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S1Flourishing at Work: Our Favorite Reads   A decade later, the promotions came after much longer gaps. There weren’t that many roles at the top to fill. While I was still doing meaningful work, I often wondered why I wasn’t growing like my younger colleagues. I once told a friend that I loved every aspect of my job, but I just wasn’t seeing any growth.
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S2Why Is It So Hard to Leave a Bad Job?  If you’ve ever been in an unhealthy work situation, you probably know how hard it can be to leave. Leaving a bad job is never easy, and each person’s breaking point is different, so beating yourself up over why you stayed so long in a traumatic situation won’t help. But learning from each experience will empower you to own your career choices and leave earlier if you find yourself in a comparable situation again. The author presents five common reasons it’s hard to leave a bad job and strategies for moving on.
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S3Research: Consumers Choose Shared Experiences Over Quality Ones  Some consumer experiences are best when they’re solo — but new research shows that people will forgo a high-quality experience in order to share it with a partner or loved one. As a result, they may have a worse time, which can lead to unsatisfied consumers, lower sales, and neglected business opportunities. This article explains why people tend to stick together, even when it isn’t necessarily beneficial, and outlines several ways marketers can encourage people to break apart (even briefly) in order to boost their satisfaction.
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S4How Smaller Manufacturers Can Upgrade Their Tech  It is an opportune time for SME manufacturers to upgrade their operations by investing in new software and manufacturing innovations. The reasons include pressures on OEMs to build more resilient supply chains and to regionalize production and the falling cost and increasing ease of use of new technologies. This article describes six steps that SMEs can take to adopt these technologies.
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S5The children leaving the Mafia  Claudia Caramanna has only been in her role two years and her work is already attracting unwanted attention. A year ago, an anonymous letter with a hand-drawn cross on it was sent to her home. Then, in March this year, a group of thugs broke into her office at night and turned the place upside down. For her own protection, Caramanna has now been given a police escort.She took up her role as public prosecutor for the juvenile court of Palermo in July 2021. Many of her investigations have focused on the children of Mafia bosses and drug traffickers. In some cases, she has asked for them to be removed from their families and placed in a care home. These interventions have turned Caramanna into a target by enraged Mafia clans. But according to her, separating children from their criminal parents is sometimes the only way of keeping them safe.
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S6What's in a domain name?  Twitch.tv. Discord.gg. Github.io. Three memorable addresses for three major websites that all have something in common: Their iconic URLs come from small island nations and territories.The three platforms use the domain suffixes — short codes at the end of URLs — theoretically reserved for sites from Tuvalu, Guernsey, and the British Indian Ocean Territory. But the country codes also carry other meanings: TV has long stood for television, gamers use “gg” as an abbreviation for “good game,” and I/O is a common technical term. And so, these small island states are among a significant number who are selling off their memorable web addresses.
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S7NASA's Gorgeous New Moon Image Paints Shackleton Crater in Light and Shadow  A new NASA instrument allows researchers to view the bright and permanently shadowed portions of the moon’s Shackleton Crater at the same timeShackleton Crater pops from the moon’s South Pole, as if a round cookie cutter were just punched into the rocks, in a gorgeous new image that shows portions of the lunar surface that are permanently shrouded by shadow.
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S8How to Figure Out if Moderate Drinking Is Too Risky for You  Wine with dinner is a lovely thing. I enjoy a glass or two, though rarely more. I have seen the terrible toll of alcohol use disorder and know the risks. Or I thought I did. I judged my drinking “moderate” and relatively benign.A decade ago scientists and public health experts agreed with me. A drink or two a day was safely within most public health guidelines, and research even suggested that a little alcohol could protect against cardiovascular disease.
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S9Period Food Cravings Are Real. A New Brain Finding Could Explain Why They Happen  A new study suggests that changes in the brain's sensitivity to insulin during phases of the menstrual cycle may be linked to appetiteThe insatiable hunger that often accompanies a period is a very real feeling, but that increased craving for carbs and sweets has not been fully understood by science. Now new research suggests a possible mechanism in the brain that could help explain food cravings related to the menstrual cycle.
