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 S22The Wild West of Executive Coaching   Annual spending on executive coaching in the United States is estimated at $1 billion. Yet information about coaching’s effectiveness is scarce and unreliable. No one has yet demonstrated conclusively what qualifies an executive coach or what makes one approach to executive coaching better than another. Barriers to entry are nonexistent—many executive coaches know little about business, and some know little about coaching. The coaching certifications offered by various self-appointed bodies are difficult to assess, and methods of measuring return on investment are questionable.
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S1To Sell an Unconventional Product, Tell a Compelling Story  Selling original or quirky products is often an uphill battle. But research that involved an analysis of quirky products sold by some 7,000 craft entrepreneurs on Etsy suggests that effective storytelling that helps people relate to such offerings can turn them into successes. This article shares three storytelling techniques that work.
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S2Boosting Demand in the "Experience Economy"  When Georgia Aquarium opened, in 2005, it was the biggest aquarium in the world. During its first year more than 3.5 million visitors came to see its exhibits, which feature some 120,000 animals spread across 60 habitats in more than 8 million gallons of water. “We didn’t have to do any marketing at all,” says Carey Rountree, the senior vice president of sales and marketing. “It was a case where you’re closing the doors and they’re coming in through the windows.” Demand was so great that tickets were available by reservation only, and waiting times stretched six months or more.
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S3New Ventures for Corporate Growth To meet ambitious plans for growth and diversification, corporations are turning in increasing numbers to new venture strategies. However, most new ventures fail. And even when they do succeed, they often take ten years or more to generate substantial returns on the initial investment of capital and management attention. The question is obvious: Given its uncertain promise, why is corporate venturing proving so attractive?
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S4What Big Companies Can Learn from Shark Tank  One of the hardest places to get capital to commercialize a great growth idea is within corporate america. Startups can tap the venture capital market. Corporations can go to the general capital markets by issuing stocks or bonds. But let’s say you are a general manager or director/VP level of a business unit or brand within a corporation. Your options for funding a corporate idea are very narrow — basically, you have to go through the often bureaucratic and political process of getting a budget from the managers above you. Many great commercial ideas never blossom because they get choked out by internal politics, risk avoidance, shorter payback horizons, or perceived lack of capabilities.
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S5How an Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker Is Transforming the Lives of Afghan Women  The author visited Afghanistan in 2003 as part of a U.S. delegation focused on improving the lives of women. Her idea was to start a business that would employ the women of that country to make a product she could sell in the United States. Some locally woven rugs caught her eye; she carried them back home and started looking for initial funding. She set up a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and began working to construct an entirely new and socially responsible supply chain.
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S6How Direct-to-Consumer Brands Can Continue to Grow  Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands such as Allbirds, Casper, Peloton, and Warby Parker have creatively found a weakness in the marketing citadel of incumbent brands. By using data gleaned from daily interactions with customers, these brands have been able to adapt how they serve their unique customer communities across a start-to-finish purchase journey. The best of them have parlayed that ability into a profitable business model applied across multiple channels and customer segments. But as successful DTC brands mature, they must recognize the need to evolve. The authors offer four principles for continued success: (1) Focus on deepening customer relationships, not just making comparisons with competitors. (2) Accompany the customer beyond the initial transaction. (3) Omnichannel is about value addition, not cost reduction. (4) Strengthen the core first; consider extensions later.
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S7Are Targeted Ads Worth the Privacy Price? This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The Future of Retail. Is the entire marketing profession headed in the wrong direction? My article (co-authored with Leandro Dalle Mule and John Lucker) in HBR’s December-issue spotlight on retailing deals with one tenet of marketing orthodoxy — that customers will respond well to targeted […]
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S8How Far Can the Surveillance Economy Go?  Three years ago the satirical website The Onion ran an article with the headline “Woman Stalked Across 8 Websites by Obsessed Shoe Advertisement.” Everywhere she went online, this fictional consumer saw the same ad. “The creepiest part,” she says in the story, “is that it even seems to know my shoe size.” The piece poked fun at an increasingly common — if clumsy — digital marketing technique. But today its gentle humor seems almost quaint. Technology has advanced far beyond the browser cookies and retargeting that allow ads to follow us around the internet. Smartphones now track our physical location and proximity to other people — and, as researchers recently discovered, can even do so when we turn off location services. We can disable the tracking on our web browsers, but our digital fingerprints can still be connected across devices, enabling our identities to be sleuthed out. Home assistants like Alexa listen to our conversations and, when activated, record what we’re saying. A growing range of everyday things — from Barbie dolls to medical devices — connect to the internet and transmit information about our movements, our behavior, our preferences, and even our health. A dominant web business model today is to amass as much data on individuals as possible and then use it or sell it — to target or persuade, reward or penalize. The internet has become a surveillance economy.
