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 S17Taupo: 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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S1Don't Pause Your Job Search Just Because It's the Holidays  Hiring is a year-round process and there’s never a bad time to apply for a job. That means holidays are a great time to look for a job, too. So don’t put off your job search for after the holidays. Here’s why. It’s a great time to network. People gather during the holiday season. Reach out to your alumni network, past recruiters, or ex-colleagues and use the holidays as an “in” to update people on how you’re doing, ask about their lives, and share your goals, including career changes you want to make. Managers have hiring objectives they need to hit by the end of the year. As a result, many hiring managers who have not yet hit their hiring objectives will feel the pressure to give offers by the end of the year. The ratio of applicants per job posting may be better during the holiday season, as many people take this time off from job searching, feel burned out and need a break. And this can work in your favor. While some organizations may slow down hiring during the holiday season, some employers will increase hiring in preparation for the holiday season. These employers include retail stores, food and beverage stores, and e-commerce providers. These positions include full-time, seasonal, and part-time positions.
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S2Break Your Bad Habits Before Starting a New Job  When starting a new job, we inadvertently drag some of our bad habits like procrastination, gossiping, or tardiness to our new job. These could hamper our growth or make us seem unprofessional. To truly start fresh, we have to commit to making some changes. A new job offers an excellent opportunity to break up with the past, leverage and build on our strengths, and chart a new course.
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S3You're Not an Imposter. You're Actually Pretty Amazing.  Do you feel like a fraud? Many of us do. Perhaps you started a new job and believe you have less experience than you need, despite being the perfect candidate on paper. Or maybe your boss trusted you with an assignment that you feel totally unprepared to lead, regardless of your flawless track record.
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S4S5S6S7S8S9S10S11S12S13S14The Outsized Benefits of "Minimalist" Leadership  Although we have known about the benefits of servant leadership for a long time, many CEOs are still far from putting it into practice. While minimalist leadership may feel counterintuitive and uncomfortable, those who dare to practice it will gain an edge in industries requiring engaged and innovative employees. They’ll also eliminate the bottlenecks that often happen when CEOs insist on retaining too much control. But the shift to it will require unlearning counterproductive practices more than learning new things. Finland, one of the least-hierarchical countries in the world, is at the forefront of the trend. This country could be considered a laboratory for the low-status, humble approach the author calls Nordic minimalist leadership. CEOs who practice it are less visible, try to avoid being the center of attention, and assert less control. They let employees shine, put the good of the company above their own egos, and ultimately build stronger and more-innovative businesses.
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S15How Banks Can Stay Resilient As AI Becomes More Disruptive  Historically, disruption is extremely rare. Only 23 of the 568 companies included in the Fortune 500 since 1997 were under 15 years old when they entered. But right now, there are three forces converging that might transform finance and other industries. The first is the explosive growth of AI. The second is a massive migration of tech talent from big finance to big tech. The third is an increased appetite by big tech companies to enter industries like big finance. Leaders in finance should take the following three steps: 1) accept that culture transformation is essential to digital transformation, 2) not settle for AI optics, and 3) assume the disruptive threat is real and be proactive.
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S16How to Get the Honest Input You Need from Your Employees  Leaders often struggle to get complete, unfiltered information from the people around them. This wealth of unspoken information represents a great untapped resource for today’s leaders, and yet most remain at a loss for how to reliably access it. Common tactics for overcoming this problem, such as taking another’s perspective or reading their body language, simply aren’t sufficient. Research shows that if you want to learn what those around you really think, feel, and know, there’s only one reliable strategy: asking them. The author presents a five-step process for leaders to tap into the hidden insights of those around them.
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S18Message 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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S19Did 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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S20How New Zealand is reducing methane emissions from farming  The young bull's head disappears into a plastic green hood. He scoops up a mouthful of dried pellets, chews, flicks his ears, and exhales. The hood is attached to a contraption on wheels that looks a bit like a high-tech mobile pizza oven.But the only thing cooking up here is a precise measurement of methane, a highly potent gas that has a global warming impact 84 times higher than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 20-year period.
