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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S2619 Best Gifts for Dad (2024): Grilling Gear, Coffee, Mitts  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDYour dad probably isn't going to complain about any gift you give him. For better or worse, most modern dads don't get hung up on presents. You know the meme of the older, bearded gentleman with a goofy smile opening a shirt just like the one he has on? There's a lot of truth to that. However, I am not only a dad and a gear reviewer but also someone with a specific philosophy about what makes a good gift for middle-aged men like me.
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S28Why We Believe the Myth of High Crime Rates  The crime issue, a focus of the 2024 presidential election, is sometimes rooted in the misplaced fears of people who live in some of the safest placesAmericans are convinced that they are living in a world ravaged by crime. In major cities, we fear riding public transportation or going out after dark. We buy weapons for self-defense and skip our nightly jogs. Next to the weather, the explosion of crime is a favorite topic of conversation. The overwhelming consensus is that crime is only getting worse. According to a Gallup poll, in late 2022, 78 percent of Americans contended that there was more crime than there used to be.
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S11Car Insurance Prices Rise as Vehicle Prices Decline  "It takes the fun out of owning a new car when you're paying so much money," said Davis, adding that if he'd known such a massive increase was coming, he might have opted for a less expensive model. But by then it was too late.In one of the cruel twists of an inflation-weary U.S. economy, car prices are coming down after surging by record amounts during the COVID-19 pandemic. But at least part of those gains for consumers are getting gobbled up by rising auto insurance rates that for some models now account for more than a quarter of the total cost of owning a vehicle.Â
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S30Why Some People Always Get Lost--And Others Never Do  Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.The world is full of people like Uttal — and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location — or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location — and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.
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S154 Reasons Why Managers Fail  Gartner research has found that managers today are accountable for 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively manage — and they’re starting to buckle under the pressure: 54% are suffering from work-induced stress and fatigue, and 44% are struggling to provide personalized support to their direct reports. Ultimately, one in five managers said they would prefer not being people managers given a choice. Further analysis found that 48% of managers are at risk of failure based on two criteria: 1) inconsistency in current performance and 2) lack of confidence in the manager’s ability to lead the team to future success. This article offers four predictors of manager failure and offers suggestions for organizations on how to address them.
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S2521 Best Dog Accessories (2024): Dog Beds, Pet Cameras, Carriers, and More If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDAT WIRED, WE really love our dogs. We also love each other's dogs, whether they're adorable little nuggets in New York City apartments, pit mixes in the country, or loyal heelers that spend all day, every day within 6 inches of my left foot. For the past few years, my colleagues and I have been trading tips, tricks, and gear. These are the best dog accessories we've bought or tested for our very, very good boys and girls.
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S27Taylor Swift's Music Is Back on TikTok--Right Before Her New Album Drops In the drawn-out contract battle between TikTok and Universal Music Group, a high-profile exemption has been made for Taylor Swift. A few of her songs became available again as TikTok sounds on Thursday, just a week before the release of SwiftâÂÂs latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. It remains unclear what kind of arrangement was made for her official music to come back or how long it will remain on the social media platform.Madeline Macrae, a Swift fan and TikTok creator, heard the news Thursday morning and immediately started searching TikTok and Google to confirm it wasnâÂÂt some hoax. âÂÂI'm really excited to have that catalog back, and I don't have to rely on sped-up versions or edited versions,â she says. âÂÂI can just use her actual music.â Songs like âÂÂCruel Summer,â âÂÂCardigan,â and âÂÂStyle (TaylorâÂÂs Version)â can now be used by content creators on the platform, as first reported by Variety.
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S14TikTok Rizz Party: How a Family Business Is Riding the Wave of Its Viral Hit  Joseph Delvillar and his son Michael Delvillar never would have predicted that a 17-second video of teenagers dancing to the Kanye West track "Carnival" at a Sweet 16 would go viral on TikTok. And yet, it did.The video--which they'd posted on the account of their Staten Island-based party planning business, Island Entertainment--has been viewed more than 58 million times since it was uploaded a month ago. The business's TikTok account has amassed more than 34 million likes across all its videos. And TikTok users have turned the clip into a full-blown meme, producing countless videos humorously analyzing the dynamics between the teens in the video, ascribing character arcs, rankings, and nicknames to them--such as the "blue tie leader" and "Turkish Quandale Dingle."
