Wren

China has sent its coast guard through the waters of the Senkaku islands and military drones past outlying Japanese territory as Beijing ramps up tensions over the Japanese prime minister’s remarks on Taiwan.

Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others and to put them at ease. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or simply eccentric in another cultural context.

In the immediate aftermath of David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker prize, one feature of the novel stood out: how often the protagonist utters the word “OK”.

The 500 times István grunts out the response is part of a sparse prose style through which the British-Hungarian Szalay gives the reader few insights into the inner workings of a man whose fortunes rise and fall.

But however inarticulate István is, the fact a story about a working-class man from eastern Europe won one of the biggest literary prizes in the world has started a debate about masculinity in literature in 2025.

It’s happened to you countless times: You’re waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It’s the placeholder icon for a “missing image.”

But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted?

Hello chemistry nerds!

I got into dyeing, first using commercial products, then experimenting with DIY vegetable-based dyes, because if there's a more expensive and labour intense alternative to buying a ten dollar product, I'm all over it. Naturally, I started extracting lake pigments to make paints out of my used dye baths.

Before you say it, yes! I do want lower quality paints that fade faster and take two days to make.

I use alum (aluminium phosphate) and soda ash (sodium carbonate) to precipitate the pigment, followed by drying and grinding.

Since this journey began I noticed some dyes just won't work for pigments. I tried hot, cold, waiting, stirring, light jazz, more acid, more base, but the bitches won't precipitate. Cranberries were my most recent failed pigment (but they dyed real nice.) There was lots of colour left, and I even tried a new dye batch with fresh cranberries, but it had the same result.

SO! I'm wondering:

1. What makes a dye substance a better candidate for a lake pigment? Are there chemicals the alum can latch onto easier than others?

2. If alum doesn't work, could a different metallic salt work better?

3. Why does every blog say not to use your dye equipment for food? What if I clean it super well?

4. Are there other chemicals I can try? For funzies?

5. Are there any other cheap, convenient products I can replace with five hours of destroying my kitchen?

The British Army is the only military in Europe that still recruits 16-year-olds.

That’s how old Hamish* was when he joined last year. As is required of all 16- and 17-year-old sign-ups, who are legally still children but are given the titles of ‘junior soldiers’, he moved into the residential Army Foundation College Harrogate in the north of England to begin his military training.

“In the first couple of weeks, it’s brilliant,” he said of his early days in the army, explaining that most teenage recruits “see it as a brilliant way of earning money”, particularly “if you haven’t really got any GCSEs”.

In Tehran, only 1mm of rain has fallen this year, a once-in-a-century event (the capital’s average annual rainfall between 1991 and 2000 was 350mm). All this comes on top of five previous years of drought. The second half of November is normally the snow season in the capital.

Snow cover has decreased by 98.6% nationwide compared with the same point last year, and in Tehran the daily temperature has been a balmy 20C. The price of bottled water has escalated and limits are being placed on purchases.

The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents fanned out across Charlotte on Saturday, making arrests along Charlotte's immigrant-heavy Central Avenue and South Boulevard corridors. The arrests preceded a protest Saturday afternoon in uptown, where hundreds condemned the crackdown and the deployment of federal immigration agents.

On Sunday morning, CBP Commander Greg Bovino said in a social media post that agents had arrested 81 people so far, "many" of whom have criminal histories. He said the agency will release more information about people who were arrested on social media.

We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.

The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.

It’s not a single moment; it’s an epoch – we’re in the middle of it already and it is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And I’d argue that this is the third great information crisis human beings have gone through: following the invention of writing and the Gutenberg printing press, we are now witnessing a crisis caused by digital communications technology. These prolonged crises aren’t just neutral technological improvements; they change us psychologically and socially in profound ways that cannot be reversed.

Like most mathematicians, I hear confessions from complete strangers: the inevitable “I was always bad at math.” I suppress the response, “You are forgiven, my child.”

Why does it feel like a sin to struggle in math? Why are so many traumatized by their mathematics education? Is learning math worthwhile?

Sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, André and Simone Weil were the sort of siblings who would argue about such questions. André achieved renown as a mathematician; Simone was a formidable philosopher and mystic. André focused on applying algebra and geometry to deep questions about the structures of whole numbers, while Simone was concerned with how the world can be soul-crushing.

Both wrestled with the best way to teach math. Their insights and contradictions point to the fundamental role that mathematics and mathematics education play in human life and culture.

For decades, the image of gun ownership in America was white, rural and Republican, but that's been changing, according to gun clubs, trainers, Second Amendment advocates and academic researchers.

They say more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks have been buying guns for years and particularly since Trump's reelection in 2024. This story was based on more than 30 interviews. David Phillips is on the training team of the Liberal Gun Club, which has chapters in more than 30 states and provides a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns. He says club membership has grown from 2,700 in November to 4,500 today. Requests for training, he says, have quintupled.