   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S61America's Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist   Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.In late 1922, The New York Times reported the “rumor” passing through Berlin that Henry Ford was bankrolling Adolf Hitler and his curiously well-funded Nazi movement. The wall of Hitler’s office featured a large picture of the American mogul, the Times noted, and copies of a book bearing Ford’s byline littered a table in the anteroom. Titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, the volume was an anthology of articles published by Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper, which two years earlier had launched an unrelenting crusade to expose Jews’ supposed “financial and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of necessities, and autocratic direction of the very news that the American people read.” The series, which eventually spanned 92 issues over seven years, concluded that the “International Jew and his satellites” lurked behind virtually all of the world’s ills: labor unrest, Bolshevism, financial panics, wars.
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S3S4You Might Be Too Woke to Get Work  The nation's most powerful law firms just sent a warning to the nation's top law schools and their students about the rights of others and that actions have consequences. The message is something that all businesses should keep in mind as they look to hire graduates.
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S5S6S7S8S9S10S11How Generative AI Will Transform Knowledge Work  Generative AI can be a boon for knowledge work, but only if you use it in the right way. New generative AI-enabled tools are rapidly emerging to assist and transform knowledge work in industries ranging from education and finance to law and medicine. Companies are starting to introduce generative AI-powered innovations into their processes, and to promulgate policies on how to use the tools safely. However, there is no need to wait for these externally-imposed changes. You can start now to use generative AI for your own benefit, once your understand and learn to mitigate the associated risks. Using free tools already available on the web, you can reduce your cognitive load from constantly rising tides of information, while also boosting your cognitive abilities and learning effectiveness. Now is the time to start using generative AI in your knowledge work, and to help your colleagues to use it wisely.
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S12A High-Performance Coach on the Key to Achieving Your Full Potential  What holds many people back from attaining the success they want - whether it’s winning an Olympic medal or a seat in the C-suite – isn’t a lack of effort or talent. It’s the fear of other people’s opinions. That’s according to Michael Gervais, a performance expert and founder of the consultancy Finding Mastery. He works with top athletes and executives around the world to help them overcome FOPO and improve their performance and well-being. Gervais is the author of the book The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about What People Think of You.
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S134 Factors That Will Help Project Managers Fulfill AI's Potential  According to Gartner, 80% of project management tasks will be run by AI by 2030. Indeed, AI is transforming every aspect of work, including our management of people and projects. However, to realize AI’s transformational potential for project management, four critical pieces must come together: 1) organizations will need high-quality data; 2) human employees will need to think of AI as a copilot; 3) humans will need reskilling; and 4) organizations will need to prioritize the human experience. To truly realize AI’s full project management potential, humans will ultimately be the key. Success will ultimately be determined by whether they have both the skills and the comfort level, not to mention the leadership and mindset, needed to leverage rather than resist AI.
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S14S15How Leaders Can Create a Purpose-Driven Culture  Companies are increasingly emphasizing a corporate purpose beyond mere profitability. The success of this integration largely hinges on organizational culture. Leaders, spanning all tiers, need to genuinely exemplify and articulate the company’s values, as demonstrated by companies like Netflix and LUSH. It’s vital for employees to perceive their daily roles as contributing to this larger purpose, with firms like Atlassian and Cisco offering noteworthy models. Crucially, recognizing and rewarding behaviors that align with a company’s purpose, as seen with Patagonia and Unilever, solidifies this culture. In essence, a genuine, purpose-driven culture can significantly enhance long-term shareholder value, societal contributions, and environmental stewardship.
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S16Creating an Organizational Culture That's More Inclusive for Black Employees  What comprises an organizational culture that makes Black employees feel welcomed and valued? According to research and in-depth interviews, two qualities stand out, particularly among Black workers in market-focused sectors: the ability to collaborate and the space to be open about race at work. Both are areas where organizations are slowly moving the needle, and they should continue to do so in order to make organizations more racially inclusive.
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S17A 6-Step Plan to Prepare for Any Career Setback  Revenue spirals, industry shifts, and legislative changes can have unexpected ripple effects on your career advancement. Developing a predetermined fallback plan allows you to proceed with a clear head if you’re faced with a career setback. Importantly, fallback plans are not a marker of failure. Considering your options is an essential part of career exploration, adaptation to sudden transitions, and commitment to growth. The author, a career coach, presents six steps for creating a fallback plan so you’ll be ready in case you’re faced with a career setback.
