Beware of the Food That Isn't Food

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Beware of the Food That Isn't Food   The podcaster Chris van Tulleken has strong opinions about soft bread and candy that never decays.Chris van Tulleken refuses to tell me what to have for breakfast. “Everyone thinks that I have a strong opinion about what they should eat,” he tells me, as I hesitate between the eggs benedict and the full English. “And I have almost no opinion.” Continued here

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Build Up Your Mindset And A Business That Aligns With Your Fulfillment    Here are mindset practices that will help you pursue your entrepreneurial goals from a place of happiness. Continued here

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Tim Keller's Critique of Liberal Secularism   Keller, the most influential Christian apologist and evangelical leader of his generation, died Friday at age 72.One spring day in 1970, a tall, slightly awkward undergraduate named Timothy Keller was standing with friends on the main quadrangle of Bucknell University’s campus in central Pennsylvania. Students were protesting in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings; they crowded onto the quad, half-listening to speakers who vied for the open mic. Keller, a new convert to Christianity and a religion major, ordinarily would have been busy with courses in existential philosophy, Buddhism, and biblical criticism. But at the moment, he and his friends in the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were trying to decide how to participate in this tense moment, when their peers were angry and probably not interested in talking about God. Continued here

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The ChatGPT iPhone App from OpenAI Has a Glaring Privacy Problem: The Company Is Reading Your Conversations   The app warns you not to send personal information in your prompts. Continued here

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My Friend, Tim Keller   I first heard about Timothy J. Keller in the early 1990s. My future wife, Cindy, began attending Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City shortly after it was founded by Tim and his wife, Kathy, in 1989. I didn’t personally know Tim—I was living in northern Virginia at the time—but Cindy spoke very highly of the Kellers. During car rides together we would listen to tapes of his sermons.I was impressed enough to invite Tim and Kathy to a small gathering in Washington, D.C., to discuss faith and culture. Tim wasn’t particularly well known at the time, but it was clear to me—from how well he spoke, how well he thought, how well he reasoned—that that would change. It did. Continued here

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The pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation, Martin Amis's pyrotechnic prose captured life's destructive energies   Martin Amis, pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation, has died at the age of 73. His dazzling, pyrotechnic prose dominated the world of English writing from the mid-1970s through the fin de siècle. Amis captured the contemporary world’s sinister, destructive energies in a savage and glittering series of novels, essays and memoirs. Continued here

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If ghosts are real, then they aren't supernatural   Long before humanity learned to write, stories were told about spirits and demons and things that go bump in the night. Similar stories are told today involving religious beliefs, extrasensory perception, auras, miracles, and ghosts, just to name a few.I’m a scientist, and therefore it should surprise no one that I am skeptical of all such beliefs. In conversations with people who embrace them, I will point to inconsistencies in their ideas, or to reasons why I don’t accept their conclusions. Often these conversations will conclude with the other person saying, “Of course you don’t believe in this. You’re a scientist. You don’t know anything about this. It’s supernatural.” Continued here

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Unionized bodies in topless bar! Strippers join servers and baristas in new labor movement   Dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in Los Angeles have voted to become the only unionized strippers in the U.S. – joining a growing trend of young employees seeking workplace protection though labor mobilization.On May 18, 2023, the National Labor Relations Board announced that balloted employees at the topless bar had voted 17-0 in favor of joining the Actors’ Equity Association. Continued here

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The Best Gear for Your Home Emergency Kit   Preparing for an emergency is the last thing you want to be doing during an emergency. There's never enough food, flashlights, batteries, or fuel to go around once you hear of an impending hurricane, blizzard, or wildfire, because everyone else in town is going to out fighitng over the same limited stock of items. It's better to stock up in advance and avoid the battle royal. Forget the milk and eggs. We've rounded up all the essentials for your emergency kit.Be sure to check out more guides to keep your home stocked and yourself prepared, such as How to Build a Home Tool Kit, Best Multi-Tools, and How to Winterize Your Home. Continued here

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A World Without Martin Amis   The small, cold shock of loneliness upon hearing of the great British comic writer’s deathSometime in the late ’90s I went to see Martin Amis read at a branch of the bookstore chain Waterstones (long gone) in downtown Boston. It was Amis and Will Self—a proper lexically charged white-man road show. Continued here

