The Era of "Move Fast and Break Things" Is Over
Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst argues that the era of “move fast and break things” is over; that in the wake of the Facebook scandal, the public is less tolerant of tech startups that ignore the societal ramifications of their innovations; and that VCs should analyze not only for market size and product viability, but for whether founders show sufficient foresight and concern about the unintended consequences of the ideas they are pursuing. Instead of just “minimum viable products,” today VCs need to screen for “minimum virtuous products.” The author offers eight questions to help VCs identify entrepreneurs who can meet this evolving need.
Continued here  S245 Reasons to Leave Your Job -- Even in a Downturn
In a tight labor market, especially when news of large and small-scale layoffs continues to proliferate, it might seem inadvisable to look for a new job if you’re employed. But if you’re not engaged in your work, that will eventually show, which could put your career at risk. Once you realize you’re spending 40 hours weekly feeling unfulfilled, it’s always better to control your destiny than wait for others to decide your fate for you. Consider what steps you can take to reengage or whether a new job will make you feel more fulfilled. The author presents five signs that it’s worth looking for a new job elsewhere.
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S13S14S25The promise of batteries that come from trees
About eight years ago, a major paper producer in Finland realised the world was changing. The rise of digital media, a fall in office printing and the dwindling popularity of sending things by post – among other factors – meant that paper had embarked on a steady decline.
Stora Enso, in Finland, describes itself as "one of the largest private forest owners in the world". As such, it has a lot of trees, which it uses to make wood products, paper and packaging, for example. Now it wants to make batteries as well – electric vehicle batteries that charge up in as little as eight minutes.
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S16S33Humans Walk Weird. Scientists May Finally Know Why
For something so routine, walking is shockingly complicated. Biomechanists break a single step into several phases: First there’s touchdown, when your heel strikes the floor. Next comes the single support phase, when you’re balancing on that leg. After that, you roll onto your toes for takeoff and your leg goes into a forward swing.
All of this contains a mystery. Researchers have long observed that when we walk, our planted leg bounces twice before swinging into the next step. That is, the knee bends and extends once when the foot first touches down, then again just before takeoff. That first bounce helps our foot absorb the impact of our weight as we hit the ground. But the function of the second bounce, a feature characteristic to human gait, has never been clear.
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S28Predators Act like Butterflies' Eyespots Are Looking Right at Them
The concentric circles or eyespots on butterfly and moth wings—like those seen on this Suraka silk moth—not only look like real eyes but may also appear to glare directly at predators from many directions, scientists have found. This optical illusion, called the “Mona Lisa effect,” could scare would-be attackers and buy the insects enough time to escape.
Scientists suspect that eyespots, with dark “pupils” in the center surrounded by lighter “irises,” look like real eyes to predators. Hannah Rowland, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, wanted to see if the direction of this fake gaze contributed to the effect. Her study results were published recently in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
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S26Meet the most powerful Uber driver in India
For nearly 20 minutes in November 2022, Shaik Salauddin walked alongside Rahul Gandhi, the former president of India’s main opposition political party, the Indian National Congress, in Hyderabad. The march was part of Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra (“unite India movement”), in which he walked across 12 states to modernize his party’s image, ahead of the elections in 2024. In a video, Gandhi can be seen placing his hand on Salauddin’s shoulder as they engage in a deep conversation while passing through the Kukatpally neighborhood of the southern Indian city.
Salauddin is neither a powerful politician nor an affluent business tycoon. An Uber driver by profession, over the last three years, Salauddin has become a quasi-celebrity as a gig industry organizer: spearheading strikes, engaging with policymakers, and highlighting issues in the media to help improve the working conditions of his peers. Walking alongside Salauddin sent a strong message to Gandhi’s supporters: He is serious about India’s unemployment issues. Perhaps Gandhi knew how important it was to be seen with the unofficial leader of millions of gig workers in India.
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S43Bored at work? Your brain is trying to warn you.
Our modern understanding of the relationship between work and boredom developed largely out of the Industrial Revolution. As the demand for factory labor increased, millions of people were forced to perform the same repetitive task for 12 hours a day, day after day, ad nauseum. This seismic shift from the work of centuries past erupted in a boredom epidemic.
In fact, our modern word boredom didn’t originate until the mid-19th century, a combination of bore (one that causes weariness or restlessness) and the suffix –dom (a state of being).
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S30Are Home Insurers Abandoning Communities Vulnerable to Climate Change?
