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 S48Google Fixes Nearly 100 Android Security Issues   December was a hectic month for updates as firms including Apple and Google rushed to get patches out to fix serious flaws in their products before the holiday break.Enterprise software giants also issued their fair share of patches, with Atlassian and SAP squashing several critical bugs during December.
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S61The Best Home-Invasion Thriller of 2023 Brought Back an Underrated Genre  We’re living in an interesting era for horror movies. Over the past decade, filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jennifer Kent have brought interesting new perspectives to the genre, while the creation of streaming services like Netflix and Shudder has made it easier for filmmakers to get their low-budget thrillers in front of more viewers. Never before has the horror field felt quite as diverse, experimental, or exciting.But no matter how — dare we say it — elevated the genre becomes, its fans will always be hungry for new versions of the cold-blooded, straightforward thrillers that have been the cornerstones of horror for decades. That’s where films like Sick come in. The underrated slasher doesn’t reinvent the wheel or do anything particularly out of the box. It’s a bare-bones, by-the-numbers home invasion movie that’ll remind you why certain formulas don’t always need to be broken.
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S56The Secret Joys of Geriatric Rock  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.Rock and roll is full of legends who should retire. But some bands know how to get back onstage without making fools of themselves—or of their fans.
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S35A Planetary Scientist Reveals the 6 Biggest Space Missions in 2024  From the Moon’s south pole to an ice-covered ocean world, several exciting space missions are slated for launch in 2024. The year 2023 proved to be an important one for space missions, with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returning a sample from an asteroid and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission exploring the lunar south pole, and 2024 is shaping up to be another exciting year for space exploration.
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S37The 15 Most Exciting Sci-Fi TV Shows Coming Out in 2024  It’s been a huge year for science fiction television. From The Last of Us in January to What If...? Season 2 in the last few days of the year, there’s been endless entertainment for genre fans across cable and streaming alike — even if some series got delayed due to Hollywood strikes that reshaped the industry for the better.While we’ll likely still feel the effects of those strikes well into 2024, there’s still plenty of exciting sci-fi (and fantasy, and horror) to get excited for this year. It’s the nature of television that more shows will likely get added to the schedule later on, but here’s everything currently slated for 2024 to get excited about, from the high-profile adaptations to franchise experiments and everything in between.
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S30Rivka Galchen Reads Aleksandar Hemon  In the two-hundredth episode of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, Rivka Galchen joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Bees, Part 1,” by Aleksandar Hemon, which was published in The New Yorker in 2002. Galchen’s books include the story collection “American Innovations” and the novel “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch.”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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S63Marvel Is Doing Everything Right to Save the MCU in 2024 -- But Is It Enough?  2023 has been a year of a few highs and many lows for Marvel Studios. While Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Loki Season 2 both received plenty of praise, Secret Invasion, The Marvels, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania all produced lackluster results. Secret Invasion and Quantumania, in particular, received some of the worst criticisms of any Marvel Cinematic Universe titles to date (and for good reason). December, meanwhile, has seen one of Marvel’s most turbulent years end with the unorthodox release of What If…? Season 2 and the studio officially parting ways with Kang the Conqueror actor Jonathan Majors.Heading into 2024, Marvel seems fully committed to adopting a less-is-more approach. The studio is set to release an uncharacteristically small number of new titles and seems intent on righting the increasingly directionless ship that has been the MCU these past few years. But can the studio’s 2024 slate actually get the MCU back on track? Right now, the answer to that question seems to be both “yes” and “no.”
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S69'Dune's Timeliest Sci-Fi Concept Is Missing From the Movies for a Crucial Reason  The future of 10,191 in Dune is lacking in one thing you see in a lot of far-future science fiction: computers. Frank Herbert’s sci-fi saga takes place in the distant aftermath of a massive conflict between “thinking machines” and humans called the Butlerian Jihad, which ended with humanity outlawing all forms of artificial intelligence. In the absence of computers and AI, humans stepped in, leading to a profession of super-intelligent people known as the Mentats.But here’s the thing: Most screen adaptations of Dune downplay the Mentats a bit, including Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming movie, Dune: Part Two. During CCXP 2023 earlier this month, Villeneuve explained why, beyond Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), you don’t see a ton of Mentats in either of his Dune films. Here’s what that is, and how a third Dune movie might fix it.