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Audi's New Transformer-Like Concept Car Morphs From Sedan to Off-Road Vehicle to Pickup Truck   This is what happens when you take an established product and let your imagination run wild. Continued here

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A Reliable Weekly Laugh   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.Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Continued here

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The Real Risks in Google's New .Zip and .Mov Domains   At the beginning of May, Google released eight new top-level domains (TLDs)—the suffixes at the end of URLs, like ".com" or ".uk." These little addendums were developed decades ago to expand and organize URLs, and over the years, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has loosened restrictions on TLDs so organizations like Google can bid to sell access to more of them. But while Google's announcement included light-hearted offerings like ".dad" and ".nexus," it also debuted a pair of TLDs that are uniquely poised to invite phishing and other types of online scamming: ".zip" and ".mov".The two stand out because they are also common file extension names. The former, .zip, is ubiquitous for data compression, while .mov is a video format developed by Apple. The concern, which is already starting to play out, is that URLs that look like file names will open up even more possibilities for digital scams like phishing that trick web users into clicking on malicious links that are masquerading as something legitimate. And the two domains could also expand the problem of programs mistakenly recognizing file names as URLs and automatically adding links to the file names. With this in mind, scammers could strategically buy .zip and .mov URLs that are also common file names—think, springbreak23.mov—so online references to a file with that name could automatically link to a malicious website. Continued here

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4 Clear Signs That You May Be Smarter Than You Think   True intelligence extends beyond the acquisition of knowledge. Continued here

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I'm Dependent on My Phone--and I've Never Slept Better   For the past several months, I've fallen asleep listening to a woman named Teri—or someone like her—every night. I crawl into bed around midnight, open a certain proprietary wellness app on my phone, tap the "sleep hypnosis" section, and mindlessly select one of the hundreds of available tracks. Then I place my phone face-down on my pillow, just beside my head, and focus on the voice in my ear. I often drift off before the recording is over. I haven't slept so well in years. I have no idea who Teri is. Her bio identifies her as a "trainer of hypnotherapy and NLP." According to a little research, NLP stands for something called Neuro Linguistic Programming, a pseudoscientific method of hypnotic instruction somewhere between life-coaching and magical thinking. On other nights I choose Dorothy, a "licensed psychotherapist and meditation teacher," or Anaïs, a "neuromindfulness coach." From a scientific standpoint, I haven't found much evidence that these methods are proven effective for dealing with insomnia. The tracks are cheesy—usually backgrounded by chimes or the gentle pitter-patter of rain—and the whispered platitudes sound silly when I listen to them in the light of day.  Continued here

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The Far-Seeing Faith of Tim Keller   On the evening of February 11, 2006, a severe winter storm arrived in New York City. By four in the afternoon the next day, nearly twenty-seven inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, surpassing the record that had been set in 1947. That night, as many streets in the city remained impassable, I trudged to a church building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and found six hundred or so people, mostly young professionals, squeezed into the pews. They had come to listen to a Presbyterian minister named Timothy J. Keller preach his fourth sermon of the day. I was there, as a religion reporter for the Times, to observe perhaps the most gifted communicator of historically orthodox Christian teachings in the country.Keller had glasses and a bald pate and wore a dark blazer and a red tie. He stood well over six feet tall. The stage made him appear even more imposing, particularly when he raised his hand high to make a point, but his mannerisms and tone were that of an English professor. With a sheaf of notes on a music stand, he preached a thoughtful disquisition on Jesus’ healing of a paralyzed man, drawing on readings from C. S. Lewis, the Village Voice, and the George MacDonald fairy tale “The Princess and the Goblin.” Continued here

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Primitive Asgard Cells Show Life on the Brink of Complexity   An oak tree. The symbiotic fungus intertwined with its roots. A cardinal chirping from one of its branches. Our best clue yet to their shared ancestor might have arrived in electron microscope images that were unveiled in December.“Look!” said microbiologist Christa Schleper, beaming as she held a printed, high-resolution image in front of her webcam at the University of Vienna. “Isn’t it beautiful?” The cells in the micrograph were 500-nanometer-wide orbs, each surrounded by a Medusa-like halo of tendrils. Her team had not only isolated and cultivated the organism for the first time but shown that its flailing filaments were made of actin, the protein that forms a skeletal scaffold in almost all complex cells, or eukaryotes. Continued here

