Climate Regulations Are About to Disrupt Global Shipping

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Climate Regulations Are About to Disrupt Global Shipping Ships that transport goods across oceans are collectively a major generator of greenhouse gases. Rules from the International Maritime Organization and the European Union aimed at curbing these emission promise to make transoceanic and regional shipping more expensive and reduce service, which will have a significant impact on global supply chains. Managers should begin to prepare now for this new era. Continued here

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Tech Companies Innovate at the Edge. Legacy Companies Can Too. Technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence, and low and no code software design tools are changing how companies need to approach innovation. Specifically, they look to the edge of the organization where the business interfaces with its customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, and where small-scale innovations are happening. Companies should adopt three practices: 1) free up small teams to act independently, 2) feed these teams with the systems, resources, and tools they need, and 3) funnel the best innovations back through the company. Continued here

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How to Gain a Competitive Advantage on Customer Insights Based on research into 12 companies, the authors detail the ways companies can gain their own privileged insights — including creating a more robust and engaging customer service experience, integrating customers into product and service development, and observing and interacting with customers while they use products. Continued here

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4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Shareholder Value The idea that maximizing shareholder value takes legal and practical precedence above all else first came to prominence in the 1970s. The person who arguably did the most to advance the idea was the business school professor Michael Jensen, who wrote in Harvard Business Review and elsewhere that CEOs pursue their own interests at the expense of shareholders’ interests. Among other things, he argued for stock-based incentives that would neatly align CEO and shareholder interests. Continued here

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How LinkedIn Redesigned Its HQ for Hybrid Work More than half of people who can work remotely expect or prefer to do so at least part of the time. Organizations of all types must therefore make hybrid work more viable and sustainable. The design and construction of LinkedIn’s new headquarters offers three important lessons. First, the office has to be optimized for all use cases, from heads-down work to social gatherings. It also has to accommodate a more diverse workforce, accepting a more relaxed professionalism. Finally, those designing workspaces must constantly test, retest, and adapt them to suit changing needs. Continued here

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Rooting Out the Masculine Defaults in Your Workplace Masculine defaults in the workplace aren’t new, but you may not always notice them. Masculine defaults are a form of gender bias in which characteristics and behaviors typically associated with men are rewarded and considered standard practice. But the evidence shows that effective workplaces require masculine and feminine behaviors (as well as non-gendered ones) to be effective. With masculine defaults, it may seem like there’s equal opportunity for men and women, but men are often more socialized to engage in stereotypical masculine behaviors and more typically rewarded for them. Based on their research, the authors identify how masculine defaults permeate organizations, and steps to address them: 1) Identify masculine defaults, 2) determine their necessity, and 3) dismantle or balance them. They also identify traps to avoid when addressing masculine defaults at work, like 1) believing that removing gender information is enough, 2) fighting masculine defaults with masculine defaults, and 3) seeing masculine defaults as culturally “good.” Continued here

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Successful Digital Transformation is All About Value In the digital era, how firms create and capture value has changed profoundly. But with digital transformation, many firms are leaving substantial value on the table, getting caught up in “doing” digital transformation rather than staying focused on how they will create and capture value with digital. To do this, first companies need to understand the three different types of digital value: value from customers (cross-selling, increased loyalty, great customer experience); value from operations (increased efficiency, modularity and reuse of components, automating processes); and value from ecosystems (leveraging partners for both access to more customers and range of products and services). With these types of value in mind, firms can then take action to create digital value by: identifying domain opportunities; building mutually-reinforcing capabilities; tracking digital value with a dashboard; recruiting digital partners; and investing in digital savviness of everyone at the firm. Companies that do this will become truly “future ready.” Continued here

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Look to exercise to extend life, even for the oldest, study says | CNN Physical activity guidelines for older adults stress doing at least two days of strength training and 2½ hours of moderate to vigorous aerobic physical activity each week. Yet many people downplay muscle strengthening, relying on the heart-pumping benefits of aerobic exercise. That would be a mistake, a new study found. Independent of aerobic physical activity, adults over 65 who did strength training two to six times per week lived longer than those who did less than two, according to study author Dr. Bryant Webber, an epidemiologist in the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We found that each type of physical activity was independently associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality in older adults," Webber said in an email. Continued here

