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S1May Sarton on Generosity   “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel t…
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S3The Case for a Chief of Staff  New CEOs are typically focused on creating and implementing a strategy, building a top team, and driving culture change. Optimizing administrative workflow may not seem to be a priority. But a former CEO who now advises boards argues that many chief executives need a chief of staff (CoS)—someone who goes beyond the executive assistant role to help the office function smoothly. According to one CoS, the role encompasses being an air traffic controller for the leader and the senior team, an integrator connecting work streams that would otherwise remain siloed, a communicator linking the leadership team and the broader organization, an honest broker when the leader needs a wide-ranging view without turf considerations, and a confidant. In this article Ciampa outlines what a CoS does, the qualities one needs to succeed, and the ways companies typically design the role (with varying levels of responsibility) to help make a CEO more focused and productive.
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S4The Balanced Scorecard--Measures that Drive Performance  In the same way that you can’t fly an airplane with just one instrument gauge, you can’t manage a company with just one kind of performance measure. Think of a balanced scorecard as the instrument panel in the cockpit of an airplane. It’s a set of interrelated gauges that links seemingly disparate information about a company’s finances and operations. Together, they give you a more complete view of how your company has been performing, as well as where it’s headed.
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S5How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut  Intuition is frequently dismissed as mystical or unreliable — but there’s a deep neurological basis for it. When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. The author offers strategies to learn how to leverage your intuition as a helpful decision-making tool in your career: 1) discern gut feeling from fear, 2) start by making minor decisions, 3) test drive your choices, 4) try the snap judgment test, and 5) fall back on your values.
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S6The Elements of Good Judgment  Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions—is “the core of exemplary leadership,” according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Likierman believes that a more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible for people to learn and improve on it. He approached CEOs at a range of companies, from some of the world’s largest right down to start-ups, along with leaders in the professions: senior partners at law and accountancy firms, generals, doctors, scientists, priests, and diplomats. He asked them to share their observations of their own and other people’s exercise of judgment so that he could identify the skills and behaviors that collectively create the conditions for fresh insights and enable decision makers to discern patterns that others miss. As a result, he has identified six key elements that collectively constitute good judgment: learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery. He describes these elements and offers suggestions for improvement in each one.
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S8The ABCs of the Critical Path Method Recently added to the growing assortment of quantitative tools for business decision making is the Critical Path Method—a powerful but basically simple technique for analyzing, planning, and scheduling large, complex projects. In essence, the tool provides a means of determining (2) which jobs or activities, of the many that comprise a project, are “critical” in their effect on total project time, and (2) how best to schedule all jobs in the project in order to meet a target date at minimum cost. Widely diverse kinds of projects lend themselves to analysis by CPM, as is suggested in the following list of applications:
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S9Katarzynki: Poland's famous gingerbread from Torun  The Polish city of Toruń is famous for being the birthplace of Nikolaus Copernicus – also known as Kopernik – the astronomer who, as we say in Poland, "stopped the Sun, and moved the Earth". But Kopernik is also the name of a company producing the town's famous Toruńskie pierniczki (Toruń gingerbread), which is celebrating its 260th anniversary this year.Many Polish sweets are named after people (a chocolate bar called Grzesiek, or Greg, is a great example), and a type of Toruń gingerbread called katarzynki is no exception. These spiced biscuits, which are covered in chocolate and shaped like a cloud, were most likely named after Katherine of Alexandria, a 4th-Century saint and martyr who is honoured in the Orthodox and Catholic church on 25 November. In Poland, "Katarzynki Day" is often celebrated by young men who wish to get married and is devoted to fortune telling and divination rituals to reveal the name of their future wives. (Women have "Andrzejki Day", or St Andrew's Day, on 30 November.)
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S10S11Nine out of 10 South African criminals reoffend, while in Finland it's 1 in 3. This is why  A very large percentage of South Africans who are released from prison end up being rearrested and being convicted for crimes again. The country has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. Criminologist Casper Lӧtter sets out his findings in a recent paper on what can be learnt from Finland’s experience in reducing this trend.About 9 out of 10 ex-offenders reoffend in South Africa. Expressed as a percentage of 90% of the prison population of roughly 260,000 at any one point in time, this is one of the highest and most unsustainable in the world.
