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 S6110 Years Ago, a Disappointing Video Game Battle Changed the Industry Forever   When the PlayStation 4 launched on November 15, 2013, Microsoft’s response was shocking: the company applauded its rival. “Congratulations on your launch, Sony,” read the social media posts, which were reciprocated by Sony wishing Microsoft all the best with the imminent Xbox One launch. What kind of wussy console war was this?The console wars aren’t dead — it’s easy to find someone willing to call you a childish idiot for owning the device of your choice — but they’re being fought by the equivalent of Japanese holdouts discovered in the ’70s. The number of gamers who own both a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X or S is growing, while console-exclusive games are getting rarer. With modern development costs in the stratosphere, creators look to the PC as a steady source of additional revenue (you don’t need to shell out for an Xbox just to play Starfield). Fans will always argue, but consoles have become all-purpose entertainment devices that happen to sport a few exclusives.
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S2How to Be a Better Leader Amid Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity  More than three decades ago, the U.S. Army War College developed a framework for understanding how leaders succeed during times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The framework, known as VUCA, has been widely discussed and adopted since, but it turns out to be better at describing what successful leaders do than teaching all leaders how to succeed. The authors present an updated approach that has generated positive outcomes in military, business, and sports contexts.
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S3Three big reasons Americans haven't rapidly adopted EVs  Throughout the past few years, analysts have touted electric vehicles as the future of transport – one Americans would dive into, eagerly and rapidly. The EV market is indeed expanding, but the US's electric vehicle 'revolution' appears to be happening much slower than some analysts and car manufacturers expected.Since 2016, sales of EVs in the US have grown – from nearly 65,000 vehicles sold in 2017, to more than 800,000 vehicles in 2022. Data from auto analytics firm Motor Intelligence showed EV sales rose 51% in the first half of 2023, following the upwards trend. However, those gains are still a drop from last year's 71% growth in the same timeframe. And Tesla, which leads the market with more than half of all EV sales, recently reported its lowest quarterly earnings in two years, leading to a $138bn (£111.4bn) drop in the company's stock value.
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S4Mii kathi: Thailand's sweet and sour breakfast noodles  If you didn't grow up on Ko Yao Noi, an island in Thailand's Phang-Nga Province, finding breakfast can require a bit of luck. On this and similarly small islands in southern Thailand, the first meal of the day is often sold from rural homes that double as simple restaurants – the kind of places non-locals would pass by without noticing.
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S5Can luxury fashion ever be fully sustainable?  Channing Tatum is hot. One evening in September, he was also a bit overheated. The Hollywood actor was at New York's Four Seasons Hotel as a guest of the Kering Foundation, a charity that was launched to combat gender-based violence. The foundation was marking its 15th anniversary with a September gala that showcased Kering's luxury brands – Gucci, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent among them. While Mr Tatum gently dabbed his forehead with a cocktail napkin, Isabelle Huppert, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Linda Evangelista were making the rounds and posing for photos. All were clad in designer gowns; all were a tiny bit sweaty. The doyenne of this literal hotspot was Marie-Claire Daveu, 51, who serves as Kering's chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer. Daveu heads up the brand's efforts on everything from recycled material sourcing to carbon footprint reduction. Famously, she also has a strict environmental policy of limiting "wasteful" air conditioning whenever possible - even when it's a balmy night in September, and Nicole Kidman is wearing a Balenciaga catwalk gown with full-length black gloves.
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S7Exposing plants to an unusual chemical early on may bolster their growth and help feed the world  Just like any other organism, plants can get stressed. Usually it’s conditions like heat and drought that lead to this stress, and when they’re stressed, plants might not grow as large or produce as much. This can be a problem for farmers, so many scientists have tried genetically modifying plants to be more resilient. But plants modified for higher crop yields tend to have a lower stress tolerance because they put more energy into growth than into protection against stresses. Similarly, improving the ability of plants to survive stress often results in plants that produce less because they put more energy into protection than into growth. This conundrum makes it difficult to improve crop production.
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S8People dig deeper to fact-check social media posts when paired with someone who doesn't share their perspective - new research  People fact-checked social media posts more carefully and were more willing to revise their initial beliefs when they were paired with someone from a different cultural background than their own, according to a study my collaborators Michael Baker and Françoise Détienne and I recently published in Frontiers in Psychology.If you’re French, you’re less likely than an English person to believe a tweet that claims Britain produces more varieties of cheese than France. And if you’re English, you’re more likely than a French person to believe a tweet that claims only 43% of French people shower daily.
