December 17, 2022 - Why Your Dog Might Think You're a Bonehead

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Why Your Dog Might Think You're a Bonehead Hopkin: Well, you’re in for a surprise. Because it’s actually your pooch who might be viewing you with a critical eye.  Hopkin: That’s according to a study that shows that dogs can assess human aptitude…and will look toward people who seem to know what they’re doing. The work appears in the journal Behavioral Processes. Continued here

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Fauci Responds to Musk's Twitter Attack and Rates World's COVID Response Public health leader Anthony Fauci advises early-career researchers “not to be deterred” by vitriol This month, Anthony Fauci will step down as director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after more than 38 years in the post and 54 years at its parent organization, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has led the institute under seven US presidents and overseen its research and response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa in 2014 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The 81-year-old physician-scientist became a household name during the pandemic, during which he was revered as a trusted source of advice by some and disparaged by others, including former US president Donald Trump, who saw his advice as inconsistent and overbearing. On 11 December, he was attacked on Twitter by Elon Musk, who took over the social-media platform in October. Fauci spoke to Nature about Musk’s comments, the pandemic and his own legacy. Continued here

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Cleaner Jet Fuel Is Poised for Takeoff Sustainable aviation fuel is poised for exponential growth thanks to increased investment and policy support, according to industry officials Production of cleaner jet fuel is showing signs of a boom in the United States and around the world, propelling what could be the best tool for reducing aviation emissions in the short term. Continued here

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Goat or motorcycle? Sound radically alters our visual perception In a well-known illusion called the McGurk effect, we see a person pronouncing the “word” ba over and over again. But if the lip movements change to correspond to another word, we hear something else, even though the sound emanating from the person’s lips has not changed. This illusion shows that visual information plays a large role in how we hear speech.  Research published in the journal Psychological Science now shows that sound has a big influence on what we see. Jamal Williams of the University of California-San Diego and his colleagues created a set of ambiguous images by combining the features of pairs of objects, such as a cat and kettle, an airplane and bird, or a goat and Vespa scooter. Continued here

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Miguel Goncalves: How millennials and Gen Z can invest in a better future Millennials and Gen Z will inherit 30 trillion dollars of wealth in the coming decades, and what they do with their money will have an incredible impact on the future of the planet, says impact investor Miguel Goncalves. He makes a case for ESG investing -- or putting money in funds that weigh environmental and social factors -- and proposes a societal shift towards a more sustainable and equitable future, led by a forward-thinking next generation. Continued here

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Why Am I So Obsessed with Giving People Gifts? In the fall of 2018, I spent the majority of December cooped up inside my apartment, hand-painting Bitmojis of my coworkers onto wine glasses. I baked them in the oven to ensure they would be dishwasher safe and wrapped them in glossy gold paper. A few days before people left for vacation, I snuck into the office around 6 am, and like an elf, I placed the gifts on their desks and waited. Continued here

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Can't Overcome a Bad Habit? Neuroscience Says This Simple Habit-Breaking Strategy Works Best Best of all, no willpower required. Continued here

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The next big bet for global streaming services: live sports In 2021, Viacom18, a media conglomerate jointly owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, spent an estimated $50 million to secure the digital rights to stream the FIFA World Cup in India on his service, JioCinema. But, on November 20, as the tournament’s first match started, the JioCinema app stumbled. The stream lagged and buffered, frustrating fans. Within hours, #JioCinema began trending on Twitter, with thousands of users tweeting about the platform’s choppy stream. JioCinema is just one of over a dozen streaming platforms around the world exploring and investing in streaming live sports. In Indonesia, local streamer Vidio outpaced Netflix in subscription growth in the second quarter of this year due, in part, to the platform acquiring streaming rights for the English Premier League. In Latin America, the relative newcomer Vix+, owned by television network TelevisaUnivision, has secured streaming rights in Mexico to football events like the 2022 FIFA World Cup, as part of a bid to pull subscribers from Disney+ and Netflix. In Japan, live TV service Abema broke its audience records this month thanks to its licensing rights for the FIFA World Cup. Continued here

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Research: What Effective Allies Do Differently Many people strive to be an ally to their historically marginalized colleagues. But too often, they also fear that their allyship efforts could expose their co-workers to backlash, could be unwelcome by the people they strive to support, or could fall into the social traps of “performativeness.” Instead of doing nothing as a result of these fears, research suggests that, by rooting allyship in their virtues, potential allies can better understand why they seek to support others — and to maintain this support over the long-term. Specifically, there are four stages to follow, comprised of nine key virtues. Continued here

