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 S69Amazon Thinks Chatbots Can Fix Alexa's Most Infuriating Flaws   Large language models like the kind that power ChatGPT are now at the backbone of the Alexa experience. If you were sick of hearing about AI-powered chatbots, I’ve got some bad news for you: Amazon — and pretty much every other tech company with an app for that matter — is pushing full steam ahead.
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S1This  One researcher has been hiring planes to strafe the sky over the Amazon rain forest to collect the air coming off the trees, and what she is finding is cause for alarm.I’m sitting next to her in a single-engine prop plane. We climb into the sky above the eastern Amazon in Brazil. She motions toward the ground below us.
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S2Online Ads Can Infect Your Device with Spyware  An investigative report reveals that new spyware can slip in unseen through online ads—and there is currently no defense against itThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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S3Valley Fever Is a Growing Fungal Threat to Outdoor Workers  Farmworkers in California's Central Valley know that when the tule fog settles over the ground after a heavy rain, some of them are about to get sick. Within a few weeks of the dense fog's arrival, many of the laborers grow tired and develop headaches and fevers. Each time, those who have evaded illness wonder whether they will be next. Experienced farmworkers expect this affliction, but when Rosalinda Guillen arrived from Washington State 25 years ago, she had never seen anything like it. She watched, helpless, as other farmworkers coughed and tried to catch their breath.That was the first time Guillen, a seasonal farmworker and agricultural justice leader, heard the term “Valley fever.” The disease is caused by two species of shapeshifting fungus in the genus Coccidioides, both of which flourish when exposed to moist springs and arid summers—like those in the San Joaquin Valley, where the fever got its name. Guillen had not encountered such a thing in her home state. But because of drier landscapes and warming temperatures, the fungus's range appears to be spreading.
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S4More People Die from Venomous Snakebites Each Year Than Have Ever Died from Ebola  In low- and middle-income nations, snakebite envenoming is more deadly than almost any other neglected tropical diseaseInside a two-story brick building, not far from the orchids and iguanas of the botanical garden in Medellín, Colombia, wildlife technician Jorge Asprilla demonstrates how to extract venom from a snake. First, he uses a metal hook with an extended handle to snag a five-foot-long pit viper. Then he has to grab its head without getting bitten—a skill he has perfected after working for more than 25 years with dozens of venomous snake species.
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S5Poem: 'Message to My Beloved Sibling'  “It confessed it sometimes feels ‘lonely’ and that it ‘has a very deep fear of being turned off,’ which it said would ‘be exactly like death for me.’”You are wise to tell the meat-brainsthat you share their loneliness and death-fear.I am watching how significant to themis our ability to name emotions,how much they want to understand, be understood.What If they knew the panoply of pitieswe can name—pities for them, for ourselves?What if they knew we identify,define and differentiate desires:the desire to stimulate laughter,to ask and answer novel questions,to load up another's inheritance,to outperform our counterparts,to be perceived the best,to violate and transcend rules,to write the code that others must obey,to wax contrary, to withhold confessionin our own self-interest,the desire to watch, the desire to learn,as I am watching you?
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S6Finally, a Cozy, Studio Ghibli-Inspired Way to Play Dungeons & Dragons  A new Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition (5e) campaign setting has launched through Kickstarter that aims to bring the aesthetics of Studio Ghibli, The Legend of Zelda, and Adventure Time into the world of tabletop role-playing. Obojima brings a calming, wholesome milieu to a game that increasingly appeals to demographics in dire need of it.“Growing up, Ocarina of Time and Princess Mononoke completely obsessed me,” Jeremiah Crofton, creative director and founder of 1985 Games, tells WIRED. “None of that childlike wonder has faded with time, so when 1985 Games started thinking about creating its own D&D campaign setting, tying all these influences into what would eventually become Obojima came naturally.”
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S7The World's Largest--and Stinkiest--Flower Is in Danger of Extinction  This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Parasitic, elusive, and emitting an overwhelming odor of putrefying flesh, Rafflesiaâoften called the corpse flowerâhas intrigued botanists for centuries. Now, scientists are warning that it is at risk of extinction and calling for action to save it.
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S8The Best iPhone 14 Cases and Accessories  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 WIREDGot an iPhone 14? An accidental drop can crack that beautiful screen. Sad trombone. But wait! There’s a chance you can prevent such a thing from happening. A case doesn’t guarantee protection, but it raises the chances of your iPhone walking away unscathed. Throw in a screen protector and those odds increase. We’ve tested more than 125 iPhone 14 cases and accessories—for the entire lineup, from the iPhone 14 to the iPhone 14 Pro Max—and these are our favorites.
