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 S35S65What 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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S59Thousands 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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S56CRISPR 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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S55Why 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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S42How 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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S61Soccer 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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S46A 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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S70'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 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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S47Help 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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S58US 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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S66Supermarkets 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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S41The 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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S39'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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S60Vaccine 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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S43Research: 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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S64'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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S67We 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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S45The 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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S36The 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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S38The 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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S51A 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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S50How 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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S48How 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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S33Amazon'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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S54The 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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S49Message 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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S62Why 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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S31Waking 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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S57Chasing 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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S40This 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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S69A 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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S68A 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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S53The 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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S37Amazon 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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S32Notes 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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S34Do 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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S63How 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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S28S44How 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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S30The 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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S29The 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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S27S2The Easiest Ways to Access Your Computer Remotely  From music streaming to video calling, the internet has given us so much. It has also made it much easier to get to your computer when you're not actually sitting in front of it. There are now numerous remote access programs to choose from that will connect one computer to another across the web. What's more, a lot of the basic tools are free to use.Windows and macOS both have built-in remote access tools, but they’re not particularly straightforward to use, nor are they cross-platform. That’s why we’re focusing on free third-party options here.
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S3How These Nobel-Winning Physicists Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time  To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini, and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales.Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the three physicists developed techniques for producing laser pulses lasting mere attoseconds—periods billions of billions of times briefer than a second. When viewed in such short flashes, the world slows down. The beat of a hummingbird’s wings becomes an eternity. Even the incessant buzzing of atoms becomes sluggish. On the attosecond timescale, physicists can directly detect the motion of electrons themselves as they flit around atoms, skipping from place to place.
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S4The Best Camping Cookware  Spend any time in the backcountry or the campground at your local state park, and you'll quickly realize the importance of a good meal outdoors. You need the calories for hiking, and good food helps soothe the pain of a long day and turn that rained-out trip into an “at-least-we-ate-well” adventure.Bringing the kitchen to the outdoors isn't always as simple as it sounds. I've been a professional chef and have also guided quite a few groups through the wilderness, and in that time I discovered what every professional guide knows: Food makes or breaks the trip. Here, I've put together a menu of ideas, from the gear you'll need to advice on meal planning. There's something here for everyone, whether you're new to camping or a seasoned tent slinger. Be sure to check out our other outdoor guides for more tips, including the Best Camping Gear and Best Tents.
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S5Israel's Failure to Stop the Hamas Attack Shows the Danger of Too Much Surveillance  The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. It’s also one of the most heavily locked down, surveilled, and suppressed. Israel has evolved an entire intelligence apparatus and aggressive digital espionage industry around advancing its geopolitical interests, particularly its interminable conflict in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Yet on Saturday, Hamas militants caught Israel unaware with a series of devastating land, air, and sea attacks, killing hundreds of people and leaving thousands wounded. Israel has now declared war.Hamas’ surprise attack on Saturday is shocking given not only its scale compared to previous attacks, but also the fact that it was planned and carried out without Israel’s knowledge. Hamas’ deadly barrage underscores the limitations of even the most intrusive surveillance dragnets. In fact, experts say the sheer quantity of intelligence that Israel collects on Hamas, as well as the group’s constant activity and organizing, may have played a role in obscuring plans for this particular attack amid the endless barrage of potentially credible threats.
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S6Why free will is required for true artificial intelligence  The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has always taken inspiration from neuroscience, starting with the field’s founding papers, which suggested that neurons can be thought of as performing logical operations. Taking a cue from that perspective, most of the initial efforts to develop AI focused on tasks requiring abstract, logical reasoning, especially in testing grounds like playing chess or Go, for example — the kinds of things that are hard for most humans. The successes of the field in these arenas are well known.Recent years have witnessed stunning advances in other areas like image recognition, text prediction, speech recognition, and language translation. These were achieved mainly due to the development and application of deep learning, inspired by the massively parallel, multilevel architecture of the cerebral cortex. This approach is tailor-made for learning the statistical regularities in masses and masses of training data. The trained neural networks can then abstract higher-order patterns; for example, recognizing types of objects in images. Or they can predict what patterns will be most likely in new instances of similar data, as in the autocompletion of text messages or the prediction of the three-dimensional structures of proteins.
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S7How could we tell if those "alien bodies" in Mexico are legit?  Last week, I was contacted by a German documentary producer, asking if I was willing to be interviewed about two mummified bodies presented at a Mexican congressional hearing by TV personality Jaime Maussan, who claimed they were aliens.I declined, explaining that I didn’t have any inside knowledge about the alleged discovery. But I did say in a written statement that I was skeptical. The “bodies” shown at the hearing look a little too humanoid to me. That is what we have come to expect from decades of science fiction movies, but in actuality, I would not necessarily expect aliens to look like us.
