Apple's Latest Leadership Reshuffle Is a No-Brainer. So Why Did It Take the Company 47 Years to Do It?

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Apple's Latest Leadership Reshuffle Is a No-Brainer. So Why Did It Take the Company 47 Years to Do It? Your people are your business. Continued here

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Do You Feel a Lack of Meaning at Work? You Could Be Languishing. If you’re just starting out in your career, chances are that you sometimes feel as if you’re languishing. When you’re languishing, you feel a lack of meaning and a desire to “fit in” emotionally. These three steps can help you stop languishing and start flourishing in your career. Continued here

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The Neuroscience of Trust Managers have tried various strategies and perks to boost employee engagement—all with little impact on long-term retention and performance. But now, neuroscience offers some answers. Through his research on the brain chemical oxytocin—shown to facilitate collaboration and teamwork—Zak has developed a framework for creating a culture of trust and building a happier, more loyal, and more productive workforce. Continued here

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Want to Instantly Be More Likable and Make a Great First Impression, Without Really Trying? A Harvard Study Shows This Is All You Need to Do Best of all, it's something you already know how to do. Continued here

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Jalen Hurts Just Delivered an Emotional Intelligence Master Class. It All Starts With Just 6 Words Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts may have lost the Super Bowl, but his postgame press conference teaches multiple lessons in emotional intelligence, the ability to make emotions work for you, instead of against you. Continued here

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How Overcoming Adversity Drives Growth and Engagement Why many well-intended employee engagement initiatives are counter-productive Continued here

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My Team Doesn't Want Managers to Hang Out With Them Should I worry about an us versus them dynamic? Continued here

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Here's How to Unlock Your Leadership Skills to Grow Your Business Gain more credibility for yourself and your business by improving in these areas. Continued here

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Will Washington Really Get Tougher on Airlines? Not soon enough to make your next trip less miserable, or expensive. But after the Southwest meltdown, there's more appetite for protecting travelers. Continued here

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Warren Buffett's Remarkably Easy Writing Hack to Simplify Complex Ideas Three questions to ask before you write a word. Continued here

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Increase Your Leadership Skills Starting With Changing Your Mind Unlock your brain and your true leadership potential by recognizing these self-limitingpatterns. Continued here

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3 Wacky Valentine's Day Products That Go the Extra Mile to Win Customers' Hearts These companies are driving sales around Valentine's Day with unconventional love-themed products. Continued here

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How to Answer "What Are Your Salary Expectations?" There are many interview questions that inspire dread in an interviewee — from “What’s your greatest weakness?” to “Tell me about yourself.” But one in particular is especially complicated: “What are your salary expectations?” If you go too low, you might end up making less than they’re willing to pay. But if you go too high, you could price yourself out of the job. In this piece, the author offers practical strategies for how to approch this question along with sample answers to use as a guide. Continued here

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Hold Your Team Accountable with Compassion, Not Fear As a manager, it’s a tricky balance to promote accountability for business outcomes while demonstrating kindness to individuals on your team. How do you find the sweet spot between being compassionate and holding people responsible? The secret is to over-index on clear expectations and then provide frequent, low-impact coaching and feedback to give your team members assistance without ever transferring ownership of responsibility. This article covers some techniques to instill in your team the sense that they can be simultaneously vulnerable with you and responsible for hitting their goals. Continued here

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Career Sponsorship Is a Two-Way Street Sponsorship is a vital mechanism for advancing the careers of junior employees. But it’s not just a one-way relationship in which everything flows from the sponsor to the sponsee. What sponsees bring to the relationship, in fact, is just as important — if not more important — than what sponsors do. This article describes six of the most important attributes of successful sponsees. Continued here

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Why the human genome was never completed Before the end of 2023, you should be able to read something remarkable. It will be the story of a single individual, who they are and where they come from – and it will offer hints about what their future holds. It probably won't be the most entertaining read on first glance, and it will be very, very long. But it will be a seminal moment – the publication online of the entire genome of a human being, end to end with no gaps. At this point you may feel that you have heard this before. Surely the human genome was published decades ago? Isn't that all done? Continued here

