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 S69US Supreme Court refuses to hear Alabama's request to keep separate and unequal political districts   For the second time in three months, the U.S. Supreme Court has rebuffed Alabama’s attempts to advance its legislature’s congressional maps that federal courts have ruled harm Black voters.The court had first rejected the maps in its stunning June 8, 2023, decision that upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in an act of defiance, Alabama lawmakers resubmitted maps that didn’t include what the court had urged them to do – create a second political district in which Black voters could reasonably be expected to choose a candidate of their choice.
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S1How Brands and Influencers Can Make the Most of the Relationship  Even as companies devote increasing shares of their marketing budgets to paying social media influencers to tout their products, researchers know little about the tactic’s effectiveness or its overall impact on influencers, their followers, and their partner brands. So, a team of researchers decided to investigate. HBS assistant professor Shunyuan Zhang and doctoral student Magie Cheng analyzed more than 85,000 influencer videos posted on YouTube from August 2019 to August 2020. Comparing similar posts with and without paid promotions, they found that putting out a sponsored video caused significant numbers of followers to doubt the influencers’ authenticity and drop off. The study’s findings suggest several ways for influencers and brands, along with the platforms hosting their content, to minimize the damage.
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S2Analytics for Marketers  Advanced analytics can help companies solve a host of management problems, including those related to marketing, sales, and supply-chain operations, which can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. But as more data becomes available and advanced analytics are further refined, managers may struggle with when, where, and how much to incorporate machines into their business analytics, and to what extent they should bring their own judgment to bear when making data-driven decisions.
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S3What Makes a Great Leader?  Tomorrow’s leaders master three key roles — architect, bridger, and catalyst, or ABCs — to access the talent and tools they need to drive innovation and impact. As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems. These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation.
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S4Above-Elbow Bionic Arm Can Control Every Finger  Researchers have created the first nerve-controlled prosthetic hand that can be used in daily lifeMost bionic limbs are controlled by electrical signals generated by muscles moving near the attachment site. But when an arm is amputated above the elbow, the remaining muscles aren't enough to control every joint in an artificial hand. “The higher the amputation, the more joints you have to replace, and the fewer muscles you have to do it,” says Max Ortiz Catalán, a bionicist at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
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S5Ram  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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S6Your Project Management Software Can't Save You  When I worked as a copywriter at a dog-toy-slash-tech company, we used Airtable and Basecamp to organize our workflows. At my next job, the marketers made us learn Asana (“same as Airtable but much better”), but the product team pushed their work and sprints through Jira. I was laid off before I had to learn Jira, and at my next gig they swore by Airtable, which, phew, I already knew. But efficiencies were still being lost, apparently, and Airtable took the blame. As I was leaving that job, I heard someone mention that a new program, Trello, was going to replace Airtable and “change everything” for us. I came back as a contractor a few years later, and everything had not changed. The company had moved on from Trello and was now in the thrall of something called Monday.com. It, too, promised big changes.If you work as an “individual contributor”—engineer, copywriter, designer, data analyst, marketer—in the modern white-collar workforce, you’ve probably encountered one of these project-management software (PM software) enterprises. Your onboarding will include an invitation to collaborate from the likes of Smartsheet, Notion, Udemy, ClickUp, Projectworks, Wrike, and Height. The list seems endless and yet is somehow still growing. More than a hundred proprietary apps and planners are currently vying for companies’ business, all promising increased productivity, seamless workflow, and unmatched agility. And if, like me, you’ve ping-ponged between a couple of jobs and project teams over a few years, you’ve had to come to terms with the fact that misunderstandings and confusion are natural in any large workforce. But in an increasingly digital, increasingly remote age of work, you might still imagine that a “killer app” really would win. And yet none of these PM software services make work work. The key to these deficiencies lies in the history of workplace efficiency itself—starting with the original business consultants.
