December 12, 2022 - How Politics Compounded a Hostage Family"s Grief

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How Politics Compounded a Hostage Family’s Grief This week, Paul Whelan’s sister watched as politicians and pundits weaponized the imprisoned American’s plight. On Friday, December 2, Elizabeth Whelan was at home on  Chappaquiddick, off Massachusetts, when she received a text message from a State Department official—a representative from the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—asking when she might be available for a visit. He had news concerning her youngest brother, Paul. Continued here

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The Reinvention of the Catholic Church Scandals have taken a toll, and faith is flagging in Europe and the U.S. But Catholicism isn’t on the wane—it’s changing in influential ways. In May 2021, a time when public gatherings in England were strictly limited because of the coronavirus pandemic, the British tabloids were caught off guard by a stealth celebrity wedding in London. Westminster Cathedral—the “mother church” of Roman Catholics in England and Wales—was abruptly closed on a Saturday afternoon. Soon the groom and bride arrived: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, a Catholic and a former Conservative Party press officer with whom he had fathered a child the previous year. A priest duly presided over the marriage, despite the fact that the Catholic Church opposes divorce and sex outside marriage, and that Johnson had been married twice before and had taken up with Symonds before securing a divorce. It was an inadvertently vivid display of the Church’s efforts to accommodate its teachings to worldly circumstances. Continued here

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The C.E.O. of Anti-Woke, Inc. In June, as the sun set on Dublin, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Columbus, several dozen people dressed in golf shirts and floral shifts filed into a small auditorium to listen to a talk by a new neighbor. Vivek Ramaswamy, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur, had settled in the area with his wife and toddler son after making a large fortune as the founder of a biotech company. Now, thanks to dozens of appearances on Fox News to criticize “cultural totalitarianism” enforced by liberal élites, he was closing in on fame as a conservative pundit. In the past year, he had cast aspersions on Black Lives Matter and “the death of merit”; mask mandates and U.S.-border protection; public-school curricula and the actor Jussie Smollett. All the flame-throwing had established him, in the words of one anchor, as the network’s “woke and cancel-culture guru.” Ramaswamy has perfect-looking teeth, a high forehead, and a thick shock of hair that rises into a swirl at his crown. Out on the sidewalk, he’d hastily replaced his flip-flops with sneakers, in a nod to formality. At the front of the auditorium, perched on a stool, he spoke into his microphone with a showman’s brio, as if addressing a far larger crowd. He enjoyed forums like this, “where there’s no agenda, there’s no objective, other than to create spaces for open conversation, for people to be free to say, and feel free to say, the kinds of things that they might have wanted to say behind closed doors,” he said, smiling brightly. The true test of the strength of a democracy was not, he argued, how many people voted. It was “the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think, in public.” Continued here

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The Eureka Theory of History Is Wrong If you were, for whatever macabre reason, seeking the most catastrophic moment in the history of humankind, you might well settle on this: About 10,000 years ago, as people first began to domesticate animals and farm the land in Mesopotamia, India, and northern Africa, a peculiar virus leaped across the species barrier. Little is known about its early years. But the virus spread and, whether sooner or later, became virulent. It ransacked internal organs before traveling through the blood to the skin, where it erupted in pus-filled lesions. Many of those who survived it were left marked, disfigured, even blind. As civilizations bloomed across the planet, the virus stalked them like a curse. Some speculate that it swept through ancient Egypt, where its scars appear to mar the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V. By the fourth century A.D., it had gained a foothold in China. Christian soldiers spread it through Europe during the 11th- and 12th-century Crusades. In the early 1500s, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors conveyed it west across the Atlantic, where it ravaged native communities and contributed to the downfall of the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca empires. Continued here

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Why China’s Leaders Fear Anniversaries Commemorations of the dearly departed are a licensed form of popular feeling that can make them dangerous moments for the Communist authorities. Two kinds of deaths, one of ordinary people and the other of famous ones, periodically pose special challenges for the Chinese Communist Party. Both types can give rise to immediate vigils and later anniversary commemorations that become occasions for an outpouring of popular sentiment that turns from grief to anger—with sharp criticism of the authorities licensed by mourning. Continued here

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Digits: Jeans, screens, and more news numbers - The Hustle 1) On the off chance a pair of really old jeans wind up in your possession, don’t dispose of them — a pair recovered from a 19th-century shipwreck recently sold for $95k. Earlier this year, a pair found in an abandoned mine sold for $87k. 2) Amid covid restrictions and tense geopolitics, Disney is banking hard on Chinese moviegoers to see the upcoming Avatar sequel. Today, there are 82k+ movie screens in China, up from ~5.7k in 2010 when the original film earned $202.6m there. Continued here

