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 S61Why 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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S63Matter, 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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S20AI Is Telling Bedtime Stories to Your Kids Now  The problem with Bluey is there's not enough of it. Even with 151 seven-minute-long episodes of the popular children's animated show out there, parents of toddlers still desperately wait for Australia’s Ludo Studio to release another season. The only way to get more Bluey more quickly is if they create their own stories starring the Brisbane-based family of blue heeler dogs.Luke Warner did this—with generative AI. The London-based developer and father used OpenAI's latest tool, customizable bots called GPTs, to create a story generator for his young daughter. The bot, which he calls Bluey-GPT, begins each session by asking people their name, age, and a bit about their day, then churns out personalized tales starring Bluey and her sister Bingo. "It names her school, the area she lives in, and talks about the fact it's cold outside," Warner says. "It makes it more real and engaging."
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S41What Makes a Great Leader?  Tomorrow’s leaders master three key roles — architect, bridger, and catalyst, or ABCs — to access the talent and tools they need to drive innovation and impact. As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems. These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation.
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S30Danielle Brooks Comes Full Circle  Although Danielle Brooks has become most known for her role as Taystee, on the television show “Orange Is the New Black,” she is a creation of the stage. Our generation’s yen for Black-theatre revivalism is rooted in her gift for externalized performance: she is the kind of actor who interprets the monologue as she delivers it. As Berniece in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” and as Sofia in John Doyle’s 2015 revival of “The Color Purple” musical on Broadway, Brooks has brought the ache of life to her characters, her voice piercing the artifice around her. For her, the act of inhabiting these women was personal. She recalled to me, recently, being fifteen years old, watching the performer LaChanze play Sofia in the original musical staging, and bursting into tears. Brooks won a Grammy and earned a Tony nomination for her own performance as Sofia, and she will take up the role again, in a film adaptation of the musical, which will première on Christmas.Hadn’t “The Color Purple” already been wrung dry? It has been more than four decades since Alice Walker published her epistolary novel—a long view of the oppression visited on Celie Harris, a young Black girl in turn-of-the-century Georgia—and, in the intervening years, Walker’s story has been made into a film, a musical, a revived musical, and now a film again. A few weeks ago, the latest film’s director, Blitz Bazawule, admitted in the Los Angeles Times that he initially “didn’t see why it needed to be remade.” “The Color Purple” of the twenty-twenties is a sweet, smoothed show: the hubris of the original film, directed by Steven Spielberg and derived from his belief that Hollywood can supplant history, is not Bazawule’s thing. Humility and redemption are. The Ghanaian director has gone for a high-style reverie, creating set pieces sprung from the imagination of Celie, played as a child by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and as a woman by Fantasia Barrino, who is reprising her Broadway role. (Spielberg, as well as Quincy Jones, who produced the score for the 1985 film, and Oprah Winfrey, who played Sofia in that movie, serve as executive producers.) As Sofia, Brooks turns the sun-bleached world upside down. Barrelling into the lives of Celie, Mister (Colman Domingo), and Harpo (Corey Hawkins), Sofia embodies self-determination, an idea that Celie, passive and somnambulant, has not yet encountered. It is with a totalizing passion that Brooks plays her Sofia, the link between the actor and the character having been strengthened over so many years of knowing. Even when the film’s gloss aroused doubt in me, I could not help but let Brooks bowl me over.
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S42S235 books you probably haven't read (and how to pretend you have)  For one reason or another, you sometimes have to talk about a book you haven’t read. It might be that you want to impress your boss or appear intellectual on a first date. It might be that you’ve got a selection of books on your shelves that one looks suspiciously new, with its pristine spine and unthumbed pages. So, what do you do if someone asks you about those books? How do you respond if someone presses you for more than a blurb’s worth of information?To help you on your way to Blagville, we’ve compiled five of the most common books people pretend to read and explain how to bluff your way through a conversation about them.
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S35This Cult-Favorite Sock Brand Dropped A Must-Have Slipper  If your feet are the first thing to feel cold when temps drop, there’s a reason for that: Feet don’t have as much insulating fat coverage as other areas of the body, so they tend to lose heat quickly. A cozy slipper is an essential part of any stay-warm toolkit — and beloved sock brand Bombas has some of the best at-home slippers to keep your feet insulated all chilly season. Cushioned footbeds, merino wool lining, and custom engineered grip: Bombas slippers will be all you'll want to wear in your downtime.