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S12African countries lost control to foreign mining companies - the 3 steps that allowed this to happen  Within a few years of independence, African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources. Prior to this, the resources were exploited by European mining corporations. Since the 1990s, transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force as owners and managers of major mining projects. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), president Joseph-Désiré Mobutu took steps early to place resources under state control. The Bakajika Law of June 1966 required all foreign-based companies to establish their headquarters in the DRC, then known as Zaire, by the end of the year. In addition, the largest Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary, Union minière de Haut Katanga, was nationalised the same year. It became Société générale Congolaise des minerais (Gécamines). By 1970, the Congolese public sector controlled 40% of national value added.
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S13The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, December 3, 2023  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.© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
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S14Amazon Just Quietly Released the Weirdest Fight-Club Thriller of the Decade  In a time where literally thousands of movies and TV shows are at viewers’ fingertips, it’s hard for a movie to be truly surprising. Marketing has to lay out a movie’s entire premise and tone from the get-go in order to set it apart and show what’s special. Because of this, some great twists have been spoiled. Prey, the Predator prequel that caused a splash on Hulu last year, was initially supposed to not mention the creature at all in marketing, making it a shocking twist for viewers. Unfortunately, the allure of a new Predator movie won out and the twist was spoiled. But one 2023 movie proved to be truly surprising. Instead of being a frothy high school R-rated comedy, it proved it could be a solid action thriller with a brutal ending, more Heathers than Superbad — and now you can see it for yourself on Amazon Prime Video.
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S1565 Cool Things That Seem Expensive but Are Cheap AF on Amazon  One of the many tricks to saving money is to buy stuff that looks expensive but isn’t expensive. With a little persistence and some shopping savviness, you can easily find everything from plush bed sheets to stylish hammock chairs at shockingly low prices. But if you don’t have time to scour the internet for deals? Not a problem, as I’ve put together this list of cool things that seem expensive, but are really cheap AF — and you can find them all right on Amazon. So what are you waiting for? Keep scrolling to see more.Not only is this bidet a cost-effective alternative to toilet paper, but it’s also so easy to install that you shouldn’t have any trouble doing it on your own — no need to call a plumber. Its water pressure is adjustable up to six levels, and you can easily tweak the spraying angle by pressing a button on the side control panel. Plus, all pieces are either rustproof or rust-resistant.
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S16'Deadpool 3' Is Marvel's Most Important Upcoming Movie -- And It's Been Set Up to Fail  In the four years since Disney finished its acquisition of Fox, Marvel Studios has slowly grown more comfortable with exercising its rights to Fox’s X-Men characters. Patrick Stewart’s Professor X had a cameo in last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, while Kelsey Grammer recently returned as Beast in the mid-credits scene of The Marvels. Now the studio seems primed to finally bridge the remaining gaps between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Fox’s X-Men Universe with Deadpool 3.The highly anticipated superhero film is set to feature both Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. If certain reports are to be believed, Deadpool 3 won’t just bring the Merc with a Mouth and his fourth-wall-breaking antics to the MCU, either. The film is rumored to play an important role in setting up the multiversal conflict of Avengers: Secret Wars.
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S17Yes, Even Your Indoor Cat Should Wear a Collar. A Vet Tells Us Why.  Modern collars are much more than a loop of fabric with an engraved tag. They boast wi-fi connection and AI capability and might be nicer than your fanciest pair of shoes. But strip back the superfluous parts, collars serve a basic, important function of identifying your fur baby if they ever get out of your sight.While collars are arguably important for humans, our smooth-brained friends don’t know what they’re wearing or why. Are there potential drawbacks to making our pets wear collars? And do indoor cats need them as much as the most trail-blazing dog? The health effects of collars, unsurprisingly, are far more beneficial than they are detrimental.
