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S1Boosted Breeding and beyond: 3 tech trends that could end world hunger  This article is an installment of Future Explored, Freethink’s weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing here.
It’s 2050. The global population has increased to nearly 10 billion, and while we’re still working to ensure every person on the planet has the opportunity to live their best life, we have eliminated one of humanity’s oldest foes: tonight, no one will go to bed hungry. Here’s how we’ll (maybe) do it.
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S2The race to be the tallest building in the world As 1930 approached, New York City seemed flush with money, construction sites, and excitement—despite the recent stock market crash. The Woolworth Building, a Gothic Revival skyscraper designed to celebrate the success of Woolworth “Five-and-Dime” stores, had stood as the tallest building in the world since 1913. But that was about to change.
An unofficial competition had broken out between former business partners William Van Alen and H. Craig Severance, both designing skyscrapers they hoped would be the tallest in the world. Severance kept adding floors to the Manhattan Bank Building (now 40 Wall Street) until he was sure that its height would exceed what was proposed in Van Alen’s design for the Chrysler Building. However, Van Alen had a surprise. To Severance’s dismay, he added a 125-foot-long spire to his design, secretly constructed within the Chrysler Building. Once the spire was hoisted to the top of the building, the Chrysler towered over the Manhattan Bank Building. Van Alen had bested his former partner and earned the title he desired for his skyscraper.
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S310 Essential Procedures Every Business Must Document Adi Klevit, an Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) member in Portland, Oregon, is the co-founder of Business Success Consulting Group, which helps leaders create and document custom processes and tailor-made management systems. We asked Adi to share her expertise around the most critical procedures businesses must document:Â
Business owners around the world struggle with each of these scenarios. In fact, I recently interviewed a business owner who lived in terror that a key employee might leave--because that would mean the entire company would fall apart.
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S4A Massive New Stanford Study Says This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Stay Up Too Late Writing in the journal Psychiatry Research, Stanford University researchers said they surveyed 73,880 adults as part of a study about whether people's chronotypes, which basically means their preferred sleep timing, correlated with their actual sleep timing.
"We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it's being up late that is not good for your mental health," said senior author Jamie Zeitzer, a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "The big unknown is why."
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S5Why You Should Tackle the Big Things First Let's say you're trying to teach an elephant how to recite poetry while balancing on a soccer ball. How should you allocate your time and money between training the elephant and designing the soccer ball?
The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the ball. But most people will rush off and start designing a really great soccer ball first. Why? Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update -- and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching an elephant to talk is really, really hard.
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S6From Corporate Giant to SME: Navigating Your Transition Successfully Transitioning from a large company to a small or medium-size enterprise (SME) can be a profound shift, requiring a distinct set of adjustments and an understanding of the new environment. If you've spent significant time in a large corporation, the move to a smaller entity can feel like venturing into a different world. Here are five critical areas to focus on to navigate this transition effectively.
First, understand that the scope and nature of responsibilities in an SME can be vastly different. In large corporations, roles are often highly specialized, with each employee focusing on a specific set of tasks within a defined framework. However, SMEs typically require a more generalist approach. You might find yourself wearing multiple hats, engaging in a broader range of activities than you used to. For instance, if you were an IT specialist in a large company, your role might have been strictly technical, focusing solely on network security or database management. In an SME, you might still handle these tasks, but also find yourself involved in user support, project management, or even marketing strategy. This broadened scope necessitates a willingness to step out of your comfort zone and tackle a variety of challenges, often simultaneously.
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S75 Ways to Master Tactfulness: A Quick Guide to Highly Effective Communication Tact is a delicate balancing act between forthrightness, bluntness, and callousness on the one hand, and sensitivity, delicacy, and mindfulness on the other. To be tactful is to be both straightforward and direct--blunt but not cruel, frank but not offensive.
First, speaking too quickly, before you've had a chance to think, can be avoided by practicing good listening and being able to tune into others' emotions. You want to understand the other person's position and express it back, using the same emotional language. Once you can do that, you can open the door to understanding where they're coming from, and hopefully avoid those situations when you go home and think, "I should have said this instead!"
