Welcome to Bihar flood relief 2008: How You Can Build an Inclusive Workplace

How You Can Build an Inclusive Workplace

Entrepreneurs who have mastered forgiveness will bring the best out of their team.

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This military level decision making strategy will help you make smarter decisions.

Don't wait for constructive criticism. Ask for it.

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Research: The Complicated Effects of Pay Transparency

Companies are facing a crescendo of calls for greater pay transparency as local, regional, and national governments across the globe are enacting laws designed to increase the visibility of pay practices. These changes are already forcing companies to abandon unfair, discriminatory compensation policies, but beyond this important and clearly desirable result, pay transparency’s influence is more difficult to assess. Empirical studies suggest that pay transparency may lower compensation overall, even as it removes inequities. It may also in some circumstances compromise employee productivity and affect companies’ ability to attract and retain high performers. Perhaps more dangerously, it skews employees to favor a specific aspect of performance over others, weakening the organization’s performance overall. How transparency is enacted, therefore, is critical to ensuring that the organization and its employees all benefit from it.

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How the Artists of 'Destiny 2' Gave Life to Its Big, Bad Enemy

Destiny, the sci-fi first-person shooter from Bungie, places Guardians between two powerful and mysterious forces of the universe: the Light and the Darkness. Players have heard of the foreboding nature of the Darkness since the first campaign of the original Destiny, and the player character has the Light to thank for most of the supernatural powers that make the game fun to play. The story of Destiny 2, however, puts a new, more nuanced focus on both of these forces, with players using Darkness powers for their benefit and questioning the motives of the Traveler, the mysterious being that originally granted humanity the Light.

Forces of the Darkness have stood against the Traveler’s Light throughout Destiny and Destiny 2. For years, the story was largely Light versus Darkness, with humanity on the side of the Light and enemies like the Hive, the Taken, and others on the side of the Darkness. It wasn’t until 2022’s The Witch Queen expansion for Destiny 2 that the sibylline messenger of the Darkness, known as the Witness, was identified, giving players a closer look inside the Pyramid Fleet—where its peculiar design revealed characteristics of this long-standing, elusive enemy.

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My Employee Missed Work After a Night of Drinking

... and three other tricky workplace dilemmas.

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What Prince Harry Can Teach Every CEO About Managing Envy

Catch envy early to contain this contagious business risk.

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State of the Union: Biden Talks Taxes, the Debt Ceiling, and a New Major 'Made in America' Standard

The president detailed an enterprising agenda. Federal contractors, in particular, had better listen up.

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This Change Could Reduce Police Brutality against Black Drivers like Tyre Nichols

Cops—no matter their own race—are more confrontational toward Black drivers. Social psychologist Nicholas Camp describes ways to reduce police antagonism

Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was severely beaten by five Memphis police officers during a traffic stop in January. Shocking footage of the assault highlights what researchers describe as deeply ingrained racial biases that fuel police brutality. Black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers. Once stopped, they are more likely to be searched. And they are much more likely to be killed during a police encounter. Nichols died after he was beaten, and the officers have been charged with murder.

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5 Emerging Social Media Platforms to Watch in 2023

Americans are turning away from social media giants. The founders of these platforms are taking advantage.

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How GDPR Changed European Companies' Tech Stacks

As companies adapt their IT infrastructure to deal with new privacy regulations, they are coming up against a tradeoff between flexibility and efficiency. Highly integrated technologies facilitate the exchange and use of customer data. The problem is that these very interdependencies are an obstacle on the path toward compliance. Their efficiency has become a liability. That raises an interesting paradox. Can companies achieve competitive advantage by deploying less integrated technologies? To explore this, the authors of this article conducted a large-scale empirical study of 400 e-commerce firms to understand the implications of the tension between efficiency and flexibility on firm performance in response to GDPR. They found that firms that had built their websites for efficiency, electing tightly integrated services from closely linked suppliers, suffered disproportionately when GDPR came into force. In contrast, companies that deployed new combinations of technologies not extensively used before performed much better.

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What New Managers Can Do to Support Employee Mental Health

Managers today have the unique opportunity to create a cultural shift and promote employee care at the workplace. When you lead conversations about performance and productivity with empathy and care, everyone feels more valued and supported. If you’re a first-time manager, here are some strategies you can adopt.

