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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S33Why Project-Based Work Fails -- and How to Get It Right  ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. If the 20th century was all about operational efficiency in businesses, the 21st century is all about organizational change. And how do new initiatives, products and services, strategies or business models advance? Through project work. It’s what our guest today calls the project economy, and it’s estimated to generate $20 trillion in economic activity and employ 88 million people in project management related roles by 2027.
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S1Substance use experts are sounding the alarm on another addiction: gambling The session on gambling constituted a sharp pivot from the rest of the conference, put on by the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, an advocacy group representing the nation’s more than 2,000 methadone clinics. But it underscored the growing unease across the public health world about harmful gambling behavior, which some surveys show has increased by 30% in the last six years. “Why don’t we consider gambling when we’re talking about opioids?” asked Andrew Schreier, a director of clinical services for Community Medical Services, a chain of opioid treatment programs. “There’s actually a lot of information out there about gambling in relation to opioid use. We often don’t talk about it.”
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S5Trump's Brazen Pact with the One Per Cent One thing we can say for sure about Joe Biden's three and half years in office: it's been a very rewarding time to be an American capitalist. Since the end of 2020, the S. & P. 500 has risen by nearly fifty per cent, and the companies in the index have seen their earnings per share nearly double. Big banks, hedge funds, and private-equity funds have all made bumper profits; the Financial Times recently reported that "founders and top executives of the largest private equity groups in the US have seen the value of their shares rise by more than $40bn since the beginning of 2023." The swelling tide has also benefitted many investors and executives in the tech sector. According to the Institute for Regional Studies, a Silicon Valley research group, the market capitalization of companies based in the Valley reached $14.3 trillion last year, and "venture capital funding reached an astounding $30 billion."How grateful is the capitalist class to Biden for presiding over this showering of riches? In certain cases, not grateful at all, it seems. In the past few weeks, the political media has been awash with stories about Wall Street bigwigs and tech barons throwing their support behind Donald Trump, whom some of them disowned following the January 6, 2021 assault on Capitol Hill. Back then, the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, who is chief executive of the Blackstone Group, a big private-equity shop, denounced the attack as "appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans." Last month, Schwarzman issued a statement: "I am planning to vote for change and support Donald Trump for president." The Financial Times reported that Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager who campaigned to have Claudine Gay removed as Harvard's president over her handling of pro-Palestinian campus protests, is soon likely to throw his support behind Trump, too.
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S6Apple Is Bringing A.I. to Your Personal Life, Like It or Not Last week, Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference, the annual event that is often used to showcase the company’s most significant innovations. Much of the presentation this year was devoted to A.I., or, as the company is branding it, Apple Intelligence. Whereas Google and Microsoft have leaped headlong into A.I. with their Gemini and OpenAI products, respectively, Apple is so far taking a narrower approach. The A.I. model it is unveiling on iPhone hardware is relatively weak. A.I. models are measured on their number of “parameters,” or the variables adjusted during the training process; while OpenAI’s GPT-4 has more than one and a half trillion parameters, Apple’s model has three billion. For queries that require more horsepower, users will be offered the option to outsource a task via the cloud to ChatGPT, via a corporate licensing deal that is reportedly not in exchange for a fee but for exposure for OpenAI. In other words, there’s no Apple-made superintelligent thinking machine—at least not yet.Accordingly, the reaction to the conference presentation has been somewhat muted. In New York magazine, John Herrman wrote that it represented “a cautious approach by Apple,” and speculated that the company might be wary of overinvesting in a technology that isn’t quite as far along as it is often marketed to be. In the Washington Post, Josh Tyrangiel described Apple Intelligence as “the first rational theory of AI for the masses,” praising the applications’ limited scope and the partnership between the veteran computing company and the upstart OpenAI. I suppose we should be celebrating the fact that Apple hasn’t entered the A.I. arms race full throttle. Google’s rush to keep pace with Microsoft’s A.I. developments has already resulted in the accelerated decay of Google Search tools. But I had a less sanguine reaction to the W.W.D.C. Apple Intelligence, a small model that could eventually be nestled on more than a billion iPhones around the world, crosses a kind of Rubicon: A.I. is entering our personal lives, and once it’s there it’s not likely to retreat.
