Society

Interesting. Apparently, I’m a Gemini, sted Cancer. My first wife is a Taurus, sted Gemini. And my second wife is a Leo, sted Virgo.

It’s no secret that Israel is losing ground in American public opinion on both the left and the right, even as many American Jews feel newly besieged by rising antisemitism. On much of the left, activists and intellectuals increasingly interpret Israel and Zionism through anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks, casting the conflict in the moral language of oppressor and oppressed.

Intergenerational relations, or lack of them, is a subject I’ve been thinking about, on and off, since the financial crisis. I’ve read up on it, too – things such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report on intergenerational earnings mobility, which is wonky but full of fascinating information which needs some parsing. (Example: “While the educational attainment of ethnic minorities growing up in families eligible for free school meals is often higher than that of their white majority peers, their earnings outcomes show no such advantage.” Why not?) Another good source of data is the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s (OBR) report on intergenerational fairness – which, interestingly, is about the bluntest statement of fiscal unfairness that you can find. The OBR makes the point that “a current new-born baby would make an average net discounted contribution to the exchequer of £68,400 over its life-time, whilst future generations would have to contribute £159,700”. In plain English, people’s lifetime contribution to the state is going to double. That number is from 2011, and will definitely have got worse. In 2019, the House of Lords published a report on “Tackling intergenerational unfairness”, which doesn’t even bother pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. Mind you, not everyone agrees. A 2023 report from Imperial College Business School argues “there is more solidarity between generations than the ‘Millennials versus Boomers’ narrative would suggest”.

Each day when you wake up, you come back to yourself. You see the room around you, feel your body brush against your clothes and think about your plans, worries and hopes for the day. This daily internal experience is miraculous and mysterious, and the subject of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.

Following horrifying revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic sexual assaults and trafficking of underage girls, the United States Department of Justice has been forced to publicly release millions of the late sex offender’s emails and texts.

Influencers have had a bad time of it at restaurants recently. There they are, just trying to record a quick video and take a few pictures of their lunch, and restaurateur Jeremy King (of the Ivy and the Wolseley in London) goes and writes an article saying they’re ruining the dining experience of “bona fide guests” – something he says staff are “desperately trying to stop”. I’ve read pieces calling TikTok the end of the London restaurant scene. Friends’ parents have even said they would get up and leave if they were sitting next to anyone filming their meal.

From ancient times, people have always tried to pass on messages to others by drawing pictures. Sometimes these pictures are self-explanatory, like the drawings of mountains or trees on a map. Sometimes they represent quite complex ideas that need to be learned. Egyptian hieroglyphs are one example, mathematical symbols another.

Robin Giles did not quite believe the rumors that passed among his neighbors. He couldn’t yet picture the carnage: pastures bloodied by the carcasses of sheep and goats with highly distinctive wounds—bite marks at the throat, abdominal cavities emptied of lungs and liver, entrails left to rot in the Hill Country sun. Coyotes.

Most Americans say race doesn’t drive their daily decisions, even as the country feels more divided than ever, a new national survey finds.

The utility room is where many of the more intimate aspects of our family life unfold: parenting conferences about so-called “natural consequences,” muttered curse words, and quick visits with my secret chocolate stash. For one strange month last January, it was also where I read several Stephen King novels in bite-size increments between dinner prep and bath time. And maybe that is why I keep thinking about its architectural cousin and opposite: what I call the aspirational pantry.

There’s a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you “lose” one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale.

On Valentine’s Day, there’s the temptation to believe that somewhere out there is “The One": a soulmate, a perfect match, the person you were meant to be with.

A few years ago I spent more time than I thought would be necessary to find a quality historical resource for a broad introduction to West African history from West African scholars. I found this instead, which covers the entire continent and its many regions and is composed by scholars of those regions.

Out on the water, paddling across the straits between two small rocky islands, the dusk fades and the stars appear. Jennie has done her best to coach me in local geography before darkness, showing me the map with its patchwork of islands and bays, and describing the shape of each landmark. All to no avail. I’m more than happy to be lost at sea, leaning back in my kayak to gaze at the constellations, occasionally checking that the red light on the stern of her kayak is still visible ahead. We stop in the sheltered lee of an island and hear a hoot. “Eurasian eagle owl,” says Jennie. “They nest here.” Then she switches off all the lights. “Let’s paddle slowly close to shore. Watch what happens.”

The city of Shenzhen is one of the most striking examples of China’s super-rapid development in recent decades. As recently as 1955, it was just a collection of fishing villages in the Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), with an estimated 5,000 residents. The name “Shenzhen” meant “deep drainage ditch.” It was nowheresville, a patch of emptiness only distinguished by proximity to better-known cities. In American terms, a patch of Long Island that was mostly empty lots.