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How to Become a Digital Nomad

If you could work from anywhere, where would you go? For more and more people, it’s not a hypothetical question: Young or old, single or with a family, full-time employee or contractor, the digital nomad life is more accessible than ever before. But of course, becoming a digital nomad isn’t without its challenges and risks. From determining where you can legally and safely travel to making sure you’re set up for success when you arrive, this comprehensive guide offers tactical steps to help anyone truly put the “remote” into remote work. So ask yourself: Are you ready to take the leap?

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Scientists Decipher 57 Letters That Mary, Queen of Scots Wrote before Her Beheading

In newly deciphered letters written from captivity in the late 1500s, deposed queen of Scotland Mary Stuart complained about her health and tried to negotiate her release

A mysterious sheaf of coded letters tucked away in the National Library of France (BnF) has turned out to be never-before-seen correspondence from Mary, Queen of Scots.

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COVID Rebound Can Happen Even without Paxlovid

Concerns about Paxlovid rebound are preventing some doctors from prescribing the lifesaving drug and some high-risk patients from taking it

Paxlovid gets a bad rap over concerns about COVID “rebound.” That’s the primary takeaway from a series of papers showing that whether or not people take the antiviral medication, many have symptoms that wax and wane before going away completely.

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How to Find, Define, and Use Your Values

As a career coach, when I ask my clients this question, I usually get one of two answers. They either say “I’ve never actually thought about that…” or “Oh, easy. These are my values.” After more conversations, the first group often realizes that they do have some ideas about their values, and the second group realizes that their values are mostly just a list of words without substance.

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A Crucial Group of Covid Drugs Has Stopped Working

In March 2020, as a mysterious respiratory virus was sweeping the globe, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee tracked down some of the first known Covid-19 patients in North America and asked them for blood samples.

Doctors shipped vials of the blood to Nashville, where the Vanderbilt team got to work analyzing it for proteins called antibodies, which the immune system generates when it’s exposed to a virus or other foreign substance. In particular, the Vanderbilt team was looking for neutralizing antibodies—those capable of binding to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and preventing it from entering cells and causing infection.

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The Benefits of Outsourcing for Small Business Growth (and When You Shouldn't)

When you should and shouldn't outsource, and how to find the right provider.

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How to Deal with High Pressure Situations at Work

Many of the things we’re proud to achieve in life are the product, not just of our talent and effort, but also our ability to handle pressure. From studying for exams, to preparing for job interviews, to giving a big speech or presentation, it’s hard to conceive of any career-defining moments that aren’t peppered with pressure.

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'Astonishing'Â New Cognitive Research Shows Gaining Knowledge, Learning NewÂ Skills, and Achieving MasteryÂ Come Down to the Rule of 7

While talent matters, we all learn at basically the same rate. And we can "learn anything we want."

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15 Million People Are at Risk from Bursting Glacial Lakes

At least 15 million people worldwide live in the flood paths of lakes that form as mountain glaciers melt and that can abruptly burst their banks

At least 15 million people worldwide live in the flood paths of dangerous glacial lakes that can abruptly burst their banks and rush down mountainsides.

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Why cash is still king in Iraq

The currency market is one of the busiest parts of the old bazaar in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah. Currency-counting machines whir as porters ferry stacks of Iraqi dinars, Iranian tomans, and U.S. dollars around the tight warren of offices, and groups of men clamor to take advantage of minor fluctuations. Merchants and brokers share cigarettes and the latest prices. Their mobile devices lie near at hand but are mostly used to call counterparts in other cities to authorize cash payments. While businesses and customers around the world increasingly employ digital transactions, cash remains king in Iraq.

There are a number of e-payment platforms available for Iraqi consumers. The Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) has issued licenses for 17 companies to operate digital wallets, including notables like AsiaHawala, Zain Cash, NassWallet, and FastPay. Another 15 licenses have been issued for services related to e-payments.

