How to Apologize Like a Pro

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How to Apologize Like a Pro     Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.And so apologized William Carlos Williams, presumably to his wife, Flossie, in his 1934 poem “This Is Just to Say.” My own apologies tend to be somewhat less elegant, and certainly less worthy of publication. In my defense, however, I don’t directly repurpose my apologies as content for The Atlantic, explaining to my wife before a large audience that although I have been an insensitive jerk for the millionth time, it was totally worth it. Continued here

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Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don't store data safely, lawsuit says     Amid ongoing pressure to address claims that its SanDisk Extreme SSDs are still erasing data and becoming unmountable despite a firmware fix, Western Digital is facing a lawsuit over its storage drives. A lawsuit filed on Wednesday accuses the company of knowingly selling defective SSDs. Continued here

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Microsoft AI suggests food bank as a "cannot miss" tourist spot in Canada     Late last week, MSN.com's Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the "cannot miss" attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft's AI model wrote, "Consider going into it on an empty stomach." Continued here

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Iron Window Bars Unearthed at a Roman Public Bath in Spain     The crisscrossing bars were likely part of the bath’s changing room, called the apodyteriumArchaeologists working at the site of an ancient Roman bath complex in Spain have uncovered a well-preserved set of crisscrossing iron bars that likely went over a window in a changing room. Continued here

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This is how your brain distinguishes reality from imagination | Psyche Ideas     is a staff writer at Psyche. Her science journalism has appeared in Vice, The New York Times and Wired, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.In 1910, the psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky asked volunteers what you’d think would be an easy question for them to answer: is what you’re seeing real or imaginary? In her research, she told people to imagine objects, such as an apple, while looking at a wall. Then, secretly, she used an early projector called a magic lantern to cast the same image. The participants had trouble distinguishing what they perceived with their eyes from what they imagined in their heads. Continued here

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Life Can't Get Much Hotter Than This     Anoles have always been happy in the heat. The svelte little lizards, a group some 400 species strong, thrive in the Americas’ warmest parts—from the balmy rainforests of South America up through the United States’ Sun Belt—where they spend their days basking on boulders and scurrying out to the sun-soaked tips of twigs, or even scampering over the blistering metal of exposed city pipes.And when local temperatures get even hotter, as they now so often do, anoles take those changes in stride. Beneath the shady canopies of Caribbean rainforests, Martha Muñoz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, and her students have found species that have rapidly evolved the ability to withstand temperatures verging on 110 degrees Fahrenheit; elsewhere, near the forest’s perimeter, the researchers have discovered species that have taught themselves to shelter beneath rocks until it’s cool enough to leave. On this fast-warming planet, animals have just three options: “Behave, adapt, or die,” Brian Cheng, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. So far, anoles are excelling at the first two. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Early Labor Day deals on laptops, smartphones, and more     The end of summer is just around the corner, and with the changing of the season comes the time for a refresh. Whether you need to upgrade your laptop or update your home storage and organization needs, our pre-Labor Day Dealmaster comes with plenty of discounts. From laptop savings on popular brands like Microsoft, Apple, Lenovo, Dell, and HP to deals on essential tools for around the home to sales on headphones and smartphones, there's a lot of tech to choose from. But if you're not interested in new tech for Labor Day, we also found deals on storage containers, kitchenware, and personal care products. Continued here

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What Do You Do When You Realize You're Ruining the Earth?     Lydia Kiesling’s new novel presents us with an individual who goes to great lengths to justify the harm she’s doing.“Thinking ecologically about global warming requires a kind of mental upgrade,” Timothy Morton, the environmental philosopher, has written, “to cope with something that is so big and so powerful that until now we had no real word for it.” In 2008, Morton tried to invent one: hyperobject. The term doesn’t necessarily connote a value judgment, that this enormous thing is good or bad, but simply that in its hugeness it is inescapable, like air. To wrap one’s mind around the idea of a hyperobject is to accept that we, humans, “can’t jump out of the universe.” And according to Morton, being able to acknowledge the scale of a phenomenon as all-encompassing as, say, climate change, to name it, might be the first step toward actually doing something about it. Continued here

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Fleur de courgette: The simple dish beloved in the South of France     No one knows for sure when or how locals in the South of France started eating fleurs de courgette (courgette flowers), but their simple philosophy endures: when life gives you courgettes, make stuffed courgette blossoms. Once an affordable, rural dish due to an abundance of produce, the trumpet-like bright yellow flowers have found their way onto tables at Michelin-star restaurants.Alain Llorca, chef and owner of his eponymous one-star restaurant, about 18km from Nice in La Colle-sur-Loup, is fond of the dish, which has become one of his signatures (see recipe below). Often stuffed with creamy ewe's milk cheese aged for months before being blended with ingredients like locally grown aubergine, basil and olives, he says that his stuffed courgette flowers "highlight other flavours from the South of France". Continued here