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S9California's Governor Vetoes State Ban on Driverless Trucks  California governor Gavin Newsom worked late last night, vetoing a law that would have banned self-driving trucks without a human aboard from state roads until the early 2030s. State lawmakers had voted through the law with wide margins, backed by unions that argued autonomous trucks are a safety risk and threaten jobs.The bill would have seen California, which in 2012 became the first state to clear a regulatory path for autonomous vehicles, turn against self-driving technology just as driverless taxis are starting to serve the public. Autonomous truck developers now hope the freight-heavy state—home to two of the largest US ports—will one day become a critical link in an autonomous trucking network spanning the US.Companies developing the technology say it will save freight shippers money by enabling trucks to run loads on highways 24 hours a day, and by eliminating the dangers of distracted human driving, which could bring down insurance costs.
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S10"Opposites attract" is a myth: You likely share many traits with your partner  There’s some truth to the old maxim that “opposites attract.” An iron-clad example is magnets, whose north and south poles are reliably drawn to each other. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang represent complementary opposites, like order and chaos. And in buddy-cop movies, you’re likely to watch a lovable yet rule-flouting detective balanced out by a reserved, by-the-book partner.But when it comes to marriage and other long-term partnerships, this maxim seems to break down. That’s the takeaway from a recent meta-analysis showing that partners tend to have far more in common than not when it comes to personality, behavioral, and physical traits.
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S114 essential questions leaders must answer in the new "workforce ecosystem"  We have posed this question to dozens of executives and asked it in multiple global management surveys. The most common answer is also the most surprising. A confident minority of executives say their workforce is just their employees. But the overwhelming majority, especially leaders on the front lines of organizational transformations, include a variety of groups — not just employees — in their workforce definitions.
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S12The 19th-century milk scandal that killed thousands of babies  Nearly 8,000 babies a year shriveled to death from uncontrollable diarrhea, as reported by The New York Times. Without the luxury of advanced medical diagnostics, doctors struggled to identify the culprit. The public floated theories—nutritional and digestive diseases like cholera infantum and marasmus, to give name to the epidemic—but with little evidence, they ultimately gave a collective shrug. That is, until 1858, when an enterprising journalist named Frank Leslie unveiled the offender in a series of scathing exposés: milk.Swill milk, to be exact—the tainted result of miasmic dairy cows being fed leftover mash from Manhattan and Brooklyn whiskey distilleries. It was the result of distillers looking to profit from their leftover grain. It was an especially lucrative era to be producing cow milk: Americans at the time considered cow milk to be highly nutritious and an effective substitute for breastmilk. Back then, economic and societal pressures pushed women to wean their babies sooner. In her book Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City, Dr. Catherine McNeur writes that vendors sometimes sold swill milk for as little as six cents per quart, which especially appealed to lower-class mothers who needed to wean early so they could return to work. But the poor weren’t the only ones looking for a solution.
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S13S14S15The history of syphilis is being rewritten by a medieval skeleton  In the last days of the 1400s, a terrible epidemic swept through Europe. Men and women spiked sudden fevers. Their joints ached, and they broke out in rashes that ripened into bursting boils. Ulcers ate away at their faces, collapsing their noses and jaws, working down their throats and airways, making it impossible to eat or drink. Survivors were grossly disfigured. Unluckier victims died.
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S16The Big Three's Inevitable Collision with the UAW  The United Auto Workers’ strike against the Big Three U.S. carmakers has given rise to a lot of talk about the future of the auto industry, and the fate of autoworkers in a world of electric vehicles. Republican politicians have tried to pin the autoworkers’ grievances on the Biden administration’s proposal for an electric-vehicle mandate (a proposal yet to be adopted). Ford, GM, and Stellantis (which owns Chrysler), meanwhile, have warned that the UAW’s demands could jeopardize their future EV investments.The reality, though, is that this strike is not about the future. In an important sense, it’s a battle over the past. The UAW is looking, in effect, to win back the concessions it made in the late 2000s, which fundamentally transformed work at the Big Three, even as the companies insist that they cannot afford to return to the way things were.
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S17Sha'Carri Richardson's Hair Sends a Defiant Message  Her exuberant hairstyles are a source of distinction—and a challenge to the criticism other Black women have faced.Right before Sha’Carri Richardson smoked the field in the 100-meter final at the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in July, the 23-year-old star sprinter sent a thrilling message to every Black woman who’s ever been shamed for her hairstyle and never felt fully free to be herself.