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S9As national political omens go, Republicans sought middle ground on abortion in Virginia - and still lost the state legislature  The election results in Virginia offer Republicans across the country one key lesson before the 2024 presidential election: Revise the GOP position on the critical issue of abortion. Though not on the ballot, GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin had campaigned for other GOP members on his plan to ban abortions after 15 weeks, as opposed to the outright abortion ban that some Virginia politicians have promised to pass. Political observers saw Youngkin’s plan as a compromise that would limit the political fallout for the GOP from the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which constitutionally protected the right to abortion.
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S10With government funding running out soon, expect more brinkmanship despite public dismay at political gridlock  Much of the news coverage of the discussions and negotiations aimed at averting a government shutdown on Nov. 17, 2023, relies on pundits and their unnamed sources, on leaks, speculation, wishful thinking and maybe even the reading of tea leaves. The Conversation tapped an expert on congressional behavior, Northwestern University political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong, and asked her what she sees when she looks at the prolonged trouble Congress has had over the past few years coming to agreement on the debt ceiling and spending to keep the government open. Harbridge-Yong is a specialist in partisan conflict and the lack of bipartisan agreement in American politics, so her expertise is tailor-made for the moment. The problems that Congress and the White House are having in reaching compromises highlight two aspects of contemporary politics. The first: Since the 1970s, both the House and Senate have become much more polarized. Members of the two parties are more unified internally and further apart from the opposing party. You don’t have the overlap between parties now that existed 50 years ago.
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S11S12Ghanaians don't trust the police. A criminologist on what needs to be done about it  First is the effective use of police authority to protect citizens from violence and threats to their constitutional rights. Fear of crime is a reasonable indication of police effectiveness. Data from Afrobarometer shows that, in 2002, 16.8% of Ghanaians feared becoming victims of crime at their homes. This declined to 9.2% in 2012 but has now risen to 24.6%. The second dimension is lawful police conduct. Police officers do not serve this interest when they engage in illegal practices such as robbery, unlawful killing of civilians or bribery. A recent survey funded by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime showed that 53.2% of Ghanaians who interacted with police officers paid them a bribe.
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S13S14S15Kora: in search of the origins of west Africa's famed stringed musical instrument  “How come we’ve never heard of this beautiful instrument until now?” This was posted by a first-year college student to my world music course discussion board recently. He voiced what many of his peers probably felt after watching the extraordinary documentary Ballaké Sissoko, Kora Tales. The film, available for free online, follows Sissoko, a world class musical artist, from his home in Bamako, Mali to a sacred well and baobab tree in The Gambia on the Atlantic coast. In the film, the award-winning Sissoko revisits his childhood homeland and traces the origins of the instrument that became his destiny.
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S16How autistic parents feel about breastfeeding and the support they receive - new research  So, for our newly released study, we asked 152 autistic parents from across the UK about their breast- and formula-feeding experiences. Some 87% of those who breastfed were strongly motivated to keep breastfeeding even if they ran into difficulties, while only 54% of all the parents we interviewed used any infant formula. This is a substantially lower rate of formula use than we’d typically see in the UK, where 88% of babies receive some infant formula during their first six months.Almost half of our respondents found breastfeeding to be a positive or enjoyable experience most or all of the time. This included the experience of feeling bonded with their baby and enjoying learning about breastfeeding.
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S17Many physicists assume we must live in a multiverse - but their basic maths may be wrong  One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall within a certain, very narrow range. One of the examples of fine-tuning which has most baffled physicists is the strength of dark energy, the force that powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. If that force had been just a little stronger, matter couldn’t clump together. No two particles would have ever combined, meaning no stars, planets, or any kind of structural complexity, and therefore no life.
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S18Narges Mohammadi: 2023 Nobel peace laureate on hunger strike after being denied medical treatment over hijab ban  Narges Mohammadi, the recipient of the 2023 Nobel peace prize for her long fight against the oppression of women in Iran, is reported to have started a hunger strike. Her family told CNN this week that she began refusing food on Monday in protest over what she said was the jail’s refusal to provide her with medical treatment.Mohammadi is serving multiple sentences in Iran’s infamous Evin prison on charges that include spreading propaganda against the state. Her rights campaigns were characterised by the Nobel prize committee as a “brave struggle [that] has come with tremendous personal costs”.
