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 S166 Criminally Overlooked 2023 Games You Need to Play   It feels like 2023 has seen a nonstop torrent of fantastic video games with each step of the year bringing massive hits like Resident Evil 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Alan Wake 2. Fans of every genre have been inundated with things to play, but with a steady stream of releases, a few things will inevitably fall through the cracks. This year has also provided dozens of smaller titles with unique vibrant styles and unique ideas, from both the indie and AAA sides of the industry. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of six hidden gems from 2023 that you absolutely shouldn’t miss. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a fourth-wall-breaking horror visual novel from Square Enix and possibly the most criminally overlooked game of the entire year. Set in 1980s Tokyo, Paranormasight follows multiple protagonists through a twisty tale about curses that have infested the city. All of the curses in the game are based on real-life urban legends from Sumida, Tokyo.
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S17To Prove Your Company Isn't Greenwashing, Endorse Smart Regulation  Whether you call it propaganda or greenwashing, companies have long used marketing to tout the good they do for the environment while obfuscating any negative externalities of their businesses. However, thanks to the rise of the internet and social media and the proliferation of data on ESG performance, consumers (and employees) are now acutely aware of whether organizations are actually practicing what they preach. Conversations with advocates, regulators, consumers, and executives suggest that the most powerful way for businesses to prove they do so is to support meaningful regulations to ensure that their entire sector or industry will do the right thing. This includes exiting lobby groups that fight against such measures, communicating more regularly with regulators, and endorsing and advocating for more science-backed regulation.
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S18S48These scientists explored the good vibrations of the bundengan and didgeridoo  The bundengan is a rare, endangered instrument from Indonesia that can imitate the sound of metallic gongs and cow-hide drums (kendangs) in a traditional gamelan ensemble. The didgeridoo is an iconic instrument associated with Australian Aboriginal culture that produces a single, low-pitched droning note that can be continuously sustained by skilled players. Both instruments are a topic of scientific interest because their relatively simple construction produces some surprisingly complicated physics. Two recent studies into their acoustical properties were featured at an early December meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Acoustical Society.
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S2Fondue Chinoise: Switzerland's Asian-inspired hot pot  While Italian-Americans may celebrate the holiday season with the feast of the seven fishes and the Swedes spread the festive table with seafood to make their julebord (Christmas Smorgasbord), the Swiss gather around a fondue pot in an activity of unity and friendship. However, it's not the cheese fondue you might expect – instead, they celebrate the end of the year by preparing fondue Chinoise (Chinese fondue), an Asian-inspired hot pot made with a fragrant, salty broth in lieu of cheese, and tender, melt-in-your-mouth ribeye steak for dipping, instead of bread. Dating to the 17th Century, the history of cheese fondue, unlike fondue Chinoise, has been well-documented. It originated in western Switzerland, where farmers made hard cheese from a surplus of milk during the winter and it was ultimately eaten in the most delicious way possible: melted in a pot.
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S61Ten major events that shaped business in 2023  Amid an uncertain economy, international political tension and leadership shake-ups, 2023 delivered big moments in business that shaped our year. They'll set the stage for the months to come.Prior to 2023, some governments around the world had banned the use of Chinese tech-company Bytedance's TikTok on devices, citing security concerns around data sharing with the Chinese government. In 2023, these bans spread – quickly.
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S70How to Disappear Your Partner's Ugly Sweater  Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.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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S60A New Model for Ethical Leadership  Rather than try to follow a set of simple rules (“Don’t lie.” “Don’t cheat.”), leaders and managers seeking to be more ethical should focus on creating the most value for society. This utilitarian view, Bazerman argues, blends philosophical thought with business school pragmatism and can inform a wide variety of managerial decisions in areas including hiring, negotiations, and even time management. Creating value requires that managers confront and overcome the cognitive barriers that prevent them from being as ethical as they would like to be. Just as we rely on System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (deliberative) thinking, he says, we have parallel systems for ethical decision-making. He proposes strategies for engaging the deliberative one in order to make more-ethical choices. Managers who care about the value they create can influence others throughout the organization by means of the norms and decision-making environment they create.
