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 S65What Was Hamas Thinking?   Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, awoke Saturday morning to news of a bloodbath. Hamas’s military commanders, who are based in Gaza, had been so determined to keep secret their plan for a pre-dawn invasion of Israel that they’d hidden the details and the timing of the offensive even from the organization’s political leaders—including Abu Marzouk, who lives in exile in Doha, Qatar. He’d gone to sleep anticipating nothing, he told us, in a phone interview. “All of Hamas's leaders who are not military ones received the news early Saturday morning,” Abu Marzouk said. The claim was plausible: given the penetration of Israeli intelligence services and the surveillance typically surrounding exiled Hamas leaders, it would have been unwise to give Abu Marzouk foreknowledge of the assault.Hamas’s attack has introduced a dangerous new stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas fighters and other militants gunned down more than twelve hundred Israelis—many of them civilians. And more than a hundred and fifty hostages were captured. The Israeli government has retaliated by cutting off food, fuel, and water to Gaza’s two million residents. The Israeli military has begun levelling entire neighborhoods with air strikes, causing nineteen hundred deaths so far, and tens of thousands of ground troops may soon be deployed on a mission to eliminate Hamas as an organization.
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S1Build a Winning AI Strategy for Your Business  Artificial intelligence is a kind of catalyst; it’s the next wave of truly transformative technology with potential we cannot yet fully envision or appreciate. Companies will start by using this new technology to do “old things” before discovering the new opportunities it creates. So, how should they go about this process? They should: start by experimenting, deploy for productivity, transform experiences, and then try to build new things. Throughout this process, they should prioritize security and responsible use.
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S2You're Not Powerless in the Face of Imposter Syndrome  Research shows that high achievers from underrepresented backgrounds often find themselves confronting imposter syndrome or feeling they don’t fit in, are not welcome, or don’t belong. But understanding imposter syndrome does little to end it. The author, who studied underrepresented board members for his PhD and who interacts with hundreds of aspiring and existing board directors in his role at an executive search firm, has found that attributes of moxie — strength of will, self-discipline, and the ability to persist despite challenges — were vital to underrepresented directors’ success. He recommends four tactics to help make moxie your own super power.
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S3How to Keep Working When You're Just Not Feeling It  Motivating yourself is one of the main things that sets high achievers apart, and it’s hard. How do you keep pushing onward when your heart isn’t in it? In her research, Fishbach has identified some simple tactics: Set goals that are intrinsically rewarding, and make them very specific. If a task isn’t satisfying, focus on aspects of it that are or combine it with pleasant activities. Reward yourself in the right way for getting things done. To avoid slumps, break objectives into subgoals; look at how much you’ve accomplished until you’re halfway there; and then count down what you have left to do. And use social influence: Let high performers inspire you, boost your get-up-and-go by giving advice, and keep the people you want to succeed for front of mind.
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S4S5S6Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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S7Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language  The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
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S8Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?  The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
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S9I'm Charging My Toothbrush With Wireless Power Over Distance--and It's a Trip  For the past month or so, my electric toothbrush has been charging wirelessly, but not the way you think. My toothbrush charger is not plugged into an outlet. There are no wires or cables. The charging cradle can sit anywhere on the bathroom counter and continue to charge my toothbrush. This is because I am beta testing a prototype from Wi-Charge, an Israeli company that employs infrared technology to deliver wireless power across distances of up to 30 feet.Several companies have demonstrated wireless power over distance in the past decade, but tangible products have failed to materialize. More than a century has passed since Nikola Tesla thought up the idea of transferring electrical energy through the air, so you could be forgiven for thinking it's simply not feasible (or at least not profitable) to implement. I've been watching this space for over five years and have grown increasingly skeptical.Â
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S10Hit the Dirt Hard With This Nimble and Powerful Electric Mountain Bike  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 WIREDFull disclosure: I’m a runaway fan of commuter ebikes because they eliminate the use of cars and make mundane errands way more fun. Electric mountain bikes, not so much. For an able-bodied cyclist, adding an electric motor to the equation feels like overkill. Plus, in my unscientific opinion, because of their weight and gravitational force, e-MTBs seem to do more damage to dirt trails, freak out other riders and wildlife, and feel less safe than conventional mountain bikes.
