Interest rates have stopped rising, but 2023 hikes could still cause recession for some economies

Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic kept their main interest rates unchanged for the fourth successive month in December 2023. These rates are closely watched because they set the minimum interest at which your bank borrows and lends. This determines the cost of credit for all firms and households with mortgages or other loans. The European Central Bank (ECB), the US Federal Reserve and the UK Bank of England have raised interest rates sharply since the start of 2022. This was in response to a surge in inflation – the annual increase in consumer prices – far above the 2% rate that all these central banks now target.

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The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality

“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.”

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Favorite Books of 2023

To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night. While the literatur…

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Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem

Generative AI, which uses data lakes and question snippets to recover patterns and relationships, is becoming more prevalent in creative industries. However, the legal implications of using generative AI are still unclear, particularly in relation to copyright infringement, ownership of AI-generated works, and unlicensed content in training data. Courts are currently trying to establish how intellectual property laws should be applied to generative AI, and several cases have already been filed. To protect themselves from these risks, companies that use generative AI need to ensure that they are in compliance with the law and take steps to mitigate potential risks, such as ensuring they use training data free from unlicensed content and developing ways to show provenance of generated content.

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What Managers Should Ask About AI Models and Data Sets

The winter 2024 issue features a special report on sustainability, and provides insights on developing leadership skills, recognizing and addressing caste discrimination, and engaging in strategic planning and execution.The winter 2024 issue features a special report on sustainability, and provides insights on developing leadership skills, recognizing and addressing caste discrimination, and engaging in strategic planning and execution.The power of AI and the machine learning models on which it is based continue to reshape the rules of business. However, too many AI projects are failing — often after deployment, which is especially costly and embarrassing. Just ask Amazon about its facial recognition fiascos, or Microsoft about its blunders with its Tay chatbot. Too often, data scientists write off such failures as individual anomalies without looking for patterns that could help prevent future failures. Today’s senior business managers have the power — and the responsibility — to prevent post-deployment failures. But to do so, they must understand more about the data sets and data models in order to both ask the right questions of AI model developers and evaluate the answers.

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Adding Cybersecurity Expertise to Your Board

How much it costs to decorate big for Christmas in the US

Hand-carved figurines, gigantic LED screens and twinkling lights: these are the hallmarks of America's extreme holiday decorators. These festive-décor fanatics say the thousands of dollars – and hours of labour – is worth it. Over-the-top holiday decorating certainly extends beyond the US, yet American homeowners tend to take a different tack, focusing less on cohesive neighbourhood displays and more on wildly individual spectacles that attract hordes of visitors. These displays sometimes take decades to curate, with cumulative investments reaching well into the hundreds of thousands.

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Gohona bori: India's heritage edible ornament

Jyotsna Maity fixed the large, circular brass plate with a meditative gaze. A bed of poppy seeds was neatly and evenly spread over the dish. She began to slowly extrude the lentil batter through the piped cloth bag she had in her right hand, holding it perpendicularly over the platter. Her nimble wrist delicately twisted and turned to form concentric circles, decorative curls and miniscule triangles with the gooey paste. With a sharp, controlled jerk of her hand, she completed the design that now resembled a dainty designer necklace.Maity was the head of the squad of women similarly occupied on the spacious terrace: their heads bent over brass plates and hands busy to create a culinary artform, the tricks of which have been handed down to them orally through generations.

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The cookie that can't be perfected

If you're going to call a recipe "The Ultimate Chocolate Cookie", you better be prepared to back up the claim.Nancy Silverton is. The only chef to have won James Beard awards both for outstanding pastry chef (1991) and outstanding chef (2014), Silverton has always aimed high, and her new cookbook published this November, The Cookie That Changed My Life, is no exception.

