Every company needs transformational leaders—those who spearhead changes that elevate profitability, expand market share, and change the rules of the game in their industry. But few executives understand the unique strengths needed to become such a leader. Result? They miss the opportunity to develop those strengths. They and their firms lose out.

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How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O'Donohue on the Light Within Us and Between Us

“The structures of our experience are the windows into the divine. When we are true to the call of experience, we are true to God.”

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How T-Mobile Brought Collaboration to Customer Service

There are no rows of service agents robotically responding to random calls as quickly as possible. Instead, T-Mobile relies on colocated, collaborative teams of reps who manage specific accounts in a given locale, with a focus on autonomous problem solving. Reps get more-comprehensive training, managers get more time for coaching, and team members are evaluated on group performance as well as individual performance. In addition, teams are authorized and expected to manage their own P&L statements.

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What Skeptics Get Wrong About Crypto's Volatility

One of the leading arguments against crypto is its volatility. In the wake of the most recent downturn, critics have doubled down on this point. But the argument misses an important insight about how crypto assets differ from those in traditional finance. While different coins are meant to serve different functions, today they all more or less act as startup equity — and often serve as hybrid assets, treated as commodities, currency, store of value, and incentive for the validators that make a project function. Unlike traditional equity, crypto assets have liquidity and price discovery from the start. This does mean that crypto markets are more sensitive to signals and changes. The overlooked feature of this, however, is that price swings communicate important information to founders and investors, and builds previously unseen levels of transparency into the system.

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Adding More Data Isn't the Only Way to Improve AI

Sometimes an AI-based system can’t decipher the physical world with a sufficient degree of accuracy and the option of just adding more data isn’t possible. In many of these cases, however, this deficiency can be addressed by using four techniques to help AI better understand the physical world: synergize AI with scientific laws, augment data with expert human insights, employ devices to explain how AI makes decisions, and use other models to predict behavior.

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Can Your Sales Team Actually Achieve Their Stretch Goals?

Sales leaders have a deep-seated belief in using stretch goals to challenge a sales force. Stretch goals are correctly credited with guiding effort, promoting innovative thinking, energizing salespeople, and boosting persistence. Many successful companies have lived the virtuous cycle: Sales leaders set a stretch goal, the sales force surpasses it, and sales force morale and confidence gets a boost. But we’ve also seen, with increasing frequency in the last decade, companies set stretch goals that are impossible to achieve. What masquerades as a stretch goal is really wishful thinking or misguided sales goal padding.

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Stop Feeling Guilty About Delegating

Overriding guilt around delegation is not easy. Especially when you and your team are already time-strapped, it can feel misguided to invest in delegating. But remember this investment will unlock longer-term benefits: time savings and more capable, engaged employees. In this piece, the author offers five strategies to help you delegate more often and with less guilt.

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How Will You Measure Your Company's Life?

Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life has turned into a well-deserved best seller. Beyond drawing individual lessons from the book, corporate leaders should turn the central framing question on their organizations — asking how they will measure their company’s lives.

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What to Ask the Person in the Mirror

Every leader gets off track from time to time. But as leaders rise through the ranks, they have fewer and fewer opportunities for honest and direct feedback. Their bosses are no longer monitoring their actions, and by the time management missteps have a negative impact on business results, it’s usually too late to make course corrections that will set things right. Therefore, it is wise to go through a self-assessment, to periodically step back from the bustle of running a business and ask some key questions of yourself.

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Being a Good Boss in Dark Times

Senseless acts of violence affect all of us. Mass shootings, suicide bombers, assassinations — the emotions such events bring up are strong, even if our personal connection to the events is not. Feelings of sadness, pain, confusion, and anger don’t get checked at the office door. If you’re leading a team or an organization, how can you help manage the emotional culture of the people you’re responsible for?

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Fast Thinkers Are More Charismatic

The Research: William von Hippel of the University of Queensland and a team of researchers recruited dozens of small groups of friends for a study. They gave participants intelligence and personality tests and then asked each subject to answer 30 common-knowledge questions—such as “What’s the name of a precious gem?”—as rapidly as possible. Participants also rated their friends’ charisma and social skills. The researchers found that individuals who answered the questions more quickly were perceived to be more charismatic—regardless of their IQ, knowledge, or personality.

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Deciding Whether to Respond to Breaking News (or Not)

As leaders, there is no way to anticipate and be ready with a public response for every scenario. In this excerpt from her new book, Pfizer Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sally Susman provides a five-point framework of questions to help leaders figure out whether and how to weigh-in: Does the issue relate to our purpose? How does it impact our stakeholders? What are our choices for engagement? What’s the price of our silence? How does the issue relate to our values?

