All posts tagged: Understand

Americans Don’t Understand Who’s Rich

Americans Don’t Understand Who’s Rich

Published by Sam Flores

Terry Taylor is worth about $2 billion, and you have almost surely never heard of him. Based in Florida, he doesn’t put his name on the car dealerships that he buys up, and he reportedly attends conferences only on the condition that no one announces who he is. Taylor came to our attention in 2023, when he paid $76 million for an Aspen mansion—then the most expensive home sale in the Colorado town’s history. In 2024, Forbes magazine, which keeps tabs on the richest people in the United States and around the world, slotted Taylor in at No. 1,694 on its World Billionaires List and published a profile titled “The Car Dealership Billionaire No One Knows.” “He’s like Batman,” a source told Forbes. “You hear about him and you admire his work, but nobody has really ever seen him in real life.” When Americans picture the ultrarich, they typically think of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth lies predominantly in shares of publicly traded companies. They might also think of …

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Xi

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Xi

Published by Sam Flores

President Trump will host Xi Jinping for a state visit on September 24, once again putting his claimed bonhomie with the Chinese leader at the center of the relations between the two superpowers. But Trump’s insistence on the importance of this personal rapport shows just how little he understands his adversary. I have been studying Xi ever since he became China’s heir apparent, and I became an analyst at the CIA in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. I spent years deciphering Xi for U.S. presidents as the intelligence community’s top expert on Xi. And I spent two years as the director for China at the National Security Council, where I staffed all of President Biden’s interactions with Xi and coordinated diplomacy with China across the U.S. government. For a decade now, Trump has oscillated between courting and skirmishing with Xi. After his first term, Trump called Xi a friend and described him as someone he knew well. His experience with Xi seems to have led him to believe that he has …

Best ever Ofsted for Kent school where pupils are thriving and staff understand their needs ‘extremely well’

Best ever Ofsted for Kent school where pupils are thriving and staff understand their needs ‘extremely well’

Published by Sam Flores

A school in Kent where pupils are “happy and thriving”, and staff understand their needs “extremely well” is celebrating after achieving its best ever Ofsted. Never in the school’s history has it earned such a positive report, with inspectors grading it a strong standard in five of the seven areas. These results under Ofsted’s new five-point grading system which came into effect in November last year, mean the school is performing “exceptionally well”. The positive vibes from earning the unprecedent Ofsted have been reverberating throughout Dover Christ Church Academy, which inspectors described as “welcoming” and having a “highly positive culture of behaviour”. Dover Christ Church Academy was praised by Ofsted for its strong approach to inclusion and for cultivating a highly inclusive culture -Credit:DCCA The school in Melbourne Avenue in Whitfield, which has a sixth form, joined the Turner Schools multi-academy trust in 2023. The trust’s chief executive Seamus Murphy said this result was testament to the dedication of the leadership team, staff and pupils and their “willingness to hold high expectations and aim for …

The Books Briefing: What Tech Titans Don’t Understand About Sci-Fi

The Books Briefing: What Tech Titans Don’t Understand About Sci-Fi

Published by Daniella Wilson

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When I read Thomas More’s Utopia in college, the main thing I retained was that the inhabitants of More’s imaginary island worked just six hours a day and earned what we might now call a universal basic income. But the fact that I came away from this 16th-century classic with only visions of a shorter workday and a generous allowance says more about my undergraduate habits than it does about More’s ideas or intentions. Looking back recently, I remembered that his civilization wasn’t exactly the campus commune of my dreams. Its citizens held slaves, some of whom were shackled for committing adultery. The punishment for premarital sex, meanwhile, was permanent celibacy; the whole place sounded like a punitive surveillance state. I’d somehow missed all of this initially. Still, as Gal Beckerman noted this week in an Atlantic essay about Silicon Valley’s misreadings of science fiction, I wasn’t the first person to make this …

Is It Even Possible to Understand Quantum Mechanics?

Is It Even Possible to Understand Quantum Mechanics?

Published by skeptic

That’s just silly, right? It’s crazy that the act of measurement changes the outcome. Does this mean that physics experiments can change reality? Maybe. What About That Zombie Cat? I mentioned Erwin Schrödinger above. He was one of the pioneers of quantum theory, but he couldn’t bring himself to accept this idea of superposition. Using his macro-world common sense, he insisted there must be a flaw in the model, and that a complete theory of quantum mechanics would eventually be deterministic like classical physics. When scientists don’t like something, they make up absurd scenarios to invite mockery of its proponents. So Schrödinger created a famous thought experiment you may have heard of. It’s called Schrödinger’s Cat, and it goes like this: There is a cat in a box. This box also contains a radioactive atom, a detector, and a vial of poison. If the atom decays and produces radiation, the detector will open the vial and the cat will die. But if the box is closed, the atom is in a superposition state, being both …