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S1111 Must-Play Games on Xbox Game Pass  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 WIREDXbox Game Pass is a solid deal for anyone who likes to try new games and bounce around between titles. A subscription to Game Pass Ultimate costs $17 a month for access to online multiplayer and a regularly refreshed library of over 100 games.
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S12Soccer goalkeepers literally see and hear the world differently  In soccer, the goalkeeper is a team’s last line of defense, whose primary role is to stand in the goal mouth and prevent the opposing team from scoring. This highly specialized position involves diving or jumping to intercept the ball and “save” it from entering the goal.A goalkeeper’s view of the matchplay is often obscured by other players, so these explosive movements typically require split-second decisions based on limited sensory information. Michael Quinn of University College Dublin and his colleagues therefore hypothesized that goalkeepers would have an enhanced ability to integrate auditory and visual information compared to other players.
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S13Starts With A Bang Podcast #98 - The line between star and planet  Out there in the Universe, there’s a whole lot more than simply what we find in our own Solar System. Here at home, the largest, most massive object is the Sun: a bright, hot, luminous star, while the second most massive object is Jupiter: a mere gas giant planet, exhibiting a small amount of self-compression due to the force of gravity.But elsewhere in the Milky Way and beyond, numerous classes of objects exist in that murky “in-between” space. There are stars less luminous and lower in mass: the K-type stars as well as the most numerous star of all: the red dwarf. At even lower masses, there are brown dwarf stars, possessing various temperatures ranging from a little over ~1000 K all the way down to just ~250 K at the ultra-cool end.
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S14In Japan, ghosts haunt the bathroom  As any horror film fan can attest, the bathroom can be a scary place. From Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scene in Psycho to the blood-spewing drain pipes of Stephen King’s It, there’s no shortage of genuinely startling imagery connected to lavatories. But when it comes to conjuring up the most terrifying possible interruptions to our most private moments, no one beats Japan.In Japanese folklore, there are a number of spirits rumored to appear in bathrooms. Some reach out from the insides of toilets; others whisper through the stall walls. Each one has its own grim story and particular behavior, but they all share a connection to the bathroom.
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S15Adding spider DNA to silkworms creates silk stronger than Kevlar  The study and copying of nature’s models, systems, or elements to address complex human challenges is known as “biomimetics.” Five hundred years ago, an elderly Italian polymath spent months looking at the soaring flight of birds. The result was Leonardo da Vinci’s biomimetic Codex on the Flight of Birds, one of the foundational texts in the science of aerodynamics. It’s the science that elevated the Wright Brothers and has yet to peak. Today, biomimetics is everywhere. Shark-inspired swimming trunks, gecko-inspired adhesives, and lotus-inspired water-repellents are all taken from observing the natural world. After millions of years of evolution, nature has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. They are tricks we can learn from. And now, thanks to some spider DNA and clever genetic engineering, we have another one to add to the list.
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S16S17Plant-based cheese may be getting more appetizing  There is no questioning our ongoing love affair with cheese. From pizza and pasta to that decadent slice of cheesecake, we can’t get enough. But the dairy industry that produces cheese has had a negative impact on our climate that is not exactly appetizing.
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S18Inside Gaza's Last Catholic Parish  It’s just past 1 a.m. on October 12, the fourth day of Israel’s assault on Gaza, and my friend Rami is awake, texting me from a pew in the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where he and his family are sheltering from air strikes.He tells me their apartment building was hit last night, their home completely demolished. Now he, his wife, and their two kids are sleeping on mattresses in the church hall, alongside almost 200 other Gazans evacuated or displaced from their homes. Because Rami fears for his safety, I’m using only his first name here.
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S19Only Wes Anderson Could Have Adapted Roald Dahl This Way  The director’s renditions of the famed author’s short stories ask us to think actively—even skeptically—about what we’re seeing.Wes Anderson’s recent collection of Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix are so specifically theatrical that you could replicate them on virtually any stage armed with just a small troupe of repertory actors and a meager budget. Characters narrate what’s happening while staring directly at us, the implied audience; obliging stagehands shift scenery and assist with costume changes and makeup right in front of our eyes. The action is so resolutely analog that it feels like a manifesto for good old-fashioned stagecraft in a cinematic era steamrolled by CGI—our imaginations are forced to fill in the gaps when, say, a train rushes right over a character, or a man appears to levitate several feet off the ground. This is storytelling that shows you all of its seams. The question is: Why?