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Don't Focus on Your Job at the Expense of Your Career

The gap between what we have to do today and where we see ourselves in the future can be vexing. We’d like to advance toward our goals, but we feel dragged down by responsibilities that seem banal or off-target for our eventual vision. In this piece, the author offers four strategies you can try so that you can simultaneously accomplish what’s necessary in the short-term while playing the long game for the betterment of your career.

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The Best Negotiators Plan to Think on Their Feet

You can’t adapt if you haven’t prepared.

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Strategic Planning as Leadership Challenge

Company strategies often fail and this is frequently ascribed to unpredictable changes in the context. But most failures are the result of fairly predictable challenges, including one factor that is constantly overlooked: the role and impact of loss. New strategic priorities inevitably generate losses as people’s reality changes: loss of power, loss of competence or identity. Companies typically trumpet the benefits and ignore these losses, treating implementation as a straightforward technical challenge. Instead, they need to treat strategic planning as an adaptive leadership challenge, helping the organization come to terms with new realities and to appropriately grieve what is lost. Leaders should build an adaptive strategic planning process by: strengthening the “holding environment”; creating a formal moment to discuss losses; and mapping the affected groups and losses for each strategic priority.

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Riding the Marketing Information Wave

The phrase “getting close to the customer” now has a definite high-tech ring. Farsighted companies like American Airlines and R.J. Reynolds have gained a decisive competitive edge by building powerful customer information systems. Through such systems, these companies not only understand individual consumers better but also employ information to develop and market new products.

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Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters

Among the tests of a leader, few are more challenging—and more painful—than recovering from a career catastrophe. Most fallen leaders, in fact, don’t recover. Still, two decades of consulting experience, scholarly research, and their own personal experiences have convinced the authors that leaders can triumph over tragedy—if they do so deliberately.

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The Main Ingredient of Change

When I became Campbell’s CEO, in 2011, our soup sales in the U.S. were down and our innovation pipeline was virtually dry. More concerning, our people seemed content to rest on our past success. How could we get a 145-year-old company to embrace change? We started by pointing to the seismic shifts going on around […]

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How Banks Can Finally Get Risk Management Right

Banks have three lines of defense for managing risk — and then regulators are the fourth line of defense. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, all four failed. If banks want to manage risk better, one good place to start is making sure a Chief Risk Officer is in place and a board-level risk committee is in place. And the people on that committee should have real experience in managing enterprise risk.

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Your Corporate Purpose Changed. Has Your Strategy Kept Up?

Following statements by the U.S. Business Roundtable in 2019 and 2021, the basic purpose of the corporation has been expanded from maximizing value for shareholders to maximizing it for all stakeholders. The implications of this are that performance must now be measured along many more dimensions than before and that leaders have to help employees transition to a stakeholder mindset, broaden participation in strategy-making, and make sure that their strategies really do reflect purpose.

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Keeping Up with Customers' Increasingly Dynamic Needs

Over time, businesses have moved from a product-centric approach focused on performance to a customer-centric strategy meant to prioritize experience. But today’s dynamics are more complicated. Companies need to accept their customers as ever-changing, complex people deeply impacted by unpredictable external forces — an approach the authors call life centricity. Life-centric businesses are deeply attuned to the forces that most profoundly affect their customers’ lives, such as technology, health, and culture. They achieve relevance by bridging the interplay between these life forces and their customers’ everyday decisions. And they maintain that relevance by perpetually evolving their products, marketing, sales, and service experiences as life continues to shift.

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Absorb Their Uncertainty -- And Get Your People Unstuck

I am here to tell you, it’s a pretty depressing time to be a business professor focused on helping companies identify and capitalize on new growth opportunities. Last week, a financial services client set to send their top people to a session I was going to run on finding opportunities from disruptive innovations cancelled – at 3pm the day before! Although everybody recognized the importance of the workshop, they couldn’t help it – they were all called off to an urgent offsite meeting to figure out how the company was going to respond to the mornings’ headlines.

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The Condensed May 2015 Issue

Amy Bernstein, editor of HBR, offers executive summaries of the major features.

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You've Made A Mistake. Now What?

