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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S22Xbox Confirms Cross-Platform Rumors -- But There's a Catch   The way you play Xbox games is about to change. Four games previously exclusive to Xbox are coming to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, according to the official Xbox podcast. Microsoft also teased its next-generation console, confirming that it’s not shifting away from hardware entirely.Xbox hasn’t yet announced which four games are coming to other consoles, but Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are not among them yet, despite persistent rumors that both could be coming to PS5. It did name one recent hit coming to Game Pass next month.
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S1How Alexei Navalny defied Putin - The Economist (No paywall)  ALEXEI NAVALNY did not like tragedies. He preferred Hollywood films and fables in which heroes vanquish villains and good triumphs over evil. He had the looks and talent to be one of those heroes, but he was born in Russia and lived in dark times, spending his last days in a penal colony in the Arctic permafrost. A fan of “Star Wars”, he described his ordeal in lyrical terms. “Prison [exists] in one’s mind,” he wrote from his cell in 2021. “And if you think carefully, I am not in prison but on a space voyage…to a wonderful new world.” That voyage ended on February 16th.
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S2How China stifles dissent without a KGB or Stasi of its own - The Economist (No paywall)  Much thought has gone into making the Beijing Police Museum a family-friendly attraction. Housed in a classical mansion near Tiananmen Square, the museum is big on crime-fighting heroics. Glass cases show guns used by Chinese police. A model of a police dog sports a bullet-proof vest, commando-style helmet and protective boots on its paws. During the lunar-new-year holidays, a recent weekday found parents and children admiring displays about police helicopters, drug squads, traffic patrols and cyber-officers keeping the internet “healthy”. Political repression earns a passing mention—but in a historical section. An old photograph shows student protesters being arrested by plain-clothes agents, decades before the Communist Party took power.
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S3What the Scientists Who Pioneered Weight-Loss Drugs Want You to Know - WIRED (No paywall)  The history of weight-loss drugs is littered with failures. Some were outright dangerous: In the 1950s and ’60s, amphetamine-based diet pills were popular, but their prominence faded after being linked to addiction and other severe side effects. In 1997 the drug cocktail fen-phen was removed from the US market after it became clear it caused heart valve damage. Other attempts at treating obesity with drugs hit scientific dead ends. The history of anti-obesity drug discovery is for the most part “a bottomless pit into which people shove money and time,” wrote Derek Lowe in Science.The new crop of much-hyped weight loss drugs seems to be different. These work by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), which regulates blood sugar levels and slows down the rate at which food leaves the stomach, making people fuller for longer. GLP-1-mimicking drugs seem to be a powerful tool for weight loss: Some people lose 15 percent of their body weight or more after 68 weeks on semaglutide, which is approved in the US for weight loss as Wegovy and for type 2 diabetes under the brand name Ozempic.
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S4Why We Set Unattainable Goals - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  There is merit in setting stretch goals, but we need to manage how we react to failure. If we don’t, we may ultimately end up demotivating ourselves. Try celebrating small wins. Suppose your goal was to read 100 books in the year and you read only 12; it’s proof enough that you’re capable of making a change for the better. Don’t dwell on the failure. Think about what worked and what didn’t. Then, use that information to be more strategic next time. Think about “accidental” or related benefits. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. What did you learn about yourself along the way? Ask a trusted friend why they think you failed. Sometimes a reality check from a good source can help you better understand yourself.
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S5How to Evaluate, Manage, and Strengthen Your Resilience - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Think back to your last off-site meeting. You and the rest of your team likely poured over reports and spreadsheets, facts and figures. Strewn about the table were probably the tools of your trade: reams of data, balance sheets and P&Ls. Managers understand that clear-eyed analysis — both quantitative and qualitative — is the key to building a resilient business. And yet when it comes to measuring and strengthening our own ability to adapt, grow, and prosper, rarely do we apply the same methodical approach.
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S6Weight wasn't the only thing I lost when I took a weight-loss drug - Business Insider (No paywall)  I can't count how many times Levain's cookies sabotaged me â a day of disciplined dieting broken as I got sucked into those buttery black holes. Often I fought the temptation; sometimes I won, but too frequently I felt my body pulse in anticipation of the dopamine reward (mouth salivating, throat tensing) before caving to the cookies, resenting my choice, and feeling the familiar shame.So when I realized I suddenly didn't care about stepping inside, I didn't trust it. I forced myself to visualize that first perfect bite, waiting for my mouth to water and jaw to ache ⦠but nothing. When it dawned on me that I could win my daily battle without even fighting it, I felt like I'd learned how to breathe underwater, as if I'd lost enough weight to levitate.
