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 S69You Need to Play This Brilliant Co-Op Puzzle Game For Free -- While You Still Can   Multiplayer games have largely moved from local co-op to the internet, but few take advantage of that physical disconnect the way that couch co-op games like Overcooked benefit from letting you yell at your friends in person. We Were Here Expeditions: The Friendship makes the distance between you and your online partner count, and it’s just as easy to get into as any party game. And if you download it before October 13, it’s free on Xbox and PC.Since 2017, the We Were Here series has delivered a unique vision of online co-op. In each of the five games in the series, you and a partner are separated in space, connected only by your walkie-talkies. Progressing through each game is an exercise in communication, as you can only solve their puzzles by sharing what you can see and guiding your partner through their part. And just like with real walkie-talkies, only one of you can talk at a time.
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S1Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45  It’s widely believed that the most successful entrepreneurs are young. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg were in their early twenties when they launched what would become world-changing companies. Do these famous cases reflect a generalizable pattern? In fact, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. But what about the most successful startups? Is it possible that companies started by younger entrepreneurs are particularly successful? Research shows that among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old.
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S2How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions  For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually do and how they create value. To pull the curtain back, Paul Gompers of Harvard Business School, Will Gornall of the Sauder School of Business, Steven N. Kaplan of the Chicago Booth School of Business, and Ilya A. Strebulaev of Stanford Business School conducted what is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of VC firms to date. In this article, they share their findings, offering details on how VCs hunt for deals, assess and winnow down opportunities, add value to portfolio companies, structure agreements with founders, and operate their own firms. These insights into VC practices can be helpful to entrepreneurs trying to raise capital, corporate investment arms that want to emulate VCs’ success, and policy makers who seek to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in their communities.
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S3The New Science of Customer Emotions  When a company connects with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 “emotional motivators” and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors. They describe how firms can identify and leverage the particular motivators that will maximize their competitive advantage and growth. The process can be divided into three phases. First, companies should inventory their existing market research and customer insight data, looking for qualitative descriptions of what motivates their customers—desires for freedom, security, success, and so on. Further research can add to their understanding of those motivators. Second, companies should analyze their best customers to learn which of the motivators just identified are specific or more important to the high-value group. They should then find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with their brand. This provides a guide to the emotions they need to connect with in order to grow their most valuable customer segment. Third, companies need to make the organization’s commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth—not just in the marketing department but across every function in the firm.
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S4A New Approach to Writing Job Descriptions  Traditional job descriptions can’t keep up with the rate of change in real roles in today’s organizations. As new technologies disrupt processes and require new skills, and as companies are moving toward more and more project-based work, we are beginning to see the evolution of job descriptions away from static, holistic prescriptions that follow an employee for years to dynamic guidance that changes based on needs. What’s replacing them are approaches that are more flexible because they’re based on outcomes, skills, or teams.
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S5Help Your Employees Develop the Skills They Really Need  The future of work will not be determined by technology, but by creating the right mix of education, exposure, and experience needed to develop skills and put them to work, creating a vastly more productive workplace and economy. In this article, the authors recommend a “70/20/10” learning model, in which only 10% of learning comes from formal instruction (education), 20% from social learning or mentorship (exposure), and 70% from hands-on, experiential practice with feedback (experience). By adopting this model, organizations can ensure that employees not only understand new skills, but that they can apply them effectively in different contexts. It is the crucial 70% of learning in the flow of work that is most often neglected, and most needed to build the skills needed to succeed in the future.
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S6How Middle Market Companies Can Avoid a Liquidity Crisis  Managers tend to think about liquidity as a finance issue, but in face the behaviors of the sales and operations team — and how they communicate and work together — can have a direct affect on a company’s cash position. To improve this working relationship, focus on aligning the teams, improving the quality of forecasts, map forecasts to the supply chain, and optimize for profitability rather than predictability. Following these steps can reduce a company’s working capital needs and increase earnings and cash flow.
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S7Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language  The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
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S8How life might hitchhike its way through the galaxy  By the time we realised that there was an extrasolar intruder, 'Oumuamua, named after the Hawaiian word for "scout", had already passed its closest point to the Sun and was leaving, as fast and stealthily as it had arrived. We are talking about the first sighting, in 2017, of an asteroid-like object from another area of the galaxy, a messenger from distant worlds. What do we know about this dark, probably cigar-shaped shard, which visited our Solar System with a trajectory and velocity that allowed it to leave so quickly?Roberto Battiston is a physicist at the University of Trento, Italy, and author of several books, including "First Dawn: From the Big Bang to Our Future in Space", from which this article is adapted.