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S7Risking Everything to Lose Money Professional athletes are now playing sports in a gamblers’ world, and it isn’t going well for them. In April, the NBA banned Jontay Porter, a 24-year-old role player for the Toronto Raptors and a younger brother of the Denver Nuggets star Michael Porter Jr., for allegedly wagering on NBA games, including his team’s, and throwing his own performances to influence prop bets. Porter was the first active NBA player banned for gambling in 70 years, but he wasn’t the only athlete facing banishment this spring. In June, Major League Baseball suspended four players for betting on games and banned a fifth, Tucupita Marcano, for life. Marcano’s alleged sin: betting on hundreds of games, including 25 of his own team’s.What were these guys thinking? How could they throw away their childhood dream—and the chance at a long, lucrative career—by doing something so reckless? Porter was low paid by NBA standards, but he had made more than $2 million and stood to earn much more over the course of his career. Marcano’s behavior is even more perplexing. Unlike Porter, he wasn’t accused of trying to fix any outcomes; he was just betting a lot—and losing a lot, too. According to information released by MLB this month, Marcano began betting prolifically on baseball games after suffering a season-ending injury last July—and lost almost 96 percent of those bets. Risking everything to make money is one thing. Who risks everything to lose money?
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S8Americans With Food Allergies Are Getting a Bad Deal Precautionary allergen labels like those that say “Processed in a facility that uses milk or may contain fish” are meant to address the potential for cross-contact. For instance, a granola bar that doesn’t list peanuts as an ingredient could still say they may be included. And in the United States, these warnings are voluntary and not regulated; companies can use whatever precautionary phrasing they choose on any product. Some don’t use any labels, even in facilities where unintended allergens slip in; others list allergens that may pose little risk. Robert Earl, the vice president of regulatory affairs at the nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education, or FARE, has even seen labels that include all nine common food allergens. “I would bet my bottom dollar not all of those allergens are even in the facility,” he says.Recognizing this uncertainty, food-safety experts, allergy advocates, policy makers, and food producers are discussing how to demystify precautionary allergen labels. One widely considered solution is to restrict warnings to cases where visual or analytical tests demonstrate that there is enough allergen to actually trigger a reaction. Experts say the costs to the food industry are minimal, and some food producers across the globe, including in Canada, Australia, Thailand, and the United States, already voluntarily take this approach. But in the U.S., where there are no clear guidelines to follow, consumers are still left wondering what each individual precautionary allergen label even means.
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S9This Is What Would Happen if China Invaded Taiwan In late March, a Taiwanese data analyst posted on social media about an odd satellite image: It appeared that the Chinese military had erected at one of its remote military bases in Inner Mongolia a series of roads that perfectly re-created the roads around the presidential palace in Taipei. The revelation only appeared to underscore the seriousness with which Chinese officials are proceeding with President Xi Jinping’s directive to be ready to invade the independent island by the late 2020s. As part of the research for his new book, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century, Dmitri Alperovitch journeyed to Taiwan, talked with multiple high-level officials and national security planners in Taiwan and the United States, and walked the possible invasion terrain to imagine just how such an invasion might occur. His scenario, excerpted here and which he imagines taking place on November 13, 2028, serves as the new book’s prologue.The winter season in Taiwan—lasting from November till March—is great for surfers. It’s no Bali or Hawaii, as the size of the waves and their consistency may vary, but the Northeast Monsoon, which brings in the cold China Coastal Current water into the Taiwan Strait, where it meets the warm Kuroshio Branch Current coming from the south, is known to form some significant waves. The Taiwan Strait is only about a hundred meters deep—shallow enough that during ice ages and the time of glaciers the island of Taiwan was physically connected to the Chinese mainland; but even in the modern era the 200-mile-long passage—which varies in width from about 100 nautical miles down to just 70 nautical miles and is one of the most vital shipping routes in the world—is known for frequent storms, large swells, and blinding fog and is bedeviled by annual summer typhoons from roughly May to October. Between the typhoons in the summer and the stormy high-wave winter season, there is no predictably perfect and easy time to launch a large-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, especially with the strait registering about 150 days a year of winds above 20 knots, rough seas for amphibious ships and landing craft. Any landing on Taiwan’s windy, shallow, and rocky beaches during that time is fraught and risky. Which is why, in the end, China decided to forego a beach landing and attempt an air assault on the island’s port and airfield facilities, the seizure of which would allow for rapid arrival of follow-on troops and logistical supplies to facilitate a successful occupation.
