Do Rewards Really Create Loyalty?

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Do Rewards Really Create Loyalty? Customer rewards have been reviled in the business press as cheap promotional devices, short-term fads, giving something for nothing. Yet they’ve been around for more than a decade, and more companies, not fewer, are jumping on the bandwagon. From airlines offering frequent flier deals to telecommunications companies lowering their fees to get more volume, organizations are spending millions of dollars developing and implementing rewards programs. Continued here

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Is Your Startup Doing Everything It Can to Capture Value? Fortunately, there is a strategic model that startups can follow that allows them to focus on service and capture value at the same time — double play. Building double play into a startup operation means that a startup understands the current positioning it has and then find ways to capture extra value in that process. In double play, there is a high level of dependency within the business units, making it possible to create a virtuoso circle of value capture within a symbiotic relationship. There are three core phases in creating double play: discovering the best product your business can offer, identifying value points in your company, and then monetizing that value. Continued here

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4 Ideas to Beat the New Year Doldrums Studies have found January to be the least-productive month of the year, and this year, the problem is compounded by headline-making layoffs, so-called quiet quitting, and a broader productivity slump. The signs are strong that 2023 won’t be an easy year to navigate, which is all the more reason to shake things up at the start. The author presents four ways to breathe new life into this notoriously dreary time of year. Continued here

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The Surprising Consequences of Antitrust Actions Against Big Tech One of the major questions of the day is whether antitrust actions against Big Tech platforms would increase competition and the number of new products that consumers can choose from. A study of a landmark case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago in the enterprise infrastructure software industry suggests the answer is “not always.” It found that while the number of patents in the aftermath of the decision did increase, the number of new products and entrants into the market did not, and profits decreased across the market. These findings have implications for regulators, complementors, and platforms. Continued here

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How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To There’s that project you’ve left on the backburner – the one with the deadline that’s growing uncomfortably near.  And there’s the client whose phone call you really should return – the one that does nothing but complain and eat up your valuable time.  Wait, weren’t you going to try to go to the gym more often this year? Continued here

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How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To There’s that project you’ve left on the backburner – the one with the deadline that’s growing uncomfortably near.  And there’s the client whose phone call you really should return – the one that does nothing but complain and eat up your valuable time.  Wait, weren’t you going to try to go to the gym more often this year? Continued here

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How to Work Under a First-Time Manager Nobody is born with the skills of a great leader. Good managers are built over the course of many years through learning, experience, and mentorship. But every boss must start somewhere — with their first direct report. Here are a few types of first-time managers you may encounter, and ways to make the most of your working relationship with them. Continued here

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Getting Better Sleep: Our Favorite Reads I’ve been having a tough time with it lately. My evening ritual currently involves scrolling through TikTok videos until my eyelids drop, or listening to my favorite ASMR influencer clean her mic with a soft makeup brush — at least until my anxieties fade and I’m able to partially doze off. Continued here

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You Are More Than the Voice in Your Head During one of my first assignments, I met a woman who had an enormous freezer in her garage stuffed with boxes of See’s Candies. It cost her a fortune to keep that freezer running, but she wasn’t ready to give it up. As I evaluated her home, I discovered that her attic wasn’t insulated. Insulating her attic would help reduce her energy cost enough to run the freezer, reduce her bill, and save her a lot more money over time. Continued here

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Is Tech the Right Career for You? Jobs in the tech industry are expected to grow exponentially in the next few years. All companies, in one way or another, need to transform to keep up with the future of work. If you are planning to enter the job market soon, you may be considering one of the many opportunities in this field. Continued here

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How to Work Under a First-Time Manager Nobody is born with the skills of a great leader. Good managers are built over the course of many years through learning, experience, and mentorship. But every boss must start somewhere — with their first direct report. Here are a few types of first-time managers you may encounter, and ways to make the most of your working relationship with them. Continued here

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Lena Waithe Knows Good TV. Now She Wants to Make Her Mark in Music, Books, Podcasts, and More The longtime storyteller is working to widen her lens, moving beyond Hollywood in the process. Continued here

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How Kim Abrams's Underground Drilling Business Plans to Take on Wildfires -- and Elon Musk The serial entrepreneur and former NASA employee built a better drill, and now she's using it to bury electrical cables, revolutionizing the utilities industry and saving trees. Continued here

