January 1, 2023 - Pope Benedict XVI: A man at odds with the modern world who leaves a legacy of intellectual brilliance and controversy

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Pope Benedict XVI: A man at odds with the modern world who leaves a legacy of intellectual brilliance and controversy To many observers, Benedict, who died on Dec. 31, 2022 at the age of 95, was known for criticizing what he saw as the modern world’s rejection of God and Christianity’s timeless truths. But as a scholar of the diversity of global Catholicism, I think it’s best to avoid simple characterizations of Benedict’s theology, which I believe will influence the Catholic Church for generations. While the brilliance of this intellectual legacy will certainly endure, it will also have to contend with the shadows of the numerous controversies that marked Benedict’s time as pope and, later, as pope emeritus. Continued here

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Emotional AI Is No Substitute for Empathy In 2023, emotional AI—technology that can sense and interact with human emotions—will become one of the dominant applications of machine learning. For instance, Hume AI, founded by Alan Cowen, a former Google researcher, is developing tools to measure emotions from verbal, facial, and vocal expressions. Swedish company Smart Eyes recently acquired Affectiva, the MIT Media Lab spinoff that developed the SoundNet neural network, an algorithm that classifies emotions such as anger from audio samples in less than 1.2 seconds. Even the video platform Zoom is introducing Zoom IQ, a feature that will soon provide users with real-time analysis of emotions and engagement during a virtual meeting.   In 2023, tech companies will be releasing advanced chatbots that can closely mimic human emotions to create more empathetic connections with users across banking, education, and health care. Microsoft’s chatbot Xiaoice is already successful in China, with average users reported to have conversed with “her” more than 60 times in a month. It also passed the Turing test, with the users failing to recognize it as a bot for 10 minutes. Analysis from Juniper Research Consultancy shows that chatbot interactions in health care will rise by almost 167 percent from 2018, to reach 2.8 billion annual interactions in 2023. This will free up medical staff time and potentially save around $3.7 billion for health care systems around the world.  Continued here

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Ancient Chinese text reveals earliest known record of a candidate aurora A pair of researchers has identified the earliest description of a candidate aurora yet found in an ancient Chinese text, according to an April paper published in the journal Advances in Space Research. The authors peg the likely date of the event to either 977 or 957 BCE. The next earliest description of a candidate aurora is found on Assyrian cuneiform tablets dated between 679-655 BCE, three centuries later. Continued here

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What Are You Reading? Hey, thanks for coming over to catch up. How are you? Actually, let me stop you right there, because I have a more important question. Let’s dim the lights. I’ll recline on this lush, velvet daybed, and you can rest on that one. I’m lowering my eyelids, tilting my head a little bit, and settling into my deep Kathleen Turner voice. Continued here

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Marvel’s biggest movie ever could finally make the X-Men MCU canon The map of Marvel’s Multiverse Saga is a long and winding one, and the arc that began with WandaVision in 2021 will conclude with Avengers: Secret Wars in 2026. Since the beginning of Phase 4 and the weekly mystery of WandaVision, fans have speculated that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) would usher mutants into the MCU in a reversal of her infamous “no more mutants” spell from the comic book storyline House of M. That proliferation of mutants hasn’t happened… yet. Sure, we’ve seen a few, including Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the reveal that Ms. Marvel is a mutant herself. But we’re still pretty far away from a full-blown X-Men invasion of the MCU. Continued here

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50 cheap ways to upgrade your home you'll wish you knew about sooner I’ve been doing small weekend projects on my house lately and they have transformed the place. I haven’t spent much time or money, but it’s easier to cook in my kitchen, my stairs are no longer dangerous, there is less clutter, and my once-crappy shower is suddenly amazing. I don’t have the money or patience at the moment for tearing out walls or upgrading appliances, but these little improvements have had a huge impact. And along the way, I discovered 50 cheap ways to upgrade your home you'll wish you knew about sooner. Lighting is one of the first things I tackled and I’m super pleased with the results. I love it when the laundry room light turns on when I enter, since my hands are full carrying laundry baskets, and turns off again when I leave. It’s more convenient and it saves power. So I installed lights in my closets and on the stairs that do the same thing. I also found a quick and easy way to declutter my bathroom, installed an incredible shower head, and found a permanent home for my electric toothbrush. Each of these fixes took less than 10 minutes yet the results please me every day. Continued here

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Wolf Moon: You need to see the first Full Moon of 2023 next week The Wolf Moon will dazzle the night sky just days after the start of the new year. But the first Full Moon of 2023 will appear smaller than usual. The glow of moonlight is a reflection of sunlight. When the far side of the Moon is lit up, its near side is all dark: that’s New Moon. But when it comes time in the month for the near side to get the star’s illumination, it’s quite a sight. The Full Moon is one of the most spectacular lunar phases, and in January, it will appear about a week into the new year. Continued here

