How Brands and Influencers Can Make the Most of the Relationship

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How Brands and Influencers Can Make the Most of the Relationship Even as companies devote increasing shares of their marketing budgets to paying social media influencers to tout their products, researchers know little about the tactic’s effectiveness or its overall impact on influencers, their followers, and their partner brands. So, a team of researchers decided to investigate. HBS assistant professor Shunyuan Zhang and doctoral student Magie Cheng analyzed more than 85,000 influencer videos posted on YouTube from August 2019 to August 2020. Comparing similar posts with and without paid promotions, they found that putting out a sponsored video caused significant numbers of followers to doubt the influencers’ authenticity and drop off. The study’s findings suggest several ways for influencers and brands, along with the platforms hosting their content, to minimize the damage. Continued here

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4 Things to Consider Before Opening a Restaurant An unforgiving industry means you have to plan that much more. Continued here

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2 Toxic Mindsets That Instantly Demotivate Your Employees Many owners and leaders have a "win-lose" mindset. Do you? Continued here

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If You Plug Your iPhone Into USB Ports in Coffee Shops or Airports, the FBI Has a Warning for You It's time for a refresher on data-protection best practices. Continued here

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Innovation Doesn't Have to Be Disruptive For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a battle cry in business. Not surprisingly, many have come to see it as a near-synonym for innovation. But the obsession with disruption obscures an important truth: Market-creating innovation isn’t always disruptive. Disruption may be what people talk about. It’s certainly important, and it’s all around us. But, as the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy argue, it’s only one end of the innovation spectrum. On the other end is what they call nondisruptive creation, through which new industries, new jobs, and profitable growth are created without social harm. Nondisruptive creation reveals an immense potential to establish new markets where none existed before and, in doing so, to foster economic growth without a loss of jobs or damage to other industries, enabling business and society to thrive together. Continued here

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What Makes a Great Leader? Tomorrow’s leaders master three key roles — architect, bridger, and catalyst, or ABCs — to access the talent and tools they need to drive innovation and impact. As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems. These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation. Continued here

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In a Distracted World, Solitude Is a Competitive Advantage Technology has undoubtedly ushered in progress in a myriad of ways. But this same force has also led to work environments that inundate people with a relentless stream of emails, meetings, and distractions. A significant volume of research has outlined the problem with this onslaught of information: Studies show that when we’re constantly distracted, performance decreases. Having the discipline to step back from the noise of the world is essential. To stay focused at work, build periods of solitude into your schedule, as you would for a meeting or an appointment. Use some of that time to reflect on your top priorities. Don’t fill your schedule with so many commitments that you consistently prioritize urgent tasks over important ones. Starve your distractions by logging out of social media accounts and blocking certain websites during work hours. Finally, create a “stop doing” list to help provide clarity on what you need to start saying no to. Continued here

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How Frank Gehry Delivers On Time and On Budget When the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened, in 1997, critics hailed Frank Gehry’s masterpiece as one of the architectural wonders of the past century. The provincial government’s ambitious projections had called for 500,000 people a year to make the trek to Bilbao to visit the museum; in the first three years alone, 4 million came. The term “Bilbao effect” was coined in urban planning and economic development to describe architecture so spectacular it could transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions. Continued here

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8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year And then last year I surprised myself by reading 50 books. This year I’m on pace for 100. I’ve never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life. I feel more interesting, I feel like a better father, and my writing output has dramatically increased. Amplifying my reading rate has been the domino that’s tipped over a slew of others. Continued here

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How the "Glass Wall" Can Hold Female Freelancers Back As freelance working structures become increasingly common, some have argued that this opportunity for women to escape the Glass Ceiling of corporate hierarchies may boost gender equity. However, the authors’ recent research suggests that freelancing comes with its own systemic barriers to equity. Specifically, freelance careers often benefit from horizontal role expansion into new domains, and the authors’ analyses found that women are perceived worse than men when attempting to make these sorts of career moves. This Glass Wall limits female freelancers’ ability to grow their careers, as when they attempt to shift into new, broader roles, they are perceived as having less agency, less competence, and less commitment to their careers than equivalent male freelancers. To address this, the authors offer strategies to help both female freelancers and organizations break down the Glass Wall and build more-equitable work structures — while acknowledging that responsibility for combatting hiring bias falls squarely on the shoulders of those doing the hiring. Continued here