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Another Way to Watch the World Cup I don’t actually care who wins the World Cup, but I do call myself a fan. Even though I know little about soccer, I love the complex and ardent interplay of bodies. I am a choreographer by trade, and the game, with its rules about proximity, time, and motion, plays out for me as a theatrical spectacle. Here is what I see. Soccer is a taut group dance with a quick tempo on a green, rectangular stage. The players are arcane creatures, their four appendages reimagined; they activate their head and chest in tandem with their legs, a kind of armless reptile. The arms dangle without specific gesture, unnecessary, even illegal. The upper body spirals and rotates, dives and bows. Virtuosity plays out in the feet: sometimes strong and long, like during a goal kick; sometimes tiny and precise, like during a string of step overs. And all of this happens in concert with the other dancers. Duets and trios of bodies form and disperse in heightened tempos and tense pauses; they bend and arch in response to the possibility that the ball—that precious protagonist—will become theirs for a moment. Continued here

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12 Questions to Ask Yourself If You Want to Reinvent Your Life in 2023 Trying to figure out what you want your life to look like? These questions can help. Continued here

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The Substitute Teachers of 'SNL' The plan was relatively straightforward: Take two comedic legends, each with a rich history on Saturday Night Live and a working partnership spanning decades, and invite them to co-host. Steve Martin and Martin Short had even previously shared the SNL stage in 1986, when they hosted alongside Chevy Chase to promote their film Three Amigos. Last night’s episode, therefore, had every reason to be not just funny but riotous—the kind of impish return Will Forte delivered last season. Instead, it landed with a clunk. Martin and Short felt like veteran substitute teachers called in to steady a school where most of the experienced faculty had left. Yet the episode hampered their efforts, placing the consummate vaudevillians in sketch after sketch that restricted their talents. As a result, even “Steve and Marty” couldn’t save SNL from the struggles that continue to impact what the executive producer Lorne Michaels has called a “transition year.” Continued here

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3 Simple Tips for Zeroing In On Your Audience’s Most Pressing Pain Points When you take the time to truly understand what your audience needs, you will serve them better and set yourself up for lasting success. Continued here

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Americans Should Not Be Tempted by China’s COVID Policies The human capacity to transcend the past and even the present is powerful. Three years after a devastating coronavirus pandemic took hold, nearly every country has dropped restrictions and mostly resumed normal life. The one country where COVID has never seemed to end, however, is China. After the country’s largest protests in decades, Chinese officials are finally rolling back some of their harshest “zero COVID” pandemic regulations. But China’s COVID regime still remains one of the world’s most restrictive, with officials retaining the ability to enforce lockdowns in designated “high-risk areas.” The adoption of zero-COVID measures and now their abrupt reversal have revived a debate over whether autocracies like China are more effective at governance than democracies like America. Continued here

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Elon Musk Is a Far-Right Activist If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning: In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins. (Fauci, for his part, has said he would cooperate with any possible investigations and has nothing to hide.) Continued here

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Sri Lanka's most beautiful train journey I was woken by the long, forlorn sound of the siren. The brakes hissed and screeched as our train chugged up the hill and pulled into Radella, a station along one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world: the Colombo to Badulla railway. "The journey is so enthralling that you don't want to take your head out of the window," said Dayawathie Ekanayake, who has travelled extensively by train across the island during her career as a finance consultant. "It makes you feel constantly in awe. You wonder about what comes next – is it a waterfall? A stupa-like tea garden? Or is it mist-clouded peaks? You never know. You just have to keep looking." Continued here

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Star Wars finally admitted that the Emperor's master plan was actually terrible The most important scene in A New Hope has nothing to do with the Force, Darth Vader, or even Luke Skywalker. Instead, it has an impact on the mechanics of Star Wars that the creators of 45 years ago couldn’t have appreciated. Here’s how the conference room scene explains why the Empire operates the way it does in Andor and beyond. One striking element of Andor is that every scene with Mon Mothma on Courscant doesn’t feel very different from how the upper class behaved in the prequels. As demonstrated in The Phantom Menace, the Senate was corrupt before Palpatine took power, and the hypocrisy that Padmé bemoaned throughout the entire prequel trilogy is only slightly worse. Continued here

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The Anabasis of Godspeed “The Anabasis of Godspeed” is excerpted from a forthcoming book-length poem, School of Instructions. A memorial to the experience of West Indian soldiers serving in British regiments during World War I, the poem is also the narrative of Godspeed, a young boy living in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. Bivouacking the night at PELUSIUM. Some nights from his hole at BARRACKS LANEas the sugar factory purred to sleep and the canes curled their tails like fields of kittens Godspeed polished the moon to see better Rosalie’s face and proceeded to ROMANI in the morning. Moved to MAGDHABA by rail. And 2 platoons formed escort to prisoners of war passing through the immemorial shade of the staffroom after the successful action at RAFA. Continued here

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The perfect holiday cookies depend on this one overlooked, abundant ingredient There’s a key ingredient missing from the list of your favorite cookie, cake, and bread recipes. Don’t panic! Even though the recipe might not call for it outright, you’ve been adding it all along. Continued here

