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S70How to Build Wealth When You Don't Come from Money   The first step to attaining wealth — at least for people who are not born into it — is much more personal than building millionaire habits or investing wisely. Such approaches often fail to address the systemic and mental barriers faced by many of the marginalized groups who grew up without access to wealth. The author argues that changing your mindset, or building a mindset conducive to wealth, is the real first step.
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S35Matter, set to fix smart home standards in 2023, stumbled in the real market  Matter, as a smart home standard, would make everything about owning a smart home better. Devices could be set up with any phone, for either remote or local control, put onto any major platform (like Alexa, Google, or HomeKit) or combinations of them, and avoid being orphaned if their device maker goes out of business. Less fragmentation, more security, fewer junked devices: win, win, win.
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S63Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving  At seventy-four, Bruce Springsteen has been cementing his status as a rock-and-roll legend for almost fifty years: he released his widely heralded, but not initially widely heard, début, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973. But, true to form, the artist who became known to his fans as the Boss hasn’t rested on his laurels. After weathering a spate of health troubles this past year, which led him to cancel much of his tour, the rock icon plans to hit the road again in the new year, all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. When Springsteen published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” back in 2016, David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, with that same pedal-to-the-floor quality, and just as honest about the struggles in his own life.” In October of that year, Springsteen appeared at the New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with the editor. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation. Springsteen tells Remnick how, as a young musician gigging around New Jersey, he decided to up his game: “I’m going to have to write some songs that are fireworks. . . . I needed to do something that was more original.” They talked for more than an hour about Springsteen’s tortured relationship with his father, his triumphant audition for the legendary producer John Hammond, and his struggles with depression. As Springsteen explains it, his tremendously exuberant concert performances were a form of catharsis: “I had had enough of myself by that time to want to lose myself. So I went onstage every night to do exactly that.”By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S37Corvids seem to handle temporary memories the way we do  Humans tend to think that we are the most intelligent life-forms on Earth, and that we’re largely followed by our close relatives such as chimps and gorillas. But there are some areas of cognition in which homo sapiens and other primates are not unmatched. What other animal’s brain could possibly operate at a human’s level, at least when it comes to one function? Birds—again.
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S20S41Six Books to Read During a Stressful Family Holiday  Reading about other people’s kin, fictional or not, may help you feel better about yours.Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact. Every family plays host to its own histories, neuroses, feuds, foibles, tragedies, traumas, triggers, pains, pet peeves, and dysfunctional patterns. Literature has long borne witness to humanity’s enormous diversity of potential interpersonal horrors, all of which seem to become accentuated during stressful periods—such as the holiday season. According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping nine out of 10 U.S. adults experience stress at the end of the year, in part because they are “anticipating family conflict.”
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S60Lift your spirits with our musical playlist: Don't Call Me Resilient's year in review  It’s been quite a year. The last few months especially have been particularly heavy for just about everyone. Amid the intensity of it all, my team and I on the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast produced another two seasons — in our new, newsier format. Individually, each episode stands as an intimate exploration of some of the most pressing issues of our time. Collectively, our back catalogue serves as a library of critical conversations around systemic racism that can be revisited as similar issues continue to unfold in the world.
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S30This Radical Plan to Make Roads Greener Actually Works ![]() This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Makueni County, a corner of southern Kenya that’s home to nearly a million people, is a land of extremes. Nine months a year, Makueni is a hardened, sun-scorched place where crops struggle and plumes of orange dust billow from dirt roads. Twice yearly, though, the county is battered by weeks of torrential rain, which drown farm fields and transform roads into impassable morasses. “Water,” says Michael Maluki, a Makueni County engineer, “is the enemy of roads.”
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S54S69Sorry, But AI-Generated Video Kind of Sucks (For Now)  It turns out text is a lot easier to generate on the fly than video. Who could have guessed!The thrill that comes from generating text or images with an AI-powered tool is short-lived, but alluring. If there’s any reason AI caught the attention of normal people in 2023, it’s because you shouldn’t be able to type a few sentences and get out paragraphs of text or dozens of images. And yet, now with the right website or app, you can. We’re used to instantly getting what we want online, but not like that.