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Analytics for Marketers Advanced analytics can help companies solve a host of management problems, including those related to marketing, sales, and supply-chain operations, which can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. But as more data becomes available and advanced analytics are further refined, managers may struggle with when, where, and how much to incorporate machines into their business analytics, and to what extent they should bring their own judgment to bear when making data-driven decisions. Continued here

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Blue Oceans in Outer Space The void beyond Earth has become an exciting frontier for entrepreneurial ventures. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and scads of other companies are pursuing commercial activities in outer space—launching rockets to send tourists to new heights, deploying satellites to collect data and improve terrestrial telecommunications and logistics, and developing novel space-driven products and services. Continued here

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How Your Physical Surroundings Shape Your Work Life The past few years have encouraged us to revisit many assumptions about our lives, including the state and function of our workplaces. More than ever, it’s clear that our workplaces both shape and reflect important parts of ourselves, impacting our performance and well-being. While there are clearly limits to the places we have available to us for work (and our agency in making them “ours”), there are always at least small opportunities to engage in placemaking. Drawing from their theory of workplace identification, which integrates research on environmental psychology, organizational behavior, and workplace design, the authors offer insight into how you might consider and shape the physical landscape of the workplaces you have available to you in ways that can help you become your best self at work. Continued here

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How Should I Handle Questions About Religion in Work Meetings? Religion should stay out of work. Continued here

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How to Navigate Conflict with a Coworker Interpersonal conflicts are common in the workplace, and it’s easy to get caught up in them. But that can lead to reduced creativity, slower and worse decision-making, and even fatal mistakes. So how can we return to our best selves? Having studied conflict management and resolution over the past several years, the author outlines seven principles to help you work more effectively with difficult colleagues: (1) Understand that your perspective is not the only one possible. (2) Be aware of and question any unconscious biases you may be harboring. (3) View the conflict not as me-versus-them but as a problem to be jointly solved. (4) Understand what outcome you’re aiming for. (5) Be very judicious in discussing the issue with others. (6) Experiment with behavior change to find out what will improve the situation. (7) Make sure to stay curious about the other person and how you can more effectively work together. Continued here

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Companies Need to Normalize Healthy Turnover Turnover isn’t inherently a bad thing. Intentional attrition — a deliberate plan to reduce the number of employees in an organization over time — creates a finite timeline where employees and the employer mutually benefit. Most companies don’t work this way; when people leave (and most eventually do), it’s awkward and often unacknowledged. Pointing to the example of McKinsey & Co., the author argues that creating an “up-an-out” system where employees are encouraged to make the most of their limited time at a company can generate a positive employer brand for organizations as a springboard for talent. To make planned attrition a normal process, the author suggests three strategies for companies to get started: 1) Acknowledge that this isn’t forever from the beginning, 2) focus on promoting internal candidates and boomerang employees, and 3) engage your alumni. Continued here

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You Can't Be Creative If You're Fearful In the current political environment, your team could be exercising too much caution. You need to free them from their fears or risk falling into mediocrity. Continued here

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How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together To achieve performance- accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, firms must create metrics that measure the effects of both types of investments on a single North Star metric: brand equity. That is then linked to specific financial outcomes—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment—and deployed as a key performance indicator for both brand building and performance marketing. Continued here

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5 Science-Backed Reasons You're More Successful Than You Think Because comparisons, no matter how easy to make, never tell the whole story. Continued here

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Are You a Digital Narcissist? Research shows that scores on a clinical measure of narcissism increased by 30% in the U.S.  between the late 1970s and the mid 2000s. Social media platforms that reward self-centered and exhibitionist behaviors may be the driver. The narcissistic habits many of us form online can easily bleed into other areas of our lives, including the workplace. If this trend continues, so will incompetent leadership and toxic work environments. Continued here

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The Future of Explainer Videos for Marketing: Leveraging Interactive and Personalized Content How the emerging marketing trends of using interactive and personalized content can upgrade your brand power. Continued here

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Abortion Clinics in Conservative-Led States Face Increasing Threats After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, physical and legal attacks against clinics that provide abortions have increasedThirty years ago, Blue Mountain Clinic Director Willa Craig stood in front of the sagging roof and broken windows of an abortion clinic that an arsonist had burned down early that morning in Missoula, Montana. Continued here

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Why You Need Inside-Outside Capabilities on Your Management Team Why you need inside-outside and rational-emotional talent on you team. Continued here

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This Entrepreneur Learned the Hard Way That Business and Politics Don't Mix When Covid-19 hit, the founder of BML-Blackbird knew he was in trouble. But he didn't think the live events industry would get forgotten. Continued here