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How to watch Netflix's 'Kaleidoscope': The "correct" episode order, explained The non-linear series will appear in your profile randomly, but you can choose a straightforward order. Kaleidoscope is trying to change the way you watch television. The Netflix heist series, starring Giancarlo Esposito, Tati Gabrielle, and Rufus Sewell, portrays an ultra-complicated crime with a 25-year backstory. Continued here

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100 years ago, Stan Lee was born. He changed superheroes — and the world. Lee wrote the first lines of dialogue for Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men. But his influence goes far beyond that. December 28, 2022, marks 100 years since the birth of the world’s most famous comic book writer: the late Stan Lee. Continued here

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The Psychology Behind Unethical Behavior Leaders are often faced with ethical conundrums. So how can they determine when they’re inching toward dangerous territory? There are three main psychological dynamics that lead to crossing moral lines. First, there’s omnipotence: when someone feels so aggrandized and entitled that they believe the rules of decent behavior don’t apply to them. Second, consider cultural numbness: when others play along and gradually begin to accept and embody deviant norms. Finally, when people don’t speak up because they are thinking of more immediate rewards, we see justified neglect. There are several strategies leaders can use to counter these dynamics, including relying on a group of trusted peers to keep you in check, keeping a list of things you will never do for profit, and looking out for ways you explain away borderline actions. Continued here

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People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likable and Give Better Advice No matter what, keep asking questions. Continued here

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This overlooked biometric on fitness trackers could reveal how healthy your heart is Your heart beats around 100,000 times every day. Heart rate is a key marker of cardiovascular activity and an important vital sign. But your pulse is not as steady as a precision clock — nor would you want it to be. As a cardiovascular physiologist, I measure heart rate in nearly every experiment my students and I perform. Sometimes we use an electrocardiogram, such as you’d see in a medical clinic, which uses sticky electrodes to measure electrical signals between two points of your body. Other times we use a chest strap monitor, like ones you might see on someone at the gym, which also detects heartbeats based on electrical activity. Continued here

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You need to play the most relaxing sim on Xbox Game Pass ASAP Capitalism is the best. Well, the best we’ve done so far (looking at you, Divine Right of Kings). Exchanging our labor for cold, hard cash is the foundation of civil society. Commerce makes the world go round, but the actual economics are rarely fun. It’s why most video game economies are only there to quantify all the shooting and looting. Is there a game that shows us that business can be pleasure? Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator from developer niceplay games does this, and does it better than any game in recent memory. As the title implies, you’re an alchemist brewing potent potables in a medieval village for everyone from witchers who need healing draughts to wimps who need elixirs of strength. The hook of the game isn’t in the numbers as you buy and sell, but rather in an innovative crafting system that’s part puzzle, part cartography. It’s chill AF and endlessly addictive. Continued here

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The best boss battle of 2022 made this Nintendo shooter an instant classic Imagine getting duped by a giant, ink-spattered grizzly bear into helping him wipe out your entire species. Nintendo has never been afraid to get weird, and Splatoon 3, with its absurd and surprisingly detailed lore, is the ultimate expression of that weirdness. The game’s final boss battle is a stunning culmination of both the story and various game mechanics in wacky ways that make you ask, “Is this really happening!?” about every 30 seconds. Continued here

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The Family-Separation Files Made public here for the first time, a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy These records showcase, among other things, government officials’ attempts to mislead the public; inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent record keeping, which to this day means that a full accounting of separations does not exist; efforts to extend the length of time that children and parents were kept apart; and early and repeated internal warnings about the policy’s worst outcomes, which were ignored. Continued here

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You need to watch the most subversive alien invasion thriller on HBO Max ASAP Going back to your hometown can be a strange experience. You might be surprised and delighted to realize that very little has changed since you left, but the town will likely still feel, in some odd, unexplainable way, different than it did before. More often than not, that feeling is the natural result of how much you’ve changed and grown. But what if that nagging feeling wasn’t just the result of your own experience? What if there really was a new secret suddenly lurking beneath the surface of the town you once called home? That’s the idea at the center of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s 2013 sci-fi comedy thriller. The final installment in Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost’s Cornetto Trilogy offers the most absurd answer to the question. Continued here

