   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S6220 Years Ago, an Underrated Insomniac Franchise Changed Video Games Forever   There’s a rule in life that I learned many eons ago. It’s a rule most often missed or outright disregarded for a combination of ignorance and, frankly, snobbery. The rule is that you must never underestimate the power of a simple, cuddly-looking, cartoon aesthetic.Such is the case for Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, the PlayStation 2 classic about furry “lombax,” his robot sidekick, and lots of weird, sci-fi weapons. From Insomniac Studios, which would go on to make Sony’s modern Spider-Man video games, Going Commando paved the way for the developer’s future projects when it comes to gameplay, narrative, and character.
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S1How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together  To achieve performance- accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, firms must create metrics that measure the effects of both types of investments on a single North Star metric: brand equity. That is then linked to specific financial outcomes—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment—and deployed as a key performance indicator for both brand building and performance marketing.
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S2Innovation Doesn't Have to Be Disruptive  For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a battle cry in business. Not surprisingly, many have come to see it as a near-synonym for innovation. But the obsession with disruption obscures an important truth: Market-creating innovation isn’t always disruptive. Disruption may be what people talk about. It’s certainly important, and it’s all around us. But, as the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy argue, it’s only one end of the innovation spectrum. On the other end is what they call nondisruptive creation, through which new industries, new jobs, and profitable growth are created without social harm. Nondisruptive creation reveals an immense potential to establish new markets where none existed before and, in doing so, to foster economic growth without a loss of jobs or damage to other industries, enabling business and society to thrive together.
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S3S4S5S6S7S8S9S10Taupo: 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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S11Message 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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S12Did 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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S13How Africa's first heat officer is protecting women in Sierra Leone  At the start of Sierra Leone's dry season in November, 26-year-old Adama Sesay sells fruits and vegetables at a busy market in the centre of the country's capital, Freetown. It's hard work, and one of the greatest challenges in her day is extreme heat."We suffer from extreme heat, suffocation and noise pollution," says Sesay, sitting on a cylinder brick in the overcrowded Bombay Street market, bustling with customers, traders, motorists and travelers.
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S14Egypt's Iconic Sphinx May Have Begun as Natural Carving by the Wind  Egypt’s famous Sphinx may have originated as a rock feature carved by erosion that ancient Egyptians further refined into the iconic monumentThe ancient Egyptians may have crafted the Sphinx, a 4,500-year-old monument at Giza that stands in front of the pyramid of Khafre not completely from scratch but rather on a natural feature that already looked surprisingly sphinx-like, a new study suggests.
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S15The unexpected way spirituality connects to climate change  Environmental activist Gopal D. Patel thinks the climate movement could learn a lot from one of the longest-standing social initiatives in human history: religion. Exploring three areas where frameworks from faith traditions could benefit the climate movement, Patel offers a playbook for discovering your big idea to build momentum towards powerful social change.
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S16Scientists Have Been Freezing Corals for Decades. Now They're Learning How to Wake Them Up  Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture.“It’s like if you see Captain America buried in snow and, after so many years, he’s alive,” she says. “It’s so cool!”
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S17Wegovy Slashes the Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke in a Landmark Trial  More than half the world’s population is expected to be overweight or obese by 2035. Excess weight is often linked with cardiovascular disease: It can lead to higher blood pressure or cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Now, the makers of the popular weight-loss drug Wegovy are making a case for its use as a treatment option for diseases of the heart and blood vessels.In a landmark trial of 17,604 overweight and obese patients with heart disease, weekly injections of semaglutide—the active ingredient in Wegovy and its twin Ozempic—for an average of 33 months reduced the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from cardiovascular causes by 20 percent compared with a placebo group. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting Saturday morning.
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S18I'm Wearing Wool Underwear, and I've Never Been Comfier ![]() About a decade ago, I started noticing that certain clothes made my skin itch. Like, a lot. Then my infant son was diagnosed with eczema, painful rashes that covered his arms and legs. I started buying the gentlest detergents I could find and checking fabric content labels on all our clothes. When I started paying a little more for jeans, the gnarly itching stopped.Was it psychosomatic? Do I stop itching only when swaddled in the finest of denims and cotton flannel tank tops? According to fashion and sustainability journalist Alden Wicker, who runs the website Ecocult and recently published the book To Dye For, your clothes really could be making you sick. A lot of fast fashion is made from polyester, which requires special dyes. Manufacturers then add wrinkle- or stain-resistant agents, or spray fabric for soft-touch finishes. Finally, whole shipments get dusted with fungicides or pesticides to make it all the way around the world without getting eaten by moths.
