   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
S1The Strategic Secret of Private Equity  The huge sums that private equity firms make on their investments evoke admiration and envy. Typically, these returns are attributed to the firms’ aggressive use of debt, concentration on cash flow and margins, freedom from public company regulations, and hefty incentives for operating managers. But the fundamental reason for private equity’s success is the strategy of buying to sell—one rarely employed by public companies, which, in pursuit of synergies, usually buy to keep.
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S2How Venture Capital Works  The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk-taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy.
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S3SPACs: What You Need to Know  Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies.
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S4Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?  Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic.
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S5The Value of Keeping the Right Customers  Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy. If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
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S6Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time  As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better.
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S7Are You an Accidental Manager?  When the career path to manager is unclear, results-oriented and high-performing employees often find that themselves suddenly promoted into the role — more for their technical strengths than for their people management skills. Many of these accidental managers are then let loose on their teams without receiving the proper skills and training. The result is a new manager who experiences anxiety and imposter syndrome, potentially causing a disconnect between them and their direct reports. It can negatively impact team productivity, engagement levels, and well-being. But the good news is that this need not continue to define you. In the absence of any formal training, you can use these tips to excel in your new role.
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S8S9S10S11S12S13S14S15S16S17S18Why Authentic Leadership Is So Hard  “Humans automatically categorize other people. We automatically think, ‘OK. This kind of person is going to be more professional. This kind of person is not going to be,’” she tells Women at Work hosts Amy Bernstein, Sarah Green Carmichael, and Nicole Torres. “If you happen to fall into the latter category, you may have some additional work that you have to do to demonstrate that you are in fact fierce, professional, amazing.”
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S19CEOs, Step into the Front Lines or Risk Losing Touch  Leading change is both a top-down process and a bottom-up process. The goal is to educate and energize colleagues at every level, especially those on the front lines, about the power of your plans, and to be educated and energized by the pragmatic wisdom of their experiences. Change programs work when they shape the behaviors and unleash the enthusiasm of the people closest to the work — the technologists who write code, the front-line employees who interact with customers, and customers themselves, who have the deciding vote on whether a company is doing something worthwhile. Put simply, it’s hard to reach people’s hearts and minds if the CEO’s head is in the clouds.
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S20How Small Companies Compete with -- and Beat -- Big Ones  HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. In an era driven by network effects – how can smaller players compete against bigger platforms? Today, we bring you a conversation with Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee – who says the trick to gaining ground on a much larger rival is choosing a strategy that they can’t easily imitate. This episode breaks down TaoBao’s strategy for displacing eBay in China. Back in 2007, eBay was the world’s largest consumer marketplace, and TaoBao was an underdog with a new strategy to pivot away from B2B sales and engage consumers directly. This episode originally aired on Cold Call in July 2021. Here it is.
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S21To Regulate Big Corporations, Understand How They Got That Way  While regulators are considering new ways of taking on corporate power, it’s important to recognize that big corporations are not all of a piece. Large firms, whether measured by employees, sales, or assets, should be thought of along at least two axes. First, centralized, where a company owns a small number of very large production facilities, vs. decentralized, meaning it aggregates many production facilities (some of which can be large in their own right). And second, whether the firm principally grew through organic expansion vs. mergers and acquisitions. Understand the differences can guide regulators in understanding when they create public good and when they don’t.
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S22Azeem on AI: Are Large Language Models the Future of the Web?  In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar lays out why the future of the Web is underpinned by AI, and what this means for the traditional business model of the internet. He considers whether there will be a single dominant player, like Google in Web 2.0, or a more fragmented landscape, as in social media?
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S23When to Give Employees Access to Data and Analytics  As business leaders look to democratize data and analysis within their organizations, the real question they should be asking is “when” it makes the most sense. We offer the following criteria to help you determine when to empower data citizens: think about the citizen’s skill level, measure the importance of the problem, determine the problem’s complexity, empower those with domain expertise, and challenge experts to scout for bias.
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S24New York's skyscrapers are causing it to sink - what can be done about it?  On 27 September 1889, workers put the finishing touches to the Tower Building. It was an 11-storey building that, thanks to its steel skeleton structure, is thought of as New York City's first skyscraper. The Tower Building is long gone – its plum spot on Broadway was taken in 1914 – but its erection marked the beginning of a construction spree that still has not stopped.