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S54Midwinter  After, with their underwear still tangled in the top sheet, or just waking in winter, the stunned trees thrusting up their arms, he was always the first to leave the bed. Rising, he’d put on coffee. Or coming back, she’d pull him toward her with her legs wrapped around his waist, and when they fought he’d say, “Hey,” trying to reach her, and she’d say, “Hey,” and turn away, and a whole day could pass in silence, the vista of the cold city through the windows, voices and the smell of coffee rising from the flat below, their toothbrushes neck to neck inside their cup, resting against each other like someone whispering in someone’s ear. “Still friends?” he’d ask, in the middle of the night, when he would wake, and she’d move closer, and he’d move closer, and she would wake, the light in the room from the crescent of the moon moving somewhere in the sky high above them, carrying its dark half in its arms.
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S43S19What to Read If You Want to Reinvent Yourself  Whether you’re starting over or discovering a new identity, these works can help reset your perspective.A new calendar year frequently conjures up visions of radical self-transformation. This year, we tell ourselves, will be the one where we finally lose 20 pounds, take up gratitude journaling, or read 100 books. New year, new you! But then inertia slowly creeps in, inconveniences arise, and by June our New Year’s resolutions are a distant memory.
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S60Justin Torres's Art of Exposure and Concealment  According to the author Justin Torres, "backstory and exposition are tricks of the adult mind." That explains why his first novel, "We the Animals," which is told from the shared perspective of three young brothers in upstate New York, unfolds not as a narrative but as a string of vignettes. The semi-autobiographical novel describes a family with not enough money or status to satisfy its hungers for food, dignity, safety, or belonging. The boys, born to a white mother and a Puerto Rican father, are halfway feral: their father, who has an explosive temper, disappears for days at a time; their mother works the overnight shift at a brewery. Parental love is abundant but expressed complexly, through touch, hard and soft, through delirious predawn meat loaves."We the Animals" came out in 2011, rocketing Torres, then in his early thirties, to literary stardom. He'd graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop the year before and would go on to Stanford, as a Stegner Fellow, and the University of California, Los Angeles, as a professor of writing. After the novel was published, the National Book Foundation put Torres on its "5 Under 35" list of fiction writers; Salon named him one of the sexiest men of the year. A film adaptation was released, in 2018, to quiet fanfare.
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S6765 Cheap Things on Amazon That Are Amazeballs  Contrary to what you might see on social media, you don’t have to spend a fortune or dedicate hours to improve your daily life. Whether you’re gearing up for a camping trip or redecorating your home, bringing a spark of joy into your life doesn’t have to cost a lot. Take a look at these amazing wallet-friendly gadgets, and you’ll instantly understand why. No matter where life takes you, this collapsible water bottle keeps you hydrated. Its watertight seal prevents spills, and when you're finished sipping and ready to go, simply collapse it down and stash it in the side pocket of your bag. That way, you'll use less plastic and drink more water throughout the day.
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S29S53S33The 10 Most Anticipated Indie Games of 2024  Before we’ve even had a chance to play all the great indie games released in 2023, it’s already time to start looking ahead to what we can’t wait for in 2024. Ranging from titles from our favorite developers to out-of-the-blue releases from new studios, 2024 looks to be another incredible year for games that fall a little off the beaten path. Whether you’re looking for cooking sims, strategy RPGs, or action platformers, our most anticipated indie games of the next year run the gamut of genres.This look at the year ahead only includes games that have a confirmed 2024 release date, no to-be-determined games here. That means we had to leave out some games we’re equally excited about that may well launch in the next year, so in no particular order, consider these our honorable mentions:
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S65Did Marvel Just Casually Put an End to Its Messy Multiverse Saga?  The Marvel Cinematic Universe just spent three long years deeply entrenched in the multiverse, and not every attempt has been successful. Now, in 2023, the lasting legacy of the Multiverse Saga basically amounts to a few movies, Loki, and the ongoing animated anthology What If...? Technically, the entire arc could still come to a crescendo in the next Avengers movie, but the apparently untitled crossover movie is currently such an unknown that we wouldn’t bet on it. Avengers 5 could still be Kang Dynasty or even Secret Wars, but it could just as easily wind up being Avengers: Return of Thanos.