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S20The Gal  By the late 19th century, whalers, settlers, and pirates had changed the ecology of the Galápagos Islands by poaching some native species—like Galápagos giant tortoises—and introducing others, such as goats and rats. The latter species became pests and severely destabilized the island ecosystems. Goats overgrazed the plants the tortoises ate while rats preyed on their eggs. Over time, the tortoise population plummeted. On Española, an island in the southeast of the archipelago, the tortoise count fell from thousands to less than 20. Along the way, as goats ate all the plants they could, Española—once akin to a savanna—turned barren.In the following century, conservationists set out to restore the Galápagos giant tortoise on Española—and the island ecosystem. They began eradicating the introduced species, and capturing Española’s remaining tortoises and breeding them in captivity. With the goats wiped out and the tortoises in cages, the ecosystem transformed once again. This time, the overgrazed terrain became overgrown with densely packed trees and woody bushes. Española’s full recovery to its savanna-like state would have to wait for the tortoises’ return.
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S21"The Month of Painted Leaves"  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.In the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau argued that foliage was not getting the attention it deserved. “The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet,” he wrote. “October has hardly tinged our poetry.”
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S22A Poet Reckons With Her Past  In a striking new memoir, the Jamaican writer Safiya Sinclair attempts to make peace with her Rastafari childhood and the island that shaped her.“Out here I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness,” the Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair writes of growing up by the water, “stretched out under the almond trees fed by brine, relishing every fish eye like precious candy, my toes dipped in the sea’s milky lapping.”
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S23Students for Pogroms in Israel  By excusing murder and kidnapping, activist groups have already changed campus politics in America. Campus politics in America irrevocably changed this week when student groups that champion the noble goal of justice for Palestinians endorsed the evil means of war crimes in pursuit of it.
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S24Biden's Test in the Middle East  President Joe Biden is facing one of the most difficult tests in his decades of experience shaping U.S. foreign policy: how to support Israel in the war against Hamas while preventing additional conflict from breaking out in the region.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss this and more: Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post; Mary Louise Kelly, a co-host of All Things Considered on NPR; and Vivian Salama, a national-security reporter at The New York Times.
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S25Born to be mild | Psyche Films  Whether you’re crazy for roundabouts, addicted to photographing mailboxes, have the world’s largest collection of British milk bottles, or you’re a dull man with pretty much any sort of hobby that induces bafflement and yawns in friends and acquaintances, there’s a club just for you. A drolly cheerful celebration of the very ordinary, Born to Be Mild explores the uncommon hobbies practised by the members of the Dull Men’s Club – an online community that connects ‘dull men, and women who appreciate dull men’. A film-festival favourite upon its release in 2015, the UK director Andy Oxley’s now-beloved short documentary has, for nearly a decade, been introducing viewers to the mildly profound virtue of being ‘dull, not boring’. And while certainly played for droll laughs, the film may just inspire you to appreciate the mundane, familiar and otherwise unremarkable anew.Psyche is a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.
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S26S27S28S29How much it costs to attend New York Comic Con  For four days every October, New York City resembles something out of a science fiction movie – people dressed in elabourate, head-turning costumes pepper Manhttan's West Side. These superheroes, winged creatures and anime characters are all on their way to New York Comic Con, the US east coast's massive ode to comic books and entertainment.The first New York Comic Con was held in 2006 with 33,000 attendees. Today, roughly 200,000 fans gather at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center, attending panels and swarming booths showcasing future releases in comics, video games and toys. Celebrity spottings are common: 2023's convention, which runs 12 to 15 October, will feature top names in entertainment, including Ewan McGregor and Chris Evans, who each played major characters in blockbuster films.
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S30Sancocho: A Panamanian chicken and vegetable soup  Sancocho may be ubiquitous across Latin America, but no two recipes are the same. That's because the primary ingredients of this hearty soup – meat, vegetables and tubers – are as broad and as varied as Latin America itself.Perhaps that's why the name of the dish is so generic; sancocho is derived from the Spanish verb sancochar, meaning to cook in liquid. Nevertheless, when you look at the different countries where the dish is made, you'll find sancocho recipes vary based on regional ingredients, seasoned to comfort local palates.
