I was doomscrolling through news articles one evening — this was June 2024, which feels simultaneously like yesterday and several epochs ago — when I saw a headline stating there was $2.8 million in school lunch debt across Utah.
After its release in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Since then the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has significantly affected how we learn, write, work and create. But new research shows that it’s also influencing us in ways we may not be aware of—such as changing how we speak.
A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2
For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests.
In an era when a cold beer and a hot dog define the quintessential baseball experience, it’s hard to imagine a time when the former could cause an all-out riot. But the annals of baseball history are not only filled with double plays and home runs; they also record moments when the game spiraled out of control. One such incident, the infamous “Ten Cent Beer Night,” is a tale of caution recounted with both horror and fascination by the channel Weird History, and detailed by Grace Johnson and Samuel Trunley in an article for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
I consider no activity more luxurious than posting up at a bar solo with a good book. The creasing of a paperback in one hand, the weight of a wine glass in the other, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people all make for a lovely evening. Or at least, I thought so, until recently, when two twentysomethings approached me during this ritual. “Are you reading alone?” one asked. “I could neverrrr,” the other said, and then uttered the universal mean girl slight: “I wish I had your confidence.”
When I started college, in 2012, I felt like a virginal freak. Rather than warn me off of sex, the pearl-clutching over hookup culture had left me desperate to have it.
It started to become clear the previous April, when a man who had been pursuing me canceled a dinner at the last minute. There was a scheduling mix-up with his son’s game. I understood. I’m a hockey mom; I get it. Still, I went. I wore what I would have worn anyway. I took the table. I ordered well. And I watched the room.
Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori spent six years living in the western Amazon. He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master’s thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD on the music of eight Indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the local Shipibo tribe and settled down.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.
In an era of escalating censorship, disinformation, and the erosion of public trust in institutions, Wikipedia may seem like an unlikely site of resistance. But at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and other institutions across the country, a quiet revolution is taking place, one edit at a time.
In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest enclosure, the process by which common land was parcelled into units of private property, stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. The land was bad – ‘nothing but a bare heath & sandy ground’, surveyors reported in 1650 – but the Diggers believed it could be made fruitful.
New research suggests that Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system may have been significantly influenced by the work of a 14th-century Muslim astronomer, Ibn al-Shatir. The study draws detailed comparisons between the planetary models of both figures and proposes that Copernicus’s ideas could have stemmed—directly or indirectly—from earlier Islamic scientific traditions.
I have been thinking about this issue a lot considering the context of my life and the present political situation and have been planning to write my own essay, only to find that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written exactly was I was thinking decades ago just before he was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I think it's an important thought to spread and I'm curious as to what y'all think. This is the essay:
Amid constant noise and spectacle, moments of stillness carry unusual weight. This short essay explores how the appearance of a global figure, not for what he said but for how he held space, reawakened something deeper than charisma.
It began in late September 2022. I was just recovering from a severe case of COVID-19 when Hurricane Ian hit my hometown in southwest Florida. My wife and I evacuated to Miami for a week and watched the damage unfold on various news channels. When we returned to our home in Fort Myers a week later, we were shocked by the devastation. The scenes were absurd. There were huge fishing boats suspended like toys from mangrove and palm trees, entire homes floating in the middle of San Carlos Bay, the famous causeway to Sanibel Island ripped in half, and the town of Fort Myers Beach utterly flattened. But our house, albeit without power, made it through the storm relatively unscathed.
In January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.
There are currently 43.7 million refugees worldwide. These are people who have been forced to flee their home countries due to severe threats to their lives, human rights and basic needs. Yet, having fled in search of safety, they have not always found it. Instead, the vast majority live in squalid and dangerous camps or face destitution in urban areas in regions neighbouring their own states in the Global South. In these conditions, refugees continue to face severe human rights violations. A small minority undertake perilous journeys to find adequate safety in the Global North. Thousands lose their lives on the way, every year.
But wedding lists should be to help couples build their first homes together. Oh please, that doesn’t happen any more. Say your best friend announced that they were getting married to someone who they didn’t already live with. How would you react?
Recently, I accidentally overdrew my checking account. That hadn’t happened to me in years—the last time was in 2008, when I was running a small business with no safety net in the middle of a financial crisis. Back then, an overdrawn account meant eating canned soup and borrowing cash from friends only slightly better off than me. This time, I didn’t need to worry—I was able to move money from a different account. And yet all the old feelings—heart palpitations, the seizure of reason in my brain—came right back again.
In the days after the training, I continued to communicate with my small group and other participants from the course. The collective high was initially palpable. Everyone was going to achieve it all. But as the days passed, the general mood drifted back down to earth, and gradually these channels fell silent.
The Southern accent, which has many variations, is fading in some areas of the South as people migrate to the region from other parts of the U.S. and around the world. A series of research papers published in December documented the diminishment of the regional accent among Black residents of the Atlanta area, white working-class people in the New Orleans area and people who grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The 69th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest kicks off this week in Basel, Switzerland, and as always, it promises a heady mix of pomp, power ballads and geopolitics. While fans gear up for a week of camp performances and dramatic key changes, this year’s competition is also weighed down by controversy over Israel’s continued participation, with questions about who gets to perform—and why—looming larger than ever.
