The Debate Over What Happens Next in the Middle East

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The Debate Over What Happens Next in the Middle East     Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.In the 2024 election, candidates will debate U.S. foreign policy toward China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran, Mexico, and beyond. What foreign-policy matters are most important to you and why? Continued here

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Don't Cry for Jim Harbaugh     After Michigan’s impressive 24–15 win over Penn State last weekend, the offensive coordinator, Sherrone Moore, broke down in tears as he professed his loyalty to the head coach, Jim Harbaugh, who could not be present at the game. “I fucking love you, man,” he said in a live TV interview, choking back emotion. “I love the shit out of you, man. We did this for you.”Moore laid it on so thick, you would have thought Harbaugh was absent because of a life-threatening illness. In fact, he was serving a suspension for letting a significant alleged cheating scandal unfold right under his nose—or worse. The NCAA is investigating claims that the former Michigan staffer Connor Stalions concocted a scheme to surveil and sometimes film opposing coaches’ signals, in violation of NCAA rules. Last week, while the NCAA investigation was ongoing, the Big Ten, Michigan’s athletic conference, imposed a punishment of its own, suspending Harbaugh for three games. Continued here

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The U.S. Government UFO Cover-Up Is Real--But It's Not What You Think     Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings.There aren’t many secrets that John Brennan doesn’t know. He spent 25 years in the CIA, became the White House homeland-security adviser, and then returned to the CIA as its director. If a question interested him, he could’ve commanded legions of analysts, officers, surveillance networks, and tools to find the answer. Yet in a December 2020 interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he was flummoxed by the wave of recent reporting about UFOs: “Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” Continued here

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Hospitals Have Gotten Too Nice     Medical centers are offering fancy food and rebranding health as a “journey.” How about helping us feel better instead?The last time I stepped on a plane for vacation, for fun, was more than three years ago. I haven’t been able to visit California, whose coast I adore. Nor Rome, where my husband and I lived for some time. Continued here

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The Daily Responsibility of Democracy     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.Much of America’s politics has descended into ignorant, juvenile stunts that distract us from the existential danger facing democracy. Citizens must take up the burden of being the adults in the room. Continued here

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Revisiting Hidden Pasts at the National Book Awards     The National Book Awards, a glitzy affair otherwise known as the Oscars for book nerds, took place on Wednesday night. One overwhelming motif pulsed through nearly all of the winning books: the will of marginalized people to have their suppressed stories heard and acknowledged. The winner in the nonfiction category was Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America, a radical retelling of history from a Native American perspective. Craig Santos Perez, an Indigenous Chamorro writer from Guam, won the poetry prize for his collection from unincorporated territory [åmot]. At the end of his acceptance speech, he read a poem, “The Pacific Written Tradition,” about wanting young Indigenous people from his island to understand all the ways their history had actually been preserved despite not being taught in school: “Our ancestors tattooed their skin with defiant / scripts of intricately inked genealogy, stories / of plumage and pain.” The translated-literature prize went to Stênio Gardel, a Brazilian writer, for his novel, The Words That Remain, about an elderly gay man, illiterate for most of his life and from an impoverished area of Brazil, who finally learns to read and can piece together the story of his own youthful, illicit love affair. But the book that best demonstrated the night’s strong preference for works that deal with stifled or erased histories was Justin Torres’s Blackouts, which won the fiction award. Tope Folarin’s essay on the novel, published this week in The Atlantic, homes in on this theme.Torres’s book is a complex, multilayered work that, Folarin writes, “incorporates photographs, scripts, and other literary fragments to reclaim history.” Its plot is not so easy to convey, but at its center is a real book, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, a 1941 study that predated the Kinsey Reports by several years. Sex Variants included 80 case studies of gay and lesbian people; it presented their sexual lives as aberrant while, at the same time and in spite of itself, making their world more legible to outsiders. In Blackouts, the narrator comes into possession of a redacted copy of the report, and he spends the course of the novel trying to make sense of the text that remains—“little poems of illumination,” one character calls them—while slowly working to salvage the lines that were omitted. Continued here

