What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity

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What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity Many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. Hating your job is one thing  –  but what happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. While identifying closely with your career isn’t necessarily bad, it makes you vulnerable to a painful identity crisis if you burn out, get laid off, or retire. Individuals in these situations frequently suffer anxiety, depression, and despair. By claiming back some time for yourself and diversifying your activities and relationships, you can build a more balanced and robust identity in line with your values. Continued here

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Chobani Founder Hamdi Ulukaya on the Journey from Abandoned Factory to Yogurt Powerhouse Today Chobani is a global player and has more than 20% of the U.S. yogurt market. But it was a long, difficult journey (that began in an antiquated, abandoned yogurt factory in upstate New York) to get it there. CEO and founder Hamdi Ulukaya shares his thoughts on how to be a successful entrepreneur. He has always done things his own way. He wrote a piece for HBR nine years ago in which he said he was proud of the fact that Chobani didn’t have outside investors and that therefore he could run the company as he saw fit. Now Chobani is on track for an IPO, which means he’ll have plenty of new investors and outside scrutiny. Why the change? “In the early days, I wanted to have the freedom and flexibility to be able to make decisions fast and go forward,” he says. “Now we are in a place where the company is sizable, we have greater market share. Our growth is really, really good. And there’s still a long way to go. I celebrate people coming and being partners and being shareholders. It’s a perfect moment for us to be able to have others to come and join.” Continued here

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Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now. Space is becoming a potential source of value for businesses across a range of sectors, including agriculture, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and tourism. To understand what the opportunities are for your company, the authors advise you to consider the four ways in which using space could create value: data, capabilities, resources, and markets. Continued here

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What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity Many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. Hating your job is one thing  –  but what happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. While identifying closely with your career isn’t necessarily bad, it makes you vulnerable to a painful identity crisis if you burn out, get laid off, or retire. Individuals in these situations frequently suffer anxiety, depression, and despair. By claiming back some time for yourself and diversifying your activities and relationships, you can build a more balanced and robust identity in line with your values. Continued here

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Make Peace with Your Unlived Life Tina was at a crossroads. Her daughter had recently left for college, and her husband had his own pursuits. And although she’d once enjoyed banking, she now bore little interest in her work. For some time, she had been asking herself whether she should quit. But what would her colleagues and bosses think of her? Continued here

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Make Peace with Your Unlived Life Tina was at a crossroads. Her daughter had recently left for college, and her husband had his own pursuits. And although she’d once enjoyed banking, she now bore little interest in her work. For some time, she had been asking herself whether she should quit. But what would her colleagues and bosses think of her? Continued here

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Why You Need to Stop Using These Words and Phrases Try this thought experiment: You’re sitting at your desk, when your friend texts you an article about a topic you’re passionate about. You read it and ask her what she thinks. To your surprise, her opinion is the complete opposite of your own. This obviously upsets you. Later that evening, as you explain what happened to your partner, how do you describe your friend’s point of view? Continued here

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Can Hobbies Actually Make You a Better Person? How much time do you spend on your hobbies? Odds are, it’s not as much time as you’d like. When life gets busy, our hobbies are one of the first things to go out the window. But research shows that taking part in leisure activities can actually have a positive impact on our overall happiness and health. Ascend editor, Kelsey Alpaio, puts this research to the test by trying out four new hobbies: hiking, cooking, journaling, and coloring. Follow along to find out which hobby worked best for her — and which might work for you. Continued here

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79 Years Ago, a Spy Agency Showed Agents 8 Ways to Sabotage Business Meetings. Unfortunately, Most Can Still Be Found in Every Meeting You Attend A U.S. spy agency's 'General Interference With Organizations and Production' list might as well be a blueprint for the average meeting. Continued here

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My Employee Has No Attention to Detail Is this coachable? Continued here

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Cancel Meetings to Save Time, Boost Productivity, and Reduce Waste If you don't know the purpose of a meeting, cancel it. Continued here

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Most Small Businesses Hand Government 'C or Below' Grades Ahead of Biden's State of the Union wktk Continued here