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S18Taupo: 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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S19Message 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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S20Did 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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S21AI safety: How close is global regulation of artificial intelligence really?  As more than 100 attendees from civil society, the world's leading tech companies, and governments gathered in an English stately home, there was some tension.This was the world's first AI Safety Summit convened by a major international country, and was intended to help chart the future direction of the technology. And it was held at Bletchley Park, where more than 80 years ago, a group of British scientists broke the German Enigma code.
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S22How bubble curtains protect porpoises from wind farm noise  Over the past decade, a curious invention has spread across Europe's northern seas. It's called a big bubble curtain, it works a bit like a giant jacuzzi, and it helps protect porpoises from the massive underwater noise caused by wind farm construction. A very large, perforated hose is laid on the seabed, encircling the wind turbine site. Air is pumped through, and bubbles rise from the holes to the surface of the water, forming a noise-buffering veil.
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S23How regulation and consumer behavior drives fintech growth in Africa  Wiza Jalakasi is the director of Africa market development at Ebanx, a payment company headquartered in Brazil and focused on emerging markets. Ebanx grew fast in Latin America and has now expanded into Africa.Each market has unique regulatory dynamics and changing consumer behavior that favors certain local payment methods over others. For example, in Kenya, mobile money emerged as the dominant payment method because the government allowed telcos to offer financial services. Yet, in Nigeria, this model didn’t take off. Instead, the central bank, along with the banking sector, created a national switch that enabled instant bank-to-bank transfers. In South Africa, given a surge in online card fraud, users are increasingly switching to instant electronic funds transfers.
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S24Ideas | Apple should share its knowledge of Indian politicians' iPhone hacks  Barkha Dutt, an Emmy-nominated journalist from India, is the founding editor of the multimedia platform Mojo Story. She is the author of two books: “This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault Lines” and “Humans of Covid: To Hell and Back.”India’s opposition has accused the government of spying on them after multiple iPhone users in the country received an alert from Apple. “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone,” the automated text message read. So far, all the members of Parliament who have come forward about receiving the alert are those who oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
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S25Birds Named after People Will Get New English Names  Standard English names for North American birds will now focus on the animals rather than peopleTo J. Drew Lanham, a conservation and cultural ornithologist at Clemson University and a lifelong birder, the little brown bird officially called Bachman’s Sparrow has long been the pinewoods sparrow. He hopes that someday the latter name might become official. That change would replace the nod to a slave owner and vocal opponent of abolition and instead honor the sparrow’s own life and the disappearing pine forests through which its song lilts in the Southeastern U.S.
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S26Our Evolutionary Past Can Teach Us about AI's Future  Evolutionary biology offers warnings, and tips, for surviving the advent of artificial intelligenceAs artificial intelligence advances, experts have warned about its potential to cause human extinction. Exactly how this might come about is a matter of speculation—but it’s not hard to see that intelligent robots could build more of themselves, improve on their own designs and pursue their own interests. And that could be a threat to humanity.
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S27Understanding Consciousness Goes Beyond Exploring Brain Chemistry  We can account for the evolution of consciousness only if we crack the philosophy, as well as the physics, of the brainOver the summer, the neuroscientist Christof Koch conceded defeat on his 25-year bet with the philosopher David Chalmers, a lost wager that the science of consciousness would be all wrapped up by now. In September, over 100 consciousness researchers signed a public letter condemning one of the most popular theories of consciousness—the integrated information theory—as pseudoscience. This in turn prompted strong responses from other researchers in the field. Despite decades of research, there’s little sign of consensus on consciousness, with several rival theories still in contention.
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S28S29'ChatGPT Detector' Catches AI-Generated Papers with Unprecedented Accuracy  A new tool based on machine learning uses features of writing style to distinguish between human and AI authorsA machine-learning tool can easily spot when chemistry papers are written using the chatbot ChatGPT, according to a study published on 6 November in Cell Reports Physical Science. The specialized classifier, which outperformed two existing artificial intelligence (AI) detectors, could help academic publishers to identify papers created by AI text generators.