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Are Blackout Curtains Key Not Just for Sleep, But Improving Long-Term Health? The earth is getting brighter. About 99% of people living in the United States and Europe spend their nights beneath the gleam of artificial lights, according to a 2016 report published by The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness. The effect is called Sky Glow—a poetic term for the cumulation of house lights and streetlights we began burning over the past century to improve our safety and productivity through the night. Unfortunately, it’s obscured the Milky Way for an estimated 80% of Americans. According to two studies published this year, Sky Glow is detrimental to our sleep and long-term health. The REM-cycle disruptions spurred are linked to heart disease, obesity, and Alzheimer’s. I write this from one of the brightest cities in the world, on the most brilliant street I have ever lived on. My bedroom experience more closely resembles that of Chevy Chase’s resentful, floodlit neighbors in Christmas Vacation than it does the blackout cave our ancestors spent hundreds of millennia evolving to sleep in. According to the data, I am not alone.   Continued here

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This Nearly Lost Ancient Grain Tradition Could Be the Future of Farming When Zemede Asfaw was growing up on a farm in eastern Ethiopia, he soaked up plant lore and other traditional knowledge the way a tree takes in sunlight and converts it to energy. “I knew the crops, and the wild plants, and the fruits and other things,” says Zemede, who goes by his given name. The practical methods he learned covered every aspect of farming: Instead of stone walls or wire fences, plant field edges with darker crops, so the bold colors of red sorghum, for example, create a clear border between the family’s plot and that of a neighbor. Leave a few wild olive or acacia trees in the fields to harvest sustainably, over time, for firewood, animal fodder, or building materials. And instead of sowing the seeds of a single grain in orderly rows, spread a mix of grains all over the field, “mimicking nature so crops have random distribution patterns, as in natural forests,” he says. Once harvested, these grain mixtures could be turned into many things: nutritious bread, a kind of roasted-grain trail mix called kolo, beer, and the potent clear spirit known as areki.Now an ethnobotanist at Addis Ababa University, Zemede conducts field research in northern Ethiopia. The dominant grains grown there are different than in the region of his youth—his family grew sorghum and maize, while the northerners prefer barley and wheat, better suited to their mountainous highlands—but the principle is the same: “We’ll plant the things that go together and are compatible with each other,” Zemede says. “Our farmers are good at mirroring nature.” Continued here

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"Painful memories": what will the royal family do with the Koh-i-noor diamond? I grew up with friends and relatives from India insisting on trips to the Tower of London almost as soon as they landed at Heathrow. When you got there, you always knew where the Koh-i-noor was in the dim half-light, thanks to the knots of people in front of it hissing "chor" at the glass - the Hindustani word for "robbers". I think the traffic jam may have led to the Tower putting in a moving walkway, but it is only marginally helpful: it turns out Indians and Pakistanis are inadvertently good at the moonwalk. The grumbling discontent around the diamond has now tbecome front-page news.The ruling BJP party of Narendra Modi has let it be known that any plans for the Queen Consort to wear the Koh-i-noor at her coronation would bring back "painful memories of the colonial past". For a country that is involved in top level trade negotiations with Britain at this very moment, this is a powerful statement, and one which the palace will now have to deal with. Does it refashion a new Queen Consort's crown for Camilla, which would be costly at a time of financial hardship in the country? Can it swap out the diamond for another gem in the collection? If it did, there will doubtless be cries of "Woke-ageddon" to deal with. But to leave it where it is clearly puts pressure on an economically important bilateral relationship with India - so what to do? This is not an easy problem to solve, but then, the Koh-i-noor has never been easy. Continued here

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Syrian Refugees Are Transforming an Ancient Turkish City's Food Culture IT’S 11 A.M. IN GAZIANTEP, a city in southeastern Türkiye, and I’m stunned by the sheer spectacle of our late breakfast. My partner, Barry, and I are at a restaurant called Orkide with our friend Filiz Hösükoğlu, an expert in local culture and food. Around us, guys in trim leather jackets and ladies—some in sparkly black tops, some in flowing hijabs—sip menengiç, a warm drink made from ground wild pistachios.I circle our table in awe, trying to count and record all the dishes, losing track at three dozen. There are snowy clumps of kaymak (clotted buffalo cream) to be eaten with raw honey from the nearby hills; eggs scrambled with walnuts, fresh tarragon, and tiny roasted green olives; and eggs fried with topaç (beef confit). Copper bowls hold apricots stewed with fresh almonds and tahini the color of deep earth. All dishes seem touched by mint, live fire, and flakes of local red pepper. Continued here