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S19Best of Watches and Wonders 2024 After two years of the kind of exuberance and endeavor that brought a Rolex emoji watch, colored lab-grown diamonds, 3D-printed gold, light-sucking cases, and even a Stormtrooper metaverse watch, 2024's Watches and Wondersâthe annual trade show of the international watch and jewelry industryâfeels positively tame in comparison.Perhaps this is because big-brand chief executives have acknowledged an increasingly uncertain market. Swiss watch exports are slowing after a record run. According to a Morgan Stanley report in collaboration with WatchCharts, prices on the secondary market decreased in Q4 last year for the seventh quarter in a row.
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S42Researchers find a new organelle evolving  The complex cells that underlie animals and plants have a large collection of what are called organelles—compartments surrounded by membranes that perform specialized functions. Two of these were formed through a process called endosymbiosis, in which a once free-living organism is incorporated into a cell. These are the mitochondrion, where a former bacteria now handles the task of converting chemical energy into useful forms, and the chloroplast, where photosynthesis happens.
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S20San Francisco's Train System Still Uses Floppy Disks--and Will for Years The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which runs the city's Muni Metro light rail, claims to be the first US agency to adopt floppy disks. But today, the SFMTA is eager to abandon its reliance on 5ü-inch floppy disksâÂÂjust give it about six years and a few hundred million dollars more.Members of the SFMTA recently spoke withàthe ABC7 Bay Area News and detailed the agency's use of three 5ü-inch floppy disks every morning. The floppies have been part of Muni Metro's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) since its installation in a Market Street subway stop in 1998. The ATCS has multiple components, "including computers onboard the trains that are tied into propulsion and brake systems, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure, like loop cable signal wires," Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, told Ars Technica.
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S21How Election Deniers Became Mainstream--and Are Weaponizing Tech Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, it's become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers who are already facing threats and harassment.Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Tori Elliott is @Telliotter. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Write to us at [email protected]. Our show is produced by produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer and Amar Lal mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is the Executive Producer of Audio Development and Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Condé Nast.
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S16Research: How Ratings Systems Shape User Behavior in the Gig Economy  Platform providers typically display ratings information to the user in two ways. Incremental rating systems, employed by platforms like TaskRabbit and Airbnb, offer a detailed view by listing and often providing insights into every individual review score. Averaged rating systems, used by platforms such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash, present an overall score that aggregates all individual ratings. Over a series of nine experiments, researchers found that the way low ratings are communicated shapes user experience and behavior in a number of ways. Their findings offer implications for companies choosing between incremental or average ratings systems.
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S17Chip dreams: Young tech workers are flocking to Taiwan  When Hans Juliano was looking to go abroad for a master’s degree in semiconductors, the Indonesian student initially considered Japan and South Korea. But he wasn’t eligible for a scholarship because he didn’t know the language. His friends studying in Taiwan connected him to their professors, who offered him a scholarship.“It’s quite easy to get a scholarship in Taiwan. You just need your English proficiency test,” Juliano, 23, told Rest of World. He’s now in the second year of a master’s degree at the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) in Hsinchu, known as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley.
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S6TikTok Sale Deadline Could be Extended to One Year  The chair of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said on Wednesday that lawmakers could extend to one year a proposed deadline to force TikTok's parent company, China's ByteDance, to divest the short video app used by 170 million Americans.Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell said she likes the idea of extending the deadline to one year. "My guess is that would be a good component to guarantee success," she told reporters on Wednesday. "We're talking to our colleagues, people have questions."
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S18No One Actually Knows How AI Will Affect Jobs Forget artificial intelligence breaking free of human control and taking over the world. A far more pressing concern is how today's generative AI tools will transform the labor market. Some experts envisage a world of increased productivity and job satisfaction; others, a landscape of mass unemployment and social upheaval.Someone with a bird's-eye view of the situation is Mary Daly, CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, part of the national system responsible for setting monetary policy, maintaining a stable financial system, and ensuring maximal employment. Daly, a labor market economist by training, is especially interested in how generative AI might change the labor market picture.
