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S1Do Less. It's Good for You  You take a vacation day, but get distracted by the thought of your work inbox filling up. Or you sit down to watch a movie and immediately feel guilty about all the tasks still on your to-do list. Or perhaps you splurge on a massage, but barely enjoy it because your thoughts are racing the entire time. The truth is, rest and relaxation are vital to well-being. Chronic stress negatively affects nearly every aspect of mental and physical health, even contributing to higher risks for chronic disease and premature death. Meanwhile, rest may boost your health, quality of life, and longevity. Getting better at resting and relaxing, then, isn’t frivolous; it could actually be lifesaving.
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S2Elon Musk threatens to ban iPhones and MacBooks at his companies after Apple announces OpenAI partnership | Business Insider India  It also separately announced a partnership with OpenAI, which includes the option to integrate ChatGPT powered by GPT-4o across some of its software, including its new and improved Siri. Apple said the ChatGPT integration will be available for free without an account in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year.Apple said in its announcement of the partnership that "protections are built in for users who access ChatGPT." It said that device IP addresses are kept private, and OpenAI won't store requests. Users who choose to connect their accounts will be under ChatGPT's data-use policies, the announcement said.
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S3Ranked: The Countries Most Dependent on Agricultural Exports  Maldives, in the Indian ocean, is also within the top 10. Its top agricultural export is also fish. Interestingly, the Observatory of Economic Complexity states “Planes, Helicopters, and Spacecraft” as Maldives’ top overall export in 2022 ($433M). However, it’s possible that this might be a case of re-exportation.
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S5The Region of Space Influenced by the Sun Is the Heliosphere - Discover Magazine (No paywall)  The Sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma – highly energized ionized gas – called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind, the Sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections, which can contribute to the aurora, and bursts of light and energy, called flares.The plasma coming off the Sun expands through space, along with the Sun’s magnetic field. Together they form the heliosphere within the surrounding local interstellar medium – the plasma, neutral particles and dust that fill the space between stars and their respective astrospheres. Heliophysicists like me want to understand the heliosphere and how it interacts with the interstellar medium.
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S8Elephants may call each other by name, a rare trait in nature - National Geographic Premium (No paywall)  In human language, an arbitrary label would be calling a bovine a “cow,” since that word does not resemble, either physically or acoustically, the animal itself. A simpler label, which scientists call an iconic label, would refer to a bovine as a “moo,” since that’s based on and imitates sound the animal makes.The scientists focused on contact, greeting, and caregiving rumbles, which elephants use when initiating contact with an unseen family member, approaching another in touching distance, and nurturing a calf. These were the types of calls researchers thought were most likely to contain a name. (Learn why both African elephant species are now endangered, one critically.)
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S9How the humble soybean took over the world - Environment (No paywall)  Soy was likely domesticated in China approximately 6,000 to 9,000 years ago from its wild relative, Glycine soja. Because soybeans grew so heartily, even during extreme periods of drought, the first soy farmers found several uses for the bean. Thousands of years ago, ancient Chinese medical healers described using all parts of the plant as medicine. People also turned soy into noodles, tofu, tempeh, and soy sauce.Soybeans were initially planted to be sent to England to meet rising demands for soy sauce, which was becoming a staple in British cuisine. It would not be long, though, before Americans found another use for the bean. During the Civil War, roasted soybeans were used as coffee substitutes. One report in an 1893 issue of The Rural New Yorker said that soy coffee “is for those who desire a substitute for economy and health considerations.”
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S10Israel Is Losing the United States - Foreign Affairs (No paywall)  For months, as Israel has intensified its grip over Gaza despite mounting international condemnation, the impasse between Biden and Netanyahu has seemed only to worsen. In the weeks before Biden’s address, recriminations escalated. “We are not a vassal state of the United States,” Netanyahu told his cabinet on May 9. More recently, Biden suggested that observers could legitimately conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war to preserve his grip on power. As a consequence of this discord, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is turning from an intimate friendship into a contentious brawl. The ability to resolve differences and coordinate policy behind closed doors is vanishing rapidly, being replaced by animosity and dissent.Washington continues to dangle a normalization pact with Saudi Arabia in front of Israel as part of a transaction that would include a cessation of hostilities, freedom for the hostages in Hamas’s captivity, and a defined pathway to Palestinian statehood. But on May 19—two days after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met to discuss the “nearly final version” of agreements between their countries—Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “it may well be that Israel isn’t able, [or] willing to proceed” down this route. Motivated by political or personal considerations, Netanyahu—who told the UN last September that peace with Riyadh would “bring the possibility of peace to this entire region”—seems to suddenly have become lukewarm to the idea. His resistance has encouraged the Saudis to explore a bilateral framework with the United States that would leave Israel out in the cold.
