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Saturday, February 25, 2023

People Forgot How War Actually Works



S49

People Forgot How War Actually Works

Although the consequences of Russia’s terrible war in Ukraine will unfold over decades, three lessons from the conflict are already clear—and, in retrospect, should have been apparent all along. When the invasion began, a year ago today, much of the outside commentary focused on Russia’s advantages. President Vladimir Putin’s military was widely said to have overwhelming airpower and firepower, a fast-moving ground force, and extensive cyberwarfare capacity—all of which supposedly meant that Russia would rapidly conquer its neighbor. Its purported strengths seemed so great that when Russian forces were only just crossing the border, some analysts were musing about which pro-Moscow Ukrainian politician might lead a puppet regime in Kyiv.

Yet the first lesson of the past 12 months is that war is rarely easy or straightforward—which is why starting one is almost always the wrong decision for any nation. The United States has made war look simple at times, most obviously in 1991, when Operation Desert Storm dislodged Iraqi forces from Kuwait in a month and a half. Yet that victory was possible only after a decade-long U.S.-military buildup and with the deployment of the world’s most advanced military technologies. Even then, a defining feature of the Gulf War was that the U.S. did not try to occupy another society. When the opportunity to march on Baghdad presented itself, President George H. W. Bush’s administration held back.

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S70
The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War

Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed an unusual adaptation that shaped its destiny: Despite being a conifer — needle-leaved trees that are usually evergreen — it became deciduous, losing all of its needles during the months-long lightless winter to conserve energy, then growing vigorously in the bright summer months — the fastest-growing of the redwoods. With this uncommon competitive edge, it conquered large swaths of the globe, spreading the seeds of its handsome cones across North America and Eurasia. But when the global climate plunged into the Ice Age, its victory march came to an abrupt halt.

We know this because, at the peak of WWII, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki discovered fossils of this small, mighty redwood species. Nothing like it had ever been described in the botanical literature, so he deemed it extinct, naming it Metasequoia after its kinship to Earth’s most majestic tree.

The World War was still raging when a Chinese forester traveling through Central China in the winter of 1941 came upon a majestic old tree of a kind he had never seen before. There was a small shrine at its foot, where locals had been lighting votives and leaving offerings for decades. They called it, he learned, shui-sa, or “water fir,” for its love of moist soil — a name he had never heard before. Because the tree was already denuded of needles for its seasonal hibernation, he was unable to collect a proper specimen for identification — but he told other foresters and botanists of it, until word reached Zhan Wang, director of China’s Central Bureau of Forest Research.

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S46
Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

Google's offices were once famous to outsiders as a whimsical, magical place full of giant playground slides, 24/7 staff masseuses, a huge selection of free food, and complimentary laundry service. Today, in the new, cost-cutting era of Google, some employees don't even get to have their own desks.

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S50
No Time for Funeral Rites

Three hundred sixty-five days of war, and my mind keeps drifting back to one of them: the June morning when I met Andriy Galavin, the gravedigger of Bucha.

Sunburned and baggy-eyed, he stood at the end of a stairway on a small hill that led to an imposing church. War hadn’t muted the vibrancy of spring; a charred remnant of a backyard garden, all ashes and burnt shards of terra cotta, sat next to an unscathed plot of growing vegetables. Workers carrying weed trimmers tamed ankle-high patches along the side of the road, maneuvering around the steel corpses of armored vehicles.

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S3
Setting Goals with Self-Compassion: Our Favorite Reads

If you’re like me, the resolutions you set for yourself at the beginning of the year are far-away thoughts. Those new sneakers you got to jumpstart your workout routine haven’t seen much action. That journal you bought to help track your new habits is still blank. The pile of books on your shelf that you promised to read this year continues to collect dust.

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S40
Meta unveils a new large language model that can run on a single GPU

On Friday, Meta announced a new AI-powered large language model (LLM) called LLaMA-13B that it claims can outperform OpenAI's GPT-3 model despite being "10x smaller." Smaller-sized AI models could lead to running ChatGPT-style language assistants locally on devices such as PCs and smartphones. It's part of a new family of language models called "Large Language Model Meta AI," or LLAMA for short.