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The 51 Best Horror Movies To Scare Yourself Silly Grab the popcorn, we've got the 51 best horror films of all time for you to queue up on your next Friday night. Continued here

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A few simple steps could empower the world’s largest minority | Psyche Ideas For most of my life, I hated having a disability. The accommodations I received in school, like my black-and-white enlarged textbooks or a seat at the front of the room, made me feel different and alone. I wanted my books in colour and to sit with my friends. During gym class when we played softball, I hit the ball off a tee. Three times a week, that rubber ball reminded me that, just because I was born a certain way, my world and my potential had limits.After college, I started a fellowship at Human Rights Watch that taught me a new way to think about disability. I learned to treat disability not as a medical condition that limits my potential or as something that requires ‘fixing’, but as a condition that interacts with attitudes and barriers that are disabling themselves. This ‘social model’ of disability shifts the focus away from an impairment and asks what we can all do to promote inclusion. Continued here

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The Solar System Isn’t Ready to Deal With Humanity’s Garbage One project NASA is working on right now is a compaction system that could turn astronaut garbage into tiles that can then be used for practical applications like radiation shielding. Such an approach hits home at an ethos that’s relevant here on Earth but especially important if you’re an astronaut who is weeks or even months away from a crucial resupply mission: reduce, reuse, recycle.Undoubtedly, the grossest category of the challenge involved what to do with fecal waste. One example involves fermenting fecal matter in order to break it down. The idea is to “get anaerobic decomposition very similar to what goes on with composting,” Sepka said. “We’re getting microbes to do it and what to do with leftover materials. It’s very similar to what we do on Earth.” Continued here

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Asian South America - JSTOR Daily Globalization being centuries old, the movement of people coexisted alongside trade—even when that trade wasn’t actually in people. Consider the 1613 census of Lima in the Viceroy of Peru. The city’s population was 25,000: “in the midst of Spaniards, blacks, and mulattos, the census noted ‘Indians of China and Manila,’ ‘Indians of Portuguese India,’ and ‘Indians of Japan.’” (In 1990, Alberto Fujimori, child of Japanese immigrants, became president of Peru.) In 1614, a party of Christian-convert Japanese passed through Mexico on the way to Spain, with some of them staying on in Mexico.This early presence was small. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Asians started arriving in significant numbers as countries became independent of Spain. Migrants from both Europe and Asia were welcomed to “populate and work the land.” Chinese and South Asians were also openly demanded as replacements for slave labor, write Hu-DeHart and López, as “white planters and officials perceived Asian migrants as more industrious, more economical, and less threatening than Africans.” Cuba’s sugar-based economy, for example, was heavily dependent on Chinese laborers called culíes. Continued here

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Inside the black market for blue checks Pearl had fallen prey to a phishing attack. The email wasn’t from Twitter but from a hacker who had copied the look of an official Twitter message. Pearl was out when the email landed and assumed she couldn’t afford to wait till she was home to read it on her computer. Plus, the email’s urgent tone rushed Pearl to react without verifying its details. If she had, she might have noticed the fishy email address it came from or the fact that the link didn’t lead to the official Twitter URL.  Pearl’s account was just one sale in a vast and highly lucrative black market for verified Twitter handles. In this particular Telegram group, control of a verified account usually goes for a couple hundred dollars, which buyers usually hope to make back by promoting NFT scams. Such thefts occur regularly, with dozens losing their profiles every day if the frequency of new listings on marketplaces for verified profiles is any evidence. And despite years of evidence, platforms seem powerless to stop the ongoing trade. Continued here

