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 S48What's the Value of 3 Million LPs in a Digital World?   Kindle libraries; troves of infinitely streamable songs on Spotify and Apple Music; scores of shows and films on Netflix, Max, and Hulu. Even the Criterion Collection is online now. Cultural archives now live on server farms, so much so that the value of physical media seems ever-shifting. While there's some benefit to itâthe ineffable experience of flipping through a book, owning DVDs of your favorite show to watch when it disappears from streamingâthe logistical issues involved in preserving massive archives of these things feels astronomical. Especially now, when many shows, comics, and albums aren't even released as Blu-rays, bound editions, or LPs.While physical media faces an increasingly uncertain and unsympathetic future, its defenders do all they can to protect what they see as an invaluable resource. Nowhere is that more evident than at the ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC), a New York-based nonprofit that keeps and maintains the largest popular music collection in the world.
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S63Senegal's small scale gold miners still use poisonous mercury: how to reduce the harm  These warnings are shown at thousands of lakes and rivers globally, as well as on numerous fish products.But eating mercury-laden fish is not the only source of mercury exposure. Even more dangerous is the inhalation of mercury vapours, which are released as mercury is used in the extraction of another trace element – gold. Miners inhaling mercury vapour can experience the same toxic effects as people eating mercury-laden food: limb tremors, blurred vision, loss of limb functionality, and even death. Globally, between 10 million and 19 million people work in artisanal and small-scale gold mining.
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S50The Best Smart Shades, Blinds, and Curtains  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDSmart shades and automatic curtains used to be luxury gadgets found only in high-end hotels or the homes of the rich and famous. Nowadays, they are more affordable and accessible than ever. You can measure up, order, and install them yourself. We have spent months testing to find the best smart shades and retrofit options to smarten up your regular shades, blinds, or curtains.
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S58ArChan Chan's Sweet-soy chicken wings from Hong Kong  In Hong Kong, there is no shortage of good chicken wing spots, from Taiwanese fried wings at snack stands and Korean fried chicken joints to all-you-can-eat Buffalo wings at American restaurants.Out of all the options, however, Swiss chicken wings are one of the most popular choices, available at cha chaan tengs – Hong Kong's version of cafes or diners.
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S61S67Netflix Just Quietly Released the Most Wildly Entertaining Action Thriller of the Year  Netflix hasn’t had a particularly great track record when it comes to the action comedy show. Medical Police and Teenage Bounty Hunters only lasted a single season, the dismal critical response suggests Obliterated will follow suit and even the almighty presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t stop FUBAR from flying under the radar. However, proving Michelle Yeoh can do no wrong, The Brothers Sun is the streaming giant’s first such show that could be classed as unmissable.Created by regular Ryan Murphy cohort Brad Falchuk and relative unknown Byron Wu, the eight-part drama stars Yeoh as Eileen ‘Mama’ Sun, a Taiwanese native who’s spent the last 10 years living the domestic life in Los Angeles mollycoddling her medical student son Bruce (Sam Song Li). But their peaceful existence is shattered one day when her estranged first-born Charles (Justin Chien) shows up at their front door.
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S3510 Years Ago, Nintendo Made an Embarrassing Flop That Exposed an Even Bigger Problem  If your resolution for 2008 involved exercising more, the odds were good that Nintendo’s novel fitness game flew off the shelves, becoming an all-time bestseller despite its hefty balance-board peripheral, which ballooned the price tag to $90. Fawning press coverage followed: Nintendo’s Wii Fit was helping children perform physiotherapy and entertaining Finnish soldiers, among other benefits.You didn’t need a business degree to greenlight a sequel. Wii Fit U, however, “only” sold about 860,000 copies, an enviable number for many developers but a scrawny little figure compared to the 43.8 million moved by Wii Fit and its enhanced re-release, Wii Fit Plus. What happened? Had the gaming community decided good health was overrated by the time January 2014 rolled around? Maybe some of us were mainlining Doritos, but the sequel’s struggles were emblematic of a broader malaise at Nintendo.
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S69Can Home Electronics Harm Your Pet? A Veterinarian Reveals What To Turn Off  Sirens, thunder, vacuum cleaners, and fireworks can wreak havoc on your pet. Subtler sounds — ones that don’t even register to human ears — may also affect them. But how can you know what your pets can hear, especially if you can’t hear it yourself? Understanding your pet’s hearing capabilities and the quiet cacophony of your home could help identify any nuisances.If something bothers our pet, it often shows up in their behavior. Katherine Houpt, professor emeritus of behavioral medicine at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, recounts to Inverse one instance she remembers about one couple whose dog “suddenly began to pace.” Worried, “they took it to the emergency room where they had a huge bill. But they noticed that as soon as they left the house, the dog was fine.”