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S18'The Boys' Season 4 Trailer Reveals 2 Terrifying New Superheroes  The Boys may now be the center of an ever-widening franchise, but there’s nothing like the original recipe. Hot off the heels of Gen V, which brought the action to superhero college Godolkin University, The Boys Season 4 will pick up after a chilling change for Homelander. Now, we have our first look at the new season of the series, revealed at CCXP.The Boys’ Season 4 trailer starts with an eerie narration by new super Sister Sage, noting how empires must be conquered by sowing unrest. The opening is set to shots of the new division ripping through the country: Homelander sympathizers vs. Starlight sympathizers after Homelander’s public heel turn at the end of Season 3.
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S19'Fallout' Trailer Subverts a Huge Adaptation Trend  Gone are the days of “the video game curse.” In a post-The-Last-of-Us world, video game adaptations are almost expected to counter the expectations of their source material and take things super seriously, with grey, muddy color grading and heart-wrenching death scenes (Twisted Metal notwithstanding).Fallout, Prime Video’s stab at adapting Bethesda’s hit franchise, may have found the balance between “Peak TV”-style drama and goofy video-game high jinks to deliver what may just be the next great apocalyptic TV saga.
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S20'House of the Dragon' Season 2 Trailer Finally Gets to the Main Event  House of the Dragon Season 2 is finally delivering great action on par with its predecessor, high fantasy behemoth Game of Thrones. While Season 1 set up the Targaryen empire and those operating within it, it was all a precursor to what we know is upcoming: The Dance of the Dragons, a massive civil war between the Greens and the Blacks. (The Greens being those who side with Queen Alicent and her son Aegon; the Blacks being those loyal to Rhaenyra, Viserys’ eldest child.)Now, in a first-look trailer revealed at CCXP, it’s clear that war has finally descended onto Westeros and nobody is safe.
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S2145 genius solutions to your stupid problems around the house  I'm a science fiction fan, and I thought that, by now, there would be robots available to handle all the annoying household problems. But here we are, still struggling with issues like drafty doors, rotting produce, and sock drawers in chaos. It's all good, though. After boldly going where no AI can, I found 45 solutions to various household issues — and they're all on Amazon.Nothing on this list is too expensive, but all of it is necessary if you want to prepare meals with ease, organize your closet, or create a comfier WFH environment.
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S22'Discovery' Season 5 Confirms 2024 Release Date -- With A Twist On An Old Star Trek Trope  Nearly two years after the Season 4 finale — and almost seven years since its 2017 debut — Star Trek: Discovery will return for its fifth and final season in March of 2024. At CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil, Paramount+ revealed the release date window for Discovery Season 5 and dropped an action-packed clip that brings back a classic Trek concept in an entirely new way.Because the new season of Discovery has been described as a “galaxy-wide treasure hunt,” and Johnathan Frakes has indicated that there are “Indiana Jones” vibes to the overall story, the brand new clip sees Book (David Ajala) and Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) racing against the clock while trying to decipher some kind of ancient writing on a rock face. We don’t know the context of this galaxy-wide mystery yet, but in a clip released back in July, we did learn that certain mercenaries were willing to have their entire ship ripped apart by a tractor beam at high warp, just to keep a secret.
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S232 Years Later, 'Doctor Who' Just Confirmed Its Most Controversial Canon Reboot  The Timeless Child: It was the retcon that shook one of the oldest sci-fi fandoms in history. And, per the latest 60th-anniversary episode of Doctor Who, it’s here to stay. But by reckoning with its recent past, Doctor Who might be finally allowing itself to evolve in a really exciting and unexpected way.Doctor Who’s most recent 60th-anniversary special, “Wild Blue Yonder,” is a terrific return to form for the show, with a tense, horror-tinged hour that drew from paranoid sci-fi classics like The Thing and the show’s own all-time great episode “Midnight.” While it was mainly a one-off adventure (the more cynical might call it a filler episode) that allowed the 14th Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna (Catherine Tate) to get back into their old rhythms, the episode made a few offhand references to the previous era under Chris Chibnall that suggests a significant new approach for returning showrunner Russell T. Davies’ era going forward.
