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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S26For the First Time in 75 years, In-N-Out Burger Is Closing a Store Today. It's a Bittersweet Lesson About What Really Matters   On Sunday, In-N-Out store 193 in Oakland, California, will close its doors for the last time. You probably heard that the company announced--back in January--that it would close the store due to an increase in crime activity in the area. My colleague, Bill Murphy Jr., confirmed at the time that it would be the first time the company had permanently closed one of its stores. Today, March 24, 2024, that time has come. If you're not a fan of In-N-Out, it's hard to imagine what it means that one of its stores is closing. It's also hard to put into context the idea that the company has never permanently closed a store before. It has been around for 75 years, which is a long time not to shut down a single restaurant. In-N-Out has closed some stores when it relocated them or opened another one nearby, but this is the first time it is taking a store off its map completely.
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S6Why AI is so thirsty: Data centers use massive amounts of water  Tech companies also like Iowa's wind power, which gives it the country's highest rate of renewable energy. Some 60 percent of Iowa's electricity comes from renewable sources, so tech companies can power their data centers there while also working toward ambitious climate goals for low-carbon power.As data center operators power up the servers that keep the internet humming and make artificial intelligence possible, they also need large volumes of water to cool those servers down, to keep them from overheating. The growing water consumption by data centers is becoming a challenge for some host communities.
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S43Trump Would Break the Budget  No one is talking enough about one of the most important policy choices at stake in this election.A decision Donald Trump made in his first presidential term has triggered one of the most important policy choices at stake in this year's election. The massive tax cuts for individuals that Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress and the next president act to extend them. So far, the question of whether to preserve the Trump tax cuts has received almost no attention in the early stages of a presidential contest dominated by other issues (including abortion, inflation, and immigration), Trump's legal troubles, and Joe Biden's age.
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S12TikTok is not the only Chinese app thriving in America - The Economist (No paywall)  WITH THE prospect of a ban hanging over TikTok, its 170m American users may start looking for an alternative time-sink. They could plump for Bigo Live, popular for TikTokish live-streaming. Or Likee, which offers similar video-editing and sharing options and has more than 100m users around the world. There is also Hago, which blends social media and video games, and which has clocked up some 500m downloads.
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S7Are You Noise Sensitive? Here's How to Tell - WIRED (No paywall)  As a mom of three boys, I can barely hear my thoughts against the cacophony of my brood plotting their next Minecraft moves, bartering Pokémon cards, or singing a Weird Al parody. They’re not fighting or wreaking havoc, but life with three energetic school-aged kids is, well, noisy … and I’m noise sensitive.It turns out, I’m in good company. According to a 2023 PLOS One study conducted in the UK, nearly one in five adults have some level of noise sensitivity. And Richard J. Salvi, cofounder and director of the University at Buffalo's Center for Hearing and Deafness, tells me that at least 29 medical conditions are linked to noise sensitivity.
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S9What's next for offshore wind - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  Large groups of turbines installed along coastlines can harness the powerful, consistent winds that blow offshore. Given that 40% of the global population lives within 60 miles of the ocean, offshore wind farms can be a major boon to efforts to clean up the electricity supply around the world. The coming year and beyond will likely be littered with more delayed and canceled projects, but the industry is also seeing new starts and continuing technological development. The question is whether current troubles are more like a speed bump or a sign that 2024 will see the industry run off the road. Here’s what’s next for offshore wind power.
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S11S13The secret to career success may well be off to the side - The Economist (No paywall)  The conventional language of career success moves in only one direction: up. You scale the career ladder or climb the greasy pole. If you do well, you have a rapid ascent. And if you really succeed, you reach the top. No one ever rings home to share the news that they have reached a plateau. But there is another type of career trajectory. Sideways moves, to jobs that don’t involve a promotion or even necessarily a pay rise, can be a boon to employees and organisations alike.
