Pope Benedict XVI: A man at odds with the modern world who leaves a legacy of intellectual brilliance and controversy
To many observers, Benedict, who died on Dec. 31, 2022 at the age of 95, was known for criticizing what he saw as the modern world’s rejection of God and Christianity’s timeless truths. But as a scholar of the diversity of global Catholicism, I think it’s best to avoid simple characterizations of Benedict’s theology, which I believe will influence the Catholic Church for generations. While the brilliance of this intellectual legacy will certainly endure, it will also have to contend with the shadows of the numerous controversies that marked Benedict’s time as pope and, later, as pope emeritus. Continued here |
Emotional AI Is No Substitute for Empathy
In 2023, emotional AI—technology that can sense and interact with human emotions—will become one of the dominant applications of machine learning. For instance, Hume AI, founded by Alan Cowen, a former Google researcher, is developing tools to measure emotions from verbal, facial, and vocal expressions. Swedish company Smart Eyes recently acquired Affectiva, the MIT Media Lab spinoff that developed the SoundNet neural network, an algorithm that classifies emotions such as anger from audio samples in less than 1.2 seconds. Even the video platform Zoom is introducing Zoom IQ, a feature that will soon provide users with real-time analysis of emotions and engagement during a virtual meeting. In 2023, tech companies will be releasing advanced chatbots that can closely mimic human emotions to create more empathetic connections with users across banking, education, and health care. Microsoft’s chatbot Xiaoice is already successful in China, with average users reported to have conversed with “her” more than 60 times in a month. It also passed the Turing test, with the users failing to recognize it as a bot for 10 minutes. Analysis from Juniper Research Consultancy shows that chatbot interactions in health care will rise by almost 167 percent from 2018, to reach 2.8 billion annual interactions in 2023. This will free up medical staff time and potentially save around $3.7 billion for health care systems around the world. Continued here |
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Ancient Chinese text reveals earliest known record of a candidate aurora
A pair of researchers has identified the earliest description of a candidate aurora yet found in an ancient Chinese text, according to an April paper published in the journal Advances in Space Research. The authors peg the likely date of the event to either 977 or 957 BCE. The next earliest description of a candidate aurora is found on Assyrian cuneiform tablets dated between 679-655 BCE, three centuries later. Continued here |
What Are You Reading?
Hey, thanks for coming over to catch up. How are you? Actually, let me stop you right there, because I have a more important question. Let’s dim the lights. I’ll recline on this lush, velvet daybed, and you can rest on that one. I’m lowering my eyelids, tilting my head a little bit, and settling into my deep Kathleen Turner voice. Continued here |
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Marvel’s biggest movie ever could finally make the X-Men MCU canon
The map of Marvel’s Multiverse Saga is a long and winding one, and the arc that began with WandaVision in 2021 will conclude with Avengers: Secret Wars in 2026. Since the beginning of Phase 4 and the weekly mystery of WandaVision, fans have speculated that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) would usher mutants into the MCU in a reversal of her infamous “no more mutants” spell from the comic book storyline House of M. That proliferation of mutants hasn’t happened… yet. Sure, we’ve seen a few, including Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the reveal that Ms. Marvel is a mutant herself. But we’re still pretty far away from a full-blown X-Men invasion of the MCU. Continued here |
50 cheap ways to upgrade your home you'll wish you knew about sooner
I’ve been doing small weekend projects on my house lately and they have transformed the place. I haven’t spent much time or money, but it’s easier to cook in my kitchen, my stairs are no longer dangerous, there is less clutter, and my once-crappy shower is suddenly amazing. I don’t have the money or patience at the moment for tearing out walls or upgrading appliances, but these little improvements have had a huge impact. And along the way, I discovered 50 cheap ways to upgrade your home you'll wish you knew about sooner. Lighting is one of the first things I tackled and I’m super pleased with the results. I love it when the laundry room light turns on when I enter, since my hands are full carrying laundry baskets, and turns off again when I leave. It’s more convenient and it saves power. So I installed lights in my closets and on the stairs that do the same thing. I also found a quick and easy way to declutter my bathroom, installed an incredible shower head, and found a permanent home for my electric toothbrush. Each of these fixes took less than 10 minutes yet the results please me every day. Continued here |
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Wolf Moon: You need to see the first Full Moon of 2023 next week