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S24'Rick and Morty' Is Finally Bringing Back Its Weirdest Character Ever  Everything you need to know about Water-T’s return in “Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie.”Last week’s episode of Rick and Morty, “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer,” went all in on the mutant-based body horror to parody Total Recall. But all the Kuato fun is over now with the Season 7 finale fast approaching. Before that, however, Morty’s going to get a visit from an old comrade. Here’s everything you need to know about Rick and Morty Season 7 Episode 8, including the release date and time, episode title, teaser trailer, and more.
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S25The Most Brutal Multiplayer Melee On Xbox Game Pass Just Got A Huge Update  Fighting evolves alongside us. In just the last century battlefields have gone from bloody, trench-filled meat grinders to sky-high drones dropping smartbombs. Our tastes skew to the modern too, especially in our video games. You can relive D-Day time and again across a bunch of titles. But what if you want to get medieval on some asses?Enter Chivalry II. The melee multiplayer from Torn Banner Studios is everything you could want in a siege combat simulator. There’s tons of weapons and maps all buoyed by mechanics and objectives that feel both immersive and absurd. Its latest update, Reclamation, dropped on Game Pass Nov. 7 and provides the perfect excuse to go once more unto the breach, even if it's your first time.
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S26How to Measure Inclusion in the Workplace  In an era where companies are paying more and more attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), inclusion remains the most difficult metric to track. From new research, Gartner developed the Gartner Inclusion Index to measure what true inclusion looks like across an organization. The authors outline how to use the Gartner Inclusion Index to measure employee perceptions of inclusion, what effective action looks like from leaders, and common pitfalls to avoid.
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S27How to Answer "What Are Your Strengths and Weaknesses?"  Don’t take common interview questions lightly just because they’re predictable. Underpreparing for them can make the difference between moving ahead and moving on. One question that often comes up: What are your strengths and weaknesses? In this article, the author outlines clear steps for how to describe your strengths and weaknesses along with sample language to use as a guide.
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S28S29S30S31S32Denmark: The major pork producer trying to wean itself off eating meat  Trine Krebs adores vegetables. "When I get a plant in my hands that I can feel is healthy, I can smell it, feel it, almost taste it in my mouth," the 47-year-old, cardigan-clad farmer enthuses over Zoom. Described affectionately by some as "Miss Dry-Legume of Denmark", Krebs has won awards for her advocacy of plant-rich – or "plant-rig" in Danish – diets. To this end she has run food festivals, trained cooks and invented songs. She even appeared on a Danish dating show, Farmer Looking for Love, and taught her prospective romantic interests to cook legumes: the first refused, the second was luke-warm, but the third was totally won over. "He thought it tasted amazing and wanted me to teach all his friends."
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S33Fevered Planet: How a shifting climate is catalysing infectious disease  When temperatures rise, everything changes and disease arrives. As the thick ice melts and the seas and the air warm, so new life arrives in Arctic waters. Minke, bottlenose, fin and sperm whales are heading north, even as grizzly bears, white-tailed deer, coyotes and other animals and birds expand their range into boreal forests to the south.But the geography of disease is also changing as novel pathogens affecting plants, animals and humans increase their range. New beetles are heading north and devastating Siberian forests, Alaskan mammals are struggling as new ticks arrive and human habitations in northern Norway are infested by new insects.
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S34Zapping Plastic Waste Can Produce Clean Fuel  Hydrogen gas is a carbon-free energy source that can be burned in place of fossil fuels. But its most common production method relies on methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Other known methods are costly and resource-intensive. Now researchers have found a cleaner—and, in theory, profitable—way to make hydrogen gas from waste plastic. The process also generates graphene, an extremely valuable, ultrathin carbon material used in products such as electronics, concrete and car parts.This method could help keep heat- trapping carbon out of the atmosphere, says James Tour, a Rice University chemistry professor and senior author of a recent study on the topic, published in Advanced Materials.
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S35Primordial Helium May Be Leaking from Earth's Core  Helium gas may be seeping from Earth’s core, say scientists who found extremely high helium isotope ratios in lavas on Baffin IslandA new analysis of ancient lava flows in the Canadian Arctic suggests helium trapped in Earth’s core could be slowly “leaking” into the mantle and then reaching the surface—an idea that challenges the scientific understanding of our planet’s inner workings.