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Storytelling Will Save the Earth Picture the world 4.4°C hotter than preindustrial levels by the end of this century. That was one of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report predictions for scenarios with either unabated emissions rise or immediate climate action. But unless you’ve pored over climate models and understand the intricacy of tipping points to a tee, it’s unlikely that you can visualize this outcome and truly imagine the severity of what’s to come.  Now picture Timothy, who lives with his grandchildren in Walande Island, a small dot of land off the east coast of South Malaita Island, part of the Solomon Islands. Since 2002, the 1,200 inhabitants of Walande have abandoned their homes and moved away from the island. Only one house remains: Timothy’s. When his former neighbors are asked about Timothy’s motives they shrug indifferently. “He’s stubborn,” one says. “He won’t listen to us,” says another. Every morning his four young grandchildren take the canoe to the mainland, where they go to school, while Timothy spends the day adding rocks to the wall around his house, trying to hold off the water for a bit longer. “If I move to the mainland, I can’t see anything through the trees. I won’t even see the water. I want to have this spot where I can look around me. Because I’m part of this place,” he says. His is a story that powerfully conveys the loneliness and loss that 1.1 degrees of anthropogenic warming is already causing.  Continued here

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Unraveling the Secrets of the Sarcophagi Found Beneath Notre-Dame Cathedral During restoration efforts at Notre-Dame Cathedral, which burned in a fire three years ago, archaeologists discovered two mysterious sarcophagi buried under the church’s nave. After months of research, they now know more about who was entombed in them. One contained the remains of a high priest who died in 1710. Archaeologists gleaned the man’s identity—Antoine de la Porte—from writing on his coffin, which also revealed that he was 83 when he died, per a statement from the National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) and Toulouse University Hospital. Continued here

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Argentina fans gamble on Messi with the team's official crypto token As Lionel Messi tore through opposition defenses during the World Cup in Qatar, Argentine heart rates weren’t the only thing fluctuating. Every goal, yellow card, and penalty also led to spikes and dips in the price of the $ARG, the Argentine Football Association’s (AFA) fan crypto token.  Created as the association’s official fan crypto token in June 2021, the value of the $ARG has rocketed from $2 to $6.42 since then. Over the course of the World Cup, the coin fluctuated in value based, apparently, on sentiment about the Argentine national team’s overall performance. With a market cap currently valued at over $24 million, coin holders not only risk losing to France in the World Cup final, but potentially some money as well. Continued here

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Here's How Robert Jordan Built 'The Wheel of Time' Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUH Slide: 1 / of 1.Caption: Massimo Ravera/Getty Images Continued here

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Ask Ethan: Do protons really contain charm quarks? At the start of the 20th century, we were still figuring out what the structure of matter was. We knew everything was made up of atoms, and that there were negatively charged electrons within them, but the rest of the atom was a mystery. Over the course of the past 120 years, we subsequently learned that there was a small, massive, positively charged nucleus anchoring every atom. That nucleus itself is composed of nucleons — protons and neutrons — with each one itself made up of quarks and gluons. Protons consist of two up and one down quark apiece, while neutrons are made of two down and one up quark. But there are four other fundamental types of quark: strange, charm, bottom, and top, with the latter three all heavier than the proton itself. How would it be possible, then, for such a particle to be found inside a proton? That’s what our Patreon supporter Aaron Weiss wants to know, asking: Continued here

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US lawmakers take aim at gaming's "harassment and extremism" problem That language comes from a letter that seven Democratic legislators plan to send later today, as reported by Axios yesterday evening. The lawmakers—including Reps. Lori Trahan (D-MA), Katie Porter (D-CA), and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—are asking for more information on how those reports are handled, what data is collected regarding them, and whether the companies have "safety measures pertaining to anti-harassment and anti-extremism." Continued here

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What Successful Memoirs Accomplish When she read Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, a book about Manguso’s lifelong diary that never quotes from that text itself, Leslie Jamison felt ashamed of her own desire for personal details, “guilty for wanting the more traditionally confessional narrative,” she writes. This guilt points to the way memoir, as a genre, is often regarded: as solipsistic unburdening on the part of the writer, and as naked voyeurism on the part of the reader. Even the adjective that Jamison uses, confessional, communicates this. We tend to imagine the memoirist as a naive spiller of information about their life, as in religious confession, rather than the intentional constructor of a narrative; notably, this attitude is most frequently applied to women who write about love, sex, and parenthood. In her collection Not One Day, Anne Garréta proves the limits of this stigma. She sets out to write, every day, about one woman she has desired or who has desired her, intending to “subject [herself] to the discipline of confessional writing.” By turning revelation into something that requires rigor and intentionality, and by giving herself narrow stipulations on what she will include, Garréta demonstrates the craft and restraint inherent to even seemingly raw personal writing. Continued here

