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 S69Women are returning to work, but there's more to the story   Finally, there's some good news for women workers. After a three-year period that saw their workforce participation plummet – so severe, it was labelled the "she-cession" – scores of women are actively searching for jobs. Many are finally back to work.It's been a long road. During the pandemic, women were disproportionately affected by job losses; since 2020, they've been dropping out of the workforce in record numbers, largely to tend to caring responsibilities (particularly mums of colour). Meanwhile, employment sectors that women workers have traditionally been dominated – such as education, nursing and hospitality – took the brunt of job losses during lockdowns and social distancing.
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S1How Apple Is Organized for Innovation  When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments.
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S2What Is Disruptive Innovation?  For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents.
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S3A 100-Day Plan for Your First Job Out of College  You studied and worked hard, got your degree, and secured a full-time job. Congratulations! You’re onto the next stage of adulthood: building your career. But where do you even begin? Anyone who’s been there will tell you that the transition from college to corporate isn’t a smooth sail. The cultural shift can be overwhelming.
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S4Research: Consumers' Sustainability Demands Are Rising  Three factors are driving us toward a major shift in consumption patterns where consumers will consider sustainability as a baseline requirement for purchase: 1) Trust drives behavior and, ultimately, business outcomes; 2) Sustainability promotes trust, particularly among younger generations; and 3) Younger generations will soon have most of the purchasing power in the U.S. Companies that understand these trends — and create truly sustainable brands that make good on their promises to people and the planet — will seize advantage from brands that make flimsy claims or have not invested sufficiently in sustainability.
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S5How to Address the Supply-Chain Staffing Crisis  Businesses are being impacted by a global skills shortage that is hampering manufacturing output and service delivery. In addition, the costs of producing materials, manufacturing goods, and providing services is rising due to labor costs. For small to medium enterprises, this means margins may be squeezed to the point to where they can no longer compete in today’s hyper-competitive global marketplace. AI, robotics, digital transactions, and related automation provide the means for SMEs to enhance and build capabilities cost-effectively.
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S6How Do I Communicate With More Tact?  He’s always believed in hard work and is extremely ambitious. But he’s received feedback that sometimes the way he communicates is too direct, and he wants to work on his delivery. Host Muriel Wilkins helps him understand what might be holding him back and coaches him through how he can improve his approach.
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S76 Actions CEOs Must Take During a Cyberattack  Many have warned over the years of the growing cyber threats and some have offered thoughtful advice for how to strengthen an organization’s protection and resilience. Three questions can help determine whether enough has been done: First, have you participated in a cyber tabletop exercise recently? Second, do you have the contact information of your chief information security officer saved somewhere other than your work phone or computer? (Remember, if your company’s networks suffer a ransomware attack, your work devices may be inaccessible.) Third, do you know your point of contact in government in case of a cybersecurity incident?
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S8Earth's newest 'baby volcano'  On the afternoon of 10 July, the Earth cracked open. Three fissures appeared north-east of the base of Litli-Hrútur – a small mountain on the Reykjanes Peninsula in south-western Iceland – and began to spew molten lava high into the air accompanied by plumes of gas.Iceland's latest eruption wasn't a total shock; Litli-Hrútur (which translates to "Little Ram") is part of the Fagradalsfjall volcanic area that erupted in March 2021 and August 2022 after a break of almost 800 years, and the surrounding area had been shaking for several days with more than 12,000 earthquakes recorded prior the start of the eruption.
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S9Why we personify threatening events  How do you picture a menace that creeps into your home unannounced and takes your loved ones?In plague-infested Europe, the answer was the skeletal, hooded figure that we have come to know as the Grim Reaper. He first emerged in the 14th Century, during the time of the Black Death, as wave after wave of the infection (caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis) swept across the continent and killed half its population.