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How Two Great White Shark 'Buddies' Could Change Perceptions of the Species     A pair of great white sharks named Simon and Jekyll have been swimming together for more than 4,000 miles in recent monthsGreat white sharks are typically loners, swimming through the world’s vast oceans largely on their own, in search of prey and mates. That’s why scientists were so perplexed—and intrigued—when they noticed an odd pattern in tracking data from two sharks, named Simon and Jekyll. Continued here

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Fatigue Can Wreck You     As a medical term, fatigue seems suspiciously unspecific. Is it just the common tired we all feel, but extra? Is it more like a bad, long day? A state of mind? This lack of clarity made me assume that “fatigue” was a medical mystery and thus impossible for doctors to diagnose or treat. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, former Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong disabuses me of that idea. I was surprised to learn the medical establishment actually knows quite a bit about the mechanisms of fatigue. What often gets in the way of understanding or treating it can be based more in bias than in an absence of knowledge.As ambitious Americans, we tend to attach value to productivity. Good capitalists that we are, we can’t help ourselves. This bias forces a lot of sufferers of fatigue to hide their symptoms, or fall prey to bad medical advice that tells them to exercise or grind their way through their symptoms. As the number of people with long COVID increases, understanding fatigue, a symptom of the chronic illness, is more crucial than ever. The pandemic was a shared experience. The aftermath is lonely. Yong’s reporting aims to make it less so. Continued here

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NASA's buildings are even older than its graying workforce     It's big news when a hurricane damages buildings at NASA's Kennedy Space Center or hits a rocket factory in New Orleans. There's damage that needs repairing immediately so missions can move forward to launch. Continued here

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Can coffee or a nap make up for sleep deprivation?     There is no denying the importance of sleep. Everyone feels better after a good night of sleep, and lack of sleep can have profoundly negative effects on both the body and the brain. So what can be done to substitute for a lack of sleep? Put another way, how can you get less sleep and still perform at your peak? Continued here

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Why is the letter "X" so fascinating and mysterious?     Even though x is one of the least-used letters in the English alphabet, it appears throughout American culture – from Stan Lee’s X-Men superheroes to The X-Files TV series. The letter x often symbolizes something unknown, with an air of mystery that can be appealing – just look at Elon Musk with SpaceX, Tesla’s Model X, and now X as a new name for Twitter.You might be most familiar with x from math class. Many algebra problems use x as a variable, to stand in for an unknown quantity. But why is x the letter chosen for this role? When and where did this convention begin? Continued here

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Terror, Tenderness, and the Paradoxes of Human Nature: How a Marmoset Saved Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Lives from the Nazis     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.The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing that “no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human.” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry experienced it first-hand when a smile and a cigarette exchanged with an enemy saved his life while captive as a prisoner of war.In the spring of 1935, traveling through Nazi-occupied Europe, Virginia Woolf and her Jewish husband Leonard came face to face with this haunting paradox of human nature — an experience both sinister and strangely hopeful. Continued here

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'And Just Like That' Finds Its Missing Ingredient     Despite its ludicrous storylines, And Just Like That manages to get something right about modern parenting.And Just Like That, like no other show in our admittedly depleted television universe right now, is simultaneously a riot, a rout, and an utterly chaotic melange of small-scale storytelling and high—but-literally-am-I-high—fashion. Every episode contains at least three scenes to which there is nothing to say but “What?!?” Five weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a humor piece that imagined ludicrously banal storylines the show could tackle next; since then, two have basically happened. Last week, Miranda and Charlotte went to Chipotle, where they were confused by the fast-casual chain’s ordering system. Carrie might have a cat now? Che, a comedian who used to have a hit podcast and a sizable-enough following to get them a sitcom pilot and a Cameo presence, is doing overtime at a vet’s office again, because apparently the only two financial brackets in this world are Hudson Yards–rich and shift work. Continued here

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Mars keeps spinning faster every year, NASA InSight data says     To say Mars is a bizarre planet might be something of an understatement. It has nearly no atmosphere, has an unstable liquid metal core that causes it to wobble on its axis constantly, and as a frozen desert, is an oxymoron in itself. As if Mars wasn’t strange enough, data from NASA’s InSight Lander (RIP) has now revealed that the red planet is spinning faster and faster every year. Continued here

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Scientists Recreated a Pink Floyd Song From Listeners' Brain Waves     Electrodes collected brain signals while people listened to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” then computers produced a garbled but recognizable trackA computer model has reconstructed a snippet of a Pink Floyd song by reading the brain activity of people listening to the tune. Continued here