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Mark Cuban, Kyrie Irving and the Risks of Adding a Difficult Star to Your Company The Dallas Mavericks just won the Irving sweepstakes. Should fans rejoice? Continued here

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Banning Noncompetes Is Good for Innovation A ban on noncompetes, like the one proposed in the U.S. by the Federal Trade Commission, is not just good for workers. It’s good for companies and innovation in the long run. By letting workers share in the benefits of their innovations, a ban on noncompetes would motivate them to work harder, make it easier for them to start new companies, and make the overall economy more dynamic and competitive. Continued here

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Getting Employee Buy-In for Organizational Change Although change is never easy, how leaders approach it makes a significant difference to whether it’s embraced or rejected. By addressing the organizational buy-in context, it’s much easier to move past resistance and stagnation, because your path forward will be shaped by realities rather than banalities. The most successful organizations do this by addressing six components of culture: legitimacy, ownership, relevance, attainability, authenticity, and impartiality. Continued here

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3 Steps to Ensure Your Corporate Strategy Delivers Both Growth and Sustainability - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM EY-PARTHENON CEOs could once focus almost single-mindedly on their businesses and value chains. Now, along with driving a strategy that generates competitive advantage and enhanced value, they face another core task: satisfying a broad base of stakeholders with diverse interests who all demand sustainability policies and practices in different variations. Continued here

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Do Retention Bonuses Pay Off? In the wake of the Great Resignation, the use of employee retention bonuses is at an all-time high. But is it money well spent? Ultimately, when used surgically, retention bonuses can be an effective short-term tool for senior and hard-to-replace roles. The author outlines four steps to ensure your company is using retention bonuses effectively. Continued here

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Why the world feels so unstable right now For many of us, life seems to progress smoothly and predictably for much of the time. Indeed, it seems one of our biggest concerns appears to be getting stuck in a rut. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, our world is turned upside down. A global pandemic strikes us down, killing millions of people and forcing entire countries into lockdown. Then inflation takes off and economic downturn threatens our livelihoods. And (not unrelated) one country invades another and the resulting war affects us all. Whoa! Where on Earth did all that come from? Tim Palmer a Royal Society Research Professor in climate physics at the University of Oxford. His book The Primacy of Doubt (Oxford University Press and Basic Books), describes the science of uncertainty across a range of fundamental and applied sciences. Continued here

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As Western brands leave Russia, Chinese companies are cashing in Last March, as a slew of international brands, from H&M to Apple to Ikea, pulled out of Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, 24-year-old Chinese trader Alfie Chai sensed a business opportunity.  Two months later, Chai began selling made-in-China home appliances, kitchenware, and car parts on Ozon, one of Russia’s most popular e-commerce sites, dubbed Russia’s Amazon. By the end of 2022, Chai was receiving 30 to 40 orders every day, despite the fact that deliveries often took more than 20 days to arrive.  Continued here

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Anime artists are panicking over Netflix's AI experiment On January 31, Netflix turned heads with the release of a new anime short film. Posted to Netflix Japan’s official YouTube account, The Dog and the Boy follows a robotic dog and his human companion, who are separated by war and then reunited in old age. All background art for the three-minute video was created using an AI image generator, similar to tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. A tweet from the official Netflix Japan account describes the novel technique as “an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labor shortage.” Continued here

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Scientists Try to Get Serious about Studying UFOs. Good Luck with That New dedicated observatories and crowdsourced smartphone apps will study strange sightings in the sky. But questionable data quality and a lack of shared research standards remain key challenges Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane—or a weather balloon or a rocket or a satellite! No, wait! It’s—an interstellar probe from elsewhere in the galaxy? Continued here

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The Psychological Benefits of Commuting Commuting creates a liminal space that allows people to transition between home and work, which remote work doesn’t provide The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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Native Americans Conducted Large-Scale Copper Mining 6,000 Years Ago Copper’s allure has endured for millennia. Both ancient and modern mines for the extremely useful metal abound in North America’s Lake Superior region; long before modern miners extracted the ore from deep underground, local Indigenous communities dug it from shallow pit mines. These prehistoric mines’ ages were a “long-standing mystery,” says David Pompeani, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Previous research used archaeological remnants to evaluate when mine sites were active, but later mining at the same sites often obliterated ancient artifacts, Pompeani says. To work around this, he and his colleagues took a different approach: instead of artifacts, they looked for signs of mining preserved in the environment. Continued here