Anyone who has worked in an office for more than a day has made a mistake. While most people accept that slip-ups are unavoidable, no one likes to be responsible for them. The good news is that mistakes, even big ones, don’t have to leave a permanent mark on your career. In fact, most contribute to organizational and personal learning; they are an essential part of experimentation and a prerequisite for innovation. So don’t worry: if you’ve made a mistake at work, — and, again, who hasn’t? — you can recover gracefully and use the experience to learn and grow.

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Five Must-Reads for Tackling Complex Problems

What is a must-read book? For me, it’s a book that explores, in a compelling way, a must-know idea — one that altered my perspective long after I had forgotten the book’s narrative and details. The following five books are a small sample from a longer list of must-reads, but they have two things in common. First, they forced me to confront how superficial and inadequate my thinking was in assessing different kinds of complex problems. Second, they took the important next step of introducing more sophisticated approaches to tackling complexity, which I have been using ever since.

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Why Enterprise 2.0 Won't Transform Organizations

Recently I posted about my personal bet on analytics. I wanted to start here on a positive note. This week, however, I am playing the role of curmudgeon, and arguing that one particular idea is not going to become the next big thing. The “next small thing” in question is Enterprise 2.0, or the widespread […]

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Managing for the Next Big Thing

While countless high-tech companies have soared and then crashed in recent years, EMC has successfully anticipated one new technology after another. Here, CEO Michael Ruettgers talks about the managerial practices that have allowed the data storage powerhouse to see—and exploit—emerging trends before anyone else.

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Here's Why People Trust Human Judgment Over Algorithms

People think they learn faster than machines, according to research.

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When Uncertainty Makes Your Core Business Feel Like a Startup

For many years, I’ve been studying and researching how companies can drive organic growth and innovation. An argument that is central to this line of work is that one needs to use different disciplines when operating in an environment in which one has to make many more assumptions than one has knowledge (see McGrath RG, MacMillan IC. 1995. Discovery Driven Planning. Harvard Business Review 73(4): 44-54). I’ve always thought of these situations as ones involving a company getting into a new area, such as exploring a new technology, getting into a new geography or developing an offering for a new customer segment. I’m here at an executive course in which all the participants are keen to learn to lead growth and change, and in the course of this week have really looked hard at the challenges they are facing. In the context of this course, I’m having conversations that are suggesting a radically different application of these ideas.

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'Little luxuries': The affordable treats driving consumer spending

If 2023 was the year consumers helped stave off a recession with an unexpected surge in spending, many economists predict 2024 will be the time shoppers finally tighten their belts. That doesn't mean people will stop spending, say retail analysts. But it will change what they choose to buy. Amid factors including inflation and a slowing job market, global consumers are likely to move away from more high-priced purchases, like electronics, and focus instead on smaller, less expensive treats.

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A festive Filipino bread for the holidays

If you've stumbled upon a panaderia (neighborhood bakery) in the Philippines, chances are you have seen freshly baked pan de regla, the soft Filipino bread roll filled with a custard-like pudding that ranges in colour from bright pink to dark red. The so-called "pink bread" appears different from its cousins pandesal (Filipino bread roll) and pan de coco (coconut bread), with its vibrant-coloured filling. No other favourites from the panaderia look like this, which screams for attention and piques your interest.Pan de regla literally translates to "menstrual bread" for its distinct filling, but there are 14 different names given to it in different parts of the country. Depending on who you talk to and where they are from, pan de regla may have a Filipino name, such as ligaya (happiness) and lahi (race of a people), while in some regions, the bread has an English name, such as "everlasting" and "lipstick".

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10 of the best TV shows to watch this January

Jamie Dornan returns for season two of this comic thriller, but in a different part of the world. In the first season his character found himself in Australia, trying to recall his name and past after a car crash left him without a memory. He discovered that he was an Irishman named Elliot Stanley and – no spoilers for anyone who hasn't caught up with that season – what he learned about himself wasn't pretty. In the new episodes he is back home in Ireland, now in a couple with Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), the police officer he met in Australia. As they try to find out even more about who he is and was, they land in the midst of a dangerous feud between two families. The Guardian calls the new season "wildly fun", saying that with "more 80s bangers and Dornan doing ballet", it is "a hoot".The Tourist premiered on 1 January on BBC in the UK, and premieres on 29 February on Netflix in the US.