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S31Heurigen: Vienna's hyper-local wine taverns  Come warm weather, Vienna's residents flock to the city's bucolic outskirts with the determination of migrating birds. Their destinations? Heurigen, the rustic winery-run taverns showing off their aromatic white wines around wooden tables set under grape arbors and laden with traditional Austrian fare that might include schnitzel and blood sausage, always potato salad and ham and a variety of savory cheesy spreads to go with dark sourdough bread.Paris might have its bars du vin, Rome its enotecas. But Vienna's relationship to wine (and wine-friendly food) is unique. The Austrian capital is the only major European metropolis with a designated wine-growing area within its city limits, counting more than 600 producers on some 1,700 acres of vineyards.
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S32Barbie to Suzume: 20 of the best films of 2023 so far  The numbers in this list do not represent ranking, but are intended to make the separate entries as clear as possible.This tough-minded, heart-breaking drama about race, class and motherhood was France's entry to last year's Oscar race, and I'm still mystified as to why it wasn't nominated. Alice Diop puts her experience making documentaries to good use, as she bases her story on the real-life case of a young Senegalese woman in France charged with abandoning her baby on a beach to die. Diop invents Rama, a pregnant novelist who goes to the town of Saint Omer to witness the trial, which plays into her own doubts and fears. As Laurence, the mother on trial, Guslagie Malanda is unnaturally calm, almost frozen in resignation. Kayije Kagame as Rama lets you see her mind racing and her heart pounding as she watches, even though her face is impassive. Diop based her dialogue on court transcripts, but the results go far beyond dry facts on the page to create an enthralling film with two profound and vivid women on screen. (CJ)
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S33The Curse review: Emma Stone comes up trumps again in this brilliantly unsettling new television comedy  The Curse is as edgy, unsettling and smart as you'd expect from a series created by Nathan Fielder, the experimental creator of the recent quasi-reality show The Rehearsal, and actor-indie filmmaker Benny Safdie, who star along with Emma Stone. The show is nominally a satire about a married couple creating a television pilot for a home-improvement series in the town of Espanola, New Mexico, not far from Los Alamos (any jittery association with the site of the atomic bomb test is intentional). More like this: – How a sham reality show tricked people – The new Frasier is "fun but creaky" – 12 series to watch this October
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S34As Disney turns 100, the brand's real legacy is its business acumen  “100 Years of Wonder” is the theme for Disney’s year-long promotion of the company’s centenary. From special Disney on Ice events to a retrospective at the British Film Institute and limited edition Disney100 merchandise, Disney’s celebration is big business. The wonder and magic of Disney is consistently promoted. And yet I would argue that Disney’s greatest legacy is not its animated stories or characters, but the more mundane history of its mergers, acquisitions and intellectual property rights.
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S35Osiris-Rex: Nasa reveals evidence of water and carbon in sample delivered to Earth from an asteroid  On September 24 this year, a Nasa capsule parachuted down to Earth carrying a precious cache of material grabbed from an asteroid. The space agency has now revealed images and a preliminary analysis of the space rocks it found after lifting the lid off that capsule.The mission to the asteroid was called Osiris-Rex, and in 2020, it collected a sample of material from the asteroid Bennu. Afterwards, it travelled back to Earth and released the capsule containing the rocks into our atmosphere three weeks ago.
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S36S37This engineering course has students use their brainwaves to create performing art  Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. After a serious injury in 2016, I started drawing and painting during my recovery as a form of self-taught art therapy. I found the experience transformative. During my recovery, I rediscovered Pablo Picasso’s artwork and the geometry of his cubism, which inspired my early paintings.
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S38Steep physical decline with age is not inevitable - here's how strength training can change the trajectory  Raise your hand if you regularly find yourself walking up a flight of stairs. What about carrying heavy bags of groceries? How about picking up your child or grandchild? Most of us would raise our hands to doing at least one of those weekly, or even daily. As people age, it can become more and more difficult to perform some physical tasks, even those that are normal activities of daily living. However, prioritizing physical fitness and health as you get older can help you go through your normal day-to-day routine without feeling physically exhausted at the end of the day.