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S41
Keyboard DIYing is moving outside hobbyist circles--and that's a good thing

Last week, I visited a friend and, for the first time, saw a mechanical keyboard on her desk. This is someone I've known for decades and who's not into tech, so this was a surprise. But her job became partially remote since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so she needed something comfortable with a numpad to use at home. The keyboard was a cheap, quick buy off Amazon that earned its keep by looking cute and being "so clicky," she informed me.

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S11
Researchers Analyzed 2,600 CEOs to Determine Their Biggest Driver of Success. One Quality Stood Out Above All the Rest

Developing this quality doesn't take special talent or even intelligence. Learn what it is, and how to get better at it.

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S42
Motorola brings $5-a-month satellite messaging to any phone with new hotspot

The launch of the iPhone 14 made satellite messaging the hot new feature in smartphones. You've been able to get big, bulky, ugly satellite phones for years with full satellite calling and messaging, but it turns out if you scope down the feature to only "emergency SOS," and heavily compress everything, you can connect to a satellite from a normal smartphone form factor. Since the iPhone announcement, everyone in Android land has been eager to copy this, and we've seen satellite connectivity announcements from Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, and Huawei and news that some kind of satellite support will be built into Android 14. Mostly these are chip and software announcements—not many companies have been talking about satellite products end users will actually be able to buy—until now.

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S52
Permission-Slip Culture Is Hurting America

In louisiana, it takes $1,485 and roughly 2,190 days to become an interior designer. In Washington, it takes $319 and 373 days to become a cosmetologist. The District of Columbia requires $740 to become an auctioneer, and a college degree to watch children for someone else. (Having and watching your own children continues to be an unlicensed affair.) In Kansas, you have to cough up $200 to work as a funeral attendant. And Maine requires $235 and 1,095 days to become a travel guide. Want to move states? That could mean you have to relicense, as if, say, cutting hair is materially different in Massachusetts than it is in New York.

This is absurd, and not just to me. Last week, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced that he would seek to “fully remove 34 different outdated licenses from state government” and eliminate “14 underutilized regulatory boards.” He also said that he would seek to make New Hampshire the next state to adopt universal recognition: “If you have a substantially similar license and are in good standing in another state, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a license on Day One in New Hampshire.” He joins a number of governors in embracing universal recognition but is going one step further by pushing to fully delicense certain professions.

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S1
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.

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S39
Unexpected protein interactions needed to build flowers

The pros and cons of moonlighting—taking up an extra job in addition to full-time employment—are hotly debated. But in biology, moonlighting is not uncommon, as individual proteins often perform multiple functions. For many years, scientists knew that the Unusual Floral Organ (UFO) protein seems to do some moonlighting.

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S43
These scientists lugged logs on their heads to resolve Chaco Canyon mystery

The so-called "great houses" of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico may have taken decades or longer to construct. Most large complexes had four or five stories and averaged over 200 rooms, with the largest boasting as many as 700 rooms. The complexes also featured large circular ceremonial areas called kivas. To construct these great houses, archaeologists have estimated that the Chacoans would have needed wood from some 200,000 trees, and those 16-foot-long wooden beams must have been transported from mountain ranges as far as 70 miles (110 km) away.

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S7
3 Keys to Turning Your Idea Into a $10-Billion Company

Solve the right problem, build the best solution, get more efficient as you grow.

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S69
The Two Objects of the Good Life: Mary Shelley's Father on the Relationship Between Personal Happiness, Imagination, and Social Harmony

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote as he reflected on how to stop limiting your happiness. “Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.”

A century and a half before him, the radical and far-seeing political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) — father of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley — examined the building blocks of the good life in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (public library) — the book he began writing when his wife, the radical and far-seeing political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, was pregnant with the daughter whose birth would kill her.

In a sentiment David Foster Wallace would echo in his own radical reflection on the true value of education, Godwin writes:

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S12
Leading a Business in Ukraine During the War

As the world marks the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this article shares first-hand stories from a diverse group of Ukrainian business leaders. Their experiences provide a glimpse into the challenges of leading in the midst of war, and offer lessons on the power of resilience, purpose, empathy, and gratitude — no matter how hopeless things may appear.

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S5
Feeling Stressed? Neuroscience Shows This Simple Cognitive Reframing Technique Instantly Boosts Confidence and Self-Assurance

Start seeing feelings of stress as a positive signal and your mind--and body--will respond in a completely different way.

