   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S62Jupiter's Moon Europa May Contain Carbon, a Crucial Ingredient for Life  /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/07/c3/07c383a0-a76a-4792-9fd8-bbad0aec1269/184_pia17043_resize.jpg) The James Webb Space Telescope found carbon dioxide on Europa’s surface, and astronomers say it likely originated in the moon’s vast oceanCarbon—an essential element for life on Earth—might be lurking beneath the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, two new studies report, strengthening the moon’s place as a leading contender for hosting extraterrestrial life.
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S56Venetian men | Psyche Films  Commemorating an era when life was documented on rolls of film rather than Instagram, this portrait of being 15 in the 1990s takes viewers back to when unbridled freedom reigned supreme. The English director Celia Willis’s short film centres on a whirlwind trip from her home in south London to Venice, weaving a tapestry of memories into a narrative poem that’s part lament, part celebration. Prefaced with a note about today’s technology-ridden world, the window into her youth is flavoured with the old adage that life was simpler – and certainly more fun – back then.‘It’s the joy of doing all the things that aren’t meant for us,’ Willis says, recounting how she and some friends spontaneously booked their trip and set out on their adventure. Unbothered by the responsibilities of adulthood, their boundless trust, curiosity and innocence lead them to ‘fall in love with Italian men’ and ‘smoke and sing Bob Marley songs’ with strangers. Reenactments of teenage girls twirling around a pastel-tinted bedroom in baggy jeans and flannel shirts, together with archival imagery – including snapshots of the many handsome European men they met along the way – evoke the aesthetics of the age, imbuing the piece with an infectious, nostalgic energy. An affectionate ode to the fearlessness and enduring friendships that can characterise the teenage years, the film is a worthy trip, no matter your background – although it may leave viewers of a certain age yearning for their youth and smiling in recognition.
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S64What Does It Actually Take to Build a Data-Driven Culture?  Building a data driven culture is hard. To capture what it takes to succeed, the authors look at the first two years of a new data program at Kuwait’s Gulf Bank in which they worked to build a culture that embraced data, and offer a few lessons. First, it is important to start building the new culture from day one, even as doing so is not the primary mandate. Second, to change a culture, you need to get everyone involved. Third, give data quality strong consideration as the place to start. Finally, building this new culture takes courage and persistence.Most people who work on data science, AI, and digital transformation are painfully aware that it is often culture, not technology, that stymies their efforts. Many even know the high-level steps they’re supposed to take to fix this problem — invest attention and money into changing people’s mindsets and how the company uses data. But once companies and leaders get into the nitty-gritty details of how to do this, it can be hard to know what implementing those steps actually looks like.
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S34Depredations and depravities reign in this week's Wheel of Time  Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode of Amazon's new WoT TV series. Now they're doing it again for season two—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We're going to do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.
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S63Virginia Woolf Scorned Fashion but Couldn't Escape It /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/0f/08/0f0851f7-202f-42f3-83f5-011eb00714ed/gettyimages-5261885803.jpg) A new exhibition investigates the Bloomsbury Group’s relationship with clothing, accessories and sartorial social norms“We are hoping to see you on Saturday,” she wrote in a letter to the poet. After reviewing which trains to catch, she concluded with one final instruction: “Please bring no clothes; we live in a state of the greatest simplicity.”
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S53The Calendar of Human Fertility Is Changing  American births have historically peaked in late summer. But our changing behaviors, technology, and environment are flattening that bump.As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.
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S57S10Scientists built this listening network to detect nuclear bomb tests. It found blue whales instead  For generations, the creatures swam through the ocean without crossing paths with any human beings. Some of them grew to 24m (80ft) long and weighed 90 tonnes. But if these enormous animals did encounter any boats, those meetings went unrecorded. Until recently, we didn't even know they were there: a pod of pygmy blue whales in the Indian Ocean.Their discovery in 2021 was all the more striking because of how they were found. We wouldn't have come across them if it wasn't for nuclear weapons.