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S11America Is Losing the Arab World - Foreign Affairs (No paywall)  October 7, 2023, was a watershed moment not just for Israel but for the Arab world. Hamas’s horrific attack occurred just as a new order appeared to be emerging in the region. Three years earlier, four members of the Arab League—Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—had launched processes to normalize their diplomatic relations with Israel. As the summer of 2023 drew to a close, the most important Arab country that still did not recognize Israel, Saudi Arabia, looked poised to do so, too.Hamas’s assault and Israel’s subsequent devastating military operation in Gaza have curtailed this march toward normalization. Saudi Arabia has stated that it will not proceed with a normalization deal until Israel takes clear steps to facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state. Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel in November 2023, and a visit to Morocco by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu planned for late 2023 never materialized. Arab leaders have watched warily as their citizens have grown vocally opposed to the war in Gaza. In many Arab countries, thousands have turned out to protest Israel’s war and the humanitarian crisis it has produced. Protesters in Jordan and Morocco have also called for an end to their countries’ respective peace treaties with Israel, voicing frustration that their governments are not listening to the people.
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S12Europe Faces a Far-Right Reckoning - Foreign Policy (No paywall)  Mainstream parties secured a slim majority during European Union parliamentary elections this weekend, but far-right groups made the most noteworthy gains in the bloc’s legislative body. “The center is holding, but it is also true that the extremes on the left and on the right have gained support,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday following the end of Europe’s four-day vote.Among the centrist leaders forced to reckon with the far right’s rise is French President Emmanuel Macron, who called for snap legislative elections on Sunday after opposition leader Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party delivered a crushing defeat to Macron’s Renaissance party in the European Parliament elections—winning around 31 percent of the vote compared with the Renaissance delegation’s less than 15 percent. France’s snap elections will take place on June 30 and July 7.
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S13Donât Bet Against the Dollar - Foreign Policy (No paywall)  It has been 80 years since the Bretton Woods Conference, when the U.S. dollar became the central pillar of the world economy and of U.S. economic statecraft. And for eight decades, we’ve also witnessed predictions about the dollar’s coming demise. But almost from the beginning, the debate about the future of the dollar has missed the mark. The question isn’t about whether an event or a crisis or a new technology will knock the dollar off its pedestal. Rather, it is about how the United States’ competitors, and even partners, are pushing the boundaries of the financial system in a global economy where the dollar still dominates but the post-Cold War consensus is breaking down.It has been 80 years since the Bretton Woods Conference, when the U.S. dollar became the central pillar of the world economy and of U.S. economic statecraft. And for eight decades, we’ve also witnessed predictions about the dollar’s coming demise. But almost from the beginning, the debate about the future of the dollar has missed the mark. The question isn’t about whether an event or a crisis or a new technology will knock the dollar off its pedestal. Rather, it is about how the United States’ competitors, and even partners, are pushing the boundaries of the financial system in a global economy where the dollar still dominates but the post-Cold War consensus is breaking down.
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S15Medical device trials still donât enroll enough women, study finds - STAT (No paywall)  In a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday, researchers found that the percentage of women represented in high-risk medical device trials did not increase from 2010 to 2020. Women generally made up just 33% of participants when the team reviewed 195 trials published from 2016 to 2022. The percentages varied between devices: Women made up 46% of participants in orthopedic trials, but 29% in cardiovascular studies. The issue isn’t new. The government has made some strides in correcting earlier missteps, like the Food and Drug Administration telling researchers in 1977 to exclude women of reproductive potential from early clinical trials. But stakeholders think agencies like the FDA could do more to incentivize the enrollment of women.
