   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S1240 Years Ago, An Iconic Director Tackled One of Stephen King's Weirdest Stories -- And Succeeded   In one of those bizarre twists of Hollywood synchronicity, 1983 gave us two Stephen King adaptations about typically innocuous possessions developing murderous tendencies. While Cujo transformed a cuddly St. Bernard into a rabid homicidal maniac, Christine turned a 1958 Plymouth Fury into a lean, mean killing machine. In another coincidence, both raked in $21 million at the domestic box office. But thanks to its impressive pedigree, and we’re not talking the canine kind, the latter has better stood the test of time.Christine was the first (and still the only) time King’s words were transferred to the big screen by another horror titan: John Carpenter. The filmmaker had previously been lined up to direct the 1980 novel Firestarter, but following the disappointing response to his now-cult classic The Thing, he was ruthlessly replaced.
Continued here
|
S1
S2Native American 'slump': puffy dumplings in simmered fruit  Chef Sherry Pocknett, the first Indigenous woman to win a James Beard Foundation Award (she took home the 2023 title for Best Chef: Northeast), doesn't celebrate just one "Thanksgiving." Instead, she celebrates every harvest as a moment to pause, reflect and give thanks. During autumn, Pocknett said, "We're giving thanks to cranberries because cranberries are back." In the summer, Pocknett gives thanks to things like blueberries and strawberries. "Thanksgiving for me is giving thanks to a harvest… all these different things that come back yearly and they're still coming."Pocknett is a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, which has had roots in modern-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years. She owns the restaurant Sly Fox Den Too in Charlestown, Rhode Island. There, she serves food that highlights the indigenous cuisine of the Northeast – dishes like nausamp, a porridge-like dish made of dried corn; Indian pudding, a dessert made of molasses and cornmeal blended together; and blueberry slump, Pocknett's personal favourite.
Continued here
|
S3Kanuchi: A nut-based soup to celebrate autumn  Loretta Barrett Oden is 81 years old and just came out with her first cookbook, Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine, this past October. In the book, Oden shares stories and recipes that are intended to educate and enlighten the home cook with a celebration of indigenous foods. "I should have written this book many, many years ago," she said, "but I've just stayed so busy with one project after another, one restaurant after another, that I just now found the time to sit down and write." After years of telling the stories of other chefs and cultures, it was finally time to share her own.Oden was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, a small town 40 minutes by car east of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Her paternal grandmother was a descendent of the Mayflower, a card-carrying member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her mother was from a large family of Potawatomi origins, now known as Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The nine different tribes of Potawatomi peoples are mostly from the Great Lakes region of the US and Canada. Oden refers to her tribe as Anishinaabe, a larger group of Indigenous peoples that encompasses Citizen Potawotomi Nation as well the Ojibwe, among others.
Continued here
|
S4Three Native American dishes to celebrate autumn  Across cultures, fall is a time for celebrating the bounty of hearty food, gathering with family and feasting together. While November is often tied to Thanksgiving in the larger US culture, the fraught narrative that has long fuelled the holiday is a reminder to look deeper. For many of the Indigenous peoples who have generations of roots on this land, Thanksgiving represents something much different than a table full of turkey and pie.Take chef Loretta Barrett Oden, who recently published her first cookbook, Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine. Oden, whose lineage is with the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma, grew up celebrating Thanksgiving and still feasts with family on that day. But when she owned a restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she highlighted indigenous ingredients by putting turkey and stuffing on the menu, thereby treating every day like it was Thanksgiving. Here, Oden shares her recipe for kanuchi, a rich, creamy soup made of ground nuts and maple syrup.
Continued here
|
S5
S6With Annastacia Palaszczuk gone, can Labor achieve the unachievable in Queensland?  But, north of the Tweed River, Queensland politics is very much about stability, and only a little about change. Where, for example, New South Wales has seen nine premiers over the past 20 years, Queensland has seen just four.Yet a changing of the guard is now occurring after Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk – the daughter of a Labor cabinet minister and the last of the “COVID-19 era” premiers – tearfully announced her resignation as the state’s 39th (and second woman) premier. With the coming of the “silly season”, this is the perfect time for leadership transition: Labor can begin 2024 with a clean page.
