The Strategic Secret of Private Equity

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The Strategic Secret of Private Equity   The huge sums that private equity firms make on their investments evoke admiration and envy. Typically, these returns are attributed to the firms’ aggressive use of debt, concentration on cash flow and margins, freedom from public company regulations, and hefty incentives for operating managers. But the fundamental reason for private equity’s success is the strategy of buying to sell—one rarely employed by public companies, which, in pursuit of synergies, usually buy to keep. Continued here

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Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?   Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic. Continued here

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The Strategic Secret of Private Equity   The huge sums that private equity firms make on their investments evoke admiration and envy. Typically, these returns are attributed to the firms’ aggressive use of debt, concentration on cash flow and margins, freedom from public company regulations, and hefty incentives for operating managers. But the fundamental reason for private equity’s success is the strategy of buying to sell—one rarely employed by public companies, which, in pursuit of synergies, usually buy to keep. Continued here

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How Venture Capital Works   The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk-taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Continued here

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SPACs: What You Need to Know   Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies. Continued here

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Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?   Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic. Continued here

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How Venture Capital Works   The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk-taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Continued here

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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

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Genpact CEO Tiger Tyagarajan: AI Is Getting Good, But Still Can't Replace Human Curiosity   HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius sat down with Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact. As CEO of a $4 billion global firm that advises clients on digital transformation, Tiger had a lot to say about AI, the metaverse, and how companies often fail on their innovation journey. “When it comes to digital transformation, it’s not just about technology,” he said. “It’s about processes, about the data underlying those processes; it’s about people.” Tiger also had interesting things to say about his biggest passion: cricket. (He schedules his board meetings so that they won’t clash with the Indian cricket team’s matches.) Continued here

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Reduce Your Stress in Two Minutes a Day   Bill Rielly had it all: a degree from West Point, an executive position at Microsoft, strong faith, a great family life, and plenty of money.  He even got along well with his in-laws!  So why did he have so much stress and anxiety that he could barely sleep at night? I have worked with Bill for several years now and we both believe his experience could be useful for other capable, driven individuals. Continued here

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Finding a Career That's Right for You: Our Favorite Reads   But when I landed my first job as a reporter, it didn’t make sense. The adrenaline rush of breaking news came at a high cost: my mental health. The fast-paced nature didn’t energize me — it was soul-crushing. The writing was monotonous and stifling. It was difficult to find the collaborative space I needed to be creative. Continued here

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If You Haven't Yet Made the Switch to Google Analytics 4, Now's the Time to Do So   Retail businesses will benefit from upgrading to Google Analytics 4 from the now-outdated Universal Analytics platform. Here's why. Continued here

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Younger Businesses More Likely To Embrace Work From Home, New Data Shows.   The workplace future is looking increasingly remote as newer companies embrace flexible office arrangements. The older generation isn't quite as convinced. Continued here

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Walmart Has Sold Men's Fashion Brand Bonobos for $75 Million at a Significant Loss--How Did the Brand Get Here?   The company, founded in 2007, first sold to Walmart for $310 million in 2017 under the leadership of founding CEO Andy Dunn. Continued here

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Don't Use Emojis To Approve Transactions and Other Lessons From FTX's Unorthodox Bookkeeping   FTX's downfall contains some keys lessons on why bookkeeping is so important. Continued here

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Every Solopreneur Should Know Their WHY   When times get tough, your North Star document will help get you through! Continued here

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3 Tips for Building a Company Focused on Closing the Equity Gap   Companies that help create wealth and close wealth gaps for low-income communities can yield strong financial turns. Here are some tips for getting it right. Continued here

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5 Questions to Ask Your PR Partner   It's essential to audit your PR agency to get the most value. Continued here

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The Secret to Building Adaptable, Flexible Teams   Use this military strategy to build your business. Continued here

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Growth Hacking Versus Growth Marketing   Which strategy is right for your business? Continued here

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Cultivating Kindness: A Blueprint for Business Success   Kindness isn't just for kindergarten--the best leaders know how to bring it into the workplace, too. Continued here