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Eva Longoria and 6 Other Hard-Charging Founders on What Keeps Them Well and Balanced Being an entrepreneur can be a lonely, back-breaking business, but it shouldn't be. See how these founders find the fuel to keep thriving. Continued here

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To Show, or Not to Show: Michael Jordan's Reaction to a Pit Crew Member's Mistake Raises an Important Question About Leadership and Body Language Does body language carry more weight than words? Sometimes, yes. Continued here

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How Emma Grede Showed the Fashion World One Size Doesn't Fit All Behind the 'Shark Tank' judge's body-inclusive empire, and why she's paying it forward to new founders. Continued here

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What Sealed the Deal? Funding Advice From Some of the Brightest Women in Business They're among the rare female founders to land funding. See how they did it. Continued here

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My New Employee Fell Asleep in a Meeting ... And three other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here

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Watch: Why Entrepreneurship Is More Than Just a Job for These Dynamic Women Meet the cover stars of Inc.'s 2023 Female Founders 200 issue. Continued here

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Does Every Email Need a Subject Line? Yes, Every Reader Appreciates a Heads-Up About the Content of Your Email Here's how to ensure your email subject lines are concise and informative. Continued here

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New Law Requires Nearly All Employers to Provide Time and Space for Breastfeeding Employees The new law exempts most employers with fewer than 50 employees, but firms in an expanded slate of industries are newly required to comply. Continued here

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Building Psychological Attachment -- Not Just Ownership -- Into Web3 User interest in crypto projects is often transactional, mercenary, and short-lived. As the next era of the internet progresses with products that give users ownership through crypto tokens, people building in crypto and Web3 should consider the concept of psychological ownership. By applying this lens, crypto projects can foster a greater sense of attachment, leading to healthier user retention and sustainable ecosystems. Looking to other digital goods and applications, many have fostered psychological ownership and loyalty from users through personal investment, control, mastery, and alignment with how they see themselves. Continued here

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Create Winning Customer Experiences with Generative AI The launch of ChatGPT will be remembered in business history as a milestone in which artificial intelligence moved from many narrow applications to a more universal tool that can be applied in very different ways. While the technology still has many shortcomings (e.g., hallucinations, biases, and non-transparency), it’s improving rapidly and is showing great promise. It’s therefore a good time to start thinking about the competitive implications that will inevitably arise from this new technology. Many executives are wrestling with the question of how to take advantage of this new technology and reimagine the digital customer experience? For value creation to happen, we have to think about large language models as a solution to an unmet need, which requires a precise understanding about the pain points in customer experiences. From finance to healthcare and from education to travel, industry observers expect an explosion of service innovations and new digital user experiences on the horizon. Continued here

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A Forensic Accountant on How Companies Can Avoid Fraud and Scandal From Theranos to Enron, we can’t get enough of corporate scandals. We also can’t get enough of the intriguing people who perpetrate them. But instigators of fraud are not all Disneyesque villains chasing money and power at any cost, says DePaul University accounting professor Kelly Richmond Pope. She studies white-collar crime and finds that besides intentional perpetrators, there are also accidental and righteous ones. And she shares real stories of these long-overlooked employees and explains exactly which behaviors and incentives should raise red flags for managers and leaders. Pope is the author of the new book Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry. Continued here

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You Checked Out at Work. Here's How to Check Back In. If you’re unhappy at work, you already know that feeling can grow rapidly for a variety of reasons. In the current economic climate where job stability feels uncertain, professionals who had previously been disengaged at work may be rethinking their short-term objectives. If you want to keep your job until you can make the next step on your own terms, here’s how to shift your approach and intentions to embrace the role you currently have. Continued here

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How to Make Difficult Conversations Worse, as Seen on "Succession" There are so many moments in “Rehearsal,” the latest episode of “Succession,” where characters face the choice of engaging in a hard conversation and choose avoidance. While this may seem like an easy way out in the moment, in the long run, it can be a recipe for disaster. Here’s a closer look at four common mistakes the Roys made — and how they could have done things differently. Continued here

