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 S69Eight Ways to Banish Misery   The philosopher Bertrand Russell knew something about unhappiness. He also knew how to overcome it.Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
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S1How to Build Wealth When You Don't Come from Money  The first step to attaining wealth — at least for people who are not born into it — is much more personal than building millionaire habits or investing wisely. Such approaches often fail to address the systemic and mental barriers faced by many of the marginalized groups who grew up without access to wealth. The author argues that changing your mindset, or building a mindset conducive to wealth, is the real first step.
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S2Conservatives Are More Open to Seemingly Inferior Products Than Liberals Are  Dartmouth College’s Nailya Ordabayeva and Arizona State University’s Monika Lisjak photographed the purchases of customers at a Boston farmers market and surveyed the shoppers about their political leanings. They rated each person’s items on aesthetics and mapped the results against the survey responses and found a correlation: Conservatives were more likely than liberals to have bought misshapen or blemished produce. Eight subsequent studies found a similar pattern with other goods. The conclusion: Conservatives are more open to seemingly inferior products than liberals are.
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S3Should You Launch Products During a Recession?  Economic downturns are frightening. Consumers curb spending, companies cut costs, and we all wait anxiously for the economy to recover. In such a climate, launching a product—an expensive and uncertain endeavor in the best of times—would seem to make little sense. But a new study finds that products launched during recessions outperform on several important measures.
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S4Change Management Requires a Change Mindset  Every organization of every size struggles with change in some way. While midsize companies are no exception, their size offers a competitive advantage. Unlike small companies with limited resources, or large companies saddled by bureaucracy or “this is how we do it” norms, midsize companies are in the sweet spot for rethinking how to relate to change and uncertainty effectively. Helping your team develop and strengthen their change mindset should be a priority. Team discussions about one’s orientation to change could unlock hidden superpowers and create new pathways for internal mobility. This article discusses how to integrate scenario mapping into your strategic planning process to boost your “flux capacity” (your tolerance for change) and contribute to the kinds of futures you’d like to see.
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S5Marketing When Budgets Are Down  The general rule of enterprise finance is that marketing budgets drop like a stone at the first sign of trouble and rise like a feather once the environment is more settled. In mid-2023 we’re far from a settled state — projected GDP growth in western markets is depressingly flat, inflation is proving to be rather stubborn, and those disruptions just keep on coming. It’s tough to see a significant increase in marketing budgets in the near term. Gartner’s annual survey of hundreds of CMOs charts the evolution of marketing spending over recent history, offering guidance for how enterprise leaders can deliver results and build the capabilities to fuel growth in a time of less.
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S6Why Today's Leaders Need to Be Perpetual Learners  Andrew Liveris likes to defy expectations. Born to immigrant parents in the Australian outback, he would eventually rise to the top of the corporate world, taking over in 2004 as CEO of Dow Chemical. In that job, which he held for 14 years, he won widespread credit for pushing an ambitious sustainability agenda, no easy task at one of the world’s biggest chemical producers. In this episode of “The New World of Work”, he offers his thoughts on leadership in tough times. He says executives need to be far more proactive, to find ways to discern relevant facts in a society that increasingly offers competing narratives of the truth. To do this, he says, leaders need to get out to the front lines, to travel, to perpetually reinvent themselves.
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S7A New Approach to Strategic Innovation  Companies typically treat their innovation projects as a portfolio, aiming for a mix of projects that collectively meet their strategic objectives. The problem, say the authors, is that portfolio objectives have become standardized, and innovation projects are often only weakly related to a company’s distinctive strategy.
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S810 Signs Your Company Is Resistant to Change  In their new book, Move Fast and Fix Things, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change. The first step is to identify the real problem you need to solve. Often that’s not clear to everyone – because people have developed a number of effective ways to tolerate the problem instead of fix it.
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S9How to Develop a 5-Year Career Plan  Turns out, having a long-term plan for your career can be beneficial. Taking time to actively think about your path can reduce career-related stress, increase your perceived employability, and help you connect more deeply to your purpose. Yet, a Gartner survey conducted in March 2022 found that fewer than one in three employees knows how to develop their career over the next five years.