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Gladiator 2 to a new Mad Max: 25 films to watch in 2024

Anyone with an appetite for "foodie films" should prepare to tuck into the most lavish of banquets. Trần Anh Hùng's warm-hearted period drama is set in 1885 in the idyllic rural kitchen of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the so-called "Napoleon of the culinary arts". He spends his days preparing gourmet feasts for his friends and a few wealthy clients, with the invaluable help of a loyal cook, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) – and long scenes are devoted to the step-by-step preparation of their mouth-watering dishes. The film also serves up a side order of tender romance. The pair have been happily in love for years, but Dodin may have to take his gastronomy to new heights if he is ever to persuade Eugénie to marry him. (NB)Authorised biopics never stop coming at us, with mixed results, but this has two strengths going in: Bob Marley's classic reggae music and the film's star, Kingsley Ben-Adir, who has been convincing in everything he has done, in roles as different as Malcolm X in One Night in Miami, and one of Barbie's many Kens. The producers include Marley's son, Ziggy, and his widow, Rita, played on screen by Lashana Lynch. Instead of cradle to grave, the story focuses on the years 1976-77, when Marley was politically active, trying to unify divided factions in Jamaica, and survived an assassination attempt, all while preparing for his huge One Love Peace Concert in 1978. The director, Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), has said, "It was a period of great creative genius, but he was also dealing with a lot, including cancer", which caused his death in 1981 when he was just 36. Ben-Adir plays and sings in the film, but the songs we hear are a combination of his voice and recordings of Marley himself. (CJ)

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Gaza war: Israeli assassinations draw fiery rhetoric from Iran and Hezbollah - but regional escalation is unlikely

Two weeks ago, Sayyed Razi Mousavi was a ghost on the internet. He left no mark on search engines or in coverage of Iran’s military and the Middle East.But in the Syrian capital Damascus, Mousavi’s 30-year presence was an open secret. He had been the right-hand man of General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ branch for operations outside Iran.

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#JeSuisCharlie was one of the most viral hashtags in history - here's why it wouldn't happen today

It will be nine years on January 7 since a shooting at French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo killed 12 and injured 11 of its employees. The attack led to an immediate and unprecedented outpouring of solidarity around the world. Much of this support was organised online, using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie).The designer Joachim Roncin is credited with the first use of the phrase, which he posted to Twitter less than an hour after the attack started. It was immediately turned into a hashtag and within a week it had been used about six million times, becoming one of the most retweeted hashtags in history.

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'Designated contrarians' could improve nonprofit boards by disrupting the kind of consensus and groupthink that contributed to the NRA's woes

More than three years after New York authorities sued the National Rifle Association and four of its current and former leaders, the trial will begin on Jan. 8, 2024. In her complaint, New York Attorney General Letitia James alleges that outgoing NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre “exploited the organization for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors,” ultimately diverting over US$63 million from legitimate uses.

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With higher fees and more ads, streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu are cashing in by using the old tactics of cable TV

There’s one thing that television viewers can count on in 2024: higher fees and more commercials.The major streaming services – Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Max – have all announced rate hikes and new advertising policies.

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Trump's Iowa political organizing this year is nothing like his scattershot 2016 campaign

The state is home to the first-in-the-nation GOP nomination event, the Iowa caucus, which takes place on Jan. 15, 2024, at 7 pm. Trump, the former president, holds a resounding lead over his rivals. What’s new for Trump in this campaign is actually old stuff – a throwback to traditional caucus campaigning. I’ve observed Iowa caucus campaigns over eight cycles, and my 2022 book, “Inside the Bubble,” offers a close-up of the 2020 Democratic contest. Against that backdrop, it’s clear that the former president is taking cues from those who’ve come before him.

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The US invented shopping malls, but China is writing their next chapter

Along a stretch of the mall’s interior walkway, a cluster of parents and grandparents sat on chairs. They were looking through a plate glass window, watching a dozen 5- to 7-year-old girls practice ballet steps, carefully following their teacher’s choreography. A space initially designed for retail had been turned into a dance studio.From 1990 through 2020, large, shiny shopping malls embodied China’s spectacular economic growth. They sprouted in cities large and small to meet consumer demand from an emerging middle class that was keen to express its newfound affluence. These centers look familiar to American eyes, which isn’t surprising: U.S. architectural firms built 170 malls in China during this period.

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What is resilience? A psychologist explains the main ingredients that help people manage stress

The word resilience can be perplexing. Does it mean remaining calm when faced with stress? Bouncing back quickly? Growing from adversity? Is resilience an attitude, a character trait or a skill set? And can misperceptions about resilience hurt people, rather than help?But as with physical fitness, you can’t get stronger abs by just wanting them. Instead, you have to repeat specific exercises that make your abs stronger; intention alone just won’t do it.