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S67What Great Data Analysts Do -- and Why Every Organization Needs Them  “Full-stack” data scientist means mastery of machine learning, statistics, and analytics. Today’s fashion in data science favors flashy sophistication with a dash of sci-fi, making AI and machine learning the darlings of the job market. Alternative challengers for the alpha spot come from statistics, thanks to a century-long reputation for rigor and mathematical superiority. What about analysts?Whereas excellence in statistics is about rigor and excellence in machine learning is about performance, excellence in analytics is all about speed. Analysts are your best bet for coming up with those hypotheses in the first place. As analysts mature, they’ll begin to get the hang of judging what’s important in addition to what’s interesting, allowing decision-makers to step away from the middleman role. Of the three breeds, analysts are the most likely heirs to the decision throne.
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S58Scientists Collect First RNA From an Extinct Tasmanian Tiger /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/51/fe/51fe033d-c648-459d-a09e-a04603f5ed7c/gettyimages-946150422.jpg) No other RNA has ever been extracted from an extinct species, so the breakthrough opens doors to understanding the biology of long-gone organismsScientists have extracted RNA from a roughly 130-year-old specimen preserved in a museum: a Tasmanian tiger, also known as a thylacine. The feat marks the first time any RNA has been obtained from an extinct species, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Genome Research.
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S52S59S70Almuerzo and the super-sandwiches of Valencia  It is 11:00 on a Tuesday at Bodega Casa Flor, a 130-year-old restaurant in the Cabanyal neighbourhood of Valencia City, Spain, and noise levels have reached a peak. Waiters zip around bearing huge paper-wrapped sandwiches to tables strewn with peanuts and sipped beers. It's a scene that plays out daily in cafes and bars across the province of Valencia, as people take a break for this uniquely Valencian ritual.Considered a late breakfast or an early lunch (actual lunch starts around 14:30), the almuerzo in Castilian Spanish (esmorzaret in Valencian) happens between 09:00 and 11:30 on Mondays through Saturdays and always features a massive sandwich.
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S51Are Driverless Cars the Future?  Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Earlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.
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S47Is Single Parenthood the Problem?  The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids.I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege, released this week. And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty.
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S11A little-understood role in a global VC could also be one of the most influential  Ana Jiménez is the Mexico City-based chief of staff for the Latin America branch of 500 Global — an early-stage venture capital firm and seed accelerator. It was founded in the U.S. as 500 Startups in 2010, and now has an international presence.Although it has been around for many years in the government and the military, the position of chief of staff (CoS) is relatively new in business. It is a leader’s trusted person from whom they expect strategic vision. In my case, that’s Santiago Zavala, who is a partner at 500 Global. I help him across the board — from fundraising to team organization, roadmap prep, tracking OKRs [objectives and key results]. The work of a CoS depends on the focus of the leader or the organization. Since 500 is going from being local to global, it needs the team to keep in lockstep by standardizing processes, while always “tropicalizing” components for each region.
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S61See Underwater Wreckage From the Battle of Midway in Stunning Detail /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/71/a6/71a65c38-cb5a-42b2-ba5a-40fdfb683a1a/uss_yorktown_3_credit__ocean_exploration_trust_noaa.png) In June of 1942, thousands of American and Japanese forces faced off in the Pacific Ocean in a deadly World War II conflict known as the Battle of Midway. After four days of fighting, the Japanese were forced to retreat.This key United States victory stymied Japanese efforts to become the dominant power in the Pacific—but not without a cost. The fighting killed 3,057 Japanese troops and 362 U.S. soldiers. It also resulted in the loss of seven large ships and hundreds of airplanes on both sides, according to the National WWII Museum.
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S13Fixing Air Pollution Could Dramatically Improve Health Disparities  The most marginalized people are breathing the most polluted air, and improving it could improve health equity worldwideDolores Perales was 10 years old the first time she couldn't take a breath and thought she was going to die. Parts of the memory remain vague: she knows it was early April, the start of softball season, and she was playing outside. What she remembers clearly is the tightness in her chest and the rising panic. After it happened repeatedly, her mother took her to a doctor, who diagnosed her with asthma. “Ever since then I just had my inhaler,” she says. “One of my younger brothers had asthma; my cousin across the street had asthma. So many of the kids in my classroom had asthma,” Perales says. “As a kid, you kind of start thinking this is something normal.”