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The quantum reason why neutral atoms first formed

In order for you to exist, a lot of things had to happen beforehand. Planet Earth needed to come into existence, complete with the organic ingredients from which life could arise. In order to have those ingredients, we need for many previous generations of stars to have lived-and-died, recycling the elements formed within them back into the interstellar medium. For those stars to live, large quantities of neutral, molecular gas had to collect in one place, collapsing under its own gravity to fragment and form stars in the first place. But in order to make those stars — even the very first stars — we first need the Universe to create stable, neutral atoms.

In a Universe that begins with a hot Big Bang, this isn’t necessarily so easy! A few minutes after the hot Big Bang, our Universe was filled with protons and a small but important population of more complex light atomic nuclei, an equal number of electrons to the total number of protons, a large number of neutrinos that don’t interact with any of them, and about 1.4 billion photons for every proton-or-neutron present. (There’s also dark matter and dark energy, but like neutrinos, they’re not important to this part of the story.)

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New COVID Antiviral Cuts Hospitalizations in Half

An injection of a type of interferon drastically reduced the risk of severe COVID in a late-stage trial

The pandemic is not over, despite some proclamations to the contrary. The good news is that we now have some effective therapeutics that are helping drive fatality rates down. Chief among these is Paxlovid, which significantly reduces the risk of hospitalization and death and was first granted an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration in December 2021. Paxlovid is not an option for everyone, though. And SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, has the potential to evolve resistance to it. The world desperately needs more options to ensure we stay ahead of the virus.

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These Noise-Canceling Earbuds Punch Above Their $100 Price

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

You’ve probably heard of the golden age of TV, a renaissance brought on by the streaming era that is now, sadly, on the decline. It might not bring us another Better Call Saul, but there’s a different golden age that’s still very much shimmering in A/V: the wireless earbud market.

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7 essential management training topics for every team leader

It’s been said that people don’t leave bad companies — they leave bad managers. Yet all too often, new managers are left to develop the skills needed to succeed in their roles all on their own.

Without the right tools, managers can easily fall into the traps of becoming autocratic, passive aggressive, or timid. Because each leader has their own unique struggles, it’s important for learning and development teams to explore a wide range of management training topics.

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The Political Theater Behind the Bipartisan Data Privacy Push

If you talk to US House Republicans, President Joe Biden delivered an offensive, hyperpartisan diatribe last evening. Hell, if you just listened to the State of the Union address, you’d have heard the commander-in-chief heckled as a “liar,” blamed for the opioid epidemic—“It’s your fault!”—or heard him met with a thunderous and sustained Republican “BOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Yet most all of those raucous Republicans—the ones who now control the gavels, televisions thermostats, and magnetometers throughout the US House of Representatives—couldn’t help but set aside their rowdy ways when Biden unleashed the full weight of his presidential bully pulpit on their common Silicon foe.

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I Thought Pour-Over Coffee Wasn't for Meâ€”Until I Did It Right

Back when pour-over coffee got a popularity boost on North American shores in the late aughts, I was fairly certain it wasn't my cup of joe. I kept shelling money to try it at coffee shops, but between the price and the flavor, it felt like an "it's not you, it's me" thing.

Lauded Japanese manufacturer Hario, which makes a variety of inexpensive gadgets to brew and serve pour-over coffee, helped me see that my ambivalence was just a big misunderstanding. For the uninitiated, pour-over is a bit like a handmade version of drip coffee. You typically use a gooseneck kettle to pour a thin stream of hot water over a basket or cone filled with grounds, often breaking the flow into a series of precise pours and pauses over the course of several minutes. It's labor-intensive, but the results can be phenomenal.

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When's the best time to consume caffeine? Hint: Not right after you wake

Billions of people worldwide consume caffeine as a quick and easy pick-me-up. But most use the central nervous system stimulant commonly found in coffee, dark chocolate, tea, and soda as a broad brush rather than a precision scalpel — and to their detriment.

For maximum effect, caffeine is best used sparingly. That’s because just a few weeks of habitual consumption (as little as one cup of coffee per day) causes physiological dependency. Caffeine’s stimulant effect arises by blocking certain receptors in the brain. These receptors prompt fatigue and tiredness when filled with adenosine molecules, produced as we exert ourselves during waking hours.

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What if you could rewire your brain to conquer suffering? Buddhism says you can

The World Health Organization reports that the number of people suffering mental health conditions is increasing worldwide. Buddhism acknowledges that suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition. But what if you could rewire your brain to conquer suffering? According to Buddhism, you can.