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S48
Photos of the Week: Viking Festival, Costumed Revelers, Orange Battle

A grim anniversary of war in Ukraine, icicles in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, livestreamers on a bridge in China, cherry blossoms in Japan, deadly mudslides in Brazil, a Carnival parade in Bolivia, another earthquake in Turkey, flooding in South Africa, and much more

Hikers are silhouetted against the setting sun at Papago Park in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 18, 2023. #

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S8
7 Simple Steps to Creating a Productivity Tracker for Your Business

Work on the right things at the right time in your business using this simple method.

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S54
The Supreme Court Actually Understands the Internet

For the first time, the Supreme Court is considering its opinion on the brief but powerful “26 words that created the internet.”

Enacted in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms from liability for anything that is posted on their site by a third party—a protection that allowed the web to bloom by encouraging experimentation and interactivity in its early years. More recently, Section 230 has been the subject of scrutiny as bipartisan critics argue that it provides powerful tech companies with too much cover and too little accountability.

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S51
Blinken: Zelensky Is Right to Demand That the U.S. ‘Do Even More and Do It Even Faster’

The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken

One year ago, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating aggression that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been at the center of the U.S.’s involvement in the war, relaying intelligence to President Volodymyr Zelensky and working with allies to provide aid to the Ukrainian military. Today, Blinken spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, deterring similar aggression from China across the Taiwan Strait, and what a Ukrainian victory might look like. “There is more convergence now over the last couple of years with our partners in Europe, but also in Asia, than I’ve seen any time in the last 30 years,” Blinken said. “For me, that tells us that America’s place in the world and ability to confront these challenges is much stronger than it’s been.”

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S53
Shoppers Are Stuck in a Dupe Loop

This 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.     

Everyone loves to feel like they’re getting a good deal. It’s a trait found across history and geography: People haggled in the agoras and souks of antiquity; they bargain in car dealerships; they scour the internet for coupon codes. Now deal hunting has been discovered by TikTok, where an audience made up overwhelmingly of teens and young adults has gathered to worship at the altar of the dupe.

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S47
Signal CEO: We "1,000% won't participate" in UK law to weaken encryption

The nonprofit responsible for the Signal messenger app is prepared to exit the UK if the country requires providers of encrypted communications to alter their products to ensure user messages are free of material that’s harmful to children.

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S6
4 Ways to Bring Empathy to Your Hiring Process

Empathy is the one crucial piece missing from your hiring strategy and with it, you'll attract the top talent in your industry.

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S66
Ways of Being: Rethinking Intelligence

“Intelligence supposes good will,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “Sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself.” Yet our efforts to define and measure intelligence have been pocked with insensitivity to nuance, to diversity, to the myriad possible ways of paying attention to the world. Within the human realm, there is the dark cultural history of IQ. Beyond the human realm, there is the growing abashed understanding that other forms of intelligence exist, capable of comprehending and navigating the world in ways wildly different from ours, no less successful and no less poetic. One measure of our own intelligence may be the degree of our openness to these other ways of being — the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit with which we recognize and regard otherness.

The science-reverent English artist James Bridle invites such a broadening of mind in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (public library). He writes:

The tree of evolution bears many fruits and many flowers, and intelligence, rather than being found only in the highest branches, has in fact flowered everywhere.

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S10
The Key to Building Confidence and Growing Your Business Is Simple -- Just Ask

Asking questions is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to increase knowledge and confidence.

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S35
How video gaming could boost your career

When Heather Newman, an avid gamer, was applying for the job of director of marketing and communications at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, she included all relevant experience on her résumé, including her prior role as a guild master in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

While most people might not consider video gaming to be applicable to the workplace, Newman disagreed. In her in-game role, she managed guilds of as many as 500 people and organized 25 to 40 players to raid dungeons for several hours four to five days a week.

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S33
Cancer evolution is mathematical

Cancer is often seen as a disease that arises from genetic mutations causing cells to divide uncontrollably and invade other parts of the body. But the spread of cells away from their origins is actually a normal process in some cases. The embryo burrows into the uterus during early pregnancy. Immune cells spread from lymph nodes to sites of infection to attack the invading bacteria. And germ cells migrate to where the gonad will be during early human development. 

Cancer is not a uniform disease. Rather, cancer is a disease of phenotypic plasticity, meaning tumor cells can change from one form or function to another. This includes reverting to less mature states and losing their normal function, which can result in treatment resistance, or changing their cell type altogether, which facilitates metastasis.

