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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S12This Venture Firm Sees Opportunity In Generative AI: Here's How To Win Its Capital   Does your startup want a piece of the future? Since there have been no initial public offerings of generative AI startups, opportunity lies ahead. That's because if the dot-com boom is any indication -- there were 2,888 IPOs between 1996 and 2000 -- the current generative AI boom is just getting started.Big opportunities could emerge for investors who buy shares in the most successful generative AI startups. Team8, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based venture capital firm that raised $500 million in new funds, could be among the winners.
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S13Effective Strategies for Building a High-Performing Team  In today's fast-paced business landscape, building a high-performing team is essential for achieving organizational success. A high-performing team is characterized by its ability to consistently exceed goals, innovate, and adapt to changing circumstances. Whether you're a team leader or a business owner, cultivating such a team can be a game-changer. In this article, we'll explore effective strategies for building and nurturing a high-performing team.High-performing teams are the driving force behind many successful businesses and projects. They exhibit characteristics such as strong collaboration, excellent communication, adaptability, and a shared commitment to achieving objectives. A well-structured high-performing team can elevate an organization's performance and foster a culture of excellence.
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S11Taylor Swift Just Made a Very Smart Announcement, and Taught a Masterclass in Emotional Intelligence  Instead, it's about the deep emotional connection she's forged with her fans. It's about her music, of course, but to paraphrase the poet Maya Angelou, it's even more about the way she makes them feel.And when people are able to forge that kind of emotional connection intentionally we have a name for the skill: emotional intelligence. It's especially impressive in business, when a person or an entity can inspire emotional reactions in thousands or even millions of people.
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S10There's a New Policy at  In short, United used to give its flight attendants two badges: wings, and a nameplate. But last year, United started issuing a new type of wings that included the nameplate in the same piece of hardware (including both the flight attendant's first name and (if desired) his or her pronouns).Why would they care? Because having two separate badges -- wings plus a separate nameplate -- meant that when flight attendants were off-duty but wearing their uniforms (say, while waiting in an airport, or while traveling "non-revenue" on airplanes to travel to or from whatever city their jobs required) they could take off the nameplates, but not the wings.
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S35I Am in Cloud-Storage Hell  Here I was, going about my day and minding my own business, when a notification popped up on my phone that made my blood run cold: Your iCloud storage is full. I am, as I've written before, a digital hoarder whose trinkets, tchotchkes, and stacks of yellowing newspapers (read: old pixelated memes) are distributed across an unknown number of cloud servers around the globe. On Apple's, I've managed to blow through 200 gigabytes of storage, an amount of data that, not even a decade ago, felt almost infinite: my own little Library of Congress, or that warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, filled with screenshots of bad tweets. The overwhelming majority of this space is dedicated to 31,013 photos and 1,742 videos I've personally taken. The rest is likely brain-cell-destroying junk that others have sent me in texts and group chats.
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S33America's Loneliness Epidemic Comes for the Restaurant  This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here.In 2020, the restaurant business as we knew it looked like a goner. Even its own lobbying group said so. As the pandemic crushed bars and sit-downs, the National Restaurant Association put out a dire prediction: The business would likely never return to its pre-pandemic state.
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S14AI Is Affecting Small Business Marketing. How Can You Use It Right Now?  It was late Autumn 2022, and I was happily writing away in my home office. At the time, I was 18 years into my "self-employed marketing copywriter" life and loving every second of it. Being on the other side of 55, I felt like I could do this forever, and work as long as I wanted to. Retirement in a few years? Pfft... not for me!It changed for me, and it changed for businesses everywhere. And it's still evolving. We don't know where we're going with AI or how deep the real impact of AI will be, but it's becoming clear that it will be substantial. Personally, for a minute there, I felt like a horse and buggy driver looking at the first automobile coming down the road (fun fact: my last name - Furman - derives from a carriage driver!)