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Literature inspired my medical career: Why the humanities are needed in health care

Irène Mathieu, MD, MPH is an iTHRIV Scholar. The iTHRIV Scholars Program is supported in part by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers UL1TR003015 and KL2TR003016.While there is a long history of doctor-poets – one giant of mid-20th-century poetry, William Carlos Williams, was famously also a pediatrician – few people seem to know this or understand the power of combining the humanities and medicine.

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Why does Claudine Gay still work at Harvard after being forced to resign as its president? She's got tenure

Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned on Jan. 2, 2024, less than one month after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down. They called it quits amid uproar among conservative lawmakers and several major donors regarding what they saw as Gay’s and Magill’s underwhelming responses to antisemitism on their campuses. In Gay’s case, there were also accusation of plagiarism.Tenure is university specific. If a tenured professor gets hired by another school, they lose those protections unless their new academic institution grants them again.

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70 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, public schools still deeply segregated

Brown vs. Board of Education, the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024. At the time of the 1954 ruling, 17 U.S. states had laws permitting or requiring racially segregated schools. The Brown decision declared that segregation in public schools was “inherently unequal.” This was, in part, because the court argued that access to equitable, nonsegregated education played a critical role in creating informed citizens – a paramount concern for the political establishment amid the Cold War. With Brown, the justices overturned decades of legal precedent that kept Black Americans in separate and unequal schools.

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Jan. 6 was an example of networked incitement - a media and disinformation expert explains the danger of political violence orchestrated over social media

Joan Donovan is on the board of Free Press and the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute.The shocking events of Jan. 6, 2021, signaled a major break from the nonviolent rallies that categorized most major protests over the past few decades.

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New antibiotic zosurabalpin shows promise against drug-resistant bacteria - an expert explains how it works

Researchers have identified an entirely new class of antibiotic that can kill bacteria that are resistant to most current drugs. Zosurabalpin is highly effective against the bacterium carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (Crab), which is classified as a “priority 1” pathogen by the World Health Organization due to its growing presence in hospitals.

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Should we believe Rishi Sunak's hint that the election will be in October? What the evidence tells us

So now we know. After weeks of speculation, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he is “working on the assumption” that a general election will take place in the second half of this year. That’s just a few months before the latest possible date of January 28 2025. The choice of an autumn election does make sense for Sunak and the Conservatives. With the polls showing the Labour opposition on a stable and substantial lead, it makes sense for the Conservatives to buy some time. The idea would be to try to make inroads into Labour’s lead before setting an election date.

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How Ireland's Nollaig na mBan evolved from a day off housework to a celebration of women's achievements

Growing up in west Kerry, Christmas was (and still is) not officially over until after Nollaig na mBan (Women’s Christmas) on January 6 – candles are lit in windows and decorations are not taken down until the next day. I’ve celebrated this since I was a child. My grandmother loved Nollaig na mBan, when my Dad would collect her around lunchtime and bring her to visit with her sister in Dún Chaoin, a village in west County Kerry. They would both dress in their Sunday best, my grandmother wearing the colourful beaded necklace she saved for special occasions.

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The curious link between animal hibernation and ageing - and what humans could learn from it

When the cold and dark winter is setting in, some of us envy animals that can hibernate. This long, deep rest is an example of how nature develops clever solution to difficult problems. In this case, how to survive a long, cold and dark period without much food and water. An article in a copy of the British Medical Journal from 1900 describes a strange human dormancy-like hibernation called “lotska” that was common among farmers in Pskov, Russia. In this area, food was so scarce during the winter that the problem was solved by sleeping through the dark part of the year.

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Israeli government riven with division over future of Gaza after far-right calls to expel Palestinians

After more than 90 days of war in Gaza, in which at least 22,000 Palestinians are reported to have been killed, Israeli officials have shifted their attention to what happens once the fighting has ceased.There has been considerable controversy over proposals from far-right members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The pair, who Netanyahu needed to include in his coalition to form a government last year, have advocated for Palestinians in Gaza to be resettled in countries around the world, making space for Israeli civilians to reoccupy the area.

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Can you really be allergic to alcohol?

Some people get allergy-like symptoms when drinking alcohol, but can you really be allergic to alcohol? Alcohol allergies are rare, with documented cases primarily involving a rash. However, what often perplexes people are the symptoms that mimic allergies, such as wheezing, headaches and skin flushing.

