   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S66Amazon's 'Fallout' Show Is Taking a Risk With Franchise Canon -- It Could Pay Off   From high-budget prestige dramas like The Last of Us to irreverent action shows like Twisted Metal, we suddenly find ourselves in a golden age of video game adaptations. Any game now has the potential to be spun into a gripping TV show, and the next title to get this treatment is also the most anticipated game adaptation yet: Fallout, based on Bethesda’s hit post-apocalyptic RPG franchise. Now, we have our first glimpse of how Westworld masterminds Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan intend to bring the world of the wasteland to Amazon Prime Video.A first look for Vanity Fair has revealed that, rather than directly lifting the plot of one of the Fallout games, the series will follow Lucy (Ella Purnell), a vault dweller forced to the surface to explore the new world along with Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a gunslinging mutant bounty hunter.
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S2How to Tap the Full Potential of Telemedicine  Telemedicine visits in the United States have fallen sharply since April 2020, but the end of the pandemic should not spell the end of telemedicine. It can play a valuable role in the delivery of health care. The key to tapping its potential is to bring many elements of the clinic to the patient. An array of new technologies and services is making that possible.
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S35 Tactics to Combat a Culture of False Urgency at Work  The headwinds of false urgency can be intense. But they also foster a reactive culture. If everything is urgent, there’s little opportunity for creative and deep work, which tends to flourish only when there’s time and space. In this article, the author offers tips that will help you focus on what’s truly urgent in your organization and enable your team to deliver strong results and sustain high performance over time.
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S4Everything Starts with Trust  Trust is the basis for almost everything we do. It’s the foundation on which our laws and contracts are built. It’s the reason we’re willing to exchange our hard-earned paychecks for goods and services, to pledge our lives to another person in marriage, and to cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. It’s also the input that makes it possible for leaders to create the conditions for employees to fully realize their own capacity and power.
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S5How Brands Can Sell to Environmentally Conscious Nonconsumers  New research into how consumer attitudes about climate change affect their behavior and purchasing habits find that the largest segment is “Conscious Non-consumers” — that is, people who have changed their behavior to help the environment, but are not purchasing environmentally friendly products. For companies selling these products, reaching this segment of consumers can be a source of profits and impact. The research finds specific barriers that prevent this group from making sustainable purchases — and corresponding strategies to help overcome those barriers.
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S6What Leaders Really Do  Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in today’s business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are largely a response to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the twentieth century. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change. Part of the reason it has become so important in recent years is that the business world has become more competitive and more volatile. More change always demands more leadership. Most U.S. corporations today are over-managed and under-led. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization. But while improving their ability to lead, companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.
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S7How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight  Top-level managers know that conflict over issues is natural and even necessary. Management teams that challenge one another’s thinking develop a more complete understanding of their choices, create a richer range of options, and make better decisions. But the challenge–familiar to anyone who has ever been part of a management team–is to keep constructive conflict over issues from degenerating into interpersonal conflict. From their research on the interplay of conflict, politics, and speed in the decision-making process of management teams, the authors have distilled a set of six tactics characteristic of high-performing teams:
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S8Leading in the Age of Exploding Transparency | Melissa Swift  Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.The seasoned CIO wakes up groggy to a flurry of texts from his team, who found out about the CEO’s retirement from LinkedIn because the internal announcement got stuck in everyone’s spam filters. As Frank huffs and puffs around the park during his morning run, his boss quizzes him by phone about some troubling numbers on a brand-new dashboard. Arriving at the office already feeling beleaguered, he spits iced coffee all over his keyboard when an email alerts him that another leader in the organization dramatically documented her departure on “QuitTok” — racking up half a million views already.