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The Black Lives Matter Movement What began as a call to action in response to police violence and anti-Black racism in the U.S. is now a global initiative to confront racial inequities in society, including environmental injustice, bias in academia and the public health threat of racism. Contrary to the sanitized version we sometimes hear about the civil rights movement, change was not achieved solely by protest marches and people singing “We Shall Overcome” Continued here

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Coming Soon to Your Podcast Feed: Science, Quickly A new era in Scientific American audio history is about to drop starting next week—get ready for a science variety show guaranteed to quench your curiosity in under 10 minutes. DelViscio: The existence of Dark matter was confirmed. The missing link between fish and stuff with four legs–a fossil of a creature dubbed Tiktaalik–was found. Twitter launched. But Pluto also lost its planetary status.  Continued here

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Disasters displaced More Than 3 Million Americans in 2022 More than three million adults were forced to evacuate their homes in the U.S. in the past year because of hurricanes, floods and other disasters, according to the Census Bureau More than 3 million adults were forced to evacuate their homes in the past year because of a natural disaster, according to a new Census Bureau tally that marks a rare federal effort to assess the uprooting caused by hurricanes, floods and other events. Continued here

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Can We Predict Earthquakes At All? If we can predict hurricanes, floods, and tornados to differing degrees of reliability, why don’t we know when the next big earthquake will come? My hometown of Los Angeles is home to the earliest reported earthquake dating back to 1769 (and, of course, many more since then). The largest recorded earthquake in the world occurred in Chile in May of 1960 measuring at a magnitude of 9.5 moment magnitudes. A single earthquake can cause destruction costing hundreds of millions of dollars to repair and, far more importantly, can end in fatalities. Continued here

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Why the Earthquake in Turkey Was So Damaging and Deadly A magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey is a rare occurrence and underscores the importance of setting and enforcing building codes A major earthquake struck southern Turkey early on Monday, causing extensive damage and killing thousands there and in neighboring Syria. Rescue workers have been searching the rubble of buildings for survivors, who face bitterly cold winter temperatures, as well as electricity and water outages—and the terror of continuing aftershocks. Continued here

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3 stories of Pakistani resilience, told in film TED Fellow Jawad Sharif was born with a rebellious streak -- and he's used it in his documentary films to amplify the unheard voices of Pakistan. Sharing three stories of everyday heroes -- a high-altitude mountaineer, a folk musician of a bygone instrument and the country's first transgender doctor -- Sharif shows how documentaries can be a space for both creation and defiance. Continued here

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All the Top New Features in MacOS Ventura Say goodbye to Monterey and hello to Ventura—MacOS Ventura, that is. Also known as MacOS 13, Apple’s latest operating system is finally available for download. The latest version packs a variety of new capabilities into desktops and laptops, including updates to Messages, Safari, the Mail app, and Continuity, among others. Below, we've gathered all the top features available with MacOS Ventura and tell you how to download it. You can also check out our iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 feature roundup for all the new features available on iPhone and iPad. Continued here

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The Best Cheap Phones for Almost Every Budget wireless carriers in the US go out of their way to make expensive smartphones seem affordable. You may wonder why you shouldn’t buy a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra if it costs nothing down and is only $33 a month. The answer is that over 36 monthly installments, you’re still spending more than a thousand dollars on a phone. Your pricey device may also keep you locked in the network, unable to switch wireless carriers until the phone is paid off. Forget the spendy option and get a seriously great affordable smartphone instead. I’ve tested dozens to find the best cheap phones that perform where it counts and aren’t annoyingly slow. Our top pick, the Google Pixel 6A, is as good as almost any device, and our other choices strike a great balance between price and luxury. Continued here