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How a fantasy masterpiece led to the discovery of a real psychological condition Some 40 years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1866, accounts of hallucinations similar to those described by Lewis Carroll began to appear in the medical literature. In 1904, William Spratling, one of the first American epileptologists, published case studies of several patients for whom “everything looked bigger” just before their seizures; three years later, in 1907, the great British neurologist William Gowers also reported epilepsy patients who perceived objects to look “twice their size” during the aura preceding their seizures; and in 1913, the German neurologist Hermann Oppenheim noted that he had “seen a case of genuine hemicrania [“one-sided headache”] in which there was during an episode of violent migraine an indescribable feeling of detachment of the trunk or extremity after an hour or even a day of spontaneous dizziness.” Continued here

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Babies look for this clue to see which adults they can trust This article was first published on Big Think in February 2022. It was updated in December 2022. Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them. Continued here

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Jorie Graham Takes the Long View The poet Jorie Graham is one of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. As James Longenbach put it, she engages “the whole human contraption . . . rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems.” Graham is a chronicler of bigness, the overawing bigness of our planet but also the too-bigness, at times, of the self. “I am huge,” she writes mournfully, in “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” an elegy for what humans have already blotted out. Many of Graham’s subjects—politics, technology, natural history, and climate loss—have a sweeping scope. This year, she compiled four of her books on global warming—“Sea Change,” “Place,” “Fast,” and “Runaway”—into “[To] The Last [Be] Human,” which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022. In spring, Graham will publish “To 2040,” her fifteenth collection. (It begins: “Are we / extinct yet.”) Graham’s attention to bigness is set off by a gift for evoking smallness. She notices an “almost tired-looking” tendril of wisteria; she pauses to wonder “what it is we mean by / ok.” Our own comprehension of enormity, Graham writes, slides off of us “like a ring into the sea.” It’s a truism that poetry’s task is finding amazement in the everyday. Graham turns this into a terrifying as well as a moral project. (In her ocean metaphor, the ring is vast, and the unknowingness in which we lose it is vaster still. Perhaps her poems are salvage divers.) What makes Graham especially unique is her long, galloping line, a line that she consistently thematizes: she has described line breaks as cliffs that the reader tumbles down, over and over. Some of the poems in “[To] The Last [Be] Human” are right-justified; rather than fall off a ledge, the reader careens into a wall. Continued here

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How to Start (and Keep) a Healthy Habit It's almost that time of year. Everyone you know will soon be hitting the gym, smiling while eating broccoli, or crushing out a last cigarette. For some, the gym really will become a new part of life, and that really will be the last cigarette they smoke. But most of us have probably experienced the letdown—perhaps even self-loathing—of failing to stick to a New Year's resolution. I can't promise the advice I've collected will help—anyone who knows me would laugh hysterically at the idea of me guiding anyone toward successful habit formation—but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success and make sure your resolutions become more than just that. Continued here

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Why Yale Law School Left the U.S. News & World Report Rankings Dean Heather Gerken says it’s her belief that “this is not where students should get their information from.” Each year, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of top colleges, law schools, and medical schools land to a chorus of groans and cheers. The rankings began in 1983, and were originally drawn solely from peer reviews of institutions. Did the provost at Brown think better of the University of Virginia than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Since then, the publication has tinkered with the rankings several times—taking into account factors such as how many students an institution rejects each year, how much it costs to attend, and the student-to-faculty ratio—to give more rigor to its methodology. Continued here

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2,700 years later, ancient rock carvings reveal the most stunning city in the world Archaeologists in northern Iraq, working on the Masaki and Adad gate sites in Mosul that were destroyed by Islamic State in 2016, recently uncovered 2,700-year-old Assyrian reliefs. Featuring battle scenes and trees, these rock carvings add to the bounty of detailed stone panels excavated from the 1840s onwards, many of which are currently held in the British Museum. They stem from the ancient city of Nineveh, which, for a time, was likely the most dazzling in the world. There is evidence of occupation at the site already by 3,000 BC, an era known as the late Uruk period. But it was under King Sennacherib (705-681 BC), son of Sargon and grandfather of Ashurbanipal, that Nineveh became the capital of Assyria, the greatest power of its day. Continued here

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The WIRED Guide to 5G The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, to telemedicine and mixed reality, to as yet undreamed technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier require high-speed, always-on internet connections. To keep up with the demand, the mobile industry introduced 5G—so named because it's the fifth generation of wireless networking technology. 5G brings faster speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to your phone. That's fast enough to download a 4K movie in 25 seconds. But 5G is not just about faster connections. It also delivers lower latency and allows for more devices to be connected simultaneously. Continued here

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New drugs could turn the clock back on aging — will they work? James Kirkland started his career in 1982 as a geriatrician, treating aging patients. But he found himself dissatisfied with what he could offer them. “I got tired of prescribing wheelchairs, walkers, and incontinence devices,” recalls Kirkland, now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He knew that aging is considered the biggest risk factor for chronic illness, but he was frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. Continued here