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S60The "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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S6S62S46S37Creative Structures Built By Neanderthals Is Upending How We View the Species  Researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals, offering new insights into their biologyNeanderthals are Homo sapiens’s closest-known relative, and today we know we rubbed shoulders with them for thousands of years, up until the very end of their long reign some 40,000 years ago. Most researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn’t get along with each other back then, yet we haven’t been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse. Even today, their name is sometimes hurled at misbehaving members of our own species, though there is no evidence they engaged in any kind of prehistoric hooliganism.
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S33Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs Might Also Slash Inflammation  If you thought weight loss headliners like Ozempic and the latest Zepbound were only good for shedding pounds, think again: These drugs may help the body fight inflammation.That’s according to new research out of Canada that found the class of drugs Ozempic belongs to — called GLP-1 receptor agonists — may be tempering inflammation in all parts of the body through a gut-brain-immune system pathway. When researchers induced a systemic inflammatory condition known as sepsis in mice, the drug reduced inflammation throughout different organ systems as long as it could still interact with the brain.
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S3960 Rad Things for Your Home That Are So Freaking Cheap on Amazon  If your Amazon cart is rarely full of home goods other than the occasional hand soap refill, you have to take a peek at this list of clever finds to instantly elevate your space. They’re all practical and functional around the house, but they’ll also make your home look super impressive (with barely any effort). Best of all, these 60 home finds are all so freaking cheap that you’ll want to start redoing your home ASAP.These reusable dishcloths will last for up to 100 uses, and they come in a bulk pack, so they’ll be a super long-lasting addition to your cleaning closet. Their absorbent and scrubby texture is also durable enough to clean up anything — including dirty mirrors without leaving streaks.
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S58This 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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S64S562023 Ripple Rewind  From evolving workplace trends to achieving your goals, Wharton professors explain this year’s key research insights.In this special episode, listen to curated excerpts from this year’s Ripple Effect podcast, where Wharton professors discuss a range of trending business topics.
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S44S29Canadians are losing faith in the economy -- and it's affecting their perception of inequality  Nearly half of Canadian workers feel as though the economic conditions in Canada are “poor,” according to our survey of 2,500 Canadian workers in September of 2023. And another 38 per cent said they believed economic conditions are “only fair.”These findings are unsurprising, given the poor state of the Canadian economy and the growing pessimism among Canadians toward it. Inflation and interest rates both remain high, and job openings are struggling to keep up with the growing labour force.
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S59Undersea-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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S69Six 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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S50S55S40The Great Resignation Didn't Start with the Pandemic  Covid-19 spurred on the Great Resignation of 2021, during which record numbers of employees voluntarily quit their jobs. But what we are living through is not just short-term turbulence provoked by the pandemic. Instead, it’s the continuation of a trend of rising quit rates that began more than a decade ago. Five main factors are at play in this trend: retirement, relocation, reconsideration, reshuffling, and reluctance. All of these factors, the authors argue, are here to stay. They explore each in turn and encourage leaders to examine which of them are contributing most to turnover in their organizations, so that they can adapt appropriately as they move into the future.
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S2S38S65Corvids 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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S32The 10 Best Indie Games of 2023, Ranked  All the games that will confuse your friends when you say they are your games of the year. Massive games like Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 may have captured the most attention this year, but 2023 was just as full of hidden gems as AAA hits. The year’s best indie games told stories of family and fantastical adventure alike, with inventive twists to set them apart. Indies in 2023 explored language, broke conventions, and celebrated the history of gaming as an artform. The 10 indie games we chose for this year represent the extremes of what makes gaming great, from intimate stories to impossible journeys.
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S14Shukubo: The Japanese temples where you can sleep alongside monks  In the serene world of Japanese Buddhist monks, life takes on a distinctive form, interwoven with discipline and mindfulness. These monks subscribe to a unique method of meditation, often sitting upright, supported only by a modest cushion. In this position, they uphold a constant state of awareness, embodying the Buddhist quality of prolonged concentration. This approach to faith is just one facet of a monk's lifestyle, which revolves around spiritual dedication and mindfulness.Their days typically commence with pre-dawn meditation, followed by a simple breakfast composed of vegetarian or vegan offerings. As the sun rises, the monks chant to foster self-awareness and inner peace.
