January 1, 2023 - This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wildfire, Then Returned to Study How It Happened

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This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wildfire, Then Returned to Study How It Happened An engineer who has traveled to Japan and New Zealand to study earthquake damage to help communities prepare for future temblors, Wham returned to his own devastated city to find his home intact despite embers the size of dinner plates in his townhome’s window wells. Assured his place was safe, the University of Colorado assistant research professor jumped on his bike and pedaled into a snowstorm to start documenting the destruction. Some of America’s fastest-growing areas are in arid Western states prone to wildfires. About 1 in 3 homes are being built in areas that abut land with flammable vegetation — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. And about 60 million homes are within a kilometer of areas that have burned at some point in the past 24 years, scientists found in a 2020 analysis. The study’s authors cautioned: “We’ve been living with wildfire risk that we haven’t fully understood.” Continued here

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Does Influencer Marketing Really Pay Off? Influencer marketing is a huge industry, with companies around the world spending billions of dollars on these partnerships. But do these investments actually pay off? To quantify the ROI of influencer marketing, the authors analyzed engagement for more than 5,800 influencer posts and identified seven key variables that drive a campaign’s effectiveness, including characteristics of both the influencer and of their individual posts. They further found that by optimizing these variables, the average brand could boost ROI by 16.6%, suggesting that many companies are designing campaigns that leave substantial value on the table. By adopting these research-backed guidelines, brands can move past anecdotal evidence to ensure that their marketing dollars go toward the partnerships and content that are most likely to offer returns. Continued here

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Nazi Germany Used Honorary Consuls to Advance Agenda Globally, Records Show Historians have long chronicled the clandestine use of ambassadors and other professional diplomats by Nazi intelligence services. Far less attention has focused on the activities of honorary consuls, who for centuries have worked from their home countries to represent the interests of foreign governments. The consuls included a social hall vice president, a fertilizer merchant and a chemist. They largely lived and worked in neutral countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa, where Nazi Germany sought to cultivate allies or gain an advantage at critical ports and other strategic locations. A majority of the honorary consuls were appointed directly by Germany; some were named by other countries. Continued here

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My year — and yours — of cooking Quick & Dirty I think the best dishes are the kind that come with a story. The kind that make you feel loved and cared for. Preferably ones that also involve an awful lot of butter. It makes sense, then, that so many of the most popular recipes I published this year came via personal recollections and lively conversations with Salon guests. It wasn't just that food itself was so enticing. It was the reassuring tenderness of their origins.  When I talked to novelist Patricia Cornwell last winter about her latest thriller, "Autopsy," she revealed how Kay Scarpetta's famed garlic bread is based on her partner Staci's version of "the best thing you've ever tasted." And though Cornwell can't get Staci to spill what her addictive secret ingredient is, my own garlic bread deep diving led me to discover a memorable take on the classic from none other than Guy Fieri. A garlic bread that holds absolutely nothing back, butter-wise, and then gets a surprise lift from a shake of hot sauce, this was the dish that neither Salon readers nor my family could get enough of this year. I don't know if mine is as good as Staci's, but I do know I have since forgotten all other garlic breads I've ever known.  Continued here

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The Family-Separation Files Made public here for the first time, a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy These records showcase, among other things, government officials’ attempts to mislead the public; inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent record keeping, which to this day means that a full accounting of separations does not exist; efforts to extend the length of time that children and parents were kept apart; and early and repeated internal warnings about the policy’s worst outcomes, which were ignored. Continued here

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Emotional AI Is No Substitute for Empathy In 2023, emotional AI—technology that can sense and interact with human emotions—will become one of the dominant applications of machine learning. For instance, Hume AI, founded by Alan Cowen, a former Google researcher, is developing tools to measure emotions from verbal, facial, and vocal expressions. Swedish company Smart Eyes recently acquired Affectiva, the MIT Media Lab spinoff that developed the SoundNet neural network, an algorithm that classifies emotions such as anger from audio samples in less than 1.2 seconds. Even the video platform Zoom is introducing Zoom IQ, a feature that will soon provide users with real-time analysis of emotions and engagement during a virtual meeting.   In 2023, tech companies will be releasing advanced chatbots that can closely mimic human emotions to create more empathetic connections with users across banking, education, and health care. Microsoft’s chatbot Xiaoice is already successful in China, with average users reported to have conversed with “her” more than 60 times in a month. It also passed the Turing test, with the users failing to recognize it as a bot for 10 minutes. Analysis from Juniper Research Consultancy shows that chatbot interactions in health care will rise by almost 167 percent from 2018, to reach 2.8 billion annual interactions in 2023. This will free up medical staff time and potentially save around $3.7 billion for health care systems around the world.  Continued here

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Babies look for this clue to see which adults they can trust This article was first published on Big Think in February 2022. It was updated in December 2022. Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them. Continued here