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What Business Needs to Know About the New U.S. Cybersecurity Strategy   In March 2023, the Biden administration released a new National Cybersecurity Strategy, which makes it clear that the time for private companies voluntarily opting into cybersecurity has long passed. Instead, the new strategy promises to support new regulatory frameworks that will shift liability and create incentives for private firms to defend against critical vulnerabilities. This article discusses three concrete things business leaders should know about the new strategy. First, every company will need to identify their distinct vulnerabilities and risks. Second, companies will then need to adopt measures that address those vulnerabilities. Third, the strategy categorically states that it will push for legislation to hold these firms liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care they owe consumers, businesses, or critical infrastructure providers. Continued here

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The Ripple Effect of a Bad Boss on Dual-Career Parents   It’s no secret that a supportive boss can play an instrumental role in your ability to thrive both at work and at home. In this piece, the authors take this finding one step further. Their research highlights how your boss can also indirectly influence your co-parent’s ability to thrive as well. While it may not always be an option to choose your supervisor, by understanding how this process unfolds, you can take steps to more consciously navigate complex work, parenting, and partnership decisions to maximize opportunities for both you and your co-parent to thrive in all facets of life. Continued here

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Research: Being Funny Can Pay Off More for Women Than Men   The stereotype that “women aren’t funny” pervades pop culture. But is it true? The authors analyzed more than 2,400 TED and TEDx talks, as well as more than 200 startup pitches, and found that female speakers who used more humor were more popular and perceived as more influential and inspiring than both less-funny women and comparably-funny men. They suggest that this is because humor conveys both warmth and competence, thus helping female presenters break free from the warmth-competence double bind that so often keeps women from exerting influence in professional settings. Of course, humor won’t be effective in every setting — and jokes that work well for one speaker in one context may not be as effective in another. But when done right, the authors’ research demonstrates the power of humor to overcome bias against women and help them succeed in public arenas. Continued here

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6 Emerging Technology Domains That Will Change Your Business - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM DELOITTE   The most widely predictable aspect of technology trends has long been the constant of escalating disruption. Since 2010, Deloitte’s tech futurists have viewed disruption largely through the lens of information technology (IT), which is rooted in the formal sciences—computer and system sciences, logic, mathematics, and statistics—to support new models that meet new needs in new markets. Continued here

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What parents get wrong about childhood 'milestones'   Scroll through parenting feeds on social media, and you'll soon come across so-called milestone cards: pastel-coloured cards marking a baby's first attempt at crawling, sitting up, or walking, along with their age. It's not just on social media that developmental milestones have become something to celebrate – or stress over. One recent poll, for example, found that around six in 10 US parents worried about their babies meeting their developmental milestones. But few knew what should happen, when.Other parents may take the opposite approach and pay little attention to the timing of new skills, trusting that a child will develop at their own pace. Continued here

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What are the best lucid dreaming techniques?   I first heard about lucid dreaming as a teenager, and for a short while became fascinated with it. The idea of being conscious in your dreams, and even being able to direct and adapt them, holds an obvious appeal. Ever wanted to fly? Walk through walls? Meet a famous person? Anything could be possible in a lucid dream – in theory at least.Lucid dreaming simply means a dream where you're aware that you're dreaming, while you are still asleep. There is of course a huge spectrum of what can occur in the dream within this definition – from a fleeting, passive awareness you are in a dream to taking full control of the dream and being able to direct it. Continued here

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What life might be like in alien oceans   Recent discoveries have led astrobiologists to think that moons are the most promising places for alien life to exist in our Solar System. And now several major space missions are being planned over the next decade to search for hints of life there.Unlike our neighbouring planets, some of the moons have plenty of liquid water. Jupiter’s moon, Europa, for example, is thought to contain more liquid water than all of Earth's oceans combined. This water – and any life in it – is protected from space radiation and asteroid impacts by a thick layer of kilometers-deep surface ice. Continued here

