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「這次，『它』真的變得不一樣了……。」時間往前推，今年三月，全球最大的上市避險基金集團英仕曼（ManGroup），在官網發布了一篇分析報告，報告核心，圍繞在一個已開發國家近年推行的資本市場改革。報告的結論是這麼下的：「它付出的努力，曾經收效甚微，但，這一切很可能即將改變。」 「轉型」、「不一樣」……，這些象徵著自我革新與重生的語彙，指向的，是一個經濟發展停滯逾三十年的國度——日本。 「過去十年，是這個國家的盤整期，」談到日本的未來展望時，元大金控策略長吳杰用篤定與樂觀的語氣提出定調：「現在，它即將全面邁入復興的階段。」 時間回到五月十七日，當天，代表日本大型股表現的日經二二五指數升破了三萬點關卡，不僅創下二○二一年九月以來新高，更逼近一九九○年八月以來的最高水平；同期間，反映日本整體企業表現的東證指數（Topix）也突破了二一二七點，來到三十三年高位。 帶動日股創新高的一大功臣，是外資。 根據日本財務省日前公布的統計資料顯示，今年四月，外資在日本股市總計買超四．九八兆日圓，這個單月買超金額，創下自○五年一月日本開始統計外資動向以來的歷史最高紀錄。 另一邊，…

If you’ve ever learned a new language — or tried to — you know how difficult it can be. Native languages seem almost built-in. We soak them up naturally when we’re very young. But learning a new language, especially after early childhood, can be a huge task, burdened by long vocabulary lists and genders to memorize, complex cases and troublesome tenses to master. Of course, it’s worth the effort. In today’s interconnected world, learning a new language can change your life. It will certainly change your brain. ALTERNATE ROUTES Learning anything changes your brain, at least a little bit. But learning a language does it in high gear. John Grundy, a neuroscientist at Iowa State University who specializes in bilingualism and the brain, explains that learning a new language causes extensive neuroplasticity in…

How can I fix a small area of peeling paint in my bathroom? IF YOU HAVE leftover paint in the original color, check to see if it’s still usable, says Rich Handel, who oversees paint ratings at CR. You’ll know the paint is too old to use if you find a thick, rubberlike layer sitting on top of the paint, or the paint doesn’t mix well when stirred. (Paint that’s still usable should stay blended for 10 to 15 minutes after mixing.) To test it, try painting a small area on a piece of cardboard: The paint should go onto the surface smoothly, and the color should be uniform. If you determine that the paint isn’t usable, take the can to a paint or home improvement store and ask whether it…

EVEN BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, HOPIN WAS A good idea. The British startup, founded by first-time entrepreneur Johnny Boufarhat in 2019, offered an online venue for virtual talks, breakout rooms, and one-on-one networking – an engaging alternative to expensive, large-scale conferences. Hopin began 2020 with a 10,000-strong waitlist of conference organisers seeking early access. But, in February that year, when coronavirus swept in-person events off the table, potential customers got impatient. “We had a ton of people that were upset with us for not letting them through, so we decided we need to expand as fast as we can and to hire as quickly as possible,” Boufarhat recalls. “I was on Twitter looking for people who had just been furloughed, because I knew they’d be able to start tomorrow; I had people…

The Dadisi Crew is an eclectic bunch. Dre is athletic and passionate about astronomy, Maya is adventurous and loves to code, and Amara is a budding environmental scientist who encourages her friends to recycle. A couple of things bind the group together: Each member is fascinated with a cutting-edge discipline, and they’re all Black characters. The fictional clique and their circle of friends are the creation of Terri-Nichelle Bradley, a Black mom of four who’s determined to inspire Black kids to pursue well-paying careers in STEAM—science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. The characters are at the heart of her company, Brown Toy Box, which makes educational play kits featuring fields such as chemistry, museum arts, and robotics. “My dream is for a child to walk up to me 10 years from now,…

It’s unusual for a governor to denounce one of his state’s biggest and most prominent employers. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on Walt Disney Co. for criticizing a new law curtailing what schools can teach students about gender identity and sexual orientation aren’t likely to be a limited instance. Instead, they’re another sign that political fights—especially for presidential hopefuls like DeSantis—are expanding from legislatures to corporations and the business world. Last month, under pressure from activists and its own employees, Disney put out a statement declaring that the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, as critics have dubbed it, “should never have been passed and should never have been signed into law.” The company vowed to work to help get it repealed or struck down in court. Disney’s actions follow what’s recently become…