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S39From ancient Jewish texts to androids to AI, a just-right sequence of numbers or letters turns matter into meaning  Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction collection “I, Robot” tells the story of androids created at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. The androids range from “Robbie,” who is nonvocal, to “Stephen Byerley,” who may or may not be a robot – he is so humanlike that people can’t tell. Yet each model is made of the same elementary components: the binary code of ones and zeros. The differences in behavior between the simplest robot and the most advanced one, nigh indistinguishable from a human being, is simply the sequence of these two digits.
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S40Israel's Iron Dome air defense system works well - here's how Hamas got around it  Because of its unique national security challenges, Israel has a long history of developing highly effective, state-of-the-art defense technologies and capabilities. A prime example of Israeli military strength is the Iron Dome air defense system, which has been widely touted as the world’s best defense against missiles and rockets.However, on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was caught off guard by a very large-scale missile attack by the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas. The group fired several thousand missiles at a number of targets across Israel, according to reports. While exact details are not available, it is clear that a significant number of the Hamas missiles penetrated the Israeli defenses, inflicting extensive damage and casualties.
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S41Empire building has always come at an economic cost for Russia - from the days of the czars to Putin's Ukraine invasion  President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has come at huge economic costs. By conservative estimates, the Russian economy has taken a US$67 billion annual hit as a result of war expenses and the effects of economic sanctions. In the early stages of the invasion, some analysts put the costs even higher, at $900 million per day.These war costs show no sign of abating. The newly released Russian government budget for 2024 calls for a 70% defense expenditure increase, an astonishing reallocation of precious resources for a war that some observers expected to last a week at most.
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S42Western sanctions haven't curbed Russian oil profits, but the green energy transition could  Western sanctions that put a price cap on Russian oil exports from December 2022 aimed to cause the country significant economic pain after its invasion of Ukraine last year. The idea was to curtail the amount Russia makes from its oil while ensuring it continues to flow into the global market to reduce price pressures on consumers around the world. Back then, oil prices were trading around US$80 (£66) per barrel (/bbl). More than 10 months later, the opposite has happened: Russian exports have declined but its revenues have increased, providing it with significant funds to continue the war.
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S43Scientists can't agree on when the first animals evolved - our research hopes to end the debate  There are estimated to be nearly 8 million species of animals living today, making up the majority of Earth’s documented biodiversity and inhabiting almost all of its environments. However, for most of Earth’s history animals were completely absent. The date of the first animals marks a shift in the history of life on Earth. Of course, as animals ourselves, it’s also the story of our origins. Without animals, our planet would have been a very different world.
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S44Forests v farmland: what the world would look like if we allocated all our land in the optimal way  What would the world look like if we could decide – globally and collectively – to allocate all our land in the optimal way? Where would we grow food and find water, and what areas would we leave to nature?It’s a radical suggestion that isn’t likely to ever happen. But a thought experiment like this provides an insight into the scale of transformation that may be required to maintain a healthy planet while adapting to a changing climate and a growing population.
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S45S46Xi-Putin meeting: here's what it says about their current, and future, relationship  Vladimir Putin is expected to travel outside the borders of the former Soviet Union for the first time in 20 months to meet China’s Xi Jinping on October 17. The visit, if it happens, is likely to entrench a relationship in which Russia has become a useful tool in a broader Chinese strategy to consolidate its influence in Europe and the Americas.The occasion of Putin’s likely trip to Beijing is the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious Chinese project to expand global trade routes with other nations and extend transport and infrastructure links.
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S47Afghanistan earthquakes: Taliban interference in aid efforts is affecting disaster response  Over 1,000 people are thought to have been killed in the latest earthquake to hit Afghanistan. Humanitarian aid agencies are scrambling to help the affected villages. But the realities of Taliban rule are starting to have an impact on the ground, as relations between the authorities and NGOs fray.Two earthquakes struck Afghanistan’s western province of Herat on October 7 and a third on October 11. Zindajan district, 50km west of Herat, was the worst affected area. It is a rural area of scattered hamlets, where most people live in traditional single-storey mud-brick structures. In villages near the epicentre, the damage was total. Mud structures simply collapsed on their occupants. As the October 7 quakes occurred late in the morning, the victims were mainly women and children, who were indoors. Men working in the fields were spared.