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S14S33S45Reading as a Sensory Experience  Join Atlantic editors Jane Yong Kim, Gal Beckerman, and Ellen Cushing in conversation with executive editor Adrienne LaFrance for a discussion of "The Great American Novels," an ambitious new editorial project from The Atlantic. The conversation will take place at The Strand in New York (828 Broadway) on Wednesday, April 3, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available for purchase here.When your senses feel numb, you're likely to seek direct experiences: You might bite into a crisp slice of watermelon to taste the brightness of summer, or spend an evening enveloped in layers of rich sound at the symphony, or stick your nose in a bouquet of perfumed, blooming flowers. A book can deliver these satisfactions only secondhandâbut the ones that do it well tap into one of literature's great pleasures: A skilled writer, through words alone, can draw up scenes that awaken your perception and, in turn, your emotions.
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S46It's Time to Give Up on Ending Social Media's Misinformation Problem  If you don't trust social media, you should know you're not alone. Most people surveyed around the world feel the sameâin fact, they've been saying so for a decade. There is clearly a problem with misinformation and hazardous speech on platforms such as Facebook and X. And before the end of its term this year, the Supreme Court may redefine how that problem is treated.Over the past few weeks, the Court has heard arguments in three cases that deal with controlling political speech and misinformation online. In the first two, heard last month, lawmakers in Texas and Florida claim that platforms such as Facebook are selectively removing political content that its moderators deem harmful or otherwise against their terms of service; tech companies have argued that they have the right to curate what their users see. Meanwhile, some policy makers believe that content moderation hasn't gone far enough, and that misinformation still flows too easily through social networks; whether (and how) government officials can directly communicate with tech platforms about removing such content is at issue in the third case, which was put before the Court this week.
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S20S25Here We Are, Right In the Middle of March Madness, and the NCAA Just Taught a Key Leadership Lesson  Sometimes these stories come from places you don't expect. That's what happened Saturday, when for a few minutes, the biggest news out of the NCAA college basketball tournaments wasn't about the players or the coaches, or even the fans.At halftime during the game between 3rd seed N.C. State and 14th seed Chattanooga in the women's tournament, the NCAA removed referee Tommi Paris, citing an alleged conflict of interest that the NCAA said it hadn't been aware of beforehand.
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S34Mobile Gaming Is Having a Moment--and Backbone Wants to Unite It ![]() Mobile gaming has never received the same respect as console and PC gaming. Yet it generated over $90 billion in 2023, accounting for half of the global games market, and runs the gamut from casual to AAA titles. It's continuing to grow, and the boundary between mobile gaming and âÂÂregularâ gaming is increasingly blurry.While gaming on the phone is usually secondary for folks with a console under the TV, thereâÂÂs a huge untapped market of potential gamers who use smartphones as their primary device. I spoke with Maneet Khaira, CEO and founder of BackboneâÂÂwhich makes a popular mobile gaming controllerâÂÂabout why he thinks mobile gaming is set to soar. ItâÂÂs not just better native games driving mobile forward; remote play and cloud gaming are also taking off.
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S21S31How to View April's Total Solar Eclipse, Online and In Person ![]() ItâÂÂs shadow time, baby! Soon, people living in North America will get to experience their first solar eclipse in almost a decade.Even though the last solar eclipse in North America happened in 2017, the next one isnâÂÂt expected until August 2044, so seizing this moment is critical. More than just a peculiar shadow, the solar eclipse is a perfect opportunity to hang out with loved ones outside and meditate on humanityâÂÂs smallness compared to the vast universe.
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S10Inside the hunt for new physics at the world's largest particle collider - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  In 1977, Ray and Charles Eames released a remarkable film that, over the course of just nine minutes, spanned the limits of human knowledge. Powers of Ten begins with an overhead shot of a man on a picnic blanket inside a one-square-meter frame. The camera pans out: 10, then 100 meters, then a kilometer, and eventually all the way to the then-known edges of the observable universe—1024 meters. There, at the farthest vantage, it reverses. The camera zooms back in, flying through galaxies to arrive at the picnic scene, where it plunges into the man’s skin, digging down through successively smaller scales: tissues, cells, DNA, molecules, atoms, and eventually atomic nuclei—10-14 meters. The narrator’s smooth voice-over ends the journey: “As a single proton fills our scene, we reach the edge of present understanding.” During the intervening half-century, particle physicists have been exploring the subatomic landscape where Powers of Ten left off. Today, much of this global effort centers on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an underground ring 17 miles (27 kilometers) around that straddles the border between Switzerland and France. There, powerful magnets guide hundreds of trillions of protons as they do laps at nearly the speed of light underneath the countryside. When a proton headed clockwise plows into a proton headed counterclockwise, the churn of matter into energy transmutes the protons into debris: electrons, photons, and more exotic subatomic bric-a-brac. The newly created particles explode radially outward, where they are picked up by detectors.