Trump doesn’t understand the forever war he’s created with Iran – and Russia

Trump doesn’t understand the forever war he’s created with Iran – and Russia

Published by Sam Flores

In an age of rogue lawlessness dominating international affairs since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and then staggered about the globe like a toddler with a chainsaw, it is inevitable that other outlaw nations, Russia and Iran, would see opportunity in the mayhem. The 47th US president is too infantile and misled by a messianic government in Israel to comprehend that the citizens of Iran will not rise against their oppressors in Tehran under the Stars and Stripes and that Moscow will never be America‘s friend. But Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei (along with his Guardian Council), the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin are locking America into another forever war. Their long-term intent is to expose the limits of current US power and to further weaken its influence across the Middle East, where the close alliance between Washington and Israel is a liability. In the latest escalation of the conflict between the US and Iran, Tehran’s murderous theocracy, which has supported anti-Western terror groups since the early 1980s, is dominated by end-times religious fanaticism, …

7 Ways Gen X & Millennials Had It Harder Than Gen Z Will Ever Understand

7 Ways Gen X & Millennials Had It Harder Than Gen Z Will Ever Understand

Published by Jenni Sidey

Something about the debate over which generation had it the easiest gets even the calmest people locked in a heated argument. But Gen X and millennials aren’t backing down in this fight. Actual survey results have shown that older generations are split on whether young people are going through more than they did. Still, there are some struggles that Gen X and millennials had to accept as a part of their lives that would make Gen Z absolutely lose it. Gen X and millennials had to deal with these hardships that Gen Z will never understand: 1. They learned their technology skills in the computer lab xavierarnau from Getty Images Signature via Canva For Gen Z, there was really no such thing as learning how to use a computer, unless you compare it to something like learning how to walk or talk. It was a part of their lives from the day they were born, so they knew how to unlock a phone before they could count the numbers in the passcode. Gen X and …

How to understand this heat wave (as told by NPR’s senior climate editor) : NPR

How to understand this heat wave (as told by NPR’s senior climate editor) : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

A woman walks in the shade in downtown Houston, Texas, on July 30, 2026, during a regional heat wave. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images More than 80 million people are under an Extreme Heat Warning or Heat Advisory through this week, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters at the service’s Weather Prediction Center called this latest heat dome a “steamy air-mass even by mid-to-late August standards.” Dangerous record-breaking heat will continue across the South-Central U.S. and expand into the Southwest by mid-week, bringing daytime temperatures into the triple digits. Much of the desert Southwest, including parts of Arizona and New Mexico, could also break heat records, according to the National Weather Service. As the senior climate editor at NPR, I often send out guidance to the NPR newsroom during extreme weather to help other editors and reporters understand the role of climate change. Now, as large regions of the U.S. are under threats from dangerous heat, you might be looking for that same context and …

Men Are Tanning Again. I Got a 0 Spray Tan—And Now I Understand Why

Men Are Tanning Again. I Got a $500 Spray Tan—And Now I Understand Why

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Our Age of Bronze is collapsing,” warns Odysseus, in the summer blockbuster of the year. Maybe for the Ithacans. But if you look around the world of men’s style, bronzed is back. Matt Damon seems to have kept his Mediterranean glow for the whole Odyssey press tour. Yung Lean went to Paris Fashion Week looking downright sun-kissed. A J.Crew summer campaign featured models as scantily clad camp counselors with a laissez-faire approach to sunscreen. In 2020, Timothée Chalamet lamented to GQ that he looked “all pale” in paparazzi photos of him on a boat, but in a beach photo shoot this year, he had some nice color. Erling Haaland posted his cherry red nose and captioned it: ☀️ All this celebrity sun worship might mark a turning point after a decade of warnings about sun exposure reached a fever pitch. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that everyone use sunscreen every day on all skin not covered by clothing to reduce the risk of skin cancer. Around Covid, as people were shut indoors staring at …

‘One Night Only’: An Attempt to Understand the World of Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro’s New Rom-Com

‘One Night Only’: An Attempt to Understand the World of Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro’s New Rom-Com

Published by Sam Flores

The real answer: without that loophole, there would be no movie. The in-world answer: “Because that’s what sets us apart from other places,” Holloway smarmily tells the Chinese newscaster. “Here, politics require compromise. But on this night, we have made the use of protection mandatory.” Wait a minute: condoms are mandatory? They are. In the world of One Night Only, you can and will be arrested for having sex without using a condom. Specifically a condom? Yes. Do birth control pills and IUDs not exist in this universe? They might, but nobody in One Night Only ever mentions them. And how do the authorities know if you’re using a condom? No idea; it’s never explained. Could it be that this rule exists only to catalyze a sequence where both Turner and Barbaro’s characters go on a desperate quest to find a condom, conveniently bringing them to the same bodega at the same time and allowing for a second meet-cute—and also so the movie can engage in a little Durex product placement? That’s the most likely …