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S10Getting Out of a Creative Slump: Our Favorite Reads  I know that this feeling is neither new nor permanent. Over the years, I’ve learned that a creative slump is just a phase — one that eventually passes. We all experience moments in which seemingly effortless things are a struggle. Getting up on time. Finishing that one simple task. Staying motivated enough to just make it through the day. None of this makes us unproductive. It makes us human.
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S11How Deep Tech Can Drive Sustainability and Profitability in Manufacturing  Companies are facing more pressure to become more sustainable while remaining profitable — and deep tech can help. Deep tech, which combines physical technologies and digital technologies, is moving out of the lab and into real-world supply chains. Younger firms, working alone or in collaboration with large companies, are doing much of the work to commercialize it.
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S12Eliminating Algorithmic Bias Is Just the Beginning of Equitable AI  When it comes to artificial intelligence and inequality, algorithmic bias rightly receives a lot of attention. But it’s just one way that AI can lead to inequitable outcomes. To truly create equitable AI, we need to consider three forces through which it might make society more or less equal: technological forces, supply-side forces, and demand-side forces. The last of these is particularly underemphasized. The use of AI in a product can change how much customers value it — for example, patients who put less stock in an algorithmic diagnosis — which in turn can affect how that product is used and how those working alongside it are compensated.
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S13Creating a Cohesive Team for Corporate Transformation Projects  Hollywood films have long been made by teams of independent contractors and employees of different production companies brought together for short-term projects. Companies have embraced this model for transformations, with data showing that 45% of the people on these projects are not regular employees. Managing a disparate group like this can be a challenge, but team leaders can overcome that by working to create one culture, making work personal, and empowering the team leader.
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S14Research: In Recessions, Employees Avoid Jobs with Startups  Startups typically have a tougher time raising money during recessions. But that’s not the only reason they struggle during downturns, according to new research — they also have a tougher time hiring. That’s because job seekers prefer safer options and so are more likely to apply for jobs at incumbent firms. This, alongside the difficulty fundraising, makes growth even tougher for startups during recessions.
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S15The Next Supply-Chain Challenge Isn't a Shortage -- It's Inventory Glut  Inventory challenges aren’t new. Electronics littered shelves in 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst. In 2009, the financial crash left manufacturers with excess inventory when consumer buying power suddenly dropped. And now, the high-tech industry is feeling the weight of a volatile market that has led to excess component inventory. Measuring inventory momentum can help leaders address the problem. It’s a forward-looking metric based on the classic momentum equation: current inventory x rate of inventory change. Once leaders understand their inventory momentum, they can take actions to reduce excess inventory, stem the rate of inventory change, and prevent the situation from happening in the future.
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S16Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel on the Challenges and Opportunities of Following a Visionary Leader  In the final episode of the season, HBR editor Adi Ignatius interviews Jason Buechel, the CEO of Whole Foods. Buechel discusses the challenges of succeeding a larger-than-life executive, the role of Whole Foods as a subsidiary of Amazon, and how the company is addressing changes in the business environment, such as climate change and hybrid work. Buechel emphasizes the importance of understanding the voice of team members during a leadership transition and being authentic as a leader. He also highlights Whole Foods’ focus on growth opportunities for employees and its commitment to sustainability. Buechel believes that AI will fundamentally change the retail and grocery shopping experience in the next decade. The episode concludes with Buechel sharing his favorite products from Whole Foods.
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S17The ancient Sri Lankan 'tank cascades' tackling drought  Each April, in the village of Maeliya in northwest Sri Lanka, Pinchal Weldurelage Siriwardene gathers his community under the shade of a large banyan tree. The tree overlooks a human-made body of water called a wewa – meaning reservoir or "tank" in Sinhala. The wewa stretches out besides the village's rice paddies for 175-acres (708,200 sq m) and is filled with the rainwater of preceding months. Siriwardene, the 76-year-old secretary of the village's agrarian committee, has a tightly-guarded ritual to perform. By boiling coconut milk on an open hearth beside the tank, he will seek blessings for a prosperous harvest from the deities residing in the tree. "It's only after that we open the sluice gate to water the rice fields," he told me when I visited on a scorching mid-April afternoon.