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S56Trump's Supreme Court Blunderbuss  The Supreme Court will decide whether the Colorado court was right to bar the former president from the ballot. Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming history’s greatest litigation loser ever. But in the multifront war of Trump v. Seemingly Everyone Else, he has just prevailed in one small skirmish: The Battle of the Questions Presented.
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S62After 3 months of devastation in the Israel-Hamas war, is anyone 'winning'?  The 19th century German war strategist and field marshal Helmuth von Moltke famously coined the aphorism “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. His observation might well be applied to the tragedy we are witnessing in Gaza.Three months after the current conflict began, civilians have borne the brunt of the violence on both sides, with the deaths of more than 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza and 1,200 Israelis. Some 85% of Gazans have also been displaced and a quarter of the population is facing a famine, according to the United Nations.
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S68The 13 Most Exciting Video Games Coming Out In 2024  We’ve been through the best indie games of 2024, but what about the biggest ones? After combing through video game blog mines, developers’ tacit teasers, and the fine print on the back of the box, we’re bringing you the biggest and best video games of 2024 to sit on the edge of your seat to wait for. This is no world premiere, but instead a meaty list of the absolute most phenomenal games we’re holding our breath for. Everything from a new Star Wars, Final Fantasy, and a solo adventure for Princess Peach means it’s going to be another great year of video game releases that might just rival 2023’s incredible lineup.
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S43S54We Got Lucky With the Mystery Dog Illness  In late July 1980, a five-month-old Doberman pinscher puppy in Washington, D.C., started throwing up blood. It died the next day at an animal hospital, one of many pets that suffered that year from a new illness, parvovirus. “This is the worst disease I’ve ever seen in dogs,” a local veterinarian told The Washington Post, in an article describing the regional outbreak. It killed so fast that it left pet owners in disbelief, he said.The world was in the middle of a canine pandemic. The parvovirus, which was first recognized in 1978, can live for months outside the body, spreading not just from animal to animal but through feces, sneaking into the yards of dog owners via a bit of excrement stuck to the bottom of a person’s shoe. It quickly traveled across countries and continents, infecting thousands and possibly millions of dogs in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Essentially every dog alive at the time caught it, Colin Parrish, a virology professor at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, told me. And untold numbers died: A single Associated Press report from August 1980 mentions the city of Chicago losing 300 dogs by July of that year, and South Carolina losing more than 700 in just two months.
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S38An artist swaps her head with everyday objects in a musing on consumerism | Aeon Videos  Amazon Woman offers an amusingly surreal take on mindless materialism and instant gratification readymade for our age of inexhaustible online shopping. For the piece, the Vienna-based multimedia artist Anna Vasof creates a series of ‘head-missing magic tricks’ wherein she digitally trades her own head with parts of everyday objects, including a smartphone, a teabag and a vacuum cleaner. Filmed during lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021 – a time when dependence on Amazon.com was at an all-time high for many people around the globe – each vignette is entertaining yet also somewhat discomforting, hinting at the trade-offs inherent to all-consuming consumerism.
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S64Taxes on e-cigarettes: South Africa must strike a balance between economic arguments and health concerns  The 21st century has seen a massive expansion in the ways that people can consume tobacco and nicotine. Innovative new products include electronic nicotine delivery systems (“ENDS” or e-cigarettes) and heat-not-burn (HnB) products. Combustible tobacco products like cigarettes and loose tobacco are generally taxed at similar rates since the harmful behaviour tied to these products – inhaling tobacco toxins released by burning – is the same. But e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco and HnB devices do not burn tobacco. Nevertheless, they contain nicotine, which is addictive.