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S10Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine Earlier this year, speaking to WIRED, Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, described his product—a chatbot that gives natural-language answers to prompts and can, the company says, access the internet in real time—as an “answer engine.” A few weeks later, shortly before a funding round valuing the company at a billion dollars was announced, he told Forbes, “It’s almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid.” More recently, after Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing its content, Srinivas told the AP it was a mere “aggregator of information.”The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific. Prompted to describe what Perplexity is, it provides text that reads, “Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine that combines features of traditional search engines and chatbots. It provides concise, real-time answers to user queries by pulling information from recent articles and indexing the web daily.”
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S11S12The High Cost of Misaligned Business and Analytics Goals How and where do companies’ investments in new and improved data and analytic capabilities contribute to tangible business benefits like profitability and growth? Should they invest in talent? Technology? Culture? According to new research, the degree of alignment between business goals and analytics capabilities is among the most important factors. While companies that are early in their analytics journey will see value creation even with significant internal misalignment, at higher levels of data maturity aligned companies find that analytics capabilities create significantly more value across growth, financial, and customer KPIs.
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S13S14S15S16S17Shopify has a nearly $1 trillion opportunity according to this legendary Wall St. analyst That’s according to legendary wall street tech analyst Mark Mahaney and his colleagues at the research firm Evercore ISI. Mahaney and company recently upgraded Shopify’s stock to an “outperform” rating with a price target of $75 per share. The stock was trading around $64 at the time. And a major component of the Shopify upside that Evercore sees has to do with Shopify’s work in recent years to appeal to large enterprises in addition to small and mid-sized merchants. In interviews with Shopify merchants, Mahaney and team found that the moves seem to be working. In addition to Mattel and Steve Madden, Shopify has also attracted large fast-growing brands like Kim Kardashian’s Skims apparel company.
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S18Massachusetts 911 Outage Triggered By Firewall, Not A Hack, Officials Say The outage, designated as a “technical issue” on Tuesday, forced officials to ask people in Massachusetts to call precincts or pull on emergency fire boxes in case of an emergency. The interruption came amid the state’s first heat wave of the summer, which brought high humidity and hot temperatures exceeding the 90 degree mark. Brian Fontes, the chief executive of the National Emergency Number Association, told The New York Times that upgrading the U.S. 911 system would cost an estimated $15 billion.
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S19FedExâs Secretive Police Force Is Helping Cops Build An AI Car Surveillance Network Forbes has learned the shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock video surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least five multi-billion dollar private companies. But publicly available documents reveal that some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx — a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus.To civil rights activists, such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock’s car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren’t subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could “[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network.”
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S20Astronomy's secret weapon in the resolution wars: interferometry When human eyes gaze up at the night sky, what we can see is profoundly limited. The pupils of our eyes, which allow light through, can only reach a maximum diameter of around 7 millimeters (0.28 inches) each, which limits the amount of light our eyes can collect and, therefore, the faintness of the objects we’re sensitive to. Because we can only see visible (optical) light, the maximum resolution we can see is defined by the number of wavelengths that can fit across the diameter of our pupils. It’s why the stars Mizar and Alcor, the second star in the handle of the Big Dipper, can be seen as two individual points of light by unaided human eyes, but the binary star Albireo, within the Summer Triangle, requires binoculars or a telescope to resolve into two separate stars.Traditionally, the simplest way to improve your view of the Universe is to build larger-aperture instruments: telescopes with larger collecting areas. That gives them both more light-gathering power and also higher resolution, as larger telescopes collect more light in the same amount of observing time, and also as more wavelengths of the same type of light can fit across the diameter of your telescope, producing sharper images. However, larger telescopes are more expensive and more challenging to build instruments for, as there are only two optical telescopes larger than ~12 meters under construction today.