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Mother-son YouTubers cook Nepali dishes with sides of nostalgia and ASMR   On her YouTube channel, Kanchhi Maiya Bhandari cooks appetizing, classic Nepali dishes while dressed in traditional gunyu–choli attire. There’s no over-the-top music or narration in the 10-minute-long videos, as the 50-year-old quietly cooks on fire in metal and earthen pots — while cooking, she rarely talks to the camera held by her son. There’s a strong ASMR effect, as the only sounds you hear in the videos are the ones you would hear in a village in Nepal: birds chirping, water gushing, hot oil crackling, and the sound of meat charring over a fire. Most of the videos end with her saying, “mitho chha” (tastes good) — now a trademark of her videos.The overarching sentiment in the comments on the channel KanchhiKitchen, which has 362,000 subscribers and gets millions of views, is one of yearning. Her followers — Nepalis at home and the Nepali diaspora abroad — often post about how they long for a simple village life. Bhandari and her son created the channel during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they got to spend time together at their ancestral village in Sangkosh, Dhading, in central Nepal. Rest of World asked the duo about their unique social media stardom. Continued here

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Amazon fends off calls for takedown transparency in message to shareholders   In a statement to shareholders Thursday afternoon, Amazon rejected calls for greater disclosure on government-ordered removal of product pages and reviews.Amazon currently does not disclose when it removes a product as the result of a court order, and there have been numerous incidents of apparent government intervention. In one case, the company was found to be restricting LGBTQIA products and searches in the United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal. In another incident, user reviews were disabled for a book written by Chinese president Xi Jinping. Continued here

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Tech Layoffs Reveal America's Unhealthy Obsession With Work   It's so nice that everything's back to normal at the office now, isn't it? If "normal" means mass layoffs, empty office buildings, confusing return-to-office policies, AI panic, and the whiplash-y feeling that just when employees were starting to redraw some boundaries between work and home, an economic downturn has forced society to fret even more about work. Managers are channeling this too by emphasizing "efficiency"—at least if they're not among the many managers Mark Zuckerberg has laid off in his quest for, well, efficiency.If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Continued here

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Which Sonos Speakers Should You Buy?   Here at WIRED, we like Sonos speakers. We really do. Throughout the past decade, we’ve reviewed all of the company’s wirelessly connectable speakers, from its small shelf speakers to its TV soundbars, and we’ve recommended every one of them. But turning your home into a Sonos-powered shrine to sound isn’t cheap. Like Apple products, Sonos speakers sell at a premium, starting at $120 for a basic model. But which ones should you buy? Read on for our recommendations.Updated April 2023: We've added our impressions of the Sonos Era 100 and Sonos Era 300 and updated pricing and retailers. Continued here

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The 14 Best Accessories for Your PlayStation 5   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 WIREDIt's not as hard to buy a new PlayStation 5 as it used to be, but its capabilities are still impressive. The cybernetic clamshell tower of a console is packed to the gills with killer hardware. It can run games in native 4K, hit frame rates in excess of 120 frames per second, and output video at 120 hertz for that ultra-silky-smooth look and feel. Continued here

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Meet the 'Anti-Woke' Job Board for Christian Nationalists   On March 19, Donald Trump Jr. sent an email via the firm that manages his father's email list, Campaign Nucleus, announcing "a HUGE advance in the culture war." That culture war, Trump wrote, is "coming to corporate America." He added that conservatives have a "new" tool to fight back against "woke" workplaces: the "free to work" job board RedBalloon. As an incentive to create an account on the website, Trump offered 20 autographed copies of his latest book, Triggered."The big job boards like Indeed and ZipRecruiter are actually promoting 'woke' workplace policies," Trump said in a promotional video posted on the right-wing video streaming site Rumble. "They're a huge part of the problem." Exactly what the problem is, or what the word "woke" is supposed to stand for other than a conservative shibboleth, is unclear.  Continued here

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The US Supreme Court Restores Access to Abortion Pills—for Now   US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday stepped in to temporarily block lower courts' decisions to impose restrictions on mifepristone, a pill used for medication abortion. The measure is essentially a pause on a Texas judge's ruling last week to void the drug's approval by the Food and Drug Administration. It also overrides the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' attempt late Wednesday to curb access to the drug. It means mifepristone remains legal to use, and can continue to be distributed by mail and taken up until the 10th week of pregnancy—at least until midnight on Wednesday, April 19, when the temporary hold expires. Continued here

