I just got done with a talk for a college about how we squandered the possibilities for a networked society by focusing on IP in the cloud rather than the people with whom we were connecting. Afterwards, during the Q&A, a student wanted to know why I was so pessimistic about the digital future. I was a bit surprised. Because while I do think we screwed things up, I wouldn’t still be writing and speaking and podcasting and Zooming if I didn’t believe we can still turn this all around.

I’m no pessimist. I’m usually accused of the opposite. I was one of the first to celebrate how the digital renaissance could unleash the wild potentials of the collective human imagination. This renaissance included everything from the chaos math and quantum physics to fantasy role-playing and the Gaia hypothesis. We believed that human beings, connected as never before, could create any future we wanted. The internet would do for humanity what LSD did for the individual.

I Love Lucy was just about the most famous show in the history of television, but the dramatic behind-the-scenes story stayed off screen, until now. Amazon Studios’ Being the Ricardos incorporates several of the true stories of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman), Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) and their staff. Only writer-director Aaron Sorkin sets them all in one week.

In Season 2 of I Love Lucy, Ball gets two pieces of troubling news on a Monday: A magazine reports that Arnaz has been seen around town with another woman, and Walter Winchell discovers that Ball had once applied to be a member of the Communist party, sharing that news with his audience.

USC women’s basketball postponed another Pac-12 conference game Wednesday as COVID-19 issues in the program continue. USC‘s next scheduled game is at Colorado on Jan. 7.

Two days after postponing a home game against No. 4 Arizona, the Trojans pushed back a Jan. 2 game against Arizona State at Galen Center, their third consecutive conference game affected during the national rise in coronavirus cases. USC’s original conference opener at rival UCLA was rescheduled from Dec. 28 to Jan. 20, but matchups against Arizona and Arizona State don’t have new dates yet.

COVID-19 turned the world upside down two long years ago, and the omicron variant is giving us something new to worry about in the coming year. Meanwhile, the pandemic is still prompting people to withdraw from social activities, and many continue to work from home, with weekdays blurring into weekends, month after month.

With all this stress, social isolation and disruption, it’s no wonder if you’ve been feeling the effects, even being more forgetful or absent-minded. Maybe you’ve found yourself unable to remember a common term, what day it is or why you walked into a room. Experts say prolonged stress can affect people’s everyday memory and cognitive skills.

“If we’re under a lot of stress, sometimes it can very negatively impact retrieval of information,” said Daniel Schacter (SHS 1970), a professor of psychology and director of the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University. He's also the author of “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson (SHS 1973) had a fiery back-and-forth during the press briefing on Monday.

Psaki addresses a multitude of issues that President Joe Biden’s administration is currently facing including the announcement of a U.S. diplomatic boycott from the 2022 Beijing Olympics, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and her office’s viral tweet that stirred some controversy.

Liasson asked a question that shifted the focus towards the administration’s efforts to quell the spread of Covid-19, which is posing an urgent threat with the Omicron Variant’s arrival.

Think of an Aaron Sorkin (SHS 1979) production and several things spring to mind. Zinging dialogue, yes. A cheesy orchestral flourish, perhaps? A fist-pumping denouement? Certainly. The writer-director’s name has almost become an adjective, its own distinct sub-genre. Not Lynchian, or Hitchcockian, but Sorkinian. In Sorkin’s breakthrough film, 1992’s A Few Good Men, there was Tom Cruise vs Jack Nicholson (”You can’t handle the truth!”). There was the rat-a-tat political drama ofThe West Wing, perhaps Sorkin’s crowning achievement. There was Mark Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network, speaking at breakneck speed, his sentences swathed in cold erudition, stressing the importance of "final clubs". And there were the swelling strings at the climax of The Trial of the Chicago 7, when the protesters are acquitted.

The leading student-first connected learning platform, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Busuu, one of the leading language learning platforms which has reached over 120 million learners to date across more than 160 countries. Busuu provides courses in 12 different languages to over 500,000 paying subscribers.

"The addition of Busuu gives Chegg the unique opportunity to expand our business while also adding tremendous value to our existing users," said Dan Rosensweig, President and CEO of Chegg. "It will allow us to drive further into international markets, as well as accelerate Busuu’s growth in the US market. Busuu’s team, who we have known for many years, are a great cultural fit. 

The research adds to a growing body of work finding that climate change is increasing fire risk in California and elsewhere in the West.

The hottest summer days in the Sierra Nevada in California greatly increase the risk that wildfires will ignite or spread, and as the planet keeps warming the risks will increase even more, scientists said Wednesday.

The research, which examined daily temperatures and data from nearly 450 Sierra Nevada fires from 2001 to 2020 and projected the analysis into the future, found that the number of fires could increase by about 20 percent or more by the 2040s, and that the total burned area could increase by about 25 percent or more.