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S18A far-off asteroid brought to life in 3D  On Sunday (24 September) a small capsule crashed down onto the Utah desert, in the US, after travelling billions of miles across our Solar System. Inside were tiny fragments from a rocky asteroid some 525m (1,722ft) across called "101955 Bennu". It is only the third time in history that material from an asteroid has been gathered and returned to Earth.The capsule – filled with an estimated 250g (9oz) worth of rocks and dust – was released into the atmosphere and parachuted to the ground from Nasa’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft. The craft's multi-year trip to the asteroid was the US's first sample-return mission of its kind, and scientists hope its results will shed light on the mysterious origins of life – as well as on the threat posed by Bennu's potential collision-course with our planet.
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S19What does spending more than a year in space do to the human body?  With a few handshakes, a brief photoshoot and a wave, Nasa astronaut Frank Rubio bid farewell to the American-football-field-sized collection of modules and solar panels that has been his home for the past 371 days. His departure from the International Space Station (ISS) and return to Earth marks the end of the longest single spaceflight by an American to date.His time in orbit – which surpassed the previous US record of 355 consecutive days – was extended in March after the spacecraft he and his crewmates had been due to fly home in developed a coolant leak. The extra months in space allowed Rubio to clock up a total of 5,963 orbits around the Earth, travelling 157.4 million miles (253.3 million km). But it still means he is around two months short of the record for the longest ever spaceflight by a human – Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days onboard the Mir Space Station in the mid 1990s.
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S20The latest maps of the world's eighth continent  In 1820, a Russian ship packed with sailors and, oddly, penguins – destined for the men's dinner – spotted a towering shore of ice on the horizon. This was the first ever sighting of the Fimbul Ice Shelf, and it marked the official discovery of a new continent: Antarctica. It also cemented the modern idea, upheld by most maps across the English-speaking world, that there are seven major landmasses.Today, schoolchildren, explorers and politicians generally accept the neat division of the world's ground into these simple units, which include Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica.
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S21Upwork in South Africa: The copywriter working 20 hours per day  For the past seven years, 47-year-old Busani Moyo has spent his working hours from his home in Johannesburg, eyes glued to the computer as he attempts to keep up with a relentless stream of writing gigs. He tries to write up to 1,000 words per hour, avoiding any distractions. He often works 20 hours per day.“That is how l have managed to sustain some of the best companies [as clients] on Upwork,” Moyo told Rest of World. “Over the years, I have turned into an Upwork expert.”
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S22The new AI assistants may not speak your language  We want to hear from you! Is there something you’d like to see me cover in Exporter? You can use this form to let me know — the more detail you can give, the better.Microsoft is betting the future of Windows on its new AI assistant, called Copilot. In a rare keynote event last week (complete with a Satya Nadella appearance), the company announced a new update to Windows 11 that ties Copilot into the operating system at the deepest level. On Tuesday, that update became available to Windows 11 users everywhere. Crucially, the assistant will be able to draw on data from workplace tools like Outlook, Teams, and Calendar, giving it an inside view of your working life.
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S23The job listing app where you can slide into a recruiter's DMs  Boss Zhipin is China’s largest online recruitment platform, its name translating to “Boss directly hiring” in Chinese. Since its launch in 2014, the app has firmly established itself as the preferred job-seeking portal for individuals in their 20s and 30s. Its recommendation algorithm is powered by artificial intelligence, matching users’ work experience and qualifications with job listings. It also connects job seekers with employers through its signature “direct chat” feature.To use Boss Zhipin, a job seeker first needs to create a profile and complete their digital resume. The homepage then displays a personalized feed of jobs matching the seeker’s experience. The app’s design is simple, but densely packed with information. Besides essential details including job title, company name, and salary, each listing contains tags indicating the years of experience required, benefits, and commute time from the address in the user’s profile.
