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 S59Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?   When American History X was released in 1998, 25 years ago, it warned of a gathering storm of white supremacist violence. The indie crime thriller garnered both praise and criticism, but also a measure of suspicion. Some critics took exception to what they viewed as its "bombastic" tone and "red-meat melodrama," as though the film's racist zealots looked more like caricatures than anything that could have sprouted from the multicultural soil of US democracy.Warning: This article contains descriptions of extreme violence that some may find upsetting
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S4Growing African vegetables on buildings can save space and feed cities - new study  Living wall systems are vertical growing platforms which usually form part of a building façade. Some are continuous, others modular.Continuous systems are lightweight screens with pockets that can contain wet felted substrate layers, or rock wool, for the plants to grow in, or the plants’ exposed roots are kept wet with nutrient-rich fluids. An example of a continuous system is hydroponics.
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S6Clarence Thomas's R.V. Loan and Supreme Court Scrutiny  Justice Clarence Thomas is once again under the spotlightâthis time, for a forgiven R.V. loan. In the nineteen-nineties, a wealthy friend loaned Thomas more than a quarter of a million dollars to purchase a forty-foot motor coach. A Senate inquiry has now found that Thomas's loan was later forgiven; this discovery raises questions about the ethics of the deal. Over the years, the conduct of Justices appointed by both Democratic and Republican Presidents has been in question, the staff writer Jane Mayer explains, "but there is nothing that comes near the magnitude of goodies that have been taken by Clarence Thomas": if Thomas "were in any other branch of government, he'd never be able to stay in that job." Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are looking to subpoena three conservative donors and activists tied to gifts and trips involving Supreme Court Justices. Why has the judicial branch been allowed to regulate itself for so long, and who has the responsibility to clean it up? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Evan Osnos join Mayer to weigh in on how the Supreme Court's unchecked power has affected American politics.After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served.
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S7George C. Wolfe Would Not Be Dismissed  “If that shit don’t work, I don’t wear it,” the director and writer George C. Wolfe told me when we spoke last month. He was talking about the baggage of childhood and the aftermath of his early life in a small, segregated Southern town, but he might just as easily have been talking about his approach to art. Wolfe, sixty-nine, a titan of the American theatre, writes and directs plays and films with an exuberance that feels like the product of freedom unfettered by obligation. He always seems, by the evidence of his work, to be having fun.In August, at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, I had watched from the audience as Wolfe, wearing a sand-colored suit and sneakers, talked with the MSNBC journalist Jonathan Capehart about his new film, “Rustin,” which takes as its subject the great and somewhat undersung civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin. Onstage, Wolfe sat back easily in his chair as if it were a loveseat in a friend’s living room. All self-acceptance, he smiled through clips from the movie as they played, clearly gratified by the results, and sharpened his answers into quips that he knew would get laughs from Capehart and the crowd.
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S815 Years Ago, a Legendary Xbox Exclusive Changed the Shooter Game Genre Forever  Back when Xbox exclusives were typically spelled H-A-L-O, Epic Games came along to give third-person shooters an extra coat of blood-spattered paint. This unique formula arguably peaked in November 2008 with Gears of War 2. To this day, not a single game of its kind has arguably even come close to matching the magic of Horde mode.Gears of War 2 wasn't just a tremendous Gears of War sequel, it was an incredible game, period. 15 years later, it may still be the best of the entire franchise to date. That's not to say its immediate follow-up, Gears of War 3, was all that lacking, but it's fitting to call Gears of War 2 the Empire Strikes Back of that initial trilogy.
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S929 Years Later, Star Trek Showrunner Reveals One Hero's Secret Journey  Mike McMahan reveals Mariner's timeline and why 'Lower Decks' became a sequel to 'The Next Generation.'Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation will never watch two episodes of the classic show the same way again. In a way that is both profound and tender, the animated comedy series Lower Decks has insinuated itself into the backstory of two TNG classics, “The First Duty,” and the beloved 1994 episode “Lower Decks,” to which the series owes its name. But, Lower Decks didn’t create this retcon for laughs. Instead, the emotional arc of Lower Decks Season 4 pays off TNG-era Star Trek character drama, several decades in the making. For showrunner and series creator Mike McMahan, this wasn’t an easy decision.