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Elon Musk fired Twitter's janitorial staff and employees are left to supply their own toilet paper On Thursday, The New York Times reported on the drastic cuts tech billionaire Elon Musk has made at Twitter since purchasing it for $44 billion and assuming control of the company. One of the stranger cuts, noted reporters Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, and Mike Isaac: firing the janitorial staff and forcing employees to bring their own toilet paper. Continued here

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Patients Went to This Isolated Facility for Treatment. Instead, Nearly Two Dozen Were Charged With Crimes. Williams has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and her personal story consists of one upheaval after another. At age 23, in a state of crisis, Williams had sought help at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. She’d never been charged with a crime before. But four months before the deputy showed up, a Choate employee who claimed Williams had forcefully shoved her asked her employer to pursue charges against the patient. By scouring courthouse and police records, reporters with Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica discovered at least 40 felony charges filed against 29 patients since 2015 in two of the four downstate counties where the state operates a residential facility. (Reporters did not identify any charges at two of the four facilities.) Continued here

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In Child Welfare Cases, Most of Your Constitutional Rights Don't Apply In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely. Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents. Continued here

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Hollywood’s Love Affair With Fictional Languages For big fans of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year’s sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it’s actually been vomrra zìsìt, or “15 years.” I’m not implying that Avatar rots the brain. Rather, the blue-skinned Na’vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron’s universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language—painstakingly built from scratch for the movies—uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na’vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13. Continued here

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Best of 2022 | I won big on "Jeopardy!" So why does it still haunt me? This essay was originally published in Salon on October 15, 2022. We're revisiting Salon's Best Life Stories of 2022 now through the end of the year. Read more Best of 2022. It was an early evening in the summer of 2019. I'd arrived at LAX with hours to go until my red-eye to Louisville. But even though I had plenty of time, I moved through the airport like a heat-seeking missile — past check-in, through security, down the long hall to my terminal. I found my gate, then kept walking, past the stores and the restaurants, looking desperately for somewhere to be alone. Finally, one terminal over, I found a quiet stretch of unused gates. I scanned the area so I could be sure that no one would hear what I was about to say. Then I pulled out my phone. Continued here

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The year's most powerful nudity in film Two documentaries that played only on the festival circuit this year crystalized some of the attitudes about nudity on display in films in 2022. The immersive, observational film, "Naked Gardens," set in a Florida naturist community, featured subjects of all ages and sizes unclothed almost all the time doing everything from cooking to using power tools. It celebrated being naked in a safe space where people weren't eroticized. It also considered issues about body image. In contrast, "Body Parts," was a cogent, eye-opening analysis of how women's bodies are presented in Hollywood films and television. The documentary shows how nudity was often expected from actresses, and getting naked on screen was often done as a way of "paying their dues" as performers. However, even with contracts and nudity riders, women had to lobby for intimacy coordinators and protection against harassment. Many subjects in the film discuss having to "disassociate" from their bodies to "get through" having to perform a nude or sex scene. The film made viewers feel for the actresses having to be vulnerable on screen. Continued here

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Why Yale Law School Left the U.S. News & World Report Rankings Dean Heather Gerken says it’s her belief that “this is not where students should get their information from.” Each year, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of top colleges, law schools, and medical schools land to a chorus of groans and cheers. The rankings began in 1983, and were originally drawn solely from peer reviews of institutions. Did the provost at Brown think better of the University of Virginia than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Since then, the publication has tinkered with the rankings several times—taking into account factors such as how many students an institution rejects each year, how much it costs to attend, and the student-to-faculty ratio—to give more rigor to its methodology. Continued here

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She Says Doctors Ignored Her Concerns About Her Pregnancy. For Many Black Women, It's a Familiar Story. Paging through the documents, she read a narrative that did not match her experience, one in which she said doctors failed to heed her concerns and nurses misrepresented what she told them. In anticipation of giving birth to her first child in the spring of 2014, Brooke had twice gone to the hospital in the weeks leading up to her due date because she hadn’t felt the baby kick, her medical records show. And twice doctors had sent her back home. After that second hospital admission, and following some testing, she was diagnosed with “false labor” and discharged, records show, though she was 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant and insisted that her baby’s movements had slowed. Research shows that after 28 weeks, changes in fetal movement, including decreased activity or bursts of excessive fetal activity, are associated with an increased risk of stillbirth. The risk of delivering a stillborn child also continues to rise at or after 40 weeks. Continued here

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MAGA blowhard Andrew Tate arrested for rape and human trafficking MAGA influencer and former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate — along with his brother Tristan and two other suspects — was detained on Thursday under suspicion of human trafficking and rape. According to a statement from prosecutors obtained from NBC, "The four suspects appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost."  Continued here