Buddhism is a religion and philosophical system that originated in ancient India in the 5th Century BCE. It is based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Buddha. It is estimated that about 500 million people follow Buddhism today.

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Uber dodges responsibility for its workers in Chile

Whether Uber is a transportation company or a technology platform has long been at the heart of the discussion of its legal responsibilities with its third-party contractors. With the array of other products it offers in some parts of Latin America, including Uber Moto (which operates in a legal gray area) and Uber Live (a food ordering service for concerts), the line got more blurry.

In Chile, Uber has added to the controversy. Last week, the country’s Senate passed the so-called Uber Law: a bill that considers the company and its kin as transportation apps and demands specific responsibilities from them, such as insurance for all cars, riders, and drivers.

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The End of the Zoom Boom

Layoffs continue to hit the tech industry, and this week they came for one of the pandemic’s biggest winners: Zoom.

Yesterday, the video conferencing platform cut 15 percent of its staff, or about 1,300 people. That came after Zoom had tripled its head count in two years. “We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities,” Eric Yuan, Zoom’s CEO, said in a statement announcing the layoffs. Yuan said he was “accountable for these mistakes” and vowed to reduce his salary by 98 percent and forgo a 2023 bonus, dropping his compensation to about $10,000, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

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Solved: 500-year-old mystery about bubbles that puzzled Leonardo da Vinci

Pour water — or another tasty, bubbly liquid — into a clear glass. Carefully watch bubbles as they nucleate and then float up in the glass: You’ll notice that some of them rise differently than others. The tiniest ones shoot straight up, while bigger bubbles rhythmically bounce back and forth, slowing their trip. If you’ve ever wondered why this occurs, you’re not alone. No less a natural philosopher than Leonardo da Vinci was confounded by it.

Kids are fascinated by bubbles, and apparently so are some scientists, one of whom described them this way: “Bubbles are emptiness, non-liquid, a tiny cloud shielding a mathematical singularity. Born from chance, a violent and brief life ending in the union with the (nearly) infinite.”

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Hertz wanted 100,000 Teslas by the end of 2022; it has fewer than 50,000

In 2021, after the pandemic destroyed its business and forced it into bankruptcy, Hertz unveiled a bold new plan to add hundreds of thousands of new electric vehicles to its fleet. In October 2021, the rental car company announced it would add 100,000 Tesla Model 3s and Model Ys to its fleet by the end of 2022, the first of several EV purchase announcements.

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The weirdness of quantum mechanics forces scientists to confront philosophy

The world of the very small is like nothing we see in our everyday lives. We do not think of people or rocks being in more than one place at the same time until we look at them. They are where they are, in one place only, whether or not we know where that place is. Nor do we think of a cat locked in a box as being both dead and alive before we open the box to check. But such dualities are the norm for quantum objects like atoms or subatomic particles, or even larger ones like a cat. Before we look at them, these objects exist in what we call a superposition of states, each state with an assigned probability. When we measure many times their position or some other physical property, we will find it in one of such states with certain probabilities.

The crucial question that still haunts or inspires physicists is this: Are such possible states real — is the particle really in a superposition of states — or is this way of thinking just a mathematical trick we invented to describe what we measure with our detectors? To take a stance on this question is to choose a certain way of interpreting quantum mechanics and our take on the world. It is important to stress that quantum mechanics works beautifully as a mathematical theory. It describes the experiments incredibly well. So we are not debating whether quantum mechanics works or not, because we are well past that point. The issue is whether it describes physical reality as it is or whether it does not, and we need something more if we are to arrive at a deeper understanding of how nature operates in the world of the very small.

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Donâ€™t Read His Lips

Jerome Powell has a tough job as chair of the Federal Reserve, trying to make Fed policy perfectly clear. Is anyone listening properly?

When Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke last week after the Fed’s monthly meeting, he was trying to convey the message that the fight against inflation was not yet won, and that the Fed anticipated continuing to raise interest rates over the next few months. “We’re talking about a couple more rate hikes,” he said, adding that the Fed needed “substantially more evidence” to be confident that inflation was falling.