Dozens of environmental and consumer groups are rallying behind the Biden administration’s plan to collect information from property insurance companies to determine if they are abandoning communities that are vulnerable to climate change.
The groups submitted comments praising the Treasury Department’s unprecedented plan to require 213 large insurers to present detailed information about their homeowners insurance policies and claims.
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S23How to Motivate a Top Performer -- When You Can't Promote Them
Organizations can’t promote everyone; there will always be high-performing employees who want to get promoted in situations where promotion isn’t possible or requires waiting. This creates a problem for managers and leaders who want to retain top talent, but don’t have flexibility in promotions. The solution is to develop interim strategies to help these employees get their underlying needs met. For example, by narrowing down what the promotion signifies or enables for a given employee, managers can then scan for opportunities that could lead to uniquely meaningful work experiences.
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S32KC Davis: How to do laundry when you're depressed
Ever had a hard time doing daily household tasks -- cooking, cleaning, laundry -- and felt like a terrible person for struggling in the first place? Therapist KC Davis is here to flip that negative internalized script with a simple yet perspective-shifting fact that may change your approach to life. Learn a gentler, more practical approach to mental health as Davis shares hard-won wisdom and helpful shortcuts on how to get by when you feel like you've barely got it together.
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S40The key lesson to learn from science's greatest debate
So, you’ve arrived at a crossroads: you think the world works in a certain way, and someone else disagrees with you and thinks the world works in a different way. You’ve both got your reasons as to why you’re convinced that your way is right and the other person is wrong, but for some reason, you cannot come to an agreement with one another. Despite agreeing on the facts and the evidence, you don’t agree on how to interpret them, and you’re both unable to convince the other of their folly.
In most arenas of life, you’d rightfully chalk this up to a difference of opinion. But in science, opinions don’t really matter: the world and Universe really do behave in a particular fashion. Either your conception of how the world works agrees with reality, in which case it’s valid, or it doesn’t, in which case it isn’t. Yet scientific arguments and debates happen all the time, even though they never settle anything. The only solution that’s scientifically valid is to obtain the critical evidence: a lesson we all need to be reminded of.
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S38Sony Releases Its First Accessible Controller
Despite game studios investing in accessibility teams and design practices for their games, Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller has been the only first-party accessible game controller available. Until now, that is, with Sony’s announcement of Project Leonardo for the PlayStation, a split-design controller designed with accessibility and customization in mind.
Software accessibility has advanced tremendously in recent years. 2022’s God of War Ragnarök, for example, includes dozens of features that cater to an array of disabilities. Indie darling Tunic offers a No Fail Mode that removes the challenges of combat so players can focus on exploration and the story.
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S41The mind-blowing stats on male inequality
Boys and men are falling behind. This might seem surprising to some people — and maybe ridiculous to others — considering that discussions on gender disparities tend to focus on the structural challenges faced by girls and women, not boys and men.
But long-term data reveal a clear and alarming trend: In recent decades, American men have been faring increasingly worse in many areas of life, including education, workforce participation, skill acquisition, wages, and fatherhood.
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S42Boys are graded more harshly than girls. Why?
“Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in maths. Boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading, and science,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow in Economic Studies and the Director of the Future of the Middle Class Initiative, wrote in his recent book Why the Modern Male is Struggling,
According to a 2018 Brookings Institution report, about 88% of American girls graduated high school on time, compared with 82% of boys. In 2020, six out of ten college students were women. Once on campus, they graduate at higher rates, receiving more associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in the process. As evidenced by declining college enrollment in the U.S., a drop for which men account for 71%, the gender disparity is continuing to worsen.
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S34The Gear You Need to Shoot Your Own Indie Movies
It’s never been easier to produce your own videos, short films, or even feature-length movies. While video production isn’t exactly a cheap hobby, you don’t need a film studio to get studio-level shots. No piece of equipment will automatically make you skilled with a camera, but if your skills are struggling against the limitations of your environment, these tools might open up some possibilities for you.
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.