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S10The Genius Bar in a country where iPhones can't legally be sold  Months after Ángel García Padrón fixed a German journalist’s MacBook Pro in his small Havana repair shop, she sent him an email. García Padrón had mended her waterlogged laptop after her home in Cuba flooded, but when the journalist took it to an official Apple Store in Berlin, the authorized repair person had expressed disbelief, saying there was no trace of any water damage at all. “Then my Cuban repairman must be a magician,” she recounted telling the Apple worker. García Padrón is used to conjuring these sorts of tricks on a daily basis — the skills required to deal with Apple products in Cuba require a special sort of magic.Even though prohibition limiting the exportation, re-exportation, sale, and supply of Apple products to Cuba was eased in 2015, getting a hold of, operating, and maintaining them can still be a challenge. This is in part because basic replacement parts are difficult to import, since they cannot be purchased directly from Apple. It’s not just hardware, either: Downloading apps or software updates is tricky because Cuban IP addresses are blocked. And setting up a new Apple ID with two-factor verification requires a phone number from outside Cuba.
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S11Drive fast and carry a fake wallet: How Pakistan's gig workers stay safe  Four months ago, Karachi-based inDrive worker Hasnat Khan was robbed at gunpoint on his way to pick up a passenger at around 2 a.m. “[The robbers] trailed behind for a couple of kilometers, cornered me in a dark alley, and showed me a pistol,” he told Rest of World. “I thought I was going to die.”When Khan reached out to inDrive, he said the company apologized but offered no help. “I lost my new bike, my phone, and all the money I earned that day. We risk our lives every day trying to earn a living.”
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S12Here's How to Actually Keep Kids and Teens Safe Online  Controversial policy proposals such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) are making headway across the country, but there are other ways to help protect young people in the digital worldThe Internet can be a risky place. There are endless feeds filled with posts that contain graphic sexual and violent content, glamorize eating disorders, encourage self-harm or promote discriminatory and offensive diatribes. People often share too much personal information with a too-public audience that includes cyberbullies and strangers with ill intent. And they also risk losing time: by spending hours online, they might miss out on experiences and growth opportunities that can be found elsewhere. These problems are particularly acute for children and teenagers, and new laws that attempt to protect youth from the Internet’s negative effects have their own serious downsides. Scientific American spoke with experts about the best evidence-backed ways to actually keep kids safe online.
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S13Florida's Attacks on Education Threaten Science  Laws that gut science classes of social context and inclusive design jeopardize progress towards equitable scienceAs students across the U.S. begin the school year, many will find their classrooms changed by politics. More than 19 states, from Idaho to North Carolina, have embraced “educational intimidation” laws or policies. They target discussions on race, gender and sexuality, and will influence all disciplines, including the sciences.
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S14Ada Limón's Poem for Europa, Jupiter's Smallest Galilean Moon  U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón discusses her involvement in NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and the inspiration behind her poem, which will travel onboard the spacecraft.Bri Kane: Poets are always talking about the moon. But this time it’s Ada Limón, our United States Poet Laureate, and she’s not talking about our moon. She was asked by NASA to write a poem about Jupiter’s smallest [Galilean] moon, Europa, which they believe may have the potential for life. Limón’s poem will be engraved on a spacecraft called the Europa Clipper, which will begin its journey to the icy moon in 2024.
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S15Why There's a Serious Cancer Drug Shortage, and How to Fix It  The recent national shortage in chemotherapy drugs points to a need to overhaul the generics marketA cancer diagnosis is already devastating. It’s even more gut-wrenching when your doctor tells you that a drug shortage has disrupted your treatment regimen—that your hospital can’t get its hands on the very drugs that can save your life. Many cancer patients are now facing this grim reality as hospitals nationwide weather what is “likely the worst chemotherapy drug shortage crisis that the U.S. has ever seen,” says Amanda Nickles Fader, a gynecologic oncologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
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S16This Insect-Sized Robot Can Carry 22 Times Its Own Weight  An insect-sized robot powered by tiny explosions can crawl, leap and carry a load many times its own weight.The robot, developed by materials engineer Robert Shepherd at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, his PhD student Cameron Aubin and their colleagues, is powered by tiny actuators. “The actuator kind of looks like a drum. It’s a hollow cylinder with an elastomeric silicone rubber on the top,” says Aubin.