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How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions     For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually do and how they create value. To pull the curtain back, Paul Gompers of Harvard Business School, Will Gornall of the Sauder School of Business, Steven N. Kaplan of the Chicago Booth School of Business, and Ilya A. Strebulaev of Stanford Business School conducted what is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of VC firms to date. In this article, they share their findings, offering details on how VCs hunt for deals, assess and winnow down opportunities, add value to portfolio companies, structure agreements with founders, and operate their own firms. These insights into VC practices can be helpful to entrepreneurs trying to raise capital, corporate investment arms that want to emulate VCs’ success, and policy makers who seek to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in their communities. Continued here

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The New Science of Customer Emotions     When a company connects with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 “emotional motivators” and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors. They describe how firms can identify and leverage the particular motivators that will maximize their competitive advantage and growth. The process can be divided into three phases. First, companies should inventory their existing market research and customer insight data, looking for qualitative descriptions of what motivates their customers—desires for freedom, security, success, and so on. Further research can add to their understanding of those motivators. Second, companies should analyze their best customers to learn which of the motivators just identified are specific or more important to the high-value group. They should then find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with their brand. This provides a guide to the emotions they need to connect with in order to grow their most valuable customer segment. Third, companies need to make the organization’s commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth—not just in the marketing department but across every function in the firm. Continued here

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Bundle Up:     Peak camping demand and advances in camping gear create expansion opportunities for camping properties willing to brave the cold. Continued here

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How to Avoid Email Bounces in Your Email Campaigns     Use this simple technique to avoid bounce-backs and land your newsletters and campaigns in your customers' inboxes. Continued here

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5 Transgender Entrepreneurs of Color You Should Know     In honor of Transgender Awareness Week, take a look at how these trailblazing transgender entrepreneurs of color do business. Continued here

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Small Businesses Brace to Battle Giant Retailers This Thanksgiving     Shop owners and online retailers are fighting even harder against industry goliaths for sales from price conscious shoppers. Continued here

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The Stakes for Returning to the Office Just Got Higher     Amazon is warning employees they may not get promoted if they don't work on site. Continued here

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How a Dorm Room Side Hustle Became a Three-Time Inc. 5000 Company     The CoinFlip team turned their network of cryptocurrency ATMs into a fast-growth business. Continued here

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Sam's Out: OpenAI Co-Founder Sam Altman Fired as CEO     Following the shocking announcement, chief technology officer Mira Murati was named as interim CEO . Continued here

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Step Right Up: How to Compete in the A.I. Biomedical Race     The new OpenChallenges hub includes a slew of health care contests open to all tech innovators. Continued here

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Is Starting an A.I. Company Worth the Risk Right Now?     With an uncertain funding landscape and potential legal curbs on the horizon, it may be a risky bet. Continued here

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Starbucks Strike Tries to Move the Needle for Workers     The limited walkout in a select number of locations won't likely yield a union contract, but the company has boosted pay and improved work conditions. Continued here

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Research: How Women Improve Decision-Making on Boards     This article reports on a study of women and men directors at more than 200 publicly traded companies on the major stock exchanges in the U.S. and Europe. The results provide key insights on how the presence of women influences boards. First, it turns out that women directors come to board meetings well-prepared and concerned with accountability. Second, women are not shy about acknowledging when they don’t know something, are more willing to ask in-depth questions, and seek to get things on the table. As a result, the presence of women improves the quality of discussion. Continued here

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Leaders, Make Curiosity the Core of Your Organizational Culture     Great corporate cultures are not just good for performance, but for the flourishing and engagement of the people who work in them and to deliver greater meaning and purpose. But oft overlooked is the central role that curiosity plays in crafting an organizational culture. To unlock the potential of their institutions and the people within them, great leaders need to demonstrate consistent curiosity in four key areas. First, they must be curious about the values and motivations of their employees in shaping and maintaining a corporate culture. Second, curiosity must be extended to customers to find out not just about your products and services but about “why” your customers love your organization. Third, leaders must reflect with open-mindedness and curiosity on their own roles, especially as they change. Finally, leaders must stay curious about the changing nature of their companies and contexts over time, and adjust their cultures accordingly. Continued here