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New York Bans Sale of Dogs, Cats and Rabbits in Pet Stores The state of New York passed a law Thursday prohibiting the sale of dogs, cats and rabbits in pet stores. The move is an attempt to halt the puppy-mill-to-pet-store pipeline and stop abusive breeders.  “Dogs, cats and rabbits across New York deserve loving homes and humane treatment,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul says in a statement. “I'm proud to sign this legislation, which will make meaningful steps to cut down on harsh treatment and protect the welfare of animals across the state.” Continued here

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The Good-Better-Best Approach to Pricing Companies often crimp profits by using discounts to attract price-sensitive customers and by failing to give high-end customers reasons to spend more. A multitiered offering can use a stripped-down product (the “Good” option) to attract new customers, the existing product (“Better”) to keep current customers happy, and a feature-laden premium version (“Best”) to increase spending by customers who want more. Continued here

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Fusion power is a scientific triumph, but not (yet) a commercial one. How do we make it so? On Dec. 5, an array of 192 powerful lasers fired on a pellet the size of a peppercorn. For a split second a miniature star came into being, and just as quickly, it was gone. The micro-star fused together some of the same ingredients found at the center of the Sun, and in the process, it generated more energy than the lasers put in. With that energy gain, researchers for the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved something that had never been accomplished. The champagne came out, a press conference was called, and the media told the story of a scientific milestone.  As is often the case, though, the media coverage was uneven. Some outlets described the accomplishment as a turning point in science, while others were more cautious. So what is the truth?  Continued here

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NASA Launches New Satellite to Study Earth’s Water Early Friday morning, the new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, beginning its journey toward a low-Earth orbit. From its perch, the satellite will measure water on more than 90 percent of Earth's surface. The data will help scientists better understand the role oceans play in climate change, the effect of global warming on bodies of water and how people can prepare for natural disasters, per a statement. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and ​​the French space agency Centre National d'Études Spatiales. Continued here

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The dark side of workplace recognition Relationships are vital to our well-being and a life well-lived. Multiple longitudinal studies have shown the central role human connection plays in our health, happiness, and resilience. That’s not just true of our partners, friends, and families either. Research conducted by Aaron Hurst, founder of Imperative, suggests that relationships are the key driver of fulfillment at work. One way we can build and reinforce those relationships is through recognition. Just imagine how uplifting it feels to have a partner appreciate your sense of humor or a supervisor offer praise for a job well done. And such thankfulness can be as pleasant to give as it is to receive. In fact, simply witnessing people express gratitude makes those people more appealing to be around. Continued here

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No One on Twitter Is Safe From Elon Musk Elon Musk’s commitment to near-absolute free speech has collapsed. When the entrepreneur launched his takeover bid for Twitter earlier this year, he said the platform should permit all legal speech. His shift away from that stance began this month when he blocked a tweet featuring a swastika from rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. This week, he amped up his efforts and suspended more than 25 Twitter accounts posting public flight data, including that for his own private jet. And yesterday, several journalists who had reported on that purge were kicked off Twitter too, alongside the account of one of Twitter’s most notable competitors, Mastodon.  Twitter’s moderation is seemingly guided less by set rules and more by what its owner wants at any moment. While Musk argues he’s protecting people from being doxed, this week he censored accounts freely—not for illegal speech, but because they offended him. Continued here

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The Best Umbrellas to Help You Ride Out the Rain If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED It always seems to rain when you least expect it. That's when I'd usually hit a corner store here in New York City to grab a cheap $20 umbrella. A few months later, I'd bring out the same umbrella and it would already have small rips on the canopy or the stretchers would break and make a floppy mess in the wind. Rinse and repeat. Continued here

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Work Speak: The Right Way to Network Networking used to make me cringe. It felt dirty and didn’t come naturally to me. I would enter a networking event and find a seat in the very last row, preferably the corner with the least amount of light. I would much rather spend lunch breaks cleaning up my inbox than meeting new people. I joined virtual group meetings a minute late so I didn’t have to indulge in small talk. Continued here