THE PREVAILING NARRATIVE in business today is one of ever faster change and creative destruction: Big Tech companies are taking over, the number of unicorns (start-ups worth $1 billion) keeps growing, the average tenure of old-economy companies on the S&P 500 is plummeting, and incumbency has never been worth less. The message to established firms—play catch-up or die—is bleak. But let’s look at the bigger picture. Yes, there’s no denying the exponential growth of the large tech companies or the cautionary tales of disruption’s famous victims (think Nokia, Kodak, and Blockbuster). However, over the past three decades many large sectors of the economy have not been disrupted—that is, taken over by tech-enabled competitors that serve customers more efficiently and cheaply than incumbents do—to any significant degree. Indeed, most established firms are…

WATCH THE MASTERS ESPN and CBS, April 8–11 Tony Finau should be one of the biggest stars in golf. Everything about his game is outsize, from his height (6' 4") to his power off the tee (he has said he is chasing Bryson DeChambeau, and he is one of the few who can catch him) to his smile. He has a memorable name, a fun backstory, he is perpetually in contention and he might be the nicest player on the PGA Tour. There is just one small problem: He never wins. From October 2017 through the beginning of March, Finau finished in second place eight times. He didn’t win once. His run of near-greatness is maddening; it seems so statistically unlikely that one wonders whether Finau was born with a severe trophy allergy, or…

The winds this April morning were giving Wayne Boone’s massive 2007 semitrailer a good lashing. A driver for a paper recycling company in Virginia, US, Boone steered the empty 18-wheeler up a stretch of the highway, to pick up his first load of the day. The 53-year-old driver pulled into the eastbound left lane of the G.A. Treakle Memorial Bridge, known to locals as the I-64 High Rise, a four-lane drawbridge traversing the Elizabeth River. On the span, the storm let loose its full force, finding no obstacles in its path but vehicles, which it pummelled. Boone slowed as wind and rain hammered his windshield. At the bridge’s crest, 21 metres above the rushing estuary, the concrete road gave way to steel decking. Boone’s front wheels met the slick steel just as…

ESSENTIALS GETTING THERE Zakopane – the base for exploring the area – is a two-hour drive from Kraków Balice airport. It’s served by BA and others including Ryanair, easyJet, Wizz and Jet2 (from £70; wizzair.com). You could travel by train from London to Kraków in 22 hours, or make the most of it with some great city stop-offs en route. One such option would be going via Brussels, Copenhagen and Berlin (trainline.com). GETTING AROUND The trip is possible without a car. Take a bus or airport transfer to Zakopane and go by foot and city buses, private mini-buses and taxis. A car gives more freedom, and you you shouldn’t need snow chains or a 4WD on main roads (all major outlets operate from the airport, from £16 per day; arguscarhire.com). FURTHER INFO See Lonely Planet’s…

MICHAEL C. HALL can guess what you’re thinking, Dexter fans: Eight years later, you’re probably still mad about that final episode—the one that ended up on countless “worst series finales of all time” lists. And he’s mindful of how devoted you are, especially those who’ve asked him to autograph their kitchen knives. So yes, he feels your pain. “It was so confounding for people,” Hall, 50, says of the series ender, in which Dexter Morgan—forensic-blood-splatter analyst by day, vigilante serial killer, um, also by day—threw his dead sister, Deb (Jennifer Carpenter), into the angry waters off Miami. “I can appreciate how it was pretty dissatisfying for anyone who was hoping for something definitive or some sense of closure,” the actor adds of Dexter faking his own death and moving to a…

They said we’d never last. They were off, thankfully, by approximately 32 years and some 1,600 issues, but the armchair pundits had a point: Who could have guessed that a weekly entertainment magazine born at the dawn of The Simpsons and CD-ROMs would go on to become its own cultural touchstone? The idea at the time—either revolutionary or delusional, depending on your framing—was to create a new space in journalism, a publication that didn’t just cover what was new in movies and television and books and music (streaming was yet but a twinkle of a dream) but lived for it, from every angle. And for the next three-plus decades, EW would share one promise with its readers: that we were as incurably curious and passionate and outright obsessive about all…

選股會是你的困擾嗎？獲利成長的好公司，當你發現時，股價是不是都已經漲到買不下手了？你是不是在想，如果能找到獲利成長，股價又很便宜的公司該有多好？《投資家日報》總監孫慶龍表示，投資大師喬伊．葛林布雷（Joel Greenblt）有一個平均年賺40%的神奇公式，套用在台股也可以讓你找到，平均年賺40%的標的。 葛林布雷是誰？他是美國哥倫比亞商學院的教授，同時也是戈坦資本投資（GothamCapital）的創辦人，該公司成立於1985年，之後的20年間，每年平均報酬率達40%，竟然比股神巴菲特（WarrenBuffett）的績效還高！ 孫慶龍 出生：1977年 學歷： 成功大學中國文學系、英國艾克斯特（Exeter）大學財務管理研究所 經歷：致理科技大學財金系講師 現職：《投資家日報》總監 以稅前淨利為計算基礎更能貼近公司營運狀況 葛林布雷著作有3本暢銷書籍，《你也可以成為股市天才（You Can Be a Stock MarketGenius）》、《超越大盤的獲利公式（The Little Book That Beats the Market）》，以及《不買飆股，年均獲利40%（The…

