Mac McClung may have 'saved' the slam dunk contest, but scoring methods could still be improved, a dunkologist explains

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Mac McClung may have 'saved' the slam dunk contest, but scoring methods could still be improved, a dunkologist explains Shawn Kemp was one of my favorites because he was freaky athletic and dunked so powerfully. Plus, he seemed so nonchalant about everything. It made his dunks look effortless. Dominique Wilkins just jumped so high on every dunk. His limbs are long and he would windmill the ball so far around and then dunk hard on the rim like a sledgehammer. Continued here

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Ways of Being: Rethinking Intelligence “Intelligence supposes good will,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “Sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself.” Yet our efforts to define and measure intelligence have been pocked with insensitivity to nuance, to diversity, to the myriad possible ways of paying attention to the world. Within the human realm, there is the dark cultural history of IQ. Beyond the human realm, there is the growing abashed understanding that other forms of intelligence exist, capable of comprehending and navigating the world in ways wildly different from ours, no less successful and no less poetic. One measure of our own intelligence may be the degree of our openness to these other ways of being — the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit with which we recognize and regard otherness. The science-reverent English artist James Bridle invites such a broadening of mind in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (public library). He writes: The tree of evolution bears many fruits and many flowers, and intelligence, rather than being found only in the highest branches, has in fact flowered everywhere. Continued here

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The Vital Difference Between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work does, dishwashing or dentistry. And yet such labors of diligence and devotion — the kind William Blake called “eternal work” — are somehow different, different and more vulnerable, for they enter the world in a singular spirit and are recompensed in a singular spirit, distinct from dentistry or dishwashing. That spirit is the spirit of a gift — not the transaction of two commodities but the interchange of two mutual generosities, passing between people who share in the project of a life worth living. A year before I was born, the poet Lewis Hyde taxonomized that vital and delicate distinction between work and labor in his eternally giving book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) — a timeless inquiry into what it takes to harmonize “the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture.” Continued here

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Audre Lorde on What to Do When Difference Ruptures Society “If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else,” the young poet Nikki Giovanni told the elder James Baldwin in their historic intergenerational conversation. Perhaps it is because we are such strangers to ourselves — so opaque in our own motives and vulnerabilities, so haunted by confusion and self-contradiction — that we so bruisingly misunderstand and mistreat others, so readily seize on their otherness, lashing our confusions at them, so readily forget that diversity and difference are the reason life exists. The antidote to that reflex is what Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) considers in an interview found in Black Women Writers at Work (public library) — the superb collection that also gave us Maya Angelou on writing and our responsibility to our creative gifts. A generation after Hannah Arendt’s insight into the power and opportunity of the outsider position, and an epoch before the term intersectionality existed, Lorde considers the challenge of the multiple identities we each inhabit, which further alienate us from each other for as long as they remain unreconciled and unintegrated within us: Continued here

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The Two Objects of the Good Life: Mary Shelley's Father on the Relationship Between Personal Happiness, Imagination, and Social Harmony “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote as he reflected on how to stop limiting your happiness. “Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.” A century and a half before him, the radical and far-seeing political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) — father of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley — examined the building blocks of the good life in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (public library) — the book he began writing when his wife, the radical and far-seeing political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, was pregnant with the daughter whose birth would kill her. In a sentiment David Foster Wallace would echo in his own radical reflection on the true value of education, Godwin writes: Continued here

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The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed an unusual adaptation that shaped its destiny: Despite being a conifer — needle-leaved trees that are usually evergreen — it became deciduous, losing all of its needles during the months-long lightless winter to conserve energy, then growing vigorously in the bright summer months — the fastest-growing of the redwoods. With this uncommon competitive edge, it conquered large swaths of the globe, spreading the seeds of its handsome cones across North America and Eurasia. But when the global climate plunged into the Ice Age, its victory march came to an abrupt halt. We know this because, at the peak of WWII, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki discovered fossils of this small, mighty redwood species. Nothing like it had ever been described in the botanical literature, so he deemed it extinct, naming it Metasequoia after its kinship to Earth’s most majestic tree. The World War was still raging when a Chinese forester traveling through Central China in the winter of 1941 came upon a majestic old tree of a kind he had never seen before. There was a small shrine at its foot, where locals had been lighting votives and leaving offerings for decades. They called it, he learned, shui-sa, or “water fir,” for its love of moist soil — a name he had never heard before. Because the tree was already denuded of needles for its seasonal hibernation, he was unable to collect a proper specimen for identification — but he told other foresters and botanists of it, until word reached Zhan Wang, director of China’s Central Bureau of Forest Research. Continued here