On the 300sq miles (777sq km) that comprise New York City sit 762 million tonnes (1.68 trillion pounds) of concrete, glass and steel, according to estimates by researchers at the United States Geological Survey (USGS). While that figure involves some generalisations about constriction materials, that prodigious tonnage does not include the fixtures, fittings and furniture inside those million-odd buildings. Nor does it include the transport infrastructure that connects them, nor the 8.5 million people who inhabit them.
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S25Kenya's plan for tracking down counterfeit phones has digital rights activists concerned  Kenya’s government is set to roll out a controversial plan that it says will help tackle the problem of counterfeit mobile devices. But digital rights activists and telecommunications experts believe the program is “excessive” and threatens Kenyans’ right to privacy.
On April 28, after over six years of back-and-forth on the issue, the Supreme Court granted the Communications Authority of Kenya permission to implement the Device Management System (DMS) program. It allows the communications regulator to access the unique identification number for each mobile device active in Kenya, so it can deny services to counterfeit devices.
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S26Astronomers Have Spotted a Once-in-a-Decade Supernova - and You Can, Too  The death throes of a massive star in the galaxy M101, located just 21 million light-years away from Earth, are entrancing professional and amateur astronomers alike
An amateur astronomer has spotted a once-in-a-decade supernova that scientists hope will shed light on how dying massive stars give birth to strange objects such as neutron stars and black holes.
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S27High School Students Need More Sleep and Later School Start Times  After reading a Scientific American editorial on sleep and school start times, students and their teacher wrote to the editors about their experiences. Their district listened, and school will start later next year
In February, while going to the library to check out a manga comic one of my students recommended, I (Thomas Franich) grabbed a copy (as I always do) of Scientific American and read the February editorial “Let Teenagers Sleep.” The editors advocated for delaying school start times based on overwhelming evidence that teens are biologically driven to go to bed later and wake up later than other age groups. The editors pushed for that change because later start times were linked to students’ well-being and possible improvements in academic performance.
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S28S29S30The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives  By enacting simple laws that make guns safer and harder to get, we can prevent killings like the ones in Uvalde and Buffalo
Editor’s Note (5/24/23): One year ago, on May 24, 2022, 19 students and two teachers were fatally shot at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. This piece by Scientific American's editors presents the case that simple gun laws can prevent future tragedies.
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S31People, Not Google's Algorithm, Create Their Own Partisan 'Bubbles' Online  Politically polarized Google users are not steered to partisan sites by the search engine’s algorithm but generally decide to go there on their own
From Thanksgiving dinner conversations to pop culture discourse, it’s easy to feel like individuals of different political ideologies are occupying completely separate worlds, especially online. People often blame algorithms—the invisible sets of rules that shape online landscapes, from social media to search engines—for cordoning use off into digital “filter bubbles” by feeding us content that reinforces our preexisting world view.
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S32S33The Universe Began with a Bang, Not a Bounce, New Studies Find  New research pokes holes in the idea that the cosmos expanded and then contracted before beginning again
How did the universe start? Did we begin with a big bang, or was there a bounce? Might the cosmos evolve in a cycle of expansion and collapse, over and over for all eternity? Now, in two papers, researchers have poked holes in different models of a so-called bouncing universe, suggesting the universe we see around us is probably a one-and-done proposition.
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S34The U.S. Debt-Ceiling Crisis Could Harm Science for Years to Come  Investments in research and development are likely to drop—even if the worst-case scenario is avoided
The US government could run out of money as early as next week if lawmakers in Washington DC fail to reach an agreement to increase the federal debt limit. If the worst happens, economists warn, it would be the first time in history that the government has defaulted on paying its loans, and it could throw the country — and possibly the world — into financial turmoil. Also hanging in the balance, as politicians haggle over government spending, is a decade of funding for research and innovation, and many science advocates fear that budget cuts are inevitable.
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S35Why Financial Stability Is Vital to Monetary Policy Moves  Central banking policies that aim to stabilize credit spreads deliver all-around gains, according to a paper by Wharton experts.
In framing monetary policy, the Federal Reserve should go beyond its dual mandate to promote maximum employment and price stability, and formally recognize financial stability as the third leg of its mandate, according to a new research paper by Wharton experts.
