Look Up! July's Full Buck Moon Will Rise This Week

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Look Up! July's Full Buck Moon Will Rise This Week     Remember to look up this weekend — the Moon is gearing up for its brightest show of the month on Monday, July 3, as Full Moon.According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the Full Moon reaches peak illumination at 7:39 a.m. Eastern Time on July 3. The Full Moon could appear as soon as Saturday, July 1, however, according to a lunar phase generator from NASA. Continued here

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EU's carbon border tax: a new report shows Africa stands to lose US$25 billion every year     A new European law that imposes the first ever carbon border tax in the world comes into force in October 2023. It will be applied gradually over the next three years before it is fully implemented. A carbon tax is a type of levy imposed on greenhouse gas emissions. It is meant to encourage companies to adopt clean methods of production. Continued here

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Two more RBA rate hikes, tumbling inflation, and a high chance of recession: how our forecasting panel sees 2023-24     Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Of the 27 leading economists assembled by The Conversation to forecast the financial year that’s just begun, every one expects inflation to continue to fall. Continued here

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How to Actually Find Good Recipes Online     Ever been catfished by a recipe that ranks at the top of your Google search but turns out meh when you make it yourself? Google does mean well by favoring longer, keyword-rich posts, videos, and studio-quality photography in its algorithm. However, the result of this is a conveyor belt of food blogs with uniform content, written to meet ever-changing search engine optimization (SEO) criteria. For amateur cooks, it can be hard to find recipes that taste as good as they look online.My relationship with this issue is complicated: As a writer, cookbook editor, and recipe tester, I’m gut-punched by the lack of creativity on food blogs these days, and I notice more and more recipe developers prioritizing SEO over quality and accuracy. At the same time, as a food blogger reliant on monthly ad revenue (based on page views), I’m an unabashed contributor to that conveyer belt of formulaically structured recipe websites, and I know firsthand that—at least for now—tailoring posts to Google’s search algorithm is essential for digital content creators’ income. Finally, as a busy human and my household’s head of food and nutrition, I just want to find trustworthy recipes fast so I can get on with my life.   Continued here

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A Computer-Assisted Proof Solves the 'Packing Coloring' Problem     As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux took a dim view of using computers to do math. It seemed antithetical to real intellectual discovery."There's some instinct or gut reaction against using computers to solve your problems, like it goes against the ideal beauty or elegance of a fantastic argument," he said. Continued here

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Waste disposal in Nigeria is a mess: how Lagos can take the lead in sorting and recycling     Nigeria, like many other Sub-Saharan Africa countries, has a waste management problem. The Nigerian National Municipal Waste Management Policy (2020) gives no estimate but states that “Nigeria produces a large volume of solid waste out of which less than 20% is collected through a formal system”.This is lower than the World Bank’s estimate of average waste collection for Sub-Saharan countries, which is 44 percent. It also contrasts with the European and North American collection rate – 90 percent of waste generated. Continued here

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Train Like an Astronaut to Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking     Practice in conditions that mirror the real event. Continued here

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Everything We Know About the Xbox Time-Travel RPG 'Clockwork Revolution'     The slate of games from Xbox’s growing list of first-party studios is shaping up to be a fascinating collection. During the 2023 Xbox Games Showcase we got a look at many upcoming titles for Xbox, but one of the standouts was the steampunk RPG Clockwork Revolution. The Bioshock Infinite look-a-like promises fans a fascinating world defined by player choice that affects past and present. As of yet, there is no official release date for Clockwork Revolution, nor a release window. As it was only announced during the 2023 Xbox Games Showcase in June, it is likely Clockwork Revolution won’t be released until 2024 at the earliest. Continued here

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A Crypto Micronation's Future Hangs on a Border Dispute     Late one morning in April, a boat called Liberty sailed down the Danube on a reconnaissance mission, toward a destination found on no map or atlas. It was decorated with the yellow livery of the Free Republic of Liberland—a tiny new country in the making on the border between Serbia and Croatia. As Liberty turned onto the river, at the rear of a small convoy, a Croatian police boat pulled out from among the waterside vegetation and began to follow.One way to think about Liberland—a portmanteau of "liberty" and "land"—is as an experiment in ultra-libertarianism. The project is the baby of Vít Jedlička, a Eurosceptic politician from the Czech Republic who believes modern democracies are burdened by overtaxation and overregulation. Continued here

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Why Republicans Keep Calling for the End of Birthright Citizenship     When my Google Alerts sounded this past week, I knew that birthright citizenship was again lighting up in the news. My interest in debates over birthright is professional and abiding: I’m a historian who in 2018 published a book, Birthright Citizens, that traced this approach to national belonging from its origins in debates among Black Americans at the start of the 19th century to 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment established that, with a few exceptions, anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, looking to advance his presidential campaign, promised to reverse more than a century and a half of law and policy and, as he put it in a statement, “end the idea that children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.” A few days later, a spokesperson for another GOP presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, said she “opposes birthright citizenship for those who enter the country illegally,” and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign said he would reform birthright by adding new citizenship requirements. Having lived through more than one such outburst in recent years—the first in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump proposed to do away with birthright—I know that any promise to transform our citizenship scheme is sure to set off a debate. Continued here