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Why I Joined, Then Left, the Forward Party The desire to fix the political process doesn’t necessarily convey the ability to make change happen. Because I no longer feel at home among either Democrats or Republicans, and because I have a weakness for hopeless causes, I joined a movement this year to get a third party onto ballots in my state. But our effort to launch the Forward Party—the brainchild of the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, among others—did not go well. Continued here

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How to Start (and Keep) a Healthy Habit It's almost that time of year. Everyone you know will soon be hitting the gym, smiling while eating broccoli, or crushing out a last cigarette. For some, the gym really will become a new part of life, and that really will be the last cigarette they smoke. But most of us have probably experienced the letdown—perhaps even self-loathing—of failing to stick to a New Year's resolution. I can't promise the advice I've collected will help—anyone who knows me would laugh hysterically at the idea of me guiding anyone toward successful habit formation—but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success and make sure your resolutions become more than just that. Continued here

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Where 2022's news was (mostly) good: The year's top science stories How often does something work exactly as planned, and live up to its hype? In most of the world, that's the equivalent of stumbling across a unicorn that's holding a few winning lottery tickets in its teeth. But that pretty much describes our top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and initial images from the Webb Telescope. Continued here

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People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likable and Give Better Advice No matter what, keep asking questions. Continued here

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365 Micro-Challenges and Daily Tips to Keep You Motivated and Inspired Every Day in 2023 It's a daily dose of inspiration to help you reach your biggest goals in the new year. Continued here

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Arizona's Governor-Elect Chooses Critic of Racial Disparities in Child Welfare to Lead CPS Agency This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work. Arizona’s child welfare system has long disproportionately investigated Black families. According to the ProPublica-NBC News investigation, which highlighted Stewart’s role, 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix faced a DCS investigation in just a recent five-year period. Faust said the department had made progress over that time, but the news organizations found that while the overall number of investigations has gone down, the racial disparity between white and Black families has only increased. Continued here

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How the Democrats became the party of endless war The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now. All the wars they support and fund are "good" wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelenskyy as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party's abject subservience to the war machine. The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.  Continued here

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The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of 'White Noise' The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat? Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure. Continued here

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What Gen Z Knows About Stephen Sondheim How the late composer’s preoccupation with outsiders has endeared him to a new generation “I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. In the class I was teaching at Portland State University, I’d anticipated #Hamilfans, enthusiasts for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen—appreciation for anything that had debuted to acclaim during my students’ lifetimes. Vintage Stephen Sondheim stans, however, I had not predicted. Continued here

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A Water War Is Brewing Over the Dwindling Colorado River On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry. The Uncompahgre Valley, stretching 34 miles from Delta through the town of Montrose, is, and always has been, an arid place. Most of the water comes from the Gunnison River, a major tributary of the Colorado, which courses out of the peaks of the Elk Range through the cavernous and sun-starved depths of the Black Canyon, one rocky and inaccessible valley to the east. In 1903, the federal government backed a plan hatched by Uncompahgre farmers to breach the ridge with an enormous tunnel and then in the 1960s to build one of Colorado’s largest reservoirs above the Black Canyon called Blue Mesa. Now that tunnel feeds a neural system of water: 782 miles worth of successively smaller canals and then dirt ditches, laterals and drains that turn 83,000 Western Colorado acres into farmland. Today, the farm association in this valley is one of the largest single users of Colorado River water outside of California. Continued here

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Elon banned me for calling him a “bologna face.” I'm a history professor with 139 followers If Elon Musk steps down as Twitter CEO, as he claims, what will happen to all those banned accounts? Yes, I know the "mass unbanning of suspended Twitter users is underway," as CNN boldly announced on Dec. 8. Even neo-Nazis and apologists for rape have been welcomed back, and all manner of hate speech is thriving on Musk's new Twitter.   But "abusive behavior" still supposedly violates the Twitter Rules, and my account has been blocked for weeks for such crimes. Specifically, I called Elon Musk a "poopy pants." Also a "bologna face."   Continued here

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This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico The seventh grader, whose middle name is Matthew, said that was the culmination of months of being written up for “everything” — from being off-task in class to playing on the school elevator. (Out of concern that the boy will be stigmatized at school, his grandmother agreed to speak on the condition that she not be identified and that he be identified only by his middle name.) Matthew’s school district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity, according to an analysis of state records by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020. Continued here