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NASA’s Plan to Bounce People Off the Atmosphere If you want to send people to the moon, you have to be able to bring them home safely. And if you want to bring them home, you must send them hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere in a wash of heat and fire. An incoming capsule exits space at thousands of miles per hour, then decelerates rapidly. The astronauts inside feel gravity reassert itself with an uncomfortable crush. Friction between the blazing capsule and the surrounding atmosphere produces heat scorching enough to break apart air molecules, and the resulting flashes of plasma fill up the windows, blocking the view of Earth. Some of the heat shield, coated in an inches-thick layer of resin meant to protect the precious cargo against the worst of the fiery conditions, vaporizes. Continued here

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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022 We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it. Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation. Continued here

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The Obvious Answer to Homelessness When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it. But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat. Continued here

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What to Do When the Recovery of One Species Puts Another at Risk? | Hakai Magazine In the Antarctic, the fur seal population is booming. Having rebounded from near eradication by hunters in the early 20th century, Antarctic fur seals are making their way to new frontiers. Their recovery has been so successful that the animals are pushing beyond their known historical range, causing “unexpected terrestrial conservation challenges” for Antarctica’s fragile vegetation, warns a recent study. Starting around 2010, fur seals have been expanding from their hub centered on South Georgia island down the Antarctic Peninsula, reaching the southern side of Marguerite Bay. “That’s way farther south than we would have seen them before,” says Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the new study. This expansion is led mostly by juveniles and non-breeding males. When they haul out on land, these fur seals trample the fragile coastal vegetation that thrives on Antarctica’s limited ice-free terrain. Continued here S69 Between Shame, Desire, and Destiny: On the Genius of Annie Ernaux On the day that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I flew to Paris. I couldn’t help but see the trip as a chance to flee a country slipping into a furious authoritarianism. This collision between public history and private interiority, as well as the destination, made me think of the work of Annie Ernaux, who wrote two books on abortion: her first novel Cleaned Out and her nonfiction book Happening, which describes an abortion she underwent in the 1960s when the act was still illegal in France. “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled,” she writes in the latter. “There is no such thing as a lesser truth.” Happening is a tense, devastating portrayal of how the discourse of the abortion must always lay submerged below the surface of acceptable discourse. Much of the book consists of Ernaux wondering how she can discuss the illicit operation. Who can she ask for help? Who must she hide from? Her parents, obviously. What about a male doctor? What about male friends? What about other women, who seen from a passing glance, may not appear sympathetic? In other words, one way of characterizing how Annie Ernaux describes being a woman is as an experience of surveillance. Continued here S6 Korean philosophy is built upon daily practice of good habits | Aeon Essays Detail from a six-panel folding screen in the Chaekgado style, a still-life genre from the Joseon period depicting a scholar’s books and possessions. Courtesy the National Folk Museum of Korea Detail from a six-panel folding screen in the Chaekgado style, a still-life genre from the Joseon period depicting a scholar’s books and possessions. Courtesy the National Folk Museum of Korea Continued here S16 Can younger workers speak up without managers bristling? As millennials and Gen Zers make up more of the workforce each year, there’s one big difference emerging that sets them apart from their predecessors. Unlike the generations that came before them, these younger workers are more eager to be heard in the workplace, whether that’s suggesting improvements or innovations; questioning salary and benefits, such as flexible working; and even pressing on larger issues, such as company values and diversity. "Recent entrants into the workplace do seem a lot more comfortable talking about flexibility, work-life balance, fairness, about the kinds of expectations they have for their working lives, compared to older generations," says Martin Kilduff, professor of organisational behaviour at University College London. That’s even true of his own recent hires for research assistants, he says: "They're a lot more vocal – in a positive way. They let you know what they're thinking."  Continued here S42 For the First Time, Chinese Protesters Are Standing With Uyghurs. Will it Last? Ever since Abduweli Ayup fled China in 2015, the Uyghur linguist has been organizing protests in Europe against human rights abuses in China. He invited his friends from the Han Chinese community in Norway to the protests many times, but they never showed up.  At a rally in Oslo, one of many held across universities around the world to commemorate the victims of a fire in Urumqi last month, he was surrounded by Chinese faces. “This is the first time I have seen that they are standing with us,” Ayup told VICE World News.   