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| Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer! S61The Case for Miniatures Empires and nation-states are remembered for their monuments, but they also leave behind plenty of miniatures. Inside the Egyptian pyramids, within the chamber where the pharaoh's mummy rests, stand collections of little statuesâwooden figurines of mummified servants, clay hippos painted turquoiseâto remind the ruler how the world once looked. Academics have complained that miniatures suffer from scholarly neglect. After carrying out the first comprehensive survey of more than 500 miniatures found in excavations along the Nile in 2011, the Italian archeologist Grazia Di Pietro felt compelled to remark in an essay that these were more than "simple toys."A miniature is a replica of something bigger, a distortion of scale that makes it wonderful in a way the merely small is not. Miniatures are not the same as models, which are didactic (an anatomical model of the heart to educate students, for example) or utilitarian (a model showing the plan for a skyscraper yet to be built). Miniatures imitate life but have no clear practical purpose. They can be harder to make than their full-size counterparts. But they are portable, like the tiny mannequins the French government commissioned from fashion houses when World War II ended and Parisians couldn't afford human-size haute couture. The mannequins toured Europe, splendidly dressed ambassadors carrying the message that the French had skill, if not much fabric.
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S8Does More Money Really Make Us More Happy? - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) Although some studies show that wealthier people tend to be happier, prioritizing money over time can actually have the opposite effect. But even having just a little bit of extra cash in your savings account ($500), can increase your life satisfaction. So how can you keep more cash on hand? Ask yourself: What do I buy that isn’t essential for my survival? Is the expense genuinely contributing to my happiness? If the answer to the second question is no, try taking a break from those expenses. Other research shows there are specific ways to spend your money to promote happiness, such as spending on experiences, buying time, and investing in others. Spending choices that promote happiness are also dependent on individual personalities, and future research may provide more individualized advice to help you get the most happiness from your money.
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S22S303 Lessons for Leaders From Elon Musk's $100 Billion Payday Boards should pay CEOs based on performance. However, what does that mean? To put such pay into effect, leaders should negotiate with their board a contract specifying CEO performance targets, the mix of cash and stock the CEO will receive if the company meets the targets, and the consequences of not sustaining the performance targets over the long run.Consider the example of Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, whose pay package topped out at $100 billion and had since dropped to $56 billion as of April 16, according to the Guardian. To reach that sum, in 2018, Tesla's board granted Musk a package of "conditional Tesla stock options" with the potential to be worth about $55 billion if Tesla "succeeded wildly," noted Bloomberg.
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S40S45The fungi in our guts can make cases of Covid worse Fungi are an indispensable part of your microbiome, keeping the body’s host of microorganisms healthy as part of a system of checks and balances. But when you’re hit by an infection, fungi can be thrown out of equilibrium with other organisms inside you, leading to a more severe infection and other symptoms of illness.
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S54Democrats' Unproven Plan to Close Biden's Enthusiasm Gap On Indivisible's website, the first words you'll findâin large font and all capsâare "Defeat MAGA. Save democracy." The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump's 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall's presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up."We're not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden," Indivisible's co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballotâincluding the party's nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislatureâas well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.
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| S58The Languages AI Is Leaving Behind 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.Generative AI is famously data-hungry. The technology requires huge troves of digital informationâtext, photos, video, audioâto "learn" how to produce convincingly humanlike material. The most powerful large language models have effectively "read" just about everything; when it comes to content mined from the open web, this means that AI is especially well versed in English and a handful of other languages, to the exclusion of thousands more that people speak around the world.
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S7The Case for the 6-Hour Workday - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week. But so much has changed since then. The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and uninterrupted stretches of time to get into a state of flow. How can you foster a shorter, more productive workday for your own team? Make it okay for employees to not be in a hyper-responsive state. Encourage employees to turn off notifications and batch-check e-mails. Block off time in calendars to allow for several hours of uninterrupted work each day. Cut your default meeting time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes. By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.