Continued here
|
S7From trash to power: how to harness energy from Africa's garbage dumps - and save billions in future damage  About 70% of municipal solid waste ends up in landfills or unregulated dumpsites. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 24% of waste is disposed of in landfills, while the rest is left on open dumps, streets, rivers, and other unsuitable locations. We live in a society where waste is often disposed of without considering the cost to either the consumer or the producer. Waste decomposing in landfills releases greenhouse gases. The release of carbon dioxide, nitrates and hydrogen sulfides can harm people’s health, either by polluting the air we breathe or contaminating nearby water sources.
Continued here
|
S8Uganda will soon be exporting oil: an energy economist outlines 3 keys to success  Uganda entered into agreements in 2012 with two foreign oil entities to exploit its oil resources. Total Energies holds 56.67% of the joint venture partnership and China National Oil Offshore Company (CNOOC) has 28.33%. Through Uganda National Oil Company, the government owns the remaining 15%.Production is due to start in 2025. As part of the production sharing agreement, the production licences are valid for 25 years upon extracting the first oil.
Continued here
|
S9In the Shadow of the Holocaust  Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”
Continued here
|
S10Looking for a Greener Way to Fly  Sometime in the next few weeks, the Department of the Treasury is expected to decide who—or, really, what—will qualify for a new set of tax credits. The credits were created under the Inflation Reduction Act, which many argue was misnamed, and they involve “sustainable aviation fuel,” which some argue is an oxymoron. For months, a debate has been raging over how the credits should be allocated, and though the arguments can get pretty deep into the weeds—some of them literally involve weeds—they’re worth attending to because of the stakes. The fight could determine whether key provisions of the I.R.A. help to address climate change or end up making things worse. As a briefing paper from the Environmental Defense Fund (E.D.F.) put it, there is a risk of substituting “one environmental threat for another.”Key to the debate are two unfortunate facts, the first of which is that aviation emissions are a big problem. Planes account for roughly two per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions, meaning that, if all the world’s aircraft got together to form a country, they’d emit more than the vast majority of actual nations, including Germany, Brazil, and Indonesia. And this still underestimates their impact. Owing to a variety of complex processes, airplane emissions have an oversized impact on the atmosphere; it’s been estimated that, historically, aviation may be responsible for two to four times more warming than the CO2 numbers alone suggest. Meanwhile, in a highly inequitable world, flying is particularly unequal: a study published in 2020 found that just one per cent of the global population is likely responsible for more than fifty per cent of passenger-plane emissions. (Although aviation emissions fell during the COVID lockdowns, they are once again rising fast; according to a recent report, in 2023, they are expected to increase by twenty-eight per cent over 2022.)
Continued here
|
S11The Best TV Shows of 2023  Hollywood came to a standstill for much of 2023, when its writers and actors hit the picket line simultaneously for the first time in more than sixty years. Arriving in the wake of the pandemic—which made television more central to daily life even as it impeded its production—the strikes had an instantaneous and sustained impact. Late-night shows went dark, the broadcast networks’ fall season fell through, and the Peak TV era came to an unceremonious end. Both unions have convincingly declared victory, but, after years of reliance on boom-time profligacy, the industry is bracing for a downturn in the quantity—and perhaps the quality—of its output.The cloud of that uncertainty hangs over the end of this year in television. Certain factions have already adopted a doomer mind-set; in the past few weeks, multiple people have asked me whether the business will revert to risk aversion. (I hope not!) But before we look ahead to TV’s next chapter, it’s worth celebrating the highlights of the previous twelve months. Given the studio stoppages, there were fewer contenders than usual. But 2023’s best offerings are strong enough that the following Top Ten list, arranged in alphabetical order, could rival any other year’s.
