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I’m a Fan is a fast, fizzing cherry bomb of a debut by Sheena Patel, mining the darkest depths of coercion, seduction and abuser dynamics. It has the urgency of a diary, mixed with a certain hard and sharp clarity. The narrator skitters through a well-observed urban half-life of bad jobs, bad men, mean streets and atomised “third spaces” – a gym, a gallery, a coffee shop – where human connection is hard to maintain and actual love and kindness seem impossible to find. Instead of joy and friendship, I’m a Fan’s world is…

Photo: Joe McKendrickLast month, it was disclosed that the National Security Agency re-awarded a massive and hotly contested cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon Web Services.  One can assume a large government agency procuring $10 billion of cloud services has quite a bit of leverage over the terms of the agreement. However, for mainstream companies, the opposite may be true -- the cloud provider holds many of the cards, in a legal or contractual sense, with terms that may come back to bite the…

Image: Getty Images/iStockphotoWhen it comes to remote working, employees say they can be relied upon to get the job done – but don't necessarily say the same about their colleagues.A report by Cisco on the impact of hybrid working found that workers view themselves as more dependable than their co-workers in being productive while working from home.In a survey of 1,050 UK employees, 75% of respondents said their manager trusted them to be productive while working remotely, yet a lower proportion (61%) felt their…

Jon Hamm has shared the strict rules he had to follow when meeting Prince William and Kate Middleton.The actor stars in the new film Top Gun: Maverick alongside Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer and Miles Teller.At the UK premiere in London last week (19 May), the cast met special guests the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Hamm revealed that while the couple “couldn’t be nicer”, there were clear standards he had to adhere to.“There are guidelines that are not so much…

Google has announced that it’s adding the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to cut, copy, and paste files in Drive, as long as you’re using Chrome. The feature will use th— okay, hold on just a minute here. Are you really trying to tell me that we couldn’t already do this? Sure enough, when I went to Google Drive on the web and pressed Command + C on a file, then went into a folder and pressed Command + V, nothing happened. And this December 2021 archive of Drive’s list of keyboard shortcuts doesn’t say anything about…

Any portable hard drive, SSD or even a flash drive will let you transport, store and backup your files. But getting the best external hard drive or best external SSD for your storage needs is important. A portable hard drive or SSD is a do-it-all storage wallet, a travel-friendly device that can carry huge files (or lots of small ones) between PCs, Macs and phones, back up your irreplaceable data, offload from your DSLR or drone while in the field, and more.But with dozens of external drives available, how do you know…

What is it?The endowment effect describes our tendency to overvalue the goods in our endowment — our possessions — just because they are ours.The seminal studyThe term “endowment effect” was coined by the Nobel prize-winning economist Richard Thaler in 1980, but the most well-known experiment was carried out by Thaler and two colleagues, psychologist Daniel Kahneman and behavioral economist Jack Knetsch, a decade later. In the experiment, a group of Cornell students participated in an artificial market in which objects…

Europe’s economy slowed in May and flagging factory orders point to a further weakening over coming months, according to business surveys released Tuesday. Europe and Japan appear to be in the midst of a transition, with services still being buoyed by the gradual lifting of pandemic restrictions while manufacturing faces rising production costs and signs of weakening demand. In reaction, some global businesses have begun planning for a significant slowdown or a recession. Data firm S&P Global said its…

Automated accounts have become more sophisticated and complex in recent years. Many fake accounts are partly operated by humans, as well as machines, or just amplify messages written by real people (what Menczer calls “cyborg accounts”). Other accounts use tricks designed to evade human and algorithmic detection, such as rapidly liking and unliking tweets or posting and deleting tweets. And of course there are plenty of automated or semi-automated accounts, such as those run by many companies, that aren’t actually…

Two years ago, 24 million tons of dust lifted high above Africa to create a plume that swirled across the Atlantic Ocean and covered Puerto Rico in a pink patina. An unusually meandering jet stream helped launch the monster dust cloud. But this week, ecologists fingered another factor in such storms: the disappearance of biocrust, a microbial mat that coats dryland soil and helps keep dust in place. “It glues the sand together,” says Bettina Weber, an ecologist at the University…