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S48S49S50S51Israel seems poised for a massive invasion of Gaza rather than prolonged attrition  In the days since the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas, Israel has counted its dead and secured its borders. The country now faces a grim choice. Will it continue trading air strikes and rocket fire with Hamas militants for a prolonged period? Or will it launch a ground invasion of Gaza that triggers more casualties among Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians while risking a two-front war?
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S52From Nordic symbols to sledgehammer executions: Inside the Wagner Group's neo-pagan rituals  According to the Orthodox Eastern Church, the spirit of Wagner chief Evgeny Prigozhin now ought to have embarked in heaven or hell. The religion believes it takes 40 days after death for souls to reach their final destination, a threshold that the once hotdog seller reached on 1 October.Dozens of everyday Russians and fighters gathered in Moscow and several other Russian cities to mark the occasion, amid notable silence from officials and state media. Prigozhin, who died in a plane explosion weeks after having led the biggest mutiny Russian president Vladimir Putin has faced in his 22-year rule, is thought to be buried at Porokhovskoye cemetery in St-Petersburg.
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S53Reflections on hope during unprecedented violence in the Israel-Hamas war  On Yom Kippur in 1973, I was 6 years old and living in Petah Tikvah, a city in central Israel. Playing a nail-biting game of marbles, I initially ignored my mom calling me from our front porch. But sensing something was wrong, I gave up my potential winnings and ran home. I arrived to see my dad emerge from our front door wearing an Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, olive-green uniform. He hugged and kissed me goodbye. He then disappeared for nearly two weeks.
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S54Where does international law fit into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?  Thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is never easy. Yet the growing number of declarations being made highlights how important it is to consider the factors involved in making a juridical assessment of the situation. While the solution to any conflict is political, the fact remains that any armed conflict is covered by a specific branch of international law, the law of armed conflict, also known as international humanitarian law.
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S55S56Voice to Parliament referendum defeated: results at-a-glance  The referendum has been defeated, with a “no” majority called by the ABC in at least four states.The Constitution can only be changed if there is a double majority, meaning there must be a national majority of voters across all states and territories and a majority of voters in a majority of the states (at least four of the six states). The Northern Territory and ACT counts are not included in the majority of states, but do contribute to the overall national count.
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S57The political subjugation of First Nations' peoples is no longer historical legacy  There has never been a decade without a significant Indigenous-led movement in Australia. These movements have centred on the reinstatement of Indigenous peoples’ rights as self-determining peoples, and demands for justice arising from our brutal dispossession and its contemporary fingerprints.There has never been a successful referendum without bipartisan support. Success for the Voice to Parliament was always going to be against the odds. Tonight, we saw results track recent polls with an overall Yes vote expected in the mid 40s nationally. With New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia called by 7:25pm, the referendum has failed.
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S58S59Was Dracula a Vegan, Really?  Last spring, the inventor Gleb Zilberstein and his wife, Svetlana, visited the Transylvanian city of Sibiu for three days to study the papers of Vlad III, also known as Vlad Ţepeş (the Impaler), a fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, who has come to be mistaken as the historical source for Count Dracula, from the novel by Bram Stoker. In the Sibiu city archives, Zilberstein, who is based in Israel, was pleased to find three letters written by Ţepeş some five hundred years ago, two of which were in pristine condition. Since 2012, Zilberstein has sought to collect traces of proteins from historical documents—the blood, sweat, and dietary habits of long-dead clerks and authors—which can then be analyzed in a mass spectrometer, sometimes with startling results. (I wrote about Zilberstein and his long-term collaborator, an Italian chemistry professor named Pier Giorgio Righetti, in 2018.) The night after Zilberstein began working on Ţepeş’s letters, there was a violent storm. “There was heavy rain and strong winds,” he told me in an e-mail. “Lightning flashed, dogs and some other animals howled. There was a great atmosphere to start our ‘gothic’ project.” The next morning was Thursday, May 26th, the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Stoker’s “Dracula.” The Zilbersteins went on a tour of Sibiu’s churches. “No supernatural phenomena as a reaction of the devil’s or vampire power appeared,” Zilberstein noted.Ţepeş and Dracula have been locked in an uncomfortable, non-consensual embrace for more than fifty years. In the early seventies, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, historians from Boston College, who were researching Ţepeş’s bloody life and rule, came upon Stoker’s research notes for “Dracula” in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, in Philadelphia. The notes had lain, unstudied, for decades as the vampire went global. Stoker was the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London and friends with Oscar Wilde. He never visited Transylvania. But McNally and Florescu discovered that one of Stoker’s sources for the novel was “An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia,” by William Wilkinson, a one-time British diplomat in Bucharest, which he read on a visit to Whitby Public Library in the summer of 1890.
