'Lemon Cake' Is the Perfect Recipe for Casual Gamers
I can't remember the last time I finished a video game. I've had my Nintendo Switch Lite for two years now, and it's riddled with a number of titles I've abandoned for one reason or another. I often scroll through the Nintendo eShop, watching dozens of trailers in search of a game that might hook my ADHD brain, but nothing ever feels quite tantalizing. And now I feel guilty that my Switch sees most of its days tucked away in a drawer. As a kid, I was always into simulation-style games (The Sims, Mall Tycoon, and Nintendogs, to name a few) and that has carried over into my adulthood. I've long struggled to find a game that scratches this itch though—devoid of side quests, intense customization, multiple storylines, and tough levels. That is, until a couple of months ago, when a TikTok video about "cozy Nintendo Switch games" appeared on my For You page. Continued here |
Spectacular Anglo-Saxon burial uncovered - here's what it tells us about women in seventh-century England
A village with the Old English name “Filthy Pool” wasn’t an auspicious location to discover one of the most spectacular burials of the Anglo Saxon period. Nevertheless, excavations by the Museum of London Archaeology at Harpole, Northamptonshire, in England’s Midlands, have uncovered an astonishing Christian burial of the seventh century, a period when the religion was relatively new in England. Continued here |
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Musk suspends NYT and WaPo reporters from Twitter, claims they doxxed him
Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk is now suspending some journalists who write about him, including reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. The journalist suspensions seem to be part of Musk's quest to erase references or links to the now-suspended ElonJet account that used publicly available data from ADS-B Exchange to track Musk's private jet. Continued here |
The Republican Party Is in a Strange Place
The GOP is in a strange place. After falling short of expectations in the midterms, some Republicans blame Donald Trump, and some want to anoint a challenger for 2024. But with Trump already announced and a GOP-controlled House set to spend two years investigating Joe Biden, is the party at all likely to move on from Trump? The Atlantic staff writers Mark Leibovich and Elaina Plott consider that question, as well as the ascent of Marjorie Taylor Greene as Congress prepares for its 2023 session, on this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic. Continued here |
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The Pressure Increases on Sam Bankman-Fried
Just after 6 P.M. on Monday, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested, in response to a request from U.S. law enforcement, at his home at the Albany, a luxurious Bahamas beach resort. Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency platform FTX, had been staying there since his company collapsed, in November, issuing public statements along the lines of “fuck regulators” and “I’m sorry. That’s the biggest thing.” He appeared at a Bahamian magistrate’s court on Tuesday in a blue suit. There, according to the local press, an attorney for Bankman-Fried argued that he should be released on bail, stating that Bankman-Fried is a vegan, and has suffered from depression, insomnia, and A.D.D. The attorney also said that his client is prepared to fight any effort to extradite him to the United States. He has deep ties in the Bahamas, owns property there, and would be willing, the attorney reportedly added, to pay two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash bail. The judge expressed concern that Bankman-Fried could be a flight risk, given the amount of money he is believed to still have access to. At the end of the hearing, the judge denied the bail request. It was a day of competing FTX-related spectacles. As the Bahamian bail hearing wound down, Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, held a press conference in lower Manhattan, where he said that the allegations represented one of the largest financial-fraud cases in history, and he issued an ominous warning about what was to come. “To anyone who participated in wrongdoing at FTX or Alameda Research”—a hedge fund also controlled by Bankman-Fried—“and who has not yet come forward, I would strongly encourage you to come see us before we come see you,” Williams said. “We are not done.” That same day, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the FTX collapse, at which Bankman-Fried had been expected to testify. Continued here |
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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How the Families of American Hostages Created Bipartisan Support for Prisoner Swaps
