The Other Cost of Climate Change - The New Yorker

The Other Cost of Climate Change - The New Yorker: There’s no doubt that the coming century will be a tough one for wild animals. But, for countless species, including almost all of North America’s birds, the threat is not direct. The responses of birds to acute climatic stress are not well studied, but birds have been adapting to such stresses for tens of millions of years, and they’re surprising us all the time—emperor penguins relocating their breeding grounds as the Antarctic ice melts, tundra swans leaving the water and learning to glean grains from agricultural fields. Not every species will manage to adapt. But the larger and healthier and more diverse our bird populations are, the greater the chances that many species will survive, even thrive. To prevent extinctions in the future, it’s not enough to curb our carbon emissions. We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now.

Elton McDonald and the incredible story behind the Toronto tunnel

Elton McDonald and the incredible story behind the Toronto tunnel: Why Elton McDonald built the Toronto tunnel that captivated the world

[Essay] | A Grand Juror Speaks, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus | Harper's Magazine

[Essay] | A Grand Juror Speaks, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus | Harper's Magazine: Because of the secrecy requirement, those who haven’t served on a grand jury have little idea of the closed circuits of that cramped, wood-paneled room.

But if the actions of jurors like me can bring thousands of people into the streets to protest, it seems worth risking a felony charge to describe the arguments and expectations of the chamber.

Everyone who cares about free speech should care about the attacks on Github - Vox

Everyone who cares about free speech should care about the attacks on Github - Vox: If you're not a programmer, you've probably never heard of Github, a website programmers use to track and share software source code. But if you care about free speech, you should be paying attention to an attack on the site that's going on right now.

Last Thursday, someone launched a massive online assault against the Github website that is still ongoing. There's no proof that the Chinese government is behind the attacks, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggests it played a role. The attacks targeted Github projects that were dedicated to circumventing Chinese censorship of Western news media.

Thomas Gray lived six days, but his life has lasting impact

Thomas Gray lived six days, but his life has lasting impact: When she found out early in her pregnancy that one of her identical twins would die at birth, Sarah Gray began a five-year journey that culminated last week in Philadelphia.

She had to carry the sick baby to term in order to protect his healthy twin. And she also looked into organ and tissue donation.

"Instead of thinking of our son as a victim," she said, "I started thinking of him as a contributor to research, to science."

Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast - NYTimes.com

Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast - NYTimes.com: Cain has always been fast. In fifth grade, she ran a 6:15 mile. Cain’s father, Charlie, an anesthesiologist, knew so little about track then that he had to ask Mary’s gym teacher if this was any good. In seventh grade, she ran a mile in 5:03, at which point, recalls Cain — a self-described nerd — “Everybody was like, what?! That wasn’t supposed to happen.” In ninth grade, Cain won the New York State 1,500-meter championship, breaking the freshman girls’ record. The summer after her sophomore year, she flew to the Junior World Championships in Barcelona and ran the 1,500 in 4:11.01, setting a new American high-school record for girls.

Former college president skeptical of fraternities | News and Observer News and Observer

Former college president skeptical of fraternities | News and Observer News and Observer: My experience was overwhelmingly good. Some brothers remain my closest friends – good guys doing good things in their families and communities.

But I also was aware of sickening discrimination when a great person – one of the best dudes ever, a big-hearted bridge-builder and fun guy – was denied admission by a couple of morons because of his ethnicity.

Chandler says fraternities are more prone to bad behavior because they attract people of the same backgrounds who are less likely to confront one another. He thinks a more diverse membership serves as a check on bad behavior.

A gorgeous visualization of 200 years of immigration to the US - Vox

A gorgeous visualization of 200 years of immigration to the US - Vox: Bronshtein pulled 200 years of government data to put together the visualization. There's an interactive version on her website: you can hover over any color, at any point, and see the exact number of immigrants who became residents from that country in that decade.

But taken as a whole, the chart tells a very clear story: there are two laws that totally transformed immigration to the United States.