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S68The GOP-Speaker-Vote Burlesque
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
If you think the crisis of American democracy is over, the circus in the House should remind you that a significant portion of the Republican Party has no interest in governing, policy, or democracy itself. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
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S47S70Shut up and paint | Psyche Films
Titus Kaphar has reached the pinnacle of the art world. A critical and commercial success, the Kalamazoo, Michigan-born, New Haven, Connecticut-based painter has earned accolades including a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and has work on display in some of the world’s most vaunted art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York City. Kaphar’s provocative images address struggle, white supremacy and omissions of Black representation at the intersection of art and history. This includes, notably, a loose-hanging portrait of Thomas Jefferson, which reveals a painting of an unclothed Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman owned by Jefferson who bore several of his children, and a TIME Magazine cover, commissioned in the wake of the George Floyd racial justice protests of 2020, which depicts a Black mother clutching the silhouette of a baby to her chest.
But, as the short documentary Shut Up and Paint (2022) conveys, Kaphar’s lofty achievements have been profoundly complicated for him to process. As a Black artist born to a 15-year-old single mother, Kaphar has always created work that reflects his own struggles, intending to connect with those who’ve shared in them. However, these deeply personal expressions are often characterised as ‘activism’ by those in the art and media worlds. With each mounting success, he seems to find the chasm between his work and where it ends up – as ‘non-fungible tokens for billionaires’, as the philosopher Jason Stanley puts it in one conversation – growing ever wider. And so, over the course of the film, each major career accomplishment Kaphar experiences, including a work selling for more than $1 million, is cause for deeper introspection rather than celebration.
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S57The Economy Is Improving in Three Major Ways
The bad news you probably already know. Mortgage costs are brutal at the moment, putting homeownership out of reach for millions of Americans. The pace of inflation is coming down but remains high, meaning consumer goods keep getting more expensive. Businesses are bracing for a recession. The economy is just weird right now, suffused with uncertainty and crossed with mixed signals.
Nevertheless, Americans have some positive short-term trends to celebrate, among them falling gas prices. Better still are three long-term trends that, despite their economy-transforming magnitude, have gone largely uncelebrated or even unnoticed. These trends promise a more dynamic economy not only in 2023 but also in the coming decades:
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S54Abortion pills can now be sold at pharmacies, FDA rules
Last summer, US President Joe Biden criticized states attempting to restrict access to abortion pills. In response, Biden directed the Food and Drug Administration to protect access, saying that “extremist governors and state legislatures” that were “looking to block the mail or search a person’s medicine cabinet or control a woman’s actions by tracking data on her apps she uses” were “wrong” and “out-of-touch” with “the majority of Americans.” Now, the FDA has taken its biggest step yet to expand access to abortions by allowing retail pharmacies to sell medications by mail order or in drugstores.
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S35'Andor' Is a Master Class in Good Writing
Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUH
The new Star Wars series Andor, a prequel to the 2016 film Rogue One, is a dramatic examination of the early days of the Rebel Alliance. Science fiction author Matt London was impressed by the show’s sophisticated characterization and dialog.
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S45The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked to Rome
She’s been called “the greatest female explorer of all time,” and the “best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages.” Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law.
Her full name, in modern Icelandic, is Guðríður víðförla Þorbjarnardóttir — Gudrid the Far-Traveled, daughter of Thorbjorn. She was born around 985 AD on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland and died around 1050 AD at Glaumbær in northern Iceland. This map shows the extraordinary extent of her travels in between those dates and places. In all, she made eight Atlantic sea voyages, at a time when those were very dangerous and often deadly.
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S46About 1 in 100 people stutter. What causes it?
What comes to mind when you think of someone who stutters? Is that person male or female? Are they weak and nervous, or powerful and heroic? If you have a choice, would you like to marry them, introduce them to your friends or recommend them for a job?
Your attitudes toward people who stutter may depend partly on what you think causes stuttering. If you think that stuttering is due to psychological causes, such as being nervous, research suggests that you are more likely to distance yourself from those who stutter and view them more negatively.
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S53Experiments with paper airplanes reveal surprisingly complex aerodynamics
Drop a flat piece of paper and it will flutter and tumble through the air as it falls, but a well-fashioned paper airplane will glide smoothly. Yet these seemingly simple structures involve surprisingly complex aerodynamics. Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences conducted a series of experiments involving paper airplanes to explore this transition and develop a mathematical model to predict flight stability, according to a March paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
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S37Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You
Disclaimer: All #WiredSixWord submissions become the property of WIRED. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any other materials, including your name or social media handle, may be published, illustrated, edited, or otherwise used in any medium. Submissions must be original and not violate the rights of any other person or entity.