Continued here
|
S13Xbox Game Pass Just Quietly Released the Most Deranged Action Game of the Decade  Comedy works best in threes, which is probably why so many comedy sequels suck. The list is long: Caddyshack 2, Clerks II, Airplane 2: The Sequel, and many more. A joke is rarely as funny the second time around. Maybe this is why Coffee Stain Studios, the creators behind the 2014 smash-hit game Goat Simulator decided to lean into the rule of threes and skip right ahead to Goat Simulator 3 as the title for their second game in the franchise. It’s a fitting joke for a game that’s all about subverting expectations. But is it enough to break the comedy sequel curse?Goat Simulator 3, which dropped on Game Pass on Dec. 7, gives a huge new audience access to one of the funniest games of this generation, or any generation. The original game’s premise, a ragdolling goat with a sticky tongue runs amok in a physics-driven sandbox, is intact. This time, the world is bigger, the objectives zanier, and you can even bring a friend along for the ride.
Continued here
|
S14Netflix's Best Sci-Fi Show of 2023 Was 20 Years in the Making  One of the best sci-fi shows of 2023 has been 20 years in the making. So why does it resonate so powerfully today?My favorite show of 2023 was one I’d been waiting on for years. Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s 2003-2009 manga Pluto, a mature re-envisioning of “The Greatest Robot on Earth” arc from Osamu Tezuka’s classic Astro Boy, has long been a favorite of mine. Studio M2’s anime adaptation has been in the works since at least 2017 (before that, it was almost a movie from Minions studio Illumination — bullet dodged). After six years of waiting, it finally arrived on Netflix in October. The anime adapts its source material extremely faithfully, so it may come as a surprise that the original manga’s of-the-moment political commentary from 20 years ago is still startlingly relevant.
Continued here
|
S15'Stranger Things' Star Gaten Matarazzo Is Obsessed With 'Zelda' Timelines  “They have those awesome videos trying to break down exactly where the timelines line up.”Gaten Matarazzo has had a busy life. The child actor debuted on Broadway when he was just 9 years old and then blew up on Netflix’s Stranger Things series, playing a nerdy middle schooler obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons. Matarazzo has recently returned to Broadway with Sweeney Todd before he did Dear Evan Hansen, led a rom-com in Honor Society, and embodied a lovable dragon in My Father’s Dragon.
Continued here
|
S16The Longest Living Dogs May Hold Unknown Secrets About Aging  If you have ever cared for a pet dog, it is a sad truth that you are likely to outlive them.If you have ever cared for a pet dog, it is a sad truth that you are likely to outlive them. So it’s no wonder that people may be asking how to increase their pet’s longevity following the news that a dog in Portugal lived longer than 30 years.
Continued here
|
S17'Poor Things' Overlooked This One Fundamental Part of Developmental Psychology  If you were hoping for a deep dive into the real-life science behind transplanting prenatal brains into dead bodies and reanimating the corpse, I have some disappointing news for you.Poor Things — the latest bizarre yet somehow heartwarming film by Yorgos Lanthimos — is, at its core, a fresh take on Frankenstein tale, taking the basic premise from Mary Shelley’s story of reanimating the dead. Bella Baxter, the story’s headstrong, insatiable heroine portrayed by Emma Stone, demonstrates that psychology is the real science worth examining.
Continued here
|
S1850 Weird Things for Your Home That Are Clever as Hell on Amazon  Could your kitchen use a couple of updates? Is your closet bursting at the seams? Or are you tired of bathroom cleaners that don’t get the job done? Lucky for you, this list of clever things from Amazon has solutions for these problems and more. I’m talking weird things you never knew you needed, but now won’t be able to live without — such as a set of genius straps that keep a fitted sheet in place no matter how much you toss and turn. You’re welcome.Trade a perpetually damp hand towel for this fuzzy ball towel that’s highly absorbent and dries hands almost instantly. The round design makes it easy to use, and the neutral color options are versatile enough to work in any space. The towels have a built-in hook for easy hanging and besides being practical, they’re also a unique and stylish addition to your bathroom or powder room.
