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S2Meet Tomorrow's Workforce: Today's Student Labor Activists | Ayanna Howard   Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Student labor activism is on the rise in new and surprising ways. Not only do students in higher education regularly turn out to support striking staff members on college campuses, but they're also organizing and joining unions themselves in growing numbers. This direct action sets the stage for their lives after they leave higher education, because when students are involved in organizing efforts in their on-campus working lives, you'd better believe these same workers will seek out unions later in their careers.
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S3How bosses won the fight for power in 2023  Tension between workers and bosses has risen dramatically throughout the past few years – especially around the return-to-office battle. As employees seek to retain the flexibility they've prized for more than three years, employers have sought to instil greater rigidity, often through fixed working patterns that require employees at their desks.Since the pandemic, workers have largely had the upper hand over executives, whether due to a favourable labour market or simple outright stubbornness to give up their remote set-ups. But 2023 marked a turning point: for the first time since Covid-19 hit, amid a weakening economy and cooling labour market, employers are coming out on top. Yet although this power struggle has seemingly ended in favour of bosses, workers haven't lost all they've fought for – millions of employees have ended up with greater flexibility, autonomy and pay than perhaps ever before. But going forward, say experts, the new hybrid working environment looks set to be dictated by employers for the foreseeable future.
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S4ArChan Chan's Sweet-soy chicken wings from Hong Kong  In Hong Kong, there is no shortage of good chicken wing spots, from Taiwanese fried wings at snack stands and Korean fried chicken joints to all-you-can-eat Buffalo wings at American restaurants.Out of all the options, however, Swiss chicken wings are one of the most popular choices, available at cha chaan tengs – Hong Kong's version of cafes or diners.
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S5The Boy and the Heron: Inside the dark heart of Studio Ghibli's latest animated masterpiece  The Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki, a workaholic auteur generally considered to be one of the artform's most accomplished masters, has been trying to retire since 1997. Back then, it was the thematically rich Princess Mononoke, a record-breaking Japanese box-office smash, that was to be his final film. Then, in 2001, it was to be Spirited Away, the sumptuous mega-hit that announced Studio Ghibli, the production company co-founded by Miyazaki and the director Isao Takahata (who died in 2018), to the world. And in 2013, he said the same the thing about The Wind Rises, a loosely autobiographical film about the development of the Mitsubishi Zero, Japan's most famous warplane.
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S6What made Maria Callas the world's 'greatest diva'  This month marks the centenary of one of music's most illustrious artists: Greek-American opera soprano Maria Callas, born Maria Kalogeropoulos in Manhattan, December 1923. Callas earned the sobriquet "La Divina" over a relatively brief singing career that projected her technical brilliance, passion and expressive flair to the world. She also bore the crushing pressures of that status, and was just 53 when she died of a heart attack at her Paris home. Many of the 100th anniversary events are invariably epic in scale, including Unesco celebrations across iconic Greek landmarks, and a wealth of music reissues. Yet Callas's legacy remains powerfully intimate, too.A new documentary explores the highs and lows of Callas's life, as well as what her legacy is today. "She worked so hard, she made herself Maria Callas – she made herself the greatest diva," Stella Kourmapana, archivist at the Athens Conservatoire, explains in Maria Callas, part of the BBC series Take Me to the Opera.
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S7S8S9Technologies like artificial intelligence are changing our understanding of war  Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely regarded as a disruptive technology because it has the potential to fundamentally alter social relationships. AI has affected how people understand the world, the jobs available in the workforce and judgments of who merits employment or threatens society.Nowhere is this more apparent than in warfare, which is defined by social and technological processes. Technologies such as autonomous weapon systems (AWS) and cyberweapons have the potential to change conflicts and combat forever.
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S10S11S13S14S15S16S17Doing science in Antarctica has harmed an environment under great pressure. Here's how we can do better  This work was funded and supported by the Australian Antarctic Division, Australian Antarctic Science project 4565.As well as the local impacts of these stations, the Antarctic environment is facing massive challenges from external pressures such as climate change. The loss of sea ice could mean some of the continent’s most iconic wildlife face extinction this century. For example, the early melting of sea ice recently led to complete breeding failure at several emperor penguin colonies.
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S18S19S20S21COP28: Why China's clean energy boom matters for global climate action  With an energy-hungry economy, an historic reliance on coal and vast manufacturing enterprises, China is the world’s single largest emitter, accounting for 27% of the world’s carbon dioxide and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.But China is also the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panelsand wind turbines. Domestically, it is installing green power at a rate the world has never seen. This year alone, China built enough solar, wind, hydro and nuclear capacity to cover the entire electricity consumption of France. Next year, we may see something even more remarkable – the population giant’s first ever drop in emissions from the power sector.