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The pilots who ejected underwater - and lived On 13 October 1954, a Royal Navy aviator called Bruce MacFarlane took off from the deck of the British aircraft carrier Albion, somewhere in the Mediterranean. Moments later his plane plunged into the water in front of the ship.MacFarlane was flying a heavy and powerful aircraft called the Westland Wyvern, an attack fighter powered by an enormous engine, which drove two contra-rotating propellors at the front of the aircraft, each spinning in a different direction. Continued here

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How do fish survive in the deep ocean? Last week, scientists filmed a fish swimming at a depth of more than 8km (27,000ft), setting a new record for the deepest ever fish documented by humans.The unknown type of snailfish of the genus Pseudoliparis was captured by an autonomous camera swimming at a depth of 8,336m (27,349ft) in the Izu-Ogasawara trench, south-east of Japan. Continued here

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How China's hottest social media app turned D At 10 a.m. on a Saturday, all the deep-fried youtiao at Wenzhou Dim Sum are sold out. Customers queuing inside the casual eatery, located across the Rhine river from Düsseldorf’s Old Town, groan in disappointment. Some consider meat buns instead. A cover of Taiwanese star Cyndi Wang’s classic song “Love You” plays in the background. Shen Chao and Liu Ying, a Chinese couple based in the Netherlands, drove three hours from The Hague to sample Wenzhou Dim Sum’s youtiao — fried dough sticks often eaten for breakfast. They have planned an entire day around eating and shopping for Chinese food: Start the morning with youtiao, pick up pre-cooked dishes at the Hao You Duo Supermarket, and then get da pan ji (“big plate chicken”) at Tengri Tagh Uigur Restaurant for lunch. Their plans, marked out by Shen Chao on Google Maps, were curated by Liu Ying on the Chinese social media and e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu. Continued here

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How tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.The customers, often in a rush, would get impatient. Ali would have to spend more time attending to them than he had back when he accepted only cash. Eventually, a fellow vendor suggested he subscribe to a “sound box” — a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages. “Earlier, I had to wait for five to 10 minutes after every transaction to get confirmation,” Ali told Rest of World. “I can now focus on other customers while the payment is being made. I have installed two sound boxes … one from Paytm and the other one from PhonePe.” Continued here

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How to become an #Influencer in India Last month, Rest of World published a short interview with Enioluwa Adeoluwa — one of Nigeria’s leading male social media influencers, with nearly 3 million followers and brand deals with MAC and Crocs. In the interview, he mentioned that finding brands to sponsor content is not as easy for him as it is for creators in developed markets. “They could create 10 videos, and all of them will be ‘sponsored by’ something. In Nigeria, you don’t get that. When you know your dreams are limited to what your finances can handle, then you’re not allowed to dream that big,” he said.By now, we all know at least one person who has given up a comfortable day job in the hope of becoming a social media star. Or, you might have a friend who is hustling on the side to find success on the internet. Continued here

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Bizarre Quantum Tunneling Observation Throws Out All the Rules The strange phenomenon of quantum tunneling has been observed in a chemical reaction that defies classical physicsA chemical reaction is a bit like traveling from Vienna to Venice: your destination might be downhill, but to get there, you’ll need to cross the Alps. You can think of the energy changes molecules must go through as a landscape. Between the start and end of a reaction, this terrain can sometimes be so hilly that otherwise favorable reactions don’t happen at all if molecules lack the energy to make it over the bumps. Yet in some of these cases, such reactions do happen, thanks to quantum tunneling, which allows particles to occasionally bore through energy barriers they’d never be able to climb. This bizarre behavior is forbidden in traditional physics but allowed under the wild rules of quantum mechanics. Continued here

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AI Is Getting Powerful. But Can Researchers Make It Principled? Can researchers create AI algorithms that are ethical today—and will be safe in the future?Soon after Alan Turing initiated the study of computer science in 1936, he began wondering if humanity could one day build machines with intelligence comparable to that of humans. Artificial intelligence, the modern field concerned with this question, has come a long way since then. But truly intelligent machines that can independently accomplish many different tasks have yet to be invented. And though science fiction has long imagined AI one day taking malevolent forms such as amoral androids or murderous Terminators, today’s AI researchers are often more worried about the everyday AI algorithms that already are enmeshed with our lives—and the problems that have already become associated with them. Continued here