Paula and Joey Reed had no idea what to do when their son Trevor was arrested in Moscow, on August 16, 2019. Trevor, who had been drinking heavily at a party with his girlfriend, said he felt nauseated and asked to step out of the car as he rode home with acquaintances. Trevor was badly intoxicated and began running around a busy street. His acquaintances called the police for help. Officers took him into custody and brought him to a nearby police station. When his girlfriend came back in a few hours to pick him up, Trevor, a twenty-eight-year-old former marine and an eighth-generation Texan, was questioned by officials from the F.S.B., the Russian equivalent of the F.B.I., without a translator or an attorney. She was informed that Trevor was being charged with intentionally endangering the lives and health of police officers, a charge that carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison, for allegedly grabbing the arm of the police officer who was driving and elbowing another. Trevor’s girlfriend called his parents in a panic. She told the Reeds that their son had bruises on his body and may have been badly beaten by the police. The Reeds immediately called the U.S. Embassy. The lackadaisical response of American diplomats intensified their fear. “This was on a Friday, midday, and we asked if they were going to check on him,” Joey Reed recalled. “And they said we’ll check on Monday. That gives you a pretty good sense of our relationship with the United States Embassy for the first year.” A month later, with Trevor still in a Russian pre-detention center, Joey Reed, a retired fire chief, moved to Moscow to be closer to his son and to monitor the legal proceedings. Paula, a health-care-office manager who left her job to focus on Trevor’s case, stayed in Texas and tried to pressure officials in Washington. Trevor’s lawyers maintained that surveillance video from street cameras never showed the police car dangerously swerving, as officers claimed occurred when Trevor allegedly grabbed the officer, but he was not released on bail, and his case dragged on for months. Joey pushed to get U.S. diplomats to engage in his son’s case, and the embassy sent a Russian-speaking consular officer to attend Trevor’s criminal trial, which concluded in July, 2020, nearly a year after his arrest. In Washington, meanwhile, the Reeds’ calls to White House officials went largely unanswered. Part of the problem, they assessed, was the desire of the Trump Administration to preserve its relationship with Russia. “President Trump never discussed hostages until they were freed, and then he claimed full responsibility,” Joey Reed told me. It was only after a Russian judge sentenced Trevor to nine years in prison, he said, that some U.S. officials began to take the case seriously. The punitive and unprecedented sentence made clear that Trevor was being used as a point of diplomatic leverage with the U.S. Continued here |
Long COVID Isn't the Only Post-Viral Illness
In the 1980s, many people in the medical community treated chronic fatigue syndrome as a punchline. Some doctors dismissed patients’ debilitating symptoms, including crushing fatigue and crashes after exercise, as figments of their imaginations. Media outlets even dismissively nicknamed the condition “yuppie flu,” since many cases were reported among affluent white women. In the infectious-disease clinic where Dr. Lucinda Bateman was at the time finishing her medical training, some doctors didn’t want to bother treating chronic-fatigue patients. When Bateman left to go into private practice, she remembers her old colleagues recording a message on their clinic’s answering machine, directing anyone with chronic fatigue syndrome to call Bateman so they wouldn’t have to get involved. Continued here |
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RSV treatments for young children are lacking, but the record 2022 cold and flu season highlights the urgency for vaccines and other preventive strategies
For many parents, respiratory syncytial virus – or RSV – which has been causing record numbers of hospitalizations of children during the fall of 2022, may sound like a relatively new and unheard-of threat. But in fact, RSV is a common respiratory virus that circulates every fall and winter and is a common cause of lung infections in young children. RSV can be difficult to distinguish from other respiratory infections since the symptoms are common to other illnesses – runny nose, sneezing, congestion, coughing, fever, decreased appetite and wheezing. In most cases, RSV is mild and will improve at home. However, in certain cases, it can cause severe illness and require hospital treatment. Continued here |
Ina Garten: Cooking Is Hard
With the help of countless viral videos and her Food Network program “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten has become a household name. An essential element of her success is her confiding warmth, and her encouragement for even the most novice home cook. She talks with David Remnick, a longtime friend, about her new book, and why her own childhood experiences at dinner were filled with dread. We take a look at the craft of narrating an audiobook with a master of the form, Robin Miles, who has lent her voice to hundreds of titles from “Charlotte’s Web” to Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste.” And Susan Orlean, in an installment of her column “Afterword,” remembers a Texas man with a passion for rattlesnakes. The food guru explains why she hated dinnertime growing up, and how she learned to love it. Garten takes questions from listeners on everything from bay leaves to her scarves. Continued here |
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Wealthy individuals are giving billions to solve the climate crisis - is it working?
