   
CEO Picks - The most popular editorials that have stood the test of time!
The Russian Family That Cut Itself Off From Civilization for More Than 40 Years
 By the time the geologists made contact with the family, the Lykovs had been living away from the world for approximately 40 years. World War II had passed without their knowledge, and Smithsonian reported that Karp didn\'t believe that we had landed on the moon - though he had a feeling we had at least made it to space, judging by the streaking satellites he had observed. "People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars," he said.
The family remained in the dark about much of the progress of the 20th century, and they were greatly interested in the new technology they were shown. Dmitry, in particular, was astonished by a circular saw that could accomplish in moments what would take him hours or days to finish. Karp, on the other hand, seemed most excited by the geologists\' gift of salt, which the family patriarch described as "true torture" to live without.
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Most Dictators Self Destruct. Why?
 In most cases, democratization has followed an authoritarian ruler\'s mistake.
With authoritarian rulers ascendant in many parts of the world, one wonders what must happen for their countries to liberalize. The likes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey or Xi Jinping in China are entrenched, experienced and not unpopular -- so should their opponents simply resign themselves to an open-ended period of illiberal rule?
According to Daniel Treisman, a UCLA political scientist, that\'s not necessarily the case. For a recent paper, he analyzed 218 episodes of democratization between 1800 and 2015 and found they were, with some exceptions (such as Danish King Frederick VII\'s voluntary acceptance of a constitution in 1848), the result of authoritarian rulers\' mistakes in seeking to hold on to power. The list of these errors is both a useful handbook.
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Insomnia: Sleeplessness Traced Back to Five Different Personality Types
 Sleeplessness affects people in vastly different ways. For some people, insomnia is linked to endless exposure to blue light, while in others, it indicates a struggle with depression. Because there\'s such a wide range of factors that can lead to the same condition, it\'s not always easy to identify and address the problems that various sleepless individuals face. That\'s why the authors of a recent Lancet Psychiatry paper propose a different way of looking at insomnia: by tracing it back to five personality types.
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'Fat burning zone'? The best way to exercise to burn fat
 When it comes to losing weight, people often want know the best way to shed excess pounds - and there\'s no shortage of fad diets or fitness crazes claiming to have the "secret" to fat loss. One theory even suggests that exercising at around 60% of your maximum heart rate will bring our bodies into a so-called "fat burning zone", optimal for losing weight.
But does this "fat burning zone" even exist?
First, it\'s important to understand a little about our metabolism. Even if we were to sit at our desk all day, our body still needs "fuel" to meet energy demands. This energy comes from carbohydrates, proteins, fats and phosphates. However, the rate at which we use them, and how much we have available, varies between people. It depends on a number of factors, such as dietary intake, age, sex and how hard or often we exercise.
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Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
/media/img/mt/2020/08/Atlantic_covid_immunity_v2/original.png) There\'s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, "Well, I\'ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people." Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. "What have you done?" they ask. The immunologist says, "The thing is, the immune system is very complicated ..." And the cardiologist says, "Just shoot me now."
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The Incredibly True Story of Renting a Friend in Tokyo
 When you\'re alone in Tokyo and you need someone to talk to, do as the locals do: Rent a friend.
It\'s muggy and I\'m confused. I don\'t understand where I am, though it was only a short walk from my Airbnb studio to this little curry place. I don\'t understand the lunch menu, or even if it is a lunch menu. Could be a religious tract or a laminated ransom note. I\'m new in Tokyo, and sweaty, and jet-lagged. But I am entirely at ease. I owe this to my friend Miyabi. She\'s one of those reassuring presences, warm and eternally nodding and unfailingly loyal, like she will never leave my side. At least not for another 90 minutes, which is how much of her friendship I\'ve paid for.
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How a White Lie Gave Japan KFC for Christmas
 One cunning business maneuver created a tradition and saved a franchise.
This year, millions of people across Japan will celebrate Christmas around buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Families will order "Party Barrels" weeks in advance, replete with this year\'s offering of cole slaw, shrimp gratin, triple-berry tiramisu cake, and, of course, fried chicken. Santa-clad Colonel Sanders statues will stand at attention outside storefronts, grinning mutely through December as KFC Japan sales multiply tenfold, earning the chain a third of its annual income. The corporate promotion is one of Japan\'s longest-standing Christmas traditions.
