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 S60The Theory of Hamas's Catastrophic Success   Three days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, I called the operation a “catastrophic success.” Now Hamas itself is saying something similar. A strange report in Middle East Eye (a publication funded by Hamas-friendly Qatar) quotes Hamas leaders admitting that they intended to commit heinous war crimes, but not at this scale. Hamas “had in mind to take between 20 and 30 hostages,” a source told the reporter. “They had not bargained on the collapse of [Israel’s] Gaza Division. This produced a much bigger result.”By “bigger result,” the source presumably meant the murder, torture, and dismemberment of more than 1,400 Israelis, Thais, Nepalis, and others. Another bigger-than-anticipated result might be the invasion of Gaza. Had the dead and kidnapped numbered in the dozens, Israel would have had to consider its options. Once Hamas broke the three- and then four-digit barriers, Israel’s commitment to destroy Hamas completely became inevitable. Hamas’s main military benefactor, Iran, tends to mount attacks just under the threshold of causing all-out war. That pattern keeps the geopolitical consequences manageable. Hamas’s attack crossed that line.
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S1The Discipline of Innovation  In the hypercompetition for breakthrough solutions, managers worry too much about characteristics and personality—“Am I smart enough? Do I have the right temperament?”—and not enough about process. A commitment to the systematic search for imaginative and useful ideas is what successful entrepreneurs share—not some special genius or trait. What’s more, entrepreneurship can occur in a business of any size or age because, at heart, it has to do with a certain kind of activity: innovation, the disciplined effort to improve a business’s potential.
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S2How the Best Brand-Influencer Partnerships Reach Gen Z  Authenticity is among Gen Z’s most important values. They feel empowered to ask and answer their own questions in a variety of social forums on any topic — from beauty to health to home improvement to technology to science. And their view of authority has expanded from traditional sources, like academic institutions or reputable editorial voices, to perceived influence. The author offers five lessons for brands who want to tap into this era of influencers and make authentic connections with Gen Z.
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S3E-Commerce Platforms Must Prioritize the Consumer-Influencer Relationship  In China, content-based platforms are generating a growing proportion of e-commerce, presenting a growing threat to established platforms like Alibaba and JD.com. In this model, consumers buy products during their engagement with the content provider. Managing the platform to generate sales, therefore, is about enabling the right content to reach the right viewers. Savvy content-based platforms are leveraging AI to this trend and carefully curate their influencer relationships. Are the big retail platforms ready for this new model?
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S4Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything  In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into “stealth mode” to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from the people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for.
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S5Why Design Thinking Works  While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.
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S6You Need an Innovation Strategy  Without such a strategy, companies will have a hard time weighing the trade-offs of various practices—such as crowdsourcing and customer co-creation—and so may end up with a grab bag of approaches. They will have trouble designing a coherent innovation system that fits their competitive needs over time and may be tempted to ape someone else’s system. And they will find it difficult to align different parts of the organization with shared priorities.
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S7The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs  The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.
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S8S9S10S11S12S13S14S15S16S17S18Why Big Projects Fail -- and How to Give Yours a Better Chance of Success  There are five reasons that large projects fail. Wrong projects are ones that defy conventional business rationale, creating outputs that either few people want, that add little to no real value, or that undershoot the desired benefits because they are so difficult to achieve. A second reason is unreasonable constraints — when the effort doesn’t have adequate funding, people, time, or other key inputs. Lack of effective leadership is another project killer, as is undue complexity, where projects span multiple teams, business units, geographies, and organizations and face volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity. A final obstacle to project success is too much or too little management. To avoid these pitfalls, smart companies should hire senior executives who are project management experts, commit to clear processes and strong governance, and empower project managers.
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S194 Fundamental Ways to Boost Employee Engagement  With the rise of hybrid and remote work, there’s a real danger — unless companies think deeply about what kind of a culture they’re developing — that workers may come to feel like “just another face on the zoom screen.” Employees need to know that their leaders value them and their unique perspective. If employees feel that their ideas and suggestions don’t matter, it’s very hard for them to feel engaged.