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S15First person with a Neuralink brain implant reveals how he uses it  On March 20, Elon Musk’s Neuralink revealed the identity of the first person to receive one of its brain implants — and the young man appears to be hugely grateful for the “life changing” technology.The background: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) translate signals in the brain into commands for machines, computers, and robotic limbs. While some brain signals can be detected noninvasively, with EEG headsets, implants installed inside the skull are vastly more powerful and precise.
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S36How to Find Film for Your Old Polaroid Camera (2024) ![]() We really like physical photos around these parts. Our guide to the Best Instant Cameras has a collection of modern gadgets that print out pictures that you can stick on your fridge or pin on your walls. But what about the ones that started it all? Polaroid cameras have been fumbling around attics, garages, and storage closets for decades. And if you found one or just bought a cheap used one, there's good news: You just need some film.The better news is that, despite huge difficulty in the past, it's now easier than ever to get film for your old Polaroid cameras. However, despite it being easy to find cheap film on Amazon, there's a bit more nuance to choosing film than randomly picking whatever shows up first. If you're not sure what kind of film your camera uses, read on.
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S44The Shohei Ohtani Betting Scandal Won't Be the Last  If the world's most famous baseball player can be implicated in allegations of illegal gambling, what else is happening in the shadows?Major League Baseball officials will tell anyone who listens that the integrity of the sport is safer than ever. Despite the widespread legalization of sports gambling, despite MLB's lucrative partnerships with the gambling platforms, despite Americans legally wagering about $120 billion on sports last year alone, and despite in-game advertisements that encourage fans to place bets right nowâdespite all that, everything's fine. Third-party security companies, baseball officials point out, are monitoring traffic on DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and other legal apps, and can see wagers in real time. They can flag curious activity in a matter of minutes and then trace the activity all the way to an IP address, usually someone's computer or phone.
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S5Most of This Island Disappeared in Just a Decade - The Atlantic (No paywall)  Before the sea started taking house-size bites out of Nyangai, this small tropical island off the coast of Sierra Leone hummed with activity. I first visited in 2013 while documenting the construction of a school on a neighboring island. It was a cloudless day in April. A group of teenagers was busy setting up a sound system for a party. Old men chatted and smoked in the shade of palm trees. Children chased one another through the maze of sandy lanes while a constant traffic of roughly hewn wooden boats plied the surrounding waters.The silhouettes of coconut palms and June plum trees dominated the island’s profile, and beneath them stood clusters of neat mud-and-thatch homes. The beach that ringed the island was so white, it hurt the eyes, the water a limpid green. I couldn’t stay for long, but Nyangai left a deep impression.
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S8Large Language Models' Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage - WIRED (No paywall)  Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performance improved predictably and smoothly as the models scaled upâthe larger the model, the better it got. But with other tasks, the jump in ability wasn't smooth. The performance remained near zero for a while, then performance jumped. Other studies found similar leaps in ability.We're only now seeing and studying this behavior because of how large these models have become. Large language models train by analyzing enormous data sets of textâwords from online sources including books, web searches, and Wikipediaâand finding links between words that often appear together. The size is measured in terms of parameters, roughly analogous to all the ways that words can be connected. The more parameters, the more connections an LLM can find. GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters, while GPT-3.5, the LLM that powers ChatGPT, uses 350 billion. GPT-4, which debuted in March 2023 and now underlies Microsoft Copilot, reportedly uses 1.75 trillion.
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S22Improve Productivity by Plugging Energy-Sapping Leaks in Your Business  While such improvements can be helpful in the world of work, there's something to be said for addressing wasted time and energy in your daily business affairs. Incomplete, unattended, and unconfirmed items not only are a physical drain to existing resources, materials, and staff, but also can be a wasteful mental drain as well.   Finishing a work project can be extremely satisfying. But it can also be draining, especially if you haven't fully tied up loose ends. Consider where there are still remnants of a completed project in your work environment.