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S36What Went Wrong at Bed Bath & Beyond  Wharton’s Barbara Kahn analyzes the downfall of Bed Bath & Beyond, which went from dominating the housewares market to filing for bankruptcy.
Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn heard the death knell for Bed Bath & Beyond long before the company announced last month that it was going out of business.
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S37How Defining a Brand Purpose Can Build Consumer Trust  Is it possible for companies to increase feelings of well-being in their consumers? Yes, if they put brand purpose at the center of their marketing strategy, according to research from Wharton’s Patti Williams.
In his 2022 letter to CEOs, BlackRock founder Larry Fink called on companies to articulate their core values during this era of stakeholder capitalism and eroded consumer trust.
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S38A foster care system where every child has a loving home  In the US, youth in foster care are nearly twice as likely as war veterans to suffer from PTSD. Placed in foster care at just 11 months old, 2023 Audacious Project grantee Sixto Cancel experienced the faults of the system firsthand. Now, he's the founder of Think of Us, an organization working to reform child welfare by centering kinship care, or placing a child with an extended family member or a familiar adult. Learn more about his plan to help thousands of kids searching for a loving home with one simple, systemic switch. (This ambitious idea is a part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)Continued here
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S39Generative AI Podcasts Are Here. Prepare to Be Bored  More than 4 million, to be precise, according to the database Podcast Index. In the past three days alone, nearly 103,000 individual podcast episodes were published online, a deluge of audio content so voluminous that listeners need never run out of options. You could spend the rest of your life working through the existing true crime catalog on Apple Podcasts or the sports chat shows on Spotify and end up dying of old age in 2070 while Michael Barbaro reads an ad for Mailchimp to your corpse.
In the ongoing generative AI gold rush, though, opportunistic entrepreneurs are looking for entry into even the most saturated markets. A wave of startups, including ElevenLabs, WondercraftAI, and Podcastle, have introduced easy-to-use tools to generate AI voices in minutes. So, as if on cue, AI podcasts are here, whether anyone asked for them or not.
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S40How to Close the Gender Health Gap .jpg) Meet Christina. She’s a healthy 20-year-old British woman, but she’s been suffering from heavy periods and menstrual cramps that have become too painful to manage. She visits her GP, who recommends a hormonal contraceptive—like nine in 10 women in the same scenario, Christina is given the combined pill.
But the pain doesn’t stop. The pill makes her feel overwhelmed and depressed, so she stops taking it. Her doctor puts her on the progestogen-only mini pill. The pain is, he says, “just something women have to put up with.”
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S41BMW Has Finally Made the 5 Series Electric  An entire decade after the launch of its first full production electric vehicle, the i3, BMW has finally revealed its full electric version of the 5 Series, its second most popular car globally.
Well actually, it's two versions. The new BMW i5 eDrive40 will supposedly offer 361-mile range, while the sportier BMW i5 M60 xDrive 600-hp version will apparently launch from zero to 62 mph in 3.8 seconds, though the range drops to 320 miles.
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S42The Best Multi-Tools for Any Task  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED
You're capable of more than you know. Is your chair wobbly because it's got a screw loose? Your child needs a toy freed from zip ties that make it as impenetrable as a bank vault? At a picnic with a bottle of wine? You don't need to fetch a toolbox. You might not even need to stand up, as long as you've got the right multi-tool handy.
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S43Sam Altman's World Tour Hopes to Reassure AI Doomers  The excitement around the London arrival of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was palpable from the queue that snaked its way around the University College London building ahead of his speech on Wednesday afternoon. Hundreds of eager-faced students and admirers of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT had come here to watch the UK leg of Altman's world tour, where he expects to travel to around 17 cities. This week, he has already visited Paris and Warsaw. Last week he was in Lagos. Next, he's on to Munich.
But the queue was soundtracked by a small group of people who had traveled to loudly express their anxiety that AI is advancing too fast. "Sam Altman is willing to bet humanity on the hope of some sort of transhumanist utopia," one protester shouted into a megaphone. Ben, another protester, who declined to share his surname in case it affects his job prospects, was also worried. "We're particularly concerned about the development of future AI models which might be existentially dangerous for the human race."
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S44China Hacks US Critical Networks in Guam, Raising Cyberwar Fears  As state-sponsored hackers working on behalf of Russia, Iran, and North Korea have for years wreaked havoc with disruptive cyberattacks across the globe, China's military and intelligence hackers have largely maintained a reputation for constraining their intrusions to espionage. But when those cyberspies breach critical infrastructure in the United States—and specifically a US territory on China's doorstep—spying, conflict contingency planning, and cyberwar escalation all start to look dangerously similar.