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From 'Iron Man' to 'When Harry Met Sally,' These Are the 25 New Additions to the National Film Registry Every year, the Library of Congress selects 25 films of "cultural, historic or aesthetic importance" Iron Man (2008), The Little Mermaid (1989) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) are among the 25 movies the Library of Congress inducted into its National Film Registry this year, the library announced in a statement on Wednesday. Continued here

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What a Famous Writer’s Early Work Can Teach Us About Failure Reading the early works of established, revered writers always reminds me of looking at a baby’s face: how it seems impossible to know the ways that visage will sharpen and emerge, how mushy it is, sometimes indistinguishable from others—but also, when looking back at photos once the baby is grown, how difficult it is to imagine that face turning into anything other than what it has become. The French novelist Marguerite Duras’s second book, The Easy Life, which has just been translated into English for the first time by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, might not be much of a draw by itself. The thrill of reading it comes from seeing all of the ways Duras was already the writer she would spend the next 50 years becoming, from recognizing how the interests she cultivated throughout her career were already in progress. Continued here

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Trump's Twitter Ban Was Unfair, but Not for the Reason You Think In January 2021, after former US president Donald Trump tweeted in support of an insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. But across the world, leaders have tweeted in support of genocide and threatened violence, yet none of them have been banned from the platform. Less than six months later, in June 2021, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari posted a tweet threatening violence against Biafran separatist groups in the country's southwest. Buhari's tweet was removed, but his account remained live. Almost two years after Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, Elon Musk has released a series of documents—dubbed the Twitter Files—arguing that the site got it wrong. The leaked documents show the way the platform made decisions before Musk took over, focused on the former president and other controversial moderation decisions.  Continued here

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What are the chances that falling space debris could hit someone or something? In a week in August, we saw two separate incidents of space debris hurtling back to Earth in unexpected places.  One day there was the uncontrolled re-entry of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket over Malaysia. And outlets reported on some spacecraft parts that turned up in regional New South Wales – now confirmed to be from a SpaceX Crew-1 mission. Continued here

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How to Get Through the Holidays Without Going Broke While your friends and families may not all be dealing with the same pressures you face — finding a job, making rent, and generally, figuring out your life and career — everyone knows that it’s been a tough 12 months. Your loved ones likely won’t be disappointed if you can’t give them lavish gifts (and if they are, they might not be the best people to have in your circle). Continued here

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Why More International Life Sciences Companies Are Locating in Austria - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ABA American biotech, pharmaceutical, and life sciences companies face myriad challenges today. Organizations are struggling with a shortage of skilled workers, rising costs, supply chain disruptions, and data security. Other difficulties include a growing scrutiny of regulations and sustainability. And the pressure is always mounting to drive growth and international expansion, develop domestic manufacturing and research capacities abroad, and improve access to new drugs and technologies. Continued here

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5 Questions for Business Leaders to Ask in Uncertain Times In today’s economic headwinds, companies that aggressively prioritize and focus on what is within their own control can retain and earn the confidence and trust of their people, customers, investors, and other stakeholders. Leading companies are keeping it simple and focusing on what they can control, setting strategy by asking five key questions: 1) Am I differentiated? 2) Am I fit for growth? 3) Is my IT spend effective and at the right levels? 4) Is my portfolio of businesses too complex? and 5) How do I reduce risk? Continued here

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3 Limits to Artificial Intelligence's Creativity (and How to Solve Them) Here's what you need to know about harnessing A.I. technology to be more creative. Continued here

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Corsair says bug, not keylogger, behind some K100 keyboards' creepy behavior Keylogger-like behavior has some Corsair K100 keyboard customers concerned. Several users have reported their peripheral randomly entering text into their computer that they previously typed days or weeks ago. However, Corsair told Ars Technica that the behavior is a bug, not keylogging, and it's possibly related to the keyboard's macro recording feature. Continued here

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Jerry Seinfeld's Editing Tip Will Make Your Presentations Shorter and More Concise Editing is an act of selection, not compression. Continued here

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Photos of the Week: Frosty Morning, Meteor Shower, Surfing Santa The successful splashdown of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, a candlelit procession in Jerusalem, a 100-million-year-old fossil in Australia, an oil spill in rural Kansas, scenes from the World Cup in Qatar, tornado destruction in Louisiana, a war-damaged church in Ukraine, and much more Lithuanian pianist Darius Majintas plays music by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Sylvestrov near a monument on the Kremyanets mountain in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on December 13, 2022. # Continued here