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S26The 160-year mystery of Europe's Ice Age 'queens'  It's a typical evening at the Hohle Fels cave, around 38,000BC. Outside is a barren expanse of frigid steppe – a frozen landscape with few trees, stalked by cave lions and cave bears. But within, a cosy domestic scene is unfolding: a group of hunter-gatherers is lounging around in a vast natural hall – complete with a cathedral-like ceiling some 30m (98ft) high – illuminated by the flickering glow of an open fire. A woman is absent-mindedly fondling a small ivory figurine hung around her neck – her most valuable possession. Nearby, someone is knapping flint tools. The air is thick with the raspy, haunting sound of a vulture-bone flute, and the smell of roasting mammoth meat.At least, this is one possible scene that may have unfolded. Some 40,000 years later, archaeologists were excavating at the very same site – a limestone cave in what is now southwestern Germany – when they uncovered six intriguing fragments of ivory, buried under 3m (9.8ft) of sediment. Each was tiny, and when glued back together they made a single figurine – a woman just 6cm (2.4in) high, with a ring at the top instead of a head, possibly so that it could be worn as a pendant. This is the Venus of Hohle Fels, and she is thought to be the oldest representation of a human ever found.
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S15After 23 Long Years, Target Just Made a Brilliant Announcement  Because big companies have "what were you doing?" stories as well. And, on September 11, 2001, what Amazon and Target were doing was announcing that Target had agreed to a five-year deal outsourcing its entire online, digital sales operation to Amazon:Target Corporation and Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) today announced plans to open a Target store at www.amazon.com beginning later this fall, which will expand product offerings available at Amazon.com to include thousands of apparel, home, electronics and jewelry products.
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S25A Roku Terms of Service Update Locks Up Your TV Until You Agree ![]() Roku customers are threatening to stop using, or to even dispose of, their low-priced TVs and streaming gadgets after the company appears to be locking devices for people who don't conform to the recently updated terms of service.This month, users on Roku's support forums reported suddenly seeing a message when turning on their Roku TV or streaming device reading: "We've made an important update: We've updated our Dispute Resolution Terms. Select 'Agree' to agree to these updated Terms and to continue enjoying our products and services. Press * to view these updated Terms." A large button reading "Agree" follows. The pop-up doesn't offer a way to disagree, and users are unable to use their device unless they hit agree.
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S8Behind the Brand with Bryan Johnson  Johnson is an accomplished entrepreneur but is perhaps best known for his bold foray into anti-aging and Project Blueprint, a rigid set of health regimens strictly based on data- communicating through dozens of trackers per day, his organs write his grocery list for him. Now in the upper echelon of America's uber-wealthy tech founders at age 35, Johnson embarked on the quest for eternal life, becoming the protagonist in his own sci-fi novel- figuratively and also literally writing a sci-fi novel aptly named DON'T DIE under the pen name Zero.
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S34Photos of the Week: Snowy Soccer, Crouching Spider, Pain Simulator  Humanitarian aid air-dropped into Gaza, the funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow, a skijoring competition in Colorado, a blizzard in California, scenes from Paris Fashion Week in France, a sinking cargo ship off the coast of Yemen, thousands of cross-country ski racers in Sweden, a parade of effigies in Bali, and much more A model walks the runway during the Vetements Womenswear Fall/Winter 2024-2025 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on March 1, 2024, in Paris, France. #
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S32The Most Unusual State of the Union in Living Memory  Republican members of Congress repeatedly heckled President Biden, who was happy to mix it up with them.Few leaders have so visibly enjoyed being president as Joe Biden. That might explain why he took so long getting down the aisle of the House chamber tonight, shaking hands and taking selfies. When he finally made it to the dais, he soaked up the applause and then grinned. "Good evening! If I were smart, I'd go home now," he said.
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S3The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the "Submerged Sunrise of Wonder"  There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours.These are the thoughts coursing through this temporary constellation of consciousness as I pause at the lush mid-June dandelion at the foot of the hill on my morning run — the dandelion, now a fiesta of green where a season ago the small sun of its bloom had been, then the ethereal orb of its seeds, now long dispersed; the dandelion, existing for no better reason than do I, than do you — and no worse — by the same laws of physics beyond meaning: these clauses of exquisite precision punctuated by chance.