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S17Satellite Internet Companies Could Help Break Authoritarianism  In Iran and elsewhere, governments restrict Internet access to restrict freedoms. Companies that launch communications satellites can ensure a free and open Internet for allIn 2022, when Iran’s notorious “morality police” killed 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini, the act triggered nationwide protests around police brutality and women’s rights. The government tried to quell the unrest by shutting down mobile data communication and hampering the flow of information through social media channels. Iranian officials cut off Internet access entirely to Kurdistan.
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S18Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee's Carbon Footprint  By not going into the office, an at-home worker can cut greenhouse emissions in excess of 50 percent if they take energy-conservation stepsAt the height of the COVID pandemic, an estimated 50 percent of all Americans began working remotely. Since then many workers have returned to the office—but around 20 percent have continued to work from home at least part-time.
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S19S20Artificial Womb Trials in Humans Could Start Soon  U.S. regulators will consider clinical trials of a system that mimics the womb, which could reduce deaths and disability for babies born extremely pretermA hairless, pale-skinned lamb lies on its side in what appears to be an oversized sandwich bag filled with hazy fluid. Its eyes are closed, and its snout and limbs jerk as if the animal — which is only about three-quarters of the way through its gestation period — is dreaming.
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S21Can Zillow's Low Down Payment Program Help Thaw the Housing Market?  Wharton’s Benjamin Keys weighs in on Zillow’s new 1% down payment loan, saying the fintech firm is trying to innovate in a housing market that just isn’t moving.Zillow’s new promotion is enticing for eligible home buyers in Arizona who can’t save enough for a down payment: Pay as little as 1% down, and the company will contribute 2% in closing costs to help them get in the door of a new home.
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S22Pay Transparency Is Sweeping Across the US  Applying for a new job is always a venture into the unknown, but when it comes to the pay on offer, that uncertainty is lessening. Salary disclosure in US job ads appears to now be the norm. New data from job marketplace Indeed shows that as of August more than half of US job postings on the site included a salary range.Pay transparency laws have recently spread across the US, taking effect in Colorado in 2021, New York City in 2022, and California and Washington states this year. New York state enacted its own law yesterday. But the trend to more openness about pay may also reflect a growing awareness that pay transparency is good for business.
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S23Xiaomi's Fantastic Folding Phone Is the Slimmest Yet  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 WIREDFolding phone fans have more options than ever right now, from Google’s Pixel Fold and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold5 to the Motorola Razr+ and Galaxy Z Flip5, but it’s worth looking at smartphones like Xiaomi’s new Mix Fold 3. It’s only available in China, and even if you do import it, you’ll need to jump through hoops to get Google apps working. But it offers a peek at what might come to our shores in the not-too-distant future.
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S24X Challenger Pebble Thinks AI-Generated Posts Can Help Lure Users Away From Elon Musk  Every text-centric social platform has its own way of nudging people to write the content needed to keep other users engaged. “What is happening?!” yelps the compose box on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. Meta’s equivalent on Facebook wonders, “What’s on your mind?” No matter what the question, it’s always been on users to conjure up a response.Pebble, a Twitter-style service formerly known as T2, today launched a new approach: Users can skip past its “What’s happening?” nudge and click on a tab labeled Ideas with a lightbulb icon, to view a list of AI-generated posts or replies inspired by their past activity. Publishing one of those suggestions after reviewing it takes a single click.
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S2540 Amazingly Addictive Couch Co-Op Games  If you need to recharge, what better way than to cozy up with friends or family and play some couch co-op games? Whether you want space shooter action, a platform challenge, or a tricky puzzler, we have a game here for every co-op crew, including games built for pairs, trios, quartets, and more. Here are the very best cooperative titles for the PlayStation, Xbox, Windows PC, and Nintendo Switch.For co-operative fun when you can't get together physically, check out the Best Online Co-Op Games.