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S23With 3 Heartfelt Words, Kansas City Chiefs Tight End--and Taylor Swift Boyfriend--Travis Kelce Taught a Huge Lesson in Leadership  This week, during a podcast episode, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce gave a special callout to his teammate, cornerback L'Jarius Sneed. Sneed has now been traded to the Tennessee Titans, but at the time, Kelce was hoping he would stay on the Chiefs. It was a lesson for every entrepreneur or business leader about how to let colleagues and employees know just how much you appreciate and value them.The Chiefs won the Super Bowl last month. But even on that elite team, Kelce occupies a special place. For one thing he's been there for 11 seasons--his entire career. Also, he's considered by many to be the best tight end in the NFL right now. He's a celebrity beyond football, having hosted Saturday Night Live, modeled, and even starred in his own reality series called Catching Kelce. And, of course, he's dating Taylor Swift.
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S16The most dangerous woman in the world  It takes a lot to be branded “The Most Dangerous Woman in the World.” You need to live a life that’s more skeletons than closet. You keep your head on a swivel, trying to stay a step ahead of the people in hot pursuit—the press, the cops, your victims. This was life for Mary Ann Duignan, a.k.a. May Churchill Sharpe, a.k.a. “Chicago May,” who made her way from Europe to America and back again as one the most notorious criminals of the early 1900s. As historian Laurence William White writes, “by allying prostitution with robbery and blackmail, [Chicago May] was soon a familiar figure among the gamblers, gangsters and courtesans.”Duignan was born in Ireland in 1871. But life across the ocean was calling her, and she answered by leaving home in 1890. This wasn’t an unusual decision, explains Lauren Byrne in her review of Nuala O’Faolain’s biography of Duignan. Half the population of post-famine Ireland was emigrating, but Duignan did things a little differently.
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S42Sydney Sweeney's Growing Empire  Immaculate is obsessed with Sydney Sweeney's face. It's not news that the camera loves the actor, who has fast become Hollywood's newest ingenue. But Immaculate, a horror film set in a convent, is a Sweeney showcase in the smartest possible way, devoting much of its running time to her wide-eyed, trembling visage as she encounters all kinds of demonic nastiness. It's a straightforward piece of genre silliness, an 89-minute thrill fest crammed with the requisite jump scares and creepy religious imagery. But it's also part of a larger body of evidence that Sweeney, unlike the guileless characters she often portrays, is carefully constructing her career in ways that suit her skill set.Consider Madame Web, the comic-book movie that starred Dakota Johnson as a laconic superhero and featured Sweeney in a supporting role. The film was so noxious that it became an instant cult classic (although I stress that it's quite bad), with Johnson herself practically reveling in its ineptitude while publicizing the movie. Sweeney got in a few of her own licks: "You might have seen me in Anyone but You or Euphoria," she said in her opening monologue when hosting Saturday Night Live. "You definitely did not see me in Madame Web."
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S17S24After 53 Years, Starbucks Is Making a Risky Change. It's the Smartest Idea I've Seen Yet  You--like most people--probably think of Starbucks as a coffee shop. And, for most of its existence, it has been exactly that. It's the place where you go for a cup of coffee or a latte or whatever Venti iced concoction happens to be your favorite. That's not, however, how Starbucks got its start. Originally, it was a store where you could buy fresh-roasted coffee beans, tea, and spices. It wasn't until 10 years later that Howard Schultz, who would eventually go on to be CEO and become the most public face of Starbucks, joined the company and reimagined it as an American version of the Italian espresso houses he fell in love with in Milan.