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Crabs have evolved five separate times – why do the same forms keep coming back? Charles Darwin believed evolution created “endless forms most beautiful”. It’s a nice sentiment but it doesn’t explain why evolution keeps making crabs. Scientists have long wondered whether there are limits to what evolution can do or if Darwin had the right idea. The truth may lie somewhere between the two. Continued here

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Building Wealth: Our Favorite Reads At the time, my uncle’s explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I nodded, let it go, and didn’t think more about it until a few years later when I finished grad school with massive debt from a student loan. The first job I took barely covered my expenses. I had to rely on a credit card, even when I didn’t fully understand how credit worked. Living in a city as overpriced as New York (and later New Delhi) was a daily reminder of how expensive life could get. Continued here

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'Kaleidoscope' review: Netflix's gimmicky heist doesn't pay off When streaming blew up, its biggest strength against primetime television was that it allowed the viewer to watch shows at their own speed. You could watch one episode a week like a regular show, or binge the entire thing. Suddenly, appointment television was a thing of the past and water cooler conversations started with, “Have you finished it yet?” But one element remained the same — everyone watched the shows in the same order. With Kaleidoscope, Netflix’s newest heist show starring Giancarlo Esposito, this model is disrupted. But while the format is intriguing, it’s not the case for another upheaval of how we watch TV. Continued here

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Where 2022's news was (mostly) good: The year's top science stories How often does something work exactly as planned, and live up to its hype? In most of the world, that's the equivalent of stumbling across a unicorn that's holding a few winning lottery tickets in its teeth. But that pretty much describes our top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and initial images from the Webb Telescope. Continued here

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What Gen Z Knows About Stephen Sondheim How the late composer’s preoccupation with outsiders has endeared him to a new generation “I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. In the class I was teaching at Portland State University, I’d anticipated #Hamilfans, enthusiasts for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen—appreciation for anything that had debuted to acclaim during my students’ lifetimes. Vintage Stephen Sondheim stans, however, I had not predicted. Continued here

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In Child Welfare Cases, Most of Your Constitutional Rights Don't Apply In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely. Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents. Continued here

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Does Influencer Marketing Really Pay Off? Influencer marketing is a huge industry, with companies around the world spending billions of dollars on these partnerships. But do these investments actually pay off? To quantify the ROI of influencer marketing, the authors analyzed engagement for more than 5,800 influencer posts and identified seven key variables that drive a campaign’s effectiveness, including characteristics of both the influencer and of their individual posts. They further found that by optimizing these variables, the average brand could boost ROI by 16.6%, suggesting that many companies are designing campaigns that leave substantial value on the table. By adopting these research-backed guidelines, brands can move past anecdotal evidence to ensure that their marketing dollars go toward the partnerships and content that are most likely to offer returns. Continued here

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Medicare Keeps Spending More on COVID-19 Testing. Fraud and Overspending Are Partly Why. Fraud and overspending are contributing to the increases, experts say, because federal money for COVID-19 testing is not subject to some of the same financial and regulatory constraints as other tests covered by Medicare, the government insurance program for people 65 and older and the disabled. Early in the pandemic, testing was both critical to slowing the spread of the virus and in short supply. So the federal government enacted measures to make it more profitable to get in the COVID-19 testing business. Good for the duration of the public health emergency, which has not yet expired, the measures include a generous Medicare reimbursement rate, requirements for private insurance to cover testing — even compelling insurance plans to pay whatever cash price is demanded by out-of-network labs — and a hefty fund for testing those people who didn’t have insurance. Continued here

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Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family's Fight to Preserve a Way of Life This is the life of the Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, the Salmon People. It is a life Columbia River tribal people have lived for generations and have fought for decades to protect. Over the last century and a half, they have watched as forces eroded their access to salmon. Treaties removed them from their traditional fishing areas; dams massively reduced the numbers of salmon that swam in the waters; environmental contamination further poisoned the well. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that produces nonpartisan, evidence-based journalism to expose injustice, corruption and wrongdoing. We were founded over 10 years ago to fill a growing hole in journalism: Newsrooms were (and still are) shrinking, and legacy funding models are failing. Deep-dive reporting like ours is slow and expensive, and investigative journalism is a luxury in many newsrooms today — but it remains as critical as ever to democracy and our civic life. More than a decade (and six Pulitzer Prizes) later, ProPublica has built one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the country. Our work has spurred reform through legislation, at the voting booth and inside our nation’s most important institutions. Continued here