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S9Case Study: When Your Brand Is Racist  Shawn Lewis kept one eye on his laptop while footage of the protests in support of Black Lives Matter flashed across the TV. His family was asleep, but he was waiting for a press release draft from his colleague Angela that would go out tomorrow. Angela Howell was the head of PR at Cork Beverages, a brewing and distilling company based in Nashville, where Shawn was a senior brand manager. The release concerned the brand he was responsible for: Overseer Whiskey.
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S10Former Skeptics Can Be Your Best Spokespeople  In a series of conversations leading up to the U.S. presidential election, Christopher Graves, a recent Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio resident honoree for behavioral science, global chair of Ogilvy Public Relations, and chair of the PR Council, and Steve Simpson, chief creative officer of Ogilvy & Mather North America, dissect and debate the candidates’ communications and marketing strategies and techniques.
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S11The Sales Learning Curve When a company launches a new product into a new market, the temptation is to immediately ramp up sales force capacity to gain customers as quickly as possible. But hiring a full sales force too early just causes the firm to burn through cash and fail to meet revenue expectations. Before it can sell an innovative product efficiently, the entire organization needs to learn how customers will acquire and use it, a process the authors call the sales learning curve.
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S12Customer Complaints Are a Lousy Source of Start-Up Ideas  Consider this situation. A good friend of yours calls you one day to pick your brain about an innovative business idea. He’ll only consider pursuing this opportunity if you give him a positive review. This particular friend is unemployed at the moment, and he plans to invest most of his savings in the venture. So there’s a lot at stake for him.
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S13What's Holding Uber Back  As a consumer, I absolutely love Uber. The other week I was at a dinner in a relatively remote part of Singapore. Afterwards, the hotel concierge furiously worked three phones to get taxi cabs to appear for the 15 people who were waiting with growing impatience. I clicked three buttons, and my ride was there in 12 minutes. It’s simple, and it works beautifully.
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S14A Framework for Picking the Right Generative AI Project  Generative AI has captured the public’s imagination. It is able to produce first drafts and generate ideas virtually instantaneously, but it can also struggle with accuracy and other ethical problems. How should companies navigate the risks in their pursuit of its rewards? In picking use cases, they need to balance risk (how likely and how damaging is the possibility of untruths and inaccuracies being generated and disseminated?) and demand (what is the real and sustainable need for this kind of output, beyond the current buzz?). The authors suggest using a 2×2 matrix to identify the use cases with the lowest risk and highest demand.
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S15S16Collaborating with Creative Peers  A subset of creative professionals identify as “artists,” meaning they value three things: having a signature creative style so that their work bears a unique stamp; remaining involved in the execution of creative concepts rather than handing them off; and succeeding on noncommercial terms.
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S17Even Small Negotiations Require Preparation and Creativity Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re negotiating all the time. When you ask your boss for more resources, agree with a vendor on a price, deliver a performance evaluation, convince a business partner to join forces with your company, or even when you decide with your spouse where to go on your next vacation, you’re taking a potentially conflict-filled conversation and working toward a joint solution.
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S18The Right Way to Ask for Help at Work  We’re often reluctant to ask for help because of the social threats involved—uncertainty, risk of rejection, potential for diminished status, relinquishment of authority. But without support from others, it’s virtually impossible to advance in your career. And studies show that most people are surprisingly willing to lend a hand—if you ask in the right way.
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S19Negotiating Is Not the Same as Haggling There’s a popular misconception that in a negotiation you can either “win” or preserve your relationship with your counterpart — your boss, a customer, a business partner — but you can’t do both. People assume they need to make a choice between getting good results (by being hard and bargaining at all costs) or developing a good relationship (by being soft and making concessions to build the relationship). Thinking that way is dangerous, however, because you need both: You have to be able to stand firm and maintain important relationships.
