   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S6An Ecology of Intimacies   At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment — a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself as projections give way to presence and complexes are composted into candid relation. In his slender and splendid book Twice Alive (public library), poet, geologist, and translator Forrest Gander draws from the natural world a poetic “ecology of intimacies,” reverencing lichens’ “supreme parsimony in drought” and the “long soft sarongs of moss” as a way “to recover the play of life itself.”
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S9How governments are using facial recognition to crack down on protesters  On March 13, 2022, 34-year-old English teacher Yulia Zhivtsova left her Moscow apartment to meet her friends at the mall. Bundled up against the freezing cold, she entered the metro at the CSKA station on the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line, passing through station barriers that let travelers pay by scanning their faces.The officers looked back and forth between Zhivtsova and an image on their smartphones. They seemed unsure if they had the right person. Catching a glimpse of the screen, Zhivtsova recognized a photo of herself taken the month before, when she was detained for protesting Russia’s war in Ukraine. Her hair looked different: In the photo it was faded blue, but that day it was back to a gleaming teal. “I do tend to change my hair color a lot,” Zhivtsova told Rest of World.
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S27The 10 Best Games to Play While You Wait for Grand Theft Auto 6  The wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 has been a long one — full of rumors, leaks, and grasping at straws. Then, in late 2023, Rockstar Games finally revealed a trailer — shortly after it leaked online. The trailer confirmed reports that GTA 6 will mark the series’ return to Vice City when it arrives some time in 2025. That means we still have a long wait before we can go on our own virtual crime sprees, at least GTA-style. But if you don’t want to wait until then, there are plenty of other open-world games that capture the same feeling. Here are the 10 best games to play while you wait for Grand Theft Auto 6.
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S10Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation  Jane Fonda, at 86, is small-boned and elegant, her eyes like soft blue-gray flannel. Yet it’s startling how much energy shoots through her via a simple handshake: if a woodland creature could shake your hand, it might feel like this, the will of an entire forest ecosystem pouring through one being. She’s physically strong, sitting up straight and tall for more than an hour on a backless ottoman, perched before a cozy sitting-room fireplace in her Los Angeles town house. But the message telegraphed by her handshake is less a matter of muscle tone than of pure urgency. If you could put it into words, it would be this: There’s not much time left.Fonda has already lived many lives. The daughter of a much loved actor and a socialite, Henry Fonda and Frances Ford Seymour, she has built an astonishing acting career herself: In the space of just a few years, she shifted from the campy delights of Barbarella to career-defining performances in Klute and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Younger audiences know her from the Book Club movies and the hit TV series Grace and Frankie. And although it’s now common for actors to support causes they care about, vocally and financially, Fonda is the OG actor-activist. In the early 1970s she supported Native American causes and spoke out on behalf of the Black Panthers. She’s fought for civil rights and issues directly affecting women’s welfare, though she may be best known for her anti–Vietnam War stance in the 1970s—in particular, a photograph of her perched on an anti-aircraft gun taken during a 1972 trip to Hanoi. Fonda has apologized repeatedly and profusely over the years for that photo, knowing how hurtful it was to GIs and veterans. She knows what it’s like to be embattled, and to go to battle for principles she believes in. But in 2019 Fonda had a breakthrough that, as she describes it, was bigger than any revelation she’s had in decades of both acting and activism.
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S3Why Is My Apartment So Dusty All the Time?  Walking into my apartment, you might think no one had been there for months. There is a thick layer of dust on nearly every surface — the dresser, the bookshelves, the mirrors. It gathers in the corners of my room, in long strings and fat clumps. Dusting doesn’t seem to help much, either: A surface I wipe down in the morning will be at least a little dusty by afternoon. In comparison, my parents’ house upstate is almost never dusty. I stayed there after they were away for months on a recent trip and marveled at how pristine the piano and coffee table were. It seemed unfair somehow. Was it me? My apartment? Is New York City just dustier than other places?But Bostick did have some theories about why I felt so plagued by the stuff. He guessed (correctly) that I lived on the first or second floor of my building, and pointed out that most of the fine particle dust in the city comes from pollutants like combustion from cars. While we may not have as many cars per capita as other cities that are more suburban and spread out, we do live closer to them. (In certain neighborhoods, like the South Bronx, proximity to truck pollution is especially bad, driving high rates of asthma.) “In New York, your house is right on the street and the windows are one sidewalk away from traffic,” Bostick said. All those particles just waft right in. There are other possible factors at play: The buildings in New York are relatively old — the median age of buildings is around 90 years — and many of them lack new air-filtration systems. A lot of indoor air pollution also comes from cooking, which, again, settles differently in a tiny apartment compared to a huge suburban kitchen. “Think of how many people essentially live in their kitchens in New York,” Bostick said.
