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India Today
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
The Traitors: Actor Elnaaz Norouzi prepared for six months, read psychology books
Ahead of 'The Traitors' finale on July 3, actor Elnaaz Norouzi said she prepared to become a traitor for six months. In a YouTube video on her channel, the now-eliminated contestant shared that she read several books on human psychology and watched international versions of the show to hone her her elimination, Norouzi managed to fool her co-contestants by putting up an innocent act from day one. "This just didn't come from nowhere. Everything you do, you have to be well-read and well-prepared," she said in her YouTube actor then listed the books she specifically read for 'The Traitors' and said, "One of them is 'How to Make Your Audience Fall in Love with You', which is about acting. And then there's 'The Laws of Human Nature', which was very important for me, and it gave me so many insights."advertisementShe added, "It was so important for me to understand the other players. And then there's 'How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Mastermind', which is what a lot of you have been calling me. There were two more that I listened to. One of them is 'Telling Lies', and 'How to Read People Like a Book'." Watch the video here: The 'Sacred Games' fame then emphasised the importance of preparation and hard work, saying that all of this made her game very strong."It's a little scary to learn these things, because, in real life, I don't like to cheat anybody around me But all of this really helped make my game strong. Everything needs preparation, everything needs a lot of hard work," she 28-year-old also said that it wasn't about winning but doing well on the show for her. "If you get into something without knowing what you're doing, without having studied it properly, you might just do well to a certain extent. It wasn't about winning, it was about doing well on the show," Norouzi a traitor, the actor was instructed to carry out 'murders' while remaining undetected by her fellow contestants. Her strategy involved convincing others that she was unintelligent and struggling with Hindi, leveraging her status as a foreigner to enhance her Norouzi rose to fame in India by playing a supporting role in Netflix's 'Sacred Games'. She also appeared in Gerard Butler's 'Kandahar', and in the Apple TV+ show 'Tehran'.- EndsMust Watch
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Women Are Turning Substack Newsletters Into 7-Figure Incomes
Here's a jaw-dropping statistic: 45 Substack publishers are earning more than $1 million annually in recurring subscription revenue. And they're not all household names or media moguls. Many of them are individuals who have built highly engaged audiences through consistent, focused and authentic content. For women exploring alternative income streams, platforms like Substack offer a powerful opportunity to turn ideas, insights and storytelling into sustainable revenue. Whether you're an expert in your field, a passionate writer or simply someone with something to say, Substack makes publishing, and profiting, more accessible than ever. What Is Substack? Substack is a digital publishing platform that brings together email newsletters, blogs and podcasts in one user-friendly interface. It allows writers to publish directly to their subscribers, offering both free and paid content, all while maintaining full ownership of their audience. According to social media consultant Emily Raiber, what sets Substack apart from traditional tools like MailChimp is that it's built specifically for content-first creators rather than for businesses sending promotional blasts. Substack is designed to help individuals grow a readership and monetize their writing through direct subscriptions. And the best part is, it's free to start. Women are Leading the Way on Substack It's not surprising that brands have jumped on the Substack bandwagon, with an increasing number of founders using the platform for what fellow Forbes contributor Karin Eldor calls 'a content playground to spark delight for the engaged consumer.' But nowadays even ordinary women are finding financial and personal success on Substack—and several are sharing their strategies so others can do the same. Cassandra Campbell has taken a deep dive into what separates the top earners from the rest. One of her biggest takeaways? You don't need to publish every day to make money. 'Most seven-figure newsletters publish just a few times per week. In fact, weekly publishing is more common among top earners than daily or multiple-times-daily output. Consistency matters, but frequency alone isn't the differentiator.' Campbell also found that the most lucrative newsletters fall into just a few high-interest categories, like U.S. politics, finance, technology and business. If you're aiming to earn significant income, focusing on these themes is a great place to start. Hannah Ashe, a former teacher who now runs a successful newsletter on Substack called 'Chez Hanny,' credits her growth to simply showing up and writing regularly. 