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Train Cars Carrying Toxic Chemicals Derail in Ohio

Black smoke rose from the site as officials released and burned chemicals to avert a potentially deadly explosion

Some four dozen train cars careened off their tracks and caught fire on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania on Friday. Several of these had been carrying toxic chemicals, and as fears of an explosion mounted, officials conducted a controlled release and burn of the toxins on Monday.

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Man on the chair | Psyche Films

For some, the existential heebie-jeebies creep in only during small, idle moments – perhaps when you’re awake in bed, or prompted by a mind-bending book or film. Or maybe you find the mysteries of the Universe an endless source of wonder and even joy. But for others, the strangeness of existence, and the reality it rests upon, can be a haunting prospect. Where did I – and everything else – come from? Am I really here? How can I know that I even exist? For those with ruminative and anxious minds, these most fundamental questions are more than just philosophy-class curiosities – they have the capacity to reverberate, linger and overwhelm.

At once meditative and unsettling, Man on the Chair by the Korean animator Jeong Dahee mines enigmatic art from the unknowable. With very few words from an unseen narrator and a stunning series of visuals, she sketches out the tale of a man who, unable to move, spirals deep into the ontological quandaries that have troubled him since childhood. The story unfolds like a haunting dream, drifting further into the surreal with each passing moment.

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Tech Volunteers Rush to Save Turkey's Earthquake Survivors

Furkan KÄ±lÄ±Ã§ and Eser Ã–zvataf woke in Istanbul on the morning of February 6 to news of the earthquake that had left huge areas of Southeast Turkey and western Syria in ruins. The scenes of destruction were overwhelming at first. "We were devastated over what was happening in our country," KÄ±lÄ±Ã§ says. "It was hard to process what happened."

But soon the pair got to work. KÄ±lÄ±Ã§ is the founding engineer and Ã–zvataf the CTO ofÂ software startup Datapad. Both are well-known members of the Turkish tech sceneâ€”Ã–zvataf was previously an engineering director for Getir, Turkey'sÂ first decacornâ€”and between them they have nearly three decades of experience in the industry. They began mobilizing colleagues over Twitter, and within hours they had brought together a rapid response movement, dubbed simply "Earthquake Help Project," bootstrapping tech to help NGOs and rescue teams on the ground.

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Android 14 Preview 1 is out, will officially ban installation of old apps

Google is kicking off the months-long developer preview process for Android's latest version, which will get a final release in the second half of the year. Even with multiple previews, Google likes to keep the final set of Android features under wraps at least until its I/O conference in May, so we can't look at the features here to determine the scope of Android 14. These are just some of the features Google wants developers to have a head start on.

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Republicans Keep Underestimating Joe Biden

Joe Biden knows how to handle a tough crowd. This was evident last night at the State of the Union, and it was apparent to me seven years ago, on March 20, 2016. On that day, President Barack Obama sent Biden to sell the recently struck Iran nuclear deal to the national conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This was the political equivalent of asking the vice president to push New York Times subscriptions at a Donald Trump rally. Over the previous year, AIPAC had spent every ounce of its political capital to oppose Obama’s accord with Iran, which it cast as an existential threat to Israel. Obama, for his part, had implied that opponents of the deal were effectively pro-war. As 18,000 AIPAC delegates converged on Washington, Biden was dispatched to defend the administration to a crowd whose feelings ranged from skeptical to hostile. To call this a thankless task would be to woefully understate the animosity in the arena.

What happened next was remarkable: Biden somehow won over the room. He turned on his well-honed political charm, flattered the audience, and spoke passionately about his personal attachment to Israel, and by the time he got to the unpopular nuclear deal, he had the crowd applauding for it. He exited to a standing ovation.

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Apple seems ready to re-release its revamped Home architecture in iOS 16.4

An upgraded architecture for Apple's Home smart home system, one that would potentially make device-packed networks faster and more reliable, is coming back to iOS soon after a failed launch late last year.

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The Challenges of Disaster Planning

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.

The aftermath of this week’s tragic earthquake in Turkey and Syria is a stark reminder of the devastating impact of severe natural disasters, and how so many of us live under their threat. You might be asking yourself in this moment, What have I done to prepare? We want to hear your thoughts on the matter; alternatively, feel free to share your stories of living through a natural disaster.