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S30S31Redefining Modern Luxury Consumption | Pinar Yildirim  Wharton’s Pinar Yildirim deciphers the changing consumer signals in the luxury market, the evolution of trends like “quiet luxury” and “conspicuous consumption,” and what it means for high-end brands. This episode is part of a series on “Holiday Retail.”Dan Loney: While retail overall is hitting some headwinds with an up-and-down economy, luxury retail is not. Sales appear to be strong, and companies are even doubling down on brick-and-mortar stores. What do you think is driving this want around luxury retail at the moment?
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S32Photographing nature beyond the limits of human perception  Artist Doris Mitsch invites us to revel in the wonders of nature through her dazzling photography: stacked images of starlings in flight, hawks surfing thermal updrafts, bats echolocating through the night sky and more. Revealing the hidden trails created by creatures in flight, her work offers unique insight into the intelligence behind nature's invisible rhythms.
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S3334 Viral TikTok Gifts That Are Actually Worth a Look  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 WIREDYou've probably heard someone say that over the past few years. Maybe you said it yourself. The popular app started out as a platform for creative dance routines, quick skits, and memes, but it's quickly turned into a catalog of shopping recommendations. But can you trust a viral TikTok product rave? Or will it turn out to be one of those shoddy products from as-seen-on-TV ads? Don't worry, the WIRED Gear team has you covered! We found some of the most popular TikTok gadgets and put them to the test, to find out if they're both viral- and gift-worthy.
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S34The 19 Best Subscription Boxes for Gifts  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 WIREDBetween birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, it's easy to run out of gift ideas. Don't throw your hands in the air yet—consider a subscription box. There are boxes for nearly every interest, and your giftee can try a bunch of stuff that would be far too expensive for you to compile yourself. You can buy them for one month, but we think three months makes the perfect gift since they'll get that warm giddy feeling again and again. I'm also a firm believer that you need to gift yourself every so often. These boxes work whether you're buying for yourself or someone else.
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S35A Major Alarm Is Flashing Under Greenland's Ice .jpg) Climate change would be much worse if it weren't for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere. That warming of the oceans has already been devastating for the organisms that live there, but it's also come back to bite us in a more unexpected way: It's contributing to the destruction of ice sitting on top of Greenland.That ailing ice sheet (the bit resting on land) contributed more than 17 percent of observed sea level rise between 2006 and 2018, and new research delivers yet more ominous news. (Greenland has much less ice than Antarctica but is losing 270 billion tons of it a year, compared to Antarctica's 150 billion tons.) Greenland's northern ice shelvesâthe ice that floats on the ocean instead of resting on landâhave actually lost more than a third of their volume since 1978, thanks to warm sea water eating away at their bellies. Three of these northern ice shelves have completely collapsed since the year 2000, and the five that remain are rapidly deteriorating, in turn destabilizing nearby glaciers.
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S36YouTube's Ad Blocker Detection Believed to Break EU Privacy Law  Privacy campaigner Alexander Hanff claims that YouTube’s new ad blocker detection is illegal under European law, and he's taking the fight to the European Commission.On November 6, German Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer addressed Hanff’s claim to the European Commission, formally requesting a legal position as to whether “protection of information stored on the device (Article 5(3) ePR) also cover information as to whether the user's device hides or blocks certain page elements, or whether ad-blocking software is used on the device” and—critically—if this kind of detection is “absolutely necessary to provide a service such as YouTube.”
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S375 Key Updates in GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI's Newest Model  OpenAI recently announced multiple new features for ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools during its recent developer conference. The upcoming launch of a creator tool for chatbots, called GPTs (short for generative pretrained transformers), and a new model for ChatGPT, called GPT-4 Turbo, are two of the most important announcements from the company's event.This isn't the first time OpenAI has given ChatGPT a new model. Earlier this year, OpenAI updated the algorithm for ChatGPT from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4. Are you curious how the GPT-4 Turbo version of the chatbot will be different when it rolls out later this year? Based on previous releases, it's likely the model will roll out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers first and to the general public later.