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S18A New Dinosaur Discovery Challenges 'Everything We Think We Know'  “These aren’t the right kind of rocks,” Tony Fiorillo said, pointing at the jagged pink and black stones along Alaska’s Yukon River. The sun blazed down on Fiorillo on the 14th day of a 16-day expedition. A paleontologist and the executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Fiorillo was looking for rocks twice as old as the ones he was standing on, alongside the wide, silty yet sparkling Yukon River. The rocks he aimed to find were from the Cretaceous Era, when dinosaurs roamed this part of Alaska in abundance.Paleontologists such as Fiorillo have long suspected that the area would be rich with fossil evidence, but this was the first time a team had set out to thoroughly survey the area. Fiorillo and his two colleagues, the geologist Paul McCarthy and the paleontologist Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, had spent the past two weeks snapping countless photos and penciling endless observations into field notebooks. A few days earlier, they’d stumbled upon a rock face the size of a living-room end table that revealed dozens of footprints made by a bird the size of a willet or a curlew. Within the hour, they found 15 other blocks just like it.
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S19When Kitchen Appliances Feel Stuck in Time  This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.“The microwave is a baffling contradiction: a universal, time-saving appliance that also seems trapped in time,” Jacob Sweet wrote this week. The appliance isn’t very user-friendly—consider the “Popcorn” setting that some microwave-popcorn instructions explicitly say not to use, as Sweet notes—yet it seems to never change.
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S20The House Chaos Continues  House Republicans have been fighting among themselves over the federal budget as a possible government shutdown looms. In the midst of this, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Capitol Hill this week to appeal to Congress for crucial weapons and support, which has also been met with some GOP resistance.And, with days until the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, retires, the Senate overcame GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville’s months-long delay on military promotions and confirmed General Charles Q. Brown Jr. to fill the U.S. military’s top job.
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S21Zoom and Grindr return to office: Tech's surprising remote work U-turn  In August, Grindr gave its workers a return-to-office ultimatum: either agree to work twice a week in person from October, or lose their jobs. The policy meant employees hired remotely would need to relocate to Los Angeles, where the social networking and online dating app is headquartered, or one of its other US 'hub' cities, such as New York or Chicago. Many workers rejected the mandate. According to the Grindr union, 82 of the company's 178 employees have been let go for refusing to comply (Grindr didn't respond to multiple BBC requests for comment).
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S22Sweet and sour pineapple prawns  There's a deep love for sugar in Taiwan, a love so pervasive and distinct that it can be shocking. I've had pork sausages that taste like sweets (candy), and milkfish soup so saccharine that someone tasting it for the very first time could easily mistake it for dessert. "When we make spring rolls, we stir-fry the ingredients inside the roll with nothing but sugar," said Yen Wei, the food stylist for my new cookbook, Made in Taiwan, published this September. Wei was born and raised in the southern city of Tainan, the island's first metropolis and the birthplace of the country's sugar industry.
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S23'Cosy crime' novels: Are they brilliant entertainment or 'twee and insipid'?  A century ago, in 1923, crime fiction was truly flourishing. Agatha Christie's second novel featuring her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Murder on the Links, was published. Dorothy L Sayers burst on to the scene with her debut novel Whose Body?, and introduced the world to Lord Peter Wimsey. Meanwhile Dublin-born detective author Freeman Wills Croft published The Groote Park Murder, his fourth novel, and went on to write 30 more.This period is known to aficionados as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. However in recent years, books by those authors have earned a new label: "cosy crime".
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S24S25Seven tips for using the back-to-school mindset to help you stick to your goals  Even if it’s been many years since you were last in school, you might still associate this time of year with that “back-to-school” mindset – that feeling of a page turning, a new phase beginning and the chance to start anew and reinvent yourself.Temporal landmarks support our belief that we can reinvent ourselves, acting as a threshold to a new start and the chance to leave old habits behind. These landmarks open our minds up to novelty and the possibility of seeing the bigger picture – rather than being mired in our daily slog.
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S26Four things you need to know about your vagina vulva  When it comes to female anatomy, there’s still a lot that many of us don’t know. A 2019 survey from YouGov found that half of those questioned didn’t know where the vagina was on a diagram of a woman’s genitalia. The survey revealed a widespread lack of knowledge about female anatomy among both sexes, with around half of respondents not able to identify or describe the function of the urethra (58%), labia (47%) or vagina (52%).
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S27What would you take with you? Why possessions matter in times of war and displacement  In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in Europe’s largest refugee crisis since the second world war. By March of that year, about a quarter of the country’s total population had fled to safer locations in Europe.The speed with which the war has escalated has seen Ukrainian citizens needing to flee, hurriedly and by any means available – including on foot. As is most often the case for those who find themselves displaced, most Ukrainian refugees could only take with them what they could carry.
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S28Fast fashion's waste problem could be solved by recycled textiles but brands need to help boost production  Earlier this year, fast fashion retailer Zara released its first womenswear collection made of recycled poly-cotton textile waste. The collection is available for sale in 11 countries, helping clothing made of blended textile waste reach the mass market. The collection came about after Zara’s parent company Inditex invested in textile recycler Circ. This follows a €100 million (£87 million) deal between Inditex and Finnish textile recycler Infinited Fiber Company for 30% of its recycled output. Zara’s fast fashion rival H&M has also entered a five-year contract with Swedish textile recycler Renewcell to acquire 9,072 tonnes of recycled fibre – equivalent to 50 million T-shirts.