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Video call with a traditional healer? Once unthinkable, it's now common in South Africa In May 2020, two months into South Africa’s strict Covid-19 lockdown, Makhosi Keagile Kamo Malatji decided to purchase a ring light and a second smartphone. She needed them for her online consultations, conducted over WhatsApp video calls from her shrine at home in east Johannesburg. “Obviously, we were forced not to work, but that didn’t take away from people needing spiritual help or guidance,” Malatji, a sangoma — or a traditional healer believed to have access to the spirit world — told Rest of World. “At that point, I felt I needed to make it work for me, so I started doing online consultations.” Continued here

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Love and the Brain, Part 1: The 36 Questions, Revisited Host Shayla Love dives into the true story behind the now infamous 36 questions that lead to love. Ivan Vendrov: It always stuck with me, just this story that there’s a formula for love. I’m an engineer, mathematician by training, and numbers and processes come easy to me—love maybe less so. Continued here

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Quantum Entanglement Isn't All That Spooky After All Quantum entanglement is a complex phenomenon in physics that is usually poorly described as an invisible link between distant quantum objects that allows one to instantly affect the other. Albert Einstein famously dismissed this idea of entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” In reality, entanglement is better understood as information, but that’s admittedly bland. So nowadays, every news article, explainer, opinion piece and artistic interpretation of quantum entanglement equates the phenomenon with Einstein’s spookiness. The situation has only worsened with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics going to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for quantum entanglement experiments. But it’s time to cut this adjective loose. Calling entanglement spooky completely misrepresents how it actually works and hinders our ability to make sense of it. In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger coined the term entanglement, emphasizing that it was “not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.” He was writing in response to a famous paper (known simply to physicists as the EPR argument) by Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, that claimed quantum physics was incomplete. The New York Times headline read, “Einstein attacks quantum theory,” which solidified the widespread perception that Einstein hated quantum physics. Continued here

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Underdog Technologies Gain Ground in Quantum-Computing Race Individual atoms trapped by optical ‘tweezers’ are emerging as a promising computational platform The race to build practical quantum computers might be entering a new phase. Some of the front-runner technologies are now facing size constraints, and others are rapidly coming up from behind. Continued here

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The Best Way to Boost Workers' Mental Health Is to Give Them Good Managers To improve workers’ health, research shows, companies need to support “transformational” leaders and weed out “destructive” actors, not just tout wellness programs Workers are not doing well. Around the globe, employees report rising rates of burnout despite efforts by many organizations to add programs and resources such as counseling, more paid time off and even free access to meditation apps. Continued here

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Monogamous Prairie Voles Reveal the Neurobiology of Love The prairie vole is a small Midwestern rodent known for shacking up and settling down, a tendency that is rare among mammals. Mated pairs form bonds, share a nest and raise young together. In the laboratory, a pair-bonded vole will work for access to its mate. Prairie voles even exhibit something like empathy for their partners, getting stressed when they are stressed, and consoling each other through touch. As the pandemic has brought into stark relief, such social connections are essential to human well-being as well. Researchers are turning to these unusual rodents to understand how relationships have a profound impact on health. Leveraging biomedical advances of the past few decades, scientists have watched neurons in action. They have manipulated gene activity with exquisite precision, examining the functions of individual genes in specific brain regions. With the prairie vole as a subject, researchers are learning how bonds are forged, how early life shapes relationships and why we ache when they fall apart. Continued here

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Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi? Trees communicate and cooperate through a fungal web, according to a widespread idea. But not everyone is convinced The tips of tree roots are intertwined with filaments of fungus, forming a hidden underground network that seems to benefit both organisms: the filaments, known as hyphae, break down minerals from the soil that trees can then take into their roots, while the fungus gets a steady source of sugar from the trees. Continued here

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Lisa Damour: 3 steps of anxiety overload -- and how you can take back control Anxiety is a normal part of life, so why are we so afraid of it? Psychologist Lisa Damour breaks down how to recognize when anxiety is helpful and when it's harmful, offering simple solutions for calming yourself and taking back control when you feel it slipping away. (This conversation, hosted by TED science curator David Biello, was part of an exclusive TED Membership event. Visit ted.com/membership to become a TED Member.) Continued here

