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S5S7Taupo: 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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S8Message 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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S9Did 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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S10Happy Grundsaudaag! The ancient Germanic history of Groundhog Day  Every 2 February since at least 1886, people have been gathering in the Pennsylvanian town of Punxsutawney to watch a groundhog – a furry rodent – crawl out of a hole after its winter sleep. If the day is sunny and the groundhog sees its own shadow, there will be six more weeks of cold weather, according to legend – but if it's a cloudy day, and there is no shadow, spring has arrived. Across the US, the quirky tradition is known as Groundhog Day. But among its original celebrants, it has a different name: Grundsaudaag.At first glance, Grundsaudaag may look like an ancient German word. Instead, it is actually an example of Pennsylvania Dutch, a Germanic language that emerged in the 18th Century and is now mostly used by the Amish and Mennonite religious communities. Due to the rapid growth of the Amish population, which numbers almost 380,000 people and for whom the language has a special spiritual and cultural significance, this relatively little-known language is in fact thriving and growing.
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S11S12S13S14S15S16Elon Musk's Neuralink has implanted its first device in a human being  Neuralink, Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company, has implanted its first device in a human patient, according to posts on X by Musk.The device, called Telepathy, is a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to allow users to directly control computers and phones with pure thought. The initial use case for the device will be to assist people who have lost the use of their limbs, and it could one day be revolutionary for conditions that block speech.
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S17S18The Theater Director Who Likes to Go Too Far  “I would not say that my art is dark,” Milo Rau tells me, and I burst out laughing. We are sitting in the office space of his theater in Ghent, Belgium, surrounded by posters of his work. In the past decade, Rau has directed plays about a homophobic murder (La Reprise), the unexplained suicide of two parents and their children (Familie), and the exploitation of the developing world (The Congo Tribunal). The Swiss-born director’s best-known work, 2018’s Lam Gods, re-created events depicted on a celebrated 15th-century altarpiece that is on display at the cathedral across the square from the theater. Does the poster for that production show a silken apple, like the one held by Eve? Or a group of angels? Some prosperous Belgian burghers, perhaps? No, I am conducting this interview while under the gaze of a sheep’s head bloodily severed from its body. Rau is still faintly annoyed that he wasn’t allowed to slaughter the animal live onstage, thanks to animal-cruelty rules.I had traveled to Ghent—a pleasant city of fewer than 300,000 people in the predominantly Flemish-speaking part of Belgium—to meet a man regularly described as “the most controversial director in theater.” This week, Rau is coming to the U.S. for an event dedicated to raising the profile of women composers.
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S19Why California and Oregon Broke With the CDC  Two blue states acknowledge that health precautions need to be balanced with other priorities. Recently, California surprised the public-health world by easing the state’s recommendations for asymptomatic people who test positive for COVID. The state previously urged them to isolate for five days to avoid infecting others. In a January memo, though, California Public Health Officer Tomás Aragón declared that “there is no infectious period for the purpose of isolation or exclusion.”
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S20Tinder for Baby Names Exists  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 or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Christina McCausland, a copy editor who works on this newsletter and has previously written about what successful memoirs accomplish.
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S21The  Watching the real Nikki Haley spar with a fake Donald Trump was awkward—and not very funny.Last night, audiences who tuned into Saturday Night Live to see The Bear star and Emmy winner Ayo Edebiri host for the first time were greeted with an awkward surprise: The sight of the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, trying her best to seem at ease opposite a fake Donald Trump. Haley popped up in the cold open, playing herself as a “concerned South Carolina voter” attending a CNN town hall with James Austin Johnson’s Trump. “Why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?” she asked. In response, Johnson started rambling about Nancy Pelosi—mistaking the former South Carolina governor for the Democratic congresswoman—which Haley followed up by asking “Donald” to take a mental-competency test.
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S22The 'Southern Lady' Who Beat the Courthouse Crowd  One woman’s crusade for democratic participation and political efficacy in the face of powerful institutionsIn 1976, a little southern lady “dressed like a fairy princess”—as she later recounted the moment—stepped to the microphone at a shareholder meeting in Boston and lavishly praised the chair of W. R. Grace & Co. for his commitment to preserving her community. Rae Ely knew perfectly well this was a lie; W. R. Grace was planning to strip-mine for vermiculite in her bucolic Virginia town. In fact, the whole “southern lady” thing was a bit of a lie. But Ely, who had fought the scheme for years, was prepared to use every tool at her disposal to stop the plan, whether eye-catching outfits that captured the attention of the news cameras or entirely unearned flattery.
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