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The Best Advice I Ever Got: Fred Carl, Jr., Founder and CEO, Viking Range In 1986 I was working full-time in the construction business and renting an unfinished one-room office in an old cotton exchange building in downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, trying to start a company in my spare time. I had dozens of detailed sketches for what would be the first Viking range, and little else. Continued here S11 The Many Metaphors of Metamorphosis We are being pitched futures all the time. Every advertisement, every political campaign, every quarterly budget is a promise or a threat about what tomorrow could look like. And it can feel, sometimes, like those futures are happening, whether we like it or not—that we’re simply along for the ride. But the future hasn’t happened yet. We do, in fact, get a say, and we should seize that voice as much as we possibly can. But how? I’ve spent the past eight years making over 180 episodes of a podcast about the future called Flash Forward. Here, in a three-part series, are the big things I’ve learned about how to think about what’s possible for tomorrow. (This is part 3. Read part 1 and part 2.) As a moth, Uraba lugens isn’t particularly noteworthy in appearance. Its wings are mottled gray and brown, only about 25 millimeters across. But as a caterpillar, the gum-leaf skeletonizer is full of surprises—and perhaps lessons.  Continued here S66 From "The Bear" to "The Menu," this was the year pop culture faced the horrors of fine dining There's a Gordon Ramsay clip that I just can't seem to escape. You've probably seen it, too: It features the chef holding television host Julie Chen Moonves' head between two slices of bread while yelling at her. "What are you?" he screams.  The scene originates from "Hell's Cafeteria," a parody skit from an episode of "The Late Late Show with James Cordon." It satirizes Ramsay's own pugilistic and profane-laced television persona, which first achieved global attention through the 1999 BBC docu-series "Britain's Most Unbearable Bosses," and which he has continued to sharpen through programs like "Kitchen Nightmares" and "Hell's Kitchen."  Continued here S39 They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said. Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone. Continued here S3 Building Wealth: Our Favorite Reads At the time, my uncle’s explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I nodded, let it go, and didn’t think more about it until a few years later when I finished grad school with massive debt from a student loan. The first job I took barely covered my expenses. I had to rely on a credit card, even when I didn’t fully understand how credit worked. Living in a city as overpriced as New York (and later New Delhi) was a daily reminder of how expensive life could get. Continued here S4 With Only 6 Words, Patagonia Explained the Brilliant Reason It Closed All of Its Stores and Paid Its Employees to Take a Week Off Sometimes your employees need a break. Continued here S52 Herpes vaccine tests underway by company that made COVID-19 vaccines Ever since BioNTech and its occasional corporate partner Pfizer announced they had developed an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, biotech researchers have salivated over the promise of using mRNA vaccines on other pathogens. That speaks to the promise of mRNA vaccines: unlike conventional vaccine platforms, mRNA vaccines can be much more easily modified to treat new viruses. That has opened the doors for the possibility of vaccines against viruses that had eluded immunologists, including retroviruses like HIV — for which researchers are already working on an mRNA vaccine.  Such is the case with BioNTech's latest endeavor with mRNA vaccines: Developing an inoculation for herpes, for which a vaccine has never existed.  Continued here S15 Ancient Chinese text reveals earliest known record of a candidate aurora A pair of researchers has identified the earliest description of a candidate aurora yet found in an ancient Chinese text, according to an April paper published in the journal Advances in Space Research. The authors peg the likely date of the event to either 977 or 957 BCE. The next earliest description of a candidate aurora is found on Assyrian cuneiform tablets dated between 679-655 BCE, three centuries later. Continued here S23 Rethinking the European Conquest of Native Americans In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America. When the term Indian appears in the Declaration of Independence, it is used to refer to “savage” outsiders employed by the British as a way of keeping the colonists down. Eleven years later, in the U.S. Constitution, the Indigenous peoples of North America are presented  differently: as separate entities with which the federal government must negotiate. They also appear as insiders who are clearly within the borders of the new country yet not to be counted for purposes of representation. The same people are at once part of the oppression that justifies the need for independence, a rival for control of land, and a subjugated minority whose rights are ignored. Continued here S53 Jan. 6 committee withdraws Trump subpoena after failing to beat the clock The subpoena issued to Trump by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol has officially been withdrawn after failing to beat the clock on the committee's allotted time frame.  In a letter from committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson issued to Trump's attorney he states, "In light of the imminent end of our investigation, the select committee can no longer pursue the specific information covered by the subpoena. Therefore, through this letter, I hereby formally withdraw the subpoena issued to former President Trump, and notify you that he is no longer obligated to comply or produce records in response to said subpoena."  