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Forget The Witcher and Superman: Henry Cavill to lead Warhammer 40K dream project Amazon has signed a deal with Games Workshop to gain the intellectual property rights that will allow the tech and media giant to make films, TV series, and other content based on the popular Warhammer 40K franchise. Continued here

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How the Moon Devastated a Mangrove Forest In 2015 the moon’s wobble and an El Niño teamed up to kill off tens of millions of Australian mangroves The mystery emerged in 2015, when nearly 10 percent of the seemingly healthy mangrove forest along northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria suddenly died. Scientists initially blamed this crucial ecosystem’s die-off solely on an unusually strong El Niño, a weather pattern that periodically siphons water away from the western Pacific and lowers local tides. But a new study published in Science Advances reveals that El Niño had a stealthy accomplice: the moon. Continued here

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7 Principles to Attract and Retain Older Frontline Workers Organizations are increasingly in need of frontline workers, and older workers want and need to work longer. How can smart leaders hire and retain these workers, particularly in a time of increased uncertainty? Survey analysis and interviews with older frontline workers suggests seven key strategies: designing purposeful roles, enabling flexible schedules, adapting pay policies, accommodating physical challenges, communicating clearly, building community, and tackling ageism. Continued here

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United Airlines Just Made a Big Announcement. Here's the Part You Should Definitely Copy How do you grow your operation, without risking core competence of the sake of scale? Continued here

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This Year's Most Thought-Provoking Brain Discoveries Neural circuits that label experiences as “good” or “bad” and the emotional meaninglessness of facial expressions are some standouts among 2022’s mind and brain breakthroughs Can the human brain ever really understand itself? The problem of gaining a deep knowledge of the subjective depths of the conscious mind is such a hard problem that it has in fact been named the hard problem. Continued here

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How to Power Off and Start the New Year With New Energy Follow these tips to start 2023 with new energy. Continued here

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What Will the Global Economy Look Like in 2023? Three experts explore how the global economy will look in 2023. Though they agree there’s a chance inflation eases, there are major risks and it will take a long while before inflation gets down to central banks’ target levels. And there are other risks lurking too, from sovereign debt defaults to geopolitical rifts. Continued here

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Is COVID a Common Cold Yet? At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst things about SARS-CoV-2 was that it was so new: The world lacked immunity, treatments, and vaccines. Tests were hard to come by too, making diagnosis a pain—except when it wasn’t. Sometimes, the symptoms of COVID got so odd, so off-book, that telling SARS-CoV-2 from other viruses became “kind of a slam dunk,” says Summer Chavez, an emergency physician at the University of Houston. Patients would turn up with the standard-issue signs of respiratory illness—fever, coughing, and the like—but also less expected ones, such as rashes, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell. A strange new virus was colliding with people’s bodies in such unusual ways that it couldn’t help but stand out. Now, nearly three years into the crisis, the virus is more familiar, and its symptoms are too. Put three sick people in the same room this winter—one with COVID, another with a common cold, and the third with the flu—and “it’s way harder to tell the difference,” Chavez told me. Today’s most common COVID symptoms are mundane: sore throat, runny nose, congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache. And several of the wonkier ones that once hogged headlines have become rare. More people are weathering their infections with their taste and smell intact; many can no longer remember when they last considered the scourge of “COVID toes.” Even fever, a former COVID classic, no longer cracks the top-20 list from the ZOE Health Study, a long-standing symptom-tracking project based in the United Kingdom, according to Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London who heads the project. Longer, weirder, more serious illness still manifests, but for most people, SARS-CoV-2’s symptoms are getting “pretty close to other viruses’, and I think that’s reassuring,” Spector told me. “We are moving toward a cold-like illness.” Continued here

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The Joy of Morocco This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here. It’s not of Christian Pulisic’s self-sacrificial goal against Iran that sent the United States into the round of 16, or Lionel Messi dancing past a Croatian defender before providing the assist that sealed Argentina’s place in the final. It’s not even of France’s Kylian Mbappé tormenting world-class defenders in ways we have seen only a few times in the history of the game. Continued here

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Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly Google Maps is getting some competition. The Linux Foundation has announced Overture Maps, a "new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide." It's an open source mapping effort that includes a list of heavy hitters: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, with the foundation adding that the project is "open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data." Continued here