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S10The Father of Environmental Justice Exposes the Geography of Inequity  Black people face some of the highest cancer and asthma rates in the U.S., statistics that are inarguably linked to the environment in which someone lives, works and plays. But until Robert D. Bullard began collecting data in the 1970s, no one fully understood how a person's surroundings can affect their health. And no one, not even Bullard, knew how segregated the most polluted places really were.Bullard was the first scientist to publish systematic research on the links between race and exposure to pollution, which he documented for a 1979 lawsuit. “This is before everyone had [geographic information system] mapping, before iPads, iPhones, laptops, Google,” he says. “This is doing research way back with a hammer and a chisel.”
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S11S12This Efficiency-Obsessed Psychologist (and Mother of 11) Revolutionized Kitchen Design  Lillian Gilbreth pioneered time and motion efficiency in workplaces and revolutionized kitchen designThis is the story of how one woman changed the design of American kitchens. But it’s actually more than that: Lillian Gilbreth was a pioneering scientist and business woman who was forced to reinvent herself after her husband and business partner died in 1924. Lillian cleverly shifted her focus to what was considered the domain of women: the home.
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S13S14Prominent Consciousness Theory Is Slammed as Bogus Science  Researchers publicly call out theory that they say is not well supported by science, but that gets undue attentionA letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience.” Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.
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S15World Governments Recommit to 2030 Goals to Save Humanity  United Nations secretary-general António Guterres is proposing a $500-billion annual stimulus package to meet the Sustainable Development Goals to preserve the environment and end poverty and hungerWorld leaders this week vowed to redouble their efforts on an ambitious plan to end poverty and protect the environment, which is woefully behind schedule.
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S16AI Tool Pinpoints Genetic Mutations That Cause Disease  Google DeepMind has wielded its revolutionary protein-structure-prediction AI in the hunt for genetic mutations that cause disease.A new tool based on the AlphaFold network can accurately predict which mutations in proteins are likely to cause health conditions — a challenge that limits the use of genomics in healthcare.
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S17S18Josephine Philips: The simple solution to fast fashion  Your favorite pair of jeans -- the ones you refuse to throw out -- are actually a part of a global climate solution, says fashion entrepreneur Josephine Philips. When you value your existing clothes instead of chasing the latest trends, you help reduce waste and protect our planet for generations to come. Learn more about the impacts of what you wear -- and the incredible power of repairing your clothes.
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S19I Failed Two Captcha Tests This Week. Am I Still Human?  For philosophical guidance on encounters with technology, open a support ticket via email; or register and post a comment below.The comedian John Mulaney has a bit about the self-reflexive absurdity of captchas. “You spend most of your day telling a robot that you’re not a robot,” he says. “Think about that for two minutes and tell me you don’t want to walk into the ocean.” The only thing more depressing than being made to prove one’s humanity to robots is, arguably, failing to do so.
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S20The Dumb Alien Mummy Story Takes an Entirely Predictable Turn  On September 12, ufologist and journalist Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed to be evidence of alien life to the Congress of Mexico. On September 19, Mexico’s scientific community gathered for a conference to ask a simple question in return: “Extraterrestrials or Llama Skeletons?”The answer was right there in the subtitle of the conference itself: “Science responds to the charlatans and the gullible.” If Maussan had shocked Mexico and the world with his outlandish claims, this was Mexico’s scientific community fighting back. Toward the end of the conference, Alejandro Frank, a professor of mathematical physics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the host of the event, summed things up: “Faced with the serious problems we are experiencing in Mexico and the entire planet, starting with climate change, war, and pandemics, it is sad to gather to talk about the misdeeds of a professional charlatan.”
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S21Enough Talk, ChatGPT--My New Chatbot Friend Can Get Things Done  I recently needed to contact the CEO of a startup called Lindy, a company developing personal assistants powered by artificial intelligence. Instead of looking for it myself, I turned to an AI helper of my own, an open source program called Auto-GPT, typing in "Find me the email address of the CEO of Lindy AI."Like a delightfully enthusiastic intern, Auto-GPT began furiously Googling and browsing the web for answers, providing a running commentary designed to explain its actions as it went. "A web search is a good starting point to gather information about the CEO and their email address," it told me.
