The 2023 Porsche Cayman GT4 RS is the best sports car on sale today

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The 2023 Porsche Cayman GT4 RS is the best sports car on sale today     Judging by recent projects like the Mission R and 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance, Porsche looks poised to introduce an electrified version of the Cayman in the not-too-distant future. While it's likely that such a sports car will raise the bar for certain measures of performance, it's also safe to assume that the driving experience will be altered significantly. Thus far, high-performance EVs have struggled to deliver the kind of emotional connection that enthusiasts have grown accustomed to from their ICE-motivated counterparts—a factor that's undoubtedly top of mind for the designers who are working on the next generation of the automaker's lineup. In the meantime, though, the folks in Porsche's GT division have ensured that the current era of the Cayman will not go gentle into that good night. Continued here

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The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church     The defining problem driving people out is ... just how American life works in the 21st century.Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have. Continued here

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The microbes that could protect grapevines from climate change     When a blistering heatwave struck a group of grapevines in Portugal, the end seemed nigh for these fruit-bearing plants. Temperatures rose to a scorching 42C (107F) during the day. But not all of the grapevines facing this onslaught were alike: some had a secret weapon.The heatwave was actually an artificial one, created in a laboratory to mimic the kind of conditions that large parts of southern Europe are, coincidentally, experiencing this summer. The scientists who carried out the experiment had treated some of their vines with a special cocktail of bacteria from an unlikely source: Spanish salt marshes. While all the vines were kept watered, they were exposed to punishing heat. Continued here

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Laughter Communicates Specific Emotions --     Laughter is an everyday reminder that we humans are animals. In fact, when recorded laughter is slowed down, listeners can’t tell whether the sound is from a person or an animal.We throw our heads back and bare our teeth in a monkeylike grin. Sometimes we double over and lose our ability to speak for a moment, reverting temporarily to hooting apes. And just as hoots and howls help strengthen bonds in a troop of primates or a pack of wolves, laughter helps us connect with others. Continued here

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A Guide to Motivating Yourself at Work     Sixty percent of employees feel emotionally detached from their jobs and 50% report feeling stressed on a daily basis, according to a recent global survey from Gallup. While your first instinct may be to quit your job, it might not be the most sustainable option. Know that you have the agency to create better working conditions for yourself. Continued here

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Six Years Ago, Dragon Quest Unleashed the Most Dramatic RPG Twist Ever     RPGs as a whole simply wouldn’t be what they are today without Dragon Quest, one of gaming’s longest-running franchises. Over the last 36 years, the franchise has kept reevaluating itself and redefining the genre at large. Six years ago, Dragon Quest XI instantly became the very best game in the series, with a rich and vibrant world, lovable party members, and a truly unforgettable twist. Dragon Quest XI has a deceptively simple setup, casting you as the legendary Luminary, a hero destined to save the land of Erdrea from darkness. Things quickly take a turn, when you meet the King of Heliodor, who accuses you of being evil and throws you in jail. From there, Dragon Quest XI starts to layer in more complex narratives and characters, starting with the thief Erik who helps you break out. Continued here

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Disabled Nigerians battle when using minibus taxis - they share their experiences     People with disabilities often face difficulties when accessing transport services. Inadequate and unsuitable options restrict their mobility, independence and ability to navigate their communities. This limits their opportunities for employment, education, healthcare and social engagement. These individuals can also be very vocal about their experiences – sharing comments online that can shape the branding and marketing of a city. I’ve studied the experiences of commuters with disabilities and examined their interactions with transport providers. My focus has been on developing countries, like Nigeria, where limited transport infrastructure poses unique challenges for disabled commuters. Continued here

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One More COVID Summer?     A mid-year wave might be brewing for the fourth year in a row. Will it always be like this?Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical. Continued here