On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed in a blog post that it has tracked a group of what it believes to be Chinese state-sponsored hackers who have since 2021 carried out a broad hacking campaign that has targeted critical infrastructure systems in US states and Guam, including communications, manufacturing, utilities, construction, and transportation.
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S45Surprise: the Moon outshines the Sun at the highest energies  If you look at all the objects in Earth’s skies, both natural and artificial, it should come as no surprise that the Sun is the brightest object of all. The Sun, after all, produces its own light, powered by nuclear fusion in its core. That core-generated energy not only holds the Sun up against gravitational collapse, but also propagates to the Sun’s edge, the photosphere, where the Sun emits radiation over a wide range of wavelengths that correspond to a temperature of around 6,000 K. Although the Moon is the second-brightest object that we see, it’s only so bright because of its very close proximity to Earth; most of the Moon’s light, intrinsically, is just reflected light from the Sun.
Although this was first shown to be true in visible wavelengths of light, the 20th century revealed that the same circumstances held for a wide variety of other wavelengths. The Sun was the brightest object, followed distantly by the Moon in second place, as seen from Earth in:
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S46How did we miss the "botnet" blindspot? Ask the legends of Hollywood sci-fi  Excerpted from FANCY BEAR GOES PHISHING: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Scott J. Shapiro. All rights reserved.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic sci-fi movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ship Discovery One rockets to Jupiter to investigate signs of extraterrestrial life. The craft has five crew members: Dr. David Bowman, Dr. Frank Poole, and three hibernating astronauts in suspended animation. Bowman and Poole are able to run the Discovery One because most of its operations are controlled by HAL, a superintelligent computer that communicates with the crew via a human voice (supplied by Douglas Rain, a Canadian actor chosen because of his bland Midwestern accent).
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S47Is there a planet out there even better than Earth?  For us humans, our home planet of Earth is about as perfect as it gets. This shouldn’t be surprising since we evolved here, and natural selection made sure that we were well adapted to the environment. That holds true for all the species on our planet — at least until conditions change and new adaptations are required for survival.
When we talk about the habitability of a region or a planet, we mean the capacity to support life. And as practical measures, the amount of biomass and biodiversity serve to quantify how habitable a place is.
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S48Give pee a chance: Why German men urinate sitting down  Does language shape culture? Yes, says the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This map may be used as additional evidence. Take the German language: rich in single words that express things other languages need half a sentence to describe. One such word is Sitzpinkler, a man who pees sitting down. Not only do the Germans have a word for it, they are remarkably more proficient at it than most other nationalities.
Recently, UK-based pollster YouGov published the results of a 13-country survey of men’s urinating preferences. This map shows the eight countries surveyed in Europe — the others were Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Singapore, and Australia. Of all 13 countries, Germany was the one where most men sat down “every time” to urinate (40%). Add those who do so “most times” (22%), and you get the result shown on the map: nearly two-thirds are Sitzpinkler (without final “s”: the word is both singular and plural).
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S49How to design an emerging leaders program: 5 best practices  Are leaders born or made? Although some may argue that leadership traits are innate, the successful application of an emerging leaders program shows that true leaders acquire and hone their skills through learning and development.
An emerging leaders program identifies individual contributors who have demonstrated leadership competencies and provides them with development opportunities. These opportunities can include training, mentoring, coaching, job shadowing, cross-functional projects, and stretch assignments, among other initiatives. If comprehensive and well-structured, the program allows an organization to cultivate talent from within, creating a pipeline of capable leaders ready to succeed in higher-level roles when needed.
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S50Is the Universe a quantum fluctuation?  Can science figure out how the Universe came to be? The Big Bang model, as developed by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman, reconstructed the history of the Universe from about one ten-thousandth of a second after the “bang,” all the way to the formation of the first hydrogen atoms and the decoupling of photons when the Universe was about 400,000 years old. That last process gave rise to the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was discovered in 1965.