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Use GenAI to Uncover New Insights into Your Competitors     Companies have a growing problem of information overload regarding markets and competitors, which often prevents the C-suite from making the best decisions available given the data at its disposal. While generative AI is often pitched as a way to create new content (information in, message out), it can work just as well — or depending on the application, even better — in reverse (message in, information out). And this counterintuitive application of generative AI is starting to enable leaders in marketing, strategy, and competitive intelligence to unearth strategically relevant insights about their competitors from documents made publicly available by those competitors. In other words, generative AI can become the watchful eye that spots useful insights in the field of competitive intelligence. Continued here

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Is Your Hospitality Business Ready for a Robot?     As more businesses in the hospitality industry consider robots as a solution to a thinned frontline service workforce, owners and operators must recognize that their investment in a service robot extends beyond the hardware and software. It may require targeted training, small architectural and design improvements to the physical space, an assessment of organizational and managerial readiness, or all of the above. Service robots can help elevate customer service if their purpose is clear, if their physical environment is conducive, and if leadership actively supports staff during the adoption process. Continued here

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Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake     Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel. Continued here

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Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language     The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups. Continued here

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Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?     The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.   Continued here

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Time: The Ultimate Guide     Stories about Time: The Ultimate Guide Continued here

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How did time begin, and how will it end?     One of the pleasures of a show like Doctor Who that features near-unlimited time travel is that it can go anywhere and anywhen. That includes going to cosmic extremes.On multiple occasions the Doctor has gone billions of years into the future, to the end of the Universe. The Tenth Doctor went to the Universe's dying days in the episode Utopia, and the Twelfth Doctor went there in Season Eight's Listen and Season Nine's Hell Bent. Continued here

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Just One U.S. Reservation Hosts Nuclear Weapons. This Is The Story of How That Came to Be     15 nuclear missiles deployed in underground concrete silos across the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. It took displacement and flood to get them there.This podcast is Part 2 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal. Continued here

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Is the Lottery Ever a Good Bet?     Here’s a thought challenge for you: Let’s say I have chosen a particular second in time from the past nine years. Between November of 2014 and today, I am thinking of a specific (and totally random) year, month, day, hour, minute and second. Could you guess it? No chance? You have a better chance of guessing a specific second from a nine-year span than you have of winning the Powerball. Last month’s Powerball made headlines for topping a colossal $1.7 billion jackpot, the second largest in the game’s history (the winner hadn’t claimed their prize). Everybody knows that your chances of winning the lottery are slimmer than slim. But when rollover jackpots accumulate to record-size prizes, could the potential massive payout ever offset the rarity of winning? In other words, is the lottery ever a good bet?  The answer might surprise you, when even a good bet might turn out to be a bad idea, mathematically. Continued here

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Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You've Never Heard Of     For decades a Titan missile—sans top, which fell off—stood in a town park in Kimball, Neb. The missile was removed in September 2023 after it was deemed a safety hazard.This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal. Continued here

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'Olfactory Training' during Sleep Could Help Your Memory     Smell is probably our most underappreciated sense. “If you ask people which sense they would be most willing to give up, it would be the olfactory system,” says Michael Leon, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine. But a loss of smell has been linked to health complications such as depression and cognitive decline. And mounting evidence shows that olfactory training, which involves deliberately smelling strong scents on a regular basis, may help stave off that decline. Now a team of researchers led by Leon has successfully boosted cognitive performance by exposing people to smells while they sleep. Twenty participants—all older than 60 years and generally healthy—received six months of overnight olfactory enrichment, and all significantly improved their ability to recall lists of words compared with a control group. The study appeared in Frontiers in Neuroscience.The scientists are unsure about how the overnight odors may have produced this result, but Leon notes that the neurons involved in olfaction have “direct superhighway access” to brain regions related to memory and emotion. In participants who received the treatment, the study authors observed physical changes in a brain structure that connects the memory and emotional centers—a pathway that often deteriorates as people age, especially in those with Alzheimer's disease. Continued here