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S38Internet Blackouts in Gaza Are a New Weapon in the Israel-Hamas War  Since Hamas’ tragic October attack on Israel that killed at least 1,400 people, the country’s retaliation in Gaza has led to more than 10,000 deaths, according to unverified claims from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry, and broad destruction of the community's basic utilities and infrastructure. This includes its internet and communication systems, with dwindling connectivity largely cutting off 2.2 million Gazans from the outside world.On October 27, Israel reportedly imposed a full internet shutdown in the area, cutting off the last remaining connectivity for about 34 hours as its troops moved into the Gaza Strip. After what’s left of Gaza’s internet access was restored—data shows it stands at around 15 percent or less of usual connectivity—the area has suffered two other, similar connectivity blackouts. The most recent lasted for about 15 hours on Sunday as Israel was carrying out an intense operation to cut off Gaza City in the north from southern Gaza
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S39The 19 Best Shows on Apple TV+ Right Now  Slowly but surely, Apple TV+ is finding its feet. The streaming service, which at launch we called “odd, angsty, and horny as hell,” has evolved into a diverse library of dramas, documentaries, and comedies. It’s also fairly cheap compared to services like Netflix—and Apple often throws in three free months when you buy a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV.Curious but don’t know where to get started? Below are our picks for the best shows on the service. (Also, here are our picks for the best movies on Apple TV+.) When you’re done, head over to our guides to the best shows on Netflix, best movies on Hulu, and best movies on Amazon Prime, because you can never have too much television.
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S40A New US Privacy Bill Seeks to End Warrantless Police and FBI Spying  In 1763, the radical journalist and colonial sympathizer John Wilkes published issue no. 45 of North Briton, a periodical of anonymous essays known for its virulent anti-Scottish drivel—and for viciously satirizing a British prime minister until he quit his job. The fallout from the subsequent plan of the British king, George III, to see Wilkes put in irons for the crime of being too good at lambasting his own government reverberates today, particularly in the nation whose founders once held Wilkes up as an idol, plotting a revolt of their own.Wilkes’ arrest boiled the Americans’ blood. Reportedly, the politician-cum-fugitive had invited the king’s men into his home to read the warrant for his arrest aloud. He quickly tossed it aside. At trial, Wilkes explained its most insidious feature: “It named nobody,” he said, “in violation of the laws of my country.” This so-called general warrant, which subsequent lawsuits by Wilkes would see permanently banned, vaguely described some criminal allegations, but not a single place to be searched nor suspect to be arrested was named. This ambiguity granted the king's men near blanket authority to arrest anyone they wanted, raid their homes, and ransack and destroy their possessions and heirlooms, confiscating large bundles of private letters and correspondence. When the Americans later passed an amendment to ban vague legal warrants describing neither "the place to be searched" nor "persons or things to be seized," it was Wilkes's home, historians say, that they pictured.
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S41The Pros and Cons of Apple's HomeKit Secure Video  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 WIRED© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
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S42Euclid's first science images reveal what JWST cannot  No single observatory, no matter how powerful, can ever teach us all we want to know about the Universe on its own. No matter how advanced our telescope technology gets, there will always be a tradeoff between:among other aspects. While telescopes like Hubble and JWST have captured our imaginations with their deep, high-resolution views all across the Universe, they also face a tremendous limitation: they have narrow, small-angle fields of view, and can only see a tiny fraction of the sky at once.
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S436 forces that cause us to self-sabotage constructive feedback -- and how to overcome them  Whether you’re being told you are falling short of your potential, or falling short of someone else’s expectations, feedback stings. “Feedback is a gift,” is an easy bumper sticker to apply, but a harder philosophy to put into execution in your real life. Unleashing the power of feedback takes hard work. Making the choice to engage with feedback is what turns a painful comment into a strength. The way you transform an “ouch” into your superpower is to pick up the feedback, examine it, and make a plan for how you will do things differently the next time.Because what I’ve learned in my 23 years of being in business is that there is always a next time. Perhaps it’s not with the same people, or the same company, but opportunities to stop making the same mistake abound.
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S44Are parallel universes real?  Modern science can rule out some ideas, but not all of them. The possibility of the existence of parallel universes — which crucially depends on the definition of “parallel” — might be one of those ideas.We live in three dimensions, meaning that we can go left/right, up/down, and forward/backward. Living in our 3D world, it is difficult to envision a fourth spatial dimension, so let’s explore the concept with two dimensions existing in a three-dimensional space. Suppose we could only live in two dimensions. If those two dimensions were flat, this means that we would live on a plane. In this two-dimensional world, we would go about our lives moving east/west and north/south — but never climbing a set of stairs.
