Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi

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Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi     Back at the turn of the 21st century, valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases a year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of valley fever have exploded, increasing roughly sevenfold by 2019.And valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful fungi are becoming more dangerous for people. One likely reason for this worsening fungal situation, scientists say, is climate change. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns are expanding where disease-causing fungi occur; climate-triggered calamities can help fungi disperse and reach more people; and warmer temperatures create opportunities for fungi to evolve into more dangerous agents of disease. Continued here

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An Octogenarian Horror Villain Still Racking Up Scares     The long-running Saw franchise is back, and finally putting its most defining antagonist in the spotlight. Hollywood’s biggest horror franchises have lately been lacking in all-star villainy. This isn’t to demonize long-running hit series such as The Conjuring, Insidious, and The Purge, none of which rely on one big bad guy. But many of scary cinema’s most infamous adversaries—Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees—have grown quite long in the tooth, without any obvious contemporary heirs. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Saw X, one of the biggest horror-movie offerings this Halloween season, centers on a man in his early 80s. Continued here

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The road is long and time is short, but Australia's pace towards net zero is quickening     This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.The marks of industry have forever changed the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, edged by the Blue Mountains to the south and ancient rainforests to the north. Coal has been mined here for more than 200 years, providing generations of people with good livelihoods and lives. But the end of coal in the Hunter does not spell the end of communities. Quite the opposite. Continued here

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Replacing gas heating with reverse-cycle aircon leaves some people feeling cold. Why? And what's the solution?     Researchers and policymakers are advocating all-electric housing to reduce energy bills and emissions. Using energy-efficient reverse-cycle air conditioners is a core element of the shift from gas.However, not everyone is happy with the change. “I just don’t feel warm,” said some people we interviewed after they switched to reverse-cycle air conditioning. Continued here

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Low Stakes, High Drama     Some of our writers’ most entertaining—and controversial—opinions on everyday mattersThis 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

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Closer relations between Australia and India have the potential to benefit both nations     The structure of Andrew Charlton’s Australia’s Pivot to India is built on three promises: the promise of India; the promise of the Australia-India relationship; and the promise of the Indian diaspora becoming a powerful mainstream force in Australian politics. At a time when the Indian diaspora is attracting attention globally, this book – launched on Wednesday by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – will be read, and read widely. Continued here

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What kind of Australia will we wake up to if the Voice referendum is defeated on October 14?     It was Robert Menzies, father of the modern Liberal Party, who famously remarked: “to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is the labour of Hercules”. Menzies knew this from bitter experience. The politician with the electoral Midas touch was the sponsor of three unsuccessful referendums. Most notable was Menzies’ (thankfully) failed 1951 attempt to win public support for amending the Constitution to grant his government the power to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. Continued here

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The Supreme Court Cases That Could Redefine the Internet     In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents) were divided on the laws’ legality. And now they’re going to the Supreme Court. Continued here

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The Indian Ocean has the world's largest gravity hole. Now we know why     Dear Indian Ocean, please don’t take offense, but: Why is your gravity hole so big? That question had been baffling scientists ever since the hole was discovered back in 1948. Now a team from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) thinks they have found the answer: The “hole” in the Indian Ocean is caused by fragments from the sunken floor of another, much older ocean.In a mysterious part of the Indian Ocean, the pull of gravity is much weaker than anywhere else on Earth. This gravity hole, the world’s largest (and deepest) gravitational anomaly, is officially known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL). (A geoid is a theoretical model of sea levels worldwide, with its irregularities corresponding to variations in the Earth’s gravity.) Continued here

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Avoid cramming and don't just highlight bits of text: how to help your memory when preparing for exams     With school and university exams looming, students will be thinking about how they can maximise their learning.If students understand how memory works, they can prioritise effective study habits. This will help for exams as well as their learning in the longer term. Continued here

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AI disinformation is a threat to elections - learning to spot Russian, Chinese and Iranian meddling in other countries can help the US prepare for 2024     Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries – most prominently China and Iran – used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. There’s no reason to expect 2023 and 2024 to be any different. Continued here

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Sleep apnea is surprisingly deadly. One in five adults has it     A pernicious scourge strikes an estimated one in five American adults as they sleep, and most are unaware of it: sleep apnea.Sleep apnea is a condition in which your breathing frequently stops and restarts during sleep, simultaneously depriving the body of vital oxygen and forcing you to repeatedly and unknowingly wake up, often preventing adequate rest. Its most common form, called obstructive sleep apnea, is caused when the muscles supporting the throat and nose relax to such a degree that they entirely block your airway. Continued here