'Everything I've learned has come from writing week after week,' she says in her Substack post How to Build a Successful Substack. Her advice is to not overthink it. Instead, write with honesty and show your personality. How Women Can Build and Monetize a Substack Newsletter Raiber recommends beginning with a topic you know well and can talk about authentically. Readers are drawn to depth, expertise and voice. Whether it's parenting, politics, mental health or marketing tips, clarity of focus helps set expectations and builds loyalty. It's important to let your audience know what kind of content they'll get - free or paid - and how often they'll receive it. Consistency builds trust, and trust builds community. Whether it's every Tuesday or the first Friday of the month, a regular cadence helps readers form a habit of engagement. Campbell's research reveals that successful newsletters don't always need massive audiences. In fact, many seven-figure earners fall into Substack's 'Thousands' tier of subscribers, not 'Tens of Thousands' or more. There's a slightly stronger correlation between higher pricing and earnings than between sheer subscriber numbers and earnings. Try different pricing strategies to see what works best for your audience and your niche. It may take some experimentation, but it's a crucial part of building a sustainable income. According to Raiber, Substack readers value long-form content, thought leadership, storytelling, personal reflection and niche expertise. Posts that offer clear takeaways, valuable lessons and compelling Q&As tend to perform well. Write with a consistent voice and consider turning posts into series to encourage return readership. Building community on Substack is important. Interacting with other Substack writers can lead to valuable cross-promotion opportunities. Collaborating with like-minded creators, engaging in reader comments and sharing your newsletter on your website and other social platforms can amplify your reach. Also, don't be afraid to ask friends or colleagues for help spreading the word. One of Raiber's most useful pieces of wisdom comes from her earlier TV days. 'You pass 10 story ideas on the way to work—don't miss them!' her mentor shared. Inspiration is everywhere. But it's important to stay in your lane. Readers come to you for a specific type of content, and consistency in tone and topic is key to building a strong, lasting relationship. Writing can be solitary, but it doesn't have to be isolating. 'Don't scream into a vacuum,' Raiber advises. Find someone you trust to give you honest feedback. Whether it's about tone, clarity or structure, a second pair of eyes can help you refine your message and improve your connection with readers. If you've ever considered putting your voice out there, Substack might just be the platform for you. It can help you get heard…and paid.
Mint
19-05-2025
- Health
- Mint
Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, reveals he has same cancer as Joe Biden: ‘My life expectancy is maybe this summer'
Scott Adams, the creator of the popular comic strip Dilbert and a known conservative commentator, has publicly revealed that he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer—the same type recently diagnosed in former President Joe Biden. Adams shared the news during his online show, Coffee with Scott Adams, describing his condition as severe and life-altering. Adams shared the grim news during his livestream show Coffee with Scott Adams on Monday. In an emotional and candid announcement, Adams told his viewers that his cancer has metastasised and that he may only have a few months left to live. "I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones," Adams said. "My life expectancy is maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer." Adams described the disease as debilitating and said he no longer experiences any good days. "The disease is already intolerable. I can tell you that I don't have good days," he said. "So if you are wondering, 'Hey Scott, do you have any good days'? Nope. Nope. Every day is a nightmare and evening is even worse." Adams also spoke about the physical toll the illness has taken on him, noting that he's been relying on a walker and is in constant pain. "I do have the ability to kind of get up for this part of the day, but I am in pain, and I'm always in pain," he explained. "And the pain moves around to different parts of my body. I've been using a walker to walk for months now." Adams' announcement follows news that Joe Biden, 81, was diagnosed with a high-grade form of prostate cancer, prompting renewed public attention on the disease and its impact. The shared diagnosis has added a somber tone to the national conversation about prostate cancer and late-stage detection. Adams gained international recognition in the early 1990s with the launch of Dilbert, a satirical comic strip poking fun at office life, corporate bureaucracy, and tech culture. Debuting in 1989, Dilbert quickly became a staple in newspapers and online platforms, resonating with workers around the globe. At its peak, the strip was syndicated in over 2,000 publications and translated into dozens of languages. In addition to his cartooning, Adams has authored numerous books, both humorous and philosophical, including The Dilbert Principle and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. His writing often blends self-help, management insights, and provocative opinions. In recent years, Adams gained attention as a political