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Christmas Wrapping: The 'anti-Christmas' song that's become a festive favourite

The best Christmas songs feel like old friends who come to visit every year. It wouldn't be December without hearing Wham!'s Last Christmas on the radio or Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree playing as you order a gingerbread latte. In the streaming era, some old festive favourites are now regulars in the charts each winter too: Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You finally topped the Billboard Hot 100 in December 2019, some 25 years after it was first released.There is no formula for making the perfect Christmas song, though it never hurts to include sleigh bells and other musical nods to Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" production style. The disgraced producer's classic 1963 album A Christmas Gift for You has become an enduring festive bellwether: its most famous song, Darlene Love's Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), has been covered by the likes of U2 and Michael Bublé, while its maximalist style has inspired seasonal staples from Wizzard's 1973 stomper I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday to Kelly Clarkson's 2013 chestnut Underneath the Tree. A general sense of bonhomie is also commonplace in holiday songs: Paul McCartney's contribution to the oeuvre, 1980's Wonderful Christmastime, hinges on a simple, winsome hook: "Simply having a wonderful Christmastime."

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The Color Purple review: 'A joy to watch'

The Color Purple is a big, brash spectacle, an extravaganza blending the styles of Broadway musicals, Hollywood studio movies and music videos, with a mix of gospel, pop, blues and ballads, all of that coming together smoothly in one exuberant film. Exuberance is an odd choice for the story of a woman abused by her father and husband, and cruelly separated from her sister and her children. But this new iteration – based on Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the successful Broadway musical – leans into the hope and triumph of its heroine, Celie.More like this:- Chicken Run: Dawn of the nugget soars above original- The Iron Claw is 'shallow' and 'bland'- A truly underrated Christmas classic

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Finding objective ways to talk about religion in the classroom is tough - but the cost of not doing so is clear

Despite the holiday season’s calls for joy and peace, religious strife continues in many places. While the United States has a great deal of litigation and controversy over religion’s place in public life, it has largely avoided violence. Yet our society often seems unprepared to talk constructively about this contentious topic, especially in schools. Other countries also face challenges in deciding what kind of religion-related instruction can or can’t be legally taught in public schools, and each deals with the question in different ways.

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Digital inaccessibility: Blind and low-vision people have powerful technology but still face barriers to the digital world

Imagine that you have low vision and you’re completing an online job application using screen reader software. You get through half the form and then come to a question with drop-down options the screen reader cannot access because the online form doesn’t conform to accessibility standards. You’re stuck. You can’t submit the application, and your time has been wasted.

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How active are the microorganisms in your yogurt? We created a new tool to study probiotic activity -- and made it out of cardboard

Financial support for this project has been provided by the Department of Chemistry at Clemson University and by CAPES (Brazil).Humans have been fermenting food and drinks — everything from kimchi and yogurt to beer and kombucha — for more than 13,000 years.

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More city hall news coverage isn't enough to revive local news outlets

Whether it’s a new round of journalist layoffs or further consolidation into the hands of a few owners, the problems confronting local media in the U.S. are easy to see. We are political scientists who study how the decline of local news affects American politics. In past work, we showed that these changes hamper the ability of local newspapers and television stations to cover their communities. We also wrote about how they limit what the public can learn about politics from local news.

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2023's extreme storms, heat and wildfires broke records - a scientist explains how global warming fuels climate disasters

In the U.S., an unprecedented heat wave gripped much of Texas and the Southwest with highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) for the entire month of July.Historic rainfall in April flooded Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 25 inches of rain in 24 hours. A wave of severe storms in July sent water pouring into cities across Vermont and New York. Another powerful system in December swept up the Atlantic coast with hurricane-like storm surge and heavy rainfall. California faced flooding and mudslides from a series of atmospheric rivers early in the year, then was hit in August by a tropical storm – an extremely rare event there.

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Wild 'super pigs' from Canada could become a new front in the war on feral hogs

They go by many names – pigs, hogs, swine, razorbacks – but whatever you call them, wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are one of the most damaging invasive species in North America. They cause millions of dollars in crop damage yearly and harbor dozens of pathogens that threaten humans and pets, as well as meat production systems.Although wild pigs have been present in North America for centuries, their populations have rapidly expanded over the past several decades. Recent studies estimate that since the 1980s the wild pig population in the United States has nearly tripled and expanded from 18 to 35 states. More recently, they have spread rapidly across Canada, and these populations are threatening to invade the U.S. from the north.