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The Secret Lives of Neutron Stars Forget archaeologists and their lost civilizations, or paleontologists with their fossils—astrophysicist Heloise Stevance studies the past on an entirely different scale. When astronomers catch a glimpse of an unusual signal in the sky, perhaps the light from a star exploding, Stevance takes that signal and rewinds the clock on it by billions of years. Working at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, she traces the past lives of dead and dying stars, a process she calls stellar genealogy. “There’s a lot of drama in the lives of stars,” she says.  On August 17, 2017, astrophysicists witnessed two dead stars’ remnant cores, known as neutron stars, colliding into each other in a distant galaxy. Known as a neutron star merger, they detected this event via ripples in spacetime—known as gravitational waves—and light produced by the resulting explosion. This marked the first and only time scientists had seen such an event using gravitational waves. From those signals, they deduced that the neutron stars were 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun. They also figured out that such collisions create some of the heavier natural elements found in the universe, such as gold and platinum. But overall, the signals presented more puzzles than answers.  Continued here

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I Found My Chosen Family on Social Media Six months after I first posted on Instagram, I left my husband and kids behind and set out, alone, to drive 348 miles to meet a bunch of strangers in Las Vegas. That was January 2013. In the 10 years since, many in this group of “strangers” have become my dearest friends, traveling companions, fellow adventurers, and, dare I say, chosen family. We wouldn’t know each other if not for Instagram. When the platform launched in 2010, and I heard that, instead of personal news, gossip, and political opinions, it was just about sharing images, I jumped on and posted my first photo. It was of the neon sign above the 1958 diner Rae’s in West Los Angeles, where I had grown up. Certain that I was the only person to ever have taken a photo of an old sign, I did a search: #vintageneonsigns. To my astonishment, up popped a bunch of photos just like the ones I’d been taking for decades. Other sign photographers were equally surprised. Los Angeles–based graphic designer Kathy Kikkert says, “I had no idea there were other people out there doing this same weird thing,” and caretaker April Bryan, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, notes, “I wasn’t alone after all!” Continued here

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'Love in the Time of Fentanyl' Tells the Whole Truth Love in the Time of Fentanyl begins with an overdose. A man collapses in the street, lying unconscious. Two harm reduction workers named Ronnie and Dana administer naloxone and oxygen; they arrive on the scene long before paramedics. “Talk to us, come on bud,” Ronnie says. Dana counts out the man’s pulse. Soon, he rouses, and they help him sit up as an ambulance approaches.  It’s a gripping scene—and all too familiar. If you’ve seen a documentary about addiction before, you’ve seen something like this. There is no shortage of drug footage already out in the world. You can find it on every streaming platform, even Disney+. Or flip around on basic cable: A&E’s Intervention is in its 24th season. You could spend weeks with it playing continuously in the background and never run out of fresh episodes. Why watch another addiction documentary, then, another onscreen overdose?  Continued here

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13 Face Masks We Actually Like to Wear 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 WIRED Do you wear a face mask or don't you? Currently, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) offers guidance that if you live in a community with medium or high levels of Covid-19, you should continue to wear a well-fitting mask or respirator (you can check local levels here). However, the Kraken variant is still spreading, and colds and the flu have continued to circulate. Local authorities can require mask wearing too.  Continued here

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Twitter's API Crackdown Will Hit More Than Just Bots On February 13, Twitter is expected to end free access to its API, or application programming interface, the backend access that lets people build bots to automatically post and respond to tweets on the site. Elon Musk, who took over Twitter in October last year, has long said he wants to scour the platform of bots, and has said that charging a minimum of $100 a month to access the API will "clean things up greatly." But by cutting off free access to its API, Twitter will also prevent many researchers from accessing its data, stopping them from analyzing how misinformation and hate speech spreads on social media.  Continued here

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Loverwatch Left Me Wishing For a Third First Date The world of Overwatch has, to some degree, always been a bit more compelling than the game that inhabits it. Even people who never play the game are familiar with its characters, and its bright vision of an optimistic tech-driven future feels equal parts MCU and Star Trek. Oh, and everyone is super hot. Perhaps that's why a dating sim featuring Overwatch characters isn't just a logical choice, but an inevitability. Continued here