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S19For All Mankind: space drama's alternate history constructs a better vision of Nasa  Great art is often difficult to quantify. Apple TV’s series For All Mankind is a case in point, running the risk of being too sci-fi for drama fans (rockets, moon bases, Mars) and having too much naturalistic drama for sci-fi aficionados (jealousy, divorce, institutional politics). Nonetheless, the show consistently rewards both sets of viewers by brilliantly blurring the line between reality and alternate history. It tells a compelling story wherein the Soviet Union beat the US to land on the Moon and, consequently, the space race never ended.
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S20State of Georgia using extreme legal measures to quell 'Cop City' dissenters  Earlier this week, nearly five dozen people appeared in a courtroom near Atlanta to answer criminal racketeering and domestic terrorism charges brought against them by the state. The charges are related to what’s commonly known as “Cop City,” a $90-million paramilitary police and firefighter training facility planned for 85 acres of forest near Atlanta.The Atlanta Police Association saw a need for such a facility at the start of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and started to fund raise. Many corporations have contributed to the plans for a world-class police training facility.
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S21How To Have Sex: landmark film wants to change how we talk about consent  Written and directed by Molly Manning Walker, How to Have Sex is a powerful rites-of-passage drama that follows the tale of three 16-year-old girls on a post-GCSE bender in the party resort of Malia, on the Greek island of Crete.I sat through most of this film feeling painfully uncomfortable. It authentically captures, in documentary fly-on-the-wall style, the riotous, noisy mayhem of my own teen years, partying on cheap booze and obsessing over boys. But now I am also watching as the mother of Gen Z teenagers.
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S22Suella Braverman: why the home secretary can't force the police to cancel a pro-Palestine march  The UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, has reached new heights with her criticism of the Metropolitan police over its handling of pro-Palestinian marches. In an op-ed for the Times, reportedly not cleared by Number 10, Braverman accused police of a double standard, treating left-wing marches more leniently than right-wing ones.In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have marched through London in a generally orderly way to protest what they consider to be indiscriminate harm being done to civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military.
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S23'Bluewashing': how ecotourism can be used against indigenous communities  When the notion of “ecotourism” was introduced in the late 1970s, it was intended to be ecologically responsible, promote conservation, benefit local populations and help travellers foster a “reconnection with biocultural diversity”. It’s now more of a marketing term, used to give mass adventure-tourism packages a more “responsible” sheen. Visitors might get a nature walk, but interactions with local residents are limited to souvenir sellers at best, and international consortiums arrange everything and keep the profits for themselves.While it’s no surprise that the original concept of ecotourism has been obscured by less virtuous projects, they become more problematic when they block local communities from ancestral lands or even involve their forced relocation. A recent case on the eviction of 16 villages on Rempang Island, Indonesia to build a solar panel factory and “eco-city” illustrates this. While the need to increase renewable energy production is urgent, it’s harder to justify when it comes at the expense of local residents’ lives and territorial sovereignty.
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S24S25Sunak's climate shift is out of touch with the demands of the UK's workforce - here's why  Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to introduce a bill aimed at granting new oil and gas drilling licences in the North Sea. The proposal was outlined in the 2023 king’s speech to parliament, where he set out the government’s priorities ahead of the next general election. This development comes less than two months after Sunak made a series of controversial announcements setting out the government’s revised strategy for achieving net zero emissions – a move that many argue has diluted its commitment to the UK’s climate objectives.
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S26Earth has many objects in orbit but definitely only one Moon - despite what some people think  Big Brother has always chosen its contestants for entertainment value rather than for intellectual debate. This was recently highlighted in a discussion started on the programme by dental therapist Chantelle, who suggested there must be more than one moon in the sky because it changes size and can be seen around the world. Chantelle had trouble believing that the Moon can be seen in the UK and Australia at the same time, when it takes almost a whole day and night to fly between the countries. Some of the other housemates tried to dissuade her of this view, while others decided not to get involved in the discussion.
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S27Ukraine recap: with winter closing in Zelensky resists calls to negotiate - but Gaza war adds to pressure  For the past month, the world’s attention has reeled at the violence in Israel and Gaza. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has ground on, day by day, metre by metre. Fierce fighting has continued in the north-eastern Donetsk region as a Russian offensive has attempted – thus far unsuccessfully – to consolidate its control by capturing the key town of Avdiivka, 20kms from the city of Donetsk. Avdiivka was occupied briefly in 2014 by Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” (Russian troops fighting without insignia), but was swiftly retaken by Ukraine which has heavily fortified the town. Reports from the frontline are that Russia has committed significant forces to the offensive, and suffered heavy losses.