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S7Why pet owners are spending thousands of dollars on 'human-grade' food  When Amy Barkham adopted her dog named Wednesday, she already knew she wanted to feed the German Shepherd-Husky mix premium dog food. She scoured websites, and read labels and reviews to select UK brands of kibble that positioned themselves as grain-free, nutritionally balanced and bursting with the goodness of top-notch ingredients, including free-range chicken and "vegetables and botanicals that match your dog's ancestral diet".Wednesday, whom Barkham describes as "the biggest bundle of energy I have ever come across", was uninterested in the grain-free kibble her owner had searched for high and low. (She preferred to play with her plush toy pumpkin instead.) After a month, she began refusing the food entirely, dramatically losing weight during her hunger strikes.
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S8How Google is sticking to - and soaring past - its DEI goals  Commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are forward-looking investments for companies. Research consistently shows embracing diversity makes companies more innovative – and ultimately more profitable.In recent decades, many global companies launched new initiatives to improve their DEI efforts, bringing in new executives and bolstering their hiring of diverse candidates. However, the landscape shifted in 2022, when many tech companies made significant cuts and downsized DEI programmes. In many cases, workers of colour were among the first affected by layoffs.
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S9Gioras: The 'Parthenon of all Greek woodfired bakeries'  Blink and you'll miss it. That's how the location of Gioras Wood Medieval Mykonian Bakery was described to me by a local who had, indeed, blinked and missed it several times, despite being a regular. On the windswept island of Mykonos – where tourism is the main source of income and locals are often wildly outnumbered by visitors – there is little left that is authentically Mykonian. When the international jet set "discovered" the island in the 1960s, it brought much needed revenue to a poverty-stricken people. Rapid development followed to attract international tourist dollars, but despite the sudden influx of wealth, the Mykonian population started to fall because the cost of living became too expensive. Traditional fishing villages fell by the wayside and hotels popped up alongside tavernas designed not for locals but for foreigners.
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S10The childhood WW2 trauma that inspired Yoko Ono  In 1945, Yoko Ono's parents sent her and her younger sibling to the Japanese countryside to escape the attacks on major cities in Japan during World War Two. The United States had firebombed Tokyo, Ono's hometown at the time, killing up to 100,000 people. The now 90-year-old artist was then 12 and from an affluent family, but food shortages during the war meant that Ono, her brother, Keisuke and sister, Setsuko, often went hungry.According to Ono's son, 48-year-old American-British musician and producer Sean Ono Lennon, his mother, who now lives in New York, would play "imaginary meal games" with her siblings where they would pretend they were eating food. "You could say that the conceptual origins of her work started there in World War Two – being hungry and realising the power of imagination," says Ono Lennon, who runs her day-to-day affairs now that the artist has retired."You could even say it led directly to the song Imagine, which became this world-famous anthem," he tells BBC Culture. The 1971 song Imagine was co-written by Ono and her husband, John Lennon, though at the time of the song’s release, only Lennon was credited.
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S11New Star Wars Animated Movie? 'Bad Batch' Showrunners Say "How Could You Say No?"  The Bad Batch showrunners reflect on whether this season is truly the end of the 15-year-old chapter of Star Wars history.Since the release of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie in August 2008, the stylized animation covering the prequel era of the Clone Wars and beyond has bridged the gap between the prequel trilogy and then some, building a strong foundation that’s now being used by live-action television series like The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka.
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S12This Unhealthy Activity Could Alter Your Immune System Forever  Smoking shapes your adaptive immune system into something more overreactive and pro-inflammatory even long after you quit.Smoking does not do a body good. We’ve known this universally acknowledged truth for at least the past 60 years. Still, researchers are constantly finding new ways that it harms our health. In a study out this week in Nature, scientists detail how smoking influences the immune system, revealing how it affects a person’s pathogen-fighting abilities even years after they’ve quit.
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S1336 Years Later, a 'Deadpool 3' Easter Egg May Solve A Major Wolverine Mystery  The first Deadpool & Wolverine trailer is full of noteworthy moments. From Wade Wilson's (Ryan Reynolds) canon-altering run-in with the Time Variance Authority (TVA) to the blink-and-you'll-miss-it return of Pyro (Aaron Stanford), the teaser trailer is practically brimming with details that are meant to further promote Deadpool & Wolverine's position as a can't-miss addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Based on the responses that the trailer has received, it seems safe to say that it's done just that, too.There's even one brief moment in the trailer involving Hugh Jackman's Logan, who is largely absent from the teaser itself, that may answer one of the biggest questions that fans have had about the forthcoming film ever since Wolverine's involvement in it was first announced. That question is: How will Deadpool & Wolverine bring Jackman's fan-favorite X-Men hero back without invalidating the events of 2017's Logan, which famously ends with its titular hero's demise?
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S1427 Years Later, X-Men Will Finally Explain its Biggest Cliffhanger  The ’90s X-Men are back! On March 20, Disney+ will drop a new series called X-Men ’97, which is essentially not new at all. In terms of both style and continuity, it appears to be a direct sequel to the beloved ’90s animated series that ran from 1992 to 1997. But it seems Marvel is futzing with the fate of Charles Xavier and adding a new layer to the show’s infamous final episode, “Graduation Day.”Does this mean X-Men ’97 is changing the events of the original series? Maybe. The trailer includes scenes from the final episode of the original cartoon, “Graduation Day.” In it, a dying Professor X left Earth and entrusted the survival of mutants to the remaining X-Men. And, for almost three decades, that was it for animated X-Men.
