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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S19What makes someone vote against their political party?   Our brains are hardwired to crave community and belonging — a tribal instinct that drives politics in the United States, says political strategist Sarah Longwell. She shares what she learned trying to convince people to vote against their political party in a recent election and shows why telling a better story about democracy is key to bridging the ideological divide.
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S25The race against radon  Deep in the frozen ground of the north, a radioactive hazard has lain trapped for millennia. But UK scientist Paul Glover realized some years back that it wouldn’t always be that way: One day it might get out. Glover had attended a conference where a speaker described the low permeability of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years or, in some cases, thousands. It is an icy shield, a thick blanket that locks contaminants, microbes and molecules below foot — and that includes the cancer-causing radioactive gas radon.
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S58Designing a Great Early-User Program - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Early user programs are critical to the success of products. But B2B companies often are disappointed with their results. The problem is the way they are designed and implemented. This article provides a process that can make a big difference in helping companies do a better job of choosing early users and harvesting valuable information. They can have a significant impact on the success of a new product launch.
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S40Why Pope Francis's Recent Decree Shook the Catholic Church  Several years ago, my partner and I asked a priest for a blessing. We wouldn’t describe ourselves as particularly pious, but our Catholic faith has shaped our lives both as individuals and as a couple. We met more than a decade ago, volunteering on a spring-break service trip run by our university’s Catholic student center. We attend church most Sundays, volunteer occasionally at our parish, and try to live out the Gospel as best we can. We’re also gay, so when we approached the priest, we knew we were putting him in a difficult position: At the time, the Church didn’t officially allow clergy to bless same-sex couples.A priest can bless just about anything—person, place, object, event. The process has many forms and functions but ultimately serves to invoke God’s love and remind us of God’s presence. Some blessings occur within a liturgy, such as the one a priest offers a congregation after Mass. Others, like the blessing that my partner and I requested, are less formal; they’re offered spontaneously and wouldn’t be found in a book of prayers.
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S17Can Remote Work Help Diversity Recruitment?  In their latest study, Wharton’s David Hsu and Sonny Tambe found that when STEM job listings switched to remote during the pandemic, they drew significantly more female and minority applicants.New research from Wharton shows that technology firms pull a more diverse pool of job applicants when they offer remote work, a finding that could help shape how jobs are designed in the future.
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S53Do We Need a Category 6 Designation for Hurricanes? /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/69/e8/69e834e4-fb37-4bb4-8b5f-60c69949fb14/gettyimages-187855038.jpg) Global warming is leading to more intense storms well above the threshold for Category 5 hurricanes, scientists write in a new paperWith global warming leading to more intense storms, two scientists have investigated the implications of extending the hurricane wind scale to add a sixth category. The Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale currently tops out at Category 5—for hurricanes marked by maximum sustained winds of at least 157 miles per hour. Now, the scientists have suggested that any hurricane with sustained winds of 192 miles per hour or more could earn a higher designation.
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S15S28Boston Dynamics' Atlas tries out inventory work, gets better at lifting  The world's most advanced humanoid robot, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, is back, and it's moving some medium-weight car parts. While the robot has mastered a lot of bipedal tricks like walking, running, jumping, and even backflips, it's still in the early days of picking stuff up. When we last saw the robot, it had sprouted a set of rudimentary hand clamps and was using those to carry heavy objects like a toolbox, barbells, and a plank of wood. The new focus seems to be on "kinetically challenging" work—these things are heavy enough to mess with the robot's balance, so picking them up, carrying them, and putting them down requires all sorts of additional calculations and planning so the robot doesn't fall over.
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S69Jay-Z's speech: Do the Grammys have a Beyonc  At Sunday night's Grammy Awards, Jay-Z highlighted a surprising slight hidden in the Recording Academy's recent voting record. Despite winning 32 Grammys across her remarkable career – more than any other artist – Beyoncé has never taken home the most prestigious prize of all: for album of the year. "Even by your own metrics, that doesn't work," Jay-Z said as he accepted the Dr Dre global impact award. "Think about that. The most Grammys, never won album of the year. That doesn't work."More like this:- Why Fast Car became a viral moment at the Grammys- How Joni Mitchell forged a path for Taylor Swift- Why Beyoncé speaks for a generation
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S39The GOP's True Priority  Negotiators in the Senate have produced a draft agreement on immigration and asylum. The deal delivers on Republican priorities. It includes changes to federal law to discourage asylum seeking. It shuts down asylum processing altogether if too many people arrive at once. Those and other changes send a clear message to would-be immigrants: You’re going to find it a lot harder to enter the United States without authorization. Rethink your plans.The draft agreement offers little to nothing on major Democratic immigration priorities: no pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants, only the slightest increase in legal immigration. The Democrats traded away most of their own policy wish list. In return, they want an end to the mood of crisis at the border, plus emergency defense aid for Ukraine and Israel.