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S45Moments of hope and resilience from the climate frontlines  The change is happening so rapidly that even the time between major climate reports can be measured in tenths of a degree of warming. Between one landmark report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 and another in 2023, humans warmed the world by about 0.1C.Taking stock of climate change can be difficult in a year of such rapid transformation as 2023.
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S51A brief history of (linear) time  It’s a fundamental part of human nature to invent different ways of seeing the world. Our cultural, historical, and personal upbringing all play their part, providing concepts and belief structures that act as a lens through which we interpret reality. A small boy, hundreds of years ago, would look out into a dark forest and hear monsters prowling within. A medieval mother would open the windows and buy fragrant flowers because she thought that bad air was what sickened her child.Today, those born into a Western intellectual tradition (at least those of us outside of physics departments) most often see time as linear. Just as we all divide and sort the world according to us, time is no different. A life has a beginning and an end. In so much of how we understand the world, time is bookended by two final points. Everything exists along a line with “before” at one end and “after” at the other. At the middle of that line lies us — reading this sentence.
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S50How to Back Up Your Digital Life  Making backups is boring, but the alternative—losing your data—is the kind of excitement no one wants. I once lost 80 pages of a novel to a bad hard drive. I had no backups. While most of the world is thankful to have been spared those 80 pages, if that hard drive had lived, who knows? I might be sipping a mai tai on a Maine beach with Stephen King right now.Nowadays I back up my data at least three times, in three physically separate places. I know what you’re thinking—wow, he is really bummed about missing out on that mai tai. It may sound excessive, but it costs next to nothing and happens without me lifting a finger, so why not?
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S25From Blue Pacific to Indo-Pacific: how politics and language define our 'Indigenous ocean'  This is an edited extract from An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books)In September 2017, at the 48th meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, the political leaders of the Pacific agreed a new regional approach. They announced the way forward as the “Blue Pacific – Our Sea of Islands, Our Livelihoods, Our Oceania”. It was a remarkable moment of solidarity and ambition, charting a vision towards 2050.
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S31Watch NASA's Curiosity Rover Vlog Its Holiday Vacation on Mars  Like most humans on Earth this past week, NASA’s Curiosity rover took a vacation of itself a few weeks ago. After soaking up the Martian scenery, it beamed back holiday videos from its cameras. On Thursday, NASA published the tranquil alien footage.Among many things, the dawn-to-dusk videos show the shadow of the six-wheeled rover sliding across the rugged terrain. “When NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover isn’t on the move, it works pretty well as a sundial,” space agency officials wrote in a description of the videos. The rover also caught a cosmic ray.
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S32Amazon Just Quietly Added Stephen King's Most Chilling Sci-Fi Movie  The 21st century has been warped by a wave of hyper-interconnectivity, infecting all of us with an appetite for global information. The internet, pulsing like a collective organ for the human race, has given us unbridled access to knowledge in exchange for a new kind of existential anxiety. To know is to fear, and being plugged in all day has made us privy to every horror unfolding across the world at any given time. We’re the most overstimulated generation of human beings to walk the Earth, and every natural catastrophe, violent crime, and authoritarian demagogue gives us a glimpse at what the end could look like. The price of information is a front-row seat to every potential societal collapse, a feeling two of horror’s greatest visionaries amplified and twisted into a paranormal tragedy.