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S52The Art of Putting On Airs In the 21st century, you are who you pretend to be. It's a world Tom Ripley was made for.The paintings in Dickie Greenleaf's studio are bad. Hilariously bad, so much so that the set dressers on Ripley, the Netflix adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, must have let out a real cackle when they were commissioned. Dickie, the Ivy-educated dilettante son of a New York ship-building titan who has moved to seaside Italy to fritter away his inheritance, claims, about his work, "I happen to be pretty good at it." But he can't see what the audience can: the droopy Modigliani knockoffs and derivative Cubist faces that would make Picasso wince. When Tom Ripley, who will soon focus his affection and envy and rage at Dickie, first looks at the paintings, he practically laughs into his sleeve. As he quickly comes to realize, it doesn't matter that the paintings are tripeâDickie himself is a piece of art worth copying.
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| S3S11S15S233D-printed "metamaterial" is stronger than anything in nature Using lasers and metal powder, Australian scientists have created a super strong, super lightweight new “metamaterial” — but they got the idea for this sci fi-sounding creation from plants.The challenge: Materials that are strong yet lightweight, such as carbon fiber and graphene, are used to make everything from medical implants to airships, and developing ones with ever greater “strength-to-weight ratios” is the goal of many material scientists.
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| S29A Master CMO and Company Builder Says 5 Things Will Help You Achieve, and Enjoy, Rapid Company Growth Yaniv Masjedi is the chief marketing officer of Nextiva, a fast-growing enterprise software company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. When you talk with Masjedi, you can't help but notice that he exudes a sense of purposeful calm. He seems both aware of and not swept up by the swirl of activity going on all around him, even though he insists on sitting smack dab in the middle of the Nextiva marketing team. If you were to ask Masjedi to share his tips for scaling a company (Nextiva has grown from five employees to more than 1,500 and in 2021 landed an infusion of $200 million from Goldman Sachs at a $2.7 billion valuation), you shouldn't be surprised to learn that achieving calm comes first.
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| S55Taylor Swift Is Having Quality-Control Issues The Tortured Poets Department excavates her private life more deeply than everâbut somehow, it's a story we've heard before.This album is okay. I understand that Taylor Swift is not someone you're supposed to feel okay aboutâshe is either the great redeemer of English-language arts and letters in the 21st century, as her fans have it, or a total cornball foisted upon the public by the evil record industry, as the haters say. The truth is that she is a talented artist who has reinvigorated popular music as a storytelling mediumâbut who has, all along, suffered from some quality-control issues.
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| S63It's Really Hard to Rebuild a Marsh The water in California's San Francisco Bay could rise more than two meters by the year 2100. For the region's tidal marshes and their inhabitants, such as Ridgway's rail and the endangered salt-marsh harvest mouse, it's a potential death sentence.Given enough time, space, and sediment, tidal marshes can build layers of mud and decaying vegetation to keep up with rising seas. Unfortunately, upstream dams and a long history of dredging bays and dumping the sediment offshore are starving many tidal marshes around the world of the sediment they need to grow.
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| S6Why Highly Efficient Leaders Fail - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) With ever-increasing demands at work, being able to get things done can be a key driver of success. But, the irony is that it can also deter success, because a focus on tasks often comes at the expense of a focus on people. Things like building relationships, inspiring a team, developing others, and showing empathy can fall by the wayside. If you sense that you may be overly task-focused, talk to your team about what you can do to focus more meaningfully on the people on your team. Seek out the advice of others who are good at balancing task- and people-focus to gain some insight into how they do it. Building greater self-awareness in the moment provides an opportunity to pause and choose a different approach. This might mean choosing not to send a slew of emails about your big project over the weekend, pausing to acknowledge a colleague’s effort, or taking the time to teach a team member something new. To be sure, task-focus and achieving results are vital for any leader, team, or organization to succeed, but without a sufficient balance with people-focus, success will be limited at every level.