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The Ants, the Bees, and the Blind Spots of the Human Mind: How Entomologist Charles Henry Turner Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Evolution of Intelligence and Emotion The son of a nurse and a church janitor, entomologist Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867–February 14, 1923) died with a personal library of a thousand books, having published more than fifty scientific papers, having named his youngest son Darwin, and having revolutionized our understanding of the most abundant non-human animals on Earth by pioneering a psychological approach to insect learning, devoting his life to discovering “stubborn facts that should not be ignored.” Without a proper laboratory, without access to research libraries and university facilities, he became the first human being to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch, and the first scientist to achieve Pavlovian conditioning in insects, training moths to beat their wings whenever they heard his whistle and concluding that “there is much evidence that the responses of moths to stimuli are expressions of emotion.” He studied the brains of birds, the web-making habits of spiders, the growth of grape-vine leaves, and why antlions feign death. He volunteered at the Cincinnati Observatory. He discovered new species of aquatic invertebrates. But insects were his great love. He constructed elaborate apparatuses and painstakingly painted tiny cardboard discs to conduct the first controlled studies of color vision and pattern recognition in honeybees, dismantling the scientific dogma of his day by proving that bees see color and create “memory pictures” of their environment. He illuminated sex differences in ant intelligence, musing that “the males seem unable to solve even the simplest problems.” Kneeling patiently for hours, he built intricate obstacle courses and mazes to study how twelve different species of ants navigate space. Two generations before E.O. Wilson, he concluded: Continued here

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The Balancing Monsters of Love: Leonard Cohen on What Makes a Saint In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the sacred wonder of reality, most capable of awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us when we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That word was “saint.” Saints still walk our world, though now we might simply call them heroes, if we recognize them at all — heroes whose superpower is love. Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) — one of the modern heroes — explores what makes a saint in a passage from his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers (public library). Continued here

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A Toxic Boss Obliterated My Team's Morale. What It Resulted In Was Pleasantly Unexpected The surprising result of a bad manager, and a better path to it. Continued here

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Steve Jobs' Masterful Presentation Ability Came Down to 1 Underrated Thing. Anyone Can Do It It's not charisma. Continued here

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Want to Be Smarter? Apply the "10,000 Steps" Rule to Your Reading List Author Stephen King uses a version of the "10,000 steps" rule to sneak more reading time into his busy day. Continued here

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3 Things People Who Are Good at Conversation Don't Do, According to a Research Psychologist It's easy to fall in to bad conversational habits. Here's how to avoid them. Continued here

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Reimagining HR for Better Well-Being and Performance Organizations must rethink historical divisions between talent and benefits groups if they are to more effectively help workers develop the psychological skills to thrive now and in the future. Humans have been challenged to adjust to new ways of working since the first farmers abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But the demands of work today exact a high price on employee well-being, as workers strive to cope with the rapid pace of technological change, the overnight disruption of entire industries by new upstarts, and the rise of uncertainty and volatility in every global market. Roughly half the U.S. workforce struggles with burnout.1 Seventy-six percent see workplace stress negatively impacting their personal relationships.2 Excessive stress at work accounts for $190 billion in health care costs each year, plus hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.3 And in the past three years, the stressors and disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic have spun a rising storm into a full-on tornado — and made employee well-being an urgent priority for many business leaders. Continued here

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The chefs reviving the Arctic's forgotten food It is appropriate that I am on a boat in South Greenland when I try my first mouthful of fermented seal blubber, a buttery slice tasting not unpleasantly of the sea with a lingering note of fish oil, followed by a jaw-bustingly lengthy chew of the country's famous delicacy mattak, a square of scored whale skin, cartilage and fat. That's because here in the Arctic, there is only a short distance between tundra and table, or as it is today, the sea and the serving dish: only a window separates me from the clear water, studded with icebergs, where the food was caught. Inunnguaq Hegelund, the award-winning indigenous Greenlandic chef introducing me to these dishes, is known in Greenland for his outstanding work with traditional meats, including polar bear, who are roaming on the rocky shoreline some hundred metres away. Continued here

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Vegetarian borsch with vushka (dumplings) Cooks and wait staff were criss-crossing behind chef Ievgen Klopotenko at his award-winning 100 Rokiv Tomu Vpered restaurant in Kyiv when he launched into a poetic discussion about borsch. It's a category of food unto itself, he exclaimed; it's the feeling of a mother hugging their child, it's the backbone of Ukrainian strength and culinary identity. The chef paused every now and again to answer a question or give instructions in Ukrainian. Then he was back at it, proclaiming his love for all things borsch and Ukraine. Continued here

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What's going on with the wave of GOP bills about trans teens? Utah provides clues In 2022, Republican politicians proposed over 150 bills limiting trans rights in state legislatures across the country. By February 2023, the GOP had already surpassed that record by proposing over 200 similar bills. Many of these bills would legislate access to hormone replacement therapy for transgender individuals, making it illegal – and in some cases, criminal – for adolescents to receive such treatments. The first to make it into law in 2023 was Utah’s SB 16, “Transgender Medical Treatments and Procedures,” which Gov. Spencer Cox signed on Jan. 28. Continued here