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S16 S17 S18 S19Is Hunter Biden a Scapegoat or a Favored Son? - The New Yorker (No paywall)  Coming in by train to Wilmington, Delaware, one of the first things you see is a sign by the glass station doors welcoming you to Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Railroad Station. When I arrived, on Wednesday night, to attend part of Hunter Biden’s trial—he faces three criminal charges, for unlawfully buying and possessing a firearm while using crack cocaine, lying on a federal form, and lying to a federally licensed gun dealer—a tornado warning was in effect, and apocalyptic rain lashed the sides of the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building. In the morning, the sky had cleared; the air was wet yet full of warmth, and the streets of downtown Wilmington exuded a palpable, homey Bidenosity, a rough-around-the-edges charm. At the courthouse, President Biden’s beaming visage greets you in the foyer. The courtroom, on the fourth floor, is an unpretentious wood-panelled affair, with oil paintings and an unobtrusive seal behind the judge’s bench, and a yellowy glow filtering gently from the domed ceiling. The city, with its warts-and-all friendliness, has a small-town feel. The Bidens are its appealingly run-down royalty, who mingle with the commoners: a number of prospective jurors in the case were dismissed after they said that they couldn’t be impartial about Hunter, and one spoke of running into Joe and Jill Biden over the years.The same coziness—now curdled—hung about several of the Delawareans called to testify. The prosecution’s marquee witness, Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter’s brother Beau, met Beau in middle school. As Hunter writes in his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” Beau’s death, from brain cancer, in 2015 upended the family’s lives. Hunter, who’d already grappled with alcohol issues, became addicted to crack and sought out his sister-in-law for comfort. The two fell into a grief-stricken romance. Hallie was dear friends with Kathleen Buhle, Hunter’s first wife, to whom he was still married at the time; Buhle’s daughters—Hallie’s nieces—found evidence of the affair in 2017. The characters in the tragedy are uncomfortably close together, as in an awkward family photo, and the dynastic incestuousness of the situation lends it a gothic quality.
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S20The Immigration Story Nobody Is Talking About - The New Yorker (No paywall)  But at least one economist, who strongly favors liberal immigration policies, was more sympathetic to the White House’s move. “The situation at the southern border has been chaotic,” Giovanni Peri, who directs the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis, told me. “It has been hurting the case for immigration because people have only been talking about that, and not talking about all the migrants who have been coming here and working and boosting the economy.”Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University who is an expert on immigration, said that some of the coverage of the new policy, particularly online, had been misleading. Under certain exceptions enumerated in the plan, at least sixty thousand migrants—with access to parole pending an asylum or other court hearing—are likely to be lawfully admitted to the U.S. each month, about six times as many as under Donald Trump, Clemens said. “This is not a return to Trump,” he told me. “There is no comparison.” Biden’s plan, which went into effect on Wednesday, does limit most asylum claims for migrants crossing between ports of entry, until the daily average of migrant arrests falls and stays below certain thresholds. But Clemens pointed out that migrants could still schedule appointments to appear at border posts, or could apply under a separate, special admissions program that the Biden Administration has set up for residents of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Nevertheless, he and Peri both agreed that there is an urgent need to accompany the new policy with more legal-entry options for the migrants who are trying to cross the southern border. “We can easily absorb these people, and the economy needs them,” Peri said. Clemens also argued that expanding legal channels is necessary to secure the border: “Just denying access is very likely to encourage more clandestine entry. It may be completely ineffective.”
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S21Americaâs Loneliness Has a Concrete Explanation - The Atlantic (No paywall)  The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back.
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S22The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status - The Atlantic (No paywall)  If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.Let’s start with economists’ favorite metric: growth. When an economy is growing, more money is being spent. More stuff is being produced, more services are being performed, more businesses are being started, more workers are being hired—and, because of this abundance, living standards are probably rising. (On the flip side, during a recession—literally, when the economy shrinks—life gets materially worse.) Right now America’s economic-growth rate is the envy of the world. From the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, U.S. GDP grew by 8.2 percent—nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s.
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S23Ransomware Is âMore Brutalâ Than Ever in 2024 - WIRED (No paywall)  Today, people around the world will head to school, doctor's appointments, and pharmacies, only to be told, "Sorry, our computer systems are down." The frequent culprit is a cybercrime gang operating on the other side of the world, demanding payment for system access or the safe return of stolen data.Ransomware may be the defining cybercrime of the past decade, with criminals targeting a wide range of victims including hospitals, schools, and governments. The attackers encrypt critical data, bringing the victim's operation to a grinding halt, and then extort them with the threat of releasing sensitive information. These attacks have had serious consequences. In 2021, the Colonial Pipeline Company was targeted by ransomware, forcing the company to pause fuel delivery and spurring US president Joe Biden to implement emergency measures to meet demand. But ransomware attacks are a daily event around the worldâlast week, ransomware hit hospitals in the UKâand many of them don't make headlines.