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Confusion Spirals in Crypto as the US Cracks Down The US Securities and Exchange Commission is on the warpath—and crypto is in its crosshairs. Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that the agency intends to sue crypto firm Paxos for issuing BUSD, a stablecoin developed in partnership with the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance.  The SEC declined to comment, but Paxos, which is based in New York and Singapore, confirmed today that the agency alleges BUSD should have been registered as a security in the US, which requires compliance with complex rules. In a statement, the firm said it “categorically disagrees” that BUSD is a security but has complied with an order from the New York Department of Financial Services to halt the creation of any new BUSD, effectively strangling the coin. Continued here

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The Universe violates the perfect cosmological principle By combining measured distances with observed recession speed, we determined the Universe was expanding. The Universe could obey the perfect cosmological principle: identical in all locations and throughout time. Continued here

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How reading fiction can make you a better person In 1862, Abraham Lincoln met with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel detailing the horrors of slavery. He supposedly greeted her with, “So, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” an acknowledgment of the novel’s role in adding fuel to the abolitionist movement and helping spark the Civil War.  Novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin have long been credited with ushering along large-scale social changes. But such credit implicitly suggests that reading fiction can change people on an individual level. And a possible avenue for this change is an ability to cultivate empathy in readers. Continued here

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Ease productivity overload with "niksen," the Dutch art of doing nothing When was the last time you did nothing? By that, I don’t mean scrolling through social media, watching reruns of Always Sunny, or fretting over the latest office drama. I mean nothingness with no purpose and no goal other than to just enjoy being.  If you’re like most people, you’re likely to have difficulty recalling such a luxurious moment. And even if you could, would you admit it? The more you think about it, the more you realize how incredibly difficult it is not only to find the time for nothing but to own it without embarrassment. Continued here

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The highest earning men aren't especially intelligent. What explains their success? In capitalist societies, we like to think that the greatest rewards go to the most deserving individuals — namely, the smartest people who work the hardest. A team of researchers from institutions in Sweden and the Netherlands sought to find out if this really is the case. In their study, published at the end of January in the journal European Sociological Review, they probed how cognitive ability correlated with annual earnings among Swedish men. For decades, Sweden has had a conscription system in which young men are enlisted to serve for a year in the country’s armed forces. (In 2010, women were also included.) As part of their military intake testing, recruits complete an in-depth exam of their cognitive abilities. The researchers used this data from 59,387 men who were assessed during 1971–1977 or 1980–1999 and correlated it with their future average annual earnings as reported in government data. Continued here

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What is the protein of the future? Over the past few years, media coverage has emphasized the need for most people to eat less meat — both for their own health, and to reduce the burden that our food system places on the environment. This sounds like a simple message. But the best solution for the perfect future diet is more complicated than it may first seem. Meat and milk contain important nutritional factors, and many consumers love their taste. I’m the executive director of the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab, which is funded by the North Carolina state legislature and works with food processing companies to develop and scale up plant-based foods. One of our focus areas is helping companies fine-tune alternative protein products — things like plant-based burgers — in our pilot plant, and bring them to market. For example, we helped to develop Nowadays chicken nuggets and Memore, a powder focused on cognitive health. Continued here

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Your brain is wired to detect fear, outside of your conscious awareness Subcortical regions of the brain can rapidly detect and process fearful faces that are otherwise invisible to the eye, according to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience.    The ability to quickly recognize fearful facial expressions and other emotional signals may be critical to survival, as it enables us to detect potential threats. The amygdala is believed to play a central role in these processes. Continued here

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Happy Valentine's Day — in 10 maps! The very first Valentine was written by the 3rd-century Roman saint of that name. Before his execution, he wrote to Julia, the daughter of his jailer, whom he had been treating for her blindness, urging her to remain faithful. As she opened the note — signed “from your Valentine” — her sight was restored. That’s just one of the many stories and traditions that have attached themselves to the popular patron saint of courtly love (and, incidentally, of beekeepers). On the day of his feast — February 14, first established in 496 AD — pilgrims looking for love pray for his intercession at Whitefriar Church in Dublin, which holds some of his relics: a bit of bone and a tiny blood-soaked piece of cloth. Continued here

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How America lost its mind—and how to get rationality back What explains the high levels of political polarization in American society today? To writer and law professor John Inazu, the answer is not necessarily that the media has become more biased — there has always been bias in the news, after all. The more likely answer is that the “volume” of the information we encounter has been turned way up, thanks to technology. For example, while we used to have limited access to the news through the newspaper and nightly broadcasts, we can now receive constant updates on social media, email, and news apps. Continued here