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What "Succession" Can Teach Us About Regret Looking back on the past and wishing we had done things differently is a common human experience. We most commonly regret making poor choices in our relationships, careers, and education. Looking back years later, we might kick ourselves for not taking an exciting job offer or not following a somewhat risky dream or not telling others how we truly feel about them. We tend to regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did do, research finds. In the most recent episode of HBO’s “Succession,” there are moments that show us how we can respond to regret in a way that lowers its intensity and allows us to focus on other aspects of our lives. Continued here

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How Managing Your Anxiety Can Make You a Better Leader The business world has increasingly begun to recognize the importance of mental health, but we still have a long way to go in openly acknowledging our challenges with it. Writer, entrepreneur, and podcast host Morra Aarons-Mele says that when we take the time and energy to better understand and talk about our own issues, we can actually harness the learnings to become better managers and colleagues. She says that there are a number of ways to stop anxiety from spiraling and instead use it for good. She also has recommendations for organizations trying to enhance the mental health of their workforces. Morra Aarons-Mele is the article “How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety” and the book The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower. Continued here

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Better, Faster, Safer: How to Find and Fill Gaps in Any Market For a founder, starting another business makes sense, but not for the reasons you think. Continued here

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Mifepristone Is Safe. A Court Ruling Reducing Access to It Is Dangerous A judge’s bad decision about the abortion pill rests on stigma about abortion that harms health careAfter several weeks of deliberation, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk handed down a decision that could alter the lives of the millions of Americans who can get pregnant. Kacsmaryk, an antiabortion jurist nominated by Donald Trump, issued a ruling staying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone, the most effective medication for early abortion and miscarriage care, currently used in a majority of abortions in the United States. Continued here

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Why California Can’t Catch a Break This winter, storm after storm after storm dumped rain and snow on California, and now, as the spring poppies bloom, the state is lush. Hillsides once prickly with dry vegetation have softened. Ski resorts, once thawed out and closed by late spring, are buried under record snow and planning to stay open into July. Satellite photos show a state transformed from brown to green, streaked from top to bottom with bright-emerald patches.The onslaught of water brought problems, such as deadly snowstorms and floods. But now that it’s stopped, the state’s residents seem to be finally getting a break after years of constant climate emergencies. For the first time in three years, the majority of the state is not in drought. And the storms have likely delayed the start of wildfire season by weeks, if not months. Continued here

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African startups need more than just funds from their investors While funding is crucial to any startup’s success, Anne-Marie Chidzero knows it’s not the only challenge facing young companies in Africa. Entrepreneurs on the continent navigate problems around policies and regulations and need the backing of investors who can do more than what regular venture capitalists would.Chidzero, the chief investment officer of FSD Africa Investments, has spent over 20 years in finance and the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In her current role, she identifies and coordinates investment opportunities for the firm. She believes African startups need development finance institutions (DFIs), which provide capital for high-risk projects that traditional lenders are not inclined to fund. Continued here

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How Over-the-Counter Narcan Can Help Reverse Opioid Overdoses A recent Food and Drug Administration decision that makes naloxone available without a prescription may increase the drug’s accessibility. But cost could be a barrierA lifesaving drug that can reverse an opioid overdose will be available on pharmacy shelves without a prescription this summer, a regulatory relaxation that experts herald as an important step in managing the U.S. opioid epidemic. Continued here

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Brazil is the first stop in the Latin American electric motorcycle market Jack Sarvary is the co-founder and CEO of Vammo, and one of the first employees at Rappi, the Colombian delivery giant.After working as a consultant and living in New York City for a few years, I ended up in Bogotá, where I joined the Rappi team when the company was less than a year old. There were eight people doing everything. I was there for six years, during which time I had a lot of different roles — from operations manager dealing with delivery workers in six countries to software and product manager leading the technology stack. During my last years at Rappi, I developed Turbo, the company’s 10-minute delivery service, and that’s when I really got to understand the delivery workers’ needs and woes. Continued here

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Southeastern U.S. Seas Are Rising at Triple the Global Average Sea levels off the southeastern U.S. have risen more than a centimeter a year over the past decade—about triple the global average—and the effects on communities near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean already are being observedCLIMATEWIRE | Sea levels have surged along the coastlines of the southeastern United States, new research finds — hitting some of their highest rates in more than a century. Continued here