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S9Ram  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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S10A Silk Pillowcase Can't Fix All Your Curly Hair Problems  As many of my curly-haired colleagues know, managing your curls requires a lot of problem-solving. I used to straighten the bananas out of it, until I figured out a good curl routine in my late twenties. Even then, I would get only one day of great curls and wake up to find them tangled and trashed. I tried a bunch of products. Sea salt spray makes my hair feel sticky and dry. My hairdresser suggested a head wrap, but I kept waking up to find it lost in my sheets. So many of my friends raved about silk pillowcases: "Your skin and hair will look so much better!" "It's the only thing I'll sleep on!" I decided this would be the easiestâand best!âsolution.
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S11The Best Mouse (and Mousepad) for Every Kind of Gamer  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 WIREDPicking a gaming mouse is a very personal endeavor. Everyone's hands are different, everyone's preferences and needs are different, and we all play different games. That's why we're lucky to live in the golden age of gaming mice, with major manufacturers pouring engineering muscle into one-upping one another. The result is a market loaded with high-quality yet relatively inexpensive mice.
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S12The Best Baby Carriers for Every Situation  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 WIREDIf you're a parent, you've probably heard the term "babywearing." It's the practice of carrying your baby constantly, and it's not just for kangaroos. Carrying your infant or toddler can be more practical and convenient than pushing a stroller—especially if you're hiking, traveling, or running errands. We've tested several baby carriers over the years while running through airports, hiking through forests and on mountain trails, and wandering city streets. These are our favorites.
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S13The Best Umbrellas to Help You Ride Out the Rain  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 WIREDIt always seems to rain when you least expect it. That's when I'd usually hit a corner store here in New York City to grab a cheap $20 umbrella. A few months later, I'd bring out the same umbrella and it would already have small rips on the canopy or the stretchers would break and make a floppy mess in the wind. Rinse and repeat.
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S14Why does the Universe appear fine-tuned for life to exist?  It is really quite amazing that you’re alive. I’m not talking about you specifically and how if your mom and dad hadn’t met, that you’d never have been born. I’m thinking much bigger, namely, about the fundamental laws of nature that govern the deepest and most basic behaviors of matter and energy. For reasons that we do not understand, among the many ways the Universe could be, it seems to be finely tuned in a way that makes it possible for life to exist.Let’s discuss some examples. Everything is made of atoms. If atoms didn’t exist, you certainly wouldn’t either. Thus, any change in the laws of nature that interferes with atoms could have a huge consequence for the makeup of the Universe. Suppose that the mass of the electron is twice as big as it is now. If that were true, the main fusion process in most stars wouldn’t work. Because stars are the kilns in which heavy elements are formed, some of the familiar elements of the periodic table wouldn’t exist at all.
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S15CRISPR is helping "de-extinct" the Tasmanian tiger  This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.Extinction is a regular part of nature. An estimated 99% of all species that have existed on Earth have gone the way of the dodo, sometimes because a fitter competitor came along or their environment changed (often because of humans) and they couldn’t adapt.
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S16Chasing Black Caesar, southern Florida's notorious pirate  The first time maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano stood at the mouth of Caesar Creek, something smelled fishy. Overlooking a snaking waterway of tangled emerald mangroves and silver-flanked snapper stood a lone interpretive sign. It featured a drawing of a courageous Black man wearing a tricornered hat and looking wistfully toward the horizon.“Many legends talk of a pirate named ‘Black Caesar,’ who was reputed to have stalked the water and keys of Biscayne Bay during the 1700s,” the sign states. “Some of these stories claim that Black Caesar left tons of silver somewhere in what is now Biscayne National Park.”
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S17US government considers protecting octopuses used in research  While cephalopods have captured the imagination of marine biologists, science fiction writers, and curious individuals, it’s only recently that the public has become significantly interested in learning more about these animals. Part of their appeal has come from recent studies revealing the intelligence behind some of their sophisticated behaviors.
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S18Thousands of Android devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled  When you buy a TV streaming box, there are certain things you wouldn’t expect it to do. It shouldn’t secretly be laced with malware or start communicating with servers in China when it’s powered up. It definitely should not be acting as a node in an organized crime scheme making millions of dollars through fraud. However, that’s been the reality for thousands of unknowing people who own cheap Android TV devices.
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S19Vaccine may save endangered California condors from succumbing to bird flu  Early March last year, an endangered California condor—one of less than 350 of its kind surviving in the wild—perched on an Arizona cliff face staring into space for days. It’s probably sick from lead poisoning, thought Tim Hauck, the condor program director with The Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit conservation group helping to reintroduce condors to the skies above Grand Canyon and Zion. These bald-headed scavengers—weighing up to 25 pounds with black-feathered wings spanning nearly 10 feet—often fall victim to lead exposure when they consume the flesh of cows, coyotes, and other large mammals killed by ranchers and hunters firing lead bullets. Listlessness and droopy posture are telltale signs. “We were like, I bet this bird’s got into something bad,” said Hauck.