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S20Finding the Balance Between Coaching and Managing Ask 100 people if they have good common sense, and more than 95% will tell you they do. Ask them if they are good coaches, and almost as many will say yes. Executives we talk to assume that if they’re good managers, then being a good coach is like your shadow on a sunny day. It just naturally follows.
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S21The Right Way to Present Your Business Case  You’ve already put a great deal of work into preparing a solid business case for your project or idea. But when it comes to the critical presentation phase, how do you earn the support of decision makers in the room? How do you present your case so that it’s clear and straightforward while also persuasive?
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S23S24So Your Boss Refused to Give You a Raise  While being rejected for a raise can be a blow to your self-esteem, it’s an opportunity for development, and not a step backwards. The author offers advice on how to maintain momentum after being denied a raise: 1) respond diplomatically, 2) unearth possible barriers and pressures, 3) propose alternatives, 4) master the art of authentic self-promotion, and 5) seek out additional advocates.
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S25The Secret Payoff of Meetings I miss office meetings. No one is more surprised about that than me. I’ve had days when I was in meetings from the moment I walked into the office until the moment I left. I’ve opened Outlook some days and wanted to pull my hair out at the day set out before me. I’ve had […]
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S264 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Dropping Out of College  You put in the hard work, got into college, and even have a few semesters under your belt. But now, you find yourself wondering — is it all worth it? Would it actually be better for you and your career to drop out? Consider these questions to help inform your decision: What’s more important for your career aspirations, a degree or experience? First, you must clarify what your long-term career aspirations are. Knowing what you want out of your future career will help you understand what you need to achieve those aspirations — a degree or experience. Sometimes doing things in the real world can help you learn faster and learn more than you might in the classroom. But many industries and roles still require college degrees to get your foot in the door. Will alternative training help you reach career goals faster? With options like online courses, vocational training, and apprenticeships gaining ground, there’s a world beyond traditional college that’s worth exploring. These courses often focus directly on the skills you need for certain jobs, and they can help get you into the workforce faster. But keep in mind that online training and certifications require discipline and a specific approach to learning that isn’t right for everyone. Is staying in college financially smart for you? It’s no secret that college costs a lot, not just in tuition but also in living expenses. We also can’t forget about the student loans that you may be paying back for years. On the other hand, research shows that those with college degrees generally earn more money over time than their counterparts. Ask yourself: Will the money you might earn after graduating make the costs of attending worth it? How is your mental and emotional well-being? Your personal situation, feelings, mental health, and well-being are all factors you should consider as well. If you’re thinking about leaving school for mental health reasons, first consider the support that might be available to you through your college. Even with help, if you determine that college, itself, is contributing to your mental health challenges, it might be valuable to take a semester off.
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S27S28S29S30S31S32S33S34S35S36S37Your Burnout Is Trying to Tell You Something  Research has established that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous factors that occur at your workplace. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers. No two experiences of burnout are exactly alike, and recovery requires that you pinpoint the unique workplace conditions that are contributing to your stress. One way to do this is to use your self-awareness skills to tune in and discover what your experience of burnout is trying to tell you — indeed, what it’s been trying to tell you all along. Here are some of the vital and lesser-known messages that burnout can reveal, and what to do about them.
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S38Making Peace with Your Midlife, Mid-career Self  Research shows that happiness bottoms out for people in their mid to late 40s. We might struggle with mid-career slumps, caring for both children and aging parents, and existential questions about whether everything has turned out as we’d planned. But Chip Conley says we can approach this phase of our personal and profesional lives with a different perspective. He’s a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, and he explains how to reframe our thinking about middle age, find new energy, and become more fulfilled and successful people at work and home. Conley wrote the book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age.
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S39Reinventing Your Career -- When It's Not Just About You  When you decide to change careers, the important people in your life have a stake in what you do, so it’s important to factor them in to your decision process. The challenge is to figure out how to honor your responsibilities to them without allowing yourself to be defined exclusively by what they feel you ought to be. To do this most effectively, Herminia Ibarra, an expert on career transitions, recommends a two-pronged approach that involves working closely with the primary “stakeholder” in your personal life to explore many different possibilities for yourself, and expanding the reference group within which you consider and evaluate possibilities.