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This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico The seventh grader, whose middle name is Matthew, said that was the culmination of months of being written up for “everything” — from being off-task in class to playing on the school elevator. (Out of concern that the boy will be stigmatized at school, his grandmother agreed to speak on the condition that she not be identified and that he be identified only by his middle name.) Matthew’s school district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity, according to an analysis of state records by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020. Continued here

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The last fisherman of Monaco It's often just past midnight when Eric Rinaldi unties the mooring lines and carefully manoeuvres his fishing boat Diego out of Monaco's harbour, Port Hercules. Contemplating the hours of inky darkness in front of him, he'll steer past rows of superyachts as he heads out into the open sea, their polished hulls and elaborate designs a stark contrast to the simple practicality of his fibreglass workboat. Onboard Diego – named for his young son – Rinaldi's biggest luxury is an old Nespresso machine, one of the few comforts among the jumble of nets, hooks, bright orange buoys and other tools of his trade.  Continued here S25 The Rise of the Chief Project Officer Thirty years ago 80% of the resources in an organization were dedicated to operations, and 20% to projects; today, that ratio has flipped. Despite this massive disruption, most organizations still don’t have one senior leader overseeing or supervising all the project activities. A chief project officer (CPO) should fill that void. The role goes far beyond the direct sponsorship of individual projects. The CPO reports directly to the CEO. They must push their organization toward adopting a project-driven structure and foster a collaborative and empowering culture that reaches across silos. They must also ensure that project-management competencies are developed throughout the organization. This article will explore the benefits a CPO can bring, how to understand whether your organization needs a CPO, and how to hire one. Continued here S30 With Only 6 Words, Patagonia Explained the Brilliant Reason It Closed All of Its Stores and Paid Its Employees to Take a Week Off Sometimes your employees need a break. Continued here S15 Trillions of tiny, self-replicating satellites could unlock interstellar travel Inspiration for space exploration can come from all corners. One of the most inspiring, or terrifying, sources of inspiration for some in space exploration came from computer science expert John von Neumann, who laid out a framework for self-replicating machines in a series of lectures he gave in 1948. Ever since then, scientists and engineers have been debating the advantages, and the perils, of such a system. However, while technology has indeed advanced a long way since the 1940s, it still seems like we are still a long way from having a fully functional von Neumann machine. That is unless you turn to biology. Even simple biological systems can perform absolutely mind-blowing feats of chemical synthesis. And there are few people in the world today who know that better than George Church. The geneticist from Harvard has been at the forefront of a revolution in the biological sciences over the last 30 years. Now, he’s published a new paper in Astrobiology musing about how biology could aid in creating a pico-scale system that could potentially explore other star systems at next to no cost. Continued here S70 Arizona's Governor-Elect Chooses Critic of Racial Disparities in Child Welfare to Lead CPS Agency This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work. Arizona’s child welfare system has long disproportionately investigated Black families. According to the ProPublica-NBC News investigation, which highlighted Stewart’s role, 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix faced a DCS investigation in just a recent five-year period. Faust said the department had made progress over that time, but the news organizations found that while the overall number of investigations has gone down, the racial disparity between white and Black families has only increased. Continued here S69 Nazi Germany Used Honorary Consuls to Advance Agenda Globally, Records Show Historians have long chronicled the clandestine use of ambassadors and other professional diplomats by Nazi intelligence services. Far less attention has focused on the activities of honorary consuls, who for centuries have worked from their home countries to represent the interests of foreign governments. The consuls included a social hall vice president, a fertilizer merchant and a chemist. They largely lived and worked in neutral countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa, where Nazi Germany sought to cultivate allies or gain an advantage at critical ports and other strategic locations. A majority of the honorary consuls were appointed directly by Germany; some were named by other countries. Continued here S42 Alabama Makes Plans to Gas Its Prisoners After a series of botched executions, the state is choosing a path of technical, rather than moral, innovation. Critics called 2022 “the year of the botched execution”—and it was indeed an infamous period, mainly because the state of Alabama lost the ability to competently kill prisoners in its charge while retaining the sovereignty to try. Continued here S9 Shipwrecks, new species, and more: 9 biggest deep-sea discoveries of 2022 Peculiar lifeforms and toxic environments are just part of everyday life in some of the darkest, coldest, places on Earth. Continued here S17 Animal brains use complex calculations to evade getting eaten Scientists are beginning to unravel the complex circuitry behind the split-second decision to beat a hasty retreat. Survival of the fittest often means survival of the fastest. But the fastest doesn’t necessarily mean the fastest moving. It might mean the fastest thinking. When faced with the approach of a powerful predator, for