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S63Why the Flying Scotsman is a symbol of Britishness  Some grow misty-eyed with nostalgia at the mere mention of them, waiting for hours on a windy platform just to get a glimpse or a photo of these stars of a bygone age. Others find them smelly, dirty, and their hooting and screeching too much to bear. We're talking about steam engines, and although travelling by locomotive may be a rare treat for most, the golden age of steam is being kept alive at the many heritage railways around the world, with more than 30 still running in the UK alone.More like this:- The fabric design duo behind London's tubes and trains- How the Barbour became an icon of Britishness- What kings wore from Tudor times to today
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S58What Does It Actually Take to Build a Data-Driven Culture?  Building a data driven culture is hard. To capture what it takes to succeed, the authors look at the first two years of a new data program at Kuwait’s Gulf Bank in which they worked to build a culture that embraced data, and offer a few lessons. First, it is important to start building the new culture from day one, even as doing so is not the primary mandate. Second, to change a culture, you need to get everyone involved. Third, give data quality strong consideration as the place to start. Finally, building this new culture takes courage and persistence.
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S68Could you cope with a shock to your bank balance? 5 ways to check you are financially resilient  Imagine the dentist has just said you urgently need a A$2,000 dental crown. A week later, a pipe in your bathroom bursts, causing $8,000 worth of damage. Suddenly, you’ve been hit with a $10,000 financial shock.As the cost-of-living crisis plunges more households into financial uncertainty and at least one-third of Australians struggle to make ends meet, it’s more important than ever to ask yourself: how financially resilient am I?
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S69What will you read on the beach this summer? We asked 6 avid readers  Liz Evans' debut novel will be published by Ultimo Press in 2024. Michelle Cahill is the current Hedberg Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tasmania. One of the best things about summer for the book-lovers among us is a beach towel by a strip of water … and time to lose yourself in another world. That might be a traditional beach read – typically a genre paperback with a propulsive plot – or an opportunity to catch up on the classics you never got around to during the year. Or, really, anything you like!
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S53The Year We Embraced Our Destruction  The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate—more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour. I watched the kind woman behind the counter stifle an eye roll, a small mercy for which I will be eternally grateful. Her look indicated that she’d been through this before, enough times to see through my bravado. I was just another man standing in front of a Panera Bread employee, asking her to hand me 30 fluid ounces of allegedly deadly lemonade. (I would have procured it myself, but it was kept behind the counter, like a controlled substance.)
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S65Larger and more frequent solar storms will make for potential disruptions and spectacular auroras on Earth  Bright auroras, with dancing lights in the sky, characterize the clear winter nights of northern Canada. Longer nights during the fall and winter also favour seeing more auroras, but the show is best outside of light-polluted cities. Impressive auroral events allowed bright auroras to be seen as far south as the United States recently. Auroras are produced through the sun’s interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. The number of auroras is increasing as the sun’s activity becomes stronger, approaching a solar maximum.
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S56S37S54S62Frikadeller: The classic Danish comfort food dish  At this time of year in Scandinavia, as nights grow colder and darker and people gather around fires and cosy tables, the meatball really shines. A classic comfort food beloved by all three Scandinavian nations – Denmark, Sweden and Norway – meatballs are simultaneously an easy weeknight meal for busy families and the kind of dish you'd see on the menu for a large gathering or celebration.The origin of the meatball is more than a little unclear. According to food historian Nina Bauer, like the pancake, the meatball was invented simultaneously in many countries worldwide, so no one country can lay claim to it. It remains, however, a classic food across Scandinavia, though not without its differences.