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JWST's Smashing Success Shifts Focus to Astronomy's Blind Spots Looming gaps in astronomers’ views of the heavens could undercut the revolutionary potential of NASA’s latest, greatest space telescopeReal revolutions are rarely instantaneous. Their world-changing effects—like those from the invention of the printing press or the discovery of radioactivity—typically take generations to play out. The debut of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may mark a similarly epochal event in human history. But whether JWST’s revolution proves momentary—or instead endures and expands for many generations to come—now depends on how we choose to chase the new cosmic vistas it has only just begun to reveal. Continued here

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A Mysterious Rise in Banned Chemicals Is Warming the Planet A new study documents the mysterious presence of five banned chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals that not only deplete the ozone layer but also contribute to global warmingCLIMATEWIRE | Five ozone-depleting substances are increasing in the atmosphere, a new study finds, despite an international ban on their use and production. Continued here

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Fallout from the Banking Crisis: What’s Ahead? During a recent LinkedIn Live event, a panel of Wharton experts noted that the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s failure will likely be contained within the commercial real estate sector. Much, however, depends on the Fed’s rate moves, they said.Predictions of dire days ahead for the U.S. economy in the wake of the failure in March of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) are overstated, Wharton experts said at a LinkedIn Live event titled “Understanding the Banking Crisis” on March 30, organized by Wharton Executive Education and co-hosted by the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation (WIFPR). (Watch a video of the complete presentation above.) Continued here

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Finding the Model That Captures Investment Risks, but Not Mispricing of Assets The latest Wharton-Jacobs Levy “Best Paper” shows fund managers a way to isolate mispricing of securities to weigh the role of risks.Trying to accurately project the return on your investment has never been easy, which of course explains why some win big, and some lose, in the stock markets. As the stakes get bigger, investors use a variety of models to analyze various pieces of information they have gathered on a security, such as on its competitors and its business outlook, in attempts to predict its future price. A big challenge in that exercise is to weigh two aspects: the various types of risks that a security has, and the role of potential mispricing. Continued here

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A faster way to get to a clean energy future When it comes to cost, clean energy is bound to beat out fossil fuels, says technologist Ramez Naam. But the hesitancy to build amid the prevalence of "not in my backyard" campaigns is preventing the creation of our sustainable future. Naam outlines the changes we need to make to get out of our own way and create a stronger, more reliable renewable energy grid. "It is time for us to build," he says. Continued here

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Palantir's Plan to Decipher the Mysteries of Long Covid At least 65 million people are still suffering from long Covid, the mysterious cocktail of symptoms that persist in some patients more than 12 weeks after an initial infection. Researchers are still working to understand this illness, but it's been slow progress so far. This is because long Covid is not just a medical problem—it's also a data problem, says Indra Joshi, director of health, research, and artificial intelligence at Palantir, which specializes in analyzing big data.   Continued here

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Can Burning Man Pull Out of Its Climate Death Spiral? It was desperation that led Michelle into a BDSM tent at Burning Man. Not a desperate need for a spanking. Far from being a masochist, Michelle just wanted relief from the heat, and the BDSM tent had air-conditioning.Burning Man 2022 was hot. The infamous bacchanal held in the dusty, dry lake bed of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert started at a high of 98 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, August 29. By the weekend it had gotten up to 103, a record-setting temperature for a place already inhospitable to life.  Continued here

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System76's Pangolin Is a 15-Inch Linux Laptop for the Masses 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 WIREDLinux may not have evolved (yet!) into the mainstream desktop operating system its advocates had hoped for, but fans of free software have never had it so good. Dell, Lenovo, HP, Purism, and System76 all sell excellent Linux-based hardware. Time-travel back to 2012 to shout the good news and you'll have trouble convincing even the Linux faithful that the future is even brighter than they're dreaming. Continued here

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The Best Fitness Trackers and Watches for Everyone 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 WIREDLike every piece of gear you wear on your body day in and day out, fitness trackers are incredibly personal. They have to be comfortable and attractive, sure, but they must also fit your lifestyle, as well as when and how you like to work out. Do you bike, row, or do strength training? Do you run on trails for hours at a time, or do you just want a reminder to get up every hour? Continued here