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Too hard basket: why climate change is defeating our political system     This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.When I was first asked to write an opening piece in The Conversation’s series on climate change and the energy transition, I wanted to say no. I didn’t want to think about what I and anyone else who has been paying attention knows is coming; not just next summer, which is likely to be a scorcher like the one the northern hemisphere has just endured, but in the summers after that for centuries to come. Continued here

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How the U.S. Ended Up on the Brink of Government Shutdown     The American government on the brink of shutdown: With the federal government about to run out of money, we explore how the country got to this point, who will be affected, and how U.S. support for Ukraine has become a divisive political issue. Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss these issues and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, an anchor at Washington Post Live and a co-author of the Early 202; and Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast. Continued here

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A Satanic Rebellion     The last time Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out.In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife. Continued here

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Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right     The speaker made a last-minute reversal to avert a government shutdown. It could cost him his job.For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty. Continued here

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A Soviet doctor's wild experiment to create hybrid human-ape super warriors     The 1973 film The Wicker Man is one of the most quietly disturbing movies. One reason is that it features people dressed in animal masks. They appear from time to time, often just standing there in silence, and they’re watching you. Seeing a fully grown man wearing a fish face should be comical. In The Wicker Man, few in the audience are laughing.There is something primal about the fear of man-beast hybrids. The earliest stories we know of contain many of these “chimeras” — humans but with an aspect of a beast. We have the minotaur, mermaid, harpy, or wendigo. The Hindu and ancient Egyptian pantheon are full of chimerical deities. These stories often represent tension between our human rational side and our animalistic drives. They’re also scary folk stories to tell around the campfire. Continued here

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Why do I suddenly owe tax this year? It could be because the Low and Middle Income Tax offset is gone, forever     Ever since Australia’s transition to self-assessment for income tax returns, we have been primed to expect an annual refund.That’s by design. Thinking we will get a refund acts as an incentive to get us to fill in the form. Continued here

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Get a whiff of ancient Egyptian mummified organs      We expect death to stink. In our olfactory memory, the idea of decaying organic remains rarely conjures a pleasant odor: sour, fetid, nauseating. But in ancient Egypt, death—and therefore the afterlife—had a different aroma.“They [ancient Egyptian texts] say that when ‘people die, they rot, they decay, they stink, and they will become countless worms.’ This is how they describe it,” says Barbara Huber, doctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. “If you stink it means your body is already decaying—a bad, bad thing. So in order to be able to live for eternity, you need to smell good.” Continued here

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Emperor penguins face a bleak future - but some colonies will do better than others in diverse sea-ice conditions     Over the past two years, Antarctic sea ice has declined dramatically, prompting scientists to suggest it could reach a “new state”. A study based on satellite images shows that sea ice broke out early in Antarctica’s Bellingshausen Sea in 2022, potentially resulting in breeding failures across several Emperor penguin colonies in that region. Continued here

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Our mood usually lifts in spring. But after early heatwaves and bushfires, this year may be different     When we think of spring, we might imagine rebirth and renewal that comes with the warmer weather and longer days. It’s usually a time to celebrate, flock to spring flower festivals and spend more time in nature.Spending time in nature or doing things outside, such as exercising or gardening, lifts our mood. Continued here

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Taylor Swift Is Too Famous for This     The celebrity-gossip industrial complex is about to crash into the savagery of sports media. Cover your eyes.Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere. And now, to her vast dominion, she has added untold millions of football-loving (mostly) men, thanks to her escalating flirtations with the Kansas City Chiefs’ sexy goofus tight end, Travis Kelce. Continued here

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Is psychology good for anything?     After all, many published studies fail to replicate, and influential researchers have admitted to wrongdoing, from engaging in questionable research practices to committing outright fraud. Just this summer, allegations of data tampering have thrown into question numerous studies about (ironically) honesty by high-profile psychologists Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino. Has discarding these findings affected our understanding of human psychology in any meaningful way?According to a recent piece by Adam Mastroianni, who is now a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, the answer may be: meh, not really. Continued here