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S49A Truly Amazing Vaccine Breakthrough Is Hiding in Plain Sight  Updated 6:20 p.m. on Sept. 22, 2023 Every fall, when the air turns chilly and the leaves red, pediatric ICUs begin preparing for the onslaught of the virus known as RSV. Not flu, not COVID, but RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is the No. 1 reason babies are hospitalized, year after year. Their tiny airways can become inflamed, and the sickest ones struggle to breathe. RSV is deadly on the other end of the age spectrum too, killing 6,000 to 10,000 elderly Americans every year.For decades though, there was no way to stop the virus’s seasonal tide. The quest for a vaccine always came up short. And then suddenly, the vaccines started working.
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S54Get That Senator a Cinnabon  At long last, the rigid and outdated dress code in Congress has been sent down the river of bad ideas, along with the Segway and natural childbirth.Americans have been going through a sea change regarding work, with many of us experiencing not less but more productivity when we started working from home during the pandemic. Among the young, the change is even deeper. They are vocal about their disdain for jobs that might not end at 5 o’clock and bosses who police employee behavior, right down to what they wear. They are rightly disaffected by the workings of a government where a gerontocracy rules and things never seem to get better. The elimination of the dress code could be one small step toward making Congress more relevant to them; it will make the institution seem less formal, less impenetrable.
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S12The Equinox Is Not What You Think It Is  The equinox is not when day and night have equal lengths. Instead it’s something more nuanced but no less gloriousOn Saturday, September 23, at 6:50 A.M. UTC (2:50 A.M. EDT or 11:50 P.M. Friday PDT), the sun will be directly over Earth’s equator, which is how astronomers define the equinox.
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S50A Period Film From ... 2021?  Dumb Money captures the internet fanaticism of the GameStop-stock rush almost one year into the pandemic.It seems the turnaround time for films that are “based on a true story” is forever shrinking. Dumb Money, the director Craig Gillespie’s new movie about the GameStop-stock craze, chronicles events that took place in January 2021: a surprising boom in the brick-and-mortar video-game retailer’s stock value that eventually created a mini-crisis on Wall Street. The writer Ben Mezrich published an account of the story, The Antisocial Network, in September 2021; production on its film adaptation started a year later. This raises a question: How could they possibly create a period piece chronicling events that are so recent?
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S6What It Means to Be a Moral Leader  Dov Seidman makes people think, hard, not just about what they do but about how they do it. He’s so focused on the “how” that he created the HOW Institute for Society, which encourages leaders to pursue a path of moral leadership. He even wrote a book called How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything. In this episode of our weekly live series “The New World of Work,” Seidman provides insights and inspiration about what good, moral leadership looks like these days — in an era of perpetual disruption. His central message is that the old leadership approach no longer works. He challenged viewers to come up with even one command-and-control-style mayor or big-company CEO or professional coach who has enjoyed success in recent years. He has a point. Our expectations for what we require from our leaders – with the glaring example, perhaps, of national political figures – now include empathy, vulnerability, integrity, and morality.
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S55How Corporate Jargon Can Obscure Reality  Buzzwords are ways to make the banal sound thrilling, but they can also gloss over real issues such as layoffs.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.
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S65S8Pakistan's lost city of 40,000 people  A slight breeze cut through the balmy heat as I surveyed the ancient city around me. Millions of red bricks formed walkways and wells, with entire neighbourhoods sprawled out in a grid-like fashion. An ancient Buddhist stupa towered over the time-worn streets, with a large communal pool complete with a wide staircase below. Somehow, only a handful of other people were here – I practically had the place all to myself.I was about an hour outside of the dusty town of Larkana in southern Pakistan at the historical site of Mohenjo-daro. While today only ruins remain, 4,500 years ago this was not only one of the world's earliest cities, but a thriving metropolis featuring highly advanced infrastructures.
