Humanities & Cultures

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

I don't believe in any of this shit, but it's interesting to see just how unscientific it is.

As a teenager, I loved reading my horoscope in gossip magazines. But even then my friends and I knew it was nonsense. For us, this was a fun pastimes for bored teens. So I was surprised when my hairdresser recently asked me my star sign. When I shared my opinion on astrology and horoscopes, she simply replied, “Typical Taurus.”

Astrology is currently experiencing a remarkable renaissance—especially on social media, where posts about “Geminis,” “Leos” and “Virgos rising” are everywhere. The trend may partly reflect how deeply people want to identify with personality types and, in the process, gain some insights into an uncertain future. And perhaps surprisingly, many astrology posts come from people who consider themselves to be scientifically inclined.

#DonaldTrump #IsraelFirst
#Peace #President 🤥
#usa #iran #palestine #venezuela #NicolasMaduro #AliKhamenei #cuba #nigeria #lebanon #Africa #middleeast #yemen

#news #mastodon #socialmedia #war #resistance #uspol #cdnpol @politics @democracy @socialmedia @humanities #education #humanrights #eu #icc #un

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

So this is definitely a question you can address through data – though there is a risk that you can use numbers to cherrypick your way to a conclusion you already held in advance. The other way of thinking about it is through lived experience. Not necessarily just your own. I often find myself thinking about the range of experiences and expectations in my own family, going no further than one generation back and one generation forward. I’m on the cusp between boomers and generation X. My children, both in their 20s, are firmly in generation Z. My parents were born in the 20s, in the west of Ireland and in South Africa. Between us, it’s a wildly different set of life stories, and chucking it into the capacious carpet bag labelled “generational differences” seems to me to be a violent oversimplification.

Damn, are those some long grafs.

Faith, Power, and Foreign Policy: A #Christian Nationalist Vision – Gerald Horne & Jonathan Katz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usT6RMTK2CY

Do You Trust #Epstein Elite With #NuclearWeapons ? – Matt Korda & Paul Jay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMAzRy%5C_msNQ

#Iran #war #resistance #news #freepalestine #socialmedia #uspol #cdnpoli #humanrights #china #middleeast @politics @socialmedia @humanities #education #canada #europe #Africa #justice #warcrimes #imperialism #fascism #philosophy #ai @journalismandcomment #Mastodon #fediverse

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

On the right, a different but equally consequential shift is underway. Influential conservatives like Tucker Carlson have come to view Israel as a drain on American resources, setting up debates with Israel supporters like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and ambassador to Israel. But the criticisms go beyond the MAGA movement’s “America First” isolationism. The turn on the right isn’t just about geopolitics — it’s about theology.

“Christian Zionism,” as Carlson described it in his podcast interview with white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, is a “brain virus” and “dangerous heresy.”

For decades, one of the most reliable pillars of pro-Israel sentiment in the United States was not just Jews but conservative Christians. That support had a theological motor: Israel mattered not just as an ally on a Cold War map, but as a central actor on the map of the End Times. Put simply, Christians needed Jews to return to the homeland of Israel to usher in the second coming of Christ.

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

It also may be under siege, Pollan said. He recently suggested that people need a “consciousness hygiene” to defend our internal world against invaders that are trying to move in. Our ability to sit with our thoughts and perceive the world, he argues, is increasingly disrupted by algorithms engineered to tickle our dopamine receptors and capture our attention. Meanwhile, people are forming attachments to non-human chatbots, projecting consciousness on to entities that do not possess it.

I spoke with Pollan over the phone about what consciousness hygiene looks like in practice. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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

The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making.

Both measures are purposefully vague on the timeline, procedure, and funding. “We are in difficult times,” said UT board of regents chair Kevin Eltife during the meeting at which the topics policy was approved. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

For the impacted students and faculty, this lack of specificity serves only to plunge their work and studies into a state of precarity. Reid Pinckard, a first-year PhD student in American Studies, said when the consolidation was announced on February 12, “it genuinely sucked the energy out of the office we were in.” In chats with other graduate students, the measure also caused a “frenzy,” he said. “There were questions like, ‘What are we supposed to do? How can we handle this?’ People that are graduating this semester were like, ‘Is my degree going to be in American Studies, or is it going to be this or that?’ That’s really what this is serving to do, which is to make people feel like they don’t know what’s going on.”