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S26Review: Sonos Move 2 Portable Speaker  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 WIREDOne person’s “deliberate and unhurried” is another’s “tardy and overdue,” of course. But whatever spin you put on it, there’s no denying that Sonos takes its sweet time in developing and launching new products. So the fact that it’s replacing its Move portable wireless speaker after just four years seems almost like a rush job.
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S27Explore the Ancient Aztec Capital in This Lifelike 3D Rendering  TenochtitlÁn has been rebuilt, or at least a 3D version of it has, and the fascinating work has quickly gone viral. Digital artist Thomas Kole, originally from Amersfoort, Netherlands, has re-created the capital of the Aztec, or Mexica, empire with so much detail that it looks like a living metropolis. “What did the ancient, enormous city built atop a lake look like?" wondered Kole, as he explored Mexico City on Google Maps. Finding no satisfactory visual answers, he opted to re-create it in his spare time using open source software like Blender, Gimp, and Darktable. For a year and a half, he turned to historical and archaeological sources as he sought to bring Tenochtitlán back to life while remaining as faithful as possible to what we know about the city.“My interest grew as I explored maps of Mexico City. First, however, I am originally from Europe, where we hardly learn about Native Americans and pre-Columbian civilizations. We are too often taught that they were very primitive peoples. But, as I learned more about the Mexica capital, I came to understand it was a very organized city and one of the largest in the world at the time,” says Thomas Kole, in an interview with WIRED.
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S28The Dark Economics of Russell Brand .jpg) There was a brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. With an election looming, the opposition Labour Party was trailing in the polls against a coalition government that was the very definition of establishment—led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister in David Cameron and his Westminster- and Cambridge-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, now president of global affairs at Meta. So the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went seeking the endorsement of Brand, the actor, comedian, and emerging online provocateur whose anti-corporatist screeds to his 9.5 million Twitter followers and 100,000 YouTube subscribers gave him the appearance of a power player. Miliband got Brand’s endorsement but lost the election.Since then, Brand’s reach has exploded. His YouTube channel now has 6.6 million subscribers, his X account more than 11 million followers. But his anti-establishment message has morphed, from a broader, almost coherent response to the politics of fiscal austerity that shaped the UK after the 2008 financial crisis to a series of cultish, conspiracy-driven narratives that draw in Covid denialism, Russian disinformation, and the far-right-inspired “Great Reset” theory, united by the meta-conspiracy that the mainstream—the “elites”—have darker agendas based on control.
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S29S30Un-sabotage yourself with intrinsic motivation  Johann Hari received the most poignant wake-up call of his life at his local fast food joint. It was Christmas Eve 2009, and to his horror, the staff had written him a huge Christmas card, declaring Hari their “best customer.” It wasn’t just the realization that junk food had taken over his life that startled Hari. It was the grim reality that vast swathes of humanity are ruled by desires that only serve to make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unfulfilled. Yet we listen to those desires again and again, driving ourselves into chronic states of depression and anxiety.
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S31In 1909, a best-selling book predicted WWI would never happen. Then it did.  In the spring of 1949, foreign ministers from Canada, the United States, and Western Europe met in Washington D.C. to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. Many thought the treaty, which effectively created the military alliance known as NATO, would not last, with The Washington Post writing that the signing ceremony was “more spectacular than the act itself.”One person who did not share this sentiment was Norman Angell, a British journalist and politician who believed it was only a matter of time before humanity would say goodbye to war forever. In his 1909 book The Great Illusion, Angell argued that developed countries were becoming so economically dependent on each other that the costs of international conflict far outweighed its gains.
