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 S37George Santos Was All Hot Air   American politics is a circus. In the arena of Washington, DC, lawmaking and lawbreaking is a fanatical kind of entertainment, a warped experiment that, in recent years, has taken on the veneer of blind zealotry. Republicans, in particular, have thrived on a diet of chaos since the rise of former president Donald Trump, turning the performance of democracy into primetime viewing. “The reality of it is, it’s all theater,” Representative George Santos of New York said on Thursday during a press conference on the steps of the US Capitol as he faced expulsion from Congress.Soaking in the carnival of media attention that has stalked him since he arrived in DC in 2022, Santos—taking one last stand as a solo act this week—was predictably unmuzzled in the hours leading up to the vote that would decide his political future. “It’s theater for the cameras, it’s theater for the microphones,” he said, referring to the playhouse of American bureaucracy and, ironically, himself. “It’s theater for the American people at the expense of the American people.”
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S20How common are unexplained outbreaks of disease?  It began one spring morning in 1993, when a Navajo family pulled into a service station in New Mexico and dialled 911. Their son, a 19-year-old marathon runner, had suddenly developed breathing problems. He was rushed to the local hospital by ambulance, where he died. The doctors were stumped – what could have killed someone so young and healthy? It soon transpired that the marathon runner's death was not an isolated incident. He had been on the way to his fiancée's funeral, after she had succumbed to a similar respiratory illness just a few days earlier.
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S49Neptune-sized exoplanet is too big for its host star  You win some, you lose some. Earlier this week, observations made by the Webb Space Telescope provided new data that supports what we thought we understood about planet formation. On Thursday, word came that astronomers spotted a large planet orbiting close to a tiny star—a star that's too small to have had enough material around it to form a planet that large.
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S34The Best Security Cameras for Inside Your Home  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDNot quite ready to deck out your house with window, door, and motion sensors and hire an on-call monitoring service? Don’t fret! You can still keep your home secure without messing with your wiring by going with an indoor security camera or two. Knowing you can check in when you are away from home offers peace of mind, but these cameras aren’t perfect. There’s an obvious security benefit, but you expose yourself to privacy risks. These are our favorite security cameras after rigorous testing, and we’ve also got details on what to look for when shopping for one.
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S35The Cybertruck Must Be Huge--or It Will Dig Tesla's Grave  Stupid. Divisive. Fugly. The Hummer shouldn't have sold in numbers, but it did. Might Elon Musk pull off a similar trick with the stainless steel Cybertruck?Forty-six months after the official unveilingâwhen design chief Franz von Holzhausen famously shattered the prototype's Armor Glass with the spirited throw of a metal ballâyesterday's Cybertruck Delivery Event confirmed that Tesla's Texan Gigafactory is finally now slowly spitting out Cybertrucks.
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S42Fraud abounds -- meet the three kinds of people stealing your money  When we think of someone who commits fraud, we think of people like Bernie Madoff or companies like Enron: intentional perpetrators of financial crimes. But other kinds of people commit fraud, too. Accounting professor Kelly Richmond Pope explains who else comprises the “fraud triangle” — and they might be even scarier than the big bads.KELLY RICHMOND POPE: Fraud does not happen in a vacuum- it happens in a village. If there are people, there could be fraud. about $5 trillion today, with that number increasingly rising. So it affects everybody, every industry, every country. And so I think what attracted me originally to the subject is how universal it was. There's some research that talks about So if there's more distance between you and what you are stealing, then you sometimes think it's victimless. A lot of times people think booking a false entry is not the same thing as stealing money out of someone's wallet. No one's really going to get hurt. It's just a company. So it allows us to think that there's no victim on the other end, but we all know that there's lots of victims on the other end.
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S58What If Americans Are Happy at Work?  This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.The typical career is about 80,000 hours long, or one-sixth of the average person’s waking life. One would love to be deliriously happy for all 80,000 hours. But, alas, we’re not. And the economic-news industry loves nothing more than to remind us of it. In fact, for the past three years, finance media have become so desperate to explain the state of workplace misery to their audience that they’ve often ignored facts, logic, or basic common sense.
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S36Dungeons & Dragons Is a Household Name Again  Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUHKyle Newman, director of the cult classic Fanboys, recently coauthored the book Lore and Legends: A Visual Celebration of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game. The book chronicles the astounding success of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset, which launched in 2014.
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S59What Kissinger Didn't Understand  His blindness to human suffering was, in the end, both a moral failure and a strategic one.Henry Kissinger spent half a century pursuing and using power, and a second half century trying to shape history’s judgment of the first. His longevity, and the frantic activity that ceased only when he stopped breathing, felt like an interminable refusal to disappear until he’d ensured that posthumous admiration would outweigh revulsion. In the end none of it mattered. The historical record—Vietnam and Cambodia, the China opening, the Soviet détente, slaughter in Bangladesh and East Timor, peace in the Middle East, the coup in Chile—was already there. Its interpretation will not be up to him.