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S28When Marx met Confucius: Xi Jinping's attempt to influence China's intellectual loyalties has met with a mixed reception at home and abroad  A new film series produced in China, When Marx met Confucius, was viewed more than 8 million times in the first two weeks after it was released online in October. But this is not another blockbuster drama of the sort China has been adept at producing in recent years, but a propaganda film aimed at popularising the latest version of what is known as “Xi Jinping thought”.Ever since Xi took power in March 2013, his regime has focused on introducing stricter ideological controls and banishing what it calls “false ideological trends, positions and activities”. The Chinese Communist Party has published regular communiques pushing Xi’s ideological line and When Marx met Confucius is the latest version of this propaganda drive. Its aim is to reconcile the regime’s official Marxist underpinnings with an appeal to a more specifically Chinese cultural heritage.
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S29S305 Aussie musicals you might not have heard of - but really should see  When you think of great Aussie musicals, some key films from the 1990s and 2000s come to mind: Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Moulin Rouge!, Bran Nue Dae and The Sapphires. These films are often framed as “reviving” the musical genre for Australian audiences, due in large part to their box-office success. While certainly fantastic films, there is actually a long history of Aussie musicals that have been popular with cinema audiences since the 1930s.
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S31S32S33S34Overwhelmed by group chat messages? You're not alone  For many of us, group chats are part of the texture of our social lives. These groups, formed on apps like Messenger or Whatsapp, can be as large as a hundred people or as small as three. We use them for organising one-off tasks or events, managing recurring coordination between groups like sports clubs or work teams, and keeping in touch with family and friends.
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S35S36S37S38New law sidesteps British culpability in Northern Ireland's Troubles  Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, Ontario The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act became law in the United Kingdom on Sept. 18. It is an attempt to resolve the many open investigations into murders committed during the 30-year armed conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.
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S39The experiences of older drivers can help design cleaner and safer cars  The current pace of technological change in automobile technology rivals the period about a century ago when cars were moving from the exotic fringes of transportation into the lives of ordinary people. The automobile has reshaped the world, giving rise to new freedoms and greater access to distant places, creating jobs and wealth and changing the physical landscape with roads, service stations, dealerships and suburbs.
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S40S41Maine voters don't like their electric utilities, but they balked at paying billions to buy them out  Frustration with electric utilities is universal today. Whether it’s concerns over high rates, poor service or a combination of both, people are constantly looking for a better answer to the systems that serve them.In the Nov. 7, 2023, election, voters in Maine had a chance to consider a new model for electricity service that would replace the state’s two widely unpopular private utilities, but they balked in the face of multibillion-dollar cost projections.
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S42S43Perimenopause usually begins in your 40s. How do you know if it has started?  More than half our population (50.7%) are born with ovaries and will experience perimenopause in midlife. This occurs as hormone levels decrease and ovaries slow their release of eggs. Perimenopause usually begins in the early to mid-40s. Some people even begin perimenopause earlier, due to premature ovarian insufficiency or medical treatments such as chemotherapy or surgical oophorectomy (ovary removal).
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S44Will Saturn's rings really 'disappear' by 2025? An astronomer explains  If you can get your hands on a telescope, there are few sights more spectacular than the magnificent ringed planet – Saturn.Currently, Saturn is clearly visible in the evening sky, at its highest just after sunset. It’s the ideal time to use a telescope or binoculars to get a good view of the Solar System’s sixth planet and its famous rings.
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S45We're in a new COVID wave. What can we expect this time?  Australia is now into its next COVID wave. We’ve seen hints of this for a while. Case numbers and indicators of severe disease began rising in Victoria in August. But it has taken several months for a consistent pattern to emerge across Australia. Now we see evidence of this new wave via wastewater surveillance for traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. We also see rises in COVID-related hospital admissions and antiviral prescriptions. Compared to past waves, this one has built up slowly and over a longer period.
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S46S47S48S49Cricket World Cup 2023: what it'll take for South Africa to win  Second-ranked South Africa is the only African team to make it to the semi-finals at the 2023 Cricket World Cup. After being banished from the international game in 1970 because of apartheid policies, the country began playing in the tournament in 1992 once democracy was on the cards. Since then South Africa have been semi-finalists often. But what are their chances of winning in 2023 and how does the country’s history live on today? We asked cricket expert Mogammad Sharhidd Taliep five questions.South Africa have performed admirably. Of the eight cricket world cups since 1992, they have reached the semi-finals in four, but have never proceeded to the finals. They “choked” in the crucial stages of their matches and were labelled “chokers”. This is their ninth cup and they are semi-finalists for the fifth time.