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S19S20"Terminalism" -- discrimination against the dying -- is the unseen prejudice of our times  When you are dying, you are placed in a hospice. Often, this is a real, brick-and-mortar hospice with palliative care and psychological support. At other times, though, the hospice is a metaphorical one. The terminally ill are ignored by those too awkward or scared to face them. They are told not to work or exert themselves in the slightest. The dying exist as ghosts and live in the hinge space between society and “on the way out.” When you’re told you’re going to die, you become invisible.This has led the philosopher Phillip Reed to coin the expression “terminalism.” For Reed, terminalism “is discrimination against the dying, or treating the terminally ill worse than they would expect to be treated if they were not dying.” In other words, it involves treating those in a hospice — literally or metaphorically — as second-class citizens.
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S21Starts With A Bang podcast #99 - Varying and evolving stars  You might not think about it very often, but when it comes to the question of “how old is a star that we’re observing,” there are some very simple approximations that we make: measure its mass, radius, temperature, and luminosity (and maybe metallicity, too, for an extra layer of accuracy), and we’ll tell you the age of this star, including how far along it is and how long we have to go until it meets its demise.This also operates under a simple but not-always-accurate assumption: that all stars of a given mass and composition have the same age-radius and radius-temperature-luminosity relationships. That simply isn’t true! Stars vary, both over time as they evolve and also from star-to-star dependent on their rotation and magnetism. It’s a funny situation, because just a few years ago, people had declared stellar evolution as a basically “solved” field, and now it turns out that we might have to rethink how we’ve been thinking about the most common classes of stars of all!
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S22Are "paranormal" experiences due to infrasound, gas leaks, and toxic mold?  LONDON IS A GHOST HUNTER’S dream, dotted with potentially haunted sites like mass graves of plague victims and the pub where Jack the Ripper’s final victim was last seen alive. But in the early 2000s, one of its most reliably spooky locations was the front room of a ground floor flat in north London. People reported feeling a supernatural presence, dizzying sensations, and even abject terror. The apartment wasn’t the site of anything grisly or nefarious that could explain these experiences, though: It was part of a scientific experiment on external, physical causes of ghostly encounters.For decades, skeptics have attempted to find scientific explanations for hauntings. Several of their theories have shown promise. In 1921, the American Journal of Ophthalmology detailed two cases of carbon monoxide poisoning in which the victims experienced psychological symptoms, including delusions and hallucinations. “The paper reads like a ghost story in places, and certainly throws light on the question of haunted houses,” reported the British Medical Journal that same year. More recently, the writer Carrie Poppy experienced a haunting that turned out to be a near-fatal carbon monoxide leak.
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S23Japan sets new nuclear fusion record  A massive nuclear fusion experiment in Japan just hit a major milestone, potentially putting us a little closer to a future of limitless clean energy.Nuclear fusion 101: Nuclear fusion is a process in which two atoms merge into one (unlike conventional nuclear power, which relies on fission — splitting an atom into two). This releases an incredible amount of energy in the form of heat, so much heat, in fact, that it can power the Sun and other stars.
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S24Mummified baboons point to the direction of the fabled land of Punt  One of the most enduring mysteries within archaeology revolves around the identity of Punt, an otherworldly “land of plenty” revered by the ancient Egyptians. Punt had it all—fragrant myrrh and frankincense, precious electrum (a mixed alloy of gold and silver) and malachite, and coveted leopard skins, among other exotic luxury goods.