Continued here
|
S1960 Years Later, Sci-Fi's Longest Running Show Just Reaffirmed Its Most Paradoxical Idea  With “The Giggle” finally hitting Disney+, the three David Tennant-centric Doctor Who specials have come to a close, with surprising and spoilerific results. We’ve known for ages that Neil Patrick Harris was playing a new incarnation of a 1966 1st Doctor villain, The Celestial Toymaker, but until now, nobody knew how that was going to play out. And of course, there’s the whole question of the 14th Doctor’s surprising regeneration. With deep dives into recent lore, the return of Mel (Bonnie Langford) from the 6th and 7th Doctor eras, “The Giggle” will give fans plenty to talk about for a very long time to come.But, squeezed into all of this was one very telling line from the 14th Doctor, a kind of revelation we’ve heard before, but that truly helps to contextualize the more contemporary Doctors as being very different from the 1st Doctor, William Hartnell, for one crucial reason. Just because the 1st Doctor appears to be a literal grandfather, that version of our eponymous Time Lord is among the youngest, and least-wise of all our Doctor Who incarnations.
Continued here
|
S20What is Bi-generation? 'Doctor Who' Just Changed Its Oldest Canon Rule Forever  The greatest innovation of Doctor Who has always been the concept of regeneration. When the 1st Doctor, William Hartnell, became too ill to keep playing the role, producers devised the idea of regeneration, which allowed the Doctor to renew his face and his body whenever he was killed. This rendered the Doctor — and the show itself — essentially immortal. The Doctor could continually regenerate, and the show could continually recast its lead actor and reset itself every few years. It became the key to the show’s longevity and an essential part of the show’s creative DNA. And, 60 years later, Doctor Who just changed the rules of regeneration again.
Continued here
|
S2125 Years Ago, an Outdated Sci-Fi Classic Got a Brilliant Update  Twelve years after Lily Tomlin fronted a gender-reversed remake of The Incredible Shrinking Man, another 1950s B-movie about an abnormally sized human got the modern feminist treatment. Although it didn’t need to change the sex of its leading character, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman is unarguably the more radical reinterpretation.Adapted from the 1958 film, the HBO TV movie sees Daryl Hannah take over from silver screen star Allison Hayes as Nancy Archer, a wealthy yet troubled heiress. Not only did her mother take her own life after being committed to a sanitarium, she has a manipulative, scheming father determined to get his grubby hands on her money and, perhaps most tragically of all, she’s married to one of the lesser Baldwin brothers.
Continued here
|
S228 Questions About Using AI Responsibly, Answered  Generative AI tools are poised to change the way every business operates. As your own organization begins strategizing which to use, and how, operational and ethical considerations are inevitable. This article delves into eight of them, including how your organization should prepare to introduce AI responsibly, how you can prevent harmful bias from proliferating in your systems, and how to avoid key privacy risks.
Continued here
|
S23AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It  Will smart machines really replace human workers? Probably not. People and AI both bring different abilities and strengths to the table. The real question is: how can human intelligence work with artificial intelligence to produce augmented intelligence. Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov offers some unique insight here. After losing to IBM’s Deep Blue, he began to experiment how a computer helper changed players’ competitive advantage in high-level chess games. What he discovered was that having the best players and the best program was less a predictor of success than having a really good process. Put simply, “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.” As leaders look at how to incorporate AI into their organizations, they’ll have to manage expectations as AI is introduced, invest in bringing teams together and perfecting processes, and refine their own leadership abilities.
Continued here
|
S24Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done"  Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done.
Continued here
|
S25S26S27S28S29S30S31S32S33S34S35How ancient civilisations dealt with trauma  The attacker approached from behind. His victim was a muscular middle-aged man with missing teeth – possibly a hardened English fighter, who had already sustained a serious head injury years before. The Norman soldier lifted his heavy double-edged sword, and struck a blow near his target's right ear. He didn't stop. In a frenzy of slashing movements which gouged the Englishman's skull, the victim fell. And there his bones would lie, on the slope of a hill in Sussex, for nearly 1,000 years – that is, until they were discovered under a school by archaeologists in 1994.The original proprietor of "Skeleton 180" is thought to have died during the Norman invasion of England in 1066. If this is the case, his bones are the only human remains ever found from this conflict. But though the physical relics from this violence have mostly dissolved into the region's acidic soil, the evidence of its psychological impact has lingered on in an obscure medieval document.