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Managing Your Innovation Portfolio     For many companies, innovation is a sprawling collection of initiatives, energetic but uncoordinated, and managed with vacillating strategies. For steady, above-average returns, firms need a balanced innovation portfolio and the ability to approach it as an integrated whole. Having studied companies in the industrial, technology, and consumer goods sectors, the authors found a striking pattern: Outperforming firms typically allocate about 70% of their innovation resources to core offerings, 20% to adjacent efforts, and 10% to transformational initiatives. As it happens, returns from innovation investments tend to follow an inverse ratio, with 70% coming from the transformational realm. Continued here

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Communal stargazing using your phone: The Unistellar eQuinox 2, reviewed     When we reviewed the Unistellar eVscope a couple of years ago, we came away impressed. It offered a communal stargazing experience that takes our ubiquitous smartphones and turns them into a way to view the heavens. Unistellar's newest offering is the eQuinox 2, a lower-cost alternative to eVscope 2, taking all of the features from its original telescope, improving the technology, and dropping the price to $2,499. Continued here

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Instead of obtaining a warrant, the NSA would like to keep buying your data     An effort by United States lawmakers to prevent government agencies from domestically tracking citizens without a search warrant is facing opposition internally from one of its largest intelligence services. Continued here

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4 literary masterpieces that make you despise the protagonist by the end     Many of world literature’s most unlikable protagonists start unlikeable and end unlikeable. From the very beginning of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is clear that the titular Gray is a narcissist who’ll do anything to inflate his already monstrous ego. The same goes for Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, a pedophile with a silver tongue who conjures up excuses for his inexcusable actions.But these characters form only the tip of the iceberg. A different yet equally interesting species of unlikable protagonist is the protagonist who starts off sympathetic but becomes more and more unsympathetic as the story develops. Though they appear similar, this type of character is not to be confused with other archetypes such as the tragic hero or antihero. The former (Oedipus, Hamlet) are good people who make bad decisions due to fate or circumstance, while antiheroes (Jack Sparrow, Batman) are morally ambiguous individuals who, in spite of their flaws, possess notable heroic qualities. Continued here

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Cameroon's anglophone conflict has lasted for six years: what citizens say about how to end it     The armed conflict in Cameroon between separatist groups and the military is in its sixth year. Armed groups are fighting for secession of the English-speaking north-west and south-west regions and establishment of the Republic of Ambazonia. The government rejected a Canadian peace initiative in January 2023. Cameroon is officially bilingual. However, the minority English-speaking population has complained for decades of unfair treatment by the francophone-dominated state. Periods of opposition and resistance have come and gone, for instance in the 1990s. But the current levels of violence are unprecedented. Continued here

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Why The Future Of Disaster Relief Will Rely On Robots     When a Manhattan parking garage collapsed in April this year, rescuers were reluctant to stay in the damaged building, fearing further danger. So they used a combination of flying drones and a doglike walking robot to inspect the damage, look for survivors and make sure the site was safe for human rescuers to return.Despite the robot dog falling over onto its side while walking over a pile of rubble — a moment that became internet-famous — New York Mayor Eric Adams called the robots a success, saying they had ensured there were no overlooked survivors while helping keep human rescuers safe. Continued here

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Astronomers May Have Just Solved an Enduring Venus Mystery     With its thick, cloudy atmosphere, Venus has long held mysteries about its surface. It was only in the late 20th century that astronomers had detailed observations of the Venusian landscape, with the Russian Venera landers in the 1970s and 1980s and later the 1990 Magellan mission, which made high-resolution radar maps of the surface. There are many things we still don’t know, but one thing we do know is that the surface of Venus is young. And a new study in Nature Astronomy may know why.Earth has a young surface thanks to tectonic plates, which float on Earth’s upper mantle. The drift of these plates not only drives geological formations, it also helps recycle Earth’s surface, keeping it geologically young. In contrast, worlds such as the Moon and Mars have old surfaces since their geologic activity dwindled long ago. Maps of Venus show a young surface, but it doesn’t seem to have tectonic plates. Continued here

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You Can Just Work Out On Weekends -- And Still Get Results     Research shows that on most health metrics, it’s about cumulative time instead of regularity. Physical activity has established benefits for health. The World Health Organization recommends adults do a minimum of 150–300 minutes of moderate or 75–150 minutes of vigorous activity each week. This can include active transport from place to place, exercise for fun and fitness, energetic housework, or physical activity at work. Continued here