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S21Red Sea cargo ship hijack: How to keep merchant vessels safe from attack  The gunmen arrive seemingly out of nowhere, descending from a clear blue sky. Their helicopter swoops down towards a 190m-long (623ft) merchant ship in the Red Sea, a key waterway between the Arabian Peninsula and north-east Africa. As the aircraft touches down on the upper deck, masked attackers swarm out.They're wearing black and khaki gear, aiming their machine guns along the deck as they pace towards the ship's bridge. Once they reach it, there's shouting, they point their weapons at the crew, who surrender with their arms aloft. This is a hijacking.
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S22How different languages laugh online  It’s a trick question: They mean the same thing. They’re all ways to express laughter, as interpreted by different cultures in different languages.In person, laughter is universal. No matter what language you speak, almost anyone can understand the meaning of a mischievous giggle, sarcastic snort, or an infectious belly laugh. But it isn’t quite as simple when it comes to writing it down, especially in the era of social media and messaging apps.
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S23Are Orca Whales Friends or Foes?  Leong: Earlier this year the story of orcas ramming into yachts off the Spanish coast kind of took off.Leong: People on the Internet were calling them allies, hoping that they would sink billionaires and making other jokes about orcas being behind the Titan submersible tragedy.
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S24Losing a Grandparent Hurts Boys at School  The death of a grandparent may be a rite of passage, but it is not harmless for many boys, particularly boys of color. Losing a grandparent in childhood corresponds with lower reading, math and verbal skills among boys at a critical ageDeath is not random. Demographers estimate that 75 percent of Americans are expected to live to age 70, meaning that most deaths occur late in life. The death of an older relative, such as a grandparent, is expected. As such, a grandparent’s death is considered part of life and not an event with consequences that ripple through space and time. But what if this is a misconception?
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S25Young Researchers of Color Need Better Mentors  Universities need to train their faculty to be better mentors to students of color, and to understand these students’ vulnerabilitiesWhen I started the physics Ph.D. program I was so excited about, I realized I was one of the few Black graduate students in the department and the only Black woman. I wasn’t surprised. I already knew Black women made up less than 1 percent of the physics doctorates in the U.S., but nevertheless, I soon started feeling isolated.
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S26Lost 'Woolly Dog' Genetics Highlight Indigenous Science  “Woolly dogs” that were kept by the Coast Salish peoples are now extinct, but researchers were able to see their importance written in the genome of the only known peltFull-body forensic reconstruction of a woolly dog based on a 160-year-old pelt in the Smithsonian’s collection as well as archaeological remains. The reconstructed woolly dog stands against a stylized background of a Coast Salish weaving motif from a historic dog-wool blanket. The portrayal of the weaving motif was designed under advisement of the study’s Coast Salish advisory group.
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S27Meet the Young Activists behind the New Youth Climate Lawsuit  CLIMATEWIRE | SAN FRANCISCO — Maya Wiliams, 17, already does what she can to tackle climate change. She’s a vegan. She elected not to get her driver’s license, and she turns down trips if they involve airplanes.Now the high school senior is also a challenger in Genesis B. v. EPA, the latest youth-led climate lawsuit that accuses the nation’s top environmental agency of failing to protect kids and teens like her by allowing the release of dangerous levels of greenhouse gases, decade after decade.
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S28S29First Atlas of Every Mouse Brain Cell Could Improve Neuro Disease Treatments  Several research teams have created an atlas of the mouse brain. The map, which has more than 5,300 cell clusters, should help to improve the treatment of brain diseasesHow many different cell clusters are in the brain of a mouse? Where are they located, and what are their functions? A large international team of researchers has tackled this enormously difficult puzzle and presented a complete cell atlas of the mouse brain.