AI tools like Sudowrite, Novelcrafter, and Squibler promise full-length books in minutes—or seconds. AI-produced books have begun to flood Amazon, and range from kids and coloring books to derivative novels and faux biographies repurposed from Wikipedia pages. It’s a mess, and it is only going to get worse.

Happy MLK Day!

There’s a certain serendipity that happens at a potluck. Foods that have never mingled together find themselves side by side: jambalaya in a crockpot, a cardboard pizza box, a plastic tub of Trader Joe’s hummus, a platter of gluten-free brownies. None of it really makes sense when scooped together onto a plate, but all of the flavors blend like fast friends—and if you’re lucky, oftentimes, the people do, too.

In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.

Understanding the significance of our own lives requires some understanding of scale. “Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences,” Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist, writes. The Anthropocene, she suggests, is a fine time to “adopt a geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, destroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate, and exterminate.” We need to know how to navigate our epoch: to recognize our profusion of scales and strive to understand, amidst their collisions, not just how to care for the world beyond us but how a person can be, what it means to stand as a morally vested individual.

There aren’t many escapes from the grim onslaught of terrible news these days. You can stare at a blank wall, obsessively count the hairs on your arm, or, in a true moment of desperation, ponder the state of global fashion. I prefer the last one. I love being on the cutting edge of style, peacocking out in the decaying slopfest that is our planet. A crisp, well-made suit is a cure for all manner of emotionally trying times. I relish being hyper-aware of the goings-on of fashion, so I was one of the first sorry souls to learn of the current global obsession with flimsy canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags.

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

‘A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.’ VS Naipaul’s first rule for good writing is a popular one. From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter.

Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after Israel’s war and genocide destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities. The two men, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim, are avid readers who have spent years trying to save books as they struggled to survive in Gaza.

We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can’t define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.

There was a time when fat liberation seemed inevitable: Body positivity, a movement to dismantle systems that map stigma onto fat bodies, was having a cultural moment. Plus-size model Ashley Graham received a Barbie molded in her image. Per her request, Mattel made the doll’s thighs touch, an ode to the realness of Graham’s body and that of the 67 percent of women in the United States who are above a size 14. She also appeared on the cover of Vogue UK and American Vogue, designed a swimsuit line with Swimsuits For All, and became the first plus-size model to grace the cover of Sport Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. At the time, Graham’s ascendancy and success were treated as the collective win of a movement that had pushed for fashion, in particular, to become more inclusive of larger bodies.

Donald Trump wants us to believe that the “war on Christianity” is spreading across the globe. The US president recently sounded the alarm on the “mass slaughter” of Christians in Nigeria while threatening a US invasion of the African nation. We shouldn’t be surprised. This falls right in line with Trump’s ongoing attempts to project Maga Christianity on to the global stage and crack down on religious freedom.

Emilie Nasseh, a 30-year-old living in Manhattan, has made up to US$2,000 a month through an unconventional side hustle: renting her clothes and accessories.

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As I apply for yet another job, I look at the company’s website for context. I’ve now read their “what we do” section four or five times, and I have a problem – I can’t figure out what they do. There are two possibilities here. One: they don’t know what they do. Two: what they do is so pointless and embarrassing that they dare not spell it out in plain English. “We forge marketing systems at the forefront of the online wellness space” translates to something like “we use ChatGPT to sell dodgy supplements”.

Inexorably, nostalgia grinds on, ingesting and crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable, homogeneous slurry. The ironclad law stating everyone in their 30s must get obsessed with resurrecting childhood media assures no decade can escape. But as said threshold creeps through the 80s and 90s and draws unavoidably closer to the 2000s, remembering the era fondly is requiring more and more ludicrous amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rife with war, fearmongering, and recession, and the 2000s were not a fun decade to live through, especially as a teenager.

I know that a lot of us here already know this, but this explanation is unusual on its clarity and so I think it’s good for sharing to friends and family that don’t see what’s happening.

So, I recently learned how pen caps work. I think it’s neat, so I’m going to tell you about it, but I also think the experience of figuring this out illustrates some other interesting things about the world, so I’m going to tell you about that too.

With a Batman (person in costume) present in the subway, seat offered to a pregnant person increased from 37 % to 67 %.

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Miami’s Cubans re-create the country they love through bodily sensation, reinventing life just as it was. In Cuba, the pizzas have thick, burned crusts and cheese only at the center because no one can get enough ingredients or anything but a deep aluminum dish to cook them in — and so, in Miami, with all the resources of capitalism at hand, Cubans make the same pizza. In Cuba, rural teenagers snack on huge, wavy crackers at school and chips called “chicoticos” at home, and so in Miami, Cubans crank out the same crackers and chips.