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European colonialism has had a lasting legacy on how plants are distributed around the world A few years ago, one of us (Guillaume) moved to the town of Stellenbosch, in South Africa, and found himself walking through town while being shaded from the sun by European oak trees. The region is famous for its wine, and the oaks were imported centuries ago to make wood for casks. But the difference in climate caused the trees to grow too fast, making their wood unsuitable. The oaks were left to disperse and are now a symbol of a town many thousands of miles from where they evolved.As with many things, the answer is humans. Given our movement across the globe, we have always redistributed so-called “alien species” beyond their native areas where they naturally evolved. Some of these alien species have become deeply embedded, for example South American chillies across Asia and potatoes and tomatoes worldwide. This species redistribution became truly global when Europeans started to establish colonial empires across the world in the late 15th century. Continued here

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Confronting Xenophobia Through Food—and Comics Indian cuisine in the U.K. has transformed over the decades in relation to changing geopolitical relationships. During the Victorian period, roughly 1820–1914, British expatriates returning home after spending time in colonial India popularized “curries” among some British consumers. But until the middle of the 20th century, most Britons stayed away from curries due to racist stereotypes of South Asians being “dirty” and the food being “smelly.”This started to change after the passing of the 1948 British Nationality Act, a year after the end of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent. This act, which granted citizenship to people who lived in the British Empire and Commonwealth, also overlapped with the post–World War II labor shortage. It led to a huge influx of students and laborers from across South Asia to the U.K. Local eateries catering to working-class South Asian migrants popped up in neighborhoods with large migrant populations, such as the now-famous Brick Lane in London, creating new markets for imported foods from India. Over time, these foods become more widely eaten across the U.K., expanding the Indian food market further and eventually bringing curry sauces and spice mixes to the shelves of popular supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Continued here

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How truffles took root around the world Every morning for three months of the year, Lola wakes at 8 and goes hunting. She races past oak trees, running at full speed through a 50-hectare field set in the southern end of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The daily challenge - to find her elusive prey - never fails to excite Lola. She darts from place to place until faltering at last: 40 minutes into her day, she gets distracted or simply gives in to exhaustion.Lola is a Brittany spaniel, and beneath her orange-spotted white coat is the agile body of a hunter. But her most important tool is her sense of smell. "Through training, dogs learn to recognize substances in their long-term memory - in this case, the smell of truffles," says dog trainer German Escobar. Continued here

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When a Houseplant Obsession Becomes a Nightmare Your monstera is boring. The pothos hanging from your bookshelf? Yawn. That windowsill cactus collection is, at best, a solid meh. Anyone can grow houseplants that absorb nutrients from the soil, energy from the sun, etc. But if your plants don’t consume insect flesh in a gut-sucking display of evolutionary brutality, let’s face it: Your collection is basic. To turn your mild-leafed menagerie into the ultimate selfie background, what you need is a Nepenthes.Nepenthes (pronounced neh-PEN-theeze) is a genus of pitcher plants typically found in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Madagascar. The plants produce vase-shaped contraptions that grow from emerald leaves fanning off a vine, each one topped with a mouthlike opening and shielded from the rain by an umbrella lid. The pitchers secrete a sweet nectar that insects find irresistible and inebriating. After a sip or two, sugar-drunk bugs stumble into the mouths and fall to their doom, landing in a pool of digestive juices enclosed by walls so slippery that even the stickiest-footed fly can’t escape. The drowned corpses slowly dissolve, and the pitchers absorb their nutrients like a stomach, allowing Nepenthes plants to grow in nutrient-poor soils. It’s this macabre survival strategy that makes the plants so bizarrely beautiful, and so coveted by hobbyists. Continued here