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How to help teen girls' mental health struggles - 6 research-based strategies for parents, teachers and friends Adjunct Faculty in Psychology and Childhood Studies, Bridgewater State University A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was published in early February 2023 found that, in 2021, 57% of high school girls reported experiencing “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year,” up from 36% in 2011. That’s nearly twice as high as the 29% of males who reported having those feelings in 2021. Continued here

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To clean up England's rivers we need to know how much sewage is dumped - but water firms won't tell us UK environment secretary Thérèse Coffey has demanded that water companies share plans for how they will reduce sewage discharges into rivers. They could start by coming clean on how much sewage is being dumped. If we don’t know how much sewage is actually being released – for at least the worst offending locations – we won’t be able to measure environmental and industry improvement with any confidence. Water companies in England have failed to invest sufficiently in wastewater treatment and sewerage infrastructure to keep pace with increasing populations and more intense rainfall. To take pressure off their sewer networks, companies allow huge volumes of untreated wastewater and sewage to be dumped into our rivers and coastal waters. Continued here

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Novelist, academic and tattoo artist Samuel Steward's plight shows that 'cancel culture' was alive and well in the 1930s In January 2023, Hamline University opted not to renew the contract of an art professor who showed a 14th-century depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in class. Hamline labeled the incident “Islamophobic” and released a statement, co-signed by the university’s president, saying that respect for “Muslim students … should have superseded academic freedom.” After widespread backlash, the university walked back that statement. However, the lecturer was still not rehired. Continued here

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Africa's first heat officer is based in Freetown - 5 things that should be on her agenda Eugenia Kargbo has an unusual job: she is the city of Freetown’s chief heat officer. Her role in Sierra Leone’s capital is the first of its kind in Africa. She has been tasked with raising public awareness about extreme heat, improving responses to heat waves, and collecting, analysing and visualising heat impact data for the city, which is home to 1.2 million people. Freetown is increasingly threatened by dangerous temperatures. In 2017, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranked Sierra Leone third, after Bangladesh and Guinea Bissau, on its list of countries most vulnerable to climate change. Continued here

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Pretty Yende, a South African opera star with a voice that shatters glass ceilings It’s been announced that South African opera star Pretty Yende will sing at King Charles III’s coronation on 6 May in Westminster Abbey, London. The 37-year-old soprano was elated. The invitation is reminiscent of when Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales were married in 1981. For this occasion, the New Zealand soprano Kiri Te Kanawa’s beautiful voice beguiled the royal couple. Te Kanawa, being Maori, represented her indigenous community who were the victims of imperialism and colonialism. Continued here

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Jake Paul v Tommy Fury: whoever reigns in the ring, it's no contest when it comes to social media Head of Centre for Professional and Economic Development, University of Chester Jake Paul, an American social media celebrity turned professional boxer, has made a name for himself in the ring. After defeating former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva by unanimous decision in October 2022, he now turns his attention to the UK’s Tommy Fury, brother of world champion Tyson Fury. Continued here

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Roald Dahl: A brief history of sensitivity edits to children's literature Puffin Books have worked with the consultancy Inclusive Minds (who say they help publishers, authors and illustrators work towards authentic inclusion, accessibility, and diverse representation) to revise some of the language used in Roald Dahl’s books for children, more than 100 years after his birth. The story has attracted mass attention. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and author Salman Rushdie have both expressed their disagreement with this approach to Dahl’s work. However, it is not unusual for books for children to undergo revisions for new generations. Continued here

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I was an adoring Dahl fan as a child but let's not reissue them for a new generation Jo Nadin is a member of the Society of Authors (SOA) and the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). Her book, No Man's Land, is part of the Empathy Lab collection. Her book, The Worst Class in the World Gets Worse, is shortlisted for the Lollies Prize. If children are built, in part, by the books they’re raised on, then I was all Roald Dahl. From my small bedroom in suburban Essex, his stories allowed me to try on new and distinctly more exciting lives for size. Continued here

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Ukraine: this new cold war must end before the world faces Armageddon Gilbert Achcar's latest book: The New Cold War: The US, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine is published by The Westbourne Press. One year of war and Russia is still mired in its second invasion of its neighbour’s internationally recognised territory – which turned out to be much bloodier and more devastating than the first due to Ukraine’s incomparably stronger resistance. Continued here

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After oil: the challenge and promise of getting the world off fossil fuels - podcast Science + Technology Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation Associate Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation Continued here