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S20Soccer Diplomacy Comes to the Middle East  On the night of September 1, 2023, a Saudi Pro League soccer game was broadcast directly into Iranian homes. Less than a year ago, such a broadcast would have been unthinkable. Iran and Saudi Arabia were sworn adversaries whose football teams could not even play each other except on neutral turf.The broadcast didn’t disappoint. Nor was it expected to, as the league, with abundant coffers, now features an ever-expanding roster of players who are among the most celebrated to have ever played the game. When one of those players, the striker Karim Benzema, scored a world-class, side-heel clip of a goal, the Iranian sportscaster, in awe of what he and everyone else had just witnessed, lingered on the player’s full name with near-veneration: Karim Mostafa Benzema.
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S21Why Commander Is No Longer His Master's Dog  Being a presidential dog is hard. It’s not his fault that his biting became a political liability.“Dog Bites Man,” in journalism lore, is a boring headline about a predictable event—a non-news story that should never be written, let alone read. But what if the dog in question belongs to the president of the United States? And what if the president’s dog bites not one man, but many?
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S22How a Social Network Fails  Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino are making the same mistake that has tanked other social networks.During a bizarre interview last week at Vox Media’s Code conference, X CEO Linda Yaccarino was eager to talk about numbers. She said that the platform, formerly known as Twitter, now has 540 million monthly users, along with 225 million daily users, and that “key” user-engagement metrics were “trending very, very positively.”
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S23'We Put Sharp Knives in the Hands of Children'  Few Americans are shedding tears for Kevin McCarthy. The former House speaker engendered little public sympathy as he tried, and ultimately failed, to wrangle a narrow and fractured Republican majority into a functioning governing body. His ouster on Tuesday has, in the short term, paralyzed Congress and increased the likelihood of a prolonged government shutdown in the coming weeks.Republicans are only now beginning to contemplate the significant political ramifications of tossing McCarthy. Retaining their narrow majority in the House next year was already going to be a challenge. But the GOP will now have to defend its four-seat advantage without a leader who, for all of McCarthy’s political shortcomings, was widely recognized as its best fundraiser, candidate recruiter, and campaign strategist. “They just took out our best player,” a rueful Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me on Thursday, referring to the eight renegade Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy.
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S24What Really Took Down Airbnb  Earlier this month, I stayed in an Airbnb in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.In the past decade or so, the neighborhood has undergone as dizzying a process of gentrification as a place can. The median sales price of a condo nearly doubled; the median sales price of a single-family home more than tripled. The share of Black residents dropped from 60 percent to 40 percent; the share of white residents increased from 15 percent to 33 percent. The neighborhood became less socioeconomically diverse, home to fewer immigrants, fewer families, and more single people. It became less like the old New York and more like the new New York, which is to say more like Greenwich or Short Hills—a place where family wealth or a job on Wall Street are table stakes.
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S25Supermarkets Are More Than Stores  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.“I don’t remember my first visit to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I do remember my first trip to Fairway,” Bianca Bosker wrote in 2020 of the grocery store in New York City.
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S26We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse  High-profile lawsuits against Google and Amazon have revealed Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives.Living online means never quite understanding what’s happening to you at a given moment. Why these search results? Why this product recommendation? There is a feeling—often warranted, sometimes conspiracy-minded—that we are constantly manipulated by platforms and websites.
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S27A Devastating Attack by Hamas  The attacks by Hamas against Israel beginning early this morning, some of which are ongoing, will be met by Israel with force. How all of this will unfold, and its impact on domestic and global politics, is not clear, but a simple answer may suffice for now: It will not go well. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already warned his citizens that they are at war; civil reservists have been called up; videos are showing hand battles on the streets. The country is on lockdown, with the potential for future strikes in the south by Hamas and new ones by Hezbollah in the north. A country torn apart by domestic divisions seems to be united against a common enemy. As of this writing, the death toll is confirmed at a minimum of 70 Israelis, with hundreds more wounded.One aspect of this needs little analysis, but a lot of explanation: How did Israel’s extensive counterterrorism efforts fail to pick up an attack waged by land, sea, and air? How did its defenses fail so extensively? This wasn’t just an intelligence failure. It was an everything failure. Israeli and American commentators are already describing this as Israel’s 9/11, but that comparison is a crutch—9/11 was about, in the words of the commission that reviewed it, a “failure of imagination” to understand what could happen in America, a nation that had not encountered foreign terror threats of any significant magnitude. Israel has existed, still exists, with that very imaginable prospect as part of its national being.