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S8Are You Promoting Your Emotionally Intelligent People? Speaking at a conference recently, I was wrapping things up and opened the floor to questions. All started well enough until this one guy got the mic. He just would not, well, shut up. His questions were all prefaced with lengthy monologues and the queries were all about his specific situation. On and on and on he went. Finally, with the audience exasperated, I had to be more direct than I preferred, interrupted him, and told him I had to move on.Â
No matter where you work, there is always someone who just doesn't "get it"--folks who are obnoxious, rude, lazy, loud, mean, narcissistic, selfish, manipulative, clueless, whatever. It is a wonder they ever get hired.Â
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S95 Hard Questions to Ask Yourself Before Selling Your Business For many founders, selling a company is the ultimate accomplishment. The dream of starting something from scratch, growing and scaling the business, finding a buyer, and exiting is the stuff movies are made of. While it can be quite thrilling and satisfying, it can also be a dramatic and, at times, a traumatic process.
As a strategic growth coach, I've worked with dozens of companies on how to create and implement successful scaling strategies, and many of them have found successful exits. I've also been a founder and CEO myself and successfully sold my business. While they were all big wins, they came with a lot of complexity and anguish that could have been avoided.
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S10Today's Most Overlooked Mergers and Acquisitions Cybersecurity and Compliance Risks Merger and acquisition activity has been volatile for several years. With a surge in the last quarter of 2023 globally, analysts predict an M&A rebound in 2024, with deal volumes expected to rise as much as 50 percent year-over-year.
While this is a good indicator of things to come for the global economy, I strongly believe that business leaders should focus on the journey, not the destination. I know from personal experience, that if you build a great company, good things will happen--one of which could be a merger or an acquisition.Â
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S11You Don't Need to Offer Clients the World I recently threw away a giant, overflowing makeup organizer that was taking up valuable space on a bathroom shelf. It had been driving me nuts for months: I had somehow accumulated a ton of products that I did not use or like and felt like I was sifting through a pile of half-used junk to find the five products that I consistently used.
Who knows why we hold onto things that don't work. All I can tell you is that it felt so good to get rid of those ten never-worn lipsticks and put my five workhorse products into a sleek black bag--one that takes up about a quarter of the space on my shelf.
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S12How Non-Traditional Education is Preparing Tech Talent For the Future While unemployment rates are at an all-time low, the talent shortage in the tech space persists. According to a study by HCA, 92 percent of tech leaders report challenges finding skilled talent, and nearly six in 10 predict a significant hiring challenge will be the lack of applicants with the skill sets needed to support essential initiatives.
According to Gaper, the talent shortage has led to a situation where only 65 positions out of every 100 open job roles get filled. However, despite this glaring shortage, young Americans are not flocking to colleges to be trained to fill this gap. The reason is that the tech-talent gap has also coincided with a time when University enrollment is lower than in recent history.Â
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S13S14S15A Catastrophic Hospital Hack Ends in a Leak of 300M Patient Records The rolling series of breaches targeting customers of cloud platform Snowflake appears to be a supply chain attack wrapped in another supply chain attack. A hacker who claims to have been involved in the attacks tells WIRED that the hackers, known as ShinyHunter, stole victims' Snowflake credentials by first breaching an employee of a third-party contractor. (The contractor, however, says it does not believe it was involved.)
Ultimately, the breach of the Snowflake customer accounts, which include Ticketmaster, banking firm Santander, and potentially more than 160 other companies, was possible because their Snowflake accounts did not have multifactor authentication enabled.
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S16S17Everything's About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change If youâÂÂre one of the millions of Americans worried about your pocketbooks and the general cost of living, you might have picked up on some good news recently: Inflation has really been cooling off this summer, as long-sticky (and long-lamented) food and energy prices continue to moderate. Some economic indicators remain stubborn, howeverâÂÂand they arenâÂÂt likely to abate anytime in the near future, no matter how long the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates high, what tweaks President Joe Biden makes to his trade policy, whether corporations decide themselves to slash prices on certain products, or whether Covid-battered supply chains finally get some long-needed fixes.
Other, grimmer recent headlines help to explain why. Hard rains from a tropical disruption in the Gulf have been battering FloridaâÂÂs southern regions for days, leading to a rare flash-flood emergency. Another batch of storms is swirling near Texas at the moment and could form into a tropical depression, according to forecasts from the National Hurricane Center. Even if both states end up missing bigger storms now, itâÂÂs likely only a matter of time before theyâÂÂre threatened again: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the United States will see its worst hurricane season in decades this summer.