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S25Photos of the Week:  Chilly swimmers in China, a deadly earthquake in Nepal, figure skating in France, Israeli attacks in Gaza, Palestinians fleeing from Gaza City, a proposal at the New York City Marathon, flooding in Somalia, a shrinking reservoir in Turkey, and much more A cruise ship passes under the Golden Gate Bridge on November 7, 2023, in San Francisco, California. Scaffolding attached to the underside of the bridge supports builders working on a suicide-prevention barrier, hanging nets of stainless-steel cables. The barrier project is nearing completion after six years at a cost of more than $215 million. #
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S26The Timeshare Comes for Us All  Very early in my first marriage—I’m talking four or five days—I lay on a lounge chair on the white, powdery sand of an island paradise and took stock of my problems. First off, in that short time I’d already managed to lose both a piece of precious heirloom jewelry that my new mother-in-law had given me and also my new husband’s lucky Mets cap, which I’d left at a bar one island over. He’d taken both of these losses hard, and he’d felt that the missing jewelry had to be reported at once—long-distance and from the front desk—to his parents. The losses and the long-distance phone call were harbingers of the inevitable. But my biggest problem was immediate (aren’t they all?): Cheryl and Don, as I’ll call them.Cheryl and Don had grown children, were either world-class social drinkers or textbook alcoholics, possessed a font of knowledge on matters such as how to take advantage of a loophole in the island’s customs law so we could each bring home an extra gallon of rum, and had decided that these two honeymooning 25-year-olds (us) needed their company. No matter where we went or what we were doing—limbo-ing, eating dinner, bronzing ourselves under a punishing sun—we’d hear a little Cheryl-pitched shriek of delight and there they were.
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S27Finally, a Coral Success Story  Scientists have spent years cryopreserving coral in the hopes of restoring reefs. For the first time, some unfrozen specimens have reached adulthood.Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University, in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture.
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S28The Show That Transforms Our Understanding of History  Season by season, For All Mankind has become less a tale of an alternate future than a meditation on historical memory.For All Mankind treats the future as a matter of physics. The Apple TV+ series started its story with a national trauma: The United States loses to the U.S.S.R. in the race to put a man on the moon. That one change to the timeline bends the trajectory of everything that follows until, like a space capsule that has gone off course, the show’s version of history ends up far from the one we know. Some conflicts dissipate; new ones arise in their place. Some familiar technologies emerge; others never come. The superpowers, caught in a Cold War that never ends, establish separate colonies on the moon. Humans go to Mars. They bring Earth’s problems with them. The show’s universe is familiar and uncanny at once, and this is part of the joy of watching it: For All Mankind, as it merges the world-building powers of science fiction with the provocations of alternate history, turns time’s march into an endless cliff-hanger. What will change in this world? What will be constant?
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S29Albert Brooks Everlasting  A conversation with the legendary comedian and filmmaker about what annoys him, how you know when something is funny, and his theory about John LennonThere are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture.
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S30What We Do With Our Faces  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.In 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote. “Whenever I or my friends were having our photos taken, we were told to say ‘cheese’ and smile. But if my parents also happened to be in the photo, they were stone-faced. So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.”
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S31What on Earth Is Nathan Fielder Up to Now?  Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets. When he pushes uncomfortable bits to their extreme, you can feel like your mind is short-circuiting, the deluge of his off-kilter, often meta humor leaving you delighted and disturbed. So the best way to watch Fielder’s work, I’ve long accepted, is to persist until the punch line reveals itself.And yet, I was still caught off guard by The Curse, the new Showtime series Fielder co-created with the filmmaker and actor Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems). I needed breaks between episodes, even pausing in the middle of scenes the deeper I went into the season, fearful of what would happen next. The show is unlike Fielder’s previous output. For one thing, it’s fully scripted—a 10-episode story packed with surreal set pieces and cinematic plot twists. For another, Fielder acts, and not just as a version of himself.
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S32A Paradoxical Week for Democrats  Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s announcement that he will not seek reelection in 2024 capped a paradoxical week for Democrats. Manchin’s news puts Democrats’ control of the Senate at greater risk at the same time that polling for President Joe Biden continues to decline. But there was good news for Democrats: They scored a number of victories in Tuesday’s off-year election, including swing state Ohio voting to codify the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss this and more are David Brooks, a columnist at The New York Times and the author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent and a co-author of Politico’s Playbook; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR; and Ed O’Keefe, a senior White House and political correspondent at CBS.
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S33London's Day of Creeping Extremism  How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.” That refers to Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a convicted mortgage fraudster who is the former head of a far-right, anti-Muslim group called the English Defence League. Robinson was here, somewhere, in person—and as of last week, he was back on X (formerly Twitter), five years after being “permanently suspended.” Violence and disorder follow him around, so London’s Metropolitan Police had drafted reinforcements from around Britain to deal with the situation. Walking down the Mall, a long, open road stretching from Trafalgar Square to Westminster, I saw police vans from Durham and Northumbria, in the north of England, and some officers wore caps reading HEDDLU, the Welsh word for police.