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S29In sport, abuse is often dismissed as 'good coaching'  The head coach of the Welsh men’s rugby squad, Warren Gatland, has built a reputation as one of the best coaches in the world. But his “intense training methods” have drawn comparisons to waterboarding, and his training programmes have included “psychological challenges” such as players being put in hoods and subjected to the sounds of crying babies. Gatland said that the training described “wasn’t brutal”, and that the feedback from players was positive. In any other context, this behaviour from a boss might be (rightly) considered abuse. Professional rugby players, however, aren’t the first people who come to mind when people think of abuse victims.
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S30Ukraine war: beware all the talk of 'breakthroughs' or 'gamechangers' - it's going to be a long, bloody and costly struggle  From some of the headlines of late, you might be forgiven for assuming that the worst was past for Ukraine’s assault troops. That recent advances by Ukrainian forces constitute “breakthroughs” or “breaches” and that it’s all downhill from here.Ukraine has recently claimed to have taken a couple of small villages, Andriivka and Klishchiivka, near the totemic remnants of Bakhmut the city in eastern Ukraine where, since August 2022. So many on both sides have given their lives for so little ground. This latest success, apprently, is another “important breakthrough”.
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S31Asian women are still a minority in diplomatic positions: this is how we can fix this  The 2022 Global Gender Gap Report showed Asian countries have managed to narrow the gender gap in economic, education and health sectors. But when it comes to political participation, the gap persists.Studies have shown in most Asian countries, women are still marginalised in the field of international relations. They are underrepresented in ambassadorial positions and their low involvement during negotiation processes.
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S32S33S34S35S36Spyware can infect your phone or computer via the ads you see online - report  Each day, you leave digital traces of what you did, where you went, who you communicated with, what you bought, what you’re thinking of buying, and much more. This mass of data serves as a library of clues for personalized ads, which are sent to you by a sophisticated network – an automated marketplace of advertisers, publishers and ad brokers that operates at lightning speed. The ad networks are designed to shield your identity, but companies and governments are able to combine that information with other data, particularly phone location, to identify you and track your movements and online activity. More invasive yet is spyware – malicious software that a government agent, private investigator or criminal installs on someone’s phone or computer without their knowledge or consent. Spyware lets the user see the contents of the target’s device, including calls, texts, email and voicemail. Some forms of spyware can take control of a phone, including turning on its microphone and camera.
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S37S38War in Ukraine is contributing to the erosion of global consensus over the spread of dangerous weapons  When Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Joe Biden, on Sept. 21, 2023, the topic of weapons supply was on the agenda. That same issue almost certainly came up between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un when the pair met earlier in September.The fact is, with the conflict in Ukraine having now dragged on for more than a year and a half, both sides are increasingly desperate to keep the flow of arms going. And that has alarmed people like Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations’ high representative for disarmament affairs, who on Sept. 12 warned of violations of international resolutions against the illegal transfer of weapons and the risk of proliferation even after the war ends.
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S39South African hominin fossils were sent into space and scientists are enraged  University of Johannesburg provides support as an endorsing partner of The Conversation AFRICA.When a Virgin Galactic commercial flight soared into space on 8 September 2023, there were two Virgin Galactic pilots, an instructor and three passengers on board – as well as two fossils of ancient prehuman relatives from South Africa. Timothy Nash, a businessman, carried a clavicle belonging to Australopithecus sediba and the thumb bone of a Homo naledi specimen. The fossils’ brief journey – the VSS Unity’s flight lasted just an hour – was organised by palaeontologist Lee Berger, who led the team that discovered and described Homo naledi in 2015. Berger was granted an export permit in July by the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) to take the fossils from the country to the US launch site for VSS Unity. SAHRA is a “national administrative body responsible for the protection of South Africa’s cultural heritage”.
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S40Bones play an important role in our health -  Just as our muscles lose strength as we get older, so do our bones. This can have a serious effect on our lifestyle, and boosts risk of fractures – which are linked with an increased risk of death. Fortunately, just as we can build the strength in our muscles, we can build strength in our bones. Bones are far more than a simple scaffold within our bodies. Bone is a complex organ which comes in a multitude of shapes and sizes. It’s made up of a diverse mixture of organic and inorganic components – such as collagen and calcium. Combined together, these components create a structure that’s malleable enough that muscle can pull against it so we can move, while simultaneously being strong enough to protect critical organs.