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S18S19How to Exercise Safely During a Heat Wave When summer starts with a stifling heat wave, as many places are seeing in 2024, it can pose risks for just about anyone who spends time outside, whether they're runners, people who walk or cycle to work, outdoor workers, or kids playing sports.
Susan Yeargin, an expert on heat-related illnesses, explains what everyone should think about before spending time outside in a heat wave and how to keep yourself and vulnerable family members and friends safe.
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S20S21Jabra Enhance Select 500 Review: Excellent Hearing Aids 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 WIRED
Anyone who says you shouldn't mess with a good thing is wrongâthat's old and busted thinking. That kind of talk is a recipe for complacency, particularly in the hearing aid world, where things can and should always get better.
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S22These Are the Best Laptop Backpacks We've Tried and Tested 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 WIRED
A backpack is the best, most efficient, and most comfortable way to carry your stuffâthere's a reason why you don't see people hiking the Appalachian Trail with a tote. But finding the right one that works for you and your lifestyle isn't easy. Whether you're commuting to an office or school, running to your local coffee shop, or going on a weekend trip, a good backpack will look good and keep your stuff organized. It's easier on your neck and shoulders than an overstuffed purse or briefcase (and miles better than trying to hold everything in your hands).
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S23How a Band Falls Apart, According to 'Stereophonic' The Tony-winning play explores the heartbreak and turmoil that sometimes accompany great music.Like the members of Fleetwood Mac, or the Mamas & the Papas, or the Beatles, or Van Halen, the rock band at the center of the Broadway play Stereophonic can't seem to keep its act together. The bassist stumbles drunk and late into a recording session; the guitarist keeps futzing with the tempo on a song. The musicians are clearly close with one anotherâlots of inside jokes, lots of casual touchingâbut that only makes the bickering more personal.
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S24The Books The Atlantic Loved--And Hated This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.Working on the Books desk of a 167-year-old publication offers incredible opportunitiesâand dredges up some insecurities. Will our judgment hold up to future readers' evaluations? Is the work we're putting out worthy of the magazine's illustrious traditions? Over the years, The Atlantic's literary coverage has taken on both the task of criticismâor situating a work in its era, evaluating its ideas, and considering its symbolsâand of reviewing which titles are worth people's time and why. Today, my job includes editing book recommendations and essays on new releases, and contributing to avowedly ambitious projects such as our recent list of great American novels. This involves listening to the opinions and disagreements of our contemporary readers. But there's also an entire archive full of people who talk back, disagree, and weigh in, too.
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S25The Flimsiness of Trumponomics Trump's latest reported idea would result in massive tax cuts for the ultrarichâat the expense of other Americans.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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S26An Attack on Free Speech at Harvard Universities require a culture of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.In a recent op-ed in The Harvard Crimsonâ"Faculty Speech Must Have Limits"âthe university's dean of social science, Lawrence Bobo, made an extraordinary set of claims that seriously threaten academic freedom, including the chilling idea that faculty members who dare to criticize the university should be punished. Bobo is a senior administrator at Harvard, overseeing centers and departments including history, economics, sociology, and African and African American studies. When he writes about faculty free speech, those within and outside his division listen.
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S27Dog Food Is So Fancy Now That I Ate Some Canumi's yellowfin tuna is caught in the Atlantic and then gently steamed and packed with fresh water in a storied factory in Galicia, Spain. A tin costs about $6 and comes inside an Instagram-ready, peach-colored box designed with spunky typefaces. (The brand also makes tote bags.) I am, honestly, desperate to try it, but it's been sold out in America for weeks. Also, it's for dogs.If you are old enough to be reading this and you grew up with a dog, he probably did not eat anything that would appeal to a human adult with a reasonably sophisticated palate. What he ate, in all likelihood, was kibble: hard, stinky, cereal-like pellets of grains and a small amount of meat, processed at high heat and pressure and sold by a global food mega-conglomerate in a big, unphotogenic bag. Whoever was in charge of buying the kibble may have had a choice among, say, salmon, chicken, and beef, but those distinctions were less about a meaningful difference in taste or composition than about the feeble work of flavoring agents. Your dog might have liked the food; your dog might have hated the food. He almost certainly didn't know anything better.