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S48This Week in Books: The Rare Novel With a Happy Parent  When my children were very young, friends standing on the precipice of parenthood would ask me to reveal what it was like, what I could report from a country that was still exotic to them. I’d look through eyes rimmed red from sleep deprivation and utter some well-worn cliché. The drudgery of it all was easy enough to explain, I’d say, understandable even to someone who didn’t have children: You repeat a million little tasks in service of a tiny, ungrateful human being, and then the next day you have to do it all over again. You feel slightly obliterated by this. But—and here my eyes would widen as much as they could—it’s harder to convey the joy. Novels about parenting seem to agree; in book after book, raising children seems akin to living in a “penal colony of toy-straightening and carrot-steaming,” Hillary Kelly writes in an essay this week. What a relief, then—a joy, even—to discover a novel that tries to describe the other side of it.How do you portray the pleasurable parts of being a parent? And how do you do so in writing that avoids curdling into the self-indulgent, the boring, the treacly? Maybe this is why many books, such as Rachel Cusk’s genre-establishing A Life’s Work, have opted to explore the discordant feelings that come along with motherhood: Because expressing anything less than bliss is generally considered taboo, there’s a strong artistic and feminist case for diving into the hard parts. But this turn away from joy has left out an emotion that any parent would have to admit exists alongside the tedium. After picking up the British writer Susie Boyt’s new novel, Loved and Missed, Kelly was shocked to learn that the book practically luxuriates in the many gratifications of child-rearing. Nor does it suffer as a result; in fact, it’s quite good.
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S69The companies doling out thousands for workers' holidays  Lazing on the beach, drink in hand. Hiking with friends, a spectacular view at the summit. Exploring a foreign city, eating the most incredible food you've ever tasted. But the best part? You've barely spent a dime of your own money for these experiences.Perks have changed in the pandemic era. One emerging incentive stands out: handing out four-figure budgets for employees to see the world.
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S44The Tragedy of Google Search  With a landmark antitrust trial under way, a giant of the modern web is buckling under its own weight.What is Google Search in 2023? A site that started 25 years ago as a list of blue links has mutated beyond recognition. Today, Google isn’t just an index to help sort through the endless libraries of online information—it’s a reference guide for the physical world too, having mapped most corners of the Earth and cataloged its contents. It is part encyclopedia and part predictive engine, guessing what you might be typing or thinking, serving information based on what others before you typed. It is Moviefone and the stock ticker, a well-trained chatbot, an image repository, a shopping mall.
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S68How the 'lazy girl job' took over work TikTok  In late May, 26-year-old Gabrielle Judge sat in front of a camera in oversized glasses and pigtails to film a TikTok about what she called the “lazy girl job” – a low stress, fully remote job with little oversight and a good salary.“A lazy girl job is basically something you can just quiet quit,” she says in the two-and-a-half minute video. “There’s lots of jobs out there where you could make, like, 60 to 80 K and not do that much work and be remote.” As an example, she zeroes in on non-technical roles, where she feels the hours fall within a 9-to-5 schedule, and believes the pay is enough to allow for some financial freedom.
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S9A new life for London's lost rivers  Though most visitors to London think only of the River Thames, the city is a myriad of waterways. Old maps show a skein of rivers and brooks that provided "blue corridors" traversing the city for centuries, providing both sources of food and recreation. But as London boomed, these waterways faded from consciousness – encased by walls, turned into polluted backwaters or simply covered over to run unseen beneath busy streets.But these "secret" rivers are imprinted on London's geography. Marylebone started life as St Mary by the bourne (an old name for a watercourse, in this case the Tyburn); while Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Westbourne and Holborn are all named by waterways that ran through them. Deptford was the site of a deep ford over the Ravensbourne, while Wandsworth is named after the River Wandle. East Ham and West Ham get their names from an old word for an area between rivers (hamm) – in their case, the Lea and the Roding. And while Britain's leading newspapers have left Fleet Street, the River Fleet still runs beneath.