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ChromeOS will finally, mercifully, let you change its keyboard shortcuts ChromeOS devices have become far more useful since the Cr-48. With Linux and Android apps, and "web only" being far less of a hindrance these days, they're compelling as a secondary machine. But having to learn a whole separate set of keyboard shortcuts to use them efficiently is always going to be painful. Continued here

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Samsung 990 Pro SSD firmware update should halt--but not reverse--rapid wear-out Samsung has released a firmware update for its newest 990 Pro SSDs today. While the company didn't provide official release notes, Tom's Hardware reports that the update is likely intended to fix an issue that caused the drives to report that they were wearing out and failing at an accelerated rate. Continued here

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Google employees criticize CEO for "dumpster fire" response to ChatGPT When Google's ChatGPT competitor event was announced for last week, we wrote that it seemed like a rush job designed to reassure investors, and since then, that event happened and went worse than anyone could have imagined. Google's event did the opposite of what it wanted, with the stock down nearly 12 percent since the recent high just before the event. Even Google employees are starting to take notice, with CNBC's Jennifer Elias writing that, internally, employees are criticizing CEO Sundar Pichai for what they call a ‘rushed, botched’ announcement of Google's new chatbot. Continued here

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Apple releases iOS 16.3.1 and other updates with fix for "actively exploited" bug Apple is releasing minor updates to all of its major software platforms today to address one high-priority security vulnerability and to fix a handful of other device- and service-specific issues. The iOS 16.3.1, iPadOS 16.3.1, and macOS 13.2.1 updates all patch an "actively exploited" arbitrary code execution vulnerability in WebKit/Safari, and a second kernel vulnerability that isn't known to be actively exploited. Continued here

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~11,000 sites have been infected with malware that's good at avoiding detection Nearly 11,000 websites in recent months have been infected with a backdoor that redirects visitors to sites that rack up fraudulent views of ads provided by Google Adsense, researchers said. Continued here

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Ford will spend $3.5 billion to build lithium iron phosphate battery plant The US is getting yet another new electric vehicle battery factory. On Monday afternoon, Ford announced that it will spend $3.5 billion to build a new plant in Marshall, Michigan. Significantly, this new site will make lithium iron phosphate (also known as LFP) cells, which are both cheaper and longer-lived than lithium-ion chemistries like nickel cobalt manganese (NCM), albeit at the cost of some energy density and cold weather performance. Continued here

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Starlink, Verizon, and T-Mobile made shaky claims on FCC coverage map Multiple Internet service providers have submitted false availability data to the federal government for a map that will be used to determine which parts of the US get access to a $42.45 billion broadband fund. We wrote about Comcast's false coverage claims last week, and this article will detail false or at least questionable coverage claims from SpaceX's Starlink division and the wireless home Internet divisions at Verizon and T-Mobile. Continued here

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It's not aliens. It'll probably never be aliens. So stop. Please just stop. For decades the notion of unidentified flying objects—UFOs—and little green men running around Roswell, New Mexico, remained comfortably confined along the fringes of societal discourse. But no longer. Serious people in the government are taking a serious look at the phenomenon. Continued here

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Our favorite superhero misfits are back in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 trailer Director James Gunn took an unlikely group of fairly obscure misfit characters from Marvel Comics and turned them into lovable unlikely superheroes with 2014's hugely entertaining Guardians of the Galaxy and its 2017 sequel. The Guardians have been through the wringer since then, and this battered-but-unbowed crew still has tough times ahead, judging by the new trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 that dropped during Super Bowl LVII. Continued here

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Shkreli tells judge his drug discovery software is not for discovering drugs In an effort to avoid being held in contempt of court, former pharmaceutical executive and convicted fraudster, Martin Shkreli, made an eyebrow-raising argument to a federal judge Friday, stating that his company Druglike, which he previously described as a "drug discovery software platform," was not engaged in drug discovery. As such, he argued he is not in violation of his sweeping lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry. Continued here