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S10Can You Learn to Meow Like Your Cat? Yes and No, According to an Animal Behavioralist  Whenever my cat meows incessantly in my direction despite my attempts to play with him, I so wish I could just speak meow to figure out what he really wants. (Though I'd place my bets on it being treats.)“It's kind of a yes-no answer,” Molly DeVoss, a cat behavior specialist, tells Inverse. Cats do recognize different pitches and tones, she says. In fact, cats seem to pay attention to the way their owners address them and can recognize whether they’re being spoken to based on voice and tone. One 2022 study published in the journal Animal Cognition found that if a pet owner spoke in baby talk to their cat, the cat responded with much more alertness to this voice than to their owner speaking normally to other humans or speaking to a stranger in baby talk.
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S11'Rick and Morty' Is Finally About to Explain the Season 7 Trailer's Weirdest Moment  An oft-forgotten tidbit about Rick Sanchez is that he just might be the best cook in the multiverse, despite the fact we rarely ever see him do much more in the Smith family kitchen than chug booze. He relished in garnishing the canapés he made for the party in Rick and Morty Season 1’s “Ricksy Business,” and the non-toxic version of Rick in Season 3’s “Rest and Ricklaxation” was delighted at the prospect of picking fresh basil in the garden for a “nice scallopini.” Now, in Season 7’s fourth episode, it’s time for… Rick’s Famous Spaghetti!“That’s Amorte” features a previously unknown Smith family tradition of spaghetti Thursdays. But is there a marinara-colored red flag that something strange is going on? Rick and Morty Season 7, Episode 4 is almost here, so here’s everything you need to know from the release date and time to the episode title and other details.
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S12Be Gay and Do Crime in The Best Swashbuckling Video Game of 2023  For years I have wanted to take up fencing. The idea of doing a sport that gives me a reason to own and use a sword has always been the perfect sales pitch for me. Sadly, in my research to take up foil (or saber, or épée — I haven’t decided), I found that fencing is quite an expensive sport to dive into. Thank god there are video games like En Garde! The self-described swashbuckling title is an indie delight on PC that blends humor, style, and satisfying swordplay.Even before getting to the sword fighting, players will take note of the Pixar-esque art style of En Garde! The warm sun-drenched environments decorated with specks of color and vibrant costumes that drip with personality are a feast for the eyes. At the center of all this visual wonder is the game’s protagonist Adalia de Volador.
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S13This One Mindset Shift Could Radically Change How We Experience Chronic Pain  People often use the phrase “mind over matter” to describe situations where aches and pains in the body are overridden using the mind. People often use the phrase “mind over matter” to describe situations where aches and pains in the body are overridden using the mind. A gardener comes in from gardening and is surprised to discover a nasty cut on her hand, something she wasn’t aware of while focused on her plants. Or a soldier in Afghanistan is wounded by a bullet but feels little pain until he is safe in the infirmary. If pain was directly and entirely linked to bodily injury, these examples would be impossible. A cut would always lead to mild pain, whereas a gunshot wound would immediately cause severe pain. But this is not always the case.
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S14Amazon's Selling a Ton of These 50 Weird, Cheap Things That Work So Freaking Well  Sometimes you have to think outside the box to come up with a great solution to all of life’s little problems. And the weird items on this list are gaining new fans daily thanks to their low prices and high level of functionality. From a popular cover that will keep your microwave clean to a bug-shaped flashlight that runs for 22 hours, everything has a genius design that allows it to work effectively.Coming with a retractable brush, a microfiber cloth, and two multifunctional pens, you’ll have everything you need to keep your devices spotless with this laptop cleaner kit. You’ll be able to remove embedded dirt from between keys and leave your screens streak-free. The tools can also be used on your phone, camera, wireless earbuds, and more.
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S15Writing a Rejection Letter (with Samples)  I have a friend who appraises antiques — assigning a dollar value to the old Chinese vase your grandmother used for storing pencils, telling you how much those silver knickknacks from Aunt Fern are worth. He says the hardest part of his job, the part he dreads the most, is telling people that their treasure is worthless.
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S16How to Stop Saying "Um," "Ah," and "You Know"  When you get rattled while speaking — whether you’re nervous, distracted, or at a loss for what comes next — it’s easy to lean on filler words, such as “um,” “ah,” or “you know.” These words can become crutches that diminish our credibility and distract from our message. To eliminate such words from your speech, replace them with pauses. To train yourself to do this, take these three steps. First, identify your crutch words and pair them with an action. Every time you catch yourself saying “like,” for example, tap your leg. Once you’ve become aware of your filler words as they try to escape your lips, begin forcing yourself to be silent. Finally, practice more than you think you should. The optimal ratio of preparation to performance is one hour of practice for every minute of presentation.