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S24Song of the Stars, Part 3:  An astronomy festival in Italy opted to make all of its events and workshops multisensory. They wanted to see whether sound, touch and smell can, like sight, transmit the wonders of the cosmos.Timmy Broderick: So I’m sitting inside this stone clock tower in the small town of Castellaro Lagusello in Italy. It’s pretty old, like 800 years old. I had found a nook in this tower where I could sit and record this ethereal music coming from the speaker in front of me. And through the slit of a window behind me, I could watch Italians mill about below.
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S25EPA's Critics Recycle Nonsense about Cost to Cut Pollution  For decades industry has claimed that curbing pollution costs too much, but the reality has proven otherwise. Here we go again, this time on power plant carbon emissionsAs young lawyers, working out of the dusty attic in an aging townhouse, a few of us were given a simple but monumental task: figure out how to make a new law—the Clean Air Act—work.
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S26What Humans Lose When AI Writes for Us  In Who Wrote This? linguist Naomi S. Baron discusses how artificial intelligence threatens our ability to express ourselvesArtificial intelligence has pervaded much of our daily life, whether it’s in the form of scarily believable deepfakes, online news containing “written by AI” taglines or novel tools that could diagnose health conditions. It can feel like everything we do is run through some sort of software, interpreted by some mysterious program and kept on a server who knows where. When will the robots take over already? Have they already taken over?
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S27S28Eaten, Crushed or Starved; Male Tarantulas Trade Their Life to Impregnate a Mate  After eight years maturing in a burrow, male tarantulas venture out to mate, then die a cruel deathOn an early evening in September, 16 dark, hairy legs were kicking up dust on the prairie floor in La Junta, Colo. A male Oklahoma brown tarantula was locked in a heated mating match with a female twice his age. Although weary, he plunged a set of hooks that had recently grown on his front legs into his mate’s mouth, just below her glossy fangs, to prevent her from chewing him up.
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S29Controversy Surrounds Blockbuster Superconductivity Claim  Will a possible breakthrough for room-temperature superconducting materials hold up to scrutiny?Editor’s Note (9/29/23): This article from March 10 reported on a study claiming the discovery of room-temperature superconducting material that was published in Nature. Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported that nearly three quarters of that paper’s co-authors had contacted the publisher to ask that the study be retracted because it had flaws. Nature confirmed that it is in contact with this group and plans to take action.
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S30Government Shutdown Could Delay Climate Action  EPA rules on clean cars, power plants and methane could face delays if there is a federal government shutdown because of budget turmoil in CongressCLIMATEWIRE | EPA was already facing a mad dash to complete climate rules in the next six months. A government shutdown could make that harder.
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S31Government Shutdown Looms over Scientists  A government shutdown would disrupt biomedical research and clinical trials as federal experimental facilities shutteredFuelled by infighting among Republicans in the House of Representatives over spending cuts, the United States is barreling towards a government shutdown. Lawmakers in the US Congress have until 30 September (the end of the fiscal year) to reach an agreement over how to keep money flowing to federal agencies, or the government will have to close many of its doors and furlough staff — including tens of thousands of scientists — without pay. Depending on how long the shutdown lasts, work at science agencies will stop, interrupting experiments, delaying the approval of research grants and halting travel to scientific conferences.
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S32New York City's Floods and Torrential Rainfall Explained  Record-breaking rains caused major flash flooding in New York City, reminiscent of Hurricane Ida and a sign of what climate change will increasingly bringPhotographs and videos of New York City have shown rainwater spurting from between subway station tiles, cars bobbing in floodwaters that turned Brooklyn intersections into lakes and parts of LaGuardia Airport inundated as the city and surrounding areas have been deluged by heavy downpours on Friday.
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S33S34Why I gave my teenage daughter a vibrator  "Why does a vibrator make us uncomfortable, but Viagra does not?" asks cognitive-behavioral coach Robin Buckley. Sharing her own personal story of empowering her teenage daughter to explore the power of pleasure, Buckley encourages parents to talk to their teens about healthy sexual development -- and shares why the awkward conversations are worth it.