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S45S52High-Flying Frigatebirds Collect Data from the Top of the Sky  Scientists accidentally discovered a new way of monitoring the Earth’s planetary boundary layer: high-flying great frigatebirdsCLIMATEWIRE | Great frigatebirds are among nature’s most effortless fliers, routinely soaring more than a mile above the ground and sometimes staying aloft for weeks at a time.
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S57The Internet Isn't Dead. It's 'Saturday Night Live'  The internet sucks now. Once a playground fueled by experimentation and freedom and connection, it’s a flimsy husk of what it was, all merriment and serendipity leached from our screens by vile capitalist forces. Everything is too commercialized. We commodified the self, then we commodified robots to impersonate the self, and now they’re taking our damn jobs. We live in diminished and degrading times. I miss when memes were funny. I miss Vine. I miss Gawker. I miss old Twitter. Blogs—those were the days!Stop me if these gripes sound familiar. In 2023, the idea that the internet isn’t fun anymore is conventional wisdom. This year, after Elon Musk renamed Twitter “X” and instituted a series of berserk changes that made it substantially less functional, complaints about the demise of the good internet popped up like mushrooms sprouting in dirt tossed over a fresh grave. Some people even complained on the very platforms they were mourning. Type “internet sucks now” into X’s search bar, you’ll see.
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S19The 46 Best Movies on Netflix This Week  Netflix has plenty of movies to watch, but it’s a real mixed bag. Sometimes finding the right film at the right time can seem like an impossible task. Fret not, we’re here to help. Below is a list of some of our favorites currently on the streaming service—from dramas to comedies to thrillers.If you decide you’re in more of a TV mood, head over to our collection of the best TV series on Netflix. Want more? Check out our lists of the best sci-fi movies, best movies on Amazon Prime, and the best flicks on Disney+.
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S3135 Years Ago, a Brilliant Sci-Fi Sequel Launched a Lousy Franchise  Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is such an idiosyncratic work of art that it’s astonishing it launched a long-running franchise. There’s almost nothing in Barker’s BDSM-fueled vision of horror that suggests a string of sequels and a secure place in mainstream pop culture, and even as the movie became a box-office success, it didn’t seem like it could lead to an open-ended series in the vein of other lucrative 1980s horror properties.It’s really its first sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, that provided the foundation for the franchise to continue. With Barker credited with the story and as a producer, director Tony Randel and screenwriter Peter Atkins expanded on his initial vision to incorporate it into a more conventional horror-movie structure. Hellbound is still infused with kinky sexuality, but it also sets up a more clearly defined mythology that can be adapted into future films, providing actively evil intent for the demonic Cenobites.
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S54S67The 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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S43S36What Do Dogs Dream About? A Psychologist Has Answers  “A dream pointer will point at dream birds and a Doberman will bark at dream burglars.”It’s the cutest when your pooch starts snorting and twitching in their sleep, a sure sign that they’re dreaming. Maybe you’ve even wondered what they dream about: Playing fetch? Finding treats? Or outlandish things, like flying and showing up to a college course in their underwear?
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S49S25Some of Our Most-Read Stories of 2023  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 of the stories our readers spent time with this year revealed a curiosity about the historical events that shaped current circumstances at home and abroad, and a desire to examine humanity’s best and worst impulses. Spend some of your Sunday with 12 don’t-miss stories of the past year.
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S26Why Black Jesus Made My Grandmother Uncomfortable  The Washington, D.C., my sisters and I grew up in was known as Chocolate City for good reason. As Black children in the city then, we were a majority. We sauntered from school to store to home to kickball field, oblivious to our segregation. When I was a tween, and just beginning to be conscious about the giving of gifts, my sisters and I were Christmas shopping at one of the festive pop-up markets in our corner of the city. We found a stellar gift for one of our grandmothers, which we knew for sure she would love. We knew for sure because of her religiosity.No one was more openly devoted to the will of the Lord than Ma Jones, our father’s mother. Mabel Irene Young Jones was her name. She traveled very few miles in her lifetime, and yet she traveled a long way during her 65 years in Northwest Washington, D.C., where she was born, Black and poor, in 1912. When she died, in 1977, she was proud to have obtained with her mother and daughter a rowhouse, which they’d purchased collectively and occupied as multiple generations.