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Plants and bookcases in, living rooms and blank walls out: how your Zoom background can make you seem more competent

Working from home has made job interviews and starting a new role easier in many ways. You don’t have to worry about a missed train or spilt coffee derailing a job interview if it’s on Zoom – but you still need to impress your interviewer.Your home surroundings help show off your personality to the person on the other end of the Zoom call. Anyone who judged the bookcases of politicians and celebrities during the early days of lockdown will be familiar with this.

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Consumer confidence is rising amid gloomy economic news - here's what that means and why it matters

People’s confidence in the UK’s economic outlook improved towards the end of 2023, despite continuing to battle a cost-of-living crisis. Although it has strengthened over the year to December, “consumer sentiment” as this confidence is called, is still in negative territory.Indeed, UK consumer price inflation remains well above the Bank of England’s 2% target and interest rates are at highs not seen since the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008?. And, of course, the outlook for the UK economy in 2024 is also in the doldrums.

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Tom Wilkinson: an actor of great humanity who seldom played the lead but dominated the screen

Reader in Film & Television, Department of English & Creative Arts, Edge Hill University It is rare that the news of the death of an actor brings with it a pang of loss for something more than their craft, something perhaps more profound. But such was the public regard and affection for Tom Wilkinson that his death on December 30 at the age of 75 prompted much remembering of something greater than his brilliant acting: his unerring ability to convey a sense of humanity.

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Priscilla: a bold feminist retelling of Elvis' dark fairytale marriage

In director Sofia Coppola’s new biopic Priscilla, we meet the future Mrs Presley in 1959 when she is a typical 14-year-old all-American schoolgirl, hanging out at a diner and sipping a Coke. She meets the 24-year-old Elvis Presley during his military service and the two begin a wholesome romance of cinema dates and hangouts, despite her parents’ concerns over the age difference.Over the course of the relationship, we see Priscilla grow from girlhood to womanhood. She moves to Graceland. She graduates from high school. The two get married and have a child.

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Scabies: UK facing unusually large outbreaks - and treatment shortages appear mostly to blame

Scabies is an unpleasant skin infection that’s common all around the world. Outbreaks happen regularly – with an estimated 450 million cases occurring globally each year. But since the start of winter, outbreaks in the UK have been higher than normal. In November 2023 alone, cases were double the seasonal average. While there a probably a few factors that can explain this spike, treatment shortages appear to be at the heart of it.

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Ava DuVernay Wants Her Film "Origin" to Influence the 2024 Election

The filmmaker Ava DuVernay has a reputation for tackling challenging material about America's troubled past with such works as "Selma" and "When They See Us." "Origin," her adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson's best-seller "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," may be her most ambitious undertaking to date. "This breaks every screenwriting rule, every rule of filmmaking that I know," DuVernay tells David Remnick. Plus, the journalist John Nichols discusses what it's like to be drawn into a January 6th conspiracy theory, and former President Trump's legal defense in the federal case against him.The celebrated filmmaker is back with a challenging new movie intended to provoke a political response.

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The Many Lives of Vinie Burrows

When the actor and activist Vinie Burrows died, on December 25, 2023, surrounded by her family, she was ninety-nine. She had lived at least five lives. In the course of nearly a century, she had spent time as “one of the reigning divas of the Black theatre,” as the New York Post called her in 1996, but she had also been a representative at the United Nations for the Women’s International Democratic Federation, a self-made pioneer of touring solo shows (she counted at least six thousand performances), an antiwar protester with the Granny Peace Brigade, and, in her eighties and nineties, a newly flourishing muse of downtown theatre, which awarded her an Obie for Lifetime Achievement in 2020.Tiny (under five feet tall) and radiant, Burrows looked like a sparkler and sounded like a thunderstorm; she had a voice, rich and super-resonant, shaped for declamation. Her friend the playwright and performer Daniel Alexander Jones told me that she was “a living embodiment of the Black oratorical tradition,” connecting her thrilling, kettledrum timbre to that of Paul Robeson’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s. “When she would speak in a rehearsal room, if you put your hand on any wood, it would be vibrating,” Jones said.