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S35The world's rarest diseases -- and how they impact everyone  Physician-scientist Anna Greka investigates the world's rarest genetic diseases, decoding the secrets of our cells through "molecular detective work." She explains how her team is using new, advanced technology to solve decades-old medical mysteries — and shows how this work could help develop precision treatments for millions of people across the globe.
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S36Ram  Fifteen years ago, Uruguay was experiencing an energy crisis brought on by its reliance on fossil fuels; today, the nation produces 98 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (and even exports extra energy to neighboring countries). How did they turn things around so quickly? Uruguay's former secretary of energy, Ramón Méndez Galain, explains how they pulled off this unprecedented shift -- and shares how any other country can do the same.
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S37Which Spider-Man Is Stronger: Tobey Maguire or Tom Holland?  Although Spider-Man started as a comic book character, he has made his way to live-action video several times. I remember seeing him appear on The Electric Company in the 1970s for a short skit; it was cool but a little odd. In the modern era of live-action Spider-Man movies, we had the Tobey Maguire version, followed by Andrew Garfield’s turn, and finally the Tom Holland version that appears in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe. We got a chance to see all three in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was great, plus a good excuse to answer the question of whether MJ could really hang on during one of Spidey’s swings.But now it is time to ask an even tougher question: Which version of Spider-Man is the strongest? Let's compare the Maguire version in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 to the Holland version in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, since they perform similar actions: a test of strength that involves using Spidey’s webs to restrain a moving vehicle. Maguire’s Spider-Man stops a runaway subway train, and Holland’s uses webs to hold a splitting ferry together. (It would have been great to include Garfield’s version in this comparison, but there’s just not a scene that shows a similar feat of strength.)
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S38Netflix Just Shipped Its Last DVD. The Algorithms Won  Collectively, separately, Netflix’s film nerds mourn. On X/Twitter, and in think pieces, and in private moments, they let out a collective sigh knowing that they’ll never see a red-wrapped DVD in their mailboxes again. For some 25 years, the period after Netflix all but obliterated Blockbuster and most mom-and-pop video rental stores, it was the best place to get truly obscure films. Now, it’s gone. Netflix says it'll send out its last DVD today. For sure, this was always destined to happen. In the early days, the company’s cofounder and CEO, Reed Hastings, would often tell people, “There’s a reason we didn’t call the company ‘DVD-by-Mail.com.’” Netflix was always going to become a streaming giant; it just needed bandwidths to catch up. Before it became a place for people to rewatch classics like The Office and, eventually, original content, it was also the place to get the special edition DVD of The Lost Boys or the niche theater camp documentary Stagedoor or scores of obscure foreign films.
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S39The Best Hair Straighteners to Iron Out Those Kinks  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 WIREDCurls are beautiful, but taking care of and styling them can be a long, frustrating, and often expensive task. Whether you have tight coils, waves, or Shirley Temple spirals, sometimes you just want to smooth them out and not be bothered for a few days. Having a good tool, be it a flat iron or a blow-dry brush, makes that process easier.
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S40'EA Sports FC 24' Is Just 'FIFA 24' in a Different Jersey  After a messy divorce, the long-running video game FIFA has got a rebrand, bringing a 30-year relationship to an end. In 2021, soccer’s governing body said it would refuse to let EA Sports continue to use the FIFA name without a hike in the licensing fee. At the same time, EA was questioning what value there was in partnering with an organization that seems to lurch from scandal to scandal. With EA Sports FC 24, out today, the divorce is final.The franchise, which has sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide, now has a new name and new look, a post-split glow-up as it goes back out into the world and tries to make it on its own. The changes are obvious from the title screen. Menus have been refreshed for the first time in years, boxy tiles have been replaced with a white-on-black text reminiscent of a high-end cocktail menu (or a post-midlife-crisis bachelor pad), and there’s a new stylized logo that would work well as an ill-advised upper arm tattoo.