Continued here S19 Keep talking to make fieldwork a true team effort Anna Osiecka is a bioacoustician and marine-animal observer, currently working on seabird vocal behaviour at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Frequent discussion of plans and progress is crucial on camping expeditions, for example, when other forms of communication are unavailable.Credit: Getty Continued here S4 What's It Like Working in a Ghost Kitchen? We Couldn't Get Close Enough to Ask. Your burger or tacos or pizza could be cooked anywhere by anyone — which is what makes the ghost kitchen concept so lucrative and appealing to owners and investors. Ordering takeout or delivery is a lot like watching Netflix. You can do both things on your phone, the options are seemingly endless, and nothing looks particularly good. You scroll and scroll and scroll until you can't scroll anymore, and begrudgingly decide on some gauzy teen drama, or defer to whatever generically named chicken wing joint paid for the best placement in the app. You hit play or pay or both, and several hours later you mope off to bed a little annoyed (with yourself, with contemporary life) and a little dyspeptic. Continued here S25 Women are 50–75% more likely to have adverse drug reactions. A new mouse study finally helps explain why Yet men and women experience disease differently. That includes how diseases develop, the length and severity of symptoms, and the effectiveness of treatment options. Although these differences are now widely acknowledged, they are not fully understood. And women are often worse off as a result. Continued here S31 The Most Moving Scene in Love Is Blind Jenisha Watts’s culture picks include a dramatic reality-TV moment, Viola Davis, and the young-adult writer Jason Reynolds. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here S7 Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? During one of my more desperate phases as a young novelist, I began to question whether I should actually be writing my own stories. I was deeply uninterested at the time in anything that resembled a plot, but I acknowledged that if I wanted to attain any sort of literary success I would need to tell a story that had a distinct beginning, middle, and end. This was about twenty years ago. My graduate-school friends and I were obsessed with a Web site called the Postmodernism Generator that spat out nonsensical but hilarious critical-theory papers. The site, which was created by a coder named Andrew C. Bulhak, who was building off Jamie Zawinski’s Dada Engine, is still up today, and generates fake scholarly writing that reads like, “In the works of Tarantino, a predominant concept is the distinction between creation and destruction. Marx’s essay on capitalist socialism holds that society has objective value. But an abundance of appropriations concerning not theory, but subtheory exist.” Continued here S11 Curastory Has 40,000 Users Who Want New Features. Zola’s Shan-Lyn Ma Knows How to Deliver Them Zola co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma helps Tiffany Kelly, founder of the adtech company Curastory, navigate the highs and lows of running a fast-growing tech startup. Continued here S18 Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, and a visiting senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Giorgos Kallis is a professor of ecological economics and political ecology at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, and at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain. Continued here S53 Ready to upgrade your sound setup? These are the best JBL Bluetooth speakers. From pocket-size Bluetooths to a professional-quality loud speaker — and everything in between. If you’re shopping for portable JBL speakers, high-quality sound output isn’t the only feature to consider. There are tons of models on the market, each designed for specific needs. The best JBL Bluetooth speakers boast the right dimensions, battery life, and level of durability for their intended use. Continued here S47 40 years ago, an underrated time-travel movie beat 'Back to the Future' to its best twist Can a film be described as a fish-out-of-water if the fish doesn’t realize they’re out of water? That’s one of the many conundrums posed by Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, a curious time travel western which may well have given the Back to the Future franchise some ideas. Directed by William Dear (Harry and the Hendersons), the 1982 film stars the late Fred Ward as Swann, a dirt bike racer seemingly more concerned with pimping out his XT500 Yamaha than riding it to victory. “Made entirely from farm animals,” he deadpans when asked about his latest contraption. “Runs like a rocket up to 60, at which point, I punch this little button here, the whole thing turns into an adult motel.” Continued here S3 Whatever Happened to the Open Internet? - JSTOR Daily There may be a way out of corporate control of the internet, but it probably starts with money. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has many users worried that the social media site will become unusable. One response has been to explore Mastodon, a decentralized network run on open-source software with no advertising or other forms of monetization. In some respects, Mastodon is a lot like the early internet. But why did the internet move away from that model in the first place? Back in 2016, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explored that question. Continued here S17 The 21 best TV shows of 2022 Given the literal and metaphorical heat inside a restaurant kitchen, it would seem to be a perfect crucible for drama. So it's surprising that there hasn't been a top-flight restaurant-centred show – ok, Bob's Burgers aside – until this June, when Hulu production The Bear premiered in the US and quickly became the breakout hit of the summer. In a star-making performance, Jeremy Allen White plays the fine-dining chef returning from New York to his native Chicago to take over his family's sandwich shop following the suicide of his brother. But as he tries to revive its fortunes, he comes into conflict with the joint's long-standing staff, as does his new hire, keen young sous chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri). Altogether, it makes for the very opposite of comfort TV, both tightly wound and exhilaratingly kinetic – as well as mouthwatering, for carnivores at least, with its depiction of Chicago's famous beef sandwich, among other things. (HM) This year saw us bid farewell to a few all-time-great series (including Atlanta, below), but perhaps no finale was a bigger deal than that of this Breaking Bad spin-off exploring how the once flawed but well-intentioned Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) became