Some of the materials use are considered irreplaceable in terms of the building process. Concrete, iron, and aluminium are such cases, used over a long time because of the ease of their production and construction. However, lots of carbon is emitted in the mining and manufacture of raw materials to obtain these materials and to transport them to construction sites. According to data released in 2020 by Architecture 2030, a nonprofit architectural organisation established to cope with the climate crisis, the amount of carbon emitted by concrete, iron, and aluminium accounts for about 23% of the annual carbon emissions on earth. With a growing social consensus that this fact should be taken more seriously, the number of materials that consider carbon reduction is on the rise, with performance comparable to…

四月二十六日，星宇航空創辦人張國煒親自執飛，台北洛杉磯的首航。 這是重要性不亞於三年前開航的飛行任務。 飛向北美天空，意味著星宇從區域走向國際。猶如四十年前，張國煒的父親張榮發獨排眾議，大膽開出橫跨太平洋與大西洋的雙向環球航線，讓長榮海運由亞洲船公司變成世界第一。 「他們（父子）DNA是一樣的，都很有魄力、很有魅力，」長榮集團出身、前中菲行執行長林天送評論。 北美首航，轉動了星宇最關鍵的中轉客商模。這位台灣唯一、世界少數同時擁有機師和維修證照的航空公司董事長，要驗證自己「從王子變成King（國王）」，只能贏不能輸的不可能任務。 首航倒數前兩天，星宇航空的營運大腦，張國煒與執行長翟健華所在的內湖總部十六樓，透明辦公室一目了然，從主管房內到開放空間的討論區，沒有一張會議桌是空的，都處於作戰模式。就連秘書遞送文件也都急如風、甚至小跑步。 競爭對手不是兩位老大哥 當年， 看好亞洲成為世界工廠，張榮發大膽擴張海運版圖，捉住趨勢破浪。而張國煒眼中的航空市場，「台灣的地理位置這麼好，如果你善用它，台灣市場無限大，真的太大了，」張國煒左右手，翟健華提高音調分析。…

Arguably the most sophisticated of all front-engined grand prix cars Gianni Lancia must have followed the 1956 Formula 1 World Championship with a certain level of bemusement. His rivals of old, Scuderia Ferrari, won five of the seven grands prix in which the team competed, and Ferrari driver, Juan Manuel Fangio, was crowned World Champion at the end of the year. What made this particularly poignant for Lancia, though, was the fact the cars used by Scuderia Ferrari had started life late in 1954 and early in 1955 as Lancia D50s. Designed under the technical leadership of the legendary Vittorio Jano, the cutting-edge Lancia grand prix car was the culmination of a vast competition programme that also included a full range of sports racers. In addition to indulging in motorsport for the…

Tacked on the wall of Anna Ewers’s childhood bedroom is an old black-and-white Calvin Klein ad featuring Kate Moss in a pair of faded jeans and little else. Ewers says she was “probably around 12” when she found the image, flipping through one of her father’s music magazines from 1993. The date on the cover was what initially caught Ewers’s eye—she was born that same year in Freiburg, Germany, a college town on the edge of the Black Forest mountains, not far from the French/Swiss border. “It was a very different time, but an amazing time for the industry,” says the now-29-year-old model, who bears more than a passing resemblance to another fashion icon of that era (and a fellow German), Claudia Schiffer. A decade after swiping the ad from her…

For many of our gardens, autumn signals a slowing down, a gradual slide into lazy senescence. Not so for Sussex Prairie Garden. Come September and October, this unique West Sussex garden is reaching its wonderfully dizzying peak. For nearly 30 years, Paul and Pauline McBride have been designing and making gardens all over the world. Sussex Prairies, conceived with their own British twist on the Dutch Wave New Perennial movement, is their signature creation. The eight-acre garden sits in a wider landscape of 32 acres of farmland, formerly owned and farmed by Pauline’s parents. On entering, visitors are greeted – perhaps surprisingly given the garden’s moniker – by tropical planting including towering bananas, cannas and tetrapanax. So far, so unexpected. Then, you step out from the canopy into the open and…