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S7The Game Theory of the Auto Strikes  The United Auto Workers strike against Detroit’s Big Three—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis—escalated into its third week on Friday. Workers at two additional plants operated by Ford and GM walked off the job, taking the number of union members striking for better pay and benefits to more than 25,000.The dispute looks unlikely to end soon. As they try to understand where things are headed, economists, philosophers, labor experts, business professors, and a handful of boutique consulting firms see a juicy opportunity to put a 100-year-old economic theory into practice. Guys. It’s time for some game theory.
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S8How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis  On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University of Washington. “It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one animal.”
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S9A Soviet doctor's wild experiment to create hybrid human-ape super warriors  The 1973 film The Wicker Man is one of the most quietly disturbing movies. One reason is that it features people dressed in animal masks. They appear from time to time, often just standing there in silence, and they’re watching you. Seeing a fully grown man wearing a fish face should be comical. In The Wicker Man, few in the audience are laughing.There is something primal about the fear of man-beast hybrids. The earliest stories we know of contain many of these “chimeras” — humans but with an aspect of a beast. We have the minotaur, mermaid, harpy, or wendigo. The Hindu and ancient Egyptian pantheon are full of chimerical deities. These stories often represent tension between our human rational side and our animalistic drives. They’re also scary folk stories to tell around the campfire.
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S10Get a whiff of ancient Egyptian mummified organs  We expect death to stink. In our olfactory memory, the idea of decaying organic remains rarely conjures a pleasant odor: sour, fetid, nauseating. But in ancient Egypt, death—and therefore the afterlife—had a different aroma.“They [ancient Egyptian texts] say that when ‘people die, they rot, they decay, they stink, and they will become countless worms.’ This is how they describe it,” says Barbara Huber, doctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. “If you stink it means your body is already decaying—a bad, bad thing. So in order to be able to live for eternity, you need to smell good.”
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S11The Indian Ocean has the world's largest gravity hole. Now we know why  Dear Indian Ocean, please don’t take offense, but: Why is your gravity hole so big? That question had been baffling scientists ever since the hole was discovered back in 1948. Now a team from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) thinks they have found the answer: The “hole” in the Indian Ocean is caused by fragments from the sunken floor of another, much older ocean.In a mysterious part of the Indian Ocean, the pull of gravity is much weaker than anywhere else on Earth. This gravity hole, the world’s largest (and deepest) gravitational anomaly, is officially known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL). (A geoid is a theoretical model of sea levels worldwide, with its irregularities corresponding to variations in the Earth’s gravity.)
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S12Is psychology good for anything?  After all, many published studies fail to replicate, and influential researchers have admitted to wrongdoing, from engaging in questionable research practices to committing outright fraud. Just this summer, allegations of data tampering have thrown into question numerous studies about (ironically) honesty by high-profile psychologists Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino. Has discarding these findings affected our understanding of human psychology in any meaningful way?According to a recent piece by Adam Mastroianni, who is now a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, the answer may be: meh, not really.
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S13Sleep apnea is surprisingly deadly. One in five adults has it  A pernicious scourge strikes an estimated one in five American adults as they sleep, and most are unaware of it: sleep apnea.Sleep apnea is a condition in which your breathing frequently stops and restarts during sleep, simultaneously depriving the body of vital oxygen and forcing you to repeatedly and unknowingly wake up, often preventing adequate rest. Its most common form, called obstructive sleep apnea, is caused when the muscles supporting the throat and nose relax to such a degree that they entirely block your airway.
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S14An Octogenarian Horror Villain Still Racking Up Scares  The long-running Saw franchise is back, and finally putting its most defining antagonist in the spotlight. Hollywood’s biggest horror franchises have lately been lacking in all-star villainy. This isn’t to demonize long-running hit series such as The Conjuring, Insidious, and The Purge, none of which rely on one big bad guy. But many of scary cinema’s most infamous adversaries—Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees—have grown quite long in the tooth, without any obvious contemporary heirs. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Saw X, one of the biggest horror-movie offerings this Halloween season, centers on a man in his early 80s.