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S30The Rings of Uranus Glow in Epic JWST Photo  The James Webb Space Telescope caught its second glimpse of the year of Uranus and its bright-shining ringsThis image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet and its rings in new clarity. The Webb image exquisitely captures Uranus's seasonal north polar cap, including the bright, white, inner cap and the dark lane in the bottom of the polar cap. Uranus' dim inner and outer rings are also visible in this image, including the elusive Zeta ring — the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet.
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S31Why you should embrace mediocrity  From "elite" pickles to "premium" baby diapers, marketers are constantly telling us to seek superiority — but "by the simple law of averages, most of us have to live a life more ordinary," says sociolinguist Crispin Thurlow. He invites us to embrace mediocrity for a change, offering a different path to contentedness without comparison.
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S32Scammers Are Tricking Anti-Vaxxers Into Buying Bogus Medical Documents  Kristina Collins didn’t know her photo was being used on Telegram. Over the past few months, an Instagram picture of Collins, a Texas-based doctor and dermatologist, has been used by scammers on the chat app to try to persuade people to buy false proof that they have been vaccinated against Covid-19 and other diseases.“The last thing you want as a physician is for your identity to be used to promote misinformation,” Collins tells WIRED, adding that many doctors use social media specifically to make sure people have access to accurate health information. “When people are able to take that likeness and use it for bad purposes, whether it’s fraud, whether it’s misinformation, I think it’s really scary.”
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S3330 Outstanding Online Co-Op Games to Play With Faraway Friends  It's not always possible to round up your friends to play couch coop games, but there are a ton of titles that let you keep the fun going from afar. If you're hunting for the best online co-op games to play, we assume you are familiar with classics like Minecraft, Fortnite, Among Us, Left 4 Dead 2, and GTA Online, so we have hand-picked fresh alternatives. Our picks cover all kinds of genres: squad-based ninja brawlers, first-person paranormal investigations, pixelated farming simulators, and many more. No matter what you and your friends are into, there's a PlayStation, Xbox, Windows PC, or Switch experience listed here worth checking out.Updated December 2023: We added five games, including Baldur’s Gate 3, Lethal Company, and Risk of Rain 2.
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S34EU Investigates Elon Musk's X for Spreading Illegal Content  The relationship between Elon Musk and the European Union deteriorated further on Monday, with the bloc launching a formal investigation into the way X has been run since the billionaire took over last year.Senior officials from the European Commission said they were concerned about a range of new features that have been added to X under Musk, as well as the way violent content related to the Hamas attack on Israel was allowed to spread without consistently being labeled with a graphic content warning.
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S35The 8 Best Changing Robes for Swimmers and Surfers  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 WIREDChanging robes are pretty self-explanatory. They’re designed to make it easy to get changed in and out of your swimming or water sports gear while you’re on the beach, camping, or in the parking lot. With super-soft fleecy linings, waterproof exteriors, and oversize designs for discreet changing, they can keep you warm and dry and protect you from the elements. They make a lot of sense, for both style and convenience, when you’re open-water or wild swimming, taking part in a triathlon, or surfing, paddleboarding, or kayaking. If you’re swimming in cold conditions, drying and covering yourself can help you warm up gradually and avoid the “after-drop” decline in your core body temperature when you get out of the water.
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S36Worried About Deepfakes? Don't Forget "Cheapfakes"  Over the summer, a political action committee (PAC) supporting Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis uploaded a video of former president Donald Trump on YouTube in which he appeared to attack Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. It wasn't exactly realâthough the text was taken from one of Trump's tweets, the voice used in the ad was AI-generated. The video was subsequently removed, but it has spurred questions about the role generative AI will play in the 2024 elections in the US and around the world.While platforms and politicians are focusing on deepfakesâAI-generated content that might depict a real person saying something they didn't or an entirely fake personâexperts told WIRED there's a lot more at stake. Long before generative AI became widely available, people were making "cheapfakes" or "shallowfakes." It can be as simple as mislabeling images, videos, or audio clips to imply they're from a different time or location, or editing a piece of media to make it look like something happened that didn't. This content can still have a profound impact if they're allowed to circulate on social platforms. As more than 50 countries prepare for national elections in 2024, mis- and disinformation are still powerful tools for shaping public perception and political narratives.