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S40The Best Mattresses You Can Buy Online  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDSearching for the best mattress online is a waking nightmare, and picking the wrong one can literally cause bad dreams or kill your back. It doesn't help that the online market is flooded with options or that there are more dedicated mattress review sites than stars in the sky.
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S39The 25 Best Shows on Max (aka HBO Max) Right Now  Max (previously HBO Max) might be one of the greatest things to come out of the streaming revolution. No, this is not a paid promotion; it’s just simple logic, given that so much of television’s most compelling content of the past 25 years—from The Sopranos and The Wire to Game of Thrones and The Leftovers—originated on the “it’s not TV” network. So having one hub to find them all (including the aforementioned titles) makes good sense for both the network and binge-watchers looking to maximize their investment.But HBO’s streaming arm has gotten into the original content game too, with highly acclaimed series like Hacks, Station Eleven, and The Staircase (the owl did it!). When you’re done rewatching some of the classics, here are our favorite shows streaming on HBO Max right now.
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S28S47S9S48What a lovely day: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga trailer is so shiny and chrome  Among the undisputed highlights of 2015's post-apocalyptic masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road was Charlize Theron's steely, vengeful Imperator Furiosa, a war captain who turned against the brutal ruler of the Wasteland to free his enslaved "wives." We now have our first look at the younger version of our beloved Imperator with the official trailer for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—a spinoff prequel film starring Anya Taylor-Joy that traces the origin of this iconic character. It's everything we could want in a Mad Max trailer, and we are so very ready to witness this movie when it hits theaters next spring.
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S32'Authentic' Is the Word of the Year. You Read That Right  At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. At 100 years old, news outletsâand the worldâhad been preparing for the passing of President Nixon's secretary of state for a while. Still, when people were finding out via emoji-filled chain texts, it seemed unreal. Everything does now. Deepfakes, the metaverse, Elon Musk telling advertisers to fuck themselves at a time when X could probably use the money. Even intelligence is artificial.Perhaps this is why there is a premium on genuineness these days. On the real deal. Monday, Merriam-Webster announced its word of the year: authentic. Like Spotify Wrapped, the announcement is something of an internet holiday. And like Wrapped, 2023's word has ties to Taylor Swift, who is Spotify's most-streamed artist and someone fans find to be genuine. Beyond Swift, searches for "authentic" were up on M-W "driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media."
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S44Philosopher tells us why the elderly owe the young compensation for the COVID lockdowns  There has never been such a widespread and stringent lockdown as the one for COVID. There was some kind of social distancing for the Spanish Flu after World War I and localized lockdowns during Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, but there is no recorded precedent for the majority of the world following quarantine policies. Before the vaccination rollout, COVID was estimated to kill roughly 1.4% of those infected, with the immunocompromised and elderly at far greater risk. This means that the vast majority of people in the world went into lockdown to help protect a minority of their societies.Lockdown harmed a lot of people in a lot of ways. Everyone felt the brunt of its isolation. But not everyone was harmed to the same degree. Hundreds of millions of students fell behind in school — and many remain behind. In a recent paper published in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, the philosopher Kal Kalewold argues that the lockdown disproportionately impacted younger age groups.
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S50The Universe in a lab: Testing alternate cosmology using a cloud of atoms  In the basement of Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik in Germany, researchers have been simulating the Universe as it might have existed shortly after the Big Bang. They have created a tabletop quantum field simulation that involves using magnets and lasers to control a sample of potassium-39 atoms that is held close to absolute zero. They then use equations to translate the results at this small scale to explore possible features of the early Universe.
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S53S43$230,000: The price at which the average American would give up democracy  “Everyone has a price,” the cynical saying goes. In other words, there’s always an amount of money that would convince someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t, like give up a prized possession, betray a friend, or behave immorally.Researchers based out of Princeton University and the University of Barcelona recently explored whether this statement applies to democracy. Is there a price at which citizens of a country with free elections would give up their fundamental right to choose their representatives? The scientists’ findings, published November 20th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest there is indeed such a price — but reassuringly, it is quite high.