instance, a quick brain can be just as important as quick feet. Continued here S43 Why I Joined, Then Left, the Forward Party The desire to fix the political process doesn’t necessarily convey the ability to make change happen. Because I no longer feel at home among either Democrats or Republicans, and because I have a weakness for hopeless causes, I joined a movement this year to get a third party onto ballots in my state. But our effort to launch the Forward Party—the brainchild of the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, among others—did not go well. Continued here S11 'Alice in Borderland' Season 2 ends with a surprisingly kind message — and one character is proof One character in Alice in Borderland Season 2 represents the show's unexpectedly kind message. Alice in Borderland’s cast of characters is an embarrassment of riches. It’s one of the many story elements that makes this Japanese deadly competition drama a must-watch in the era of peak entertainment. In the Netflix series, no character is too small to get a flashback, expanding the world far beyond protagonists Arisu and Usagi. In Season 2, this means new characters for Arisu, Usagi, and us viewers to get to know. And one character in particular has stolen the show. Continued here S31 365 Micro-Challenges and Daily Tips to Keep You Motivated and Inspired Every Day in 2023 It's a daily dose of inspiration to help you reach your biggest goals in the new year. Continued here S47 Hollywood’s Love Affair With Fictional Languages For big fans of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year’s sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it’s actually been vomrra zìsìt, or “15 years.” I’m not implying that Avatar rots the brain. Rather, the blue-skinned Na’vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron’s universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language—painstakingly built from scratch for the movies—uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na’vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13. Continued here S27 The Best Advice I Ever Got: Fred Carl, Jr., Founder and CEO, Viking Range In 1986 I was working full-time in the construction business and renting an unfinished one-room office in an old cotton exchange building in downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, trying to start a company in my spare time. I had dozens of detailed sketches for what would be the first Viking range, and little else. Continued here S37 The Many Metaphors of Metamorphosis We are being pitched futures all the time. Every advertisement, every political campaign, every quarterly budget is a promise or a threat about what tomorrow could look like. And it can feel, sometimes, like those futures are happening, whether we like it or not—that we’re simply along for the ride. But the future hasn’t happened yet. We do, in fact, get a say, and we should seize that voice as much as we possibly can. But how? I’ve spent the past eight years making over 180 episodes of a podcast about the future called Flash Forward. Here, in a three-part series, are the big things I’ve learned about how to think about what’s possible for tomorrow. (This is part 3. Read part 1 and part 2.) As a moth, Uraba lugens isn’t particularly noteworthy in appearance. Its wings are mottled gray and brown, only about 25 millimeters across. But as a caterpillar, the gum-leaf skeletonizer is full of surprises—and perhaps lessons.  Continued here S50 The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of 'White Noise' The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat? Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure. Continued here S61 America's Adult Education System Is Broken. Here's How Experts Say We Can Fix It. For a number of sometimes overlapping reasons, 48 million American adults struggle to read basic English, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That may leave them unable to find and keep a decent job, navigate the signage on city streets, follow medical instructions and vote. They’re vulnerable to scams and face stigma and shame. But the infrastructure for adult education is profoundly inadequate, a ProPublica investigation found — and, as the nation’s persistently low literacy rates reveal, the government’s efforts haven’t done enough to address the problem. About 500 counties across the nation are hot spots where nearly a third of adults struggle to read basic English. This contributes to disproportionate underemployment. In communities with lower literacy, there is often less economic investment, a smaller tax base and fewer resources to fund public services. Continued here S62 This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wildfire, Then Returned to Study How It Happened An engineer who has traveled to Japan and New Zealand to study earthquake damage to help communities prepare for future temblors, Wham returned to his own devastated city to find his home intact despite embers the size of dinner plates in his townhome’s window wells. Assured his place was safe, the University of Colorado assistant research professor jumped on his bike and pedaled into a snowstorm to start documenting the destruction. Some of America’s fastest-growing areas are in arid Western states prone to wildfires. About 1 in 3 homes are being built in areas that abut land with flammable vegetation — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. And about 60 million homes are within a kilometer of areas that have burned at some point in the past 24 years, scientists found in a 2020 analysis. The study’s authors cautioned: “We’ve been living with wildfire risk that we haven’t fully understood.” Continued here S26 The Best Places to Travel in 2023 It’s our favorite time of year: the Where to Go season, when AFAR reveals our list of the ultimate places to travel in the coming year. How to choose? Our editorial team reached out to writers, reporters, and correspondents around the world and curated 12 global destinations for 2023 that feel poised for a “moment": creative cities, seaside villages, national parks, and other places where wonder prevails. Read on and prepare to start