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S15Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi  Back at the turn of the 21st century, valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases a year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of valley fever have exploded, increasing roughly sevenfold by 2019.And valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful fungi are becoming more dangerous for people. One likely reason for this worsening fungal situation, scientists say, is climate change. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns are expanding where disease-causing fungi occur; climate-triggered calamities can help fungi disperse and reach more people; and warmer temperatures create opportunities for fungi to evolve into more dangerous agents of disease.
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S16Low Stakes, High Drama  Some of our writers’ most entertaining—and controversial—opinions on everyday mattersThis 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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S17The Supreme Court Cases That Could Redefine the Internet  In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents) were divided on the laws’ legality. And now they’re going to the Supreme Court.
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S18How the U.S. Ended Up on the Brink of Government Shutdown  The American government on the brink of shutdown: With the federal government about to run out of money, we explore how the country got to this point, who will be affected, and how U.S. support for Ukraine has become a divisive political issue. Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss these issues and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, an anchor at Washington Post Live and a co-author of the Early 202; and Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast.
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S19Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right  The speaker made a last-minute reversal to avert a government shutdown. It could cost him his job.For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.
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S20A Satanic Rebellion  The last time Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out.In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife.
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S21Taylor Swift Is Too Famous for This  The celebrity-gossip industrial complex is about to crash into the savagery of sports media. Cover your eyes.Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere. And now, to her vast dominion, she has added untold millions of football-loving (mostly) men, thanks to her escalating flirtations with the Kansas City Chiefs’ sexy goofus tight end, Travis Kelce.
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S22Here's to a New Generation of Classic Cars  Enough with Boomer nostalgia for shiny chrome and mad speed. Let’s celebrate old automobiles to suit our more sober, constrained America.Here they come, two by two, the classic cars of America. The 1970s muscle cars, the ’60s coupes, and the ’50s sedans—“kandy-kolored” (to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase) beauties that came off the line in the golden age before the catalytic converter, when rich black smoke pooled above the beach lot where the boys gathered. These were America’s fantasy rides: the Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special, the sort painted pink for Elvis Presley; Porsche’s 550 Spyder, the kind James Dean drove to his death on U.S. 466 in 1955; the 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird; the 1965 Shelby Mustang. They remain our classic cars, after six or seven decades.
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S23A Crucial Barrier Against Hurricanes Is at Risk  Sand dunes can protect the coastline from the effects of climate change. But they’re vulnerable to intense storms.Two weeks after Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Atlantic Canada on September 24, 2022, Jeff Ollerhead found himself staring at an upended boardwalk in Prince Edward Island National Park. Damaged by the storm—one of the strongest cyclones ever recorded in Canada—Greenwich Beach was still closed to the general public. Ollerhead, who is a coastal geomorphologist at Mount Allison University, in New Brunswick, treads carefully around the doomed boardwalk and a large pond to reach the sand dunes bordering the sea. “The whole thing had been scarped,” he says, referring to how waves carried away large amounts of sand from the seaward side, leaving the normally sloping face of the dune almost vertical.
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S24Love Is Not Always Song, but the Swelling  in the throat before a cry. It is my father, changing his god because my mother asked. After the baptism, his curly hair wet and cold like an animal caught out in the snow. Fleeing from my grandmother, who rushed after him with butcher knives not yet wiped clean of pigeon meat, the untucked bits of herhijab licking the air behind her like a shadow.You need to go back to Egypt, she had said. Sometimes, home is not a home, but a claw lodged inside you. A river you step into because it holds light. You are waist deep, wading in what mauls you and also
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S25A '90s Blockbuster That Holds Up  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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our staff writer Olga Khazan. Olga has recently written about not liking dogs (and joining a rather intense Subreddit of people who share that unpopular opinion), and why married people are happier than the rest of us. She’s also working on a book about personality change.