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S2
Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the November–December 1974 issue of HBR and has been one of the publication’s two best-selling reprints ever. For its reissue as a Classic, HBR asked Stephen R. Covey to provide a commentary (see the sidebar “Making Time for Gorillas”).

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S9
Serial Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy Is Running for President on an 'Anti-Woke' Platform

Ramaswamy, among one of America's richest entrepreneurs, is the latest to join the presidential race. Repealingaffirmative action is his first priority should he win.

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S4
3 Areas in Which to Partner With Black Entrepreneurs in 2023

A new survey of Black small-business owners lays out their challenges for the year.

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S26
Human Art Already Has So Much In Common With AI

Despite being human-made, human-taught, and human-promoted, it’s easy to criticize AI for being fundamentally inhuman. To claim that AI models like ChatGPT and DALL-E will replace art created by people is to ignore both the ineffable qualities of the human touch and the critical flaws of these models—or so say the artists and writers.

They’re right that AI isn't quite at the stage of completely replacing human creativity—it is biased and inaccurate, good at bullshitting without substance. It offers a simulacrum of desired output but cannot be trusted on its own. But to home in on AI's failures underestimates the will of their developers to overcome them. And it overlooks the fact that these algorithms are able to mimic the creative process precisely because human creativity is, in many respects, just as algorithmic as the AI models that seek to outperform it. 

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S27
'The Last of Us' Signals the End of an Era

Each Sunday night, as The Last of Us airs on HBO, a sense of dread permeates the air—and it has nothing to do with the fact that Joel and Ellie may never know peace. Instead, it’s the notion that The Last of Us, with its genre roots and prestige TV gloss, feels like the final salvo of a particular era of HBO Sunday night programming. 

To be sure, HBO and its End-of-the-Weekend Bummer Salve lineup aren’t going anywhere. The fourth season of Succession begins on March 26, just a couple weeks after The Last of Us ends. But at the same time, it stands to be one of the last, if not the last, breakout show to premiere before HBO Max—the streaming service where most people watch the series—merges with content from Discovery+, lumping it into an entertainment ecosystem with My Lottery Dream Home. The years of logging into HBO Go, and later HBO Max, for Game of Thrones, and later House of the Dragon, are gone. 

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S38
An EV charger every 50 miles: Here's the plan to keep them running

The last few years have, after much inaction, seen a flurry of new policies informed by the looming threat of climate change. Among these has been the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which will spend almost $5 billion by 2027 in order to build out a national network of fast-charging stations along federal interstate highways.

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S37
The Fermi paradox was created by geniuses during a strange debate over lunch

The question is both totally obvious yet technically deep: “Where are all the aliens?” There are hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way alone. Surely some of them must be hospitable. And yet, we never see any aliens! When a group of the world’s greatest scientists sat down to lunch, they challenged one another with this paradox.

It would come to be named after Enrico Fermi, who expressed it in a famously pithy form. Fermi led the world in both experimental and theoretical physics, winning the Nobel Prize at age 37 and inventing the first nuclear reactor. His dining interlocutors were Edward Teller, inventor of the thermonuclear bomb and another certifiable genius; Herbert York, Manhattan Project member and first director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Emil Konopinski, another Manhattan Project member and notable physicist.

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S45
As COVID vaccine patent dispute drags on, Moderna forks over $400M to NIH

Vaccine maker Moderna has forked over $400 million to the National Institutes of Health for using a molecular stabilizing technique borrowed from government and academic researchers in its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine—which the company made roughly $36 billion selling amid the deadly pandemic, according to The New York Times.

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S44
Report: More Twitter drama after Slack shutdown; employees play hooky

On Wednesday and Thursday, Twitter’s internal Slack channels were suddenly shut down. Platformer reported that the company manually shut services off. Before that was confirmed, a Twitter employee posting on the anonymous workplace chat app Blind had speculated that it was also possible that Twitter had shut down employee access because it had stopped paying its Slack bills.

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S29
Who Should You Believe When Chatbots Go Wild?

In 1987, then-CEO of Apple Computer, John Sculley, unveiled a vision that he hoped would cement his legacy as more than just a former purveyor of soft drinks. Keynoting at the EDUCOM conference, he presented a 5-minute, 45-second video of a product that built upon some ideas he had presented in his autobiography the previous year. (They were hugely informed by computer scientist Alan Kay, who then worked at Apple.) Sculley called it the Knowledge Navigator.