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The stabbing attack at the University of Waterloo underscores the dangers of polarizing rhetoric about gender     In the wake of the recent stabbing attack on a University of Waterloo professor and two students in a philosophy of gender course, we need to talk about the profound power words have to shape our world. In her book, Call Them By Their True Names, journalist and author Rebecca Solnit argues that we are presently in a crisis of language where words have lost their meaning in a sea of misinformation and inflamed debates. Her response is that we all must be careful and precise with the words we use in order to “oppose the disintegration of meaning.” Continued here

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28 Questions to Ask Your Boss in Your One-on-Ones     Good one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports address the practical and personal needs of the employee, benefitting their performance, growth, and well-being, as well as the success of their team and the broader organization. However, since managers are typically the ones who run these meetings, the employee’s needs are often forgotten. Then it’s up to the employee to ask questions to get the attention they need. The authors’ research points to twenty-eight questions that can drive the best conversations.When she started a new role, Brianna was told she would be having regular one-on-one meetings (1:1s) with her manager, Jayden. She welcomed this news; she saw it as a great opportunity to get aligned with and supported and mentored by her new boss. But her hopes were quickly dashed. In their initial meeting, Jayden focused only on project updates and then assigned her a few additional tasks. This pattern continued over the weeks and Brianna routinely left their meetings feeling both micro-managed and unsupported in her development. Continued here

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4 Easy Breathing Exercises That Are Scientifically Proven to Calm Anxiety, Fight Stress, and Help You Focus     60 seconds is all you'll need. Continued here

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17 Toxic Phrases Emotionally Intelligent People Notice Before Anyone Else, and Why     The key: build a deep, multidimensional understanding of how people use language to inspire particular emotions. Continued here

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Lab-Grown Chicken Meat Was Just Approved By the FDA, But It Uses This Decades-Old Technique     In drug development, growing cells in culture is usually the first step before potential drug candidates can be tested in animals.You might be old enough to remember the famous “Where’s the Beef?” Wendy’s commercials. This question may be asked in a different context since U.S. regulators approved the sale of lab-grown chicken meat made from cultivated cells in June 2023. Continued here

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How to Give (and Receive) Critical Feedback     New leaders often procrastinate difficult discussions at the expense of themselves and their teams. At the root of this feeling is usually a lack of experience and practice — both of which can be gained with intention and time. Here are two especially “spicy” conversations that all new managers face, and how to navigate them now and in the future: Continued here

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The Never-Ending Debate Over Who Deserves to Be Rescued     The Titan disaster raised a perennial question: How much should the government protect people who put themselves in harm’s way?In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey came barreling toward Texas, Patrick Rios, the mayor of a coastal community called Rockport, had a morbid message for residents who might consider ignoring an evacuation order. “We’re suggesting if people are going to stay here, mark their arm with a Sharpie marker with their name and Social Security number,” Rios warned would-be holdouts. No first responders’ lives would be risked to help them, and should they die, the marking would help identify them. Continued here

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Cyberstalkers Win First Amendment Victory in the US Supreme Court     Amid exploding AI usage, the United States Senate is mulling legislation to regulate the development of artificial intelligence, but lawmakers' comments to WIRED this week indicate that Congress' abysmal track record on tech regulation may be doomed to repeat itself. Meanwhile, in the European Union, challenges filed under the EU's GDPR data law on Thursday allege that Pornhub has been collecting user data illegally.We looked at a common air travel booking scam that can turn real—but not ticketed—flight reservations into cash grabs for cybercriminals. And tech companies have recently released an array of critical software updates that you should install on your devices right now. Some patches published in recent weeks from the company Progress Software patch flaws in the popular file transfer service MOVEit, which has been exploited by ransomware actors to spread malware and steal data from international companies, universities, and the US government. Continued here

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Photos of the Week:     Artistic swimming in El Salvador, smoke-filled skies over Chicago, a fashion show in Versailles, an Eid al-Adha festival in India, a military rebellion in Russia, angry protests in France, a collapsed rail bridge in Montana, a Pride festival in the Philippines, and much more A couple watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean in Bal Harbour, Florida, on June 28, 2023. # Continued here

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America!: A24 Acquires the Rights to a New Film About July 4th at Mar-a-Lago     Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices Continued here

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How to Keep Muscles Strong as You Age     Here’s why older adults naturally lose muscle mass over time and how regular physical activity and resistance training can helpAlmost everyone shrinks with old age. Many older adults have more difficulty gaining muscle than they did in their childhood and teenage years. And when it comes to maintaining that muscle, the phrase “use it or lose it” holds weight, says Michelle Gray, a physiologist and professor of exercise at the University of Arkansas. Continued here