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S28A Historic Cataclysm in the Middle East  Hamas’s attacks could be a daring single-day raid or the start of a regional war of a scale not seen since 1973.War is a perpetual concern in Israel, but it has been decades since Israelis have had to wonder whether today might be the day that their borders will be overrun and their enemies will go building to building deciding whom to slaughter. Early this morning, a few Israeli military outposts and settlements saw an apparent preview of that nightmare—an operation by Hamas that could be a daring single-day raid or the start of a regional war of a scale not seen since 1973. Hamas rocketed Israel thousands of times, then began a land-air-sea operation against targets in southern Israel. Commandos in gliders, trucks, and dune buggies raided Israeli military posts around Gaza. Images on social media show Israeli soldiers in states of dress and undress, apparently dead in the dirt, and Hamas fighters celebrating the destruction of armored vehicles and the looting of lighter ones. The images from Israel show carnage and cruelty comparable to Mesopotamia during the campaigns of the Islamic State.
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S29'The Middle East Region Is Quieter Today Than It Has Been in Two Decades'  A week ago, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sounded optimistic about the region.Just eight days ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at The Atlantic Festival, rattled off a long list of positive developments in the Middle East, developments that were allowing the Biden administration to focus on other regions and other problems. A truce was holding in Yemen. Iranian attacks against U.S. forces had stopped. America’s presence in Iraq was “stable.” The good news crescendoed with this statement: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
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S30The Anarchic Spirit Among House Republicans  Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, was ousted from his role as speaker of the House this week, and the race for someone to replace him is under way. The anarchic spirit that is alive and well among House Republicans threatens to exacerbate the federal government’s dysfunction and places support for Ukraine in peril as another potential shutdown looms.What does the GOP’s infighting mean for the health of the party and the country, and for the 2024 presidential campaign?
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S31This Will Be a Pyrrhic Victory for Hamas  Israel could go much further than it has in the past in responding to the group’s attacks.In the hours following Hamas’s large-scale surprise attack on Israel early this morning, Israelis on social media quickly dubbed the day a “second Yom Kippur”—referring to the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in 1973—or an “Israeli 9/11.” Not since the 1947–49 Arab-Israeli War had Palestinian or Arab forces captured Israeli villages.
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S32Strategies for Learning from Failure  Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons) and that learning from it is pretty straightforward. The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. In organizational life, she says, some failures are inevitable and some are even good. And successful learning from failure is not simple: It requires context-specific strategies. But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure.Failures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec; unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems; and intelligent ones at the frontier, where “good” failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information.
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S33AI Can Help You Ask Better Questions -- and Solve Bigger Problems  Most companies still view AI rather narrowly, as a tool that alleviates the costs and inefficiencies of repetitive human labor and increasing organizations’ capacity to produce, process, and analyze piles and piles of data. But when paired with “soft” inquiry-related skills it can help people ask better questions and be more innovative.
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S34How to Make Great Decisions, Quickly  As a new leader, learning to make good decisions without hesitation and procrastination is a capability that can set you apart from your peers. While others vacillate on tricky choices, your team could be hitting deadlines and producing the type of results that deliver true value. That’s something that will get you — and them — noticed. Here are a few of a great decision:
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S35Why more fashion retailers are charging return fees  Some of the biggest business winners of the Covid-19 pandemic were e-commerce retailers. In the US, Census Bureau data shows $571.2bn (£473bn) of goods were sold online in 2019. The next year, that figure hit $815.4bn: a 43% climb. In 2022, annual US e-commerce spending hit the $1tn mark for the very first time.But the sheer volume of goods sold and shipped from the warehouses e-commerce giants, such as Amazon and H&M, came with a price for retailers. Roughly 17% of online purchases were returned in 2022, according to data from the National Retail Federation, down from 21% the previous year. When retailers rode the pandemic wave of online shopping growth, the volume of goods coming back swelled exponentially.
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S36Italy's classic pasta e patate (pasta and potatoes) dish  Literally meaning "poor kitchen", cucina povera is a traditional style of Italian cooking that embraces a frugal, no-waste philosophy. Created out of necessity, cucina povera is considered poor in terms of cost, but never poor in flavour; uncomplicated, but by no means unremarkable. With a long, rich history deeply ingrained in Italian culture and the daily life of many families, the dishes of cucina povera have provided nourishment for centuries. Its exact origins aren't particularly clear, but food historians suggest that cucina povera is rooted in the countryside traditions of "peasant cooking", dating back long before Italy was unified in 1870, first concocted for manual labourers in need of affordable sustenance. As such, cucina povera dishes make great use of humble, inexpensive ingredients or leftovers. Think small animals such as rabbit and poultry – all simple to hunt – or less popular offal cuts from pigs and cattle, plus beans, legumes and plenty of carbohydrates like pasta, potatoes and bread.
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S37Bebinca: a multi-layered cake from India  "An excess of egg yolks led to the creation of bebinca," said Gracian de Souza, a chef and restaurant consultant from India's western state of Goa. "And in today's parlance, we can call it a perfect example of zero-waste cooking."Bebinca is a multi-layered cake that has been dubbed the "queen of Goan desserts" and is considered such an inherent part of Goa's culinary identity that the state administration is pushing for a Geographical Indication (GI) tag for the caramelised confection.
