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 S4GTA 6: Grand Theft Auto VI could smash revenue records   It's been condemned by Britain, Germany and France. It's been outright banned in Brazil. Its violence and vehicular mayhem has drawn the ire of organisations including the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the UK's Freedom from Torture organisation. It's also spawned memes and a singular cult fandom.This subject of both controversy and culture – Grand Theft Auto – is expected to make its return in 2025 with Grand Theft Auto VI, widely known as GTA 6. It's the first release of the game since 2013 – and to call it "wildly anticipated" in its community is a great understatement.
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S6Trade rules and climate change: Africa stands to lose from proposed WTO policy tools  The World Trade Organisation launched its Trade Policy Tools for Climate Action during the COP28 conference. International economic law expert Olabisi D. Akinkugbe discusses whether the new Trade Policy Tools benefit Africa.The new tools offer opportunities for countries to mitigate the climate change effect of their trade practices. The tools align with the Paris Agreement, the 2015 legally binding United Nations Treaty on Climate Change.
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S7Buying indie video games over the holidays can help make the industry more ethical and fair  The 2023 Game Awards recently saw accolades doled out to the biggest and most celebrated games of the year — alongside a few lucky indie titles — and with the holidays fast approaching, many of those same games are starting to go on sale. Video game companies often time the release of their most popular titles for the holiday season. The biggest sales of the year happen between Black Friday and Christmas, and since publishers often push hard for new game releases in the last quarter of the year, now is the time to reflect on the political economy of video games and to think carefully about which games to buy and why.
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S9If a tree burns in Canada's unmanaged forest, does anyone count the carbon?  Earlier this fall, a commentary in the journal Nature Communications, Earth & Environment argued for a change to the implementation of the Paris Agreement’s reporting mechanisms. The authors called for all countries to report carbon emissions and removals taking place across their entire territories, not just within so-called “managed” lands (as is presently the case).However, this poses a challenge here in Canada, as there is deep uncertainty about the total carbon flux (balance of emissions and captures) in Canada’s “unmanaged” land.
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S66S50How Britain's taste for tea may have been a life saver  Tea has been many things in its time – a global commodity, a comforting beverage, and even, in the eyes of some Bostonians 250 years ago this week, a symbol of oppressive politics. But one role you might not have attributed to tea is that of a life-saving health intervention.In a recent paper in the Review of Statistics and Economics, economist Francisca Antman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, makes a convincing case that the explosion of tea as an everyman's drink in late 1700s England saved many lives. This would not have been because of any antioxidants or other substances inherent to the lauded leaf.
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S68Brack: a fruit cake to celebrate Women's Christmas  Twelfth Night is the last great frolicking feast of Christmas. It's the day decorations are taken down and stored away – woe betide anyone who takes them down sooner, tempting bad luck for the coming year. Across the British Isles, 6 January is most associated with this hand-me-down piece of folklore, rather than the arrival of the Three Kings to Bethlehem bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for the baby Jesus.On the south-western edge of Ireland, in Cork and bordering parts of Kerry, Twelfth Night is still celebrated in style, and exclusively by women. It's a night for soaking up the last vestiges of Christmas spirit in rambunctious merriment rather than a staid religious observance.
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S67Madhur Jaffrey: The woman who gave the world Indian food  At a spirited 90 years of age, Madhur Jaffrey takes centre stage on the streaming platform MasterClass, her screen presence marked by a shiny bob, smoky-lined eyes, vivid red lips and a trove of lively, endearing anecdotes from her rich life. A true polymath, Madhur is more than a versatile actress whose cinematic impact has spanned several decades, she's a culinary chronicler and food icon. With over 30 cookbooks to her name, spanning the flavours of India, Asia and global vegetarian cuisine, as well as many television cookery shows (including on the BBC), Madhur Jaffrey is a household name for anyone with a taste for South Asian cuisine.As Indian-born Nobel Laureate and cookbook author Abhijit Banerjee shared during this year's annual HC Mahindra Lecture at Harvard University, "While I could cook many Western dishes, I did not know how to cook Indian food. My first step was smart – to buy her [cookbook], An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and follow it with a certain amount of diligence. And that's how I learned to cook Indian food."
