The Pleasures of Amateur Photography

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The Pleasures of Amateur Photography     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.“I wonder whether the non-photographer can grasp the peculiar quality of the pleasure of being an amateur photographer,” Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of the publishing house Simon & Schuster, wrote in The Atlantic in 1942. Simon credits the camera itself with much of the joy of amateur photography: Continued here

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From Victoria Beckham to Coleen Rooney: How the WAGs became the women that Britain 'loved to hate'     There's a moment in the first episode of Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story – a new documentary series telling the story behind her blockbuster libel case with Rebekah Vardy – in which paparazzo George Bamby remembers the first time he was sent to photograph an unsuspecting Rooney, then known as Coleen McLoughlin. It was 2002 and her 16-year-old footballer boyfriend Wayne had just scored his first Premier League goal for Everton. The British tabloids wanted to know everything about this new star – including who he was dating. Coleen was the same age, still in school, and suddenly her walk home involved navigating the men hiding behind bins to get her picture.More like this:- Is it time to reconsider Britney's legacy? - Is the age of the celebrity over? - The greatest reality TV show never made Continued here

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Calls for a Cease-Fire--But Then What?     On Thursday, President Joe Biden called for religious tolerance and military aid for Israel. On Friday, thousands of Muslim Americans protested against him.The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall. Continued here

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Space is getting crowded with satellites and space junk. How do we avoid collisions?     Reports this week suggest a near-collision between an Australian satellite and a suspected Chinese military satellite.Meanwhile, earlier this month, the US government issued the first ever space junk fine. The Federal Communications Commission handed a US$150,000 penalty to the DISH Network, a publicly traded company providing satellite TV services. Continued here

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Astounding byelection losses are about more than Tory MPs' conduct - the party has a big general election problem     Byelection results in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire represent new lows for a Conservative government that will soon be obliged to confront its mortality. Even allowing for the capacity of byelections to produce startling results, the scale of collapse was jaw-dropping. The swing of 23.9% in Tamworth was the second largest Conservative-to-Labour shift we have seen, as a 19,634 majority was removed. Only 53 seats were safer for the Conservatives than Tamworth at the 2019 general election. Continued here

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Poems: 'Fractal' and 'In Practice'     Editor's Note: A kitty tail worked its way into this poem when the poet's granddaughters, arguing over a cat costume, interrupted her reading of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time, excerpts from which appear here in quotation marks.This article was originally published with the title "The Poetry of Fractals and Physics" in Scientific American 329, 4, 91 (November 2023) Continued here

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How to Own Your Weakness: Alan Watts on the Confucian Concept of Jen and the Dangers of Self-Righteousness     “Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.” Continued here

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What Went Wrong with a Highly Publicized COVID Mask Analysis?     The Cochrane Library, a trusted source of health information, misled the public by prioritizing rigor over realityThe COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, but in May officials ended its designation as a public health emergency. So it's now fair to ask if all our efforts to slow the spread of the disease—from masking, to hand washing, to working from home—were worth it. One group of scientists has seriously muddied the waters with a report that gave the false impression that masking didn't help. Continued here

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Inflation: raising interest rates was never the right medicine -     Inflation remains too high in the UK. The annual rate of consumer price inflation to September was 6.7%, the same as a month earlier. This is well below the 11.1% peak reached in October 2022, but the failure of inflation to keep falling indicates it is proving far more stubborn than anticipated. This may prompt the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to raise the benchmark interest rate yet again when it meets in November, but in my view this would not be entirely justified. Continued here

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Photos of the Week:     A beach motocross event in England, Kibera Fashion Week in Kenya, Israeli air strikes in Gaza, a new science-fiction museum in China, a water-ski championship in Florida, a cranberry harvest in Massachusetts, a salmon run in Canada, and much more Tourists take a boat ride through Pingshan Grand Canyon in Hefeng County, Enshi, Hubei province, China, on October 16, 2023. # Continued here

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Southwest Airlines Just Make Some Big Changes for Passengers. Most Companies     Naturally, I thought of the 19th century French economist, Jules Dupuit. Continued here

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Carbon capture pipeline nixed after widespread opposition     A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners. Continued here

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Readers Respond to the June 2023 Issue     “Mimicking Matter with Light,” by Charles D. Brown II, discusses a phase of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) acquiring a geometric phase, “a term in the mathematical description of its quantum phase that determines how it evolves.” The article mentions the BEC picking up a geometric phase of pi (π) in one experiment, and it shows a full circle in an accompanying graphic. Later it depicts a phase of 2π with two full circles.I understand that a geometric phase has no physical interpretation, which the article also mentions. But I am still confused because a single full circle is usually associated with 2π, as I remember from my telecommunications engineering studies, which had a lot of math as their base. Can you clear up this seeming contradiction? Continued here