The Wolf Moon will dazzle the night sky just days after the start of the new year. But the first Full Moon of 2023 will appear smaller than usual. The glow of moonlight is a reflection of sunlight. When the far side of the Moon is lit up, its near side is all dark: that’s New Moon. But when it comes time in the month for the near side to get the star’s illumination, it’s quite a sight. The Full Moon is one of the most spectacular lunar phases, and in January, it will appear about a week into the new year. Continued here |
How to watch Netflix's 'Kaleidoscope': The "correct" episode order, explained
The non-linear series will appear in your profile randomly, but you can choose a straightforward order. Kaleidoscope is trying to change the way you watch television. The Netflix heist series, starring Giancarlo Esposito, Tati Gabrielle, and Rufus Sewell, portrays an ultra-complicated crime with a 25-year backstory. Continued here |
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100 years ago, Stan Lee was born. He changed superheroes — and the world.
Lee wrote the first lines of dialogue for Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men. But his influence goes far beyond that. December 28, 2022, marks 100 years since the birth of the world’s most famous comic book writer: the late Stan Lee. Continued here |
The Psychology Behind Unethical Behavior
Leaders are often faced with ethical conundrums. So how can they determine when they’re inching toward dangerous territory? There are three main psychological dynamics that lead to crossing moral lines. First, there’s omnipotence: when someone feels so aggrandized and entitled that they believe the rules of decent behavior don’t apply to them. Second, consider cultural numbness: when others play along and gradually begin to accept and embody deviant norms. Finally, when people don’t speak up because they are thinking of more immediate rewards, we see justified neglect. There are several strategies leaders can use to counter these dynamics, including relying on a group of trusted peers to keep you in check, keeping a list of things you will never do for profit, and looking out for ways you explain away borderline actions. Continued here |
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People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likable and Give Better Advice No matter what, keep asking questions. Continued here |
This overlooked biometric on fitness trackers could reveal how healthy your heart is
Your heart beats around 100,000 times every day. Heart rate is a key marker of cardiovascular activity and an important vital sign. But your pulse is not as steady as a precision clock — nor would you want it to be. As a cardiovascular physiologist, I measure heart rate in nearly every experiment my students and I perform. Sometimes we use an electrocardiogram, such as you’d see in a medical clinic, which uses sticky electrodes to measure electrical signals between two points of your body. Other times we use a chest strap monitor, like ones you might see on someone at the gym, which also detects heartbeats based on electrical activity. Continued here |
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You need to play the most relaxing sim on Xbox Game Pass ASAP
Capitalism is the best. Well, the best we’ve done so far (looking at you, Divine Right of Kings). Exchanging our labor for cold, hard cash is the foundation of civil society. Commerce makes the world go round, but the actual economics are rarely fun. It’s why most video game economies are only there to quantify all the shooting and looting. Is there a game that shows us that business can be pleasure? Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator from developer niceplay games does this, and does it better than any game in recent memory. As the title implies, you’re an alchemist brewing potent potables in a medieval village for everyone from witchers who need healing draughts to wimps who need elixirs of strength. The hook of the game isn’t in the numbers as you buy and sell, but rather in an innovative crafting system that’s part puzzle, part cartography. It’s chill AF and endlessly addictive. Continued here |
The best boss battle of 2022 made this Nintendo shooter an instant classic
Imagine getting duped by a giant, ink-spattered grizzly bear into helping him wipe out your entire species. Nintendo has never been afraid to get weird, and Splatoon 3, with its absurd and surprisingly detailed lore, is the ultimate expression of that weirdness. The game’s final boss battle is a stunning culmination of both the story and various game mechanics in wacky ways that make you ask, “Is this really happening!?” about every 30 seconds. Continued here |
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The Family-Separation Files
Made public here for the first time, a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy These records showcase, among other things, government officials’ attempts to mislead the public; inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent record keeping, which to this day means that a full accounting of separations does not exist; efforts to extend the length of time that children and parents were kept apart; and early and repeated internal warnings about the policy’s worst outcomes, which were ignored. Continued here |