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S60Republican Intern Named Zach to Be Speaker of the House  WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what they are hailing as a consensus choice, House Republicans have nominated a college intern named Zach to be the new Speaker of the House.The freshly minted G.O.P. nominee acknowledged that he was “kind of surprised” to be chosen as Speaker but said that he was “totally stoked about wielding that hammer.”
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S61Showdown in Hyperpolarized America  Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S62Werner Herzog Defends His "Ecstatic" Approach to the Truth  The renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog has become known for many things: notoriously ambitious movies like "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"; his expansive documentaries; and his deep, mellifluous German accent, which he has used to great effect lately as an actor in productions like "Jack Reacher" and "The Mandalorian." But, according to Herzog himself, his fabulist work as his own biographer deserves just as much praise. "I keep saying facts do not illuminate us," Herzog tells David Remnick. "And that's my approach, that is beyond outside of facts." In a wide-ranging conversation, Herzog looks back on his career, his newfound success embracing the "self irony" of his persona, and why he avoided watching any of "Star Wars" until fairly recently. Plus, the Manila-based reporter Patricia Evangelista describes the horrors of Rodrigo Duterte's regime in the Philippines, and how they echo here in the U.S.The German filmmaking legend says the New York Times is simply "dazed and confused" when it comes to the veracity of his new memoir.
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S63Drake's Era of Masculine Frustration  In 2019, Drake sat down in his Toronto home to record a rare, career-spanning interview with the journalists Elliott Wilson and Brian (B.Dot) Miller for their "Rap Radar" podcast. Much of the sprawling two-hour conversation was spent reflecting on Drake's early successes and the unconventional path that he took to dominance. When Drake started making music, he was both celebrated and dismissed for favoring the sounds of R. & B. over hip-hop, and for balancing swagger and vulnerabilityâa move that felt daring at the time, but that eventually became the standard in the world of radio rap. "To me, making music for girls is just the waviest thing you could do," Drake told the interviewers, making no apologies for his affection for R. & B. and his tendency toward openheartedness. "Of all the things people could say about me, I was never affected by the whole 'This is soft, this is emotional' or whatever. I guess I could just make music for dusty guys or whatever, but that's not what inspires me."Four years and three albums later, though, Drake no longer seems particularly interested in making the sort of soft, emotional music that connected with a more feminine sensibility. His most recent releases, "Her Loss" (a 2022 collaborative album with the Atlanta rapper 21 Savage) and, out just this past Friday, "For All the Dogs," are embittered documents of masculine frustration. Drake, perhaps the most influential and commercially successful artist of his generation besides Taylor Swift, has conquered all there is to conquer within music, but he sounds more dispirited than everâeven deadened. The record begins with the musician making a stony rebuttal to a woman who claimed that he should have treated her better. "Nope," he grunts. It seems particularly lonely at the top for the thirty-seven-year-old Drake, who telegraphs alienation in both his professional and romantic lives.