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S36S49These Rogue Worlds Upend the Theory of How Planets Form  When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw—more than 500 new stars in the constellation Orion, in addition to the familiar three in the hunter’s belt and six in the sword.In October, astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on one of the middle stars in the sword and identified another 500 or so previously unseen spots. The worlds are so small and dim that they blur the line between star and planet. It’s an ambiguity that plagued Galileo, who referred to the moons of Jupiter as both “stars” and “planets” in the same page of his 1610 astronomical treatise, and it continues to trouble astronomers today.
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S4S59O.O.O. Messages for Everyday Life  Thank you for your text! I am out of energy and unable to respond to your very reasonable question about scheduling dinner this weekend. Although you sent a perfectly normal request, I am currently rotting in bed while scrolling on TikTok because every small interaction feels too exhausting. For immediate assistance, please reach out via TikTok direct message. Somehow I am still able to respond to correspondence there.Thank you for ringing the doorbell four times while attempting to drop off a package that requires a signature! Although I did order that package for myself, I panicked that a murderer was trying to break into my apartment and decided not to open the door. This irrational fear is likely related to the fact that I am currently on the couch bingeing “Law & Order: S.V.U.,” which is inexplicably my comfort watch when I am feeling overwhelmed by life. I have not left my apartment in twenty-seven hours. Thank you for your patience and understanding. I plan to not hide in the bathroom during your second attempt to deliver the package tomorrow.
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S58Katarzynki: Poland's famous gingerbread from Torun  The Polish city of Toruń is famous for being the birthplace of Nikolaus Copernicus – also known as Kopernik – the astronomer who, as we say in Poland, "stopped the Sun, and moved the Earth". But Kopernik is also the name of a company producing the town's famous Toruńskie pierniczki (Toruń gingerbread), which is celebrating its 260th anniversary this year.Many Polish sweets are named after people (a chocolate bar called Grzesiek, or Greg, is a great example), and a type of Toruń gingerbread called katarzynki is no exception. These spiced biscuits, which are covered in chocolate and shaped like a cloud, were most likely named after Katherine of Alexandria, a 4th-Century saint and martyr who is honoured in the Orthodox and Catholic church on 25 November. In Poland, "Katarzynki Day" is often celebrated by young men who wish to get married and is devoted to fortune telling and divination rituals to reveal the name of their future wives. (Women have "Andrzejki Day", or St Andrew's Day, on 30 November.)
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S34Netflix's Biggest Sci-Fi Movie Exposes the Weakest Part of Star Wars  Zack Synder isn't subtle about being influenced by Star Wars, but he made one smart change to his galaxy.Audiences aren’t really digging Rebel Moon, Zack Snyder’s supposed answer to sci-fi epics like Star Wars. For better or worse, it is the quintessential Snyder movie, with oodles of slow motion and an R-rated director’s cut already waiting in the wings. The parallels between Snyder’s world and George Lucas’ are admittedly forthright, but comparisons to that galaxy far away can actually enrich the film where it needs it the most, and even highlight the one thing the Star Wars franchise still hasn’t gotten right.
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S57S62Iconic, Abandoned Stone Walls In New England Contain A Hidden Secret  Natural scientists have been working to quantify this phenomenon, which is larger in volume than the Great Wall of China. The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets, and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere — a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils.
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S46Readers Respond to the September 2023 Issue  In “An AI Mystery,” George Musser makes multiple references to “probes” that can examine the methods an artificial-intelligence model uses to produce its output. Does this not effectively solve the “black box” problem that is often cited by AI experts—that is, the problem of our inability to know how an AI reaches a certain conclusion? How is the hypothetical black box different from the inner workings of AI revealed by these probes?MUSSER REPLIES: Probes don't solve the black box problem on their own—they're just one research tool. They can reveal how groups of artificial neurons in a network encode higher-level information, such as parts of speech or positions on a chessboard. Researchers first decide what information they want to look for and then design a probe to detect it and translate it into a human-readable form. The probe can resolve whether a network is merely parroting its training data or recognizing the patterns within it. But probes reveal only the presence of information, not how, or even whether, the network uses it to reach a conclusion. Researchers must still trace how information flows through the system.