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ChatGPT Has a Big Privacy Problem When OpenAI released GPT-3 in July 2020, it offered a glimpse of the data used to train the large language model. Millions of pages scraped from the web, Reddit posts, books, and more are used to create the generative text system, according to a technical paper. Scooped up in this data is some of the personal information you share about yourself online. This data is now getting OpenAI into trouble. On March 31, Italy’s data regulator issued a temporary emergency decision demanding OpenAI stop using the personal information of millions of Italians that’s included in its training data. According to the regulator, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, OpenAI doesn’t have the legal right to use people’s personal information in ChatGPT. In response, OpenAI has stopped people in Italy from accessing its chatbot while it provides responses to the officials, who are investigating further.  Continued here

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Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You Disclaimer: All #WiredSixWord submissions become the property of WIRED. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any other materials, including your name or social media handle, may be published, illustrated, edited, or otherwise used in any medium. Submissions must be original and not violate the rights of any other person or entity.🏔🏃‍♀️🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏽‍♀️🦑🛸 —@jessbeckah42, via Instagram Continued here

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The 35 Best Shows on Disney+ Right Now Disney+ isn’t just for kids. With its ownership of the Star Wars brand and all Marvel titles, the streaming service offers plenty of grown-up shows in its bid to compete with Netflix and Amazon.And we’re not just talking movies. Since launching the service, Disney has used the name recognition of Star Wars and Marvel to launch scores of TV shows, from The Mandalorian to Loki. In the list below, we’ve collected the ones we think are the best to watch, from those franchises and beyond. Continued here

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Rainbows are actually full circles. A physicist explains Think about the last time you saw a rainbow; what was it like? It was probably evidently a “bow,” for starters, where it made its classic arc-like shape, with colors changing from red on the outside through the full spectrum of colors, down to blue/violet on the interior. There may have been a secondary rainbow, fainter and with color-order reversed, above it. The weather conditions were probably a mix of cloudy, rainy skies and cloud-free, sunlit streaks, or otherwise it was likely sunny and you had a lot of mist nearby. And although you probably don’t think of it as being a remarkable occurrence, it was probably daytime and you were probably somewhere on the surface of the Earth.What you might not realize is that the shape of a rainbow isn’t a “bow” or an “arc” at all, but rather a full circle. The only reason you see part of that full circle, under most conditions, is because the Earth itself (or other foreground features) are in the way, preventing you from seeing the entire rainbow at once. Continued here

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Evolution of the dad Lee Gettler is hard to get on the phone, for the very ordinary reason that he’s busy caring for his two young children. Among mammals, though, that makes him extraordinary.“Human fathers engage in really costly forms of care,” says Gettler, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. In that way, humans stand out from almost all other mammals. Fathers, and parents in general, are Gettler’s field of study. He and others have found that the role of dads varies widely between cultures — and that some other animal dads may give helpful glimpses of our evolutionary past. Continued here

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Before your real funeral, you should attend a "living funeral” “What a waste. All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.” — Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with MorrieDeath is inevitable. It is out of our control. But how we die is within our control. One way to reclaim some measure of control over death is by way of a “living funeral,” also known as a “living wake” — a ceremony held for a person who is still alive, often to celebrate their life and legacy while they are able to participate. Unlike a traditional funeral, it is a way for the person to say goodbye to loved ones and to be able to smell the flowers at their own funeral. Continued here

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How ketamine-fueled dreams can promote a spiritual approach to mental health and therapy Excerpted from THE KETAMINE BREAKTHROUGH by Dr. Mike Dow & Ronan Levy published by Hay House, Inc. Copyright © 2023Ketamine’s unique effects make it an ideal companion to psychotherapy. By integrating proven psychotherapeutic techniques into the ketamine experience, we can affect long-term change in a person’s life. The medicine lights the fire by relieving symptoms virtually immediately; the psychotherapy and associated life-style changes keep it burning.  Continued here