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S68Arlington'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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S51What 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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S53Decoding Your Hunger During the Holidays  Deciding when and what to eat is a complex calculus incorporating input from your eyes, your gut and your vagus nerveThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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S28We Love in the Only Ways We Can  What’s the point, now, of crying, when you’ve cried already, he said, as if he’d never thought, or been told— and perhaps he hadn’t— Write down something that doesn’t have to matter, that still matters, to you. Though I didn’t know it then, those indeed were the days. Random corners, around one of which, on that particular day, a colony of bees, bound by instinct, swarmed low to the ground, so as not to abandon the wounded queen, trying to rise, not rising, from the strip of dirt where nothing had ever thrived, really, except in clumps the grass here and there that we used to call cowboy grass, I guess for its toughness: stubborn, almost, steadfast, though that’s a word I learned early, each time the hard way, not to use too easily.
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S15S24The Middle East Conflict That the U.S. Can't Stay Out Of  An Iranian-backed group is attacking an essential shipping route through the Suez Canal. The U.S. will have to step in.The sooner President Joe Biden acknowledges that Americans will likely be drawn into a fight to protect shipping traffic through the Suez Canal, the more time the U.S. military has to plan, and the less severe the harm will be to the global economy. For months, ever since a deadly Hamas incursion into Israel triggered a massive Israeli military campaign in Gaza, the United States has sought to deter Israel’s enemies, most notably Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, from spreading the conflict to other fronts in the Middle East.
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S70Why 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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S3S66A 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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S17Intervention at an Early Age May Hold Off the Onset of Depression  Preventing initial episodes might stop depression from becoming a disabling chronic conditionEsther Oladejo knew she'd crossed an invisible boundary when she started forgetting to eat for entire days at a time. A gifted rugby player, Oladejo had once thrived on her jam-packed school schedule. But after she entered her teenage years, her teachers started piling on assignments and quizzes to prepare students for high-stakes testing that would help them to qualify for university.
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S7S13Did 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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S16The mystery of the medieval fighting snails  The knight pulls his arm back, poised to strike. He's dressed in the typical armour of the 14th Century, with a chainmail suit, belted tunic and bucket-style helmet. Standing within a small grassy clearing, he's holding up a shield which, inexplicably, has its own face. He also wields a club, which brushes the bottom of a swathe of religious text on the yellowed page of the medieval book he's drawn onto. But even within the pages of antique tomes, knights must face mortal perils. This one's chivalric opponent is a particularly slippery beast – a foe often found slinking along in their margins and engaging noblemen in deadly combat. Sometimes the creatures appear to be hovering, attacking knights in mid-air. Occasionally there is more than one. This is the uniquely medieval phenomenon of the fighting snail – and to this day, why they were depicted remains utterly mysterious.
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S4S5S22Our Favorite Strollers for Carting Kids  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 WIREDWhen I started shopping for a stroller, I purchased the cheapest one that worked with my car seat and called it a day. To no one's surprise, that stroller is terrible, and both my child and I hated using it.
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S27America Lost Its One Perfect Tree  Lumber, shelter, delicious nuts—there was nothing the American chestnut couldn’t provide.Across the Northeast, forests are haunted by the ghosts of American giants. A little more than a century ago, these woods brimmed with American chestnuts—stately Goliaths that could grow as high as 130 feet tall and more than 10 feet wide. Nicknamed “the redwoods of the East,” some 4 billion American chestnuts dotted the United States’ eastern flank, stretching from the misty coasts of Maine down into the thick humidity of Appalachia.
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S12Message 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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S342023'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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S18How to Escape a Time Loop You Don't Really Want to Leave  Time and grief are two inexorable companions in life, even when we are falling in love. It is truths like this one that set the scene for A Quantum Love Story. Tragedy has already struck when the novel begins, as neuroscientist Mariana Pineda has just lost her best friend, Shay. Carrying Shay's framed portrait, Mariana is headed to marvel at the new Hawke Accelerator with the team from ReLive, an experimental program that allows people to reenter their memories and live those moments once again. Mariana has given up her old life to start working at ReLive just before disaster hits.One morning she runs into Carter Cho, a mysterious man bearing doughnuts and a surprising amount of knowledge about who she is and what she's after. Carter tries to explain something to her about how they've been there before and how he needs her to remember. Carter, who has an eidetic memory, can do nothing but remember. He knows what's about to happen: there's going to be an explosion at Hawke, and time is going to bend around them in a time loop that restarts every four days.
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S21The Tantalizing Mystery of the Solar System's Hidden Oceans -copy.jpg) For most of humankind's existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle.But in 1979, NASA's two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was decorated with grooves and fracturesâhints that there might be something dynamic beneath its surface.
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S8S9S11Taupo: 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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