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S9How much it costs to attend the Burning Man festival  It's not easy – or cheap – to pop up a bustling city from empty desert ground. But that's exactly what happens at the Burning Man festival, held annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.Burning Man started in 1986 at a San Francisco beach with 35 people united by "the pursuit of a more creative and connected existence in the world"; this week, nearly 70,000 people are making their way out of the muddy desert after Burning Man's 37th year. The now nine-day festival has morphed into a massive brand and destination, where so-called "Burners" from around the world build a civilisation together from scratch, complete with art installations, healing camps, inspiring talks and live DJs.
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S10In the age of public salary-range listings, some jobseekers feel duped  In October, Mary submitted an online application for a communications job at a large multinational firm. She satisfied or exceeded all the requirements for the role, so she requested a figure in the top quartile of the salary range listed in the job description. Within 24 hours, Mary had been notified of her rejection with an automated email.A few days later, she got a private tip from an acquaintance in the company's recruiting department: the desired salary she wrote was too high, and the company had no intention of honouring the full range it listed in the job posting. The algorithm used to screen applications had simply eliminated her.
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S11Massimo Bottura's new "Not Barbecue" restaurant  I'm three dishes deep into the tasting menu at Al Gatto Verde – Massimo Bottura's new "Not Barbecue" restaurant at Casa Maria Luigia, his intensely stylish guesthouse on the outskirts of Modena, Italy – when the cotechino sangue di drago arrives.Cotechino, a Northern Italian pork sausage flavoured with juniper, cloves and garlic, is the quintessential Italian New Year's Eve dish; stewed with lentils and served at midnight. I've eaten it every winter of my life, but only on New Year's, and never on an early autumn night in the ochre-hued Emilian hills, surrounded by edgy artwork.
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S12The large and fluffy tamale few know  Deep inside a 6th Century Mayan pyramid in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli stumbled on a massive carved frieze; a mythological scene. A Mayan king in apotheosis is flanked by two ancestor gods, each holding out a round-shaped offering. The glyph beneath reads: The first tamale."This was the biggest discovery of my life," said Estrada-Belli of the 2013 find. "It's very powerful symbolism that tells you how fundamental the tamale was regarded by the Maya."
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S13Is Squid Game: The Challenge unethical or top entertainment?  If you want to watch a man crying and almost vomiting from stress – and it seems millions of us do – Netflix has you covered with its latest hit. According to unofficial metrics, since the first five episodes of Squid Game: The Challenge (SGTC) were made available last week, the addictive reality game show has topped Netflix’s charts in numerous countries, including the US and the UK. Early official figures for the UK have appeared to confirm its popularity.It is inspired by Squid Game, a nine-part dystopian drama which arrived on Netflix in 2021 and became the streamer’s most watched show ever according to its own figures. In the South Korean fictional series, 456 people who desperately need money sign up to take part in a secret, deadly elimination contest based on children's games; the last player left standing wins a cash prize of 45.6 billion South Korean won. It is revealed over the course of the show that – spoiler alert – the competition is being staged for bored super-wealthy patrons. The series has been widely interpreted as satirising capitalism.
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S14Slapps: inside Europe's struggle to protect journalists from malicious lawsuits  Francesca Farrington has consulted to the European Parliament, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE). Justin Borg-Barthet has consulted to the European Parliament, the European Commission, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE).
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S15Umaru Shehu: Nigerian public health giant who played a major role in polio eradication  Professor Emeritus Umaru Shehu, who died on 2 October 2023, was born in Yerwa (Maiduguri), Nigeria, in 1930. Widely regarded as one of the country’s early leaders in public health policy and practice, he was the first public health physician in the northern region and remained active all his life. He will be remembered for his great work in eradicating poliomyelitis from Nigeria. He started the National Programme on Immunisation in 1995 and was the agency’s first chairman. His efforts, with others, culminated in Nigeria achieving polio-free status on 18 June 2020. The country was officially declared free of the disease on 25 August 2020. Poliomyelitis mainly affects children under five years of age.