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S24S29S31S33S8SEC Warns Crypto Exchange Developer Uniswap Labs of Potential Enforcement Action  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has notified of potential enforcement action against Uniswap Labs, the main developer behind one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. Â The reason for the SEC's warning against Uniswap was not immediately clear from the blog post, but can be pegged to the regulator's campaign to apply U.S. securities law to the digital asset-related companies like Coinbase.
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S10Third-Party Web Browser Downloads Soar After EU Breaks Apple's Grip  Apple's longstanding, strict control over nearly everything that happens on its iPhones and iPads is eroding in the European Union, thanks to legal moves like the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which was designed to force more competition on what are deemed "technology gatekeeper" platforms like Apple's. In particular, the EU's regulation has forced Apple to relax some of the control it exerts over the App Store for mobile devices. As a consequence, alternative app stores--including one from long-term Apple rival Epic Games and another novel rival, AltStore, which allows crowdfunding payments for apps--can now be used by Apple device owners in Europe. Similarly, Apple and other big tech peers like Google and Microsoft have been forced by the same DMA act to make it much easier for users to choose alternative web browsers instead of the tech companies' default options. Fresh data suggest this is having a positive effect, particularly for smaller-scale app developers.Â
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S22Apple Is Making It Slightly Easier to Repair Your iPhone Apple will make it a little bit easier to get an iPhone fixed with used parts, marking a reversal of long-standing, strict rules around swapping out iPhone parts.The change, announced Thursday, will begin with "select" iPhone models this fall (The Washington Post reported it will cover iPhone 15 and newer). It comes as states move to ban parts pairing, which requires a company's software to recognize and approve a replacement part. The practice has long frustrated third-party repair shops, as well as at-home self repairers, and lawmakers around the US are looking to ban it.
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S34S35S40S12Amazon Hit With $535 Million Patent Suit Judgement, Seeks to Cut Fulfillment Costs  Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud-service provider, owes tech company Kove $525 million for violating its patent rights in data-storage technology, an Illinois federal jury said on Wednesday.The jury determined that AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that Kove said had become "essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."
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S13Minneapolis May Delay Showdown with Uber and Lyft, While Startup Replacements Hustle to Launch  A timid gesture of compromise by Minneapolis officials may delay the application of a city law that mandates a pay increase for ridesharing drivers, which could dampen the threat by Uber and Lyft leave the city. If the May 1 deadline is moved back, that might deflate the ultimatum from the rideshare giants, and in turn jeopardize the plans of several entrepreneurs already preparing to start local competitors rolling into the anticipated void.At least eight mostly local businesspeople are already fundraising and securing permits to launch their ridesharing startups as soon as possible--one said it could be ready as early as next week. They mobilized in response to the threat by Uber and Lyft to leave Minneapolis in response to a city council ordinance raising driver pay. Voted through in March despite a mayoral veto, the municipal measure guarantees drivers the equivalent of the city's $15.57 hourly minimum wage.Â
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S32S5Apple Store Workers in New Jersey File Union Petition  Apple's New Jersey store workers file petition for unionization Workers at Apple's store in Short Hills, New Jersey, have filed for union representation, a staff member who is part of the organizing committee said on Wednesday amid a push for unionization across sectors in corporate America.Apple retail staff at New Jersey store filed for union representation with Communications Workers of America on April 8, according to John Nagy, who is the operations lead at the Short Hill store and a member of the organizing committee.
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S7This Was Chobani Founder Hamdi Ulukaya's First Move Upon Acquiring La Colombe  Chobani acquired coffee company La Colombe for $900 million in December. But for Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of the New Berlin, New York-based yogurt brand, the relationship with La Colombe goes back much further. That's why he took a very hands-on approach to relaunching La Colombe's signature canned draft lattes, which are available starting Thursday."I walked into a La Colombe café in 2012 in Tribeca, and I thought, 'This was one of the best coffees I've ever had in my life,'" Ulukaya told Inc. He said it was a bit remarkable for him: "Coming from Turkey, I drink only tea and Turkish coffee, of course." That led to a meeting with La Colombe founders Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti, who Ulukaya says impressed him with their commitment to their craft.