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Montana's Looming TikTok Ban Is a Dangerous Tipping Point   Montana lawmakers voted 54-43 today to ban TikTok from operating in the state and forbid app stores from offering it for download. The legislation is likely to become law, which would make Montana the first state in the US to ban the popular social media platform—a move that could spark a constitutional battle and endanger digital rights.People who already have TikTok on their devices would not be in violation of the law, which will now go to Greg Gianforte, Montana's Republican governor. The move comes after years of amorphous assertions from the United States government under two presidential administrations that TikTok, which has 150 million US users, is a threat to national security because its parent, ByteDance, is a Chinese company. Continued here

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Ask Ethan: How do you cope with cosmic anxiety?   Our Universe — the cosmos — consists of all that ever was, is, or will be, at least as far as we know. The information that we can access or observe isn’t infinite, but it is tremendously vast. The earliest signals we can receive originated 13.8 billion years ago: at the start of the hot Big Bang or even a tiny fraction-of-a-second earlier, during the final moments of cosmic inflation. We can see objects as distant as 46.1 billion light-years away, and will someday, as light already on its way finally reaches us, be able to see things presently about another 15 billion light-years farther.But of the trillions upon trillions of galaxies out there, only about 6% of the ones we can see are reachable by us, with the unreachable ones being only observable as they were in the past, not as they are now or will be in the future. With all the vastness of what’s out there, how do people think about it without an overwhelming sense of anxiety and dread? That’s what Jesus Ocotecatl wants to know, writing in to ask: Continued here

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The neuroscience of nightmares   What are nightmares, and why do we have them? Patrick McNamara, an experimental neuroscientist who studies the neurobiology of sleep, dreams, and religion, believes nightmares have both important spiritual and emotional functions for our minds.While nightmares can be deeply unpleasant, they have been experienced and recorded by humans for thousands of years, and historically those who were able to withstand and control their nightmares were held in high societal regard — appointed as spiritual guides or shamans. Continued here

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Gökotta: How to experience nature the Swedish way   You know it’s too early to wake. Everyone else is fast asleep and the house has that indefinable stillness that is telling you to be quiet. At this hour, the walls frown at unwelcome noises. With a sigh, you get out of bed and put on some clothes. This was meant to be a holiday, and today was meant to be your lie-in. Lost for ideas in an unfamiliar home, you make yourself a coffee, open the door, and step out into the garden. It’s a big garden. It’s the kind of garden that is big enough to feel wild. There are dark canopies and dense bushes. There’s long grass dotted with strange, radiant flowers. There’s a rustling far away that might have been a fox, a deer, or a goblin, for all you know.You sit at a table, take a sip from your coffee, and you listen. Here, it is not still. Gone is the muffled silence of a house at sleep. This place is of loud, jubilant worship — a morning symphony of birds in chorus. The trees are curtains, behind which sparrows, jays, and larks sing in the new day. There is beauty here. It stirs a deep something in your being. It’s not quite “oneness,” but it’s the appreciation of the moment — a unique encounter that feels personal, somehow. As if the birds have gifted you, alone, this song. Continued here

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Why has every postwar generation since the 1950s become less religious?   For Western countries, surveys show that each successive postwar generation since the 1950s has been less religious on average than the previous generation. Besides a decline in religiosity such as church service attendance, we also can see a decline in religious socialization in families, which affects religious practice and educational goals in families. While there is agreement that this decline is due to a generational change, we do not yet understand how precisely this change takes place. Moreover, the conditions under which religious and non-religious worldviews and values are passed on have rarely been the subject of comparative studies.In this article, I will present some findings on how family matters for the transmission of religion, while context matters for the transformation of religion from an international research project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, “The transmission of religion across generations: a comparative international study of continuities and discontinuities in family socialization.” The project addresses the research deficits mentioned by investigating Canada and four European countries (Germany, Finland, Hungary, and Italy). Our main goal is to gain a better understanding of how faith and worldviews are passed on, transformed, or come to an end across generations. We believe that, besides the international comparison, our project is innovative for three main reasons. Continued here