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S70Biden's Domestic, Foreign, and Familial Issues  President Joe Biden faced a convergence of issues this week—domestic, foreign, and familial.The Biden administration’s request for additional aid for Ukraine has stalled as House and Senate Republicans are prioritizing negotiations over border-security policies. Tensions between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war in Gaza have spilled into the open. And Hunter Biden, the president’s only surviving son, defied a congressional subpoena and instead offered again to testify in public in front of the Republican-led House committees investigating him. All of this comes as the House voted along party lines to officially open its impeachment inquiry into the president.
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S22Israel-Hamas war: a ceasefire is now in sight. Will Israel's prime minister agree?  The mistaken killing of three Israeli hostages by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) at the weekend has substantially increased pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in the war against Hamas.The Biden administration is exerting maximum pressure to convince the Israeli government that the downsides of its prosecution of the war, particularly the shockingly high Palestinian civilian death toll, now outweigh the potential gains.
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S17S54The Best Travel Mugs to Keep Drinks Hot or Cold  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 WIREDIf it isn't wine or whiskey, you shouldn't be drinking it at room temperature. Even river water on a warm day of hiking is refreshingly cooler than the ambient air temperature. Lukewarm coffee is a great way to get your whole day off to rough start, and nobody daydreams about relaxing by the pool with a tepid glass of 70-degree water by their side.
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S24Have we been trying to prevent suicides wrongly all this time?  Traditional approaches to preventing suicide have focused on “who is at risk?” The aim is to identify an individual and to help them get support.But that approach doesn’t seem to be working. Australia’s suicide rates have remained stubbornly high. There was an increase in the rate of suicides from 2012 to 2022.
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S53The Best Apps for Your Foldable Phone  If you're in the market for a new smartphone, you could choose one of the best folding phones—like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 or the Google Pixel Fold—rather than opting for a traditional single-screen model. The foldable form factor is getting more popular, even though it comes at a price premium. However, you get two screens rather than one, and (with a book-style foldable) the larger display opens out to something approaching tablet size.Are there apps that take advantage of that extra space though? Apps that aren't afraid to expand to take up the extra room? Sure, but they're mostly big names you know already. These are our favorite ones so far—and they're all on Android of course, while we wait for a folding iPhone that may never come.
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S48S58How Microsoft's cybercrime unit has evolved to combat increased threats  Governments and the tech industry around the world have been scrambling in recent years to curb the rise of online scamming and cybercrime. Yet even with progress on digital defenses, enforcement, and deterrence, the ransomware attacks, business email compromises, and malware infections keep on coming. Over the past decade, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has forged its own strategies, both technical and legal, to investigate scams, take down criminal infrastructure, and block malicious traffic.
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S19Housing and the Albanese government: a mid-term report card  The Albanese government can justly claim to have reasserted Commonwealth leadership on housing since its election in 2022. Media attention has focused mainly on the legislative stoush with the Greens over the Housing Australia Future Fund. But that’s only one element of a raft of initiatives from Canberra over this time.Many Australians have recently felt the impact of sharply rising rent and mortgage payments as household numbers and interest rates surged in the post-COVID period. However, several fundamental and enduring housing problems have been escalating for decades. These include:
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S63Bored  When the poet and novelist Margaret Atwood was a child, she spent much of each year in the forests of northern Quebec. Her father was an entomologist—he kept an insect lab up there—and the family went along with him to the freezing wilds without electricity. “Places choose you,” the adult Atwood once said when asked how she decided where to locate a story. In a sense, that was also true of her early life. Her father chose the place, or the place chose her; she certainly didn’t choose it herself. What young person does?Reading Atwood’s poem “Bored,” I imagine her in this period: a typical tween who “could hardly wait to get / the hell out of there.” She’s rolling her eyes about holding logs to saw, carrying wood, sitting in a boat. I’ll admit, I don’t really know if Atwood was writing about that time of her life. But I do know that she published this poem in 1994 after her father died in 1993, and here her memory feels saturated with grief. She’s gripped with the regret that so many of us know: What felt unbearably mundane in the moment reveals itself later to be precious, if only because it passed in the company of a loved one.