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Are NFTs really dead and buried? All signs point to 'yes'     Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are in dire straits. With the market in a severe downturn, it’s safe to assume the NFT bubble has well and truly burst.It was never clear why these digital collectables traded for such large amounts of money. Now they mostly do not. What’s behind their turn of fate? And is there any hope for their future? Continued here

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'Ahsoka' Episode 8 Runtime Reveals a Disappointing Fact About the Finale      Even for Star Wars, a franchise that encompasses everything from laser swords to ghosts, Ahsoka is pushing the limits of what’s possible in that galaxy far away. Already this season, we’ve gotten everything from galaxy-hopping space whales to Clone Wars flashback hallucinations. But the show’s runtimes have remained surprisingly consistent. Aside from a short Episode 3, every episode so far has been 40-something minutes long, which feels consistent with a classic hour-long broadcast series (minus commercials).If any episode were to be extra long, it would be Ahsoka’s Season 1 (or perhaps series?) finale, which presumably needs to wrap up all the loose ends established so far, from Thrawn’s ongoing threat to just how Ahsoka and company will return to their home galaxy. However, the leaked runtime of the episode suggests we may have to wait longer for all the answers. Continued here

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For socialism and freedom: the life of Eugene Debs | Aeon Essays     is lecturer in political theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.A shot rang out from the jailhouse at Woodstock, Illinois on a quiet summer’s morning in 1895. One of the inmates had pulled the trigger on an old Civil War musket after thrusting it between the iron bars of a window. The gun was fired by the union leader Eugene V Debs to mark the Fourth of July: this was no prison break, but a demand for another kind of freedom. Later that day, he would write in praise of liberty, while delivering the grim verdict that, in the United States, it now ‘lies cold and stiff and dead’. Soon to be the country’s most influential socialist, how had Debs come to find himself contemplating the prospects of US liberty from behind the bars of McHenry County Jail? Continued here

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Political leaders need a grand narrative - Rishi Sunak's is a story of decline     During a January 2023 speech on “building a better future” the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, insisted that “we can change our country’s character. We can reverse the creeping acceptance of a narrative of decline.”Months later, this narrative has manifested in Tory malaise and division, low approval ratings, and collapsing buildings. Sunak recently watered down his climate change mitigation policies, and refused to “speculate” on the future of rail project HS2. The Sunak government is seemingly unable to reverse a harmful narrative or maintain its own. Continued here

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11 Years Later, The Scariest Sci-Fi Thriller of 2023 Borrows One Brilliant Cinematic Trick     The celebrated horror director reveals the secret to making a great found-footage movie — and his dream sci-fi project.A serial killer stalks the streets of a town, leaving a trail of violence and gore behind him. The local police (including a videographer capturing everything on his Super 8 camera) track the murder futilely. Their only clue is a series of videotapes that show up at the station, revealing footage of each murder somehow recorded days before they take place. Continued here

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What Makes a Great Leader?     Tomorrow’s leaders master three key roles — architect, bridger, and catalyst, or ABCs — to access the talent and tools they need to drive innovation and impact. As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems. These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation. Continued here

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Analytics for Marketers     Advanced analytics can help companies solve a host of management problems, including those related to marketing, sales, and supply-chain operations, which can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. But as more data becomes available and advanced analytics are further refined, managers may struggle with when, where, and how much to incorporate machines into their business analytics, and to what extent they should bring their own judgment to bear when making data-driven decisions. Continued here

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'The boss of Country', not wild dogs to kill: living with dingoes can unite communities     Girringun Aboriginal Corporation Communications Officer and Founder of Dingo Culture, Indigenous Knowledge Girringun Aboriginal Corporation Indigenous Protected Areas Coordinator and Acting Executive Officer, Indigenous Knowledge Continued here

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How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis     On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University of Washington. “It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one animal.” Continued here

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These All-Electric Vans Making Camping Look Luxurious     The idea of living in your van had humble beginnings with people tackling budget DIY conversions of decommissioned utility vans. But it didn’t take very long for influencers to spark the #vanlife movement, making life on the road seem glamorous. The surge in popularity has led to pre-built camper vans made by boutique startups with outrageous price tags, and now, big-time automakers are offering pre-built camper vans complete with sleeping quarters, kitchens, and bathrooms. Continued here