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S26 Causes of Burnout, and How to Avoid Them - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  There are six key areas where you could experience imbalances that lead to burnout. First, your workload. Do you feel chronically feel overloaded, and do you have opportunities to rest and recover? Second, a perceived lack of control. Do you lack autonomy, access to resources, and a say in decisions? Third rewards. Do the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards for your job match the amount of effort and time you put in to them? Fourth, community. How supportive and trusting are the relationships around you? Fifth, fairness. Do you believe that you receive fair and equitable treatment? Finally, values. Do your values match those of your leaders and the company?A fog of burnout surrounds you: You’re perpetually exhausted, annoyed, and feeling unaccomplished and unappreciated. Everything in you wants to quit your job. But is that the best choice? Ultimately only you can know what is right in your situation. But there is research that can help you determine whether you can salvage your current job or whether the mismatch between you and your current position is so great that you need to look for a new one.
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S27How the Seven Bridges of K  During the 18th century the denizens of the Prussian city of Königsberg wrestled with a puzzle: How could they find a walking path through the city that crossed each of its storied seven bridges exactly once?The bridges spanned a river containing two large islands. No matter how much they strategized their routes, they couldn’t avoid repeating a bridge.
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S28Microplastics Linked to Heart Attack, Stroke and Death  People who had tiny plastic particles lodged in a key blood vessel were more likely to experience serious health problems or die during a three-year studyPlastics are just about everywhere — food packaging, tyres, clothes, water pipes. And they shed microscopic particles that end up in the environment and can be ingested or inhaled by people.
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S50Conscious AI Is the Second-Scariest Kind  Everyone knows AIs are dangerous. Everyone knows they can rattle off breakthroughs in wildlife tracking and protein folding before lunch, put half the workforce out of a job by supper, and fake enough reality to kill whatever's left of democracy itself before lights out.Fewer people admit that AIs are intelligentânot yet, anywayâand even fewer, that they might be conscious. We can handle GPT-4 beating 90 percent of us on the SAT, but we might not be so copacetic with the idea that AI could wake upâcould already be awake, if you buy what Blake Lemoine (formerly of Google) or Ilya Sutskever (a co-founder of OpenAI) has been selling.
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S16S19Stop Misunderstanding the Gender Health Gap ![]() In many areas of health, women receive worse care, and suffer worse outcomes, than men. Women experience higher rates of adverse drug reactions. Across hundreds of diseases, they are diagnosed later than men. Women are more likely to suffer from common mental health conditions. In moments of acute pain, women are less likely to be given painkillers.One small positive is that this gender health gap is finally getting the attention it deserves. "We're much more aware of these issues now than we were previously," says Angela Saini, a journalist and the author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong. "It's become a huge topic right across academia, medical research, health institutions, everywhere. Even everyday people see it in the press all the time."
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S39The Haunting of Modern Pop Music  The producer who helped build Taylor Swift's empire of nostalgia is still finding new ways to explore the past.The song that has most influenced pop music of the past decade might be one released in 1984: Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire." With a rhythm that was twitchy but not quite danceable, with desperate vocals and cooling puddles of reverb, "I'm on Fire" was ballad and banger, confessional and slick, embodied and ghostly. Springsteen sang of being trapped on the edge of catharsis, and the music seemed to want to suspend time.
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S6S7Become a Paid Speaker to Promote Your Business  On my podcast, I spoke with Lois Creamer, professional speaker coach and author of the book Book More Business: Make Money Speaking. During the hour-long interview, we covered a number of topics related to becoming a paid speaker. Here are three tips stemming from our conversation.During our interview, Lois and I talked about the positioning statement, a clear and concise sentence of what you do and who you work with. With Lois' help, I developed my positioning statement years ago. My positioning statement is "I work with technical professionals so they can present more effectively, especially in front of non-technical audiences." If people ask what you do, with a positioning statement, you haven't taken a lot of time to say what you do, and people don't have to sit through a long spiel if they're not interested in what you do. If you use the positioning statement when speaking with decision-makers, you'd be surprised how often it leads to a conversation about how you can work with their organizations. My positioning statement is everywhere: my LinkedIn profile, my website, and my email signature. Everywhere!
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S9Emotionally Intelligent People Know That Willpower is a Big Fat Lie. They Do This Instead  For decades, the concept of willpower has reigned supreme in the realms of self-improvement and psychology. It's been revered as the iron-willed disciplinarian that can whip anyone into shape, capable of overcoming any temptation or challenge through sheer determination.But a closer examination of the psychological literature reveals a more nuanced reality, challenging the traditional notion of willpower as a standalone virtue. Emotionally intelligent individuals understand this complexity and leverage alternative regulatory strategies for achieving personal and professional success. Among these, temptation avoidance emerges as a pivotal technique, revealing that true self-control is more about strategic avoidance than brute force endurance.