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S22Microsoft Shows Off New Surface Laptops and AI-Enhanced Windows  Microsoft held a media event in New York City this morning. The company used the occasion to show off two new laptops from its house-made Surface line as well as a slew of AI-powered enhancements coming to Windows 11 later this month. The hour-long presentation was not livestreamed, but we were there to hear the announcements, watch the demos, and go hands-on with the new devices. Highlights are below.The Surface hardware announced today is currently available for preorder at Microsoft.com and will officially go on sale starting October 3.
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S23The Great Unbundling of Rupert Murdoch  In a move that surely made the Succession theme play in the heads of all who got the push notification, Rupert Murdoch announced today that the “time is right” for him to step down as chair of Fox Corporation and News Corp, ending his seven-decade reign as mastermind of the media landscape. His retirement won’t begin until November, but the great unbundling of his media empire has already begun.Still, what an empire it is, or was. Murdoch, 92, got his start at 21 years old, when his father died and left him in charge of his relatively small Australian newspaper company. On taking the helm, he upped circulation by shifting their coverage to be more tabloidy. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he continued to build that portfolio, gobbling up everything from The Sun in the UK to The Village Voice and New York magazine in the US.
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S24Google Mourns Veteran Engineer Luiz Andr  Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley's development of cloud computing.Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of "the data center as a computer," which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.
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S25Best Prime Day Laptop Deals  More than a decade ago, Steve Jobs likened the computer to a truck, suitable for the heavy lifting of serious work and intensive tasks. It holds true, even in 2023. Most of us who work at an office for a living still need the computer's keyboard and multitasking abilities. If you're ready for a new laptop or a few upgrades to your at-work or home office setup, Amazon's Prime Day events are a great time to buy.Amazon has a new shopping event for Prime members coming on October 10 and 11. It's called Prime Big Deals Days, and will feature 48 hours of discounts on pretty much everything you find for sale on Amazon. Check out a handful of early TV deals or come back here for frequent refreshes on laptop and home office deals. In the meantime, we've scoured around to find a few early discounts that are on par with Prime Day.
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S26Amazon's Next Prime Day Sales Event Is in October. Here's What to Know  What makes Something a Prime Day deal? Once upon a time, the answer was easy: Prime Day deals were steeply discounted products sold through Amazon on one sunny summer day, usually in July. Things were simpler then. You may have forgotten why it startedâback in 2015, the first Prime Day was a way to celebrate Amazon's 20-year anniversary with loyal Prime subscribers.Now, the flagship Amazon Prime Day event spans two days and is really more of a deals season, with early deals that start dropping in June. Is a Prime Day deal really a Prime Day deal if it's offered a month before the event? Is it a Prime Day deal if it's from a rival retailer that spends little energy on branding its own shopping event? These questions are best left to the philosophers. What we can say, definitively, is that Prime Day has been so successful that it has plenty of imitators. Even Amazon can't stop diluting its major event with yet another Prime Day deals event this fall.
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S276 Best Prime Day Deals on Apple Devices  A lot has changed on the Apple front since July. Last week, the company announced a host of new and improved products, including a new Apple Watch, new AirPods, and a brand new iPhone line with (finally!) USB-C. The bad news is that you should not expect to see deals on those new devices at the upcoming Amazon Prime Day event in October. Prime Big Deals Days will have deals aplenty—but probably not on flagship smartphones released less than a month before the sale starts on October 10.However, the good news is that other Apple deals are likely to exist, including iPads (which were not refreshed this round) and older models of the iPhone and Apple Watch.