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S38The Exorcist and why demonic possession taps into our darkest fears  Over the last few years, possession narratives, in which characters are taken over by malevolent spirits, demons or gods, have been booming among horror filmmakers, with The Pope's Exorcism (2023), The Medium (2021), Evil Dead Rise (2022), Umma (2022), Talk to Me (2023), It Lives Inside (2023) and, of course, The Conjuring Universe all deploying them.Spirit possession as a subject for art is nothing new, and it indeed has even been used as an apparent method for making art, such as by the artists aligned with the spiritualism movement, which hit its peak popularity in the 19th Century. British artist Georgiana Houghton, for example, claimed that she let herself be invaded by spirits, and painted their otherworldly missives. Meanwhile celebrated abstract artists in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries like Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich were also interested and influenced by the growing spiritualist movement.
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S39Nagorno-Karabakh: Azerbaijan's energy wealth gives it de facto impunity for ethnic cleansing  A United Nations mission finally arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh on October 1 to find its towns and villages almost completely deserted. Two weeks after Azerbaijan launched an all-out military assault on the disputed territory in the south Caucasus, the Armenian government has said there are now almost no ethnic Armenians left in an area they have lived in for more than two millennia. The only people left are reportedly either too old, too poor, too remote or too infirm to flee to safety along the Lachin corridor to Armenia.
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S40S41Often in error but still seductive: Why we can't quit election polls  Their record is uneven. They misfired in one way or another in the past three presidential elections. And yet the prevalence of election polls is undiminished. Thirteen months before the 2024 election, polls are many – and inescapable.The reasons go beyond facile analogies that election polls are akin to weather forecasts in offering a fluid, if sometimes contradictory, sense of what lies ahead.
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S42S43The pope's new letter isn't just an 'exhortation' on the environment - for Francis, everything is connected, which is a source of wonder  Eight years have elapsed since Pope Francis released “Laudato Si,” his encyclical urging “care for our common home.” Though hailed as an eloquent plea to protect the environment, climate change was just one part of the pope’s message, from encouraging solidarity with the poor to criticizing “blind confidence” in technology. On Oct. 4, 2023, Francis released an addendum to “Laudato Si,” addressed to “all people of good will on the climate crisis.” October 4 marks the feast day of the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, who famously loved all of creation. The new installment, “Laudate Deum” – “Praise God” – is no less sweeping in the way it links environmental problems with economic, social and technological issues.
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S44Why the UAW union's tough bargaining strategy is working  The United Auto Workers union isn’t backing down as it bargains for more compensation and better benefits in its new contracts with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Under the deft leadership of its president, Shawn Fain, and other officials elected in March 2023, the union has thrown the three companies off balance with a strike that began on Sept. 15 – the minute its prior contracts expired.As of Oct. 6, the number of UAW members on strike from their Big Three jobs stood at 25,000 after a gradual climb – meaning that 1 in 6 of the union’s nearly 150,000 autoworkers were on the picket lines instead of going to work.
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S45S46UK bonds have hit a 25-year high - here's what that means for the economy  It’s been more than a year since the UK economy was thrown into crisis after then-prime minister Liz Truss suggested making a wealth of unfunded tax cuts in her September 2022 mini-budget. But a recent bond market sell-off has now sent borrowing costs rocketing again, pushing the bond market even higher than after Truss’s announcement. Yields on UK treasury bonds – the rate the UK government must pay to borrow money – have risen to approximately 4.6% for ten-year bonds. Yields on 30-year bonds hit 5.1%, the highest since 1998.
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S47Could Donald Trump stand for US speaker? An expert explains  The roiling civil war on Capitol Hill that’s led to the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the US House of Representatives has left Republicans scrambling for a replacement. With no clear successor, the risk of further acute embarrassment to the party, and a slew of legislative priorities on the docket, desperation may already be setting in.That’s led some to float the possibility of a left-field pick for the speakership — someone who’s not even serving in Congress. That man: Donald Trump.
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S48Nobel peace prize: Narges Mohammadi wins on behalf of thousands of Iranian women struggling for human rights  Prominent Iranian women’s rights advocate Narges Mohammadi has won the 2023 Nobel peace prize for her long fight against the oppression of women in Iran. Mohammadi is serving multiple prison sentences in Evin prison in Tehran on charges which include spreading propaganda against the state. She was named by the committee for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all”. The award comes as women across Iran and around the world continue to protest the treatment of women in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police, for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.
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S49Meat tax: no UK politician is calling for one - but maybe they should  Livestock farming contributes to numerous environmental problems, from deforestation and biodiversity loss to pollution and climate change. But when a meat tax is suggested to stem these problems, by reducing meat demand and financing more sustainable alternatives, such a policy tends to be interpreted as an assault on consumer freedoms or hard working taxpayers.