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S203 Ways to Build an Organizational Culture That Supports Mental Health  The cultural shift toward greater mental health awareness has helped bring needed attention to psychological suffering, improve access to mental health resources, and reduce stigma. However, it may also be increasing the pathologization of ordinary life, leading people to think of themselves as mentally fragile and unwell. This creates a challenge for employers. How can they support workers’ mental health without encouraging them to dwell on their negative thoughts and feelings? The author argues in favor of what he calls an outward-action approach to mental health: evidence-based mental health strategies that don’t encourage a fixation on one’s own negative thoughts and emotions.
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S21How to Strengthen Your Curiosity Muscle  Building our curiosity muscle is essential because it will aid in the efficiency of leadership, enables continual learning, and because it’s a sought after skill by employers. Like any muscle, to strengthen it, you must activate and exercise it. You can strengthen your curiosity muscle by ditching excuses, finding the right angle, changing up your routine, experimenting, and shifting your focus once you become uninterested. Curiosity is a skill that is useful in every context, whether it be in the workplace or in the lives of your loved ones. It shows interests, prompts discovery, and finally, leaves all involved parties changed in some form or fashion — all by way of a simple question of who, what, when, where, why, or how.
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S22The Skills Your Employees Need to Work Effectively with AI  Leaders understand that the future will involve humans working with AI and feel immense pressure to “do something” to implement AI solutions. But how do they actually integrate AI with their workforce to achieve good business outcomes? Interviews with company leaders and CEOs shed light on a counterintuitive answer: invest more in two important human skills. Specifically, companies report the need for 1) effective interpersonal skills — the ability to effectively communicate, meaningfully engage with others, and garner team cooperation — and 2) domain knowledge that can help workers get the most — and make the best decisions — when working with AI tools.
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S23Taupo: 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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S24Message 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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S25Did 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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S26Shukubo: The Japanese temples where you can sleep alongside monks  In the serene world of Japanese Buddhist monks, life takes on a distinctive form, interwoven with discipline and mindfulness. These monks subscribe to a unique method of meditation, often sitting upright, supported only by a modest cushion. In this position, they uphold a constant state of awareness, embodying the Buddhist quality of prolonged concentration. This approach to faith is just one facet of a monk's lifestyle, which revolves around spiritual dedication and mindfulness.Their days typically commence with pre-dawn meditation, followed by a simple breakfast composed of vegetarian or vegan offerings. As the sun rises, the monks chant to foster self-awareness and inner peace.
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S27The human-chimp bond captured in an iconic photo  On 14 July 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived by boat to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania. Here, in what is now Gombe Stream National Park, her ground-breaking scientific research into chimpanzee behaviour began.Previously a secretarial student without an undergraduate degree in science, Goodall says she observed her wild subjects with an open mind and without preconceptions. Controversially at the time, she defied convention by giving these chimps names instead of numbers.
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S28Sea sponges offer lifeline to women in Zanzibar  As a gentle morning breeze blows across the Zanzibar shore, Hindu Simai Rajabu walks through knee-deep water to reach a shallow lagoon off the coast of Jambiani, Tanzania, where her floating sponge farm is located.Sporting shiny goggles and with a snorkel placed on top of her headscarf, Rajabu wades through the Indian Ocean, her laughter at the experience of being filmed mingling with the sound of the crashing waves.
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S29S30Why grazing bison could be good for the planet  It takes mettle to live on Montana's shortgrass prairie. It's dry, windy and a long way from anywhere. In summer, temperatures can top 100F (38C). In winter, the mercury plunges to -50F (-45C). In some spots, it is more than an hour's drive on gravel roads to buy a loaf of bread. When you get back, grasshoppers start cannibalising their brethren impaled on your car grille.The indigenous Blackfeet, Nakoda and Gros Ventre peoples successfully adapted to the harsh environment over many centuries. More recently, a handful of hardy white settlers managed it too. Both left their mark on this forbidding land with fire, arrows and the plough. The shortgrass prairie makes up 71 million hectares (27,413 sq miles) of remote land straddling the US/Canadian border to the east of the Rocky Mountains. This rare habitat is in ecological decline. For the last 150 years, wildlife have surrendered the prime habitat to cows. Crested wheatgrass, a non-native plant seeded by European settlers for their cattle, paints swathes of land yellow in summer.
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S31S32Anna Maria Coclite: Artificial skin? We made it -- here's why  Material scientist Anna Maria Coclite unveils "smart skin" — artificial skin technology that responds to touch, temperature and humidity like your very own. (It's actually even more sensitive than human skin!) From helping burn victims to paving the way to smarter, safer humanoid robots, Coclite highlights the broad-ranging potential of this innovation.