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How Long Will Canada Burn?     The smoke is back. Large swaths of America are once again engulfed in a toxic haze that’s drifted down from Canada, which is experiencing its worst fire season on record. Our northern neighbor has burned through a record-breaking 8.2 million hectares so far this year, sending smoke plumes as far as Europe. And, despite the best efforts of hundreds of firefighting personnel who have come from all over the world to pitch in, the fires don’t look like they will be winding down anytime soon.The problem is, Canada is not trying to put out just one fire. Right now, a map from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre shows a country spotted red with blazes, like it’s come down with a nasty case of chicken pox. Remarkably, these fires aren’t clustered in a single region: Their spread is the northern equivalent of New York and California burning at the same time, with additional fires stretched in between. According to the CIFFC, more than 509 fires are active in Canada, 253 of which are classified as “out of control.” Continued here

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When Domestic Life Is Like a Horror Story     Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more. It is a 26-year-old novel very much grounded in middle-class Tokyo, and yet it manages to feel both universal and of the moment, perhaps because of its workaday concerns: the seduction and despair of consumerism and housework. Mild Vertigo, though, gets its potent immediacy not from its subject matter, per se, but from Kanai’s astonishing ability to write a domestic horror story that somehow doubles as a surprising glorification of domestic life. Continued here

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Astronomers Find a Supermassive Black Hole That Pits Stars Against Each Other     If you’re an evil genius supervillain looking to freak out your enemy with a big messy space kablooie, here’s a novel way to do it.If you’re an evil genius supervillain looking to freak out your enemy with a big messy space kablooie, here’s a novel way to do it. Smack a couple of ancient star remnants together right in front of your nemesis. The result will give you a gratifyingly huge, bright explosion plus a bonus gamma-ray burst visible across the Universe. And, it’ll scare everybody into doing your evil bidding. Continued here

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Using AI to Adjust Your Marketing and Sales in a Volatile World     Why are some firms better and faster than others at adapting their use of customer data to respond to changing or uncertain marketing conditions? A common thread across faster-acting firms is the use of AI models to predict outcomes at various stages of the customer journey. These firms are using AI to predict which customers are likely to churn, while their competitors react after the customers have already left. And when their predictions go off track because of external changes or market conditions, they use that feedback to quickly reorient and redirect their marketing and sales efforts. Using AI models to predict customer response has translated, in effect, to designing and running a large number of digital experiments that helped these firms respond to market changes faster than firms not using those tools. And while AI tools are far from infallible, they could reshape how we make decisions in functions such as marketing and sales and maintain a competitive advantage. Continued here

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Fox and Bear: A Tender Modern Fable About Reversing the Anthropocene, Illustrated in Cut-Cardboard Dioramas     Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” And yet, both as a species and as individuals in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic culture, we are living under the tyranny of more — a civilizational cult we call progress. We have forgotten who we would be, and what our world would look like, if instead we lived under the benediction of enough. How we got here, and what we might do about it, is what photographer, writer, illustrator, and wilderness guide Miriam Körner explores in Fox and Bear (public library) — a love letter to nature disguised as a modern fable of ecological grief and hope, partway between The Iron Giant and The Forest, yet entirely and consummately original, painstakingly illustrated in cut-out dioramas from reused and recycled cardboard, narrated with poetic tenderness and a passion for possibility. Continued here

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Creating Psychological Safety for Black Women at Your Company     Feelings of inclusion, connection, and trust with colleagues and managers are harder to come by for Black women due to the historical and sociocultural context of the U.S. workplace, and more broadly, our country. Research has shown that diverse teams need a foundation of psychological safety — the belief that everyone can pitch risky ideas and challenge the status quo without retaliation or judgment — to excel in the workplace. Additional research, as well as the authors’ professional experience as DEI strategy consultants and personal lived experience, shows that Black women require differentiated solutions to feel psychologically safe at both the interpersonal and organizational levels at work. They offer strategies for both individuals and organizations to do more to increase psychological safety for Black women. Continued here

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The Best Background-Noise TV     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.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 Most Clever, Best-Looking Things for Your Backyard Under $35 on Amazon     Looking for ways to upgrade your backyard without breaking the bank? Like a well-placed patio umbrella, I've got you covered. From clever gadgets to stylish decor, there are plenty of amazing options that will transform your outdoor space into an oasis of comfort and style without sending you into economic ruin. And the best part? Everything on this list is under $35, so you can create the stunning backyard of your dreams on a budget. Whether you're hosting a barbecue, enjoying a relaxing afternoon, or spending quality time with family and friends, these clever, stylish, and downright useful products will make your backyard the envy of the neighborhood. With a bit of creativity and these affordable finds, you can create a backyard haven that's both beautiful and practical. Continued here

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Great White Sharks Are Surging off Cape Cod     Cape Cod has quickly become one of the largest white shark hotspots in the world and the first ever in the North AtlanticThey’re here. Once rare in this area, great white sharks—hundreds of them—are hunting in the shallow waters along the beaches of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The upsurge over the past decade has caught just about everyone by surprise, including marine scientists. Renowned shark expert Greg Skomal, who has studied white sharks off the coast of New England since the early 1980s, says he didn’t encounter one anywhere near Cape Cod until 2004 and didn’t tag his first one there until 2009. Continued here