Can we feed ourselves without devouring the planet? Farming is the worst thing humanity has ever done to the planet, says journalist George Monbiot. What's more: the global food system could be heading toward collapse. Detailing the technological solutions we need to radically reshape food production -- from lab-grown, protein-rich foods to crops that don't require plowing -- Monbiot shares a future-focused vision of how humanity could feed itself without destroying the planet. Continued here |
The Coming GOP Inquisition Biden’s classified documents, the “weaponization of the federal government,” and other new targets for House investigations 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. Continued here |
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Arthur Duncan, Talented Tap Dancer Who Broke Barriers, Dies at 97 In 1954, a spirited tap dancer named Arthur Duncan appeared on several episodes of “The Betty White Show,” a daytime talk series hosted by the future Golden Girl. Duncan’s skilled footwork delighted many viewers, but some were rankled by his inclusion in the show’s cast. Duncan was Black—and at a time when racial segregation was institutionalized in the United States, he shared the stage with white performers. “[A]ll through the South, there was this whole ruckus,” White recalled in the 2018 documentary Betty White: First Lady of Television. “They were going to take our show off the air if we didn’t get rid of Arthur, because he was Black.” Continued here |
The photography of Acacia Johnson | Psyche Films Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, Acacia Johnson waits for a photograph. It’s not always something she can plan, or articulate, but she knows it when she sees it. Her favourite images are the ones that make you question what you have seen, snapping you from the complacency of knowing – the way you stop when you think you’ve witnessed something supernatural. ‘The polar regions are full of phenomena that classify as otherworldly,’ says Johnson. The landscapes are ‘unreal – in the best way’. Growing up in Alaska, in a family for whom flying in small planes over glaciers was a regular activity, and later working as a guide in Antarctica, Johnson’s relationship with polar landscapes is personal. But as that landscape shifts and changes under the effects of the climate crisis, and the human cultures that depend on it adjust, it is inherently political too. In this film, which honours her work as winner of the 2022 International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Photojournalism, she explains how she is compelled to record life in polar landscapes, and show ‘why it matters, why it is worth protecting. Or why it’s just beautiful.’ Continued here |
How to make the most of university | Psyche Guides Learning psychological flexibility is the key to coping with difficult times and to pursuing what really matters to you is a psychology lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. He is the author of The Unbreakable Student (2021) and the co-author of The Research Journey of ACT (2015), The ACT Diary (published annually) and The ACT Journal (2021). Continued here |
9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2023 and Beyond Last year was another tumultuous year in the workplace, with continued high employee turnover rates, evolving return-to-office policies, inflation, and more. In 2023, amid a looming economic downturn, organizations will continue to face significant challenges — and how they respond could determine whether they are an employer of choice. Several authors from Gartner’s HR practice predict nine trends that organizations will have to confront this year. Continued here |
Scientists Guide Lightning Bolts With Lasers for the First Time The technology could one day protect wider areas than metal lightning rods do, perhaps shielding airports and launchpads during storms For the first time, scientists have diverted lightning by using lasers. On the Säntis mountain in northeastern Switzerland, they shot rapid-fire beams of light into the sky and successfully guided lightning for 50 meters. Continued here |
The Paradox of Diversity Trainings This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries? Do you have personal experiences with them? I’d love to hear from boosters and critics alike, especially if your commentary is grounded in something you’ve observed at work, school, or elsewhere in your life. Continued here |
The Film That Accurately Captures Teen Grief In many West African cultures, griots are the keepers of memory, their oral traditions simultaneously positioning them as fabulists, historians, genealogists, entertainers, and messengers. To serve as a voice for a people is a heavy burden—colonization has dispossessed many Indigenous communities of the cultural artifacts that hold their history, and the triangular slave trade decimated the landscapes and kingdoms of various ethnic groups. But griots remind people that we truly die only when we are forgotten, not when we are separated from our earthly bodies or environments. Hawa, the second feature film from the director Maïmouna Doucouré, serves as an apt, fantastical canvas to explore this dynamic between legacy and memory. Streaming on Amazon Prime, the coming-of-age story follows its titular character (played by Sania Halifa), a young Malian girl in Paris who is struggling to accept the impending death of her griotte grandmother. Maminata, compellingly rendered by Oumou Sangaré, the legendary Wassoulou musician, is not only Hawa’s last remaining relative, but also her anchor to Malian culture. She teaches Hawa the Bambara language and tries to impress upon her the importance of griots’ musical stylings and magical storytelling conventions. Continued here |