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S42S41S44S59Khowsey: a festive South Asian spaghetti curry  Khowsey is a beloved spaghetti curry in Karachi, Pakistan, with different dialects spelling and pronouncing it as khao suey, khoi soi, khowsa, khawsa and many other ways. It is championed most fervently by the Memon community, a Muslim ethnic group known for their affinity for trade and entrepreneurial prowess in the city. However, historically, it isn't a Pakistani dish at all.Memon businessmen and traders who had established themselves in British-occupied Burma (now Myanmar) in the 19th Century were forced to return to the subcontinent after the military junta regime in the 1960s. When they returned to Pakistan and India, they brought a version of flavourful Burmese Ohn-No Kyaukse, noodles with chicken in a coconut milk-based broth (often thickened with chickpea flour). When the Memon traders settled in Karachi, they made the dish their own by heaping on the spice and zest. They swapped out egg noodles for easily accessible spaghetti, and a served rich curry made with yoghurt and gram (chickpea) flour on the side to drown the noodles, before adding a decadent, fall-apart meat gravy on top.
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S40S66The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, January 7, 2024  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.© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
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S25What Could Tip the Balance in the War in Ukraine?  In 2024, the most decisive fight may also be the least visible: Russia and Ukraine will spend the next twelve months in a race to reconstitute and resupply their forces.On December 29th, Russia fired more than a hundred and fifty missiles and drones on cities and towns across Ukraine, killing more than thirty people in Kyiv alone, the largest number dead in the capital in a single day since Russia’s invasion nearly two years ago. The first days of 2024 brought more of the same: day after day of aerial bombardment, with the seeming aim of weakening Ukraine’s air defenses and targeting facilities that produce long-range weapons. This year is likely to be marked by exchanges of missile and rocket fire rather than dramatic, large-scale maneuver warfare. But the most decisive fight may also be the least immediately visible: Russia and Ukraine will spend the next twelve months in a race to determine which side can better reconstitute and resupply its forces, in terms of not only personnel but also shells, rockets, and drones.
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S4723andMe Blames Users for Recent Data Breach as It's Hit With Dozens of Lawsuits  It’s been nearly two years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and as the grim milestone looms and winter drags on, the two nations are locked in a grueling standoff. In order to “break military parity” with Russia, Ukraine’s top general says that Kyiv needs an inspired military innovation that equals the magnitude of inventing gunpowder to decide the conflict in the process of advancing modern warfare.If you made some New Year’s resolutions related to digital security (it’s not too late!), check out our rundown of the most significant software updates to install right now, including fixes from Google for nearly 100 Android bugs. It’s close to impossible to be completely anonymous online, but there are steps you can take to dramatically enhance your digital privacy. And if you’ve been considering turning on Apple’s extra-secure Lockdown Mode, it’s not as hard to enable or as onerous to use as you might think.
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S52College Football's Super PACs Produced This Championship Game  New rules let student-athletes accept endorsement deals, but big-name schools are exploiting the reforms.Fan support is a big reason the University of Washington Huskies and the University of Michigan Wolverines will play in college football’s championship game tomorrow night in Houston. That support isn’t just emotional; it’s also financial.
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S51NASA beams home cat video from 19 million miles away  For the first time, NASA has used lasers to send data from deep space to Earth — and the data for the history-making demonstration was a cat video.Deep space communication: Sending data from spacecraft to Earth or vice versa using radio signals can take a long time — NASA sometimes waits several hours for a single high-resolution photo from a Mars rover to fully arrive.
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S3625 Years Later, Marvel Fixes a Problem With Its Next Big Anti-Hero  The cast and crew discuss the new series’ approach to the MCU’s first Deaf and Indigenous hero.When Maya Lopez, aka Echo, first appeared in Daredevil #9 back in December 1999. She made a resounding splash. Introduced as a Deaf, piano-playing, boxing, Indigenous person whose hobbies included weekly theater performances and missions from Kingpin, Echo was a great female role model and foil to the blind Matt Murdock.
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S37Cosmic expansion is a given. Who inherits the cosmos is not | Aeon Essays  Artist’s impression of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteArtist’s impression of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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S33S70Hands Down the 50 Weirdest, Most Clever Things for Your Home on Amazon Under $35  Sure, Amazon is chock full of items that make us stop and think, “Is this for real?” But some are most definitely more clever and useful than others. If there’s something out there that can instantly add form or function to our homes or daily routines, we’re all for it. From unusual ways to add lighting to your home to an ingenious hanger that slows down banana ripening, here are the 50 weirdest but smartest things for your living space, all under $35.Two snack dishes are better than one, as proven by this double-dish snack bowl. Great for those moments when you’re munching on things with pits, seeds, or shells, the bottom bowl is designed to catch your snack debris, while the other bowl holds the main event. Genius.