Profile 黃仁勳 出生：1963年 現職：輝達執行長 經歷：超微（AMD）、巨積（LSI logic）工程師 學歷：史丹佛大學電子工程碩士、奧勒岡州立大學電機工程學士 家庭：妻Lori Huang，育有2子女 他用一份財報，瞬間炸開這個世界對人工智慧（AI）的進度想像！ 美東時間五月二十四日，輝達（NVIDIA）公布今年第一季財報及第二季財測。首先讓一眾分析師跌破眼鏡的，是第一季的「成績單」。 根據輝達公告，第一季（二月至四月底）公司營收七十一．九億美元，高於市場預期的六十五．二億美元；其中，來自「資料中心」的營收達到四十二．八億美元，年增十四％，不僅高於預期的三十九億美元，亦超越了晶片龍頭英特爾同季的三十七．二億美元。獲利部分不遑多讓，第一季調整後（Non-GAAP）的EPS為一．○九美元，儘管年減二○％，仍高於市場預期的○．九二美元。 更讓分析師跌破眼鏡的，是第二季的營收與獲利預測。…

President Trump and his allies nearly succeeded in consigning the Mueller report to oblivion. William Barr, Trump’s compliant Attorney General, got a jump on the process when he preëmpted the public release of the report by providing a misleading summary, which minimized the special counsel’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Trump compounded Barr’s distortions by falsely and endlessly repeating that the report found “no collusion, no obstruction.” Congressional Democrats did little for the cause of clarity by using the report as an occasion to debate the semantics of what constitutes an impeachment investigation. And Robert Mueller himself invited a certain measure of confusion by telling his story in dense, legalistic prose. Barely six months after he delivered the report, it had already faded into the mists of…

Slowly and deliberately, I searched shallow, underwater outcrops covered in colors. Weightless amidst the invisible push and pull of the current, pink coralline algae hung closely to rock surfaces or branched skyward against sporadic patches of neon green and glimmering iridescence. Shades of yellow, brown, white and orange flora began to appear as I drifted past micro-environments dictated by sunlight and structure. I allowed my scientific brain to go to work underwater, relying on one of my first developed senses: observation. I had come to this underwater world to seek out a nudibranch. I had heard of this elusive marine organism, but until recently, knew almost nothing about it. My goal at the moment was just to find one, to examine it with my own eyes. I’ve always been drawn to scuba…

Hey there! It’s me, the stock market. I know it’s weird to write you like this, but I felt like I needed to drop a quick thank-you note for everything you’ve done for me this year. I mean, your big ol’ balance sheet is almost $3 trillion larger since early March! You’re backing up the truck and loading it with Treasuries and corporate bonds and bond ETFs, all to keep the competition to stocks from fixed-income yields as limited as Jim Cramer’s understanding of me. It’s been a dream come true, honestly. I mean, fess up: Have you been reading my diary?! Maybe you’ve noticed, but everything else is a royal mess. Covid-19 is still killing people. Parents are dreading the beginning of “school.” U.S. unemployment is still above 10%, higher…

The McDonald’s in Great Barrington, Mass., had hired extra employees to keep up with the flow of hungry customers from a marijuana shop nearby. What its managers didn’t realize, on a Saturday afternoon in December, was that the payment processing technology at the dispensary was misidentifying a purchase of pear-flavored THC chews as a withdrawal from an ATM—at the burger joint’s address. The dispensary, Theory Wellness, didn’t know about the wrong address either. But why did the purchase show up as a cash withdrawal? Theory’s payment machine, which looked to a customer a lot like a card reader at a coffee shop, was in fact running a so-called cashless ATM. Instead of spitting out $20 bills, the machines work with software that programs them to send signals down debit rails, where…

On Nov. 3, 2020, Election Day, two young entrepreneurs received a call from the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with some important news. Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour had spent the past 18 months trying to get permission to start an ambitious and controversial new type of financial exchange—one where, rather than betting on equity prices or commodity futures, people could trade instruments tied to the outcomes of real-world events, such as the passage of legislation, the weather on a particular day, or the winner of best actor at the Oscars. “Congratulations,” boomed Heath Tarbert, a Republican who’d been appointed by President Donald Trump the previous year. “You now stand with markets that have been around since the 1840s. And I have no doubt that in time you’ll…

AUTHORS WHEN WE FIRST traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the countryside life retained many of its traditional elements. But over the next 30 years, thanks to policies aimed at developing the economy and increasing capital investment, China emerged as a global power, with the second-largest economy in the world and a burgeoning middle class eager to spend. One thing hasn’t changed, though: Many Western politicians and business executives still don’t get China. Believing, for example, that political freedom would follow the new economic freedoms, they wrongly assumed that China’s internet would be similar to the freewheeling and often politically disruptive…