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S36The Withings ScanWatch 2 Checks Your Temperature and Ups the Price  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 WIREDI loved the original Withings ScanWatch (8/10, WIRED recommends). It was a refined, elegant, health- and fitness-focused hybrid smartwatch with impressive stamina. The ScanWatch 2 retains everything that made the original so compelling and adds some subtle improvements, most notably temperature tracking, but this comes with an unpalatable price hike.
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S37Climate Cookbooks Are Here to Change How You Eat  Kitchen Arts & Letters, a legendary cookbook store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is tiny—just 750 square feet—but not an inch of space is wasted. With roughly 12,000 different cookbooks and a staff of former chefs and food academics, it’s the land of plenty for those seeking guidance beyond the typical weekday recipe.One table is piled high with new cookbooks about ramen, eggs, and the many uses of whey, the overflow stacked in leaning towers above the shelves along the walls. One bookcase is packed with nothing but titles about fish. And next to a robust vegetarian section at the back of the store, tucked in a corner, is a minuscule collection of cookbooks about sustainability and climate change.
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S38ChatGPT Spit Out Sensitive Data When Told to Repeat 'Poem' Forever  Brinkmanship escalated in the US Congress this week over strategies to reauthorize the government surveillance powers known as "Section 702," as civil rights groups sounded the alarm about the consequences of the program and its potential renewal. A WIRED investigation of more than 100 restricted Telegram channels indicated that the communication app's bans on extremist discourse aren't effective or adequate bans. And the identity management platform Okta admitted this week that a security breach previously thought to impact 1 percent of its customers actually affected 100 percent.Analysis indicates that OpenAI's custom chatbots, known as GPTs, can be manipulated to leak their training data and other private information. Funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gun violence research is at risk as Republicans quietly work to strip support. Palmer Luckey's autonomous drone company Anduril is exploring innovations in jet power and artificial intelligence to enhance these combat-shifting devicesâfor better or worse. And the Indian government's longtime control of radio news is giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi a critical advantage with elections looming in the country.
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S39Ancient black hole challenges our understanding of the early Universe  At the center of nearly every galaxy in the cosmos sits a monster: a black hole with a mass millions or even billions of times heavier than our Sun. When and how these enormous objects formed is an open question in the astrophysics community.Recently, in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, scientists reported the discovery of an ancient supermassive black hole, one that existed very early in life of the Universe. While some enthusiasts have claimed that the observation of these gigantic black holes has disproved the theory of the Big Bang, this is a hasty conclusion. However, it is certainly true that the existence of very early supermassive black holes will require astronomers to rethink some things.
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S40Why R is the weirdest letter  In November 2021, linguists from around the world met in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the seventh edition of a conference focusing specifically on the “R” sound. The conference, called ‘R-Atics, included a presentation on the intrusive R used in the Falkland Islands, a reconstruction of what R sounded like in historical Armenian, and a discussion of the R sounds in Shiwiar, an indigenous Ecuadorian language spoken by well under 10,000 people, among other events and talks. Don’t be too surprised if, at a future ‘R-Atics conference, the “crispy R” joins the ranks of esoteric presentations from linguists obsessed with the weirdness and variation of this particular sound.The crispy R is a phenomenon that some linguists had noticed, but which had gone largely unstudied—until the phrase “crispy R” was bestowed on it by Brian Michael Firkus, better known as Trixie Mattel, the winner of the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, and later popularized via TikTok. The sound is easier to point out than it is to either describe or reproduce. Some of the most frequent users of this unusual-sounding R include Kourtney Kardashian, Max Greenfield of New Girl fame, Stassi from Vanderpump Rules, and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. It sounds, to me at least, like a sort of elongated, curled sound, a laconic way of saying R.
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S41Experimental drug cuts heart disease risk factor by 96%  The first-in-human trial of an experimental drug, lepodisiran, found that a single shot could dramatically and durably reduce blood levels of lipoprotein(a), a currently untreatable risk factor for heart disease.The challenge: Your levels of LDL cholesterol — the bad kind that clogs arteries and leads to heart disease — are based on a combination of factors, including genetics, diet, and lifestyle.