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A Looming El Niño Could Dry the Amazon On paper, the Amazon rainforest is a static expanse: perpetually wet, impenetrable, consistently humming with biology. But in reality, the region endures periodic droughts when the rains dwindle, trees stress out, and wetlands parch. Boom and bust. As with forests around the world, that's part of the natural order. One of the drivers of Amazonian droughts may soon kick off, potentially piling yet more stress on an ecosystem already ravaged by the deforestation and fires caused by human meddling. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a Pacific Ocean phenomenon in which a band of water develops off the coast of South America that transitions from neutral to exceptionally cold or warm. The past few years of cold "La Niña" conditions are weakening, potentially giving way to warm "El Niño" conditions later this year, according to modeling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And for the Amazon, that can cause drought. Continued here

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My Cats Love These Tricky Sliding Puzzle Boxes What makes a good life? Whether you're human or feline, we think life should be safe and cozy. But it should also be fun and moderately active, lest we all turn into blobs like in Wall-E. Just like us, our cats need something to do in between naps.   My cats, Huxley and Eely-Rue, live a lavishly pampered life where they are safe from the harm of the outside world. They won't be hit by a car or preyed on by the neighborhood coyotes, and they've learned to hypnotize me into sharing every bit of food I eat with them. I know they're happy, but I was worried their spoiled lives were becoming monotonous. I tried introducing several new toys meant to keep them active, but Cat Amazing's treat puzzles have been the only real hit. And the puzzles are actually helping them become more catlike in the process. Continued here

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The Best Binoculars to Zoom In on Real Life Binoculars mean the difference between seeing a little gray bird and identifying a titmouse, cheering a home run and seeing the epic catch, or realizing that the 10-point buck is actually a doe standing in front of dead branches. Whether you're scouting terrain, watching birds in your backyard, or getting season tickets at Fenway, binoculars bring the world closer, making it sharp and clear far beyond what your eye is capable of seeing. Finding the right pair of binoculars means first figuring out what you're going to use them for. If you'd just like to watch some birds at the feeder in your backyard and perhaps overcome the limitations of the cheap seats at the ballpark, there's no need to spend a fortune. On the other hand, if you plan to go birding in diverse locations, or are planning a big hunt in unfamiliar territory, it's often worth the extra money to get something a little more powerful. Continued here

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The 19 Best Shows on Hulu Right Now Netflix may have led the way for other streaming networks to create compelling original programming, but Hulu made history when it became the first streamer to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series for The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017. In fact, that was just one of eight Emmys the series took home for its inaugural season, and it continued to rack up nominations and wins over the years.  While more competition for streaming eyeballs has popped up since Hulu started gaining serious critical credibility, the network has continued to stand out for its carefully curated selection of original series and network partnerships that make it the home of FX series and more. Below are some of our favorite shows streaming on Hulu right now. Continued here

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Meet Bard, Google's Answer to ChatGPT Google isn’t about to let Microsoft or anyone else make a swipe for its search crown without a fight. The company announced today that it will roll out a chatbot named Bard “in the coming weeks.” The launch appears to be a response to ChatGPT, the sensationally popular artificial intelligence chatbot developed by startup OpenAI with funding from Microsoft. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, wrote in a blog post that Bard is already available to “trusted testers” and designed to put the “breadth of the world’s knowledge” behind a conversational interface. It uses a smaller version of a powerful AI model called LaMDA, which Google first announced in May 2021 and is based on similar technology to ChatGPT. Google says this will allow it to offer the chatbot to more users and gather feedback to help address challenges around the quality and accuracy of the chatbot’s responses.Google and OpenAI are both building their bots on text generation software that, while eloquent, is prone to fabrication and can replicate unsavory styles of speech picked up online. The need to mitigate those flaws, and the fact that this type of software cannot easily be updated with new information, poses a challenge for hopes of building powerful and lucrative new products on top of the technology, including the suggestion that chatbots could reinvent web search. Continued here

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Aftershocks May Rock Turkey and Syria for Months, Even Years Early Monday morning, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake ripped through Turkey and Syria, followed nine hours later by a 7.5 aftershock. The death toll stands at more than 3,800, and rescuers have only just begun to comb through the collapsed buildings.  Aftershocks will continue to shake the area as local faults adjust to such a huge initial tremor, and scientists say that process could continue for not just days but months or even years. There’s even a chance—albeit a small one—of an aftershock bigger than the original quake.  Continued here