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S66S16S43Talk to Coldhearted Criminals  “Never touch your idols,” Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “for the gilding will stick to your fingers.” A few days ago, Roya Hakakian argued in The Atlantic that meeting your enemies is even less hygienic. Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, “Has Blood on His Hands,” the headline announced. Raisi had been asked to address the Council on Foreign Relations, and Hakakian wrote in a statement that the invitation was “a political baptism” for a depraved man. Previous Iranian presidents have included a Holocaust denier, but Raisi’s depravity crossed a line: Courts had determined that he ran a policy of mass killings of dissidents in the 1980s. “There is an important distinction between [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, who denies an evil,” she wrote, “and Raisi, who has committed one.”I see things differently: The more odious the geopolitical figure, the more urgent the invitation. Like Hakakian, I am a member of CFR. And yesterday, I, along with a handful of others, attended the Raisi event.
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S60S14Artificial Intelligence Could Finally Let Us Talk with Animals  Underneath the thick forest canopy on a remote island in the South Pacific, a New Caledonian Crow peers from its perch, dark eyes glittering. The bird carefully removes a branch, strips off unwanted leaves with its bill and fashions a hook from the wood. The crow is a perfectionist: if it makes an error, it will scrap the whole thing and start over. When it's satisfied, the bird pokes the finished utensil into a crevice in the tree and fishes out a wriggling grub.The New Caledonian Crow is one of the only birds known to manufacture tools, a skill once thought to be unique to humans. Christian Rutz, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, has spent much of his career studying the crow's capabilities. The remarkable ingenuity Rutz observed changed his understanding of what birds can do. He started wondering if there might be other overlooked animal capacities. The crows live in complex social groups and may pass toolmaking techniques on to their offspring. Experiments have also shown that different crow groups around the island have distinct vocalizations. Rutz wanted to know whether these dialects could help explain cultural differences in toolmaking among the groups.
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S41Photos of the Week: Giant Cabbage,  A cotton harvest in Uzbekistan, a skateboarding showcase in Spain, F1 racing in Singapore, widespread flood damage in Libya, a reenactment of a 17th-century civil war in England, a shattered forest on the front line in Ukraine, a giant inflatable duck in Toronto, and much more "Seraph," by Sasha Wisniowski, is modeled in the Gold Section during the 2023 World of WearableArt Preview Show at TSB Bank Arena in Wellington, New Zealand, on September 20, 2023. #
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S30Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can illuminate the debate over generative AI  In January 1818, Mary Shelley anonymously published a strange little novel that would eventually make her world-famous. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is the story of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who is driven by an unrelenting “thirst for knowledge,” an ambition to penetrate the secrets of nature, heaven, and Earth. He works tirelessly to engineer a sentient being who, upon coming alive, is hideous to him. Realizing with horror that his plan has gone awry, Frankenstein flees his creature who in turn angrily chases him to the end of the Earth and finally destroys him at the novel’s end.Shelley’s dystopian tale has managed to stay relevant since its publication. It has a riddling, Zen koan-like quality that has edified and entertained readers for centuries, inspiring a range of interpretations. Recently, it has been making appearances in the heated debates over generative artificial intelligence, where it often is evoked as a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific overreach. Some worry that in pursuing technologies like AI, we are recklessly consigning our species to Victor Frankenstein’s tragic fate. Our wonderchildren, our miraculous machines, might ultimately destroy us. This fear is an expression of what science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once called the “Frankenstein complex,” a Luddite fear of robots.
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S40S35Unity makes major changes to controversial install-fee program  In a new blog post, Unity now says that projects made on current and earlier versions of Unity will not be subject to the new runtime fee structure. Only projects that upgrade to a new "Long Term Support" (LTS) version of Unity starting in 2024 and beyond will have to pay the charges, the company says.