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S42Roar of cicadas was so loud, it was picked up by fiber-optic cables  One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It’s a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS.
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S43Porsche summons old-school cool with the 2024 911 Sport Classic  Sports cars have always been emotionally driven purchases, and perhaps no automaker understands this better than Porsche. There are more than two dozen iterations of the 911 on sale today, and while it can sometimes feel like sussing out the differences in character between one variant and another is an exercise in splitting hairs, the new Sport Classic tugs at enthusiasts' heartstrings in a way that no other modern 911 can.
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S44New algorithm finds lots of gene-editing enzymes in environmental DNA  CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then hold those antibodies in abeyance in case they encounter that same pathogen again, the way we do. Instead, they incorporate some of the pathogen’s DNA into their own genome and link it to an enzyme that can use it to recognize that pathogenic DNA sequence and cut it to pieces if the pathogen ever turns up again.
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S45S46S47What Happens When the U.S. Overestimates Its Power  American leaders keep overestimating their control over events in the Middle East, Ukraine, and around the world.Ever since a terror attack by Hamas triggered a war in Israel and Gaza in October, many commentators have presumed that the United States can in some way manage the course of the crisis—either by supporting Israel emphatically or by demanding greater restraint from that country’s leaders. Successive American administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have encouraged this belief in American control of events in the Middle East and around the world. Just days before the Hamas attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted in an article in a Foreign Affairs article that the Biden administration had “de-escalated crises in Gaza.” The Middle East, he wrote, is “quieter than it has been for decades,” echoing comments he made at tThe Atlantic Festival in late September. (The online version of the article was subsequently edited to omit those statements.) In essence, the United States had mistaken a temporary lull in the Middle East for a more enduring period of relative peace—and ascribed the apparent boon to American influence.
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S48The Fall of Sports Illustrated  The week I started working at Sports Illustrated, in April 1984, the issue on newsstands featured a glowering Georgetown power forward named Michael Graham dunking on two flat-footed Houston Cougars in the NCAA championship, won by the Hoyas. Filing the gamer that night was Curry Kirkpatrick, a gonzo genius whose pyrotechnical run-on sentences left one winded and smiling. But the story that stuck with me from that issue was shorter and angrier. Frank Deford needed only 587 words to eviscerate Robert Irsay, the then-owner of the Baltimore Colts, who’d hired 15 Mayflower trucks the previous week and moved the team to Indianapolis.“It’s really quite amazing,” Deford wrote. “A man who could screw up professional football in Baltimore would foul the water at Lourdes or flatten the beer in Munich.”
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S49Giving Birth in Gaza  Every morning since October 7, Nour Shath has woken up, scanned her body, and felt relief that her twin babies were still inside her. Each additional day, her doctor has told her, makes their birth less likely to require an obstetric or neonatal intervention that might not be available in Gaza.But even after those morning checks reassure her that she’s one day closer to a normal, safe delivery, Shath told me, she feels a deep, wrenching fear—one she worries she’ll transmit to her babies: “Are they feeling scared inside me?” she asks herself. She wonders whether they can sense when she cries, and whether the stress will induce premature labor.
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S50What the Act of Crying Can Offer  “I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others.”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.
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S51Let's Never Do This to Edith Wharton Again  The writer’s deeply emotional architecture is made dully explicit in a new adaptation of The Buccaneers.Edith Wharton’s unfinished 1938 novel, The Buccaneers, occupies much of its second half with the unhappy marriage of Annabel, an innocent American aesthete, and the Duke of Tintagel, a small, easily slighted man whose life’s passion is repairing clocks. As analogies, they read to me as pure Charles and Diana—the too-young woman who finds herself, on her wedding day, suddenly encased in a world with unknowable rules, and the man who chooses a wife based on the extent to which he thinks he can control her.