wandering... Across this secluded and beautiful island state near Melbourne, irreverence and experimentation reign. Continued here S60 Our Year in Visual Journalism ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that produces nonpartisan, evidence-based journalism to expose injustice, corruption and wrongdoing. We were founded over 10 years ago to fill a growing hole in journalism: Newsrooms were (and still are) shrinking, and legacy funding models are failing. Deep-dive reporting like ours is slow and expensive, and investigative journalism is a luxury in many newsrooms today — but it remains as critical as ever to democracy and our civic life. More than a decade (and six Pulitzer Prizes) later, ProPublica has built one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the country. Our work has spurred reform through legislation, at the voting booth and inside our nation’s most important institutions. Your donation today will help us ensure that we can continue this critical work. From the climate crisis, to racial justice, to wealth inequality and much more, we are busier than ever covering stories you won’t see anywhere else. Make your gift of any amount today and join the tens of thousands of ProPublicans across the country, standing up for the power of independent journalism to produce real, lasting change. Thank you. Continued here S59 Patients Went to This Isolated Facility for Treatment. Instead, Nearly Two Dozen Were Charged With Crimes. Williams has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and her personal story consists of one upheaval after another. At age 23, in a state of crisis, Williams had sought help at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. She’d never been charged with a crime before. But four months before the deputy showed up, a Choate employee who claimed Williams had forcefully shoved her asked her employer to pursue charges against the patient. By scouring courthouse and police records, reporters with Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica discovered at least 40 felony charges filed against 29 patients since 2015 in two of the four downstate counties where the state operates a residential facility. (Reporters did not identify any charges at two of the four facilities.) Continued here S66 How to Evaluate a Nonprofit Before You Donate How nonprofits spend their money may be different than what you expect. For instance, ProPublica has reported on how the Red Cross built just six homes after raising millions for Haiti disaster relief, how St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital keeps billions of dollars in reserves and how a nonprofit college spent more on marketing than financial aid. Since nonprofits are required to file a document called a Form 990 with the IRS every year, you can check out a nonprofit’s finances for yourself with a few online resources. By taking the time to evaluate the charity before you donate, you can see how effective your donation will be and get peace of mind knowing it’s more likely that the organization effectively spends your donation and does what it says. Continued here S64 She Says Doctors Ignored Her Concerns About Her Pregnancy. For Many Black Women, It's a Familiar Story. Paging through the documents, she read a narrative that did not match her experience, one in which she said doctors failed to heed her concerns and nurses misrepresented what she told them. In anticipation of giving birth to her first child in the spring of 2014, Brooke had twice gone to the hospital in the weeks leading up to her due date because she hadn’t felt the baby kick, her medical records show. And twice doctors had sent her back home. After that second hospital admission, and following some testing, she was diagnosed with “false labor” and discharged, records show, though she was 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant and insisted that her baby’s movements had slowed. Research shows that after 28 weeks, changes in fetal movement, including decreased activity or bursts of excessive fetal activity, are associated with an increased risk of stillbirth. The risk of delivering a stillborn child also continues to rise at or after 40 weeks. Continued here S49 Rethinking the European Conquest of Native Americans In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America. When the term Indian appears in the Declaration of Independence, it is used to refer to “savage” outsiders employed by the British as a way of keeping the colonists down. Eleven years later, in the U.S. Constitution, the Indigenous peoples of North America are presented  differently: as separate entities with which the federal government must negotiate. They also appear as insiders who are clearly within the borders of the new country yet not to be counted for purposes of representation. The same people are at once part of the oppression that justifies the need for independence, a rival for control of land, and a subjugated minority whose rights are ignored. Continued here S54 Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google's Black Box Ad Empire It wasn’t Conservative Beaver’s first brush with fabricated news. The site had falsely claimed Barack Obama was arrested for espionage, Pope Francis was arrested for possession of child pornography and “human trafficking,” and the Pfizer CEO’s wife died after being compelled to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As Conservative Beaver pumped out these and other lies, Google placed ads on the site and split the revenue with its then-anonymous owner. He runs the conservative political site Toronto 99 and uses the same Google publisher account he had for Conservative Beaver to collect ad revenue. Google simply allowed Slapinski to start a new site and keep earning money. It’s the equivalent of taking away an unsafe driver’s car instead of their license. Continued here S57 The IRS Hasn't Released Nearly Half a Million Nonprofit Tax Records According to a ProPublica review of public IRS data, which powers our Nonprofit Explorer database, the agency is behind on releasing nearly half a million tax records, known as Form 990s, for tax-exempt organizations. The