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S50S51Dengue: why is this sometimes fatal disease increasing around the world?  Something unusual seems to be happening with dengue, a potentially fatal mosquito-borne viral disease found across swathes of tropical Africa, Asia and the Americas. As with most infectious diseases, the number of cases tends to rise and fall over the years as epidemics come and go, but recently changes seem to be afoot in how dengue is behaving. Not only is the number of new infections steadily rising around the world, but outbreaks are becoming larger and less predictable. For example, 2019 saw the greatest number of dengue fever cases ever recorded – almost twice as high as the previous year. And in July 2023, there were a record number of deaths from the disease in Bangladesh.
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S52Jon Fosse: Nobel prize in literature winner is a playwright who puts outsiders centre stage  When Jon Fosse receives this year’s Nobel prize in literature in December, it will be collected by a playwright and novelist whose work examines the lives of ordinary people on the outer reaches of society, trying to cope with the challenges and hardships of daily life. But his work is suffused with hope and affection as well as a darker sense of foreboding. There is a warm affinity between Fosse and the characters that populate his plays, highlighting their humanity.
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S53S54What the decision to curtail HS2 and embrace cars means for the UK's cities  If you consider the decision by the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to cancel phase two of the high-speed rail project, HS2 in the context of the government’s growing pro-car stance, the potential ramifications for the country are profound.Steve Tuckwell’s single-issue campaign against the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) in London won him the Uxbridge and South Ruislip vote in the three byelections held in July 2023. This saw the Conservatives narrowly avoid what would have otherwise been a crippling 3-0 defeat.
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S55The history of the Yellow Book - the 19th century journal that celebrated women writers  In the middle of the final decade of the 19th century, Britain was the most powerful and richest nation on earth, with the largest empire ever known. The nation might be thought to have had nothing of which to be frightened, yet frightened it was.Many Britons of the time were steeped in an education in Latin and Greek in the classical tradition, so they knew what happened to great empires: they decline and fall. This was the atmosphere addressed by the Yellow Book, the most innovative journal of art and literature of the period, published between 1894 and 1897. It’s a topic I explore in my new book, Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives.
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S56S57Al Gore Doesn't Say I Told You So  There was always the possibility that Al Gore, after making the hideously painful decision to concede the contested 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, would have to live out the remainder of his life as both a tragic loser and a tragic heroâsomeone who stood down in the name of the orderly transition of power. Gore resisted self-pity by projecting mordant good humor. "Hi, I'm Al Gore," he would tell audiences. "I used to be the next President of the United States." Or, in slightly darker moods, he'd say, "You know the old saying: you win some, you lose someâand then there's that little-known third category."In the years to come, Gore made targeted criticisms of the Bush Administrationâparticularly of the war in Iraqâand became a kind of evangelist on the issue of climate change. His interest in ecological issues was evident as early as 1976, when he was elected to Congress as a young Democrat from Tennessee; in 1992, he published "Earth in the Balance," which called for a "Global Marshall Plan" to protect the environment.
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S58With Trump Absent, His New York Civil Trial Gets Down to Business  After Donald Trump left New York and flew to Florida on Wednesday afternoon, the New York County Courthouse—where Trump, two of his sons, and two of his former executives stand accused in a civil fraud case—was much calmer. When I arrived at 60 Centre Street, on Thursday morning, for the fourth day of the trial, there was only one television camera standing outside; previously, there had been more than a dozen. The improvised press pen outside Courtroom 300, where Trump had repeatedly railed against the judge and the prosecutor, calling the case a “scam” and a “sham,” was empty. The courtroom itself was far from full.Trump wasn’t the only notable absentee. Chris Kise, his lead attorney, wasn’t present that morning, either. But the New York attorney general, Letitia James, whose office is bringing the case, was sitting in the front row of the spectators’ section. Also present, on the witness stand for a fourth successive day, was Donald Bender, recently retired from the accounting firm Mazars, which for many years was in charge of compiling the Trump Organization’s notorious annual “Statements of Financial Condition,” which purported to show that Trump was a genuine gazillionaire. After Judge Arthur F. Engoron finally let Bender step down, he was replaced by Jeffrey McConney, the former comptroller of the Trump Organization, who helped put together the documents that Mazars used to compile the “S.O.F.C.s,” as they are referred to in court.