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S7A new mission to see Titanic  Four-hundred miles from St Johns, Newfoundland, in the choppy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, a large industrial vessel swayed from side to side. Onboard, Stockton Rush expressed a vision for the future:"There will be a time when people will go to space for less cost and very regularly. I think the same thing is going to happen going under water."
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S46The Pro-life Movement Is Fuming at Donald Trump  A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”
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S5Web3 Could Change the Business Model of Creative Work  Web3 — the read-write-own web — could offer a new model for creative work. By offering new tools to earn and own assets, build wealth, and wrestle back control from powerful platforms and intermediaries, it has the potential to simplify how creators fund their ventures and new ways to earn a living, not just on the first sale of a work of art but in perpetuity thanks to programmatic royalty streams paid via smart contracts, self-executing code that can move and store money. If Web1 and Web2 democratized access to information and made it easier to collaborate online, Web3 equips creators with a new toolkit to build real wealth from their work, on a globally level playing field.
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S42The 22 Most Exciting Films to Watch This Season  The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley LiKitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism. — Shirley Li
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S29Kinsey at 75: How the sexologist enlightened -- then scandalized -- American society  Seventy-five years ago, Dr. Alfred Kinsey released a book that transformed American society. When Kinsey published Sexual Behavior In the Human Male, most people didn’t talk about sex. No one knew how much or how little sex everyone else was having. There was no sense of normal, abnormal, common, or rare. Sex was some shadowy taboo locked behind a closed door and a lot of puritanical strictures. Then Kinsey released his study. Suddenly, people could see that their particular sexual predilection wasn’t freakish or pathological — it was a percentage. People weren’t alone; they were part of many. Kinsey shone a light where there was only darkness before.Kinsey’s 1948 book sold 200,000 copies in two months. His publishers had to keep two printing presses running 24 hours a day to meet demand. All of a sudden, people were using once-whispered words at cocktail parties. They were asking new, exciting questions and looking at their lives in entirely new ways.
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S38Android phones get PC webcam capabilities in the latest beta  Here's a fun new use for your Android phone: A PC webcam! In the latest Android beta, plugging a phone into a PC will reveal a new option in the USB Preferences menu for webcam functionality. Just pick that option instead of the default "file transfer," and the phone camera will register itself as a webcam. Then you can fire up Zoom and start video calling.
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S27S39S22In the War Between Harassment and Censorship, No One Wins  I don’t like to rank ethical issues in a hierarchy, but one problem sits with a weaver’s serenity at the center of a whole web of others: How do we ethically address networked harassment? Two recent articles about the ongoing battle to keep the stalking and harassment nexus of Kiwi Farms offline—one a Washington Post report detailing the saga, the other an unsigned statement from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—perfectly illustrate the grinding gears of our age’s thorniest tech ethics issue.Kiwi Farms was subject to a broadly successful series of campaigns led by erstwhile targets of the site, like the streamer Clara Sorrenti and technologist Liz Fong-Jones. The activists—most of whom are trans women, a group the site has viciously harassed for years—pressured Tier 1 internet service providers (ISPs) like Cloudflare (sometimes known as the internet’s backbone) and got them to cut off Kiwi Farms, making it harder for the site to be accessed globally. The battle “raises serious doubts about society’s ability to block any site from the global web—even one that explicitly incites violence,” writes Washington Post reporter Nitasha Tiku.
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S37S36S32S19U.S. Will Weigh Cost of Carbon Pollution in More Government Decisions  Calculations determining the climate damage of greenhouse gas emissions—called the social cost of carbon—will be considered in federal agencies’ budgets, permitting decisions and, eventually, government purchasesCLIMATEWIRE | The Biden administration announced plans Thursday to consider climate costs in a much broader swath of government policies and decisions than ever before — including how the federal government wields its massive buying power.