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The galaxy cluster that broke modified gravity From matter’s behavior, measuring stars and galaxies reveals their normal matter contents. The speeding gas heats up and slows down, attaining temperatures approaching ~100 million K. Continued here

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3 brain games to practice deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning We use reasoning skills to navigate our world every day, whether we’re troubleshooting a maintenance issue with a car or simply trying to find a lost set of keys. But it’s probably rare that you consider which type of reasoning you’re using in any given situation. You might benefit from taking a closer look at the most common types of reasoning. These include deductive reasoning, where definitions give us certain truths; inductive reasoning, which uses observations to make probable generalizations; and abductive reasoning, which looks for causes. Each one has its own strengths, weaknesses, and situations where it works best. Continued here

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The Taoist philosophy behind Alibaba, China's e-commerce giant This article has been excerpted from The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That Is Changing the World by Brian A. Wong. Copyright © 2022. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. I have long admired how the visionary thinker R. Buckminster Fuller articulated a philosophical, almost spiritual faith in the power of technology to transform the human condition, to elevate human dignity and empowerment. He criticized some technologies — fossil fuels, for instance, and atomic energy — but few have believed more wholeheartedly, with an almost childlike exuberance, in the transcendent power of well-engineered, innovative tools to liberate people from the clutches of poverty, disease, and exploitation. Continued here

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Subatomic ghosts shed new light on the structure of protons Many advances in the history of science can be directly attributed to the development of a new way of looking at things. Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, but he turned it to the heavens and, with the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, resolved the question of whether the Sun or the Earth was the center of the solar system. And with the discovery of radiation, scientists gained insight into the nature of the atom.  In that noble tradition, scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory published a paper in the journal Nature that describes studies of the size and structure of the proton using neutrinos, which are the most weakly interacting of the known subatomic particles. The study demonstrates a new method for studying weak force interactions, one of the four known fundamental interactions in the Universe. Continued here

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The horrors of World War II air war, in one stark map This article was first published on Big Think in October 2020. It was updated in February 2023. “If just one English bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is no longer Hermann Göring, but Hermann Meier,” the Luftwaffe commander boasted in August 1939. Continued here

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The scientific highs and lows of cannibinoids The 1960s was a big decade for cannabis: Images of flower power, the summer of love and Woodstock wouldn’t be complete without a joint hanging from someone’s mouth. Yet in the early ’60s, scientists knew surprisingly little about the plant. When Raphael Mechoulam, then a young chemist in his 30s at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, went looking for interesting natural products to investigate, he saw an enticing gap in knowledge about the hippie weed: The chemical structure of its active ingredients hadn’t been worked out. The first hurdle was simply getting hold of some cannabis, given that it was illegal. “I was lucky,” Mechoulam recounts in a personal chronicle of his life’s work, published this month in the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. “The administrative head of my Institute knew a police officer. … I just went to Police headquarters, had a cup of coffee with the policeman in charge of the storage of illicit drugs, and got 5 kg of confiscated hashish, presumably smuggled from Lebanon.” Continued here

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Twitter suspended 400K for child abuse content but only reported 8K to police Last week, Twitter Safety tweeted that the platform is now “moving faster than ever” to remove child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). It seems, however, that’s not entirely accurate. Child safety advocates told The New York Times that after Elon Musk took over, Twitter started taking twice as long to remove CSAM flagged by various organizations. Continued here

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Monstrous DIY mechanical keyboard cost $14,000 to build Sometimes, bigger is better. And sometimes, bigger is just... massive. That's the word that comes to mind when looking at and pricing the latest DIY mechanical keyboard from YouTuber Glarses that's as long and costly as he is tall. Continued here

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Report: Microsoft expects UK to block Activision merger deal Representatives from Microsoft and Activision have yet to offer any public comment in response to a request from Ars Technica. Continued here