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S17S44The 2024 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet  No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that didn't prevent a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates announced campaigns against Trump, even though the former president's lead appeared prohibitive long before he dominated early caucuses and primaries. With Nikki Haley's March 6 exit, he is now the presumptive nominee.
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S48Biden Is Serious About His Candy-Bar Crusade  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.In his State of the Union address last night, President Joe Biden took on a new symbolic foe: shrinkflation. In attacking the practice, he's trying to signal that he's aligned with the common American against corporate greedâeven if it's not clear what he can actually do about the problem.
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S4How three students wrote history by winning the Vesuvius Challenge  For nearly 20 years, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky named Brent Seales tried to develop software to pry open ancient scrolls that were charred and buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Eventually it became clear to him that the work was too much for a single team, so he considered making use of rapid advances in the field of AI. He then had another, even bolder idea: to turn the project into a worldwide, open-source contest.Combined, these ideas fueled a breakthrough. Since its March 2023 launch, the Vesuvius Challenge – funded by technology investors Nat Friedman (former CEO of Github) and entrepreneur Daniel Gross, among others – has made more progress toward unwrapping and reading the scrolls than anyone could have imagined. Machine learning automated processes that would have taken human beings decades to complete, while the competition generated a multinational network of bright minds that worked together rather than against each other.
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S246 Best Cheap Smartphones (2024): iPhone, Android, 5G ![]() Wireless carriers in the US go out of their way to make expensive smartphones seem affordable. AT&T will advertise a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra for just $36 a month, but don't let them fool you. Over 36 monthly installments, you're still spending more than a thousand dollars on a phone. Your pricey device may also keep you locked into the network, unable to switch wireless carriers until the phone is paid off.Forget the spendy option and get a seriously great affordable smartphone instead. I've tested dozens to find the best cheap phones that perform where it counts and aren't annoyingly slow. Our top pick, the Google Pixel 7A, is as good as almost any device, and our other choices strike a great balance between price and luxury.
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S36The 'Secret' Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus  A Columbia historian said he'd discovered a sacred text with clues to Jesus's sexuality. Was it real?In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem. In its library, he found what he said was a lost gospel. His announcement made international headlines. Scholars of the Bible would spend years debating the discovery's significance for the history of Christianity. But in 1975, one of Smith's colleagues went public with an extraordinary suggestion: The gospel was a fake. Its forger, the colleague believed, was Smith himself.
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S42'Shogun' Is Challenging Hollywood's Most Revered Stereotype  FX's epic new series is bringing unusual complexity to the beloved figure of the samurai.Most American audiences have probably never seen Hiroyuki Sanada without a sword in his hand. The illustrious Japanese actor has, since making his international film debut in 2003's The Last Samurai, practically cornered the Hollywood market on playing yakuza bosses and samurai warriors. Look, there he is, facing off against Hawkeye. There he goes, defending John Wick. And, oh, who's that guy Brad Pitt just brushed past aboard a bullet train? Sanada, again with a blade.
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S43Everything Can Be Meat  Recently, a photo of rice left me confused. The rice itself looked tasty enoughâfluffy, well formedâbut its oddly fleshy hue gave me the creeps. According to the scientists who'd developed it, each pink-tinged grain was seeded with muscle and fat cells from a cow, imparting a nutty, umami flavor.In one sense, this "beef rice" was just another example of lab-grown meat, touted as a way to eat animals without the ethical and environmental impacts. Though not yet commercially available, the rice was developed by researchers in Korea as a nutrition-dense food that can be produced sustainably, at least more so than beef itself. Although it has a more brittle texture than normal rice, it can be cooked and served in the same way. Yet in another sense, this rice was entirely different. Lab-grown meat aims to replicate conventional meat in every dimension, including taste, nutrition, and appearance. Beef rice doesn't even try.
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S49Katie Britt's Strange Speech  Before last night, the Alabama senator had distinguished herself with a reputation for being, well, normal.You might not have known it from Katie Britt's State of the Union rebuttal last nightâa performance derided by members of her own party as "bizarre" and "confusing"âbut up until then, Britt had distinguished herself in the Senate with a reputation for being startlingly, well, normal.