You need to watch the most subversive alien invasion thriller on HBO Max ASAP
Going back to your hometown can be a strange experience. You might be surprised and delighted to realize that very little has changed since you left, but the town will likely still feel, in some odd, unexplainable way, different than it did before. More often than not, that feeling is the natural result of how much you’ve changed and grown. But what if that nagging feeling wasn’t just the result of your own experience? What if there really was a new secret suddenly lurking beneath the surface of the town you once called home? That’s the idea at the center of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s 2013 sci-fi comedy thriller. The final installment in Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost’s Cornetto Trilogy offers the most absurd answer to the question. Continued here |
How a fantasy masterpiece led to the discovery of a real psychological condition
Some 40 years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1866, accounts of hallucinations similar to those described by Lewis Carroll began to appear in the medical literature. In 1904, William Spratling, one of the first American epileptologists, published case studies of several patients for whom “everything looked bigger” just before their seizures; three years later, in 1907, the great British neurologist William Gowers also reported epilepsy patients who perceived objects to look “twice their size” during the aura preceding their seizures; and in 1913, the German neurologist Hermann Oppenheim noted that he had “seen a case of genuine hemicrania [“one-sided headache”] in which there was during an episode of violent migraine an indescribable feeling of detachment of the trunk or extremity after an hour or even a day of spontaneous dizziness.” Continued here |
Babies look for this clue to see which adults they can trust
This article was first published on Big Think in February 2022. It was updated in December 2022. Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them. Continued here |
Jorie Graham Takes the Long View
The poet Jorie Graham is one of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. As James Longenbach put it, she engages “the whole human contraption . . . rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems.” Graham is a chronicler of bigness, the overawing bigness of our planet but also the too-bigness, at times, of the self. “I am huge,” she writes mournfully, in “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” an elegy for what humans have already blotted out. Many of Graham’s subjects—politics, technology, natural history, and climate loss—have a sweeping scope. This year, she compiled four of her books on global warming—“Sea Change,” “Place,” “Fast,” and “Runaway”—into “[To] The Last [Be] Human,” which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022. In spring, Graham will publish “To 2040,” her fifteenth collection. (It begins: “Are we / extinct yet.”) Graham’s attention to bigness is set off by a gift for evoking smallness. She notices an “almost tired-looking” tendril of wisteria; she pauses to wonder “what it is we mean by / ok.” Our own comprehension of enormity, Graham writes, slides off of us “like a ring into the sea.” It’s a truism that poetry’s task is finding amazement in the everyday. Graham turns this into a terrifying as well as a moral project. (In her ocean metaphor, the ring is vast, and the unknowingness in which we lose it is vaster still. Perhaps her poems are salvage divers.) What makes Graham especially unique is her long, galloping line, a line that she consistently thematizes: she has described line breaks as cliffs that the reader tumbles down, over and over. Some of the poems in “[To] The Last [Be] Human” are right-justified; rather than fall off a ledge, the reader careens into a wall. Continued here |
How to Start (and Keep) a Healthy Habit
It's almost that time of year. Everyone you know will soon be hitting the gym, smiling while eating broccoli, or crushing out a last cigarette. For some, the gym really will become a new part of life, and that really will be the last cigarette they smoke. But most of us have probably experienced the letdown—perhaps even self-loathing—of failing to stick to a New Year's resolution. I can't promise the advice I've collected will help—anyone who knows me would laugh hysterically at the idea of me guiding anyone toward successful habit formation—but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success and make sure your resolutions become more than just that. Continued here |
Why Yale Law School Left the U.S. News & World Report Rankings
Dean Heather Gerken says it’s her belief that “this is not where students should get their information from.” Each year, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of top colleges, law schools, and medical schools land to a chorus of groans and cheers. The rankings began in 1983, and were originally drawn solely from peer reviews of institutions. Did the provost at Brown think better of the University of Virginia than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Since then, the publication has tinkered with the rankings several times—taking into account factors such as how many students an institution rejects each year, how much it costs to attend, and the student-to-faculty ratio—to give more rigor to its methodology. Continued here |