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S16Inside the Creation of the World's Most Powerful Open Source AI Model - WIRED (No paywall)  This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had spent months, and about $10 million, training DBRX, a large language model similar in design to the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But they wouldn’t know how powerful their creation was until results came back from the final tests of its abilities.“We’ve surpassed everything,” Jonathan Frankle, chief neural network architect at Databricks and leader of the team that built DBRX, eventually told the team, which responded with whoops, cheers, and applause emojis. Frankle usually steers clear of caffeine but was taking sips of iced latte after pulling an all-nighter to write up the results.
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S3825 Years Ago, a Very Stupid Sci-Fi Show Created a Brilliant TV Universe  Predicting the future is a sucker’s game. For every sci-fi story hailed for its uncanny prescience, dozens portray the coming years with about as much accuracy as a boardwalk psychic describing your future spouse. 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a masterpiece, but we weren’t visiting Howard Johnson’s orbital branch by the time the calendar caught up to Stanley Kubrick’s vision.That’s part of what makes Futurama such a joy to watch. Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s sci-fi comedy was never seriously trying to predict life in the year 3000, and the fourth millennium was so far removed from its March 1999 debut that Futurama had the freedom to do what was funny, not sensical. Its future still has rules and structure, but those fiddly details were always bent for the sake of a good story.
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S28YouTube Just Quietly Added a Brilliant Spider-Verse Sequel -- And You Can Stream It For Free  In a perfect world, Sony’s animated Spider-Verse trilogy would be complete this year. Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the third film in the studio’s acclaimed series, was slated for a Spring 2024 release. That was before the actors’ strike pushed production back indefinitely, and before Vulture reported on unsustainable working conditions for the project’s animators.“There’s no way that movie’s coming out then,” an anonymous animator told the publication. “Everyone’s been fully focused on Across the Spider-Verse and barely crossing the finish line. And now it’s like, Oh, yeah, now we have to do the other one.”
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S30An Iconic Star Wars Villain Just Rose From the Dead  From the moment she appeared in the trailer for The Bad Batch Season 3, Asajj Ventress became a major draw for fans tuning into the animated series’ final season. The former Nightsister was a big baddie in The Clone Wars, and hardcore fans know she had a redemption arc and whirlwind romance in the 2015 young adult novel Dark Disciple. However, her appearance meant a major Star Wars mystery needed to be answered. This topic was conveniently sidestepped in her first Bad Batch episode, but that decision proved how not revealing something can be a stronger choice than explaining everything all at once.
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S7How mastering the art of being alone can boost your mental health - New Scientist (No paywall)  Solitude is inevitable. Adults in the UK and US spend around one-third of their waking lives alone and that increases as we get older. In many places, we live alone in greater proportions than ever before. A recent survey of 75 countries shows that 17 of them have more than 25 per cent solo households.As social creatures, research has historically pointed us away from time alone. But recently, more people are spending time away from the crowd, and even seem to crave it. Now, we have evidence as to why alone time can feel so good and may in fact be vital to your health and well-being. Moreover, we have…
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S8Investing in productivity growth  The world’s living standards have climbed sharply over the past 25 years, driven by strong productivity growth.1Pixels of Progress: A granular look at human development around the world, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2022; and Max Roser, The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it, Our World in Data, 2016. Median economy productivity surged sixfold over this period.2Based on Conference Board data (from the Total Economy Database) for 125 emerging and advanced economies. The sixfold increase is the jump in the weighted median productivity level of these economies between 1997 and 2022. Note that several numbers in this report may not perfectly match similar numbers from other MGI reports. The differences normally come from different definitions or methodologies, depending on the data source. For example, in the February 2023 MGI report Rekindling US productivity for a new era, the most common measure is nonfarm, private business labor productivity, while in this report we use total economy productivity. Additionally, that report uses data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, while here we use The Conference Board and other sources that allow us to make comparisons across economies. Like the United States, other economies have local sources whose statistics may differ slightly from the numbers we present.Yet productivity growth is fading, and in many parts of the world, it has failed to start at all. Since the global financial crisis (GFC) around 2008, there has been a near-universal slowdown. In advanced economies, productivity growth had already decelerated before the GFC—from an average of 2.2 percent per year in the five years to 2002 to 1.6 percent through 2007—and then fell further, to less than 1 percent, in the 2012–22 decade.3We split the quarter century into five-year periods: 1997–2002, 2002–07, 2012–16, and 2016–22. We skip the volatile five years of the GFC (2007–12) because they are highly distortive. For instance, in the United States, growth in capital per hour jumped significantly during the crisis simply because hours worked tanked. In emerging economies, productivity growth accelerated before the GFC, from 2.0 percent in the five years to 2002 to 5.9 percent through 2007, and then fell to 3.4 percent in the decade to 2022.4China and India are among the economies whose productivity growth slowed, but their increasing importance masks a starker decline. Excluding them, productivity growth in emerging economies fell from 3.5 percent in 2002–07 to 1.3 percent in 2012–22.
