Would you rather be a manager or a leader? | Forgetting My First Language | The Inside Story Of Las Vegas’ First Cannabis-Friendly Hotel | AI could help unearth a trove of lost classical texts

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Would you rather be a manager or a leader? - The Economist

If you were asked to imagine a manager, you might well conjure up someone comically boring, desk-bound and monotonal. Now do the same for a leader. You may well be picturing someone delivering a rousing speech. A horse may be involved. You almost certainly have different types in mind. There is indeed a distinction between managers and leaders, but it should not be overdone.

Various attempts have been made to pin down the differences between the two, but they boil down to the same thing. Managers, according to an influential article by Abraham Zaleznik in the Harvard Business Review in 1977, value order; leaders are tolerant of chaos. A later article in the same publication, by John Kotter, described management as a problem-solving discipline, in which planning and budgeting creates predictability. Leadership, in contrast, is about the embrace of change and inspiring people to brave the unknown. Warren Bennis, an American academic who made leadership studies respectable, reckoned that a manager administers and a leader innovates.

Some of these definitions might be a tad arbitrary but they can be useful nonetheless. Too many firms promote employees into management roles because that is the only way for them to get on in their careers. But some people are much more suited to the ethos of management, as we explore in our new podcast, “Boss Class”. They are more focused on process; they like the idea of spreadsheets, orderliness and supporting others to do good work. Shopify, an e-commerce firm, has created separate career paths for managers and developers with these differences in motivation in mind.

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Forgetting My First Language - The New Yorker

No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my first language. It doesn’t feel like the sudden, sharp pain of losing someone you love, but rather a dull ache that builds slowly until it becomes a part of you. My first language, Cantonese, is the only one I share with my parents, and, as it slips from my memory, I also lose my ability to communicate with them. When I tell people this, their eyes tend to grow wide with disbelief, as if it’s so absurd that I must be joking. “They can’t speak English?” they ask. “So how do you talk to your parents?” I never have a good answer. The truth is, I rely on translation apps and online dictionaries for most of our conversations.

It’s strange when I hear myself say that I have trouble talking to my parents, because I still don’t quite believe it myself. We speak on the phone once a week and the script is the same: “Have you eaten yet?” my father asks in Cantonese. Long pause. “No, not yet. You?” I reply. “Why not? It’s so late,” my mother cuts in. Long pause. “Remember to drink more water and wear a mask outside,” she continues. “O.K. You too.” Longest pause. “We’ll stop bothering you, then.” The conversation is shallow but familiar. Deviating from it puts us (or, if I’m being honest, just me) at risk of discomfort, which I try to avoid at all costs.

I grew up during the nineties in Sheepshead Bay, a quiet neighborhood located in the southern tip of Brooklyn, where the residents were mostly Russian-Jewish immigrants. Unable to communicate with neighbors, my parents kept to themselves and found other ways to participate in American culture. Once a month, my dad attempted to re-create McDonald’s chicken nuggets at home for my two brothers and me before taking us to the Coney Island boardwalk to watch the Cyclone roller coaster rumble by. On Sundays, my mom brought me to violin lessons, and afterward I accompanied her to a factory in Chinatown where she sacrificed her day off to sew blouses to pay for my next lesson while I did homework. These constant acts of love—my parents’ ideas of Americana—shaped who I am today. Why is it so difficult for me, at age thirty-two, to have a meaningful discussion with them? As an adult, I feel like their acquaintance instead of their daughter.

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The Inside Story Of Las Vegas’ First Cannabis-Friendly Hotel - Forbes

Located just off the Strip, The Lexi was once the Artisan Hotel, which became notorious among locals as a late-night hang out that hosted sex parties. But now the 64-room, adults-only Lexi has officially become Sin City's first weed-friendly hotel.

"It's cannabis-inclusive, not cannabis-centric," says Alexandre Rizk, the 44-year-old real estate entrepreneur who bought The Artisan for $12 million with a small group of investors in March 2022. The distinction is important for Rizk. The new boutique hotel will not sell cannabis, nor will non-consuming guests be bombarded with pot smoke.

The Lexi opened in early June after Rizk spent around $3 million on renovations, which includes a high-end air filtration system on the fourth floorâwhere all suites are cheekily numbered 420a, 420b, 420câto accommodate the marijuana-friendly rooms. Only paying guestsâ a suite costs between $180 to $400 depending on the nightâwith rooms on that floor can consume cannabis. No smoking is allowed in public areas, including the bikini tops-optional swimming pool.

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AI could help unearth a trove of lost classical texts - The Economist

THE OBJECT known as P.Herc.Paris.3 resembles a dark grey lump of charcoal, about the size and shape of a banana. That explains its nickname: Banana Boy. It is in fact a papyrus scroll, found in the ruins of a villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum, in Campania. Along with hundreds of other scrolls in the villa’s library, it was carbonised when scorching gases engulfed the town during the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in 79AD, that also buried the nearby town of Pompeii.

Although the scrolls survived, their charring means that unrolling them is almost impossible. Now, nearly 2,000 years later, words from inside Banana Boy have been revealed for the first time, after volunteers competing in a prize challenge used X-rays and artificial intelligence to do the unrolling virtually.

The first word to be found, announced on October 12th, was “porphyras”, which means “purple” in ancient Greek (see picture below). It was uncovered by Luke Farritor, a computer-science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, earning him a $40,000 prize. Mr Farritor built on work by Casey Handmer, a former NASA physicist, whose examination of X-ray images of Banana Boy’s charred layers identified a characteristic “crackle pattern” indicating the presence of ink.

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