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The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’ Every morning, you are gently awakened by the Amazon Halo Rise. From its perch on your nightstand, the round device has spent the night monitoring the movements of your body, the light in your room, and the space’s temperature and humidity. At the optimal moment in your sleep cycle, as calculated by a proprietary algorithm, the device’s light gradually brightens to mimic the natural warm hue of sunrise. Your Amazon Echo, plugged in somewhere nearby, automatically starts playing your favorite music as part of your wake-up routine. You ask the device about the day’s weather; it tells you to expect rain. Then it informs you that your next “Subscribe & Save” shipment of Amazon Elements Super Omega-3 softgels is out for delivery. On your way to the bathroom, a notification bubbles up on your phone from Amazon’s Neighbors app, which is populated with video footage from the area’s Amazon Ring cameras: Someone has been overturning garbage cans, leaving the community’s yards a total wreck. (Maybe it’s just raccoons.)Standing at the sink, you glance at the Amazon Halo app, which is connected to your Amazon Halo fitness tracker. You feel awful, which is probably why the wearable is analyzing your tone of voice as “low energy” and “low positivity.” Your sleep score is dismal. After your morning rinse, you hear the Amazon Astro robot chasing your dog, Fred, down the hallway; you see on the Astro’s video feed that Fred is gnawing on your Amazon Essentials athletic sneaker. Your Ring doorbell sounds. The pills have arrived. Continued here

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The melting face emoji is everywhere and all of us Every so often a piece of art comes along that captures a moment in history, and in 2022 the hieroglyphic on the cave wall is undoubtedly the melting face emoji. Recently I was having dinner with friends and making the case for why, week after week, it was my most used emoji. Like the best of them – the upside-down smile, the face with no mouth – it has taken on a life outside of my phone. I have started to have moments where I actually feel like the melting face. I can’t remember if I did before the emoji came along or if the emoji created that feeling in me, I explained to my friends, whose own faces were starting to melt.That slowly sinking sense of dread may sound familiar. Everything is melting. The government, which looks set to collapse in the next 48 hours or so, is melting. Democracy in Iran and China are melting, and in America and Britain too, in a way that’s harder to notice but still going drip, drip, drip. In the last three years our collective health, wealth and prosperity have all melted. The planet is quite literally melting.  Continued here

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The return of Aztec floating farms It was early on a Sunday morning, and I was in the Floating Gardens of Xochimilco, 28km south of Mexico City's historical centre. The endless maze of canals and waterways was already filling up with colourful trajineras (flat-bottomed boats) packed with day trippers from the Mexican capital. Vendors were selling grilled elotes (corn on the cob) and michelada cocktails, while a band filled the air with festive Mariachi music.Hundreds of tourists throng the canals of Xochimilco every weekend for a flamboyant display of sombreros, food, music and art. Yet, as they cruise alongside the chinampas, or "floating gardens", most remain oblivious to the fact that they are looking at an ancient engineering wonder. These man-made island-farms are the last vestiges of a massive 14th-Century land reclamation project of the Aztec Empire that continues to feed the people of Mexico City even today. Continued here

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Why great employee experience starts with the freedom to focus - HR News We’ve all observed the exponential growth of benefits programmes and wellbeing initiatives over the past couple of years, especially as recent reports show that 46% of HR professionals have seen an increase in wellbeing budgets during the pandemic. Employers are increasingly offering a variety of perks such as free breakfast, social events and extensive medical insurance options to keep employees content.  But employee experience doesn’t just sit with HR. As Harvard Business Review points out, the technology experience now defines the employee experience. It’s becoming central in attracting and retaining talent, fostering the right culture, and creating productivity. As with flashy benefits, the IT team needs to seek new promising solutions to increase productivity, help with every part of our work and, ultimately, make the employees’ lives easier.  Continued here

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How to Stop Unwanted Thoughts In the mid-1980s scientists conducted a famous experiment in which they asked participants to try to avoid thinking of a white bear. Over the course of five minutes, the experimental subjects were to ring a bell if a white bear came to mind. They rang the bell more than once per minute on average. And later, when the same people were told to think of white bears, the animals came to mind more often than they did for a control group that was instructed to think about white bears from the outset.The findings suggested that blocking out unwanted thoughts triggered rebound effects, making it harder to keep them at bay. Many people interpreted the results as support for the Freudian notion that repressed memories persist in the subconscious, where they may haunt us. The idea that thought suppression is harmful became conventional wisdom and influenced the practice of clinical psychology. Even today established forms of therapy offer antidotes to the dangers of quashing a memory by guiding patients to repeatedly revisit and elaborate on difficult experiences. Continued here