We all survey the vastness of space with a certain amount of wonder and awe. Exploring and understanding the cosmos requires units to express its size — including volume. But because of that vastness, we often revert to nonstandard metaphors to help convey it. To express the volume of something big, like the Sun for example, writers commonly say that a million planet Earths would fit inside it. Tiny objects demand similarly creative analogies. The universe contains mostly hydrogen atoms, whose mass is concentrated in the nucleus, usually as a single proton. That proton is 1,836 times heavier than the electron buzzing around it. But a true picture requires us to also visualize its structure, which is mostly empty space. We’d succeed by representing that proton as a raisin in the…

Since ancient times, I, the esteemed pomegranate (Punica granatum), have been regarded with reverence as a symbol of your human central beliefs. In many cultures and virtually every religion, I have come to represent life and death, fertility and marriage, beauty and abundance. Why, you may ask? It all has to do with my seeds (my name means ‘apple with many seeds’), while my orb shape and crown of sepals take on a different meaning all together. Buddhists revere me as one of the three blessed fruit (the other two are peach and citrus); in some Hindu traditions I’m a symbol of prosperity and fertility, while for Muslims I’m a symbol of beauty. As a romantic symbol I have featured in sonnets and literature, as well as Renaissance paintings. Sandro Botticelli and…

OCTOBER OCT 22 RON’S GONE WRONG Zach Galifianakis, Jack Dylan Grazer, Olivia Colman, and Ed Helms lend their voices to an animated coming-of-age story about a shy student and his new “best friend out of the box,” robot Ron. (In theaters) OCT 29 ANTLERS Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons team up in a Guillermo del Toro-produced chiller about a mysterious creature haunting a small town in Oregon, and a young boy hiding a dark secret. (In theaters) ARMY OF THIEVES This prequel to Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead stars Matthias Schweighöfer (who also directs) as a bank teller swept up in a robbery that happens to coincide with the zombie apocalypse. (Netflix) NOVEMBER NOV 5 THE ELECTRICAL LIFE OF LOUIS WAIN From cowboys to cats! Benedict Cumberbatch (yes, him again) plays eclectic British artist Louis Wain, who, after adopting a kitten,…

Nobody needs to convince me that Apple is at the top of its game when it comes to designing iPad hardware. The 2018 iPad Pro was so fast that more than two years later, it can still handle more or less anything that you can throw at it. The 2020 iPad Pro essentially operated at the same speed—and that was so fast it didn’t matter. So here comes the 2021 iPad Pro (see page 39), which is an even more extreme dunk in terms of features. Adding an M1 processor isn’t going to add the same boost as it did on the Mac side, because the iPad Pro was always powered by an energy-efficient Apple processor. But it’s still an upgrade of two processor generations, and that matters. A revamped display…

If you’ve looked into how much storage space to keep unused on an SSD, you likely came across recommendations ranging from 0 to 50 percent and may be frustrated about how to sort out the right number. When you have a 1TB or 2TB drive, keeping even 20 percent (200GB or 400GB) unused might seem both wasteful and costly. For most consumer uses and even many professional ones, you can err on the low side of empty storage, down to even filling a drive up to what you might have thought was 100 percent full, depending on how you use the SSD now and plan to in the future. You may decide after reading this column not to worry about free space at all or opt to keep empty nearly 30…

China’s bookstores — once largely drab, state-run and pragmatic spaces — are slowly evolving to attract a new generation of social media–savvy clientele through daring design. Escher-inspired staircases and towering shelves are the country’s flavour du jour, an arrangement that plays well on camera but can feel as hollow as the fake books that sometimes adorn the shelves. Shanghai’s Wutopia Lab, however, is striving to return the bliss of reading to the heart of bookstore design. Marking the design studio’s 10th book-related project since 2013, Satori Harbor in China’s sprawling southern port city of Guangzhou is Wutopia’s most explicit spatial response to a typology in existential flux. Drawing from zha oche, the Taoist concept of enlightenment (known as “satori” in Japanese), the space is crisp and meditative. Yet, as this is…

Like most forgers, I try to build a stockpile of damascus and differentsized blades in the winter months when the temperature is below 50 degrees F. Sometimes, because of where you live, it might not drop below 70 degrees F. Hot is hot no matter where you forge, and there will be a time when you have to forge no matter how high the temperature is. Here are some helpful hints to get you through the hot times. HYDRATE “Pre-hydrate” the day before you are going to forge. Also, drink plenty of water during forging and aft erward. I use a squirt bottle to spray myself during forging to add extra cooling. Staying hydrated should keep those nasty headaches away. LIMIT HEAT EXPOSURE If you are lucky enough to have a second person that knows…