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S40How SolarWinds Responded to the 2020 SUNBURST Cyberattack  In December of 2020, SolarWinds learned that they had fallen victim to hackers. Unknown actors had inserted malware called SUNBURST into a software update, potentially granting hackers access to thousands of its customers’ data, including government agencies across the globe and the US military. General Counsel Jason Bliss needed to orchestrate the company’s response without knowing how many of its 300,000 customers had been affected, or how severely. What’s more, the existing CEO was scheduled to step down and incoming CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna had yet to come on board. Bliss needed to immediately communicate the company’s action plan with customers and the media. In this episode of Cold Call, Harvard Business School Professor Frank Nagle discusses SolarWinds’ response to this supply chain attack in the case, “SolarWinds Confronts SUNBURST.”
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S41How Companies Can Help Universities Train Tech Workers  Companies across the economy require new tech workers who have the training in state-of-the art technologies so they can hit the ground running. A model that has been applied at universities such as Arizona State, the University of California San Diego, and Oregon State, and Purdue can help address this need. It is based on five principles.
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S42Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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S43Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language  The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
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S44Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?  The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
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S45The hacks that can help to keep your home warmer  Things came to a head last winter. Patsy Pope, a pensioner who lives alone in London, UK, could feel the cold air on her legs and back hampering her efforts to keep warm. The draughts were leaking in from around the windows in her council flat. Outside, temperatures fell to around 0C (32F) that December but the cost of heating had rocketed, due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.Pope tried wrapping up as best she could but was still miserably cold. So she called her local authority. They were soon on site with draught blockers and foil backing for her six radiators, the idea being that these reflect heat back into the room rather than letting it escape through the external walls.
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S46Visualising the Great Pacific Garbage Patch  Over a thousand miles from land in the central North Pacific Ocean, the boat captain and oceanographer Captain Charles Moore puzzled over the source of the litter."It can't be a trail of breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretel leading me home," he recalled thinking. "This has got to be a larger phenomenon."
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S47How to launch a Chinese smartphone in Mexico  Antonio Tercero is country manager in Mexico for Infinix, a Chinese-owned smartphone brand that launched in Latin America in 2022. For decades, Infinix’s parent company, Transsion, has been one of the top-selling smartphone companies in countries like Nigeria, Tunisia, and Pakistan. Now, Tercero is leading Infinix’s expansion in Mexico, a 127-million-person market that’s increasingly appealing for Chinese brands. As Huawei has reduced its market share in the country since 2021, brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Honor have stepped in.In Africa, our success is mostly based on our online sales because the brand is so well known there and has been so for years. Since we’re just introducing our phones to the Mexican market, we’re focusing on partnering with large physical stores nationwide so potential users can get to know our products firsthand.
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S48The New Story of the Milky Way's Surprisingly Turbulent Past  The latest star maps are rewriting the story of our Milky Way, revealing a much more tumultuous history than astronomers suspectedAstronomer Bob Benjamin has spent the past 20 years trying to figure out what the Milky Way looks like. The work isn't easy, because we're inside the galaxy and can't see it from the outside, but astronomers have ingenious workarounds, and Benjamin thinks “it's a knowable thing.” He carries in his mind a picture of what astronomers have been able to put together so far: a dense, barred center embedded in a layered disk of gas and stars, some of which pile up into arms that spiral through the disk, all encased in a sparse spherical halo of stars.
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S49A Quantum Clock That Is Ticking Down, the Turbulent Milky Way and Dinosaur Lives  One of the biggest mysteries of the universe is why there is a universe at all. According to particle physics, the big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and they should have immediately canceled each other out. But here we are! We're lucky enough to exist, and we get to live in a time when fundamental questions can be asked and potentially answered scientifically. Physicist Luke Caldwell narrates how he and his colleagues made the most precise measurement ever of a property of electrons that could help explain the existence of everything.It's tempting to think that our big old human brains are uniquely able to learn, store information, and use know-how to make decisions and solve problems. But bizarrely, recent research suggests that even rudimentary clumps of nonbrain cells—from the skin or the heart, for instance—can remember experiences and act on their knowledge. This work is leading to new ideas about the evolutionary origins of intelligence, as author Rowan Jacobsen writes. The field, called basal cognition, is full of startling examples that may change how you think about thinking.