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Are you an ethical true crime fan? 4 questions to ask From the Salem witch trials to Jack the Ripper, humanity's historic fascination for true crime content can be traced back to the Middle Ages. But is it ethical to consume these real-life dramas in the way we do? Researcher Lindsey A. Sherrill shares four questions to ask yourself to be a mindful fan of this provocative cultural obsession -- so you can direct your attention away from the exploitative "ugly side" of true crime and to those that are doing useful work in the genre. Continued here

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A Rose by Any Other Name: Supply Chains and Carbon Emissions in the Flower Industry Headquartered in Kitengela, Kenya, Sian Flowers exports roses to Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian and its distributors used international air cargo to transport them to Amsterdam, where they were sold at auction and trucked to markets across Europe. But when the Covid-19 pandemic caused huge increases in shipping costs, Sian launched experiments to ship roses by ocean using refrigerated containers. Continued here

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How Shoppers Got Tricked By Vegan Leather If you’ve ever purchased a pair of faux-leather sandals without realizing they were faux, the sandals probably cleared up that misunderstanding for you pretty quickly. Both real and fake leather can shred your feet on first meeting, but the real stuff will eventually stretch, bend, soften, and mold itself to your needs. Faux leather, meanwhile, is more likely to remind you why it has long had the derogatory moniker of pleather. It’s plastic, which doesn’t really break in. In many of plastic’s uses, that’s a feature. In footwear, it’s a skin-sloughing, blister-producing bug.Pleather has always had some obstacles to full consumer acceptance. Real leather is widely understood as a status symbol, so among shoppers, pleather is known primarily for what it fails to be: rare, luxurious, expensive, convincing, real. Its main advantage is being super cheap—a property that ingratiates it to manufacturers looking to cut costs and shoppers looking for bargain-basement prices. But even a couple of steps up the fashion food chain, buyers are harder to convince that pleather is tolerable, let alone desirable. As plastics have successfully slithered into all kinds of clothing, many people who are perfectly happy with a viscose-polyester-blend dress or a partially acrylic wool coat will still scoff at a fake-leather jacket. Continued here

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Forget the race cars, here's how F1 will really cut carbon emissions Formula 1 might be a sport, but it's also a $2.6 billion business with shareholders, and like pretty much every other multibillion-dollar business with shareholders, that means it's under increasing scrutiny regarding the amount of carbon emissions it's responsible for. Currently, that's about 250,000 tons a year, but the sport says it wants to reduce that to net zero by 2030. I spoke with F1's chief sustainability to learn more about how it's doing that, and you may be surprised to learn that race cars have very little to do with it. Continued here

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Substack debuts feature that spooked Musk into suppressing Substack tweets Today, Substack officially rolled out Notes, the product that creates a feed that allows Substack creators and subscribers to interact. It functions so much like Twitter that it controversially caused Twitter to restrict links to Substack. But Substack doesn’t see Notes as a Twitter rival, telling Ars that Substack has no plans to become the next Twitter. Continued here

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Alysa McCall: What to do when there's a polar bear in your backyard As Arctic ice melts, polar bears are being forced on land -- and they're hungry. With the apex predators frequently turning to human junkyards for a snack, northern towns have had to get creative in order to keep both their people and wildlife safe. Biologist and conservationist Alysa McCall shares lessons from the field on how to safely navigate contact with these magnificent animals and plan for a future where climate change forces us all a little closer. Continued here

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Valuing Human Capital: How Small Changes Could Help Firms Simple additions to financial disclosure rules could help firms see human capital as a competitive advantage rather than just a cost, while also helping to improve market pricing, Wharton experts say.In the past few decades, the global economy has gone through a fundamental transformation, whereby the bulk of value is no longer generated by physical assets such as machinery, buildings, and computers; today, knowledge, skills, competencies, and people are at the core of value creation. Continued here

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Speak With Confidence: Four Fixes That Work In this Nano Tool for Leaders, Wharton's Jonah Berger shares four tips for confident communication in the workplace.Nano Tools for Leaders®  — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success. Continued here

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No, Fusion Energy Won't Be 'Limitless' Last December, researchers at California's National Ignition Facility achieved what many in the fusion industry have called its "Wright brothers" moment. Using a laser, they zapped a golden vessel with a microseconds-long pulse of energy and received a dividend in return: About 50 percent more energy than they put in. That feat is called ignition, and it's a triumph that's been awaited since the 1970s. The perpetually 30-years-out technology of fusion power suddenly looks closer.Well, not all that much closer. The ignition experiment still consumed energy overall, because the laser burned a lot more power than it delivered to its target. And there's still plenty to figure out about how to harness fusion energy for electricity. But the result has prompted a revival of long-established predictions that fusion will solve all humanity's energy needs. Startups working on fusion have reported a surge of interest from investors this year. The US government has announced a record $1.4 billion in funding for research, the beginning of a 10-year drive toward practical fusion. The potential payoff is big: Figure out the science, the wisdom goes, and fusion will unlock "unlimited clean energy." Continued here