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S34S35Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel on the Challenges and Opportunities of Following a Visionary Leader  In the final episode of the season, HBR editor Adi Ignatius interviews Jason Buechel, the CEO of Whole Foods. Buechel discusses the challenges of succeeding a larger-than-life executive, the role of Whole Foods as a subsidiary of Amazon, and how the company is addressing changes in the business environment, such as climate change and hybrid work. Buechel emphasizes the importance of understanding the voice of team members during a leadership transition and being authentic as a leader. He also highlights Whole Foods’ focus on growth opportunities for employees and its commitment to sustainability. Buechel believes that AI will fundamentally change the retail and grocery shopping experience in the next decade. The episode concludes with Buechel sharing his favorite products from Whole Foods.
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S36From Riders to Tackle! - how Britain loves Jilly Cooper's raunchy novels  Despite being a nation with a reputation for prudishness about sex, the British don't seem to have any problem reading about it, at least not if you go by the enduring popularity of one the country's most successful writers, Jilly Cooper. Known as the Queen of the "bonkbuster" (a British term for a popular novel stuffed with salacious storylines and frequent sexual encounters), she even counts the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as one of her fans. For those who came of age in the UK in the 1980s or 90s, the covers of Cooper's raunchy books alone are forever imprinted on their memory, such was their ubiquity on bookshelves and sun loungers, or in schools, where they were shared like contraband by teenage girls.More like this:- Why the British are obsessed with footballers' wives - Why 'Slut' is Swift's call to arms - The greatest reality TV show never made
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S37COP28: a year on from climate change funding breakthrough, poor countries eye disappointment at Dubai summit  At the COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, an agreement to establish a loss and damage fund was hailed as a major breakthrough on one of the trickiest topics in the UN climate change negotiations. In an otherwise frustrating conference, this decision in November 2022 acknowledged the help that poorer and low-emitting countries in particular need to deal with the consequences of climate change – and, tentatively, who ought to pay. This following year has seen more extreme weather records broken. Torrential rains created flooding which swept away an entire city in Libya, while wildfires razed swathes of Canada, Greece and the Hawaiian island of Maui.
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S38S39S40S41S42Restorers uncover demon in a 1789 painting - and reveal the decline of superstition in the Age of Reason  Recent news that restorers had uncovered the image of a Gothic-looking demon in a late work by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) seems fitting for these long, dark evenings. The sinister face hovers above the head of a dying clergyman in The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, painted in 1789. Fake-or-Fortune-style reveals such as this, where Reynolds’s hollow-eyed fiend re-emerges, fanged and uncanny from the gloom of centuries of overpainting, are always popular with the public. But what are we to make of Reynolds’s devilish detail in his painting, and how does it fit into the larger story of demonic representation in the art and literature of the 18th century?
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S43Phoebe Philo's fashion frenzy: why her much-anticipated collection sold out within hours  British luxury fashion designer Phoebe Philo OBE, debuted her long-anticipated eponymous label to critical acclaim at the end of October. Despite the eye-watering price tags, the small range of clothing, accessories, jewellery and footwear – only available on the Phoebe Philo website – virtually sold out within hours. But Philo is no stranger to fashion frenzies. Her 2005 Paddington bag, created during her tenure as creative director at French designer Chloé, became an instant and enduring “It bag” that sold out before it even hit the shelves.
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S44S45Shareholder activists can inadvertently raise CEO pay - here's how to help make pay rises more equal for all  Activist investors or shareholders can be a powerful force in the corporate world, capable of driving significant change within companies. Their influence can be a force for good. It can extend beyond financial decisions to advocate that a company makes important societal, ethical and, increasingly, environmental changes. Recently, shareholder collaboration initiatives like Say on Climate have led investors to influence companies’ environmental policies and practices. But investors are also speaking out on social issues such as income inequality.
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S46S47S48Suella Braverman's comments comparing Gaza protests with Northern Ireland are a grave misunderstanding of the facts  The aim of Suella Braverman’s controversial Times article commenting on the ongoing protests over Gaza seems obvious. As with many of her recent and provocative statements, the assumption is that she is trying to undermine and ultimately replace Rishi Sunak as Tory leader by appealing to the party’s right. However, the methods used – and particularly the comparisons she made between marches in Northern Ireland and demonstrations in London – are more confusing. This confusion is understandable, as Braverman herself seems confused in what she wrote. She linked marches over the Gaza conflict to “the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”. She drew further comparisons when suggesting that some of those organising the London protests “have links to terrorist groups, including Hamas”.