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S28Pulsars, not dark matter, explain the Milky Way's antimatter  When you look out at the Universe, what you see is only a tiny portion of what’s actually out there. If you were to examine the Universe solely with what’s perceptible to your eyes, you’d miss out on a whole slew of information that exists in wavelengths of light that are invisible to us. From the highest-energy gamma rays to the lowest-energy radio waves, the electromagnetic spectrum is enormous, with visible light representing just a tiny sliver of what’s out there. At shorter wavelengths and higher energies, gamma rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet light are all present, while at longer wavelengths and lower energies, infrared, microwave, and radio light encodes a wide variety of information about what various astrophysical sources are doing.However, there’s an entirely different method to measure the Universe: to collect actual particles and antiparticles, a science known as cosmic ray astronomy. For more than a decade, astronomers have seen a signal of cosmic ray positrons — the antimatter counterpart of the electron — that they’ve struggled to explain. Could it be humanity’s best clue toward solving the dark matter mystery? While many hoped that the answer would be “yes,” a recent study definitively says no, it’s probably just pulsars. Here’s why.
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S29We asked Big Thinkers: "Is there life after death?" Here's what they said.  You will die. No matter how powerful you are, how hard you pray, or how sophisticated nanotechnology becomes, you will die. The vast majority of people can see their death approaching. We have a lot of time to think about it. Yet, death remains a great mystery — the veil behind which no one can peek.Given how terrifying and unknown death is, it’s no wonder we talk about it a lot. It’s not too ridiculous to suppose that almost all the world’s religions are, to some degree, a response to death. Most of our philosophies are, too. In 2020, Big Think interviewed some big names in academia. They gave us their answers to the “What happens after we die?” question.
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S30Why the myth of the "alpha leader" should be debunked  The alpha leader is about power and dominance. He thinks and acts like a winner, and people are naturally drawn to his strength and assertiveness. He can dole out favors from his social throne or be downright Machiavellian to anyone foolish enough to step out of line. Oh, and he’s totally ripped, too — with a six-pack and everything.This concept of the alpha leader is instantly recognizable in our popular imagination. He makes regular cameos in TV dramas, history books, and political ads. He’s also a myth — or, more accurately, not the only alpha in town.
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S31The paradox of the radioactive boars  Deep in the Bavarian woods of Southeast Germany roam scores of wild boars—prized game in a country where hunting is akin to a national tradition. But most hunters would think twice before venturing into the woods to chase these fat and fleshy pigs. Even if they track one and take it down, chances are they won’t be able to enjoy the meat. The boars are too dangerous to eat.In some cases, the Bavarian boars are several hundred times more radioactive than what’s considered safe for human consumption. The hunters are well aware of this phenomenon, typically attributed to the 1986 Chornobyl accident, during which radioactive fallout drifted over to Europe. (Chornobyl is the preferred spelling in Ukraine.) “Europe is pretty much a mess in terms of radioactive contamination,” says Georg Steinhauser, professor of physical radioecology at the Vienna University of Technology.
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S32Is iron the Achilles' heel for cancer?  Good medical treatments destroy bad stuff while leaving the good stuff untouched. One of the tricky parts of treating cancer is that the stuff that needs to be destroyed (cancer cells) is painfully similar to that which needs to be untouched (healthy cells). This means drugs that kill cancer cells usually harm healthy cells as well. In 2022, however, a team of scientists at UC San Francisco reported a way to leverage cancers’ unique metabolic profile to ensure that drugs only target cancer cells.
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S33S34New study looks again at how alcohol influences attraction  For a phenomenon that is so deeply engrained in the public consciousness, the scientific evidence regarding what has been called "beer goggles" is surprisingly inconsistent. The term refers to finding people more attractive after drinking alcohol, and there is a wealth of scientific evidence both for and against its existence.
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S35S36S37EU game devs ask regulators to look at Unity's "anti-competitive" bundling  In an open letter published last week, the European Games Developer Federation goes through a lot of the now-familiar arguments for why Unity's decision to charge up to $0.20 per game install will be bad for the industry. The federation of 23 national game developer trade associations argues that the new fee structure will make it "much harder for [small and midsize developers] to build reliable business plans" by "significantly increas[ing] the game development costs for most game developers relying on [Unity's] services."