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S16Faith communities are rallying to check climate change - their size and influence counts  According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 80% of the global population are motivated by a faith or spirituality. Faced with the triple planetary crises of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change, what role can faith communities play in saving the planet?In a recent publication, we looked at the role of two faith-based organisations – the Green Anglicans movement, which is present in 13 African countries, and UNEP’s Faith for Earth Initiative, a UN programme which partners with faith-based organisations on development goals. Our aim was to find out what role faith and religion can play in addressing climate change both at the grassroots and within the UN.
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S17Sharpeville: new research on 1960 South African massacre shows the number of dead and injured was massively undercounted  On 21 March 1960 at 1.40 in the afternoon, apartheid South Africa’s police opened fire on a peaceful crowd of about 4,000 residents of Sharpeville, who were protesting against carrying identity documents that restricted black people’s movement. The police minimised the number of victims by at least one third, and justified the shooting by claiming that the crowd was violent. This shocking story has been thus misrepresented for over 60 years.The Sharpeville Massacre ignited international outrage and the birth of the Anti-Apartheid Movement worldwide. It also led to renewed political protests inside South Africa. These were met with the total suppression of political movements that lasted for 30 years. Despite its historic importance, Sharpeville as a place and a community has remained unknown to the wider public and its residents anonymous. Yet they have a story to tell.
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S18Zambia's foreign debt tragedy - what needs to happen to resolve the crisis  Three years after defaulting on its foreign debt, Zambia is still trying to reach agreement with all its creditors on how to manage this situation. This has left the southern African country in a state of development finance limbo. It is handicapped in raising the funds needed to generate jobs, build infrastructure, provide health, education and social services and deal with climate change. Its president, Hakainde Hichilema, has warned that the situation threatens to undermine its democracy.Zambia’s inability to reach a definitive agreement with all its creditors is not for lack of trying. But it has had bad luck. It is the test case for the Common Framework that the G20 international forum established in November 2020 to deal with the debts of low-income countries. The framework was expected to result in all creditors making comparable contributions to help a defaulting country resolve its debt crisis.
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S19Unwrapping Uranus and its icy secrets: What NASA would learn from a mission to a wild world  Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, orbits in the outer solar system, about two billion miles (3.2 billion kilometers) from Earth. It is an enormous world – quadruple the diameter of Earth, with 15 times the mass and 63 times the volume. Unvisited by spacecraft for more than 35 years, Uranus inhabits one of the least explored regions of our solar system. Although scientists have learned some things about it from telescopic observations and theoretical work since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986, the planet remains an enigma.
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S20S21Philly parents worry about kids' digital media use but see some benefits, too  A group of U.S. senators recently called on tech giant Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – to hand over documents related to the mental and physical harms its products cause to young people. The demand follows a lawsuit filed by 33 states in October 2023 that alleges that Meta, in order to maximize profits, knowingly designs addictive social media features. The lawsuit states these features are designed “to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens.”Although we did not set out to study parental concerns about children’s media use, every one of the parents expressed worries. Only eight parents discussed any positive aspects of media use.
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S22S23S24Writing instructors are less afraid of students cheating with ChatGPT than you might think  Troy Hicks is affiliated as an occasional consultant with Writable, a web-based platform to support writers and the teaching of writing which also includes an AI-enhanced revision assistant. When ChatGPT launched a year ago, headlines flooded the internet about fears of student cheating. A pair of essays in The Atlantic decried “the end of high-school English” and the death of the college essay.“ NPR informed readers that ”everybody is cheating.“
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S25The four challenges faced by Spain's new government  Pedro Sánchez’ investiture marks the beginning of the third consecutive parliamentary term led by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). After a fraught period of negotiations, Sánchez now leads a broad coalition government along with seven other parties.The new government faces enormous challenges, not least the fallout from the controversial Amnesty Law pardoning hundreds of Catalan separatists which has been dominating headlines. This will continue to shape public discourse over the coming months and determine the continuity of the government.