As with most Christmas traditions, it all started with a marketing campaign. For years, English-language media cited company spokespeople, who said the idea came from expats looking for an alternative to turkey. There was never a reason to doubt the company\'s account, until the man who brought KFC to Japan spoke up. Takeshi Okawara, manager of Japan\'s first KFC, came forward in recent years with a confession that upended years of innocent origin narratives - a confession that KFC denies. The man who brought the Colonel to Japan says it started with a lie.
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So You Want to Be an Entrepreneur?
 When I graduated from college in 2001, I didn\'t have a single friend whose plan was to start his or her own business. Med school, law school, finance, consulting: these were the coveted jobs, the clear paths laid out before us. I took a job in advertising, which was seen as much more rebellious than the reality. I worked in advertising for a few years, and learned an incredible amount about how brands get built and communicated. But I grew restless and bored, tasked with coming up with new campaigns for old and broken products that lacked relevance, unable to influence the products themselves. During that time, I was lucky to have an amazing boss who explained a simple principle that fundamentally altered my path. What she told me was that stress is not about how much you have on your plate; it\'s about how much control you have over the outcomes. Suddenly I realized why every Sunday night I was overcome with a feeling of dread. It wasn\'t because I had too much going on at work. It was because I had too little power to effect change.
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Why your 'weak-tie' friendships may mean more than you think?
 In 1973, Mark Granovetter, a sociology professor at Stanford University, published a paper entitled The Strength of Weak Ties. It went on to become one of the most influential sociology papers of all time. Until then scholars had assumed that an individual\'s well-being depended mainly on the quality of relationships with close friends and family. Granovetter showed that quantity matters, too.
One way to think about any person\'s social world is that you have an inner circle of people whom you often talk to and feel close with, and an outer circle of acquaintances whom you see infrequently or fleetingly. Granovetter named these categories "strong ties" and "weak ties". His central insight was that for new information and ideas, weak ties are more important to us than strong ones.
Granovetter surveyed 282 Boston-based workers and found that most of them got their jobs through someone they knew. But only a minority got the job through a close friend; 84% got their job through those weak-tie relationships - casual contacts whom they saw only occasionally. As Granovetter pointed out, the people whom you spend a lot of time with swim in the same pool of information as you do. We depend on friendly outsiders to bring us news of opportunities from beyond our immediate circles - and so the more of those acquaintances we have, the better.
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Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong
 In the 1990s, a troupe of hippies spent two years sealed inside a dome called Biosphere 2. They ended up starving and gasping for breath. As a new documentary Spaceship Earth tells their story, we meet the \'biospherians\'
It sounds like a sci-fi movie, or the weirdest series of Big Brother ever. Eight volunteers wearing snazzy red jumpsuits seal themselves into a hi-tech glasshouse that\'s meant to perfectly replicate Earth\'s ecosystems. They end up starving, gasping for air and at each other\'s throats - while the world\'s media looks on.
But the Biosphere 2 experiment really did happen. Running from 1991 to 1993, it is remembered as a failure, if it is remembered at all - a hubristic, pseudo-scientific experiment that was never going to accomplish its mission. However, as the new documentary Spaceship Earth shows, the escapade is a cautionary tale, now that the outside world - Biosphere 1, if you prefer - is itself coming to resemble an apocalyptic sci-fi world. Looking back, it\'s amazing that Biosphere 2 even happened at all, not least because the people behind it started out as a hippy theatre group.
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Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered
 Being bad-tempered and pessimistic helps you to earn more, live longer and enjoy a healthier marriage. It\'s almost enough to put a smile on the dourest of faces.
The pressure to be positive has never been greater. Cultural forces have whipped up a frenzied pursuit of happiness, spawning billion-dollar book sales, a cottage industry in self-help and plastering inspirational quotes all over the internet.
Now you can hire a happiness expert, undertake training in \'mindfulness\', or seek inner satisfaction via an app. The US army currently trains its soldiers - over a million people - in positive psychology and optimism is taught in UK schools. Meanwhile the \'happiness index\' has become an indicator of national wellbeing to rival GDP.