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S32Building leaders ready for anything: 4 critical change leadership capabilities  It is difficult to name an organization that hasn’t been affected by significant change in recent years, and the pace of that change shows no sign of decelerating. Organizations continue to struggle with developing strong leaders who are not only adept at managing today’s challenges — whether those are customers, competitors, communities, climate change, or the realities of the post-COVID economy — but also prepared for whatever the future may bring.Why is change leadership so difficult? Because leaders too often assume that revising policies, incorporating new technology, or communicating updated financial goals will drive the desired results. If it were that simple, there wouldn’t be such a long history of highly touted shake-ups, reorganizations, and innovations now used as case studies for what not to do.
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S33Kakeibo: The Japanese way to manage money through mindfulness  We can sometimes approach household finances as a cold math problem. You start with a fixed income. You pay your bills and utilities, maybe save a small percentage, and finally spread out the remainder to see you through to next month. Plug in the numbers, do the operations, and you’re done. Budget budgeted!But this approach has a major flaw: It puts math before mindfulness. That’s a problem because finances are math problems complicated by the variables of human psychology.
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S34S35Ancient Roman "wow glass" has photonic crystal patina forged over centuries  Nature is the ultimate nanofabricator. The latest evidence of that is an unusual shard of ancient Roman glass (dubbed the "wow glass") that boasts a thin, golden-hued patina. Roman glass shards are noteworthy for their iridescent hues of blue, green, and orange—the result of the corrosion process slowly restructuring the glass to form photonic crystals—and this particular shard's shimmering mirror-like gold sheen is a rare example with unusual optical properties, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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S36Hell freezes over, MS Paint adds support for layers and PNG transparency  The venerable, equally derided and beloved MS Paint app has been on a roll lately, picking up a major redesign, dark-mode support, better zoom controls, and other fit-and-finish updates all within the last couple of years. But today Microsoft announced that it is finally adding two features that could make the app a bit more useful for power users: support for Photoshop-esque image layers and the ability to open and save transparent PNGs.
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S37S38Report: Unity considering revenue-based fee caps, self-reported install numbers  Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier cites a recording of a (threat-delayed) Unity all-hands meeting in reporting that the company is tentatively considering limiting total fees to 4 percent of a game's revenue. That change would potentially ameliorate concerns that some developers could literally bankrupt themselves with games that generate lots of installs but relatively little revenue per player under the currently proposed fee structure.
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S39Autoworker strike could give GM breathing room to fix battery production  Last Thursday, the United Auto Workers went on strike at a trio of factories owned by Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. Negotiations to replace an expiring contract reached a stalemate, leading to thousands of UAW members stopping work in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. The strike has been targeted to disrupt profitable production lines like Ford's Bronco, but there might be a silver lining to the strike for General Motors.
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S40S41S42S43S44All Our Pretty Sons  All our pretty sons on the playground running in bright colors, their high, bright voices ringing out. Now the slides, now climbing, now leaping from swings. They’re wonder-struck at the sight of a green maple tree spilling its magic, waving its arms at blue sky. They are so little, the language of violence hasn’t yet entered them. Older boys haven’t yet taught them how to be cruel. They touch the world with small hands and are delighted—a xylophone bell ringing a rainbow of sounds like concentric circles cast by a pebble on the surface of a lake. It’s late afternoon. We join the shadows of other mothers, pushing our swinging children. Little parabolas. They go higher and higher into what seems an endless sky. The enormous shadows thrown by our bodies are us but not us, like silhouettes of women moving behind white sheets on a clothesline. And now this evening before the solstice, swinging our sons and the shadows of our sons suspended in midair. We own nothing, not even our own shadows, tethered as we are to time.