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S23Bird Flu Is Spreading in Alarming New Ways Last Friday, a health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinged its way across the inboxes of clinicians and state health departments all over the US. The message described how a dairy farm worker in Texas had contracted H5N1, the highly infectious strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, that's currently circling worldwide. The dairy worker had caught the virus, apparently, from cattle.The CDC's alert urged doctors to be vigilant and consider H5N1 a possibility in any patients presenting with acute respiratory symptoms or sore eyes who had recently been in contact with animals.
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S3The physical reason behind quantum uncertainty  Perhaps the most bizarre property we’ve discovered about the Universe is that our physical reality doesn’t seem to be governed by purely deterministic laws. Instead, at a fundamental, quantum level, the laws of physics are only probabilistic: you can compute the likelihood of the possible experimental outcomes that will occur, but only by measuring the quantity in question can you truly determine what your particular system is doing at that instant in time. Furthermore, the very act of measuring/observing certain quantities leads to an increased uncertainty in certain related properties: what physicists call conjugate variables.While many have put forth the idea that this uncertainty and indeterminism might only be apparent, and could be due to some unseen “hidden” variables that truly are deterministic, we have yet to find a mechanism that allows us to successfully predict any quantum outcomes. But could the quantum fields inherent to space be the ultimate culprit? That’s this week’s question from Paul Marinaccio, who wants to know:
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S9Apple Drops 'State-Sponsored' Attacks Label From its Threat Notifications  Apple has warned its users in India and 91 other countries that they were possible victims of a "mercenary spyware attack," dropping the word "state-sponsored" it used in its previous alerts to refer to such malware attacks.It also noted that such attacks have been historically associated with state actors, including private companies developing mercenary spyware on their behalf, such as Pegasus spyware from Israeli firm NSO Group.
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S38Intel's "Gaudi 3" AI accelerator chip may give Nvidia's H100 a run for its money  On Tuesday, Intel revealed a new AI accelerator chip called Gaudi 3 at its Vision 2024 event in Phoenix. With strong claimed performance while running large language models (like those that power ChatGPT), the company has positioned Gaudi 3 as an alternative to Nvidia's H100, a popular data center GPU that has been subject to shortages, though apparently that is easing somewhat.
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S39S44Clash of the Patriarchs  A hard-line Russian bishop backed by the political might of the Kremlin could split the Orthodox Church in two.In late August of 2018, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, flew from Moscow to Istanbul on an urgent mission. He brought with him an entourageâa dozen clerics, diplomats, and bodyguardsâthat made its way in a convoy to the Phanar, the Orthodox world's equivalent of the Vatican, housed in a complex of buildings just off the Golden Horn waterway, on Istanbul's European side.
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S45Welcome to Kidulthood  Stuffed animals have often been deemed one of the quirky conventions of childhoodâan infantile love we should eventually let go of, along with imaginary friends and Capri-Suns. If that love lasts past adolescence, it can be seen as embarrassing. "Please," the actor Margot Robbie joked on The Late Late Show With James Corden, "no one psychoanalyze the fact that I'm 30 and I sleep with a bunny rabbit every night."Yet that isn't really such an unusual thing to do: Surveys have found that four in 10 American adults sleep with stuffed animals. And it seems that over the past few years especially, plushies and toys have become more popular with adults, Erica Kanesaka, a professor at Emory University who studies cuteness, told me in an email. This isn't just a matter of childhood keepsakes tagging along into adulthood for sentimental reasonsâadults are also buying plushies for themselves, simply because they like them. The "kidult" marketâwhich one market-research company generously defines as anyone over age 12âis said to account for about $9 billion in toy sales every year. Among the most popular modern stuffed-animal brands are Squishmallows and Jellycat, which specialize in unconventional plushies such as bok choy and rainbow ostriches. Gen Z is leading the way in embracing stuffed animals: Of Squishmallows buyers, 65 percent are ages 18 to 24. "It went from being an embarrassment ⦠to today, when Gen Z and Millennials proudly play," the toy-industry consultant Richard Gottlieb told NPR.