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S26Research: How Cultural Differences Can Impact Global Teams  Diversity can be both a benefit and a challenge to virtual teams, especially those which are global. The authors unpack their recent research on how diversity works in remote teams, concluding that benefits and drawbacks can be explained by how teams manage the two facets of diversity: personal and contextual. They find that contextual diversity is key to aiding creativity, decision-making, and problem-solving, while personal diversity does not. In their study, teams with higher contextual diversity produced higher-quality consulting reports, and their solutions were more creative and innovative. When it comes to the quality of work, teams that were higher on contextual diversity performed better. Therefore, the potential challenges caused by personal diversity should be anticipated and managed, but the benefits of contextual diversity are likely to outweigh such challenges.A recent survey of employees from 90 countries found that 89 percent of white-collar workers “at least occasionally” complete projects in global virtual teams (GVTs), where team members are dispersed around the planet and rely on online tools for communication. This is not surprising. In a globalized — not to mention socially distanced — world, online collaboration is indispensable for bringing people together.
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S27S28Killers of the Flower Moon to The Exorcist: Believer: 10 of the best films to watch in October  Eugenio Derbez, who played the inspirational music teacher in Coda, is another inspirational teacher in Radical, a fact-based drama directed by Christopher Zalla. Derbez plays Sergio, who is hired to teach sixth grade in a poor Mexican border town, mainly because no one else wants the job. His pupils are resigned to lives of poverty and gang violence, but Sergio encourages them to follow their dreams. A Spanish-language answer to Dead Poets Society and To Sir, With Love? "Yes, the professor-shaking-up-students shtick has been done on-screen many times before," says Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. "But two factors make Radical feel, well, radical: the story being driven by the unique culture of Mexico, and the kids, all exceptional actors, being so devastatingly young... Zalla teaches a lesson on how to deliver an affirming, emotional gut punch."Two of Ireland's finest young screen actors, Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, co-star in Foe, a brooding science-fiction drama directed by Garth Davis (Lion) and adapted from the novel by Iain Reid (I'm Thinking of Ending Things). Ronan and Mescal play Hen and Junior, a couple living in a remote American farmhouse, a few decades into the future. The Earth is dying, but a mysterious stranger (Aaron Pierre) tells them that the Government is developing a plan to colonise space. Junior has been selected to help, but that means leaving Hen behind for several years. David Canfield at Vanity Fair calls the film "a twisty, heated chamber drama overflowing with explosive emotions... an unpredictable, tragic journey, sprinkled with glimmers of hope and punctuated by a reveal that ought to compel a rewatch."
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S29Feinstein's death raises the question: How are vacant Senate seats filled?  There’s an empty seat in the U.S. Senate now that California’s longtime and senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, has died.And, following the Sept. 22, 2023, federal indictment on bribery and other charges of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, numerous people, including some prominent Democratic lawmakers, have called for Menendez to resign. Even Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who would appoint a replacement for Menendez, has said the senator should step down.
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S30Nigeria at 63: four reasons for persistent disunity six decades on  At 63 the story of Nigeria can be anything from the “celebration of greatness to an act of barbaric cruelty”. These are the words of Nigerian writer Dipo Faloyin in his book Africa Is Not a Country.Nigeria attained its independence from Britain on 1 October 1960. Nearly half a century earlier, in 1914, the British amalgamated the Northern and Southern British protectorates into the Nigerian Federation. For many — including the Nigerian independence leader Chief Obafémi Awólòwò, in his book Path to Nigerian Freedom – the country that emerged from this amalgamation was “a mere geographical expression”.
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S31S32The Quiet Revolution of the Sabbath  Here is a story I wasn’t sure my sister would ever let me tell. I come from a churchgoing family, but one Sunday my sister did not go to worship, even though the rest of us did. She wasn’t sick. In fact, she was the opposite of sick: recently confirmed, she had simply decided to exercise one of the rights she understood to be hers through confirmation, namely staying home for no reason other than that she wanted to do so. I must have found this shocking—not only her decision but the willingness of our parents to abide—though I can’t really summon a memory of how I felt before worship because of what happened after.Back then, the sanctuary of our little country church was divided from the fellowship hall by a single doorway. Pitched high on the left and low on the right, the door is uneven, a fact I’ve loved ever since someone told me an apocryphal story about Christ the carpenter helping his father, Joseph, correct a crooked doorframe. I looked at that door every week during worship. For a long time, it was right behind the pulpit, so I would watch it during the entire sermon, waiting expectantly for a similar miracle, for the right corner to rise to meet the left or for the left to fall to meet the right. Whenever I walked through, I dragged my fingers up and down its slanted frame; eventually, I was tall enough to touch its crooked corners.
