Ken Schafer

August 9, 2022

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Opinion | The Case for Longtermism

“Guest Essay The Case for Longtermism Aug. 5, 2022 Credit… Tim Enthoven Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.…”
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Opinion | Why does the IRS need $80 billion? Just look at its cafeteria.

“Opinion Why does the IRS need $80 billion? Just look at its cafeteria. By and Photos by Matthew Busch This is the cafeteria at the Internal Revenue Service…”

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The Perils of Audience Capture

“I. The Man Who Ate Himself In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued…”

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The Rehearsal’s Most Mind-Bending Episode Yet Reveals What the Show Is Really About

“Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal episode, “The Fielder Method.” HBO What does Nathan Fielder want? Or should we perhaps ask what, exactly, does “Nathan Fielder,”…”
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Five Sci-Fi Classics, One Summer: How 1982 Shaped Our Present

““Blade Runner,” “E.T.,” “Tron,” “The Wrath of Khan” and “The Thing” all arrived that one season 40 years ago to become indelible and influential. The future is…”
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Four ways of looking at The Rehearsal

“Nathan Fielder, the mastermind of The Rehearsal . HBO Imagine a TV show so profoundly strange that the more you thought about it, the less you knew what it ……”
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What was the Schleswig-Holstein Question anyway?

““Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business,” occasional British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston is reputed to have said. “The…”

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How a Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

“Mike Esposito still won’t say who gave him the tip about the records. But on July 14, he went public with an explosive claim. In a sometimes halting video…”

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Footprints Discovery Suggests Ancient ‘Ghost Tracks’ May Cover the West

“Footprints discovered on the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City. Credit… Daron Duke The set of 88 prints is about 12,000…”
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Speculation Is on Fire Around HBO Max’s Future, Planned Layoffs in Major Streaming Shake-Up

“Speculation Is on Fire Around HBO Max’s Future, Planned Layoffs in Major Streaming Shake-Up by , Brandon Katz and Umberto Gonzalez | August 3, 2022 @ 11:23 AM…”
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Why Old Spice, Colgate and Dawn are locked up at drug stores

“New York (CNN Business) These days, it feels like many stores are fortresses. Most of the products on the drug store shelf are behind lock and key, even…”

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The Ace Hotel brings Toronto architecture to a new level

“The Ace Hotel’s main entrance on Camden Street cuts through a facade made up of brick-fronted panels. Younes Bounhar/Doublespace Photography/The Globe and Mail…”

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TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

“Last month, Blake Chandlee, TikTok ’s president of global business solutions, was asked if he was concerned about competition from existing social-media…”
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The campaign to rename monkeypox gets complicated

“S ince the earliest days of the current global monkeypox outbreak, scientists and public health authorities have been calling for the disease to be renamed,…”

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The End of Social Media

“Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash Recommendation media is the new standard for content distribution. Here’s why friend graphs can‘t compete in an algorithmic…”
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‘You can’t say that!’: how to argue, better

“A few years ago, I had an argument with a close friend who had decided not to give his children any vaccinations . To preserve our relationship, I vowed never…”

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US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

“Enlarge / NuScale’s reactor-in-a-can. NuScale On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new…”

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Is This the Future of Urban Resilience?

“What began as a defensive measure to protect Canada’s largest city from extreme flooding has evolved into one of the most ambitious urban resilience projects in…”
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What’s the Deal With Water Bottles?

“July 9, 2022 A solitary figure, a microphone and a stool. Those are the primary images of stand-up comedy — as reliable and ubiquitous as a book’s cover, spine…”
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Of the hundreds of methods out there to help us get things done…why don’t they, you know, work?

“Back in 2010, Walter Chen and Rodrigo Guzman had a weird idea: a website where you write down the stuff you accomplished that day, and which then emails you a…”

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The habits that help prevent allergies

“As a child, Isabelle Gerretsen suffered from a wide range of food allergies. Could scientific advances save others from having to endure the same? W When I was…”
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Is Beyoncé’s Latest Album Rollout (Gasp!) Conventional?

“The singer, who has prioritized innovation over commercial domination, has opted for a more standard playbook ahead of her seventh solo album, “Renaissance,”…”
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The Internet Is a Collective Hallucination

“Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both…”

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A terrifying new theory: Fake news and conspiracy theories as an evolutionary strategy

“Political misinformation — whether “fake news,” conspiracy theories or outright lying — has often been attributed to widespread ignorance, even though there are…”
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‘Operating With Increased Intensity’: Zuckerberg Leads Meta Into Next Phase

“Facebook’s founder is setting a relentless pace as he pushes his company through a tech transformation during a global economic slowdown. Send any friend a…”

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The Search for America’s Atlantis

“Editor’s note: This article is part of a new series called “ Who Owns America’s Wilderness? ” Like apparitions , California’s Channel Islands sometimes vanish…”
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We Need to Keep Building Houses, Even if No One Wants to Buy

“Right now, builders have too many homes and not enough people to sell them to. In the long term, the United States has the opposite problem: Not enough houses…”
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Results: The Computerized Philosopher: Can You Distinguish Daniel Dennett from a Computer?

“Chat-bots are amazing these days! About a month ago LaMDA made the news when it apparently convinced an engineer at Google that it was sentient. GPT-3 from…”
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Prenups Aren’t Just for Rich People Anymore

“A few months after Sandy Webb moved from Indiana to Arizona, in 1994, she and a close friend decided to go out for drinks at a bar known for its country…”
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Very Online

““O urs is a period of increasing noise,” Jason Parham wrote earlier this year, for Wired . “Everything is bleeding into everything around it. All trends, large…”