2,700 years later, ancient rock carvings reveal the most stunning city in the world
Archaeologists in northern Iraq, working on the Masaki and Adad gate sites in Mosul that were destroyed by Islamic State in 2016, recently uncovered 2,700-year-old Assyrian reliefs. Featuring battle scenes and trees, these rock carvings add to the bounty of detailed stone panels excavated from the 1840s onwards, many of which are currently held in the British Museum. They stem from the ancient city of Nineveh, which, for a time, was likely the most dazzling in the world. There is evidence of occupation at the site already by 3,000 BC, an era known as the late Uruk period. But it was under King Sennacherib (705-681 BC), son of Sargon and grandfather of Ashurbanipal, that Nineveh became the capital of Assyria, the greatest power of its day. Continued here |
The WIRED Guide to 5G
The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, to telemedicine and mixed reality, to as yet undreamed technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier require high-speed, always-on internet connections. To keep up with the demand, the mobile industry introduced 5G—so named because it's the fifth generation of wireless networking technology. 5G brings faster speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to your phone. That's fast enough to download a 4K movie in 25 seconds. But 5G is not just about faster connections. It also delivers lower latency and allows for more devices to be connected simultaneously. Continued here |
New drugs could turn the clock back on aging — will they work?
James Kirkland started his career in 1982 as a geriatrician, treating aging patients. But he found himself dissatisfied with what he could offer them. “I got tired of prescribing wheelchairs, walkers, and incontinence devices,” recalls Kirkland, now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He knew that aging is considered the biggest risk factor for chronic illness, but he was frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. Continued here |
Crabs have evolved five separate times – why do the same forms keep coming back?
Charles Darwin believed evolution created “endless forms most beautiful”. It’s a nice sentiment but it doesn’t explain why evolution keeps making crabs. Scientists have long wondered whether there are limits to what evolution can do or if Darwin had the right idea. The truth may lie somewhere between the two. Continued here |
Building Wealth: Our Favorite Reads
At the time, my uncle’s explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I nodded, let it go, and didn’t think more about it until a few years later when I finished grad school with massive debt from a student loan. The first job I took barely covered my expenses. I had to rely on a credit card, even when I didn’t fully understand how credit worked. Living in a city as overpriced as New York (and later New Delhi) was a daily reminder of how expensive life could get. Continued here |
'Kaleidoscope' review: Netflix's gimmicky heist doesn't pay off
When streaming blew up, its biggest strength against primetime television was that it allowed the viewer to watch shows at their own speed. You could watch one episode a week like a regular show, or binge the entire thing. Suddenly, appointment television was a thing of the past and water cooler conversations started with, “Have you finished it yet?” But one element remained the same — everyone watched the shows in the same order. With Kaleidoscope, Netflix’s newest heist show starring Giancarlo Esposito, this model is disrupted. But while the format is intriguing, it’s not the case for another upheaval of how we watch TV. Continued here |
Where 2022's news was (mostly) good: The year's top science stories
How often does something work exactly as planned, and live up to its hype? In most of the world, that's the equivalent of stumbling across a unicorn that's holding a few winning lottery tickets in its teeth. But that pretty much describes our top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and initial images from the Webb Telescope. Continued here |
What Gen Z Knows About Stephen Sondheim
How the late composer’s preoccupation with outsiders has endeared him to a new generation “I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. In the class I was teaching at Portland State University, I’d anticipated #Hamilfans, enthusiasts for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen—appreciation for anything that had debuted to acclaim during my students’ lifetimes. Vintage Stephen Sondheim stans, however, I had not predicted. Continued here |
In Child Welfare Cases, Most of Your Constitutional Rights Don't Apply
In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely. Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents. Continued here |
Does Influencer Marketing Really Pay Off?