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S45The Unlikely World Leader Who Just Dispelled Musk's Utopian AI Dreams  On Sunday, just before heading to the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Elon Musk in San Francisco. Their livestreamed rendezvous held obvious appeal for both men. The embattled Netanyahu would get to show his voters that he could command the attention of the world’s richest man. Musk would get to show the world that he had a Jewish friend, days after getting caught up in an anti-Semitism scandal on his social-media platform. The meeting was, essentially, a glorified photo op.At the outset, Netanyahu called Musk the “Edison of our time.” Musk returned the favor by not challenging Netanyahu’s insistence that his proposed judicial reforms—which have provoked the largest protest movement in Israel’s history—would make the country a “stronger democracy.” (“Sounds good,” the mogul replied.) The two men discussed their shared love of books and then, after about 40 minutes, wrapped up their exchange, at which point most people tuned out. But that’s precisely when things got interesting.
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S23Inside the Race to Stop a Deadly Viral Outbreak in India  On the morning of September 11, critical care specialist Anoop Kumar was presented with an unusual situation. Four members of the same family had been admitted to his hospital—Aster MIMS in Kozhikode, Kerala—the previous day, all similarly sick. Would he take a look?He gathered his team of doctors to investigate. Soon they were at the bedsides of a 9-year-old boy, his 4-year-old sister, their 24-year-old uncle, and a 10-month-old cousin. All had arrived at the hospital with fever, cough, and flulike symptoms. The 9-year-old was in respiratory distress, struggling to breathe properly, and had needed to be put on a noninvasive ventilator, with air pumped through a mask to keep his lungs expanded.
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S20Are we the last generation -- or the first sustainable one?  The word "sustainability" gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it actually mean for humanity to be sustainable? Environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie digs into the numbers behind human progress across centuries, unpacking why the conventional understanding of sustainability is misleading and showing how we can be the first generation of humans to actually achieve it.
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S18People Who Are Changing the Environment One Community at a Time  These four researchers are highlighting environmental inequities and improving the health of their communitiesOne in four deaths worldwide can be linked to environmental conditions. Heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and more could be alleviated or even prevented by reducing environmental risks. Exposure to polluted water and air, flooding, extreme heat, and other dangers is driven in part by economic and racial discrimination, causing an unequal burden of disease. The political forces that drive this can be sweeping, but these four researchers are making a difference at a local level. They are attacking inequity, fighting historical wrongs, and helping to ensure a more equitable and healthy future.
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S21The Fairphone 5 Is a Smartphone for a More Ethical World  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 WIREDThe Fairphone 5 is a unique proposition in the world of smartphones. Pick this as your next handset and you send a clear message that you believe in ethical sourcing of manufacturing materials, that the people who construct these devices deserve fair pay and safe working conditions, and that we should all have the right to repair. This antidote to planned obsolescence could even last you a decade.
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S24'Majority' Imagines Internet Hate Mobs to the Extreme  Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUHAbby Goldsmith’s science fiction novel Majority tells the story of a group of young people from Earth who get abducted by the Torth, a galaxy-spanning civilization ruled by merciless telepaths.
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S31Microsoft is finally on the verge of closing its Activision deal  The CMA initially blocked the Activision acquisition back in April, saying that the purchase would "substantially lessen competition" in the nascent cloud gaming market. But after the US Federal Trade Commission's attempt at a merger-blocking injunction lost in court in April, Microsoft and the CMA went back to the drawing board to negotiate a settlement.
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S25Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle  Unity, the company behind the game engine of the same name, is walking back part of a controversial new fee policy announced last week that infuriated developers and ignited a firestorm of criticism across the industry. “We should have spoken with more of you, and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing,” Unity president Marc Whitten wrote in a mea culpa published today on the company’s blog.On September 12, Unity announced that beginning January 1, 2024, its pricing for developers would include a “Runtime Fee,” a new 20-cent charge to be levied every time a player installed a game after the title reached 200,000 downloads and $200,000 in revenue. Furthermore, that policy would not only impact games made after the changes, but “eligible games” that had already been released. The backlash from developers was swift, leading Unity to apologize and rethink its stance.