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S59What to See in the New York Film Festival's Second Week  When a filmmaker is as prolific as Hong Sangsoo, paying his work the attention it deserves can seem almost unfair to everyone else. Not for the first time, the New York Film Festival has two new films of his on its main slate, and rightly so: "In Water," which screened this past week, and "In Our Day," which will screen from October 11th to 13th. The parallels and contrasts between the two reveal a lot, not only about Hong's art but also about some baseline cinematic ideas. "In Water," which I wrote about last week, tells the story of an actor-director and his two associates, a cameraman and an actress, as the three of them try to make an improvised short film during one week in a seaside town. Compared with this compact tale, "In Our Day," is virtually sprawling. It runs considerably longer (eighty-three minutes versus sixty-one) and is centered on two trios of characters rather than just one, and it only gradually becomes apparent how the two trios are connected. The shorter film is more vigorous: a tale of youth on the brink, it has an inherently romantic flair. "In Our Day" is a drama of exhaustion and withdrawal; it's a sedentary film, set mainly in and around two apartments, taking place within the confines of a single day. It has young characters, too, but, in each of its parallel stories, the focus is on an older artist figureâan actress and a poet, respectivelyâfrom whom the younger seek inspiration.The actress, named Sangwon (Kim Min-hee), is maybe forty or so but has had a long career. Recently, though, she has quit acting and is now studying something called "architectural aesthetics." She has returned to Seoul from unspecified wanderings and is staying with her friend Jungsoo (Song Seon-mi). The two women's friendship, marked less by what they say than by all that they keep to themselves, gets a shakeup with the arrival of Sangwon's young cousin Jisoo (Park Mi-so), an aspiring actress who wants to ask the veteran for advice. As for the poet, Uiju (Ki Joo-bong), he seems to be pushing sixty and he doesn't seem to be writing much poetry. Instead, he is living in the light, or, rather, the shadow of his fame. (He's introduced in a title card stating that he "has belatedly become popular with young people, but all he wants is to live a peaceful life free of pain.") Divorced and living alone, Uiju suffers from heart trouble and is deprived of his basic pleasures of smoking and drinking. Poorly feigning modesty, he basks in the attention of a young woman (Kim Seung-yun) who's filming a documentary about him, and he makes excessively sure that she catches the details of his domestic routine. Here too, a third person arrives: a young aspiring actor (Ha Seong-guk) who peppers Uiju with questions about art and life, while the documentarian films their long discussions.
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S60The Border Doesn't Need Elon Musk's "Citizen Journalism"  After designing a hyperloop to vault travellers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in thirty-five minutes, establishing SpaceX so that humans can colonize other planets, and building a satellite-powered Internet system, Starlink, that has played a role in the war between Russia and Ukraine, Elon Musk has turned his attention to the U.S.-Mexico border. Last week, he visited Eagle Pass, Texas, for a firsthand look at the unfolding migration crisis, and streamed it live on his social-media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), so that his hundred and fifty million followers could "see what's really going on." In an e-mail, Musk's most recent biographer Walter Isaacson told me that the visit was another example of the billionaire's "epic-hero complex": Musk's confidence that his attention will be an important part of the solution to our national, global, and interplanetary challenges. But though Musk claimed objectivity, he platformed just one side of an exceedingly complex story.In the weeks before his visit, Musk primed his followers by posting commentary and news stories about immigration challenges in the United States and beyond. He also spoke with the Republican congressman Tony Gonzales, whose district runs along Mexico's border with Texas and includes Eagle Pass. Three days after his phone call with Gonzales, Musk touched down wearing an outfit that made him look like a stock border sheriff with a twist: a black Stetson, black boots, and mirrored aviator sunglasses, with black jeans and a black Dead Space T-shirt. Gonzales met him at the airport, and Musk's phone camera started to roll. He posted three separate videos, blaming a weak signal near the border for forcing him to stop and re-start the stream. The longest, taken under a bridge near the border, lasts fifteen minutes and shows him talking with Gonzales; the Medina County sheriff, Randy Brown (a Republican); the LaSalle County sheriff, Anthony Zertuche (a Democrat); and the Eagle Pass mayor, Rolando Salinas, Jr., a Democrat who has been critical of President Biden's handling of immigration and the border.
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S61Terry Bisson's History of the Future  Sometime in 1989, Terry Bisson was driving his daughter to college in upstate New York when an idea for a short story came to him. Glancing toward the highway median, he had a vision: animals sitting together, in their own world, talking to one other. The vision became a title: "Bears Discover Fire."The story that resulted is strange and funny, yet oddly realistic. It takes place in Kentucky, where Bisson grew up, but is set in "unclaimed land" that could stand in for any exurban wilderness, and follows an uncle and nephew during an odd season in which bears stop hibernating and discover fire. "They make a fire and keep it going all winter," a character explains. No one knows what to make of this development. The uncle and his nephew, Wallace Jr., follow the story on TV, but grow frustrated that the news mainly shows "guys talking about bears" rather than the bears themselves. They decide to go looking for the genuine article.
