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 S54S57Give 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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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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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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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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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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S51What 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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S53S46S58The 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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S68S62The 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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S69S60They 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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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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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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S48S45A 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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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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S67S15How 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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S42Comics, 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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S50S56Texas 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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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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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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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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S41S55Time 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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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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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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S49Musk'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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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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S70She 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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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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S47S61The 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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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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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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