To be honest, mothers make me sad. Especially working mothers with small children. Sometimes, when I see a woman in the late afternoon – pushing a buggy, a sniffling toddler in tow, tote bags swinging from her shoulder and two dark circles around her eyes – I want to cross the street. Not out of judgment, but because I can’t bear how exhausted she looks. The quiet despair etched into her face. I feel sorry for her. It’s so damn unfair. Studies and statistics back this up: the status quo for working mothers is dismal.
In the fall, Urschel will be teaching an intro to linear algebra class for the first time. The course can have up to 300 students. He also works with an MIT program for high schoolers called √mathroots. According to its website, the program was “designed to broaden the talent pool for the mathematical community” – a goal that resonates for Urschel as a Black mathematician.
In a moment when the experiment of the United States is teetering on the brink, the Trump administration is weaponizing deep-seated hatred of marginalized people to exacerbate ideological divides and deepen MAGA’s cult-like relationship with the president. A key component to this is their belief in and use of eugenics—the idea that it’s possible to create an ideal human by ≥eliminating “undesirable traits.” Meaningful resistance to Trump, then, requires a culture shift grounded in understanding the ideology’s history, the tech industry’s role in encouraging it, and the complicity of liberals and the left in conversations about whose life has value. It also means acknowledging just how deeply baked the ideology is into modern American culture.
At the entrance to the New Kituwah Academy in Cherokee, North Carolina, a big red sign reads ‘English Stops Here.’ The school, which teaches preschool through the sixth grade, is a Cherokee language immersion program. Classes, lunch and after-school activities are conducted primarily in Cherokee, and the school’s books, maps and diagrams are full of the 85 symbols that make up the Cherokee syllabary.
If you sit at the James E. Foy Information Desk in the Melton Student Center at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?”
Najin and Fatu had two horns each—one large at the very front of the snout, and a smaller one behind it. But Fatu’s had been lightly trimmed, blunted, to prevent her from jabbing Najin, who is too elderly now to keep up with Fatu’s play. With two armed guards always by their side, the rhinos looked both inviolate and fragile.
Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.
I've had many years of involvement with /r/AcademicBiblical and /r/AskBibleScholars (I am the founder of the latter). A few of us endeavored to create a YouTube channel for public education purposes. It turned out to be more difficult than we expected. Therefore we shuttered the project. Below is the second draft of the script that would have become our first video.
Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?
I’m so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment”. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.
Linguistics undergrads learn about the vocal system and how your anatomy moves and contracts to form human speech. You begin to see vocal cords as a reed and your head as a resonant chamber. I remember my own classes at University of Kansas making me hyper aware of the way people spoke, even imagining corresponding phonetic symbols as subtitles. Like my Swedish friend whose accent sounds like a whisper. To me, “raspberries” is /ˈɹæzˌbɛɹiz/ where the s’s had hard /z/ sounds but for her it’s /ˈɹæsˌbɛɹis/ where the s’s had soft sound. The only difference between these sounds is that your vocal cords are either vibrating /z/ or not /s/. The Swedes are quite literally soft spoken people.
“Hundreds of people have come in this room under addiction and sat there and drummed or sat there and listened to songs and changed,” says Aldo Garcia, whose traditional name is Puxtunxt, gesturing around a room at Painted Horse Recovery where he leads Wellbriety meetings. Garcia is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, with Assiniboine Sioux, Siletz and Miwok descendancy. “That’s just what this represents today, it’s just nurturing to this community.”
Most Muslims in Ukraine are Crimean Tatars who are Indigenous to Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. It set off the war that ramped up with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.
Recently, video essayist F. D. Signifier released a short film on the paid streaming platform Nebula called Talking to "White" People which I highly recommend. In it, he interviews a variety of "white" mostly male mostly youtubers. Notably, he at no point actually tells us who anyone is beyond their racial identity, a cheeky parody of how often Black academics when interviewed about race are reduced to being nothing more than "A Black person."
Conflicts in faraway lands and ideological differences make these three religious groups unlikely cohabitants in a shared space, but here the groups form a microcosm of peaceful coexistence united by tragedy. In January, the Pasadena synagogue burned down in the Eaton fire leaving its Jewish congregation in need of a place to grieve and worship.
The last thing a metal worker from Liège is expected to do is found a new religion. Yet that is just what Louis-Joseph Antoine did, in Jameppe-sur-Meuse, Belgium, in 1910. Antoinism, his namesake religion, is not nearly as popular today as it was in its early years — but to its latest followers, it remains as current as ever.
Over the last few decades, there has been a continued interest in whether engaging in brain-stimulating activities – even for short periods – may help “exercise” our brain. There have been claims that activities which engage our attention and memory could prevent cognitive decline in older age.
For almost a century, cosmetic companies have tested their products on animals. But it’s an inhumane practice of questionable reliability, and countries around the world are beginning to recognize this. In 2023, Canada, Chile and Brazil all outlawed cosmetic testing on animals, as did the state of Oregon.
Entering the lobby of Magdas Hotel around midday, the scene is one familiar from countless trendy hotels around Vienna — the cool-yet-cozy décor and quiet music in the background, locals on lunch break slowly filling the restaurant, a gaggle of tourists checking in at the reception desk, taking in their new environment with jet-lagged excitement. A neon sign behind the reception reminds them to “stay open-minded.”
PieFed
alyaza [they/she]
Powderhorn
Lime Buzz (fae/she)
Gaywallet (they/it)
Chris Remington
🔻Stones of David🔻
Kwakigra
versiqcontent
Yingwu