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S62Amazon Just Quietly Released the Best Time-Travel Thriller of the Year  For all the scary monsters and skeevy killers synonymous with horror, nostalgia may be the real specter haunting the genre. The past few years have seen the endless resurgence of warmed-over franchises like Halloween and Scream — even Pet Sematary is getting its own reappraisal. While there are definitely some hidden gems, not every horror property seems destined for second chances. Sometimes it’s best to leave things in the era they’re from — or, at the very least, try to meet them where they’re at.Amazon and Blumhouse’s Totally Killer takes that advice literally. It’s the latest in a modest pool of time-traveling slasher films, after 2015’s The Final Girls and sleeper hit Happy Death Day. Rather than transporting its heroine into a fictional horror movie world, though, or making her relive her own death, Totally Killer turns the clock back to the 1987. In the small town on Vernon, three 16-year-old girls were murdered by the same killer, each stabbed a wincing 16 times. While the “Sweet 16 Killer” disappeared shortly after the murders, their killing spree lives on through a tactless true-crime podcast, and in the memories of those who survived.
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S63"I Wanted Him to Be a Suspect." How 'Totally Killer' Uses Pop Culture to Hide Its Mystery  Totally Killer is a pop culture-laden film that isn’t afraid to get meta for the sake of a good reference. The movie follows Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), a young teen transported back to 1987 to protect her mother from a serial killer and possibly change her future. But notably, Lochlyn Munro, best known for playing Hal Cooper, Betty’s serial killer father in Riverdale, plays the adult version of Jamie’s father, casting immediate suspicion on him. According to writer/director Nahnatchka Khan, that’s entirely purposeful.“That's exactly why I was so excited to cast him because I wanted him to be a suspect,” Khan tells Inverse. “I want you to immediately be like, ‘It's him. It's him.’”
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S64'Loki' Season 2 is Pulling Off a Trick that Star Wars Totally Flubbed  Star Wars and Marvel are two sides of the same coin: both of them are vast, sprawling science fiction franchises bound together by Disney ownerships. But just like any science fiction story, these two franchises often dip into familiar tropes. There’s no better example than Ahsoka and Loki, two Disney+ original series released this week with only a 48-hour gap. While they may be very different shows, they both dip into familiar territory. But it’s clear that Loki has a firmer grasp of how its world works — something Star Wars should learn from going forward.
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S65'Ahsoka' Theory Teases Thrawn's Vile Plan -- and a Big Canon Rewrite  With Ahsoka heralding the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), the Star Wars galaxy is about to encounter its biggest threat since Palpatine. Given that the Disney+ series is sandwiched between the original Star Wars trilogy and its sequels, it’s safe to say Thrawn will be defeated within the next few years. But that doesn’t mean he can’t inflict some damage in the interim. Thrawn’s well-known as a masterful tactician, but his skills aren’t limited to traditional warfare. He’s also great at getting in his opponent’s head, as we saw in his cat-and-mouse game with Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson). Because Thrawn knew Ahsoka’s Jedi Master, he could deduce her strategy and defeat her. His experiences with Anakin Skywalker will come in handy as he works to reconquer the galaxy in the Empire’s name, and according to a new fan theory, he could also pose an immediate threat to two of the New Republic’s biggest heroes.
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S66S67What Exactly Happened in that Mind-Blowing 'Assassin's Creed Mirage' Ending?  With Assassin’s Creed Mirage, returning character Basim gets an upgrade to franchise protagonist. Acting as an origin story for Basim before the events of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Mirage charts his journey from thief to master assassin. While new and old fans may expect Mirage’s ending to lead cleanly into Valhalla, the reality is much more complicated — and confusing. If you find yourself scratching your head as you watch the credits roll, then fear not. Here is exactly what happened at the end of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and what it means for the franchise’s future.Basim’s mission in Baghdad comes to a head as he discovers the identity of the Snake, the head of the Order of the Ancients in the city. It is revealed the Snake is Qabiha, the wife of the Caliph, whom Basim murders in Mirage’s opening while attempting to steal an Isu artifact. Basim hesitates to assassinate her as she cryptically talks about the truth of his identity and suggests he should seek out a hidden Isu temple underneath the Hidden One’s home base of Alamut.
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S68This Bizarre Phenomenon Occurs When People Are Listening To The Same Music  Imagine you’re at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour jamming away to “Anti-Hero” to your heart’s content. Looking over the sea of fellow Swifties, you feel a camaraderie — not just over ex-lovers and grappling with personal insecurities — but of harmony and synchrony. As it turns out, this synchronous, almost hivemind response to T-Swizzle’s music, or any other artists or musical genres, may be a real phenomenon called induction synchrony.
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S70Toyota's New EV Concept Makes Moon Exploration Look Stylish  It’s a moonshot, but maybe Toyota’s Baby Lunar Cruiser can help the lagging automaker catch up in the race for making more EVs. Toyota unveiled its ultra-futuristic EV concept that’s meant to handle Earth’s rugged roads as well as the uncharted terrain of the Moon.The concept is the latest wacky brainchild of Calty Design Research, the American division of Toyota’s design network that has been putting out wild conceptual designs for 50 years. Calty has made some serious contributions that influenced Toyota’s production models like the Celica and Tacoma. In between those production models, Calty has put out some experimental designs like the Scion NYC where the driver almost stands upright when behind the wheel.
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