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How women's environmental action across the Global South can create a better planet     Patriarchal culture is the cause behind this. We often do not involve women in responding to environmental problems. To often, we exclude them in discussions on solutions to climate crisis. Patriarchal culture also creates unequal gender relations, with women being considered only capable of managing household and domestic work. Continued here

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McKinsey's Three Horizons Model Defined Innovation for Years. Here's Why It No Longer Applies.     In the 20th century McKinsey created a model called the Three Horizons to explain how businesses must invest in current products, incremental innovations, and breakthrough innovations. The framework relied on time as a guiding factor; it assumes that truly breakthrough innovations will take years to develop. Technology has made that assumption incorrect: Today innovations like Uber and Airbnb can be rolled out extremely quickly. Because established companies tend to move slowly and must invest resources in existing products, this means that unlike in the 20th century, attacking disruptors now have the advantage.The Three Horizons allowed senior management to visualize what an ambidextrous organization would look like — the idea that companies and government agencies need to execute existing business models while simultaneously creating new capabilities — and helped to prioritize innovation products and programs. Continued here

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Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells Channel Two Pals from Junior High     History, as Florida has taught us, is constantly being rewritten. Just ask Anthony King and Scott Brown, whose “Gutenberg! The Musical!”—a hilariously apocryphal two-man show about the invention of the printing press—started previews on Broadway this month. (Their musical “Beetlejuice,” meanwhile, has cropped up in recent stranger-than-fiction headlines.) The other morning, they stood outside the Morgan Library & Museum, waiting to see two of the Morgan’s three Gutenberg Bibles, and tried to reconstruct their friendship origin story.“Eighth grade, Carrington Junior High, Durham, North Carolina. Working on ‘Oliver!’ ” Brown recalled. Continued here

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Introducing The Conversation's new climate series, Getting to Zero     Australia, like many other countries, has committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 – just 27 years from now. The Albanese government has also committed to sourcing 82% of all electricity from renewables by 2030 – just seven years from now.To meet these targets, and to avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of unchecked global warming, requires Australia to play its part in a transformation that former Chief Scientist Alan Finkel describes as “the most profound economic change to civilisation of all time.” Continued here

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The Game Theory of the Auto Strikes     The United Auto Workers strike against Detroit’s Big Three—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis—escalated into its third week on Friday. Workers at two additional plants operated by Ford and GM walked off the job, taking the number of union members striking for better pay and benefits to more than 25,000.The dispute looks unlikely to end soon. As they try to understand where things are headed, economists, philosophers, labor experts, business professors, and a handful of boutique consulting firms see a juicy opportunity to put a 100-year-old economic theory into practice. Guys. It’s time for some game theory. Continued here

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'Ahsoka's Most Disappointing Reveal Sets Up Episode 8 for Failure     Ahsoka has spent the majority of its eight-episode season building to the intergalactic return of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), a character so formidable that he could, according to multiple characters, single-handedly lead an Imperial resurgence. Despite that fact, many of Thrawn’s scenes throughout Ahsoka’s sixth and seventh episodes have been utterly devoid of tension. The character has been so coolly confident and blasé about every obstacle that has entered his path that it’s been hard to get truly invested in his storyline.That’s particularly true of Thrawn’s scenes throughout Ahsoka Episode 7, which see him respond to the arrival of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) with several decisions that fail in surprisingly spectacular fashion. Rather than expressing frustration or anger over his failures throughout the episode, he explains them away and lays out his entire plan for escaping Peridea. Continued here

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Why one man spent 15 years in 'self-imposed' island exile | Aeon Videos     Born on Jersey in the Channel Islands (part of the British Crown Dependency), Alphonse Le Gastelois (1914-2012) moved to the small, only seasonally inhabited Écréhous island chain roughly six miles away in 1961, after being wrongly suspected of a series of heinous sexual assaults. Relocating for his own safety and peace of mind, he remained there, living mostly in isolation, until 1975, even after he was proven innocent when the string of attacks continued in his absence and the real culprit was finally caught in 1971. First broadcast in 1978, this clip from the BBC series Nationwide: Remote Britain tells Le Gastelois’s incredible story of ‘self-imposed exile’, including his formal attempt to become ‘King of the Écréhous’ – a request that would ultimately go unfulfilled in law, if not in legend. Depicting the power of unfounded rumour and gossip to derail a life, his story is one that echoes with amplified intensity in the internet age.An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’ Continued here