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S27S41Whatever Happened to the Urban Doom Loop?  The pandemic was supposed to be the death of the great American city. The rise of remote work unleashed an exodus to the Sun Belt and suburbs, leaving behind empty subway cars, abandoned offices, and desolate downtowns. Violent crime spiked. Suddenly, so-called superstar citiesâsuch as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, which boomed throughout the 2010sâwere facing what experts called an "urban doom loop." The more people moved away, the worse things would get; the worse things got, the more people would move away; and so on, in an endless spiral that would do to superstar cities what the decline of the auto industry did to Detroit.But that hasn't happened. Twenty-five of America's 26 largest downtowns have more residents today than they did on the eve of the pandemic. Meanwhile, both violent and property crime plummeted in cities across the country in 2022 and 2023 (Washington, D.C., was a notable exception), and some other threats to public order, such as shoplifting, appear to have been overstated. In fact, the biggest problem that superstar cities face today is the same one that afflicted them before the pandemic: Too many people want to live in them. Housing prices have skyrocketed over the past four years. In New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, vacancy rates are at or near their lowest levels in decades. Even San Francisco, the paragon of post-pandemic urban decline, is doing remarkably well. Last year, its population grew more from net migration than any other city in California, and its crime rate fell. Car break-ins, the symbol of Bay Area decay, declined dramatically in late 2023, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis. Homelessness and open-air drug use remain big problems, but they haven't prompted mass urban flight. Even if things aren't fully back to normal, the arrow appears to be pointing up.
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S29S30The Apple Antitrust Case and the 'Stigma' of the Green Bubble ![]() Back in 2022 at the annual Code Conference, where tech luminaries submit to onstage interviews, an audience member asked Apple CEO Tim Cook for some tech support. âÂÂI canâÂÂt send my mom certain videos,â he said; she used an Android device, which means she can't access AppleâÂÂs iMessage. CookâÂÂs now-infamous response: âÂÂBuy your mom an iPhone.âÂÂCookâÂÂs remark and AppleâÂÂs recent decision to block the third-party app Beeper from bridging the Android-to-iMessage interoperability chasm are two of the many examples of allegedly monopolistic behavior cited in the US governmentâÂÂs antitrust suit against Apple. Central to the case is AppleâÂÂs practice of âÂÂlocking inâ iPhone customers by undermining competing apps, using its proprietary messaging protocol as glue, and generally making it challenging for people to switch to other phones.
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S28S39Is the Shorter Workweek All It Promises to Be?  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.A new bill advocates for a 32-hour workweek. Can this approach cure what ails American workers?
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S40Photos of the Week:  A massive ballet class in Mexico City, the Night of Ghosts festival in Greece, severe tornado damage in Indiana, a garbage-strewn beach in Bali, airdrops of humanitarian aid over the Gaza Strip, a St. Patrick's Day parade in Tokyo, a robot among tulips in the Netherlands, colorful Holi celebrations in India, and much more A man, dressed as the Hindu deity Sasthappan, performs during the traditional dance festival Theyyam, also known as Kaliyattam, at the Muthappa Swami temple in Somwarpet, India, on March 18, 2024. #
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S47The Wrong Way to Study AI in College  This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.Earlier this week, my colleague Ian Bogost published a provocative article about a trend in higher education: the opening of distinct colleges of computing, akin to law schools. New programs at MIT, Cornell, and soon UC Berkeley follow an uptick in the number of students graduating with computer-science majors. They are serving a growing market.
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S4How Will Putin Respond to the Terrorist Attack in Moscow? - The New Yorker (No paywall)  On Friday night, at least four men stormed Crocus City Hall, a concert venue in Moscow’s northwestern outskirts, gunning down victims as they ran, screaming, through the building’s cavernous foyer. Those trapped inside captured the grim scene on their cell phones: assailants fanning out with weapons drawn, bursts of automatic gunfire, bodies slumped on the floor. The attackers set fire to the auditorium, a blaze that spread quickly. Smoke and flames engulfed the building. According to a Telegram channel close to Russian law enforcement, police found twenty-eight bodies in a single bathroom; another fourteen were recovered in an emergency stairwell. In total, a hundred and thirty-seven people are dead—the most killed by an act of terror in Russia since 2004, when more than three hundred people were killed after militants seized a school in Beslan.The act of terror was, above all, exactly that: a ghoulish spasm of violence reminiscent of the worst attacks in Europe in recent years, such as the storming of the Bataclan theatre, in Paris, in 2015, where a hundred and thirty people were killed. But in Russia, after twenty-four years of Vladimir Putin’s rule—he just extended his reign by another six years in elections last week—and two years into its war with Ukraine, the attack may carry its own political significance.
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S18S19With 4  Twelve years ago, Taylor Swift shared her ultimate goal in life. It's something any of us can achieve.
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