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Why Talented People Don't Use Their Strengths If you've watched the Super Bowl in recent years, you've probably seen the coaches talking to each other over headsets during the game. What you didn't know is that during the 2016 season, the NFL made major league-wide improvements to its radio frequency technology, both to prevent interference from media using the same frequency and to prevent tampering. This was a development led by John Cave, VP of football technology at the National Football League. It's been incredibly helpful to the coaches. But it might never have been built, or at least Cave wouldn't have built it, had it not been for his boss, Michelle McKenna-Doyle, CIO of the NFL.Cave had the talent to create products and build things. But he didn't have time to do it, because he had the big job of system development, including enterprise systems. "Why was he weighed down with the payroll system when he could figure out how to evolve the game through technology?" McKenna-Doyle asked. As she later explained to me, she envisioned a better role for his distinctive strengths. The coaches wanted to talk to each other. The technology didn't exist. She tasked Cave with creating it. "At first, he was concerned, because his overall span was shrinking. 'Just trust me,' I said. 'You're going to be a great innovator,' and he is." Continued here

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Stomach Issues? Here’s What to Eat When Working Out. Experiencing this type of GI distress during exercise is “more common than people realize,” says sports dietitian Angie Asche, MS, RD, CSSD, founder of Eleat Sports Nutrition and author of Fuel Your Body: How to Cook and Eat for Peak Performance. There are a number of reasons why your stomach or bowels may misbehave mid-workout, including dehydration and eating too much protein, fat, and fiber shortly before you break a sweat, according to Jen Scott, RDN, LD, a Road Runners Club of America running coach.Quick caveat: Nutrition isn’t one-size-fits-all. Scott, for instance, has worked with hundreds of runners and says that people’s fueling plans differ from one person to the next. Factors including individual food intolerances and conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, and celiac disease can impact what sits well for you. That said, “your gut is highly adaptable, and there is evidence you can actually ‘train the gut’ to better tolerate food and drinks around exercise,” Asche says. So just because you can’t stomach a mid-workout snack right now doesn’t mean you can’t gradually work your way up to it. Continued here

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How to Learn Fast: 10 Ways to Boost Math and Language Skills Learning new things is a huge part of life -- we should always be striving to grow and learn a new skill. Whether you're learning Spanish or want to do math fast, it takes time to learn each lesson, and time is precious. So how can you make the most of your time by speeding up the learning process? Thanks to neuroscience, we now have a better understanding of how we learn and the most effective ways our brains process and hold on to information.Though it might seem that typing your notes on a laptop during a conference or lecture will be more thorough, thus helping you learn faster, it doesn't work that way. To speed up your learning, skip the laptop and take notes the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. Research has shown that those who type in their lecture notes process and retain the information at a lower level. Those who take notes by hand actually learn more. Continued here

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Fast food fever: how ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think In NOVA’s first category, Group 1 is unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk). Group 2 is made up of processed culinary ingredients such as sugars, oils and butter. Group 3 is processed foods (canned vegetables and fish, bread, jam). Group 4 is ultra-high processed foods, which are mostly low in protein and fibre, and high in salt, sugar and fat, and have undergone industrial interventions such as extrusion, moulding and milling.Spector’s King’s College colleague Dr Sarah Berry is a nutrition expert in the area of cardio-metabolic health. She is not uncritical of NOVA’s system of classification, which has been beset by problems of blurry distinctions and subjective application, but she says: “There is very clear observational data showing that people who have higher intakes of ultra-processed foods have higher levels of ill-health, whether it be cancer, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, obesity or type 2 diabetes.” Continued here

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Inside the world of Wikipedia's deaditors Wikipedia is pretty sick, isn't it? Imagine the world before you could do a quick ​"Wiki" search - life must have been inconvenient, dissatisfying, maybe even frustrating. Pub chats, quick curiosities, proving points to your flatmates halfway through a discussion, all left up in the air. Libraries are useful, but they're just not at our fingertips. Nor are their books updated in practically real time. At 5:30pm on September 8 2022, for instance, the Queen's Wiki page had a huge increase in ​"edit conflicts", the term given to an instance where two or more people edit the same page at the same time. In fact, there were hundreds of edit conflicts. Note the time. The BBC announced her death on the news at 6:30pm. This means Wiki's ​"deaditors" were already scrambling to update her Wiki page an hour before the beeb. Now that's quick. Continued here