Saul Goodman, aka Walter White's deeply crooked lawyer. What started out as a spin-off project that even creator Vince Gilligan wasn't totally sure about ended up arguably outshining its acclaimed predecessor with its more nuanced depiction of a man succumbing to moral compromise. And perhaps most impressive of all was the way it managed to stick the landing in its final season: without giving anything away, it confirmed the show, in the words of the New Statesman, as a "a high point in television drama: never has a series better conveyed the complexities of human lives". (HM) Continued here S24 Will AI decide if you get your next job? Without legal regulation, you may never even know At present, Australia has no specific laws to regulate how these tools operate or how organisations may use them. The closest thing we have is new guidance for employers in the public sector, issued by the Merit Protection Commissioner after overturning several automated promotion decisions. Continued here S13 Neuroscience Says This is the Best Way to Make Better Decisions, Almost Instantly Making smart intuitive decisions may sound like a trait, but it's actually a skill anyone can develop. Continued here S8 Britain's Richest Man Pays Himself $2 Million a Day. So Why is He Going After Overpaid Googlers? Sir Christopher Hohn lambasts Google CEO for overpaying employees. Continued here S21 What are bonuses looking like this holiday season? - The Hustle As the economy teeters with uncertainty, it looks like people’s chances for a generous year-end bonus are teetering with it. This year, 27% of companies across a range of sectors will not be awarding bonuses, up from 23% last year, per The Wall Street Journal. Continued here S36 The End of the New Peace Vladimir Putin is pushing humanity toward an era of war that might be worse than anything we have seen before. It could threaten the very survival of our species. A few years ago, I published a book called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and dedicated one of the chapters to the future of war. Subtitled “Never underestimate human stupidity,” this chapter argued that the first decades of the 21st century had been the most peaceful era in human history, and that waging war no longer made much economic or geopolitical sense. But these facts did not absolutely guarantee peace, because “human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history” and “even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.” Continued here S67 Robin Coste Lewis on Giving the Reader a Poetic Experience Poets.org: This multi-layered, archival project entwines ancestry and lineage, memory, mourning, migration, and public and personal history. The photographs play an integral role in the storytelling, designating readers witnesses, or outsiders, peering into a curtained home. How do the stories, stories silently passed on for generations within our bodies as both ancestral memory and trauma, change when shared publicly? RCL: Well, my point of entry isn’t narrative at all. I actually think the emphasis we place on “narrative” is, at times, oppressive. I’m not interested in telling my reader “a story.” I’m interested in giving my reader an experience. That’s the distinction between poetry and prose. Poems can and do tell stories sometimes, I know. Thankfully. I, too, write poems like that sometimes. But I am much more interested in the ways in which a poem can be a two-word experience that disarms the reader, that takes the reader back toward a place they have forgotten, or plunges the reader forward into a wordless dream they never imagined possible. Continued here S52 Selling stolen data on the darknet is a million-dollar industry, study finds It is common to hear news reports about significant data breaches, but what happens once your data is stolen? Our research shows that, like most legal commodities, stolen data products flow through a supply chain consisting of producers, wholesalers, and consumers. But this supply chain involves the interconnection of multiple criminal organizations operating in illicit underground marketplaces. Continued here S61 Microbiome home test kits are the wild west of gut health Direct-to-consumer gut microbiome tests are increasingly popular, but experts argue they may do more harm than good. We all have a gut microbiome — a complex community of trillions of microbes living in our digestive tracts. Researchers are still figuring out all the different ways these organisms affect our health, but the science suggests that they play a role in many physiological processes, including our ability to fight cancer and maintain good brain health. Continued here S63 From violent criminal to loving parent – a son’s story of his father’s transformation | Aeon Videos In Violator, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker Edward Robles chronicles the turbulent life of his father, Christopher Robles, building a generation-spanning family portrait that blurs the boundary between biography and autobiography. Edward, who was raised with love and care by Christopher, details his father’s much more tumultuous upbringing – one that included severe childhood abuse, violent criminality, rehabilitation and, ultimately, a path to love through helping others, art and fatherhood. And, as Edward eventually reveals, it’s a life that is nearing its end due to the painful, fatal degenerative disease ataxia, which Edward has also inherited. Probing the events that shaped Christopher’s past, Edwards conveys the trauma and transformation that characterise his father’s life. In so doing, he grapples with how to best approach the rest of his own time on earth. Continued here S2 There’s no such thing as a good cold “Immunity debt” can explain this year’s eye-popping cold and flu season — but it can also be dangerously misinterpreted. This fall, America’s pediatric hospitals have been overwhelmed by a “tri-demic” of RSV, flu, and Covid-19. And while it’s not a surprise to see respiratory viral infections hit hard at this time of year, what is surprising is to see so many of these viruses hit so many parts of the country so hard at the same time. Continued here S30 The Woman Who Made Online Dating Into a ‘Science’ The anthropologist