Continued here S49 Best of 2022 | I got hooked on Uber Eats. Not as a customer — as a delivery driver This essay was originally published in Salon on September 10, 2022. We're revisiting Salon's Best Life Stories of 2022 now through the end of the year. Read more Best of 2022. It's a Saturday night, and I'm stopped at a red light on Sunset Boulevard. My gaze travels to strangers on patios laughing, drinking and eating delicious looking meals. I'm achy from being stuffed into my driver's seat for hours. Hunger burns a hole in my stomach. My jeans are uncomfortably snug, reminding me it's an inconvenient time for another bathroom break. Many restaurants won't let me use their restroom when I'm picking up an order, so I have to hold it until one that will. My car smells like the last three things I delivered — Japanese seafood, barbecued meat and the Chick-fil-A I just dropped off at a Bel Air mansion. I'm a vegetarian.  Continued here S25 People who live to 100 don't eat like typical Americans: Here are 'the 5 pillars of a longevity diet' There are some daily practices that may increase your chances of living to 90 and beyond - and a healthy diet is one of the most important factors on the list. In his new book, "The Blue Zones American Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100," Dan Buettner "identified the world's longest-lived areas (blue zones) and studied the patterns and lifestyles that seem to explain their populations' longevity." Continued here S67 Trump's tax returns are finally revealed Six years of former President Donald Trump's federal tax returns were finally released on Friday. They include thousands of pages of dense financial data, showing that Trump and his wife Melania paid very little in federal income taxes in the first and last year of his presidency — and suggesting that contrary to his previous claims, Trump accepted his salary as president at least for his final year in office. The House Ways and Means Committee released the redacted versions of Trump's returns for the tax years 2015 through 2020. The report comes days before Republicans are set to take control of the House, and ends Trump's extended efforts to conceal his tax returns from the public.  Continued here S59 Hydrogen made a surprising comeback in 2022 — but it's still not the green fuel of the future One of the surprising climate stories of 2022 was the rapid emergence of hydrogen as an immediate, not just potential, decarbonization technology. Major and unprecedented investments, both from government and the private sector, were initiated this year in Europe, the U.S., China and Japan. But while hydrogen technology is growing in popularity, questions remain: Can it be one of the biggest breakthroughs for climate mitigation, or is it largely a distraction? It's likely a mixture: a viable, long-sought, low-carbon option for hard-to-electrify sectors like steel, chemicals and aviation, but also a clever oil industry ploy to extend the use of fossil fuels in sectors like power generation, road transport and home heating, which are more easily and affordably powered from the grid. Continued here S31 The IRS Hasn't Released Nearly Half a Million Nonprofit Tax Records According to a ProPublica review of public IRS data, which powers our Nonprofit Explorer database, the agency is behind on releasing nearly half a million tax records, known as Form 990s, for tax-exempt organizations. The delays, which began two years ago, are stymying access to key financial information that governments, the public and grantmakers use to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies. “For charity regulators, the Form 990 series not only helps ensure transparency and accountability, but also provides vital information for state investigations into potential fraud and misuse of charitable resources,” the organization wrote. “It is critical that the availability of that data be timely.” Continued here S54 James Cameron threatens to tell only "Avatar" stories from now on, despite the harm done Asked by Empire Magazine if James Cameron regretted spending so many years – about a quarter of a century – on one story, that of the Na'vi, giant blue humanoids who live in accordance with nature, the director gave a surprising answer: "The world of 'Avatar' is so sprawling that I can tell most of the stories I want to tell within it [Pandora]." He went on to say, "Secondly, yes . . . our time as artists is finite. I will always mourn some of the stories that I don't get to make. But I feel a great satisfaction when other directors want to explore some of my ideas." Back to the first part of that statement. Is Cameron really at peace with centering the remainder of his career in one so-called embarrassing world? Since the original "Avatar" was released in 2009, Cameron has shot two sequels to it, including "Avatar: The Way of Water," which opened in December and parts of the third film, as well as developing two other sequels. Variety writes, "It's quite possible the 68-year-old Cameron only directs 'Avatar' movies for the rest of his career. Not that that's a problem for Cameron." Continued here S35 America's Adult Education System Is Broken. Here's How Experts Say We Can Fix It. For a number of sometimes overlapping reasons, 48 million American adults struggle to read basic English, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That may leave them unable to find and keep a decent job, navigate the signage on city streets, follow medical instructions and vote. They’re vulnerable to scams and face stigma and shame. But the infrastructure for adult education is profoundly inadequate, a ProPublica investigation found — and, as the nation’s persistently low literacy rates reveal, the government’s efforts haven’t done enough to address the problem. About 500 counties across the nation are hot spots where nearly a third of adults struggle to read basic English. This contributes to disproportionate underemployment. In communities with lower literacy, there is often less economic investment, a smaller tax base and fewer resources to fund public services. Continued here S64 Elon Musk's net worth took a $206 billion hit in 2022 Twitter owner Elon Musk's net worth has plummeted by more than $200 billion since November 2021 — an amount greater than the fortune of Bernard Arnault, who recently dethroned Musk as the richest man in the world. The Independent reported on Thursday that Musk — who purchased the dollar-hemorrhaging microblogging platform for $44 billion earlier this year — has lost more money than the gross national product of Greece. Continued here S12 Crabs have evolved five separate times – why do the same forms keep coming back? Charles Darwin believed