimes; my father survived Stalin’s. Yet only one of those leader’s nations ever faced justice.“Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore.
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S662023's Best Mystery Thriller Finally Validates Hollywood's Most Underrated Director  Kenneth Branagh has never been one of the most revered directors of his generation. He has, nonetheless, carved out an impressive filmmaking career for himself. As a director, he’s proven over the years to be a favorite among actors, and, despite what some critics would have you believe, most of the films he’s directed have been well-reviewed. Why, then, has he never been fully accepted by cinephiles? One could argue that Branagh is simply a type of filmmaker that has become increasingly rare nowadays and, therefore, difficult to categorize. He isn’t an auteur on the same scale or skill level as, say, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, or Jane Campion, nor is he a talentless hack. He is, instead, a totally capable journeyman director, which is to say that he’s never made a full-blown masterpiece, but he has made a handful of well-constructed (and well-funded) Hollywood projects.
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S50Scientists discover a new type of brain cell  Swiss researchers have discovered a third type of brain cell that appears to be a hybrid of the two other primary types — and it could lead to new treatments for many brain disorders.The challenge: Most of the cells in the brain are either neurons or glial cells. While neurons use electrical and chemical signals to send messages to one another across small gaps called synapses, glial cells exist to support and protect neurons.
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S67You Need to Watch Edgar Wright's Best Movie Ever for Free on Amazon ASAP  This comedy mainstay managed to be a mystery, an action movie, and a buddy cop movie all at once. The phrase “instant classic” is bandied about often, but the criteria seem to be incredibly nebulous. An instant classic is something so groundbreaking, so masterfully pulled off, that it’s immediately clear it will age well and cement itself in history. These movies are rare in all genres, but especially in comedy, which is an incredibly timely medium that often ages like milk.
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S2917 Years Later, a Forgotten Star Wars Invention Could Save a Doomed Character  Star Wars characters once confined to the animated TV shows have been appearing in the live-action Mando-verse by the bushel. There’s Ahsoka, obviously, and her old friends Hera, Sabine, and Chopper from Rebels. But Rebels isn’t where most fans know Ahsoka from; she made a name for herself as the spunky padawan at the center of The Clone Wars. Because The Clone Wars was set decades ago, cameos from that era are looking extremely unlikely. However, a forgotten novel thrown out of the canon may provide a clever workaround to the inevitable problem of time’s passage.
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S69You Need to Play 2023's Best Retro-Inspired RPG on Xbox Game Pass ASAP  Roger Ebert once said that “criticism is a destructive activity.” In many ways, this is true, as we have more fun reading (and writing) bad reviews than we do glowing ones. There’s a kind of existential schadenfreude to trashing something. It makes those of us who don’t create feel better about our lack of contribution to the arts and endeavors we enjoy. Critics also have the power to elevate. To shine a light in a crowded field and direct our attention to something we may have otherwise overlooked. For Xbox fans, this means turning our gaze away from the gargantuan hype around Starfield to another game that, as far as the critics are concerned, is a superior title.
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S58S24How Larry McMurtry Defined and Undermined the Idea of Texas  As a boy, Larry McMurtry rode Polecat, a Shetland pony with a mean streak and a habit of dragging him through mesquite thickets. The family ranch occupied a hard, dry, largely featureless corner of north-central Texas, and was perched on a rise known as Idiot Ridge. McMurtry’s three siblings appeared better adapted to their environment—one of his sisters was named rodeo queen; his brother cowboyed for a while—but Larry, the eldest, was afraid of shrubbery, and of poultry. His father, Jeff Mac, ran hundreds of cows, which he knew individually, by their markings; Larry’s eyesight was so poor that he had a hard time spotting a herd on the horizon. When his cowboy uncles were young, they sat on the roof of a barn and watched the last cattle drives set out on the long trek north. McMurtry lay under the ranch-house roof and listened to the hum of the highway, as eighteen-wheelers headed toward Fort Worth, Dallas, or beyond—anywhere bigger, and far away. Many years later, the London-born Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, a rodeo enthusiast, wore a Stetson and a bolo tie to his first meeting with McMurtry. He was surprised, and perhaps a bit disappointed, to find the young writer dressed “like a graduate student,” in slacks and a sports coat. “He did not share my enthusiasm for horses, either,” Korda recalled.The mismatch between a glamorized West and the grimmer, starker reality was McMurtry’s great subject across the dozens of novels, nonfiction books, and screenplays that he wrote or co-wrote before his death, at eighty-four, in 2021, from congestive heart failure. In “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” a new biography by Tracy Daugherty, the author of well-received books about Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, and Donald Barthelme, McMurtry emerges as a perpetually ambivalent figure, one who eventually became a part of the mythology that he insisted he was attempting to dismantle.