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S50Why Does Salting Roads Make Them Safer?  How salt makes roads safer in winter—and why new methods could be better for the environmentIf you live in a region where winter weather is a regular hazard, you are likely used to pouring salt on your sidewalks or watching trucks douse the streets in it. But how does it work? And how much salt do humans dump onto our planet’s surface? The second question is easier to answer: a lot. We covered streets and sidewalks with nearly 23 million metric tons of salt across the U.S. in 2018 alone.
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S51Ailing Peregrine Moon Lander Is on Course to Crash into Earth  Peregrine will likely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, the moon lander’s builder has saidA timelapse view of the launch of Astrobotic's Peregrine mission from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Jan. 8, 2024. After suffering an anomaly shortly after launch, the Peregrine spacecraft is now bound for a fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, where it will likely burn up.
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S52Four New Octopus Species Discovered in the Deep Sea  Enigmatic octopuses that have been newly discovered in the waters off Costa Rica add to a growing registry of deep-sea dwellersA mother octopus broods her eggs near a small outcrop of rock unofficially called El Dorado Hill. When a female octopus broods (which can be a timespan of multiple years), she does not eat and dies around the same time her eggs hatch.
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S53Time Management Hacks for Hybrid Workers | Michael Parke  Wharton’s Michael Parke talks about time management hacks and setting boundaries for yourself in the post-pandemic era, where the traditional workday is being redefined. This episode is part of a series on getting a “Fresh Start” this new year.Dan Loney: The dynamics of time management are rooted in our history as a country, as a culture. How do you think it has developed with the pandemic and all that we’ve experienced over the last few years?
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S54Yara Shahidi: Let curiosity lead  Don't second-guess what "distracts" you, says actor-producer Yara Shahidi; that's your curiosity coming through. The star of hit shows like "black-ish" and "grown-ish" tells how she learned to spot clues to her own future — and how you can, too.
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S55Isabella Kirkland: The beauty of wildlife -- and an artistic call to protect it  "I think of my paintings as alarm clocks," says artist Isabella Kirkland. "They're reminders of what's at stake; the only problem is we keep pushing the snooze button." Investigating humanity's relationship to nature, she shares work that takes a creative stand against ecological despair — and quietly urges climate action through permanent images of vanishing wildlife.
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S56The Sad Truth of the FTC's 'Historic' Privacy Win  The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement last week with an American data broker known to sell location data gathered from hundreds of phone apps to the US government, among others. According to the agency, the company ignored in some cases the requests of consumers not to do so, and more broadly failed to ensure that users were notified of how their harvested data would be used.News that the settlement requires the company, formerly known as X-Mode, to stop selling people's “sensitive location data” was met with praise from politicians calling the outcome “historic” and reporters who deemed the settlement a “landmark” win for the American consumer. This “major privacy win,” as one outlet put it, will further require the company, rebranded as Outlogic after its activities were exposed, to delete all of the data it has illicitly gathered so far.
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S57The Internet Couldn't Save Vivek Ramaswamy  At a ritzy boutique hotel on Monday night in Des Moines, Iowa, dozens of young voters braved subzero temperatures to see Vivek Ramaswamy deliver what they would soon learn to be his final speech as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.After thanking his team, campaign volunteers, and, of course, everyone watching the livestream, Ramaswamy suspended his campaign. "We've looked at it every which way and I think that it's true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight," Ramaswamy told his room of supporters. "There is no path for me to be the next president absent things we don't want to see in this country."