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S54Police Find Ancient Teenager's Body, Preserved in Irish Bog for 2,500 Years /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/25/7e/257e376b-f925-4478-863d-1dddec3aa82a/image_1_-_excavation_1.jpeg) Nicknamed the “Bellaghy Boy,” he was likely between 13 and 17 when he died around 500 B.C.E.When law enforcement officials investigated the body of a teenage boy found in a bog in Northern Ireland, they weren't sure whether the remains belonged to someone recently deceased. Parts of the body's skin were intact and "as pink as yours or mine," Nikki Deehan, a detective inspector with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, tells the Financial Times' Jude Webber. "The kidney was malleable to the touch."
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S13S21The meaning of the hysteria over Taylor Swift - The Economist (No paywall)  As every paid-up conspiracist knows, the NFL was rigged to ease the Kansas City Chiefs into the Super Bowl on February 11th—ensuring the attendance of Taylor Swift, girlfriend of one of the players, or so they say. But why? Not just to lift the TV ratings, surely. No, the scheme is a deep-state “psy-op” to boost Joe Biden’s electoral hopes. Or the real aim is to promote satanism, as online exorcists reckon Ms Swift’s concerts do. In any case, don’t fret about the singer getting from her gig in Tokyo to Las Vegas for kickoff. Elvis is flying her in his UFO.
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S45Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction  Science fiction, when revisited years later, sometimes doesn’t come across as all that fictional. Speculative novels have an impressive track record at prophesying what innovations are to come, and how they might upend the world: H. G. Wells wrote about an atomic bomb decades before World War II, and Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, features devices we’d describe today as Bluetooth earbuds.Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution. A core element of one of his early novels, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a magical book that acts as a personal tutor and mentor for a young girl, adapting to her learning style—in essence, it is a personalized and ultra-advanced chatbot. The titular Primer speaks aloud in the voice of a live actor, known as a “ractor”—evoking how today’s generative AI, like many digital technologies, is highly dependent on humans’ creative labor.
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S63Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable -- and That's Why They Perform Better - Harvard Business Review (..)  In numerous studies, diversity — both inherent (e.g., race, gender) and acquired (experience, cultural background) — is associated with business success. For example, a 2009 analysis of 506 companies found that firms with more racial or gender diversity had more sales revenue, more customers, and greater profits. A 2016 analysis of more than 20,000 firms in 91 countries found that companies with more female executives were more profitable. In a 2011 study management teams exhibiting a wider range of educational and work backgrounds produced more-innovative products. These are mere correlations, but laboratory experiments have also shown the direct effect of diversity on team performance. In a 2006 study of mock juries, for example, when black people were added to the jury, white jurors processed the case facts more carefully and deliberated more effectively.
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S12Is Bisexuality Genetic? It's More Complex Than Some Studies Imply  The controversy over a recent paper on human bisexual behavior emphasizes how important it is not to overinterpret genetic studies of sexuality—and how easy it is to do soA recent study has drawn controversy by implying genetic links between bisexuality in men and a propensity for risk-taking. This research on human sexual behavior, published in January in Science Advances, is an example of a genome-wide association study (GWAS). Such studies compare entire genome sequences from many people in a search for areas of overlap between genes and certain traits. The authors of the new study report that bisexual behavior in men is genetically distinct from exclusively same-sex behavior and suggest that the genes underpinning bisexual behavior are also linked to possessing an inclination for risk-taking and to having more children.
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S234 core strategies as AI changes the "meaning of work"  AI will increasingly take over the boring parts of our work — but what will that actually mean for how we feel about our jobs, and ourselves? As Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick explored in an essay last year, the ‘Help Me Write’ button he tested for Google Docs is an easy way to create passable text. Just give that button a quick click, type a summary of what you want, and you can have AI do all your writing for you. Microsoft is building something similar into Word, based on OpenAI’s highly capable GPT-4. Email app Superhuman proudly touts how its AI can write whole emails in your own tone of voice. All you have to do is summarize in a few words what you want the email to say. CEO Rahul Vohra says the average user makes use of it 25 times per week. But if we send a lot of email and take care to put our personality into those messages, doesn’t a feature like that suck the soul from our jobs, replacing it with a “plastic” replica?