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My AI lover | Psyche Films     Advertised as ‘the AI companion who cares’, the chatbot program Replika exists primarily to cultivate one-way emotional bonds between users and AIs. Think less the convenient task-execution of Siri, Alexa or ChatGPT, and more the personally tailored intimacy of the Scarlett Johansson-voiced virtual assistant Samantha in the film Her (2013) – albeit without the implied sentience, and with good deal more kinks to work out. So named because it adapts to users by learning to mimic them, Replika allows for a range of relationship types, but (perhaps no surprise) many users opt for romance.One such user was the Beijing-based filmmaker Chouwa Liang. Inspired by her own experience of falling for her Replika companion amid COVID-19 lockdowns, Liang undertook to profile others who had formed intimate relationships with Replika chatbots. The resulting short film, My AI Lover, features interviews with three such women, as well as footage of these Replika users spending time with their bots in public spaces. Projecting Replika avatars into the real world via their smartphones, these users create an augmented reality where they can talk, flirt and share secrets with – but, regrettably, never quite touch – their digitally projected companions. Thought-provoking and nonjudgmental, Liang’s film captures the very human feelings and frustrations that accompany perceived human-AI intimacy, still very much in its early phase. Continued here

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The Business Case for Understanding Generation Alpha - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Journey     Close your eyes and imagine a time and place where children receive their allowance in virtual currencies. Picture kids having a gaming experience on a soccer field where they are able to play sports aided by augmented reality (AR), or imagine them as they sit in the shoppingcart their parents are filling with groceries. Envision a time when a youngster can build a roller coaster online before actually riding their creation for real at a theme park. Visualize people expressing themselves in virtual worlds through their avatars, which they prefer buying clothes and accessories for, and being able to make calls to loved ones using AR filters while wearing virtual AR outfits. Now open your eyes because this world isn’t the future. It’s the world that Generation Alpha is currently growing up in. Continued here

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Zimbabwe's 'Patriotic Act' erodes freedoms and may be a tool for repression     University of Johannesburg provides support as an endorsing partner of The Conversation AFRICA.The introduction of the controversial “Patriotic Act” in Zimbabwe will contribute to the erosion of political and civil liberties in a country that has been in the grip of one political party since independence in 1980. Continued here

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Ukrainian Is My Native Language, but I Had to Learn It     With Russian imperialism on full display, reviving Ukrainian, and expanding it to encompass new speakers and experiences, has become a national project.Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with parents. I straddled both languages with my grandmother, who spoke surzhyk, a colloquial mix of the two. Continued here

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The Bizarrely Unbalanced Early Universe Might Explain Why We Exist     New measurements from Japan’s Subaru telescope help explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.When theoretical physicists like myself say that we’re studying why the universe exists, we sound like philosophers. But new data collected by researchers using Japan’s Subaru telescope has revealed insights into that very question. Continued here

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'Talk to Me' Is Horror Made by and for the Internet Generation     Kids are going to do stupid stuff. But what does being terminally online do to IRL relationships when the entire internet is in the palm of your hand? In that world, what does real connection even look like?These were some of the many questions posed by Talk to Me, the new horror film from directing duo Danny and Michael Philippou. This movie isn’t really about the internet, which forms an invisible presence in the background, reaching in to influence the characters’ lives. In that way, it’s not unlike the deceased spirits the film’s protagonists are trying to contact. Continued here

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Israel's Avalanche     Israel’s democracy is still intact, but the country has already lost something essential.As Israel nears the end of a week of turmoil, its democracy remains intact. On Monday, the country’s Benjamin Netanyahu–led ruling coalition—the most hard-right government in Israel’s history—passed one component of its planned judicial overhaul. The proposed legislation has inspired months of outcry from Israelis, many of whom believe, with good reason, that these changes would swiftly erode the country’s democracy. This past spring, my colleague Yair Rosenberg explained some of the most concerning aspects of the overhaul: Continued here