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The Atlantic’s May Cover Story: “American Madness” Jonathan Rosen writes about his childhood best friend’s schizophrenic break, and America’s ongoing failure to help the mentally illThousands of Americans with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system. The writer Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia in his early 20s, was one of them. Twenty-five years ago, he killed the person he loved most. In “American Madness,” appearing as the cover story of the May issue of The Atlantic, Rosen writes about the extraordinary turned tragic trajectory of Michael’s life and illness, and makes a broader argument that how we treat people with severe mental illness in this country must change. Exclusively adapted from his forthcoming book The Best Minds (Penguin Press), Rosen captures his relationship with the larger-than-life Michael as they grew up together outside New York City in the 1970s, and his terrible sorrow as Michael’s illness overtook him. After applying to the top seven law schools, all of which he said accepted him, Michael suffered a psychotic break and wound up in the hospital. He stayed there for eight months before leaving for a halfway house, where he struggled to maintain his grip on reality. Despite this, Michael still attended Yale Law School, where he awed his professors and classmates with his intellect even while having to manage active delusions that convinced him that his room was on fire and that cannibals were out to eat him. After an article in The New York Times made Michael famous for both his brilliance and his mental illness, Michael landed multimillion-dollar book and movie deals to tell his life story. Brad Pitt was going to play him. But Michael went off his medications, and no one could compel him to go back on them or to check into the hospital, even as his psychotic delusions got worse. When his pregnant fiancée tried to talk him into going back on his medications, he became convinced that she was an alien and brutally killed her. His family had been frantically scrambling to try to help him, but a regime of laws and policies that make it nearly impossible to commit the mentally ill prevented them from doing so in time. Rosen writes, “Delusions were no more a justification for forced medication than refusing medication was a justification for forced hospitalization. The only question was whether Michael was violent.” And those who watched over Michael and Carrie didn’t see him as violent. More broadly, Michael is a stand-in for the thousands of Americans with severe mental illness who are still being failed by a dysfunctional system. Rosen writes, “Because he was very sick and did not always know it, Michael had refused the psychiatric care that his family and friends desperately wanted for him but could not get. Michael needed a version of what New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for in November, when announcing an initiative to assess homeless individuals so incapacitated by severe mental illness that they cannot recognize their own impairment or meet basic survival needs—even if that means bringing them to a hospital for evaluation against their will … The people Adams is trying to help have been failed by the same legal and psychiatric systems that failed Michael. They all came of age amid the wreckage of deinstitutionalization.” In deinstitutionalizing treatment for the severely mentally ill without replacing the old asylums with adequate forms of care, Rosen argues that America has failed the mentally ill and their families––not to mention the victims of people like Michael, who in their unmedicated psychosis become violent, dangerous to others and to themselves. As the former executive director of The National Alliance on Mental Illness puts it to Rose, the problem is a system that forces families to “sit and watch someone they love deteriorate, unable to get them help until they are dangerous.” He writes that the programs such as the ones being proposed by Adams and Gavin Newsom in California that make it easier to compel the severely mentally ill into treatment will reduce stigma. It will also keep people alive.“American Madness” is published today at The Atlantic. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Rosen about his reporting.Press Contacts: Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic press@theatlantic.com Continued here

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‘Screw the Rules’ On the morning of August 26, 2021, a sweaty young American diplomat named Sam Aronson stood in body armor near the end of a dusty service road outside the Kabul airport, contemplating the end of his life or his career.Thirty-one and recently married, 5 foot 10 without his combat helmet, Sam surveyed the scene at the intersection near the airport’s northwest corner, where the unnamed service road met a busy thoroughfare called Tajikan Road. Infected blisters oozed in his socks. He winced at gunfire from Afghan Army soldiers who fired over the heads of pedestrians in a crude form of crowd control. He breathed exhaust from trucks that jittered past market stalls shaded by tattered rugs and faded canvas. The withdrawal of American forces after two decades of war, the sudden fall of Kabul to the Taliban, and the mad rush to the airport by tens of thousands of desperate Afghans couldn’t stop street vendors from hawking cotton candy, vegetables, and on-the-spot tailoring. Continued here

