CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
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S1How to Write a Winning Business Plan You’ve got a great idea for a new product or service—how can you persuade investors to support it? Flashy PowerPoint slides aren’t enough; you need a winning business plan. A compelling plan accurately reflects the viewpoints of your three key constituencies: the market, potential investors, and the producer (the entrepreneur or inventor of the new offering).
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S2How Apple Is Organized for Innovation When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments.
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S3How Corporate Purpose Leads to Innovation Too often, companies’ innovation efforts overfocus on one or two stakeholder groups and ignore the others. The result is failure. The best innovations create mutual value for all key constituents: the customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and investors that together have a material “stake” in the innovation’s outcome. This article provides four tips for harnessing your corporate purpose to improve your innovation success rate.
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| S4The "Piggyback" Approach to Innovation In business and in life, we tend to address problems in the manner we’ve been taught, failing to see adjacent opportunities and unconventional pairings. Consider how we have “the way” we do things: the way we make pasta, the way we use a hammer, the way we deal with our day-to-day problems. On the one hand, this keeps us focused — it gives us a mental script to follow. On the other hand, it limits our ability to see beyond the default. Piggybacks — tactics that capitalize on pre-existing but seemingly unrelated systems and networks — can help organizations create entirely new businesses, diversify sources of revenue, improve products’ appeal, and increase exposure. The author offers examples of how organizations, ranging from small nonprofits to big corporations, are employing this tactic.
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| S5S6S7S8S9S10S11S13What You Chinese-made apps like Temu and Shadowrocket reflect a growing influence in the app marketplace.
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| S14S153 Myths About Hiring People with Criminal Records Research suggests that generalized fears about hiring people with a criminal history — such as fear they’ll commit another crime — are tough to square with the facts. An expansion of what’s often called “second-chance” or “fair-chance” hiring could drive a triple win for the U.S. economy: Employers get the workers they need, people with convictions get jobs they need, and costs to society decline with the lower rates of re-offending that are associated with holding a job. To get there, employers need to recognize some of the myths that impede progress.
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| S16Inside BMW's Decarbonization Strategy In 2023, the auto industry went through huge changes in pursuit of lower carbon emission. Some automakers, like Ford, Mercedes, and General Motors, announced their plans to stop selling vehicles with internal combustion engines. The reaction from investment analysts was overwhelmingly positive, despite the fact that the production of electric vehicles (EVs) actually increases emissions in the supply chain.
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| S17S18You Need More Than Data to Understand Your Customers Today we have more data than ever before, yet marketers still struggle to understand their customers. That’s because today’s marketers have mistaken information for intimacy. The author, who ran strategy for Wieden+Kennedy, describes an ethnographic research campaign his team conducted on behalf of McDonald’s. They produced a cultural bible of sorts that chronicled a series of beliefs, artifacts, behavioral rituals, and language that constitute the McDonald’s fandom. He offers three questions marketers can ask to start to establish more intimacy with their own customers.
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| S19A.I. Is Driving an Information Revolution Artificial Intelligence is on every business leader’s agenda. How do we make sense of the fast-moving new developments in AI over the past year? In new episodes released throughout December and January, Azeem Azhar returns to bring clarity to leaders who face a complicated information landscape.
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| S208 Essential Qualities of Successful Leaders Becoming a great leader is a journey of continuous learning and growth. It’s a process — one that thrives on embracing challenges, seeking feedback, fostering connections, and cultivating understanding. In this article, the author outlines the eight most essential leadership qualities, according to Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, one of the world’s top experts on leadership. Star leaders aren’t born with superhuman capabilities, Linda explains. Rather, they tend to have intentionally put themselves in situations where they have to learn, adapt, and grow — a crucible for developing the tenacity and fortitude to motivate and guide others.
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| S21Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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| S22Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
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| S23Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight? The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
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| S24You can't hear it, but this sound can reveal that a tornado is on its way It begins with the rustling of leaves, sinister squeak of hinges and the creak of nearby trees. Then comes a deafening rumble like an approaching freight train, the terrifying screech of nails being ripped from wooden boards and unpredictable thuds from flying debris. These are the sounds often described by tornado survivors recounting their escape from these storms.There's another sound, however, that accompanies tornadoes that we can't hear. It is so low in frequency it is beyond the realms of human hearing, but it could offer a way of providing earlier, more accurate warnings of these destructive storms.