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S34S68How one great sweater can last a lifetime  In the new Netflix comedy Good Grief, Emma Corrin knits a jumper in a London gallery while art patrons stare, transfixed. The whole scene takes less than five minutes, but fans have already turned the moment into a viral trend, with fervent comments in all caps, such as "EMMA CORRIN, I WILL HOLD YOUR YARN DRESS WHILE YOU SCREAM ANY DAY OF THE WEEK!" The enthusiasm for the comedy cameo makes sense, since Corrin is gorgeous, cool, and a fantastic actor. But as fashion weeks commence, the knitwear scene also fits nicely into a moment that puts jumpers at the centre of pop culture glory.No longer a basic granny staple, classic knitwear has gone big thanks to scene-stealing sweaters on Chris Evans in Knives Out and Harry Styles on stage. Taylor Swift named a song on the album Folklore after the humble cardigan, and Miuccia Prada embraced the lowly crewneck as a high fashion staple in her last few collections. Emerging British designer Molly Goddard elevated the Fair Isle, too, when she piled it on top of a tulle party dress for maximum whimsy – a look that street style starlets and fast fashion chains worldwide have copied.
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S8Chinese EV sellers found a loophole to export cars around the world  The staff at Chinese electric vehicle company Li Auto noticed something unusual when they counted the number of cars sold in July 2023. In the first three weeks of the month, according to CEO Li Xiang, 200 cars were registered in China, but never insured — and therefore unable to be driven in the country.After looking into it, the company realized that traders had been shipping the cars abroad, mostly to Central Asia and the Middle East, Li said on his Weibo account. He posted a picture showing a Li Auto L7 SUV priced at 31.8 million Kazakhstani tenge ($70,897), about $25,800 higher than its starting price in China.
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S11State Secrecy Explains the Origins of the 'Deep State' Conspiracy Theory  Lost in today’s misinformation fights is the recognition that modern conspiracy theories spring from excesses of state secrecyFrom election denial to QAnon, the origins of our age of misinformation too often go unexamined. That’s too bad, because unraveling the roots of one popular conspiracy theory—of a “deep state”—might reveal something important about the cynicism now infecting U.S politics.
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S14AI Unravels Ancient Roman Scroll Charred By Volcano  A team of student researchers has made a giant contribution to solving one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology by revealing the content of Greek writing inside a charred scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The winners of a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge trained their machine-learning algorithms on scans of the rolled-up papyrus, unveiling a previously unknown philosophical work that discusses senses and pleasure. The feat paves the way for artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to decipher the rest of the scrolls in their entirety, which researchers say could have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the ancient world.The achievement has ignited the usually slow-moving world of ancient studies. It’s “what I always thought was a pipe dream coming true”, says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, who was not involved in the contest. The revealed text discusses sources of pleasure including music, the taste of capers and the colour purple. “It’s an historic moment,” says classicist Bob Fowler at the University of Bristol, UK, one of the prize judges. The three students, from Egypt, Switzerland and the United States, who revealed the text share a US$700,000 grand prize.
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S22The biggest questions about the Universe's beginning  Imagine what it must have been like, as it was for so long throughout human history and prehistory, to look up at the wonders of the night sky in ignorance: not knowing what you were seeing or where any of it came from. All you could behold with your eyes were those glittering points of light in the sky: the Moon, the planets, the stars, a few deep-sky objects (or nebulae), and the tapestry of the Milky Way, with no way of knowing what they were made of, where they came from, or what any of it meant.Today, the story is very different. Nearly all of the night sky objects we can see with our naked eye are objects present within the Milky Way galaxy. A few of those deep-sky objects turn out to be galaxies, with trillions of more galaxies — including small, faint, and ultra-distant ones — observable with superior tools. These galaxies all expand away from one another, with more distant objects expanding at greater speeds than nearer ones.