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S58Even After a Landslide Victory, Trump Supporters Claim Iowa Caucus Was Rigged  Despite the overwhelming scale of former president Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have already claimed that the vote was rigged because he lost one single county.“After it was reported that President Trump won every county in Iowa tonight, Democrat shenanigans ensued and now it’s being reported that Johnson County in Iowa, which is a Biden +40 county, flipped to Nikki Haley by ONE VOTE,” Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has been embraced by Trump, posted on X in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
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S59A Flaw in Millions of Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm GPUs Could Expose AI Data .jpg) As more companies ramp up development of artificial intelligence systems, they are increasingly turning to graphics processing unit (GPU) chips for the computing power they need to run large language models (LLMs) and to crunch data quickly at massive scale. Between video game processing and AI, demand for GPUs has never been higher, and chipmakers are rushing to bolster supply. In new findings released today, though, researchers are highlighting a vulnerability in multiple brands and models of mainstream GPUs—including Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD chips—that could allow an attacker to steal large quantities of data from a GPU’s memory.The silicon industry has spent years refining the security of central processing units, or CPUs, so they don’t leak data in memory even when they are built to optimize for speed. However, since GPUs were designed for raw graphics processing power, they haven’t been architected to the same degree with data privacy as a priority. As generative AI and other machine learning applications expand the uses of these chips, though, researchers from New York–based security firm Trail of Bits say that vulnerabilities in GPUs are an increasingly urgent concern.
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S60The Emmys Proved Streaming Changed TV for the Better  This year’s Emmys marked the event’s 75th anniversary. As part of the festivities, aired Monday night, the ceremony held cast mini-reunions for some of television’s biggest shows: Cheers, The Arsenio Hall Show, Grey’s Anatomy, Martin, even Game of Thrones. It was a testament to the way TV has infiltrated popular culture—and the ways streaming has altered that influence forever, giving space to weird, genreless shows that might have floundered in prime time.Take, for example, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That show has been running for nearly 20 years; it’s TV’s longest-running live-action sitcom. Yet, when the gang—Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito—took the stage during the Emmys telecast, it wasn’t to receive an award, it was to present one. During their pre-presentation bit, they asked around if anyone had an Emmy. DeVito was the only one who said yes. That was for Taxi in 1981. “Rhea [Perlman] won four for Cheers,” DeVito cracked.
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S61The 45 Best Shows on Disney+ Right Now  Disney+, if you didn’t know, isn’t just for kids. With its ownership of the Lucasfilm brand and the Marvel titles, the streaming service also offers plenty of grown-up content in its bid to compete with Netflix and Amazon—and we’re not just talking movies. Since launching the service, Disney has used the name recognition of Star Wars and Marvel to launch scores of TV shows, from The Mandalorian to Loki. In the list below, we’ve collected the ones we think are the best to watch, from those franchises and beyond.Want more? Head to our best movies on Disney+ list if you’re looking for movies, and our guides on the best shows on Netflix and best shows on Apple TV+ to see what Disney’s rivals have to offer. Don’t like our picks, or want to suggest your own? Head to the comments below and share your thoughts.
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S62The 'Sex Update' for 'Cult of the Lamb' Is a Good Sign for Horny Video Games  The pitch is straightforward: What if this video game had sex? Fortnite needs sex. Among Us needs sex. Every game deserves a sex update, so the meme goes. In November, Cult of the Lamb, Massive Monster’s adorable, animal-themed roguelike about building and maintaining a cult, got in on the action: “We will add sex to the game if we hit 300k followers by the end of the year,” the game’s official account tweeted, in the style of the meme’s pseudo-horny forefathers. Now they’re making good on that promise.Video games have long served as an amorous playground. Some incorporate sex and romance directly into gameplay, as in BioWare’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. Others offer exploitation and titillation, like hiring sex workers in the Grand Theft Auto series. Still more offer mundane, mechanically sound methods: The Sims lets players “woohoo” (within the privacy of a rocking bed) to have babies. As games, and the ways people play them, evolve, players and developers have built entire communities around the delightful idea that games can be harmlessly horny. Taking that one step further to build off a meme, however—that’s where Massive Monster shines.
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S63How the neuroscience of fandom can strengthen company culture  People sometimes say a diverse country like the United States is a “melting pot” for culture, but this metaphor suggests blending everyone’s identities into a big stew of sameness. Instead, I prefer the metaphor of a “garden salad” that’s filled with all kinds of vegetables and, when tossed together, create a dynamic explosion of flavor and texture in your mouth. A garden salad honors the uniqueness of each ingredient (or in this case, person), while also recognizing that putting it all together makes the whole better than the sum of its parts. And incidentally, research has found that talking about vegetables can actually help us let go of our biases.Two psychologists, Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiske, conducted a study where they asked white participants to look at Black faces and sort them into one of two groups by determining whether they were older than 21 years old, or younger. When participants did this, Wheeler and Fiske saw activity spike in the participants’ amygdala, the area of the brain that’s associated with fear and feelings of threat. However, when the white participants were asked to imagine whether the people in the photos preferred a certain type of vegetable—broccoli or carrots—they didn’t show the same spike in their amygdala. Wheeler and Fiske argue that this is because they saw the person pictured as an individual, with their own tastes and preferences, rather than as a member of a monolithic group. In other words, when we think about someone as an individual, rather than through the lens of their group identity, this helps circumvent the kinds of biases that can activate the fear center of our brain.