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Guatemala's anti-corruption leader-to-be could be prevented from taking office, deepening migration concerns for US

Guatemala is in the midst of a democratic crisis so severe that it may prevent the new president from taking office, as planned, on Jan. 14, 2024.On Dec. 8, 2023, prosecutors and the Guatemalan Congress called for the nullification of the election results. A few weeks earlier, the attorney general’s office in Guatemala tried to remove President-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s immunity from prosecution. The attorney general alleged that the center-left politician, who won the election on an anti-corruption ticket, made posts on social media in 2022 that encouraged students to occupy the country’s public university. In an unprecedented attempt to prevent him from assuming power, officials accused Arévalo of complicity in the takeover of the university, illicit association and damaging the country’s cultural heritage.

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Why do some men commit domestic violence? Trauma and social isolation may play a role

Support for survivors of domestic violence is important, but to end domestic violence once and for all, society needs to understand the people who perpetrate it and how to successfully intervene.Domestic violence is very common in the United States. Nearly half of women and men in the U.S. experience sexual or physical violence, stalking or psychological harm or coercion in a romantic relationship during their lifetime.

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Pope Francis' approval of blessings for LGBTQ+ couples is a historic gesture, according to a Catholic theologian

Pope Francis’ Dec. 18, 2023, announcement that Catholic priests may bless LGBTQ+ couples and others in “irregular” situations marks a definitive shift in the Roman Catholic Church’s posture toward many types of loving relationships. It may also mark a definitive turning point within the Roman Catholic Church.Across the last few years, Francis has made gesture after gesture indicating his desire to find a way for the Catholic Church to accompany and welcome people whose loving relationships do not fit into the church’s sacramental understanding of marriage as between a man and a woman, ordered toward procreation and ended only by death.

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Alexei Navalny disappears from jail - another in the long line of Russian dissidents to fall foul of Vladimir Putin

There is growing concern about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny who is reported to have disappeared from the Russian prison colony in which he has been serving a lengthy sentence. Lawyers for the 47-year-old dissident said he had last been in contact two weeks ago. Navalny’s imprisonment has been condemned by human rights organisations as “politically motivated” and he was due to face fresh charges. But it was announced on Monday that seven criminal proceedings that were pending had been put on hold. This has fuelled fears about his whereabouts and also his health, which has reportedly deteriorated due to the conditions in which he was being held.

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How writing 'made us human' - an 'emotional history' from ancient Iraq to the present day

Evidence suggests that writing was invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next? Anyone interested in this question will find How Writing Made Us Human by Walter Stephens both an enjoyable and stimulating read. It offers what it calls an “emotional history” of writing, chiefly referencing academics and writers in the western tradition.The most detailed sections of the book are those on the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, where the author’s expertise and wide engagement with the sources is palpable. Topics that range beyond his expertise are served by well-chosen case studies.

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Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a fast-paced slapstick extravaganza

Chicken Run 2: Dawn of the Nugget combines the distinctive charm of the Great Escape-esque story that characterised the original Chicken Run (2000), with an action-packed plot, staged in a futuristic setting fit for the 21st century. Picking the story up from where the original Chicken Run ended, this time the plot is inspired by Mission Impossible (1996) and James Bond – a caper film that sees the chicken protagonists breaking in, rather than breaking out.

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Prince Harry and the Mirror: how court victory reopened the phone hacking scandal the British press had hoped was over

Steven Barnett is on the management and editorial boards of the British Journalism Review. He is a member of the British Broadcasting Challenge which campaigns for Public Service Broadcasting. He is on the board of Hacked Off which campaigns for a free and accountable press.A pivotal court judgment has found evidence that “habitual” phone hacking went on at Mirror Group newspapers for years.

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