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Entrainment: How synching lights with brainwaves can speed up learning   Learning — and strategies for boosting it — is big business. The market for brain health supplements, which are popular among Millennials and claim to enhance attention, learning, and memory, is worth an estimated $7.69 billion. Those who are more adventurous can choose from a growing number of commercially available but still unregulated DIY brain stimulation kits, or they can zap their brains with homemade devices.Educators are also keen to enhance learning in their pupils. One method, based on Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, is to tailor teaching materials to the individual pupil’s “learning style.” This has been hugely popular for the past two decades, and remains so, even though there is no more evidence for learning styles than there is for the efficacy of brain-boosting supplements or DIY brain stimulation.   Continued here

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Superintelligence is possible   In his book A Brief History of AI, Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and an AI researcher, explains that AI is not about creating life, but rather about creating machines that can perform tasks requiring intelligence. Wooldridge discusses two approaches to AI: symbolic AI and machine learning. Symbolic AI involves coding human knowledge into machines, while machine learning allows machines to learn from examples to perform specific tasks. Progress in AI stalled in the 1970s due to a lack of data and computational power, but recent advancements in technology have led to significant progress. AI can perform narrow tasks better than humans, but the grand dream of AI is achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), which means creating machines with the same intellectual capabilities as humans. One challenge for AI is giving machines social skills, such as cooperation, coordination, and negotiation.  Continued here

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Bethesda adds Denuvo to Ghostwire: Tokyo one year after the game was cracked   Denuvo no longer provides the kind of uncrackable, piracy-protecting armor that it used to. Still, publishers often pay for the protection in an attempt to extend a "piracy-free" time window around a game's release, when most legitimate sales occur for most titles. Continued here

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Hybrids at their best: Kia's 2023 family-friendly, $29K Niro gets 53 mpg   The Kia Niro is one of those cars that just continues to impress us. It's now in its second generation, with slightly bolder—definitely more angular—styling but still the same highly efficient powertrain options. There's a fully electric version, and a plug-in hybrid, too, but today's review is of the parallel hybrid variant. Ars spent an hour or two driving one last October, but we've now had a week of living with a 2023 Niro at home, and if anything, our respect for this solid little hybrid has only grown. Continued here

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Google throws open the doors for Android Auto smart home apps   Android Auto is getting a new app category. Google has announced that Internet of Things apps (or smart home apps) for cars are now supported by the Play Store. Developers can now build smart home apps, and after an enhanced car safety check by Google, they'll be available for car screens. This has been in early access for a while, but now the feature is hitting general availability. Continued here

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If 80% of Nvidia 40-series owners turn on DLSS, what's going on with the others?   As part of its push for the RTX 4070, Nvidia's new $600 entry point into its Ada Lovelace GPU series, Nvidia has some statistics that, depending on how you look at them, are either completely baffling or entirely believable. Continued here

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Listen up! Bea Wolf is a brilliant retelling of a classic Old English saga--for kids   A rowdy group of young "mallow-munchers," "bully-crushers," and "bedtime breakers" must battle a fun-hating foe intent on putting an end to their untamed revels in Bea Wolf, a new graphic novel by cartoonist and writer Zach Weinersmith, with illustrations by the French cartoonist Boulet. It's a 21st-century re-imagining of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, but unlike most prior translations aimed at adults, this one targets kids (although adults should love it, too). Continued here

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Green light go: SpaceX receives a launch license from the FAA for Starship   On Friday afternoon—after much angst and anxious waiting by the spaceflight community—the Federal Aviation Administration issued a launch license to SpaceX for the launch of its Starship rocket from South Texas. Continued here

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Hype grows over "autonomous" AI agents that loop GPT-4 outputs   Since the launch of OpenAI's GPT-4 API last month to beta testers, a loose group of developers have been experimenting with making agent-like ("agentic") implementations of the AI model that attempt to carry out multistep tasks with as little human intervention as possible. These homebrew scripts can loop, iterate, and spin off new instances of an AI model as needed. Continued here

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After a sharp sales slump, report details some of Apple's future Mac lineup   A new report by Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman identifies several new Macs coming to Apple's lineup over the next several months, mostly strengthening previous reports from analysts and leakers, as well as Gurman's prior reporting. Gurman credits developer logs of third-party applications that contain evidence of Apple engineers or testers using the new Macs to verify that they work with popular software before release. Continued here