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S682023's Gutsiest Movies Revealed an Eye-Opening Trend  What happens when directors beloved for their films of male camaraderie turn a critical eye back on themselves?2023 was the year that dudes didn’t rock. In fact, it was the year that dudes found themselves being mercilessly held accountable in a slew of movies that took an astonishingly clear-eyed view of the actions of men in power. Whether it was the atomic angst of Oppenheimer, the banal evil of Killers of the Flower Moon, the impotent fury of Napoleon, or the capitalistic pressures of Ferrari, the dudes, in other words, were not all right. But the most interesting thing about these movies being made about how dudes didn’t rock, were that they were mostly being made by “dudes rock” directors. Let me explain.
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S16What was it like when life first became possible?  The cosmic story that unfolded following the Big Bang is ubiquitous no matter where you are. The formation of atomic nuclei, atoms, stars, galaxies, planets, complex molecules, and eventually life is a part of the shared history of everyone and everything in the Universe. Even though all of these things likely arise at somewhat different times at different locations in the Universe, largely dependent on the initial conditions such as temperature and density, once enough time goes by, they’re found literally everywhere. At least once, here on Earth, life began at some point in the Universe. At the absolute latest, it appeared only a few hundred million years after our planet was first formed.That puts life as we know it arising, at the absolute latest, nearly 10 billion years after the Big Bang. When the Big Bang first occurred, life was impossible. In fact, the Universe couldn’t have formed life from the very first moments; both the conditions and the ingredients were all wrong. But that doesn’t mean it took all those billions and billions of years of cosmic evolution to make life possible. Based on when the raw ingredients that we believe are necessary for the most primitive forms of life to arise from non-life, it’s reasonable to think that “first life” might have come around back when the Universe was just a few percent of its current age. Here’s the best scientifically-motivated story for how life might have first arisen in our Universe.
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S26A raunchy new 'Big History' tells the story of sex, but raises some unanswered questions  David Baker’s Sex: Two Billion Years of Procreation and Recreation condenses the story of the evolution of (predominantly) reproductive sex into 300 pages. That is quite a feat. The book is one of the latest additions to the popular “Big History” genre. First defined by Macquarie University historian David Christian in the early 1990s, the idea of Big History is that the temporal scale on which history should be studied is “the whole of time”. Its ambition is no less than to survey history from the Big Bang to the present, taking an interdisciplinary approach to its scholarship.
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S44S52S28Want to buy a home telescope? Tips from a professional astronomer to help you choose  While the unaided eye or binoculars can reveal much of the night sky, a telescope reveals so much more. Seeing Saturn’s rings or the Moon’s craters with your own eyes can be an “oh wow” moment.However, choosing the right telescope can be tricky. There are telescopes with lenses and telescopes with mirrors. Telescopes that are moved by hand and others that are electronically controlled. Telescopes also come in a range of sizes, with a trade-off between light-gathering power, portability and price.
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S40S47The Year the Millennial Internet Died  I remember the day exactly because I was one of seven staffers, in addition to many more permalancers, at Gawker Media who were laid off as part of a company-wide restructuring. I received a message on Slack, was asked to join a meeting in a nearby conference room, told that today, November 17, was my last day working for Gawker, and by the time I returned to my desk all of my accounts were disabled. For the company to “optimize and sharpen all the sites going forward,” executive editor John Cook explained in a memo—sites that also included Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, and Gizmodo—“shifting personnel” was necessary.In truth, I’d lasted much longer than I ever expected to. In my 18 months as a senior editor, I commissioned more than 150 stories and published young writers like Vann Newkirk II, P. E. Moskowitz, Donovan X. Ramsey, and Josie Duffy. When people ask me what it was like to work at Gawker, notorious for its sometimes unrealistic traffic demands on staffers, my answer is always the same: “I had no road map. I threw things at the wall to see what stuck.”
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