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S11Practicing Yoga Can Help Prevent Alzheimer's Disease - Discover Magazine (No paywall)  But a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) suggests yoga can be a potent ally in preserving cognitive function — especially if it involves a variety of activities like meditation, breathwork, mudras (shapes or positions made with the fingers), and chanting, all found in Kundalini.Anti-inflammatory and anti-aging benefits: Blood tests revealed increased gene expression associated with reducing inflammation and slowing aging processes — namely, improved peripheral cytokine activity or signaling proteins within the immune system. Better cytokine activity suggests a healthier immune response, which is particularly relevant in conditions like Alzheimer's disease, which research has associated with systemic inflammation.
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S21S23Apple's Most Promising Noir Thriller is the Biggest Disappointment of the Year  Like any good detective, Apple TV+’s Sugar keeps things close to the chest. But unlike any other good detective show, Sugar gets so wrapped up in its own mysteries that it forgets how to be engaging TV.A genre-bending noir from I Am Legend scribe Mark Protosevich, Sugar has a lot of intriguing elements going for it. It’s got star Colin Farrell, who also executive produces the series. It’s directed by Fernando Meirelles, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind City of God. And it’s executive produced by Simon Kinberg, whose fingerprints can be found all over sci-fi hits like Legion and The Martian (but also directed arguably the worst X-Men movie ever: Dark Phoenix). Sugar has all the makings of a great genre show, one that could cleverly play with its noir tropes in exciting and unconventional ways. Unfortunately, none of its most promising elements come together, and Sugar ends up an incoherent jumble of half-formed ideas.
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S2625 Years Later, Star Wars Finally Fixed the Most Controversial Part of Jedi Canon  When Luke Skywalker trained to be a Jedi, his potential was mostly connected to whether he could stop being so impulsive. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke left Yoda before his training was complete, but in Return of the Jedi, Yoda told him, “No more training do you require,” as figuring out his daddy issues came first. But then, in The Phantom Menace, becoming a powerful Jedi became a question of science: if you had a high midi-chlorian count, you could probably grab a lightsaber. But that wasn’t the only factor. In 2023, Ahsoka made it clear you could still become a Jedi even with a low midi-chlorian count. Sabine, apparently, has a low “aptitude” for the Force, yet she’s in Jedi training. Now, in The Bad Batch Season 3, a former Jedi and former Sith warrior makes it clear that what’s in your blood has nothing to do with anything. Spoilers ahead for The Bad Batch Season 3, Episode 9, “Harbinger.”
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S31A Novel Anti-Aging Treatment Revitalized Mice Immune Systems -- Will It Work In Humans?  One group of researchers believe they’ve found a way to reset the immune system with a one-time antibody treatment.You might know your immune system as the built-in, around-the-clock surveillance system primed to keep nasty germs out and swiftly kick to the curb any that do manage to sneak in. It’s a system primed to protect us at any age, but the sad truth is that once we get older, our immunity slows down and wanes.