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S47How much it costs to attend the Burning Man festival  It's not easy – or cheap – to pop up a bustling city from empty desert ground. But that's exactly what happens at the Burning Man festival, held annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.Burning Man started in 1986 at a San Francisco beach with 35 people united by "the pursuit of a more creative and connected existence in the world"; this week, nearly 70,000 people are making their way out of the muddy desert after Burning Man's 37th year. The now nine-day festival has morphed into a massive brand and destination, where so-called "Burners" from around the world build a civilisation together from scratch, complete with art installations, healing camps, inspiring talks and live DJs.
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S38A Tumultuous Year in Politics  On Tuesday, Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot after determining that his actions on January 6, 2021, made him ineligible under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause.The Colorado court’s actions come on the precipice of another tumultuous year in politics, one featuring a general election and a likely rematch of the 2020 race between the former and present U.S. presidents.
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S32The "Zebra Effect": Why collaboration matters  Zebras are, on first impression, ridiculous. They are herbivorous pack animals, and their natural habitat is usually some kind of treeless grassland or savanna — green, yellow, and brown. You’d think then, given the predatory appeal of their lean meat, that zebras would try and blend in more with a bit of camouflage to make themselves inconspicuous. But no. The zebra struts around in black and white stripes. It flaunts both its color and its design in such a way as to say, “Hello savannah! Here I am: a tasty, trotting crosswalk of a feast.”If we dig a bit deeper, though, we see the genius in the zebra’s game. Yes, alone, a zebra is ridiculous, but in a pack and moving at speed, they become brilliant. Because when you have a lot of black and white stripes jumping up and down, darting to and fro, and kicking up a dusty hullabaloo, it’s really hard to see what’s going on. Your eyes start to blur. Your head starts to spin. Imagine you’re a lion about to make chase. One minute, you’re salivating over a piano-key dinner. The next, you’re chasing an optical illusion.
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S33Why Americans may be dependent on processed cereals  Many American consumers are skipping the cereal aisle in grocery stores, viewing its contents as basically boxed candy. That’s understandable. A lot of cereals are chock-full of added sugars and refined grains, which can contribute to obesity and metabolic dysfunction. Ironically, at the same time, there may be no aisle more essential to the Americans’ health. That’s because cereals have become the de facto source for Americans’ micronutrients.For decades, cereal manufacturers have fortified their products with synthetic vitamins and minerals, and now, we’re kind of reliant on them.
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S46How to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward  According to an analysis led by Ranjay Gulati, during the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, 17% of the 4,700 public companies studied fared very badly: They went bankrupt, went private, or were acquired. But just as striking, 9% of the companies flourished, outperforming competitors by at least 10% in sales and profits growth.
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S59Apple, Tesla and Nvidia were among 2023's 'magnificent seven' stocks - here's what to expect from them all in 2024  In the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven, a group of seven gunfighters protect a village from bandits. Only three survive to ride out of town at the end of the movie. The odds look much better for the seven tech companies recently dubbed the magnificent seven after dominating US stock markets in 2023. But there are problems that could ambush some of these companies in 2024. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Nvidia have driven a rally in US stocks in 2023. They now make up nearly a third of the S&P 500 measure of the largest listed US companies, which has risen more than 20% since January. These tech stocks had provided shareholders with a whopping 71% return by mid-November while the other 493 names added just 6%.
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S48The large and fluffy tamale few know  Deep inside a 6th Century Mayan pyramid in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli stumbled on a massive carved frieze; a mythological scene. A Mayan king in apotheosis is flanked by two ancestor gods, each holding out a round-shaped offering. The glyph beneath reads: The first tamale."This was the biggest discovery of my life," said Estrada-Belli of the 2013 find. "It's very powerful symbolism that tells you how fundamental the tamale was regarded by the Maya."
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S56S39The Case for Kwanzaa  Maybe it’s a corny holiday, but Black Americans deserve a time to remember that our identity doesn’t begin and end with oppression.For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas. We’d listen to good music: Black R&B standards, Soul Train dance lines, and traditional djembe performed live. We’d eat familiar food, like collard greens and red beans and rice. And we’d speak unfamiliar words such as umoja and ujima. The mood was festive, but with a focus on giving everyone, children especially, time to speak about how the principles of Kwanzaa applied to their lives.