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S17To Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking, Stop Thinking About Yourself  Even the most confident speakers find ways to distance themselves from their audience. It’s how our brains are programmed, so how can we overcome it? Human generosity. The key to calming the amygdala and disarming our panic button is to turn the focus away from ourselves — away from whether we will mess up or whether the audience will like us — and toward helping the audience. Showing kindness and generosity to others has been shown to activate the vagus nerve, which has the power to calm the fight-or-flight response. When we are kind to others, we tend to feel calmer and less stressed. The same principle applies in speaking. When we approach speaking with a spirit of generosity, we counteract the sensation of being under attack and we feel less nervous.
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S18Research: Consumers Choose Shared Experiences Over Quality Ones  Some consumer experiences are best when they’re solo — but new research shows that people will forgo a high-quality experience in order to share it with a partner or loved one. As a result, they may have a worse time, which can lead to unsatisfied consumers, lower sales, and neglected business opportunities. This article explains why people tend to stick together, even when it isn’t necessarily beneficial, and outlines several ways marketers can encourage people to break apart (even briefly) in order to boost their satisfaction.
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S19S20S21S22S23Climate scientists are working with indigenous tribes  When the warm nights used to come each summer, Frank Ettawageshik would spend most of his time outdoors, sleeping outside, right on the ground. Today, he balks at the thought."I was 35 or so before I ever saw a tick," says the 74-year-old executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, a Native American advocacy group. Now in northern Michigan, he says, "there's ticks all over the place".
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S24The people who live in multiple timelines  The first time I'd been a bit preoccupied and unprepared for the existential baggage of a milestone birthday – particularly since I thought I was only 38. I turned 40 again a few months later. Well, I never had been good at maths. But then I turned 41 a few times, and then 40 once more. Nope, time was clearly out of joint.It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years – or multiple ages – simultaneously. Right now it is the start of 2023 everywhere in the world. But step into Myanmar and it's also 1384, while Thailand will shoot you forward to 2566. Moroccans are praying in 1444 but farming in 2972, and Ethiopians are working their way through 2015, which for them has 13 months. Meanwhile in South Korea, where I live, New Year is everybody's birthday. This explains how I turned 40 three times.
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S25Rats Use the Power of Imagination to Navigate and Move Objects in a VR Landscape  Humans use imagination for far more than daydreaming. The ability to visualize possible scenarios is something we do every single day. We mull over alternative routes to avoid traffic, cook up last-minute dinner plans and mentally prepare for tomorrow’s meeting.But we are not alone. A new research finding demonstrates quite vividly how humans are not the only species possessing an imaginative ability to think ahead. Researchers recently outfitted several rats with a high-tech device that tracks brain activity and observed how the rodents mentally maneuvered through a virtual reality environment. Their findings, published today in the journal Science, reveal that the rats are capable of seemingly thinking about locations and objects that are not immediately in front of them.
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S26The U.S.'s First Black Female Physician Cared for Patients from Cradle to Grave  Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to receive an M.D., earned while the Civil War raged, and the first Black person in the country to write a medical book, a popular guide with a preventive approachRebecca Lee Crumpler, born in 1831, was the first African American female medical doctor in the U.S. and is considered the first Black person to publish a medical book. In it, Crumpler lays out best practices for good health, with a focus on women and children. She writes that she was inspired by her aunt, a community healer and midwife, who raised her in Pennsylvania.
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S27Zoomable JWST Image Brings Far-Distant Galaxies to Your Fingertips  The James Webb Space Telescope is gazing across the universe to find galaxies close to the “cosmic dawn”—and you can explore them from the palm of your handThat poetic phrase is what astronomers call the time just a few hundred million years after the big bang when the very first stars switched on, flooding the cosmos with light.
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S28Precision Cancer Drugs Glitter with Promise - If You Can Get Them  A growing arsenal of genetically tailored oncology treatments have spectacular results, but scope and access remain limitedThe landscape of cancer treatment changed forever in 1998, when U.S. authorities approved the first genetically tailored precision cancer therapy. The drug, Herceptin, zeroes in on the activity of HER2—a gene that can make breast cancers especially aggressive compared with HER2-negative cancers. When the gene is mutated, it overproduces the corresponding human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein to trigger unhinged cell division. More traditional treatments attack both cancerous and healthy cells, but Herceptin goes after the root cause of a cancer’s growth by blocking the gene’s misbehaving proteins. Today, thanks to such targeted drugs, people with HER2-positive breast cancers have similar long-term survival odds as those who don’t.