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S50Barbra Streisand's autobiography My Name is Barbra shows how she redefined the diva  Barbra Streisand, whose autobiography – My Name is Barbra – was published this week, is one of the most successful divas of the past 60 years.She has released 117 singles, 36 studio albums, 12 compilations, 11 live albums and 15 soundtracks. And there are the countless awards. A Tony, eight Grammys, five Emmys, four Peabodys, two Oscars, nine Golden Globes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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S51"The Marvels" and the Paradox of the Superhero Franchise  When the best part of a superhero movie is the screenplay, you know you're in trouble. There's enough going on in "The Marvels"âenough situations with dramatic potential, enough twists with imaginative powerâto develop several decent movies. Unfortunately, they're snipped and clipped, jammed and rammed, dropped into the movie (and swept out of it) with an informational indifference that doesn't even have the virtue of speed. The heedless rush to splash the story onto the screen leads to an appalling waste of the formidable talents marshalled to depict it.There are so many undeveloped elements here, but one of the most fundamental is dramatic morality: one mode of tragedy is a conflict of virtues, but there's hardly any villainy in "The Marvels," and everyone, more or less, has their reasons. The movie, directed by Nia DaCosta (who co-wrote the script with Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik), is a follow-up to the 2019 film "Captain Marvel." There, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), a U.S. Air Force pilot who has gained superpowers (and the moniker of the title), was caught in a war between two space peoples, the Kree and the Skrulls. In the follow-up, Danvers, accused of accidentally extinguishing the sun that made the Kree and Skrulls' planet habitable, is living in a guilt-ridden, self-imposed space exile. She's called back into action by the Avengers' handler Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to repair a so-called "jump point," a kind of space portal. She's joined in this mission by an astronaut named Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who was a child in the earlier movie. Their work brings them into contact, via a strange intergalactic connection, with a Jersey City teen-ager, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a big fan of Captain Marvel comic books who also has secret superpowers and has a special glowing gauntlet to prove it. The gauntlet is one of a pair, the other of which is in the possession of a Kree warrior named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton). She hates Captain Marvel for the destruction of her planet and seeks to maximize her powers by capturing Kamala's gauntlet. Meanwhile, when Monica and Captain Marvel meet at the jump point, they and Kamala all switch places with each other, thus making one another's battles suddenly their own as well.
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S52Ivanka Trump's Shockingly Smooth Case of Selective Amnesia  On Wednesday afternoon, Judge Arthur F. Engoron dismissed Ivanka Trump from the witness stand, and the New York attorney general's office rested its civil fraud case against Donald Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization. Ivanka, who was once a Trump Organization executive herself, as well as a White House official and the owner of an apparel business, strode out of the courtroom, and, soon after, cheers and jeers could be heard coming from outside the New York County Courthouse, where a small crowd of onlookers had gathered.In September, 2022, when the state attorney general, Letitia James, first brought the civil charges against the Trumps, Ivanka was a co-defendant. In June of this year, however, an appeals court dismissed her from the case on the ground that the claims against her were barred by the state's statute of limitations. (She left the Trump Organization in 2017 to serve as an aide in the White House, alongside her husband, Jared Kushner.) After making repeated efforts to avoid testifying, or to delay her appearance, she appeared at the trial as a reluctant witness for the government. In many ways, her nearly five hours of testimony encapsulated the entire trial so far, in substance if not in style.
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S53A High-Risk Legal Effort to Keep Trump Off the Ballot  Two and a half months ago, the top election official in Minnesota, Steve Simon, received a letter from Free Speech for People (F.S.F.P.), a small nonpartisan organization that advocates for democratic principles. The letter asked Simon, as secretary of state, to do something that has never been done before: prevent a former President, Donald Trump, from appearing on the state’s 2024 election ballots. “Under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Mr. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to appear on any future ballot for federal office based on his engagement in insurrection against the United States,” it said. “Allowing a known insurrectionist to appear on the ballot is inconsistent with your prior commitments and your oath of office to support the U.S. Constitution.”Simon, a Democrat, wasn’t so sure. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment says that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then participates in an insurrection—or gives aid or comfort to those who have—is disqualified from holding any office, civil or military. But Simon told me that he does not take a position on the eligibility of individual candidates. He wanted a judge to decide whether the ballots could feature Trump’s name. “Our job is to serve the voters, and for courts to do the fact-finding and make conclusions of law,” he told me. “There is an expectation here that the person who holds this office will leave their politics at the door . . . and not do anything that creates the appearance of putting their thumb on the scale for any candidate, any political party, or any ballot question.”
