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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer! S1S2 | � |  | S3S4 | � | | S5S6
S7Editor's Note: Gordon Moore's famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history. But it may also have been badly misunderstood - in a way that now looks like a near-catastrophic missed opportunity. If we had grasped the details behind Moore's Law in the 1980s, we could be living with an abundance of clean energy by now. We fumbled it. S8 | � | | S9S10Meet the Dubai artist whose work has sold for millions — and turns down 99% of prospective buyers   "Most artists are linked very heavily to galleries … whereas with this setup, I can actually develop my own relationships with my clients and really build that collector base all over the world," Jafri told CNBC's The Art of Appreciation. He also has a London gallery space for European and U.S. buyers.
Jafri, a British artist, studied at Oxford University's prestigious Ruskin School of Art and has been working for nearly 30 years. Known for his magical realist art, he creates work in a "meditative state," he said, using music to get into the right headspace and often painting for many hours at a time.
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| � | | S11Rhyme as reason: The cognitive quirk that makes bad advice seem wise  Many summers ago, when I was young, I got some booze, I got drunk, and I got a hangover. The next morning, I told my dad what happened over breakfast. “We had some wine at the restaurant,” I groaned, “and then a few beers at Mark’s house. It doesn’t seem enough for me to feel this bad.” My dad chuckled the chuckle of the knowing. He then said something I carry with me to this day: “Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.”
Years later, I’m fairly certain my dad was dealing in aphoristic pseudoscience, but the point is that out of all the many tidbits of advice he handed down over the years, only a few stick in my memory. And those are the ones that rhymed. There’s a mnemonic heft to a well-turned phrase, and a rhyming line lodges itself far easier than an entire book’s worth of learning.
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S12A Proven Model to Combat U.S. Drug Shortages  Drug shortages continue to plague the United States. In many ways, the problem is the result of deficiencies in the current pharma market. But a model for addressing this problem is showing that it isn’t intractable. The company employing this model is Civica Rx, which was established in 2018 by health systems and philanthropies to address shortages of generic sterile injectable drug. This article discusses the elements of its model and its achievements.
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| � | | S13While Biden Touts Chip Plant Funds, Prospective Workers Wait for Production to Start  On Thursday, the Democratic president will head to upstate New York to celebrate Micron Technology's plans to build a campus of computer chip factories made possible in part with government support. But the initial phase of the project would open the first plant in 2028 and the second plant in 2029, with more time expected for the next two factories to be completed.
Staring down a rematch with Republican Donald Trump, Biden is asking voters to believe in a vision for the U.S. economy that is still largely a promise. This at a moment when voters are most worried about enduring pressures from high inflation, which have led most to rate Biden poorly on the economy.
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S14Deloitte Study: Women Are More Stressed--but Hybrid Helps  Half of women say their stress levels have increased from a year ago, according to a recent survey of 5,000 women across 10 countries from Deloitte. Meanwhile, nearly half said they were "concerned or very concerned" about their mental health--one of their top three concerns, along with financial security and their rights. Â
Why? One factor is an "inability to disconnect from work," according to the report, as only 37 percent of surveyed women said they could "switch off" from work. Mental health pressures are also particularly pertinent for women bearing the brunt of household responsibilities, who are "far less likely to say they have good mental health than those who do not."Â
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| � | | S15Boeing Crash Families Urge U.S. to Prosecute the Company  Boeing said Wednesday that it lost $355 million on falling revenue in the first quarter, another sign of the crisis gripping the aircraft manufacturer as it faces increasing scrutiny over the safety of its planes and accusations of shoddy work from a growing number of whistleblowers.
Company executives have been forced to talk more about safety and less about finances since a door plug blew out of a Boeing 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, leaving a gaping hole in the plane.
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S16How This 26-Year-Old First-Time Founder Raised $55 Million for Her AI Startup  In November 2023, generative AI-powered video startup Pika announced that it had raised $55 million from a combination of angel investors and VC firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Factorial Capital. The raise positions Pika as a potential competitor to OpenAI's in-development video generation model, Sora. Pika was launched in 2023 by 26-year-old CEO Demi Guo, who, along with her friend and co-founder Chenlin Meng, dropped out of Stanford University's artificial intelligence PhD program to start the company.
One of the keys to Pika's fundraising success is a professional network Guo has been cultivating since middle school. Mentors that Guo met through computer science competitions like the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), in which she won a silver medal in 2015, helped secure Pika's first meetings with investors.
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| � | | S17These Women Faced the Glass Cliff--and Leveraged Their Experience to Become Successful Entrepreneurs  In 2009, she was offered the CEO role at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and U.S. Trust and was tasked with turning around the business amid the mass exits of financial advisors as well as ongoing fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. However, just before her two-year anniversary at the company, when Krawcheck felt confident that the company was gaining market share, she says she was "re-orged out."