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Apple could skip an M2 Mac Studio update to boost Apple Silicon Mac Pro If rumors are to be believed, Apple has had to scale back its ambitions for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. A planned performance-boosting "M2 Extreme" chip has suposedly been canceled, and some of the perks people normally associate with the Mac Pro—upgradeable RAM and graphics—likely won't be supported because of the way Apple Silicon chips are designed. Continued here

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Hackers are mass infecting servers worldwide by exploiting a patched hole An explosion of cyberattacks is infecting servers around the world with crippling ransomware by exploiting a vulnerability that was patched two years ago, it was widely reported on Monday. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Best Super Bowl deals for 4K, OLED, and QLED TVs Whether you're looking to kick off your Super Bowl party or just in the market for a new TV, this is one of the best times to shop for a new big-screen TV for your living room. We found plenty of deals and discounts on QLED, OLED, and LED TVs. And even though 4K is now the standard, you can also opt to future-proof your next television by going with a discounted 8K set. Continued here

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Getty sues Stability AI for copying 12M photos and imitating famous watermark Getty Images is well-known for its extensive collection of millions of images, including its exclusive archive of historical images and its wider selection of stock images hosted on iStock. On Friday, Getty filed a second lawsuit against Stability AI Inc to prevent the unauthorized use and duplication of its stock images using artificial intelligence. Continued here

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US woman has walked around with untreated TB for over a year, now faces jail A woman in Washington state is facing electronic home monitoring and possible jail time after spending the past year willfully violating multiple court orders to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated and to stay in isolation while doing so. Continued here

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New battery seems to offer it all: lithium-metal/lithium-air electrodes Current lithium-based batteries are based on intercalation—lithium ions squeeze into spaces within electrode materials such as graphite. As a result, most of the battery's volume and bulk is dedicated to things that don't contribute to carrying charges between the electrodes, which sets a limit on the sorts of energy densities that these technologies can reach. Continued here

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James Cameron did the experiment: Titanic's Jack probably wouldn't have survived Ever since James Cameron's blockbuster film Titanic hit movie screens in December 1997, fans have been arguing about a specific scene in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) nobly gives up a spot on a makeshift raft to ensure Rose (Kate Winslet), the woman he loves, survives. Tired of constantly having to defend his artistic choice against claims that both lovers could have fit onto the raft, Cameron decided to re-create the scenario under controlled conditions in a new documentary for National Geographic: Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, marking the film's quarter-century anniversary. Continued here

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From This Hill, You Can See the Next Intifada It’s a little after 8 p.m. on a frigid hill in the West Bank village of Beita, and Sa’ed Hamayyel is sitting in front of a crackling outdoor fire, his face framed by smoke, telling me how his son was killed. “He was 16 years old,” the Palestinian father says. “He was a student.” On June 11, 2021, Israeli soldiers “shot him from afar … He couldn’t have posed any threat to them.” Hamayyel is intimately familiar with the violence and loss that pervades this part of the world. Decades ago, his father, brother, and sister were all killed in combat with Israeli forces. Along with them, Hamayyel is claimed as a member by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an internationally designated terrorist group responsible for numerous attacks on civilians. But when his son Mohammed was killed, the teenager was not engaged in armed conflict. He was protesting an Israeli outpost called Evyatar, which overlooks Beita. Continued here

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A Machine Crushed Us at Pokémon For a brief moment, we could taste victory. On the first turn of our online Pokémon battle against the player Athena2023, our Aegislash dealt some serious damage to Athena2023’s Gengar. One more blow like that, and Gengar, a little purple ghost with a sinister grin, would be toast. But Athena2023 had other ideas. Before we could make another move, Gengar blew away Aegislash, a levitating Pokémon with the appearance of a zoomorphic sword and shield, with a single attack. The point of a battle is to use your team of six Pokémon to knock out all six of your opponent’s, and we were losing fast. Athena2023 sent out a Lunala, a demonic purple-and-white bird with scythes for wings, which proceeded to eviscerate three straight Pokémon in an attack called Moongeist Beam. By turn 13, we had lost four of our Pokémon and defeated exactly zero of Athena2023’s. Continued here