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SCOTUS preserves access to abortion pill--for 5 days   The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court's ruling that would have curtailed access to the abortion medication mifepristone beginning on Saturday. The temporary block will preserve the status quo access to mifepristone for five days, or until midnight on Wednesday, giving the high court time to review emergency appeals and consider issuing a longer stay on the ruling. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Best cheap office chair deals   An ergonomic chair provides many health benefits. A proper task chair, for example, can prevent abnormal strain on the neuromuscular system, according to a 2012 research paper published by the National Institute of Health. Better posture support, reduced back and neck pain, and improved circulation are among some of the benefits as the chair helps keep the spine, neck, and hips aligned. Chairs with a headrest also add support for the back and shoulders, according to Open Access Government. Continued here

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Photos of the Week: Florida Flood, Reindeer Race, Ghost Forest   Barrel racing in Maryland, an azalea festival in Tokyo, medieval battle reenactments in Poland, the Dance of Death in Spain, Songkran water fights in Thailand, a record-setting dance in India, Easter fires in Germany, a communal iftar in Egypt, and much more The rising sun illuminates the statue of President Abraham Lincoln as people gather for the Easter Sunrise Service at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., hosted by the National Community Church, on April 9, 2023. # Continued here

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Taylor Swift and the Sad Dads   The indie-rock band The National has long served as a mascot for a certain type of guy: literary, self-effacing, mordantly cool. With cryptic lyrics and brooding instrumentation, the quintet of scruffy brothers and schoolmates from Ohio conveys the yearnings of the sensitive male psyche. The band’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, has a voice so doleful and deep that it seems to emanate from a cavern. His typical narrator is a wallflower pining for validation from the life of the party—the romantic swooning of a man in need of rescue.In the mid-to-late aughts, as The National was gathering acclaim with darkly experimental albums, another artist was rising to prominence: Taylor Swift. On the surface, these two acts are starkly different. Where The National’s songwriting is impressionistic, Swift’s is diaristic—built on personal stories that typically forgo abstraction or even difficult metaphor. Where The National’s charisma lies in its mysteriousness, Swift earnestly says just what she means. The National is known for somber dude-rock; Swift found fame with anthems of heartbroken but upbeat young-womanhood. (In her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she even jabbed at pretentious guys who are obsessed with dude-rock, like the ex who ran off to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”) The National became the house band for a certain segment of Millennial yuppies; Swift became one of the biggest stars in the world. Continued here

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Seven Celebrities Who Published Actually Great Memoirs   A tell-all is worth picking up when the star has an honest, grounded perspective on their life.When Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, hit the best-seller lists in January, the press spent several breathless days teasing out every revelation in the book. It went on to sell an astonishing 3.2 million copies in its first week on the shelves. Although Spare achieved what a celebrity memoir sets out to do—and although I enjoyed reading about Prince William pushing Harry into a dog bowl as much as anyone else did—it is not, in my opinion, one of the best ever published. It’s not even the best one ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer; that would be Open, his genre-expanding collaboration with the tennis great Andre Agassi. Continued here

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The Narcissists Who Endanger America   Leaked classified documents, a 21-year-old airman, and the weakness that is hardest for the U.S. national-security community to spotThis article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       Continued here

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Adult ADHD Is the Wild West of Psychiatry   In October, when the FDA first announced a shortage of Adderall in America, the agency expected it to resolve quickly. But five months in, the effects of the shortage are still making life tough for people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder who rely on the drug. Stories abound of frustrated people going to dozens of pharmacies in search of medication each month, only to come up short every time. Without treatment, students have had a hard time in school, and adults have struggled to keep up at work and maintain relationships. The Adderall shortage has ended, but the widely used generic versions of the drug, known as amphetamine mixed salts, are still scarce.A “perfect storm” of factors—manufacturing delays, labor shortages, tight regulations—is to blame for the shortage, David Goodman, an ADHD expert and a psychiatry professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told me. And they have all been compounded by the fact that the pandemic produced a surge in Americans who want Adderall. The most dramatic changes occurred among adults, according to a recent CDC report on stimulant prescriptions, with increases in some age groups of more than 10 percent in just a single year, from 2020 to 2021. It’s the nature of the spike in demand for Adderall—among adults—that has some ADHD experts worried about “whether the demand is legitimate,” Goodman said. It’s possible that at least some of these new Adderall patients, he said, are getting prescriptions they do not need. Continued here