evolution created “endless forms most beautiful”. It’s a nice sentiment but it doesn’t explain why evolution keeps making crabs. Scientists have long wondered whether there are limits to what evolution can do or if Darwin had the right idea. The truth may lie somewhere between the two. Continued here S40 How to Evaluate a Nonprofit Before You Donate How nonprofits spend their money may be different than what you expect. For instance, ProPublica has reported on how the Red Cross built just six homes after raising millions for Haiti disaster relief, how St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital keeps billions of dollars in reserves and how a nonprofit college spent more on marketing than financial aid. Since nonprofits are required to file a document called a Form 990 with the IRS every year, you can check out a nonprofit’s finances for yourself with a few online resources. By taking the time to evaluate the charity before you donate, you can see how effective your donation will be and get peace of mind knowing it’s more likely that the organization effectively spends your donation and does what it says. Continued here S42 Medicare Keeps Spending More on COVID-19 Testing. Fraud and Overspending Are Partly Why. Fraud and overspending are contributing to the increases, experts say, because federal money for COVID-19 testing is not subject to some of the same financial and regulatory constraints as other tests covered by Medicare, the government insurance program for people 65 and older and the disabled. Early in the pandemic, testing was both critical to slowing the spread of the virus and in short supply. So the federal government enacted measures to make it more profitable to get in the COVID-19 testing business. Good for the duration of the public health emergency, which has not yet expired, the measures include a generous Medicare reimbursement rate, requirements for private insurance to cover testing — even compelling insurance plans to pay whatever cash price is demanded by out-of-network labs — and a hefty fund for testing those people who didn’t have insurance. Continued here S27 Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family's Fight to Preserve a Way of Life This is the life of the Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, the Salmon People. It is a life Columbia River tribal people have lived for generations and have fought for decades to protect. Over the last century and a half, they have watched as forces eroded their access to salmon. Treaties removed them from their traditional fishing areas; dams massively reduced the numbers of salmon that swam in the waters; environmental contamination further poisoned the well. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that produces nonpartisan, evidence-based journalism to expose injustice, corruption and wrongdoing. We were founded over 10 years ago to fill a growing hole in journalism: Newsrooms were (and still are) shrinking, and legacy funding models are failing. Deep-dive reporting like ours is slow and expensive, and investigative journalism is a luxury in many newsrooms today — but it remains as critical as ever to democracy and our civic life. More than a decade (and six Pulitzer Prizes) later, ProPublica has built one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the country. Our work has spurred reform through legislation, at the voting booth and inside our nation’s most important institutions. Continued here S22 Partying Feels Different Now Parties have always been about hope. After forgoing them for so long during the pandemic, that’s clearer than ever. Parties were never on my mind more than when I wasn’t attending any. I avoided them for a couple of years, and my interest sharpened as a result. Parties were a very notable casualty of the beginning years of the coronavirus pandemic, though, it must be said, they were a pretty trifling one. Compared with the more than 1 million American lives lost, the lack of parties felt like something that was not worth grieving or complaining about. What is a party in the face of such anguish? Continued here S37 Wildfires in Colorado Are Growing More Unpredictable. Officials Have Ignored the Warnings. Within minutes, landscaped islands in a Costco parking lot in Superior, Colorado, caught fire as structures became the inferno’s primary fuel. It consumed the Element Hotel, as well as part of a Tesla service center, a Target and the entire Sagamore neighborhood. Across a six-lane freeway, in the town of Louisville, flames rocketed through parks and climbed wooden fences, setting homes ablaze. They spread from one residence to the next in a mere eight minutes, reaching temperatures as high as 1,650 degrees. Yet despite previous warnings of this new threat, ProPublica found Colorado’s response hasn’t kept pace. Legislative efforts to make homes safer by requiring fire-resistant materials in their construction have been repeatedly stymied by developers and municipalities, while taxpayers shoulder the growing cost to put out the fires and rebuild in their aftermath. Continued here S45 It was the year of "eh, not bad" — and also of avoiding the obvious My deep love for celebrating the New Year has roots in being raised Catholic and will forever be tied to an event in my pre-pubescence. I wanted an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle ... No. Wait. That was someone else. Continued here S34 Our Year in Visual Journalism ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that produces nonpartisan, evidence-based journalism to expose injustice, corruption and wrongdoing. We were founded over 10 years ago to fill a growing hole in journalism: Newsrooms were (and still are) shrinking, and legacy funding models are failing. Deep-dive reporting like ours is slow and expensive, and investigative journalism is a luxury in many newsrooms today — but it remains as critical as ever to democracy and our civic life. More than a decade (and six Pulitzer Prizes) later, ProPublica has built one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the country. Our work has spurred reform through legislation, at the voting booth and inside our nation’s most important institutions. Your donation today will help us ensure that we can continue this critical work. From the climate crisis, to racial