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S24Measurements of rare Higgs boson decay may show cracks in physics theory  In July 2012, physicists briefly enjoyed a barrage of publicity usually reserved for tabloid stories about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. International news outlets like The New York Times and BBC announced the discovery of an obscure subatomic particle called the Higgs boson — also (very misleadingly) known as the “God Particle.” The Higgs boson was first proposed in 1964 as an explanation for why subatomic particles like electrons have mass.The media hubbub surrounding the Higgs boson died down fairly quickly. In the physics community, however, things were just heating up. While physicists felt certain that they had found the Higgs boson, they weren’t 100% sure. The data was preliminary, and to be completely certain of their success, crosschecks needed to be made. Over the following decade, many measurements supported their initial claim.
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S49Is it better to have friends who are like you or different from you? | Psyche Ideas  is the editor of Psyche. A cognitive neuroscientist by training, his books include The Rough Guide to Psychology (2011), Great Myths of the Brain (2014) and Be Who You Want: Unlocking the Science of Personality Change (2021).Bring to mind the friendships in your life: what do you think makes some of them feel more supportive and enjoyable than others? No doubt there are shared stories, experiences and interests that play a part. But what about the role of your friends’ personality traits – and your own?
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S61A Study at the Center of the Abortion Pill Battle Was Just Retracted - WIRED (No paywall)  The 2021 study found that mifepristone, one of two pills used in a medication abortion, significantly increased the risk of women going to the emergency room following an abortion. The study, along with another retracted paper from 2022, was cited by US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in the April 2023 ruling that invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug.Mifepristone was approved in 2000 by the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs, and has been used by at least 5.9 million women in the US since then. The drug blocks a hormone called progesterone that’s needed for a pregnancy to continue. It’s used alongside another pill, misoprostol, to induce an abortion within 10 weeks of pregnancy.
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S57S48How Seven Companies Took Over the Stock Market  The Magnificent Seven have been buoying the S&P 500 lately, but the stocks’ outsize impact on the market may not necessarily be a good thing.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.
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S50The Moon Is Shrinking, Causing Moonquakes at a Potential NASA Landing Site, Study Finds /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/49/09/4909c035-367f-46e4-ae8c-22359cf2e3c2/gettyimages-1444254041.jpg) Though the risk to astronauts is low, the shaking could cause landslides and impact potential long-term settlements at the lunar south poleThough it might appear still and quiet, the moon is not an entirely peaceful world. Our natural satellite is slowly shrinking, and as it does, “moonquakes” rock its surface. These regular rumbles in the regolith could become a problem for future crewed flights to the moon, such as NASA’s planned Artemis 3 mission, according to a study published late last month in the Planetary Science Journal.
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S16How Does Your Financial Wellbeing Shape Your Health Outcomes?  Wharton academics and industry leaders weigh in on the intersection of health equity and financial wellbeing.Kenneth L. Shropshire, faculty director of Wharton’s Coalition for Equity and Opportunity (CEO), is joined by Wharton professor Guy David, Dr. Fareeda Griffith, CEO managing director, and Surya Kolluri, head of TIAA Institute.
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S38You'll Miss Sports Journalism When It's Gone  The ranks of sports reporters are thinning—making it easier for athletes, owners, and leagues to conceal hard truths from the public.The new sports-media reality is troubling—and paradoxical. Sports fans are awash in more “content” than ever before. The sports-talk-podcast industry is booming; many professional athletes host their own shows. Netflix cranks out one gauzy, player-approved documentary series after another, and every armchair quarterback or would-be pundit has an opinion to share on social media. Yet despite all of this entertainment, all of these shows, and all of these hot takes, true sports-accountability journalism is disappearing.
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S56Why Iran is hard to intimidate - The Economist (No paywall)  DETERRENCE IS A simple concept: using the threat of force to stop an enemy from doing something. On paper, America should have no trouble restraining Iran thus. The former has a globe-striding army; the latter still relies on warships and fighter jets that predate the Moon landing. In practice, though, Iran has proved devilishly difficult to deter. It is hard to put off insurgents and militias through air campaigns; their goals are attrition and survival, not well-ordered governance, and they are willing to sustain casualties. Full-scale invasion is the only real way to deter them and the history of such interventions is salutary.