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S29Godzilla Is Warning Us Again about the Threats to Our Planet  It’s not just nukes: the power at the heart of the Godzilla franchise is our awareness of the global consequences of human follyThe beast is born in fire. Once a prehistoric denizen of the deeps, it comes ashore on a tsunami tide, tall as a thunderhead, shrugging off artillery as it bellows a foghorn scream. It stomps. It breathes atomic fire. And it’s the star of the world’s longest continually running film franchise, the latest of which debuts this December: Godzilla.
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S30Lost River Landscape Discovered below East Antarctic Ice  A preserved river landscape from the time before Antarctica was icebound persists more than a mile below the East Antarctic Ice SheetAn ancient river system from the era when the bottom of the world was ice-free is buried more than a mile deep below the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
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S31NASA Asteroid Mission Discovers Tiny Surprise Moon with 'Really Bizarre' Shape  NASA’s Lucy mission flew past an asteroid nicknamed Dinky, only to discover an even smaller space rock orbiting itNASA’s Lucy mission has just snagged a celestially good deal: two asteroids for the price of one flyby. While flying past a small main-belt asteroid called Dinkinesh the spacecraft found an even smaller “moon” orbiting it. The two form a binary asteroid pair.
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S32Starfish Are Heads - Just Heads  At first glance, starfish seem to be all limbs, with five appendages lined with rows of tube feet giving them their signature shape. Marine scientists have long wondered how they evolved to have such anatomy—and where their head might be.It turns out that, genetically speaking, the animals are actually almost all head and no trunk, according to a new study published in Nature. The finding upends previous hypotheses about the body plans of starfish and is outright surprising, even to experts. “They’re all head?!” wrote Gail Grabowsky, a professor of environmental science at the Chaminade University of Honolulu, who wasn’t involved in the paper, in an e-mail to Scientific American. The results are “just super cool,” she added. Plus, they offer clues about how these creatures became such bizarre evolutionary exceptions.
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S33Earth Reacts to Greenhouse Gases More Strongly Than We Thought  Climate scientists, including pioneer James Hansen, are pinning down a fundamental factor that drives how hot Earth will getFor nearly 40 years, Hansen has been warning the world of the dangers of global warming. His testimony at a groundbreaking 1988 Senate hearing on the greenhouse effect helped inject the coming climate crisis into the public consciousness. And it helped make him one of the most influential climate scientists in the world.
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S34AI Needs Rules, but Who Will Get to Make Them?  Skirmishes at the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit expose tensions over how to regulate AI technologyAbout 150 government and industry leaders from around the world, including Vice President Kamala Harris and billionaire Elon Musk, descended on England this week for the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit. The meeting acted as the focal point for a global conversation about how to regulate artificial intelligence. But for some experts, it also highlighted the outsize role that AI companies are playing in that conversation—at the expense of many who stand to be affected but lack a financial stake in AI’s success.
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S35Why You Can't Stop Reading About Daylight Saving Time  It was 15:37 (GMT) on a Thursday afternoon when we officially ran out of ideas. The request from the editors had been bouncing around for a couple of weeks: We need to write about the clocks going back. We'd groaned and tried to ignore it, but it kept resurfacing. Like time itself, the need was eternal.If you're not in the digital publishing business you might not know this, but people absolutely love reading articles about the clocks changing. They are routinely among the biggest performing stories on the site, and perhaps the purest distillation of how web traffic works in 2023: Find something that people are Googling and write about it so that when they Google it, they'll click on it.
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S36Xiaomi's 13T Pro Is a Slightly Cheaper Flagship Phone  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 WIREDXiaomi has put some features that make its devices compelling into a relatively affordable package called the 13T Pro. This smartphone, ahead of the next flagship generation, packs an excellent Leica-branded camera, a large display, and beefy specs. Sensible compromises keep the price down while still delivering a taste of Xiaomi’s top-tier tech.