Continued here
|
S36S3713 Great Deals on Headphones, Wireless Earbuds, and Gaming Headsets  Arguably, the best time to get new audio gear is … well, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, just because the shopping event to end all shopping events (and our collective sanity) is over, it doesn't mean there are no deals left. We've found a ton of sales on WIRED-tested headphones, earbuds, and gaming headsets. They'll make great presents, whether for a loved one or yourself.Special offer for Gear readers: Get WIRED for just $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com, full Gear coverage, and subscriber-only newsletters. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.
Continued here
|
S38All the Fish We Cannot See ![]() The ocean has a way of upending expectations. Four-story-high rogue waves peak and collapse without warning. Light bends across the surface to conjure chimeric cities that hover at the horizon. And watery wastelands reveal themselves to be anything but. So was the case for the scientists aboard the USS Jasper in the summer of 1942. Bobbing in choppy seas off the coast of San Diego, California, acoustic physicist Carl F. Eyring and his colleagues, who had been tasked with studying a sonar device the navy could use to detect German submarines, were sending sound waves into the deep. But as the echoes of their tests came reverberating back, they revealed a puzzling phenomenon: everywhere the ship went, the sonar detected a mass nearly as solid as the seafloor, lurking about 300 meters or more below the surface. Even more mysterious, this false bottom seemed to shift over the course of the day.People had their theories—shoals? faulty equipment?—but apart from registering the anomaly, scientists let the mystery slide. (There was, after all, a war on.) It wasn’t until 1945, when oceanographer Martin Johnson dropped nets into the Pacific to take a closer look, that the culprit was definitively unmasked: a vast cloud of marine animals, most smaller than a human hand, that moved from the deep ocean to the surface and back every day.
Continued here
|
S39Physicists unveil 10-year plan for exploring the quantum Universe  After a multi-year review, the U.S. particle physics community has announced its vision for research spanning the next five to ten years. The various projects could, if funded, help researchers develop a much better understanding of the laws of nature.The recommendations were released in a report called “Exploring the Quantum Universe: Pathways to Innovation and Discovery in Particle Physics.” It was written by the Particle Physics Projects Prioritization Panel (P5), a sub-panel of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), and will be submitted to funding agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation to guide their funding decisions over the next decade.
Continued here
|
S40Starts With A Bang podcast #100 - Galaxies in the JWST era  It’s hard to believe, but it was only back just a year and a half ago, in mid-2022, that we had yet to encounter the very first science images released by JWST. In the time that’s passed since, we’ve gotten a revolutionary glimpse of our Universe, replete with tremendous new discoveries: the farthest black hole, the most distant galaxy, the farthest red supergiant star, and many other cosmic record-breakers.What is it like to be on the cutting edge of these discoveries, and what are some of the most profound ways that our prior understanding of the Universe has been challenged by these observations? I’m so pleased to welcome Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe to the program, who’s not only a member of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) collaboration, but who has spearheaded a number of novel discoveries that have been made with JWST.
Continued here
|
S41How exposure to language in the womb shapes the brain  In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky proposed his theory of universal grammar, which argued that language acquisition is biologically determined and that children have an innate ability to acquire language. The idea revolutionized the field of linguistics and changed the way psychologists view language development.Universal grammar challenged the prevailing view that language development is due solely to environmental factors, instead proposing that newborns are equipped with brain circuits that contain information about the structure of language. We still know very little about the neurological basis of how newborns so easily acquire language.
Continued here
|
S42The quest to turn basalt dust into a viable climate solution  Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve their soil. It’s a little more finicky to apply, and certainly less familiar. But basalt also comes with an important side benefit: It can naturally capture carbon from the atmosphere.
Continued here
|
S43A locally grown solution for period poverty  Women and girls across much of the developing world lack access to menstrual products. This means that for at least a week or so every month, many girls don’t go to school, so they fall behind educationally and often never catch up economically.
Continued here
|
S44The Joy of Underperforming  The idea of life having “seasons” has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval.For many of us—the vitamin-D-deprived, the sugar-addled, perhaps the suddenly jobless or those dreading family gatherings—’tis the season not so much to be jolly, but just to be “in a season.” The phrase has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval, or of explaining that you’ll be doing things a little differently for a while.