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At a G7 summit high on ambition, nuclear disarmament takes a backseat to Zelensky's diplomatic appeals   Hiroshima, the site of this year’s G7 summit, is one of just a handful of places in the world that provides a stark reminder of the horrors of war. The A-bomb Dome in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, for example, is one of few structures left standing in the neighbourhoods that were flattened by the atomic blast in August 1945. Around the city, there are also “survivor trees” from the blast and burn marks on temple stoneware and statues – reminders of how far and wide it radiated. Continued here

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Slomo | Psyche Films   Having spent decades as a ‘typical, institutionalised, educated Western man’ – or, put simply, an ‘asshole’ – the US neurologist John Kitchin found himself to be financially secure but spiritually diminished. After learning that he was losing his eyesight, he emerged from a bout of hopelessness with the realisation that all he wanted to do was ‘the basic things, and skate’, and gave up his practice. Now a familiar face on San Diego’s Pacific Beach boardwalk, Kitchin – or Slomo, as he’s become known – is famed for his idiosyncratic, seemingly slow-motion style of inline skating that doubles as meditation.The short documentary Slomo (2013) from the US filmmaker Josh Izenberg chronicles Kitchin’s transformation from a wealthy yet miserable doctor living in a mansion, to a beach bum with a studio apartment who finds transcendence in acceleration. A charming and light-hearted vision of what can happen when you actually do what you want to, Slomo won dozens of awards upon its release, including Best Short Documentary at the SXSW Film Festival. And, 10 years since the film made him a minor San Diego celebrity, Kitchin, who turned 80 this spring, still rarely misses a day on the boardwalk. Continued here

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6 Ways to Connect to Employees and Optimize Talent Retention   You may be losing your top employees due to your lack of a human focus and leadership. Continued here

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Why Your Company Needs Data-Product Managers   As companies have struggled to make use of datasets and AI, many have started to create data products — reusable datasets that can be analyzed in different ways by different users over time to solve a particular business problem. Data products can be a powerful tool, especially for large, legacy companies, but often require companies to create a new role that’s distinct from chief digital officer and product manager: the data product manager. Data product managers, like product managers of other types, don’t have all the technical or analytical expertise to create the model or engineer the data for it. They are unlikely to be gifted at redesigning business processes or retraining workers either. What they do need to have is the ability to manage a cross-functional product development and deployment process, and a team of people with diverse skills to perform the needed tasks. Continued here

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The Zone of Interest review from Cannes: Five stars for Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust 'masterpiece'   Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) is showing her mother around her garden in the sunshine. Three years earlier, it was just a field, but now it has neat lawns, paved paths, a pool, a greenhouse, and thriving flower beds. "It's a paradise garden," marvels her proud mother. But, of course, the family wouldn't have their enviable home if it weren't for the hard work of Hedwig's husband Rudolf (Christian Friedel). "He's under pressure like you wouldn't believe," she says.The women's quiet, middle-class chit-chat could hardly be more ordinary, but it's rendered dizzyingly surreal and deeply horrific by certain details that they don't seem to notice: the grey, barbed wire-topped wall on one side of the garden; the barracks and the belching chimney just beyond it; and the constant background noise of industrial rumbling, steam trains chuffing, some intermittent shouting, and the occasional echoing gunshot. Slowly and steadily, without any big, sudden reveal, we learn that Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, and that he, his wife, and their young children have a contented, healthy, if slightly boring life while thousands of people are killed daily just a few feet away. Continued here

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Using big words doesn't make you sound smarter   Does grandiloquent language, articulated via verbose constructions and multifarious lexicological composition, maximize information consumers’ appraisement of author intelligence? Or is simple better?A fun psychology study conducted a few tests to probe this question. The author asked different readers to evaluate multiple versions of various texts, written with more or less complex wording and structure. The readers’ preferences were clear and revealed more interesting truths along the way. Continued here