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Why supermarkets are rationing food and how to prevent future shortages Calls for the government to provide better support to UK food producers have intensified recently as supermarkets have been forced to ration sales of some fresh produce. Weather-related disruption has caused supply shortages of vegetables from places including Spain and North Africa. Former Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King has partly blamed the government’s decision not to subsidise producers’ spiking energy costs this winter under its plan to help businesses affected by the cost of living crisis. The National Farmers’ Union has also called on the government to “back British food production in order to secure a homegrown supply of sustainable food or risk seeing more empty shelves in the nation’s supermarkets”. Continued here

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Ukraine war: why Russia has had such a disastrous 12 months - and what to expect next When Russia’s ramshackle armies trundled into Ukraine a year ago, very few gave the defenders a chance. After all, they’d spent eight years unsuccessfully trying to fight off pro-Russian separatists (heavily backed by Moscow) in the east of their country. Meanwhile Russia had been ostentatiously developing and modernising its armed forces and using them with decisive effect in Syria. Analysts – focused on Russia’s supposed “hybrid” “approach to war” had failed to appreciate two things. First, shiny gear and buzzwords does not an army make. Second, a nation in arms, united, motivated and well led makes a very formidable opponent. Continued here

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Ukraine war: how have Vladimir Putin's narratives survived a year of reality checks? The Russian state has a long history of using its information operations to try and shore up its military plans overseas. Of course all states try to win over the hearts and minds of the population either at home or where they are fighting. But Russia’s approach is a bit different. What we see in Russia is a strange sort of intermeshing between official statements, interventions from people who are clearly on the Russian state’s payroll and the pronouncements of supposedly neutral but Kremlin-aligned commentators. It’s not for nothing that Margarita Simonyan – a close associate of Vladimir Putin and the editor-in-chief of Russia’s international broadcaster, RT – once infamously said that Russia needed RT for “the same reason the country needs a defence ministry”. Continued here

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Nigeria elections: the surprising influence of Afrobeats music on politics Reader, Development Economics in Africa and Director, African Leadership Centre, King's College London In the run-up to Nigeria’s February 2023 elections, the country’s younger generation has mobilised to demand change and redefine the political landscape – and music has been pivotal. Continued here

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Female football players are at much higher risk of career-ending ACL injuries - the science on why Women’s football is riding high. Not only are fans celebrating the success of the England team at the Arnold Clark Cup and Euro 2022, but this year will see the Fifa Women’s World Cup kick off in July. The popularity of the women’s game has led to more girls than ever before playing the sport. But alongside this has been a rise in knee injuries, in particular to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in female players. Continued here

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Why the UK has only had one named storm so far this winter - an expert explains Storm Otto, which was named by the Danish Meteorological Institute, hit Scotland and north-east England last Friday (February 17 2023) with wind gusts of over 80mph, disrupting power to 61,000 homes. Otto was the first named storm of the UK’s current winter storm season and the first to hit the country’s shores since storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin last February. Over the course of a week, these three storms barrelled in from the North Atlantic causing wind and flood damage worth over €3.7 billion (£3.2 billion) in insured losses across Europe. Continued here

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Ukraine recap: how the conflict stands after 12 months of bitter fighting It would be wrong to say that nobody saw this war coming. Vladimir Putin’s troops had been massing on the Ukraine border in Russia and its ally Belarus for some months. And, despite his assurances to the contrary, the president’s bellicose rhetoric and his insistence that Ukraine was an inalienable part of the Russian nation, were pretty clear signposts that an invasion could be imminent. Take, for example, the weird, rambling speech on February 21 2022 in which he referred to his neighbour as “a colony with a puppet regime” which has no historical right to exist. And yet to wake on the morning of February 24 to images of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles making for the Ukraine capital Kyiv, was still a huge shock. Of course, even then, Putin insisted this was was not an invasion, but a “special military operation” to root out the “Nazi gang” that the west had installed in Ukraine as part of its dastardly plan to encircle Russia. Continued here

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Water buybacks are back on the table in the Murray-Darling Basin. Here's a refresher on how they work The federal government has announced a new round of strategic water buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. The government intends to purchase water entitlements from voluntary sellers in parts of New South Wales and Queensland. A total of 49.2 gigalitres (GL) will be purchased across seven catchment areas through open, competitive and transparent tenders. This water will then be returned to the environment. Continued here

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For people with chronic pain, flexibility and persistence can protect wellbeing Chronic pain affects around one in five people and is considered “chronic” when it persists beyond the expected healing time, typically three months or longer. Along with physical problems, chronic pain can impact a person’s daily activities, employment, lifestyle and mental health. Continued here

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Netflix's new reality spectacle Physical: 100 puts South Korea's strongest through a surprisingly wholesome Squid Game South Korea’s latest Netflix sensation, the reality series Physical: 100, appears to be heavily influenced by the pop-culture phenomenon Squid Game. The series is another variant of the survival game, a common reality TV format and, as in the fictitious Squid Game, a large prize will eventually go to the person who wins the final game. However, this prize is not an unimaginable amount (ultimately around US$35 million in Squid Game) but a more modest US$250,000 – and importantly does not depend on and increase with the gory elimination of players. Continued here