and famed love expert Helen Fisher seemed ready to dash into oncoming traffic. We were on a sidewalk in Manhattan, opposite the American Museum of Natural History, and nowhere near a safe place to cross the street. She wanted me to stare down the yellow cabs and charge off the curb, though she knew I wouldn’t do it: I’d recently taken the personality questionnaire she wrote 17 years ago for a dating website, which produced the insight that I am a cautious, conventional rule follower. She, however, is an “explorer”—she has visited 111 countries, including North Korea—but also, being high in estrogen, a “negotiator” who will use the crosswalk for my benefit. “I am horribly empathetic,” she told me. “I cry at parades. I look into baby carriages and worry about their future with love.” (Really high in estrogen.) This is how Fisher, the 77-year-old chief scientific adviser for Match.com and one of the best-known, most-often-quoted experts on romance and “mate choice,” understands life: Personality is a cocktail of hormones; love comes from the buzz of mixing them just right. The human sex drive hasn’t changed for millions of years, she argues, nor has the human capacity for long-term attachment. If, as a cautious, conventional technology journalist, I’m preoccupied with the question of how we live now, Fisher has spent her career exploring the story of how we’ve lived (and loved) always. Continued here S45 Every Weird Trend You're Going to See in 2023 In the 2020s, trends move quicker than ever. It can feel as though there’s a new TikTok “aesthetic” every week (clean girl, indie sleaze, coquette, dark academia, blokecore, to name just a few). Entertainment is constantly eating itself, and when so much of life happens on the internet, it makes sense that our attention spans have become teeny tiny, with something new always on the way. As such, it can be difficult to know what’ll be next – honestly how many of us saw “Frazzled Englishwoman” coming? So to get a head start on what will inevitably be another year of relentlessness, I peered into my crystal ball – with some help from Jane Macfarlane, Biz Sherbert and Rukiat Ashawe of creative agency The Digital Fairy, as well as Fiona Harkin, foresight editor at strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory – and had a go at predicting where the Mario Kart circuit that is fashion and culture in the 2020s might go next year. Continued here S48 'Wednesday' Season 2 could make one important change to its heroine Wednesday was an exciting tonal blend. For every murdered student, there was a psychobilly dance scene. For each of Wednesday’s near-fatal experiences, she also participated in a boat race or other school tradition. It’s part of what made the show so captivating: The main character’s dour deadpan moments were offset with a fun Nancy Drew mystery adventure. Could the formula change in Season 2? Star Jenna Ortega hopes so. To her, Wednesday’s motivations have gone unexamined, and a second season could be the perfect opportunity to rectify that. Continued here S65 How CokeMachineGlow.com Defined a Decade of Music Writing This month, a book compiling writing from the website Cokemachineglow.com comes out. I edited it, the culmination of about 7 years of effort and almost two decades of involvement with the site—more than half my lived experience, I’m realizing now, staring in the mirror in the dead of night. I first heard about the site when my friend Eric went to college and told me he had this friend who wrote for a music website. I was agog, speechless. It was 2003. I later met this friend: Betz, a towering figure who would helm the AUX cord at parties and play all the most uptempo tracks off Anticon records. I loved him immediately. When I started writing for the site in 2005, it was already a bustling ecosystem: there was a layer of associate editors in place (including Betz), a lively messageboard, a fairly involved application process involving not one but two reviews written on spec and pro bono. Everything for CMG, it’s worth clarifying, was pro bono, up to and including the print reader. Continued here S14 How to Take Advantage of the Changes Coming to the Energy Industry Sunrun's CEO has spent more than 20 years scaling renewables. She shared her predictions with Inc. Continued here S68 Pitchaya Sudbanthad on the Pleasures of Restoring Fountain Pens, and Finding Respite from Writerly Abstraction Welcome to When I’m Not Writing, a new series in which we invite writers to tell us about the things they do when they’re not, you know, writing. Writers are not, as idyllically pictured, always tucked away in their garret, typing. They are out in the world, skinning their knees and putting their hands in the soil. And don’t you want to know about it? From lifelong passions to newfound pandemic hobbies to creative productive procrastination methods, the obsessions gathered here run the gamut, but they all pull back the curtain a bit and let us be a fly on the wall of extraordinary daily living. My first year in high school, my father gave me my grandfather’s pen. I had mostly been writing with mechanical pencils, but here was this sleek, gold-filled Parker 180 made even more elegant by its barley pattern etching. The filling mechanism no longer worked, but after an hour of tinkering, my father was able to revive it with a delicate operation involving glue and electrical tape. Unlike with other kinds of pens, I couldn’t write with it right away. I first needed to dip it in a bottle of ink so it could fill up. Then all I had to do was glide its gold nib across the page, no pushing into the sheet. I moved my hand in widening circles. Even after decades of disuse, the pen began to pour out ink. Continued here S12 Google Spent One Year Researching Great Managers. The Most Successful Ones Shared These 5 Traits Google found these traits led to significant improvements in managerial effectiveness and performance. Continued here S43 The Best Advice For Helping A Friend In Serious Debt Ask VICE is a series where readers ask VICE to solve their problems, from dealing with unrequited love to handling annoying flatmates. Today, we’re hoping to help a reader whose worried their friend might be slipping into a debt spiral. I’m worried about a