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Palestinians Claim Social Media 'Censorship' Is Endangering Lives     When Israel issued an evacuation order from north Gaza on October 13, Shouq Al-Najjar left her house and headed south, to the city of Khan Younis, where she’s now sharing a home with 150 relatives and friends. Every day is a struggle for the basics. “Now bakeries are stretched to the limit. They cannot meet the demand for bread,” she said in a video message over WhatsApp. “Hospitals could stop working at any hour now, as there is no electricity and no fuel to power generators.”A ground invasion of Gaza is thought to be imminent. Al-Najjar, a coordinator at Ma’an Development Centre, a nonprofit that works with other local community organizations on Gaza’s humanitarian and economic development, says there are no more shelters to go to. Local health and aid workers are warning of an impending humanitarian crisis. Services are collapsing The last remaining power station ran out of fuel on October 11, just three days after a near-total blockade began. On October 17, the Health Ministry in Gaza asked people to bring their remaining personal stashes of fuel to pump generators at hospitals and keep them running. Fresh drinking water has run out, according to the UN Refugee Agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, leaving people to drink dirty well water. Continued here

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Why Google, Bing and other search engines' embrace of generative AI threatens $68 billion SEO industry     Google, Microsoft and others boast that generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will make searching the internet better than ever for users. For example, rather than having to wade through a sea of URLs, users will be able to just get an answer combed from the entire internet. There are also some concerns with the rise of AI-fueled search engines, such as the opacity over where information comes from, the potential for “hallucinated” answers and copyright issues. Continued here

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Space is starting to look like the better mining operation     Everyone’s into asteroids these days. Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent. Companies like AstroForge, Trans Astronautica Corporation, and Karman+ are preparing to test their tech in space before venturing toward asteroids themselves. Continued here

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Fish Skin Can Heal Other Animals' Eye Injuries     Tilapia skin’s collagen can aid in healing burns, fixing heart valves, and more—and now it can be used for repairing corneasTilapia skin is rich in collagen, and this structural protein's abundance has made the fish a popular resource in veterinary and human medicine. Researchers have explored its use in applications from bandaging burn victims and correcting abdominal hernias to mending heart valves and reconstructing vaginas. Continued here

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Gaza: hundreds of tons of supplies are poised to enter but the strip remains cut off by land, air and sea     The population of the Gaza Strip remains cut off from basic supplies like water, food, and electricity since Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege”. No aid has been able to reach Gaza and the first promised convoy has just been delayed further. While sieges are not illegal under international humanitarian law, there are rules prohibiting the starvation of civilians and regulating humanitarian relief operations. Continued here

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A Paralyzed House Complicates Biden's Plans for Israel     After returning from a trip to Tel Aviv to demonstrate U.S. support for Israel’s war with Hamas, President Joe Biden used Thursday evening’s Oval Office address to make the case for sending wartime aid to Israel and continuing American support for Ukraine.The president’s plan is complicated by events at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Legislating is at a standstill as House Republicans have yet to reach a consensus on who will be their next speaker. Continued here

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16 Great Deals on Gaming Headsets, Lego Kits, and iPads     The exact timing varies, but eventually it comes for many of us: seasonal affective disorder. (It happened to me this week.) The days are shorter, the skies are drearier, and winter looms ahead. We can't make the sun shine year-round, but we can help the transition to hibernation mode feel a little less daunting. Keep yourself entertained with these great deals on board games, Lego sets, and our very favorite iPad. Be sure to check out our deals roundup from earlier this week on TVs, gaming peripherals, and wireless headphones. Special offer for Gear readers: Get WIRED for just $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com, full Gear coverage, and subscriber-only newsletters. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. Continued here

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These 6 Books Will Help You Grow Your Business Now     These six books help ambitious entrepreneurs break out of the cycle of survival and achieve prosperity at scale. Continued here

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Did Friedrich Nietzsche's own philosophy drive him insane?     In the fall of 1888, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was walking to his guesthouse in the Italian town of Turin when he felt the corners of his mouth twist upward as though they were being pulled. “My face was making continual grimaces in order to try to control my extreme pleasure,” he later wrote in a letter to a friend, “including, for 10 minutes, the grimace of tears.”Unfortunately for Nietzsche, then 44 years old, these uncontrollable fits of laughter proved the beginning of something serious. Over the following week, other members of the guesthouse noticed that the philosopher stayed in his room for days on end. Peeking inside, they would find the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra naked, playing on the piano, and dancing like a man possessed. Continued here

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Humans Are Ready to Find Alien Life     In the thousands of years that people have been arguing about whether life exists elsewhere in the universe, one thing has been constant: No one really has had a clue. But not anymore. That’s because we finally know exactly where to look for aliens.Thanks to spectacular advances in science, we’ve identified many stars that have planets in the habitable zone where life can form. We are learning which of those planets are Earthlike enough to be worth pointing our telescopes at. We have giant telescopes equipped with spectrographs that can analyze light from distant stars, and powerful computers to simulate far-flung worlds. If we want to find aliens, we don’t need them to announce their presence to the cosmos. Instead, like detectives on a stakeout, we can just hang out with our doughnuts and cold coffee, watching and waiting. Continued here

