Society

Archaeologists in Peru have found new evidence showing how the oldest known civilization in the Americas adapted and survived a climate catastrophe without resorting to violence.

Medical Aid in Dying remains one of the nation’s most divisive moral quandaries. Supporters say the practice offers autonomy and relief from debilitating, dignity-stripping suffering. Critics contend it devalues life and opens a door to efficiency masquerading as compassion. Ultimately, the question remains: How much control should we have over the terms of our deaths?

I fired up the old email machine this morning and one of my morning emails informed me that a Michigan elected official is married to a neo-Nazi, and apparently some constituents have a problem with that. Some, I thought, is significantly less than you’d want to see for something like that. The official in question is Maple Valley Township Treasurer Meghyn “Meg” Booth, who it just so happens is a Republican if you can believe it. Her husband is Johnathan Christopher “Chris” Booth, and he’d been posting on YouTube videos that make claims like “Black people oppress themselves” and “America was built by and for white people” and talk about Nazis in the 1930s breaking “the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany.” And there’s a lot more, too. It’s really sickening. Read up!

Twice a month, they gather over Chinese food at the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library: a romance book editor, a photographer, an environmental activist, tech workers, high school students, retirees. They are the co-creators of the Library Newsroom. Teens bring their friends. Parents invite their adult children. Some days more than twenty people show up. Drawing inspiration from tenant newsletters and community noticeboards, they assess the neighborhood’s needs, map its landmarks, study its governing bodies and civic institutions, and discuss journalistic ethics and skills. 1 They ask, what are we curious about? Then, how can we learn more?

Margaret Atwood is doing her grocery shopping in her local supermarket in Toronto, and it is taking longer than usual. This is not because The Handmaid’s Tale author turns 86 this month, but because she is checking the provenance of every item before it goes in her trolley: California satsumas out; Canada spuds in. Atwood is a passionate environmentalist, but at the moment she is more worried about boycotting anything that comes from over the border in the US than air miles. “Elbows up!” she declares, taking a furious stance in the fruit and veg aisle.

On a recent autumn evening in Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast museum, the guide Joseph Langelinck paused next to a Renaissance sculpture of a man with a wooden club and challenged his flock of 18 visitors to name the mythical hero depicted.

Have you had to seek veterinary attention for a beloved pet in recent years? Have you noticed higher costs for vaccines and routine exams? Do you occasionally need a pet-sitter and wish to purchase services from an on-line service? I’ve got bad news for you: the billionaires have fixed their sights on you and on every corner of the pet care economy, with the goal of squeezing more money out of you.

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To return, then, to the urgent question: What is the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide? Certainly, Chomsky’s ending to his 1967 essay continues to ring true: an individual with privilege has choices. But one must choose sides, and as we have seen, opportunities for acting depend on where one stands in relation to the ruling power. On campuses over the past few decades, dissident intellectuals have increasingly faced growing hostility and silencing. And now, in our fascist moment, we are witnessing levels of repression not seen since the Red Scare.

I’ll refrain from editorializing, as I absolutely hate kids.

Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=M1QvVnjiegE

When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people.

It happened slowly, then all at once.

Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=8Gm7kSUkBAk

Ron Holden Jr had one big question on his mind as a coffee shop-loving father of two daughters, two-year-old Layla and one-month-old Nari: there is a lot of necessary outreach, resources and activities like “Mommy and me” yoga classes for mothers. But what kind of support do dads have?

First, libraries serve as public health hubs — sometimes the only health hub — offering the community access to critical health information. For example, at the Waukegan Public Library in Illinois, community health workers run free health awareness classes (in English and Spanish), on topics like hypertension, diabetes and obesity. At the Tulsa Public Library in Oklahoma, patrons join a free, six-week course on caring for a loved one with dementia.

I was working at the magazine [*The New Yorker*] as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues. I still wasn’t a doctor or engineer, but the publication cast a flattering light on them, revealing them to be open minded enough to let me pursue a non-traditional field, yet strict enough to propel me to its most rarefied strata. I liked to name-drop where I worked, too, especially when meeting someone for the first time, though I made a point of not bringing it up until I was asked. For almost two years, things went smoothly. I had insurance and I was making more money than ever before. At work, I checked a lot of the “back of the book” pieces, which often involved going to the movies or reading novels on company time. I would write emails suggesting minor corrections:

Yushy was on a packed tube on New Year’s Eve when he heard voices yell his name. He recognised their faces from the squat raves he had been photographing. “We’re going to a party right now,” they whispered. “I have my camera,” he said, and followed them. He didn’t know anything else about them. In the squat rave underground, which thrives on anonymity and secret locations, it didn’t matter. “They trusted me with them, and I trusted them to take me to the rave,” he says.

In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women’s bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as “influencing women in their daily lives”.

We ought to be honest that design reviews have not produced attractive mid-rise homes that the public appears to like en-masse. If anything, they might have contributed to the unattractiveness. In contrast, people generally like the architecture of new single-family developments and townhomes. Lennar Corporation is seen as the McDonalds of single-family home construction but few would argue their creations are unattractive. Lennar incorporate features that are aesthetically pleasing to Americans: shingles, ornaments, simple stone masonry, plastered on wooden paneling etc. I find some of these homes to look quite silly, but I don’t think the average American disapproves. So why can’t we build apartments in similar styles?