Battling America’s other PTSD crisis - Yahoo News

Battling America’s other PTSD crisis - Yahoo News: Just after he got out of the hospital, the demon arrived. Davis was alone; his girlfriend, Regina Stewart, was out at the store. He was on the border of sleep when he noticed a shadowy figure in the room. He was terrified. He told himself it wasn’t real, but it looked real. He felt like he was falling, but his body was paralyzed. He couldn’t talk or move, couldn’t save himself from the intruder. He fell for what seemed to him like 20 minutes. He screamed and screamed, and then Stewart tapped his arm and he woke up.

The Method to Obama’s Middle East Mess - NYTimes.com

The Method to Obama’s Middle East Mess - NYTimes.com: Second, multipolar environments are often more unstable and violent, period, than unipolar ones. So offshoring American power and hoping that Iran, Iran’s Sunni neighbors and Israel will find some kind of balance on their own will probably increase the risk of arms races, cross-border invasions and full-scale regional war. The conflicts we have now are ugly enough, but absent the restraint still imposed by American military dominance, it’s easy to imagine something worse.

What We Get Wrong About Yemen - Adam Baron - POLITICO Magazine

What We Get Wrong About Yemen - Adam Baron - POLITICO Magazine:

Just stay out of it. While the chief combatants in the civil war are
certainly playing the sectarian card to some degree, there is reason to
think that Yemen will not necessarily become part of some regional
sectarian conflict. Regardless of their foreign ties, both the Shiite
Houthis and their Sunni opponents are deeply rooted in Yemen, and they
are motivated primarily by local issues.



The main danger now is
that the Western powers, Saudi Arabia or Egypt will overreact and seek
to intervene, ostensibly to counter Iranian influence or to quash the
efforts of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to gain territory. Yet
foreign intervention could very well be the worst approach now—further
regionalizing what is still a local fight, injecting a stronger
sectarian tone into the conflict while threatening to push Yemen closer
to implosion.

America’s hospitals: Our system lets big hospitals charge exorbitant prices. It’s time for change.

America’s hospitals: Our system lets big hospitals charge exorbitant prices. It’s time for change.: If you’re not saving money by shopping around for a better deal, and if you have no idea if you’re getting better care, you might as well go to the hospital closest to you. Hospitals that don’t face competition from other nearby hospitals thus have a huge amount of power in their local markets. If a private insurer refuses to pay a hospital’s exorbitant prices, a hospital can just walk and wait for the insurer’s customers to scream bloody murder over the fact that they can’t use their local hospital.

How being hit on at the bar revealed to me what an amazing marriage I have : TwoXChromosomes

How being hit on at the bar revealed to me what an amazing marriage I have : TwoXChromosomes:





This is a forever marriage.



He truly is my best friend.



I can be out in the world and see other people who are attractive,
intelligent, engaging, and fun, but they are all of those things in that
moment.



My husband is all of those things to me, forever.

Letting Go - The New Yorker

Letting Go - The New Yorker: People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

JPL | News | NASA's Opportunity Mars Rover Passes Marathon Distance

JPL | News | NASA's Opportunity Mars Rover Passes Marathon Distance: There was no tape draped across a finish line, but NASA is celebrating a win. The agency's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity completed its first Red Planet marathon Tuesday -- 26.219 miles (42.195 kilometers) - with a finish time of roughly 11 years and two months.