Continued here
|
S45Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos Get Honest With Each Other  The protagonist of the new film Poor Things is no ordinary heroine. As played by Emma Stone, Bella Baxter is a corpse reanimated by a man who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child; she’s therefore a blend of juvenile innocence and adult promiscuity, shamelessly charting her own course through life because she’s never been conditioned to meet societal constraints. She has no clue what womanhood is supposed to entail or how she’s expected to behave, yet she looks full-grown—a Frankenstein’s monster dressed in frilly outfits, without a single scar in sight.Like her, Poor Things is brazenly, gleefully original in its presentation and ideas. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, the movie takes place in a steampunk, otherworldly Victorian wonderland, and Bella’s story unfolds like a twisted fairy tale. Seeking freedom and adventure, she embarks on a journey around the world, which leads to encounters with characters who are simultaneously enthralled and threatened by her singular perspective—and who all try to control her in their own way. With them, she pursues experiences, many of them sexual, that shape her understanding of what it means to be fully alive. The film can, as a result, be hard to classify: It is at once a strangely charming bildungsroman, an erotic melodrama, a body-horror-tinged mystery, and a wondrous feminist meditation on the power of self-discovery.
Continued here
|
S46'We Only Need Some Metal Things'  In the summer of 1940, when Great Britain was fighting Nazi Germany alone, Winston Churchill asked to borrow a few dozen aging American destroyers to defend the English coast from imminent invasion. Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Mr. President, with great respect, I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”Today Ukraine is fighting Russia alone. American aid—never timely or sufficient, but enough to help keep Ukraine alive and Russian invaders at bay—is about to run out. U.S. shipments will stop in the next few weeks. Without American artillery, ammunition, missile systems, tanks, armored vehicles, humanitarian aid, or funds for reconstruction, Ukraine will be left to face the Russian onslaught with diminishing odds of survival. The Biden administration has asked Congress to vote for another $61 billion in aid for Ukraine. So far, Republicans are refusing. Members plan to leave D.C. for the holidays on December 15. This is a thing for them to do now.
Continued here
|
S47Wood That Is See-Through Like Glass and Stronger Than Plastic  Transparent wood could soon make its way into touch screens, skyscraper windows, and car dashboards.Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood-technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it.
Continued here
|
S48How to Love Winter a Little More  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In January 2021, a time when many of us were returning from halfhearted outdoor hangouts with freezing fingers, my colleague Marina Koren revealed herself as a lover of winter. Well, within reason: “I do not ski. I believe a ‘polar plunge’ is appropriate only when you’re trying to outrun a bear. I was born in Russia, but I moved to warmer climes as a toddler,” Koren writes. “I’m just a kindly winter evangelist, standing in front of your outdoor restaurant table, asking you to put on a hat.”
Continued here
|
S49Will Foreign-Policy Debates Decide Biden's Fate?  It’s been a difficult week for President Joe Biden. His agenda on funding Israel, Ukraine, and border security is stalled in Congress, and his approval ratings are nearing a record low.With just 11 months until the general election, will debate over foreign policy determine whether Biden is reelected president in 2024?
Continued here
|
S50S51A festive Filipino bread for the holidays  If you've stumbled upon a panaderia (neighborhood bakery) in the Philippines, chances are you have seen freshly baked pan de regla, the soft Filipino bread roll filled with a custard-like pudding that ranges in colour from bright pink to dark red. The so-called "pink bread" appears different from its cousins pandesal (Filipino bread roll) and pan de coco (coconut bread), with its vibrant-coloured filling. No other favourites from the panaderia look like this, which screams for attention and piques your interest.Pan de regla literally translates to "menstrual bread" for its distinct filling, but there are 14 different names given to it in different parts of the country. Depending on who you talk to and where they are from, pan de regla may have a Filipino name, such as ligaya (happiness) and lahi (race of a people), while in some regions, the bread has an English name, such as "everlasting" and "lipstick".