The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack.
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Thrilling Tales of Modern Capitalism - Floating Hellscapes: The Carnival Corporation
 The biggest cruise ship company in the world has navigated its way through crisis after crisis. Now, it\'s found itself at the center of a pandemic.
For decades, Carnival Corporation has successfully sold affordable luxury to passengers, becoming the largest cruise ship business in the world.
The reason why a vacation at sea can be so inexpensive has to do with both the vision of Carnival\'s founder and the historical origins of the cruise industry itself. But that affordability can also come with unpleasant consequences. Now, the entire industry\'s future has been thrown into doubt by a deadly virus.
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This Pacific island nation plans to raise itself above the ocean to survive sea level rise
 The previous president of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Pacific, predicted that the country\'s citizens would eventually become climate refugees, forced to relocate as sea level rise puts the islands underwater. But a new president elected in June now plans to elevate key areas of land above the rising seas instead.
In the right conditions, islands such as Kiribati\'s - coral atolls that surround lagoons - can actually naturally grow as the sea rises, says Paul Kench, dean of science at Simon Fraser University, who has been studying how the islands respond to sea level rise and who advises the Kiribati government. "The islands are made up of sand and gravel, so essentially they\'re really just large beaches," he says. "The elevation and the shape of these islands are controlled by waves that interact with the reef and transport sand and gravel to form the islands."
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Keep it clean: The surprising 130-year history of handwashing
 "If there had to be a father of handwashing it would be Ignaz Semmelweis," says Miryam Wahrman, a professor of biology at William Paterson University in New Jersey and author of The Hand Book: Surviving in a Germ-Filled World. While working at Vienna General hospital, the Hungarian doctor was at the forefront of a more scientific approach to medicine. Faced with a doctor-led maternity ward in which maternal deaths from the dreaded childbed fever were significantly higher than in the midwife-run clinic there, he racked his brain for clues as to why.
Germs were yet to be discovered, and it was still believed in the 1840s that disease was spread by miasma - bad smells in the air - emanating from rotting corpses, sewage or vegetation. Victorians kept their windows firmly shut against such malevolent forces. So it didn\'t seem a problem that trainee doctors at Vienna General would hang out in the morgue dissecting corpses to figure out what had rendered them dead and then pop up to the maternity ward to deliver a baby without washing their hands.
One of them then accidentally got cut by a scalpel during a dissection and died, seemingly of the same childbed fever the mothers had been getting. Semmelweis hypothesised that cadaverous particles from the morgue were to blame, and that such particles on the hands of doctors were making their way into women\'s bodies during childbirth.
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Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?
 It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century - and assuming fossil-fuelâ€"fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius.
A paper published in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - a developing fix for climate change - also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
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What Mentors Wish Their Mentees Knew
 The mentor-mentee relationship is a tango between a more senior person and a junior one. Just as in dance, coordination and orchestration between parties is necessary for grace and success. And while we and others have written about what makes the ideal mentor, comparatively less attention has been given to the other partner. This gap is unfortunate because, like mentorship, menteeship requires specific behaviors - without which the mentee’s success may be threatened. In this article, we outline six habits of ideal mentees and provide anecdotes and views from our combined years of academic experience.
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Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others
 People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we\'re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we\'re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins\'s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.
Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, focuses on the first - the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.
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The Math of Social Distancing Is a Lesson in Geometry
 How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries.
Sphere packing might seem like a topic only a mathematician could love. Who else could get excited about finding the most efficient way to arrange circles in the plane, or spheres in space?
But right now, millions of people all over the world are thinking about this very problem.
Determining how to safely reopen buildings and public spaces under social distancing is in part an exercise in geometry: If each person must keep six feet away from everyone else, then figuring out how many people can sit in a classroom or a dining room is a question about packing non-overlapping circles into floor plans.
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"All These Rich People Can't Stop Themselves": The Luxe Quarantine Lives of Silicon Valley's Elite
 Travis Kalanick is throwing (outdoor) parties, private-jet owners are hopping from safe zone to safe zone, and dinner party hosts are administering 15-minute COVID-19 rapid tests - all business as usual. "Coronavirus is a poor person\'s virus," says one source.