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| S10The Merger Self, the Seeker Self, and the Lifelong Challenge of Balancing Intimacy and Independence Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the difficulty of discerning comfort from entrapment, freedom from peril. It is a paradox rooted in the early development of the psyche and most poignantly manifested in our intimate relationships as we confront over and over the boundary between where we end and the other begins, the challenge of balancing intimacy and independence. Pulsating beneath the paradox are two opposing forces — one tugging us toward the comfort of the known, the safety of the terminal, the other beckoning us to fly into the open sky of the unknown, with all its sunlit freedoms and its storming dangers. In her 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (public library), Gail Sheehy (November 27, 1936–August 24, 2020) explores these “two sets of forces always at loggerheads inside us over the questions of how far and how fast we shall grow,” terming them the Merger Self and the Seeker Self.
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| S16S34IKEA Just Did What No Business Should Ever Do. They're Geniuses for It But in many ways, she's more pony than canine. In the eight years of having her, Hadley the Dane has caused her fair share of household destruction. There was a time in her puppy years when drywall was her favorite snack, as were baseboards. Whenever a door stood between Hadley and something she wanted, the poor door would soon be off its hinges.IKEA strikes again - once again defying convention with its bold new marketing campaign. It showcases its products not just in use, but in states of destructionsmashed, toppled, and thoroughly 'misused' by household pets. The irony is obvious: a business showing its products being destroyed to sell more of them. But in this counterintuitive approach lies IKEA's genius that we're used to seeing
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| S37S429 Best Indoor Security Cameras (2024): For Homes and Apartments 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 WIREDNot quite ready to deck out your house with window, door, and motion sensors and hire an on-call monitoring service? Don't fret! You can still keep your home secure without messing with your wiring by going with an indoor security camera or two. Knowing you can check in when you are away from home offers peace of mind, but these cameras aren't perfect. There's an obvious security benefit, but you expose yourself to privacy risks. These are our favorite security cameras after rigorous testing, and we've also got details on what to look for when shopping for one.
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| S43What Is 5G Home Internet? Here's Everything You Need to Know (2024) Sick of slow, expensive, or unreliable internet service? You probably are. Internet service providers (ISPs) came second to last in a study of customer satisfaction by industry in the US last year. For most folks, internet service comes into the house via cable, and choices are limited. But with mobile carriers rolling out fast, low-latency 5G networks, that is changing.For some people, 5G home internet could be a viable alternative to traditional broadband. Carriers are starting to offer 5G home internet packages as they look to recoup the costs of upgraded networks, and that could finally mean some real competition for ISPs. If youâÂÂre wondering what 5G home internet is, how it compares to broadband, and whether it might be for you, we have all the answers you seek.
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| S46Secrets of the Octopus takes us inside the world of these "aliens on Earth" With Earth Day fast approaching once again, it's time for another new documentary from National Geographic and Disney+: Secrets of the Octopus. It's the third in what has become a series, starting with the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales (narrated by Sigourney Weaver) and 2023's Secrets of the Elephants (Natalie Portman as narrator). James Cameron served as producer on all three.
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| S47Explore a digitized collection of doomed Everest climber's letters home In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—just two casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory was an alumnus of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, which maintains a collection of his personal correspondence, much of it between Mallory and his wife, Ruth. The college has now digitized the entire collection for public access. The letters can be accessed and downloaded here.
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| S48The Real Youth-Vote Shift to Watch No, young voters aren't definitively turning toward Trump. But there's a more specific dynamic to pay attention to.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.
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| S49Photos of the Week: Eid al-Fitr prayers in India, trophy winners at the Boston Marathon, the burning of a historic building in Denmark, a wildfire in Kosovo, widespread flooding in Russia, a joyous water festival in Thailand, a music festival in China, and much more A woman stands on a breakwater in China's southwestern city of Chongqing on April 13, 2024. #
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| S50The Columbine-Killers Fan Club A quarter century on, the school shooters' mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.Mass shootings didn't start at Columbine High, but the mass-shooter era did. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. How could we know we were witnessing an origin story?
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| S56Eight Cookbooks Worth Reading Cover to Cover Flag dishes you want to make, or don't: The point of this practice is pleasure, not pragmatism.A certain type of person will tell you that they read cookbooks like they do novels. This usually means they flip through them at night, in bed, perhaps with the help of some gentle, warm light and a hot cup of tea. They pore over the notes and instructions that precede each recipe; they dream up menus the way a fiction reader might picture the furniture inside a character's home. They might flag dishes they want to cook, or they might not. The point of this practice is pleasure, not pragmatism.