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'Why would you go to uni?' A new study looks at what young Australians do after school This week, the federal government released a discussion paper for a Universities Accord, which it hopes will make a 30-year plan for the sector. One of the key priorities of the upcoming accord is equal access to university. The discussion paper specifically asks: Continued here

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Losing a calf to wolves in Sweden hurts. But if lions take one in Uganda, a farming family's income is gone Sophie Gilbert worked at the University of Idaho for part of the time during this study, then at the Natural Capital Exchange (NCX) for the later phases of publication, after submission. For most people, seeing the fleeting black and gold of a tiger or hearing the roar of a lion is the experience of a lifetime. For millennia, we’ve admired large fierce animals, capturing them in ancient rock art and successful blockbuster films. Continued here

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The new major players in conservation? NGOs thrive while national parks struggle It might surprise you to know that not-for-profit conservation organisations own, manage or influence growing chunks of Australia. Not-for-profit NGOs such as The Nature Conservancy, Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Bush Heritage Australia and Trust for Nature contribute to management of over three million square kilometres, including owning about 50,000 square kilometres. Continued here

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How to perfect your prompt writing for ChatGPT, Midjourney and other AI generators Generative AI is having a moment. ChatGPT and art generators such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have proven their potential, and now millions are wracking their brains over how to get their outputs to look something like the vision in their head. This is the goal of prompt engineering: the skill of crafting an input to deliver a desired result from generative AI. Continued here

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Looking for a financial adviser? 6 expert tips to find the best one for you As an example, the difference between having superannuation in one of the top-performing quarter of funds compared to bottom-performing quarter can mean retiring with about A$1.1 million instead of $610,000, according to calculations by the Productivity Commission. It used to appear to be free. Financial advisers were paid by commissions sent their way by the makers of the products they steered their clients into and taken from the client’s funds. These commissions were not only upfront but also ongoing each year, meaning they ended up costing clients a lot. Continued here

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Ukraine a year on: the invasion changed NZ foreign policy - as the war drags on, cracks will begin to show One year to the day since Russian tanks ran over the Ukraine border – and over the UN Charter and international law in the process – the world is less certain and more dangerous than ever. For New Zealand, the war has also presented a unique foreign policy challenge. The current generation of political leaders initially responded to the invasion in much the same way previous generations responded to the first and second world wars: if a sustainable peace was to be achieved, international treaties and law were the mechanism of choice. Continued here

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Friday essay: 'killed by Natives'. The stories - and violent reprisals - behind some of Australia's settler memorials First Nations people please be advised this article contains distressing imagery of a retaliatory shooting. Some commemorations across this continent, despite their original intentions, inadvertently testify to the fact that Aboriginal peoples did, in fact, “fight back” and that colonisation was, in fact, violent. These commemorations typically consist of graves, memorial monuments and even place names, and they are dedicated to white settlers who were “killed by Natives”. Continued here

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From TV to TikTok, young people are exposed to gambling promotions everywhere I’ve walked past two TABs pretty much weekly, because one’s near our ice cream shop and one’s next to the shopping centre. So, we go there a lot. They saw promotions for gambling in local shopping centres, at post offices, during sporting matches, movies and television shows. They were also aware of a range of novel products and marketing strategies the gambling industry is using to reach the next generation of customers. Continued here

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The animals and plants that only exist in captivity - and why time is running out to restore them to the wild Sarah Elizabeth Dalrymple is affiliated with the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Conservation Translocation Specialist Group. It was April in 1981 when a party of four camped for two days and nights on the forested slopes of Mount Evermann, the central peak of Socorro, a volcanic island in the Pacific some 400 kilometres southwest of Baja California, Mexico. Their fruitless search confirmed their suspicions: the Socorro dove, an endearingly tame bird unique to the island, had disappeared, eaten by the cats of Spanish colonists, pushed out by grazing sheep and shot from the sky by hunters. Continued here

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Quilts from the Second World War tell the stories of the Canadian women who sewed them In 1992, in Esher Library southwest of London, England, Josephine Andrews and her mother, Christine, collected blankets to donate to Kurdish refugees of the Gulf War. Among the pile of donations, the two women discovered a patchwork quilt that stood out for its vibrant cornflower blue stitches, embroidery and floral patterned fabrics, as well as the remarkable cloth label inscribed by hand: “W. V. S. WINONA CIRCLE GRACE UNITED CHURCH GANANOQUE, ONT. CANADA.” Continued here