In its infancy, the Universe was filled with a primordial soup of elementary particles and radiation, all furiously colliding. This picture of the early Universe has been amazingly successful, prompting physicists to push their models as far back in time as they might reach. But how far can they reach? How close to the very origin can scientific models arrive? Could they go all the way to t = 0, the beginning of everything? Or does the notion of time passing lose its meaning as we approach the origin?
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S51The creative sweet spot of dreaming  George Church looks like he needs a nap. I’m talking to him on Zoom, and his eyelids have grown heavy, inclining toward slumber. Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. He assures me he is wide awake. But sleeping and waking life are often blurred for Church. One of the world’s most imaginative scientists, Church is a narcoleptic.
A rare disorder, narcolepsy causes sudden attacks of sleep, and Church has fallen asleep in some unfortunate circumstances—at The World Economic Forum, just a few feet away from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, for instance. He also had to give up driving due to the risk that a bout of sleepiness will strike while he is behind the wheel. But Church, a Harvard geneticist known for his pathbreaking contributions to numerous fields—from genetics to astrobiology to biomedicine—says the benefits of his condition outweigh the inconveniences. Many of his wildest and most prescient ideas come from his narcoleptic naps.
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S52S53S54Colorless nanoparticles used to create lightweight, colorful paint  Do you know more than 50 percent of microplastic pollution in our oceans comes from color paints? Almost every object that people throw into the ocean, whether it be a broken toy, a small bottle cap, or a shoe, has some sort of color coating. While you might try to collect all the plastic objects that are thrown into the oceans, there is no way to gather the microplastics that have already mixed into the water.
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S55Google never agreed it wouldn't copy Genius' song lyrics, US official says  After song lyrics website Genius sued Google in 2019 for allegedly breaching its terms of service by copying its lyrics transcriptions in search results, the United States Supreme Court invited the US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, to weigh in on how the US viewed the case. The question before Prelogar was whether federal copyright law preempted Genius' terms of service, which prohibits any of its website visitors from copying lyrics for commercial uses.
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S56S57S58S59S60S61The lightning onset of AI--what suddenly changed? An Ars Frontiers 2023 recap  On Monday, Ars Technica hosted our Ars Frontiers virtual conference. In our fifth panel, we covered "The Lightning Onset of AI—What Suddenly Changed?" The panel featured a conversation with Paige Bailey, lead product manager for Generative Models at Google DeepMind, and Haiyan Zhang, general manager of Gaming AI at Xbox, moderated by Ars Technica's AI reporter, Benj Edwards.
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S62American Guns, American Deaths  Over the course of two years, Spencer Ostrander made several trips around the country to take pictures of the sites of more than 30 mass shootings. This is a small selection from that body of work. The numbers of those killed and injured in each incident do not include the perpetrators.
ccording to a recent estimate by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, there are 393 million guns currently owned by residents of the United States—more than one firearm for every man, woman, and child in the country. Each year, approximately 40,000 Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those 40,000 gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for about half of all suicides per year. With the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, and the law-enforcement killings caused by guns, the average comes out to more than 100 Americans killed by bullets every day.
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S63Four Forces Bind Trump's Supporters More Tightly Than Ever  During a CNN town hall earlier this month, Donald Trump acted as expected. He used the phrase “wack job” to describe E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in damages because a jury unanimously concluded that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. His statement elicited applause and laughter from the mostly pro-Trump crowd. He also described the January 6 insurrection as a “beautiful day” and declared that, if reelected president in 2024, he would pardon a “large portion” of the rioters. Those statements, too, brought applause from the raucous audience.
There was more. Trump called the Black police officer who had shot and killed one of the rioters storming the Capitol a “thug,” falsely claiming that the officer had bragged about the incident. Trump defended taking top-secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate. He wouldn’t say whether he hoped that Ukraine would win the war against Russia. And he spewed lie after lie after lie about the 2020 election and virtually every other topic that came up.
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S64The Moral Case for Working Less  We shouldn’t work less simply because it allows us to be better workers. We should work less because it allows us to be better humans.
Forty-year-old Josh Epperson works 10 to 15 hours a week and makes about $100,000 a year. After more than a decade in the corporate world and seven years working at a global brand consultancy, he has spent the past three years running what he calls “The Experiment.” The Experiment has three precepts. First, Epperson accepts only work that he finds meaningful. Second, he accepts only work that pays well (his rate is $130 an hour). Third, he never works more than 20 hours a week. Rather than leverage his expertise for more money, as is customary for most ambitious professionals, he’s chosen to leverage his expertise for more time.