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S33Lucinda Rosenfeld Reads Annie Ernaux  Lucinda Rosenfeld joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Returns,” by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Treisman, which was published in The New Yorker in 2022. Rosenfeld is the author of five novels, including “I’m So Happy for You” and “Class.”Personal History by David Sedaris: after thirty years together, sleeping is the new having sex.
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S3440 Years Ago, Christopher Walken Led a Wild Sci-Fi Thriller With a Tragic Reputation  It’s unlikely even the most gifted psychic could have foreseen the problems 1983 telepathic sci-fi Brainstorm would endure during its turbulent route to the big screen. MGM ran into financial difficulties and pulled the plug on the almost-complete project, with only a last-minute deal with insurance company Lloyd’s of London saving it from gathering dust on shelves. Filmmaker Douglas Trumbull was apparently too preoccupied with the film’s special effects to guide his talented cast: rumor has it leading man Christopher Walken regularly took over the director’s chair. And then there was the tragic and mysterious death of Natalie Wood.Brainstorm was intended to be Wood’s comeback. The three-time Academy Award nominee had struggled to parlay her 1960s success into the following decade, with her only movies, Peeper and Meteor, both flopping. Instead, Brainstorm became her posthumous swansong when, during a production break vacation with husband Robert Wagner and co-star Walken, she was found drowned near Santa Catalina Island. Her sister Lana was used as a stand-in for the film’s few remaining shots.
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S35'Ahsoka' is Completely Squandering Star Wars' Most Important Villain  Hey, have you heard about Thrawn? He’s coming back! He’s going to be a threat to the entire galaxy! The New Republic needs to take him seriously! It’s Thrawn, you guys! Thrawn!The New Republic’s stuffy politicians may be sick of hearing General Hera tell them all about what a danger Thrawn is, but that’s nothing compared to the Star Wars fans who’ve been hearing it since 1991, when Timothy Zahn’s first Thrawn novel was published. Thrawn has haunted the periphery of the Star Wars canon for 32 years, popping up in novels, cartoons, and video games to offer a far greater threat than the typical Imperial officer, who can barely put his hat on without getting a squad of stormtroopers shot dead.
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S36These 7 Instant Cameras Are Way More Fun Than Shooting With an iPhone  Instant cameras are extremely popular these days. They’re fun to shoot with and the washed-out and lo-fi prints you get are one of a kind compared to photos taken with a phone.Fujifilm and Polaroid pretty much dominate the instant camera market, which isn’t surprising considering their storied pasts producing film and analog cameras.
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S3740 Years Later, 'Ahsoka' Finally Redeems Star Wars' Most Infamous Mistake  Ezra Bridger is a new man, and not just because he’s in live-action now. After years of exile in the Peridea galaxy, he’s picked up some new threads, a beard, and even a new language. But one of the biggest additions to his character fundamentally changes a part of Star Wars history, and cements a part of canon that was previously only a fan in-joke. Forty years ago, in Return of the Jedi, Luke fought off a bunch of Jabba’s lackeys on the crime lord’s sand barge. When one henchman in particular lunges for him, Luke kicks him off the barge. There’s only one problem: his leg never makes contact. Luke kicks the air, but the goon falls off the barge anyway.
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S38Is My Cat Bored or Tired? Here's What Animal Boredom Actually Looks Like  When humans are bored, we might scroll our phones or go down an internet rabbit hole. But how do you know if your pet is bored? Cats and dogs sleep 15 to 20 hours every day normally; how can you tell the difference between sleeping a healthy amount and sleeping out of boredom (another favorite human pastime)?Two veterinarians describe what animal boredom might look like, what happens if it goes unaddressed, and how to keep our favorite critters happy and curious.
