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 S69Could 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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S4Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, in prison for speaking up against human rights violations, has been a voice for women for almost two decades  “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan adopted by Iranians to protest the unjust death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 is, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the most suitable way to describe the work of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi.Mohammadi is the second Iranian woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, exactly 20 years after Shirin Ebadi was awarded the prize for her work to promote democracy and initiate legal reform under Islamic law in 2003. Mohammadi is the fourth Nobel Peace Prize laureate to be chosen while still incarcerated, joining the ranks of Aung San Suu Kyi and Ales Bialiatski.
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S7S8S9The Atlantic Ocean's major current system is slowing down - but a 21st century collapse is unlikely  Whether the water at your local beach is being roiled by nasty weather or is a perfectly calm expanse of blue, there’s always a great deal going on under the surface. The ocean is composed of various currents and water masses; those currents flow around the world through what is called thermohaline circulation. This circulation drives the distribution of heat, salinity and nutrients throughout the world’s oceans, ensuring that our whole planet is habitable for life.
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S10The Land of Trump and Gaetz  Has there been a politician both as broadly despised, including in his own party, and yet as improbably effective as Matt Gaetz? When the Florida congressman—previously best known for his unflinching support of Donald Trump’s election denialism and for being investigated over allegations of sex trafficking (he denied them, and the Department of Justice declined to bring charges)—engineered the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, last week, he had the support of exactly seven other House Republicans, out of two hundred and twenty-one. McCarthy’s supporters denounced Gaetz’s faction on the floor as “chaos” agents “running with scissors.” Even Newt Gingrich, a spiritual grandfather of Gaetz’s intraparty Molotovism, later called for him to be ejected from the Republican caucus. In a sense, Gaetz was doing what Trump has been doing this month as he contests a court case: testing whether the MAGA movement can operate simply as an ongoing insurrection against whatever it is that its principals don’t like.And yet, in the decisive hour-long debate over vacating the Speakership on Tuesday afternoon, Gaetz also demonstrated a keen eye for political weakness. McCarthy’s supporters rose in waves, protesting that it wasn’t fair to fire a Speaker who had made such progress in passing bills and in oversight. Gaetz kept asking, What progress? Many of the bills that the McCarthy faction was bragging about (some proposing steep cuts to social spending and unwinding the Biden Administration’s energy policies), having been dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, “are not law,” Gaetz said. “It is difficult to champion oversight when House Republicans haven’t even sent a subpoena to Hunter Biden,” he added. “It sort of looks like failure theatre.” As the chamber braced for the final vote, Gaetz, standing in front of a bank of Democrats who were regarding him skeptically but would nonetheless be voting with him, laid down his notes and stopped speaking, almost totally friendless and yet the central figure in Washington.
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S11Waking to an Attack from Hamas  At seven this morning, our son and daughter waded into our bedroom, a sleepy Saturday in Tel Aviv, the tail end of the long Sukkot holiday. We all snuggled together in bed, bleary-eyed. The kids started a game that soon turned into low-grade squabble, when, suddenly, an air-raid siren blared. We ducked into our building’s stairwell, our “safe space” for lack of any other in this old area of the city. Some neighbors were already there, in their pajamas, everyone smiling at one another awkwardly. We spoke of previous rounds of rocket fire, all of which had been intercepted by the Israeli military to a high degree, so panic was not in the air; even the kids were acting blasé. But then we opened our phones.Surreal sights and early reports from around the country began to trickle in: Israeli vehicles had been taken over by Palestinian militants, and were barrelling through southern Israeli cities; ski-masked terrorists were shooting indiscriminately at oncoming cars and into homes in Israeli towns. Several gunmen were seen paragliding across the border, and there were news reports that an Israeli military base had been commandeered by Hamas. Friends posted about their relatives living in kibbutzim on the Gaza border whose homes had been raided while they were huddled inside with small children, pleading for help. Images emerged purporting to show four Israeli men, stripped down to their underwear on a sidewalk of an unspecified southern city, militants standing next to them, holding rifles over the Israelis’ heads. The coming hours and days will tell us the details, the facts, the numbers—but the fear is immediate.
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S12Notes from Your Home Inspection  The back yard is currently infested with people hoping your offer falls through so that they can spring in with offers of their own and finally get a godforsaken house. None of them know you. All of them hate you.The refrigerator may look brand new and top of the line, but it’s actually an extreme threat to your safety for reasons we can’t get into right now. We would be willing to take it off of your hands for the low price of three hundred dollars.
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S13Amazon's Most Ambitious New Sci-Fi Movie Had One Major Hurdle  Foe is a unique story. In Iain Reid’s original novel, readers are dropped into the lives of Hen and Junior, a couple living on a remote farm in the near future. But their marriage is threatened by a stranger who announces that Junior has been selected to travel to an orbital space station. To keep Hen company while Junior is on his two-year assignment, the aerospace corporation the stranger works for will create a biomechanical duplicate of Junior, right down to his personality and memories. Readers of Foe will notice a structural quirk: only some characters get quotation marks with their dialogue. It’s a clever narrative trick the author uses to reveal a jaw-dropping twist.But in Garth Davis’ feature adaptation of Foe, the filmmaker had to figure out a different way to lay out this twist. Davis, who co-wrote the script with Reid, solved the problem by shifting the story’s point of view.