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S26As seas get warmer, tropical species are moving further from the equator  Climate change is causing tropical species in the ocean to move from the equator towards the poles, while temperate species recede. This mass movement of marine life, termed tropicalisation, is leading to a cascade of consequences for ecosystems and biodiversity, and has the potential to impact the global economy.My colleagues and I recently identified and reviewed 215 tropicalisation-related scientific papers published between 2003 and 2023. Our work, now published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, reveals the extent of this species movement, and demonstrates just how widespread its consequences can be.
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S27Wind turbine blades: inside the battle to overcome their waste problem  Kieran Ruane is a co-director in BladeBridge.ie, a spin-off company which offers bridge manufacturing and outdoor furniture made from used wind turbine blades. Wind-farm owners in Europe are holding off on scrapping their old turbines to maximise the power they can generate from them. That’s the latest news from a meeting we recently attended on the industry’s future. Wind turbines are designed to last 25 years, but the calculus for owners appears to have shifted because of the surge in electricity prices due to the Ukraine war.
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S28S29S30S31Should I have children? Here's what the philosophers say  Parenthood has traditionally been considered the normal outcome of growing up. A side effect of reaching maturity. Across Europe and the US, only 10%-20% of adults remain childless or (more positively) child free. In some cases, this is accidental. People wait for an ideal time that never arrives – and then it is too late.Anti-natalism is the philosophical view that it is ethically wrong to bring anyone else into being. The justifications draw upon worries about suffering and choice. And it’s not an exclusively modern attitude. The ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, writing at the end of the 5th century BC, tells us that it is “best of all” not to have been born, because life contains far more suffering than good.
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S32Nazi doctors weren't just 'a few bad apples', shows report - and simplistic stories won't help guard against future medical abuses  Extraordinary evil involves a total moral collapse across society caused by failure of individual humanity and ethical judgment. This was the conclusion of the philosopher Hannah Arendt after witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann – the chief architect of the Holocaust – in Jerusalem.Medicine, which is supposed to alleviate human suffering, became a willing accomplice in Nazi mass murder. Although medical professionals had been involved in abusive practices on human subjects and populations before, under Nazi rule the scale of their professional lapse was extreme in every respect.
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S33How a small Caribbean island is trying to become hurricane-proof  Director, Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative at the ODI, and Co-director, Caribbean Resilience and Recovery Knowledge Network, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus When Hurricane Maria struck the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica in 2017, it caused the kind of devastation which is unthinkable to larger countries. The Category 5 hurricane damaged 98% of building roofs and caused US$1.2 billion (£950 million) in damage. Dominica effectively lost 226% of its GDP overnight.
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S34Lloyds of London archives show how important the City was to transatlantic slavery  Katie Donington was on the advisory board for the 'Underwriting Souls' project. She worked on the ESRC-funded 'Legacies of British Slave-ownership' project (2009-2012) and the AHRC/ESRC-funded 'Structure and Significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership, 1763-1833' project (2013-2015).In 1783, the City of London was gripped by a court case which symbolised the brutal economics of slavery. Two years previously, the Liverpool slave ship Zong had set out from Accra, in present-day Ghana, with 442 men, women and children crammed in its hold.
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S35S36S37Science communicators need to stop telling everybody the universe is a meaningless void  The scientific worldview has made great contributions to humanity’s flourishing. But, as science advances into territory once firmly held by religion – attempting to answer questions about the origins of the universe, life and consciousness – science communication often paints a fairly pessimistic picture of the world.Take a few examples. An article in New Scientist claims our perception that pet dogs love us may be an illusion. Physicist Brian Greene sees humanity’s ultimate fate in the demise of the Solar System. Writer Yuval Noah Harari, in his bestselling book Sapiens, posits that life holds no inherent meaning. Philosopher David Benatar goes so far as to argue that being born is a bad thing.