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Photos: Rescue and Recovery in Turkey and Syria

Three days have passed since a devastating a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, followed by dozens of powerful aftershocks. Nearly 12,000 deaths have been reported across southern Turkey and northwestern Syria after thousands of buildings collapsed during the quake. A massive rescue effort is underway, with tens of thousands of soldiers, workers, and volunteers still discovering and rescuing victims who have been trapped for as long as 61 hours beneath tons of shattered concrete.

A 7-year-old Syrian child is rescued from rubble 61 hours after devastating earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, on February 8, 2023. #

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George Santos, the GOPâ€™s Useful Liar

After President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union address last night, George Santos offered his appraisal of the proceedings. “SOTU category is: GASLIGHTING!” the representative pronounced in a tweet.

The review was curious, coming as it did from a man who has fabricated much of his own biography. And the tweet, Trumpian in both look and tone, provoked precisely the replies you might expect under the circumstances: sarcastically invented references to Santos’s “experience” as the host of Jeopardy, to his own State of the Union speech, to his status as a gaslight incarnate. The replies were tidy reflections of the attitude that many Americans have adopted toward Santos, as journalists have reported on the lies he has told about his past and as polls have been conducted about those revelations. One of the few things we can agree on in these divided times, it seems, is that George Santos is a national embarrassment.

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The Legal Decision That Could Rewrite the Abortion Battleâ€”Again

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.

At last night’s State of the Union address, the first one since the fall of Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden pledged to continue working to protect access to reproductive health care amid more than a dozen extreme state-level bans. But as soon as this week, a legal decision over abortion pills could rewrite the terms of that battle.

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Long Live the Octogenarian Sex Record

After Smokey Robinson announced his upcoming album, many music listeners were aghast. The Motown legend, at the age of 82, unfurled the most blatantly sexual record title of his career: Gasms. It didn’t help that the album, which will be released in late April, includes songs such as “I Wanna Know Your Body” and, ahem, “I Fit in There.” Predictably, the subsequent volley of Viagra jokes alone could’ve crashed Twitter.

Yet Robinson’s catalog has given him every right to proudly unleash an octogenarian sex record—which, who knows, might now be a genre in the making. It wouldn’t be the first genre Robinson innovated. Not only did he revolutionize popular music as one of the architects of soul with Motown in the 1960s, but he also invented the subgenre known as “quiet storm,” named after his superb 1975 solo album, A Quiet Storm. On it, he crystallized a silky, sophisticated R&B that never tumbled into funky porn. Still, on the album’s No. 1 Billboard R&B hit, “Baby That’s Backatcha,” there’s no misinterpreting Robinson’s celebration of reciprocal lust: “Oh, baby, that’s tit for tat,” he sings. “I’m givin’ you this for that.” Many of Robinson’s peers in the ’70s—Barry White, Al Green, his Motown labelmate Marvin Gaye—rivaled his sultriness. But they all took cues from the maestro, who had long proved his ability to swoop from heartbreak to bravado in the span of a syllable.

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Palo Altoâ€™s First Tech Giant Was a Horse Farm

Silicon Valley has a short memory. The Anglo-American settlements aren’t even 200 years old, but if you ask around, regional history restarts whenever there’s a new defining technology, which happens every couple of decades; we can barely remember the dot-com boom, never mind the radio era.

And yet, if you look closely, there’s a deep continuity. California was a closing link in the capitalist chain that encircled the world at the end of the 1800s. From the railroad to real estate to fruit to radio components, settlers built pre-silicon Palo Alto on new ideas about how science yielded efficiency and profit. The content stays the same, but the form changes: Before there were apps, there were websites, and before there were websites, there were microchips, and before there were microchips, there were horses, and the horses belonged to a man named Leland Stanford.

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Why is a Starbucks loyalty rewards program making customers so angry?

Starbucks, the coffee chain giant, is modifying its rewards program, and the news is full of stories of outraged consumers.

The main focus of their ire is that, starting Feb. 13, 2023, it will cost twice as many of the program’s reward points, called stars, to earn a free cup of hot coffee.

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Feisty Joe Biden Is Back

The president called for national unity around shared goals, particularly delivering economic benefits to working families.