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S39S4040 Common Mistakes You Don't Realize Make Your Home Look Dated  Updating your home doesn’t necessarily require a full-blown renovation. Small changes here and there can make a world of difference to upgrade a room both visually and practically. With that in mind, I’ve found a cheap fix for some of the most common mistakes you probably don’t realize make your home look dated. From new cabinet hardware that’ll spruce up your kitchen to easy-to-use chalk-style paint to breathe new life into an old piece of furniture, these tried and true reviewer favorites are the perfect way to upgrade your home on a budget.
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S4150 Things Skyrocketing in Sales on Amazon That Are Smart as Hell & Have Near-Perfect Reviews  Sometimes a product comes along that makes you gasp, “I need this.” Lucky for you, I found a slew of those products that are all skyrocketing in popularity on Amazon. Some will save you space, others will save you time, and the rest are just cheap and clever. From a blind spot mirror for your car to a cup holder for your rolling suitcase, you’ll want to grab these items before they sell out. Reviewers have given them near-perfect ratings and you will too, so keep on scrolling for these smart as hell and convenient AF products that you need — now.
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S422023's Most Intriguing Sci-Fi Movie Botches Its Terrific Source Material  It’s the dead of night. A desolate cottage surrounded by dead trees and barren farmland is suddenly lit up by eerie green car headlights. Junior (Paul Mescal) wakes from the couch to look out the window at this unexpected visitor. He’s joined by his wife Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan), who fidgets as they decide what to do. They argue and eventually open the door to the visitor (Aaron Pierre), who introduces himself as Terrance, a representative of an aerospace corporation called OuterMore who wants to send Junior up to space as part of an initiative to test whether humans can survive on colonies. The Earth is dying, and the last hope for humanity may be in the stars.But that’s not what Foe, Garth Davis’ stilted adaptation of the chilling sci-fi thriller by Iain Reid, is about. Foe is about what happens when Junior is sent to space. In the two years that Junior is gone, Outermore is prepared to leave Hen with an AI duplicate of him to keep her company. Though Junior is outraged at the idea, the two of them eventually relent.
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S435 Years Later, Adventure Time Reveals a Shocking Dystopian Twist  In Fionna and Cake Episode 7, we finally learn a bit more about the mysterious duo Beth and Shermy.The Land of Ooo is a lot of things. It’s the post-apocalyptic husk of the planet Earth we know today. It’s a magical world full of talking candy and friendly vampires. And, of course, it’s the setting of Adventure Time. But one thing Ooo typically isn’t is a dystopia. Until now.
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S44The Quest to Colonize Mars Is Uncovering New Mysteries About Human Psychology  A niche research community plays out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another planet.In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.
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S45Exploit the Product Life Cycle  Most alert and thoughtful senior marketing executives are by now familiar with the concept of the product life cycle. Even a handful of uniquely cosmopolitan and up-to-date corporate presidents have familiarized themselves with this tantalizing concept. Yet a recent survey I took of such executives found none who used the concept in any strategic way whatever, and pitifully few who used it in any kind of tactical way. It has remained—as have so many fascinating theories in economics, physics, and sex—a remarkably durable but almost totally unemployed and seemingly unemployable piece of professional baggage whose presence in the rhetoric of professional discussions adds a much-coveted but apparently unattainable legitimacy to the idea that marketing management is somehow a profession. There is, furthermore, a persistent feeling that the life cycle concept adds luster and believability to the insistent claim in certain circles that marketing is close to being some sort of science.1The concept of the product life cycle is today at about the stage that the Copernican view of the universe was 300 years ago: A lot of people knew about it, but hardly anybody seemed to use it in any effective or productive way.
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S46Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only Australasia’s largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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S47Why Do We Forget So Many of Our Dreams?  We only remember a fraction of our dreams, and even those slip away if we don’t try to remember them—here’s whyIf you’ve ever awoken from a vivid dream only to find that you can’t remember the details by the end of breakfast, you’re not alone. People forget most of the dreams they have—though it is possible to train yourself to remember more of them.