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| S25Japan's SmartNews was growing fast in the U.S. What went wrong? For its 10th anniversary party in June 2022, the Japanese news aggregator app SmartNews spared no expense. The company rented out the banquet hall at the City Club of San Francisco, flying in employees from across the U.S. and its headquarters in Tokyo. Ken Suzuki, the company’s enigmatic CEO, took the stage with an expensive bottle of Japanese whisky, repeatedly boasting about its price tag as he poured it into glasses for employees. Later, he danced on stage, and colleagues belted karaoke late into the night.Within months, over 100 SmartNews employees would be laid off. In November, Suzuki stepped down as CEO. SmartNews was one of the few Japanese startups to crack the U.S. market — and the second ever to clear a billion-dollar valuation and reach unicorn status. But employees told Rest of World the U.S. expansion’s initial success was tempered by a chaotic product development process and Suzuki’s own obsession with the fractures of American political life, distracting from more central business challenges.
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| S26Vietnam's taxi drivers fight app drivers, wear their uniforms to steal customers Dao, a motorbike-taxi driver for Grab, was picking up a customer at a bus stop in Ho Chi Minh City earlier this year when a man in a Grab shirt attacked him. The assailant, Dao told Rest of World, was not a Grab driver, but a xe om, or a traditional bike-taxi driver not linked to any platform.Such incidents are common in Ho Chi Minh City, where bike-taxi drivers often try to protect their turf — busy pickup points like railway stations, bus stops, and hospitals — from drivers who use apps. “I can’t drive into bus stations to pick up passengers; [xe om] will come out and chase me away, beat me,” said Dao, requesting to be identified only by his last name for fear of retribution. Even as the xe om push back on platform workers, they often impersonate Grab drivers by wearing fake uniforms to try and win customers’ trust.
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| S27Green Glow of 'Mesospheric Ghosts' Decoded Mysterious green displays in the sky dubbed “mesospheric ghosts” can sometimes accompany the dramatic red atmospheric lights called spritesRed sprites above a supercell thunderstorm as lightning illuminates the cumulonimbus cloud below near Hay Springs, Nebraska.
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| S28This Flying Frog Spends Its Youth Masquerading as Poop These froglets disguise themselves as feces to gross out potential predators until they’re old enough to glide through jungle canopiesWallace’s flying frog (Rhacophorus nigropalmatus)—a Kermit-green amphibian that would fit in the palm of your hand—spreads its webbed toes to glide gracefully through tropical forest canopies in Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. But before it takes to the air, it looks like, well, crap.
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| S29Electric Vehicle Owners Are Not Driving Enough--And That's Bad Used car buyers and the U.S. government need to dive into the marketplace to deliver the emissions reductions promised by electric vehiclesA motorcycle officer weaves through traffic on a Los Angeles freeway during the evening rush hour on April 12, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. US President Joe Biden's administration unveiled new proposed auto emissions rules, aiming to accelerate the electric vehicle transition with a target of two-thirds of the new US car market by 2032.
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| S30S31Is Cannabis Bad for Teens? Data Paint a Conflicting Picture Ten years after cannabis was first legalized for recreational use in adults, scientists are struggling to provide evidence-based recommendations about the risks to young peopleKrista Lisdahl has been studying cannabis use among adolescents for two decades, and what she sees makes her worried for her teenage son.
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| S32Road Map for U.S. Particle Physics Wins Broad Approval A major report plotting the future of U.S. particle physics calls for cuts to the beleaguered DUNE project, advocates a “muon shot” for a next-generation collider and recommends a new survey of the universe’s oldest observable lightA view from the subterranean excavation for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
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| S33S34NFL Playoffs, Ohtani Contract, NBA In-Season Tournament In this episode, Wharton experts discuss the NFL playoff race, Shohei Ohtani's contract, and the NBA In-Season Tournament.Wharton’s Cade Massey, Eric Bradlow, Adi Wyner, and Shane Jensen discuss the NFL playoff race, Shohei Ohtani’s contract and deferral, and take a look back at the NBA In-Season Tournament.