It was a raucous, interactive, and argumentative State of the Union like no other. And when it was over, President Joe Biden had provided a clear signal of how he plans to contest the 2024 presidential election.

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Grim Reaper starts coming for fax machines, pagers, landlines

The end is near for a bunch of old telecommunications tech in China. On Monday, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced that as of March 1, it would no longer issue permits for fax machines, pagers, or integrated services digital network (ISDN) terminals to access Chinese networks.

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Dwarf planet hosts a ring that's unexpectedly far from the planet

Many bodies in the Solar System have rings—gas giants, dwarf planets, even an asteroid. These examples have allowed us to get a good picture of their physics, leading to models for how rings form and what keeps the material there from falling into the planet or condensing into a moon.

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How to appreciate buildings | Psyche Guides

It’s easy to become blasé about the built world. Tune in more deeply and architectural adventures await around each corner

is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, where he works at the intersection of urban design and experimental psychology. He also partners with architects, museums and other NGOs on projects to enrich public debate about the built environment. His most recent book is Places of the Heart (2015).

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Hackers are selling a service that bypasses ChatGPT restrictions on malware

Hackers have devised a way to bypass ChatGPT’s restrictions and are using it to sell services that allow people to create malware and phishing emails, researchers said on Wednesday.

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In Paris demo, Google scrambles to counter ChatGPT but ends up embarrassing itself

On Wednesday, Google held a highly anticipated press conference from Paris that did not deliver the decisive move against ChatGPT and the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership that many pundits expected. Instead, Google ran through a collection of previously announced technologies in a low-key presentation that included losing a demonstration phone.

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Turkeyâ€™s Trust in Government Has Turned to Dust

Earthquakes serve as turning points in Turkish history, a shattering of silence in mere seconds. In 1999, an earthquake struck near Istanbul, my hometown. More than 17,000 people were killed and many more injured. I had always known that earthquakes were something to be wary of, that they are expected in a country that sits on the Anatolian Plate bordering two major fault lines. But I had never lived through a quake before, or seen its aftermath. For weeks people slept outdoors—in parks, on the waterfront, in streets and stadiums—unable to go back to homes that had been destroyed, or afraid to return to homes still standing.

That disaster and the slow rescue operations that followed brought the AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, to power. It promised modern, transparent governance, and has led our country ever since. And yet it went on to waste decades protecting its own rule, luxuriating in its own ideological priorities, and failing to prepare for this catastrophe.

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How Biden Successfully Baited Congressional Republicans

In September 2009, a Republican representative from South Carolina named Joe Wilson inserted himself into history. He interrupted President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress by shouting, “You lie.”

The outburst shocked viewers. Wilson, not Obama, was the top trending item on Twitter in the aftermath of the speech. Wilson apologized, “I let my emotions get the best of me.” Then–Republican Conference Chair Mike Pence expressed regret: “Joe made a mistake.” Wilson was formally reprimanded by a vote of the House.

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Itâ€™s Important I Remember That Nina Simone Wrote â€˜Mississippi Goddamâ€™ in Less Than One Hourâ€”

At times the lyric is insistent, an immaculate conception, which is to say, perhaps, that urgency is the one true God we answer to and God, truly, is the one thing we need urgently: Medgar was dead from a bullet in the back. Four little beauties in Birmingham. The record was put to wax at Carnegie Hall in New York City, a spotlight on the singer as round and hot as the sun that oversaw a boy’s body bob up from the Tallahatchie. In grief and despair, it is the soul that is heavy and the bones that are weightless; Ms. Simone bore her soul, birthed a song that was more than song, laid the brunt of blackness on thin waves of air. When Philips Records sent the single to radio stations across the nation, some were returned with the vinyl broken cleanly in half; I’ve long wondered if that partition was premeditated, hateful vandalism of the voice, or if it was a moment of art imitating life so precisely that the 45s themselves, sometime during transport, had become Nina’s heart.

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A History of Confusing Stuff in the Sky

The Chinese spy balloon that was spotted and shot down on Saturday over the coast of South Carolina was far from the first threatening object to trouble American skies. Balloons have dogged U.S. aerial defenses, confounded fighter pilots, and driven UFO sightings for more than 75 years.