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S45A revolutionary new CRISPR treatment for sickle cell anemia may be imminent  I have a long-standing interest in sickle cell anemia, a genetic abnormality that is the scourge of approximately 100,000 Americans, primarily Black, who are afflicted with it.Sickle cell disease (SCD) is an inherited disorder marked by abnormal hemoglobin, the protein that delivers oxygen to the cells of the body. Normal red blood cells are disc-shaped and flexible enough to move smoothly through the blood vessels. In SCD, red blood cells become crescent or “sickle” shaped due to a genetic mutation in the patient’s hemoglobin.
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S46In countries where manhood must be proven, men have shorter lives  Stereotypes of manhood link it with strength, aggression, toughness, and courage. Moreover, manhood is often viewed as “precarious” — unlike womanhood, it must be earned and defended. Thus, one way men can protect their masculinity is by engaging in risky behaviors like fighting, binge drinking, or fast driving. (Male readers might themselves recall something stupid they did to “prove their manhood.”)Given that studies have repeatedly shown men to undertake more risky behaviors and to have shorter lives than women, a team of psychologists explored whether societal beliefs in precarious manhood might play a role in those differences. Their results were published in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities.
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S47Fruits and vegetables are trying to kill you  You probably try to exercise regularly and eat right. Perhaps you steer toward “superfoods,” fruits, nuts, and vegetables advertised as “antioxidant,” which combat the nasty effects of oxidation in our bodies. Maybe you take vitamins to protect against “free radicals,” destructive molecules that arise normally as our cells burn fuel for energy, but which may damage DNA and contribute to cancer, dementia, and the gradual meltdown we call aging.Warding off the diseases of aging is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. But evidence has mounted to suggest that antioxidant vitamin supplements, long assumed to improve health, are ineffectual. Fruits and vegetables are indeed healthful but not necessarily because they shield you from oxidative stress. In fact, they may improve health for quite the opposite reason: They stress you.
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S48S49The European Space Agency may have a bullying problem  Alex has been passionate about space exploration since her childhood. (Pseudonyms are used, and some genders are obscured throughout this piece, as sources requested anonymity to speak freely.) She considered pursuing astronomy as a career but ended up on a different professional path, one that ultimately led to a job at the European Space Agency (ESA). Alex thought she was set for a career filled with professional fulfillment.
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S50What to do if your new M3 Mac shows up with an old, non-updatable macOS version  Apple’s new M3 Macs are starting to land on doorsteps today, and at least a few people are facing an odd problem: Their Macs are showing up with an old, outdated build of last year’s macOS 13.5 Ventura on them, and checking for updates isn’t giving them the opportunity to update to either the current version of Ventura (13.6) or the recently released macOS Sonoma (14.1).
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S51S52Android 14's storage disaster gets patched, but your data might be gone  It's the start of November, and that means a new Android security patch. Google claims this one is fixing a high-profile Android 14 storage bug that was locking some people out of their devices. The November Security Bulletin contains the usual pile of security fixes, while consumer-oriented Pixel patch notes list a few user-facing changes. The important line is "Fix for issue occasionally causing devices with multiple users enabled to show out of space or be in a reboot loop." A footnote points out that this is for the "Pixel 6, Pixel 6a, 6 Pro, 7, 7 Pro, 7a, Tablet, Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro."
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S53PS5 "Slim" teardowns suggest same chip, not much shrinking, but nifty disc drive  You aren't supposed to be able to buy Sony's redesigned PlayStation 5 yet, but because global commerce is just too complicated, some people have already gotten their hands on them. One of those people is YouTube vlogger Dave2D. He gently took apart the unofficially named "Slim," noted the savings in weight, if not so much size, and detailed some intriguing details about the new heat management and detachable disc drive.
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S54S55Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes  Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its "myQ" smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers. That's "unauthorized usage" by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain's customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn't want that.
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S56Xbox moderation team turns to AI for help filtering a flood of user content  Anyone who's worked in community moderation knows that finding and removing bad content becomes exponentially tougher as a communications platform reaches into the millions of daily users. To help with that problem, Microsoft says it's turning to AI tools to help "accelerate" its Xbox moderation efforts, letting these systems automatically flag content for human review without needing a player report.