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$1 trillion in the shade - the annual profits multinational corporations shift to tax havens continues to climb and climb About a decade ago, the world’s biggest economies agreed to crack down on multinational corporations’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point action plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk of corporate profits from tax authorities. But, according to our estimates, it hasn’t worked. Instead of reining in the use of tax havens – countries such as the Bahamas and Cayman Islands with very low or no effective tax rates – the problem has only gotten worse. Continued here

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Biden's border crackdown explained - a refugee law expert looks at the legality and impact of new asylum rule Anticipating a potential surge of migrants at the southern border, the Biden administration on Feb. 21, 2023, announced a crackdown on those seeking asylum after unlawfully entering the U.S. The proposed rule change – which would see the rapid deportation of anyone who had not first applied for asylum en route to the U.S. – has been condemned by immigration rights groups, which claim it runs counter to the “humane immigration system” that Joe Biden promised while campaigning for the White House. Continued here

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How linguistic diversity in English-language fiction reveals resistance and tension Linguistic diversity, like other types of diversity, can enrich life. It’s a truism that languages and cultures are closely allied. Some believe that language imposes its own unique perceptual grid on its users. If this were true, translation would be virtually impossible. On the other hand, it’s generally accepted that a translation seldom reproduces the exact sense of the original text; nuances don’t travel well. Continued here

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The fungus zombies in 'The Last of Us' are fictional, but real fungi can infect people, and they're becoming more resistant I’ve been studying fungi since my PhD work in the 1980s, and I grow more fascinated by these amazing organisms with every passing year. In the HBO series and the video game that inspired it, a parasitic fungus — a fictitious mutation of the very real cordyceps — jumps from insects to humans and quickly spreads around the world, rendering its victims helpless to control their thoughts and actions. Far-fetched fungal fear-mongering? It’s definitely fictional, but maybe not as preposterous as it might seem. Continued here

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The news about Toronto Mayor John Tory's affair destroyed his carefully cultivated public image The Toronto Star broke news on Feb. 10 about Mayor John Tory’s extramarital affair with an employee in his office. An hour later, he had announced his resignation, and by the end of the following week, he was gone from the mayor’s office. Sex scandals are nothing new in the world of politics. Many politicians have survived such scandals and held onto their jobs. These types of scandals are usually considered to be legal, minor and mostly personal indiscretions that don’t impact the ability of government officials to do their jobs. Continued here

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Clear nutrition labels can encourage healthier eating habits. Here's how Australia's food labelling can improve In your trips to the supermarket, you’ve probably come across the Health Star Rating on the front of some foods. You might even be one of the 70% of Australians who say they read the detailed nutrition information on the back of product packaging. Nutrition labelling is designed to help people make informed food purchases, and encourage shoppers to select and eat healthier options. Continued here

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Curious Kids: where does wind actually come from? The short answer is wind happens because the Sun heats some parts of the planet more than others, and this uneven heating starts a wind going. That means wind energy is really a kind of solar energy! Wind systems on Earth vary from the global-scale trade winds and jet streams to local sea breezes, but they all ultimately depend on Earth being unevenly heated by the Sun. Continued here

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What is Tourette syndrome, the condition Lewis Capaldi lives with? You might have seen the news fans of singer Lewis Capaldi helped him finish a song at a concert this week, after symptoms of his Tourette syndrome suddenly flared up and temporarily prevented him from performing. Read more: Billie Eilish and Tourette's: our new study reveals what it's really like to live with the condition Continued here

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King Gizzard and Sampa the Great abandoning Bluesfest highlights the power of artists to change the culture of the music industry On Monday, psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard announced they were withdrawing from their scheduled headlining appearance at the Byron Bay Bluesfest in April. On their social media they attributed this decision to Bluesfest “presenting content” that did not align with their values of being opposed to “misogyny, racism, transphobia and violence”. Continued here

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Passive vaping - time we see it like secondhand smoke and stand up for the right to clean air A medical student of mine recently said he loved the smell of vanilla in the house he shared with friends who vaped. “That’s OK, right?” he asked. “Well no,” I said, “If you can smell the vanilla you are probably getting nicotine as well.” Nicotine is colourless and odourless, and is extremely well absorbed through your respiratory tract, including your nose, mouth, airways and even your ears. Continued here

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Billionaire stoush over alleged media bias highlights the need for greater media diversity The recent stoush between mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest and media mogul Kerry Stokes is just the latest flashing neon sign above the parlous state of media diversity in Australia. Laws protecting media diversity in Australia have been gradually dismantled in recent decades. Because of this, their objective of preventing a select few media owners or voices from having too much influence over public opinion and the political agenda has been placed at risk. Continued here