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Our irrational fear of risk is holding back life-saving medical research     Until now, Institutional Research Boards (IRBs) have seen experimental risk as the enemy, and research that posed a measurable risk has been considered presumptively unethical. This needs to change, since risk should be seen as something to be considered with care and managed wisely, not rejected out of hand. When IRBs permit informed subjects to accept a measure of risk, it is not only good for science, it respects potential subjects’ autonomy. Challenge testing for COVID vaccines is a good example of hazardous research that might be worth approving. Most vaccines are tested by taking a large number of subjects, giving the vaccine to half and a placebo to the other half, and waiting for people to get infected. Since the number of people infected is relatively small, vaccine trials are slow. Novavax, for instance, was proud to announce the efficacy of its COVID vaccine in July 2021, with 63 cases of infection in the placebo group and only 14 in those who received the vaccine (none severe). To obtain this result, Novavax enrolled 30,000 people.  Continued here

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End of the road: The Xbox 360 game marketplace will shut down     The digital storefront for purchasing games and other media on the Xbox 360 game console will be shut down next summer, just a bit shy of 20 years after the console's debut. Continued here

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Meet the Innovative Winners of This Year's National Design Awards     On Tuesday, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum announced the recipients of the 2023 National Design Awards. Now in their 24th year, the awards recognize innovation in areas ranging from landscaping to graphic design.The winner in the architecture category is nARCHITECTS, a studio with a mission to create “architecture for the public good.” Continued here

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Why Republicans Would Welcome a Biden Challenger     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.Some Democrats, echoing GOP narratives about Joe Biden’s age, are invested in the idea of challenging the president’s renomination. But how would that actually work? Continued here

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Swifties Can Now Study Literature (Taylor's Version)     At a Belgian university, Taylor Swift fans can expect intertextual analysis beyond their wildest dreamsLectures on “Love Story.” Papers on “Paper Rings.” This fall, a professor at Belgium’s Ghent University will ask fellow Swifties: Are you ready for it? Continued here

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The Future of Recycling Is Sorty McSortface     It’s really hard to sort all the junk that gets thrown in recycling bins. Do tech startups have the answer?At the Boulder County Recycling Center in Colorado, two team members spend all day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in junk collected from the area’s bins. One plucks out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be reprocessed, while the other searches for contaminants in the stream of paper products headed to a fiber mill. They are Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot, AI-powered robots that each resemble a supercharged mechanical arm from an arcade claw machine. Developed by the tech start-up Amp Robotics, McSortface and Sorts-a-Lot’s appendages dart down with the speed of long-beaked cranes picking fish out of the water, suctioning up items they’ve been trained to recognize. Continued here

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Heavy, highly magnetic star may be first magnetar precursor we've seen     Magnetars are some of the most extreme objects we know about, with magnetic fields so strong that chemistry becomes impossible in their vicinity. They're neutron stars with a superfluid interior that includes charged particles, so it's easy to understand how a magnetic dynamo is maintained to support that magnetic field. But it's a little harder to fully understand what starts the dynamo off in the first place. Continued here

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Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment     The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby's auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs "an air of legitimacy... to generate investors' interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand," the class-action lawsuit claims. Continued here

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Trick Yourself into Breaking a Bad Habit     Let’s face it — we all have a career-limiting habit. Whether it’s weak interpersonal skills, a tendency to procrastinate, or good-but-not-great technical prowess, one of the biggest impediments to our upward mobility is a habit we struggle to change. Continued here

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Generative AI Will Change Your Business. Here's How to Adapt.     Generative AI can “generate” text, speech, images, music, video, and especially, code. When that capability is joined with a feed of someone’s own information, used to tailor the when, what, and how of an interaction, then the ease by which someone can get things done, and the broadening accessibility of software, goes up dramatically. The simple input question box that stands at the center of Google and now, of most Generative AI systems, such as in ChatGPT and Dall-e, will power more systems. Continued here

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Michigan pipeline standoff could affect water protection and Indigenous rights across the US     Should states and Indigenous nations be able to influence energy projects they view as harmful or contrary to their laws and values? This question lies at the center of a heated debate over Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 pipeline, which carries oil and natural gas across Wisconsin and Michigan. Courts, regulatory agencies and political leaders are deciding whether Enbridge should be allowed to keep its pipeline in place for another 99 years, with upgrades. The state of Michigan and the Bad River Tribe in Wisconsin want to close the pipeline down immediately. Continued here

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Eight of the world's most stunning floating homes     There is something rebellious and individualistic about swapping a life lived within bricks and mortar for a simpler, less conventional existence on a houseboat. Boat-dwellers feel a sense of adventure and, if based in a remote, rural spot, are totally at one with nature.The cover of a new book, Making Waves: Floating Homes and Life on the Water by Portland Mitchell, captures the freedom many associate with water-borne homes. Viewed through a porthole, two swans glide by on a glassy lake. In the foreground is a less distinct glimpse of a houseboat interior. Boat-dwelling isn't always plain sailing, however. After all, houseboats are often buffeted by the elements, while truly remote ones can be completely off-grid, which can take getting used to. Continued here