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S28'The Party of the Ultrarich and the Ultra-poor' When the Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden's plan to cancel student debt, his administration hurried to find a work-around. Less than a year later, Biden has now forgiven more than $160 billion in college loans for nearly 5 million borrowersâtotals that, as he often notes, would be much higher if not for the Court.To Representative Seth Moulton, the policy that Biden tried so hard to implement is a prime example of how the Democratic Party has gone astray and why Biden might lose to Donald Trump. "In many ways, we have become the party of the ultrarich and the ultra-poor, and a lot of people in the middle think Democrats are out of touch," Moulton told me. Student-debt relief is "a terrible priority because it sends a message to everyone who didn't get the opportunity to go to college that they're less important than the people who did."
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S29'Kinds of Kindness' May Test Your Patience With his new film, Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his freaky-deaky rootsâwith mixed results.When I saw Yorgos Lanthimos's breakout 2009 film, the surreal and violent fable Dogtooth, I did not think the director was destined to grow into a Hollywood brand. Yet that's exactly what has happened to the Greek filmmaker, whose fascination with human brutality has not stopped him from becoming a recurring Oscar favorite who makes crossover art-house hits. Lanthimos's steady rise culminated in last year's Poor Things, which was somehow one of the feel-good hits of the fall: a freaky tale set in steampunk Victorian England about a woman's corpse that is revived with a baby's brain.
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S30Aileen Cannon Is Who Critics Feared She Was The judge handling Trump's classified-documents case has shown that she's not fit for the task.One year ago, when former President Donald Trump was indicted on charges related to his hoarding of classified documents, the case was randomly assigned to Aileen Cannon, a federal judge for the Southern District of Florida.
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S31Google Is Turning Into a Libel Machine A few weeks ago, I witnessed Google Search make what could have been the most expensive error in its history. In response to a query about cheating in chess, Google's new AI Overview told me that the young American player Hans Niemann had "admitted to using an engine," or a chess-playing AI, after defeating Magnus Carlsen in 2022âimplying that Niemann had confessed to cheating against the world's top-ranked player. Suspicion about the American's play against Carlsen that September indeed sparked controversy, one that reverberated even beyond the world of professional chess, garnering mainstream news coverage and the attention of Elon Musk.Except, Niemann admitted no such thing. Quite the opposite: He has vigorously defended himself against the allegations, going so far as to file a $100 million defamation lawsuit against Carlsen and several others who had accused him of cheating or punished him for the unproven allegationâChess.com, for example, had banned Niemann from its website and tournaments. Although a judge dismissed the suit on procedural grounds, Niemann has been cleared of wrongdoing, and Carlsen has agreed to play him again. But the prodigy is still seething: Niemann recently spoke of an "undying and unwavering resolve" to silence his haters, saying, "I'm going to be their biggest nightmare for the rest of their lives." Could he insist that Google and its AI, too, are on the hook for harming his reputation?
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S32The Enduring Fascination With Women in Water Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, located some 50 miles north of Tampa, Florida, is best known for its mermaids. Since 1947, synchronized swimmers in shimmering tails have performed for audiences in the park's 400-seat aquariumlike theater, which is built roughly 16 feet below the surface of the Weeki Wachee River's crystalline spring. As a young girl, watching their water ballet through a wall of glass, I studied the mermaids' every move in astonishment. Their talents and allure were otherworldlyâthe soft billowing of their hair, the smooth weightlessness of their movements, the poise they maintained in environs inhospitable to any mere mortal.The Weeki Wachee mermaid show was among dozens of roadside attractions that capitalized on the success of Esther Williams, a former competitive swimmer who parlayed her talents in the pool into movie stardom in the 1940s and '50s. Her films, often dubbed "aquamusicals," were known for their impressive underwater choreography and synchronized-swimming sequencesâas well as their enormous success at the box office.
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S33Will Publishing's Diversity Gains Last? Published works of fiction by nonwhite authors more than doubled from 2019 to 2023âbut we may now be seeing a reversal in this trend.This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
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S34America's Doublethink on Working Through the Heat Heat can be deadly; no federal rules currently exist to protect workers against that danger.It's troublingly hot in June, which means the United States is entering the heat-death zone for workers again. We've been here before. In San Antonio, on a blisteringly hot June day in 2022, Gabriel Infante, a 24-year-old construction worker, died in his first week on the job, after he entered a state of delirium while laying fiber-optic cable; medics measured his temperature at 109.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That same month, Esteban Chavez Jr., also 24, died after passing out while delivering packages in Pasadena, California, in temperatures above 90 degrees.