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Free speech or 'genocide cheering'? Ukranian authors withdraw from Adelaide Writers' Week This week, Ukrainian writer Maria Tumarkin announced her withdrawal from Adelaide Writers’ Week, along with fellow Ukrainians Olesya Khromeychuk and Kateryna Babkina. (Tumarkin writes that she doesn’t support calls for resignations, cancellations, or boycotts of the event.) A statement posted on Tumarkin’s website quotes from letters the three Ukranian writers wrote to Writers’ Week director Louise Adler about the festival’s inclusion of Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa, who has shared a tweet from Putin: “DeNazify Ukraine”, and stated: Continued here

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Misogyny in policing: how some male officers abuse their power over female victims and colleagues The case of David Carrick, a serial rapist and a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police Service, is the latest shocking example of violence against women committed by the police. For years, I have studied misogyny in policing in England in Wales. I have crunched the numbers when it comes to acts of misconduct by men and women in the force. I have conducted in-depth interviews with policewomen who suffered years of misogynistic bullying at the hands of their male colleagues. Continued here

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NHS recovery plan: why an extra This two-year plan comes in response to emergency healthcare in Britain being labelled a “national emergency”. A recent parliamentary report investigating access to emergency services has highlighted the lack of alternatives for emergency 999 calls and broken models of primary and community care. Recent statistics show that in January 2023, on average 72% of patients attending A&E were either admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. This represents a significant drop from the 95% standard, which was last met in July 2015. The average waiting time for category 2 ambulance calls, meanwhile, is over an hour and a half (93 minutes), against a target of 18 minutes. Continued here

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More Indonesian children are living with diabetes - so what can we do to prevent it? PhD Candidate, Department of Health Economics, Wellbeing and Society, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University Indonesian children under 18 were 70 times more likely to be living with diabetes in January 2023 than they were in 2010, the Indonesian Pediatric Society revealed this month. Continued here

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South African rapper AKA's murder video went viral - it shouldn't have Franz Krüger is the deputy ombud of the South African Press Council. He writes in his personal capacity. University of the Witwatersrand provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA. Continued here

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Mass Country review: murdered South African rapper's posthumous album is a mixed bag Just weeks before being gunned down in what appeared to be a hit, the South African rapper AKA (Kiernan Forbes) had announced he was ready to release his new album, Mass Country. After his death, his family decided to go ahead and release the album on schedule as a tribute. At his memorial service on 17 February in Johannesburg, fellow rapper and frequent collaborator Yanga Chief delivered a remarkable speech. In it, he revealed much of AKA’s creative process. Yanga disclosed that AKA was aware that it took “an army of different elements to create a hit”. In other words, the search for sonic gold was painstaking, deliberate and all engrossing. AKA gave what it took to find the right hooks, beats and personnel. Continued here

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Biden Beset by Balloons Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff. © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices Continued here

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“Full Time,” Reviewed: A Hectic Thriller of Everyday Life I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that takes mass transit as seriously as does "Full Time," a drama set in and around Paris by the Canadian director Éric Gravel. It's the story of a hotel chambermaid named Julie Roy (Laure Calamy) who commutes by train between her job in Paris and her home in an unnamed small town at an unspecified long distance from the city. Even under the best of circumstances, Julie's life is complicated: she's the divorced mother of two young children whom she's raising alone. There's very little leeway in Julie's schedule: she gets the kids up before dawn and hustles them over to the nearby house of an elderly woman, Mrs. Lusigny (Geneviève Mnich), their caregiver before and after school. Then Julie rushes to the local train station, goes to work, takes the train back to her town, picks up the children, brings them home, gets them to bed, falls asleep, and starts again the next morning. Next time you rush for a train, think of Julie. Consider why you're running late, why it matters that you catch this train rather than the next, why you expect that the train will show up promptly and get you reliably to your destination, what the consequences to you and others will be if it stops running—or doesn't show up—and you're late. Imagine all the working people and the functioning equipment that it takes to keep the whole system running, to keep your job and your life in order. One's own place in the system, "Full Time" shows, is the tip of an immense iceberg—which is, rather, all tips, each individual's perspective and participation in the mass affecting the lives of the others, albeit as invisibly as if submerged beneath the ocean's surface. In "Full Time," Gravel dramatizes the iceberg from the point of view of one tip. The film's meticulous realism, both at the intimate level of Julie's personal life and at the over-all societal one that knocks it off balance, lend it the excitement of a thriller; tiny perturbations of daily routines and large-scale disruptions of mass transit converge to yield high drama. Continued here