The video is a two-hander playlet. The main character is a snooty UC Berkeley university professor. The other is a bot, living inside what we’d now call a foldable tablet. The bot appears in human guise—a young man in a bow tie—perched in a window on the display. Most of the video involves the professor conversing with the bot, which seems to have access to a vast store of online knowledge, the corpus of all human scholarship, and also all of the professor’s personal information—so much so can that it can infer the relative closeness of relationships in the professor’s life.

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S34
How to use a thesaurus to actually improve your writing

If you’ve spent any time trying to learn the craft of writing, you’ve no doubt heard your share of myths, opinions, and prejudices gussied up as hard-and-fast rules. Things like: You should write every day. Only write about what you know. Bad grammar is a sign of an unintelligent person. You must know the rules to break them. And never, ever start a sentence with a conjunction.

One such “rule” that has always baffled me is the prohibition against using a thesaurus to write. I’ve heard from fellow writers, English teachers, and friends who only scratch out the occasional email or tweet. But no one has expressed it as fervently as Stephen King did in his book On Writing:

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S59
Webb Telescope Finds Evidence of Massive Galaxies That Defy Theories of the Early Universe

The six "universe breakers" appear much larger than what scientists thought was possible at that time

Astronomers have identified what appear to be six massive galaxies from the infancy of the universe. The objects are so massive, that if confirmed, they could change how we think of the origins of galaxies.

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S28
The Original Dive Watch Gets a 3-Hour Makeover

Decades after wrist-worn computers made the analog dive watch an all-but-redundant tool, it’s still one whose limits and possibilities watchmakers continue to evolve, as though functional redundancy—not to mention the limits of the human body at depth—were merely a state of mind. 

For instance, Rolex broke records last year with its Deepsea Challenge, designed to work at the bottom of the ocean’s deepest point (for all the use that would be), shortly after Omega had unleashed its own 6,000-meter monster, the Ultra Deep. The likes of Oris, IWC, and Blancpain have each engineered watches that use mechanical means to give depth readings beneath the waves.

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S36
Change your mind with these gateway drugs to intellectual humility

While working on my most recent book, How Minds Change, I learned a lot of things that required me to unlearn a lot of other things before I could add the new things I learned to the collection of things I thought I knew for sure.

For instance, one thing I learned was that the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds never led to any sort of mass panic. Rumors of such a panic had spread via newspaper think pieces about how getting news from anywhere other than newspapers was a bad idea. I also learned you can’t boil a live frog by slowly and gradually raising the temperature of the water. Turns out they jump right out once they become uncomfortable. Oh, and lemmings don’t sometimes march off cliffs because they blindly follow each other while walking in a single file. That one has been a nugget of popular, but untrue, folklore since the 1800s, long before both the 1990s video game that perpetuated the myth with its whimsical gameplay and the 1950s Disney documentary that did the same by tossing an unsettling number of real lemmings off a cliff.

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S30
The 11 Best Amazon Prime Movies Right Now

Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings (congrats, CODA!), but that doesn’t mean other streaming services don’t have excellent offerings. Like, for example, Amazon Prime. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.

Our picks for the 10 best films on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best movies on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that's what you're in the mood for. 

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S31
'Cocaine Bear' Is a Buzz Kill

Cocaine Bear, a film that sounds like it was dreamed up between bong hits, arrives in theaters today. Like Eight Legged Freaks, Snakes on a Plane, and Sharknado before it, the premise fits squarely into the “animals behaving badly” subgenre of elevator-pitch movies. Based on the title and the tagline—“Apex predator, high on cocaine, out of its mind”—you know what you’re getting when you buy a ticket. And who wouldn’t want to see a bear on a drug-fueled rampage? It’s an easy sell.

Unfortunately, Cocaine Bear is not good, and not even in a “still worth watching intoxicated” way. The film just doesn’t land right, and you can’t help but feel that it was manufactured just to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer.

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S57
MAGA Is the Mullet of Politics

The disaster in East Palestine has revealed Trumpism to be populist in the front and corporatist in the back.

After a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, national attention was slow to turn to the crash. That has now changed decisively. In the past 10 days, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, former President Donald Trump, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have all visited the town. A lively national political debate has also emerged, but it’s one that, like the burning rail cars, has produced a lot of heat, but not a great deal of light.

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S32
Ask Ethan: Could reinterpreting our data eliminate dark energy?