As incoherent, unhinged, or even cringey as the Minneapolis shooter’s videos might seem, they are part of a familiar template of terroristic behavior—one that continues to spread in online communities dedicated to mass shootings and other forms of brutality. In these morbid spaces, killers are viewed as martyrs, and they’re dubbed “saints.” Really, they’re influencers.

Even with its peeling white paint, Cabin 5 feels like home to Golda Shore. For two decades, the 96-year-old has left Florida each summer for a “Trip to Yiddishland,” a weeklong immersion in Yiddish language and culture.

A forlorn disco ball counting down the time remaining hangs at the entrance of the beloved Berlin club Wilde Renate, known only as Renate, which is rapidly heading into its final nights of wild abandon.

12 foot ladder- https://archive.ph/tHgmW

Until seven years ago, I had a really neat flat top. I was a volunteer in the playground at my kids’ school in Littleton, Colorado, and when the school announced they were going to have a Crazy Hair Day for dads, I said, “Let’s do a mohawk!” My kids thought it was a great idea. So I went to the barber shop and came back with a small mohawk.

Today the Baniwa live in off-grid communities far from universities, libraries, and cities, with only limited internet access that arrived about three years ago. In the northwest of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, their villages lie within a vast mosaic of Indigenous lands accessible only with special permission from tribes and the federal government—a system put in place to safeguard Indigenous groups and help them maintain their sovereignty. Traveling to Nazaré from the closest town, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, requires a 5- to 10-hour journey on a motorboat.

Lazy-ass 21st-century hed aside, the main takeaway I got was that no one at the Post had heard about what happens after buyouts -- somewhat confusing, given this wasn't their first rodeo.

The “great American road trip” has often been romanticized in popular culture. For Black travelers, however, navigating the highways around the United States has never been easy, as they tend to encounter racism just for driving while Black. In the Jim Crow era of segregation, when there was no safe place for them to eat, Black travelers would pack premade meals and nonperishable food items in shoeboxes for lunch. The Negro Motorist Green Book, also known simply as the Green Book, was published in 1936 by postal employee and travel writer Victor Hugo Green to address this issue. This book was born out of the idea of helping Black travelers to find safe places to eat and sleep while traveling across the United States, especially in the South, where Jim Crow was the law of the land.

Apologies for the link to The Site That Shall Not Be Named, but the thread was far more interesting than the story.

On warm summer evenings, the groundhog who lives beneath my deck likes to climb atop a bench and look across the field. As I watch, I sometimes wonder what is on her mind while she surveys her domain. The simple explanation is that she is scanning for predators, and given the realities of groundhog life, this is quite likely. But is that all there is to it? Might she also enjoy the sight of grasses swaying in the breeze and the sound of rustling leaves? Might she even find them beautiful?

I'll believe that from German researchers when LLMs start shoehorning four nouns together instead of just delving.

“You get a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of what people are going through, of the highs and lows of the human experience.

For the first time, on November 20, 2024, the Dia da Consciência Negra (Black Consciousness Day) was recognized as a national holiday in Brazil. The date marks the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of the largest Brazilian quilombo, who was beheaded in 1695 by the Portuguese Crown—his head displayed as a trophy in a public square (to dispel, it is said, the myth of his immortality). The quilombo was a community of enslaved people who escaped from white-owned plantations, where they were kept imprisoned in the senzalas, the quarters designated for them—hence the name of a classic (and controversial) Brazilian text, Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933), by sociologist Gilberto Freyre.

In June, the world’s largest psychedelics conference returned to Denver. Eight thousand participants gathered to hear 500 presenters over the course of a week.

After its release in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Since then the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has significantly affected how we learn, write, work and create. But new research shows that it’s also influencing us in ways we may not be aware of—such as changing how we speak.

I was doomscrolling through news articles one evening — this was June 2024, which feels simultaneously like yesterday and several epochs ago — when I saw a headline stating there was $2.8 million in school lunch debt across Utah.

What if planting a tree wasn’t a CSR activity, a school punishment, or a presidential photo op, but a national obligation?

A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast episode that brought me to my knees.

Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests.

I consider no activity more luxurious than posting up at a bar solo with a good book. The creasing of a paperback in one hand, the weight of a wine glass in the other, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people all make for a lovely evening. Or at least, I thought so, until recently, when two twentysomethings approached me during this ritual. “Are you reading alone?” one asked. “I could neverrrr,” the other said, and then uttered the universal mean girl slight: “I wish I had your confidence.”

When I started college, in 2012, I felt like a virginal freak. Rather than warn me off of sex, the pearl-clutching over hookup culture had left me desperate to have it.

It’s been over two decades now, but as I remember it: the floor was sticky with peanut shells and beer.

Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori spent six years living in the western Amazon. He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master’s thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD on the music of eight Indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the local Shipibo tribe and settled down.

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In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In an era of escalating censorship, disinformation, and the erosion of public trust in institutions, Wikipedia may seem like an unlikely site of resistance. But at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and other institutions across the country, a quiet revolution is taking place, one edit at a time.