YouTube is bringing viral fame to one of Delhi's oldest markets That’s how Mohammad Ali, who owns a store in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk market, describes the impact of a viral YouTube video made about his business. In the video, which now has over 400,000 views, Delhi-based YouTuber Aman Khurana introduces Ali’s shop and showcases some of his products, such as sherwanis (knee-length coats often worn as wedding attire by men), turbans, and beaded necklaces. Several times during the 18-minute-and-33-second clip, Ali claims, “Chaar hazaar mein doolha banaa ke denge” (We’ll make you a groom in 4,000 rupees, or $49). Ali’s shop is among thousands of similar stores in the narrow bylanes of one of India’s biggest markets, Chandni Chowk. He opened this store in 2019 and struggled to find customers for the first couple of months. Then, in October 2019, he invited Khurana to shoot a video in the hope of attracting customers. Within days, the crowds at the shop were unmanageable, Ali told Rest of World. Continued here |
Apple Tries Again With a Second-Gen $299 HomePod Five years after the original HomePod, Apple has finally deemed it time to release a successor. The second-generation HomePod breathes new life into the company’s smart home aspirations, boasting a new processor and improved sound quality, along with a temperature and humidity sensor, simpler smart home automation, and support for Matter—the standard that aims to make all smart home devices interoperable. However, this smart speaker is nearly as expensive as the original. Sure, it’s $50 less, but it still costs $299. At least there’s still the HomePod Mini for $99. If the price doesn’t deter you, the second-generation HomePod is available for preorder and officially hits shelves on February 3. Continued here |
The Marvel Movies From Worst to Best—and Where to Stream Them In May 2008, the recently formed Marvel Studios released its first film—and changed the face of modern cinema. Iron Man wasn't even the highest-grossing superhero film of the year (Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight took that crown), but it was a kernel that has exploded into an all-consuming entertainment juggernaut. Nearly 15 years later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a sprawling, interconnected web of character-based movies and crossovers that has pulled in billions at the box office. But which films are the best, and worst, of the bunch? Is Iron Man 3 better than Iron Man 2? How bad was The Incredible Hulk? How did the latest Thor entry hold up against its predecessors? We've spent hours arguing about the relative merits of Doctor Strange and Black Widow, and at the end of it, we've got some irreparably damaged working relationships and the definitive ranking of every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Continued here |
What It Takes to Build a Game in a War Zone The offices of GSC Game World smelled like a gas station. The Kyiv-based studio, responsible for the cult-classic immersive sim S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl and its hotly anticipated direct sequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, had stockpiled thousands of liters of fuel—alongside first aid kits and other survival supplies—in its corridors during the nervy winter of 2022. Who could blame them? Everyone in Ukraine was preparing for the worst. International headlines in January and February of 2022 warned that a massive Russian invasion of the country was imminent. The conflict, if it came to pass, would represent the most destabilizing military engagement on the European continent since the end of the Cold War. GSC Game World has furnished a legacy of taut gunplay, eerie atmospheres, and perfectly twisted side quests, but now the studio was forced to contend with a much more pressing reality—one that transcended the rigors of game development. Continued here |
What will China's population drop mean for the world? At midnight on 1 July 1982, China began a mammoth undertaking. The goal: to find out how many people there were in the country at that exact moment in time. No one had checked since 1964, so it was anyone's guess what they would find. After years of preparations, armed with 29 computers purchased for the task – including at least 21 imported from the US under a special exemption – and five million trained personnel, they would spend the coming months diligently counting the members of every household in the country. By October that same year, the results were in: the New York Times ran the headline "CHINA, POP. 1,008,175,288: ONE-FOURTH OF THE WORLD". Decades of growth had raised the country's population to the staggering new threshold of a billion people. A baby was born there every two seconds. Continued here |
Don't Fear the Handshake The gesture has survived plenty of outbreaks before COVID, and it will almost certainly outlast more to come. Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re wet; they’re warm; they’re what we use to touch everything we touch,” he said. “It’s not rocket science: The hand is a very good medium to transmit disease.” Continued here |
It's Getting Too Hot to Make Snow For dozens of Alpine ski resorts, this past Christmas and New Year season has been a literal washout. Very little snow fell in December. Then rain arrived, wiping many slopes back to green and brown turf. Frustrated skiers Googled the forecasts, glimpsed snowless mountainsides on live videofeeds, and canceled their bookings. Dozens of pistes, and even some entire resorts, remained closed as 2023 dawned. Among those that soldiered on was Laax in the Swiss Alps, about 60 kilometers from the Italian border. The resort, with roughly 200 kilometers of ski runs, has been planning for snow shortages like this for some time. An arsenal of snow guns came to the rescue. Continued here |
Superfan Buys House From 'The Goonies' Behman Zakeri has seen the film more than 100 times—and wants to restore the home to its on-screen glory In the summer of 1985, 8-year-old Behman Zakeri went to the movies with his family in Kansas, excited "mostly because of the popcorn," writes the Washington Post's Kyle Melnick. On the screen was The Goonies, which follows a group of kids as they try to save their homes from foreclosure, leading them to a treasure map that kicks off a zany adventure. Continued here |
Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers At 4 am one morning in October of last year, animal rights activist Raven Deerbrook sat on a bed in a cheap hotel in East Los Angeles, looking at a live video feed on her phone. She’d barely slept that night, waking every hour or two to check that the feed was transmitting from three pinhole infrared cameras she’d hidden in the Farmer John meatpacking plant 20 miles away. The facility, located in the LA suburb of Vernon, is owned by Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world. She waited, both anticipating and dreading what her cameras were about to reveal. A day earlier, Deerbrook had snuck into the slaughterhouse with a fake uniform and badge and climbed 26 feet underground into a “stunning chamber”—essentially a three-story-deep elevator shaft designed to be filled with carbon dioxide. Here, pigs in cages are lowered into the shaft’s invisible swimming pool of suffocating, heavier-than-air CO2, where the animals asphyxiate over a matter of minutes before being dumped out of the chamber onto a conveyor belt, hung up, drained of blood, and butchered. Continued here |
How Recruiters Can Make the Most of a Hiring Slowdown The early months of 2022 were a boon for hiring managers. It was the hottest job markets in decades, with month after month of record numbers of job openings and resignations. Now, as we launch into 2023, companies are tightening their belts in a way not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, with one high profile layoff after another. Continued here |
When Good Pain Turns Into Bad Pain Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl, recalls her life as a runner—and the culture she says the sport needs to change. When I was a high-school runner in the late 1990s, slogans such as Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body decorated the T-shirts sold at our championship races. Once, on the bus to the Connecticut state meet, my coach, who was legendary for the decades of New England titles he’d won, told us the story of an athlete collapsing on the course and crawling across the finish line. The coach visited him in the hospital afterward, he assured us; he had “a policy” to do so. That enough athletes needed medical attention for my coach to have a personal creed about it didn’t strike me as dark. I was caught up in the story’s message about determination and sacrifice—and inspired to run hard enough that I myself might end up in the hospital. Continued here |
What Happens When AI Has Read Everything? The dream of an artificial mind may never become a reality if AI runs out of quality prose to ingest—and there isn’t much left. Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they’ve finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced. Continued here |
The plan to save Italy's dying olive trees with dogs On a sunny winter morning, the dog trainer Mario Fortebraccio slowly bends toward a line of potted olive trees and indicates it with his hand. Waiting for that signal, Paco, a three-year-old white Labrador, rushes through the row of plants with his head tilted, sniffing each pot at the root, the rhythm of his inhaling echoing through the greenhouse. The dog is carefully scouting for something humans can't sense. "They don't do anything if there is no reward," Fortebraccio tells me with a smile. After a few seconds, having completed his task, Paco returned to the trainer, lifted his leg to urinate on a nearby plant, wagged his tail, and claimed a little crunchy treat. Continued here |
Helping Gen Z Employees Find Their Place at Work Gen Z is struggling with engagement at work. Many began their careers only to become furloughed or fired, and the Covid-19 pandemic worsened already growing income inequality. They’ve been influential in social justice movements against racism, climate change, and more, and are already shaping and influencing society in numerous ways. Their disillusionment with capitalism and the establishment is growing. Thus, Gen Z garnered a reputation for mistrust of the status quo, disconnection and impatience, demanding immediate action. To earn the engagement of this group, the authors suggest seven strategies managers can leverage to create a team dynamic of collaboration, commitment, and sustained motivation: 1) Increase information-sharing to alleviate fears of uncertainty, 2) show them paths to career progression to incentivize them, 3) explain how their individual contributions matter, 4) give them room for autonomy to keep them motivated, 5) provide specific, constructive feedback to demonstrate that you are invested in their success, 6) harness community and connection to engage and empower them, and 7) prioritize wellness and mental health to show you care. Continued here |
Malacca Strait: How one volcano could trigger world chaos Every year, approximately 90,000 ships pass through the narrow sea lane of the Malacca Strait, which links the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Their cargo – grain, crude oil, and every other commodity under the Sun – comprises an estimated 40% of global trade. Above these ships is one of the busiest air routes in the world, and below them, running along the seabed, is a dense array of submarine internet cables that keep the world online. Together, these factors make the Malacca Strait one of the most vital arteries of the global economy. It has been classified as a trade choke point in reports by the World Trade Organization, the US Energy Information Administration and Chatham House, the London-based foreign affairs think-tank. Continued here |
The Greatest Nuclear Threat We Face Is a Russian Victory On the morning of December 5, 2022, a large explosion occurred at Engels Air Base, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. The airfield is one of the two principal bases in Russia that host long-range strategic bombers. TU-160 Blackjacks have been taking off from Engels for the past 10 months, carrying cruise missiles and firing them at cities in Ukraine. The explosion was caused by a Ukrainian drone, and it reportedly damaged two TU-95 Bears, enormous turbo-prop bombers that have been a symbol of the Kremlin’s airpower since the early 1950s. Most of the reporting on the drone attack focused on the boldness of it, the failure of Russian air defenses, and the impact on Russian morale. But the attack had a broader significance that went largely unnoticed. About four miles from the runway at Engels where the explosion occurred, a pair of underground bunkers is likely to contain nuclear warheads, with a capacity to store hundreds of them. Blackjacks and Bears were designed during the Cold War for nuclear strikes on NATO countries, and they still play that role in Russian war plans. The drone attack on Engels was a milestone in military history: the world’s first aerial assault on a nuclear base. There was little chance of a nuclear detonation, even from a direct hit on the heavily fortified bunkers. Nevertheless, the presence of nuclear warheads at a base routinely used by Russian bombers for attacks on Ukraine is a reminder of how dangerous this war remains. On December 26, Engels was struck by another Ukrainian drone, which killed three servicemen. Continued here |