commentator, particularly for his vocal support of former President Donald Trump. He frequently shares his views on politics, persuasion, media, and current events through his blog, YouTube livestream (Coffee with Scott Adams), and social media. Former US President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office confirmed in a statement released on May 18. The diagnosis was made following symptoms related to urinary issues, Reuters reported. Despite the advanced stage of the cancer due to metastasis, Biden's medical team emphasised that the cancer is hormone-sensitive, which offers hope for effective treatment. Biden and his family are currently reviewing treatment options in consultation with medical professionals. Joe Biden took to X, to thank the public for the "love and support" following the announcement of his prostate cancer diagnosis. In a statement released on Sunday, his office confirmed that the 82-year-old had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. 'Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support,' Joe Biden posted on X. The health disclosure comes amid ongoing scrutiny of Biden's health throughout his presidency and during his brief 2024 reelection campaign. Speculation about his health circulated widely last year before Biden withdrew from the race, with then-Vice President Kamala Harris taking over as the Democratic candidate. In February 2024, Biden's physician declared him 'fit to serve' following a physical examination at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Business Insider
12-05-2025
- Business Insider
An ex-Google AI ethicist and a UW professor want you to know AI isn't what you think it is
It may seem like AI adoption has taken off rapidly, but there are some notable holdouts. Emily Bender, a UW linguistics professor, and Alex Hanna, the research director of the Distributed AI Research Institute and former Google AI ethicist, would like readers to take away from their new book, "The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want" that AI isn't want it's marketed to be. Longtime collaborators, cohosts of the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast and vocal AI critics, Bender and Hanna, want to take hyperbole out of the conversation around AI, and caution that, frankly, intelligence isn't artificial. Their at times funny and irreverent undressing of AI into "mathy maths", "text extruding machines", or classically, " stochastic parrots" aims to get us to see automation technologies for what they are and separate them from hype. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length. Bender: I think it's always helpful to keep the people in the frame. The narrative that this [automation] is artificial intelligence is designed to hide the people. The people involved are everything from the programmers who made algorithmic decisions, to the people whose creative work was appropriated, even stolen, as the basis for things. Even the people who did the data work, so the content moderation, so that the system outputs what users see, don't have horrific stuff. Hanna: This term AI is not a singular thing. There's kind of a gloss on many different types of automation, and the thought that there's a tool that's just writing emails, upstages that this term is being leveraged. These are systems used in things as broad as incarceration, hiring decisions, to outputting synthetic media. Just like fast fashion or chocolate production, a whole host of people are involved in maintaining this supply chain. That AI-generated email, or text, for this difficult thing I don't want to write, know that there's a whole ecosystem around it that's affecting people, labor-wise, environmentally, and in other guises. The book highlights countless ways that AI is extractive and can make human life worse. Why do you think so many are singing the gospel of AI and embracing such tools? Bender: It's interesting that you use the phrase singing the gospel. There are a lot of people who have drawn connections between, especially talk of artificial general intelligence and Christian eschatology, which is the idea that there is something we could build that could save us. That could save us from everything from the dread of menial tasks to major problems we're facing, like the climate crisis, to just the experience of not having answers available. Of course, none of that actually plays out. We do not live in a world where every question has an answer. The idea that if we just throw enough compute and data at it, and there's the extractivism, we'd be relieved of that, and be in a situation where there is an answer to every question at our fingertips. Hanna: There's a desire for computing to step in and really wow us, and now we have AI for everything from social services to healthcare to making art. Part of it is a desire to have a more "objective" type of computational being. Lately, there's been a lot made of 'the crisis of social capital', 'the crisis of masculinity, the crisis of 'insert your favorite thing here' that's a social phenomenon. This goes back to Robert Putman's book "Bowling Alone" and a few weird results in the 2006 general social survey, which said people have fewer close friends than they used to. There's this general thesis that people are lonelier, and that may be true, but AI is