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S38'I can see the characters': how reading aloud to patients can break through 'cancer fog'  If you were going through cancer treatment, wouldn’t you want to escape your reality for a while? Reading a story can offer an alternate world, a chance to catch your breath from the cycle of appointments and treatment, offering imagined companions. Solace is an intangible bedfellow, but a good story weaves a certain kind of magic.However, a problem arises in the form of “cancer fog”, a frequent but unwelcome side-effect of cancer and its forms of treatment. Cancer fog, also known as cancer-related cognitive impairment, can affect problem-solving, concentration, memory, motivation, navigation, keeping track of conversations, visual processing and hence, reading.
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S39S40Thalidomide survivors are receiving an apology for the pharmaceutical disaster that changed pregnancy medicine  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will deliver a national apology to thalidomide survivors and their families today. More than 60 years since the medication had devastating consequences when taken by pregnant women, the apology recognises the government’s role in the tragedy and its enduring impact. Had the government acted more swiftly to issue public warnings and restrict thalidomide use when concerns were first raised, as many as 20% of Australia’s thalidomide survivors may not have been affected.
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S41S42Striving for transparency: Why Canada's pesticide regulations need an overhaul  In 2021, Health Canada announced a freeze on changing maximum residue limits (MRLs) — the maximum allowable pesticide residues acceptable under Canadian law. This decision followed substantial public outcry following Canada’s most widely used weed killer glyphosate’s proposed MRL increase.This year, three ministries (including Health Canada) unpaused the comparatively less complex residue limit adjustments and sought to transform the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA).
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S43Cyberbullying girls with pornographic deepfakes is a form of misogyny  The BBC recently reported on a disturbing new form of cyberbullying that took place at a school in Almendralejo, Spain. A group of girls were harmed by male classmates who used an app powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to generate “deepfake” pornographic images of the girls, and then distributed those images on social media.
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S44Israel's ground offensive in Gaza City is ignoring the past lessons of urban warfare  Mediators are seeking to extend the truce between Israel and Hamas beyond Wednesday amid the exchange of hostages for prisoners. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to resume the war with “full force” when the truce ends.Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent aerial bombardment and direct ground operation in Gaza on Oct. 27 have polarized world debate. This has led to a dearth of critical analysis on the conflict. One area where this has been poignantly clear is the lack of attention paid to the tactical problems that Israel’s incursion in Gaza faces.
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S45S46S47Policing is not the answer to shoplifting, feeding people is  Big businesses like to tell us that, as consumers, we all pay for food theft. We’ve been sold a narrative that as consumers who don’t steal, we pay for the theft of food by others on our grocery receipts. Reported increases in food theft in Canada are linked to pressures from rising inflation along with diminished investment in social supports such as housing, mental health, transit and crisis and community supports.
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S48Meal kits are booming - but how do they stack up nutritionally?  Meal kits are a billion dollar industry selling the promise of convenience while cooking healthy meals at home. Delivering ingredients and step-by-step recipes to the doorstep, meal kits reduce the time and energy to plan, shop and prepare meals. But do they deliver on their promise of health?The range and quantity of vegetables in a meal is a great indicator of how healthy it is. So we assessed the vegetable content of recipes from six Australian meal kit providers. We found when it comes to nutrition, whether it be budget friendly or high-end, it’s more about the meals you choose and less about what company to use.
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S49The government has announced plans to regulate smart TV home screens: what the new rules mean for you  Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has today introduced legislation that will require smart TV manufacturers to ensure we can easily find local broadcasters – including ABC, SBS and the commercial networks – when we turn on our TVs.This “prominence” law will require TV manufacturers to preinstall iview, SBS On Demand, 9Now, 7Plus and 10Play on all smart TVs sold in Australia. It will also ensure these apps are not unfairly hidden in the user interface compared to major players like Netflix and Disney+.
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S50S51New research shows how Indigenous-owned businesses are creating better outcomes for their employees  We are seeing more Indigenous businesses in Australia. This is important, given these businesses produce social impact, support Indigenous economic self-determination and maintain strong levels of Indigenous employment.When we hear about Indigenous knowledge businesses, we often think about how this knowledge is presented within a business’ product or service, such as through art, tourism or clothing. What is less understood is the role Indigenous knowledge can play in the organisation and culture of a business, and the profound impact this can have.