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S20Which country will be last to escape inflation? - The Economist (No paywall)  To get a view of the various battlefields, we have updated our measure of “inflation entrenchment” for ten rich countries. The measure comprises five indicators: core inflation, unit labour costs, “inflation dispersion”, inflation expectations and Google-search behaviour. We rank each country on each indicator, then combine the rankings in order to form an overall score.The results are better than in November, when we last conducted the exercise. They also reveal a linguistic divide. Countries in the eu and Asia perform well; in the English-speaking world, inflation is taking longer to fade. Australia tops the ranking. Britain and Canada are not far behind. America is doing better, but even there inflation remains entrenched.
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S33 The Next Star Trek Movie Just Confirmed a Tantalizing Timeline Detail  Michelle Yeoh is back in the Final Frontier. As the duplicitous Mirror Universe character Philippa Georgiou, Yeoh starred in three seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, but later in 2024 she’ll return in her own movie — Section 31. Named for the clandestine espionage organization within Starfleet, Section 31 has just been described as a “spy thriller” by a new article in Variety. We’ve also got a new image of Yeoh as Georgiou, seemingly integrating someone with some very cyberpunk-looking gear. But the big news for Trek fans is something even bigger. It seems like we finally know when exactly Section 31 will be set.Here’s why the revelation of a very specific Starfleet captain reveals roughly where we can expect Section 31 to take place.
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S355 Years Later, Apple's Wild Bid to Be a Streaming Giant Has Actually Paid Off  When Wired put forward the idea earlier in 2024, it had a certain truth to it. Since its launch five years ago, Apple has produced critical darlings, won Emmys for Ted Lasso, a Best Picture Oscar for CODA, and generally allowed strange concepts to flourish on its streaming service. If there are any sure bets in the streaming industry, it’s that Apple still has billions to spend on new shows and movies, and doesn’t seem particularly interested in slowing down. And yet, whether Apple TV+ is similar to the home of iconic series like The Sopranos or Succession matters less than if it can maintain the general sense of goodwill it’s generated.When it launched five years ago in 2019, Apple TV+ did not seem like a sure bet. Sure, Apple had money to spend, but getting stars to make a few exclusives does not make a successful streaming platform. Just ask Quibi. Apple TV+’s success was as much a combination of developing the right shows at the right time as it was leveraging the tight control Apple had over all the screens where its streaming service would be easiest to watch. As the streaming service barrels towards its first decade, the only things that might stand in its way are the allure of advertising and whether Apple’s attempts to juice its own subscription services are fair to customers.
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S29S47S4Two brains: One visualizes too much, the other not at all | CNN  Mary Wathen has never had that experience. When the 43-year-old solicitor from Newent, England, recalls baking with her mother, no images come to mind. She cannot visualize herself as a child opening presents, her husband's face when he proposed, or even the birth of her children. A year ago Wathen discovered that she and her mother use a rare form of processing called aphantasia â their brains don't form mental images to remember or imagine. (Phantasia is the Greek word for imagination.) "Until recently, I had no idea that other people did see images. I just assumed that everyone was like me," she said.
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S12NASA smashed an asteroid with a rocket. The debris could hit Mars. - National Geographic (No paywall)  In the future, if nothing is done to stop it, an asteroid not much larger than a football stadium will crash into the planet. Should it hit a city, it will annihilate it much like a non-radioactive nuclear bomb. There are 25,000 asteroids, roughly 460-feet long, like this zipping about in near-Earth space, and about 15,000 of them are yet to be found.One way to stop them from hitting Earth is to change their trajectory by crashing into them with a small spacecraft. In September 2022, to test this deflection technique, a van-size spacecraft slammed into a 525-foot-long (harmless) near-Earth asteroid named Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour—and in doing so, successfully shifted its orbit around a larger space rock named Didymos.
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S15Does Long-Term Benadryl Use Increase Dementia Risk? - Scientific American (No paywall)  In the past few months TikTok videos about the over-the-counter antihistamine Benadryl have gone viral because of research suggesting that long-term use of the popular drug is associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. And similar effects on memory and cognition have also been suggested for dozens of other common medications.Benadryl is a brand-name medication that contains diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in many allergy, cold and anti-itch drugs. It can cause significant drowsiness and is also found in several sleep aids. Diphenhydramine has anticholinergic effects, meaning it blocks the action of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Medical uses of anticholinergics go beyond allergy relief; drugs in this class have long been used as prescription tricyclic antidepressants and incontinence treatments, as well as over-the-counter sleep aids. But experts have been finding evidence that links anticholinergics to increased dementia risks. “That’s now clear, and we have plenty of data to back it up,” says Malaz Boustani, a geriatrician and neuroscientist at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He and other researchers are now trying to determine whether anticholinergics really are contributing to dementia development in any way—and if so, what exactly is happening in the brains of vulnerable adults.