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S33Paul Hawken: Regenerative living can restore a broken world  A frog and a mockingbird changed Paul Hawken's life, kindling a devotion to protect and restore nature. Now, as one of the world's preeminent environmentalists, he advocates for regeneration — a calling and action plan for the world to come together to end the climate crisis in one generation and put life at the center of every decision we make.
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S34Yamaha's True X Bar 50A Is a Great Midrange Soundbar  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 WIREDYamaha’s YAS-209 is something of a soundbar unicorn. It’s hard to find a soundbar with solid performance that offers so much bounty at its $350 price point, from Wi-Fi and Alexa support to an included subwoofer and a spare HDMI input. Even four years on, it’s considered by most to be one of the best soundbars in its class.
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S35Imagine If Joe Biden's AI Executive Order Were Inspired by 'The Terminator'  Science fiction, for decades, has been about predicting the futureâand warning against it. Even as Star Trek envisioned the wonders of flip phones and iPads, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash warned of the dystopian nature of the metaverse.Throughout 2023, as artificial intelligence has creeped its way into every corner of public, private, and creative life, it's been easy to see the lessons sci-fi tried to teach. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data was a bot who worked in harmony with organic beings; Hal 9000, in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, (spoiler) goes all murder-y to save its own life.
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S36We Asked a Savile Row Tailor to Test All the 'Best' T-Shirts You See in Social Media Ads  Everyone has a favorite T-shirt. Most right now covet Jeremy Allen White’s from The Bear. For WIRED senior editor Jeremy Allen White, it’s one of his prized In-N-Out Burger designs—but lately, across his social media feeds, he’s been inundated by brands claiming he’s wrong and that they have unlocked the secret to creating The Perfect T-Shirt.Some use heritage as a sales strategy, others target body insecurities, while a new breed of online fashion brands are turning to high-tech lasers and adaptive algorithms to create custom T-shirts, tailored to you. But which is best?
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S37Amazing STEM Toys for the Techie Kids in Your Life  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 WIREDAnyone who has ever watched a toddler methodically take apart a Tupperware drawer should know that many children are natural-born engineers. Your only job as a parent is to nurture their creativity … and clean up the mess afterward. Between us—product reviewer Scott Gilbertson, editor Adrienne So, and I—we have seven kids. This, honestly, is the most fun part of my job—calling in STEM toys for my kids and I to test together and recommend to you. It hardly feels like work at all.
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S38'Party Time!' Crypto Land Celebrates as Sam Bankman-Fried Is Found Guilty  At 7:33 pm eastern yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. The crypto industry exhaled.The verdict was a "huge relief," says market analyst Noelle Acheson, formerly of crypto brokerage Genesis. The fraud at FTX, which threw the crypto world into a spin last November, has "unfairly tainted" the rest of the industry, she argues, in the eyes of regulators and mainstream investors alike. But Bankman-Fried's conviction will go a long way toward "closing the book" on this unflattering episode, she says.
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S39'Now and Then,' the Beatles' Last Song, Is Here, Thanks to Peter Jackson's AI  Following a lot of hypeâand a quarter century of workâ"Now and Then," presumably the last song to feature all four original Beatles, is here. The track dropped yesterday and the music video, directed by Peter Jackson, hit YouTube today. Sweet and haunting, it's full of piano and strings, and it wouldn't have been possible without the machine learning technology Jackson used on the docuseries Get Back.How the AI technology became the thing that saved the song is a bit of a journey. Years after John Lennon died in 1980, his wife, the musician and multimedia artist Yoko Ono, told his bandmate Paul McCartney that she had a demo tape Lennon had recorded at their apartment in the Dakota in New York City.
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S40S41Ask Ethan: What drives the expansion of the Universe?  Even though it’s been nearly 100 years since its initial discovery, the expanding Universe still puzzles almost everyone who thinks about it. What causes the Universe to expand? Why did it start off expanding in the first place? What determines the rate of expansion, and how does that rate translate into something that we can actually go and observe? What do we mean when we say “the expansion is accelerating,” and why is that such a profound, revolutionary statement that we only started making in the 1990s? And, behind the scenes, what is the ultimate cause of each aspect of our cosmic expansion, and how confidently can we state such things?There’s a remarkable scientific story to be told here, and even seasoned scientists and science communicators frequently make mistakes when trying to provide answers to these questions. It makes educating the general public, especially young people, a particular challenge for father-of-a-curious-13-year-old, Philip Gee, who writes in to ask:
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S42Why the wrong people end up in power  A compilation of Big Think experts on authoritarianism, narcissism, and the commonalities between con artists and the people we consider to be pillars of society.BRIAN KLAAS: The people who end up in power are not representative of the rest of us: They are not average, and they are not normal. People who are power-hungry tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us.