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S54Surveying the Vintage Market at Texas's Wildest Antique Fair  On a Tuesday morning in late October, Sheila Youngblood got in her Range Rover and headed past fields of grazing horses toward Marburger Farm, in Round Top, Texas. The morning drizzle had just let up, and yellow wildflowers dotted the roadside. Soon, traffic slowed to a crawl, and the wildflowers were replaced by tents full of a bewildering array of merchandise. For most of the year, Round Top has an official population of eighty-seven, but in October and March an estimated hundred thousand visitors come here to visit a sprawling antique market, one of the biggest in the world.Shoppers have been drawn to Round Top since a pair of Houston socialites hosted the town's inaugural sale, in 1968. In the early nineties, Youngblood visited the fair for the first time with her grandmother. "It was very small, just a select few buildings and fields," she said. "But there was just this spirit of treasure hunting." (As Youngblood recalls, her grandmother bought so many lamps, rugs, and assorted bric-a-brac that she had to tie her Lincoln Continental's door closed with her purse strap.)
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S55The Lessons of Ohio's Abortion-Rights Victory  Starting last spring, volunteers fanned out across Ohioâat farmers' markets, brewpubs, supermarkets, athletic fieldsâto try to persuade half a million people to sign a petition to get a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights on the November ballot. One afternoon, at Silk Road Textiles, in Cincinnati, among shelves of needlework books, two silver-haired volunteers sat at a table displaying stickers that said "O-H-I-Roe" and "Restore Roe," mottos designed to indicate that the proposed amendment would be anything but radical. As one of the organizers walked in, a volunteer called out, "We've had a really good day!" A few dozen signatures in the book, several hundred thousand to go. The immediate goal was to neutralize a law, passed and signed by Ohio Republicansânow blocked while under review by the Republican-controlled state Supreme Courtâprohibiting almost all abortions after about six weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest.On Tuesday, what started as a grassroots initiative with an uncertain outcome turned into the biggest victory for abortion rights since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, in June, 2022, overturned the rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. In a state that has long been dominated by Republicans, more than two million people endorsed a constitutional amendment asserting that "every individual has a right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions." The amendment, which, like Roe, allows the state to restrict abortion only after fetal viability, unless a doctor considers it necessary to protect the mother's life or health, passed by more than thirteen percentage points. Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, which promotes progressive ballot measures in red and purple states, told me, "A victory in Ohio really does tell all of us in the abortion-rights movement that this is possible almost everywhere."
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S56The Warnings About Trump in 2024 Are Getting Louder  Donald Trump often takes the breath away with his defiance of the basic norms of American public life. (See: January 6th.) But sometimes it’s the smaller encroachments on decency that serve as a reminder of how far outside the bounds he operates. “Can you control your client?” Judge Arthur Engoron demanded of Trump’s lawyer, during the former President’s testimony on Monday in Manhattan, where he stands accused of running a fraudulent business in the state of New York. “This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom.” Later, after yet another Trump soliloquy in response to a yes-or-no question, Engoron repeated his entreaty. “I beseech you,” the judge said, “to control him if you can.”Of course, seven years and five months into Trump’s political career, we know by now that there is no controlling Trump. And yet, exactly a year before Election Day, that rogue defendant in the dock is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but running in a dead heat with Joe Biden nationally and, if the shock poll that came out in the Times a day before Trump’s testimony is to be believed, ahead of him in five of six must-win battleground states. Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise even bragged about this in Engoron’s courtroom, citing the poll as he referred to his client as “the future President of the United States.” The poll’s release quickly sent Democratic Washington into a vaporous state of preëmptive blame-gaming about the status of the race: It’s Biden’s age. It’s his campaign. It’s the media’s fault. It’s all of the above. One anonymous sniper told NBC News that the campaign needed a “defibrillator.” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod even kinda, sorta, maybe suggested that Biden should consider stepping aside as the Party’s 2024 standard-bearer. The White House sought to downplay the fuss as the inevitable outcry from the Party’s large class of professional “bed wetters.” Perhaps, one Democratic strategist insisted, albeit anonymously, to the Washington Post, some bed-wetting was in order: “We should be terrified about what might happen.”