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S22Fairy Tales at QAGOMA: how we revived these stories with new myths, new media and new quirks  Fairy Tales, the latest exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), gives off the pleasurable hum of remix culture, artists riffing on a core theme in numerous ways. Overseen by the gallery’s cinematheque curator Amanda Slack-Smith, Fairy Tales focuses on how artists, designers and filmmakers have taken inspiration from fantasy motifs, adapting the fairy tale vocabulary of extremes (light and dark, good and evil, rich and poor) to their own artistic needs.
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S23We're on track to eliminate hepatitis C, but stigma remains and reinfection is a risk  Hepatitis C is a preventable but potentially life-threatening blood-borne virus. It primarily affects the liver and, if untreated, can lead to cirrhosis (scar damage) and cancer. When direct-acting antivirals for hepatitis C arrived in 2016, they were described as a game changer. They cured chronic hepatitis C in more than 95% of cases. So Australia adopted the World Health Organization’s target to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030.
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S24How 1930s American scientists came to think about the impact of climate on wine  Gabriella Maria Petrick a reçu des financements de EU Horizon 2020 MSCA project number 896298. In Europe and beyond, the notion of terroir dominates ideas about the origins of the taste and quality of wine. While there’s intense debate over the term, generally it refers to the specific place where grapes are grown. The concept is largely focused on soil, but also includes the layout of the land and the elements to which it is regularly exposed – sun, rain, wind, seasons, and more. And although climate is seen as being part of the equation, the land upon which grapes are grown is its foundation. As such thinking took root over centuries, it was eventually codified into Europe’s appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) system, meaning “registered designation of origin”.
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S25Needing to borrow money? Four tips on what's okay and what's not  It’s a financially challenging time for most households. With interest rates rising, many are spending even more money on debt repayments or taking out loans to help make ends meet. A report released recently in South Africa, compiled by one of the country’s biggest banks, found that 42% of South Africans, across various income levels, cannot manage their debt. This indebtedness has caused 67% of the respondents to worry about their debt to the point that it negatively affects their mental health.
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S26What Do We Want from Comedy?  In almost every TV comedy special, there’s a telling cutaway that the director felt obliged to insert. It shows spectators in the theatre rented for the occasion—usually a half row, half a dozen people—erupting in laughter at something outrageous that the comedian has just said while turning with quick, happy complicity to exchange a guilty glance for having done so. As often as not, someone in the row covers her face or offers an abashed look, before rocking back and forth with renewed delight. It is a heightened emotion and clearly meant to allow us, watching, to join in. Can we laugh at that? they ask one another, giving us permission to laugh as they laugh.It is, in a way, a version of the canned laughter that once enwrapped every situation comedy, and which, when now encountered on ancient shows on TV Land, sounds downright eerie in its mechanical, obviously overlaid quality. The two practices arise from a common idea: that laughter is a shared, not a solitary, experience, and needs a little kindling of collectivity to catch fire.
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S27Amazon Just Quietly Released The Best Batman Movie of the Year  As Mariah Carey knows, making an enduring piece of Christmas media can cement your legacy. But that’s easier said than done, especially for movies and television. What makes a good Christmas seasonal watch? It can’t be too cookie-cutter like a Hallmark film, and it has to be Christmassy without being too Christmassy, which can tip over into saccharine. Most importantly, it needs to have a wide appeal capable of entertaining the whole family as they relax with their new presents. It can be hard to identify what debut movies will become Christmas classics in the decades to come, but Prime Video’s Batman Christmas special is a serious contender. Its unique take sets it apart not only from other Christmas movies, but also from all the other Batman movies out there, which is a doubly impressive feat.
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S2830 Years Ago, an Iconic Sci-Fi Shooter Changed Video Games Forever  Many games released in the early ‘90s are remembered with fond nostalgia, but one beloved sci-fi shooter stands a cut above the rest. At least when it comes to cultural impact.Hailed as one of the most defining entries in the first-person shooter genre, Id Software’s Doom was a breath of fresh air when it debuted on December 10, 1993. While FPS games were all the rage back then (Id Software even birthed the Wolfenstein series before Doom), this fast-paced, no-holds-barred multiplayer shooting gallery brought gamers together like never before.
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S29The Most Outrageous Sci-Fi Movie of the Year Could Finally End an Annoying Debate  Whether you’re aware of it or not, there’s a real debate going on about the state of sex scenes in movies. The conversation has been ongoing for several years, but it’s come to the forefront of film culture this year. Viewers have spent months debating the point (or pointlessness, depending on how you see it) of Oppenheimer’s sex scenes, while a recent study revealed that the majority of Gen Z moviegoers would prefer it if there was an increased focus on platonic relationships onscreen moving forward and less of a focus on sex and nudity.Among the many questions that have emerged at the center of this debate is whether or not it’s ever actually necessary to see characters having sex onscreen in a movie or TV show. Some have claimed that it’s always indulgent and unnecessary, and even Quentin Tarantino acknowledged earlier this year that sex isn’t a part of his personal “vision of cinema.” Suffice it to say: It doesn’t seem like this debate is going away anytime soon.