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S37Review: 'Alan Wake II' Is Far Darker Than Its Predecessor--and Perfects the Horror Genre ![]() 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 WIREDAlan Wake II begins with a man stumbling naked through the woods at night. He has just emerged from a lake, mud clinging to his back, and his body a deathly blue that blends with the thick shadows of the forest. Whispered words and groans sound in his ears as he runs, sudden flashes of a screaming face explode before his eyes like fireworks, and homicidal figures in deer masks appear from the murk to threaten him. Very soon this man will be dead and splayed on a picnic table, a pair of FBI agents examining his rigid corpse for clues to the motivation behind his murder and the ritual defilement of his body.
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S3840% of people willfully choose to be ignorant. Here's why  Do you have an uncle who believes vaccines cause autism but refuses to study the reams of research showing them to be safe? What about a friend who avoids information about factory animal farming so they can eat cheap meat guilt-free? Or how about that CEO who claims their business is ethically minded, yet doesn’t investigate its supply chain for exploitation of the environment or the impoverished?Each is an example of what psychologists call willful ignorance — the intentional act of avoiding information that reveals the negative consequences of one’s actions. Not to judge: We all have a place in our lives where we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It may be personal, political, or professional in nature, but just below the conscious surface, we know our actions don’t align with our stated values.
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S39The Kakhovka Dam disaster revealed an archaeological "goldmine"  One June 29, a local man was walking along the beach on the island of Khortytsia, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, when he noticed what looked like a log half submerged in water. When he approached, he realized the log was part of a boat, one that was possibly centuries old.The man called wardens at the Khortytsia National Reserve, the large national park on the island. Soon the police arrived to cordon off the area, followed by engineers and archaeologists who started an operation to rescue the precious find.
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S40CRISPR cure for HIV now tested in 3 patients  California-based biotech company Excision BioTherapeutics has shared data from the first human clinical trial of a CRISPR cure for HIV — and it’s both encouraging and frustratingly light on details.The challenge: HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was, thanks largely to antiretroviral therapy (ART), daily medications that can decrease the amount of the virus in a person’s blood to levels that are undetectable and untransmittable.
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S41S42Dealmaster: Pre-Black Friday deals on home entertainment, Herman Miller chairs, and laptops  Whether you need a monitor for work or you want a larger living room screen for entertainment, our curated pre-Black Friday Dealmaster comes with plenty of savings on monitors, displays, and TVs. Complete the setup with upgraded audio, as we found some deals on soundbars, speakers, headphones, and more. In addition to home entertainment, there are savings on Lenovo laptops, Apple MacBooks and iPads, chargers and tech gear, and more. And for a luxurious and ergonomic upgrade, Herman Miller's popular office and gaming chairs, including the Aeron and Embody, are on sale at up to 25 percent off, making it a perfect self-care gift for yourself or your loved one for the holiday.
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S43What do we know about the Switch 2's hardware power?  That chip is the Nvidia T239, a scaled-down, custom variant of the Nvidia Orin T234 that is popular in the automotive and robotics markets. While Digital Foundry can't say definitively that this is the next Switch chip with "absolute 100 percent certainty," the website points to circumstantial links and references to the chip in a number of leaks, a recent Nvidia hack, LinkedIn posts from Nvidia employees, and Nvidia's own Linux distribution.
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S44S45S46S47A historic Falcon 9 made a little more history Friday night  CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times. For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit.
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S48No, Okta, senior management, not an errant employee, caused you to get hacked  Identity and authentication management provider Okta on Friday published an autopsy report on a recent breach that gave hackers administrative access to the Okta accounts of some of its customers. While the postmortem emphasizes the transgressions of an employee logging into a personal Google account on a work device, the biggest contributing factor was something the company understated: a badly configured service account.
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S49Hitting the trails with a low-priced e-mountain bike  The subject of this review, SWFT's new Apex mountain bike, pulls together threads from two bikes we've looked at previously. One of those threads came courtesy of SWFT, which introduced itself to the world with the Volt, an exercise in trying to get e-bike prices down to the point where they weren't competing with a decent used car. While the Volt wasn't a great bike, it was perfectly functional and offered a decent ride at a sub-$1,000 price. Now, SWFT is trying to work that same magic with a mountain bike.
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S50When the natural gas industry used the playbook from Big Tobacco  In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author, and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, Julia Child & Company, following her hit series The French Chef. Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.
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S51The Hong Kong Activist Who Called Washington's Bluff  The United States praised Joshua Wong and pledged itself to Hong Kong’s freedom. But when China cracked down, Wong found himself with nowhere to go.On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.