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S38Yelp names and shames businesses paying for 5-star reviews  Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site's new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.
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S39Don't throw out those used coffee grounds--use them for 3D printing instead  Most coffee lovers typically dump the used grounds from their morning cuppa straight into the trash; those more environmentally inclined might use them for composting. But if you're looking for a truly novel application for coffee grounds, consider using them as a sustainable material for 3D printing, as suggested by a recent paper published in DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference.
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S40S41S42S43Elon Musk's Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather  The billionaire has described his grandfather as a risk-taking adventurer. A closer read of history reveals something much darker.In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”
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S44Jenisha  Jenisha Watts, a senior editor at The Atlantic, spent a portion of her adult life telling half-truths about her upbringing—or saying nothing about it at all. But that’s all changed. Jenisha wrote this magazine’s September 2023 cover story about growing up in a crack house, being separated from her siblings, living with a literary agent in New York City, and ending up as a writer who can process her life through her work.For months, Jenisha the journalist reported on Jenisha from Kentucky. She interviewed her mother about addiction, her brother about their days hunting down dinner, and her grandmother, the family matriarch. In the course of her reporting, Jenisha learned things about her own past, details she still hasn’t figured out how to fold into the person she is today.
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S45The Patriot  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.The missiles that comprise the land component of America’s nuclear triad are scattered across thousands of square miles of prairie and farmland, mainly in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. About 150 of the roughly 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles currently on alert are dispersed in a wide circle around Minot Air Force Base, in the upper reaches of North Dakota. From Minot, it would take an ICBM about 25 minutes to reach Moscow.
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S46Airlines Are Just Banks Now  Last week, Delta Air Lines announced changes to its SkyMiles program that will make accruing status and taking advantage of perks much harder. Instead of relying on a combination of dollars spent and miles traveled in the air, Delta will grant status based on a single metric—dollars spent—and raise the amount of spending required to get it. In short, SkyMiles is no longer a frequent-flier program; it’s a big-spender program. These changes are so drastic that one of the reporters at the preeminent travel-rewards website The Points Guy declared that he’s going to “stop chasing airline status.”When even the points insiders are sick of playing the mileage game, something has clearly gone wrong. In fact, frequent-flier programs are a symptom of a much deeper rot in the American air-travel industry. And although getting mad at airlines is perfectly reasonable, the blame ultimately lies with Congress.
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S47A High-Water Mark in American Mass Culture  Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running comic strip, Nancy, helped establish the way we think visually.The great cartoonist Wally Wood once observed that not reading Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running newspaper comic strip, Nancy, is harder than reading it. Its minimalism makes the strip into something like a stop sign or a middle finger—it’s just there, all of a sudden, and you may find yourself responding to it before you’re ready to do so. This suddenness is part of what makes Nancy so funny. In many ways, the strip is a series of jokes about the nature of jokes. Despite the two rambunctious kids, Nancy and Sluggo, at its center, it’s not about childhood, like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are. And, despite its surrealism, it’s not about the silliness of life, like The Far Side is. It’s about the rules of comics, which Bushmiller made so clear that the reader can understand them at the first, most casual glance at one of his strips. A deeper look—which Nancy resists with all its might—suggests that Bushmiller’s great contribution to popular culture was the way he understood language itself.
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S48Feeling Burned Out? Here's What to Do.  Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the novel’s central protagonist, asks his father for permission to join a monastery, where he seeks to purify his soul and sanctify his work. Cynical and half-drunk, Alyosha’s father makes a prediction about what monastic life will do to the saintly youngster: “You will burn and you will burn out.”
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S49I Don't Like Dogs  I joined a Subreddit that shares my extremely unpopular opinion. I’m not sure it was a good idea.Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t like dogs. I don’t like the way they smell. I don’t like the way they jump on your dry-clean-only pants. I especially don’t like the way they “get to know you.” (I generally don’t like to be poked down there unless it’s so someone can tell me whether I have HPV.) I don’t believe animals are equal to people; I can’t believe $15,000 pet surgeries exist in a country where not every person can get health care.