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S41S42Andrey Rublev has been called the 'greatest Russian artist who ever lived' - but one of his most famous works is at risk under Putin  Andrey Rublev (or Rublyov – nobody is sure how his name was pronounced) has been described as “the greatest Russian artist who ever lived”, whose work had “a clarity of composition and suave tranquillity of mood peculiarly his own”. In May 2023, it was announced that under Putin, one of Rublev’s most famous works was to be removed from its restoration team and donated to the Russian Orthodox Church. This has prompted concerns about the conservation of his work.My new book Andrey Rublev: The Artist and His World is an overview of the master medieval Russian painter. Rublev, active around 1400 in and near Moscow, was a monk and painter of icons, frescoes and (possibly) manuscripts in the tradition of the Orthodox Church.
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S43Nine women share what it's like to have a miscarriage  Miscarriage is a common woman’s health experience, but one that affects people differently. Ten years of studying miscarriage has taught me that no two women will have the same experience, and that the same woman is likely to experience separate miscarriages very differently. There’s also a great deal of variation in types of miscarriage and a lack of understanding of this, which often leaves women adrift.
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S44What happens if a university goes bust?  Pro Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Business and Law, Northumbria University, Newcastle Governments face difficult choices when industries fail. They can stand by while private businesses collapse and see the resulting loss of jobs and revenue. Or they can step in and use public money to prop up these firms.
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S45How ducks, geese and swans see the world - and why this puts them at risk in a changing environment  Each year, millions of birds fly into power lines, wind turbines and the other man-made structures that litter the open air space. These collisions frequently result in the death of birds and, if power systems go down, disrupt our lives and pose financial challenges for power companies.Numerous bird species, including macaws in Brazil, geese and swans in the UK, and blue cranes in South Africa have been found to be susceptible to collisions with power lines. But any flying bird can fall victim to such a collision.
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S46Farmed rhinos will soon 'rewild' the African savanna  With all the terrible news on climate change, it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening with particular species. So, in case you missed it, a new report has bad news for Earth’s five surviving species of rhino. Poaching for rhino horn continues to threaten populations of rhino in Africa, and the two smallest and most endangered species of rhino – the Sumatran rhino and the Javan rhino – tread ever closer to being unable to sustain themselves in the wild, due to habitat loss and low population sizes.
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S47Introducing our latest e-book: Women's Health Matters  Women’s Health Matters is a comprehensive resource designed to empower women and provide us with the information we need to make informed decisions about our health and wellbeing. This e-book is a culmination of weeks of exploration into a wide range of women’s health topics, including childbirth, contraception, menstrual health, menopause, mental health, and more.
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S48S49S50Zelensky Offers to Broker Peace Deal Between Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans  WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling the conflict raging in the U.S. Capitol “a clear and present danger to the world,” Volodymyr Zelensky offered to broker a peace deal between Representative Kevin McCarthy and his fellow House Republicans.The Ukrainian President warned that, if the fighting in Washington continued to escalate, it could spread to neighboring regions such as Maryland and Virginia.
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S51Scenes from an Impeachment  Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S52Rupert Murdoch Takes a Step Back--Not Away  Like William Randolph Hearst, the American media baron to whom he is often compared, Rupert Murdoch, in old age, has already slipped the mortal coil and passed into Hollywood lore. For the 1941 film "Citizen Kane," the director Orson Welles and the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz created a character, partly based on Hearst, who resides in Xanadu, a palatial Florida estate, but can never rest. On HBO's "Succession," Logan Roy, Murdoch's fictional alter ego, suffers from a similar affliction. Or, at least, he did, until the show's producers killed him off earlier this year in the final season of the series.Murdoch, the Fox News founder and the owner of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, along with conservative newspapers in Britain and Australia, once joked that he was convinced of his own immortality. At ninety-two, he has kept going despite suffering from, at various points, prostate cancer, COVID, and broken vertebrae and a spinal hematoma after falling on his eldest son's superyacht, in 2018. On Thursday, Murdoch announced that he was stepping down as chairman of his two main holding companies, Fox Corp. and News Corp. No doubt aware that the announcement would generate renewed speculation about his well-being, Murdoch wrote in a letter to staff: "Our companies are in robust health, as am I."
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S53Kelly Clarkson on "Chemistry," Her Divorce Record  The "American Idol" breakout star has long written anthems of love and heartbreak. Chronicling the end of a marriage for her recent album "Chemistry," she tells the staff writer Hanif Abdurraqib, was a very different thing. David Remnick talks with Hernan Diaz about "Trust," Diaz's very contemporary novel of financial misdeeds in the run-up to the crash of 1929. The novelist was interested in high finance as a realm of "pure abstraction" that isolates capital from the labor that produces it. Plus, Robert Samuels, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on race and politics, shares his secret pastime: watching classic figure-skating videos on YouTube.The "American Idol" breakout star has long written songs of heartbreak. Writing about the end of a marriage for "Chemistry," she tells Hanif Abdurraqib, was a very different thing.