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S52The NFL's Dubious Rhetoric About Race  At every turn, the NFL portrays itself as being deeply committed to racial progress. It has a $250 million social-justice fund. It created and then expanded a rule designed to give candidates of color a shot at leadership roles. The league even had “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn often described as the Black national anthem, performed alongside “The Star-Spangled Banner” during kickoff weekend. But a contrasting picture of how the league really views matters of racial justice keeps coming into clearer focus.Earlier this week, the former NFL Network reporter Jim Trotter, who is Black, sued the league, accusing it of retaliation. The journalist alleges that the network, which is owned by the NFL, didn’t renew his contract because he publicly challenged Roger Goodell about the league’s poor diversity record during the commissioner’s Super Bowl press conference the past two years.
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S49Harvard study shows that trigger warnings are pointless and anxiety-inducing  Trigger warnings on college campuses have been controversial since they became more common and attracted public attention in the mid-2010s. Proponents argue that these statements, intended to help individuals prepare for or avoid potentially traumatizing content, make classrooms safe for students. Critics contend that they stifle free speech, coddle students, and backfire by exacerbating negative reactions.Students are also divided on them. “It really disrupts the flow,” one anonymous medical student expressed to researchers as part of a qualitative study published last year. “People start thinking; ‘Oh, do I need to be upset about this?'”
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S6840 Years Later, 'Ahsoka' Confirms the Meaning of a Pivotal Lightsaber Battle  Anakin Skywalker’s appearance in Ahsoka Episode 5 wasn’t a shock — Hayden Christensen’s involvement had already been announced — but what he did in the episode sure was. After bringing Ahsoka back to the past, he confronts her about how she’s turned her back on the Jedi legacy... and his legacy. Built into that confrontation is an important lesson that proves just how powerful Anakin’s legacy is, and how Ahsoka can continue it. Star Wars podcast Beyond the Dune Sea recently discussed the coolest part of Episode 5: the moment Ahsoka hucks Anakin’s lightsaber into the void.
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S54Mozart's Most Metal Moment  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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is staff writer Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, housing, and other related topics. She recently wrote about how Montana performed a housing miracle, and why you have to care about these 12 elite colleges.
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S25Jennifer Egan Discusses a Solution for Chronic Homelessness  About 1.4 million people in the United States end up in homeless shelters every year, many thousands more living on the street. You could fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused. The problem seems gigantic, tragic, and intractable. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing, which provides not only a stable apartment but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. The New Yorker contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals who had been homeless for long periods of time as they transitioned into a new supportive-housing building in New York. “Is it easy to bring people with these kinds of difficult histories into one place in the span of eight months? No,” she tells David Remnick. “Does it work? From what I have seen, the answer is yes.” By one estimate, addressing the country’s homelessness problem would cost about ten billion dollars. But Egan argues that the figure pales in comparison with what we’re spending on the problem in the form of emergency medical care, emergency shelter, and other piecemeal solutions. “No one wants to see that line item in a budget, but we are already spending it in all of these diffuse ways,” she says. “We are hemorrhaging money at this problem.”Personal History by David Sedaris: after thirty years together, sleeping is the new having sex.
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S437 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process  Research shows that the hiring process is impartial and unfair. Unconscious racism, ageism, and sexism play a big role in who gets hired. The good news is there are steps you can take to reduce unconscious biases. Here are some strategies: (1) Simplify. Standardize the process by seeking out software and other analytical tools that bring structure to hiring procedures. (2) Rework job descriptions. Experiment with the wording of your job listings by removing adjectives associated with a particular gender. (3) Give a work sample test. Tests that mimic the kinds of tasks the candidate will be doing in the job are the best indicators of future performance. (4) Standardize interviews. Ask each candidate the same set of defined questions, and use an interview scorecard to grade the answers. (5) Set diversity goals. Leaders should track how well they’re doing against targets. This encourages others in the organization to keep equality top of mind.