Do Rewards Really Create Loyalty? Customer rewards have been reviled in the business press as cheap promotional devices, short-term fads, giving something for nothing. Yet they’ve been around for more than a decade, and more companies, not fewer, are jumping on the bandwagon. From airlines offering frequent flier deals to telecommunications companies lowering their fees to get more volume, organizations are spending millions of dollars developing and implementing rewards programs. Continued here |
More Than 350 New UFO Sightings Added to U.S. Government Records The United States government has logged more than 350 new reports of UFOs—or, as officials call them, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—since March 2021, according to a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released last week. Of the 366 new UAP records, more than half were listed as having “unremarkable characteristics,” with 163 characterized as “balloon or balloon-like entities.” The other “unremarkable” sightings were characterized as drones or drone-like objects or attributed to clutter like airborne plastic bags, weather events or birds. Continued here |
Take Detransitioners Seriously When Kristin Beck, a decorated Navy SEAL veteran, came out as a transgender woman in 2013, she became a high-profile advocate for the trans community—a role that earned her glowing coverage in left-wing and mainstream center-left media. But unless you’ve been reading right-wing websites in recent months, you might never know that Beck has since detransitioned and gone back to the name Chris Beck. Last month, Beck declared that he had “lived in hell for the past 10 years.” Most of the outlets that reported with enthusiasm on Beck’s initial transition have yet to cover the latest chapter in his life story. Both of us are trans academics. One of us studies the history of trans activism; the other recently studied detransitioners’ experiences in depth. We strongly oppose efforts, in state legislatures and elsewhere, to target trans children and their families and pass laws restricting treatment options for gender dysphoria, a condition that the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual defines as impairment or distress over an incongruence between a person’s gender identity and their gender assigned at birth. But trans-rights advocates and mainstream-media outlets should stop downplaying the reality of detransition, lest readers and viewers conclude that it’s a negligible issue. It’s not. Continued here |
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change These are scary times for managers in big companies. Even before the Internet and globalization, their track record for dealing with major, disruptive change was not good. Out of hundreds of department stores, for example, only one—Dayton Hudson—became a leader in discount retailing. Not one of the minicomputer companies succeeded in the personal computer business. Medical and business schools are struggling—and failing—to change their curricula fast enough to train the types of doctors and managers their markets need. The list could go on. Continued here |
The Value of Keeping the Right Customers Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy. If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Continued here |
Is it Kosher? Understanding Kosher Chemicals There are many uses for chemicals certified as kosher Continued here |
Let Your Customers Guide Your Business Strategy The best companies have always done the simplest of things: Listen to their customers. Continued here |
Time(s) for a change: State Department picks a new official typeface Official correspondence from America's diplomats is getting a bit of a spruce-up next month. From February 6, the US Department of State will adopt Microsoft's sans serif Calibri in 14-point size "for all paper submitted to the Executive Secretariat," according to The Washington Post's diplomacy reporter John Hudson. Continued here |
Market Share--a Key to Profitability
The March–April 1974 issue of HBR carried an article that reported on Phases I and II of a project sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the Harvard Business School. The basic purpose of the project is to determine the profit impact of market strategies (PIMS). The earlier article established a link between strategic planning and profit performance; here, with additional data, the authors come up with a positive correlation between market share and ROI. The authors discuss why market share is profitable, listing economies of scale, market power, and quality of management as possible explanations; then, using the PIMS data base, they show how market share is related to ROI. Specifically, as market share increases, a business is likely to have a higher profit margin, a declining purchases-to-sales ratio, a decline in marketing costs as a percentage of sales, higher quality, and higher priced products. Data also indicate that the advantages of large market share are greatest for businesses selling products that are purchased infrequently by a fragmented customer group. The authors also analyze the strategic implications of the market-share/ROI relationship. They conclude by advising companies to analyze their own positions in order to achieve the best balance of costs and benefits of the different strategies. Continued here
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