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S64The Tangled Grief of Israel's Anti-Occupation Activists  On Saturday, October 7th, Avner Gvaryahu and his wife were awakened by an air-raid alarm. Their house in Tel Aviv doesn't have a safe room, so they huddled in a windowless corner of the house. Being awakened by a siren was distressing but by no means an unprecedented occurrence. Gvaryahu's wife is a journalist and nine months pregnant. Gvaryahu is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans that collects and disseminates testimonies on the cruelty and possible criminality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Both he and his wife are experts in finding and analyzing information. Still, it wasn't until about noon that they had learned enough about the Hamas attack on southern Israel to know that something extraordinary was happening.Gvaryahu drafted a statement based on what he knew so far, leading with the events of Saturday morning: "Hamas's attack and the events unfolding since yesterday are unspeakable. We are heartbroken to watch terrified civilians besieged in their homes, innocent people murdered in cold blood on the streets, at parties, and at home. Dozens taken hostage and dragged into the Gaza Strip. Every one of us knows someone who has been tragically affected." Then the tone of Gvaryahu's statement shifted: "We could go on and on about their cruel and criminal actions, or focus on how our Jewish-supremacist government brought us to this point. But, as hard as it is, our job as former Israeli soldiers is to talk about what we were sent to do." He framed the Hamas attack as a failure of the Israel Defense Forces, which, he wrote, were busy protecting settlers in the West Bank. "Our country decidedâdecades agoâthat it's willing to forfeit the security of its citizens in our towns and cities, in favor of maintaining control over an occupied civilian population of millions, all for the sake of a settler-messianic agenda." It was time for Israelis to wake up to how unsustainable and unsafe that arrangement was.
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S66An Intervention for My Friend Who's Done Too Much Therapy  We are staging this intervention to inform you that your work in therapy and your subsequently updated communication skills have made you a worse person to be around. This is a formal request for you to halt your "healing journey."Whether I was complaining about my on-again, off-again situationship or my bootlicking co-worker, you used to simply assure me that they were busted bozosâand I love a roast that sounds like something a cartoon villain might say.
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S67You Need to Watch the Most Underrated Dystopian Thriller on Amazon Prime ASAP  Thanks to Loki, Tom Hiddleston has proven that he can act in any time period. 2012, Ancient Rome, even at the very end of time: his cool demeanor and British charm work in any context. But Hiddleston seems especially suited to period pieces. He’s almost got a James Dean-esque aura that makes his very presence feel nostalgic. That’s why he’s perfect in a retro environment like Loki’s TVA, and why he’s so great in a 2015 thriller now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. High-Rise, based on J. G. Ballard’s novel, follows Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston), a successful neurologist who moves into a massive high-rise purported to be a self-sustaining utopia by its architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons). But that’s not where the movie begins. Instead, it begins where it ends: with Laing roasting a dog’s leg.
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S6815 Years Ago, an Iconic Sci-Fi Horror Game Redefined the Entire Genre  The early 2000s witnessed a boom in the survival horror game genre. Franchises like Silent Hill and Resident Evil promptly scratched the itch for immersive, nerve-wracking experiences that hinged on combat-friendly third-person perspectives with lore-heavy worlds that became more fleshed out with every installment. The inexplicable thrill of walking in the shoes of a protagonist compelled to survive amid challenging, hellish landscapes became the foundation for experimental gameplay mechanics, such as snapping photographs to defeat spirits in games like Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly.While the vignettes of survival horror eventually started to feel oversaturated, a gaping void still existed when it came to survival horror in space, an area that remained untapped despite its obvious potential. Entries like Alien: Resurrection prioritized first-person shooter mechanics over genre-specific narrative elements in a way that hampered its horror elements, while adjacent projects fell through altogether, lost in the debris of oblivion. This is when Dead Space burst into the scene in 2008, forever altering our relationship with immersion in high-intensity horror environments in space.
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S69S70'Lies of P's Post-Credits Scene Is Just Absurd Enough to Work  Plenty of video games are based on unexpected things. From bug-catching inspiring Pokémon to the 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West’s take on the Chinese epic A Journey to the West, anything could be a video game. Yet a Soulsl-like inspired by Pinocchio, the premise of 2023’s Lies of P, still feels uniquely silly. While the game manages to pull this off, nothing will prepare players for the game’s even more absurd post-credits scene. But it all works. The second Lies of P was revealed to the world, it became the butt of a million jokes. It was an easy mark. “Developers will just make anything a Souls-like nowadays,” and, “Oh no, they made Pinocchio hot,” were two common examples of how people talked about the game before its release. Now that Lies of P is out, many have been shocked to discover that the dark take on Pinocchio manages to be one of the best non-FromSoftware Souls-likes ever made.
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