Mar Hershenson: The secret to successfully pitching an idea

Have a great idea but sure how to sell it? Investor and teacher Mar Hershenson has you covered. Whether it's sharing a new product with a client or vying for a promotion, these three steps will help you tell an irresistible story and get the "yes" you're looking for.

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New Exhibition Examines the Many Converging Histories of Minnesota's Fort Snelling

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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Methuselah, the World's Oldest Living Aquarium Fish, Could Be More Than 100

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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What 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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You Might Like

When 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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Some 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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Strategic 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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San Diego Closes Popular Beach for Seven Years to Protect Sea Lions

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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How 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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Millennials 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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Biden 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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Scientists Search for Near-Death Experiences of Cardiac Arrest Patients

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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The 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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Behold 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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Eat Your Way Through the Idaho Potato Trail

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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The 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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Airlines 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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Elon 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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Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work

“There is no greatness without a little stubbornness… Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.”

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Octavia Butler's Advice on Writing

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

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A 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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I 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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Independent reviewers find NASA Mars Sample Return plans are seriously flawed

An independent review of NASA's ambitious mission to return about half a kilogram of rocks and soil from the surface of Mars has found that the program is unworkable in its current form.

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Google sued over fatal Google Maps error after man drove off broken bridge

Google is being sued by a widow who says her husband drowned in September 2022 after Google Maps directed him over a collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina.

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Feeling 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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Yelp 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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EU 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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Don'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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The 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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A 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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Why 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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AI-generated books force Amazon to cap e-book publications to 3 per day

On Monday, Amazon introduced a new policy that limits Kindle authors from self-publishing more than three books per day on its platform, reports The Guardian. The rule comes as Amazon works to curb abuses of its publication system from an influx of AI-generated books.

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Jenisha

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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Microsoft 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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Is 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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The Pixel Fold's screen repair will cost $900

We have more Pixel parts. The Pixel Fold, Google's biggest and most expensive phone, now has a whole parts selection up at iFixit.

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