Influencer marketing is a huge industry, with companies around the world spending billions of dollars on these partnerships. But do these investments actually pay off? To quantify the ROI of influencer marketing, the authors analyzed engagement for more than 5,800 influencer posts and identified seven key variables that drive a campaign’s effectiveness, including characteristics of both the influencer and of their individual posts. They further found that by optimizing these variables, the average brand could boost ROI by 16.6%, suggesting that many companies are designing campaigns that leave substantial value on the table. By adopting these research-backed guidelines, brands can move past anecdotal evidence to ensure that their marketing dollars go toward the partnerships and content that are most likely to offer returns. Continued here |
Medicare Keeps Spending More on COVID-19 Testing. Fraud and Overspending Are Partly Why.
Fraud and overspending are contributing to the increases, experts say, because federal money for COVID-19 testing is not subject to some of the same financial and regulatory constraints as other tests covered by Medicare, the government insurance program for people 65 and older and the disabled. Early in the pandemic, testing was both critical to slowing the spread of the virus and in short supply. So the federal government enacted measures to make it more profitable to get in the COVID-19 testing business. Good for the duration of the public health emergency, which has not yet expired, the measures include a generous Medicare reimbursement rate, requirements for private insurance to cover testing — even compelling insurance plans to pay whatever cash price is demanded by out-of-network labs — and a hefty fund for testing those people who didn’t have insurance. Continued here |
Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family's Fight to Preserve a Way of Life
This is the life of the Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, the Salmon People. It is a life Columbia River tribal people have lived for generations and have fought for decades to protect. Over the last century and a half, they have watched as forces eroded their access to salmon. Treaties removed them from their traditional fishing areas; dams massively reduced the numbers of salmon that swam in the waters; environmental contamination further poisoned the well. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that produces nonpartisan, evidence-based journalism to expose injustice, corruption and wrongdoing. We were founded over 10 years ago to fill a growing hole in journalism: Newsrooms were (and still are) shrinking, and legacy funding models are failing. Deep-dive reporting like ours is slow and expensive, and investigative journalism is a luxury in many newsrooms today — but it remains as critical as ever to democracy and our civic life. More than a decade (and six Pulitzer Prizes) later, ProPublica has built one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the country. Our work has spurred reform through legislation, at the voting booth and inside our nation’s most important institutions. Continued here |
This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico
The seventh grader, whose middle name is Matthew, said that was the culmination of months of being written up for “everything” — from being off-task in class to playing on the school elevator. (Out of concern that the boy will be stigmatized at school, his grandmother agreed to speak on the condition that she not be identified and that he be identified only by his middle name.) Matthew’s school district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity, according to an analysis of state records by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020. Continued here |
The last fisherman of Monaco
It's often just past midnight when Eric Rinaldi unties the mooring lines and carefully manoeuvres his fishing boat Diego out of Monaco's harbour, Port Hercules. Contemplating the hours of inky darkness in front of him, he'll steer past rows of superyachts as he heads out into the open sea, their polished hulls and elaborate designs a stark contrast to the simple practicality of his fibreglass workboat. Onboard Diego – named for his young son – Rinaldi's biggest luxury is an old Nespresso machine, one of the few comforts among the jumble of nets, hooks, bright orange buoys and other tools of his trade. Continued here
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