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S45The Bizarre Story Behind Shinzo Abe's Assassination  The man who allegedly killed the former prime minister says he was aiming for something larger: the Unification Church—the Moonies—and its political influence in Japan.This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
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S46The Overlooked Danger That's Massacring Wildlife  The surface of the United States is crisscrossed by 4 million miles of public roads—more than that of any other nation in the world. Roads are an essential part of infrastructure; they allow people, goods, and services to flow quickly and efficiently from one corner of the country to another. Bud Moore, who began a long career with the U.S. Forest Service in 1934, and spent decades cutting roads into the American West, once believed that these incursions also benefited wildlife and wildlands. With better access, “elk could be cared for. Natural stream fisheries could be improved. Log jams could be moved … to create more room for fish to spawn.” Nature was messy, he reasoned; human beings could bring order to it.The environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb shows otherwise in his new book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. Crushing turtles, severing ancient deer migration routes, isolating cougar populations—Goldfarb argues that “there may be nothing humans do that causes more misery to more wild animals than driving.” Even Moore realized this toward the end of his life, noting in his 1996 book that “none of us had the wisdom to foresee the consequences.”
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S47A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About  Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable.“What about family structure?” he asked. “Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?”
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S48What I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism  By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues, liberals like me got defeated on both.Like many women activists of my generation, I came of age politically by joining in the fight over reproductive rights. In 1986, I boarded a bus packed with other college students and rode from New Haven to Washington, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign that urged the Supreme Court to preserve Roe v. Wade. Later, in law school, I came to believe two things about the American legal system. First, its crowning achievement was the expansion of constitutional rights during the postwar New Deal era. In the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, protected the rights of criminal defendants, and put teeth on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other landmark decisions. And, of course, there was Roe.
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S49The Agony of the School Car Line  For parents across America, the school car line is a daily punishment. The stern, annoyed command from some poor teacher or volunteer to “pull all the way forward, please!” The breakdown of the whole process when someone inevitably doesn’t. The long minutes spent idling, spewing exhaust. The cones, and walkie-talkies, and little signs hung from rearview mirrors that help deliver so many kids, individually, right to their school’s doorstep.Car lines are a classic tragedy-of-the-commons problem: Every parent acting in their perceived self-interest—Oh I’ll just drop him off again; it’ll only take a minute—makes us collectively worse off in the form of dirtier air, increased traffic, less human connection, and more frustration.
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S50What to Do When Your Political Party Loses Its Mind  I was a Conservative until Boris Johnson expelled me. It was a painful experience, but here’s what I’ve learned.For three years now, I’ve had a recurring dream. I am walking into the British Parliament, which seems to have become a cathedral. Passing beneath coffered ceilings, Gothic wallpaper, and sinuous brass work, I arrive at a marble version of the debating chamber, in which I can see my sometimes-antagonist, the Conservative member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, lying in what appears to be a bishop’s surplice on one of the pews. When I step in to join my other colleagues, a large man in a tailcoat intercepts me, indicates courteously that this place is no longer for me, and escorts me out.
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S51An Intellectual and a Moral Failure  This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.” The Origins of Woke offers a plausible defense of this claim, and it features a smattering of interesting observations about the historical relationship between the legal system, corporate and education policy, and identity politics.Yet these fleeting virtues are an insufficient counterbalance to the fatal flaw at the heart of Hanania’s book: It is a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right.
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S52The 'Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist' Grows Up  Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel presents a story of gentrification without sentimentality.One afternoon a few months ago, he took me to Dean Street, the block in Boerum Hill where he grew up in the ’70s. The area is the setting of his 2003 book (and one of my favorite novels), The Fortress of Solitude, and of his new one, Brooklyn Crime Novel.
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S53Airbnb Really Is Different Now  The morning after a wedding in Vermont this summer, my friends were recovering in a hot tub while I battled a garbage disposal. And scrubbed the kitchen counter. And stripped the bed. And took out the recycling. Everyone was blissed-out at a hotel before braving the six-hour drive back to New York—except my boyfriend and me, who made the mistake of staying at an Airbnb. Despite the $95 cleaning fee, we were stuck completing a baffling list of pre-checkout chores.Something feels a bit off with Airbnb these days. Those searching for a quaint and homey place to stay now often have to brave high prices, inconsistent fees, laborious checkout demands, and untrustworthy photos and descriptions. You risk ending up, like I did in Vermont, in one of multiple cookie-cutter units listed by the same host, units that lean less “cozy ski lodge” and more “IKEA display room that has never known human touch.” Not only are customers mad, expressing their outrage across social media, but cities have also been cracking down. Earlier this month, New York City instituted a drastic new law that effectively bans most short-term rentals, resulting in the disappearance of 15,000 Airbnb listings.