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S43Here are the 10 best cars we drove in 2023  The mince pies have been eaten, the crackers have been cracked, and the days are starting to get longer. That means it's time to look back on the best vehicles we tested in 2023. It has been a good year for electric vehicles, which accounted for almost one in ten new vehicles sold in the US this year. We've also driven some rather good hybrids, as well as a pair of sports cars that reminded us that there's still room for enthusiast cars. Read on to find out which cars made the cut.
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S36Get Ready for a 'Tsunami' of AI at CES  If you're waiting for the hubbub over generative AI to die down, maybe pull up a chair. The buzz around artificial intelligence shows no signs of quietingâa fact that will become all too obvious at this year's CES.CES, the consumer electronics industry's largest annual gathering in the US, is returning to Las Vegas on January 9. It is a massive, four-day-long bustling bazaar of tech, with expo halls filled to the brim with new gadgets, hopeful startups, and prototypes that reach for the stars. CES is a trade show where sales and distribution deals are inked, where concept cars roll through crowded streets, and where tech journalists and showgoers alike wander the floors looking for the standout new products. And this year, many of the products debuting are going to be garnished with heaping globs of AI.
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S59Cope or Quit? Facing a Mid-Career Crisis  Research shows that many people—even those with seemingly enviable careers—grow dissatisfied in their jobs in their mid-40s. They may regret past choices or feel stuck in a rut. But Kieran Setiya thinks the tools of his trade—philosophy—can help. He says sadness about the road not taken can be mitigated by attending to the people and pursuits that we cherish and wouldn’t have without our careers. He notes that we spend much of our work time solving problems and meeting needs, so we should engage in some feel-good activities (inside or outside the office). And he suggests focusing less on projects and more on process, to replace a “What’s next?” mindset with an appreciation for the present.
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S46S51Taylor Swift at Harvard  Last month, Harvard announced that I would be teaching a class next semester called “Taylor Swift and Her World,” an open-enrollment lecture partly about Swift’s work and career and partly about literature (poems, novels, memoirs) that overlaps with, or speaks to, that work. When the news came out, my inbox blew up with dozens of requests, from as far away as New Zealand. Reporters wanted to know whether Swift would visit the course (not expecting her to), whether her online superfans were involved (some will be), whether Harvard approved (yes, at least so far), and, above all, why a Millennial pop star deserves this kind of treatment at a world-class university.In some ways, the answer is simple. If the humanities ought to study culture, including the culture of the present day, and Taylor Swift is all over that culture, then of course we should ask why and how the Swift phenomenon came to be. That’s what a cultural historian of the future would do, looking back at how Americans embraced Swift as an artist, debated her rise, and changed their perceptions of her over time. It’s also what a cultural anthropologist would do, decoding the rituals around Swift’s concerts and album drops, or finding cross-cultural patterns in the way that her fans respond to her voice and her work.
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S325 Ways Ozempic and Other New Weight-Loss Drugs Have Changed Health  Ozempic and similar drugs are ushering in a new era of weight management and obesity treatments, and researchers are racing to understand their impactOur culture’s obsession with weight has always felt unshakeable. But over the past year, new classes of drugs seem to be changing the way we think and talk about weight, dieting and obesity—for better and for worse. Popular pound-shedding medications including Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro and Zepbound have been all over social media and mainstream headlines in the past few years, and the frenzied interest around these drugs has fueled a research boom that produced impressive results in 2023. These drugs, typically taken as regular injections, are attractive for multiple reasons: they offer not only a seemingly fast and easy way to lose weight but unexpected cardiac benefits as well. But even though the latest research shows immense promise, high costs and poor accessibility of the life-long treatment pose thorny challenges.
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S34Podcasts of the Year: Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace  In 2013 a new user named Cleo took an online math forum by storm with unproved answers. Today she’s an urban legend. But who was she? A 2023 editor's pick. Bose: Hello fellow math nerds! This is Tulika Bose, Senior Multimedia Editor at Scientific American. If you miss that famous Scientific American Martin Gardner column from the 1950’s — never fear, we have some great mathematical content coming your way in the New Year.
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S50Electric Cars Are Already Upending America  One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.