🏔🏃♀️🏃🏻♂️🏃🏽♀️🦑🛸 —@jessbeckah42, via Instagram
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S51S48Intel announces new, mildly improved CPUs for this year's crop of laptops
Intel's 13th-generation desktop CPU refresh is interesting because processors throughout the lineup are picking up extra clusters of four or eight E-cores, significantly improving how they handle heavily threaded tasks. The new laptop CPUs that Intel has also announced are much less interesting—the ones that will end up in most laptops increase clock speeds and support faster memory but are otherwise mostly identical to the 12th-generation CPUs they're replacing.
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S64Are Sports Worth the Risks?
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Earlier this week, the NFL player Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field after a violent collision with another player; a mountain climber died after an avalanche on Britain’s highest mountain; and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles launched a new program to treat kids with sports injuries. Although the three events are technically unrelated, they each serve as a timely reminder of the potential hazards of athletic pursuits.
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S67Kevin McCarthy’s Predicament Is a Warning
Kevin McCarthy’s humiliation, and that of Donald Trump alongside him, offers a tall draft of schadenfreude. At the end of that, though, the nation is left with an empty glass and a bitter taste.
For many reasons, McCarthy is unfit for the speakership: He undermined the 2020 election, he is dishonest, he is (as we see) unable to marshal his caucus. But his defectors aren’t really interested in a speaker who is able to keep the House organized or functional. Their ability to hold Congress hostage is a flashing red light for the country.
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S58How Children Conjure a Snow Day
Snow days felt magical when I was a child—and not just because of the wonder of waking up to a world transformed or the gift of a day without school. They felt magical because I believed that I had helped to conjure them.
As soon as the forecast hinted at snow, my brothers and I would get to work. First came the ice cubes, upended from their trays and flushed down the toilet, one for each inch of snow. Then our pajamas, put on early (for good measure) and inside out (no matter how itchy the seams). Finally, three spoons, selected with care, stowed under each of our pillows. We knew our classmates had also followed these steps, because we’d all game-planned together at recess the day before. And, chances were, so had other students in schools across the district—maybe even the state, depending on the reach of the storm. We were joining an army of children who for generations, armed with nothing but household supplies, have believed they could change the weather.
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S66The Inflated Risk of Vaccine-Induced Cardiac Arrest
Damar Hamlin’s collapse on Monday Night Football calls attention to a medical myth that will not die.
During this week’s Monday Night Football game, the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed moments after making a routine defensive play. Hamlin seemed to have suffered a blow to his chest shortly before losing consciousness from cardiac arrest, and his condition is grave. The source of his illness remains unclear. A study of sudden cardiac events in U.S. athletes from 2014 to 2016 found that structural abnormalities of the heart muscle or arteries and faulty electric rhythms were the most common causes; traumatic chest injuries have also been linked to such incidents, in a rare condition called commotio cordis. Still, the availability of these hypotheses did not stop online activists from blaming Hamlin’s health crisis on vaccines.
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S36Cops Hacked Thousands of Phones. Was It Legal?
For a week in October 2020, Christian Lödden’s potential clients wanted to talk about only one thing. Every person whom the German criminal defense lawyer spoke to had been using the encrypted phone network EncroChat and was worried their devices had been hacked, potentially exposing crimes they may have committed. “I had 20 meetings like this,” Lödden says. “Then I realized—oh my gosh—the flood is coming.”
Months earlier, police across Europe, led by French and Dutch forces, revealed they had compromised the EncroChat network. Malware the police secretly planted into the encrypted system siphoned off more than 100 million messages, laying bare the inner workings of the criminal underground. People openly talked about drug deals, organized kidnappings, planned murders, and worse.
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S6513 Feel-Good TV Shows to Watch This Winter
Call it the First Law of Winter Viewing: The colder the weather, the stronger the urge to watch something warm. Although there’s nothing wrong with, say, returning to Stars Hollow for the umpteenth time or indulging in TV’s bounty of feel-good programming for the new year, why not press “Play” on an unconventional—yet equally comforting—pick? Below, we’ve compiled a guide to under-the-radar shows and nostalgic favorites that are stuffed with heartfelt themes, soothing settings, and wholesome narratives. All are perfect for an evening curled up on the couch with a cozy blanket.