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S41New York City Is Drowning  New York and the surrounding areas are under a flash flood warning, and the city and state have issued emergency declarations. Parts of Brooklyn received more than 5 inches of rain this morning; Central Park and Midtown Manhattan had around 4 inches, according to the National Weather Service. Trains were stalled or suspended. Students were in schools with no immediate safe way home. The downpour comes after days of rain that made the region susceptible to flooding.Water has been rushing down subway stairs in Brooklyn, while a terminal in LaGuardia Airport flooded and shuttered. Cars have been stranded and trash cans sent floating by dangerous flood waters, with one bus continuing on its route despite several inches of water on board.
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S42New York Needs to Get Spongier--or Get Used to More Floods  Two years after the remnants of Hurricane Ian dumped up to 10 inches of rain on New York City in just two hours, the metropolis is once again inundated today by extreme rainfall. It is one of the many cities worldwide grappling with a counterintuitive effect of climate change: Sometimes, it will get wetter, not drier. On a warming planet, it'll rain more and individual storms will get more intense. This pain will be especially acute in urban areas, which are built on stormwater infrastructure designed to handle the rainfall of yesteryear. Think back to what the builders of the last century wanted: sewers and canals that funneled rainwater as quickly as possible into a river, lake, or ocean, before it had a chance to accumulate. That worked fine, most of the time. But over the intervening years, rare catastrophic flooding has been growing more common. Ancient wastewater systems are now tasked with getting rid of ever-bigger inundations.Â
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S43Where's the beef? Middle-aged, American men ate all of it  Americans collectively consumed 30 billion pounds of beef in 2021, more than the citizens of any other nation. Considering that statistic, it’s probably not surprising that a solid majority of Americans (59%) agree that eating red meat is part of the “American way of life,” according to a 2021 Ipsos poll.But as beef-obsessed as Americans apparently are, 45% of them don’t eat it on any given day, according to a recent study published in the journal Nutrients. Instead, the team of Tulane University public health scientists behind the research found that just 12% of Americans account for half the country’s total consumption.
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S44Here's what it was like to live in ancient Rome  There are, roughly speaking, two types of historians: those who look at the past from afar, recording its wars, epidemics, and recessions; and those who look at the past from up close, studying the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people. Macro-historians help us understand the events that led up to the present moment, while micro-historians try to show us what living during these bygone times actually looked like. When it comes to the history of ancient Rome, we have all been told that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and declared himself dictator. Likewise, many of us were taught how Emperor Constantine made Christianity the main religion of the Roman Empire after seeing a cross of light appear in the sky during an ill-fated battle.
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S455 key areas where generative AI can help dissolve business roadblocks  Roadblocks are a frustrating reality in business. Consider the new team that just won’t gel; the tricky coding challenge that holds back delivery of a key project; writer’s block delaying important marketing materials; or a series of meetings that never turn into action.Generative AI is an effective way of removing many of those challenges in a simple, practical way. Even in situations where AI’s output isn’t directly applicable, it can provide valuable inspiration out of thin air. Enterprise tech giants and startups alike are busy building AI into their products to speed up old processes and open up opportunities for new ways of working.
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S46New JWST results show we're on a path to finding alien life  We are living on the cusp. Within the next few decades, we may well have hard evidence for the existence of alien life on worlds light-years distant from Earth. That was my takeaway from new results that the James Webb Space Telescope released a couple of weeks ago. While there was some controversy that swirled around the announcement, it really had nothing to do with the science itself, which was (to my mind) quite beautiful. So, let’s dig in to see how JWST is revealing the path humanity will take to resolving the age-old question: Are we alone?The JWST press release came following a new paper by Nikku Madusudhan of the University of Cambridge and his collaborators titled “Carbon-bearing Molecules in a Possible Hycean Atmosphere.” The basis of their science was the revolutionary technique called “atmospheric characterization.”