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The End of “Succession” Is Near A few minutes before Jesse Armstrong was scheduled to call for a chat earlier this month, he sent a polite text saying that he was "adrift in traffic": could he delay by fifteen? Traffic congestion served as an early plot point in Season 1 of "Succession": who can forget the excruciating sequence in which Kendall Roy, having plotted the boardroom ouster of Logan Roy, the patriarch who won't move on, is stuck in traffic—forced to leap out of his car in order to run in his leather-soled shoes toward the Waystar Royco headquarters, delivering his regicidal ultimatum while gasping for breath over the speakerphone? Seeing the ways in which even the super-rich cannot insulate themselves entirely against the vagaries of the outside world—traffic, weather—is one of the many pleasures offered by "Succession." In three seasons since the show débuted, in June of 2018, as an unsettling comedy-drama hybrid, it has become an ensemble exploration of gnarled humanity at the highest levels of power, offering resonances with contemporary media dynasties and the Julio-Claudians alike. When Armstrong got on the phone, precisely fifteen minutes after the appointed time, he sounded much calmer than the harried would-be usurper, played by Jeremy Strong, whom he had created. There had merely been busier thoroughfares anticipated on his route from Williamsburg, where he stays when he is in New York—Armstrong's home is London—to the editing suites in Greenwich Village, where he was working on the show's upcoming season, which airs on HBO starting next month. But the occasion of the call nonetheless felt consequential: Armstrong was ready to reveal that this season, the fourth, would be the last. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Armstrong talks about his collaborative creative process, the cliffhanger end of Season 3, his decision to bring his creation to its dramatic conclusion, and whether there will be a successor to "Succession." Continued here

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A Hot-Pot Marathon at Four Coconuts and the Dolar Shop Many years ago, a friend described me as “the least athletic person” he knew. I reject this designation on a number of grounds, not least the fact that he’d never seen me at my top sport: Chinese hot pot, a style of eating with ancient origins which involves a diner quick-cooking raw ingredients in a simmering pot of broth directly before her on the table. It may not burn many calories (certainly nowhere near the number consumed), but it requires deep focus, strategy, and coördination, and it gives me, when I really get going, a feeling akin to descriptions I’ve read of a euphoric runner’s high. These days, I’m in rare form. It’s never been easier to find hot pot in New York—though I’ll admit that I struggled, the other night, to locate Four Coconuts, a new restaurant in Flushing that specializes in a Hainanese-style chicken-coconut version. A group of delivery drivers, huddled with their e-bikes on the sidewalk, were unable to help, though they gamely took turns peering at my phone map and scratching their heads. If you venture to Four Coconuts (39-16 Prince St., Suite 209, Queens; broth and add-ins $4.95-$96.95), and you should: look up! In an alleyway between two malls, at the top of a staircase, you may be able to make out the potted palm trees by the door. Continued here

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Look! New Webb Telescope Image Shows 300,000 Stars in Incredible Detail Behold Messier 92, a dense place in the nearby Universe where more than 300,000 stars live with their siblings. Messier 92 is located within the Milky Way galaxy about 27,000 light-years away in the Hercules constellation. Astronomers define stellar hubs like Messier 92 as globular clusters, home to hundreds of thousands of huddled stars born roughly at the same time. In the case of this glittering scene, the stars emerged from the same clump of material about 12 and 13 billion years ago. This makes it one, if not the oldest, known globular cluster in the Milky Way. That’s quite the standard for a galaxy that contains roughly 100 billion stars. Continued here

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'Ant-Man: Quantumania' Is Setting Up 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3' to Fail It’s hard to believe today, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe began its life as the underdog. Just a few months after Iron Man kicked off the MCU, The Dark Knight dominated the box office and redefined the entire superhero genre. And while DC was playing with its most recognizable toys, Marvel was forced to rely on its B-team after selling away the rights to Spider-Man and the X-Men years earlier to avoid bankruptcy. Even after The Avengers became a mega-hit and changed Hollywood forever, that same attitude persisted at Marvel Studios. Movies like Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy used that same formula to take odd-ball characters no one had ever heard of and turn them into billion-dollar franchises. But as Marvel fans are now learning, you can only push the limits of an odd-ball hero like Scott Lang so far. Continued here

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You Need to Watch the Best Space Thriller of the Century on HBO Max ASAP Before The Martian and before For All Mankind, there was Gravity. When it comes to hard science fiction movies that try to focus on the real challenges of contemporary spaceflight, it remains one of the best. Not because all of its space science is 100 percent accurate, but because director Alfonso Cuaron proved that this kind of sci-fi aesthetic can be both accessible and exhilarating. The 2013 film just hit HBO Max, and it’s worth another look for two reasons: it’s an exciting, well-made thriller, and it ushered in a new era of realistic science fiction that barely feels like science fiction at all. Gravity is an anachronistic “hard” sci-fi full of minor scientific errors. That said, unlike some NASA-centric movies before it (see the 2000 film Space Cowboys, or rather, don’t), Cuaron did as much homework as possible to get the science of the movie right. “In the frame of the fiction, we wanted to be as respectful and accurate as possible,” Cuaron said in 2013. But he also pointed out that Gravity was “not a documentary,” but rather “a piece of fiction.” Continued here