When it comes to the Universe, it’s easy to make the incorrect assumption that what we see is an accurate reflection of all that’s out there. Certainly, what we observe to be out there really is present, but there’s always the possibility that there’s far more out there that’s unobservable. That extends to radiation outside of the visible light spectrum, matter that neither emits nor absorbs light, black holes, neutrinos, and even more exotic forms of energy. If something truly exists in this Universe and carries energy, it will have non-negligible effects on quantities that we can actually observe, and from those observations, we can go back and infer what’s truly there. But there’s a danger: perhaps our inferences are incorrect because we’re fooling ourselves somehow. Could that be a legitimate worry for dark energy? That’s what this week’s question-asker, Bud Christenson, wants to know:

“As one who has studied physics, I have been able to wrap my brain around some ideas that at one time were considered crazy… But dark energy is the most whacked idea I’ve heard. I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and not getting any smarter as I age. But if so many of you are convinced that this intuitively impossible idea is valid, maybe I need to investigate instead of rejecting it out of hand.”

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S14
How to Create a Better Consumer Market for U.S. Health Care

Measures to make prices more transparent were good steps in the drive to create more competition in health care. But they don’t do what is necessary to create a vibrant consumer market in which patients would actively shop around for the best prices. Four additional steps that would make a big difference include: (1) force care providers to specify their prices for a list of standardized, consumer-focused bundles of services tied to full episodes of clinical interventions; (2) require all providers to participate in this bundled pricing system; (3) mandate that the prices posted for these services be available to all patients, irrespective of their insurance status; and (4) ensure that consumers who select service providers that charge prices that are below what their insurance plans will pay can keep the savings.

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S21
Why the U.S. Needs a Formal Reckoning on the COVID Pandemic

After Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and other major tragedies, the U.S. has examined itself to see how to prevent the next catastrophe. We need to do the same for the COVID pandemic

In better times, the U.S. has, with some humility, owned up to its failures. Commissions have investigated tragedies such as Pearl Harbor and 9 /11. Presidential blue-ribbon panels bulwarked the Social Security program in 1983 and overhauled NASA’s space shuttle program after the 1986 Challenger disaster.

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S18
Days after a promised refund, some FTX Japan users are still waiting for their money

On Tuesday, FTX Japan, a subsidiary of FTX, began allowing customers to withdraw funds frozen in the now-defunct crypto exchange. Transfers for Japanese customers started being processed later that day, making them some of the first FTX users in the world to get their money back.

Many of these customers are now breathing a sigh of relief, after four months of alarm and uncertainty. In the mad rush to claim these withdrawals, however, others have run into hurdles, and taken to Japanese social media to share their accounts. Some users are being told they aren’t eligible for withdrawals at all. Rest of World spoke to seven FTX Japan customers, most of whom say they feel like they’ve fallen victim to a bait-and-switch.

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S13
The Surprising Consequences of Antitrust Actions Against Big Tech

One of the major questions of the day is whether antitrust actions against Big Tech platforms would increase competition and the number of new products that consumers can choose from. A study of a landmark case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago in the enterprise infrastructure software industry suggests the answer is “not always.” It found that while the number of patents in the aftermath of the decision did increase, the number of new products and entrants into the market did not, and profits decreased across the market. These findings have implications for regulators, complementors, and platforms.

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S67
The Vital Difference Between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit

It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work does, dishwashing or dentistry. And yet such labors of diligence and devotion — the kind William Blake called “eternal work” — are somehow different, different and more vulnerable, for they enter the world in a singular spirit and are recompensed in a singular spirit, distinct from dentistry or dishwashing.

That spirit is the spirit of a gift — not the transaction of two commodities but the interchange of two mutual generosities, passing between people who share in the project of a life worth living.

A year before I was born, the poet Lewis Hyde taxonomized that vital and delicate distinction between work and labor in his eternally giving book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) — a timeless inquiry into what it takes to harmonize “the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture.”