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New research helps explain why Indian girls appear to be less engaged in politics than Indian boys     Girls in India report being less interested and engaged in politics than boys and cite fewer opportunities to participate in politics, we found in a recent survey of youth across India. Further, although political interest and engagement was higher for older boys (ages 18-22) than younger boys (ages 14-17), girls’ political interest and engagement stagnated across age groups. Continued here

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Kosovo and Serbia in crisis talks as regional tension escalates thanks to Russian meddling     Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, and Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, are scheduled to meet this weekend for the first time since Nato decided to send about 600 more peacekeeping troops into the Balkans early in October to mitigate some of the region’s growing tensions.The US has already urged Serbia to withdraw its military presence along the border with Kosovo to de-escalate tensions. On October 18 the EU parliament passed a resolution that also condemned the Serbian army’s military build-up at the border with Kosovo and urged Vučić to avoid any further action. Continued here

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Does chicken soup really help when you're sick? A nutrition specialist explains what's behind the beloved comfort food     Preparing a bowl of chicken soup for a loved one when they’re sick has been a common practice throughout the world for centuries. Today, generations from virtually every culture swear to the benefits of chicken soup. In the U.S., the dish is typically made with noodles, but different cultures prepare the soothing remedy their own way. Chicken soup as a therapy can be traced back to 60 A.D. and Pedanius Dioscorides, an army surgeon who served under the Roman emperor Nero, and whose five-volume medical encyclopedia was consulted by early healers for more than a millennium. But the origins of chicken soup go back thousands of years earlier, to ancient China. Continued here

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Netanyahu's Attack on Democracy Left Israel Unprepared     This summer I spent several days in Israel talking with people who were afraid for their country’s future. They were not, at that moment, focused on terrorism, Gaza, or Hamas. They feared something different: the emergence of an undemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracy. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his justice minister had announced a package of judicial “reforms” that, taken together, would have given their coalition government the power to alter Israeli legal institutions to their own political benefit. Their motives were mixed. Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, was eager to stay out of jail. Some of his coalition partners wanted courts to stop hampering their plans to create new Israeli settlements on the West Bank, others to maintain military exemptions for Orthodox religious communities. All of them were interested in doing whatever it would take to stay in power, without the hindrance of an independent judiciary.In response, Israelis created a mass movement capable of organizing long marches and enormous weekly protests, every Saturday night, in cities and towns across the country. Unlike similar protest movements in other countries, this one did not peter out. Thanks to the financial and logistical support of the Israeli tech industry, the most dynamic economic sector in the country, as well as to organized teams of people coming from academia and the army reserves, the protests kept going for many months and successfully blocked some of the proposed legal changes. I was trying to understand why these Israeli protests had succeeded, and so I met tech-industry executives, army reservists, students, and one famous particle physicist, all of whom had participated in organizing and sustaining the demonstrations. Continued here

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Straw bale hung from London's Millennium Bridge to comply with ancient law - just part of the River Thames' long, legal history     Maintenance workers on London’s Millenium Bridge – which spans the River Thames – have hung a bale of straw from the bridge’s undercarriage. An ancient byelaw requires that a bridge’s owner warn passing ships of any reduction in headroom beneath the bridge with a white light at night and, during the day, a straw bale, “large enough to be conspicuous”, suspended from its span. Continued here

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The 23andMe User Data Leak May Be Far Worse Than Believed     With the Israel-Hamas war intensifying by the day, many people are desperate for accurate information about the conflict. Getting it has proven difficult. This has been most apparent on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, where insiders say even the company’s primary fact-checking tool, Community Notes, has been a source of disinformation and is at risk of coordinated manipulation.Case in point: An explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday was followed by a wave of mis- and disinformation around the cause. In the hours following the explosion, Hamas blamed Israel, Israel blamed militants in Gaza, mainstream media outlets repeated both sides’ claims without confirmation either way, and people posing as open source intelligence experts rushed out dubious analyses. The result was a toxic mix of information that made it harder than ever to know what’s real. Continued here

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A memorial in Yiddish, Italian and English tells the stories of Triangle Shirtwaist fire victims - testament not only to tragedy but to immigrant women's fight to remake labor laws     The 10-story Brown Building, site of one of the deadliest workplace disasters in United States history, stands one block east of Washington Square Park in New York City. Despite three bronze plaques noting its significance, it has long been easy to pass by without further thought.On March 25, 1911, however, thousands of New Yorkers gathered outside what was then known as the Asch Building, home of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Drawn by a brief but raging inferno, they bore horrified witness to dozens of factory workers with no way to escape gathering on the ninth-floor window sills, desperately jumping, and smashing onto the sidewalks far below. Continued here