How Oregon's Second Largest City Vanished in a Day | History | Smithsonian

How Oregon's Second Largest City Vanished in a Day | History | Smithsonian:

Portland's whiteness is often treated more as joke than a blemish on its reputation, but its lack of diversity (in a city of some 600,000 residents, just 6 percent are black*) stems from its racist history, of
which Vanport is an integral chapter. When Oregon was admitted to the
United States in 1859, it was the only state whose state constitution
explicitly forbade black people from living, working or owning property
within its borders. Until 1926, it was illegal for black people to even
move into the state. Its lack of diversity fed a vicious cycle: whites
looking to escape the South after the end of the Civil War flocked to
Oregon, which billed itself as a sort of pristine utopia, where land was
plentiful and diversity was scarce. In the early 1900s, Oregon was a
hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity, boasting over 14,000 members (9,000 of
whom lived in Portland). The Klan's influence could be felt everywhere,
from business to politics—the Klan was even successful in ousting a
sitting governor in favor of a governor more of its choosing. It
was commonplace for high-ranking members of local and statewide
politics to meet with Klan members, who would advise them in matters of
public policy.

A Wilderness of Waiting: Pregnancy on an Ohio Farm

A Wilderness of Waiting: Pregnancy on an Ohio Farm: This is pregnancy as, alternately, Zen state or acid trip. Zen state when I allow myself to see this strange wilderness as calm, spiritual, comforting, and acid trip when a restless frightening energy pulses behind it. In the latter case, I feel trapped by hormones, irritation and boredom threatening to overrun the precarious witnessing of what Shunryu Suzuki calls “things as they are.” I want to come down off this hormonal high, to be released back into time and steady straightforward thinking. I want plans and progress. I chafe at this stillness, this inability to be anywhere but a small cabin in middle-of-nowhere Ohio.

'A Chosen Exile': Black People Passing In White America : Code Switch : NPR

'A Chosen Exile': Black People Passing In White America : Code Switch : NPR:

n California, the young woman passed as white. She married a white
man, and they had children who never knew they had black blood. Then,
one day, years later, her phone rang.



It was the woman's mother
with distressing news: Her father was dying, and she needed to return
home immediately to tell him goodbye.



The cousin replied, "I can't. I'm a white woman now."



She missed her father's funeral, and never saw her mother or siblings again.

Yemen Melts Down | Foreign Policy

Yemen Melts Down | Foreign Policy: However, the societal structures that prevented Yemen from breaking down into abject chaos so far have been worn down by the transitional period. Even many Yemenis who were previously confident in their country’s ability to weather this storm are no longer so sure what the future holds. Amid all of the deepening divisions in the country, it appears that two things currently unite Yemenis: anguish at the country’s current condition, and a deep sense of foreboding regarding its future.

Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guant�namo | US news | The Guardian

Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guant�namo | US news | The Guardian

The Guardian examined thousands of court documents from Chicago and
interviewed two dozen people with experience at Guantánamo and in the
Chicago criminal-justice system. The results of its investigation
suggests a continuum between Guantánamo interrogation rooms and Chicago
police precincts. Zuley’s detective work, particularly when visited on
Chicago’s minority communities, contains a dark foreshadowing of the
United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture.




Allegations stemming from interviews and court documents, concerning
five Chicago suspects, suggest Zuley and his colleagues shackled
suspects to walls for extended periods, threatened their family members,
and perhaps even planted evidence on them. The point was to yield
confessions, even while ignoring potentially exculpatory evidence.

� The Ballad of Johnny France Bronx Banter

� The Ballad of Johnny France Bronx Banter: Listen to the story of the lonesome lawman who went hunting in the mountains for Don and Dan Nichols, and who finally got ‘em, right there, by the campfire

Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82 - NYTimes.com

Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82 - NYTimes.com: Chinua Achebe (pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) caught the world’s attention with his first novel, “Things Fall Apart.” Published in 1958, when he was 28, the book would become a classic of world literature and required reading for students, selling more than 10 million copies in 45 languages.

The story, a brisk 215 pages, was inspired by the history of his own family, part of the Ibo nation of southeastern Nigeria, a people victimized by the racism of British colonial administrators and then by the brutality of military dictators from other Nigerian ethnic groups.