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A Single Judge Shouldn’t Have This Kind of National Power   Last Friday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered an end to the sale of mifepristone, a drug approved by the FDA 23 years ago that’s used to induce abortions, anywhere in the United States. He’s just a single judge in a small courthouse in Amarillo, Texas. Does he really have the power to dictate national policy about drug safety? If so, should he have that power?The answer to the first question is complicated—more on that in a moment—but the answer to the second is easy. Of course he shouldn’t. Continued here

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The Mirror Test Is Broken   Alex Jordan had just surfaced from a dive off the coast of Corsica when he called me back last summer. “We’ve put mirrors in the wild,” he said. “It’s always a bit of a nightmare.” With the help of his students, he’d set them in the sinuous green seagrass of an underwater meadow, where a diverse community of fishes live and breed. Shier species, he told me, tend to avoid their own reflections, but more aggressive ones lunge toward what they take to be a rival in the mirror. At times, their headbutts crack the glass.Jordan’s mirrors were meant specifically for wrasses, one of the largest families of marine fish. His favorite Mediterranean species, the rainbow wrasse, certainly would have reason to admire its own ribbon-candy body with green and orange stripes. But when Jordan and his students started the experiment, a small and drab species called the black-tailed wrasse exhibited the most curious behavior. These fish relaxed their fins and spun repeatedly around their central axis before the mirror. “It looks like they’re doing a backflip, which is the most bizarre thing for them to do,” he said. Continued here

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The Empty Promise of Good Intentions   Even when motives are pure, altruism is too often insufficient: Your weekly guide to the best in booksStriving to be a good person can be challenging—and there are so many ways to do it badly. In her third novel, Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton follows an idealistic guerrilla gardening group in New Zealand. As Lily Meyer writes, Catton uses this collective’s not-always-pure pursuits to “poke, quite hard, at the dreams and pieties of people who believe they can change the world.” Many of Jonathan Franzen’s characters also believe they have a higher calling, but their antics can emphasize their flaws: In her review of Crossroads, Becca Rothfeld calls Russ Hildebrandt, the father at the center of the drama, “outwardly virtuous but inwardly self-pitying, progressive in principle but regressive in practice.” Franzen’s skepticism of these types comes through when Russ’s son Perry wonders whether humans “can ever escape our selfishness.” Continued here

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An Utterly Trivial Reason to Give Away National Secrets   The biggest surprise in the latest major intelligence-leak case is the purported motive: The suspected leaker provided highly sensitive U.S. intelligence assessments, mostly about the war in Ukraine, to an online chat group in order to show off.That would be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious. The information revealed could compromise the crucial flow of information about Russian decision making and has certainly harmed the prospects for Ukraine’s anticipated spring military offensive. Repairing the damage will require costly and time-consuming efforts to acquire information in new ways, as previous targets—having now been given clues about how the U.S. was collecting intelligence—change their communications and patterns to shield themselves from scrutiny. The leak has surely constricted information sharing, at least within the U.S. government, and perhaps also among allies. All of that harm occurred, news reports suggest, so someone could feel important in front of 20 to 30 people on the internet. Continued here

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An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee   What’s happened in Tennessee in recent weeks should be no surprise, coming from a party whose sensibilities and racial attitudes are embodied by Donald Trump.Earlier this month, House Republicans in Tennessee, the state in which the Ku Klux Klan was founded, overwhelmingly voted to expel two young Black lawmakers, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. Their offense? A breach of decorum and procedural rules. They led protest chants on the House floor following the mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Representative Gloria Johnson joined Jones and Pearson in the protests, but the vote to expel her fell short. Continued here