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S52'There Will Probably Be a Cease-Fire. And Then They Will Just Be Names'  Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.Survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz (which lost a quarter of its population in the October 7 pogrom) had taken over Safra Square and installed an exhibit consisting of beds, neatly made, for each of the hostages currently in Gaza. They were arranged in a grid. Some were queen beds. Others were singles. Some had books on nightstands nearby. Several were IKEA cribs, for the dozens of children among the captives. One didn’t need to know even that one word of Hebrew to figure out what the crowd was demanding—the return of the hostages, without delay—and what it was promising: the creation of a civic movement that will continue screaming at the Israeli government, in anger and recrimination, until the hostages are back.
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S53Where Was the Actual Ice During the Ice Age?  On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline 18 feet up out of the sea. The biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” Waters says.For these two scientists who had spent much of the previous decade looking for evidence of ecological upheaval on the coast, Fraser says, there was only one thing to do: “We got on a plane.”
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S54What Really Happens When You're Sick  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.When you’re suffering from a cold, the situation might seem perfectly clear—your nose is stuffed. But the truth about what’s happening to you is a little more complicated. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is connected to the armpits.
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S55China's Two-Faced Approach to Gaza  A new pattern is emerging in Chinese foreign policy that bodes poorly for global stability: Chinese leader Xi Jinping pretends to favor peaceful resolutions to international conflicts while actually encouraging the world’s most destabilizing forces.In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents. But the Chinese government is, in effect, backing Hamas—and therefore terrorism. Xi’s position on Gaza is identical to his stance on the world’s other major conflict, the war in Ukraine. There, too, Beijing has asserted principled neutrality and even launched a peace mission, while at the same time deepening ties to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.
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S56America's Aging Presidential Front-Runners  President Joe Biden is facing a unique set of challenges as he prepares to run for reelection. The most unique of all: No one his age has ever run for president. And voters are worried, even those who give him credit for an improving economy. It’s also worth pointing out that Donald Trump is 77, and has been afflicted by more than the usual number of gaffes lately.On Capitol Hill, the GOP’s new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is a full week into the job and working to regain order. But the ideological divide among House Republicans is now attracting attention in the upper chamber after GOP anger over Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville stalling military promotions erupted on the Senate floor.
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S57How Generative AI Will Change Sales  Sales teams have typically not been early adopters of technology, but generative AI may be an exception to that. Sales work typically requires administrative work, routine interactions with clients, and management attention to tasks such as forecasting. AI can help do these tasks more quickly, which is why Microsoft and Salesforce have already rolled out sales-focused versions of this powerful tool.
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S586 Strategies for Leading Through Uncertainty  It seems that any given week provides ample reminders that leaders cannot control the degree of change, uncertainty, and complexity we face. The authors offer six strategies to improve a leader’s ability to learn, grow, and more effectively navigate the increasing complexity of our world. The first step is to embrace the discomfort as an expected and normal part of the learning process. As described by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, leaders must shift from a “know it all” to “learn it all” mindset. This shift in mindset can, itself, help ease the discomfort by taking the pressure off of you to have all the answers.
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S60Understanding that chronic back pain originates from within the brain could lead to quicker recovery, a new study finds  We have been studying a psychological treatment called pain reprocessing therapy that may help “turn off” unhelpful and unnecessary pain signals in the brain. To do this, we carried out a study in which some people were randomly chosen to receive the pain reprocessing therapy treatment, while some got a placebo injection into their backs.We included 151 adults ages 21 to 70 years old with chronic back pain. We found that 66% of participants reported being pain-free or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20% of people who received a placebo.
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S61What is intersectionality? A scholar of organizational behavior explains  In modern conversations on race and politics, a popular buzzword has emerged to describe the impact of belonging to multiple social categories. Known as intersectionality, the social theory has a complex history and refers to the intertwining of different identities, such as class, gender and age. It is often applied as a way to understand how individuals may experience multiple forms of prejudice simultaneously.
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S62We analyzed over 3.5 million written teacher comments about students and found racial bias  Written teacher comments about students can show implicit racial or ethnic and gender biases in school discipline, according to our recent study. Our study showed that teachers wrote more when describing behavior incidents of Black students compared with white students. They also used more negative emotions, words like “anger,” “hurt” and “disrespectful,” and used more verbs, such as “scraped,” “hit” and “spanked.” We found the opposite was true for Asian and Hispanic students compared with white students.