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S54COVID Drugs Are a Miracle Cure for Cats  Cyprus is home to 1 million or so free-roaming cats that wander its streets, parks, and even luxury resorts. They are about as numerous as people. So when a deadly cat outbreak began sweeping across the Mediterranean island this year, the humans quickly noticed something was terribly wrong.Stray and feral cats died by the thousands. Pet cats died, too. Their bellies became swollen like bowling balls, a symptom characteristic of the disease feline infectious peritonitis, or FIP, that is almost 100 percent fatal left untreated. FIP is caused by a coronavirus that infects cats but not humans. (It is related to but distinct from SARS-CoV-2.) The disease can fester in small, indoor outbreaks, but it had never raced across an entire island, leaving thousands of dead outdoor cats in its path. In early 2023, lab-confirmed FIP cases in Cyprus shot up 20-fold. The unusualness of this outbreak frightened cat owners on the island and confounded veterinarians around the world.
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S55Parent Diplomacy Is Overwhelming Teachers  Parent diplomacy has always been a dicey endeavor for educators. The war stories teachers swap about nightmare parents are the stuff of legend. But in the decade since I started teaching in a public school outside of Boston—and particularly during the pandemic—strained conversations have become the norm. Expectations about how much teachers communicate with parents are changing, burnout is getting worse, and I’m worried about what this might mean for the profession.More parent involvement is, on its face, a good thing. Research shows that kids whose parents stay involved in school tend to do better, both academically and socially. But when I hear from some parents all the time and I can’t reach others at all, students can start to suffer. As I’ve talked with colleagues and experts in the field, I’ve realized that this is a common problem, and it’s been intensifying.
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S56Oktoberfest 2023: Scenes From the Opening Weekend  On Saturday, the 188th Oktoberfest beer festival opened in Munich, Germany. Organizers say they expect millions of visitors over the 18-day festival at Munich’s Theresienwiese—the last keg will be tapped on October 3. The Associated Press reports that the cost for a one-liter mug this year is between 12.60 euros and 14.90 euros ($13.45 to $15.90). Gathered here are images from the opening weekend of Oktoberfest 2023. A waitress reacts as she carries beer mugs in a festival tent during the opening of Oktoberfest, Munich's annual beer festival, on September 16, 2023, in Munich, Germany. #
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S57Americans Are Sleepwalking Through a National Emergency  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.The United States of America is facing a threat from a sometimes violent cult while a nuclear armed power wages war on the border of our closest allies. And yet, many Americans sleepwalk as if they are living in normal times instead of in an ongoing crisis.
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S58I'm completely blind and far more capable than you might think | Psyche Ideas  was a professor of psychology for more than 25 years and is currently a freelance science writer and disability advocate. He advocates for creating accessible digital spaces, documents, and technology. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.While walking near my house a few months ago, I heard a car pull into a driveway behind me. The driver stuck his head out the window and, sounding concerned, asked: ‘Are you OK?’ This seemed to me a strange question to ask an adult who was simply walking down the street. But you might think otherwise when you learn that I was using a white cane.
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S59Humans Have Exceeded Six of the Nine Boundaries Keeping Earth Habitable /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/14/79/14794a9b-b6f0-4ebc-9f2c-2560827f3f1a/gettyimages-1253569204.jpg) Scientists find we are "well outside the safe operating space for humanity" in a new study meant to assess the health of our planetHuman activities have caused the Earth to exceed six of nine boundaries necessary for keeping the planet healthy, pushing the environment "well outside the safe operating space for humanity," scientists warn in a new study published last week in Science Advances.