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S20
Evolution Turns These Knobs to Make a Hummingbird Hyperquick and a Cavefish Sluggishly Slow

By tuning the enzymes that control the breakdown or storage of sugars, hummingbirds and cavefish adapt their metabolism to meet the demands of the vastly different environments in which they live

We’re all familiar with muscle conditioning or deconditioning that happens in response to exercise or lack of it. But when an active lifestyle—or, by contrast, that of a couch potato—is sustained over evolutionary timescales stretching for thousands or millions  of years, that leads to dramatic changes in muscle mass, metabolism and even an animal’s biochemistry. Two recent studies reveal how some of the superathletes and couch potatoes of the animal world, hummingbirds and cavefish, have adjusted the metabolic pathways in their muscles to efficiently break down sugar or store it to suit their unique ways of life.

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S56
How Should We Teach the Story of Our Country?

Book bans and restrictive laws are threatening to warp the version of American history that kids learn in school: Your weekly guide to the best in books

The past few years have seen an intensifying of the ways politics can intervene in education, including the censorship of books. Lawmakers in Texas have made repeated pushes to restrict the books that kids can access in schools. Leaders in other states across the country have done the same, including in Tennessee, where one local school board infamously banned Maus, a graphic novel that brutally—but honestly—depicts the Holocaust. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has passed sweeping laws that limit what schools can teach about topics such as gender, sexuality, and race. In January, the state even opposed a whole course, AP African American Studies. (The class’s curriculum has since been revised; Florida has not yet said whether it will actually impose the ban.)

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S55
Can a Million Chinese People Die and Nobody Know?

Official statistics on COVID can’t be trusted, because they serve Beijing’s political interests. Making the dead disappear is only part of it.

Can a million people vanish from the planet without the world knowing? It seems impossible in this age of instant digital communications, ubiquitous smartphones, and global social-media platforms that anything of comparable consequence can go unnoticed and unrecorded—no matter how remote the country or how determined its rulers might be to hide the truth.

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S24
How This Psychological Effect Skews Home Prices

People list homes at a premium to avoid selling a house for less than they bought it, thereby reducing market liquidity, according to research co-authored by Wharton's Lu Liu.

Everyone considers their home as an investment that gains value over time, and that explains why homeownership makes up most of household wealth both in the U.S. and globally. So it’s natural for homeowners who want to sell their house to expect more than what they paid for it — even if its current market value is lower.

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S68
Audre Lorde on What to Do When Difference Ruptures Society

“If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else,” the young poet Nikki Giovanni told the elder James Baldwin in their historic intergenerational conversation. Perhaps it is because we are such strangers to ourselves — so opaque in our own motives and vulnerabilities, so haunted by confusion and self-contradiction — that we so bruisingly misunderstand and mistreat others, so readily seize on their otherness, lashing our confusions at them, so readily forget that diversity and difference are the reason life exists.

The antidote to that reflex is what Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) considers in an interview found in Black Women Writers at Work (public library) — the superb collection that also gave us Maya Angelou on writing and our responsibility to our creative gifts.

A generation after Hannah Arendt’s insight into the power and opportunity of the outsider position, and an epoch before the term intersectionality existed, Lorde considers the challenge of the multiple identities we each inhabit, which further alienate us from each other for as long as they remain unreconciled and unintegrated within us:

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S19
Sorry, UFO Hunters - You Might Just Be Looking at a Spy Balloon

From space aliens to foreign surveillance, we spoke to experts to find out what’s really going on with the balloon brouhaha.

White House Press Secretary: There is no, again, no, indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity.

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S65
30 Questions To Ask Your Kid Beyond 'How Was Your Day?'

Kid comes through the door, announcing their presence with the thud of their backpack hitting the ground.

At dinner tables around the world, kids are telling parents that they did “nothing” at school all day. Most parents aren’t quite sure how to respond. We want to know about what’s going on in our kids’ lives and to hear their thoughts and feelings, but there are dishes to wash, laundry to fold, homework assignments to complete. In the bustle of our everyday lives, calm moments appropriate for conversation can be so rare that when they do come along, we aren’t quite sure what to do with them.

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S17
Japan's "sauna boom" has a steamy new app

Public baths are central to life in Japan. Any neighborhood will have at least one well-frequented sento, often represented on Google Maps with the symbol  ♨️. In an update on the custom, saunas have been growing hugely sought-after, even labeled a “sauna boom.” These days, you can find them anywhere from along the Japanese coastline to inside a Shibuya office building near the love hotel district.

Sauna Ikitai released a new app to navigate the craze in early February. Originally a directory and ratings site, Sauna Ikitai — which straightforwardly means “I Want To Go To The Sauna” — launched in 2017. This year, it went mobile with its roster of over 11,000 listings. 