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S512023 Ripple Rewind  From evolving workplace trends to achieving your goals, Wharton professors explain this year’s key research insights.In this special episode, listen to curated excerpts from this year’s Ripple Effect podcast, where Wharton professors discuss a range of trending business topics.
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S43S70Coming of Age While Confronting Arab Stereotypes, in "Simo"  Simo, a typical teen-ager, lives in the shadow of Emad, his older brother, and their domineering dad, in the suburbs of Montreal, where the family emigrated from Egypt. One night, Simo impersonates Emad in a live-stream gaming session. That simple act leads to serious consequences, when a racist false accusation escalates and puts his brother at risk.Bold cinematography and a soundtrack of throbbing Egyptian rap beats set the scene and compound a sense of social alienation that affects these men yet strengthens the family. "Drawing heavily from my own life experiences, I couldn't ignore the elephant in the room," the film's writer and director, Aziz Zoromba, says, regarding "the stereotypes associated with being an 'Arab' in the West."
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S56The Best Bluetooth Speakers to Take Your Tunes Anywhere  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 WIREDThe best Bluetooth speakers still have a place near and dear to our hearts, even as we've seen better (and more portable) smart speakers creeping into the universe. It's fun and easy to ask an Amazon Echo or Google Nest speaker to play your favorite track or tell you the weather, but smart speakers require stable Wi-Fi and updates to work. By (mostly) forgoing voice assistants and Wi-Fi radios, Bluetooth speakers are more portable, with the ability to venture outside of your house and withstand rugged conditions like the sandy beach or the steamy Airbnb jacuzzi. They'll also work with any smartphone, and they sound as good as their smart-speaker equivalents.
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S62A Young-Adult Blockbuster With Staying Power  This 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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Elise Hannum, an assistant editor at The Atlantic who has written about Snoopy as the hero Gen Z needs and the joy of watching awards-show speeches.
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S23Labor regains lead in Newspoll after tie, but Freshwater has a 50--50 tie  Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne A national Newspoll, conducted December 11–15 from a sample of 1,219, gave Labor a 52–48 lead, a two-point gain for Labor since the previous Newspoll three weeks ago that had a 50–50 tie. Primary votes were 36% Coalition (down two), 33% Labor (up two), 13% Greens (steady), 7% One Nation (up one) and 11% for all Others (down one).
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S60The Postal Service Wasn't Built for Boxes  Packages are bringing in much-needed revenue, but the agency can’t be saved without Congress.You might have read the recent news report that Amazon now delivers more packages than established companies including UPS and FedEx—the latest sign of the e-commerce company’s dominance. But if you read closely, you also saw that the U.S. Postal Service still handles more parcels (about 7 billion a year) than any of these companies, and in fact delivers hundreds of millions of packages for them.
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S15Is it OK to take antidepressants while pregnant?  Mental health conditions including anxiety and depression are among the most common disorders affecting women during pregnancy and after birth. Evidence shows mental health conditions in pregnancy increase the risk of complications for the mother and baby.
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S57Suckup software: How sycophancy threatens the future of AI  If you wanted to make a quick buck in sixth-century Athens, you could do worse than denounce someone for smuggling figs. These informers — sykophantes, literally “those who showed the figs” — stood to gain financially from the courts, whether or not the report was true, thanks to an aggressive ban on the export of all crops but olives. According to Robin Waterfield, a classical scholar and the author of Why Socrates Died, this is where we get the term “sycophant,” someone who sucks up for personal gain.Today, the term appears mostly in politics, but according to a recent paper by researchers at Anthropic — the AI startup founded in 2021 by a handful of former OpenAI employees, which has since raised over $6 billion and released several versions of the chatbot Claude — sycophancy is a major problem with AI models.
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S52This Sony OLED Is the Most Stunning TV Money Can Buy  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 WIREDSony’s A95K TV (9/10, WIRED Recommends) was a breakthrough in picture quality, becoming an instant hit with critics and videophiles everywhere. Part of the first generation of QD-OLED TVs, which marry a layer of quantum dots with a more traditional OLED display to boost brightness and color volume, the A95K and Samsung’s 2022 S95B both helped push OLED technology into a new era of performance.
