Month: December 2022

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Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows.

It's been another banner year for television, in which streaming continued to dominate with a vengeance, giving us spy thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, tormented superheroes, gritty inner-city drama, and feel-good dramedy. In fact, this is the first year without a single major network series on the Ars year-end list.

Who knows how long this cornucopia of creative goodness will last? Nearly every major streamer, including Netflix, reported at least some losses in 2022, and the outlook for next year is cloudy at best. Budgets are getting slashed, streamers are consolidating, and promising shows are being canceled left and right as streaming services adapt to the changing market environment. For now, at least, we are still reaping the benefits of past years' investments. Our top TV picks for 2022 are listed below, in no particular order. Be sure to weigh in with your own favorite 2022 shows in the comments.

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James Kirkland started his career in 1982 as a geriatrician, treating aging patients. But he found himself dissatisfied with what he could offer them.

“I got tired of prescribing wheelchairs, walkers and incontinence devices,” recalls Kirkland, now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He knew that aging is considered the biggest risk factor for chronic illness, but he was frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. So Kirkland went back to school to learn the skills he’d need to tackle aging head-on, earning a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Today, he and his colleague Tamara Tchkonia, a molecular biologist at the Mayo Clinic, are leaders in a growing movement to halt chronic disease by protecting brains and bodies from the biological fallout of aging.

If these researchers are successful, they’ll have no shortage of customers: People are living longer, and the number of Americans age 65 and older is expected to double, to 80 million, by 2040. While researchers like Kirkland don’t expect to extend lifespan, they hope to lengthen “health span,” the time that a person lives free of disease.

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As Elon Musk's Category 5 tweetstorm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1,000 new refugees per hour, every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million.

Joining as a user is pretty easy. More than enough ex-Twitterers are happy finding a Mastodon instance via joinmastodon.org, getting a list of handles for their Twitter friends via Movetodon, and carrying on as before.

But what new converts may not realize is that Mastodon is just the most prominent node in a much broader movement to change the nature of the web.