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The Sleek Truth in Rihanna’s Halftime Show Red and white—conveying fire and blankness—were such perfect colors for Rihanna to strobe at us tonight. Over 18 years in the spotlight, the singer has left no doubt that she’s a woman of depth and range, with wild fascinations and gut-held convictions and a rich personal life. But by now, we should understand that she’s never going to show us all of that—because no artist ever could, and because she’s not going to bullshit us otherwise. Rihanna will instead give us blazing-hot surfaces. She’ll insist that attitude and fashion are enough, because they can be, because this is pop. So no one should be surprised by what her Super Bowl performance was: an act of radical minimalism, seasoned with lovable humanity. It was austere yet scruffy, flat yet real. Some halftime performers have dazzled through exertion. Some have done so by sending messages. Many have failed, or at least flailed, in the process. But Rihanna wanted us mesmerized by the thing itself, by the images and the sounds, and she largely succeeded. Plus, she graciously implied a bonbon of personal revelation: She’s pregnant again! Continued here

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The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles The experience of owning, charging, and driving an electric vehicle makes the rising inequality of America more visible in new and subtle ways. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       Continued here

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Can AI Improve the Justice System? The system for granting asylum in the U.S. has long been a political point of contention. Democrats and Republicans debate how liberal or restrictive its rules should be, but evidence suggests that the fate of some asylum seekers may be less influenced by the rules than by something far more arbitrary: the judge they’re assigned. A 2007 study titled “Refugee Roulette” found that one judge granted asylum to only 5 percent of Colombian applicants, whereas another—working in the same building and applying the same rules—granted it to 88 percent. Continued here

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Why Are Layoffs Contagious? Just because one company is firing employees by the thousands doesn’t mean that others should too. Late last year, the tech companies Stripe, Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, and Twitter laid off workers en masse. Come the new year, Google, Microsoft, Amazon (again), Salesforce, Dell, IBM, SAP, Zoom, and PayPal did the same. Continued here

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The Enduring Romance of Mixtapes Six years ago, when my now-husband was still just a friendly old flame from my high-school days, I sent him an Apple Music playlist of my favorite songs of the moment. This was not unusual: Song swapping, album recommendations, and musical one-upmanship had kept us in touch for nearly a decade. Instead of a coffee date, it was “Have you heard of Noname?” In lieu of a lengthy phone call, it was “Listened to the new GoldLink album yet?” On this playlist, the final track was “Saved” by the R&B artist Khalid. “But I’ll keep your number saved / ’Cause I hope one day you’ll get the sense to call me,” goes the swoony chorus. “I’m hoping that you’ll say / You’re missing me the way I’m missing you.” It was an innocent offering, I swear! But for my now-husband, it was an opening. “That song told me there was a chance,” he told me years later. In 2022, we added it to the must-play list at our wedding. Continued here

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The Future of Long COVID In the early spring of 2020, the condition we now call long COVID didn’t have a name, much less a large community of patient advocates. For the most part, clinicians dismissed its symptoms, and researchers focused on SARS-CoV-2 infections’ short-term effects. Now, as the pandemic approaches the end of its third winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the chronic toll of the coronavirus is much more familiar. Long COVID has been acknowledged by prominent experts, national leaders, and the World Health Organization; the National Institutes of Health has set up a billion-dollar research program to understand how and in whom its symptoms unfurl. Hundreds of long-COVID clinics now freckle the American landscape, offering services in nearly every state; and recent data hint that well-vetted drugs to treat or prevent long COVID may someday be widespread. Long COVID and the people battling it are commanding more respect, says Hannah Davis, a co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who has had long COVID for nearly three years: Finally, many people “seem willing to understand.” But for all the ground that’s been gained, the road ahead is arduous. Long COVID still lacks a universal clinical definition and a standard diagnosis protocol; there’s no consensus on its prevalence, or even what symptoms fall under its purview. Although experts now agree that long COVID does not refer to a single illness, but rather is an umbrella term, like cancer, they disagree on the number of subtypes that fall within it and how, exactly, each might manifest. Some risk factors—among them, a COVID hospitalization, female sex, and certain preexisting medical conditions—have been identified, but researchers are still trying to identify others amid fluctuating population immunity and the endless slog of viral variants. And for people who have long COVID now, or might develop it soon, the interventions are still scant. To this day, “when someone asks me, ‘How can I not get long COVID?’ I can still only say, ‘Don’t get COVID,’” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and physical therapist who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Continued here