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Why Are Killer Whales Ripping Livers Out of Their Shark Prey? Killer whales rip open the bellies of sharks to snag the liver. Other predators also have dietary preferences for organs, brains and additional rich body partsLife as a carnivore is often tough. You have to catch your meals on the run, and depending on the predator, more than 80 percent of attempts to grab a bite can end in failure. Continued here

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The 10 Best Movies on Hulu This Week In 2017, Hulu made television history by becoming the first streaming network to win the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy, thanks to the phenomenon that is The Handmaid’s Tale. While that painfully prescient adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel remains one of the best TV shows to watch on Hulu, it also set a bar for quality entertainment that the network has continued to match—and sometimes exceed—with original series like The Bear, The Great, and Only Murders in the Building. While Netflix has largely cornered the streaming market on original movies, and even managed to convince A-listers like Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Martin Scorsese to come aboard, Hulu is starting to find its footing in features too. Below are some of our top picks for the best movies (original and otherwise) streaming on Hulu right now.  Continued here

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The Moms Who Breastfeed Without Being Pregnant Hormones and pumping are allowing some parents to induce lactation—and rewrite the rules of caring for a baby.While her wife was pregnant with their son, Aimee MacDonald took an unusual step of preparing her own body for the baby’s arrival. First she began taking hormones, and then for six weeks straight, she pumped her breasts day and night every two to three hours. This process tricked her body into a pregnant and then postpartum state so she could make breast milk. By the time the couple’s son arrived, she was pumping 27 ounces a day—enough to feed a baby—all without actually getting pregnant or giving birth. Continued here

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Please Don’t Ask Me to Play Your Board Game Several years ago, I moved to a small town in eastern Pennsylvania, and a co-worker invited me over for a classic social tradition: a game night. I don’t like board games. When I’m hanging out with others, I much prefer the free flow of conversation to the structure of competition. The moment someone starts explaining the rules to something like Gloomhaven or Codenames, my brain tends to involuntarily tune out, a defense mechanism against unwanted and useless information.The evening was grim. An alarmingly complex game was first explained—something about a ghost, or a haunting—and then repeated, upon my request. I was assured that I’d “get it after a couple rounds,” which never happened. Bumbling through my turns, I felt like I was wearing a dunce cap. Worse, I was so bad that I was ruining everyone else’s experience with my erratic plays and constant need to be reminded of what was happening. Continued here

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The Galaxy S23 Ultra's "15 W" wireless charging is 33% slower than last year Samsung's already-slow charging speeds have again been caught not meeting people's expectations. This time it is the wireless charging on the Galaxy S23 series, which is slower than older Galaxy S22 phones, according to new tests from PhoneArena. The site compared wireless charging for all three models—the base, Plus, and Ultra S22s and S23—and came away with the conclusion that "All three new members of the Galaxy S23 series charge way slower than the Galaxy S22 series as per our tests." Continued here

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The Real Hero of 'Ted Lasso' Nate Shelley’s descent into villainy has been jarring and a little bit heartbreaking. It’s also an apt rejoinder to the show’s fantasies.Ted Lasso, like an athlete meeting the moment, peaked at the right time. The show premiered during the waning months of Donald Trump’s presidency; against that backdrop, its positivity felt like catharsis, its soft morals a rebuke. Soon, Ted Lasso was winning fans and Emmys. Articles were heralding it as an answer to our ills. The accolades recognized the brilliance of a show that weaves Dickensian plots with postmodern wit. But they were also concessions. Kindness should not be radical. Empathy should not be an argument. Here we were, though, as so much was falling apart, turning a wacky comedy about British soccer into a plea for American politics. Continued here

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Einstein's most famous quote is totally misunderstood What about for the life of a scientist, like a theoretical physicist? Is imagination or knowledge more important for them?If you’ve ever seen a poster of Einstein with a quote on it, there’s a very good chance that the quote simply says, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Although that quote is indeed correctly attributable to Einstein, most people completely misinterpret its meaning. Continued here

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Surprising things happen when you put 25 AI agents together in an RPG town A group of researchers at Stanford University and Google have created a miniature RPG-style virtual world similar to The Sims, where 25 characters, controlled by ChatGPT and custom code, live out their lives independently with a high degree of realistic behavior. They wrote about their experiment in a preprint academic paper released on Friday. Continued here