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S24Appleâs Biggest AI Challenge? Making It Behave - WIRED (No paywall)  Apple has a history of succeeding despite being late to market so many times before: the iPhone, the Apple Watch, AirPods, to name a few cases. Now the company hopes to show that the same approach will work with generative artificial intelligence, announcing today an Apple Intelligence initiative that bakes the technology into just about every device and application Apple offers.Apple unveiled its long-awaited AI strategy at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) today. "This is a moment we've been working towards for a long time," said Apple CEO Tim Cook at the event. "We're tremendously excited about the power of generating models."
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S25 S26Leaders Need to Reframe the Return-to-Office Conversation - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  There is no easy solution for companies trying to craft policies that balance in-office and flexible working, as there are undeniable benefits to both approaches. But much of the recent messaging from company leaders demanding that employees return to the office has felt tone-deaf at best and dictatorial at worst. To be successful, companies need to engage in dialogue with employees and be explicit and honest about which outcomes are most critical.
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S27How to Get Your Team to Actually Speak Up - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  There is a common leadership misconception that merely encouraging team members to voice their opinions will foster an environment of openness. But people won’t speak up unless they feel safe doing so. As a leader, this means you have to address the underlying reasons for employee reticence, including the individual and systemic barriers to speaking up. This article outlines several tactics that managers can use to provide alternative paths that feel safe for employees to say what’s on their minds. These include expressing genuine intent to hear diverse perspectives, employing standard questions to invite input without creating undue pressure, discussing communication preferences to align with employees’ comfort zones, leveraging your social capital to amplify the voices of underrepresented employees, and accurately attributing credit to recognize individual contributions.
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S28Roger Federer Just Shared the Secret to His Championship Mindset, and It Couldn't Be Simpler - Inc.com (No paywall)  Every match--and victory--can be whittled down into increasingly smaller pieces: sets, games, and points. The 20-time Grand Slam champion played 1,526 singles matches over more than two decades of his professional career and won nearly 80 percent of them, including a record eight men's singles titles at Wimbledon. But when Federer's lifetime performance gets broken down point by point, his winning percentage erodes to 54 percent. That stark difference informs the former world number one's mindset both on and off the court. That's not to say each individual point is not important. Whether preparing a project at work or rallying back and forth across a net, Federer told the graduates, "When you're playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world, and it is. But when it's behind you, it's behind you."
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S29A VC Gets Flamed for Pulling Out of Deals. Founders Say It's All Too Common - Inc.com (No paywall)  He wrote: "had a vc pull a term sheet on a portfolio company at the last minute, when they were on their last month of runway, for basically no reason 2 years ago." The post continued: "same company is exploding in revenue now, and just raised a $30M series b...anyway i hope he saw this." The founders also accused the Santa Monica-based Anthos Capital of doing the unforgivable: Backing out of a major capital infusion right before the finish line, as startups were angling for VC gold. The accusers offered no proof, but observers say that deals get pulled more often than people outside the boardroom might realize.
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S30China has a ânear monopolyâ on many critical minerals. JPMorgan says it could be the ânext battlegroundâ with the U.S. - Fortune (No paywall)  “The Biden administration’s latest tariff announcement on $18 billion of Chinese imports has elevated the debate on whether China’s dominance in the critical minerals supply chain will emerge as the latest battleground for U.S.-China strategic competition,” wrote JPMorgan’s executive director of strategic research, Amy Ho, and global head of research, Joyce Chang, in a note to clients.The U.S. and China’s tit-for-tat trade war began in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on a range of Chinese goods and commodities, including solar panels and steel, citing the country’s intellectual property (IP) theft and unfair trade practices. Since then, tensions between the world’s two largest superpowers have only escalated, with a high-stakes battle over semiconductor IP and manufacturing taking center stage amid the AI boom.