justice, to wealth inequality and much more, we are busier than ever covering stories you won’t see anywhere else. Make your gift of any amount today and join the tens of thousands of ProPublicans across the country, standing up for the power of independent journalism to produce real, lasting change. Thank you. Continued here S61 The hell with "compassionate conservatism": In 2023, expect all MAGA sadism, all the time Here are some snapshots of what the luminaries of the GOP, the cream of the Republican crop, have been up to since the predicted "red wave" of the 2022 midterms failed to materialize: On Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Chaya Raichik, who runs the vicious anti-LGBTQ Twitter acccount Libs of TikTok. Despite Raichik's routine online pronouncements that she doesn't hate anyone, she revealed herself to be an unreconstructed bigot in the Anita Bryant vein. "The LGTBQ community has become this cult," she said, claiming that queer people are "just evil people, and they want to groom kids," and that the only reason people are gay or trans is because they've been brainwashed. Carlson's response to all this was simple: "Yeah."  Continued here S10 The WIRED Guide to 5G The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, to telemedicine and mixed reality, to as yet undreamed technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier require high-speed, always-on internet connections. To keep up with the demand, the mobile industry introduced 5G—so named because it's the fifth generation of wireless networking technology. 5G brings faster speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to your phone. That's fast enough to download a 4K movie in 25 seconds. But 5G is not just about faster connections. It also delivers lower latency and allows for more devices to be connected simultaneously. Continued here S16 Alabama Makes Plans to Gas Its Prisoners After a series of botched executions, the state is choosing a path of technical, rather than moral, innovation. Critics called 2022 “the year of the botched execution”—and it was indeed an infamous period, mainly because the state of Alabama lost the ability to competently kill prisoners in its charge while retaining the sovereignty to try. Continued here S47 5 foods that are traditionally eaten for luck in the New Year New Year's Day is just around the corner, meaning it's time to write your resolutions and partake in the Greek custom of smashing plates before the clock strikes twelve. The special day is all about good fortune and prosperity. So, if you're looking to usher in more luck in 2023, be sure to also enjoy a plateful of lucky foods!  Per Southern superstition and traditions, black-eyed peas, greens and cornbread represent coins, paper money and gold, thus guaranteeing a year of financial success. There's also the Spanish tradition of eating 12 grapes at midnight on New Year's Eve for good luck and the Irish tradition of banging fresh baked bread against a door to get rid of any misfortune. Continued here S63 Who dares to mock Dark Brandon now? Joe Biden keeps rolling up the wins When the 2020 presidential campaign was lurching into gear three years ago, former Vice President Joe Biden had led in the polls for months. Still, everyone kind of assumed he was a placeholder, a former office-holder with high name recognition whose campaign would nevertheless go the way of his two previous presidential bids, meaning nowhere. He was dull as dishwater compared to many of the others vying for the nomination, and nobody had ever really considered him presidential timber. As the campaign took off, other candidates were winning in the early states even as Biden still led in national polls. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg looked like the major contenders after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, states where Biden did poorly. Then he pulled off a sweeping victory in South Carolina and shortly thereafter the race was effectively over. He went on to win the rest of the primaries handily. America was reeling during the traumatic first year of the pandemic and there was a sense that Democrats were happy to have the race settled so they could concentrate on taking down Donald Trump, which was considered Job One by every faction of the Democratic coalition. Continued here S57 George Santos seems to have lied about his mom dying on 9/11 United States Congressman-elect George Santos (R-New York), who is already under investigation for ostensibly lying to voters about vast chunks of his personal and professional background, is now facing additional scrutiny for making incompatible statements about the effects that the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks had on his family. On Wednesday night it was discovered that Santos twice tweeted conflicting recollections of his mother Fatima Devolder's death. Continued here S7 365 Best Inspirational Quotes for 2023 One quote for each day of the year. Take them together, and they're quite inspiring. Continued here S65 Lauren Graham rethinks identity, from writing to directing: "I want to be the one to tell the story" Hollywood, by nature, is a performative place. When you make it there by playing someone else on screen, and suddenly everyone wants to know the real you, you have to decide: Which version of your story do you tell? Interviews often reveal bits and pieces of your personal life, but that can become performative, too. "I've struggled with that over the years," Lauren Graham told me on "Salon Talks." "I'm very private and if I'm going to tell something personal, how far do I go?" Continued here S29 The Global Threat of Rogue Diplomacy Honorary consuls are not nearly as high-profile as ambassadors and other career diplomats. As private citizens, the volunteer consuls work from their home countries to represent the foreign governments that nominate them. The arrangement was meant to build country-to-country alliances without the need for embassies and staff, an inexpensive and benign diplomatic arrangement that over the years was embraced by a majority of the world’s governments. But a first-of-its-kind global investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that corrupt, violent and dangerous honorary consul appointees — including those accused of aiding terrorist