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S52The Most Dangerous Conflict No One Is Talking About  Of all the world’s hot spots, the South China Sea is one of the least remarked on and most potentially explosive.First came the concrete markers engraved in multiple languages. Naval aviators from the Philippines would spot them during surveillance flights in the mid-1990s and dispatch forces to remove them. Then came the huts—small, wooden structures teetering on stilts on uninhabited islands, fit maybe for fishermen to take shelter during storms. They looked innocuous enough, one of the pilots, Alberto Carlos, recalls thinking.
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S53We've Never Seen Beyonc  The Renaissance concert movie is joyful but jumbled—and less about the star than about her audience.Confession: The Beyoncé concert I attended this past summer was pretty good but not, as Oprah described it, “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Naturally, the expectations are high for any show by the most spectacular artist of my lifetime. Beyoncé’s previous solo arena tour, in 2016, made for a peak concertgoing experience: Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important. I felt like I was watching the Statue of Liberty come alive, declare herself empress of Earth, and twerk.
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S54The GOP's Internal Dysfunction  On Wednesday, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passed away at the age of 100. As the country remembers the former statesman’s complicated legacy, his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill are working to overcome their internal dysfunction: In the House, Republican Representative George Santos of New York was expelled from Congress in a rare bipartisan vote for ethics violations. And in the Senate, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama attempted to reassure colleagues that his monthslong blockade of Pentagon nominations will end soon.All of this comes as former President Donald Trump continues to lead in polls of Republican and evangelical voters six weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
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S55A Refresher on Regression Analysis  You probably know by now that whenever possible you should be making data-driven decisions at work. But do you know how to parse through all the data available to you? The good news is that you probably don’t need to do the number crunching yourself (hallelujah!) but you do need to correctly understand and interpret the analysis created by your colleagues. One of the most important types of data analysis is called regression analysis.
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S56What VUCA Really Means for You It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work of strategy and planning—after all, you can’t prepare for a VUCA world, right?
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S57A Leader's Framework for Decision Making  Simple contexts are characterized by stability and cause-and-effect relationships that are clear to everyone. Often, the right answer is self-evident. In this realm of “known knowns,” leaders must first assess the facts of a situation—that is, “sense” it—then categorize and respond to it.
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S58How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage The information revolution is sweeping through our economy. No company can escape its effects. Dramatic reductions in the cost of obtaining, processing, and transmitting information are changing the way we do business. Most general managers know that the revolution is under way, and few dispute its importance. As more and more of their time and […]
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S59The 4 Types of Innovation and the Problems They Solve  Innovation is, at its core, about solving problems — and there are as many ways to innovate as there are different types of problems to solve. Just like we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic for the life of an organization, or a single source of financing, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks. Leaders identify the right type of strategy to solve the right type of problem, just by asking two questions: How well we can define the problem and how well we can define the skill domain(s) needed to solve it. Well-defined problems that benefit from well-defined skills fall into the category of “sustaining innovation.” Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we’re trying to get better at something we’re already doing. “Breakthrough innovation” is needed when we run into a well-defined problem that’s just devilishly hard to solve. In cases like these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains. When the reverse is true — skills are well-defined, but the problem is not — we can tap into “disruptive innovation” strategies. And when nothing is well-defined, well, then we’re in the exploratory, pioneering realm of basic research. There are always new problems to solve; learn to apply the solution that best fits your current problem.
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S60TLC's 1995 hit Waterfalls: The number one song that promoted safe sex  In the mid-1990s, one of the world's brightest bands was boldly changing the conversation around safe sex, HIV and Aids. Award-winning Atlanta-based trio TLC (comprising Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas) released their signature track in 1995: Waterfalls, taken from their second album, CrazySexyCool.More like this: - The real meaning of Swift's song Slut - Should we bring singers back from the dead? - The extraordinary influence of Madonna
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S61Fairytale of New York: Shane MacGowan, The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl's rousing and controversial Christmas classic  When the death of Shane MacGowan was announced on Thursday, fans everywhere discussed which of his songs were their favourites. As the lead singer of Anglo-Irish band The Pogues, and then as a solo artist, MacGowan was renowned as one of pop's most distinctive writers, and as someone who brought rambunctious, punky new life to Irish folk music. But one song of his will be remembered above all others. Fairytale of New York is a bona fide Christmas classic that is currently being played in a bar, shop or home near you – although some people would prefer if it were never played again.More like this:- The most violent band in the world- Why Sinead O'Connor refused to be silenced- The number one song that promoted safe sex
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S62Emissions inequality is getting worse - here's how to end the reign of the ultra-polluters  Climate change is overwhelmingly a problem of wealthy people. The wealthiest 1% of humanity produce over 1,000 times the emissions of the poorest 1%. In fact, these 77 million people are responsible for more climate-changing emissions than the poorest 66% (5 billion people) of humanity. Since 1990, the personal emissions of the world’s wealthiest have exploded. They are now 77 times larger than the level that would be compatible with a 1.5°C warming limit – a threshold beyond which whole island nations will possibly disappear.