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S8Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites add to astronomers' light-pollution woes  Amazon is set to launch two satellite prototypes for its Project Kuiper network, which will eventually number more than 3,200 orbiters. Project Kuiper could become a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which is now nearly 4,800 strong. Amazon’s launch is planned for 2 pm Eastern time today, with a backup launch window tomorrow. This rapid growth of the satellite industry has come at a cost for astronomers and fans of the night sky, as two new studies and panels at an international astronomy conference stressed this week.
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S9Lamplighters League is light stealth, heavy pulp style, and XCOM gun battles  Lamplighters League is a modern XCOM-style turn-based strategy game with a Weird War-ish, Indiana Jones-like feel, a light stealth element, and it’s made by the folks who made Battletech and the Shadowrun Returns series. If you pay for Game Pass, or you see this game at any price that feels reasonable (including its debut $50), that should tell you enough about whether to try it. I think you should.
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S10Enhance your calm: Demolition Man turns 30  Thirty years ago today, Demolition Man first hit theaters, pitting Sylvester Stallone against Wesley Snipes in a crime-free but killjoy future where even minor vices have been declared illegal. The passage of time hasn't quite elevated this sci-fi action comedy to the legendary status of Die Hard or Lethal Weapon, but it's still an under-appreciated gem of '90s action movies, precisely because it unapologetically leans into the massive explosions and campy humor.
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S11The Least-Known Rock God  A new biography of the Velvet Underground founder, Lou Reed, considers the stark duality of the man and his music.Early in the movie Almost Famous, the gruff journalist Lester Bangs sizes up the young music writer William Miller with a litmus test: “And you like Lou Reed?”
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S12Donald Trump Is Any Defense Attorney's Nightmare  They say that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client. So, perhaps, does a person who represents Donald Trump.To most people, attacking someone with influence over one’s freedom and fortunes is self-evidently unwise, but that is precisely what Trump has been up to. This week, the former president attended a civil trial in Manhattan to determine what damages he might have to pay in a case about his company committing a massive, yearslong fraud. Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge in the case, has already ruled that fraud did occur, and Trump is furious about it.
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S13S14An Unwelcome Discovery in the Colorado River  In July 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish fish lined with vertical black stripes. He texted photos of his catch to colleagues, who confirmed his fears: The fish were smallmouth bass, voracious predators that have invaded waters around the West. Worse, they were juveniles. Smallmouth weren’t just living below the dam—they’d likely begun to breed. It was a grim discovery. Smallmouth bass, whose native range encompasses rivers and lakes throughout the eastern United States and the Great Lakes, have long plagued the Colorado River. State agencies and anglers probably began stocking them in the watershed in the mid-1900s, and they’ve since conquered much of the basin, including Lake Powell, the reservoir that sloshes above Glen Canyon Dam. Downriver from the dam, however, lies the Grand Canyon, whose sandstone depths have historically provided a bass-free haven for native fish—most of all, the humpback chub, a federally threatened species endowed with an odd dorsal bulge. Now, biologists realized, neither the canyon nor its chub were safe. Scientists have been dreading this development. As Lake Powell has shrunk over the past two decades, drained by overallocation and drought, its diminishment has created prime conditions for bass to infiltrate the Grand Canyon. But Brian Healy, a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey and the former fish biologist at Grand Canyon National Park, says that even though he and his colleagues expected the species to eventually become a problem, “we didn’t realize it would be an issue so quickly.” Preventing a bass takeover won’t be simple, biologically or politically. The Colorado’s users expect it to simultaneously serve as a pipeline for water conveyance, a source of cheap electrons, a recreational playground, and, not least, a suitable habitat for native fish. For decades, the river’s human managers have uneasily balanced these often-contradictory purposes—and now they must also work to exclude smallmouth bass, an immense challenge that may well compete with the river’s many other functions. “The best way to think about this is that everything in the Colorado River is connected to everything else,” Jack Schmidt, a watershed scientist and an emeritus professor at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies, says. “Everything has a ramification.”Forty million people rely on the Colorado River’s largesse, from Wyoming ranchers to the residents of sprawling Arizona subdivisions to the lettuce farmers in California’s Imperial Valley. Less visibly, the river is also a lifeline for 14 native species of fish. They are rarely seen by humans—the river they inhabit is as turbid as coffee, and they’re seldom fished for sport—yet they require a healthy Colorado as much as any Angeleno or Tucsonan. Today, however, four of those fish—the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow, the razorback sucker, and the bonytail—are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Lake Powell commandeered the Colorado’s payloads of silt and stymied natural floods, erasing channels and backwaters where chubs and suckers once spawned and reared. And smallmouth bass and other invasive species devastated native fish in tributaries such as the Yampa River. (“Smallmouth” is a misnomer: Bass have maws so cavernous they can gulp down prey more than half their own size.) Bass arrived in Lake Powell in 1982, courtesy of a hatchery manager who dumped 500 spare smallmouth into the reservoir. The bass, he crowed decades later, “performed magnificently,” adding, “Anglers have caught millions of smallmouth bass over the past 30 years.”