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S37In the Age of AI, 'Her' Is a Fairy Tale  When Spike Jonze’s Her came out in 2013, the film about a lonely man falling for an artificially intelligent operating system won widespread praise. Watching today, the qualities critics celebrated at the time are still there—it’s a gentle, enjoyably melancholy story, twee but not damnably so—but something else stands out. Though set in the near-future, Her captures Obama-era techno-optimism better than any other movie. It’s a time capsule, preserving dreams about the future that appear more naive the further we get from the 2010s.Her takes place in a highly-stylized version of Los Angeles from a future near enough that its protagonist is a former LA Weekly journalist but distant enough that the skyline rivals Shanghai. In the film’s universe, the creation of the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system—a consumer software capable of learning and thinking like a human—is a recent, exciting development. Shortly after Her begins, the painfully lonesome and powerfully mustachioed writer Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) buys one of these new operating systems. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, the OS names itself “Samantha” and quickly becomes the most important companion in Theodore’s life. He soon starts calling her his girlfriend.
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S38Apple to Halt Sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2  If you wanted to buy your loved ones the latest Apple Watch for the holidays, you should try to do it before December 21.Apple has announced that it will pause sales of its two newest Apple Watch models, the Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2, pending an expected ban by the US International Trade Commission. The federal agency is considering a ban because of a dispute over a patent for the technology that Apple uses in the newest Watch models’ blood-oxygen sensor.
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S39The Fight Tearing the Game Awards Apart  Geoff Keighley had a lot to talk about. Onstage at this year’s Game Awards, the host, who is also the event’s creator and producer, took an in-person and online audience through hours of trailers, announcements, celebrity appearances, and awards. His event has become, almost by default, the biggest show in gaming. By the time the lights went down and gamemakers ambled their way to the bars of Los Angeles to celebrate, there was one thing many in the gaming community had wanted to hear Keighley say. On that point, though, he stayed silent.Many knew he would. Still, beginning November 24, dozens of participants in The Game Awards' emerging talent initiative, Future Class, had signed an open letter addressed to Keighley, Future Class director Emily Bouchoc, and the event’s planning team asking them to show support for Palestinian human rights and call for a ceasefire in the Israel–Hamas war. The Future Class represents a group of young developers that Game Awards organizers believe will lead the industry forward.
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S40Which Apple Watch Is Best Right Now?  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 WIREDWe on the WIRED Gear team agree: If you have an iPhone, the Apple Watch is the best wearable to go with it. But which version should you buy? This year, Apple launched the Series 9 and the new Ultra Watch 2, the update to last year's rugged sports watch. The company has stopped selling last year's Series 8, but you can still find them at online retailers (sometimes for a significant discount), along with older models. All of these watches look pretty similar and share a rotating stable of features. Here, we break down which one is best for you and whether older models are worth the price.
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S41S42Comics, trauma and art: the origin story of Jim Lee  For many superheroes, there was a cataclysmic event that changed the course of their lives. For example, Victor Stone was injured by an interdimensional portal, Hal Jordan received a power ring from a dying alien, and Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed in front of him. Jim Lee, the legendary comic book artist, and Chief Creative Officer for DC Comics, experienced a similarly significant moment in his life. But even though he doesn’t don a mask or a cape, it did change everything for him. “When I was 4 or 5 years old, I remember wandering the streets of Seoul,” he says. “I must’ve crossed the street at a bad time because this small truck came and hit me, and I went underneath. It’s something that could’ve potentially ended my life.”
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S43How fast is gravity, exactly?  Of all of the fundamental forces known to humanity, gravity is both the most familiar and the one that holds the Universe together, connecting distant galaxies in a vast and interconnected cosmic web. With that in mind, a fascinating question to ponder is whether gravity has a speed. It turns out that it does, and scientists have precisely measured it.Let’s start with a thought experiment. Suppose at this very instant, somehow the Sun was made to disappear — not just go dark, but vanish entirely. We know that light travels at a fixed speed: 300,000 kilometers per second, or 186,000 miles per second. From the known distance between the Earth and the Sun (150 million kilometers, or 93 million miles), we can calculate how long it would take before we here on Earth would know the Sun had disappeared. It would take about eight minutes and 20 seconds before the noon sky would go dark.