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S63Why men in 19th century Wales dressed as women to protest taxation  South-west Wales was reeling in the wake of social unrest in November 1843. There had been a series of protests over several years by farmers furious at taxation levels, mainly attacking tollgates. Often, the men involved dressed as women and were therefore known in Welsh as Merched Beca (Rebecca’s daughters). The events that unfolded came to be known as the Rebecca riots in English. There has been speculation that the name “Rebecca” stemmed from a literal interpretation of Genesis 24:60 in the Bible, which refers to Rebekah’s offspring possessing the gates of their enemies. But the truth is, nobody really knows why the name was chosen.
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S64Colonized countries rarely ask for redress over past wrongs - the reasons can be complex  The king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, apologized in July 2023 for his ancestors’ role in the colonial slave trade. He is not alone in expressing remorse for past wrongs. In 2021, France returned 26 works of art seized by French colonial soldiers in Africa – the largest restitution France has ever made to a former colony. In the same year, Germany officially apologized for its 1904-08 genocide of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia and paid reparations.
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S65Who is still getting HIV in America? Medication is only half the fight -  As the globe marks another World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, it’s crucial to both acknowledge the significant strides made in the global battle against HIV and recognize the persistent challenges that remain. While the United States had seen a slow decline in the overall number of new HIV infections from 2017 to 2021, a closer look at the data reveals persistent disparities largely borne by LGBTQ people and communities of color.As a social epidemiologist who proudly identifies as a gay Latino, I have a vested interest both personally and professionally in understanding and addressing the HIV disparities my communities face. It’s disheartening to realize that, despite available medical advances that can end the AIDS epidemic, these resources aren’t reaching those who need them the most.
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S66These programs make college possible for students with developmental disabilities  For students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, opportunities to attend college may appear few and far between. But this is changing, thanks to inclusive postsecondary education – known as IPSE – programs at colleges across the United States. Here are some important things to know about these programs.Inclusive postsecondary education refers to programs at colleges and technical schools that provide career and transitional training to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Transitional training helps these individuals move into adulthood, teaching them skills like how to set up a bank account, do laundry or cook for themselves.
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S67Bringing classical physics into the modern world with Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment  If you drop a light object and a heavy object from a tower, which one reaches the ground first? As you may recall from high school physics, this is a trick question. Neglecting air resistance, they both fall the same way and reach the ground at the same time – gravity means that their speeds increase at 9.8 meters per second squared, no matter what their mass. That’s the premise behind Galileo Galilei’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, a classic thought experiment in the field of dynamics.
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S68Why all civilian lives matter equally, according to a military ethicist  Some commentators have criticized Israel for causing what is claimed to be disproportionate harm to civilians in its military response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.Others have defended Israel’s actions, claiming that such force – and the risk to civilians involved – is necessary to eliminate Hamas, which some Israelis believe poses an existential threat to Israel.
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S69S70'Wonka' movie holds remnants of novel's racist past  Several years ago, I made a visit to a local book sale and came across a rare 1964 edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Popular in its own right, the novel has also served as the inspiration for a number of movies, including “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory” – the classic 1971 movie starring the late Gene Wilder – a 2005 reboot starring Johnny Depp, and “Wonka”, the 2023 version.As a child of the 1980s, I had voraciously consumed Dahl’s novels, so I knew the book well. But the illustrations in this particular edition looked unfamiliar.
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