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S57S58A Knife Fight in a Phone Booth  Twenty years ago, on what looked like a movie set built in the Quantico woods, I learned how to fight in a city. This faux city was called “MOUT Town.” MOUT—Military Operations in Urban Terrain—is U.S. military-speak for high-intensity urban combat, like what’s unfolding in Gaza. Tactically, MOUT was very different from the traditional combat we’d already studied in the Marine Corps. The urban battlefield was highly constricted; streets and buildings funneled us into close quarters with our enemy. Beyond every corner, window, or doorway lurked a potential ambush. Most notably, and adding a specific and complex layer to this type of warfare, civilians blended with adversaries, all played by instructors who ambushed us with paintball guns. Casualty rates in urban warfare far exceed those of other forms of combat, a fact reinforced by the dime-size paintball welts that covered my body by the end of MOUT week.Less than a year later, in November 2004, I found myself leading a 46-man rifle platoon into Fallujah, in Iraq. This battle pitted 13,000 Marines and soldiers against a defending force of 4,000 al-Qaeda fighters. In staging areas outside the city, we drilled the urban tactics we’d learned in MOUT Town. Chief among those tactics was close-quarters battle, or CQB, a highly choreographed maneuver designed for hostage rescue in which a group of Marines enters a room and clears it of threats. These tactics look similar to what usually appears in movies featuring Navy SEALs or Delta Force operatives as they rescue hostages; it is a familiar, if violent, visual. The idea is to flood a room with so much speed and precision that you overwhelm a defending adversary; your enemy might be able to shoot the first man through the door, or even the second, but they’ll be killed by the third or fourth. In these situations, a room’s door isn’t even called a door; it’s called the “fatal funnel.” The first man knows he’s likely going to get shot—that’s his job.
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S59'How Much Can This Child Take?'  On the night of Friday, October 6, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg laid their hands on the head of their 23-year-old son, Hersh, so that they could bless him, a ritual of the Sabbath. They recited in Hebrew: May you feel God’s presence within you always, and may you find peace.It was an exquisitely temperate Jerusalem evening, and the Goldberg-Polin family made the most of it, dining al fresco at a long table of friends. Hersh’s presence was an unexpected blessing. He had only recently returned from several months of traveling across Europe by himself, occasionally meeting up with his boyhood friends. Earlier in the week, Hersh had told his mother that he would be away for the weekend, attending a music festival in the north. But that festival’s organizers had neglected to obtain the necessary permits, and the event ended prematurely.
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S60Eight Books That Explain How the World Works  Technologies such as skyscrapers, airplanes, and sewage systems are fundamental—and confusing. These titles explain how they actually work.Maybe this sounds familiar: You’ve stared idly through an airplane’s window and wondered, How exactly does that jet engine work? Or you’ve tracked a shipment from across the country, refreshing UPS’s website, and realized you have no idea how that package will actually make its way to your door. Or you’ve been notified that you must boil your tap water after an overnight “loss of pressure”—without knowing what that means, or why it’s affecting you.
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S62The Unabashed Jewishness of Barbra Streisand  In the history of Hollywood schmaltz, few moments quite beat the sight of Barbra Streisand dressed as a yeshiva boy, on her knees in prayer as the night sky swirls around her, plaintively singing in her buttery soprano, “Papa … can you hear me?”In 1983, Barbra was at the height of her stardom, a well-established diva with Funny Girl, A Star Is Born, and The Way We Were behind her. A silhouette of her nose was enough to identify her. She used that accumulated capital to make this: a musical adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” about a girl in the old country who wants to study Talmud and disguises herself as a boy to do so. The film has always had the taint of a vanity project and remains, as a result, vaguely embarrassing. When Streisand wasn’t nominated for best director and Yentl itself was barely recognized at the 1984 Oscars, a demonstration was staged outside the ceremony, with protesters carrying signs that read Barbra Was Robbed and What About Babs?? The outcry was a genuine objection on behalf of a rare woman director—but it was also kind of a joke.
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S63It's a Miracle Anyone Stays in Love  Fingernails, now on Apple TV+, is a mischievous brainteaser that challenges our preconceived notions of commitment.In the world of the new movie Fingernails, any two people who believe they have fallen in love can take a test to prove it. It’s simple enough: Each partner must rip out a fingernail, wait a few minutes for a microwavelike contraption to inspect it, and voilà! A result. A 100 percent score means a perfect match—and peace of mind. Fifty percent indicates that only one person is in love. And zero? Well, you know.