“DOES THIS REMIND YOU of your childhood?” I ask my mom. I had already posed the question a half dozen times on our journey to find remnants of the summers she spent in New York’s Catskill Mountains in the 1950s. So far, the answer had always been no. Now we are in Ellenville at Cohen’s Bakery, established circa 1920, buying pumpernickel bread and chocolate rugelach. She shrugs. “Maybe if there was a man speaking Yiddish behind the counter.” The Catskills region sprawls across four counties north of New York City, dotted with lakes and crowned with around a hundred mountain peaks. Once it was the sparkling center of Jewish summers, replete with glamorous hotels and thriving small towns. But by the time I moved to New York, in 2011, the glory of…

No hay nada mejor que tener un remanso de paz y tranquilidad en el que desconectar y descansar del ajetreo del día a día. Y quienes bien lo saben (y lo practican a conciencia) son los empresarios, artistas y deportistas que tienen sus refugios exclusivos en lugares recónditos en los que huir de la ciudad (o de la fama) y sentirse un vecino más. Una de las zonas de moda entre la alta sociedad en España es la comarca de La Vera, un rincón idílico entre Cáceres, Ávila y Toledo. En Jarandilla de la Vera cuentan con finca Alejandro Sanz (arregló varios secaderos de tabaco para convertirlos en El Sueño de los Parrales); Ana Rosa Quintana 7, que tiene una casita en Cuacos de Yuste; el empresario Florentino Pérez; y…

I GREW UP PLAYING ON A Par-3 course at Fargo Country Club in North Dakota. It didn’t take much more than 30 minutes to play its nine holes, and my buddies and I would often get in four loops before the sun set. I miss that course because it was such great practice for my wedges. It’s where I learned how to subtract speed and vary the distance I hit each club and how to control the launch, spin and trajectory of the ball. It’s also where I developed my bread-and-butter, low-cut shot for accuracy. If there is one place amateurs can pick up strokes, it’s inside 100 yards where the majority of shots take place. Improve your wedge game and you will lower your scores in a hurry. Here…

EVEN IF IT’S BEEN a while since health class, you likely know how estrogen impacts reproductive health. Its levels rise as we reach puberty; then each month it surges, causing the uterine lining to prep for a potential fertilized egg, and drops, kick-starting menstruation. As the years go on, levels ricochet up and down in perimenopause and drop at menopause. And along the way, estrogen gets blamed for breakouts and breakups, mood dips and weight gains. But what else does the hormone do? The better question may be “What doesn’t it do?” “Estrogen touches basically every cell,” says Jen Gunter, MD, a gynecologist and author of The Menopause Manifesto (Citadel, 2021). “Until recently, we didn’t recognize its importance beyond reproduction,” adds Elizabeth Poynor, MD, a gynecologic surgeon and founder of the…

In Kyrgyzstan, a member of parliament urgently called on the government to start creating jobs and setting up temporary housing for the information technology professionals now arriving daily from Russia. Even a poor Central Asian nation that exports cheap migrant labor for Russian construction sites and fast-food restaurants looks like a safe haven to thousands of educated Russians fleeing the cataclysm Vladimir Putin created by invading Ukraine. This can no longer be described as brain drain: It’s a stampede for the exits. Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the University of Chicago, has estimated that some 200,000 Russians fled in the first 10 days of the invasion—to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Israel—any country that admits Russians visa-free. That’s a small number compared with the 2.8 million refugees who’ve left Ukraine, but…

For the past decade, while cryptocurrencies, Fed policy, meme stocks, and Elon Musk have captured all the headlines, investors have been quietly funneling a billion dollars a day into the greatest money-transfer machine in the history of capitalism: Vanguard. Yet the company shouldn’t even exist. An asset manager owned by its investors? That invests in passive indexes? That charges only microscopic fees? That’s made millions of Americans fabulously wealthy and bankrolled countless retirements without succumbing to Wall Street? The money manager now has more than $8 trillion in assets—second only to BlackRock, which it could surpass in a few years—as well as the three biggest funds in the world and another three in the top 10. Vanguard’s influence extends well beyond the numbers on any scoreboard. The entire investing universe now…

After helping Occidental Petroleum Corp. win a bidding war for Anadarko Petroleum by purchasing $10 billion of Oxy’s preferred stock in 2019 and then quietly buying up a sizable stake in regular shares during the following months, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. suddenly disappeared from the common stock in 2020, giving no reason for the investor’s about-face. Now, Buffett is once again on the Occidental bandwagon—and with more momentum than ever. Just as billionaire investor Carl Icahn exited his own stake in Occidental, Berkshire disclosed in a regulatory filing in March a rekindled interest that’s led to a buying spree. In just a few weeks, Berkshire stacked up an investment worth about $7.7 billion on top of its preferred stock holding, making it the biggest shareholder at Occidental and landing the…