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S52S53Do you really need antibiotics? Curbing our use helps fight drug-resistant bacteria  Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest global threats to health, food security and development. This month, The Conversation’s experts explore how we got here and the potential solutions.Antibiotic resistance occurs when a microorganism changes and no longer responds to an antibiotic that was previously effective. It’s associated with poorer outcomes, a greater chance of death and higher health-care costs.
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S54Extra senators for ACT and NT will benefit left but increase malapportionment  Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne The Poll Bludger has summarised the final report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) that was released Monday. The most contentious recommendation is that the number of senators for both the ACT and the Northern Territory be increased from two to four.
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S55Denmark's biggest spy scandal raises questions on how to try intelligence officials  The biggest spy scandal in Denmark’s history closed not with a bang, but with a whimper. On November 1 the Danish Supreme Court ruled that a case involving leaked state secrets could go not go ahead in secret. In response, the state prosecutor dropped the case. Thus ended a three-year attempt to prosecute Denmark’s highest ranking spy chief and a veteran defence minister. But many questions remain unanswered. Among them: how can openness be ensured in a democratic society?In August 2020, Lars Findsen, head of the Danish foreign intelligence service, was suspended. A three-judge commission found him blameless, but he was indicted and arrested in December 2021 and jailed until February 2022, charged with leaking top-secret information. In December 2021, former Danish Defence Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen was also charged with leaking state secrets. An unnamed third intelligence agency worker also faced charges. All charges have now been dropped.
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S56Ghana wants to restrict imports on 22 products - an economist explains how, why and what else must be done  Ghana’s Ministry of Trade and Industry has tabled in parliament a proposed ban or restrictions on imports of certain goods, including rice, sugar, poultry, fruit juices and animal intestines (tripe). The proposed legislation empowers the trade minister to issue licences to potential importers of goods. Critics of the policy say it will give too much power to the minister and create room for corruption. The Conversation Africa’s Godfred Akoto Boafo spoke to development economist Adu Owusu Sarkodie about the policy.These refer to the various schemes, mechanisms and regulations that a government can impose to restrict or limit the importation of goods and services. They come in different forms.
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S57Dear Pepper: To What Degree?  Dear Pepper is a monthly advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to [email protected]. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.You—being a comic dog / dog in comic form—seem like the perfect creature to ask about a conundrum I’m facing.I’m a writer, artist, and teacher.
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S58What Would a Lasting Peace Between Israel and Palestine Really Look Like?  Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the ensuing Israeli response, has brought new energy to discussions of restarting a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, which has been dormant for years. To understand how such a process might develop, I spoke with Nathan Thrall, the former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli project, and an expert on the conflict, who lives in Jerusalem. He is also the author of the recent book “A Day In The Life Of Abed Salama,” which tells the story of the occupation through a Palestinian man’s search for his son after a fatal bus accident. (I first spoke to Thrall in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack. Since then, a number of Thrall’s book events have been cancelled.) During our conversation, the transcript of which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Hamas’s incursion may have changed Israeli politics, whether debates about a one-state solution versus a two-state solution are helpful, and America’s role in the conflict.How are you thinking about a possible resolution to this conflict differently from how you did before October 7th?
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S59The Dead Children We Must See  In a series of three essays published in 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War, which ended up with more than a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, had not really taken place. In his inimitable fashion, his argument was filled with internal contradictions, annoying trolling (Baudrillard had initially written that the Gulf War would never actually happen, which, of course, it did), and some pockets of real clarity. His ultimate argument was that what had taken place wasn’t so much a war but a one-sided aerial slaughter that was scrubbed clean through intensive media control. What people in the West saw were so-called live feeds of missiles and aerial assaults fuelled by new forms of technology, whether the Patriot missile or the stealth bomber. The war was communicated to us almost like an advertisement for a new car—here are all the new features, and here are the salesmen in the form of generals or foreign-policy experts paraded on cable news. We did not see slain enemy combatants, destroyed civilian homes.If the Gulf War was a slaughter sold to the American public as a clean military-technology show, the war in Gaza has been a production line of horrifying images. The footage of dead and wounded children, particularly on social media, has traumatized the world and made it clear that nothing—not even the Israeli military tightly controlling media access—can stop ordinary citizens around the world from seeing what happens when a shell hits a hospital or a school or an apartment building where families live. My guess is that this war’s lasting legacy may not be some geopolitical break after years of conflict but the images of the innocents we’ve seen, including children, killed in almost every imaginable way.