presented as a panacea for those social ills. When there are a lot more things that we need to focus on, that are much harder, like rebuilding social infrastructure, rebuilding third spaces, fortifying our schools, rebuilding urban infrastructure, but if we have a technology that seems to do all of those things, then people get really excited about it. Language is also a large focus of the book, and you codified the doomer, boomer, and booster camps. Can you say more about these groups? What about readers who won't recognize themselves in any of these groups? Bender: The booster versus doomer thing is really constricting. This is the discourse where that's supposed to be one-dimensional incline, where on one end you have the doomers who say, 'AI is a thing and it's going to kill us all!' And on the other end, AI boosters say, 'AI is a thing and it's going to solve all of our problems!' and the way that they speak often sounds like that is the full range of options. So you're at one end or the other, or somewhere in the middle, and the point we make is that actually, no, that's a really small space of possibilities. It's two sides of the same coin, both predicated on 'AI is a thing as is super powerful' and that is ungrounded nonsense. Most of the space of possibilities, including the space that we inhabit, is outside that. Hanna: We hope the book also gives people on that booster and doomer scale, a way out of that thinking. This can be a mechanism to help people change their minds and consider a perspective that they might not have considered. Because we're in a situation where the AI hype is so — this is a term I learned from Emily — "thick on the ground", that it's hard to really see things for what they are. You offer many steps that people can take to resist the pervasive use of AI. What does one do when your workplace, or online services you use, have baked AI functionality in everyday processes? Bender: In all cases when you're talking about refusal, both individual and collective, it's helpful to go back to values and why we're doing what we're doing. People can ask a series of questions about any technology. It is important to remember that you have the agency to ask those questions. The inevitability narrative is basically an attempt to steal that agency and say, "It is all powerful, or it will be soon, so just go along with it, and you're not in a position to understand anyway." In fact, we are all in a position to understand what it is and what values are involved in it. Then you can say, 'Okay, you're proposing to use some automation here, how does that fit with our purposes and our values, and how do we know how well it fits? Where is the evaluation?' Too much of this is 'Oh, just believe us.'". There are instances where people with a very familiar and technical understanding of AI, motives notwithstanding, still overstate and misunderstand what AI is and what it can do. How should laypeople with a more casual understanding think about and talk about AI? Bender: The first step is always disaggregating AI; it's not one thing. So what specifically is being automated? Then, be very skeptical of any claims because the people who are selling this are wholeheartedly embracing the magical sound of artificial intelligence and very often being extremely cagey at best about what the system actually does, what the training data was, and how they work. Hanna: There's a tendency, and it's partially economic, partially just because some people are so deep in the sauce that they're not really going to see the forest for the trees. AI researchers are already primed to see those things through a certain light. They're thinking about it through primarily engineering breakthroughs, more efficient ways to learn parameters, or to do XYZ tasks within that field, but they are not really the people focused on specialized fields like nursing, for instance. People should take pride in and be able to use their expertise in their field to combat the AI hype. One great example of this is National Nurses United, which wrote explainers about AI and disaggregated between AI and biometric surveillance, passive listening, and censors in the clinicians' office, and what that was doing to nursing practice. So, not buying into hype and leaning into one's own expertise is a really powerful method here. In your respective circles, what has been the reaction to the book thus far? Bender: People are excited. Where I sit in linguistics, which is really an important angle in understanding why it is that the synthetic text extruding machines in particular are so compelling. The linguists that I speak to are excited to see our field having this role at this moment. Hanna: I've had great reactions. A lot of my friends are software developers, or they're in related fields since I went to undergrad in computer science, and a lot of my friends growing up were tech nerds, and almost to a T, all of them are anti-AI. They say, 'I don't want Copilot,' 'I don't want this stuff writing my code,' 'I'm really sick of the hype around this,' and I thought that was the most surprising and maybe the most exciting part of this. People who do technical jobs, where they're promised the most speed or productivity improvements, are some of the people who are most opposed to the introduction of these tools in their work.