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S46 books that shaped Japanese philosophy  Picking a few books to characterize an entire intellectual tradition is tough. That’s because, in my view, history isn’t driven by “great men” like the 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle thought. On the contrary, history is the product of many social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, and military forces, as well as completely arbitrary ones that defy categorization. The same is true of intellectual history: At times, we can identify certain works that have had a particularly great impact, like the Bible in the West or the Confucian Analects in the East, but it would be silly to say that they wholly defined the intellectual history of a world region. The other problem with identifying some books that shaped Japanese thought is that we must first work out what shape Japanese thought has. Some think there is no such thing as Japanese philosophy, in part because lots of it was imported from China. In fact, at least three of the five books on Scotty Hendricks’ Big Think list of books that shaped Chinese thought could be included on my list as well.
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S37S36No one needs this cryptocurrency-powered Steam Deck competitor  Remember when "web3 gaming" was the hot new thing in the game industry? In 2022, it seemed like every other game maker was flirting with "NFT integration" or "blockchain support" or some other crypto-adjacent buzzword in one form or another. Then, throughout 2023, the whole idea quickly faded away as generative AI became the latest Silicon Valley obsession.
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S1S2S46When You Regret Starting a Rap Beef  J. Cole dared to insult Kendrick Lamarâand, more surprisingly, he immediately apologized for it.In what is currently the most popular song in the United States, Kendrick Lamar explains how he defines success. "Money, power, respectâthe last one is better," he raps on the Future and Metro Boomin track "Like That," released last month.
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S47The Sober-Curious Movement Has Reached an Impasse  At Hopscotch, Daryl Collins's bottle shop in Baltimore, he happily sells wine to 18-year-olds. If a customer isn't sure what variety they like (and who is, at that age?), Collins might even pull a few bottles off the shelves and pop the corks for an impromptu tasting. No Maryland law keeps these teens away from the Tempranillo, because at this shop, none of the drinks contains alcohol.The number and variety of zero- and low-alcohol beverages, a once-lagging category that academics and the World Health Organization refer to as "NoLos," has exploded in the past five-plus years. The already growing "sober curious" movementâmade up of adults who want to practice more thoughtful or limited alcohol consumption while still socializing over a drink at home or at a barâsnowballed during pandemic shutdowns. Today, about 70 NoLo bottle shops like Hopscotch dot the U.S., along with several dozen nonalcoholic, or NA, bars, most less than four years old.
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S48A Rom-Com You Might Have Written  The Idea of You is a modern spin on a Hollywood staple: someone famous falling for someone who's not.As far back as 1953's Roman Holiday, when Audrey Hepburn played a princess who falls for a reporter, Hollywood has drawn on the formula of an asymmetrical romantic union between a celebrity and a regular person. It's an appealing idea: Celebrities are meant to be pined after, and the prospect of being chosen by them must be uniquely validating. That's why much of the fan fiction on sites such as Archive of Our Own, where users write their own lengthy tales riffing on pop culture, falls squarely into the domain of "real person" fan fiction, or "RPF." Such digital spaces may be relatively new, but fantasizing about a celebrity meet-cute isn't; as my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany noted, fans have been writing RPF since at least the dawn of Beatlemania.
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S49In MAGA World, Everything Happens for a Reason  Bridge collapse, earthquake, eclipseâsurely the heavens and the Biden administration are up to something.On March 26, in the middle of the night, an enormous container shipâthe MV Daliâlost power. Slowly, excruciatingly, it drifted toward the towering steel piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, moving slightly faster than a brisk walking pace. But force is mass times acceleration, and the MV Dali weighed at least 220 million poundsâmore than 50,000 cars. Even at a snail's pace, it was a wrecker. The bridge buckled. Six men died.
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S50What I've Heard From Gaza  I'm worried about the suffering of civilians right nowâand the lack of a plan for a better future.For the first time in more than a month, I recently had the chance to talk with my 11-year-old niece, who is sheltering with my surviving family members in the southern Gazan city of Rafah. She described her daily routine, which consists of little more than playing boring games on her mom's cellphoneâwhich has no cell reception or internet accessâand eating whatever food is sent through the Rafah crossing.
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