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S50Some Good News About Your Malaise  The indie-rock band the National is at the height of its influence, and still grappling with its concerns about declining.One of the many awful effects of the coronavirus pandemic is how it has confirmed, for many of us, the nagging and perennial fear that things will never be as good as they once were. The virus still circulates, but the past few years contained a hard before and after, demarcated by lost lives and years and possibilities. We’re older and sadder, and there’s no going back. How do we move forward?
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S51The Microwave Makes No Sense  Matthew Kressy likes to think that he owns a first-rate microwave. The founding director of MIT’s integrated design and management program, Kressy lets his experience inventing gadgets guide his purchasing decisions. But when he needed a new microwave a few years ago, the best he could do was the Panasonic NN-SD861S. Instead of poking at a touch pad to set the cook time, he twists a dial. “It’s kind of fun to use,” he told me, “but it’s not much better than anything else.” His 1.2-cubic-foot unit looks essentially the same as every other countertop microwave available to the average American consumer. It is large. It is rectangular. Its right side is dominated by numerous buttons that could be removed at no loss to society. And it has the same basic look as microwaves from a decade ago, the decade before that, and the one before that.Not only are microwaves ugly, but they are also not particularly user-friendly: My own Sunbeam microwave has a “Potato” button that sets the cook time to five minutes for one potato—irrespective of spud size—and then adds 2 minutes and 30 seconds for each additional potato, up to the device’s arbitrary maximum of four potatoes. Aside from the notorious popcorn setting (which some microwave-popcorn instructions specifically tell you not to use), there are additional useless buttons for “Pizza,” “Beverage,” “Frozen dinner,” and “Reheat.” After four years, I’m still not sure whether it’s possible to set a cook time at an interval of fewer than 30 seconds; I just press “+30 Sec” repeatedly and watch to make sure nothing explodes.
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S52So Much for Biden the Bridge President  In retrospect, Joe Biden probably wishes he’d never uttered these words in public. Maybe it was just youthful exuberance: He was, after all, only 77 at the time.“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said at a rally in Detroit, one of his last pre-lockdown campaign appearances of the 2020 Democratic primaries. It was early March, and he was flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a pair of his former rivals, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker—all members of what Biden would call “an entire generation of leaders” and “the future of this country.”
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S53Millennials Have Lost Their Grip on Fashion  Ballet flats are back. Everyone’s saying it—Vogue, the TikTok girlies, The New York Times, Instagram’s foremost fashion narcs, the whole gang. Shoes from trendsetting brands such as Alaïa and Miu Miu line store shelves, and hundreds of cheap alternatives are available online at fast-fashion juggernauts such as Shein and Temu. You can run from the return of the ballet flat, but you can’t hide. And, depending on how much time your feet spent in the shoes the last time they were trendy, maybe you can’t run either.The ballet flat—a slipperlike, largely unstructured shoe style meant to evoke a ballerina’s pointe shoes—never disappears from the fashion landscape entirely, but its previous period of decided coolness was during the mid-to-late 2000s. Back then, teens were swathing themselves in Juicy Couture and Abercrombie & Fitch, Lauren Conrad was ruining her life by turning down a trip to Paris on The Hills, and fashion magazines were full of Lanvin and Chloé and Tory Burch flats. The style was paired with every kind of outfit you could think of—the chunky white sneaker of its day, if you will.
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S54Biden Lets Venezuelan Migrants Work  President Joe Biden’s administration moved boldly yesterday to solve his most immediate immigration problem at the risk of creating a new target for Republicans who accuse him of surrendering control of the border.Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security extended legal protections under a federal program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that will allow as many as 472,000 migrants from Venezuela to live and work legally in the United States for at least the next 18 months.