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S1540 Years Later, the Wildest Sci-Fi Movie of the '80s Is Finally Getting a Proper Sequel  The worst repo man in Los Angeles is back. Sort of. Almost 40 years after its original debut, the 1984 cult classic Repo Man is finally getting a proper sequel from original writer-director Alex Cox. Variety reports that the movie, titled Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer, is backed by Buffalo 8 Productions and stars Kiowa Gordon in the lead role of Otto (played by Emilio Esteves in the original). According to Variety, “The film picks up after Otto has boarded his trusty 1967 Chevy Malibu to journey across the infinities of time and space. In that time he has aged exactly 90 minutes.”Inverse recently spoke to Alex Cox for an upcoming feature on Repo Man, and while he didn’t mention this sequel, he did discuss his previous attempts at continuing the story of Otto and Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Cox originally planned to release a direct sequel titled Otto’s Hawaiian Holiday.
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S16The Next Big RPG from Persona's Publisher Feels Entirely New Despite Retro Inspirations  I’ve written a lot about Unicorn Overlord here at Inverse, from its gorgeous characters art to the welcome ability it gives you to smooch your teammates. But while we knew that it’s a tactical RPG inspired by old-school strategy games, exactly how its combat works remained a mystery. But thanks to a recent hands-on preview, I can confidently say that its battles are nothing like what I expected — and they’re far more interesting as a result.My time with Unicorn Overlord covered roughly four hours at the beginning of the game, from a prologue introducing its story’s political struggle to the campaign’s first major boss battle. You play as Alain, wayward prince of Cornia. After an introductory scene where the country’s revered General Valmore overthrows your mother, Queen Ilenia, the game picks up years later, as Alain fights to free the world from Valmore’s dominion.
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S175 Years Later, 'Godzilla x Kong' Is Revealing a Formidable New Monster  After defeating Ghidorah, Methuselah, and a slew of other Titans, Godzilla stands alone as the world’s most powerful kaiju. The King of the Monsters even forced Kong to back down and cede his crown in Godzilla vs. Kong, and turned Mechagodzilla into spare parts in the same film, effectively silencing any viable threat.When Godzilla reluctantly teams up with Kong in the upcoming Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, it will be to take down a Kong-related adversary. The so-called Skar King — an original villain introduced in the film’s first trailer — seems tailor-made for Kong to defeat. Godzilla himself doesn’t really have anyone else to fight... or does he?
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S18Netflix's Biggest Sci-Fi Show of the Year Has an Unexpected Rival  The epic story of alien first contact, slow invasion, and virtual reality is coming to TV as an epic streaming series. Yes, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem has been turned into a compact Netflix series, created by Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo. On Netflix, the first season of the 3 Body Problem series will consist of eight episodes. But, over on Peacock, you can watch a show called Three-Body which has a staggering 30 episodes.Confused? Here’s what’s going on: The Peacock Three-Body and the Netflix 3 Body Problem are completely different shows, though both adapt Liu’s groundbreaking novel. Other than the length, Peacock’s version is different for two crucial reasons: It was made in China, and the characters and plot are much more faithful to the novel. Mild book spoilers for The Three-Body Problem ahead.
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S19S20Look! Epic Images Show 'Odysseus' Lander On Its Way To the Moon  Round two of NASA’s newest Moon project is now underway, following the successful launch of the Intuitive Machines-1 (IM-1) mission in the early morning hours of Thursday.IM-1 is now on a journey to reach the Moon on February 22, aiming to place a lander dubbed Odysseus on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite. If it does, the Houston-based company would become the first private lander on the Moon. In addition, the touchdown would usher in a special delivery service developed by NASA to make lunar trips more frequent and less expensive.
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S21The Biggest Sci-Fi Space Game of the Decade Goes Free This Weekend For Its Most Exciting Update Yet  No Man’s Sky is good. By now, that’s been the case for far longer than it was a failure after its notoriously disastrous 2016 launch. But while its initial comeback is well known at this point, the spacefaring adventure has actually reinvented itself quite a few times since then. Beginning with the aptly named Expeditions update in 2021, No Man’s Sky has featured a series of expeditions — season-long events that let players team up to complete new quests for rewards exclusive to each season. Now, No Man’s Sky is getting a free weekend for the first time in its history to let players experience the Omega expedition, and it’s the perfect introduction (or re-introduction) to the game.No Man’s Sky is in some ways the very definition of the “forever game.” It features a full galaxy’s worth of planets, each teeming with procedurally generated life to collect, catalog, or blast with lasers. As updates for the game poured in, they introduced in-depth base building, new missions and storylines, and even wilder additions like controllable mechs and living spaceships. Maybe it’s just an issue of patience, but I’ve never been able to keep a campaign going long enough to see all of that.
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