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 S39How worried should Amazon be about Shein and Temu? - The Economist (No paywall)   “Shop like a billionaire.” With that enticing slogan Temu touted itself to Americans watching the Super Bowl on February 11th. Football fans had been treated to a similar advert from the e-commerce company at last year’s event. But this time the message was hammered home. In all, Temu’s ad played five times. That won’t have been cheap. A 30-second slot during this year’s Super Bowl cost around $7m. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, reckons the company will spend $3bn on marketing this year, up from $1.7bn in 2023.
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S1AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants  Body-language analysis. Vocal assessments. Gamified tests. CV scanners. These are some of the tools companies use to screen candidates with artificial intelligence recruiting software. Job applicants face these machine prompts – and AI decides whether they are a good match or fall short.Businesses are increasingly relying on them. A late-2023 IBM survey of more than 8,500 global IT professionals showed 42% of companies were using AI screening "to improve recruiting and human resources". Another 40% of respondents were considering integrating the technology.
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S2The Zone of Interest: How the most horrifying sounds in film history were created  A film about the Holocaust, 10 years in the making, The Zone of Interest has been winning acclaim as one of the most starkly chilling depictions of human brutality ever created.It is one of this year's leading awards contenders, with nine nominations for this Sunday's Baftas, and five for this year's Oscars, where, if it did land the top prize, it would certainly be the most shocking best picture winner in history. Yet a lot of its power lies in what's heard, not what's seen.
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S3'Madame Web' Proves the Worst Superhero Movie Trend Needs to Go Away Forever  Kevin Feige was on to something when he chose to steer Marvel away from superhero origin stories. In 2014, the Marvel Studios exec claimed that Doctor Strange would be the last origin story in the franchise’s cinematic universe, and while that hasn’t entirely been the case (see Shang-Chi, Captain Marvel, Moon Knight, or She-Hulk), Marvel’s subversive strategy has served it pretty well. The past decade has seen new heroes and villains introduced in seamless fashion, with each entry of the MCU serving as a back-door pilot, of sorts, for adventures to come. Sony’s Spider-Man universe is relatively young: it’s only been around for half a decade, but not for lack of trying. The studio has held the rights to the eponymous webhead for the past 25 years, and has tried to get a genuine franchise off the ground at least twice before. Though Sony is now leasing Peter Parker out to Marvel Studios, the studio hasn’t stopped trying to establish a comprehensive web of heroes and villains to set itself apart from the MCU.
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S4The Only Good Streaming Services Left Are Niche Ones  Mainstream streaming services abandoned the promise of a streaming subscription and now only niche platforms are keeping up their end of the bargain.Streaming has never been less exciting. It’s not because of poor TV apps, or uninteresting new films or shows. We still get a seasonal hit now and then from streaming giants like Netflix or Max. No, the real problem is that it feels like the “service” part of streaming services has been cast to the wayside.
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S5Hands Down the 50 Weirdest, Most Clever Things on Amazon Under $35  If you’ve ever been scrolling and wondered how people find those clever products that instantly go viral, this is the list you’ve been hoping for. These 50 weird and clever things on Amazon range from a tap-to-dim nightlight shaped like an exhausted duck to a gadget that helps you carry in all the groceries at once. Not only are these the hands-down weirdest products out there, but they’re also all under $35 — with items starting at just $5.This banana hook takes up way less space than an entire fruit bowl on your kitchen counter, and it can be installed with the included screws or adhesive tape. It reduces bruising, keeping your fruit fresh for longer. Use its fold-up design to hide it underneath your cabinet between uses. Choose from several colors in the listing.
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S6How 'True Detective: Night Country's Finale Subverts Its Horror Story  True Detective: Night Country is haunted by ghosts. Whether it be the literal ghost of Travis Cohle (Erling Eliasson) or the constant, unseen presence of Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen), whose murder haunts the season and its characters, Night Country's six episodes are full of specters both seemingly literal and emotional. And in the True Detective: Night Country finale, they finally and fully come for Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster).The central Night Country duo spends the majority of the season's finale trapped during a blizzard at the largely abandoned Tsalal Research Station. While there, Liz and Navarro both see inexplicable things, including objects moving on their own and moments in which time and reality seem to completely bend around them. These moments do a lot to up the episode's tension and suffocatingly ghostly mood.
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S7Will Marvel's 'Fantastic Four' Copy The Best Sci-Fi Show On TV?  The Fantastic Four are back, and now they’re in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But will their movie be a period piece? On Valentine’s Day, Marvel Studios released a tantalizing promo image with several Easter eggs. Two particular details suggest that not only will Marvel’s Fantastic Four be set in the 1960s, it could introduce an alternate history of spaceflight to the MCU. If any of this sounds familiar, it should; an alternate spaceflight timeline is a very popular sci-fi trope right now. Is Marvel borrowing a premise from For All Mankind? In our timeline, the first issue of The Fantastic Four dropped in the fall of 1961. Like many popular Marvel characters, this superhero team comes from the Silver Age, making them all a bit edgier than their Golden Age predecessors. The early tone and writing of The Fantastic Four is a perfect example of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee honing the Marvel formula, and whatever you think of the MCU, those comics are a great example of how we got here. But is this movie going back to its ‘60s roots?