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S64This virtual 3D model lets you wander the streets of ancient Rome  During the 1930s, the city of Rome asked Italian architect and archaeologist Italo Gismondi to build a 1:250 scale replica of the ancient city. His model, which was initially only planned to be shown at the 1937-1938 Mostra Augustea della Romanità exhibit, proved so popular with visitors that it was later put on permanent display at the Museum of Roman Civilization.It was in this museum, in October 1976, that Bernard Frischer first saw Gismondi’s work with his own eyes. An archaeologist in training who had come to Italy as part of a postdoctoral fellowship in Classical Studies, Frischer already knew of the model, but descriptions failed to do the real thing justice. “I was blown away by its detail, its massive size (its largest dimension is about 60 feet), and the awesome sense it gave you of the unique grandeur of the Eternal City at the peak of its urban development in late antiquity,” he tells Big Think. As Frischer marveled at miniature versions of the Colosseum and the Pantheon, he daydreamed of turning Gismondi’s physical model into a virtual, life-size version of the city — one that would actually allow him to walk around in it.
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S65Surprising discovery challenges key principle of modern cosmology  At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, researchers announced a surprising discovery — one that will add to a growing list of astronomical anomalies that run afoul of one of the guiding principles of cosmological research.Humanity has long imagined itself to be somehow special in the Universe: The Bible told us we have dominion over other living things, while the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that the Earth lies at the center of the Universe.
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S66How we remember last weekend  One of the most difficult questions for the science of memory deals with the most obvious fact about memories: We can, well, recollect them. The problem is that no one knows exactly how we call to mind, and with such ease, that party last weekend, with all the samba dancing and clinking of ice in glasses, the scent of circulating hors d’oeuvres, the jolt up the spine from catching a lover’s eye across a crowded room. All these emotional and sensory elements, we know, are registered in distinct areas of the brain—but how is it that we can reminisce and conjure them all up at once, recalling the mental event as a single experience?A group of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, have found a promising mechanism that may explain not just how recollection works, but also, more broadly, conscious experience itself.
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S67Apple Watch redesigned without blood oxygen monitoring to avoid import ban  Apple has developed a backup plan for if the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 are import banned again. As it currently appeals the US International Trade Commission's (ITC's) ruling that its watches violate a patent owned by Masimo, Apple has come up with a software workaround that strips its current smartwatches of their controversial blood oxygen monitoring capabilities.
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S68S69You had us at "friendly alien space spider": Netflix drops Spaceman trailer  Some people were not pleased when Netflix and other streaming platforms began making feature films. But in an industry in which smaller or medium films tend to be squeezed out in favor of big-budget fare, there's a solid argument to be made that Netflix and others could help fill that niche. That certainly seems to be the case with Netflix's forthcoming sci-fi film, Spaceman, judging by the official trailer. Adam Sandler stars as an astronaut who is not coping well with the isolation and disintegration of his marriage while on an eight-month solo mission and strikes up a friendship with a friendly alien space spider who wants to help him work through his emotional distress. Honestly, Netflix had us at friendly alien space spider.
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S70Why I hope the Atari 400 Mini will bring respect to Atari's most underrated platform  Last week, UK-based Retro Games, Ltd. announced a mini console version of the Atari 400 home computer, first released in 1979. It's called "THE400 Mini," and it includes HDMI video output, 25 built-in games, a USB version of Atari's famous joystick, and it retails for $120. But this release means something more to me personally because my first computer was an Atari 400—and as any other Atari 8-bit computer fan can tell you, the platform often doesn't get the respect it should. This will be the first time Atari's 8-bit computer line has received a major retro-remake release.
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