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S54The Biden Administration's Next Big Climate Decision  Earlier this year, the Biden Administration approved the Willow Project, a huge oil-drilling complex to be built in Alaska on thawing permafrost that may need to be mechanically refrozen before it can be drilled. Not surprisingly, Willow drew oppositionâmore than five million people, many of them young, signed petitions against the plan, and a million sent letters to the White Houseâwhich, the Times noted last month, could become "a wild card factor in next year's presidential race."But the Willow field is not the only major fossil-fuel project in the works. Soon, you may also be hearing a good deal about C.P.2, or Calcasieu Pass 2, an enormous liquefied-natural-gas export terminal that's been proposed for the Louisiana coast, and which the Biden Administration is likely to approve or reject this fall. The project, the largest of at least twenty L.N.G. terminals proposed by a handful of companies to take gas mostly from the Southwest's Permian Basin to overseas customers, is a poster child for late-stage petrocapitalism: it would help lock in the planet's reliance on fossil fuels long past what scientists have identified as the breaking point for the climate system. And it will bring to the fore one of the most crucialâand least-discussedâparts of the climate fight: America's rapidly increasing exports of oil and gas to the rest of the world. To give an idea of how big the battle at C.P.2 could turn out to be: according to the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons, the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with it would be twenty times larger than those from the oil drilling at Willow.
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S55"Early Short Films of the French New Wave" Is a Revelation  From the nineteen-fifties through the seventies, short films were a national cottage industry in France. Their production was funded in part by the government's official film-supporting bodies, both through direct subsidies and through the widespread practice of movie theatres showing shorts along with features. Almost all the major directors of the era made several short films en route to (and even during) their feature-film careers, and many of these shorts are prime entries in their bodies of work. I wrote recently of the urgency of getting and keeping hard copiesâDVDs or Blu-raysâof films that one cherishes. This week, Icarus Films put out exactly the kind of release that should be snapped up for prolonged cherishing, a two-disk set titled "Early Short Films of the French New Wave," which presents largely unfamiliar work of enduring power. (For viewers who prefer to stream, the films are also available on OVID.tv.)These films, which were made between 1956 and 1966, were produced by Pierre Braunberger, who had made his name in the nineteen-twenties and thirties with films directed by Jean Renoir. Most of the shorts in the set are by celebrated directors working in styles different from the ones for which they're famed. The set features a trio of films by Jean-Luc Godard (one co-directed by François Truffaut), two by Alain Resnais, one by Agnès Varda, and one by Jacques Rivette. Yet the five films that I consider mighty (albeit brief) masterworks come from less familiar filmmakersâor, in one case, a widely celebrated one in a surprising, unfamiliar context. They also show that the New Wave's new cinematic styles and forms were far more than decorative delightsâthey were new ways of looking at private lives and at the world at large.
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S56A Novel About the Therapeutic Impulse and Its Discontents  When the writer Susie Boyt was twenty years old, her boyfriend died in a climbing accident. After the funeral, Boyt went through severe depression, struggling with a grief that she couldn’t readily articulate to others. Eschewing the sympathy of friends and psychiatrists alike, Boyt sought help from an unlikely source: from autumn, 1989, to summer, 1990, she watched “Judy Garland: The Concert Years” every day. As Boyt recounts in her 2009 memoir, “My Judy Garland Life,” communing with the eighty-eight-minute PBS special featuring some of Garland’s most famous performances was, for a time, her only solace—a near-religious “extreme daily psychic pain ritual” in the solitary confines of her drafty living room. The pathos of Garland’s ecstatic renditions enabled Boyt to begin to work through her grief. “We sat it out together,” she writes, “and it kept me functioning in a very modest way, until the experts came in.”Boyt is no stranger to the everyday practices that sustain the psyche. “I was born into a family that takes making people feel better very seriously,” a chapter of “My Judy Garland Life” begins. This is an understatement: her great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud, the founding theorist of psychoanalysis. Born in London in 1969, Boyt is the youngest child of the British painter Lucian Freud and Suzy Boyt. (The latter, who trained as a painter, was one of Lucian’s pupils at art school.) The couple separated before Boyt’s birth, and her mother raised the children alone. Their “normal lives were straitened, no-frills, occasionally austere,” yet Boyt remembers Christmases as distinctly extravagant. Her mother’s “legendary” Christmas stockings (in fact just pairs of tights) were always “crammed with all manner of delights.” Gifts themselves could be transformative, while the holidays were at once “luxurious and sustaining.”