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S60S61MDMA Moves Closer to Approval for PTSD Treatment After New Clinical Trial /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ce/1a/ce1a901b-c434-4d0a-8c9b-c89d39aed1ff/gettyimages-1400716749_resize.jpg) If endorsed by the FDA, the drug would become the first psychedelic approved for mental health treatment in the United StatesA new clinical trial suggests that the drug MDMA, paired with therapy, is effective in reducing symptoms in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study paves the way for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as the first new treatment for PTSD in two decades.
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S62X-Wing Model From Original 'Star Wars' Movie Found in a Garage /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a8/2c/a82c674b-4a27-4ad5-a3fa-f33b5de22603/x-wing.jpg) Forty-five years after the original Star Wars premiered in 1977, a model of an X-wing Starfighter used in the film’s climactic battle was found stored away in a garage. Soon, the famous fictional spacecraft will go up for auction, with Heritage Auctions billing it as the “pinnacle of Star Wars artifacts to ever reach the market.”The model belonged to Greg Jein, a renowned visual effects artist who died last year. Throughout his lifetime, Jein amassed an impressive collection of media memorabilia, which he stored rather haphazardly across several garages and storage units.
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S63S64What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells | Quanta Magazine  Just as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms, so too do different species. They age at their own rates: Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce before their ephemeral food source disappears, while creatures like humans mature slowly over decades, in part because building a large, complex brain requires it. And at the very beginning of an embryo's life, small tweaks in the timing of when and how different tissues develop can dramatically alter an organism's form â a mechanism that evolution exploits in creating new species. However, what sets the tempo of an organism's growth has remained a mystery."Our knowledge of what controls developmental timing has really lagged behind other areas in developmental biology," said Margarete Diaz Cuadros, who leads research focused on developmental tempo at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
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S65What Makes a Good Salesman  Despite millions of dollars spent on combating the high turnover rate among insurance agents, the rate—approximately 50% within the first year and 80% within the first three years—had remained steady for the more than 35 years preceding the publication of Mayer and Greenberg’s 1964 article. The authors devoted seven years of research to studying the problem of the ineffectiveness of large numbers of salespeople. They discovered flaws in the established methods of selection and revealed the two basic qualities that any good salesperson must have: empathy and ego drive.Empathy, in this context, is the central ability to feel as other people do in order to sell them a product or service; a buyer who senses a salesperson’s empathy will provide him with valuable feedback, which will in turn facilitate the sale. The authors define the second of the two qualities, ego drive, as the personal desire and need to make the sale—not because of the money to be gained but because the salesperson feels he has to. For sales reps with strong ego drives, every sale is a conquest that dramatically improves their self-perception. In the dynamic relationship between empathy and ego drive, each must work to reinforce the other.
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S66S67A Refresher on Statistical Significance  When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are “significant.” But business relevance (i.e., practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (i.e., statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And yet because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand.
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S68 Design Your Marketing Organization to Fit Your Company's Growth Stage  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.Determining the optimal design of a department or function is a key aspect of organization design and one of the most important decisions C-level executives make. Organization design establishes the essential infrastructure that enables or hinders companies' effective deployment of strategic decisions, yet it is one of the least studied and understood by business leaders. Typically, leaders find themselves contemplating restructuring for the first time in their careers after being promoted to an executive level and facing an organizational problem that needs urgent attention. It takes adeptness for an executive to even recognize that they have a structural design problem rather than a staffing issue.
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S70The assassination of JFK: One of the US's biggest mysteries  This November, it will be 60 years since the assassination of President John F Kennedy. A significant anniversary usually provides a chance to remember and reflect on past events – but, in the case of JFK's death, interest has never really faltered. Almost immediately after those gunshots rang out on a sunny autumn day in Dallas, speculation over Kennedy's death began, and it hasn't stopped since.More like this: - The greatest spy novel ever written - The hit song that has divided the US - A watershed moment for 'faith-based' filmmaking
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