friend, let’s call her Esmée. She acts like nothing’s wrong, but I believe she’s in serious debt and unable to face reality. I’m worried she’ll end up losing her home, but I don’t know how to help her. Continued here S15 Middle Managers Are Exhausted. Top Teams Need to Listen. For years, I’ve worked with businesses to build diverse and inclusive workplaces and to address issues such as negative team dynamics and conflict. These days, I’ve learned that it’s crucial to start with a message to managers. I tell them, “I see you. I know how hard you’re working. I know how difficult this time is for you. And I’m here to honor that.” Frequently, this brings up many emotions, as many of these middle managers are feeling the effects of prolonged stress and burnout. While the past few years have been tumultuous and overwhelming for just about everyone, middle managers have faced extraordinary challenges. As businesses have gone from crisis to crisis, the number of complex responsibilities that have suddenly been thrust onto managers is astounding. With each new challenge, organizations have told managers that the solutions involve them engaging in new forms of leadership. Social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have called on corporations to transform and reckon with forms of injustice. The pandemic brought on a global crisis across all industries along with a widespread shift to remote and hybrid work, which are now a norm in the business world. Throughout the Great Resignation, managers have had to deal with unfilled positions, recruit employees in a tight labor market, and work to retain employees by keeping them feeling engaged, trusted, and respected. Continued here S64 When Your Book Tour is Interrupted by a Near-Death Experience I was halfway through my book tour when the pain started. Sharp, but strangely light; like the nub of a feather lodged in my right side. Must be all that signing with my right hand, I joked to my husband, who was traveling with me, along with our two dogs. A six-week book tour of three coasts—East, Gulf, then West—can be lonely. This time, I wanted my family with me. And it might be, who knew, my very last long book tour. No one does big tours anymore. Especially since the pandemic. Writers chirp now from little cages on computer screens. Whistle coo, whistle chee, here I am in my naked tree. Will you buy a book from me? Three weeks into the tour, in an unfamiliar suite in Houston, in a downy bed, I sweated through the night. I was so drenched, I left a puddle on the sheet. I got up and adjusted the air conditioning. It was the humidity, certainly. Plus these mad linens. Who needs a duvet in spring in Texas? But the reading had come off so beautifully. How wonderful it was, night after night, to see real people again, in cozy, yellow-lit rooms. The podium and microphone had been well placed. I was tired afterward, but then, it had already been three weeks. Continued here S49 Depression study reveals a critical difference between men and women “Our vision is that one day we’ll have improved, individually tailored therapeutics.” Unless you are a scientist, you may never have considered RNA — ribonucleic acid found in all living cells — in great detail until the advent of the mRNA (micro RNA) vaccine against Covid-19. Continued here S5 What it's like to be a food writer when you can taste everything you see People with synesthesia experience stimulation in multiple senses: hearing color, feeling sounds—or, in writer Julia Skinner's instance, tasting everything they see Some people hear colors. Some taste sounds. A few, like me, can taste everything around us. The condition of synesthesia—experiencing one or multiple senses through another sense—offers a world informed by the intersection of our experiences rather than the boundaries between them, a world that exists between sense and sensation. Continued here S41 Would You Be Friends With Your Friends if You Didn’t Do Drugs Together? “Drugs are a gateway to friendship,” said Luke, a 27-year-old doctor from Manila, Philippines. Luke, as well as the other names in this story, is a pseudonym used to protect the subjects from the legal repercussions of using drugs.  Luke occasionally uses weed, LSD, and MDMA with his friends whether they’re just hanging out, going to bars and clubs, or going on out-of-town trips. He also considers substances like alcohol and coffee to be drugs, and said that, at least in his social circles, “a lot of friendships have drugs as their centerpiece.”  Continued here S44 ‘Gas Station Heroin’ Is Causing Intense Withdrawals. It’s Legal in Most States. A drug called tianeptine, known colloquially as “gas station heroin,” has been banned by several states. It’s being marketed as a dietary supplement, but some users are describing it as a highly addictive opioid.  Tianeptine is a tricyclic antidepressant used to treat depression in some European, Latin American, and Asian countries, but it’s not approved by the FDA for medical use in the U.S. It’s not a controlled substance and is typically sold in the U.S. as a dietary supplement, nootropic (a chemical that improves cognitive function), or a research chemical under brand names like ZaZa Red, TD Red, and Tianna. It can be found in gas stations or easily bought online.  Continued here S51 40 years ago, an amazing platformer turned Nintendo's biggest franchise on its head Who was Nintendo’s first big star, Donkey Kong or Mario? It’s a chicken-or-the-egg question with no real answer, considering how they came up together. Their first game, 1981’s Donkey Kong, saw them as rivals in a light-hearted style. Drawing from Popeye and Bluto, as well as Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 movie King Kong, Shigeru Miyamoto developed a light-hearted game based on platforms, ladders, rolling barrels, and a little guy with a mustache just trying to save his girlfriend. It’s easy to forget that Miyamoto flipped that script in an underappreciated sequel. It’s one that every gamer needs to experience via their Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. While Donkey Kong wasn’t like the popular maze or shooting-based arcade games of the day, its uniqueness made it stand out. Once Donkey Kong became a hit, that uniqueness led to ubiquity. Games