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S57Photos of the Week:  The Loy Krathong festival in Thailand, a funeral service for Rosalynn Carter in Georgia, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, an eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily, hostage and prisoner releases in Israel and the West Bank, a greenhouse laboratory in France, an autumn-colored vineyard in California, ski jumping in Finland, and much more A newly born Sumatran rhino calf walks in its enclosure at Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary at Way Kambas National Park, Indonesia. The critically endangered Sumatran rhino was born on Sumatra Island on November 25, 2023, the second Sumatran rhino born in the country this year and a welcome addition to a species that currently numbers fewer than 50 animals. #
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S51Broadcom cuts at least 2,800 VMware jobs following $69 billion acquisition  Broadcom announced back in May of 2022 that it would buy VMware for $61 billion and take on an additional $8 billion of the company's debt, and on November 22 of 2023 Broadcom said that it had completed the acquisition. And it looks like Broadcom's first big move is going to be layoffs: according to WARN notices filed with multiple states (catalogued here by Channel Futures), Broadcom will be laying off at least 2,837 employees across multiple states, including 1,267 at its Palo Alto campus in California.
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S38When It Comes to January 6 Lawsuits, a Court Splits Donald Trump in Two  Donald Trump, the president, may well be immune from any civil action for allegedly inciting an attack against the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. But Donald Trump, the candidate, is not, an appellate court in the District of Columbia says.“When a first-term President opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act,” says a ruling handed down this morning.
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S60Inflation Is Your Fault  You would think, with prices as high as they are, that Americans would have tempered their enthusiasm for shopping of late; that they would have pulled back spending on luxury items; that they would have sought out budget and basic options, bought smaller packages, fewer things.This is not what has happened. Consumer spending rose 0.2 percent, after accounting for higher prices, in October, the most recent month for which the government has data. Online shopping jumped 7.8 percent over the Thanksgiving long weekend, more than analysts had anticipated. The sales of new cars, dishwashers, cruise vacations, jewelry—all things people tend to give up when they are watching their budget—remain strong. Consultants keep anticipating a recession precipitated by the “death of the consumer.” Thus far, the consumer is staying alive.
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S55S3S45"Integrated thriving" can fix unhelpful buzz words like "girlboss" and "snail girl"  It’s hardly surprising that there’s a growing obsession with labeling women in the workplace. From “girlboss” to “lazy girl” to most recently “snail girl,” women are looking for ways to redefine their professional relationship with themselves so they can lead an integrated life. This isn’t about ambition — the new McKinsey report confirms: Women are as driven as ever. Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin’s work proved most glaring gender gaps would diminish if employees had more control over where and when their work got done. No wonder why trends that originate as “a less exhausting paradigm” are catching fire. Perhaps these trends satisfy the many women who are searching for ways to “be” professionally that don’t lead to burnout or backlash. While certain labels can be cathartic for women who feel burned out or consumed by their work, words like “lazy” and “snail” and “bossy” can have damaging long-term effects.
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S22Scientists Sequence DNA from a 3,000-Year-Old Brick  A clay brick from the National Museum of Denmark from which ancient DNA samples were derived.Thousands of years ago people building a palace molded mud from beside the Tigris River into a brick, scooping up parts of nearby plants in the process. Researchers recently managed to tease discernible plant DNA from that brick, providing a rare look at what was growing in Mesopotamia (now part of Iraq) nearly three millennia ago, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.
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S67Expelling George Santos Was a Mistake  Forcing the New York representative out of the House after a conviction would have been justified; pushing him out beforehand is not.George Santos, the former Republican representative from New York, seemed like he stepped out of an episode of the HBO political-comedy show Veep. His reality-TV antics and ostentatious fabrications about his life, and the criminal allegations swirling around him, made him a surreal character in an already surreal Congress.
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S682023 Space-Telescope Advent Calendar  Once again, it’s time for one of my favorite holiday traditions: the 16th annual Space-Telescope Advent Calendar, featuring images from both NASA’s Hubble telescope and its new James Webb Space Telescope. Every day until Monday, December 25, this page will present a new, incredible image of our universe from one of these two telescopes. Be sure to come back every day until Christmas, and follow us on social media for daily updates. I hope you enjoy these amazing and awe-inspiring images, as well as the continued efforts of the science teams that have brought them to Earth. I say this every year, but it really is a joy to put this calendar together each December. A stellar nursery. The first-anniversary image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, affecting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. The heftiest star in this image is S1, which appears amid a glowing cave it is carving out with its stellar winds on the right side of the image. #
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S521960s chatbot ELIZA beat OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in a recent Turing test study  In a preprint research paper titled "Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?", two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success. But along the way, the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions—and that a 1960s computer program surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT.