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One designer’s quest to build the world’s greatest desk accessories Jeff Sheldon’s desk is sort of famous. You might have even seen it before: Sheldon, the founder and CEO of a high-design shop called Ugmonk, uploaded a few photos to Unsplash several years ago, and his ultra-clean setup filled with natural wood and white colors has since been viewed more than 400 million times. People have been asking him for a decade where he got his cool monitor stand, even though it’s actually just an Ikea hack. The desk sits in Sheldon’s home office in suburban Pennsylvania, in the corner of a sun-soaked room with so many windows and so many trees just outside the windows that commenters occasionally ask if he lives in the jungle.The day I meet Sheldon, he’s looking at that desk from the other side of his home office on a bright, hot day near the end of summer. He’s in jeans and a black T-shirt, and limping ever so slightly thanks to a recent soccer injury. His workspace looks normal enough — a little cleaner than usual, maybe, and Sheldon did just spend a few minutes making sure all the accessories were at perfect 90-degree angles. But a few feet away stand a handful of people and a heaping mound of camera gear. Two of them push a makeshift dolly with a Red camera on it, slowly, steadily in the direction of the desk, as Sheldon walks into frame and sits down. The shot ends in a perfect modern still-life: Sheldon hard at work, his dog Pixel lying on a bed a few feet behind him. Continued here

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Is ‘reverse catfishing’ really a thing? Everyone has heard of ‘catfishing’: when someone presents themselves as ‘better’ than they are in real life on social media platforms or dating apps. They might heavily edit their photos, or in extreme cases, use photos of someone else entirely. But now, people are doing precisely the opposite of this: presenting themselves as ‘worse’ than they are in real life, supposedly to ‘pleasantly surprise’ their date when they actually meet up. Think pictures of users caught off-guard, in media res: eating or blinking or talking (or… in the rain at a festival). It’s a trend which has been dubbed ‘reverse catfishing’.23-year-old James uses less conventionally attractive photos on dating apps. “I want to show all different sides to me. So I have some serious ones, where I’m smiling or doing a hobby, then a few silly ones – like pictures of me dancing, or pictures of me pulling a stupid face,” James says. “I’m trying to attract someone who doesn’t take anything too seriously, especially on social media.” Continued here

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How to reframe (and solve) a tricky life problem Anchor problems tend to occur when we’ve turned an assumed answer into a question. Evans offered me this example: Now in his late 60s, he has found love again after his wife died several years ago, and he may wonder whether he wants to write a book about, as he put it, “two old people falling in love.” This kind of question restricts Evans’s options because it assumes that he has to turn his experience into a book. Instead, he might release that “anchor” — it has to be a book — and in doing so, open himself up to different solutions. “I might ask a question like, this experience has been so life-giving. What do you want to do with that story? A book is one outcome,” says Evans.Gravity problems are defined by immovable circumstances, either because they’re beyond your control or because you’re not willing to change them. Here, Evans generously pulled from his own life again: He lives in Santa Cruz, and his sweetheart is, depending on the day, about 75 minutes up the coast in San Francisco. “I really want to stick with this partnership, but I don’t want to have to change my lifestyle,” he said. “That’s a gravity problem.” These kinds of problems require you to accept the situation and find a way to compromise or work around it — splitting time between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, for instance. Continued here

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The Unexpected Power of Seeing Yourself as a Villain Monsters in horror films aren’t just scary, or dangerous. They also “make one’s skin creep,” the philosopher Noël Carroll wrote: “Characters regard them not only with fear but with loathing, with a combination of terror and disgust.” It’s no coincidence, then, that horror is strewn with characters who are openly, or coded as, queer and transgender—and that they’re almost always the dirty, lecherous, bloodthirsty villains, seldom the victims. Think of films such as The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, with their suggestion that the gender confusion of their “cross-dressing” villain is the impetus for their violent desires.Despite such one-dimensional portrayals, queer and trans people have long found camaraderie in horror. Take Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, which has inspired countless explicitly queer retellings, including Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 Frankissstein and the 1975 camp classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (The latter, if you need a refresher, follows a young couple’s desperate bid to escape the home of the infamous “Sweet Transvestite” Frank-N-Furter, who, among other things, has created a muscle man named Rocky in his laboratory to be his companion.) In a 1994 essay, the transgender writer and theorist Susan Stryker described identifying with the bloody origin story of Frankenstein’s monster: “The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.” Continued here