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Some cancers shouldn't be treated The collective effort to improve the treatment of cancer is often described as a “war“, as if malignant tumors are a scourge to be ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed the second they are detected. But oncologists are now increasingly calling for a truce in the case of many cancers. The fight might have gone too far.As cancer screening has grown more powerful in scope and increasingly widespread, we’re detecting more cancers than ever before, and catching them earlier. A CDC study published last year found that between 2009 and 2018, the number of people diagnosed with cancer climbed from 1,292,222 to 1,708,921. For aggressive cancers of the lung, colon, and pancreas, this advanced detection can be a lifesaver. But for low-risk cancers including, for example, prostate, urethral, thyroid, certain non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and some areas of the breast, a positive test can lead to emotional stress and unneeded, physically-taxing treatment. Continued here

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The insult that sparked Genghis Khan to destroy an empire A small spark — an insult, a show of disrespect — is sometimes all it takes to ignite a war. Among the many tales of retribution echoing through history, one stands out for its scale and brutality: the tale of Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader who united the tribes of Central Asia and carved out history’s largest land empire, and his decision to wipe out the Khwarazmian Empire.In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan sought to establish peaceful trade relations with the neighboring Khwarazmian Empire, which was a powerful Muslim state that spanned much of present-day Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The Khwarazmian Empire was ruled by Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad II. Continued here

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After disrupting businesses, Google Drive's secret file cap is dead for now Google is backtracking on its decision to put a file creation cap on Google Drive. Around two months ago, the company decided to cap all Google Drive users to 5 million files, even if they were paying for extra storage. The company did this in the worst way possible, rolling out the limit as a complete surprise and with no prior communication. Some users logged in to find they were suddenly millions of files over the new limit and unable to upload new files until they deleted enough to get under the limit. Some of these users were businesses that had the sudden file cap bring down their systems, and because Google never communicated that the change was coming, many people initially thought the limitation was a bug. Continued here

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Tesla worker who rejected $15M award in racism case has payout cut to $3M A former Tesla factory worker who rejected a $15 million payout in a racial discrimination lawsuit has been awarded just $3.2 million after a new damages trial. A federal jury verdict reached yesterday gave plaintiff Owen Diaz $3 million in punitive damages and $175,000 in compensatory damages. Continued here

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Microsoft's new Surface Dock tosses the proprietary port, uses Thunderbolt 4 Microsoft is introducing a new version of its Surface Dock, the first to rely on Thunderbolt 4 instead of Microsoft's proprietary Surface Connect port. The Microsoft Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock costs $300 ($40 more than the regular price of the previous-generation Surface Dock 2) and is available starting today. Continued here

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Webb confirms we're looking at some of the Universe's earliest galaxies One of the goals of the Webb Space Telescope was imaging the earliest galaxies, giving us a new window into how our Universe evolved between the dense, hot material from the Big Bang and its star- and structure-filled present. And, almost as soon as the data started pouring in, things have looked very promising, with strong indications that we were picking up galaxies as they appeared only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Continued here

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Report: China increasingly uses merger reviews to make demands of US companies China's antitrust regulator "is holding back its required green light for mergers that involve American companies as a technology war with Washington intensifies," according to a Wall Street Journal report today. China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has asked companies seeking merger approvals to "make available in China products they sell in other countries—an attempt to counter the US's increased export controls targeting China," the report said. Continued here

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Apple joins Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in tech industry layoffs Apple, which has thus far avoided the sweeping layoffs that have taken place at rival companies like Microsoft and Google, is eliminating some roles after all, according to a report in Bloomberg. Continued here

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New buckling spring keyboards re-create IBM's iconic Model F for modern computers IBM’s Model F keyboards are prized among keyboard enthusiasts. Introducing buckling spring switches over a capacitive printed circuit board (PCB) in the early 80s, they’re considered the grandfather of mechanical switches. Despite their prestige, Model F keyboards were no more by the following decade and, due to outdated technologies, have become very rare and can be tough to use with a modern computer. Targeting retro keyboard fans who don't want to deal with long searches, repairs, or mods, Model F Labs re-creates IBM's Model F keyboards with modern OS support, and it recently introduced the iconic buckling spring switches in a classic full-sized keyboard, as well as some unique form factors. Continued here