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The Pandemic Disrupted Adolescent Brain Development     Early research presented at the leading brain conference suggests that the pandemic changed the brains of teenagersBefore COVID, American teenagers’ psychological health was already in decline. The pandemic, with its sudden lockdowns, school closures and other jolts to normal life, made that downward slope steeper. The ensuing mental health crisis has given researchers a rare opportunity to gauge how an extraordinary event such as a public health catastrophe can physically affect the brains of teenagers. Continued here

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Transgender People's Neurological Needs Are Being Overlooked     Migraine, stroke and epilepsy disproportionately affect members of the transgender community—but neurologists are often unprepared to respondAs a transgender neurologist, I advocate for the improved health care of other transgender people. I present my research findings to professional organizations and medical colleges throughout the U.S. While doing so, the most frequent criticism I receive from neurologists is: “What does being transgender have to do with neurology, the branch of medicine focused on the nervous system?” Continued here

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Weight-Loss Drug Wegovy Slashes Risk of Death in Some People with Heart Disease     The active ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic reduced the risk of heart attacks and strokes in a large trial of people with cardiovascular disease who were considered overweight or had obesity, but the cost and side effects remain barriersThe drug semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, is already known to treat diabetes, aid rapid weight loss, and possibly even curb drug and alcohol addictions. Now a new trial by the drug’s manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, has shown that it can collectively lower the risk of heart attack, stroke and death from cardiovascular disease by 20 percent. Continued here

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Net-Zero Emissions Would Save 32,000 Lives and $1 Trillion in the U.S. Alone     The U.S. will see “fewer emergency room visits, fewer asthma attacks” and will save money if it cuts carbon emissions, a new Union of Concerned Scientists analysis saysA person wearing a face mask takes photos of the skyline as smoke from wildfires in Canada cause hazy conditions in New York City on June 7, 2023. Continued here

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New Space Station Sensor Can Reveal Hidden Greenhouse Gas Polluters     An instrument mounted to the International Space Station was built to map dust in the atmosphere, but it’s also giving scientists a wealth of information about methane and carbon dioxide emissionsAn excavator at a landfill in New Delhi. Dumps, landfills and waste sites in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are huge emitters of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Continued here

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Superconductor Research Is in a 'Golden Age,' Despite Controversy     The search for room-temperature superconductors has suffered scandalous setbacks, but physicists are optimistic about the field’s futureA Nature retraction last week has put to rest the latest claim of room-temperature superconductivity — in which researchers said they had made a material that could conduct electricity without producing waste heat and without refrigeration. Continued here

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Alexa, Can You Do My Holiday Shopping? New Research Explores How Customers Use Technology to Shop     Wharton associate professor of marketing Pinar Yildirim joins the show to discuss her new research on brand loyalty and shopping with technology.©2023 Knowledge at Wharton. All rights reserved. Knowledge at Wharton is an affiliate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Continued here

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Julie Alvin, theSkimm's SVP of Content     Wharton’s Barbara Kahn and Dr. Americus Reed speak with Julie Alvin, theSkimm’s SVP of content, about the background of theSkimm, how they respond to their audience, and how they marry the ideas of sales and content.©2023 Knowledge at Wharton. All rights reserved. Knowledge at Wharton is an affiliate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Continued here

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The secret perks of driving electric     Electric vehicles need to be more than just eco-friendly — they have to be more chic, convenient and affordable than their gas-powered alternatives, says sustainability leader Cynthia Williams. She explores what it'll take for an electric revolution to succeed in the US, calling on corporations, policy leaders, investors and more to collaborate in unprecedented ways. Continued here