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S30Forgotten Star Wars Lore Could Change the Rules of the Force Forever  A little-known aspect of the Force could actually explain one of the biggest questions in Star Wars today.Star Wars’ future is bright, with a slew of TV shows and movies on the schedule for years going forward. But as it stands now, there are a lot of questions looming: What’s Thrawn up to? How will Ahsoka get home? Is The Mandalorian even about The Mandalorian anymore?
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S31Are Laser Pointers Bad For Cat's Mental Health? A Vet Reveals the Truth  Laser pointers revolutionized the cat toy game. This compact tool, mere inches long, projects a captivating red dot across the room. Not bound by string or a plastic rod, this target easily pulls your cat across the floor and up the walls. This gadget has many spin-offs, including a collar that shoots a little red dot so your cat can keep himself entertained.But considering that cats treat these light beams like material prey, they don’t get the same satisfaction that even chasing after a tinfoil ball offers. With this in mind, laser pointers go on trial: Are they actually good for your cat?
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S32Design Isn't Holding Foldables Back Anymore, It's Price  2023 was the first year with multiple great folding phones (outside of Asia), but why are they still so expensive?Samsung has been trying to popularize foldables since the disastrous launch of the original Galaxy Fold in 2019. Several years and iterations later, the company has gotten close to perfecting its two foldable options with the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5. For the most part, Samsung has figured out how to create folding screens that are not only gorgeous to look at but also durable enough that you're not afraid to use them outside.
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S33Hands Down, the 50 Most Clever Things for Your Home Under $35 on Amazon  When it comes to transforming your living space into a haven of comfort, style, and functionality, it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg. With a discerning eye and a knack for finding hidden gems, you can elevate your home without emptying your wallet. I’ve scoured Amazon to uncover the most clever products, each priced under $35, that will enhance your home. From ingenious gadgets to chic decor, these affordable finds are the key to upgrading your living space without breaking your budget. Tired of wrestling with sticky plastic wrap? Look no further — these stretchy silicone lids are a sustainable alternative that keeps food fresh. Save on wasted food, plastic, and time with this transparent variety pack that offers seven different sizes to fit your bowls, trays, and more. These eco-friendly lids are BPA-free, microwave-safe, and dishwasher-friendly.
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S34Love it Or Hate It, the Future of the iPhone Will Look More Like Android  Good artists copy and great artists steal, but the iPhone’s collision course with Android was as much chosen by Apple as it was forced by regulators in 2023.It’s a claim that’s made so many times it seems stale, but in a wilder year than most, I’ll make it again: We have Android to thank for the modern iPhone experience as much as we do Apple’s designers.
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S352023's Breakout Sci-Fi Star Explains an Exciting Star Trek Easter Egg  As Danielle Poole in For All Mankind, Krys Marshall has given us four decades in five years. But the electrifying actress says the show’s goals are even bigger.In For All Mankind Season 4, the 34-year-old actress Krys Marshall is playing her character, Danielle Poole, as a woman of roughly 60. But, just a few years ago, Dani was in her twenties, and a wide-eyed astronaut who had just joined NASA in 1969. Now, in Season 4, it’s 2003, and that once-green astronaut is now Commander Poole, in charge of an entire space base on Mars. “I look at myself in Season 1 and I think I was so young and beautiful!” Marshall says, laughing. “Now I'm like a hundred years old!”
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S36How EMDR therapy helped me heal from the trauma of a carjack | Aeon Essays  is a freelance journalist with a background in news production. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.I wore leggings that Tuesday. I never wore leggings to work, but that winter three years ago the New Orleans heat was in hibernation. Ice climbed up my windows, and my sweater almost reached my knees. I whispered: ‘Be good, I love you,’ to the puppy sound asleep in his crate and the groggy cat still snuggled in bed before I stepped out into the unseasonably cold January air. A neighbour’s motion-sensor light blinked on to help me navigate the blackness. It was 12:50am; my shift at the news station started in 10 minutes. My fingers became numb quickly, making it difficult to turn the key in the lock. I speed-walked to my car, my beautiful, white Hyundai Kona, my college graduation gift from my parents. I twisted the heat all the way up, slapped the seat-heater button, and turned my Spotify to Maggie Rogers’s new album. With my hands pulled into my North Face sleeves, I grabbed the wheel.