Krawcheck is just one of many examples of the glass cliff, a term coined in 2005 by University of Exeter researchers Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam to describe the phenomenon where women and people of color are often put in C-suite or leadership positions at a business that is facing hardship, with the expectation that they will be able to turn it all around. If you've never heard of the term before, you haven't been paying attention.Â
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S18The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager  Product management has become an aspirational career. A group of popular social media influencers regularly offers advice on what it takes to attain a job and succeed in this field. But their content tends to glamorize the profession, gloss over the day-to-day-realities, and dispense wisdom that isn’t always on point.
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S19Meta's Open Source Llama 3 Is Already Nipping at OpenAI's Heels Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta’s decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on.
Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta and says he often pushed the company to consider releasing its technology for others to use and build on. But his main reason to rejoice is that his new startup will get access to an AI model that he says is very close in power to OpenAI’s industry-leading text generator GPT-4, but considerably cheaper to run and more open to outside scrutiny and modification.
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S20Tesla Is Not the Next Ford. It's the Next Con Ed.  Of late, Tesla's cars have come to seem a bit hazardous. Their self-driving features have been linked to hundreds of accidents and more than a dozen deaths. Then, earlier this month, the company recalled its entire fleet of Cybertrucks. A mechanical problem that trapped its gas pedal, as InsideEVs put it, "could potentially turn the stainless steel trapezoid into a 6,800-pound land missile."Along the way, Tesla—which did not respond to multiple requests for comment—has defended its cars and autopilot software. As of last week, the company told federal regulators that the Cybertruck malfunction had not been linked to any accidents or injuries. But even resolving every safety concern may not stop Tesla's entire EV business from becoming a hazard. Yesterday afternoon, the world's most valuable car company released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2024, announcing that its net income had dropped 55 percent from a year ago. On an investor call shortly after, Elon Musk could offer only a vague euphemism to describe what has become an especially disastrous month: His car juggernaut "navigated several unforeseen challenges." Just in April, Tesla has announced its first drop in sales since 2020, recalled one line of vehicles and reportedly canceled plans for another, and begun mass layoffs. There are still, somehow, six days left for the month to get worse.
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S21Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is confident that Google will find a way to make money selling access to generative AI tools. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his company is already doing it.
Both companies reported better-than-expected quarterly sales and profit on Thursday. And the stock prices of both soared on the results, with Alphabet further buoyed by its new plans to buy back more shares and issue its first-ever dividend.
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S22S23Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown  So: You've decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here's what's next: *awful gurgling noises*Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, initiating what is likely to be a rushed, chaotic, technologically and logistically complex legal process that will probably please almost no one.
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S24How Bird Flu Is Shaping People's Lives  A conversation with Katherine J. Wu about the disease sweeping through animals and raising food-safety questionsThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
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S25Would Limitlessness Make Us Better Writers?  AI embodies hypotheticals I can only imagine for myself. But I believe human impediments are what lead us to create meaningful art.
The scrolls lay inside glass cases. On one, the writing was jagged; on others, swirling or steady. I was at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, admiring centuries-old Chinese calligraphy that, the wall text told me, was meant to contain the life force—qi—of the calligrapher expressed through each brushstroke. Though I couldn't read the language, I was moved to see the work of writers who lived hundreds of years ago, whose marks still seemed to say something about the creators long after they'd passed.
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S26How America Lost Sleep  Many Americans are reporting that they'd feel better if they slept more, but finding the right remedy isn't always simple.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
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S27Philosophical reflection often begins with a disruptive mood | Psyche Ideas  is a psychologist with a PhD in philosophy. He combines philosophy and a range of psychotherapeutic approaches in his private practice. He is based in Sydney, Australia, and has clients from different parts of the world. He runs professional development courses on the significance of philosophy for psychotherapy.
It’s often thought that philosophy begins and ends with abstract and rational thinking. Like science, it’s seen as a methodology of logic that allows the philosopher to be detached, disengaged, free from the irrationality and subjectivity of emotion, and precise in the pursuit of objective truth. However, the history of philosophy shows that disruptive emotions and moods are central to the experience of philosophising. Philosophy means love of wisdom. It includes a care of the self, and our attitude towards the world is extremely important for wellbeing.
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S28In Settlement, FTC Sends $5.6 Million in Refunds to Ring Customers  The Federal Trade Commission is sending more than $5.6 million in refunds to consumers as part of a settlement with Amazon-owned Ring, which was charged with failing to protect private video footage from outside access.
In a 2023 complaint, the FTC accused the doorbell camera and home security provider of allowing its employees and contractors to access customers' private videos. Ring allegedly used such footage to train algorithms without consent, among other purposes.