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S47The faulty weathermen of the mind  When Peter K. Chadwick was a boy, his mother accused him of being the Devil. She had her own demons—childhood abuse, cheating husband, family betrayals, poverty, cancer. She told Peter he was a “no good,” a “rotter,” and a “bloody Chadwick.” Don’t trust a soul, she told him, and harangued him whenever he began to develop affection for anyone.Peter grew callous and paranoid, which didn’t earn him any friends. He was bullied at school. Classmates gossiped, slandered, and ridiculed him. After he walked out on his mother when she was on her deathbed, he was overcome with guilt, and took it as proof that he was everything his mother and classmates accused him of being.
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S48Ask Ethan: Is our Universe truly matter-dominated?  Here in our own backyard, matter is common, while antimatter is rare. In fact, except for high-energy reactions that produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter — things like electron-positron pairs, for example — there’s absolutely no antimatter found anywhere that we look. All of the planets, stars, gas, dust, and more within our Milky Way are made of matter and not antimatter. All of the galaxies we look out at beyond our own are made of matter and not antimatter. Galaxy clusters and the large-scale cosmic web point to everything being made out of matter and not antimatter. Somehow, all of the normal stuff, the stuff of the Standard Model, is all “matter” in our Universe, with practically no antimatter at all.Most of the time, we ask the big question of baryogenesis: how did the Universe come to be made of matter and not antimatter? But before we even get there, are we truly, absolutely certain that the Universe is made of matter, and that there isn’t some large collection of antimatter out there? That’s what Tim Thompson wants to know, asking:
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S49S50How to succeed and find meaning in a "post-career" world  A struggling actor turned on-set intimacy coordinator. A CEO who quit to fight climate change as a consultant and politician. An Army sergeant who became a painter, an accountant who became a small-business owner, and a theoretical physicist who became an aloof ninja in a comedic rock band. (Yes, really.)Bruce Feiler interviewed these and scores more Americans for his Work Story project. They came from all walks of life, and their paths took them in even more distinctive directions. Yet taken together, their stories revealed something enlightening to Feiler: We are living through a once-in-a-generation redefining of work. Not because of AI or remote work or the post-COVID economy — well, not just because of those. At the core of this cultural shift is a “rethinking [of] the rules of success” and a “rebalancing [of] power away from employers to employees.”
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S51How humanity became slaves to the clock  My three-year-old doesn’t understand time. I don’t mean “time” in an Einsteinian kind of way, but the basic units of time. He doesn’t know what minutes or hours are. “Yesterday” could be the day before, or it could be April. When he asks how long his porridge will take to cook, I say, “A bit.” The problem is that I’ve quickly discovered that “a bit” is a woefully inadequate descriptor. And so, I’ve taken to using comparisons. I say, “It takes as long as a bath,” or, “It’ll be one episode of Spiderman.” I still don’t think he gets it, but at least I’m trying.What I’m doing isn’t unique. Millennia ago, people lived without clocks, so there was literally a time before time. And they did exactly what I do with my young boy: They used metaphors. In medieval England, for instance, they had a time measure called the “Pater Noster Whyle,” which was how long it took to say the Lord’s Prayer. And some things would take a “Pissing Whyle.”
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S52Defamiliarization: How "ostranenie" can redefine life, art, and business  Nathan Pyle and his wife had invited some guests to their house. As the day for dinner came around, the couple spent hours tidying away all the things scattered about. They made sure every last vestige of clutter was hidden away in cupboards, wardrobes, and drawers. At no point should their guests see a house as it’s lived in. They must see it tidy. Pyle found the entire experience peculiar. He found it funny. And so, he drew a comic making light of the whole thing and put it on social media.That was in 2019. Today, Pyle’s Strange Planet has nine million followers on social media. He has a series of books, a clothing line, and an Apple+ TV show. What Pyle does well, and why he’s so popular, is that he presents common, everyday situations in a comically unfamiliar way. His characters — mostly aliens — narrate normal human behaviors in a way that makes you think, “Wow, that is weird.” This technique has a particular name in aesthetics: ostranenie (aw-STRAH-nuh-nee). Not only is it a neat philosophical idea, but it can also be a transformative business strategy.