Balloons were used for spying and bombing throughout World War I, and German zeppelins regularly crossed the English Channel to drop hand grenades or small bombs on London in early, primitive air raids. One American pilot, Frank Luke, was known as the “Arizona Balloon Buster” for a balloon-shooting spree that downed 14 German balloons across the skies of Europe in just a few weeks in 1918.

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Fighting Climate Change Was Costly. Now Itâ€™s Profitable.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.

It is a good time to be in the decarbonization business in the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act—with its $374 billion cornucopia of green incentives, subsidies, and grants—was designed to entice private companies to invest in the transition away from fossil fuels. Initial reports already suggest that the IRA may be working. An analysis by American Clean Power, a lobbying group of renewable-energy companies, indicates that even just the anticipation of its bounty catalyzed $40 billion in investments and created nearly 7,000 jobs in the last few months of 2022.

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Why There Was No Racial Reckoning

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—If the summer of 2020 was, for many Americans, a breaking point, then the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd presented the nation’s leadership class with a crossroads. Would they radically rethink American policing, or would they retreat to the safety of piecemeal reform, earnestly applying Band-Aids over bullet wounds? Two and a half years later, Tyre Nichols is dead, and the choice they made is clear.

It’s not that nothing was done. Some departments vowed to make more data available, and others launched exploratory efforts to let specialists respond to mental-health emergencies. Activists in a handful of cities succeeded in securing cuts to their police budgets. Some cities proposed ending armed traffic enforcement.

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Donâ€™t â€˜Buy Americanâ€™

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

The free-trade era in America is over. Industrial policy is the new rage. After decades of trade with China and declining manufacturing employment, the U.S. is embracing a new economic theory: Build more, and build it all here.

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The Most Important Job Skill of This Century

A product race is under way in the world of artificial intelligence. Just this week, Google announced plans to release Bard, a search chatbot based on its proprietary large language model; yesterday, Microsoft held an event unveiling a next-generation web browser with a supercharged Bing interface powered by ChatGPT. Though most big tech companies have been quietly developing their own generative-AI tools for years, these giants are scrambling to demonstrate their chops after the public release and runaway adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has accumulated more than 30 million users in two months.

OpenAI’s success is an apparent signal to tech leaders that deep-learning networks are the next frontier of the commercial internet. AI evangelists will similarly tell you that generative AI is destined to become the overlay for not only search engines, but also creative work, busywork, memo writing, research, homework, sketching, outlining, storyboarding, and teaching. It will, in this telling, remake and reimagine the world. At present, sorting the hype from genuine enthusiasm is difficult, but given the billions of dollars being funneled into this technology, it’s worth asking, in ways large and small: What does the world look like if the evangelists are right? If this AI paradigm shift arrives, one vital skill of the 21st century could be effectively talking to machines. And for now, that process involves writing—or, in tech vernacular, engineering—prompts.

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Microsoft Teams Free data won't transfer over to Microsoft Teams (free)

There is a free Microsoft Teams tier now, and there will continue to be a free Microsoft Teams tier after April 12, 2023. But in a bureaucratic twist, neither product will have anything to do with the other. Current users of Microsoft Teams Free will either need to create new accounts in a new tier called Microsoft Teams (free), losing all their Teams data in the process, or upgrade to a $4-per-user-per-month Microsoft Teams Essentials tier to keep all their stuff.

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Twitter experiencing international outages; most users can't tweet or DM

Late Wednesday afternoon, Twitter began experiencing international outages, with many users unable to perform basic functions like tweeting, sending direct messages, and following accounts. When Ars reporters attempted to tweet, an error message was generated saying that a daily limit of tweets had been reached, even from accounts that had not tweeted that day. According to Twitter, users typically have to tweet 2,400 times to reach the platform’s daily limit.

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Nintendo Direct gives us Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom details, Metroid, and more

Today's Nintendo Direct livestream gave those with sky-high but long-deferred Zelda hopes just enough to stay excited: ominous tones, real gameplay footage, a tease at a playable Zelda, and a definitive May 12 release date and pre-order offer. And, not for nothing, a $70 price tag.

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Welcome to Bihar flood relief 2008

Thursday, February 9, 2023

How You Can Build an Inclusive Workplace

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