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S29Singapore's EV challenge: High prices and high-rises  For Koh Jie Ming, the decision to switch to an electric vehicle five years ago was easy — there were significant savings to be had. But there were no EV chargers in the shared car park in his public housing estate, so he had to improvise.
“There were some fast chargers near my home, so I would charge my car while I had a meal or shopped,” Koh, 33, who drove for a ride-hailing firm then, told Rest of World.
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S30Net Neutrality Returns to a Very Different Internet The Federal Communications Commission has voted—once again—to assert its power to oversee and regulate the activities of the broadband industry in the United States. In a 3-2 vote, the agency reinstated net neutrality rules that had been abandoned during the height of the Trump administration's deregulatory blitz.
"Broadband is now an essential service," FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said Thursday in prepared remarks. "Essential services—the ones we count on in every aspect of modern life—have some basic oversight."
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S31S32S33S34Why a Dog's Death Hits So Hard  My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn't cry.Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred. He was a yellow Lab mix I had found as a puppy in the ditch in front of our house. We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.
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S35The better way to measure cosmic time  There are a number of grand questions we can ask about the Universe that cut right to the very core of what reality actually is, and were some of the biggest head-scratchers for all of human history. Questions like, “What is the Universe?” “How big is it?” and “Was it eternal, or did it spring into existence, and if so, when?” used to be some of the greatest philosophical mysteries, and yet the last 100 years have provided firm, scientific answers. We know what the Universe is, we know that the part observable to us is a hair over 92 billion light-years in diameter, and we know that the hot Big Bang, which started off the Universe as-we-know-it, occurred precisely 13.8 billion years ago, with an uncertainty in these values of just ~1% or so.
But why, of all the ways there are to measure time and distance, do we use such an Earth-centric set of units, like “years” and “light-years”? Isn’t there a better, more objective, more universal way to do it? Surely there is. At least, that’s what Jerry Bear thinks, writing in to ask:
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S36Gaiasignatures: A new way to search for alien life  Hunting for life on other planets is hard; it’s like trying to spot an ant on the other end of a football field. The closest potential host, Venus, is 25 million miles away. Beyond our Solar System, exoplanets that have piqued astronomers’ interest are light-years away.
To search for life from these sizable distances, scientists look for biosignatures: elements, molecules, or substances that might have been made by life. These include oxygen and methane, among other compounds. But there’s growing doubt that biosignatures will ever constitute concrete evidence of extraterrestrials. After all, as philosopher of science Peter Vickers at Durham University notes, our knowledge of exoplanet chemistry and geology is almost as lacking as our conceptions of aliens. From so far away, how could we ever be sure that any potential biosignature didn’t come from non-life?
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S37California Rule Seeks to Limit Health Cost Increases to 3 Percent  Doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies in California will be limited to annual price increases of 3 percent starting in 2029 under a new rule state regulators approved Wednesday in the latest attempt to corral the ever-increasing costs of medical care in the United States.
The money Californians spent on health care went up about 5.4 percent each year for the past two decades. Democrats who control California's government say that's too much, especially since most people's income increased just 3 percent each year over that same time period.
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S38Connecticut AI Bill Faces Uncertain Future  The Connecticut Senate pressed ahead Wednesday with one of the first major legislative proposals in the U.S. to rein in bias in artificial intelligence decision-making and protect people from harm, including manufactured videos or deepfakes.
The bill passed 24-12 after a lengthy debate. It is the result of two years of task force meetings in Connecticut and a year's worth of collaboration among a bipartisan group of legislators from other states who are trying to prevent a patchwork of laws across the country because Congress has yet to act.
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S39TikTok Ban Is 'Misguided,' Says Former Presidential Candidate  Some lawmakers are questioning if a nationwide TikTok ban is the right choice for the United States--and they're pointing to the potential harm faced by the country's entrepreneurs to make their point.
President Joe Biden signed a national security package on Wednesday containing a provision that forces TikTok to divest from its Chinese ownership and find a new owner within nine months. If not, the app would be banned from U.S. app stores, along with any future updates--rendering it unusable in the future.Â
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S40Despite Recent Bill to Ban TikTok, Biden's Campaign Will Keep Using It  Forced inside by a rainstorm, he competed with 13-year-old Hurley "HJ" Coleman IV to make putts on a practice mat. The Coleman family posted video of the proceedings on the app--complete with Biden holing out a putt and the teen knocking his own shot home in response, over the caption, "I had to sink the rebuttal."
The network television cameras that normally follow the president were stuck outside.Biden signed legislation Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the U.S. while his campaign has embraced the platform and tried to work with influencers. Already struggling to maintain his previous support from younger voters, the president is now facing criticism from some avid users of the app, which researchers have found is a primary news source for a third of Americans under the age of 30.
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