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S65There Is No Constitutional End Run Around the Debt Ceiling  With negotiations over the debt ceiling dragging on and the country running low on cash, many Democrats have urged President Joe Biden to take a unilateral action that will make those negotiations moot: Simply declare the debt limit unconstitutional. Last week, dozens of progressive House members signed a letter urging him to do so, and over the weekend, Biden expressed cautious sympathy for the argument. “I think we have the authority,” he told reporters, though he noted that the move would be challenged in court.
There is an excellent reason why this theory has never been tried in any of the dozens of times the country has approached the limit over the past 70 years: It’s wrong. Congress has maintained some form of a debt limit, without constitutional controversy, since the dawn of the republic. According to widely held legal principles, its existence creates no conflict with the Constitution, and the Supreme Court would almost certainly reject any attempt to argue otherwise.
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S66Local Politics Was Already Messy. Then Came Nextdoor.  This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Kate Akyuz is a Girl Scout troop leader who drives a pale-blue Toyota Sienna minivan around her island community—a place full of Teslas and BMWs, surrounded by a large freshwater lake that marks Seattle’s eastern edge. She works for the county government on flood safety and salmon-habitat restoration. But two years ago, she made her first foray into local politics, declaring her candidacy for Mercer Island City Council Position No. 6. Soon after, Akyuz became the unlikely target of what appears to have been a misinformation campaign meant to influence the election.
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S67Hawaii's Feral Chickens Are Out of Control  Polynesians brought chickens’ wild ancestors to the islands. Europeans brought domestic chickens. Now they’ve mixed, and are everywhere.
On the island of Kauai, wherever humans go, chickens go too. Hens and chicks kick around in grocery-store parking lots and parks. They’re visitors to cookouts and picnics. On popular hikes, many people are rewarded at the end of the trail with a picturesque view of the island and a small flock of chickens. The birds kick up newly planted condo landscaping and community gardens. Restaurants hand-paint signs asking patrons not to feed the fowl.
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S68We Still Don't Know Anna Nicole Smith  A new Netflix documentary offers glimpses of the tabloid star but fails to reckon with the forces that ruined her.
The most notorious video of Anna Nicole Smith—and, to be clear, the category is competitive—emerged in early 2007, about two weeks after she died from an overdose of prescription drugs. Shot a year earlier in the Bahamas, when the Playboy model, diet-pill spokesperson, and object of tabloid obsession was eight months pregnant, it shows a near-catatonic Smith having clown makeup applied to her face by a 9-year-old girl named Ryley. Behind the camera is Howard K. Stern, Smith’s lawyer and longtime companion. Stern repeats questions that Smith, nodding in and out of sentience, struggles to process. When she does speak, it’s in a grotesque baby voice, her words slurred into garble. She denies that she’s pregnant. Her baby, she tells the camera while pointing to Ryley’s inanimate doll, is way over there. Her oversize belly, she insists, is just “a little gas.” Later, Ryley, disturbed by Smith’s seeming conviction that the doll is a real infant, observes that Smith is having “brain trouble.” Stern keeps rolling. “This footage is worth money,” he says, to no one in particular. “I think we need the hospital,” Ryley says. “Howard, seriously, please help.” He ignores the child and carries on filming.
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S69The Problem With How the Census Classifies White People  Being an unspecified “white” person has allowed many Americans to blend in. In this era of identity-driven polarization, we should acknowledge all the ways we are different.
The U.S. Census Bureau is considering a historic revision to the 2030 count that would recognize the distinct ethnicity of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent—primarily Arab Americans, who have been subject to post-9/11 discrimination and, until now, have been grouped into the nebulous American amalgam of “white” people.
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S70The Israeli Minister Who Is Defending Elon Musk  Amichai Chikli championed the billionaire when his tweets were criticized for anti-Semitic overtones. I asked Chikli why.
When Elon Musk tweeted that the Jewish financier George Soros “hates humanity” and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” he drew international condemnation. Musk’s outburst was “not just distressing,” but “dangerous,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, said on Twitter. “It will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.” Later that day, Israel’s foreign ministry tweeted, “The phrase ‘The Jews’ spiked today on the list of topics trending on Twitter following a tweet with antisemitic overtones by none other than the owner and CEO of the social network, Elon Musk.”
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