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S55The American Face of Authoritarian Propaganda  “Axis Sally” was the generic name for women with husky voices and good English who read German and Italian propaganda on the radio during World War II. Like the Japanese women who became collectively known as “Tokyo Rose,” they were trying to reach American soldiers, hoping to demoralize them by telling them their casualties were high, their commanders were bad, and their cause was lost. “A lousy night it sure is,” Axis Sally said on one 1944 broadcast: “You poor, silly, dumb lambs, well on your way to be slaughtered.”Tucker Carlson, who also repeats the propaganda of foreign dictators while speaking English, doesn’t have anything like the historical significance of Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, though his level of credibility is similar. This is a man who famously wrote texts about his loathing of Donald Trump, even while praising the then-president in public; recently, the former Fox News host kept a straight face while interviewing a convicted fraudster who claimed to have smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama. But when Carlson speaks on behalf of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, his words are repeated in Hungary and Russia, where they do have resonance: Look, a prominent American journalist supports us. I don’t know what Carlson’s motivation is—he did not respond to a request for comment—but his words also circulate in the far-right American echo chamber, where they are sometimes repeated by Republican presidential candidates, so unfortunately they require some explanation.
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S56The End of Rupert's Reign  In 1998, when he was already 67 years old, he told an interviewer that if he retired, he would “die pretty quickly.”Nearly two decades later, in 2015, when Rupert was grooming his son Lachlan to succeed him at Fox, Lachlan said he was well aware that “Rupert’s never retiring.”
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S57What Big Tech Knows About Your Body  If you were seeking online therapy from 2017 to 2021—and a lot of people were—chances are good that you found your way to BetterHelp, which today describes itself as the world’s largest online-therapy purveyor, with more than 2 million users. Once you were there, after a few clicks, you would have completed a form—an intake questionnaire, not unlike the paper one you’d fill out at any therapist’s office: Are you new to therapy? Are you taking any medications? Having problems with intimacy? Experiencing overwhelming sadness? Thinking of hurting yourself? BetterHelp would have asked you if you were religious, if you were LGBTQ, if you were a teenager. These questions were just meant to match you with the best counselor for your needs, small text would have assured you. Your information would remain private.Except BetterHelp isn’t exactly a therapist’s office, and your information may not have been completely private. In fact, according to a complaint brought by federal regulators, for years, BetterHelp was sharing user data—including email addresses, IP addresses, and questionnaire answers—with third parties, including Facebook and Snapchat, for the purposes of targeting ads for its services. It was also, according to the Federal Trade Commission, poorly regulating what those third parties did with users’ data once they got them. In July, the company finalized a settlement with the FTC and agreed to refund $7.8 million to consumers whose privacy regulators claimed had been compromised. (In a statement, BetterHelp admitted no wrongdoing and described the alleged sharing of user information as an “industry-standard practice.”)
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S58A President's Derangement, a General's Duty  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.In The Atlantic’s next cover story, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg profiled General Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last 16 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. What Milley saw as the nation’s highest-ranking officer is a graphic warning of the existential danger America will be in should Trump return to office.
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S59When Nietzsche said 'become who you are', this is what he meant | Psyche Ideas  is a practical philosopher, founder of Designing the Mind, and the author of the forthcoming book Become Who You Are: A New Theory of Self-Esteem, Human Greatness, and the Opposite of Depression (2024).In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche published The Gay Science, a work he referred to as ‘the most personal of all my books’. It came after a series of setbacks in his life, including the weak reception of his previous work, a soured friendship, and his declining health, which caused severe migraines and vomiting, forcing him to resign from his professorial position. Yet it strikes a surprisingly cheerful tone.
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S60Eat Your Way Through the Idaho Potato Trail /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cc/2c/cc2cdcf0-4b5b-431f-ab6b-dea2bdaf58be/media-library-healthy-baked-wsp-chives-nobutter.jpg) The new trail, which winds through Boise, celebrates the top spud-growing state in the nationWhether mashed, fried, baked or boiled, potatoes are a beloved starchy staple around the world. But in the United States, no place is more closely linked with these tasty tubers than Idaho, the top spud-growing state in the nation.