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S21Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World's Groundwater Supply ![]() This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free water available in almost unlimited quantities to grow their crops, their lives could be transformed. Until the water runs out.
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S40Electric Cars Are Still Not Good Enough  The Chevrolet Bolt was the little electric car that could. Never the fastest or the fanciest EV, the Bolt and its sticker price of roughly $30,000 made it cheaper than lots of gas cars, all while delivering a respectable 259 miles of range. With its legion of fans, the Bolt outsold every non-Tesla EV in America last year. But if you want to buy a new one, you'd better hurry: Chevy's parent company, General Motors, stopped making the Bolt at the end of 2023.The demise of the Bolt was supposed to mark the end of the beginning. In place of the BoltâGM's first mass-market EVâthe company had planned to unleash a fleet of more advanced EVs early this year. It hasn't gone as anticipated: Software bugs, battery problems, and factory delays have plagued the cars. The battery-powered Equinox SUV has yet to go on sale, and its larger sibling, the Blazer, was released before GM suspended sales. You can buy the fully electric version of the Silverado pickup truckâbut demand has been so lukewarm that GM has delayed production at a factory that, you guessed it, used to make the Bolt.
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S45The Cases Against Trump: A Guide  Fraud. Hush money. Election subversion. Mar-a-Lago documents. One place to keep track of the presidential candidate's legal troubles.Not long ago, the idea that a former presidentâor a major-party presidential nomineeâwould face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.
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S46Biden Silences the Doubters  It is hardly fashionable to say positive things about Joe Biden these days. I myself have been among his doubters, convinced that he'd never be able to win a rematch against Donald Trump. I imagined myself on a flight bound for ReykjavÃk, Lisbon, Sydney, wherever on November 6, staring backwards out the window and squinting at the smoking ruins of American democracy, grimly praying that I wouldn't turn into a pillar of salt.But it's undeniable that Biden gave a stunning speech last night, and it wasn't just because there was a game on quality to his remarks, the thwapping sound of a gauntlet hitting the ground. It's because he managed to do that thing he does best, which his aides long ago described to Richard Ben Cramer in What It Takes as "the connect." Biden's primary strength has never been formulating policy or grand ideas. It's been his ability to read a room, to sweep in the energy that's already there, and to make the most impersonal settings feel deeply intimate, like one-on-one discussions. And last night, in his State of the Union addressâgenerally the dullest and most choreographed of presidential ritualsâhe did just that.
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S18S23Rad Power Bikes Has 4 New Models--and Safer Batteries ![]() The Seattle ebike company Rad Power Bikes has announced four new ebike models, all of which have the very important distinction of being unlikely to have their batteries suddenly burst into flames.The company says its new Safe Shield BatteriesâÂÂwhich come standard on all four new bikesâÂÂhave been certified at UL-2271, an industry standard ranking for battery safety. That means the batteries on these models of Rad PowerâÂÂs bikes wonâÂÂt be nearly as susceptible to the kinds of battery fires that have been plaguing low-end ebikes and scooters and have led to injuries and nearly 20 deaths in the US.
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S37A Subtle Shift Shaking Up Sibling Relationships  Growing up with a sibling who is much younger than you are can be a profoundly humbling experience. In casual conversation, you might suddenly find yourself fumbling to parse Gen Z terminology or pretending to know the identities of the alleged celebrities they keep name-dropping. You don't even duke it out in the same way. Whereas siblings close in age might skirmish over whose turn it is to pick the night's TV show, these debates take on a different contour when one is in middle school and the other is in college. You probably can't convince a sixth grader to watch The Bear with you, so you may have to settle for Dash & Lily every time.Siblings with a several-year age gap were once considered exceptional, but they are quietly becoming more common. From 1967 to 2017, the average time between sibling births increased by about three-quarters of a year, according to data from a study published in 2020. Siblings are now, on average, 4.2 years apart. The tit-for-tat argumentsâover, say, who gets to shower firstâthat have been associated with the sibling relationship for decades are not going away completely. Yet these larger age gaps have opened the door for a new kind of dynamicâone premised more on mentorship than on a battle for limited attention or resources. Squabbles for parental attention are giving way, at least in some families, to a sense that there is enough to go around for everyone.
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