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S43Why TRAPPIST-1 is our favorite alien planetary system  When I was a wee graduate student back in the late 1980s, we didn’t know if there were any planets orbiting other stars (i.e., “exoplanets”). Now, just three decades later, we know that there are planets orbiting pretty much every star in the galaxy. This abundance of worlds was one reason I wrote my new book, The Little Book of Aliens. I wanted people to know all the crazy kinds of planets there are out there (ocean worlds, snowball worlds, magma worlds), as well as all the possibilities that exist for life. Now that the book has come out, people have asked me: What’s my favorite alien planet? My answer comes quickly, but it’s not a single planet. Instead, it’s a planetary system. Also, it’s not just my favorite. The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system is the darling of many astronomers, planetary scientists, and astrobiologists, and today I want to tell you why. There is going to be a lot of work on TRAPPIST-1 coming from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
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S44The detestable, debauched life of Ibrahim the Mad -- the Ottoman Empire's worst Sultan  Sugar was a scheming concubine. She not only shared the bed of the Sultan, but she whispered in his ear. This night, Sugar told Ibrahim that one of his harem — she knew not who — had slept with an outsider. One of his women had been defiled. Ibrahim was furious. He had his Chief Black Eunuch investigate. He had women tortured. But either they would not give up the culprit or there was none. So, Ibrahim had all 280 women in his harem gathered together. He ordered they each be tied in a sack, weighed down with stones, and thrown into the Bosporus Strait. All but one drowned. This was merely one of the twisted acts of the Ottoman Empire’s worst Sultan, Ibrahim “the Mad,” who was in charge from 1640 to 1648.
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S45Great leaders cultivate "emotional intelligence." Here's how  What separates those who stagnate in their careers from those who excel? According to psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman, a sizable distinction will come from their capacity for emotional intelligence (EI). Emotional intelligence is, broadly speaking, a person’s ability to manage their feelings, recognize how others are feeling, and then utilize both to build healthy relationships.But that skill rarely appears on any recruiter’s wish list. Peruse any job posting, and you’ll spy a litany of on-the-job experiences and technical expertise. Qualities such as empathy, teamwork, a can-do attitude, and passable small talk may be present but read like a gratuity.
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S46After leading NASA's mission to Pluto, Alan Stern flies to space himself  It has been fun to watch Virgin Galactic string together six flights to suborbital space this year. The company was founded by Richard Branson in 2004 to open the experience of spaceflight to everyday people and make some money in the process. Virgin Galactic hasn't achieved those goals yet, but the company has reason to celebrate its successes over the last six months.
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S47S48Why OLED monitor burn-in isn't a huge problem anymore  Until recently, OLED computer monitor selection was limited. Today, there's more than a handful available. LG Display and Samsung Display have made picking an OLED monitor exciting by designing competing models—white OLED (WOLED) and quantum dot OLED (QD-OLED), respectively—and monitor vendors are steadily addressing OLED scarcity and price barriers.
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S49S50Former head of NASA's climate group issues dire warning on warming  During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods, and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off any time soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published Thursday in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.
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S513D printers learn to paint like Jackson Pollock  If you've ever drizzled honey on a piece of toast, you've noticed how the amber liquid folds and coils in on itself as it hits the toast. The same thing can happen with 3D and 4D printing if the print nozzle is too far from the printing substrate. Harvard scientists have taken a page from the innovative methods of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock—aka the "splatter master"—to exploit the underlying physics rather than try to control it to significantly speed up the process, according to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter. With the help of machine learning, the authors were able to decorate a cookie with chocolate syrup to demonstrate the viability of their new approach.