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S58UK ban on boilers in new homes rules out hydrogen as a heating source  Boilers will be banned in new-build homes in the UK from 2025, according to a long-awaited government consultation on energy efficiency standards in the housebuilding industry. The report said that there is “no practical way” that installing boilers of any type will “deliver significant carbon savings and ‘zero-carbon ready’ homes”. What’s more surprising is that hydrogen has also been ruled out as a potential heating source. Previously, hydrogen had been touted by both the government and the energy industry as a logical replacement for the natural gas (a fossil fuel and contributor to climate change) that is pumped through the national grid and burned in boilers throughout the UK.
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S67Alien Invasion! The 11 Most Gripping Alien and UAP Events Of 2023  There’s nothing like a little trouble at home to make you look for greener pastures. And green or not, aliens were everywhere in 2023. Well, at least in the news. From Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, the classy new way to talk about UFOs) to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and all the way to tiny molecules clinging to frozen dust grains in interstellar space, the eyes of experts and the public were looking for life elsewhere.
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S31Undersea-Aged Champagne Is Starting to Surface  If you’ve ever been hit by a flying champagne cork, you will be painfully aware of the pressure in a bottle of fizz. And that pressure inside—and outside—the bottle has caught the imaginations of champagne innovators.“We conduct many trials every year to fine-tune the pressure to the vintage,” says Louis Roederer’s chef de cave, Jean Baptiste Lécaillon. “We have a lower pressure—so smaller bubbles—[because] we want a seamless and soft mousse.”
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S18S57Drug shortages affected 111 products in the UK thisyear - but the outlook for 2024 may be better  Over the past year there has been a consistent stream of drug supply issues in the UK and internationally. Recent figures show more than 111 products have been affected in the UK alone. This is more than double the figure recorded for 2022.These supply issues have led to shortages of numerous products. While global scarcity of Ozempic and Wegovy have received much attention, many other drugs in the UK have been in short supply – including drugs used to manage type 2 diabetes, ADHD and menopause symptoms.
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S49How Christmas pudding tried to 'save' the British Empire  It has been called a "gastronomic paradox" – the most British of all dishes largely made from non-British ingredients. Today, Christmas pudding, the dense, fruit-packed confection that is boiled for hours and served with brandy butter or steaming custard just once a year, is loved and hated in equal measure, like Brussels sprouts or Marmite. Its cultural and political clout, however, have extended far beyond the dining table.Starting out as an affordable gruel enjoyed by the British working class, by the first half of the 20th century Christmas pudding had become a call to arms – a potent propaganda tool and a boastful symbol of British imperialism. Containing such exotic fare as candied orange peel from South Africa, raisins from Australia and spices from India and Zanzibar, the dish was sent into economic battle by the state and used to promote the empire’s family of nations with a simple message: just look at the wonders we can achieve when we all pull together.
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S42Why the Holiday Movie Endures  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.The question “What is a Christmas movie?” might seem straightforward. But there’s one film that has scrambled the logic of the holiday movie for years now—at least for those who probably spend too much time online. “Because of the dreaded incentives of social media, we force debate upon ourselves all the time, even at the most wonderful time of the year,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2021. “According to Google Trends, search traffic for the phrase Is Die Hard a Christmas movie jumps every November and December.”
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S62Christmas movies always show us that being single sucks -- but that's not true  Being single sucks. At least that’s the impression you get when watching Christmas movies. So many of these films focus on finding love during the holiday season. But, can you name one about being happily single during the holidays? Probably not.Love Actually, The Holiday, Falling for Christmas, Last Christmas, Single All The Way, How to Fall in Love by Christmas, Inn Love by Christmas — there are numerous Christmas movies about finding love. So many, in fact, that Netflix has dedicated an entire genre to them.