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S44A revolting thought experiment tests the limits of philosophical exploration  You may want to put down your coffee and finish your cornflakes; this thought experiment isn’t for everyone. It comes from a paper recently published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas and written by the pseudonymous philosopher Fira Bensto. It’s a story about Alice and her dog.“Alice self-describes as being in a romantic relationship with her dog. She cares a lot about his well-being and strives to ensure that his needs are fulfilled. They often sleep together; he likes to be caressed, and she finds it pleasant to gently rub herself on him. Sometimes, when her dog is sexually aroused and tries to hump her leg, she undresses and lets him [copulate]. This is gratifying for both of them.”
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S45A song of hype and fire: The 10 biggest AI stories of 2023  "Here, There, and Everywhere" isn't just a Beatles song. It's also a phrase that recalls the spread of generative AI into the tech industry during 2023. Whether you think AI is just a fad or the dawn of a new tech revolution, it's been impossible to deny that AI news has dominated the tech space for the past year.
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S46S47S48S49Musk's X hit with EU's first investigation of Digital Services Act violations  The European Union has opened a formal investigation into whether Elon Musk's X platform (formerly Twitter) violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of global revenue. A European Commission announcement today said the agency "opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers."
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S50S51What turns a fungal scavenger into a killer?  Some of the scariest monsters are microscopic. The carnivorous fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn’t seem like much while it’s eating away at rotting wood. But when it senses a live worm, it will trap its victim and consume it alive—pure nightmare fuel.
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S52Google's Stadia Controller salvage operation will run for another year  Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google's cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn't enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.
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S53S54S55Time to Break Up With Your 9-to-5  Sometimes workplace culture requires you to leave the rest of your life at the door. What if there are better ways to structure time?Before laptops allowed us to take the office home and smartphones could light up with notifications at any hour, work time and “life” time had clearer boundaries. Today, work is not done exclusively in the workplace, and that makes it harder to leave work at work.
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S56Texas Becomes an Abortion Dystopia  Kate Cox is a mother of two young children, and in that respect, she’s like the majority of women—60 percent—who seek an abortion. She wants to have a third child, but if the state of Texas had its way, it’s possible none of her children would have a mother at all.On Monday, Cox fled Texas to seek an abortion, after the state invoked its authority to force her to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term. Pregnant with what they’d hoped would be their third child, Cox and her husband had learned that the fetus had a fatal abnormality, Trisomy 18, ensuring that even if delivered, the child would live a short, excruciating life and die a painful death. Yet she’d been told that, under Texas law, she could not get an abortion, even though carrying the baby to term would risk not only her own health but the possibility of getting pregnant again.
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S57Give Russia's Frozen Assets to Ukraine Now  Putin should pay for the damage his invasion has caused, and the money is needed immediately.A majority of Americans and a majority of Congress want to help Ukraine win the war against Russia, and to stop the spread of autocracy into Europe. A majority of people in the European Union and a majority of EU leaders want the same. But small minorities of lawmakers—some inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin or his money, some bent on bargaining for other things—have managed to block or delay that aid.
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S58The Little-Known Rule Change That Made the Supreme Court So Powerful  More than 80 years ago, the Court decided that it didn’t need to settle whole cases, but could limit its review to specific questions it liked.One must feel for the fishermen of Cape May, New Jersey. They had a fair grievance and took it to court—all the way to the Supreme Court. But along that journey their lawsuit became something else: a way to possibly remake administrative law. They just want to make a living catching herring, but the justices are more interested in using their case to weigh in on a different legal question entirely.