On May 20, Elon Musk flew to São Paulo to announce an expansion of his satellite internet service, Starlink. The moment could, and perhaps should, have been regarded as the latest in a list of achievements that have made Musk the best-known technologist of his generation and the richest person in the world. His rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., was the first private company to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. It now sends so many rockets to orbit, with such regularity, that it has put in place a constellation of thousands of satellites—Starlink—to provide internet service just about anywhere on Earth. The business serves hundreds of thousands of customers around the world, including in Ukraine—which has relied on Starlink-provided connectivity during the Russian invasion—and, according to the new…

In the grillroom of McArthur Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla., this winter, two retired pitchers were talking baseball. Jim Kaat pitched 25 seasons in the big leagues, in four decades, for six teams, while one-time Phillies prospect Bill Parcells topped out as a teenager in New Jersey, only to become a football coach of some renown. Still, both men fondly recalled the oversize sweats—some were feed bags fashioned into baseball pants—they wore to practice sliding in the 1950s should they ever have to leg out a double. “We wanted to be baseball players, not pitchers,” says Kaat, 82. “We wanted to learn to bunt, slide, run the bases and help ourselves out with the bat.” BASEBALL PREVIEW Major league pitchers have been batting for 150 years now. Their walk-up music, in…

AUTHORS To stay competitive, today’s business leaders are investing millions in digital tools, agile methodologies, and lean strategies. Too often, however, those efforts produce neither the breakthrough operational processes nor the blockbuster business models companies need—at least not before their competitors introduce their own advances. And a key culprit is the inability to make quick and effective innovation decisions. The discovery-driven innovation processes companies now rely on involve an unprecedented number of choices, from big go/no-go gates that govern which ideas are pursued to countless decisions about how to conduct experiments, what data to collect, how to interpret findings, and how to act on them. But in companies that are just learning to experiment, too many decisions are made inefficiently or informed by past experience and narrow perspectives. As a result, critical risks…

1 Soundboard “In very general terms, the top is the ‘speaker cone’ of the guitar,” explains Eggle. “It’s the thing that responds to the vibration of the strings and beats in and out, which starts the air moving. “When we’re selecting a top, one of the first things that we do is check the stiffness. I’m after tops that are stiff across the grain. With a weaker piece of wood, you’d have to leave it thicker to give it sufficient strength. But that extra thickness would also make it less responsive, meaning it would take longer to react to vibration from the strings. “By contrast, a stiffer, stronger piece of wood can be made into a thinner top, so the response is more immediate and dynamic. What you’re looking for is a’board that’s…

In for the Kill In the zombie apocalypse, who’s the bigger threat: walkers or people? Before AMC’s The Walking Dead begins its final season on Aug. 22, we crunch the numbers on the human casualties that mattered to us (not accounting for deaths such as “Nameless Savior No. 7”). —NICK ROMANO MOST MEMORABLE DEATH, BY SEASON S1: AMY (EMMA BELL) Andrea (Laurie Holden) issues the ugliest of cries for her bitten sister. S2: DALE (JEFFREY DEMUNN) A walker gave him one of the, um, gutsiest moments in show history. S3: LORI (SARAH WAYNE CALLIES) Some childbirths are more like nightmares than happy occasions. S4: LIZZIE (BRIGHTON SHARBINO) Carol (Melissa McBride) made sure that little Lizzie will never look at flowers the same way again. S5: TYREESE (CHAD L. COLEMAN) We know you were trying to give the guy a hand by taking…

NOT LONG AGO, HALLE BERRY APPEARED as a guest on Hot Ones, the viral YouTube talk show in which assorted celebrities (Billie Eilish, Charlize Theron, Shaq) agree to eat chicken wings of increasingly ungodly spice levels until they either quit, cry, or lose control of their fine motor skills. As she worked her way through a series of sauces with names like Chocolate Plague and Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity, Berry came across as charming and funny and self-deprecating, talking easily about old Kanye lyrics and dog-training tips. But when the show’s host presented her with an endurance trophy at the finish line and asked whether there was anyone she’d like to thank, she turned unexpectedly blunt: “I’m gonna thank my damn self on this one,” she shook her head, half-delirious…

CINEMAPS Ticket to Ride ON JULY 30, DWAYNE JOHNSON AND EMILY BLUNT TEAM UP AND HEAD DOWN THE AMAZON IN JUNGLE CRUISE, A DISNEY FANTASY- adventure film inspired by the three-continent riverboat tour at Disney theme parks. Usually, it’s the reverse: The movie begets the ride. Sure, you know the biggies (Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey! Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance!), but hang on for your cinematic life as we visit some of the more obscure attractions for your amusement. 1 / Borg Assimilator Flying roller coaster (2004–2008, Carowinds, North Carolina) R.I.P. Smurf Island, which was destroyed for the Collective good—to make room for the Assimillator. 2 / Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Ride Dark ride (2006–2015, Alton Towers Theme Park, England) A boat journey on a chocolate river led to an uplifting experience inside the…