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Ukraine Has the Battlefield Edge Russia’s mobilization has given it a numerical advantage, but wars are not won by manpower alone. As the conflict in Ukraine nears its first anniversary, both sides have settled in for a long war. Russia mobilized some 300,000 reservists in September to stabilize its front as winter set in. Despite recent successes in Kharkiv and Kherson, Ukrainian leaders are now warning that a new Russian offensive is imminent, boosted by these reinforcements. Some analysts believe that this offensive may already have begun. But there is little reason to expect that increased manpower alone will lead to Russian victory. Ukraine’s Western backers should hold their nerve and keep providing Ukraine with what it needs most: modern weapons and the training to use them effectively. Continued here

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The Best Books to Read With Someone You Love Until I’m actually doing it, I frequently forget how pleasurable it is to stop in the middle of a book and text a friend, aghast at what just happened. Because I no longer read with classmates and I’m not in any book clubs, this delight has become a rare one for me—most of the time, reading is a solitary pursuit. But lately, I’ve tried to make more room for wandering through a plot alongside someone I love. When my fiancée and I adore, or despise, an author’s work for the same reasons, it’s a rush—like the feeling of finishing each other’s sentences. Making my way through a book at the same time as friends who are more attentive readers helps me notice details I may have missed entirely. And with any companion—especially on a road trip—listening to an audiobook together can be spellbinding, or at least give you something to laugh about. Continued here

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What Poets Know That ChatGPT Doesn’t One of the least discussed aspects of the AI language generator ChatGPT might be its ability to produce pretty awful poetry. Given how difficult it is to teach a computer how to recognize a syllable, I’m not disparaging the technical prowess of the chatbot’s creators and testers. But very few of the AI-produced poems I’ve read actually follow the prompt that’s been provided. “Write a poem in the style of Seamus Heaney”? This is not that poem: In a garden green and fair, A flower blooms, a sight so rare. But is it meant for me, I fear? Will I, like it, bloom this year? Continued here

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The Simple Explanation for All These Flying Objects The North American skies, it turns out, contain lots of unidentified objects. That is the unremarkable conclusion from a remarkable weekend in which fighter jets downed a trio of separate flying things—over Alaska, northern Canada, and Lake Huron. This weekend’s sky wars followed the identification and eventual downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month, only after it had traversed the continental United States and was safely over U.S. waters. This is a strange series of events. A single deployment of Air Force units to obliterate something in the sky is unusual; to have three more in close succession seems quite unprecedented. Is this activity connected to a sophisticated new Chinese plot? Russian opportunism? Some other aggression testing our systems? Aliens? Pentagon officials have downplayed that last possibility while offering little additional detail about what these objects are. Before Americans react with rage or fear over the apparent uptick in intrusions into our skies, we should consider the simplest explanation: a recalibration of the U.S. military’s policies on aerial intrusions. We are seeing the legacy of the Chinese-balloon incident, which put two new factors in play. Continued here

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China’s Balloon-Size Blunder Is a Huge Opportunity Beijing has given the United States a rare opportunity to rally public concern and build international solidarity. In the pre-balloon era, China was busily engaged in a charm offensive. Following October’s Communist Party congress, at which Xi Jinping won an unprecedented third term in office, Beijing made moves to stifle the combative and confrontational group of diplomats known as wolf warriors. Xi hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the capital, and condemned Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The tone of China’s leading diplomats noticeably softened. Vice Premier Liu He, meeting with corporate executives in Davos, Switzerland, emphasized that China was back and open for business. And for the first time in almost six years, Xi planned to host a U.S. secretary of state in China. Continued here

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A New Turn in the Fight Over Masks For many Americans, wearing a mask has become a relic. But fighting about masks, it seems, has not. Masking has widely been seen as one of the best COVID precautions that people can take. Still, it has sparked ceaseless arguments: over mandates, what types of masks we should wear, and even how to wear them. A new review and meta-analysis of masking studies suggests that the detractors may have a point. The paper—a rigorous assessment of 78 studies—was published by Cochrane, an independent policy institution that has become well known for its reviews. The review’s authors found “little to no” evidence that masking at the population level reduced COVID infections, concluding that there is “uncertainty about the effects of face masks.” That result held when the researchers compared surgical masks with N95 masks, and when they compared surgical masks with nothing. Continued here