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S31Toyotaâs sterling reputation just took a $15 billion hit after the car giant was found falsifying safety tests - Fortune (No paywall)  Through an internal investigation prompted by a regulator mandate, Toyota found it had not performed safety tests as certification required in five cases related to vehicles including the Crown, Corolla, and the Yaris Cross. In one case involving the Lexus RX, the company had submitted falsified data to meet safety standards and submitted it for certification.Toyota rivals Honda, Mazda, and Suzuki also admitted to falsifying data related to safety certification tests in what amounted to a week of setbacks for Japanese automakers. Mazda, which is Japan’s second-largest automaker, suspended production of the Roadster RF and Mazda 2, while company shares sank more than 7% last week, resulting in a $500 million hit to its market cap, CNBC reported.
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S32Work-From-Home Levels Reach Lowest Since 2020âBut Remote Work Still Dominates These Industries - Forbes (No paywall)  Work-from-home levels in the U.S. have dropped to their lowest point since the spring of 2020, with employees working only 26.6% of their full paid days from home in May as people increasingly return to the office, according to the latest data from WFH Research, though working from home still dominates several white-collar industries.Only 26.6% of paid workdays in the U.S. were done from home in May, down from the pandemic peak of around 60%, and 28.6% in May 2023âmeaning about 1 in 10 workers commuted one more day each week this year compared to last year, according to the study from researchers that included economists from Stanford University and the University of Chicago.
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S33 S34 S35Anatomy of a science meeting: How controversial pesticide research all but vanished from a major conference  For $65,000, the pervasive “Corteva guy” ad – a slot that was exclusively held by Corteva in 2023 – is just one of the dozens of benefits in packages that corporations can purchase this year through a partnership program from the Entomological Society of America, whose conference is considered the Super Bowl of meetings in the field.The society, with nearly 7,000 members, is the largest organization dedicated to entomology in the world. It publishes eight scientific journals and offers prestigious awards and fellowship designations for distinguished scientists. Its meetings lend prestige to scientists who are invited to speak.
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S36The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges | Quanta Magazine  The world is full of such emergent phenomena: large-scale patterns and organization arising from innumerable interactions between component parts. And yet there is no agreed scientific theory to explain emergence. Loosely, the behavior of a complex system might be considered emergent if it can't be predicted from the properties of the parts alone. But when will such large-scale structures and patterns arise, and what's the criterion for when a phenomenon is emergent and when it isn't? Confusion has reigned. "It's just a muddle," said Jim Crutchfield, a physicist at the University of California, Davis."Philosophers have long been arguing about emergence, and going round in circles," said Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. The problem, according to Seth, is that we haven't had the right tools â "not only the tools for analysis, but the tools for thinking. Having measures and theories of emergence would not only be something we can throw at data but would also be tools that can help us think about these systems in a richer way."
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S37 S38The Great Deterioration of Local Community And The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood  But as Zach and I were finishing up the revisions of the book in the fall of 2023, and Zach was running additional analyses and making additional graphs, we began to realize that there was a third act, which predated Act I and caused it: the decline of local community, trust, and social capital. That’s the long process charted in Robert Putnam’s 2000 masterpiece Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and updated in his more recent book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.Building on the country’s long-standing associational spirit, which Alexis de Tocqueville had praised in the 1830s, the extensive civic cooperation and institutional trust developed in the Progressive Era, and solidarity spurred by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the four-year national struggle against Germany and Japan, Americans had extraordinarily high levels of social capital in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Civic groups, voluntary associations, and interfamily networks thrived in this era, giving Americans a strong sense of belonging as well as an abundance of place-based community networks.
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S39 S40The symmetry that shaped physics: Frank Wilczek on Einstein's legacy  Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek is considered by many to be Albert Einstein’s successor. He studied Einstein’s discoveries, expanded upon Einstein’s ideas, and, for several years, even lived in the same house Einstein used to. Wilczek’s dedication led to even more advancements in humanity’s understanding of our world, particularly his work on symmetry in the laws of physics. Thanks to Einstein, scientists were introduced to the concept of symmetry amid theories of general relativity and the fundamental laws of physics. Though he hadn’t explicitly articulated the role of symmetry in our universe, he did set up a framework that future scientists could expand upon.