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S57The Man Who Invented Fifteen Hundred Necktie Knots  Boris Mocka believes that, at one point, he had invented more necktie knots than anyone else on the planet—so many that he started to call himself a “tieknotologist.” Most people who wear ties are familiar with the four-in-hand knot, and perhaps the Windsor and the half-Windsor. But there are many others: the Plattsburgh, the Cavendish, the Hanover. In 1999, two physicists published a book titled “The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie.” Their tally, however, was far from comprehensive. Mocka alone has created more than fifteen hundred knots. The Gardenia looks like a flower; the Wicker and the Mockatonic look like origami. The Riddler looks like a question mark, and the Exousia requires more than one tie. “I’m very obsessed with being original,” Mocka told me.Mocka is not a physicist, or a menswear designer, but a doorman in my apartment building. His path to sartorial invention is as winding as his silken creations. He was born in Martinique in 1969 and was raised in Paris. His father died when he was two, and his mother moved to New York without him. He was adopted by a man who painted in his free time, and who inspired Mocka to pick up drawing. By the time Mocka turned ten, people were telling him that his artistic skills were a gift from God. “We knew better, because it’s called practice,” he said.
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S58The Most Surreal Sci-Fi Movie of 2023 Gives Nicolas Cage His Best Role In Years  In A24’s surreal new dramedy Dream Scenario, Nicolas Cage plays the “most interesting man in the world.” That seems like a given — Cage hasn’t met a wild swing that he hasn’t taken with the most wild-eyed zeal imaginable — but Dream Scenario imagines Hollywood’s most interesting man as not that interesting at all. In fact, he’s a little boring, a little abrasive, and more than a little unlikable. That is, until he starts popping up in everyone’s dreams.Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, Dream Scenario is a hysterically dark takedown of “cancel culture” and all its sudden highs and equally sudden lows. The film stars Cage as Paul Matthews, a mousy, hapless college professor due for a midlife crisis. But his crisis comes in a very different way: He suddenly finds himself the star of his daughter’s bizarre dream. Hilariously, he’s not disturbed by the content of her dream, which involves a scary scenario in which mundane items fall like meteorites from the sky.
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S595 Years Ago, Netflix Quietly Released the Best Western of the Decade  In the years since it began its bid to take over Hollywood, Netflix has emerged as an outlet for major filmmakers to make movies that other studios might not have shown much interest in. From Martin Scorsese (The Irishman) to David Fincher (Mank, The Killer) and Noah Baumbach (White Noise), the streaming service has worked with more iconic, acclaimed filmmakers over the past six years than most other studios. Unfortunately, Netflix has also failed to promote some of the projects that have come from its auteur collaborations as extensively as it should have.Many worthwhile, impressive films have consequently been swallowed up by the company’s ever-growing library of original programming, including The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Written and directed by the Coen Brothers, the eclectic Western anthology film was quietly added to Netflix’s platform in the fall of 2018 — and its release was only truly noted at the time by certain in-the-know cinephiles. Many critics, meanwhile, seemed to shrug the film off as a decidedly minor effort on the part of the Coens.
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S60Xbox Game Pass Just Quietly Released the Best Monster-Hunting Game of 2023  Monster Hunter has long been the king of the “hunting” genre it's responsible for creating, with countless games trying to emulate what Capcom achieved, but few really succeeding. But in 2023, one game managed to not only crack the formula but bring something truly new to the genre. This overlooked game embraced the adrenaline rush of tracking down fearsome beasts — but with a crafting twist. Now that it’s on Xbox Game Pass, hopefully, this underrated title will finally get the attention it deserves.Wild Hearts comes from Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force, the studio primarily known for Dynasty Warriors and various spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors and Persona 5 Strikers. In other words, no one expected it to make a Monster Hunter knockoff. What resulted, however, is an equally gorgeous and fascinating title that has a unique aesthetic and one of the most inventive gameplay mechanics the hunting genre has ever seen.
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S62The Most Popular Holiday Treat Reveals a Weird Evolutionary Mix-Up  Candy canes are by any measure a strange sweet. Brittle and unwieldy, theirs is a shape of candy you only see once a year — to signify ... a shepherd's crook? A crutch to get you through the loneliest season? Or just a convenient shape to hang from a fir branch?Stranger still is the flavor: peppermint. This invigorating tidal wave of a flavor is as much a sensory experience as a taste — one that defies the usual holiday hat trick of sweet, fatty, and cinnamon-y. What is the secret to this beloved treat? You can find an answer in its chemical composition, a receptor on our tongues, and evolutionary tactics.