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| S35S36Stop Planting Trees, Says Guy Who Inspired World to Plant a Trillion Trees In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations’ Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees.Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they’re purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit’s “Nature Day” events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets— “as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions,” Crowther said.
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| S37Europe to End Robo-Firing in Major Gig Economy Overhaul Platform workers can no longer be fired automatically by algorithms, according to new European Union rules agreed today in a sweeping reform of the gig economy that will affect Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers.“Now we have a proper system, which is something that doesn't exist anywhere else around the world,” said Elisabetta Gualmini, an Italian politician who led the negotiations for the European Parliament in a press conference on Wednesday. She described the new rules as a real improvement in the labor rights for millions of workers.
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| S38Denon's PerL Earbuds Sound Great, but They're Not Perfect 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’ve been down a sonic rabbit hole in which I wasn’t always sure where technology ended and human senses began. It came courtesy of Denon’s fascinating new earbuds, the PerL. I can’t even tell you what the PerL sound like; they’re designed to deliver custom sound tuned for each listener. What I can say is that Denon really has something here.
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| S39Tesla Is Recalling Nearly All Vehicles Sold in US to Fix an Autopilot Fault Tesla is recalling more than 2 million vehicles, nearly all of the vehicles it has sold in the US to date, to fix a flawed system designed to make sure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.Rather than physically recalling vehicles, documents posted today by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) state that Tesla will send out a software update in an attempt to fix the problem.
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| S40The Best Travel Bags for Wherever You're Headed 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 WIREDTravel bags live a rough life, and good luggage can be expensive. But paying for a decent bag means buying a little peace of mind. A few yards of zippers and either hard plastic or nylon are the only barriers between your bag and the belly of an airliner, the conveyor belt of a baggage claim, and the trunk of a car. In our luggage testing, we put a lot of focus on luggage that's lightweight, rolls easily or fits comfortably on your back, and doesn't split open on the way to your destination.
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| S41The US Supreme Court Will Decide the Fate of Medication Abortion The US Supreme Court decided Wednesday to hear a case challenging access to abortion pills in the United States, including in states where abortion is legal.This will be the most consequential case for access to reproductive health care since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Following the Roe decision, many patients seeking abortions turned to telehealth providers, who could then send abortion pills by mail. Pills are now the most common abortion method in the US; curtailing the availability of medication abortion would be a major blow to reproductive health care.
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| S42Hacker Group Linked to Russian Military Claims Credit for Cyberattack on Ukrainian Telecom Over nearly a decade, the hacker group within Russia's GRU military intelligence agency known as Sandworm has launched some of the most disruptive cyberattacks in history against Ukraine's power grids, financial system, media, and government agencies. Signs now point to that same usual suspect being responsible for sabotaging a major mobile provider for the country, cutting off communications for millions and even temporarily sabotaging the air raid warning system in the capital of Kyiv.On Tuesday, a cyberattack hit Kyivstar, one of Ukraine's largest mobile and internet providers. The details of how that attack was carried out remain far from clear. But it “resulted in essential services of the company’s technology network being blocked,” according to a statement posted by Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-UA.
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| S43Samsung's End-of-Year Sale Cuts Prices on Our Favorite Phones, TVs, and Tablets It's that time of year again. The holidays? Nope! Winter solstice? Try again. OK, I'll just tell you: It's Samsung's quarterly Discover event. I know, I knowâit's less exciting than wintry festivities, but if you're in the market for any Samsung products (for yourself or others), this event is big news. Samsung is running discounts not only on some of its older products but also on its latest and greatest flagships. Here's a curated list of some of the highlights, which run through the weekâand we found the same deals (if not better) at other retailers too. Each and every one of these picks has been tested, vetted, and put through the paces by the WIRED Gear team.We've also got some Samsung coupons worth checking out, including an exclusive 30 percent off code that comes with lots of strings but could save you money depending on what you're buying. Dyson also currently has many of its cordless vacuums on sale at prices at or below what we saw on Black Friday, including the Dyson V15 Absolute at $500 and the Dyson V11 at $400. You can scan our coupon page for more savings.