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S2625 Years Ago, the Most Unnecessary Sci-Fi Reboot Accidentally Changed TV Forever  One of the greatest Philip K. Dick premises of all time is the low-rent vacation. Instead of the cost and hassle of going to Mars, you can have memories of a Martian vacation implanted in your mind. This concept, introduced in the 1966 short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” spawned one of the all-time great sci-fi movies, 1990’s Total Recall. But just like the false memories implanted into its characters, the vitality of Total Recall faded with each subsequent iteration. Between the 1990 movie and the bland 2012 remake, one Recall was completely erased from your mind: Total Recall 2070.Was this TV show any good? No. However, watching it 25 years after it debuted will show you the template for several popular sci-fi shows that followed.
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S191 in 3 people are lonely. Will AI help, or make things worse?  ChatGPT has repeatedly made headlines since its release late last year, with various scholars and professionals exploring its potential applications in both work and education settings. However, one area receiving less attention is the tool’s usefulness as a conversationalist and – dare we say – as a potential friend.Some chatbots have left an unsettling impression. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot alarmed users earlier this year when it threatened and attempted to blackmail them.
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S34The Best Sci-Fi Show of 2023 Just Dropped a Secretly Brilliant Twist  In the penultimate episode of For All Mankind Season 4, “Brazil,” the United States and USSR decide the time is right to reveal that there’s an undercover CIA agent and KGB agent working right alongside Helios employees and NASA astronauts at the Happy Valley Mars base. Smack-dab in the middle of the episode, base commander Danielle Poole has to deal with the fact that two people she’s been working with have been spies. What’s brilliant about this twist lies in the identities of these characters. In blowing the cover of two Martian secret agents, For All Mankind avoided one lazy trope that so many lesser TV shows might have fallen back on. Spoilers ahead.
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S55When Punk Rockers Become Parents  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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Cullen Murphy, an editor at large at The Atlantic who has written about a night in the Sistine Chapel and the Chagossians’ struggle to return to their island homes.
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S49During Pregnancy, the Placenta Hacks the Immune System to Protect the Fetus  When you were a child, it seemed like an ingenious plan: Splash hot water on your face and stagger into the kitchen, letting out a moan that could make angels cry. One touch of your flushed forehead would convince your parents to diagnose a fever and keep you home from school.No matter how elaborately planned and performed, these theatrics probably weren’t as persuasive as you had hoped. But new research, published in Cell Host & Microbe, suggests that long before birth, a similar tactic helps developing humans and other mammals put on a more convincing show.
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S46How Your Body Adapts to Extreme Cold .jpg) A bitter winter storm is sweeping across the north-east of North America this weekend, and is expected to bring significant snow to New York City for the first time in two years. Low temperatures around freezing are expected to last into next week.If this is making you miserable, it’s because you, like most people, overwhelmingly prefer hot places. That group does not include Cara Ocobock, a biological anthropologist at University of Notre Dame who is one of the scientists trying to understand how the human body adjusts to extreme cold. “I just handle cold much better than I can handle heat,” says Ocobock.
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S29TVs Need To Chill Out With All the New AI Features  Few things are as consistent as CES and TVs. It’s a given that TV makers will dogpile the technology show with the latest in display technology. You can trace that lineage from HD through 3D and to 8K, but no matter the year, there’s always some new capability with a buzzword to tout. Unsurprisingly, in 2024, it's AI.TV makers have long used machine learning to force all kinds of media to play nice on new screens, whether it was motion smoothing, where your TV inserts frames for a smoother image, or AI upscaling, where lower resolution content is forced into a higher resolution. But this year, AI is a headlining feature, not just a menu option.
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S13Why we should take competitive video games more seriously  Professeur en droit, Section de droit civil, Université d’Ottawa (Canada), membre du Conseil scientifique de la Fondation France Libertés, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa There’s no question about it for the thousands of League of Legends fans who flocked to South Korea last October to attend the Worlds 2023 championships of this ultra-popular game. The grand prize? US$2,225,000.
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S45S53The Anticlimactic End of Israel's Democracy Crisis  The Netanyahu government’s signature legislation went out with a whimper. But the forces behind it have bigger plans.On Monday, Israel’s Supreme Court issued arguably the most momentous ruling in its history: A slim one-vote majority of the justices struck down an attempt by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to curb their power. And yet, the country largely shrugged. After months of mass protest and talk of constitutional crisis, an event that was supposed to be seismic turned out to be a sideshow. External war had eclipsed internal war.
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