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S60An "Academic Transformation" Takes On the Math Department  About twenty years ago, Olgur Celikbas attended a conference on algebra in Turkey. He and his then girlfriend, Ela ÃzçaÄlar, had recently graduated from college in Ankara; both had studied math. At the time, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln had one of the top commutative-algebra programs in the world, and professors at the conference sold Olgur on the idea of going to America for grad school. Ela was less sure. "I was, like, 'Where's Nebraska?' " she recalled. She asked her father, a geography professor. He said something about a corn ocean.Ela and Olgur got married, moved to Nebraska, and obtained Ph.D.s in mathematics. They began looking for academic positions, but finding jobs in the same place felt like "the most difficult two-body problem in the world," Ela said. They got temporary appointments at the University of Missouri, then at the University of Connecticut. In 2016, Olgur got a tenure-track job at West Virginia University. Ela was hired as a research professor. She was promoted to the tenure track in 2019, nearing her fortieth birthday.
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S61Geoffrey Hinton: "It's Far Too Late" to Stop Artificial Intelligence  The American public's increasing fascination with artificial intelligenceâits rapid advancement and ability to reshape the futureâhas put the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton in an awkward position. He is known as the godfather of A.I. because of his groundbreaking work in neural networks, a branch of computer science that most researchers had given up on, while Hinton's advances eventually led to a revolution. But he is now fearful of what it could unleash. "There's a whole bunch of risks that concern me and other people. . . . I'm a kind of latecomer to worrying about the risks, " Hinton tells The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman. "Because very recently I came to the conclusion that these digital intelligences might already be as good as us. They're able to communicate knowledge between one another much better than we can." Knowing the technology the way he does, Hinton feels it's not currently possible to limit the intentions and goals of an A.I. that inevitably becomes smarter than humans. He remains a researcher and no longer has a financial stake in the success of A.I., so he is perhaps franker about the downsides of the A.I. revolution than Sam Altman and other tech moguls. He agrees that it's "not unreasonable" for a layperson to wish that A.I. would simply go away, "but it's not going to happen. . . . It's just so useful, so much opportunity to do good." What should we do? Rothman asks him. "I don't know. Smart young people," Hinton hopes, "should be thinking about, is it possible to prevent [A.I.] from ever wanting to take over."Rothman's Profile of Geoffrey Hinton appears in a special issue of The New Yorker about artificial intelligence.
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S62You Need to Watch the Most Ridiculous Action Movie of the 2010s for Free ASAP  The Losers is an unfortunate product of its time, but one that still retains some charming merits. It shouldn’t be surprising that The Losers never got its coveted sequel, despite angling hard for one. The Warner Bros. film, adapted from the Vertigo Comics series, was hardly the first attempt to spawn a franchise from the sillier sensibilities of a post-9/11 action film. It has plenty of flaws — a contrived script chief among them — but deserves more credit than it gets.
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S63The Most Charming RPG of the Year Is Final Fantasy Meets Redwall  The opening scenes of the 1977 Disney animated film, The Rescuers, is delightful. Foreign dignitaries arrive at the U.N. building in New York to go about their international business and then tiny mice begin to sneak out of the dignitaries’ briefcases and purses and make their way to a mouse-sized U.N., full of foreign mice dignitaries called the Rescue Aid Society. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in that world of mice.Small Saga, a new indie RPG, lets me find out. It’s a story set in the world of animals that are always underfoot, pulling inspirations from the likes of Redwall and Watership Down, as well as Final Fantasy. Exploring this world and unraveling the stories within has made Small Saga a late addition to my top games of 2023 after it released earlier this month for $19.99.