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| S44The scientific hazards of being Santa Claus If you think you have it rough at your workplace, just imagine how hard it must be for Santa Claus. Over the course of the year, he has to oversee the creation of billions of toys and presents for children all across the world. Then, in one herculean night, he must travel to hundreds of millions of households across six continents (seven, if there happen to be children in Antarctica at the time), delivering over one billion kilograms of presents in the process. In addition to that, he must contend with worker safety, his own physical and mental health, as well as the hazards of heat stress and sleigh riding during his annual global journey.For too long, there has been a paucity of research into the occupational health and safety hazards that come along with being Santa Claus, as few resources were devoted to understanding both the long-term and short-term risks associated with his unique occupation. But all of that may be changing, as a 2015 paper written by Sebastian Straube and Xiangning Fan in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology kicked off what’s sure to be a fruitful field of inquiry into the occupational health of Santa Claus. Here’s what everyone considering a job at the North Pole should be thinking about.
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| S45Dare and care: An astronaut's guide to leadership Mike Massimino has been many things: a NASA astronaut, a professor of engineering at Columbia University, a senior advisor at the Intrepid Museum, and a TV personality. He was even an early social media influencer, having sent the first tweet from space. But one thing Massimino was not? A natural-born leader.By his own admission, he was always more comfortable as the co-captain. He enjoyed being the guy you could have a chin-wag with over drinks. He wanted to bring the team together and be their confidant when times get rough. Calling the shots? Being responsible for the mission? Leave that kind of stuff for the head honcho.
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| S46Exoplanet discoveries reveal Earth's profound rarity in the cosmos We are now well into a new era of astronomy, where distant planets (called exoplanets) are being detected at a fast clip. At last count, there have been 5,557 confirmed discoveries of exoplanets and another 10,000 candidates awaiting confirmation. These discoveries have given rise to “comparative planetology,” a new area of astronomy dedicated to investigating the properties of different worlds, classifying them according to size, mass, (approximate) atmospheric composition, distance from their parent star, and whether they are rocky, gaseous, or some combination of the two.The main goal is to compare them to Earth and other planets in our Solar System. For example, when astronomers talk about a “super-Earth,” they mean a rocky planet with a radius somewhat larger than Earth’s, while a “sub-Neptune” is a gaseous planet with a radius somewhat smaller than Neptune’s. These definitions are operational and the boundaries between planetary classes are not very rigid, but they offer a quick way of classifying what we see.
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| S47A new injection is helping stave off RSV this season In November 2021, Mickayla Wininger’s then one-month-old son, Malcolm, endured a terrifying bout with RSV, the respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus—a common ailment that affects all age groups. Most people recover from mild, cold-like symptoms in a week or two, but RSV can be life-threatening in others, particularly infants.Wininger, who lives in southern Illinois, was dressing Malcolm for bed when she noticed what seemed to be a minor irregularity with this breathing. She and her fiancé, Gavin McCullough, planned to take him to the hospital the next day. The matter became urgent when, in the morning, the boy’s breathing appeared to have stopped.
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| S48Dropbox spooks users with new AI features that send data to OpenAI when used On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature, but Dropbox says data is only shared if the feature is actively being used. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn't used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
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| S49Let's attempt to decode Google's confusing new location data settings Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google's misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California, Arizona, Washington, a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia, and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google's location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.
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| S50New survey: Nearly 30% of ESA workers experience workplace harassment According to a new internal survey conducted by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) staff association, about 30 percent of ESA’s employees have either experienced or witnessed harassment in the workplace. The survey, published internally on December 6 and seen by Ars Technica, confirms the findings of our recent investigation into allegations of harassment and bullying at the agency.