regimes — have turned a system meant to leverage the work of honorary citizens into a perilous form of rogue diplomacy that has threatened the rule of law around the world. Continued here S46 Trump promotes article urging him to run as third-party candidate if GOP dumps him Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday promoted an editorial suggesting that he run as a third-party candidate if the Republican Party does not make him its 2024 presidential nominee. On his Truth Social website, Trump posted a link to an editorial from the pro-MAGA publication American Greatness in which author Dan Gelernter compared Trump to the late Teddy Roosevelt, whose unsuccessful third-party bid in 1912 handed the White House to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Continued here S62 Why 2023 will be a banner year for drug research American drug policy suffers from a tremendous, harmful Catch-22: we don't know how dangerous or beneficial some drugs are because they aren't studied enough. And we can't study them easily because the federal government considers them to be too dangerous, and hence, research is bogged down by red tape. Since the days of President Nixon's War on Drugs, which spawned the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, illicit substances have been placed into different categories or "schedules" based on their perceived harms and medical benefits. For example, cannabis, the psychedelic LSD and heroin are all lumped into schedule 1, a tier considered by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to be substances with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." Continued here S30 Shadow Diplomats Have Posed a Threat for Decades. The World's Governments Looked the Other Way. The department did not respond to questions about what steps, if any, it took to review Shumake’s background. Had officials done even a cursory internet search, they would have discovered that Shumake’s real estate broker’s license was suspended in 2002 and that he settled a bank fraud case in 2008, agreeing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shumake was among at least 500 current and former honorary consuls in the United States and around the world who have been implicated in criminal investigations or other controversies — including scores named to their posts despite past convictions or other red flags, ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists disclosed in a series of stories this year. Continued here S48 "$7 billion taxpayer bailout": Sanders tells Buttigieg to hold Southwest's CEO accountable for greed This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday urged the Transportation Department to ensure Southwest's chief executive pays a price for mass U.S. flight cancellations that have left passengers and employees stranded around the country, throwing lives into chaos and drawing further attention to the company's business practices. Continued here S51 The 8 best beverages to buy at Costco As we've stated before, Costco is arguably the single best one-stop-shop for bulk groceries and that convenience is especially welcome during the holiday season. Costco has no limitations when it comes to the sheer breadth of its products, and when it comes to beverages, they truly run the gamut. From coffees and teas to sodas and plant-based milks, Costco has you fully covered when it comes to your drink needs, for both the holiday season and beyond.  Here, we've outlined some of our favorite options (and deals). You really can't go wrong with these items, which  appeal to any and all dietary restrictions, preferences or tastes. Bonus? They all taste terrific — and they're all fantastic deals, too.  Continued here S28 Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google's Black Box Ad Empire It wasn’t Conservative Beaver’s first brush with fabricated news. The site had falsely claimed Barack Obama was arrested for espionage, Pope Francis was arrested for possession of child pornography and “human trafficking,” and the Pfizer CEO’s wife died after being compelled to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As Conservative Beaver pumped out these and other lies, Google placed ads on the site and split the revenue with its then-anonymous owner. He runs the conservative political site Toronto 99 and uses the same Google publisher account he had for Conservative Beaver to collect ad revenue. Google simply allowed Slapinski to start a new site and keep earning money. It’s the equivalent of taking away an unsafe driver’s car instead of their license. Continued here S50 From Lizzo to Megan Thee Stallion, 2022 was the year of survival for Black women in the public eye Lizzo scripts a simple question into her current tour performances that doubles as a meaningful pause button, punctuating a set break: "When was the last time you said something kind about yourself?" It's an effective one because, for the briefest of moments, a sold-out arena full of fans went dead quiet, smacked silent by the question mark hanging in the air. She doesn't leave her faithful hanging for long, breaking the silence by laughing and gently suggesting people change that. Since it's her, they might actually listen. Continued here Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (51) ►  December (1) ►  October (2) ►  August (2) ►  July (4) ►  June (3) ►  May (5) ►  April (4) ►  March (2) ►  February (10) ►  January (18) ►  2023 (834) ►  December (20) ►  November (54) ►  October (44) ►  September (108) ►  August (91) ►  July (29) ►  June (68) ►  May (104) ►  April (33) ►  March (30) ►  February (99) ►  January (154) ▼  2022 (208) ▼  December (117) January 1, 2023 - This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wil... January 1, 2023 - This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wil... January 1, 2023 - Man charged in Idaho student mur... January 1, 2023 - When the Times Square Ball Drop ... December 31, 2022 - Russia-Ukraine war live: Putin... December 31, 2022 - How Unpredictable Schedules Wi... December 31, 2022 - How Unpredictable Schedules Wi... December 31, 2022 - Russia-Ukraine war live: Putin... December 31, 2022 - Barbara Walters, pioneering US... December 31, 2022 - Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Ke... 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