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Collective pessimism and our inability to guess the happiness of others We tend to underestimate the average happiness of people around us. The visualization shown demonstrates this for countries around the world, using data from Ipsos’ Perils of Perception—a cross-country survey asking people to guess what others in their country have answered to the happiness question in the World Value Survey.The horizontal axis in this chart shows the actual share of people who said they are ‘Very Happy’ or ‘Rather Happy’ in the World Value Survey; the vertical axis shows the average guess of the same number (i.e. the average guess that respondents made of the share of people reporting to be ‘Very Happy’ or ‘Rather Happy’ in their country). Continued here

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Five People Died in the Kentucky Shooting. The Full Toll Is Much Higher. It’s happened again. What could have been—what should have been—an ordinary Monday morning in America was marked by another mass shooting. Yesterday, a gunman opened fire at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. Five people were killed and eight others were injured, including a 26-year-old officer in critical condition who had just graduated from the police academy.In his public remarks in response to the shooting, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear seemed to hold back tears as he talked about how a dear friend, Thomas Elliott, was among the dead. Continued here

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The Race to Decarbonize America Needs More Workers The United States doesn’t lack the technology to head off climate catastrophe—it lacks enough trained workers to install it fast enough. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed last summer, allocates $370 billion toward energy security and climate action. According to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Energy Futures Initiative, the legislation will create 1.5 million jobs by the year 2030. Over 100,000 will be in manufacturing, with 60,000 coming from battery production alone. Nearly 600,000 jobs would be added in the construction sector—building out electrical transmission lines, for instance, and the facilities to manufacture those batteries—while the electric utility sector would gain 190,000.  Continued here

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Developer creates "self-healing" programs that fix themselves thanks to AI Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That's what a developer that goes by "BioBootloader" did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs "regenerative healing abilities," reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.) Continued here

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5 reasons the president has little control over the economy Listen to a president’s opponents, or supporters, for even just a few minutes and, in all likelihood, you will hear some reference to the national economy. At first glance, this seems reasonable; perhaps even refreshingly non-partisan. After all, the economy offers an objective, fair-game metric by which we can evaluate a president’s performance, right? Unfortunately, no. A host of biases and partisan motivations make it nearly impossible to use “the economy” as anything resembling an objective standard. But, even more fundamentally, and in spite of what many Americans believe, several basic facts reveal the limited influence that a president actually wields over the national economy at any given time.  Continued here

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Twitter "no longer exists" as a company, merges into Musk's X Corp Last month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk told employees that they’d be eligible to receive stocks in X Corporation—the new name for the holding company that he initially set up to purchase Twitter—telling them that soon Twitter could be worth $250 billion. More recently, an April court filing shows that Twitter, Inc. has officially merged with X Corp, achieving Musk’s goal of wiping out Twitter Inc. as a company. The court filing confirmed that Twitter, Inc. “no longer exists.” Now, there is only X Corp. Continued here

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The coast-to-coast road trip is 120 years old The coast-to-coast road trip, that American essential, turns 120 this year. In 1903, Horatio Jackson and Sewall Crocker became the first people ever to drive a car from one side of the U.S. all the way to the other. Cars were an exciting novelty at the time, and their numbers were exploding — from 8,000 in 1900 to 32,920 in 1903 — but many still considered the “horseless carriage” a passing fad. There were few suitable roads, let alone a nationwide road network. So theirs was an adventure like none before. And it all started with a $50 bet. Continued here

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Google's $350 NFL Sunday Ticket package is more expensive than DirecTV After Google's $2 billion-a-year deal to make NFL Sunday Ticket a YouTube TV exclusive, Google has now announced exactly how much football addicts will be paying to get every out-of-market NFL game, every week. The short answer is to not expect any revolutionary pricing packages or offerings just because this is moving online. Continued here

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How life survived "Snowball Earth" Endless expanses of ice extend in every direction. A cold wind howls over a landscape covered in glaciers, bringing the temperature down to -50°C (-58°F). We are not standing in Antarctica, nor on another planet. Rather, we stand on a much younger Earth, 650 million years ago. During this phase of its evolution, the Earth was a frozen ball of white.How did life survive during this phase? Scientists are divided. Some say the Earth was completely frozen — essentially a planet-sized snowball. Others suggest that the Earth was only partially frozen, with bands or localized areas of open ocean near the equator. Such an Earth would be more of a slushball. New research published in Nature Communications suggests that the Earth may indeed have been less frozen, with watery open oceans serving as oases for life farther from the equator than previously thought. Continued here