Susan Pinker: why face-to-face contact matters in our digital age | Books | The Guardian

Susan Pinker: why face-to-face contact matters in our digital age | Books | The Guardian: Our survival hinges on social interaction, and that is not only true of the murky evolutionary past. Over the last decade huge population studies have shown that social integration — the feeling of being part of a cohesive group — fosters immunity and resilience. How accepted and supported we feel affects the biological pathways that skew the genetic expression of a disease, while feeling isolated “leaves a loneliness imprint” on every cell, says the American social neuroscientist John Cacioppo. Women with breast cancer who have expansive, active, face-to-face social networks, for example, are four times as likely to survive their illness as women with sparser social connections. How might that work? Research led by Steve Cole at the University of California, Los Angeles shows that social contact switches on and off genes that regulate the rate of tumour growth (and the level of cancer-killing lymphocytes in our bloodstreams).

Morton Schapiro: The New Face of Campus Unrest - WSJ

Morton Schapiro: The New Face of Campus Unrest - WSJ: What’s a president to do? I have learned over 15 years in this job at two institutions that you better have a compelling reason to punish anyone—student, faculty member, staff member—for expressing his or her views, regardless of how repugnant you might find those views.



Freedom of speech doesn’t amount to much unless it is tested. And if the First Amendment doesn’t matter on college campuses, where self-expression is so deeply valued, why expect it to matter elsewhere?

In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas - NYTimes.com

In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas - NYTimes.com:

I’m
old enough to remember a time when college students objected to
providing a platform to certain speakers because they were deemed
politically unacceptable. Now students worry whether acts of speech or
pieces of writing may put them in emotional peril. Two weeks ago,
students at Northwestern University marched to protest an article by
Laura Kipnis, a professor in the university’s School of Communication.
Professor Kipnis had criticized — O.K., ridiculed — what she called the
sexual paranoia pervading campus life.

The
protesters carried mattresses and demanded that the administration
condemn the essay. One student complained that Professor Kipnis was
“erasing the very traumatic experience” of victims who spoke out. An
organizer of the demonstration said, “we need to be setting aside spaces
to talk” about “victim-blaming.” Last Wednesday, Northwestern’s
president, Morton O. Schapiro, wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street
Journal affirming his commitment to academic freedom.

How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on purpose

How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on purpose: The machine was eventually brought up a few hours later and they took a poll of the damage. When a size command was run on the Toy Story 2 directory, it was only 10% of the size it should have been.

90% of the movie had been deleted by the stray command.

Why I Still Play Football | The Players' Tribune

Why I Still Play Football | The Players' Tribune: I play because I love the game. I love hitting people. There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else. My teammates, friends and family can attest to this: When I go too long without physical contact I’m not a pleasant person to be around. This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work. I’ve fallen in love with the sport of football and the physical contact associated with it.

Who's Afraid of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank? - Bloomberg Business

Who's Afraid of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank? - Bloomberg Business: It’s been five years since the World Bank last got a capital increase—and that was its first since 1988. Under pressure from the U.S. to keep funding requirements small and changes in voting shares limited, the capital boost added a mere 30 percent to the institution’s lending capacity. That headroom has been eaten up already by the bank’s operations during the global financial crisis. When it comes to the IMF, there have been four failed attempts by the Obama administration to get congressional approval and funding for the U.S. share of a financing and reform package.

Niihau Incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Niihau Incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The Niʻihau Incident (or Battle of Niʻihau) occurred on December 7, 1941, when Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service pilot Shigenori Nishikaichi crash-landed his Zero on the Hawaiian island of Niʻihau after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was killed in a struggle with people on the island.

Luminous Life - National Geographic Magazine

Luminous Life - National Geographic Magazine: Speaking of luminous lunch, here’s a weird problem. As I mentioned, many animals that live in the open ocean have evolved to be transparent, because this makes them harder to see. But if you are transparent and you eat something glowing, all of a sudden—oops—you are highly visible. Which is why so many otherwise see-through animals have guts that are opaque.