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S64My North Star for the Future of AI  The most powerful companies in the world are shaping what artificial intelligence will become—but they’ll never get it right without the ethos and values of university scientists.Whatever academics like me thought artificial intelligence was, or what it might become, one thing is now undeniable: It is no longer ours to control. As a computer science professor at Stanford, it had been a private obsession of mine—a layer of thoughts that superimposed itself quietly over my view of the world. By the mid-2010s, however, the cultural preoccupation with AI had become deafeningly public. Billboards along Highway 101 on the California coast heralded the hiring sprees of AI start-ups. Cover stories about AI fronted the magazines in my dentist’s waiting room. I’d hear fragments of conversation about AI on my car radio as I changed stations.
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S65'We Do Not Want to Deal With Customers Like You!'  Dragon Lee, a family-owned Chinese restaurant in upstate New York, is a beloved place. On Google, it has a 4.3-star average, with high praise for its crab rangoon. Every once in a while, though, someone leaves unhappy. The food “was absolutely terrible,” a Google reviewer recently wrote in a one-star rating—so bad that he later called to ask if there had been a sudden change of chefs. (There had not.) The reviewer, who didn’t respond to an interview request, wrote that he threw most of his meal in the garbage. “I will never go back,” he wrote. “Disgusting!”Dragon Lee could have ignored the response, or apologized profusely. It did neither. “Learn to spell and use grammar,” the restaurant replied—calling out his misspelled “General Soe’s chicken.” The idea that Dragon Lee had changed chefs was laughable: Since the start of the pandemic, the restaurant wrote, no one has wanted to work long hours in a hot kitchen. “WE DO NOT WANT TO DEAL WITH CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU AND YOU DO NOT DESERVE OUR SERVICE!” concluded the reply. “DO US AND EVERYONE A FAVOR, DO NOT EVER COME BACK TO THIS PLACE EVER AGAIN.”
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S66Maybe Don't Drive Into Manhattan  Next year, congestion pricing is coming to New York City. And maybe, just maybe, the toll for motor vehicles entering the lower half of Manhattan should be set at $100.That number comes from Charles Komanoff, an environmental activist, a transit analyst, and a local political fixture. It represents neither the amount that would maximize revenue nor the amount that would minimize traffic. Rather, it is an estimate of how much it really costs for a single vehicle to take a trip into the congestion zone—in economists’ terminology, the unpriced externality associated with driving into one of the most financially productive and eternally gridlocked places on Earth.
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S67'Dream Scenario' Doesn't Transcend a Great Premise  Nicolas Cage’s new movie has some fun with the collective unconscious, but it struggles to follow through on its delightful concept.Few faces have burned deeper into the collective unconscious than Nicolas Cage’s. As an unusual but captivating star of many blockbusters, and the centerpiece of endless internet memes, Cage has persisted in the cultural zeitgeist in some form or another for several decades, even as his status as an A-list actor has fluctuated. He’s the perfect choice to lead Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, a movie in which people around the world start to dream about the same person (played by Cage), who floats through some surreal landscape like a piece of mental detritus. After all, who among us hasn’t at one point or another idly pondered Nicolas Cage?
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S68How to Talk About the Middle East  “Rather than weakening us, doubt can provide strength and resilience,” one reader argues.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.
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S69Trump Can't Hide His Utter Disdain for the Rule of Law  The former president’s testimony in a New York courtroom was a sad spectacle for the country.In another historic first for a former president, Donald J. Trump testified for five hours yesterday in the trial of the civil fraud claims brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against him, his two sons, the Trump Organization, and other related defendants. Although his testimony probably shifted little for the state’s case against him, it was a sad spectacle for the rule of law and the sanctity of the judicial system in America. Trump reportedly yelled at Judge Arthur Engoron for several minutes in open court, declaring: “It’s a terrible thing you’ve done. You know nothing about me. You believe this political hack back there,” referring to James.
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S70The Lessons Israel Should Have Learned in Lebanon  If Israel is going to have any strategic success against Hamas, it needs to do three things differently from conflicts past.We are a month into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. The ferocity of Israel’s response to the murder of more than 1,400 Israeli citizens has been such that international concern for the Palestinians of Gaza—half of whom, or more than 1 million, are children under the age of 15—has now largely eclipsed any sympathy that might have been felt for the victims of the crimes that precipitated the war in the first place.
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