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S37For ages, solo sex was hardly taboo. What led to its centuries-long dry spell? | Aeon Videos  For the vast majority of humans throughout history, masturbation has been a natural norm rather than a taboo. The brief animation ‘Masturbation: A Short History of a Great Taboo’ (2022) traces much of the blame for ‘the offensive against solo sex’ across the past several centuries back to a curious pamphlet titled Onania: Or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (c1712), which, written by a now-unknown author, attributed both moral injury and physical malady to self-pleasure. The short is part of the documentary series Magical Caresses, dedicated to ‘solo sexuality’, by the Canadian filmmaker Lori Malépart-Traversy, who previously employed her charming animation style to explore sexuality with Le Clitoris (2016).
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S38Get More Funding for Your R&D Initiatives  Although financial analysts widely acknowledge that innovation is a key driver of business growth and business sustainability, the financial markets do not reward innovation investments, largely because companies do a poor job of making innovation transparent to investors and analysts. There are legitimate reasons for being careful with information but the authors argue that companies could benefit from sharing progress with their project pipelines and communicating their decision-making progress.
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S39S40S41S42S43S44S45S46S47S48Gelatine: The ingredient with the wonder wobble  To make the first known recipe for an aspic, you'll need fish lips. These dainties are to be suspended in a set gelatine, flavoured with a riot of spices and made from boiling Iraqi carp heads, before being tinted a brilliant red with saffron.A thousand years ago in Iraq, when the cookbook containing the recipe was written, party guests might have welcomed a slice of the jiggling substance, much the way the attendees of a Tupperware party in Omaha in 1963 would have tucked into a brilliant green molded Jell-O larded with canned mandarin orange slices.
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S49Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue  Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet printer. The videos were practically identical—except one wasn’t a video at all. It was a simulation.“I was absolutely mind-blown,” said Giomi, a biophysicist at Leiden University. “You could predict everything about the ink droplets.”
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S50Why this startup is creating edible oil from sawdust  Just because something is natural doesn’t necessarily make it sustainable. Consider palm oil. The product was widely adopted in the 20th century to replace purportedly less healthy oils and fats in foods. Odorless, semi-solid at room temperature, resistant to oxidation, and — most importantly — cheap, it’s now found in almost everything.In fact, the World Wildlife Fund estimates that 50% of all packaged products contain palm oil. It’s in chocolate, pizza dough, and margarine. It’s also in cosmetics like lipstick, and personal care products, such as deodorant, shampoo, and toothpaste. We use it in cleaning products, in pet foods, and as a biofuel. The list goes on.
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S51Neurosoft CEO says new brain implant is "basically 1,000 times softer" than anything on the market  A new kind of flexible brain implant, developed by Neurosoft Bioelectronics, has been tested in humans for the first time. While more research is needed to prove its safety and efficacy, the device could give us a better way to analyze the brain — or even stimulate it with precise pulses of electricity.The challenge: Almost everything you think and do is encoded in tiny electrical signals in your brain, so recording this activity can provide valuable insights into your health. In some cases, doctors can even treat patients by stimulating parts of their brain with electricity.
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S52Why scientists are making transparent wood  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.
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S53S54Modern Britain Is a Scene From Slow Horses  Inspired by Mick Herron’s satirical novels, the Apple series captures a nation beset by institutional failure, political corruption, and hopelessness.“No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.” The rest of Slough House isn’t much better: a nest of abandoned keyboards and empty pizza boxes strewn around by agents who would rather be anywhere else. On the top floor is the lair of the spymaster Jackson Lamb, stinking of “takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer.”
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S55The Two Republican Theories for Beating Trump  The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.
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S56Catch Up on a Year of Culture  A roundup of some Atlantic writing that guided our readers through the year in film, TV, and sold-out stadium toursThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
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S57The Eerie Intensity of Adam Driver on 'Saturday Night Live'  When this week’s Saturday Night Live host, Adam Driver, explained in his opening monologue that he had a “very deep and personal relationship with Santa,” it was pretty obvious that whatever was to follow wasn’t going to be your typical holiday cheer.The Oscar-nominated actor sat down at a piano, demonstrated that he really could play it, and then started barking his wish list to the jolly man in the North Pole. Among his wants for Christmas: “One of those giant metal Tesla trucks” that would “pair perfectly with [his] teeny tiny micropenis.” He also revealed that he would like people to stop coming up to him on the street saying that he killed Han Solo, given his role as Kylo Ren in the latest Star Wars trilogy. “I didn’t kill Han Solo,” he said. “Wokeness killed Han Solo.”
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S58S59Native 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.
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S60Kanuchi: 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.
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S61Three 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.
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S62S63With 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.
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S64From 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.
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S65Uganda 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.
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S66In 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.”
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S67Looking 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.)
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S68The 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.
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S6940 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.
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S70Xbox 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.
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