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TikTok Is Too Popular to Ban   “An enormous threat.” “An unacceptable national security risk.” “A spy balloon in your phone.” These are descriptions—from members of Congress and American regulators—not of a hidden piece of malware or a computer virus, but of the Chinese social-media app TikTok. Most U.S. citizens know TikTok as the place where they can watch people do stupid dances or post clips of themselves cooking. But many government officials view the app as a Trojan horse, a device that will enable the Chinese Communist Party to insinuate itself into American life and subvert national security. And that has led civil servants and elected representatives to call on the U.S. government to cut off Americans’ access to TikTok, the app’s enormous popularity with them notwithstanding.The efforts to ban TikTok go back to the summer of 2020, when President Donald Trump, citing his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, issued an executive order prohibiting any American from participating in any transaction with the app. That order was struck down in the courts. But the impulse behind it hasn’t gone away. In January, Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill to ban TikTok from the U.S., and last month, Democrat Mark Warner and Republican John Thune introduced another Senate bill, the RESTRICT Act, which would empower the president to impose tight restrictions on “technology from foreign adversaries”—very much including TikTok. Continued here

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‘Beau Is Afraid’ Is Your Worst Nightmare, and It’s Wonderful   The writer-director Ari Aster has set himself quite the challenge with his new film, Beau Is Afraid. The scale is ambitious, the running time lengthy (about three hours), and the plot difficult to summarize, but maybe the toughest sell is the personality of the main character, Beau Wassermann (played by Joaquin Phoenix). He is a paragon of passivity, a man whose worries follow him wherever he goes and make even simple tasks preternaturally impossible to execute. He is a cartoonish coward who mumbles and yelps every line of dialogue—not the kind of person who usually leads a picaresque adventure.That dissonance is the point in Beau Is Afraid, which follows Beau’s dizzy journey back to his domineering mother, Mona (Patti LuPone). Although the comedy-thriller focuses on one man’s psychosexual dysfunction, it’s told with Dickensian sweep; everything about the title character is inflated to heroic proportions, including his abnormally large, floppy testicles. The film shares some of the unsettling horror of Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I’d call Beau Is Afraid a more straightforward comedy—as long as the idea of Looney Tunes crossed with Portnoy’s Complaint sounds funny to you. Continued here

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The Not-So-Sexy Origins of the Miniskirt   The fashion designer Mary Quant, who died at 93, recognized the power—and danger—of the mini. Mary Quant’s candy-colored fashions so successfully defined the “London Look” of the Swinging ’60s that it’s hard to believe the designer outlived her heyday by several decades, dying yesterday at the age of 93. Her passing—at a time when reproductive rights are being threatened across the U.S.—feels like not just a loss to the fashion world but also the final salvo of the sexual revolution, which she championed. Continued here

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What Do I Do With This Baby Squirrel?   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.This week, I talked to wildlife experts about my most pressing springtime animal questions. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic: Continued here

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Want to Help the FBI Find Stolen Art? There's an App for That   A new mobile app provides access to the National Stolen Art File, a database of 8,000 missing itemsThe FBI’s National Stolen Art File (NSAF) began in the late ’70s with a simple mission: Enlist the public’s help in recovering lost or stolen masterpieces. Since then, the FBI reports that over 8,000 items have been listed in the database.  Continued here

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How to Watch the Spectacular Lyrid Meteor Shower   The anticipated annual Lyrid meteor shower will begin on Sunday, sending fleeting bright streaks across the night sky. Though the spectacle will be visible from April 16 to April 25, the best time for viewing will be at the shower’s peak on April 22. During the peak, viewers can expect to see about 18 meteors per hour. The Lyrids won’t number as many as the famed summer Perseids, but the shower is still notable—the Lyrids are one of just about ten meteor showers that yield more than ten meteors per hour at their height, Peter Vereš, a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ joint organization the Minor Planet Center, tells Smithsonian magazine. Continued here

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This License Plate Just Became the Most Expensive in the World   The vanity plate, which features the characters "P7," sold for $15 million at an auction in DubaiA license plate brought in a record-breaking $15 million (55 million dirhams) at a Dubai auction over the weekend. The all-white vanity plate, sold by Emirates Auction, features just two characters: "P7." It is likely the most expensive license plate in the world. Continued here

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See the Sharp New Image of a Supermassive Black Hole   Astronomers used machine-learning technology to improve a 2019 visualization of the M87 black hole, located some 54 million light-years away from EarthIn 2019, astronomers released the first-ever photo of a black hole: a fuzzy, reddish-orange ring set against a black backdrop. Continued here