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S63Here's Exactly When You Can Start Playing 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3'  The latest entry in the Call of Duty franchise is almost here. Modern Warfare 3 (no, not the one from 2011) is set to continue the story 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot started. That means more campaign missions, multiplayer, and a new version of the zombies game mode. But when can you play it? Here’s exactly when you can preload Modern Warfare 3 and when it launches in your time zone.
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S64The End of the Hollywood Strike Reveals an Undeniable Truth About Superhero Movies  Hollywood is back. It took 118 days of striking and negotiations, but the Screen Actors Guild has officially reached a deal with studios and streamers. Their resolution comes on the heels of the writers’ own agreement, and with both writers and actors officially back at work, Hollywood projects are about to resume production. Insiders at TheWrap previously reported on an impending “traffic jam” given the abundance of projects in the pipeline, not unlike the post-production grind that followed Hollywood’s 2020 shutdown. Per Deadline, studios are prioritizing one project at a time, starting with their most anticipated blockbusters.
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S65The Most Exciting Show of 2023 Defies the Rules of Sci-Fi  Ahead of Season 4, Inverse talks to creators of Apple’s breakout epic about telling a sci-fi story set in an alternate version of the 21st century.Debates about science fiction often have to do with how the stories make us feel. For a genre supposedly all about speculation, the greatest sci-fi always seems to carry some kind of a message, and when that happens, people want to know what’s the good, what’s the bad, and what themes can help us with our own lives. As a result, sci-fi sometimes gets unfairly grouped into two categories: optimistic or dystopian.
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S66This Quest 3 Demo Will Make You a Believer in AR Smart Homes  Mixed reality is making a lot of cases. There’s gaming, working, learning — just about anything you can think of. A lot of it is compelling, but if you’re more into the practical side of mixed reality, we may have found something just for you. Developer Thomas Ratliff showed off a short demo of a concept that controls smart lights while wearing the Quest 3 headset. It may be a simple app that just turns the light on and off or adjusts intensity, but what it lacks in “fun” it makes up for in practicality and polish. All that combined makes it feel like magic, especially to those not seeing it through the headset.
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S67Star Wars' Latest Cancelled Movie Reveals the Franchise's Worst Habit  Star Wars tends to bite off more than it can chew. Just look at how two entire future trilogies were announced: one by Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss that fell through in 2019, and another by Rian Johnson that’s been in development for five years with little to show for it. One-off Star Wars movies aren’t doing much better, as Patty Jenkins’ highly anticipated Rogue Squadron was put on the back burner, and Taika Waititi joked about how his Star Wars movie couldn’t get off the ground.Now, another Star Wars movie is officially dead, and its demise is symptomatic of the franchise’s biggest problem.
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S68'Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes' Review: Hunger Games Prequel Fails to Justify Its Existence  The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has a far too clunky and long name. But it’s a name that is necessary for that coveted brand recognition, one of the few lifelines for any major release in an IP-saturated movie landscape. And yet, funnily enough, too clunky, too long, and too obviously a bid to bring back a major IP is the perfect way to describe A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.Based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a textbook example of a prequel that struggles to justify its existence. All of the elements that made the Hunger Games franchise a success are there — the dark political metaphors, the horrifying dystopian premise, the beautiful young actors in beautiful gowns who make the whole bitter pill easier to swallow — but Songbirds and Snakes feels simply like a rehash of what made the original films great, just in a different shade. It doesn’t do anything wrong, per se, but neither does it make enough of an impact to lure us back to the world of Panem nearly a decade after the last Hunger Games installment.
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S69The Chillest City Builder on Xbox Game Pass is Leaving Next Week  City builders can be some of the chillest games out there — or the most stressful, depending on how much responsibility you feel for the fate of the little digital people who fill your creations. If you visualize games like Frostpunk sitting at the most severe end of the spectrum, with its punishing weather and resource scarcity, then Townscaper is its polar opposite. Compared to Frostpunk’s frozen wastes, Townscaper’s urban landscape is decked out in Crayola colors with gentle lighting shining down and birds often swooping overhead. And if you’re an Xbox Game Pass subscriber, you have until November 15 to experience its zen-like vibes for free.
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S70Humane Finally Reveals Everything About Its $699 Phone-Killing Ai Pin  Humane’s hype train has reached its final stop. After lots of teasers and vague marketing ops, Humane finally debuted its Ai Pin (pronounced like you would say AI and not “eye”), a clothing-based wearable device that is definitely, undoubtedly, for sure, not a smartphone.First thing’s first: the Ai Pin costs $699. Yes, that’s a lot of money, but Humane is clearly positioning this as a smartphone replacement and not as something you’d use in addition to a glass slab.
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