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S61Scientists Search for Near-Death Experiences of Cardiac Arrest Patients /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/4d/c1/4dc15e87-83f8-4576-aab3-ae76f81c5c23/gettyimages-1404400016.jpg) Through survivor interviews and brain scans during CPR, researchers looked for evidence of awareness when people’s hearts had stoppedSome people who survive cardiac arrest report experiencing some form of awareness during this time when their heart has stopped beating. In a new study in the journal Resuscitation, researchers aim to better understand what, if anything, goes on in the brains of cardiac arrest patients receiving CPR.
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S62New Exhibition Examines the Many Converging Histories of Minnesota's Fort Snelling /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cb/76/cb76e6f3-8943-41b1-ae9b-994b7c58e105/037.jpg) The site was the backdrop for critical moments in Native American, African American and Japanese American historyAt the site where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, so too do many different histories. That’s the message of a new exhibition—“Many Voices, Many Stories, One Place”—at Minnesota’s Historic Fort Snelling, which tells the story of the place from multiple perspectives.
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S63Methuselah, the World's Oldest Living Aquarium Fish, Could Be More Than 100 /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/fb/1a/fb1a7d30-4d4c-4719-958d-52c2dbfd06eb/1methuselah_mg_0543-edit_gl_cas_1.jpg) Using a new and noninvasive technique, researchers analyzed the DNA of 33 lungfish in institutions across the U.S. and Australia to determine their agesIn November 1938, an Australian lungfish named Methuselah arrived at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium aboard an ocean liner. At that time, the United States was just recovering from the Great Depression. Germany, under the rule of Adolf Hitler, had recently annexed Austria. One year earlier, the first animated feature film released by Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, premiered in Los Angeles.
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S64Hong Kong Student Jailed Over Tiananmen Square Protest Banner /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ed/cd/edcd66c5-0cb2-4fde-9ec9-2c5f04593af6/gettyimages-1495889153.jpg) A Hong Kong student has been sentenced to prison over a banner commemorating the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.Zeng Yuxuan, 23, a law student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was arrested when she tried to pick up a package containing the banner in early June. Last week, a court sentenced her to six months in jail on charges of sedition, reports the South China Morning Post’s Brian Wong.
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S65San Diego Closes Popular Beach for Seven Years to Protect Sea Lions /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cd/91/cd914408-e9d5-4832-a142-9123c740f126/california_sea_lion_nap_time_in_la_jolla_70474.jpg) Visitors have been getting too close to the marine mammalsâtaking selfies and even harassing themâas they rear their pupsEvery summer, sea lions come ashore in Southern California to give birth, nurse and breed. Several of these sleek pinnipeds haul themselves out of the Pacific Ocean onto the rocks of Point La Jolla, a rugged peninsula located about 15 miles northwest of downtown San Diego.
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S66Behold Modular Forms, the 'Fifth Fundamental Operation' of Math | Quanta Magazine  "There are five fundamental operations in mathematics," the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. "Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms."Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like the others. Modular forms are much more complicated and enigmatic functions, and students don't typically encounter them until graduate school. But "there are probably fewer areas of math where they don't have applications than where they do," said Don Zagier, a mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. Every week, new papers extend their reach into number theory, geometry, combinatorics, topology, cryptography and even string theory.
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S67Strategic Management for Competitive Advantage  Within our increasingly complex economic system, ways must be found to retain the vigor of simple company structures in diverse, multinational organizations. These authors describe successive phases of corporate planning and conclude that the final one — strategic management — can help revitalize complex enterprises.For the better part of a decade, strategy has been a business buzzword. Top executives ponder strategic objectives and missions. Managers down the line rough out product/market strategies. Functional chiefs lay out “strategies” for everything from R&D to raw-materials sourcing and distributor relations. Mere planning has lost its glamor; the planners have all turned into strategists.
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S68S70How Generative AI Will Change Sales  Sales teams have typically not been early adopters of technology, but generative AI may be an exception to that. Sales work typically requires administrative work, routine interactions with clients, and management attention to tasks such as forecasting. AI can help do these tasks more quickly, which is why Microsoft and Salesforce have already rolled out sales-focused versions of this powerful tool.
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