Continued here
|
S52The 18 best TV shows of 2023  Just when it seemed there wasn't room for one more post-apocalyptic drama or video-game adaptation, The Last of Us came along. The story involves terrifying mushroom-headed zombies, but they are the least of the reasons for the show's impact. The series brings deep humanity and emotion to its tense survival story, centred on the relationship between Joel (Pedro Pascal), a bereaved father, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the orphaned girl he reluctantly agrees to take cross-country to safety. As they travel west across what was once the US, the changing landscape and characters they encounter add range and variety. An episode starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett whose relationship endures over the decades after the apocalypse is already one of the year's most poignant. A meeting with Joel's lost brother is satisfying yet fraught with loss by the end. Pascal has achieved a well-deserved mainstream breakout with the role, as he grounds the genre elements with a powerful, realistic performance, earning him an Emmy nomination. The Last of Us speaks eloquently to people who never knew it was a video game in the first place. (CJ)Sometimes a concept for a show is just so inspired, there's simply no way it can fail. Such is the case with this murder-of-the-week series from Knives Out creator Rian Johnson, which came about in the first place following of a casual dinner conversation between him and star Natasha Lyonne about their love of detective shows. One of Hollywood's most inimitable stars, Lyonne is an absolute dream here as the insouciant Charlie, a cocktail waitress on the run who finds herself travelling around the US, inadvertently getting involved in murder cases that could do with her mental acuity and unique ability to detect when someone's lying. She is, in her scrappy, wisecracking energy, a female Columbo; and as with that classic series, we see the murder at the beginning of each episode – so that it's not a whodunnit, but a howdunnit. And there is something singularly soothing about watching Lyonne put the pieces of the puzzle together, before hitting the road once more. True episodic TV of the old school, it is one of the year's simplest and purest pleasures. (HM)
Continued here
|
S53John Lennon: 'If we got in the studio together and turned each other on again, then it would be worth it'  Beatle John Lennon met Mark Chapman – the man who was to kill him – twice on the day he died, 8 December 1980.The first time was at around 5pm. Having finished a radio interview in their apartment in the Dakota building in New York to promote their new album, Double Fantasy, the musician and his artist wife Yoko Ono headed out on to the street. Mark Chapman approached Lennon to ask if he could sign a copy of the new LP. The album was later used as evidence in Chapman's trial, and reportedly went on to sell in a private auction for $1.5m in 2020.
Continued here
|
S54Israel's AI can produce 100 bombing targets a day in Gaza. Is this the future of war?  Last week, reports emerged that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are using an artificial intelligence (AI) system called Habsora (Hebrew for “The Gospel”) to select targets in the war on Hamas in Gaza. The system has reportedly been used to find more targets for bombing, to link locations to Hamas operatives, and to estimate likely numbers of civilian deaths in advance.Militaries use remote and autonomous systems as “force multipliers” to increase the impact of their troops and protect their soldiers’ lives. AI systems can make soldiers more efficient, and are likely to enhance the speed and lethality of warfare – even as humans become less visible on the battlefield, instead gathering intelligence and targeting from afar.
Continued here
|
S55Seven tips for ethical shopping this Christmas  Laura Spence is affiliated with the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. As you walk into a shop or go online to hunt for Christmas gifts, it can feel pretty daunting. Who needs what, how much will it cost, will they like it? But also very important: am I making a good choice in where I am shopping?
Continued here
|
S56Erotic Vagrancy: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor biography revels in scandal and excess of Hollywood glamour couple  Roger Lewis’s biographies are always rich, wayward, engrossing, idiosyncratic and above all obsessive, which seems entirely fitting for evoking the particular qualities of his latest subject – the celebrity couple to end them all, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.Lewis’s substantial new book, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, takes its title from a phrase used in a papal condemnation of the couple when their affair began during the making of 20th Century Fox’s epic 1963 film Cleopatra in Rome. This served to emphasise the atmosphere of notoriety that surrounded Taylor and Burton’s relationship throughout its 20-year duration.
Continued here
|
S57S58Kenya at 60: the shameful truth about British colonial abuse and how it was covered up  It is fairly well known that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were affected by terrible acts of violence under the British colonial administration. The British government and King Charles have acknowledged it, and some victims of violence have taken the British government to court for these crimes. Less-known is how much the British imperialist government tried to cover up these violations.