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An Ode to Mood Swings I’ve peaked (watching, from my kitchen window, a cat stare into a puddle), I’ve troughed (the impossibility of cosmic triumph), and I’ve bobbed in momentary equilibrium. And here you come again, my mood swing. Under the paving stones, the beach. Under the shining moment, the banana peel. Up, down, ding, dong, round and round and round … I think you might be wearing me out. But I won’t reject you. No, I won’t repudiate you. I’m alive in America in the 2020s, and even-temperedness—emotional homeostasis—is neither attainable nor appropriate. Besides, it’s always been this way for you and me. Ever since I saw Chariots of Fire. “You, Aubrey, are my most complete man,” says Harold Abrahams, the driven, chippy Olympic sprinter, to his friend Aubrey Montague. Harold is on the massage table, heavy with melancholic self-knowledge, getting a rubdown before his big race. “You’re brave,” he tells Aubrey, in a sad, horizontal voice. “Compassionate. Kind. A content man. That’s your secret. Contentment! I’m 24 and I’ve never known it.” Continued here

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We Are Not Prepared for the Coming Surge of Babies The post-Roe rise in births in the U.S. will be concentrated in some of the worst states for infant and maternal health. Plans to improve these outcomes are staggeringly thin. A typical pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that created a constitutional right to abortion, was reversed less than six months ago. This means the U.S. is currently at a unique inflection point in the history of reproductive rights: early enough to see the immediate effects of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—closed clinics, a rapidly shifting map of abortion access—but too soon to measure the rise in babies born to mothers who did not wish to have them. Many of these babies will be born in states that already have the worst maternal- and child-health outcomes in the nation. Although the existence of these children is the goal of the anti-abortion movement, America is unprepared to adequately care for them and the people who give birth to them. Continued here

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How Small Businesses Can Attract Holiday Shoppers in a Downturn The holiday season is a critical time for many small businesses. But as the threat of an economic downturn looms, what can business owners do to attract holiday shoppers, who may be increasingly price sensitive? To explore this question, the authors surveyed 550 U.S.-based consumers and interviewed nearly 50 small business owners. Based on their findings, they identified seven strategies that can help local businesses stay competitive and draw in customers this year — even as budgets grow tighter. Continued here

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Twitter stiffs software vendor with $8 million left on contract, lawsuit says A lawsuit says Twitter failed to pay a $1,092,000 invoice in a software contract that doesn't expire until late 2024, and that the Elon Musk-led company apparently intends to stiff the vendor on another $7 million worth of payments. Continued here

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PineTab 2 is another try at a Linux-based tablet, without the 2020 supply crunch Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages. Continued here

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Reliving the 2004 Movie 'Sideways' in 2022 This is the beginning of a special three-part Famous People series about a single weekend in California. Check back in the coming days for parts two and three! Kaitlyn: We write to you as different women than we were the last time you heard from us. Or rather, we should say we are different “chicks”—more appropriate in the lexicon of the 2004 film Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church as two friends on a bachelor trip in sunny Santa Barbara County. If you haven’t seen this movie, all you really need to know is that Giamatti’s character, Miles, loves wine and is depressed, while Church’s character, Jack, doesn’t care that much about wine and is horny. They are both liars. But they are friends! Continued here

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Steam Deck 2.0 could focus on battery life over better performance That news comes from a wide-ranging interview with The Verge, where the pair of Valve designers hinted that keeping the same basic spec target for future hardware could be valuable. “Right now, the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target—there’s a lot of value in having that one spec," Griffais told The Verge. Continued here