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S8Netflix Just Quietly Released the Year's Best Disaster Thriller  Having watched their Norwegian neighbors make a decent stab at the Hollywood-style disaster movie with a loosely related trilogy of films about avalanches (The Wave), earthquakes (The Quake), and oil rig explosions (The Burning Sea), Sweden decided to get in on the action themselves last year with The Abyss (or Avgrunden, if you don’t want to get confused with James Cameron’s similarly perilous underwater epic). And they didn’t have to look far for inspiration, either.Out now on Netflix six months after being released in Scandinavia, the quasi-blockbuster is set in the real-life Kiruna, the country’s northernmost town, which in 2014 had to slowly start moving three kilometers east due to the threat of mining subsidence. But with the area’s possible structural collapse still decades away, The Abyss is the only chance many of us will get to witness the carnage that may or may not eventually unfold.
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S9PlayStation Plus Just Quietly Released the Most Unique Soulslike Game of the Decade  Science can’t explain masochism. There’s some research to support the thin biochemical line between pleasure and pain within the central nervous system, but the psychology of why people seek out pain and humiliation remains a mystery. Without it, we wouldn’t have Soulslikes, the infamous subgenre named for From Software’s notoriously difficult Dark Souls series. It introduced gamers to the concept of being treated like ignoble filth, peons incapable of glory until they hone their skills through hours and hours of punishment. And we loved them for it. So much so that this thriving subgenre is going strong more than a decade later. And now PlayStation+ has dropped one of the most unique Soulslikes in recent memory.Steelrising from French studio Spiders is an alternate universe take on the French Revolution that gives King Louis XIV an army of automatons at his disposal. One automaton, or “automat” as the game prefers to call them, is named Aegis. A bodyguard for Marie Antoinette, Aegis is dispatched by the legendary beheadress to locate her missing children. Along the way, Aegis will battle King Louis’ forces on the foggy, cobbled streets of the French capital and unravel a mystery all her own.
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S11A Zen Buddhist priest voices the deep matters he usually ponders in silence | Aeon Videos  English subtitles for this video are available by clicking the CC button at the bottom right of the video player.Born into a wealthy Austrian family, the life of Vanja Palmers changed course dramatically in 1972 after a psychedelic experience. Abandoning his plan to enter the business world, he became a Zen Buddhist priest and founded a silent meditation retreat, first in Austria, then in Switzerland. Chris Santiago’s short documentary Stille finds Palmers in his 70s and still embracing a life centred on Zen practice. As the camera follows him on his meditation rituals and on a hike through the Swiss mountains, Palmers gives voice to his philosophy of non-attachment and his understanding that life is a precious, if fleeting, opportunity. ‘It is a great consolation that things are not eternal,’ he says, leaving viewers with the somewhat confronting message that if humans continue on our current trajectory of growth, consumption and harm to fellow creatures, we’ll soon disappear – and for the better.
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S12S13S14'Green' or 'blue' hydrogen -  Hydrogen can play a key role in Australia’s energy transition by giving us additional ways of storing and moving energy around. As the world shifts towards cleaner energy production, there’s a push to make hydrogen production cleaner as well. In Australia, low-emission hydrogen is produced in two main ways. One method produces what is known as “green hydrogen”. It uses electricity produced from renewables – such as solar, wind or hydro – to “crack” water into separate streams of hydrogen and oxygen.
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S15S16S17Labor's Stage 3 changes aren't genuine tax reform - here's what would be  Another year, another round of tax cuts. Australian governments have made an art of announcing new income tax cuts as elections draw near. But while such cuts are always popular with the public, they should not be confused with tax reform.Labor’s redesign of the Coalition’s Stage 3 offers larger tax cuts for low and middle earners, and smaller (but still substantial) cuts for higher earners.
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S18S19S20S21S22Asbestos in mulch? Here's the risk if you've been exposed  Peter Franklin is on the board of Reflections, a not-for-profit organisation for the asbestos awareness and support of people with asbestos-related disease. Mulch containing asbestos has now been found at 41 locations in New South Wales, including Sydney parks, schools, hospitals, a supermarket and at least one regional site. Tests are under way at other sites.
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S23Scientists shocked to discover new species of green anaconda, the world's biggest snake  Green anacondas are the world’s heaviest snakes, and among the longest. Predominantly found in rivers and wetlands in South America, they are renowned for their lightning speed and ability to asphyxiate huge prey then swallow them whole.My colleagues and I were shocked to discover significant genetic differences between the two anaconda species. Given the reptile is such a large vertebrate, it’s remarkable this difference has slipped under the radar until now.
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