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S485 Ways to Work Remotely (and Effectively) for the Long Haul  Covid-19 made remote work a reality for a lot of people, but for me, it was business as usual. I haven’t worked in a physical office in a long time. In fact, for several years, I’ve worked from anywhere but a physical office. Across three continents and a few employers (including myself), I’ve dragged my workplace with me, and along the way I’ve managed to stay on top of things despite the many distractions that have popped up to challenge my productivity. Here are just a few things I do to stay organized and make remote work a workable option for me.There’s an old saying that beds should be used for just two things. Work is not one of those things. Your sleeping space should be a sanctuary, a place of relaxing and unwinding, and if you’re spending your days propped up against pillows with your laptop, you’re not relaxing. In fact, you’re teaching yourself that the bed is a busy and possibly stressful space.
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S49'The Creator' Review: It's AI That Wants to Save Humanity  robots have been depicted in movies for more than a century, but the anxieties about artificial intelligence that they used to convey are no longer theoretical. There’s a bill in US Congress right now to stop AI from gaining control of nuclear weapons, and roughly a dozen militaries around the world are investigating the possibilities of autonomous weaponry. That’s why watching The Creator, a movie set roughly 40 years from now, feels surreal, jarring, and oddly welcome. From Metropolis to Terminator, sci-fi has taught us to fear the AI revolt. This one opts to wonder what would happen if AI got so empathetic to humanity it wanted to save people from themselves.In writer-director Gareth Edwards’ latest, war has laid waste to both humans and robots. In an attempt to eradicate AI, both sides see and feel the toll of war. Enter Alphie, an android savior and weapon that looks like a little girl. Human reactions to Alphie’s appearance (early on, she comes under the care of pseudo-father-figure Joshua, played by John David Washington) evoke author and futurist David Brin’s warning of a “robot empathy crisis,” which predicts that as droids become more humanlike in appearance and mannerism, people will begin to defend their rights.
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S50Lego Is a Company Haunted by Its Own Plastic %20copy.jpg) Lego has built an empire out of plastic. It was always thus. The bricks weren’t originally made from wood, or metal, or some other material. Ever since the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, bought Denmark’s first plastic-injection molding machine in 1946, Lego pieces have been derived from oil, a fossil fuel.The fiddly little parts that the company churns out—many billions every year—are today mostly made from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, or ABS. This material doesn’t biodegrade, nor is it easily recycled. If a smiling mini figure gets into the environment, it will likely very slowly break down into highly polluting microplastics.
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S51A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations  Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It's like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate.
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S52The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs  The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. In this essay Isaacson describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus; simplify; take responsibility end to end; when behind, leapfrog; put products before profits; don’t be a slave to focus groups; bend reality; impute; push for perfection; know both the big picture and the details; tolerate only “A” players; engage face-to-face; combine the humanities with the sciences; and “stay hungry, stay foolish.”
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S53S54How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together  To achieve performance- accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, firms must create metrics that measure the effects of both types of investments on a single North Star metric: brand equity. That is then linked to specific financial outcomes—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment—and deployed as a key performance indicator for both brand building and performance marketing.
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S55What Does "Stakeholder Capitalism" Mean to You?  Business leaders are being urged to adopt a multistakeholder approach to governance in place of the shareholder-centered approach that has guided their work for several decades. But through hundreds of interviews with directors, executives, investors, governance professionals, and academics over the years, the author has found wide differences in how those leaders understand stakeholder capitalism. That lack of clarity can put boards and executives on a collision course with one another when decisions requiring difficult trade-offs among stakeholders’ interests arise. It also creates expectations among stakeholders that if unfulfilled will fuel cynicism, alienation, and distrust.