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S25The Director of 2023's Wildest Sci-Fi Movie Just Dropped an Unsettling New Trailer  Yorgos Lanthimos has always been an offbeat director, but in recent years his strange lens on life has been elevated to a new level thanks to a partnership with The Great creator Tony McNamara, who crafted the scripts for Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Poor Things. But for his next movie Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos is going back to basics and creating a film unlike anything he’s done before: an anthology of three stories, each weird enough to capture audiences on their own. Check out the teaser trailer for the film below in anticipation of its June 21, 2024 release, less than a year after the release of Poor Things.
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S32'Marvel Rivals' Looks Like the 'Overwatch'-MCU Mashup Game of Your Dreams  If you ever thought Marvel and Overwatch sounded like a match made in heaven, first off, that’s oddly specific, and second of all, you’re in luck, because that exact game now exists. Marvel Games and NetEase have announced Marvel Rivals, a free-to-play 6 versus 6 hero shooter starring a wide array of heroes, from Spider-Man to X-Men’s Magik. A closed alpha test is currently planned for May 2024, and Marvel Rivals is coming to PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.At first glance, Marvel Rivals appears incredibly similar to Overwatch or Valorant, right down to the colorful highly stylized art and fast-paced antics. However, the teaser trailer shows quite a few unique ideas that Rivals brings to the stage, including destructible environments.
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S48How can schools make sure gifted students get the help they need?  Maria Nicholas provides professional learning courses on behalf of Deakin University for the Victorian Department of Education on the teaching of high-ability school students.Andrew Skourdoumbis provides professional learning courses on behalf of Deakin University for the Victorian Department of Education on the teaching of high-ability school students.
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S49Updated U.S. law still leaves Indigenous communities in Canada out of repatriations from museums  A new amendment to the United States’ Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) came into effect in January 2024. The amended law now has some teeth to penalize museums who have thus far been very slow to engage with Indigenous communities. It puts pressure on them to create and share inventories of the remains and artifacts they hold.NAGPRA regulates the repatriation of Native American human remains, funerary and sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony from federally funded agencies to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian Organizations.
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S34Steam Just Quietly Released The Gorgeous Sequel to 2021's Best Metroidvania In Early Access  The 2021 Metroidvania Ender Lilies may not be the best known game, but its evocative art and music along with its inventive gameplay earned critical acclaim. I fell in love with the game when I first played, but have rarely heard it discussed in the years since. So when a sequel called Ender Magnolia was announced at a Nintendo Direct in February, I was equal parts surprised and thrilled to see the series return. Based on the few hours available now with the game in early access, Ender Magnolia feels like a confident step forward that may get the series the attention it deserves.While I’d definitely recommend playing Ender Lilies, you can skip straight to Ender Magnolia without being totally lost. Both games take place in the same world, but Ender Magnolia is set years later and in a different location. For the most part, Ender Lilies was a game more about vibes than explicit story, with most of the narrative coming through short flashbacks after boss battles and in item descriptions. Ender Magnolia continues that tradition, but with the addition of a central town full of NPCs who help the game tell a stronger tale.
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S3669 Years Later, a Beloved Noir Thriller is Getting Remade By a Contentious Marvel Director  Countless classic thrillers have used novels as their source material. Gone Girl, Shutter Island, and Silence of the Lambs all brought nail-biting books to life on the big screen, and they’re just modern examples of a trend that’s endured for almost a century. Alfred Hitchcock’s third feature, 1927’s The Lodger, was based on the 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes and is considered a landmark in the genre.Now, an upcoming movie will continue this pattern by adapting a book that’s over 70 years old — and it will attempt to update one of the most iconic noir thrillers ever in the process.