Shows about raising kids are nothing new, but this short-lived series from the New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether and her collaborator J. J. Philbin, about a set of single parents in the same town, boasts a fresh charm. The families form an unconventional, close-knit group, helping one another overcome struggles that can be unexpectedly mature for a domestic comedy. Many episodes follow the divorced dad Will’s (played by Taran Killam) tentative return to the dating pool, and one of the best running gags involves the widower Douglas (Brad Garrett) treating his twin daughters like grown-ups. In some ways, with its breezy plots and youthful energy, Single Parents presents a soothing fantasy of parenting—a welcome rarity in a genre packed with tales of child-rearing woes. — Shirley Li
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S49S60The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy
Shortly before 4 p.m.yesterday, Kevin McCarthy, the man who desperately wanted to be House speaker, had just suffered two brutally public rejections in a row. For some reason, he was unbowed. “We’re staying until we win,” McCarthy assured a crush of reporters waiting for him outside a bathroom in the Capitol.
Moments earlier, McCarthy had sat and watched as a small but dug-in right-wing faction of his party twice defied his pleas for unity and ensured the 57-year-old Californian’s ignominious place in congressional history. Trying to avoid the first failed speaker vote in 100 years, McCarthy could afford to lose only four Republicans in the crucial party-line tally that opens each new Congress and allows the majority party to govern. McCarthy lost 19. The clerk called the roll again, and once again 19 Republicans voted for someone other than McCarthy. By the hyperpolarized standards of the modern Capitol, this was a rout.
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S61Another White Male Writer
Has written about poetry being dead as if no other stanzas have been structured to decolonize the page in the past 100 years.
The contemporaries fail to pique his interest. Such a fickle heirloom, to suggest something has died because you see no value in its pulse.
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S50S62The Dark Pageant of the NFL
Like millions of people, I had been looking forward to my weekly escapist fix of NFL Monday Night Football. Buffalo at Cincinnati promised to be a powerhouse clash between two teams with Super Bowl aspirations. No doubt this would be one of the top-rated television shows of the week in America, from the entertainment juggernaut that accounted for 22 of the 25 most watched prime-time telecasts in 2022.
I happened to miss the first few minutes of the contest while I walked to the market to buy a pint of ice cream. But whatever, it was all part of football’s grand entertainment bargain: I could get fat for a few hours on the couch while the players did all the work, provided all the spectacle, and suffered all the damage.
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S52Move over, Nvidia: Some AMD 7900 XTX GPUs are having their own heat issues
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 has been through the PR wringer for the last few months because of problems with its power connector, but AMD's newest Radeon cards are proving capable of having issues, too. Some users have been complaining of overheating and thermal throttling in their RX 7900 XTX GPUs, and AMD confirmed that there was an issue in a statement to Tom's Hardware today.
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S59Electric Vehicles Are Bringing Out the Worst in Us
American car executives keep insisting that there is no trade-off between saving the planet and having a hell of a good time behind the wheel. “What I find particularly gratifying,” Ford’s executive chair, Bill Ford, said in April as he unveiled his company’s new electric truck, “is not only is this a green F-150, but it’s a better F-150 … You’re actually gaining things that the internal combustion engine doesn’t have.” Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, sounded equally bullish in a recent social-media post: “Once you’ve experienced an [electric vehicle] and all it has to offer—the torque, handling, performance, capability—you’re in.”
The pitch is enticing, but it raises a few questions. Is the electric F-150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and size deepen the country’s road-safety crisis? And how, exactly, are electric-vehicle drivers going to use the extra power that companies are handing them?
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S63A Visit to the French Southern and Antarctic Lands
The French Southern and Antarctic Lands is a territory spread across multiple islands and island groups in the southern Indian Ocean. Patrick Hertzog, a photographer with AFP, recently visited several of its subantarctic districts aboard the research-and-supply vessel Marion Dufresne. These islands are home to many penguins, seals, and seabirds, and a temporary home to groups of scientists and researchers who work in several small stations that are supplied by the Marion Dufresne.
A scientist walks among thousands of King penguins on Île de la Possession, part of the Crozet Islands, on December 20, 2022. The Crozet Islands are home to multiple species of penguins, fur seals, and southern elephant seals. #
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S55S56Asus brings glasses-free 3D to OLED laptops
During the CES 2023 in Las Vegas today, Asus announced an upcoming feature that allows users to view and work with content in 3D without wearing 3D glasses. Similar technology has been used in a small number of laptops and displays before, but Asus is incorporating the feature for the first time in OLED laptop screens. Combined with high refresh rates, unique input methods like an integrated dial, and the latest CPUs and laptop GPUs, the company is touting the laptops with the Asus Spatial Vision feature as powerful, niche options for creative professionals looking for new ways to work.
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