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S56Case Study: When the CEO Dies, What Comes First: His Company or His Family?  Shortly after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Priya Gowda learns that the company he built from a small dairy farm into a major Indian conglomerate is in deep financial trouble. Unbeknownst to her and his investors, her husband had taken on a lot of short-term, high-interest loans, and the company is struggling to make its payments. As sole heir to his majority stake in Splendid Ice Cream, Priya is now its de facto CEO. Her creditors advise her to sell or liquidate the company, but Priya is determined to preserve her husband’s legacy. Her daughters, however, worried that the business is taking too high a toll on her, beg her to let it go. Should she give in to them or keep trying to save Splendid? Expert commentators weigh in.
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S57The Leadership Odyssey  A paradox of business is that while leaders often employ a hands-on, directive style to rise to the top, once they arrive, they’re supposed to empower and enable their teams. Suddenly, they’re expected to demonstrate “people skills.” And many find it challenging to adapt to that reality.
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S58Innovation Doesn't Have to Be Disruptive  For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a battle cry in business. Not surprisingly, many have come to see it as a near-synonym for innovation. But the obsession with disruption obscures an important truth: Market-creating innovation isn’t always disruptive. Disruption may be what people talk about. It’s certainly important, and it’s all around us. But, as the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy argue, it’s only one end of the innovation spectrum. On the other end is what they call nondisruptive creation, through which new industries, new jobs, and profitable growth are created without social harm. Nondisruptive creation reveals an immense potential to establish new markets where none existed before and, in doing so, to foster economic growth without a loss of jobs or damage to other industries, enabling business and society to thrive together.
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S59How to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward  According to an analysis led by Ranjay Gulati, during the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, 17% of the 4,700 public companies studied fared very badly: They went bankrupt, went private, or were acquired. But just as striking, 9% of the companies flourished, outperforming competitors by at least 10% in sales and profits growth.
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S60Maya Feller's Rastafarian ital stew  In Jamaica, there's nothing more comforting than a bowl of ital. The popular island stew eaten by the Rastafarian community is a medley of fresh vegetables, herbs and spices, all simmered in coconut milk.Rastafarians are practitioners of Rastafari, a religion founded in Jamaica in the 1930s. It is also classified as a social movement to oppose systems of oppression by the country's then-dominant British colonial rule. Historically, as Rastafarians continued to challenge Jamaica's colonial society by expressing themselves through their African roots, they wore their hair in dreadlocks, which represented a connection to Africa and a sense of pride in African physical characteristics. They smoked marijuana because they believed its use was directed in biblical passages, and they played reggae music as a voice of the oppressed.
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S61The incomparable Bombay sandwich  If there is one thing people in India never tire of debating, it is whether Mumbai or Delhi is the better city. More accurately, the argument centres around which metropolis has the better food. Delhi often comes up tops with its incredible range of street eats, but Mumbai trumps any competition when it comes to the sandwich.The sandwich may have come to India through the British, but the people of Mumbai (as Bombay is now called) have added their own fillings and spices to make it their own.
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S62S63S64From pests to pollutants, keeping schools healthy and clean is no simple task  Parents send their children to school to learn, and they don’t want to worry about whether the air is clean, whether there are insect problems or whether the school’s cleaning supplies could cause an asthma attack.I’m an extension specialist focused on pest management. I’m working with a cross-disciplinary team to improve compliance with environmental health standards, and we’ve found that schools across the nation need updates in order to meet minimum code requirements.
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S65Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science  Scientists and engineers have reported that their childhood encounters with science fiction framed their thinking about the sciences. Thinking critically about science and technology is an important part of education in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.Of the 59 elementary teachers and librarians whom I surveyed, almost a quarter of them identified themselves as science fiction fans, and nearly all of them expressed that science fiction is just as valuable as any other genre. Nevertheless, most of them indicated that while they recommend science fiction books to individual readers, they do not choose science fiction for activities or group readings.
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S66The fight for 2% - how residuals became a sticking point for striking actors  Streaming disrupted the entire entertainment industry, upending the DVD-purchasing, film-renting, moviegoing model of decades past.That shift has also changed how actors get paid. And some of the gains actors made through prior labor struggles – particularly through residuals, which are a small percentage of shared earnings from film or television – have vanished.
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