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S21From fan to showrunner: How "House of the Dragon" creator Ryan Condal landed TV's biggest job The second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon picks up right where the first left off. Rhaenyra Targaryen, played by Emma D’Arcy, is (spoilers ahead) flying across the Narrow Sea in search of the charred remains of her son, Lucerys, and his dragon. Across from the island of Dragonstone, in the capital city of King’s Landing, her half-brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) sits on the Iron Throne, counseled by his mother Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), grandfather Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), and Kingsguard Commander Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), preparing for a civil war that will change Westeros forever. The Dance of the Dragons is here, and when the dragons dance, the Seven Kingdoms bleed.At first, fans did not have high hopes for House of the Dragon, based on George R.R. Martin’s 2018 book Fire & Blood, which recounts the history of the Targaryen dynasty from founder Aegon the Conqueror all the way to Daenerys, the silver-haired heroine of the acclaimed and as of yet unfinished book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Game of Thrones, which was Ice and Fire’s TV adaptation, grew into one of the most critically and commercially successful shows of all time — until its final seasons failed to live up to audience expectations. House of the Dragon, which premiered in 2022, might have continued that trend. Instead, the show proved a return to form, offering the same Shakespearean dialogue and political intrigue that made people fall in love with Martin’s fictional universe back in 2011. The second season is just as good, if not better.
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S22When are parents responsible for their kids' behavior? When the parents of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, it was a watershed moment in US school shooting cases. It was also a key moment in parental culpability law, governing cases in which parents can be held legally responsible for the actions of their children.Ethan Crumbley, who at age 15 brought a gun to his high school and killed four people and injured seven, pleaded guilty to 24 crimes at his own trial in 2022. But for the first time in American history, a school shooter’s parents were also convicted, of involuntary manslaughter, and sentenced to prison terms.
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S23Boeing CEO Takes Thrashing From Senators, Even as the Hunt for a Successor Stalls The odds of Boeing emerging smoothly from the severe turbulence that has rocked the company since a side panel blew off one of its 737 MAX planes in January just decreased amid two grim developments. The first was a report highlighting the aircraft maker's difficulty finding a replacement for departing CEO Dave Calhoun. The second was the outgoing executive's day fielding tough questions from Senators looking into problems in the company's production safety measures. Some lawmakers asked why the embattled manager remains at the helm of the reeling aviation manufacturer--a highly public spectacle that makes the stalled effort to find his corporate successor even more urgent.The convergence of those two events underlines the enormous difficulties Boeing faces in battling through the series of aircraft incidents, scandals, and business crises that buffeted it since the start of 2024. The faltering hunt for a new CEO was described in a Wall Street Journal report Monday, explaining how the hunt for Calhoun's successor has run into unexpected trouble. Calhoun in March announced he would step down from his CEO role before the end of the year, though he retains his board seat. The main reason nobody has yet been named to the top job, the paper said, was that "(s)everal high-profile candidates have turned down the chance to run Boeing"--apparently looking at the opportunity less as a gift horse than as a bucking bronco they'd have a tough time riding if they took the company's reins.
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S24TikTok Could Face Department of Justice Inquiry Over Child Privacy Issues The FTC said in a statement Tuesday that it investigated the two companies and "uncovered reason to believe" they are "violating or are about to violate" the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law which requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment on the substance of the referral from the FTC against TikTok. "Consistent with our normal approach, the Justice Department consulted with FTC in advance of this referral and will continue to do so as we consider the claims. As always, the Department will be guided by the facts and the law as well as our responsibility to protect the American people," the spokesperson said.