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S53S54S55Knots are untied as The Wheel of Time season two approaches its end  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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S56Galaxy S24 leaks show Samsung's usual love for the iPhone  It's Galaxy S24 leak season! The phone, which won't be out until early 2024, is already being detailed by OnLeaks and SmartPrix. The two have dueling posts for the S24 Ultra and another for the cheaper S24 and S24 Plus. As usual, these are CAD-derived renders that are usually passed around to accessory makers, so while all the important bits are in the right spot down to the millimeter, don't read too much into the unconfirmed finer details.
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S57S58S59S60S61S62Behold the world's oldest sandals, buried in a "bat cave" over 6,000 years ago  In the 19th century, miners in southern Spain unearthed a prehistoric burial site in a cave containing some 22 pairs of ancient sandals woven out of esparto (a type of grass). The latest radiocarbon dating revealed that those sandals could be 6,200 years old—centuries older than similar footwear found elsewhere around the world, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The interdisciplinary team analyzed 76 artifacts made of wood, reeds, and esparto, including basketry, cords, mats, and a wooden mallet. Some of the basketry turned out to be even older than the sandals, providing the first direct evidence of basketry weaving among the hunter-gatherers and early farmers of the region.
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S63The End of Trump Inc.  The courts are finally catching up to a man who has long behaved as though there would never be any consequences for his deceptions.So wrote Arthur Engoron, a New York State judge, in an unexpected ruling late yesterday that threatens the heart of Donald Trump’s business empire. Engoron was referring in particular to arguments offered by the former president’s attorneys in the case, but his words describe many of the details of the case—such as the valuations of Trump’s properties and even the square footage he claimed they contained, both of which the court found were “clearly” fraudulent. Much of the reputation Trump cultivated as a business mogul was built on lies.
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S64World of WearableArt 2023  The annual World of WearableArt international design competition took place in Wellington, New Zealand, over the weekend. Designers with backgrounds in fashion, art, architecture, design, and more were invited to showcase their creative and inventive garments. Gathered below are of some of the amazing works shown this year in Wellington. "Tears Unseen" by Carena West, New Zealand, is modeled in the Open Section, after winning the Sustainability Award during the 2023 World of WearableArt Awards Night at TSB Bank Arena, in Wellington, New Zealand, on September 22, 2023. #
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S65The Weirdos Living Inside Our Phones  Brian Jordan Alvarez’s ode to sitting makes him the latest comedian to wring ineffable joy out of a very viral, very silly song.We’ve just lived through what Vulture has labeled “Silly Song Summer,” during which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical film ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.k.a. D.J. Crazy Times’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral. Novelty songs—fluky, hummable jokes—are nothing new, but TikTok has accelerated their production, and broadly, the cultural mood is trending toward cheesiness and wit.
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S66The Best Thing About Amazon Was Never Going to Last  My daughter needs a purple wig for school, and she needs it by this Friday. When I got the news Monday night, I had just one reliable option—Amazon—and the rancid-tapioca feeling that comes with using it. The problem isn’t just the company’s rough track record with worker safety, or its devastating effect on brick-and-mortar stores, or knowing that I was about to toss more data into its insatiable maw. Despite all that, I’m still a Prime subscriber.Lately, though, shopping on Amazon has become an exercise in frustration. My purple-wig search started with sponsored listings from unfamiliar brands with just a small disclosure noting that they’re advertisements. The organic results eventually do show up, offering hairpieces from brands with names such as DAOTS, MorvallyDirect, and eNilecor. Scroll only a little deeper into the sea of indigo fibers, and the sponsored items resume.
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S67A Court Ruling That Targets Trump's Persona  A New York judge’s decision undermines the former president’s image as a “deals guy.”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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S68'Every Time I Hear You, I Feel a Little Bit Dumber'  This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.Suddenly, it just tumbled out: “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”
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S70Group-Chat Culture Is Out of Control  Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.
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