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S46The chaos inside OpenAI - Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and existential risk explained  Journalist Karen Hao joins Big Think’s Editor-in-Chief, Robert Chapman-Smith, to discuss the recent events at OpenAI, including the ousting and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, as well as the ideological clashes regarding the development and release of powerful AI models like ChatGPT.KAREN HAO: I remember early in the days of OpenAI, when I was covering it, I mean people would joke, like if you ask any employee what we're actually trying to do here and what AGI is, you're gonna get a different answer. Yeah, artificial general intelligence, AGI, this term is not actually defined. There's no shared consensus around what AGI is- and of course there's no consensus around what is good for humanity. So if you're going to peg your mission to like really, really vague terminology that doesn't really have much of a definition, what it actually means is it's really vulnerable to ideological interpretation.
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S65Elephants Might Have a Big Carbon Footprint  In 1967, South Africa’s National Parks Board made a fateful decision: The elephant population in Kruger National Park, which had been rising steeply, should stay stable in order to preserve the other species living there. Each year, wildlife managers would choose a number of elephants to cull—usually somewhere from 350 to 500. The animals were shot, their carcasses necropsied, and their meat salted and dried for food.After international uproar and a change in management practices that separated the park into different zones, Kruger stopped culling elephants in 1994. As a result, the park’s elephant numbers swelled from more than 7,800 to 12,500 in about a decade, and its landscape changed dramatically. More elephants dispersed seeds across the park, giving life to more types of plants. They used their tusks to dig for water in the dry season, creating water holes used by many species. And most of all, they knocked down trees, especially tall ones, to get access to their tasty roots and leaves. According to a 2016 study, parts of Kruger consequently stopped absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, and started producing excess carbon instead.
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S8S29Gina Hardy, Chief Customer Officer at Drizly  Wharton’s Barbara Kahn and Dr. Americus Reed speak with Gina Hardy, chief customer officer at Drizly, about the beverage delivery, the Drizly founding story, how they connect with consumers, and more.©2023 Knowledge at Wharton. All rights reserved. Knowledge at Wharton is an affiliate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
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S21The final frontier? How humans could live underwater in 'ocean stations'  A cable vanishes from the surface, stretching away into the abyss. The water is crystal clear, yet just 20m (66ft) down – even with its lights on – the remote operated vehicle (ROV) attached to that cable is beyond the reach of our vision. What must it be like looking up from that depth? What about 10 times that depth? Most humans who venture down that far can only get a brief glimpse of what life is like at those depths. But what if you were able to stay down there for days? That is exactly what the experts at Deep aim to do.Manufacturing of the ocean technology and exploration company's "subsea habitats" has already begun and, on 3 November 2026, they plan to deploy a crew of six fully trained "aquans" to their newly unveiled Sentinel oceanic habitat system. Deep hopes this will begin an era of humanity's continuous presence underwater, an ambition that will mirror the achievements already made in outer space. The technology will allow people to live at depths of up to 200m (656 ft) for up to 28 days at a time – revolutionising the way scientists observe, monitor and understand the oceans.
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S66George Santos Was Finally Too Much for Republicans  The New York representative’s brief congressional career was finished by a decisive vote to expel him. He was a performer until the end.This morning, House members evicted one of their own for only the sixth time in history, terminating the congressional career of the Long Island Republican barely a year after he won election on a campaign of lies and alleged fraud. The vote to expel Santos was 311–114, easily clearing the two-thirds threshold needed to pass. As with most other consequential votes this year, a unified Democratic caucus carried the resolution along with a divided GOP, whose members struggled with the decision of whether to trim their already narrow majority by kicking Santos out of Congress. A slim majority of Republicans stood by Santos, while all but four Democrats voted to expel him.
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S4S64What a Classical-Music Critic Reads  Anthony Tommasini, the former chief classical-music critic for The New York Times, recommends books and music.I love music, but I never learned to play an instrument (something I still occasionally blame my parents for—though, as a father myself, I should know better). The mechanics and language of music are a blind spot for me—a deficiency I was reminded about as I tried to edit a recent essay from Anthony Tommasini, the former chief classical-music critic for The New York Times. Tommasini reviewed a new book about the composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose early-20th-century experiments in music were akin to Pablo Picasso’s in painting and James Joyce’s in fiction. But Schoenberg’s work—and the other envelope-pushing music it inspired—has not found the same sustained interest and acclaim as Picasso’s and Joyce’s. In fact, his music is often categorized as challenging or even infuriating. Tommasini makes a wonderful case for Schoenberg and his continued relevance. But in order to understand his argument and Schoenberg’s innovations, I needed to appreciate the difference between tonal and atonal music—music, as Tommasini put it in the essay, “that didn’t revolve around one key but gave equal weight to all 12 notes.” I could recognize the resulting dissonance when I heard it, but I couldn’t really explain what produced it. Tommasini’s patience with me made me think that he would be a great guide in helping me advance my own music education. So we had a brief chat full of recommendations for further reading and listening.
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