One of the best parts about being The Conversation is when we actually have a conversation in real life. And finally, we did just that recently with a fascinating event, co-sponsored by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, The Associated Press and GBH. Here is a recap from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Major philanthropists have poured billions into fighting the climate crisis in recent years amid a growing sense of urgency. Their investments have sparked broader questions over philanthropy’s approach to confronting the crisis, which activists say will require trillions of dollars yearly to solve. Continued here |
'Vaccinating' frogs may or may not protect them against a pandemic -
Scientists have found this pathogen on every continent that amphibians inhabit, and the extensive global amphibian trade has likely spread highly lethal strains around the world. The amphibian chytrid fungus is widespread in some geographic regions, and, like the virus that causes COVID-19, it can mutate rapidly and take new forms that cause varying disease severity. Conservation translocation is an increasingly popular way to recover species that have experienced extensive population declines. It involves moving organisms to reestablish populations that have gone extinct, supplement existing ones or establish new ones in areas where the species was not previously present. However, when the amphibian chytrid fungus is prevalent in the landscape, frogs are likely to get sick again, hampering the success of translocation. Continued here |
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No One Wants Your Cold
Paul Sax is a Harvard infectious diseases specialist who likes to play poker. Every few weeks, he plays with friends in Boston. Recently, when it was Sax’s turn to host, one of the game’s regulars came down with a cold. The player, Sax told me, tested negative for COVID—but offered to stay home anyway. Sax took him up on it. “Why go through the hassle of getting a cold?” he told me, offering some practical advice: “If you’re going to the house of an infectious-disease doctor, don’t come with a cold.” Continued here |
Video of college student arrest raises questions about use of police on campus
When a video emerged of a 20-year-old Black student being arrested at Winston-Salem State University on Dec. 14, 2022, after she got into a verbal argument with her professor, it brought renewed attention to the often controversial role of campus police. Here, Jarell Skinner-Roy, a University of Michigan doctoral student who is examining how students of color view police and surveillance on college and university campuses, breaks down the significance of the episode at the historically Black college in North Carolina. For me, this is additional evidence of how colleges and universities often function as an extension of what some scholars refer to as the “carceral state.” That includes penal institutions, but it also involves people’s views on when law enforcement should get involved in disputes and altercations. Continued here |
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Holiday foods can be toxic to pets - a veterinarian explains which, and what to do if Rover or Kitty eats them
During the holidays, it’s typical for people to indulge in special foods. Being a pet owner myself, I know that many pet parents want to give their fur babies special treats as well. Here are some of the most common food-related crises we veterinarians encounter in the animal ER during the holidays, and what to do if they happen. Continued here |
Over the holidays, try talking to your relatives like an anthropologist
How is it possible to spend so much time with your parents and grandparents and not really know them? This question has puzzled me as an anthropologist. It’s especially relevant for the holiday season, when millions of people travel to spend time with their families. Continued here |
Trump Drops More Superhero Collectibles
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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 |
Asylum claim rejections show the UK government has little understanding of what people are fleeing - and it's costing lives
After yet another tragedy in the Channel, there is no doubt that something needs to be done to improve the processes overseeing asylum seekers coming to the UK, through whatever route. The UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has outlined a five-point plan to fix Britain’s broken immigration system. New laws will criminalise those who enter the country “illegally”, allowing people to be more rapidly deported. Newly arrived migrants will find it more difficult to open bank accounts, and definitions of modern slavery will be changed to make it harder to claim asylum on this basis. More case workers will be drafted in to help remove people more rapidly and deal with the backlog of asylum claims. Continued here |
Medieval great halls were at the heart of the festive season - here the community kept warm by staying together