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Can you fool a monkey with a magic trick? Only if it has opposable thumbs The key to a successful sleight-of-hand magic trick is how well a magician manipulates the audience's perception, especially of manual movements, since that is crucial to how we anticipate another's actions. To learn more about how humans experience such misdirection, researchers in the UK performed simple magic tricks for three species of monkeys to see if they could be fooled. They found that only those species with at least partially opposable thumbs were fooled, suggesting that having similar anatomy (and therefore biomechanical ability) plays a vital role in the illusion. They described their results in a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. Continued here

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Competence wins over excitement with the 2023 Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV LISBON, PORTUGAL—On the whole, Americans love SUVs. And Mercedes-Benz loves selling cars to Americans. So we weren't at all surprised when it first revealed an SUV version of the EQE sedan, nor when we learned the EQE SUV would be built in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Continued here

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Open garage doors anywhere in the world by exploiting this "smart" device A market-leading garage door controller is so riddled with severe security and privacy vulnerabilities that the researcher who discovered them is advising anyone using one to immediately disconnect it until they are fixed. Continued here

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Street Photography From ’80s and ’90s New York Armed with his camera and a collection of albums, Jamel Shabazz documented Black life in the city.In 1980, after three years in the U.S. Army, Jamel Shabazz returned home, in his words, “to a war.” “I came home to a situation where a lot of people were dying at the hands of other young people,” he told me. In an era when the crack epidemic and mass incarceration were tearing families and neighborhoods apart, Shabazz saw photography as a form of “visual medicine.” Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, he traversed the streets of New York City armed with a 35-mm camera, his business card, a chessboard, and several photo albums, which he would produce to build trust with his subjects by offering evidence of his past work. Continued here

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Chicago’s Imperfect Choice A huge event today could have a major impact on national politics—and it might not be the one you have in mind.While a judge arraigns Donald Trump in New York City, voters in Chicago will be rendering their own verdict on who should lead the nation’s third-largest city: Paul Vallas, a 69-year-old former city-budget director and the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, or Brandon Johnson, a 47-year-old county commissioner, former teacher, and longtime paid organizer for the city’s most progressive political force, the Chicago Teachers Union. The outcome could have meaning well beyond the shores of Lake Michigan, offering an indication of where voters—Democrats in particular—are leaning on the issues of crime, policing, and race. Continued here

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AI Is Running Circles Around Robotics When people imagine the AI apocalypse, they generally imagine robots. The android assassins of the Terminator franchise. The humanoid helpers of I, Robot. The Cylon armies of Battlestar Galactica. But the robot-takeover scenario most often envisioned by science fiction is not exactly looming. Recent and explosive progress in AI—along with recent and explosive hype surrounding it—has made the existential risks posed by the technology a topic of mainstream conversation. Yet progress in robotics—which is to say, machines capable of interacting with the physical world through motion and perception—has been lagging way behind. “I can’t help but feel a little envious,” said Eric Jang, the vice president of AI at the humanoid-robotics company 1X, in a talk at a robotics conference last year. And that was before the arrival of ChatGPT.Large language models are drafting screenplays and writing code and cracking jokes. Image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2, are winning art prizes and democratizing interior design and producing dangerously convincing fabrications. They feel like magic. Meanwhile, the world’s most advanced robots are still struggling to open different kinds of doors. As in actual, physical doors. Chatbots, in the proper context, can be—and have been—mistaken for actual human beings; the most advanced robots still look more like mechanical arms appended to rolling tables. For now, at least, our dystopian near future looks a lot more like Her than M3GAN. Continued here

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TV Has a Cynical Message for Humanity Reality has no order—that’s why we’re always trying to impose our own framework on it, with the help of notions such as “karma” and “Mercury in retrograde.” The conventions of storytelling, conversely, are blessedly clean and concise; they allow us to at least pretend that a plot might cohere into some sort of plan. Lately, though, the rules have seemed trickier to follow. On television, the most ambitious parables about humanity are also the ones having the hardest time conceding to narrative, as though they can’t imagine anymore that a hero might be coming to save us. What happens when stories start to break down in the face of relentless human failure? Well, we get things like Apple TV+’s Extrapolations and Amazon’s The Power: sprawling, cynical, extraordinarily expensive exhalations. Characters are strangely passive; they react to circumstances rather than act on their desires; they shuffle through riots and Category 4 hurricanes and political turmoil without any point or purpose of their own.In real life, this kind of static inertia is desperately plausible. On television, though, it’s deadening. Both shows left me feeling not so much numbed as etherized after I sat through eight or nine hours of erratic, unstructured angst. Extrapolations, Scott Z. Burns’s speculative anthology series about the potential future of Earth amid climate change, has one of the starriest lineups of any non-Marvel product this decade, yet every actor seems nothing short of exhausted. In one scene, a zoologist played by Sienna Miller apologizes to a communicative whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) about humans’ infinite capacity for lying; in another, a character played by Matthew Rhys (and clearly inspired by Donald Trump Jr.) is gored to death by an avenging walrus. Oddly, neither scene is played for comedy. I laughed, but I don’t think I was supposed to. Continued here