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Why Some Academics Are Reluctant to Call Claudine Gay a Plagiarist

On Tuesday, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University, just six months into a tenure marked by campus unrest and controversy. After Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7th, a number of Harvard student groups released a statement blaming Israel for the violence. The administration’s initial response was circumspect; in a statement, the school’s leaders said they were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack.” After a public outcry, Gay released a follow-up statement explicitly condemning terrorism and distancing Harvard from the student groups. In December, Gay and two other university presidents were hauled before Congress to testify about antisemitism on their campuses. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay whether calling for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Harvard’s policies against bullying and harrassment, Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.” Shortly afterward, Gay apologized.But what ultimately brought Gay down wasn’t the furor over her testimony. It was accusations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, which has focussed in part on Black political participation. Rumors about Gay’s record had been circulating among conservative bloggers for months, but, as the national spotlight turned toward Harvard, media outlets such as the New York Post began investigating. In early December, the activist Christopher Rufo published allegations about Gay in his newsletter, including instances of missing citations and verbatim copying of other scholars’ writing without the use of quotation marks or attribution. In the following weeks, more apparent instances of plagiarism piled up. Gay has admitted to making errors, such as duplicating “other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” but she has denied claiming credit for other people’s research, and has said that she stands by her work. In any case, on January 2nd, she stepped down from her role, saying that doing so was “in the best interests of Harvard” and that it had been “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor.” (She will remain on the school’s faculty.)

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The Secret Fuel That Makes "Ferrari" Such a Triumph

Half of life is spent dealing with details: the numbers, the paperwork, the dozens of discussions upon which any shared activity, professional or private, is based. (The other half of life is dealing with the results.) Many filmmakers leave such practicalities behind, feeding escapist desires with alluring realms of fantasy. The better ones understand that those details aren't the antithesis of drama but its essence. Michael Mann has long been a director of detailsâso much so that they have often sat heavily and portentously in the action, plot points made flesh. His new film, "Ferrari," is similar but different; it's the kind of purified, rarefied film that major filmmakers make late in their careers, in which they get to the heart of the matter plainly and present their subjects unadorned and unamplified. In "Ferrari," Mann's meticulous attention to the details conveys how deeply he cares about the subject. The story seems more important to him than the manner of telling it or the application of a style, and the story's details, far from being mere signposts for the plot, emerge as the very essence of emotion, not least because of the stark force of their very nature: they're a matter of life and death.The action begins, on a bright early morning, with a delicious bit of indirection: a silver-haired man (played by Adam Driver) slips out of bed quietly, so as not to wake a sleeping younger woman (Shailene Woodley) who could be his wife, given that, on the way out, he stops by another bedroom and tucks in a sleeping boy (Giuseppe Festinese). Meanwhile, the phone rings for him in another house, where another woman, Laura (PenÃ©lope Cruz), answers and makes excuses for his absence. When he comes in, she greets him with a pistol. He is Enzo Ferrari, Laura is his wife, and he has just violated a long-standing ground rule: she won't question his philandering so long as he is home in time for morning coffee, in order to maintain appearances in front of the domestic staff. Now he has stayed overnight with his longtime lover, Lina Lardi, and their son, Piero, whose existence Laura is unaware of. From the start, Mann sets up the question of what makes a family, and the action suggests an answer: being ready to kill for the person you're ready to kill.

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How January 6th Will Shape the 2024 Election

Three years after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the fallout continues to shape American politics, both on the campaign trail and in the courtroom. With Donald Trump leading the Republican field, conservative media outlets and the political right are trying to rewrite the story of January 6th—what the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser calls “one of the most remarkable acts of historical revisionism in real time that any of us has ever seen in American politics.” Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris camp has decided to put the ongoing threat to democracy and the fear of violent political extremism at the center of its campaign; Evan Osnos discusses the President’s first ad of the year, which features imagery from January 6th. How will the memory of that dark day shape the 2024 election? The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer joins Osnos and Glasser to weigh in.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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Amazon Just Quietly Released The Most Divisive Sci-Fi Movie of 2023

Science fiction is designed, perhaps more than any other genre, to ask questions. Films like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey interrogate not only the very idea of “humanity,” but also question what it takes to possess it. Others, like Arrival and Minority Report, find very different ways to explore the nature of fate and contemplate how much authorial control one actually has over the story of their life.When a husband and wife are forced to consider the possibility of introducing a clone into their relationship in Foe, questions about love and human connection inevitably arise. The ambitious Garth Davis-directed sci-fi drama, which hit theaters in late 2023, takes a decidedly circuitous route to exploring its ideas. While the film received an overwhelmingly lackluster critical response when it was released, too, it’s already garnered a not-insignificant collection of defenders.

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This Quirky Keyboard Case Turns Your iPhone Into a BlackBerry

Have you ever looked at your iPhone and longed for a QWERTY keyboard like the good ol’ BlackBerry days? You’re not the only one.Phone reviewers Michael Fisher (you might know him as MrMobile on YouTube) and Kevin Michaluk (CrackBerry Kevin) are launching Clicks, a keyboard case for the iPhone 14 Pro, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max. The super long silicone case connects to a compatible iPhone via its port (Lightning for the 14 Pro and USB-C for the 15 Pros). Other nice details include backlit keys, a vegan leather backplate for grip, and passthrough charging (standard for the 14 Pro and fast for 15 Pros). Clicks also works with wireless chargers and some MagSafe chargers.