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How 12 Readers Prepare for Natural Disasters “People usually don’t recover from disasters. If they’re lucky, they survive them.” 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. Continued here

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Fighting the Eyes in the Sky 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. Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic. Continued here

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Our age of crises needs Bollnow’s philosophy of hope | Psyche Ideas is associate professor in the Department of Educational Technology at Boise State University in Idaho. ‘We have a new image of society … and then out of this we have a new image of religion … I feel more grandiose than I did then because now I think I’d call it the basis for a [new] universalism …’ This bold prediction of unity and renewal comes neither from a bearded prophet nor a New Age guru. The idea that society and religion are heading toward a new universalism comes instead from the psychologist Abraham Maslow speaking in 1972. Maslow is famous for his idea of self-actualisation and his hierarchy of needs. This hierarchy leads the individual from lowly physiological and safety needs (eg, food, shelter) through love, belonging and esteem, all the way to self-actualisation. Today, Maslow’s ideas are back in fashion, covered in innumerable self-help books such as Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization (2020) by Scott Barry Kaufman, or The Brother’s Handbook: Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Revised for the Black Man (2020) by Byron Cowan. Continued here

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Adolescence is a ‘use it or lose it’ time for moral development | Psyche Ideas is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Tyler where he conducts research in moral psychology, science education, and beliefs about science. His scholarly works are published in Cognitive Development and other peer-reviewed journals. A teenager, after posting an anti-LGBTQ+ and antisemitic manifesto online, stood outside a gay bar in Slovakia’s capital city and shot dead two people. He said he was inspired by another teenager, halfway across the world, Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, who livestreamed via a helmet camera the shooting and killing of 10 people at a grocery store. Gendron’s own manifesto detailed his white supremacist and antisemitic motives. All 10 people he murdered were Black. During the attack, a bullet accidently struck a white employee in the leg. Gendron turned to him and apologised before continuing his killing rampage. Continued here

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Launching Dust From the Moon Could Help Cool Earth, Scientists Say Proposals to fight climate change by blocking sunlight aren't new, but some experts argue the answer lies closer to home To prevent further damage to the planet, humans need to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, experts agree. In a new study, researchers explore an outlandish way to help do that: launching dust into space from the surface of the moon to shade the Earth. Continued here

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CDC Includes Covid-19 Shots in Routine Immunization Schedule For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has included Covid-19 vaccines in its recommended immunization schedule for children and adults. The CDC’s schedule helps doctors determine when to administer various vaccines to their patients. As Nathaniel Weixel writes for the Hill, the new recommendations are not mandatory, as the CDC does not have the authority to require vaccination for schools or workplaces. Continued here

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Owen Wilson Brings Bob Ross Energy to 'Paint' Sporting a fuzzy perm and speaking softly while painting an evergreen tree, Owen Wilson has gone “full-on Bob Ross mode,” writes Variety’s Julia MacCary. Based on the trailer, his new movie appears to be inspired, at least in part, by the legendary TV painter. In Paint, written and directed by Brit McAdams, Wilson plays a gentle, nature-loving artist named Carl Nargle. Nargle has helmed Vermont’s top painting show for nearly three decades—until another artist steals the spotlight. Continued here

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California Lost 36 Million Trees to Drought Last Year An estimated 36.3 million trees died in California in 2022, primarily because of drought, high temperatures, insects, disease and overcrowded forests, according to a recent report from the U.S. Forest Service. An aerial detection survey, conducted from July 18 to October 7 last year, looked at 39.6 million acres of land and found that 2.6 million acres contained dead trees. Continued here

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A Mysterious Pink Pigeon in New York City Has Died A king pigeon that was dyed bright pink and released into the wild has died a week after it was rescued from a New York City park. The animal likely perished from inhaling toxic dye fumes, per the Wild Bird Fund (WBF), the wildlife rehabilitation and education center that took the bird in and cared for it.  "I don't think we've ever really had a pink pigeon come into the clinic, so we were all pretty surprised," Antonio Sanchez of the WBF tells WABC. "We were honestly disgusted that someone would do this." The bird—nicknamed Flamingo—was barely older than a fledgling and showed signs of long-term malnutrition, according to the fund.  Continued here