IMF Considers Greece Its Most Unhelpful Client Ever - Bloomberg Business

IMF Considers Greece Its Most Unhelpful Client Ever - Bloomberg Business: (Bloomberg) -- International Monetary Fund officials told their euro-area colleagues that Greece is the most unhelpful country the organization has dealt with in its 70-year history, according to two people familiar with the talks.

In a short and bad-tempered conference call on Tuesday, officials from the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission complained that Greek officials aren’t adhering to a bailout extension deal reached in February or cooperating with creditors, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the call was private.

How running an $837,000 office pool destroyed this man's life | NJ.com

How running an $837,000 office pool destroyed this man's life | NJ.com:
That civil case is still awaiting an appeal. A criminal trial date
is set for June after nearly five years filled with delays that Ferrara
considers stall tactics, and even then, the trial is unlikely to start
until the fall. Bovery's lawyers plan to present a potential witness
list that includes all of the nearly 4,000 pool participants, leading to
another logistical nightmare: Would it be even possible to find 12
jurors who don't know any of the players?

Bovery, meanwhile, has watched as New Jersey aggressively pursues legalized sports betting as a way to inject money into Atlantic City's casinos and the state's racetracks.

Some of the most influential lawmakers in the state,
with the full backing of Gov. Christie, are fighting the four major
professional sports leagues and the NCAA in court for the right to have
Las Vegas-style betting ... and, all the while, one county is fighting
one New Jersey resident for essentially doing the same thing.

Netanyahu Says Never to a State for Palestinians - NYTimes.com

Netanyahu Says Never to a State for Palestinians - NYTimes.com: JERUSALEM — Under pressure on the eve of a surprisingly close election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday doubled down on his appeal to right-wing voters, declaring definitively that if he was returned to office he would never establish a Palestinian stat.

Hard Online Game

Google Feud

Follow up on Uber Surge Pricing | PoPville

Follow up on Uber Surge Pricing | PoPville:

I think Uber’s model is coming back to bite them – they’ve priced
their services so low that Uber drivers are turning off their Uber
phones (signaling no availability), waiting until this prompts surge
pricing (usually they check that from their personal phone), then going
out and giving Uber rides. The Surge Protector app is a pretty helpful
workaround as Uber’s system is clearly not working. The whole point of
surge pricing is to get more drivers out on the road when there is
naturally higher demand, but it’s not really working that way right now,
which is a shame.

The Men Who Left Were White

The Men Who Left Were White:

But there's
a history of abandonment in America, a history of leaving black women
and black children, and it did not start with black men.

I
want to tell America: you can't escape my story. After all, mine is a
storyline threaded through all of humanity, the price women have been
overpaying since the beginning of time and sex. As long as men have been
fucking, they've been disappearing. Because women carry life we are
also forced to harbor fear; history is saturated with the stories of
babies born of coercion, of aggression, of deceit, of abandonment, and
the stories of those babies turned full-grown.

When
we talk about what slavery meant we talk about the ephemeral – what was
and what ended. The details: plantation hierarchy, middle passage. We
think That's it.

But
what it meant – what it means – is worse than all of the details. What
it means is a legacy of genetic material that courses through my own
veins.

Karl Ove Knausgaard Travels Through North America - NYTimes.com

Karl Ove Knausgaard Travels Through North America - NYTimes.com:

In
front of me lay a world so beautiful and so cruel that it numbed my
senses. The vast expanse of the ice, the dark blue ocean beyond, beneath
the pale blue sky, the islands in the distance, sheer cliffs rearing up
from the water, and then the strip of land that could be glimpsed to
the north, which had to be Labrador.

It was completely silent.

I
stood there without moving for a long time, looking out to sea. The
silence did something with the landscape. Usually, something is making a
sound. The wind sweeping across the land, whistling past every ridge or
rise it encounters. Birds squawking or chirping. And the sea, the
constant soughing, night and day, that sometimes in a storm turns into
roaring and hissing.

But here everything was still.