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An Afrofuturist Architect Builds for a Better Future Growing up in rural West Africa, Diébédo Francis Kéré and his friends would build makeshift shelters from clay, tree branches, and leaves when they got caught in the rain away from home. Decades later, in 1999, he returned home to Burkina Faso as an architecture school student to build a school in his hometown of Gando, thinking he was unlikely to ever find a job.With light streaming in, passive ventilation, and walls made from bricks pressed from clay and concrete, that school was recently recognized by The New York Times as one of the most important buildings constructed since World War II. Continued here

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Questionable $2,500 hoodie makes you look like you were plucked out of Minecraft Move over, Microsoft. There's a new company out there peddling clothing evoking memories of old tech. Loewe, a Spanish fashion company that apparently makes really expensive clothing, is paying homage to pixelated graphics à la Minecraft with a recently released line of clothing that makes you look like you plucked clothing out of a retro game and slapped it on your 3D body. Continued here

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Convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison, judge rules Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison later this month as she appeals her conviction of three counts of defrauding investors, a judge ruled Monday, denying her request to remain free on bail as her legal saga continues. Continued here

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How to Use Apple's New All-In-One Password Manager Most people don't use a password manager or two-factor authentication—even people who know it's a good idea—because installing and managing yet another app just sounds exhausting. Well, if you're an Apple user, you don't need another app anymore: Your device can manage your passwords and generate two-factor authentication codes for you, and you can even sync them with a Windows computer.Password managers are important. Why? To quickly summarize, using the same password for every website and app is an open invitation for hackers to access all of your accounts. That's because passwords regularly leak, and a leaked password on one site can give hackers access to all your other accounts if you use the same password everywhere. It's best, then, to use a totally different password on every site, but no human being can remember that many passwords. Continued here

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'Succession' Finally Did It I think? For three-plus seasons, Logan Roy has ducked and weaved his way past near fatalities—a hemorrhagic stroke, multiple corporate coup attempts, a congressional investigation, a troublesome UTI, a collapse in the Hamptons—like a hirsute, cashmere-clad Road Runner. Hostile board meeting? Meep meep. Attempted patricidal veto under the Tuscan sun? Fuck off. You could be forgiven, after all this, for thinking him immortal. Which is why it was so unsettling to realize, as the Roy children did, via a phone call from Tom, that Logan’s revels might now finally have ended. That Logan actually was, despite all evidence to the contrary, human.There was something perfect, too, about the way Logan’s end was presented, after so much time spent anticipating it: It happened off camera. As his three youngest children arrived in New York for Connor’s wedding, Logan boarded a plane for impromptu crisis negotiations with the tech mogul Lukas Matsson. Early in the episode, Logan had instructed his youngest son, Roman, to metaphorically knife Gerri, the interim CEO of the Roys’ company and Roman’s surrogate mother-lover, whom Logan had decided to arbitrarily fire. (“You two are … close,” as Logan brutally put it.) Just a few minutes later, he had collapsed on the floor of the airplane, his face not visible. Succession is always meticulous about blocking: In virtually any scene Logan is in, he’s the focal point, the black hole drawing everything else into his gravitational vortex. He doesn’t typically share space with other characters the way that, say, the Roy siblings do. Other people might be shot slightly askew, but Logan is usually right in the center of the frame. In his final moments, though, he was so diminished in status that we could see only fragments of the man: his chest as a flight attendant performed CPR, the side of his head as a phone was placed next to it for his children to say goodbye. Continued here

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Entangled superpowers cause portal-jumping havoc in The Marvels teaser Remember Ms. Marvel's end credits scene, where Brie Larson's Captain Marvel suddenly appears in Kamala Khan's (Iman Vellani) bedroom, while Kamala finds herself on a spaceship with Goose (the cat that's really a Flerken)? Judging by a newly released teaser, that scene will lead directly into The Marvels, the sequel to 2019's Captain Marvel. It's part of Phase Five of the MCU, and the film is directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman). Continued here

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How French mathematicians birthed a strange form of literature Excerpted from ONCE UPON A PRIME: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature. Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Hart. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.On November 24, 1960, at a café in Paris, two Frenchmen, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, met with a group of fellow mathematically-minded writers and literature-minded mathematicians and formed the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Oulipo (from the first letters of the words). This translates roughly as “workshop of potential literature.” The aim of the group was to explore new possibilities for structures that could be used in literature, whether that be poetry, novels, or plays.  Continued here