(this could have used another pass by a copyeditor)

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

I am an anthropologist of elites who conducted field work among the secretive community of nuclear weapons scientists. The Epstein files opens a window into the even more closely guarded world of capitalism’s 0.1 per cent.

Anthropologists study people through what renowned American anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “deep hanging out” — mingling informally and taking notes on what we see. We call this “participant observation.”

People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk do not welcome anthropologists bearing notebooks. But the Epstein files, where the global elite are talking to each other in private — or so they thought — open a peephole into their world.

Read more: Andrew’s arrest: will anything like this now happen in the US? Why hasn’t it so far?

And what do we find there?

On a mundane level, we can see how they spend sums of money most of us can only dream about.
A man with thinning dark hair.
Mortimer Zuckerman gives an interview in 2008. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

For example, we learn that in 2011, billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Post and U.S. News and World Report, spent US$219,000 on his collection of horses, $50,000 on skiing and $86,000 to insure his private art collection.

But the Epstein files are most interesting for what they reveal about a web of gifts, favours and financial transactions that knit together what would otherwise be a disparate sprawl of bankers, developers, tech bros, media personalities and high-profile academics.

Author:

• Hugh Gusterson | Professor of Anthropology & Public Policy, University of British Columbia

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

This surprises me. I have worked as a waitress in restaurants for more than five years, a job I love, and the joys of which most often come from the customers I serve. Of course, for every 10 great customers, you’re bound to get one that’s not so great – I’ve come across my fair share of those.

And so I can confidently say that influencers are the least of my worries as a waitress. In fact, I’d rank them and their camera crews at the bottom of my list of the rudest types of customers I’ve come across. It’s a list which I’ll now be sharing with you, in the hopes that once you’ve read it, you’ll agree that influencers really aren’t the ultimate devil of the dining room.

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

Until recently, very few of these picture languages passed from one culture to another. But at the end of the 19th century something extraordinary happened: a movement began to create pictograms that would be recognisable everywhere, regardless of culture. It was a revolutionary idea: by using standardised pictures instead of words, it might be possible to transcend language altogether.

One of the first experiments in creating a universal picture language occurred in the Alpine regions of Italy and Switzerland, during the cycling craze of the 1890s. Cyclists’ touring clubs began to put up signs warning their members of upcoming hazards, such as sharp bends or steep hills. Picture symbols were chosen rather than words, partly because in these Alpine regions you could never be sure what language a cyclist might speak, and partly because those cyclists had to be able to take in the information quickly. Where words did appear they were short, bold and to the point: Stop, Danger, Slow Down.

By 1900, there was such a plethora of different systems that the International League of Tourist Groups decided to hold a conference in Paris to try to standardise them all. Nine years later, various national governments around Europe held another conference, this time to create standard signs for the growing number of motor vehicles on the roads. By 1928, the League of Nations had become involved, and the internationally standardised road signs of today began to take shape.

To appreciate the sheer amount of thought that has been put into road signs and symbols over the years, one needs only to look at some of those that failed to make the grade. [...]

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

It was the late 1960s, and Giles was in his 20s, a big man with dark, curly hair and cool blue eyes. His family had been raising livestock on their ranch in Kendall County, about 50 miles north of San Antonio, for nearly a century. In bygone times, Texas ranchers had waged a war of extirpation against coyotes, and Giles believed the war had been won. A coyote had scarcely been seen in that landscape for more than 40 years.

The Hill Country makes up part of a vast region known as the Edwards Plateau. As a matter of both geography and legend, there is no place closer to the heart of Texas. Occupying tens of thousands of square miles—an area more than twice the size of Massachusetts—­the plateau encompasses the intersection of Central, South and West Texas. It is bordered by Austin and San Antonio to the east, and to the west by the Pecos River and the Chihuahuan Desert. Its history is exceptionally violent. By the 1700s, the Tonkawa people were driven out by the Apache, who were in turn nearly exterminated by the Comanche. For much of the 19th century, the plateau was a site of the Texas-Indian wars, which resulted in the destruction and displacement of numerous Indigenous nations and became fodder for countless Westerns, including John Ford’s The Searchers. Until the Civil War, white settlers primarily raised cattle; as overgrazing depleted the once-rich grasslands, they brought in increasingly large herds of sheep and goats, whose diets were well suited to manage brush.

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

Why it matters: Politics and social media amplify racial division. But in daily life — at work, in friendships and in families — Americans report far more interracial contact, and far less race-based decision-making, than the national mood suggests.