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S49Palestine march: some opponents are politicising the Cenotaph to sow divisions - and it could work  The pro-Palestine protest planned to take place in London on Armistice Day has met with opposition from politicians and media pundits alike. Organisers of the Armistice Day protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have said the march will not go near the Cenotaph on Whitehall. Opponents, meanwhile, have argued that it nonetheless poses a “threat” to the national war memorial. The journalist Matt Ridley has said that “any protest which threatens the Cenotaph is a travesty”. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has echoed this sentiment, saying:
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S50All the Light We Cannot See: how progressive congenital cataracts can lead to blindness  In the new Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See, a blind French girl called Marie-Laure LeBlanc makes illicit radio broadcasts from her uncle’s house in Nazi-occupied France. We are told that Marie-Laure has congenital cataracts in both eyes. But what is this condition?The word “cataract” comes from the Latin word for waterfall and describes a condition where the usually transparent lens of the eye is cloudy or opaque. This prevents a clear image being projected onto the back of the eye and causes poor vision.
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S51How much income is needed to live well in the UK in 2023? At least  You don’t have to look very hard at the moment to find evidence of the immense financial pressure on UK households. New figures from the Trussell Trust show that 1.5 million emergency food parcels were provided to people between April and September 2023. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest report on destitution in the UK shows that around 3.8 million people in 2022 were not able to meet their basic physical needs – staying warm, dry, clean and fed – more than double the amount in 2017.
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S52S53Israel-Hamas conflict: what Gaza might look like 'the day after' the war  Rob Geist Pinfold is a Board Member at Yachad, a British NGO whose primary mission is to support a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Less than a week after Hamas’s devastating attacks on October 7, Israel’s intelligence ministry produced a chilling document. It advocated that Israel remove all of Gaza’s Palestinian population and forcibly resettle them in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.
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S54Journalistic Independence Isn't a Human-Resources Exercise  Of all the signs of the death of free speechâwhether the raft of anti-protest legislation that passed in state houses across the country after the summer of 2020, or the much-cited polls that show that free expression is not a primary concern to young peopleânone should be as concerning as the relative silence around the legitimate free-speech crisis that has unfolded over the past month.Nearly every corner of American life has felt the chill. On Tuesday night, the House of Representatives voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, for her statements on the war in Gaza, including amplifying the phrase "from the river to the sea." In the corporate world, there has been a bizarre multi-industry campaign to either reprimand current employees or refuse to hire people for participating in a protest or signing their names in support of Palestine.
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S55Ivanka Trump's Tricky Comeback Tour  Poor Ivanka! Just when she thought she was out, they pulled her back in. I am referring, of course, to her recent appearance at the civil fraud trial of her father, Donald Trump, which has been ongoing in Manhattan for six weeks. The trial stems from the New York attorney general Letitia James's contention that the former Presidentâalong with his two eldest sons, and other Trump Organization executivesâfraudulently inflated his net worth, and the value of his real-estate assets on financial documents, which helped them secure favorable loans for the company.Ivanka narrowly wriggled out of being a defendant herself: she stopped working for the Trump Organization, where she had been an executive vice-president, in 2017âwhich, as luck would have it, places her outside the statute of limitations for the trial's purposes. She also did her best to avoid getting called as a government witness, with her lawyers claiming that she would "suffer undue hardship" if she were "required to testify at trial in New York in the middle of a school week." (Ivanka lives in Florida and has three young children.) But, despite this heartstrings-pulling nod to the spectre of motherhood, the claim was rejected by the prosecution. And so there she was on Wednesday morning, striding into the New York State Supreme Courthouse, the picture of staid elegance in a navy suit and coat, a Chanel handbag in her hand, her hair long and smooth down her back, a slight smile on her face (which, if one were to believe the Daily Mail, might have been newly if tastefully nipped and tucked for the occasion). She was, apparently, ready to like it or lump it.