requiring a player to jump from platform to platform were soon everywhere, as was Donkey Kong. The highest-grossing arcade game of 1981 needed a sequel before it found itself lost amidst the knockoffs. Continued here S56 Weasels, not pandas, should be the poster animal for biodiversity loss At the United Nations biodiversity conference that opened in Montreal on Wednesday, nations aim to create a new global framework for transforming humanity’s relationship with nature. The conference logo features a human reaching to embrace a panda — but from an ecological perspective, a weasel or badger would be a more appropriate choice. Large mammals with widespread appeal, also known as charismatic megafauna, often represent the highest achievement in biodiversity protection. As the logic goes, saving the tiger, polar bear, wolf, or lion means saving an entire ecosystem since these species often have large ranges and may sit at the top of food chains. Continued here S57 Can people with disabilities be astronauts? ESA shows encouraging signs of progress Not quite two years after Hayley Arceneaux became the first person with a prosthetic body part in space, the European Space Agency has launched a “Parastronaut Feasibility Program,” and future astronaut corps may include people with disabilities. Imagine a flight to the International Space Station. As the main engines cut off and the weightlessness of space replaces the heavy G-forces of launch, the mission’s pilot unbuckles themselves from a seat designed to keep their prosthetic knee at a comfortable angle. A few minutes later, they watch the spacecraft commander discussing a science experiment with the mission specialist — in American Sign Language. This could be a glimpse of the future. Continued here S66 How Hollywood Made J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI Into the Mythical "G-Men" The display case outside J. Edgar Hoover’s office was not necessarily what President Roosevelt had in mind when he called upon law enforcement to “interpret” the problem of crime. But it was a start, a hint that Hoover was taking notice of the public interest in crime narratives and adjusting his self-presentation accordingly. Another clue came when Hoover began to push for a new name to replace the “Division of Investigation.” Since the end of Prohibition, he had longed to break away from what remained of the Prohibition Bureau—technically a separate entity, but still under the roof of his division. He had also advocated for a renaming, pointing out that other government agencies maintained their own “divisions” of investigation, a source of frequent confusion. In March 1935, just after completing the move into his new office, he got his wish. For all its later significance, the adoption of the name Federal Bureau of Investigation—FBI—occurred with little fanfare. Many other bureaus went through similar shifts during the 1930s, losing an initial here, gaining another there. As a reconfigured “alphabet agency,” the FBI was little different from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Works Progress Administration (WPA), or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), three-letter agencies born of early New Deal planning. Continued here S62 British place names resonate with the song of missing birds | Aeon Essays In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music is honorary fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and chair of New Networks for Nature. He is the author of Birds in Medieval English Poetry (2018), and is currently at work on a nature-writing book about birds and place. Continued here S55 Walking backward could help with back pain — and carry other health benefits One of the most well-studied benefits of walking backward is improving stability and balance. Walking doesn’t require any special equipment or gym memberships, and best of all, it’s completely free. For most of us, walking is something we do automatically. It doesn’t require conscious effort, so many of us fail to remember the benefits of walking for health. But what happens if we stop walking on autopilot and start challenging our brains and bodies by walking backward? Not only does this change of direction demand more of our attention, but it may also bring additional health benefits. Continued here S54 Worried about getting sick at a holiday party? 4 tips to stay well and be merry While flu rates are relatively stable, they are higher than they have been for the past few years. With Christmas just a month away, the good news is that Covid-19 cases in the United Kingdom have been falling and are now at the lowest we’ve seen for some time. Continued here S58 These are the 9 absolute best smartphones of 2022 From feature-packed slabs to more durable foldables, 2022 was a great year to upgrade your phone. The next big thing in tech might be smart glasses, a stretchable display, or whatever Humane is teasing for 2023. But one thing is certain: Smartphones aren’t going anywhere for a while. Continued here S20 How LinkedIn’s handling its bots - The Hustle Is nothing sacred? Meta and Twitter get a lot of flak about bogus profiles, but bots have invaded LinkedIn, too. LinkedIn removed 21m+ fake accounts between January and June — a ~28% increase compared to the previous six months, per CNBC. It also booted 87m+ scams and spam content. Continued here S59 The 10 Best Nintendo Switch Games Of 2022 Nearly six years since its launch, the Nintendo Switch shows no sign of slowing down. Nintendo’s November 2022 financial report confirmed rising hardware sales, particularly for its newer OLED model. The reason why is simple: Nintendo’s stellar library of games, which only got better in 2022. While we didn’t see a new Mario or Zelda this year, some truly outstanding titles came to Nintendo’s hybrid console over the past 12 months. Here are the 10 best Switch titles from 2022. Continued here S60 15 remarkable images from JWST's first year in space In December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope launched into space, carrying with it the promise of a new era for astronomy. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (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... 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