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S22
Why a Blizzard Is Hitting Southern California

A massive storm shocks Southern California with cold temperatures, strong winds and abundant moisture, causing extremely rare blizzard conditions and potentially unprecedented snowfalls

It’s not every day that snow closes roads near southern California’s city of Santa Barbara or that flakes fall on the mountain where the iconic Hollywood sign sits. Those scenes come courtesy of a powerful winter storm that is bringing unusual blizzard conditions to the southern parts of the state.

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S23
Does a Woman’s Biological Clock Have a Price?

Research by Wharton's Corinne Low examines the economic trade-offs women face in balancing career and family timing, and the need for more gender-equitable policies.

For every year a woman ages, she must earn $7,000 more annually to remain equally attractive to potential romantic partners, according to new research from Wharton professor Corinne Low that calculates the economic trade-off for women between career and family investments.

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S25
Kate Ackerman: What women athletes need to unlock their full potential

As a sports scientist, athlete and director of the Female Athlete Program at Boston Children's Hospital, Kate Ackerman understands that women athletes need more than pretty sports bras or new sneakers to achieve peak performance -- they need true investment committed to their health and well-being. Ackerman advocates for a long overdue sports medical system that's dedicated to the study and development of women athletes, supporting lifelong success on and off the field.

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S15
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.

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S61
This Tiny Welsh Island Is Europe's First Dark Sky Sanctuary

A Welsh Island called Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) became the first site in Europe to receive the designation of an International Dark Sky Sanctuary, joining just 16 others in the world. The island, which is 1.5 miles long and half a mile wide, has only two year-round residents and about a dozen during the summers.

“In a world that’s increasingly being polluted in every single way, having a pristine night sky at our doorstep still takes my breath away,” Mari Huws, who works as a warden on the island, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris and Patrick Barkham. “It means that the night is alive—oyster catchers cry, Manx shearwaters swoop and owls glide. So much of the natural world is awake at night.”

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S63
See Rare Images of Early 20th-Century Antarctic Expeditions

For the first time, hundreds of photos, lantern slides and glass plate negatives are available to the public

A trove of historic images from early 20th-century Australian and British expeditions to Antarctica is officially available to the public, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) announced this week.

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S60
You Can Buy Hot Dog Fingers and Pet Rocks From 'Everything Everywhere All at Once'

A24 is selling props and costumes from the Oscar-nominated film at an upcoming charity auction

Everything Everywhere All at Once was nominated for 11 Oscars this year. And while we can’t know whether it will win, the breakout indie hit clearly has a large, affectionate fan following. 

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S64
David Hockney Is the Subject of His Own Immersive Experience

Using projections and voiceovers, “Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away)” examines the renowned artist’s career

In recent years, everyone from Vincent van Gogh to Frida Kahlo has been the subject of an “immersive experience,” a type of installation that takes the great oeuvres of an artist, animates them, and projects them onto empty walls.

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S62
Scientists Discover an Emperor Penguin Colony From Poop Stains in Satellite Images

Geospatial scientist Peter Fretwell was really studying sea ice loss. But as he pored over satellite images of Antarctica, he couldn’t help but notice a small, brown stain amid the otherwise pristine blue and white ice.

Fretwell, who works for the British Antarctic Survey, knew right away that he needed to investigate further, as brown stains in Antarctica typically mean only one thing: penguin poo.

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S58
Explore Our National Magazine Awards Finalists

Spend your weekend with a cup of warm coffee and our National Magazine Award–nominated articles.

Yesterday, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced the finalists for this year’s National Magazine Awards, and The Atlantic was recognized for a range of work. The magazine received nominations for five individual stories, as well as a nomination for the General Excellence award, a finalist place in the Best Digital Illustration category, and a win in the Best Print Illustration category. (Winners in other nominated categories will be announced in March.)

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S16
The mental health first aiders fighting back in Ukraine

When Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine broke out on 24 February 2022, Iryna Frankova, a medical doctor and clinical psychologist working at Bogomolets National Medical University in Kyiv, knew that she had to act fast. There was the need to check her loved ones were safe, and that she wasn't in imminent danger. There was the question of whether to leave and if so, where to go.

But there was another urgent question too. Ukraine would soon be facing a crisis in mental health and, if previous conflicts were anything to go by, this was likely to be sidelined at precisely the moment when the most impactful help could be given – right at the start.

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