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S56A Philosopher-Filmmaker's Polyphonic Perspective on Trans Experience  Woe betide the critic trying to take notes at a screening of "Orlando, My Political Biography." It would require the stenographic skills of a court reporter to do justice to this essay-film, written and directed by the Spanish-born philosopher Paul B. Preciado, which takes Virginia Woolf's "Orlando: A Biography" (1928) as an ur-text from which to explore trans experience, history, and politics. The novel (which Sally Potter memorably adapted for a bold and lavish film starring Tilda Swinton) tells the story of an Elizabethan nobleman who, in the seventeenth century, is transformed into a woman and, as a woman, makes her way through British society all the way into modern times. For Preciado, the novel and its central character exemplify a crucial ideaâthat Orlando isn't a man who becomes a woman, but, rather, a person whose very identity is transition itself, who is a living challenge to the notion of determinate gender. Preciado, making his first film, brings that concept to life with some remarkable cinematic stagecraft.Preciado recruits more than twenty trans and nonbinary actors (including Preciado himself) to play the role of Orlando. There are a few ensemble scenes of great dramatic impact, but the performers mainly appear successively and separately, identifying themselves by name and then stating, "In this film, I'll be Virginia Woolf's Orlando." Their costuming and makeup frequently take place in real time, onscreen, with a wryly straightforward sense of anachronism. Chain mail and a ruffled collar go just fine with a T-shirt or a baseball jacket, and scenes set in a studio are presented as suchâwith crew members preparing a photographic backdrop of a snowy landscape and a snow machine sprinkling two actors with its artificial flakes.
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S57Everyday Harbingers of Doom  Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S58L.A. Hosts a Delegation of Survivors from Israel and Families of Hostages  Last Tuesday morning, a month after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel—a day now known as Black Sabbath—Matti Leshem and Lynn Harris, married movie producers, arrived at a back-yard gathering in West Los Angeles. It was a Hollywood crowd, assembled for a sombre purpose: to receive a delegation of survivors from Israel and families of hostages being held in Gaza.Leshem, who specializes in Jewish subjects, is tall, and he wore a khaki blazer, a polka-dot pocket square, and a jockey cap; Harris had on big sunglasses, bluejeans, and a T-shirt that read “Bring Them Home Now.” Leshem is an Israeli citizen; his cousin’s two adult children were killed at a music festival that was a target of the attack. In the weeks since, he and Harris, along with many of their colleagues in the entertainment industry, have felt a sense of urgency. “Half my day is spent triaging people saying, ‘What can I do to help?’ ” Leshem said. “Normally, people are not selfless at all. They’re putting aside their schedules.”
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S59Chicken Soup's Healing Powers Have Little To Do With Its Ingredients  Preparing a bowl of chicken soup for a loved one when they’re sick has been a common practice worldwide for centuries. Today, generations from virtually every culture swear to the benefits of chicken soup. In the U.S., the dish is typically made with noodles, but different cultures prepare the soothing remedy their own way.Chicken soup as a therapy can be traced back to 60 A.D. and Pedanius Dioscorides, an army surgeon who served under the Roman emperor Nero and whose five-volume medical encyclopedia was consulted by early healers for more than a millennium. But the origins of chicken soup go back thousands of years earlier, to ancient China.
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S60Netflix Just Quietly Released David Fincher's Most Thrilling Movie in a Decade  The Killer, the latest thriller in David Fincher’s oeuvre, stars Michael Fassbender as “The Killer,” an assassin whose life derails when a moment of distraction causes a rare miss. When his failure endangers the woman he loves, he’s forced to wage a one-man war on everyone responsible. It’s a thrilling and darkly comic tale, and rightly hailed as a true return to form for the modern thriller auteur, despite dropping too quietly on Netflix on November 10th (outside a limited theatrical run in NY and LA).Fassbender’s cold-blooded protagonist is far from the first murderer in Fincher’s canon. We’ve seen detective-taunting serial killers (Se7en, Zodiac, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), a murderously vengeful spouse (Gone Girl), criminals pushed to the brink (Panic Room), and a truly dangerous toxic masculinity cult (Fight Club). Yet another regular Fincher trajectory centers around dangers of decidedly more bourgeois varieties, from fictional corporations that ruin lives with elaborate games (The Game), to real corporations that ruin lives thanks to power hungry founders (The Social Network).