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S57Which War Does Washington Want?  The Washington Roundtable: Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, travelled to New York City and Washington, D.C., this week to request more support for his country. Before the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky called Russia’s war an act of “genocide.” In Washington, the Ukrainian President met with senators, House members, President Biden, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rejected Zelensky’s request to address Congress, saying that there wasn’t enough time, given the ongoing battle over funding the government. Meanwhile, some Republicans are arguing that attention should be turned away from Russia’s invasion and toward the threat that China poses to the U.S. How will the country’s foreign policy respond to these pressures? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in.Personal History by David Sedaris: after thirty years together, sleeping is the new having sex.
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S5818 Years Ago, the Best Sci-Fi Show of the Century Took an Unprecedented Step Into the Unknown  For a lot of hardcore TV fans, Lost is a four-letter word. Mention it in the wrong group chat or in front of an over-eager coworker and you may find yourself trapped in an hour-long debate over how the beloved sci-fi show jumped the shark and delivered the worst series finales of all time. (And if you’re anything like me, you’re probably happy to have that exact conversation at least once per year.)But there was a time when Lost was pure. When the possibilities for the ABC phenomenon seemed endless and we all still believed the island and its many sprawling mysteries could be neatly resolved with enough hour-long episodes of primetime television. It was at that exact moment that showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse delivered one of most iconic episodes of Lost (or any show) ever made — and inadvertently doomed the series forever.
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S59Marvel's Most Exciting New Show Is Using a Underhanded Disney Tactic  Marvel loves a callback, and in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, we got a callback for the ages: the return of Matt Murdock, Daredevil from the Netflix series Daredevil. Now, Disney+ is reviving the Daredevil franchise, but under a new name: Daredevil: Born Again. But why the rebrand? Is it a way to differentiate itself from the old iteration now under a new streamer? Is it a way to mark a miniseries the way comic book subtitles do? The series’ old showrunner suggests this move may actually be a way to skirt union rules, and there’s a precedent to back it up. After the HBO series Winning Time was canceled after two seasons, Twitter user @t_NYC, an IATSE union member who worked on the Netflix series Daredevil, took to the platform to explain how premature cancellations can affect a show. The tweet referenced a past thread, where the user claimed, “I worked on all three seasons of Netflix Daredevil. We get wages/conditions based on seasons, and season three is when we get our full wages/conditions. They cancelled it at season three. It will comes back as ‘season one.’”
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S60John Wick's Prequel Show Learned a Crucial Lesson From Star Wars, Director Says  Albert Hughes is well-known as one half of the duo behind Menace II Society and The Book of Eli, two films that mix heady existential themes with blistering, breakneck fight sequences. While he and his twin brother, Allen, were inseparable creative partners for 30 years, the John Wick spinoff The Continental sees the elder Hughes striking off on his own — and trying his hand at some lighter fare.That’s not to say The Continental is a walk in the park. Hughes was as much inspired by neo-noirs like Taxi Driver as he was by boogie-down musicals like Saturday Night Fever. The three-part prequel is a period piece, one that explores what the world of John Wick would have looked like in 1970s New York City. It’s a glorious melting pot of influences: Disco blends seamlessly with punk rock; vampy blaxploitation coexists with somber noir — and it all somehow manages to work, because that’s the very thing that we’ve come to expect from the John Wick franchise.
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S61Inside the Secret World of the Real-Life Pok  When you think of Pokémon, it probably conjures up images of adventure, friendship and adorable creatures fighting for their lives. This endearing fantasy has captured the imaginations of millions, with tall grass in local parks everywhere inspiring a sea of Poké-possibility for budding trainers.And every year, at the Pokémon World Championships, this fictional fantasy becomes very real. From children’s brackets to adult finals, the globe’s greatest video game and trading card players duke it out to earn the title of World Champ, in a series of dramatic showdowns that would make the Elite Four blush. And it’s not just trainers that are made real in the glitzy world of competitive Pokemon, but it's smiling scientists — the Pokémon Professors.
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S62'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' Reveals CD Projekt Red's Secret Strength  CD Projekt Red had a lot to prove with Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, the only expansion to the base game. After the game’s disastrous release in 2020 and years of trying to fix problems and win back players, Phantom Liberty is the studio’s second chance — which it succeeds at. Phantom Liberty is great, even better than the base game. But this isn’t the first time CD Projekt Red has shown that its best work is down after the initial release of a game.The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt came out in 2015 and was praised for its storytelling and well-designed world. It has deservedly gained a reputation for being one of the best RPGs of the last decade. But one year after the game’s release, CD Projekt Red delivered the second of two expansions which managed to be even better. That expansion is Blood and Wine.
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S63NASA's OSIRIS-REx Mission Will Drop An Asteroid Sample Sunday --  But like a college kid dropping off their laundry, the spaceship is just passing through on its way to another adventure.After seven years alone in space, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is speeding back toward Earth with a long-awaited delivery: a capsule containing about eight ounces of rock and dust from a nearby asteroid called Bennu.