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

I first encountered one in early 2020, when designer Sarah Sherman Samuel posted a blog about the former bathroom she turned into what she called "the pantry of my dreams." Pantries and utility rooms are meant to store different things, but both are supposed to absorb household overflow. What struck me was that hers seemed designed not for overflow at all, but for display. It was storage transformed into an object of aspiration.

The space itself was meticulously staged with elegant, custom open shelving, including a niche just for mugs, and shallow, half-open drawers so "you can still see what is in each." Her microwave, toaster, and tea kettle sat on shiny white countertops, plugged in and ready. Even the main refrigerator, also white, was tucked into a wall to be "visually out of the way but still located with super easy access," she explained in the blog. "I love having a clutter-free kitchen," she wrote.

The aspirational pantry is an Instagram-age update of an old architectural logic to hide the work that makes domestic ease possible, often reinforcing exploitative racial and gender hierarchies in the process. On plantations and estates, enslaved Black cooks labored in detached outbuildings so the heat, smell, and violence of the kitchen remained invisible to the white household. Historian Jennifer L. Morgan’s work shows how this kind of spatial separation helped normalize white domestic comfort by keeping the coercion and bodily costs of enslaved women’s labor out of everyday sight. In 19th-century urban houses, that separation moved indoors. Kitchens, sculleries, pantries, and larders formed a backstage suite where the lowest-ranking servant, often a young immigrant woman, handled the wet, airless, punishing work that made bourgeois comfort and refinement possible.

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

Economists have a word for assets that can be swapped one-for-one without loss of value: fungible. A dollar is fungible. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude is fungible.

...A mass of people bound together by years of shared context, inside jokes and collective memory is not.

And yet we keep treating communities as though they are.

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

Across history, humans have always been drawn to the idea that love isn't random. In ancient Greece, Plato imagined that we were once whole beings with four arms, four legs and two faces, so radiant that Zeus split us in two; ever since, each half has roamed the earth searching for its missing other, a myth that gives the modern soulmate its poetic pedigree and the promise that somewhere, someone will finally make us feel complete.

In the Middle Ages, troubadours and Arthurian tales recast that longing as "courtly love", a fierce, often forbidden devotion like Lancelot's for Guinevere, in which a knight proved his worth through self-sacrifice for a beloved he might never openly declare.

By the Renaissance, writers such as Shakespeare were talking of "star-crossed lovers", couples bound together by an overwhelming connection yet pulled apart by family, fortune or fate, as if the universe itself both wrote their love story and barred them from a happy ending.

In more recent times, Hollywood and romance novels have sold us fairy tale love stories.

But what does the latest science say about soulmates? Is there a particular special someone out there for us?

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

The downloaded pdfs look amazing on my e-reader so I am finally getting into these. Happy Black History month!

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

The downloaded pdfs look amazing on my e-reader so I am finally getting into these. Happy Black History month!

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

As soon as we move, the sea flickers into life, every paddle stroke triggering thrilling trails of cold, blue sparkles. When we stop, I slap my hand on the surface and the sea is momentarily electrified into a nebulous neural network of light, like some great salty brain figuring out this alien intrusion. Below that, squadrons of jellyfish pulse their own spectral contribution.

“When I was a child,” Jennie whispers (we are both whispering), “there was no light pollution. We would throw stones from the shore to see what we called ‘sea fire’.” I spend a pointless few minutes attempting to photograph this elusive bioluminescence, then relax and simply enjoy it. Travel should broaden the mind, not the iCloud.

We are in the maze of deserted islands off Hälsö (population: 569), one of 10 inhabited islands in Sweden’s northern Gothenburg archipelago. To get here, all it took was a short bus ride out of Sweden’s second city, a brief ferry ride, then a leisurely hike along the new coastal trail that snakes round these islands, using bridges, causeways and ferries to connect. It does not feel like a lot, not for the sensation of being on the far side of the Milky Way in a kayak-shaped flying saucer.

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

In 1980, as part of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy building a market economy to help develop China after Mao’s depredations, Deng Xiaoping established this strategically located patch of coastline as China’s first “Special Economic Zone,” allowing foreign companies to invest and build there on preferential terms. The then-governor of Guangdong, Xi Zhongxun (a political ally of Deng’s who had previously been purged and jailed under Mao) was an early advocate for Shenzhen’s SEZ status as well. His son, Xi Jinping, is of course the current ruler of China.