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S61S63'Fantasy Life i's Reported Delay Could Save the Game for One Simple Reason  I’m a sucker for life sims. I’ve spent more time than I care to calculate decorating digital houses and growing virtual vegetables. A life sim doesn’t even necessarily have to be that good to get me to forget my actual responsibilities in favor of my in-game life. But I couldn’t be happier to hear that my most anticipated life sim may have been delayed from this year into 2024.Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time was reportedly pushed back to winter 2024. As first spotted by Gematsu, the report comes from the Ryokutya2089 blog, which has a history of leaking reliable information, often sourced from Japanese magazines like Famitsu before it’s translated into other languages. That appears to be the case here, with Ryokutya2089 claiming the release date shift was noted in a magazine ad. Publisher Level-5 did not immediately respond to Inverse’s request for comment.
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S649 Years Later, 'The Marvels' Brings Back One of the MCU's Greatest Strengths  Most of us tune in to superhero movie to watch a good guy beat the snot out of a bad guy — but as franchises like Marvel embed themselves further into the zeitgeist, we’ve got to ask ourselves something: how many times have they delivered action that was well and truly memorable?Marvel’s Cinematic Universe prides itself on spectacle, but in 15 years and twice as many films, real, remarkable action remains as elusive as ever. Aside from the odd gem, like the Captain America sequels or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, high-quality, high-octane fight sequences feel more like afterthoughts. The MCU prioritizes CGI mush over grounded thrills, meaning that most hand-to-hand combat we do get to see often devolves into lazy slugfests before the credits roll.
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S65S66This Blacked-Out Game Boy Remake Comes With a Joystick  If you missed the window to snap up Analogue’s limited edition Pocket, you may not be out of luck just yet — Ayaneo is here to offer you an alternative modernized Game Boy.The handheld recently teased plans to remake the classic Nintendo Game Boy that we grew up with, but with a major twist of including a joystick. Introducing: the Ayaneo Pocket DMG.
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S67'Loki' Season 2's Ending Just Debunked a Major Kang Theory  Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has a Kang problem. While he may have started out as a much-needed shot in the arm for a rudderless franchise, Jonathan Majors’ time-traversing baddie has since become an unfortunate distraction. The actor has been confronting accusations of domestic violence since March 2023, but Marvel’s reluctance to distance itself from Kang and his many variants puts the franchise in a difficult spot.The controversy was especially apparent as Loki returned for its second season. Its Season 1 finale introduced Kang’s omniscient variant He Who Remains, and set the stage for Kang himself to appear in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. A handful of insiders warned about Majors’ growing role in the MCU, particularly in Loki Season 2. A blistering tell-all from Variety implied that Episode 6 put Marvel in an impossible position: “I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him,” one dealmaker told the trade.
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S68'Modern Warfare 3' Isn't the Only Game to Brutalize Cheaters in Hilarious Ways  Cheaters have something new to fear in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and it’s not just the dull pang of guilt at their misbegotten wins. As Activision announced in a pre-launch blog post, Modern Warfare 3 will have a rather direct method of keeping cheaters from ruining other players’ games — a system evocatively named Splat!“With Splat, if a cheater is discovered, we may randomly, and for fun, disable their parachute sending them careening into the ground after they deploy,” Activision says.
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S69Everything We Know About 'GTA 6,' From the Latest Leaks to Release Date Rumors  The GTA 6 rumor mill never stops churning. Rockstar finally announced the next installment of its blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series in 2022 (kinda), but with few solid details about gameplay or the faintest whiff of a release date, speculation still runs rampant. Despite the lack of official comment, a good deal about what GTA 6 might be has been revealed in bombshell leaks and reports in the past few years. With the tenth anniversary of GTA 5 quickly approaching, 2023 might be the year we finally learn more about the next entry in the series.So far, there’s no trailer for GTA 6, but that’s going to change very soon. On November 8, Rockstar shared the news that its GTA 6 trailer is set to debut “in early December,” coinciding with the developer’s 25th anniversary, but didn’t give a more exact date.
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S70Everything You Need To Know About Zynga's 'Star Wars: Hunters'  Remember that Star Wars free-to-play game being developed by Zynga called Star Wars: Hunters? Me neither! But it still exists. While the title has been mostly silent since its original announcement back in 2021, development seems to still be underway. The latest news confirms Star Wars: Hunters will come to a galaxy near you sometime in the future, but maybe not as soon as you might be hoping.Star Wars: Hunters was originally slated to be released in late 2021 for Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android. Then the game was delayed in July 2022 to a general 2023 release window. The latest news comes from a post on the Zynga Star Wars X (formerly Twitter) account on November 8 announcing the game has been delayed yet again to a nebulous 2024 release window.
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