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S52The UAW beat the big three; Elon Musk's Tesla is among its next targets  Six weeks of targeted strikes by the United Auto Workers has proved to be an effective approach. Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors have all reached tentative agreements with the UAW over the past 10 days. Now, the union wants to focus its attention on automakers like Toyota and Tesla, who have resisted unionization or opened plants in right-to-work states that are hostile to collective bargaining.
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S53Intel's failed 64-bit Itanium CPUs die another death as Linux support ends  Officially, Intel's Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021, when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn't break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.
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S54Perfect Dark finally gets the full-featured PC port it deserves  For decades now, PC players who wanted to check out Rare's seminal 2000 shooter masterpiece Perfect Dark were stuck with the compromises inherent in emulating an aging title designed for very different hardware. Now, over 23 years after its release, Perfect Dark has gotten the full PC port it so richly deserves, complete with graphics and control updates that make the experience much more enjoyable for a modern audience.
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S55S56Photos of the Week:  A Halloween parade in New York City, All Saints’ Day observations in Lithuania, fall colors in Germany, continued destruction in Gaza, a foggy sunrise over the Great Wall of China, a bodybuilding championship in Kyrgyzstan, scenes from the 2023 Pan Am Games in Chile, and much more A woman walks the grounds in costume as revelers celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, California, on October 28, 2023. #
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S57Do You Have Free Will?  A new book by Robert Sapolsky argues that we’re not in control of or responsible for the decisions we make.Writing a review is an exercise in free will. Not only can I tell you what I want about the book and whether I liked it or not, but I also get to choose how to begin. If I decide to start with a personal anecdote, that’s what you will get. And I have the ability—the freedom—to start in other ways instead. These facts may seem too obvious to mention. But they are denied by Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology at Stanford whose new book, Determined, argues, “We have no free will at all.”
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S58Sofia Coppola's Priscilla Unearths a Delicate Truth  How did one of the most storied romances in American history produce a terrible loneliness?In Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s sensitive, minor-key portrait of Elvis Presley’s ex-wife Priscilla Presley, there’s a fleeting shot of the King (played by Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi) performing onstage. His back is turned to the camera; as he opens his arms to the crowd before him, he lifts his signature cape and his body blocks out the lights.
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S59Here's What Biden Can Do to Change His Grim Polling  Whatever your theory, it should take into account a curious coincidence: how closely Biden’s approval numbers have tracked the numbers from former President Barack Obama’s first term. Obama’s numbers slumped in the second half of his third year, 2011. In the middle of that October, his disapproval number reached 41 percent, not very far off from Biden’s 37 percent at the same point in October 2023.The world of 2011 was a very different place from the world of 2023. The job market was weak, not red hot the way it is now. Immigrants were returning home, not arriving by the millions. China’s economy was booming, not slumping.
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S61Don't Equate Anti-Zionism With Anti-Semitism  It is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights for all in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Gaza, in Ramallah.On October 7, the Islamist militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Israel responded with military operations that have killed several times that number of Palestinians in Gaza, a territory described by Human Rights Watch as an “open-air prison” as a result of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. In both cases, most of the casualties are civilians. The conflict has reverberated into other areas of the world, including the United States, where anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents have included the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy. The bloodshed has revived the perennial debates about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
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S62A Book That Was Like Putting on 'a New Set of Glasses'  The literary internet is full of lists that suggest books that will inform you about one subject or another—we just published one last week in this very newsletter (on what to read to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). But recently, we decided to go a bit deeper and asked Atlantic writers and editors for books that changed how they think. We were looking for reading experiences that went beyond just adding knowledge—not a small thing, I know—and that gave readers a whole different way of perceiving the world. The entries were revealing and fun. Graeme Wood wrote about Steve Martin’s collection of stories Cruel Shoes and how it opened him up to the possibilities and joys of strangeness. Clint Smith explained how Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom allowed him to appreciate what it might be like to experience life with a chronic illness. After reading James Nestor’s Breath, Olga Khazan realized she was breathing all wrong. I didn’t add my own contribution to this list, but I thought I would share it here, because I think about its argument almost every day.The book that gave me “a new set of glasses,” as we put it in the prompt to our writers, was Neil Postman’s 1985 diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman was a media-studies professor at New York University who worried about the dominance of television and the way it was molding our public sphere, making political rhetoric more superficial and more concerned with entertaining and holding attention. He was basically taking Marshall McLuhan’s aphoristic insight that “the medium is the message” and applying it to an age of sound bites, televised debates, and pervasive commercials. The medium we use sets the limits for what we can think and how we can think, McLuhan established. So Postman argued that if our lives as citizens take place on television—a fast-moving, visual medium—then our politics will be molded to fit these biases (as Megan Garber succinctly put it in her insightful essay on the book, “There are dangers that can come with having too much fun”). Postman saw great peril in the degradation of discourse as society moved from print, a medium that demanded reasoned argument, toward one overwhelmed by what we would today call optics.