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S15Rauschenberg & Johns  You clear your throat & spit into the sink. Downstairs, a frothing fills my canvas like the sea. A need once met & met again. The fleetingness of meeting given way. Each day, the paper on the stoop ripe for the taking, for the making into something better than the news. On the record player, something bluesy, not too sweet. On the hot plate, eggs. We’ve got one fridge between us. One decent suit. One roof. And every shade of red & gray. The way these things combine: a strip of cotton, a smear of paint, the smell of turpentine. Pine in it like a thing I used to do. You walk across the floor; my ceiling creaks. You watch the falling light, & my brush moves.
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S16Five Observations About the War in Israel  Yesterday, Hamas launched a multifront attack that shocked Israel, infiltrating the Gaza border by land, sea, and air. The attack took place on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, nearly 50 years to the day after an Arab coalition’s surprise attack on Israel—the last assault of this scale—spurred the Yom Kippur War in 1973.More than 600 Israelis have been killed, according to local reports. Thousands more are injured, and an unknown number of civilians and soldiers are being held hostage in Gaza. More than 300 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,000 injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Last night, Israel’s security cabinet voted to officially put the country at war, and Israeli fighter jets have begun air strikes on targets inside Gaza.
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S17A Shocked and Frazzled Collective Mind  I will never forget that mild, golden early-October day almost exactly 50 years ago: the jarring sound of the sirens that tore into the otherworldly silence of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement; the ultra-Orthodox men, still wrapped in their snow-white High Holiday robes and fringed prayer shawls, riding on army jeeps that drove them to their volunteer positions in hospitals and military morgues—an inconceivable sight. But the most unsettling memory is of the famous speech that the prime minister, Golda Meir, delivered that evening on Israeli television, her voice trembling, her appearance bewildered. I was only 9, but I will never forget the fear in the eyes of the grown-ups. We were gathered around the clunky, old-fashioned TV set in my grandmother’s house in Jerusalem, and there was the distinct feeling that they were no longer in control of reality, that they themselves were like lost children.Waking up yesterday and glancing at my cellphone to see what was new in the world, learning about the horrific attack that Hamas had launched against so many civilians in the south of Israel, sent me straight back to that day, to the boy I was then. Shock, bewilderment, a slight nausea, a sudden urge to fight back the tears that welled in my eyes. The frightened look on the face of my parents and my aunts and uncles was the first thing that came to my mind—but now I, we, all Israelis, were those frightened grown-ups who’d lost the sense of control over our reality.
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S18Is Israel at War With Iran?  The October 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are being compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. In fact, with more than 600 Israelis dead at the time of this writing, the proportional death toll is several times higher than that of 9/11, and the factor of surprise is arguably greater than at Pearl Harbor.But 9/11 and Pearl Harbor weren’t just tragic attacks. They were casus belli for seismic wars. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared his country to be heading into “a long and grueling war.” The air attacks he ordered in Gaza have already resulted in hundreds of Palestinian casualties. Will October 7 also lead to a broader conflagration in the region? Most important, can Israel rightly consider itself to be engaged in a shadow conflict with Iran?
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S19ORA | Psyche Films  The experimental dance film ORA (2011) was inspired by the French painter Paul Gauguin’s post-impressionist masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), and it’s as entrancing and enigmatic as its muse. Eschewing traditional filmmaking methods in which light is exposed to film stock or a digital camera sensor, the Canadian filmmaker Philippe Baylaucq instead captured six dancers in motion using thermal imaging technology that’s sensitive to even minor heat fluctuations. Together with the Canadian choreographer José Navas and the Canadian musician Robert M Lepage, who provides the dreamy, propulsive score, Baylaucq deploys these innovative methods to create his own impressionistic dive into self-exploration and existential questions.The work’s ethereal beauty contains a clever artistic inversion: the infrared technology used to make the piece was first invented as a tool of warfare. This novel approach, combined with innovative staging that included shooting in a warehouse covered in heat-reflective aluminium panels, required Baylaucq to push the boundaries of cinema to create an otherworldly effect. These innovative techniques are evident in the final product, which is surely unlike anything anything you’ve seen before. As the dancers’ illuminated forms move in contrast with the dark yet reflective background, their bodies appear at once surreal and yet intensely human.
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S20Strategy for Start-ups  In their haste to get to market first, write Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern, entrepreneurs often run with the first plausible strategy they identify. They can improve their chances of picking the right path by investigating four generic go-to-market strategies and choosing a version that aligns most closely with their founding values and motivations. The authors provide a framework, which they call the entrepreneurial strategy compass, for doing so.The Syracuse University professor Carl Schramm argues that contrary to the teaching at many business schools, entrepreneurs really have no alternative to learning by doing.
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S21S22S23S24Iranian 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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