All
sounds belong to the moment, they are part of the present, the world of
change, while the soundless belongs to the unchanging. In silence lies
age.

A thousand years is no time at all, I thought.

Reaction to the Oklahoma frat scandal shows just how poorly Americans understand racism - Vox

Reaction to the Oklahoma frat scandal shows just how poorly Americans understand racism - Vox: But it's important to remember that things like this don't represent the kinds of racism that make life hard for African-Americans on a daily basis. The much more common issues faced by colleges students and people of color all throughout America have to do with structural inequality — which is maintained through deeply held prejudices against black people. Hateful tunes sung on buses by probably drunken frat boys reflect this prejudice, but they certainly don't cause it. And although the SAE members deserved the discipline they got, individual punishments certainly don't fix America's racism problem.

wixipixi comments on Four years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, one man is still living in the exclusion zone in order to feed the animals left behind when their owners fled.

wixipixi comments on Four years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, one man is still living in the exclusion zone in order to feed the animals left behind when their owners fled.: Most people left and were only allowed to bring a small bag (think about the size of one of the small-ish Jansport book bags) and pets were disallowed. There may have even been a weight limit on how much you could bring. The buses did not allow pets. The evacuation shelters did not allow pets. You may find a few pictures of one or two people with a tiny dog in a shelter, but these are exceptions. These shelters were tiny. People basically had enough room to lay out a futon (if you are unfamiliar with them, they are roughly the size of a twin mattress) and that was it. THAT was the amount of space they had to live in, with hundreds of other people doing the same thing in the same room. Everything they needed had to fit within those confines, and anything that may be a burden was banned from the centers.

To put it more directly: People were forced to leave their pets behind.

サマーナイツ (Summernights) by Alejandro Dale on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

サマーナイツ (Summernights) by Alejandro Dale on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Text of Joe Biden’s Statement on Senators’ Letter to Iran’s Leaders - Washington Wire - WSJ

Text of Joe Biden’s Statement on Senators’ Letter to Iran’s Leaders - Washington Wire - WSJ: In thirty-six years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which Senators wrote directly to advise another country—much less a longtime foreign adversary— that the President does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them.



This letter sends a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that that our Commander-in-Chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments—a message that is as false as it is dangerous.

The decision to undercut our President and circumvent our constitutional system offends me as a matter of principle. As a matter of policy, the letter and its authors have also offered no viable alternative to the diplomatic resolution with Iran that their letter seeks to undermine.

‘The last great liberator’: Why Mandela made and stayed friends with dictators - The Washington Post

‘The last great liberator’: Why Mandela made and stayed friends with dictators - The Washington Post: Mandela did finally condemn Mugabe and call for him to leave office in the 2000s, but he remained a friend of some of the world's most notorious dictatorships because of those shared liberation roots. “Mandela was profoundly loyal to those who supported the liberation struggle, even if it was in their narrow self-interest to do so and when it had little or nothing to do with nonracial democracy,” John Campbell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told my colleague Scott Wilson.





By the time Mandela became president in 1994, the Western world had embraced him and his movement, pulling post-apartheid South Africa closer to the United States and former colonial master Britain. But Mandela and his movement, the African National Congress, had suffered through its hardest decades despite Western opposition and with support from fellow liberation movements that, at the time, looked not so different from South Africa's.

Finally I Hear a Politician Explain My Country Just the Way I Understand It - The Atlantic

Finally I Hear a Politician Explain My Country Just the Way I Understand It - The Atlantic: That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others.

We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit.

I was a professor at four universities. I still couldn’t make ends meet. - The Washington Post

I was a professor at four universities. I still couldn’t make ends meet. - The Washington Post: Why are universities relying so heavily on this type of labor? According to Marisa Allison, co-author of the George Mason University survey, administrative bloat is at least partly to blame. “The university is the only space where you’ve seen an increase in middle management, in jobs that were never there before,” she says. “That is definitely a culprit.” In places like Virginia, sharp cuts in state funding for higher education are also leading universities to curb costs. Others point to rising executive compensation, especially for campus presidents.