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S35The 'Espresso' Theory of Gender Relations The men dominating the Billboard Hot 100 this summer are doing traditional male things: picking fights, playing guitar, bellowing about being saved or sabotaged by the opposite sex. Meanwhile, what are the women of popular music up to? Being brats.Brat may sound like an insult; Hollywood's "Brat Pack" certainly didn't appreciate the term in 1985. But when the hipster diva Charli XCX titled her new album Brat, which spawned a wave of memes with its bile-green cover, she crystallized a cultural mood: Seeming a little immature, a little selfish, a little nasty, has taken on an air of glamour. Although riffing on the archetype of the bad girl is pop tradition, the new insouciance has a distinctly mischievous bent. It's the sound of young women cracking jokes with one another against a backdrop of growing alienation between the genders.
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S36Americans Have Lost the Plot on Cooking Oil Olive oil is a great choice. So is canola oil, vegetable oil, avocado oil, and pretty much everything else.Every meal I make begins with a single choice: extra-virgin olive oil or canola? For as long as I've cooked, these have been my kitchen workhorses, because they're versatile, affordable, andâmost of allâhealthy. Or so I thought.
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S37The Improbable, Unstoppable Rise of Goose or the sake of brevity, let's skip the first verse and the chorus. Let's jump over some ambient noodling and the gradual building of musical tension. Let's begin, in jam-band parlance, on a peak, a moment of sonic culmination. Let's begin at Radio City Music Hall on June 25, 2022. Specifically, we're two hours and 12 minutes into the evening when the house lights come up, a red-haired 57-year-old man with a guitar walks onstage, and all 6,000 people in attendance collectively lose their minds as they realize what they are witnessing.
The redhead is the Phish front man Trey Anastasio. But this isn't a Phish show. The headliner tonight is Goose, a band of five 30-somethings in the midst of a meteoric rise. This is Goose's second-straight sold-out show at Radio City; just three years and three days earlier, the band was playing at Kenny's Westside Pub, in Peoria, Illinois.
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S38Maybe Don't Spray-Paint Stonehenge They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. Just Stop Oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pairâone of them young, the other olderâcarry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it's dyed corn flour). A bystander in a gray coat and baseball hat chases them, screaming, then grabs the man and tries to pull him away from the historic monument in a failing bid to protect it. As the cloud clears, the orange stains remain, soaked into the ancient sarsen stone.
A video of Wednesday's act of vandalism, posted by an X account devoted to Stonehenge, has accumulated more than 30 million views. The camps have coalesced as you'd expect: Conservative and moderate voices have reacted with outrage, while left-leaning environmentalists have argued that critics should be more concerned about the state of the planet than a bit of plant-based coloring that was easily removed. If I have to pick a side, I'm with the gentlemen wielding the washable dye. (I am an environmental-studies professor, after all.) But the protest left me frustrated: yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.
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S39Triple-Digit Highs Can Be Misleading Summer has only just officially begun, and the world is already sweltering. This week, two counties in northwestern Maine were under their first-ever excessive-heat warningâpart of a record-breaking "heat dome" that has settled on the eastern part of the country. Washington, D.C., might hit its first triple-digit high since 2016. Globally, the temperatures this spring have been even more shocking. Last week, the Sonoran Desert hit 125 degrees, the highest recorded temperature in Mexican history. Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, hit that same temperature. Last month, part of New Delhi, India, soared above 120 degrees.
These triple-digit highs are alarming and dangerous. In Mecca, hundreds of pilgrims making the Hajj pilgrimage to the holy Islamic city reportedly died in the heat. But in isolation, such temperatures can also be misleading. Not all 100-degree days are the same. The highest daily temperature isn't the most revealing number about what a heat wave actually feels like, or what it does to our bodies.
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S40All The Washington Post Has Is Its Credibility Hours after my Washington Post colleagues and I published the first of several articles in 2017 about the Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore's history of pursuing teenage girls, the Republican nominee's powerful allies launched an elaborate campaign seeking to discredit the story. The best-known of these efforts was an attempt carried out by the far-right activist group Project Veritas to dupe us into publishing a false story, an operation we exposed. But there were others, perhaps none more insidious than the spreading of false rumors across Alabama that The Washington Post had paid Moore's accusers to come forward, and were offering thousands of dollars to other women for salacious stories about him.
There is a reason Moore's allies used this particular tactic: They knew that any whiff of a financial motive behind the stories would taint them. There is also a reason their efforts failed. And there is a reason I'm bringing this up seven years later.
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