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S62Joni Mitchell's Openhearted Heroism - The New Yorker (..)  In 1969, Cary Raditz, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, quit his job in advertising and headed to Europe to bum around with his girlfriend. They ended up in Matala, on the island of Crete, where they found a bunch of hippies living in a network of caves. Raditz soon decamped for Afghanistan in a VW bus; when he returned, his girlfriend had bailed, but there was word that a new girl was headed to Matala. Raditz didn't know much about Joni Mitchell, but "there was buzz" among the hippies, and, soon enough, he found himself watching the sunset with one of the most extraordinary people alive. Raditz and Mitchell shared a cave for a couple of months, travelled around Greece together, and parted ways. That's where you and I come in, because Mitchell wrote two songs, among her greatest works, about her "redneck on a Grecian isle": "California" and "Carey." I've been singing along to those songs, or trying to, since I was fifteen. I learned from them what you learn from all of Mitchell's music, that love is a form of reciprocity, at times even a barter economy: "He gave me back my smile / but he kept my camera to sell." Mitchell's songs were the final, clinching trade.Joni Mitchell's gift was so enormous that it remade the social space around her. As David Yaffe's new biography, "Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell" (Sarah Crichton Books), suggests, it is no small burden to possess something as valuable as Mitchell's talent, and it meant that this girl from the Canadian prairie would be in the world, whether she liked it or not. All she needed was her lyrics, preternaturally analytic, wry, and shrewd; her chords, largely self-invented, a kind of calligraphy of the moods; and her voice, which modulates from patter to rue to rhapsody in a single phrase. In concert, she sometimes trained her attention on a single listener in the front row, casting the stranger as the vivid "you" of a song who in real life may have been Sam Shepard, James Taylor, or Leonard Cohen. The best pop music is often preening and shamanic. Mitchell's is almost always about what two articulate adults mean, or once meant, to each other.
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S66The Chinese millennials shunning Lunar New Year travel  For Lunar New Year on 10 February, Cassidy Yu has opted for a road trip with a friend instead of a family reunion. This won't be her first time skipping the trek home."Heading home for the occasion doesn't get me excited anymore," says Yu, a 32-year-old marketing professional from Shenzhen, a city in southern China. As a child, she relished simple rituals of the Lunar New Year: home decorations, firecrackers and feast after feast. Not anymore. "With so many entertainment options available today, I'd rather travel and have a quieter holiday."
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S10S41Shrugging Off the Apocalypse  “A Fierce Storm Parks Over L.A. Area,” read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday. I liked the use of that word, park, to make it sound like some average thing everyone does all the time in L.A. However, according to our mayor, Karen Bass, this is not your usual parking job. On Sunday, she held a news conference to let us know that the storm was “a serious weather event. This has the potential to be a historic storm—severe winds, thunderstorms, and even brief tornadoes.”I shrugged, I admit. Bad weather in L.A. is so rare that all forms of it, all deviations from perky sunshine, suggest apocalypse to Californians. But I’m from what Californians call “back East,” where storms arrive on whipping winds that shoulder towering, anvil-shaped cumulus clouds across the sky and darken the summer days, threatening to strike mortals below with angry-god force. They rumble and move in without hesitation and pour down on you with unquestionable power. They explode and light up the night sky.
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S2Find the AI Approach That Fits the Problem You're Trying to Solve  AI moves quickly, but organizations change much more slowly. What works in a lab may be wrong for your company right now. If you know the right questions to ask, you can make better decisions, regardless of how fast technology changes. You can work with your technical experts to use the right tool for the right job. Then each solution today becomes a foundation to build further innovations tomorrow. But without the right questions, you’ll be starting your journey in the wrong place.
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S6'A part of me was crying for freedom': The people embracing their stutter  It was the summer of 2011 and Joshua St Pierre was working in Edmonton, Canada. He was mid-conversation when he realised the other person wasn't listening. It was a moment that changed his life.St Pierre has a stammer, and until then, had always focused on trying to speak as fluently as he could, to make it more comfortable for others to listen to him. But now, he began to wonder if it was fair for him to be the one doing all the work – and what a more balanced effort might feel like.
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S9Why Do Dogs Wag Their Tail?  As any dog owner knows, there are a few surefire ways to cue a pup’s wagging tail: arriving home from work, picking up their favorite toy or uttering the word “outside.” But why do dogs wag their tail? Is it only because they are happy? It turns out that the answer is complex.Tail-wagging is “clearly a communication mechanism,” says animal behaviorist Nicholas Dodman, a professor emeritus at Tufts University and head of the Center for Canine Behavior Studies. In most cases, “a wagging tail is akin to waving a white flag of surrender—that is, ‘I’m happy to see you and present no threat,’” he says.
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