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These Remote Tech Workers Secretly Juggle Multiple Jobs At 9 am every weekday, Abel clocks in from a private office he recently started renting in Chicago. He doesn’t have breakfast and works solidly until 2 pm, when he logs off and eats a meal. But that’s where the similarities with most other tech workers ends. Abel isn’t working one, but four full-time jobs in secret, all for enterprise startups. His combined annual salary is $680,000.He started juggling jobs on the sly a year ago, when he realized he was completing tasks to a higher quality and at a faster pace than his colleagues. “I found myself with a lot of free time,” says the 35-year-old. “With rising inflation and annual raises not matching that, I figured taking a second job was a good way to get ahead of the curve. My wife and I have three kids and we’re trying to save to buy a house.” Continued here

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Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime The IT manager, Matthew (he asked us not to use his last name), works in a central London neighbourhood where affluence hides pockets of poverty, and migrant families from Pakistan, India and eastern Europe pin their hopes for their children on a small, publicly funded school. It has about 150 students aged between five and 10, many of them on free school meals. On a shoestring budget, in a Victorian building that’s showing its age, teachers track the students’ progress by photographing them as they learn how to hold a pencil, draw a picture or write their name. The snapshots and other progress reports are uploaded to a server, a powerful computer that processes data and provides services for other devices used around the school.At 2am, having exhausted other ideas, he finally contacted the help desk of the company that hosted the server. He obtained a new server and connected it to the school. With the fresh setup, Matthew could see the files listed in the directories, though he still couldn’t open them. They had been renamed with the file extension “.encrypt”. To his horror, he realised that the school had been hit by a ransomware attack – one of the world’s most pervasive and fastest-growing cybercrimes. A cross between hacking and cryptography, ransomware penetrates computers and renders files inaccessible without the right decryption key. The hackers then demand a hefty price for the string of characters that can unlock the information. Continued here

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The World According to Xi Jinping In the post–Cold War era, the Western world has suffered no shortage of grand theories of history and international relations. The settings and actors may change, but the global geopolitical drama goes on: variants of realism and liberalism compete to explain and predict state behavior, scholars debate whether the world is witnessing the end of history, a clash of civilizations, or something else entirely. And it is no surprise that the question that now attracts more analytical attention than any other is the rise of China under President Xi Jinping and the challenge it presents to American power. In the run-up to the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as Xi has maneuvered to consolidate his power and secure an unprecedented third term, Western analysts have sought to decode the worldview that drives him and his ambitions for China. One important body of thought has been largely absent from this search for understanding, however: Marxism-Leninism. This is odd because Marxism-Leninism has been China’s official ideology since 1949. But the omission is also understandable, since most Western thinkers long ago came to see communist ideology as effectively dead—even in China, where, in the late 1970s, the CCP leader Deng Xiaoping set aside the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in favor of something more akin to state capitalism. Deng summed up his thoughts on the matter with characteristic bluntness: Bu zhenglun, “Let’s dispense with theory,” he told attendees at a major CCP conference in 1981. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed his lead, rapidly expanding the role of the market in the Chinese domestic economy and embracing a foreign policy that maximized China’s participation in a global economic order led by the United States. Continued here

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Remote workers who make at least $2,750 a month can apply to Portugal's new 'digital-nomad visa' starting October 30. Here's how it stacks up to similar programs in Europe. Portugal recently released the requirements for its highly anticipated "digital-nomad visa," allowing remote workers who make four times its national minimum wage to live and work in the picturesque European nation. That calculates to about $2,750 a month.Starting October 30, remote workers can apply for either a temporary-stay visa of up to one year or a residency permit that can be renewed for up to five years.You can apply at a Portuguese Consulate in your home country or at Portugal's immigration agency, Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras. On top of proof of income for the past three months, applicants must submit tax-residency documents and a contract of employment (or proof of self-employment).One of the program's biggest selling points is that recipients can travel visa-free throughout the Schengen Area, a region containing 26 European Union member countries where travelers can move freely without dealing with border control. Continued here