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S62023's Most Unlikely Hit is a Perfect Antidote to Hollywood's Turbulent Year  Wonka is a lot of things, but a logical prequel to 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory isn’t one of them. The new film from Paddington 2 director Paul King is a family-friendly comedy that’s overflowing with optimism and obvious moral lessons. It isn’t particularly weird, nor is it the least bit scary, which makes it an undeniably strange companion piece to both Mel Stuart and Tim Burton’s previous Willy Wonka movies. It’s a musical full of earnest songs, earnestly sung.And yet Wonka still carries more weight than one might expect. The film, which purports to tell the origin story of its eponymous chocolatier (played with admiral zeal by Timothée Chalamet), paints Willy Wonka as a young artist trying to make his mark in an industry run and lorded over by the same select executives who have been in control of it for decades. When Willy introduces something new to the chocolate market, they respond aggressively.
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S64When Philosophers Become Therapists  Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. They’d eventually agreed to have an exclusive relationship, but monogamy remained a source of tension. “I always used to tell her how much it bothered me,” he recalled. “I was an asshole.”An Israeli man now in his mid-thirties, David felt conflicted about other life issues. Did he want kids? How much should he prioritize making money? In his twenties, he’d tried psychotherapy several times; he would see a therapist for a few months, grow frustrated, stop, then repeat the cycle. He developed a theory. The therapists he saw wanted to help him become better adjusted given his current world view—but perhaps his world view was wrong. He wanted to examine how defensible his values were in the first place.
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S19S50From Trump's mugshot to Burning Man, 20 photos that shocked or moved us in 2023  The numbers in this piece do not represent ranking, but are intended to make the separate entries as clear as possible.At first glance, the image is joyously familiar, archetypal even – a child, launched into the air, waits to land in the expectant arms of one who loves him. But this (despite the presence of a Paw Patrol backpack on the left of the scene) is no playground. The photograph, taken on 29 March, captures the moment a little boy is propelled over the Rio Grande river as a large group of migrants cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Though wingless, the boy's frozen flight, suspended against a smooth cerulean sky, connects him with countless cherubs floating through art history – found in the frescoed firmament of church ceilings, and endlessly in Renaissance red chalk drawings, patrolling the border between the world we can see and one we can't.
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S34S23What happens when you take too much melatonin?  Hands up those who use their smartphone in bed. From frantically scrolling to catch up on the latest news, to browsing social media channels at night – the blue light of the smartphone is never far away.Yet studies show replacing bedtime with screentime is having a devastating impact on our sleep. The reason is all down to melatonin, a hormone produced in the brain's pineal gland. Melatonin has a key role in regulating the body's sleep-wake cycle. It is sometimes referred to, rather spookily, as "the hormone of darkness", as levels are low during daytime, but rise at night once darkness descends.
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S52Wegovy: why half the people taking the weight loss drug stop within a year - and what happens when they do  Despite the effectiveness of the newer generation of anti-obesity drugs – called GLP-1 receptor agonists – few can tolerate them in the long run. A new study, published in the journal Obesity, reveals that of people prescribed weight-loss drugs, just 44% were still taking them after three months and only 19% after one year. Greater adherence to these drugs, such as Wegovy, which make you feel fuller faster and longer, is associated with greater weight loss. So why do people not persist with it?
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S55Tatahouine: 'Star Wars meteorite' sheds light on the early Solar System  Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location of the Star Wars movie series. The desert climate and traditional villages became a huge inspiration to the director, George Lucas, who proceeded to name the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader “Tatooine”.The mysterious 1931 meteorite, a rare type of achondrite (a meteorite that has experienced melting) known as a diogenite, is obviously not a fragment of Skywalker’s home planet. But it was similarly named after the city of Tatahouine. Now, a recent study has gleaned important insights into the the origin of the meteorite – and the early Solar System.
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S26S22S40Arlington's Civil War Legacy Is Finally Laid to Rest  A memorial tainted with Lost Cause mythology has at last been purged from the national cemetery. If only national memory were so easily resolved.The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of the more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried beneath. Workers in white construction hats and highlighter-yellow vests moved about while security officers in dark sunglasses and black uniforms stood along the fence’s edge. To my left was a massive yellow crane whose engine rumbled steadily as it sat staring at the bronze memorial before it.
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