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| S60The Paradoxes of Modern Dating A conversation with Faith Hill about daters' competing desires for structure and serendipityThis 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.
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| S64The Battle in Congress for Foreign Funding House Speaker Mike Johnson faces mounting frustration among his right-wing Republican colleagues.Momentum among frustrated right-wing Republicans builds against House Speaker Mike Johnson following his announcement to bring long-stalled foreign-aid bills to a vote this weekend. Johnson's battles are two-sided, as he fights to retain his leadership position while also passing crucial aid for America's overseas allies.
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| S65How Baseball Explains the Limits of AI The iconic Yankees broadcaster John Sterling reminds us that what makes us human cannot be imitated.My family never had cable or watched much TV when I was growing up, so I experienced baseball through my bedside radio. Every night during the regular season, I'd follow the Yankees vicariously through the commentary of the announcer John Sterling, who delivered the play-by-play alongside Michael Kay and later Suzyn Waldman, herself a trailblazer in the world of sportscasting.
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| S68How the Humble Donkey Became a Big Problem for China A popular remedy is made from hides imported from Africaâbut the out-of-control trade is causing geopolitical problems for Beijing.Search on the Chinese food-delivery app Meituan for ejiao, and all sorts of goodies pop up. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor's court, valued as a traditional remedy taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep, and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 vials; eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts, and black sesame at $7 for a tin of 30; or snack on ejiao-coated dates at just under a dollar a packet.
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| S69Tips and Tricks From a Crossword Prodigy If you've ever tussled with our daily mini crossword puzzles, you can most likely blame Paolo Pasco. The good news is that the constructor who stumped you is now the champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the ripe old age of 23. The ACPT is the largest speed-solving tournament in the world, this year welcoming more than 800 competitors. The three finalists solve puzzles on a big whiteboard in front of a crowd; wins come down to literal seconds.When I first met Paolo, he was 13 and already creating stellar grids as elegant as they were playful. These days, I rely on him as The Atlantic's main crossword contributor. To put into perspective what a phenomenal speed-solver Paolo is: He solved the latest Inferno (our special magazine puzzle that gets more difficult as you descend into its depths) in one minute and 27 seconds. The average solve time for that puzzle is 16 minutes, 28 seconds. I spoke with Paolo recently about his win, his speed-solving tactics, and, inevitably, the 2024 Marvel masterpiece Madame Web.
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| S1S2Arthur Schopenhauer on the Dangers of Clickbait [T]hose who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money. They think in order to write, and they may be recognized by their spinning out their thoughts to the greatest possible length, and also by the way they work out their thoughts, which are half-true, perverse, forced, and vacillating; then also by their love of evasion, so that they may seem what they are not; and this is why their writing is lacking in definiteness and clearness.What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. … The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.
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| S9Am I Old Enough to Be Taken Seriously? - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) Young adults are more likely to report experiencing ageism at work than their middle-aged and older counterparts. So what if you are facing this situation? Start or join a working group for young professionals. It’s important to create a safe space to talk to people you trust. Talk to your manager. They may have no idea what you’re going through and can give you tools to help you navigate it. Have an open discussion with the culprit. There’s nothing wrong with respectfully approaching the coworker who is demonstrating discrimination against you. Never forget your value add. You bring a special skillset to the office, which is why you were hired.
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| S14S17S18S21S24Personalized cancer vaccines are having a moment Promising personalized cancer vaccines were a recurring theme at the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) Annual Meeting in San Diego, earlier this month. A multitude of companies are pushing forward with shots designed to help the immune system fight patients’ specific tumors.Personalized cancer vaccines: Cancer cells are covered in mutated proteins, called “neoantigens,” that are not found on healthy cells. Personalized cancer vaccines train the immune system to recognize a patient’s unique neoantigens and then find and destroy the cancer cells.
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