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'The Super Mario Bros. Movie' Gives the People What They Want Hollywood’s previous attempt at a Super Mario Bros. film tried to translate the cartoon goofiness of Nintendo’s video game into something more cinematic. The result was strange and ambitious: A British character actor took the title role; Bowser was transformed from a fire-breathing turtle into a slick-haired industrialist, and the world he ruled was filled not with power-up mushrooms but with industrial catwalks and dripping slime. The film is a fascinating failure but a failure nevertheless, a baffling effort to plumb deeper into the tale of, well, a pair of heroic plumbers.The new Super Mario Bros. Movie has zero such curveballs. It is cheerfully animated and deeply committed to a world that audiences might recall from playing any one of the franchise’s games over the past 30-plus years. The film comes from Illumination, the animation studio that has long pumped out movies featuring the Minions, those cute canary-yellow imbeciles who are chemically designed to delight children. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, out Friday, is no different. It’s a 92-minute injection of kid-friendly joy that whizzes by fast enough to keep adults from getting enraged or bored. Continued here

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The Emotional Genius of Ryuichi Sakamoto The late Japanese musician scored not only films but also the exquisite highs and distressing lows of life.Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer, producer, and actor who died last Tuesday, was a musician of sophisticated talent. For many, the way he intermingled cacophony with dense synth, and his interest in both silence and sound, made Sakamoto timeless and avant-garde. But for me, Sakamoto was first and foremost a conjurer of layered emotion, as exemplified in his many film compositions. Continued here

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Ozempic Is About to Be Old News All of a sudden, Ozempic is everywhere. The weight-loss drug that it contains, semaglutide, is a potent treatment for obesity, and Hollywood and TikTok celebrities have turned it into a sensation. In just a few months, the medication has been branded as “revolutionary” and “game-changing,” with the power to permanently alter society’s conceptions of fatness and thinness. Certainly, a drug like semaglutide could be all of those things: Never in the history of medicine has one so safely led to such dramatic weight loss in so many people.But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As weight-loss medications go, Ozempic is far from perfect. Though the drug has profound impacts, it requires weekly injections, a tolerance for uncomfortable side effects, and the stamina—not to mention the budget—for long-term treatment. (Ozempic has somehow become a catchall term for semaglutide but technically that product has gotten FDA sign-off only as a diabetes medication. A larger dose of semaglutide, marketed as Wegovy, has been approved for weight loss.) Continued here

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The Arraignment of Citizen Trump The former president stands accused of 34 counts of felony—and there’s a long way to go from here.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. Continued here

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Inside Manhattan Criminal Court With Donald Trump In the weeks leading up to today’s arraignment in New York, former President Donald Trump was reportedly enamored by the idea of a dramatic “perp walk.” He seemed to revel in the power of the word arrested. Perhaps Trump, a noted Godfather fan, wanted this historic day to resemble that of the real-life mafioso John Gotti, the former Gambino-crime-family boss, who famously strutted into the New York State Supreme Court in 1990 as flashing cameras captured his smirk.Trump’s supporters and detractors alike seemed similarly hungry for a spectacle. Hundreds of reporters, photographers, and news cameras lined the area outside Manhattan Criminal Court on this blue-sky morning. Many had waited overnight in the cold in hopes of securing one of the three colors of passes to make it inside. Helicopters hovered overhead. The Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff stood atop a riser for a live-TV hit. Thousands of New York police officers were ready for deployment in case protests turned violent. Continued here