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| S51S52S53S54S55S56S57S58Israel Is Dangerously Dependent on Technology Even before start-up nation entered the lexicon, the army’s embrace of technology alarmed some military experts.Not long after the first rocket siren went off on the morning of October 7, my brother-in-law Ben was outside his house in central Israel. At the time, several thousand Hamas fighters were pouring through the Gaza border fence about an hour’s drive to the south, overrunning our military defenses and butchering hundreds of civilians. But no one knew the details yet, just that something very bad was happening and that the army had been caught off guard. Ben ran into a neighbor with two children serving in the army. The neighbor’s immediate response stayed with him, and then with me when I heard the story. “We have cameras instead of eyes,” he said.
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| S59How Anxiety Became Content The way we commonly discuss mental-health issues, especially on the internet, isn’t helping us.This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.
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| S60The New Face of the 'Great Replacement' Vivek Ramaswamy is both the newest proponent of the racist idea and the best example of why it’s wrong.Midway through last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like a frustrated child mashing buttons on Street Fighter, alleging that the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the so-called “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”
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| S61Final Words The state of Texas has executed nearly 600 men and women since 1982. Most of them had something to say in their last moments, and those words are now collected in a book, Final Words: 578 Men and Women Executed on Texas Death Row. About 100 chose to say nothing at all; “this inmate declined to make a last statement,” the book notes. But many more opted to share their final thoughts. Taken together, their words—on religious faith, love, violence, regret, and capital punishment itself—form an evocative portrait of the moieties of the death penalty in Texas: the crimes these men and women committed, and the death they now suffer for it.Each entry appears as a two-page spread, with a prisoner’s final words on one side (obtained from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice) and a brief description of his or her crimes on the opposite page. There are exceptionally short remarks—Freddie Lee Webb, executed in March of 1994, simply said, “Peace”; Jessie Gutierrez, executed roughly five months later, said, “I just love everybody, and that’s it”—and there are long monologues. Sometimes prisoners’ last words appear to have been written by someone else: Richard J. Wilkerson, executed in August of 1993, referred to himself in the third person, saying, “Killing R.J. will not bring [his victim] back.” Some are accepting. “It was horrible and inexcusable of me to take the life of your loved one and to hurt so many mentally and physically,” David Lee Herman said in April of 1997. “I am here because I took a life and killing is wrong by an individual and by the state, and I am sorry we are here but if my death gives you peace and closure then this is all worthwhile.” Others barely register at all: Harold Amos Barnard, killed in February of 1994, apparently mumbled the last of his words. They are described only as “a couple of sentences garbled.”
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| S62The 2024 Election Already Isn't Normal One party heads toward a typical primary season. The other remains gripped by an authoritarian revenge fantasy.In a survey of swing-state voters one year out from the 2024 election, a New York Times/Siena College poll asked an unusual question: If Donald Trump were convicted and sentenced to prison, would you still vote for him as the Republican nominee in the general election?
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| S63The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way' IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. “Something to do with computers, right?” was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it’s Watson, the company’s prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011.In the chronicles of garage entrepreneurship, however, IBM retains a legendary place—as a flat-footed behemoth. In 1980, bruised by nearly 13 years of antitrust litigation, its executives made the colossal error of permitting the 25-year-old Bill Gates, a co-founder of a company with several dozen employees, to retain the rights to the operating system that IBM had subcontracted with him to develop for its then-secret personal-computer project. That mistake was the making of Microsoft. By January 1993, Gates’s company was valued at $27 billion, briefly taking the lead over IBM, which that year posted some of the largest losses in American corporate history.
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| S64The Wish once again of not coming to know the strident sorrows unfulfilled for fatherland of not seeing loved ones their remains drifted in the far earth of saying father father and to be heard in this benign beginning a gray sky a fleet of nonbirds of faces of inaudible singsongs not a word unrecognizable atoned in this despicable pit of a large burning once and for all again a face your face flies into nothing the wish never to be in- visible
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| S65The 10 Best Albums of 2023 A year of great music offers a reminder that more really can be more: more melodies, more breakthroughs, more art.Narrowing the options down to a list of 10 favorite albums was, in 2023, a tougher task than ever. The music industry has been beset by concerns about market saturation, caused by an ever-rising flood of new songs onto streaming services, overwhelming artists and consumers alike. But looking back over a year of great albums offers a reminder that more really can be more: more melodies, more breakthroughs, more art.