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The Most Mysterious Part of the Moon Isn’t Where You Think The far side of the moon has a certain mystique about it. It’s eternally out of view, never facing the Earth—which has earned it a misleading nickname, “the dark side,” as if sunlight never reaches its surface (it does). It’s the section of the moon we’ll never see for ourselves, not unless we hop on a spaceship and fly over there. But the really mysterious parts of the moon aren’t on the far side. They’re at the poles, where the sun always hovers near the horizon. The lighting conditions create special circumstances: Hundreds of craters at the north and south poles never, ever receive direct sunlight, and so never feel the warmth of our star. They are, in astronomy parlance, permanently shadowed regions, and they’ve been that way, dark and frigid, for as long as billions of years. Astronauts have experienced the powdery surface of the moon up close, and space probes have mapped nearly every bit of the terrain from above—but none have peered into the depths of those pitch-black craters. With the right tools, astronomers hope, they’ll be able to peek inside and find something spectacular: water. Continued here

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The Grammys Are Built on a Delusion Even the highlights of last night’s ceremony couldn’t fully distract from its problems. At the end of last night’s Grammys ceremony, a chill and inoffensive superstar said something that sent many music listeners into a rage: “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often.” Those were Harry Styles’s words after winning Album of the Year; presumably he wanted to pull an inspirational narrative from the fact that little ol’ he, a former reality-TV contestant from a small town, had earned the most prestigious award in popular music. Yet people like him—white, well-connected singers of tasteful pop and rock—are exactly who win Album of the Year Grammys. The kind of people who don’t win include rappers (a hip-hop artist last took Album of the Year 19 years ago) and Black women (you’d have to go back to 1999 for that). Continued here

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Early Photos From the Earthquake in Turkey and Syria In the early morning today, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, collapsing thousands of buildings across southern Turkey and northwestern Syria. The quake was followed by numerous powerful aftershocks, and—nine hours later—a separate 7.5-magnitude earthquake nearby. Initial reports say that more than 2,100 people were killed in the region, and authorities say they expect that number to rise over the next few days. A person is rescued from the wreckage of a building during search-and-rescue efforts in Adana, Turkey, on February 6, 2023. # Continued here

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Bad Bunny Overthrows the Grammys The musical artist Bad Bunny—Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—is known on social media as “San Benito”: Saint Benito, perhaps a wink to his anything-but-chaste lyrics. But the nickname has taken on a somewhat literal meaning. Bad Bunny is—particularly after his bomba- and merengue-infused, fully Spanish-language opening-act performance at last night’s Grammys—the official patron saint of Latinidad. He’s nothing like what white America, or even the Latino community, expected. But he is the saint we needed. For the uninitiated, the Recording Academy produces two shows that are separate but, frankly, unequal: the Latin Grammys, which recognize the best Spanish-language music in the world, and the “gringo Grammys,” which recognize everything else. The latter, despite its American and white bias—even in categories rooted in Black history and heritage, such as hip-hop—has traditionally set the bar for who has, and hasn’t, been accepted into the American mainstream as pop-culture royalty. Continued here

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The Many Ripple Effects of the Weight-Loss Industry 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. Last week, I asked readers, “What are your thoughts … about weight gain, the weight-loss industry, diet, exercise, beauty standards, diabetes, medical treatments for obesity, or anything related?” Continued here

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So Are Nonstick Pans Safe or What? I grew up in a nonstick-pan home. No matter what was on the menu, my dad would reach for the Teflon-coated pan first: nonstick for stir-fried vegetables, for reheating takeout, for the sunny-side-up eggs, garlic fried rice, and crisped Spam slices that constituted breakfast. Nowadays, I’m a much fussier cook: A stainless-steel pan is my kitchen workhorse. Still, when I’m looking to make something delicate, such as a golden pancake or a classic omelet, I can’t help but turn back to that time-tested fave. And what a dream it is to use. Nonstick surfaces are so frictionless that fragile crepes and scallops practically lift themselves off the pan; cleaning up sticky foods, such as oozing grilled-cheese sandwiches, becomes no more strenuous than rinsing a plate. No wonder 70 percent of skillets sold in the U.S. are nonstick. Who can afford to mangle a dainty snapper fillet or spend time scrubbing away crisped rice? Continued here