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A Better Way to Map Brand Strategy Companies have long used perceptual mapping to understand how consumers feel about their brands relative to competitors’, to find gaps in the marketplace, and to develop brand positions. But the business value of these maps is limited because they fail to link a brand’s market position to business performance metrics such as pricing and sales. Other marketing tools measure brands on yardsticks such as market share, growth rate, and profitability but fail to take consumer perceptions into consideration. Continued here S43 Riffusion's AI generates music from text using visual sonograms On Thursday, a pair of tech hobbyists released Riffusion, an AI model that generates music from text prompts by creating a visual representation of sound and converting it to audio for playback. It uses a fine-tuned version of the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image synthesis model, applying visual latent diffusion to sound processing in a novel way. Continued here S17 What is the lowest-carbon protein? When it comes to reducing our individual carbon emissions, one of the most impactful steps we can take is to eat more sustainably. Global food production is responsible for 35% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. While animal products account for the bulk of our dietary emissions, they provide only 20% of the world's calories. Animal products, such as dairy, eggs, fish and meat, are known to be good sources of protein, and getting the right amount of protein is essential for our bodies to grow and repair (Read more about how much protein we really need to consume). Continued here S50 TikTok Told Me to Adopt a Pigeon Finding love at a pub is not so strange, especially if there are few pints involved. But it is rare for the new beloved to be a pigeon. That’s what happened to Hannah Hall, who met her pigeon, Penny, in a beer garden and then took her home. Hall went viral after posting a TikTok about her meet-cute with Penny, and she has since become a mainstay of #pigeontok, where millions of people watch videos that show a different side of the urban bird more often viewed as a pest than as a pet. Some TikTokers reveal how they found their pigeon—as in, it was on the street, and then it was in their arms. Others offer tips and tricks on how to befriend your own feathered urchin. Hall continues to post videos of Penny and has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who watch, with awe or disgust, as she builds a life with a pigeon. Continued here S45 Once a VR true believer, a "wearied" John Carmack leaves Meta After nearly ten years, John Carmack's time helping to guide VR hardware efforts at Meta (and at Facebook/Oculus before that) have come to a close. The id Software co-founder and Doom co-creator officially left Meta on Friday night, according to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by the New York Times. Continued here S49 Britons’ Growing Buyer’s Remorse for Brexit With the Tory government shackled to a Brexit policy that is losing support, an angry new populism may resurge. The conventional wisdom after the two major populist revolts of 2016—the United Kingdom’s referendum vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president—was that few, if any, of their respective supporters would have a change of heart. Contrary to the classic understanding of populism as an ephemeral protest, this view insisted, the votes for Brexit and for Trump reflected a profound and enduring clash over identity. Continued here S66 Qatar Won This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here. “The thing with the royal family is that for most of the time, it’s just a slightly tawdry soap opera,” a friend of mine reflected when we met up in the days after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth earlier this year. “But then, occasionally, it rises to become pure opera.” The extraordinary spectacle of the old sovereign being laid to rest, all drums and costumes, was one of those moments of high art, the perfectly choreographed finale to a 70-year drama. I now think something similar is true of soccer and, in particular, the World Cup, which draws to a close this weekend. Continued here S47 The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity In the classic Japanese film Rashomon, four people retell the same incident in different and sometimes contradictory ways. The debate about the Twitter Files—documents from and Slack conversations within the social-media platform now owned by Elon Musk—reminds me of that movie. This month, the journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and the author Michael Shellenberger have posted tweet threads describing the internal debates over banning the sharing of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, throttling the circulation of certain posts and accounts, and taking down then-President Donald Trump’s account after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Depending on your perspective, you might conclude that suspending Trump was an essential safety measure, a big scandal, or utterly inconsequential. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Musk declared on Twitter earlier this year, a week after the company’s board accepted his buyout offer. And he’s right that transparency about content moderation—that is, the screening of user-generated posts to ensure that they meet community standards—is the only thing that can deliver legitimacy for and repair trust in a platform that has enormous influence over the political discourse. Unfortunately, the Twitter Files offer little insight into how important moderation decisions are made. Individual anecdotes—particularly those involving high-stakes outlier decisions, such as how to handle a president whose supporters try to keep his successor’s election from being certified—are interesting but reveal little about how platforms operate day in and day out. And that is information that the public needs to know. Continued here S58 Why America Doesn’t Build What It Invents The U.S. just made a breakthrough in nuclear-fusion technology. Will we know how to use it? This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems.  