Irish Examiner
01-05-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
Why do sand martins sometimes reject last year's nest burrows?
Ní féidir leis an gabhlán an dá thrá a phreastal (literally means 'the sand martin can't be on two beaches'... you can't do two things at once) Having crossed Pharaoh's hot dry ocean, 'my' sand martins are back from Africa. About 30 pairs nest each summer in a soft bank facing the sea, close to my home. The little migrants are weighing up their options... they deemed the site unsatisfactory last year and moved on. Will these temperamental breeders reject it again this time around? Fingers crossed! Some positive news. The Sand Martins have arrived @stwater Minworth and are showing interest in The Sand Martin Hotel we built. Great to get active footage on our @tjfocus_ @SpypointCamera Trail Cameras. The paint job seems to have done the trick — West Midlands Ringing Group (@RingersWm) April 17, 2025 Like all creatures great and small, a 'gabhlán' faces life's two big challenges — to eat without being eaten, and to beget youngsters who will carry the genetic torch on to future generations. Success hinges on risk assessment. Humans are changing the environment, relentlessly presenting new challenges. A bird might give people a wide berth, as whooper swans do. Or, like mute swans, it can exploit the environments that humans create. Other members of the swallow family made such a choice long ago. The cave and cliff nests of old were abandoned. House martins took to building under the eaves of buildings. These squatters, however, remain outdoors. Swallows are cheekier — they nest inside barns and cow-sheds. Only the sand martin has remained true to its age-old traditions. It continues to dig tunnels in banks as it always did. Sand quarries and holes in sea-walls are our only gifts to it. The How to Build Guide booklet has arrived and is free of charge. DM me if you're interested in a copy. It's also available at the link below. — Sand Martin Wall (@SandMartinWall) October 11, 2022 'Gabhláns' have a bunker mentality. Each pair digs a tunnel. The nest chamber, a human arm's length or so underground, is safe from enemies. Only an opportunistic stoat can penetrate a burrow. Badgers were recorded digging up nests in Sweden. Burrows from previous years might seem serviceable to our eyes. Digging a new one can take up to two weeks, so renovating an existing tunnel should be labour-saving. Martins are plagued by feather-lice and creepy-crawlies. Are they fearful that old nest-holes might still harbour the eggs of previous tormentors? Sand martins are gregarious — they roost nest and migrate together. Like their cousins, sand martins are gregarious. They roost nest and migrate together. Breeding colonies, typically, have up to 50 pairs. There is safety in numbers. The hobby, a very scarce visiting falcon, has a particular penchant for martins but a swirling flock of angry parent sand martins will mob it, driving the predator from the colony. But there are downsides to communal living. A sand martin 'village' is conspicuous; it can't be hidden from prowling enemies. Breeding colonies of sand martins typically have up to 50 pairs. There is safety in numbers. Also, a male martin may copulate with a compliant female when spouses' backs are turned. He may father more offspring by doing so and her brood will have greater genetic diversity. But infidelity is a two-edged sword: all of the youngsters he nurtures so devotedly in the nest at home, may not be his — 'what goes around comes around'! There's a price to be paid for security. Songbirds, such as robins and blackbirds, generally make 'cup' nests, from which chicks can observe, and discover, the world around them. Pity the poor martin youngster emerging for the first time from darkness into light, 'cast into this breathing world, scarce half made up' etc. After three weeks in warm womb-like security, it must now sink or swim. The name 'martin' dates back to the medieval bestiaries and animal fables; this is a popular bird. "The martin and the swallow are God Almighty's birds to hallow". Read More Birds of Ireland: Swallow