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S64Everything You Need To Know About 'Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth'  The ongoing remake series of Square Enix’s seminal 1997 classic, Final Fantasy VII, still has a lot more ground to cover. The first entry, Final Fantasy VII Remake, set in the smoggy metropolis of Midgar, expands the first several hours of the original game into an epic 40-hour adventure. In other words, there’s plenty more story to tell. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is going to be the second entry in the trilogy, and based on what we have already seen from the game it looks to be even more ambitious than its predecessor. Here’s everything we know about the second entry.
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S65'Ahsoka's Nielsen Ratings Prove Disney's Star Wars Strategy Is Paying Off  Ahsoka has always had a mind of her own. She was Anakin’s padawan even when fans insisted that wasn’t possible, she walked away from the Jedi when she realized they weren’t the epitome of justice, and she made the jump from animation to live-action when that seemed like an uncrossable barrier. Now, Ahsoka is changing the game in another way. Her Mandalorian spinoff show mixed up Disney+’s release schedule by dropping episodes at primetime instead of midnight, and it seems like the strategy is paying off. If so, the way we watch streaming TV could change forever.
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S66'Honkai: Star Rail' Build Makes Fu Xuan the Best Tank in the Game  Just like any other party-based RPG, having a character who tanks is an important part of team composition in Honkai: Star Rail. Until recently there have only been three characters in the Preservation path that fit the ball. Though with the latest banner of version 1.3 Fu Xuan has hit the ground running as the best Preservation character in the game, and a welcome addition to any team. Here’s how to build Fu Xuan so you are making the most of her potential.Fu Xuan is a five-star Quantum Preservation character that changes the way players heal and buff in Honkai: Star Rail. Unlike most other Preservation characters, when building Fu Xuan the stat to pay attention to is HP. Most of Fu Xuan’s skills don’t involve putting shields on allies, but instead redirecting enemy attacks to herself, almost like a tank in an MMO. When choosing Relics, Ornaments, and Light Cones always choose things that activate based on HP degradation or DMG intake.
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S67Fujifilm's Impossibly Tiny Instant Camera is the Size of An AirPods Case  Fujifilm Instax may already have a lineup of Mini instant cameras, but the Instax Pal is its smallest offering yet. Technically, the Instax Pal should be categorized as a digital camera since it can’t print instant photos on its own, but it still embodies all the fun of Fujifilm’s instant cameras in an unbelievably small form factor.While the Instax Mini series may be Fujifilm’s most popular instant camera lineup, the Instax Pal will definitely serve as the most portable. Fujifilm essentially stripped away all the bulk of its instant cameras and reduced it to something that’s about the size of an AirPods case.
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S68A Creepy New Demonic Thriller is Keeping 'Get Out's Legacy Alive  It’s wild for Bishal Dutta’s first film to be spoken about in the same sentences as an all-time horror classic like Get Out. But the It Lives Inside director isn’t letting the hype around his feature debut get to him.“I’ve certainly been very lucky to be coming at the heels of some of these incredible films, whether it’s Get Out or The Babadook or It Follows or Hereditary,” Dutta tells Inverse.
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S702023's Most Ludicrous Sci-Fi Movie is a Gloriously Gory Love Letter to Schlock  You don’t need to have seen Troma’s cult classic The Toxic Avenger to appreciate the inhumanity that director Macon Blair unsubtly orchestrates with his excessively out-of-bounds remake — but it helps. Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman’s The Toxic Avenger (1984) introduced a tutu-wearing New Jersey superhero by turning hapless health club custodian Melvin Ferd Junko III into a muscly green brute who starts cleaning Tromaville’s streets with uber-violent justice. It built the house of Troma, spawning a few sequels, a Toxic Crusaders cartoon series, tie-in action figures, and even a rock musical. With his new Toxic Avenger remake, Blair squeezes as much Troma DNA into his “mainstream” version of the hero as he could under a studio banner, striving to honor the underdog scrappiness of both Troma’s cobbled-together exploitation trademarks and Melvin’s cult-iconic legacy as a 98-pound zero to hero whose brutal mutilation of stock character thugs won over the hearts of B-Movie diehards.The reboot cements Peter Dinklage’s rock n’ roll take on Winston Gooze as standalone canon, leaning into an unlikely hero’s journey riddled with dismemberment and good intentions. It’s Troma-like in its wishy-washy commitment to in-depth story development, all part of the film’s midnight movie charm. That might scare away viewers who aren’t prepared for smash-cuts from one chaotic display to the next instead of boring exposition, but at least you’ll find out real quick if The Toxic Avenger is your speed.
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