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S64Why Isn't the Government Doing More About the Housing Crisis?  The Department of Housing and Urban Development should consider doing some housing and urban development.The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the agency responsible, one would imagine, for housing and urban development. Over the past two decades, America has done far too little urban development—and far too little suburban and rural development as well. The ensuing housing shortage has led to rising rents, a surge in homelessness, a decline in people’s ability to move for a relationship or a job, and much general misery. Yet the response from the federal government has been to do pretty much nothing.
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S59America's Peace Wave  Rents, average monthly temperatures, grocery prices—most things in American life seem to be rising these days.But not everything. In 2023, murder rates in the United States dropped at an astonishing rate, probably among the highest on record. That’s according to data gathered by Jeff Asher, an independent criminologist, from cities with publicly available numbers. In the sample of 175 cities, murder is down by an average of almost 13 percent this year.
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S49S55Keep an Eye on Fido With These Pet Cameras  Our furry friends are important members of the family, and leaving them at home while we go out to do people things can be hard. However, pet cameras—specifically designed to keep watch over dogs and cats—can make the human's absence from the home less stressful for both parties. If you've considered getting a pet camera, there's no better time than now.Read our Best Indoor Security Cameras, Best Outdoor Security Cameras, Best Dog Tech and Accessories, Best Dog Beds, and Best Cat Tech and Supplies guides for more.
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S65The Curious 'SNL' Return of Kate McKinnon  When Kate McKinnon departed the Saturday Night Live stage in May 2022, along with a slew of others including Pete Davidson and Aidy Bryant, the clock immediately began counting down to her return. Davidson had the honor of being the first among that departing cohort to host, earlier this season, but McKinnon got her chance last night, closing out the year with SNL’s annual Christmas episode. As she discovered, it’s one thing to steal the scene and quite another to steer the show.“I’ve always felt more comfortable in a weird costume,” she admitted in her opening monologue, referring to the many oddball personalities she played on SNL. Since leaving, she jokingly confessed, she’s been struggling to figure out who she is apart from those roles, quipping, “I’ve been trying to assemble a human personality.” (Her spin as Weird Barbie in the blockbuster Barbie film perhaps complicated that effort.) Indeed, McKinnon’s turn—well earned after 11 seasons that made her one of the show’s longest-running female cast members, and easily one of its most popular—revealed the disparity between the spotlight of hosting and the camouflage of ensemble comedy. McKinnon didn’t seem entirely comfortable breaking away from the unity of the cast to assertively claim the audience’s attention. It made for a night that was less a victory lap than a reminder of the delights of collaborative live performance.
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S61The Myth of the Unemployed College Grad  A bachelor’s degree continues to be a great investment. Why does the media keep suggesting otherwise?Perhaps no puzzle has consumed the American media more in the past few months than the chasm between official measures of the economy and how average people feel about it. Inflation is down, and wages are up—yet voters remain gloomy. Young people are, at least by some measures, the most pessimistic. They think the economy is bad and getting worse. Why? The answer has major implications, not least on the outcome of the next presidential election. You can’t blame the media for being so eager to figure it out. But pundits and reporters might want to look harder at their own penchant for writing stories that make the economy look worse for young people than it really is, including, above all, by incorrectly declaring that college diplomas aren’t what they used to be.
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S27Loneliness is a major public health problem - and young people are bearing the brunt of it  Writing in the Week, journalist Theara Coleman has declared 2023 “the year of the loneliness epidemic”. In May, the US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said loneliness posed a public health risk on a par with smoking and drinking. “It’s like hunger or thirst,” Murthy said. “It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing. Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows, and that’s not right.”
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S21North Queensland's record-breaking floods are a frightening portent of what's to come under climate change  Unprecedented rain brought by Tropical Cyclone Jasper has triggered widespread flooding in far north Queensland, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. Cairns airport is closed, roads are extensively damaged and residents in the city’s northern beaches are cut off by floodwaters.Some rain gauges in the Barron and Daintree River catchments recorded more than 2m of rain over recent days, and more rain is expected. Water levels in the lower Barron River have smashed the previous record set by devastating floods in March 1977. On Monday morning, the Daintree River was more than 2m higher than the previous 118-year-old flood level, recorded in 2019.
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