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S41How to be authentically happy in a world full of suffering  When Beauvoir was a student she wondered if, given all the suffering in the world, happiness might be a privileged way of being. Perhaps it is only available to the select few who are deemed deserving of it, or those who pursue the right things in the right ways. Sometimes Beauvoir would throw her pen in exasperation: “If it comes, take it— it is only worthwhile if it is life— it is absurd to refuse it, absurd to seek it.”In one of her later memoirs, Beauvoir said she never quite broke free from yearning for happiness, though she was aware that her obsession with happiness had initially distracted her from taking politics seriously. This is what Beauvoir’s notion of freedom warns against: letting the pursuit of happiness slide into self-interest, self-sacrifice, or short-termism.
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S42Lawmakers Seek a Closer Look at NewsBreak App Over Chinese Origins, Fake News Stories  Three U.S. lawmakers have called for more scrutiny of NewsBreak, a popular news aggregation app in the United States, after Reuters reported it has Chinese origins and has used artificial intelligence tools to produce erroneous stories.The Reuters story drew upon previously unreported court documents related to copyright infringement, cease-and-desist emails, and a 2022 company memo registering concerns about "AI-generated stories" to identify at least 40 instances in which NewsBreak's use of AI tools affected the communities it strives to serve.
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S43New York State Passes Bill to Protect Youths on Social Media  New York state lawmakers on Friday passed legislation to bar social media platforms from exposing "addictive" algorithmic content to users under age 18 without parental consent, becoming the latest of several states moving to limit online risks to children.A companion bill to restrict online sites from collecting and selling the personal data of underage users also gained final legislative approval in the New York Assembly on Friday, a day after both measures cleared the state Senate.
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S44Ouch! Adobe Just Got Dragged on Social Media Over a Boring Terms of Service Update  In an era when rapidly-advancing artificial intelligence has made many consumers skeptical of tech companies' intentions, it was a case study in how trust can break down when confusion reigns, even from something as dry as a TOS notification.Screenshots of Adobe's legal update that circulated on social media last week--as well as a blog post that Adobe subsequently released June 6 to address the controversy--indicate that the terms of service were tweaked to say the company could access users' content "through both automated and manual methods." The terms also say machine learning can be used to analyze user content, although that line predates the update.
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S45A Pot Crunch Looms on Martha's Vineyard as Supply Dries Up  An 81-year-old woman on Martha's Vineyard drove up to the Island Time dispensary last week seeking her usual order of pot. But owner Geoff Rose had to tell her the cupboard was bare--he'd been forced to temporarily close three weeks earlier after selling every last bud and gummy.Unless something changes, the island's only other cannabis dispensary will sell all its remaining supplies by September at the latest, and Martha's Vineyard will run out of pot entirely, affecting more than 230 registered medical users and thousands more recreational ones.
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S46How This Latina Founder Celebrates Her Heritage--and Her Family--With Swicy Sauces  It's Immigrant Heritage Month -- a time to celebrate the contributions of immigrants to the United States. Immigrants like Annie Leal, who -- despite the fact that businesses owned by Latino immigrants generate approximately 20 percent less revenue than those owned by U.S.-born Latinos -- has found her own secret sauce to success.Leal, 33, launched her McAllen, Texas-based company I Love Chamoy, which makes sugar-free Mexican candy sauces, in 2021. While rummaging through her diabetic dad's sugar-free cabinet, Leal longed for the vibrant flavors of her Mexican childhood.Â
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S47 S48 S49Apple Just Announced Apple Intelligence, Powered by ChatGPT  At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the company announced an expansive partnership to bring ChatGPT to Apple's family of devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and Macbook. The chatbot will be integrated with Siri and Apple's writing tools, like Notes and Pages.At the event, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi introduced Apple Intelligence as the tech giant's entry into the competitive genAI field. Apple Intelligence allows you to harness the power of genAI to instantly write replies to emails and texts in your own writing style, edit photos, or do things like create custom emojis of yourself and your friends.Â
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S50More Small Businesses Seek to Include Neurodiverse Talent  Large tech companies have made a practice of recruiting autistic and other neurodiverse employees, many of whom have an aptitude for pattern recognition and detail, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. But now, companies in retail, construction, and finance are falling in the tech giants' footsteps, according to the Journal -- and this includes small businesses.Ed Thompson, founder of Denver, Colorado-based neurodiversity training company Uptimize, has implemented neuroinclusve training programs at large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Accenture. But as of late, Thompson says, the greatest increase in demand for Uptimize's services has come from SMBs.Â
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