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S64These 7 Lifestyle Changes May Slash Lifetime Cancer Risk, Study Reveals  Second only to heart disease, cancer sits high among the world’s unfortunate pantheon of fatal maladies. In the U.S. alone, more than one in three people in the U.S. will experience cancer in their lifetime. While not all cancers can be prevented, there are ways to slash your cancer risk, such as avoiding tobacco or maintaining a healthy weight.Now a new study published Tuesday in the journal BMC Medicine is adding even more weapons to your cancer-preventing arsenal. And if you strictly follow this particular set of recommendations developed by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AIRC), you just might be able to significantly cut down on your risk for all sorts of different cancers at one go.
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S65Original Avengers Actor Shoots Down the Most Exciting MCU Rumor  It’s no secret that Marvel Studios has been in a free fall lately. The franchise felt like it lost its focal point after the original Avengers departed in Avengers: Endgame, and it never found a new one. It’s been four years since any Avengers have assembled to face a worthy threat, and though there are two new Avengers films on the horizon, they may arrive too late to bring balance to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. Marvel needs a more immediate solution to its Phase 5 slump, and according to reports from Variety, an OG Avengers reunion might be the trick. While the studio has yet to confirm the rumor, it’s become an exciting prospect for fans of the iconic super-team. But what do the actors themselves have to say about it? Would Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johannson, or Chris Evans be open to another round in the MCU?
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S67This Quest 3 Demo Gives 'Super Mario 64' The First-Person VR Treatment We Deserve  We’ve already been wowed by people messing around with Super Mario 64 in mixed reality, but now ow we’re getting a teaser at what a Super Mario game could look like in full-blown virtual reality.There’s no shortage of clever Quest 3 demos out there already, so it was only a matter of time before someone reimagined the classic Nintendo 64 game in first-person VR. Even though someone already made a mod back in 2018 that turns Super Mario 64 into a first-person game, we’ve never seen it translated into VR.
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S68The Wildest Thriller of 2023 Stole Its Big Twist From a Violent Greek Myth  Saltburn isn’t exactly a nuanced story. Emerald Fennell’s take on a Talented Mr. Ripley story follows young Oxford student Oliver (Barry Keoghan) as he worms his way into the hearts and lives of an upper-class family over a summer at their sprawling country estate. The film’s entire third act is a cavalcade of bad decisions, showing how unredeemable every character involved truly is. But underneath the takedown on social climbing and class warfare, there’s an entire world of symbolism that is quite literally hiding in plain sight. And once you see it, it’ll change how you see the movie entirely.
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S69Giant Iceberg 3 Times The Size of New York City Is Loose -- Where Will It Go?  The largest iceberg ever is making a break for the open waters of the Southern Ocean, and it could be a gigantic problem.The enormous iceberg, known as A23a, has been drifting since 2020 (haven’t we all). But a European Space Agency satellite caught it rounding the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula (a tentacle-like piece of ice-covered land sticking out from West Antarctica to point vaguely toward South America) earlier this week. Depending on where it goes next, A23a could be either a hazard to shipping or an ecological disaster.
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S70Star Wars Actor Debunks a Pervasive 'Mandalorian' Fan Theory  Maintaining an air of mystery can be a double-edged sword for any popular character. There’s something to be said for the unspoken cool factor it affords, but when it comes to gaining the trust of a captive audience, mystery can harm as much as it helps. The Star Wars saga is chock full of characters in that gray area. That mystique can make you root for morally nuanced characters like Lando Calrissian and Han Solo, but as modern Star Wars projects double down on a binary view of good and evil, it’s become trickier for heroes with nebulous intentions to get by.
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