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S63The world's boreal forests may be shrinking as climate change pushes them northward  Earth’s boreal forests circle our planet’s far northern reaches, just south of the Arctic’s treeless tundra. If the planet wears an Arctic ice cap, then the boreal forests are a loose-knit headband wrapped around its ears, covering large portions of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. The boreal region’s soils have long buffered the planet against warming by storing huge quantities of carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere. Its remoteness has historically protected its forests and wetlands from extensive human impact.
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S64Defending space for free discussion, empathy and tolerance on campus is a challenge during Israel-Hamas war  College and university campuses across the U.S. have seen polarization and unrest since the Israel-Hamas war began with the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Students and faculty have held protests and rallies, argued on social media and signed statements, some of which have increased mistrust and turmoil on campus. Some college leaders have weighed in on the war, which has not necessarily calmed their campuses. At the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, scholar David Mednicoff chairs the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He spoke with The Conversation’s senior politics and democracy editor, Naomi Schalit, about how he and his colleagues and university leadership have tried to deal – as an educational institution and a community – with a highly charged situation on campus in which there is pain, anger and anguish on both sides. Mednicoff aims to contribute to an approach he believes central for his community: respectful discussion, listening and seeking understanding, and the chance for open minds and hearts in the middle of conflict. Immediately after the Oct. 7 attack, many Jewish students and community members with ties to Israel felt shocked, scared, confused and worried, and sought support from the university.
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S65Biden's executive order puts civil rights in the middle of the AI regulation discussion  Margaret Hu is a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum. She is also a Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology and a member of the Scholars Council with Data & Society. On Oct. 4, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: A Vision for Protecting Our Civil Rights in the Algorithmic Age. The blueprint launched a conversation about how artificial intelligence innovation can proceed under multiple fair principles. These include safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination protections, privacy and transparency.
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S66Vampire viruses prey on other viruses to replicate themselves -  Have you ever wondered whether the virus that gave you a nasty cold can catch one itself? It may comfort you to know that, yes, viruses can actually get sick. Even better, as karmic justice would have it, the culprits turn out to be other viruses.Viruses can get sick in the sense that their normal function is impaired. When a virus enters a cell, it can either go dormant or start replicating right away. When replicating, the virus essentially commandeers the molecular factory of the cell to make lots of copies of itself, then breaks out of the cell to set the new copies free.
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S67When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached for tobacco's PR playbook  In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, “Julia Child & Company,” following her hit series “The French Chef.” Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.While this may seem like any corporate sponsorship, we now know it was a part of a calculated campaign by gas industry executives to increase use of gas stoves across the United States. And stoves weren’t the only objective. The gas industry wanted to grow its residential market, and homes that used gas for cooking were likely also to use it for heat and hot water.
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S68All-UK astronaut mission shows that private enterprise is vital to the future of space exploration  The UK Space Agency has signed an agreement with a US company called Axiom Space to develop a space mission carrying four astronauts from the UK. The flight would most likely use the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle and travel to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew is expected to include a reserve astronaut recently selected by the European Space Agency (Esa) and two other commercial astronauts. There are also reports it could be commanded by the recently retired Tim Peake.
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S69BBC's emergency Gaza radio broadcasts show why World Service mustn't rely on digital technology  The BBC has just announced that it will start an emergency radio service for listeners in Gaza. Daily news bulletins will be produced in London and Cairo by BBC News Arabic, the corporation’s Arabic-language television service. The radio service will broadcast on medium wave, initially with a single afternoon programme from November 3, and an additional morning programme from November 10. The BBC’s stated aim is to provide “vital news daily to the people of Gaza during this time of urgent need”, including practical information about where to access shelter, food and water supplies.
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S70Gaza Update: as Israel begins its ground offensive, the conflict's reverberations are being felt far beyond the Strip  The ground assault on Gaza is now well underway and, as they advance into the Strip’s urban areas, the Israel Defence Forces are coming up against an elusive enemy that has been preparing for this conflict for years. For Hamas’s military wing, a key part of those preparations has been the construction of a large network of tunnels which it can use to move fighters from location to location to mount hit and run attacks and vanish again. Destroying this network is one of the key objectives of what Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says is the “second phase” of this campaign. Known as the “Gaza Metro”, this comprises an estimated 300 miles of tunnels, some as deep as 70 metres underground. The network has been under development for years, but construction was stepped up when Israel relaxed its embargo on the shipment of building supplies into Gaza in 2012.
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