Every time Apple holds an event, we pretty much know exactly what it’s going to release. If you’ve been keeping up with the rumor mill for the weeks and months prior to the big day, the actual keynote is like watching a show you’ve already seen and waiting for your favorite scenes to come along. But that wasn’t the case with the “California Streaming” event. While the rumor mill got many things right, it also whiffed on major predictions, more than with any other recent event. For every correct guess—such as the iPhone 13’s bigger battery and the Apple Watch’s larger screen—there was a big miss. Here’s what the rumormongers got wrong. AIRPODS DIDN’T MAKE AN APPEARANCE Perhaps the biggest miss of the day was the lack of an AirPods announcement. It feels…

So you’re ready to buy a new laptop. What do you need it for? What do you really need it for? It’s tempting to look at a top-of-the-line model, but most of us aren’t doing complex professional video edits on 4K video, heavy-duty scientific work, or really big coding projects every day. Most of us spend our time with some browser tabs open, a handful of apps for email and messaging, editing photos or maybe some simple videos, watching streaming video, that sort of thing. If you’re a gamer that wants to play the latest games, our sister site, PCWorld, can point you in the direction of a Windows laptop, but for everyone else—everyone who doesn’t use their laptop for very intensive tasks all day long—the MacBook Air is exactly what…

Most photographers are familiar with what a macro lens does, and how it differs from conventional optics of similar focal lengths. However there are multiple types of macro lens available these days, as well as several options of camera format; this can complicate the choice of gear considerably, and it’s critical to understand just how various items impact the type of creative macro shots we can capture. Magnification ratio is the first important factor to consider, as this will directly influence how close you can get to your subject. To clarify, this does not necessarily refer to the minimum focus distance of a lens, but rather the magnifying power of the optical design and the resulting reproduction size of the subject in the final frame. For beginners, many lenses have a…

一隻看不見、摸不到的病毒，顛覆全球七十八億人口的生活。 空蕩蕩的街道、渺無人煙的海灘，猶如電影《二十八週毀滅倒數：全球封閉》。對台灣而言，這些曾經虛幻的場景，如今卻全部都化為真實的日常。 二○○八年的金融海嘯，世界各國體認到過去追求經濟發展，忽視分配而出現反省聲浪；二○二○年的新冠病毒，卻讓狂飆下的高風險社會現了形。 「後疫情時代，中產階級充分感受到生活一夕之間逆轉，」台大社工系教授古允文說，當政府或社會沒有妥善的安全制度，人民只好透過搶保單來抵禦風險。 然而，世上沒有任何一張保單，可以保障我們所有幸福安康。病毒再強大，台灣終需從眼前的挫敗中再起，此時需要的是趁機重新省思過去經濟發展模式，以及在新生疫病和氣候變遷的催化下，打造給予人民美好生活、創造永續幸福的新模式。 為檢視台灣在各面向的發展狀況，《天下雜誌》依據OECD（經濟合作暨發展組織）從二○一一年起公布的「美好生活指數」（Better Life Index），進行二○二一「天下幸福生活指數」調查，以攸關人們生活和福祉的十一項領域，涵括二十四個主、客觀指標，全方位評比，並比照OECD四十個主要會員國和伙伴國家排名。（表1）…

Bikes have always been a form of freedom for Petor Georgallou. From exploring the outdoors as a boy – when his parents would have preferred him to be inside playing video games – to building any bike he could dream up as Dear Susan. Now he’s setting himself free from the workshop to take on a new challenge: running the Bespoked Handmade Bicycle Show. ‘I went to a weird all-boys boarding school in the woods. It was basically hell and incredibly dehumanising. I don’t think I was even a person until I left school,’ he says. ‘Then I had the freedom to do what I wanted and I was like, “What do people do?” So I just rode my bike a lot.’ That encompassed commuting on his fixie 20 miles each way…

When Total Film meets Cate Blanchett in a Venetian hotel suite to discuss her awardsy new film, she’s wearing a white, impeccablycut trouser suit very much in the style of her character, Lydia Tár, striding round the room exuding alpha presence. Having just watched Tár as it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, the prospect of Blanchett embodying the uncompromising, voracious Lydia is a little intimidating. But the genial Aussie proffers a plate of freshly baked chocolate brownies, which she’s munching on with little care for her pristine tailoring. This, Tár would never do. The character is a DGAF conducting maestro for the Berlin Philharmonic whose glittering career teeters as she becomes obsessed with her cellist (newcomer Sophie Kauer), skittering along the edges of #MeToo and cancel culture. As her director,…