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Not an April Fool's Joke: This Xbox Toaster Stamps the Xbox Logo on Toast

We’re already familiar with the Xbox Mini Fridge, so now it’s time for the Xbox toaster. No, seriously.It’s exactly what it sounds like: Xbox made a functioning toaster that’s modeled after its Series S console in white. The toaster even has that massive circular vent in the front. The Xbox Series S always resembled a toaster anyway, so we’re glad Xbox is leaning all the way into it.

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This New Handheld Gaming PC Could Blow Asus' ROG Ally Away

MSI is the latest to jump into the high-end gaming handheld market, putting out a short teaser with glimpses at the design. Unsurprisingly, we already have leaks about the handheld just a day after MSI’s official teaser. Coming from @wxnod on X, we now have a better idea of what it looks like and what it’ll be called, as first spotted by VideoCardz.We’re hoping the Claw name isn’t indicative of the handheld’s ergonomics, but it does suit MSI’s dragon-heavy theme. From the early leaked specs courtesy of Geekbench, it’s clear that the MSI wants to take a big swipe at the competition with the Claw. Compared to the Lenovo Legion Go and the Asus ROG Ally, this could be one of the most powerful handhelds to date, thanks to the latest Intel mobile chips and a ton of memory.

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52 Years Later, 'Doctor Who' Is Bringing Back a Controversial Plotline

After the 60th anniversary specials reintroduced David Tennant back into the (increasingly tangled) regeneration lineup, it opened the doors to the opportunity for many, many Doctor Who spinoffs. With the bi-generation of the 14th Doctor (Tennant) and the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), Doctor Who basically soft-launched its own expanded TV universe — an idea that newly returned showrunner Russell T. Davies has been dreaming of for a while. No official spinoffs had actually been announced, so fans were left to speculate: would it be a UNIT spinoff? A deep dive into the mysterious Division? Another Torchwood miniseries? Or maybe the 8th Doctor would finally get his long-deserved spotlight?Turns out the first spinoff in this new era of Doctor Who, per a recently unearthed production listing, would be none of these things. Instead, it will reportedly be a “fantasy-action saga” featuring the Sea Devils.

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60 Weird & Deadass Cool Things on Amazon Prime That Are So Cheap

Sometimes the coolest products wind up being the weirdest ones. For example, this self-closing toothpaste cap is definitely weird... though is so brilliant and helpful, I qualify it as “cool,” too. If your curiosity is piqued by such a crossroads, read on, as every item I’ve selected for you to check out is just as weird as it is cool. And since saving money is always a good thing, I’ve also made sure that everything is cheap AF. You won’t have to bend over to clean (and massage) your feet when you have this scrubber. Suction cups on the bottom keep it firmly in place on your shower or tub floor, while hundreds of silicone bristles wash away grime with a few gentle swipes back and forth. Choose from nine colors.

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Why It's So Hard for Us to Visualize Uncertainty

The U.S. presidential election did not unfold the way so many predicted it would. We now know some of the reasons why—polling failed—but watching the real-time results on Tuesday night wasn’t just surprising, it was confusing. Predictions swung back and forth, and it was hard to process the information that was coming in. So not only did the data seem wrong, the way we were presenting that data seemed wrong too.

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7 Rules for Persuasive Dissent

Decisions formed from a diversity of opinions usually lead to better long-term outcomes. So, when you believe that your team or organization is missing something important, moving in the wrong direction, or taking too much risk, you need to speak up. Done effectively, dissent challenges groupthink, reminds those in the majority that there are alternatives paths, and prompts everyone to get creative about solutions. Six decades of scientific research point to strategies those without formal power can use to make sure their dissenting ideas are heard. First, pass the in-group test by showing how you fit in. Then pass the group threat test by showing how you have your team’s best interest at heart. Make sure your message is consistent but creative tailored for different people, lean on objective information, address obstacles and risks, and encourage collaboration. Finally, make sure to get support. Dissent isn’t easy but it can be extremely worthwhile.

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Visualizing Zero: How to Show Something with Nothing

Missing data, the number zero, and white space can all tell an important story.

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Firms Far from the U.S. Write More Clearly

They want American money, and have to work harder to get it.

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