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| S66Why This Math Professor Objects to Diversity Statements What happens when the noble goal of social justice is invoked in ways that corrupt rather than improve?Before immigrating to America from Russia as a young academic, Alexander Barvinok lived under a repressive regime that he experienced as “systemic absurdity.” He is now a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Michigan. Earlier this year, he resigned his three-decade membership in the American Mathematical Society in a letter citing the group’s failure to oppose the growing number of job openings for mathematics faculty that require applicants to draft and submit a statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. He regards these statements as a gravely concerning trend for his discipline, and he wanted to register some sort of protest against them.
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| S67The Novel That Takes You Inside a Defense Lawyer's Mind In Marie NDiaye’s latest, an attorney struggles with the case of a mother accused of infanticide.She calls herself a “near-perfect mother”; to her husband, she is a “peerless mother.” Yet one day, Marlyne Principaux drowns her three children in the bath before arranging their bodies in her bed. This is the horror story that underpins Marie NDiaye’s new novel, Vengeance Is Mine. But as shocking as these details are, NDiaye pivots from them to focus instead on a more oblique drama involving the lawyer enlisted to defend the accused woman. When Gilles Principaux, Marlyne’s husband, walks into the office of the attorney Maître Susane, a strange coincidence occurs: She immediately recognizes the bereaved man. He is the teenage boy, now middle-aged, whom she met only once in her childhood under mysterious circumstances that she strains to fully remember but who nevertheless shaped the entirety of her life to come.
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| S68Why It's So Hard to Search Your Email Before a flight, I get a Pavlovian stress reaction—not from the prospect of hurtling at 30,000 feet in a concrete tube, but from my email inbox. Airline tickets sometimes get lost in an email abyss, requiring a few stressful minutes of frenzied searching when it’s time to check in. “I can’t find my confirmation for this flight in my email but I know I bought it 😭,” goes one tweet. “Gmail search is amazing,” another user posted just last week. “You can search something like ‘flight sacramento receipt 2023’ and it will somehow manage to serve up literally every email in your inbox that isn’t the receipt for the flight you just took to Sacramento.”Searching your email can sometimes feel basically impossible. Typing in a mix of search terms goes only so far. At some point, it almost feels personal, like the software is purposefully not showing you a conversation you absolutely remember having. One Beyoncé fan posted that he couldn’t find a ticket to the Renaissance movie in his email and ended up buying another. Over Zoom, I asked Hamed Zamani, a search expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, if he ever has trouble finding an email. He smiled and said, “Who doesn’t?”
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| S69The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline curtailed Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. But who was responsible?At 2:03 a.m. on Monday, September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an explosion tore open one of the four massive underwater conduits that make up the Nord Stream pipeline. The pipe, made of thick, concrete-encased steel, lay at a depth of 260 feet. It was filled with highly compressed methane gas.
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| S70The Last Time a Concert Documentary Saved the Movies After the box-office triumph of Barbenheimer this past summer, Hollywood stumbled into an uneasy fall season. The dual writer and actor strikes contributed to delayed releases, which blunted the predicted slow-walk back to theaters in the wake of COVID restrictions. Yet the second half of 2023 also yielded welcome surprises, the most unexpected of which was the success of the concert documentary.Both Taylor Swift and Beyoncé made surprise announcements that their record-breaking tours were hitting the big screen. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opened in theaters in October and domestically outgrossed several major studios’ franchise entries, including the most recent Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones sequels. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé dominated the first weekend of December, leveraging a historically light portion of the release calendar. Although Renaissance’s $21.8 million first-weekend box office didn’t match the juggernaut of The Eras Tour’s $92.8 million opening, it soared above the debut of any other concert film released in more than a decade. This made 2023 the first year in modern box-office reporting in which two concert documentaries reached No. 1.
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