Continued here
|
S59Humiliation and violence in Kenya's colonial days - when old men were called 'boy' and Africans were publicly beaten  When King Charles visited Kenya in November 2023, many Kenyans renewed their demands for an official apology for atrocities committed by the British government during the colonial era. The widespread human rights abuses during the Mau Mau rebellion are the best-known of these atrocities. Yet we should not forget more mundane, everyday acts of domination.I am a social historian who has studied race, violence, colonialism and white settlement in Kenya. From the start of colonialism in 1895 to the drawing down of the Union Jack on 12 December 1963, black Kenyans were constantly subjected to violence and humiliation at the hands of colonial officials, settlers and missionaries alike.
Continued here
|
S60S61S62Conservatives' 'anti-woke' alternative to Disney has finally arrived  As fanfare blares, female sprinters at the starting line suspiciously eye a man in a wig. A hulking, goateed wrestler slams a woman half his size to the mat. An ominous voice-over intones that women’s sports are being “trans-formed.”No, this isn’t the beginning of a classic cross-dressing comedy. It’s the trailer for “Lady Ballers,” a new right-wing movie that farcically depicts cisgendered men claiming to be women in order to dominate women’s sports.
Continued here
|
S63S64AI can teach math teachers how to improve student skills  When middle school math teachers completed an online professional development program that uses artificial intelligence to improve their math knowledge and teaching skills, their students’ math performance improved.My colleagues and I developed this online professional development program, which relies on a virtual facilitator that can – among other things – present problems to the teacher around teaching math and provide feedback on the teacher’s answers.
Continued here
|
S65S66S67How Benjamin Zephaniah became the face of British Rastafari  The sudden and untimely passing of Benjamin Zephaniah at age 65 has rightly brought reflection on his legacy as a poet and as a writer, the two fields in which he made monumental contributions. Zephaniah’s warmth, his accessibility –- and his lyrical genius – made him a household name and a national treasure. Hear him, in 2018, on BBC Radio 3, waxing lyrical about his favourite Shakespearean moments. “In Caribbean and African folklore,” he says, “there’s a character called Anansi who’s a spider and a bit of trickster, and it’s very much like Puck.”
Continued here
|
S68Does exercise really do nothing for longevity, as a Finnish twins study suggests?  Surveys on lifestyle and longevity consistently find that people who do more exercise live longer. So it is surprising to see a report from the Finnish Twins Cohort Study that there is little direct effect of “leisure time physical activity” on lifespan. What makes this study different from others – and is it right?Human behaviour and biology are complex and interact with wider society and the environment. How much exercise a person gets could be linked to their genetics, diet, disabilities, education, wealth, or just whether they have enough leisure time and a safe green space. Each of these factors could also be linked to lifespan in different ways.
Continued here
|
S69Napoleon: ignore the griping over historical details, Ridley Scott's film is a meditation on the madness of power  While Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has been causing consternation among some historians, they are overlooking the fact that the historical record does actually support the film’s narrative in terms of one man taking power and shaping a new order during times of revolution and chaos.Set against the bloody backdrop of the French revolution (1789-1799), Empress Josephine – a beautifully judged performance by Vanessa Kirby – who narrowly escaped Robespierre’s guillotine, loves Napoleon for his power and image.
Continued here
|
S70Baldurs Gate 3 wins game of the year at 2023's Game Awards -  I’m looking over the shoulder of my friend, Iulia, as she boots up her PC. “You’re going to lose your mind,” she grins. Iulia and I share a love of fantasy worlds, hot monsters and video games, and she’s invited me over to her flat to show me something “really special”.Iulia admits, with a mixture of guilt and pride, that she’s already spent over 100 hours exploring the first act of a new game. She clicks through the opening, rhapsodising about the beauty of the environments, the intricacy of the turn-based combat and the glory of something or someone called “Astarion”.
Continued here
|
 |
TradeBriefs Publications are read by over 10,00,000 Industry Executives About Us | Advertise Privacy Policy Unsubscribe (one-click) You are receiving this mail because of your subscription with TradeBriefs.
Our mailing address is GF 25/39, West Patel Nagar, New Delhi 110008, India |