I love napping. I love napping in the summer, when rhythms are more relaxed and the guilt of taking a break less intense (if only slightly). But I also love napping in the winter, when it’s cold outside, and burying myself under a warm blanket makes me feel like I’m hibernating. No matter the season, when lying in bed, I luxuriate in the feeling of my body relaxing, waiting for the moment when odd images start forming somewhere in that space between my closed lids and my corneas – or, most likely, somewhere in my mind. I love drifting into unconsciousness without worrying about the next item on my to-do list. I’m not a sound sleeper or someone who falls asleep easily at night, but napping comes easily and sweetly. I treasure the days in which I can nap. And I treasure even more the nights in which I sleep long and well.

In an article co-authored with his colleague Margarita Díaz-Andreu, the University of Barcelona researcher argues that 12 large shell trumpets found in Neolithic settlements and mines in Catalonia – and dated to between the late fifth and early fourth millennia BC – may have been used as long-distance communication devices and as rudimentary musical instruments.

Eleven years ago, Paul Lundy was dying a slow, workingman’s death under fluorescent light.

As of 2025, at least nineteen countries had a legal basis for naturalizing individuals who invest in the country or donate a specified amount, with over a dozen hosting active CBI [citizenship by investment] programs. The Caribbean is home to five: Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts, and Saint Lucia. The greater Mediterranean region is another hotbed, with Turkey, Egypt, North Macedonia, and Jordan offering programs, even as Malta, Cyprus, and Montenegro exit the scene. In Asia, Cambodia has a CBI program, and in the South Pacific, Vanuatu has a smorgasbord of available options.

The Good Country Index measures what countries contribute to the world outside their own borders, and what they take away: it’s their balance-sheet towards humanity and the planet

The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent.

Right now, there is a general belief that people of all ages are losing the ability to speak easily to one another. Increasing political polarization, the ubiquity of screens, the COVID-19 pandemic — all have contributed to a malaise and neuroticism around the practice of conversation. In the U.K., the phenomenon of young people failing to return to school since the pandemic has become so widespread that they are collectively labeled “ghost children.” A teacher friend told me that some of these children have confessed to her that their biggest fear is anticipating negative conversations they could have with their peers. After so long engaging almost exclusively with other children over social media — platforms that can intensify and melodramatize even the most quotidian encounters — they have forgotten what face-to-face interactions are like. The truth is, my teacher friend told me, the majority of conversations kids have with one another throughout the school day are neutral or often quite nice.

As Borras-Chavez and Sperou watched Nora guard her lifeless pup, they felt mixed emotions. “It’s being a scientist and a researcher and realizing that this is such a fascinating thing going on, and our curiosity just sparks,” Sperou said. “And then there’s the flip side of it, where it’s like we are humans, and we are seeing a mother carrying around her dead baby.” Or, as Borras-Chavez put it, “you weep a little bit.” The researchers abstained from flying drones or sampling the seals when they were with pups, dead or alive. “Our model is usually science-first,” Borras-Chavez said. “But if an action that we’re taking would have been disrespectful for us, if somebody else would do it, then we don’t do it.”

[…] Creative work done for artistic purposes is thought to exist for reasons above money. “Love and honor” is a convenient excuse to not compensate for it, “exposure” too. Creative work for commercial purposes, on the other hand, can be handsomely rewarded. However you’re doing a job for somebody else.

Jill Freud, a stage star who was also the inspiration for the character of Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, has died aged 98.

[…]Their name implies that security guards exist to provide security. I had expected to observe how they responded to dangerous situations and kept people safe, but the reality was quite different. As Chinese cities have gotten safer, what security guards are protecting most of all is property prices and the class status they imply.

[…]For more than a century, the cultural norm in the United States was that nudity was acceptable—at least within same-sex environments. Over the past couple of decades or so, that idea has largely dissolved. This sort of nudity is so rarely discussed that we don’t really have vocabulary for it. The term nonsexual nudity feels inadequate, because for some, changing in a locker room could carry a charge of eroticism. Communal nudity is no better, evoking images of orgies or nudist colonies rather than once-routine forms of unclothed life. The fact that the practice never really had a name suggests how unremarkable it once was.

Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.

Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=rHzjC17-tso

[…]does having interstellar technology automatically mean they must be scientific? Could there be technological but nonscientific aliens out there, capable of crossing the vast emptiness of space without understanding the physics of their amazing leaps?

Westerners could admit at any point that we have misread our place in the cosmos and shift toward this older, still living worldview: humans not as commanders of the natural world but as kin, interconnected equals among other beings and systems.

You should visit China. It’s vast, very diverse, safe, easy to get around, inexpensive, interesting, not what you expect, and increasingly important in the world. Go see for yourself.

Iceland’s former prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, has said that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.

Along Greenland’s coastline, small villages became ghost towns decades ago after the Danish government relocated their populations to larger cities. In some, though, communities have been reclaimed as summer getaways for former residents and their descendants.

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.

Art is by Candiewrapper, please check them out at their website here !

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.