The great hall is one of the most enduring images from the middle ages – and with good reason. Surviving written sources as well as archaeological and architectural analysis all attest to the importance of the hall within manor houses, castles and palaces during festive periods. Taking mostly English examples, it’s clear that the social dynamics of a great hall were all-important to its role. But the warmth of the hall is also mentioned frequently. Continued here |
1918 flu pandemic upended long-standing social inequalities - at least for a time, new study finds
Racial disparities in influenza deaths shrunk by 74% in U.S. cities during the 1918 flu pandemic due to an odd coincidence of virus and history. That’s the key finding of our recently published study in the journal Demography. This conclusion contradicts the common claim that crises like pandemics make social inequalities worse. The 1918 influenza pandemic was a surprising exception. Continued here |
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 |
Phosphorus supply is increasingly disrupted - we are sleepwalking into a global food crisis
Without phosphorus food cannot be produced, since all plants and animals need it to grow. Put simply: if there is no phosphorus, there is no life. As such, phosphorus-based fertilisers – it is the “P” in “NPK” fertiliser – have become critical to the global food system. Most phosphorus comes from non-renewable phosphate rock and it cannot be synthesised artificially. All farmers therefore need access to it, but 85% of the world’s remaining high-grade phosphate rock is concentrated in just five countries (some of which are “geopolitically complex”): Morocco, China, Egypt, Algeria and South Africa. Continued here |
Children born today will see literally thousands of animals disappear in their lifetime, as global food webs collapse
Climate change is one of the main drivers of species loss globally. We know more plants and animals will die as heatwaves, bushfires, droughts and other natural disasters worsen. But to date, science has vastly underestimated the true toll climate change and habitat destruction will have on biodiversity. That’s because it has largely neglected to consider the extent of “co-extinctions”: when species go extinct because other species on which they depend die out. Continued here |
What's the right age to get a smartphone?
It is a very modern dilemma. Should you hand your child a smartphone, or keep them away from the devices as long as possible? As a parent, you'd be forgiven for thinking of a smartphone as a sort of Pandora's box with the ability to unleash all the world's evils on your child's wholesome life. The bewildering array of headlines relating to the possible impact of children's phone and social media use are enough to make anyone want to opt out. Apparently, even celebrities are not immune to this modern parenting problem: Madonna has said that she regretted giving her older children phones at age 13, and wouldn't do it again. Continued here |
No One Wins in Elon Musk’s Battle With Journalists
Last night, several well-known journalists, including Ryan Mac of The New York Times and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, were suspended from Twitter. The suspensions were ostensibly related to the journalists’ reporting on an account—@ElonJet, operated by the 20-year-old Jack Sweeney—which was dedicated to publishing the location of Elon Musk’s private jet based on public data. Musk had once promised that his commitment to free speech would prevent him from ever suspending or banning @ElonJet, but he pivoted this week after an apparently unrelated alleged stalking incident. Continued here |
Interest rates: why your mortgage payments are going up but your savings aren't - and how better monetary policy could help
The Bank of England, the UK’s central bank, has raised its main interest rate by 0.5% to 3.5%. This is the ninth in a series of increases over the past year that have had a ripple effect across the economy. A central bank rate rise feeds into the rates that banks, businesses and people are charged to borrow, but it should also boost savings rates. These rates can – and are – being affected to different degrees, however. In central bank jargon, this is called the transmission of monetary policy varying across markets. For instance, while mortgage rates have rocketed in recent months, deposit rates for many savings accounts just haven’t kept up. Continued here |
Why Wellcome closed its Medicine Man exhibition - and others should follow suit
In November the Wellcome Collection closed their Medicine Man gallery. In a Twitter thread, they acknowledged that “the display still perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language.” Medicine Man told history from a narrow, eurocentric perspective. As such, the Wellcome’s decision to rethink its gallery is not a matter of erasing history, but of deepening it. Continued here |
Why Are We Awkward?