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S25Amazon Labor Union Members Vote to Affiliate With the Teamsters The ALU members voted 98.3 percent in favor of the affiliation, which will give them access to additional resources in their effort to bring Amazon to the bargaining table, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said Tuesday."Together, with hard work, courage, and conviction, the Teamsters and ALU will fight fearlessly to ensure Amazon workers secure the good jobs and safe working conditions they deserve in a union contract," Teamsters General President Sean M. O'Brien said in a statement.
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S26Amazon Fined Nearly $6 Million for Alleged Illegal Work Quotas at Warehouses The two citations issued in May by the California Labor Commissioner's Office said Amazon.com Services LLC ran afoul of the state's Warehouse Quota Law at facilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, east of Los Angeles.The law, which took effect in 2022, "requires warehouse employers to provide employees written notice of any quotas they must follow, including the number of tasks they need to perform per hour and any discipline that could come" from not meeting the requirements, the labor commissioner's office said in a statement.
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S27Fed Officials Scan Data and Cautiously Ponder Rate Cuts Federal Reserve officials, heartened by recent data, are looking for further confirmation that inflation is cooling and for any warning signs from a still-strong labor market as they steer cautiously toward what most expect to be an interest rate cut or two by the end of this year.Outlining a litany of reasons for optimism that inflation is back on track to the U.S. central bank's 2 percent goal after stalling earlier this year, Fed Governor Adriana Kugler said on Tuesday she believes monetary policy is "sufficiently restrictive" to ease price pressures without causing a significant deterioration in the job market.Â
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S28S29What Are EV Startups Doing to Ride Out Weak Demand? Demand has been weak for Fisker's flagship Ocean electric SUV. The company cut jobs and paused investments to slow cash burn, partnered with dealerships to boost sales and desperately sought an investment from a major automaker to stay alive. None of that worked. The startup has focused on reducing its cash burn by re-negotiating supply contracts and building some components in-house. Rivian posted cash and cash equivalents of $5.98 billion for the first quarter, compared with $7.86 billion in the fourth quarter.
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S30Katy Perry-Backed Foods Firm Bragg Explores Sale Bragg Live Food Products, which is backed by celebrities Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, is exploring a sale that could value the maker of apple cider vinegar at more than $500 million, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.The Santa Barbara, California-based company, which also counts investment firm Swander Pace Capital among its investors, is working with Bank of America to solicit interest from potential buyers, which include private equity firms, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.Â
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S31Appeals Court Sends Credit Card Late Fees Lawsuit Back to The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday suffered a jurisdictional setback in a lawsuit challenging its new rule capping credit card late fees at $8 when a federal appeals court held the case should stay in Texas and not be sent to a judge in Washington, D.C.The ruling by a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was a victory for business and banking groups challenging a key part of the crackdown by President Joe Biden's administration on "junk fees."
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S32S34Identify -- and Develop -- Your Natural Strengths When we think of self-improvement, we tend to focus on our weaknesses. But that means we often underestimate our strengths — or even don’t recognize them at all. In this article, the author explains why we’ve developed this focus on weakness, and she then lays out a program for identifying and developing our strengths, with a particular focus on natural abilities that we might take for granted and therefore overlook.
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S35The High Cost of Misaligned Business and Analytics Goals How and where do companies’ investments in new and improved data and analytic capabilities contribute to tangible business benefits like profitability and growth? Should they invest in talent? Technology? Culture? According to new research, the degree of alignment between business goals and analytics capabilities is among the most important factors. While companies that are early in their analytics journey will see value creation even with significant internal misalignment, at higher levels of data maturity aligned companies find that analytics capabilities create significantly more value across growth, financial, and customer KPIs.
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S36How to Solve Your Company's Toughest Problems You’ve likely heard the phrase, “Move fast and break things.” But Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei says speed and experimentation are not enough on their own. Instead, she argues that you should move fast and fix things. (That’s also the topic and title of the book she coauthored with Anne Morriss.)