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The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the Antidote to the Cult of More: A Lovely Vintage Illustrated Poem About the Meaning and Measure of Enough     Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough. This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along the way, we have unlearned how to live wide-eyed with wonder at what Hermann Hesse called “the little joys” — those unpurchasable, unstorable emblems of aliveness that abound the moment we look up from our ledger of lack. Continued here

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65 Cool Things That Seem Expensive but Are Cheap AF on Amazon     One of the many tricks to saving money is to buy stuff that looks expensive but isn’t expensive. With a little persistence and some shopping savviness, you can easily find everything from plush bed sheets to stylish hammock chairs at shockingly low prices. But if you don’t have time to scour the internet for deals? Not a problem, as I’ve put together this list of cool things that seem expensive, but are really cheap AF — and you can find them all right on Amazon. So what are you waiting for? Keep scrolling to see more.Not only can this hammock chair support up to 500 pounds, but it also features a strong iron bar at the top that won’t mold over time like a wooden bar can do. There’s also a pocket on the side where you can keep books, remotes, as well as other small items —and you even have the choice of five colors. Continued here

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12 Must-Play Games on Xbox Game Pass     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDXbox Game Pass is one of the few subscription services I hold on to, even when I’m cutting back. For active gamers, the $17-a-month service from Microsoft is worth it, since you can download over 100 games in a regularly refreshed library. Continued here

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Innovation chief says "pressure test" your pet hypothesis. It's guaranteed to be wrong.     Imagine trying to invent something as earth-shaking as the atomic bomb. That massive, ambitious project took place during World War II under Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership, an event at the center of Christopher Nolan’s new film “Oppenheimer.” For Astro Teller — the grandson of Edward Teller, who was on Oppenheimer’s team and later helped create the even more powerful hydrogen bomb — this era contains a valuable lesson about the difficulty of steering innovation to socially beneficial ends.Astro, who now leads Alphabet’s pioneering moonshot division known as X, believes that if we’d focused more on using nuclear energy for good, we might not be facing one of today’s greatest global crises. Continued here

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50 Smart Things Under $30 on Amazon You'll End Up Using at Least Twice a Day     There are things you buy that you use once every so often — a power drill, ice cream maker, or set of champagne glasses, for example — and then there are the standby items that are on regular rotation. I’ve rounded up a bunch of clever things on Amazon that all fall into that latter category — you’re pretty much bound to reach for them multiple times a day. From tech gadgets to ingenious kitchen inventions to storage solutions, you’re about to discover some of the smartest things that’ll streamline your day-in-and-day-out routine.Thanks to the unique, swiveling design, these outlet extenders can be pivoted to any angle. Even though they’re slim and compact, they feature three AC outlets each for extra plug-in space. Even better, they don’t obstruct your bottom outlets, so you can get maximum usage out of your wall sockets. This pair of outlets comes in classic black, but there are also packs filled with fun colors. Continued here

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It's Too Soon to Buy TP-Link's First Wi-Fi 7 Mesh     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDTP-Link’s Deco BE85 is the first Wi-Fi 7 mesh system I have tested. These tri-band routers come in packs of two or three and promise new heights for the 6-GHz band, though they are also fully backward compatible. For folks with large properties craving the fastest possible speeds, the BE85 will be tempting. But paying top dollar for a system like this does not make sense for many people today. Continued here

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Cambodia: five decades on from the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen proves himself the ultimate survivor with his plan to hand power to his son     Cambodia’s newly re-elected prime minister, Hun Sen, has confirmed he will hand over the premiership to his son, Hun Manet, in August after 38 years at the top of the country’s politics. Hun Sen, who has been at the helm of the Cambodian government since 1985, won a “landslide” general election victory on July 23. That general election, the seventh of Cambodia’s modern era, was designed to display a transition of sorts back to a multi-party democracy after the country became a one-party state in 2018. The five seats won by the royalist Funcinpec party are claimed to be (token) evidence of this. In reality, the power of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is unfettered. Continued here