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S59Seven Books That Actually Capture What Sickness Is Like  These titles aren’t interested in sticking to a simple narrative about sickness and health—they explore the textures of human life.The universality of sickness—hardly anyone can escape getting seriously ill at least once in their life—has endowed us with a rich tradition of writing about the state of being unwell, from Sophocles to Susan Sontag. Nevertheless, writers who document illness can fall into certain traps. One is to simplify their experience; another is to provide a happy ending, and, as a result, many stories lean on a predictable pattern: Doctors add up symptoms, produce a diagnosis, and cure a model patient’s disease.
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S60They Do It for Trump  The White House and Senate continue to work frantically toward a deal to supply Ukraine before Congress recesses for Christmas. Supposedly, all leaders of Congress are united in their commitment to Ukraine—so the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, insists. Yet somehow this allegedly united commitment is not translating into action. Why not?The notional answer is that Republicans must have a border-security deal as the price for Ukraine aid. But who on earth sets a price that could stymie something they affirmatively want to do? Republicans have not conditioned their support for Social Security on getting a border deal. They would never say that tax cuts must wait until after the border is secure. Only Ukraine is treated as something to be bartered, as if at a county fair. How did that happen?
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S61The New Family Vacation  More and more Americans are traveling with multiple generations—and, perhaps, learning who their relatives really are.The next time you’re at the airport or checking into a hotel, you might notice a traveling group that looks, at least at first glance, a little unwieldy: young kids, their parents, and their grandparents, all vacationing together regardless of age or mobility limits.
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S62The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read  The ownership of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster has been much in the news over the past couple of years. First Penguin Random House tried to swallow it up, then a fascinating antitrust trial put a bunch of agents and writers on the witness stand. A judge eventually quashed that merger as potentially monopolistic, and more recently, a private-equity fund, KKR, swooped in to buy the company.If you’re a shareholder or an employee of any of those companies, these have been hugely consequential events. But I can’t be the only person who has wondered: If you’re just someone who enjoys reading good books, why does any of this matter at all?
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S63A Memorial at the Barn  After an Atlantic story about the lynching of Emmett Till, the barn where he was murdered will be converted into a memorial.From the graveled bend on Drew Ruleville Road, the barn is barely visible. A knot of trees obscures its weathered cypress panels; a driver could easily miss the structure from across the bayou. There is no indication that this is the place where Emmett Till was beaten and tortured.
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S64Nobody Knows What's Happening Online Anymore  You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever.
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S652023: The Year in Volcanic Activity  Out of an estimated 1,350 active volcanoes worldwide, about 45 have continuing eruptions, and about 80 erupt each year, spewing steam, ash, toxic gases, and lava. In 2023, erupting volcanoes included the Villarrica volcano in Chile, Mount Ulawun in Papua New Guinea, Merapi volcano in Indonesia, the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland, Kilauea in Hawaii, Mount Etna in Sicily, Klyuchevskoy volcano in Russia, and more. Collected below are scenes from the wide variety of volcanic activity on Earth over the past year. The Villarrica volcano lights up the sky at night, seen from Pucon town, Chile, on December 14, 2023. #
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S66Feelings and Vibes Can't Sustain a Democracy  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.Many Americans—of both parties—have become untethered from reality. When the voters become incoherent, electing leaders becomes a reality show instead of a solemn civic obligation.
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S67S68S69S70She Bought a $3.99 Vase at Goodwill. It Just Sold for $107,100 /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a1/4a/a14ab7cf-71b6-4d3f-8d98-f0bd5f604005/106_1_important_italian_glass_december_2023_carlo_scarpa_rare_pennellate_vase_model_3664__wright_auction.jpeg) Over the summer, Jessica Vincent bought a vase at a Virginia Goodwill for just a few dollars. The piece turned out to be a rare work from Italian architect and artist Carlo Scarpa—and last week, it sold at auction for $107,100.Vincent, who is an avid thrifter, never imagined she had snagged such a good deal. “When we got to the checkout, it was $3.99,” she tells Southern Living’s Meghan Overdeep. “I had been prepared to pay $8 or $9 for it, so I was super excited at the price.”
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