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S14S47Doona's Stroller Tricycle Is Easy to Take Anywhere  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 WIREDWhen I first saw a trike stroller, I was immediately intrigued. A stroller that gives my energetic 1-year-old the sensation of riding on a trike? It sounded like his new happy place.
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S38What Kant can teach us about work: on the problem with jobs | Aeon Essays  is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is on the philosophy of labour and German idealism.Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was the same as it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, the increasing prominence of gig work has turned work from a steady ‘climb’ of the ladder into a precarious ‘hustle’.
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S20S45The 'cosmic dust' sitting on your roof  It's in the dirt on the ground, the debris on your roof, and the dust that tickles your nose – tiny pieces of "cosmic dust", everywhere.These microscopic particles from outer space are micrometeorites – mostly the debris from comets and asteroids – and they have settled all over our planet.
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S15S46The Best Video Game Deals This September  Forget worn-out WASD keys. The true hallmark of being a gamer is a never-ending list of games you want to play. Working through a wish list can get expensive, but with a little patience, it's pretty easy to come across cheap games for every system, whether it's an Xbox, PlayStation, PC, or Nintendo Switch. We hunted down the best game deals we could find for every console and gaming subscription service, and we'll be updating this story every month with a fresh batch of discounts. Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.
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S22Neighbours vs Friends: we found out which beloved show fans mourned more when it ended  Have you either felt a sense of loss after binging the final episodes of a television series? Perhaps you’ve experienced this sadness on reaching the last page of a book that you’d been reading for months? Or maybe you held off watching the final instalment of a movie franchise for as long as possible because you anticipated the emptiness that would come once your time with the characters was over?
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S39Trek alongside spiritual pilgrims on a treacherous journey across Pakistan | Aeon Videos  Each year, caravans of mostly Sufi pilgrims embark on a gruelling journey from a shrine in the city of Sehwan to a shrine near the town of Dureji in Pakistan, making stops at holy places along the way. The journey requires an intense physical and spiritual commitment, with participants required to trek 200 km across rugged mountains and scorching deserts. Titled Lahooti for the name these travellers are given, this short film gives a brief yet cinematically stunning look at the landscapes, traditions and spiritual fervour that characterise this remarkable journey, which is ‘fuelled by love and peace’.An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’
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S35'Ahsoka' Episode 5 Makes a Classic Star Wars Mistake  In its fifth episode, Ahsoka flashes back to the Clone Wars. By doing so, the episode gives Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) the chance to revisit the darkness and carnage of the very galactic conflict that paved the way for the Jedi Order’s downfall. The cavalier manner in which Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) discusses the violent ramifications of the Clone Wars, meanwhile, shines just a greater light on the arrogance that tore the Jedi down from within.Altogether, these moments highlight the divide that grew between Ahsoka’s eponymous hero and her powerful teacher, but they don’t ultimately say anything new about the Jedi, Anakin, or Ahsoka herself. Instead, Ahsoka Episode 5, titled “Shadow Warrior,” seems content to simply reiterate ideas about the complicated legacy of the Jedi that have already been explored more effectively in both the Prequel Trilogy and 2017’s Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi.
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S7040 Years Ago, a Wild Sci-Fi Movie Predicted a Life-Changing Scientific Invention  Playing fast and loose with its reductive portrayal of the brain, the film’s mind-sharing technology is far from reality. Douglas Trumbull is best known as Hollywood’s special effects guru. From 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1982’s Blade Runner, he brought the fantastical visions of other writers and directors life. But in 1983, Trumbull tried making a movie of his own — and stumbled upon a bizarre branch of science that’s just now coming to fruition.
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S18S19Contaminations, revisions, reinventions: how cultures, ancient and modern, have influenced each other  Martin Puchner’s Culture: A New World History examines “the history of humans as a culture-producing species”. At the core of this statement lies the humanities, which emerges as a collective discipline “through a desire to revive a newly recovered past – more than once”.In his introduction, Puchner qualifies this idea through the case study of the Chauvet Cave in the south of France, where elaborate rock art dating back approximately 30,000-37,000 years was discovered in 1994. He reflects on the creation of this ancient art across generations, and the recovery of its remnants by new generations.
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