Shenzhen’s first skyscraper was built (unprecedentedly fast) in 1982, becoming the tallest building in China. Migrant laborers flocked from across the impoverished Chinese mainland to the new hard but relatively high-paying jobs in rapidly-multiplying Shenzhen factories, and Shenzhen had 175,000 residents by 1985. “Shenzhen speed” became common slang for rapid construction.

As a new development on the coast, Shenzhen has also invested heavily in becoming a “sponge city” to build resilience to climate disasters and sea level rise. An integrated development plan, heavily based on the pioneering work of Chinese urban water management expert Kongjian Yu, has made Shenzhen a “garden city,” with extensive green spaces and protected wetlands on large stretches of the coastline helping to absorb excess water during floods.

Today, Shenzhen’s combination of being a world-leader in electrotech and a pioneer of city-scale nature based solutions for climate adaptation has led to the “Shenzhen model” being a buzzword in international development.

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

One AI service claims users “can streamline the book creation process, from conception to publication, making it easier to bring your ideas to life and share them with the world.” Such rhetoric is gentle, inclusive, and misleading. Great art isn’t supposed to be easy. While it’s easy to fetishize the trope of the struggling artist, art results from failure overcome by determination. The artistic ego, in asserting itself, is a human action. When we cede creation to the machine, we are not making art.

Reddit posts abound in which people turn to AI to ease their writer’s block, as if it is a temporary inconvenience. The struggle, in fact, feeds the art. Joy Williams once wrote of Jane Bowles: “Each word is built, each step painful, each transition a rope bridge thrown over a chasm. She makes it look as hard as it is.” Williams could feel Bowles’s struggle, but it was a furnace of her creation. Reading Bowles, Williams concluded, “I am always enchanted and unnerved, a little sick, actually, with love for her gloomy waterfalls, her morbid gazebos, her ghastly picnics, her serious ladies and frail whores—her tortured, awkward, groping, uncompleted souls.”

Happy MLK Day!

Several years ago, near Chester, Pa., Jason Ipock’s aunt was looking to downsize now that she had retired. In her possession was a collection of old family home videos that took up too much room.

Some of the films were in worn-out film canisters, and Ipock worried they’d soon be unplayable. “I decided that I should have the family films digitized, so that we’ll always have a copy in the event of a catastrophe,” he said.

One had a label that stood out from the others: “Martin Luther King.” Ipock had heard stories about this film for years from his aunt and grandmother, Mary Ipock, and decided to digitize it first by going to a film store in Philadelphia.

The result was an MP4 file, a 13-minute film – in color.

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

It’s another Monday night, which for me, means another neighborhood potluck. Every week, a group of us meets in the same grassy area by the bay in our neighborhood outside of Providence, Rhode Island. This week, I brought a pesto pasta salad with random veggies I found in our fridge; last week, it was leftover ribs my husband made over the weekend; the week before, a bag of chips and salsa. As we set up shop on a foldout table, I can see the curious faces of people driving and biking by, wondering what the heck is going on. But for us, it’s just another Monday night. People start trickling in around 5:30pm and stay until the sun goes down. We catch up on each other’s lives, and watch the kids run around while helping ourselves to a second plate. Then, we pack up our things and say our goodbyes, knowing we’ll see each other again next week.

While these gatherings now feel like a staple in my life, I first learned the magic of weekly potlucks a few years ago, in my old neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was 2022, and we were still feeling a bit socially raw, fresh out of our Covid bubbles. A neighbor friend started a group text, inviting us to gather every Monday at the playground for a whatever-you-have-lying-around potluck dinner and a good hang.

At first, the weekly cadence sounded like… a lot. Weekly? Really? Could my social battery handle it?

Yet after the first few months, it started feeling like an important ritual, and after the first year, it felt like a sacred space. The regular cadence was key. It allowed us to check in on each other and get to know our week-to-week rhythms. I could ask how Jen’s doctor’s appointment went last week, or if Joel had recipe-tested the chicken and dumplings he was planning for his upcoming popup restaurant. When I wanted someone to be my accountability-buddy to do that yoga class I kept swearing I’d do, I could ask if anyone else had been looking for an accountability-buddy, too. And with the standing weekly gatherings, all of this could happen in an intentional way, our commitment to a weekly meal slowly blossoming into something more.