James' World 2

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“I think there are generally three categories that are going to be relatively insulated in the foreseeable future,” says Ford. “The first would be jobs that are genuinely creative: you’re not doing formulaic work or just rearranging things, but you’re genuinely coming up with new ideas and building something new.”

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What is the most bizarre real number that you can imagine? Probably many people think of an irrational number such as pi (π) or Euler’s number. And indeed, such values can be considered “wild.” After all, their decimal representation is infinite, with no digits ever repeating. Even such bonkers-looking numbers, however, together with all the rational numbers, make up only a tiny fraction of the real numbers, or numbers that can appear along a number line. (As a reminder, these are the kinds of numbers that can be used in all manner of familiar measurements, including time, temperature and distance.)

But it turns out that if you happened to pick out a number at random on a number line, you would almost certainly draw a “noncomputable” number. For such values, there is no way to determine them precisely.

The real numbers are made up of the rational and irrational numbers. The rational numbers (that is, numbers that can be written as the fraction ^p⁄_q, where p and q are integers) include the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3,…) and the integers (…, –2, –1, 0, 1, 2,…). The rest of the numbers on the number line are irrational numbers. These, too, can be divided into different categories—most of which we can’t even imagine.

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Meetings are critical for achieving goals, as they foster unity and facilitate communication, planning, and alignment — but only if they’re run effectively. Poorly run meetings negatively affect a team’s performance, cohesion, and ultimately its success in meeting its goals.

In a survey of senior managers, 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. And a study of 20 organizations revealed that dysfunctional behaviors in meetings — like complaining or criticizing others — are associated with lower market share, less innovation, and lower employee engagement.

See if the following scenario sounds familiar: You receive a meeting invitation whose title is simply “Product Launch,” with no further details. You attend the meeting because your team handles a launch component and you want to ensure you’re not missing anything. Lisa, the team lead, introduces the new product line. However, within minutes, the conversation takes a turn when John, a senior marketing executive, starts complaining about the company’s culture and lack of support from upper management. This sparks an unrelated, heated debate about the company’s culture instead of the product launch. Everybody is confused and frustrated.

Over many years of working with teams and coaching team leaders, I’ve observed four dysfunctional behaviors that cause meetings to derail. To ensure productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, managers need to know how to spot, prevent, and deal with these behaviors when they appear.

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Grass, mammals, penicillin, John Keats. None was successful right away.

Grasses struggled along in patches here and there for some 45 million years before, rather quickly, unfurling, almost blanketlike, across the continents. Mammals, as we know, were furry blurs underground and underfoot for more than 100 million years before ascending to prominence—and then dominance. The life-saving drug penicillin was abandoned by its discoverer and lay mostly neglected for more than a decade before it was ever administered to a single patient. And now-revered Romantic poet John Keats sold just a couple hundred volumes of his poetry in his life—only entering the canon decades after his death.

In fact, many lasting innovations, whether biological or cultural, were no overnight success. Instead, they emerged and managed to persist, in the shadows, until the time was just right for them to step into the limelight.

So argues biologist Andreas Wagner in his new book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture. Wagner, a professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, came to biology not as a boy fascinated by newts or lichens, but as a teenager enchanted by the prospect of uncovering principles that guide the natural world. In the lab, Wagner has pioneered models of gene networks. In the author’s chair, he has probed the puzzling natures of innovation and creativity.

He said he originally came to the concept of “sleeping beauties” from conversations with artists and with scientists, many of whom are often frustrated by their lack of success. “I think every scientist has written a paper that he or she thought was going to rock the world,” he says. “And then once the paper comes out, nobody’s interested in it. So there are two readings of that. First: The paper just sucks and it’s not important. Or: It’s waiting to be discovered.” And in the lab, he and his colleagues have found evidence of these “latent innovations” emerging in the DNA of living organisms. So, for the wide-ranging book, he says, “I wanted to put all of this together.”

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Success in nature and culture depends just as much on timing as it does on brilliance.

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For years, the Rev. Donald Perryman wondered why the formerly thriving Black downtown of Toledo, Ohio, couldn’t get a grocery store. 

His suspicions were confirmed after a city study found in 2020 that the opening of new Dollar General stores drove other companies out of business, deterring potential grocers from investing there. He, along with a group of ministers, knew that in order to get a supermarket, they had to stop new chain dollar stores from plaguing their communities. They made great strides when the Toledo City Council passed a moratorium the same year that required new small-box retail stores to apply for a special-use permit. 

The moratorium expired a year later, however — without the community’s knowledge — and a new Dollar General opened down the street from Perryman’s church on Dorr Street.

This month, the city proposed a $12 million project to construct a food incubation hub that would deliver fresh and healthy foods to local markets and low-income areas such as Dorr Street. Without renewed legislation, Perryman fears the threat of another dollar store could jeopardize the project, halting their years-long efforts.

Now, his coalition is pushing the city to ban these stores altogether.

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A push is underway in many communities to limit dollar stores such as Family Dollar and Dollar General. One critic compared the fast-growing segment to “an invasive species.” (Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press)

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Video games are natural predators. In the earliest incarnation of the art — the arcade cabinets scattered across movie-theater lobbies and dentist waiting rooms in the ’70s and ’80s — you’d exchange a quarter for three lives and a dream. A few minutes later, once those ghosts claimed Pac-Man’s soul, or after Jumpman tripped over one too many of Donkey Kong’s barrels, you were sent back to your mother, tail between your legs, in hopes that she had a bit more spare change left in her purse. This was the business model; video games attempted to separate kids from their allowances as efficiently as possible, which was most easily accomplished through the blunt force of difficulty.

The modern home console-based games industry is almost unrecognizable compared to those early days. Extra lives are no longer stingily meted out between checkpoints, an easy mode is usually only a toggle away, and generally speaking, publishers are more interested in immersing us in a story rather than humbling us with our inadequacies. And yet, even now, gamers have a grudging appreciation for a really tough level. They may not be as common as they were in the old days when there was a direct financial incentive in thwarting players, but plenty of studios still crank up the meters to 11, eager to break our thumbs in two. In fact, with the mainstream success of games like Elden Ring and Returnal, difficulty seems to be coming back into fashion. We’re here to celebrate the tradition and hopefully get some closure on our collective anguish.

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Illustration: Diego Patiño

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