Sign up here to get it every week. Continued here S61 Why Doesn’t Every American Have a Robot Dog? Fake puppies that could move and bark and dance were all the rage in the early 2000s. How is it possible that we live in a society that could fall out of love with such a thing? From about 1999 to 2008, all kids had to do was decide which little robot dog they longed for the most. There were so many fantastic options. From the Canadian company WowWee, Mega-Byte the Hound Droid, which had a big, blocky head and glowing eyes. From Mattel, Rocket the Wonder Dog, which “rocketed through space, time, and the Milky-Bone Galaxy looking for a loving home here on earth.” Continued here S54 The Lights of Christmas 2022 With a bit more than a week left until Christmas, illuminated displays, parades, and colorful markets are lighting up the night. From the Americas to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, gathered below is a collection of holiday cheer and light wrapped up in 28 photographs. Christmas lights and ornaments are viewed outside a home in the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City on December 6, 2022. # Continued here S46 How to Enjoy the Holidays Your Way Faith Hill offers advice on creating new rituals, taking solitude breaks, and having actual fun. 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. Continued here S56 What Fusion May Mean for a Carbon-Free Future A tantalizing new scientific breakthrough will mean little if we don’t build the infrastructure to support it. 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. Continued here S32 Debate world champion: Why agreement is overrated The ability to reach agreement with other people is a crucial skill, not only in your career and everyday life, but also in your close relationships. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no place for disagreement. Many people tend to shy away from disagreements. After all, we often see videos or images of disagreements spiraling out of control, whether it’s clashes between rival political parties or people feuding on social media. But there is a way to have enlightening and productive disagreements. Continued here S51 Commercials Desperately Want You to Know They Know What They Are If you’ve watched enough TV over the past few years (and I certainly have), you may have noticed the emergence of a strange new type of commercial: the meta-commercial. As in, an advertisement about advertisements, a commercial that refers explicitly to the fact that it’s a commercial. Characters in these ads say things like “Are we in a Wayfair commercial?” and “This must be a State Farm commercial” and “You riffin’, or is this part of the commercial?” (It is.) They refer to their script. They refer to how much they’re being paid. “Oh, I forgot,” they realize with mock surprise. “We’re rolling.” Once you notice these ads, you’ll see them everywhere. Without having done anything close to a systematic analysis, I can think of more than 30 by more than a dozen different companies over the past five years. I’m surely missing many more. There’s the Subway campaign in which celebrity spokespeople keep running out of time to finish their lines. There are the Progressive commercials in which Flo the Progressive Lady leads focus groups offering feedback on other Progressive commercials. There’s the Mountain Dew ad in which the Chicago Bulls star Zach Lavine and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia lead Charlie Day, both decked out head to toe in radioactive-looking Mountain Dew gear, discuss “how obvious product placement is.” There’s the Liberty Mutual campaign in which a company spokesperson says, “Research shows that people remember ads with young people having a good time, so … here’s a pool party”—then a cut to a deliberately absurd, insurance-themed pool party, complete with a fiendishly catchy jingle, which, if you haven’t heard it, I strongly caution you against listening to. Continued here S48 The 10 Best Albums of 2022 And … we’re back? Despite a lingering pandemic and fears of a grim recession, the year in music was a party. After the doldrums of the social-distancing days, superstars and art kids alike finally unleashed albums that were like overstuffed grab bags—jumbled, generous, even happily tacky. The outburst of kinesis and creativity was oddly unifying. Whereas 2021 invited each listener to search for personal paths out of limbo, the music of 2022 sent us running up the same hill. Soon after Beyoncé’s new epic started shaking dance floors this past July, a talking point emerged among would-be killjoys. The songwriting and production credits on Renaissance are like dissertation footnotes, listing dozens of names: current hitmakers, long-dead legends, niche-beloved groundbreakers. Certain critics highlighted this fact to deflate the portrayals of Beyoncé as an innovator or auteur. Is she taking credit for a meal she didn’t cook? Continued here S53 What Second-Chance Couples Know About Love 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.       So many regrets in life are impossible to rectify. You can’t go back in time to study for a failed exam, or take a job offer you declined, or tell someone you care for them before they die. But say you come to believe—and you certainly wouldn’t be the first—that your breakup was a mistake. Maybe some memories have started sneaking up on you: the sound of your ex’s laugh, their quirky mannerisms, all the little ways they supported you that you took for granted. Maybe they have regrets too. Maybe, in this case, you might actually get a second chance. Continued here S55 The Cringeworthy End of 'Harry & Meghan' on Netflix Well, here we all are again. Ready for three more hours of expensively lit retribution? I hope so, because the second half of Netflix’s documentary Harry & Meghan dropped today, covering the four and a half years from the couple’s wedding to the present day. The final three episodes of this six-hour series—Ken Burns needed just three times as long to get through the entire Vietnam war—focus on the Royal Family’s relationship with the press (again). Over and over, Harry and Meghan’s departure from Britain is presented as a missed opportunity for racial healing, for generational change, for a new social awareness in a stuffy institution. It was, as the British journalist Afua Hirsch declares, “the death of a dream.” This recurrent motif gives the whole documentary the unfortunate air of a late-night message left on your ex’s voicemail, insisting that you are happy to have moved on, and are having a great life, actually. 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