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S37Why China still runs on Windows On May 29, Microsoft’s China division announced a new partnership with TencentiTencentBest known for its super-app WeChat, Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate and a major player in the video gaming industry.READ MORE, building a pathway for publishing Tencent’s Android catalog on Windows. Tencent is best known as the company behind WeChat — a super-app that’s virtually essential in China — but it has a vast library of apps. It’s one of the world’s biggest gaming companies and runs QQ Music, one of the country’s most popular music-streaming services. Giving people a way to use Tencent’s apps on the desktop is a good idea, but if you’re not familiar with China, it might be a little surprising that the company is looking to Microsoft to do it. Given the rising political tensions with the U.S., couldn’t Tencent find a Chinese company to partner with?But for the Chinese desktop market, Windows has become indispensable. It’s hard to get solid numbers on desktop OS usage in China, both because of piracy and general secrecy, but some analysts have estimated Microsoft’s share as high as 80%. Given the nature of Windows, that portion is probably heavily focused on offices and industry. With so much of the excitement and growth in the sector focused on mobile devices, there are few Chinese tech companies interested in challenging Microsoft in the desktop space, so there’s been no real threat to its dominance. If you’re making a product for desktops, you’re making it for Windows.
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S38Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off Huber’s Butchery, in Singapore’s upscale Dempsey Hill neighborhood, has long drawn shoppers looking for more than just cold cuts. Starting last month, the deli’s freezer section has stocked shredded chicken grown from cells in a lab, the first time anywhere in the world that cultivated meat can be bought in a store, its manufacturer said.Cultivated meat has been available at a handful of restaurants in Singapore and the U.S. for a couple of years. But the launch of Good Meat 3 — from California-based food technology firm Eat Just — at Huber’s is a high point for the industry that has been in the doldrums lately. Investor interest is flagging, and cultivated meat has been banned in Italy, and in the U.S. states of Alabama and Florida.
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S39Fans of 'Interview With the Vampire' Say the Stakes Have Never Been Higher When a new episode of AMCâÂÂs Interview With the Vampire aired the Sunday before last, a particular sort of fuse was lit in online conversations around the show. The fifth installment of the second season, âÂÂDonâÂÂt Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape,â was an impeccably written and acted horror film in miniatureâÂÂthe sort of thing you watch with your mouth hanging open, before pointing at your TV and saying, âÂÂAre you seeing this, too?!?!âÂÂYet when thousands took to social media to ask that very question, much of the commentary was underscored by confusion, even concern, that people were, in fact, not seeing it, tooâÂÂthat they werenâÂÂt seeing Interview With the Vampire at all. For a show so good, many said, it was criminal that more people werenâÂÂt watching and discussing it, and that more critics werenâÂÂt covering it. âÂÂThis is the best show on TV right now,â New York Times culture reporter Kyle Buchanan wrote in one widely shared tweet. âÂÂI feel gaslit that youâÂÂd all rather talk about mid or bad shows rather than watch the golden standard!âÂÂ
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S406 Best Toasters (2024): Tested and Reviewed 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 WIREDAn essential appliance, the toaster makes breakfast prep easy, adds flair to lunch time sandwiches and takes care of the three billion Pop Tarts we consume each year in America. Let's face it, few things in life are more delicious than a piece of hot buttered toast, well, apart from maybe toast with eggs, bacon, hash browns and a brew made with one of the best coffee makers. But not all toasters are made equally, which is why we've been carb loading in the name of research, so you can get the best for your bread, bagel, muffin or crumpet.
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S41LG Gram Pro 17 Review: Ultralight and Ultra Hot 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 WIREDChoosing a laptop inevitably involves a matter of compromise. A lightweight, more portable device means a small screen and a cramped keyboard. A larger laptop provides room to stretch out and usually more powerâat the expense of portability. What's an on-the-go creative to do? Is there a best of both worlds out there somewhere?
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S42The Evergoods Civic Panel Loader 24L Is a Well-Made Minimalist Backpack 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 WIREDI've had a mild obsession with bags since grade school. I really wanted a Jansport backpack. What I got was a generic copy on sale at the local sporting good storeâalmost a Jansport, but not quite. It wasn't the label, I didn't care who made the bag. It was build quality. The zipper snagged on the generic version. The rear pocket wasn't as big.