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. Like most other humans I know, I’m still trying to remember how to act normal when socializing. At the first parties I went to after complete pandemic isolation, I talked too loudly; I spilled drinks; I asked questions that were either too personal or too boring; I stood with my arms outstretched and said, “Are we hugging? Yes? No?” As many of us have begun to socialize more regularly, it’s gotten easier. But a question continues to circulate among my friends: Were we always this awkward? Continued here |
With 'Ragnarök,' 'God of War' Keeps Growing Up
Before the long-running God of War series was reestablished with a 2018 entry that moved the story from a mythological ancient Greece to a mythological ancient Scandinavia, its protagonist, Kratos, was an unparalleled jerk. Mouth fixed in a permanent sneer, hell-bent on revenge against the pantheon of gods who tricked him into murdering his family, the earlier Kratos roared, growled, and ripped apart every deity in his way until he'd toppled an entire civilization's metaphysical framework. With God of War's Norse reimagining, though, Kratos started to grow up. In Santa Monica Studio's new vision, he was depicted as a sullen widower now left to forge a relationship with his son, Atreus, after heading north to escape his past. Its being an action game starring a living god means it isn't long, of course, before that past catches up to him and he's forced to reckon with his child, learning the family history and protecting him from the unwanted attention of the Norse gods. Over the course of the story—which tones down much of the previously over-the-top gore and does away with the goofy, rhythm game sex scenes of the Greek series—Kratos eventually learned how to talk to his son in more than monosyllables and grunts, becoming something like a functional parent over the course of their journey to scatter his late wife's ashes. Continued here |
A Refresher on Marketing Myopia
Every year, a large majority of product launches fail. There’s debate about exactly what percentage—some say it is 75%, others claim it’s closer to 95%. Regardless of which number is right, there is no doubt that a lot of time and energy go into marketing products that will no longer exist in a year. Why is this? Some of the failure is likely attributable to the fact that many company leaders, including executives, have what’s called marketing myopia—a nearsighted focus on selling products and services, rather than seeing the “big picture” of what consumers really want. Continued here |
Why short-sightedness is on the rise
In the late 1980s and 1990s, parents in Singapore began noticing a worrying change in their children. On the whole, people's lives in the small, tropical nation were improving hugely at the time. Access to education, in particular, was transforming a generation and opening the gates to prosperity. But there was a less positive trend, too: more and more children were becoming short-sighted. Nobody was able to stop this national eyesight crisis. Rates of short-sightedness – also known as near-sightedness or myopia – continued to rise and rise. Today, Singapore has a myopia rate of around 80% in young adults, and has been called "the myopia capital of the world". Continued here |
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 |
Billionaire Richard Branson Calls This 1 Skill the Most Important Skill Every Leader Should Have Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, explains the critical skill that makes the world go around. Continued here |
Fiber optics take the pulse of the planet
Andreas Fichtner strips a cable of its protective sheath, exposing a glass core thinner than a hair — a fragile, 4-kilometer-long fiber that’s about to be fused to another. It’s a fiddly task better suited to a lab, but Fichtner and his colleague Sara Klaasen are doing it atop a windy, frigid ice sheet. After a day’s labor, they have spliced together three segments, creating a 12.5-kilometer-long cable. It will stay buried in the snow and will snoop on the activity of Grímsvötn, a dangerous, glacier-covered, Icelandic volcano. Continued here |
GPs don't give useful weight-loss advice - new study
The advice general practitioners give to patients with obesity in the UK was found to be “highly varied, superficial and often lacked an apparent evidence base”, according to a new study from the University of Oxford. GPs in the UK are in a trusted position as guides and managers of health in their communities. Expectations of them are often high: they are the personal advisers, taking stock of their patients’ physical and mental health, and delivering tailored advice and treatments. Continued here |
Poll: Most People Want to Know Elon Musk’s Location so They Can Avoid Him
SAN FRANCISCO (The Borowitz Report)—Shortly after Twitter suspended accounts that were tracking billionaires' private planes, including Elon Musk's, a new poll shows that most people who seek Musk's precise location are doing so to avoid him. The poll, from the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, reveals that a visceral fear of encountering Elon Musk is what drives eighty-nine per cent of those who follow his movements. Continued here |
You've Been Called Out for a Microaggression. What Do You Do?
As a person who wants to be an ally to members of marginalized groups, how should you respond after a colleague calls you out for committing a microaggression? First, make sure the other person feels heard. Replace your instinctive defensiveness with curiosity and empathy. Listen with an open heart and mind. Be grateful: Your colleague is telling you how you’re showing up in the world in order to help you become a more evolved person. Next, offer a sincere apology. Say something like, “Thank you for telling me. I appreciate that you trust me enough to share this feedback. I am sorry that what I said was offensive.” Finally, commit to doing better in the future. Say, “I care about creating an inclusive workplace and I want to improve. Please keep holding me accountable.” Continued here
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