The world’s papers react in horror, shock, and sadness to the attempted insurrection on Capitol Hill by pro-Trump mobs

By Michael Grothaus

Yesterday’s siege on the U.S. Capitol Building by a group of pro-Trump insurrectionists will go down as one of the darkest days in American history and forever be a mark of shame for President Trump and those in the Republican party and in the media who have enabled his actions and antics over the past four years.

The images of the insurrection were broadcast to screens around the world as citizens of every country watched in horror and disbelief at the scenes unfolding in the hallowed halls where U.S. democracy has operated from for over two centuries. Needless to say, the insurrection that took place yesterday will be dissected by the media for weeks to come. For now, however, here is how front pages around the world have chosen to cover the siege on the morning after.

The ex-CEO of Haven — Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan’s just-ended health venture — on what he’s learned as a surgeon, researcher, and entrepreneur

By Ruth Reader

After three years, Haven, the much-anticipated health venture from Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan, is shutting down. Little information came from the company itself on the decision to end the business, merely stating that its founding companies would collaborate further in the future. When it disbands at the end of February, its staff will be divvied up among its three founding partners.

Haven was an attempt to exert some control over ever-rising healthcare costs while also ensuring quality. Dr. Atul Gawande, surgeon, researcher, and professor at Harvard Medical School, helmed the effort. Gawande was a surprising choice. As a professor of health policy and management at Harvard and founding executive director of Ariadne Labs, an incubator for health systems research, his healthcare credentials are formidable. He’s also written some compelling articles on the health industry for publications such as The New Yorker. …

This PR company took a deep dive into what was knocking some employees off their game and came up with new rules to govern its communications that boosted productivity and reduced stress

By John Lacy

Whether your team is working from home or in the office, workplace distractions can be difficult to avoid. A Zoom meeting or Slack message can dislodge you from your flow state just as surely as someone sidling up to your cubicle and asking you about your weekend plans.

At our company — a PR and marketing agency — the issue of distractions also created some divisions within the team. Like most professional services firms, we have client relationships to manage and work product that must be created for our clients. …

The new union at Google aims to strengthen the growing labor movement at the company and serve as a vehicle for workers to voice their concerns

By Katharine Schwab

On Monday, more than 400 Google employees and contractors announced that they had formed the Alphabet Workers Union, a significant milestone in the tech worker movement at the company and in Silicon Valley.

Previously, efforts to unionize the highly paid workers at Big Tech firms have struggled. But in the past few years, workers have increasingly called for change, particularly at Google. Some of the search engine giant’s employees have protested the company’s contracts with the Department of Defense and Customs and Border Protection and have pushed back against a project to build a censored search engine for China. In 2018, Google’s worker discontent saw its largest eruption when more than 20,000 employees walked out over Google’s handling of sexual harassment cases. …

COVID-19 will reshape the city, but the bounce back could make them more livable

By Brooks Rainwater

Cities throughout time have faced challenges, vast changes, and civil strife, but our future — much like our past — will be urban. The nature of humanity and progress is that we need to be around one another to think collaboratively, create what is next, and collectively drive toward the future.

Even as the COVID-19 vaccine starts to be administered, the pandemic is still racing through the country — with the highest rates we have seen since its onset. Most cities are challenged in ways that they have not been for a generation, with businesses shuttered or near closure, people out of work, and the cold weather making outdoor activities increasingly difficult in much of the country. A hollowed-out feeling permeates the downtowns of many major American cities as office workers continue to stay at home and the service industry ecosystem that supports them sees overwhelming challenges. What will the future hold? …

Even during “normal” times, resolutions are hard to keep. So we spoke with experts on alternatives that boost our confidence, happiness, and productivity.

By Lindsay Tigar

If you look back on your 2020 resolutions, you may be chuckling to yourself at how the universe threw us all a big ol’ curveball. Given the unexpected circumstances of this year, perhaps it’s a sign to all of us to reframe how we think about goal-setting in January. After all, even during more “normal” times, New Year’s aspirations tend to be hard to keep.

As licensed marriage and family therapist Hanna Stensby explains, too often, we create intimidating, momentous resolutions that lack small, attainable accomplishments along the way. This sets us up for failure since few can maintain the same enthusiasm from January 1 until December 31. “The new energy of the first few days of the year can start to wane as life gets in the way, busy schedules start to fill up, and the motivation to stick with an ambitious resolution can fade,” she says. …

The new president will have to act quickly and decisively when he takes office. Here is what he should do right away, from rejoining the Paris agreement to undoing Trump’s rollback of regulations.

By Adele Peters

If 2020 hadn’t been the year of COVID-19, it might have gone down as the year that the climate crisis became more obvious than it had ever been before. By the end of January, fires in Australia that began in late 2019 had burned through an area larger than Ireland. In April, the Great Barrier Reef reported the most widespread coral bleaching event on record. In July, as much as a third of Bangladesh flooded, displacing millions of people. In August, record-breaking fires in California temporarily turned the sky dark orange, and then made it unsafe to breathe outside for weeks. In November, after a record number of storms in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific flooded Vietnam and damaged hundreds of thousands of homes in the Philippines. In the U.S., …

The head scientist for Alexa thinks the old benchmark for computing is no longer relevant for today’s AI era

By Rohit Prasad

This year marks 70 years since Alan Turing published his paper introducing the concept of the Turing Test in response to the question, “Can machines think?” The test’s goal was to determine if a machine can exhibit conversational behavior indistinguishable from a human. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, an average human would have less than a 70% chance of distinguishing an AI from a human in an imitation game where who is responding — a human or an AI — is hidden from the evaluator.

Why haven’t we as an industry been able to achieve that goal, 20 years past that mark? I believe the goal put forth by Turing is not a useful one for AI scientists like myself to work toward. The Turing Test is fraught with limitations, some of which Turing himself debated in his seminal paper. With AI now ubiquitously integrated into our phones, cars, and homes, it’s become increasingly obvious that people care much more that their interactions with machines be useful, seamless and transparent — and that the concept of machines being indistinguishable from a human is out of touch. Therefore, it is time to retire the lore that has served as an inspiration for seven decades, and set a new challenge that inspires researchers and practitioners equally. …