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S63The Great Social Media-News Collapse  Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress.No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether. After the 2016 election, news became a bug rather than a feature, a burdensome responsibility of truth arbitration that no executive particularly wanted to deal with. Slowly, and then not so slowly, companies divested from news. Facebook reduced its visibility in users’ feeds. Both Meta and Google restricted the distribution of news content in Canada. Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, noted that its newest social network, Threads, wouldn’t go out of its way to amplify news content. Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, apparently as part of a reactionary political project against the press, and made a number of decisions that resulted in its replacement, X, being flooded with garbage. As The New York Times declared recently, “The major online platforms are breaking up with news.”
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S64There's No Third Rail Like the Middle East  Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.People all over the world are divided about the best way forward in the Middle East. As conflict devastates that region, how should citizens outside the Middle East handle their differences of opinion about the best way forward without tearing their societies apart?
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S65Overthrow the Tyranny of Morning People  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.This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time.
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S66Iizuna fair | Psyche Films  The Japanese artist Sumito Sakakibara’s enigmatic short film Iizuna Fair drifts through the mental space of a man lost in memory, seemingly after his car has careened off the road. With Sakakibara describing the barely seen protagonist as ‘buried under memories full of inhibition and promises that never kept’, the window into his inner world seems tinged with both nostalgia and regret. A slow drift in perspective reveals a surreal swirl of images, with the action centred on the bustle of a fair in the small town of Iizuna, Nagano Prefecture. The vibrant colour and bustle of fair rides, ice skaters and food stands is given a haunting quality by the shifting human figures and faces that move through the scene, and a plaintive piano-and-string score that occasionally gives way to the crackle of a bonfire.Commissioned by the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, where it plays on a loop on a massive screen, themes of circularity and repetition permeate Sakakibara’s work. The rotating perspective gives the impression of a complete 360-degree turn across the film’s duration, and toy trains, people and fair rides appear to endlessly repeat their paths throughout. Perhaps embedded in this motion is an expression of the futility of fixating on regret. But, regardless of artistic intent, the resulting work contains a peculiar, poignant beauty, engrossing despite its pace due to the fine details that continue to reveal themselves as this small, self-contained world slowly turns.
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S67S68California's Surfboard-Stealing Sea Otter Has Given Birth to a Pup /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/6d/cf/6dcf2cd8-cfbf-4b14-9a4f-247edda51aca/dsc_1956.jpg) Otter 841 made headlines for her "unusual" behavior this summer, which biologists now say could've been related to pregnancy hormonesThis summer, a sea otter named 841 garnered international attention for stealing surfboards and fearlessly approaching humans off the coast Santa Cruz, California. And though many onlookers found the 5-year-old female's behaviors cute, wildlife officials began to worry about public safety. They announced in July that they planned to capture and rehome her, but she has evaded their efforts for months.
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S69Cats Make Nearly 300 Different Facial Expressions /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b0/94/b094a830-dd4e-4aca-8884-5ab2b8a3625b/gettyimages-152621111_resize.jpg) From ear position to pupil size, a new study examines how felines express themselves while interacting with one anotherCats can sometimes get a bad rap for being aloof or not emotive. Compared to dogs, felines tend to be more subtle with how they express themselves—perhaps with a mere flick of an ear or curl of their whiskers. Only sparse studies have tried to decode the mysterious emotional lives of these creatures.
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S70See Hundreds of Photographs From Elton John and David Furnish's Private Collection /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/0f/63/0f63a153-733d-4f35-9af5-eef5a8133e9d/gettyimages-1137478607.jpg) Never-before-seen images of celebrities, performers and important moments in history are going on display in LondonAudiences know Elton John as a renowned pianist and popular entertainer, but they may be surprised to learn that he is also the owner of an impressive photography collection. Over the past few decades, John and his husband, David Furnish, have amassed more than 7,000 photographs, 300 of which will go on display next spring at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
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