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S14Do Cats Need To Exercise? A Veterinarian Reveals The Ultimate Feline Workout  From apex predators and kings of the jungle (savannah, actually) to goblin babies unable to kill a cockroach, cats have near-perfect physiques. The latter, however, likely doesn’t need to hunt for its food. Even if today’s house cat doesn’t need to work to survive, keeping their body healthy is still critical to a long, healthy life with their human. Indeed, exercise for cats is indeed necessary.Feline exercises, however, shouldn’t feel like a chore for you or your cat. In fact, you’re probably helping your cat exercise every day already. Dr. Jardayna Werlin, a veterinarian and the medical director at Veterinary Centers of America (VCA) City Cats Hospital in Massachusetts, suggests how much time your kitty needs to frolic every day to stay in good health.
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S15S16The Real Reason Science Can't Explain Why People Lose Their Sense Of Smell  The pandemic brought attention to an overlooked condition. Researchers are still fighting to show smell matters.Growing up, Julian Meeks knew what a life without a sense of smell could look like. He’d watched this grandfather navigate the condition known as anosmia, observing that he didn’t perceive flavor and only enjoyed eating very salty or meaty foods.
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S17Amazon Released These Awesome Early Deals Ahead of its Prime Big Deals Days & They're Selling out Fast  Amazon’s fall Prime sales event starts October 10, and it’s happening just in time for the holidays. Smart shoppers can expect incredible discounts on entertaining essentials, cozy home decor, cool tech, and genius gift ideas — but some deals dropped early. Inverse editors are already rounding up some of the best live pre-sale deals, so you can save more than 50% before the event even starts. Act fast, though, because even if the sales last, the stock won’t.This cool mist humidifier can run for up to 50 hours straight, humidifying rooms up to 430 square feet in size. Turn the dial to tweak the mist output to your exact liking, and utilize the timer to have the machine turn off automatically after one, two, four, or eight hours.
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S18The 50 Coolest Things With Near-Perfect Amazon Reviews That You Never Knew Existed  If you don’t already own an indoor s’mores maker and reusable coffee pods, prepare to meet your new fave buys. There are plenty of unique and useful things on Amazon that have been racking up near-perfect reviews from products to make your home (and car) cleaner and more comfortable to genius personal items like a flexible flaxseed hot and cold compress. These clever products start at just $6 and everything is less than $40.You no longer have to worry about your bottle (or even mug) being too large to take on the road. This car cup holder expander has an adjustable diameter to accommodate almost any drink you’re enjoying. Plus, it has a thick base pad and rubber side tabs to keep everything secure. A cutout on one side accommodates mug handles.
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S19'Ahsoka' Episode 8's Underwhelming New Villains Reveal A Bigger Star Wars Problem  In The Mandalorian Season 2 finale, Din Djarin and his allies strap on their invincible body armor, board Moff Gideon’s flagship, and promptly massacre everyone inside, effortlessly gunning down the Imperial villains who try to stop them. According to the good folks at listofdeaths, our heroes kill 107 people, who collectively put up about as much of a fight as children playing paintball against commandos. If we saw their families back on Coruscant weeping over their bloody bodies this would be utterly horrifying, or at least a scene more befitting Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Gideon. But they’re stormtroopers, so we’re supposed to forget about them the moment they vanish from the screen.That’s why stormtroopers are faceless, interchangeable goons, and why previous Star Wars antagonists have included clones and droids. Our heroes need hordes of baddies they can kill en masse without feeling guilty, or even acknowledging at all. We’d say Ahsoka killed Morgan Elsbeth in the finale, but we wouldn’t say she killed 100 space farmboys who saw Imperial propaganda and joined up to escape their two-bit planets because they didn’t have their own personal Obi-Wans to guide them. Those were just natural obstacles with limbs.
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S20This Dangerous Infectious Disease Could Radically Change Over the Next Century  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 per year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of Valley fever are exploding, increasing more than sevenfold and expanding to other states.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 turning deadly 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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S21The World's First Dog-Fox Hybrid Species Reveals A Hard Truth About Domestication  Next time you see a fox when out walking with your dog, pause for a moment and ponder their relatedness. Dogs and foxes are distinct but distantly related canine species.Until recently, scientists thought it was impossible for them to breed. However, the discovery of a dog-fox hybrid in Brazil suggests that The Fox and the Hound might sometimes be a little more Lady and the Tramp.
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S22S23How 1% Performance Improvements Led to Olympic Gold  When Sir Dave Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2002, the team had almost no record of success: British cycling had only won a single gold medal in its 76-year history. That quickly changed under Sir Dave’s leadership. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his squad won seven out of 10 gold medals available in track cycling, and they matched the achievement at the London Olympics four years later. Sir Dave now leads Britain’s first ever professional cycling team, which has won three of the last four Tour de France events.Sir Dave, a former professional cycler who holds an MBA, applied a theory of marginal gains to cycling — he gambled that if the team broke down everything they could think of that goes into competing on a bike, and then improved each element by 1%, they would achieve a significant aggregated increase in performance.
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S24Research: 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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S25How 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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S26The 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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S27A 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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S28Help 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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S29How 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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S30Message 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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S31How 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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S32A 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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S33The 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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S34The 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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S35The 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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S36Why 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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S37CRISPR 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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S38Chasing 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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S39US 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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S40Thousands 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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S41Vaccine 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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S42Soccer 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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S43Why 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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S44How 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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S45'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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S46What 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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S47Supermarkets 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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S48We 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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S49A 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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S50A 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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S51'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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S52The 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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S53This 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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S54Strategies 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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S55AI 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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S56How 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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S57Why 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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S58Italy'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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S59Bebinca: 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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S60The 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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S61Nagorno-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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S62S63Often 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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S64S65The 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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S66Why 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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S67S68UK 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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S70Nobel 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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