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S39Xbox Game Pass Just Quietly Added the Best Action-RPG of 2023  After over a decade of silence, Blizzard Entertainment returned to the Diablo franchise in 2023, giving us a gorgeous and twisted new vision of the world of Sanctuary. Over the decades few franchises have been as influential to RPGs as Diablo, and Diablo 4 pushed the action-RPG into a new era. A stellar campaign is highlighted by an incredible atmosphere, and while the initial launch had some rough patches with the endgame, post-launch support has smoothed a lot of it out. It’s the definitive hack-and-slash RPG, and its gothic world is open for exploration on Xbox Game Pass. Diablo 4 features a more grounded and personal story than past games. While knowledge of past Diablo games certainly helps, it’s not essential to experience everything in Diablo 4.
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S40A stepfamily can rebuild over fault lines of failure and loss | Aeon Essays  is a British writer and academic. She is the author of the novel Shadowing the Sun (2008) and the memoir Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling (2022), co-editor of A Wild and Precious Life: A Recovery Anthology (2020), and her essays have appeared in Granta. She lives in the UK.Recently I watched again the classic film adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County and felt a bolt of recognition at what is known in film circles as the ‘Madison County Moment’. Francesca (played by Meryl Streep) is with her husband in their Chevy, and her lover is in the pick-up truck in front. She grips the door handle, her life on a pivot: should she stay or go? Caught between duty and freedom, she’s in no doubt of the love she feels for Robert (Clint Eastwood), but to pursue it would entail destroying her family and living with a haunting regret. However, if she stays, will this passion persist in her consciousness as an unrealised, unlived life? When young and childfree, it is much easier to break away from a partnership and start afresh, but those of us with family need to understand that damage is inevitable, that it’s simply not possible to shake off the past. ‘No matter how much distance we put between ourselves and this house, I bring it with me,’ Francesca had told Robert on the last evening they’d spent together, when he’d begged her to leave with him. ‘And I’ll feel it every minute we’re together.’ The life that was left behind.
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S44S43S135 simple things you can do to live more sustainably - Environment (No paywall)  It feels unfair to be asked to change your day-to-day life to solve what is, by all scientific accounts, a global environmental crisis, especially when fossil fuel emissions continue unabated and celebrities famously take private planes to cross distances they could easily drive. I get it—it’s exhausting.But if you’re like me and the state of our planet sends you into a mental tailspin, I’ve found that mindfully tending to your little slice of Earth can help keep that existential dread at bay. You, individually, can’t stop sea levels from rising, but you, individually, can provide a small backyard refuge for endangered monarch butterflies by planting a few milkweed bulbs. How sweet is that?
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S14One big problem with how we rank countries by happiness  Believe it or not, it typically comes down to one question. The pollsters use something called the Cantril Ladder. They ask: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”When I first did this exercise, I said my life is a seven out of 10. But behind this answer was a more complicated truth. I’d initially thought about rating my life a six. Yet there was a voice tugging at me, from my years of reporting on people living in extreme poverty. Compared to their lives, I figured mine was probably pretty easy. So I bumped up my rating."As decades of evidence demonstrate, happiness often comes not from comparing ourselves to others, but through connection with them, something that might be missing from some of the [World Happiness] report's key variables," Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychologist, noted. "As such, it's ironic that many headlines about the report have focused on how countries 'rank' in happiness, reinforcing a competitive view that might be part of why we find it so hard to be happy in the first place!"
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S18What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It) - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Self-awareness seems to have become the latest management buzzword — and for good reason. Research suggests that when we see ourselves clearly, we are more confident and more creative. We make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. We’re less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. We are better workers who get more promotions. And we’re more-effective leaders with more-satisfied employees and more-profitable companies.
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S19Smaller Businesses Looking to Human Workers, Not AI, to Boost Productivity - Inc.com (No paywall)  Just 8 percent of U.S. private company leaders in a new Deloitte survey say that A.I. is currently boosting their organization's productivity. And the smaller companies in the survey were even less likely to say they were prioritizing investments in "advanced technology," like A.I, to boost productivity in the next year: Just 16 percent of companies with annual revenues under $500 million planned to lean on A.I. versus 44 percent of companies with revenues north of that threshold.Instead, those smaller companies aim to use their talent more effectively, ranking "reskilling and upskilling existing employees" as their top priority for driving increased results. Even among larger companies---more interested in prioritizing A.I.--hiring qualified or skilled talent is still their main productivity play.
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