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S43S44Fusion Sparks an Energy Revolution In 2024, fusion technology will finally make the transition from basic research to commercial application. The reason for that will be the construction and completion of the first commercial fusion demonstrators. These cutting-edge facilities are smaller than fusion power plants. For instance, a laser-based fusion demonstrator might use five to ten laser beams, while a commercial power plant can use several hundred. However, they have a crucial roleâto prove that fusion technology works on a small scale, paving the way for the construction of larger fusion-power plants. In 2024, they will do just this, starting to build devices that will finally achieve the elusive goal of energy gain- in other words, outputting more energy than the quantity needed to kickstart the fusion process. Hitting this milestone is a critical step in addressing the steeply increasing global energy demand, as fusion energy has the potential to provide an abundant, carbon-free source of power.This story is from the WIRED World in 2024, our annual trends briefing. Read more stories from the series hereâor download a copy of the magazine.
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S4517 Management and City-Building Games for Armchair Tycoons 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 WIREDBefore kids and other responsibilities, when I regularly gamed into the wee hours, playing management sims was one of my favorite things to do. I spent countless days building in Sim Tower, SimCity, and Theme Park. I ran a studio in The Movies, managed a menagerie in Zoo Tycoon, and constructed the pyramids in Pharaoh. My villainous lairs in Dungeon Keeper 2 and Evil Genius were beyond compare. I built impregnable castles in Stronghold, and I sank days into Game Dev Storyâa game about making games.
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S46Adobe Says It Won't Train AI Using Artists' Work. Creatives Aren't Convinced When users first found out about AdobeâÂÂs new terms of service (which were quietly updated in February), there was an uproar. Adobe told users it could access their content âÂÂthrough both automated and manual methodsâ and use âÂÂtechniques such as machine learning in order to improve [AdobeâÂÂs] Services and Software.â Many understood the update as the company forcing users to grant unlimited access to their work, for purposes of training AdobeâÂÂs generative AI, known as Firefly.Late on Tuesday, Adobe issued a clarification: In an updated version of its terms of service agreement, it pledged not to train AI on its users' content stored locally or in the cloud and gave users the option to opt out of content analytics.
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S47NatGeo documents salvage of Tuskegee Airman's lost WWII plane wreckage In April 1944, a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, Second Lieutenant Frank Moody, was on a routine training mission when his plane malfunctioned. Moody lost control of the aircraft and plunged to his death in the chilly waters of Lake Huron. His body was recovered two months later, but the airplane was left at the bottom of the lake—until now. Over the last few years, a team of divers working with the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum in Detroit has been diligently recovering the various parts of Moody's plane to determine what caused the pilot's fatal crash.
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S48S49What to Read to Understand How People Get Tricked Each of these titles will stick with you and, perhaps, make you more likely to realize when you're not seeing the truth.Our brains are wired to be deceived. I'm married to a professional magician, so I'm intimately familiar with the kinds of techniques that can fool the eye and trick the senses. But the human mind's vulnerability to misdirection is more universal than that. Neurologists and psychologists have found that our predilection for trusting othersâa trait that has helped us survive as a speciesâis a major reason con artists thrive. This trait also makes dissimulation fascinating and appealing, especially in literature. Readers love the stories of swindlers and their gullible targets, of grifters themselves being tricked, and every iteration in between. They thrill us by upending the expected and making us question our assumptions.
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S50Alex Jones Lost Everything--And Still Won Alex Jones couldn't help himself. On Friday, just before a federal judge was set to decide the fate of Infowars, his conspiracy-media empire, Jones spun up yet another conspiracy.He was on his way into a Houston courthouse as part of the ongoing saga over lies he told about the Sandy Hook school shooting. After six years of litigation, Jones owes $1.5 billion in defamation damages. The "FBI and CIA" had fabricated the charges against him, Jones explained, in his famously gravelly voice, to the half dozen or so cameramen in front of him. The agencies had organized a "deep-state operation against the American people," he said, wiping the sweat off his head in the Houston heat. "This is a very, very exciting time to be alive."
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