delays, which began two years ago, are stymying access to key financial information that governments, the public and grantmakers use to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies. “For charity regulators, the Form 990 series not only helps ensure transparency and accountability, but also provides vital information for state investigations into potential fraud and misuse of charitable resources,” the organization wrote. “It is critical that the availability of that data be timely.” Continued here S6 The 9 most anticipated games that definitely won't come out in 2023 2023 will see the release of many highly anticipated games, like Final Fantasy XVI. But many of the most hotly anticipated games have no chance of being released next year, no matter how hard we wish it weren’t so. Here are the 9 most anticipated games that have no chance of seeing the light of day in 2023 Continued here S58 A Water War Is Brewing Over the Dwindling Colorado River On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry. The Uncompahgre Valley, stretching 34 miles from Delta through the town of Montrose, is, and always has been, an arid place. Most of the water comes from the Gunnison River, a major tributary of the Colorado, which courses out of the peaks of the Elk Range through the cavernous and sun-starved depths of the Black Canyon, one rocky and inaccessible valley to the east. In 1903, the federal government backed a plan hatched by Uncompahgre farmers to breach the ridge with an enormous tunnel and then in the 1960s to build one of Colorado’s largest reservoirs above the Black Canyon called Blue Mesa. Now that tunnel feeds a neural system of water: 782 miles worth of successively smaller canals and then dirt ditches, laterals and drains that turn 83,000 Western Colorado acres into farmland. Today, the farm association in this valley is one of the largest single users of Colorado River water outside of California. Continued here S65 They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said. Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone. Continued here S48 Partying Feels Different Now Parties have always been about hope. After forgoing them for so long during the pandemic, that’s clearer than ever. Parties were never on my mind more than when I wasn’t attending any. I avoided them for a couple of years, and my interest sharpened as a result. Parties were a very notable casualty of the beginning years of the coronavirus pandemic, though, it must be said, they were a pretty trifling one. Compared with the more than 1 million American lives lost, the lack of parties felt like something that was not worth grieving or complaining about. What is a party in the face of such anguish? Continued here S55 The Global Threat of Rogue Diplomacy Honorary consuls are not nearly as high-profile as ambassadors and other career diplomats. As private citizens, the volunteer consuls work from their home countries to represent the foreign governments that nominate them. The arrangement was meant to build country-to-country alliances without the need for embassies and staff, an inexpensive and benign diplomatic arrangement that over the years was embraced by a majority of the world’s governments. But a first-of-its-kind global investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that corrupt, violent and dangerous honorary consul appointees — including those accused of aiding terrorist regimes — have turned a system meant to leverage the work of honorary citizens into a perilous form of rogue diplomacy that has threatened the rule of law around the world. Continued here S33 365 Best Inspirational Quotes for 2023 One quote for each day of the year. Take them together, and they're quite inspiring. Continued here S56 Shadow Diplomats Have Posed a Threat for Decades. The World's Governments Looked the Other Way. The department did not respond to questions about what steps, if any, it took to review Shumake’s background. Had officials done even a cursory internet search, they would have discovered that Shumake’s real estate broker’s license was suspended in 2002 and that he settled a bank fraud case in 2008, agreeing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shumake was among at least 500 current and former honorary consuls in the United States and around the world who have been implicated in criminal investigations or other controversies — including scores named to their posts despite past convictions or other red flags, ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists disclosed in a series of stories this year. Continued here S51 People who live to 100 don't eat like typical Americans: Here are 'the 5 pillars of a longevity diet' There are some daily practices that may increase your chances of living to 90 and beyond - and a healthy diet is one of the most important factors on the list. In his new book, "The Blue Zones American Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100," Dan Buettner "identified the world's longest-lived areas (blue zones) and studied the patterns and lifestyles that seem to explain their populations' longevity." Continued here S63 Wildfires in Colorado Are Growing More Unpredictable. Officials Have Ignored the Warnings. Within minutes, landscaped islands in a Costco parking lot in Superior, Colorado, caught fire as structures became the inferno’s primary fuel. It consumed the Element Hotel, as well as part of a Tesla service center, a Target and the entire Sagamore neighborhood. Across a six-lane freeway, in the town of Louisville, flames rocketed through parks and climbed wooden fences, setting homes ablaze. They spread from one residence to the next in a mere eight minutes, reaching temperatures as high as 1,650 degrees. Yet despite previous warnings of this new threat, ProPublica found Colorado’s response hasn’t kept pace. Legislative efforts to make homes safer by requiring fire-resistant materials in their construction have been repeatedly stymied by developers and municipalities, while taxpayers shoulder the growing cost to put out the fires and rebuild in their aftermath. Continued here Contributors Dharmendra Kumar Priya Ranjan Powered by Blogger.