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S49SpaceX launches two rockets--three hours apart--to close out a record year  On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.
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S64A brief history of Britain's obsession with the hot water bottle  Last winter, UK retailers reported record sales of water bottles as consumers look to cut their heating costs as the average household energy bills soared. Boiling a kettle to fill a hot water bottle uses less energy than an electric blanket or turning on the heating and so is the cheapest option to keep you warm, according to consumer insights publication Which?.
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S44Saving the African penguin from climate change and overfishing  CAPE TOWN, South Africa—A weathered, green building stands at the edge of the cozy suburban Table View neighborhood in Cape Town, just a few blocks down from a Burger King and a community library. Upon stepping inside, visitors’ feet squelch on a mat submerged in antibacterial liquid—one of the first signs this isn’t just another shop on the street.
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S35The Foods the World Will Lose to Climate Change  There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared.To be a farmer right now—or an agronomist or an agricultural economist—is to recognize how closely those weird weather events are linked to climate change. In fact, when the United Nations Climate Change Summit, known as COP28, ran in Dubai earlier this month, it featured a 134-country pact to integrate planning for sustainable agriculture into countries’ climate road maps.
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S30How Autonomous Vehicles Could Help People with Disabilities  Self-driving cars could give people who live outside big cities and are unable to drive more mobility, but the technology must still overcome some hurdlesGRAND RAPIDS, Minn. ― Myrna Peterson predicts self-driving vehicles will be a ticket out of isolation and loneliness for people like her, who live outside big cities and have disabilities that prevent them from driving.
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S42TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year  Everything was coming up mystery in 2023, judging by our picks for Ars Technica's annual list of the best TV shows of the year. There's just something about the basic framework that seems to lend itself to television. Showrunners and studios have clearly concluded that genre mashups with a mystery at the center is a reliable winning formula, whether it's combined with science fiction (Silo, Bodies, Pluto), horror (Fall of the House of Usher), or comedy (Only Murders in the Building, The Afterparty). And there's clearly still plenty of room in the market for the classic police procedural (Dark Winds, Poker Face, Justified: City Primeval). Even many shows we loved that were not overt nods to the genre still had some kind of mystery at their core (Yellowjackets, Mrs. Davis), so one could argue it's almost a universal narrative framework.
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S52Where Will AI Take Us in 2024?  This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.What will next year hold for AI? In a new story, Atlantic staff writer Ross Andersen looks ahead, outlining five key questions that will define the technology’s trajectory from here. A big one: How will it affect the election? “Many blamed the spread of lies through social media for enabling [Donald] Trump’s victory in 2016, and for helping him gin up a conspiratorial insurrection following his 2020 defeat,” Andersen writes. “But the tools of misinformation that were used in those elections were crude compared with those that will be available next year.”
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S45How watching beavers from space can help drought-ridden areas bounce back  For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.
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S29Behold--the Best Space Images of 2023  This year’s most interesting space images include infrared views of galactic “bones,” an asteroid’s double moon, Jupiter’s giant polar vortex, and moreThe year 2023, like every other one before it—and, no doubt, every year to come—has had its crests of good news and its troughs of bad tidings. But one constant, reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky over our head. After journeys of mere seconds to billions of years, the light from astronomical objects in the cosmos rains down on all of us, and scientists have patiently photographed some of it to better understand the universe in which we live.
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S38The 15 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now  Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings (congrats, CODA!), but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.Our picks for the 10 best films on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best shows on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that's what you're in the mood for.
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S66S67S47This bird is like a GPS for honey  With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we’ve lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird.
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S26Your Favorite HBR Articles of 2023  As we close out 2023, we asked our readers: Did an HBR article make a meaningful impact on the way you think, work, or lead this year? And how specifically did it change the way you operate? We heard from readers in a variety of different industries, writing in from various corners of the world. They called out articles ranging from a 2001 classic article about managing your energy as a worker to a recent magazine piece on storytelling for leaders.
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