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The GOP Has a 2024 Problem 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. By this time in an American president’s term, the next presidential race is typically in full swing. But the GOP’s Trump problem is making the 2024 race an unusual one. Continued here

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A game is not a game without a special kind of conflict | Psyche Ideas designs video games, tabletop games and large-scale game installations. He also teaches at the NYU Game Center and is the author of The Rules We Break (2022). He lives in New York City. To play is to explore possibilities, to test limits, to move beyond the functional and utilitarian and into the realm of the unexpected and inappropriate. Punk rock played with the conventions of how to make music. Political revolutions play with the established order. New ideas play with old ideas. In experiencing play, we are training ourselves to be flexible and creative. To be critical. To not just accept things as they are. Continued here

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A Controversial Arctic Oil Drilling Project Is One Step Closer to Moving Forward The Biden administration recommended a scaled-back proposal for drilling in Alaska, which may emit 280 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years A plan for oil drilling on a long-disputed site in the Arctic is one step closer to moving forward after the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recommended it last week.  Continued here

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French Museum Will Return 'Talking Drum' to Ivory Coast This year, France will officially return a 940-pound wooden drum to Ivory Coast. The move is the latest instance in a wave of repatriation efforts from prominent institutions around the world.  In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to return artifacts looted from African countries. The Djidji Ayôkwé drum—also known as the “talking drum”—was at the top of a list of 148 objects Ivory Coast requested from France in 2018. Continued here

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The Wind Chill Hit Minus 108 at New Hampshire’s Mount Washington As extremely cold temperatures gripped the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada over the weekend, New Hampshire's Mount Washington endured record-breaking conditions. On Friday, the wind chill at the top of the peak reached minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit, which is likely the lowest wind chill ever recorded in the history of the nation, report CNN's Ralph Ellis and Aya Elamroussi. The mountain in north-central New Hampshire stands 6,288 feet tall and often experiences dramatic weather. But meteorologists say this weekend's powerful winds and chilly temperatures—which dipped to as low as minus 47 degrees—were unparalleled. The previous record-low wind chill at Mount Washington was minus 102.7 degrees in 2004. Continued here

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Metal Detectorist Finds Mysterious Roman Object Possibly Used for Magic Amateur archaeologist Patrick Schuermans was wandering around a field in northern Belgium when his metal detector alerted him to the presence of something underfoot. When he located the item in question, he realized it might be something special. He had stumbled upon a fragment of a 12-sided Roman object called a dodecahedron. It’s likely more than 1,600 years old, according to the experts at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium, where Schuermans took the fragment in December. His find will now go on display at the museum alongside an intact bronze dodecahedron found nearby in 1939. Continued here

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7.8-Magnitude Earthquake Felt 'Like the Apocalypse' in Turkey and Syria The death toll has risen to at least 3,000 following one of the largest quakes recorded in the region A massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on Monday morning, killing at least 3,000 people and injuring thousands more. It was the worst earthquake in Turkey since 1999 and one of the strongest recorded in the region in a century. Casualties are expected to rise as rescuers continue to dig through rubble for survivors. Continued here

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Beyoncé Just Became the Most Awarded Artist in Grammy History "We can finally end the GOAT debate," host Trevor Noah declared at the 65th annual Grammy Awards last night. "... It's not LeBron. It's not Jordan. It's not Tom Brady. It's not Messi. It's Beyoncé." Minutes before, Beyoncé had been handed her 32nd Grammy, making her the most decorated artist in the prestigious award's history. She officially surpassed the record previously held by Georg Solti, a Hungarian-born British conductor who died in 1997.  Continued here

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How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities | Quanta Magazine A particle's straight-line path through space can be understood as the sum of all its possible paths. The most powerful formula in physics starts with a slender S, the symbol for a sort of sum known as an integral. Further along comes a second S, representing a quantity known as action. Together, these twin S's form the essence of an equation that is arguably the most effective diviner of the future yet devised. Continued here