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S33S28How to avoid "death by LLM"  When Stack Overflow’s traffic apparently went into rapid decline this year, Elon Musk reacted on X with an epitaph: “Death by LLM.” (LLM stands for “large language model.”) His message initially sent a shockwave across the business world as it underlined the imminent threat generative AI poses across a wide swathe of sectors — from accountancy and legal to media and software — but are all these companies really hurtling toward oblivion? Stack Overflow is the go-to forum for programmers wanting help with coding problems. Musk’s tweet appeared to suggest LLM-based AI programs like ChatGPT were making the site rapidly obsolete as they offered the same information to coders more quickly. However, Stack Overflow’s response not only opened up a more nuanced picture of the AI landscape — it also contained valuable insights into possible enterprise strategies for riding the AI wave.
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S26Ask Ethan: What were the "dark ages" of the Universe?  Today, in all directions, no matter where we look, there are luminous sources of energy to behold. Stars, galaxies, nebulae, and even energy-emitting black holes populate the Universe wherever matter has clumped and clustered together sufficiently. Even though there are great cosmic voids that span up to around a billion light-years in diameter, they’re merely holes in the cosmic “Swiss cheese” of structure. From all directions, the light still gets in, and illuminates even the darkest corners of the Universe.But that’s what things are like now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. As we look deeper and deeper into the Universe, we see that the story gradually begins to change. Past a certain threshold, galaxies appear redder and fainter than expected: as though something were in the way, blocking that light. That effect gets more severe with distance, where only the brightest of galaxies can be perceived at all. At last, we run out of light to see, suggesting that there were “dark ages” beyond a certain point. What were those dark ages like? That’s what Predrag Branković wants to know, asking:
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S17See How AI Generates Images from Text  Last year the Internet got its first taste of image-generating artificial intelligence. Suddenly, technology that had once been offered only to specialists was available to anyone with a web connection. The enthusiasm shows no signs of abating, and AI-generated images have won a major photography competition, created the title credits of a television series and tricked people into believing the pope stepped out in a fashionable puffer coat. Yet critics have noted how training the algorithms on existing works could potentially infringe on copyright, and using them could put artists' jobs in jeopardy. Generative AI also risks supercharging fake news: the pope coat was fun, but a generated photograph supposedly showing an attack on the Pentagon briefly inspired a dip in the stock market.How did programs such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion get to be so good all at once? Although AI has been in development for decades, the most popular of today's image generators use a technique called a diffusion model, which is relatively new on the AI scene. Here's how it works:
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S2How the Food Industry Is Using Cross-Training to Boost Service  Cross-training employees on a variety of tasks can be a powerful tool for improving operations, as well as for attracting and retaining workers. When employees are cross-trained to perform a variety of both customer-facing and non-customer-facing tasks, they can adjust their work depending on demand and business needs. Of course, that’s good for the business, but it also makes the job better for workers. For one thing, when employees are more productive and contribute more, companies can pay them more. Cross-training helps employees build capabilities that they can leverage in their career growth. It also enables more stable schedules. This article shows how several small food companies were able to use cross-training to improve service and job quality. Any industry can learn from these approaches to improve operations, customer experience, and employee experience.
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S35 Types of Stories Leaders Need to Tell  Storytelling is an important leadership skill, and executives who want to succeed should master five types of narrative: Vision stories, which inspire a shared one; values stories that model the way; action stories that spark progress and change; teaching stories that transmit knowledge and skills to others; and trust stories that help people understand, connect with, and believe in you.
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S4How Software Companies Can Avoid the Trap of Product-Led Growth  Companies like Slack and Dropbox have pioneered the use of Product-Led Growth (PLG). They start by building a product that’s indispensable for small teams, then count on low friction and customer advocates to expand throughout the organization. PLG works, at least at first. But it can create challenges for growing companies. The answer isn’t to reject PLG. It’s to embrace it — but to plan ahead. Eventually, even the best PLG company will need an enterprise sales strategy which takes years to develop. Don’t wait until product-led growth stalls to plan for a multi-pronged sales strategy.
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