Are you going to Travis Kalanick\'s party this weekend?" read a text that popped up on my phone a couple of weeks ago. "Umm, no!" I replied. First, I wasn\'t invited. (Kalanick is not a big fan of mine, or most other people who have written about him.) But more importantly, this message landed in my inbox smack in the middle of a spike in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles, where Kalanick now lives. (Kalanick held the party outside, according to two people with knowledge of the soiree, and it was a smaller gathering than pre-COVID parties he is known for.)
Kalanick isn\'t the only one throwing parties during the worst pandemic in 100 years. I\'ve heard about parties from Palm Springs to Palo Alto, business meetings on the slopes in Colorado after a mountain-biking sesh, electric surfing in Hawaii, and billionaires traveling the world on their private jets, hopping from state to state, country to country, intentionally following the lowest COVID rates of the previous week. "All these rich people can\'t stop themselves," one person who is close to a number of wealthy tech CEOs and venture capitalists told me. "They just can\'t stop themselves from throwing parties and going on their jets and socializing as if everything was normal."
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What's wrong with WhatsApp
 For all the benefits that WhatsApp offers in helping people feel close to others, its rapid ascendency is one further sign of how a common public world - based upon verified facts and recognised procedures - is disintegrating. WhatsApp is well equipped to support communications on the margins of institutions and public discussion: backbenchers plotting coups, parents gossipping about teachers, friends sharing edgy memes, journalists circulating rumours, family members forwarding on unofficial medical advice. A society that only speaks honestly on the margins like this will find it harder to sustain the legitimacy of experts, officials and representatives who, by definition, operate in the spotlight. Meanwhile, distrust, alienation and conspiracy theories become the norm, chipping away at the institutions that might hold us together.
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Data Science and the Art of Persuasion
 Data science is growing up fast. Over the past five years companies have invested billions to get the most-talented data scientists to set up shop, amass zettabytes of material, and run it through their deduction machines to find signals in the unfathomable volume of noise. It\'s working - to a point. Data has begun to change our relationship to fields as varied as language translation, retail, health care, and basketball.
But despite the success stories, many companies aren\'t getting the value they could from data science. Even well-run operations that generate strong analysis fail to capitalize on their insights. Efforts fall short in the last mile, when it comes time to explain the stuff to decision makers.
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The story of La Colombe Coffee Roasters: Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti (1 hour podcast)
 When Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti met at a grunge concert in Seattle in the 1980s, they were an unlikely pair. But they shared a love for great coffee, and the two friends began to dream about opening a cafe and premium roastery that would produce coffee at a higher quality than anything available in the U.S. at the time.
La Colombe started out as one shop in a run-down part of Philadelphia. Today you can find its cold brew cans in tons of convenience stores across the U.S. And the company is now valued at around a billion dollars, but to get there was a long slow grind. J.P. Iberti was born in southern France where his dad ran a business supplying fresh meat and produce to restaurants, but Todd grew up literally and figuratively half a world away in Eastern Washington State, where a lot of times his mom struggled to put food on the table.
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The hackers getting paid to keep the internet safe
 It had taken a month of work, but Jesse Kinser had finally hit the jackpot. The security researcher had managed to pull off quite a feat - stealing the source code for more than 10,000 different websites, including a big four consulting company - and the ramifications of her find were staggering.
But contrary to many people\'s perceptions of shadowy hackers, her next move wasn\'t trading the data on the dark web, or crafting exploits to sell to the highest bidder. Rather, she was faced with a different sort of daunting task: developing a responsible disclosure process to notify the thousands of vulnerable companies she\'d just owned. That\'s right, after accessing all that code, her next job was to let the victims know exactly how she\'d done it - and how they could stop someone with a different set of moral guideposts from doing the same.
It\'s all in a day\'s work for the researchers who, driven by curiosity, a common sense of purpose, and the real possibility of financial reward, spend their time hunting bugs online. Welcome to the world of bug bounties, where the hackers are the good guys - or, just as often, the good gals.
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