And there are the graduate programs, which keep churning out people with MAs or PhDs, even though there aren’t enough positions for these graduates to move into. For many of us, our graduate programs didn’t tell us that teaching in academia was no longer a guaranteed — or even sane — route on which to rely.

Page 13 of Why Is This Man Still in Jail? | Rolling Stone

Page 13 of Why Is This Man Still in Jail? | Rolling Stone: But who, with Wright's inventory of pain and sorrows, could describe the indescribable that befell him? How do you convey being a strapping young man with a job and a little boy and a lazy Sunday watching football when two cops barge into your life and drag you off to hell? Is there any way to summon a sense of what it was like in that box in the Police Administration Building, where, as you would later tell the court, they chained you to a chair, pressed their hands on your neck and threatened to skullfuck you if you didn't sign a confession that you did not write to the rape and murder of a 77-year-old woman? No call to a lawyer or your terrified mother, no room to breathe in or gather your wits; just hour after hour in a hole with those men and their short-fuse insistence that you sign their paper.

Five Reflections on my last day at the White House — Medium

Five Reflections on my last day at the White House — Medium: Working in politics generally, and the White House in particular, is largely about trying to separate the signal from the noise — to understand which things really matter and which are distractions that suck up valuable time and energy. One of the things holding back progress in Washington is so much focus on the noise. The political cable-internet machine reduces the entire discussion to questions of optics, tactics and horserace politics. Those things sometimes matter a great deal, but they are usually a distraction from both what people outside of Washington are talking about around the kitchen table (or in their social media feeds) and what actually affects political outcomes. Elections are won, bills are passed, cliffs are avoided almost always because of the big macro-factors about the economy, public opinion, demographics and the individual political interests of all the players. Our politics works better when more people know how to listen for the signal.

The Plot to Free North Korea With Smuggled Episodes of 'Friends' | WIRED

The Plot to Free North Korea With Smuggled Episodes of 'Friends' | WIRED: The totalitarian government inherited by its 32-year-old leader, Kim Jong-un, punishes any real political resistance with death. And the regime’s most powerful tool for control remains its grip on North Korean minds. The state propaganda system indoctrinates its 25 million citizens from birth, insisting that the Kim family is infallible and that the country enjoys a superior standard of living. In a ranking of 197 countries’ press freedom by research group Freedom House, North Korea places last. It sees any attempt to introduce competing ideas, even the possession of a radio capable of accessing foreign frequencies, as a threat to its power; these infractions are punishable by exile to one of its prison camps, which hold as many as 200,000 people, according to Amnesty International. “The Kim regime needs its ideology,” Cha says. Without it, he argues, North Korea would face the same threats as every dictatorship, such as an internal coup or a popular revolt. “If they get to the point where all they can do is point guns at people, they’ll know their system has failed.”

The Seminal Video on smog in China?

▶ Chai Jing's review: Under the Dome – Investigating China’s Smog 柴静雾霾调查：穹顶之下 (full translation) - YouTube

Japan's Deaf Composer Wasn't What He Seemed | The New Republic

Japan's Deaf Composer Wasn't What He Seemed | The New Republic: Mamoru Samuragochi’s story hit all the right notes: a deaf genius whose music inspired a nation. But the “Japanese Beethoven” wasn’t who he seemed.

How we upgrade a live data center - Server Fault Blog

How we upgrade a live data center - Server Fault Blog: A few weeks ago we upgraded a lot of the core infrastructure in our New York (okay, it’s really in New Jersey now – but don’t tell anyone) data center. We love being open with everything we do (including infrastructure), and really consider it one of the best job perks we have. So here’s how and why we upgrade a data center.

When your father is the BTK serial killer, forgiveness is not tidy | The Wichita Eagle The Wichita Eagle

When your father is the BTK serial killer, forgiveness is not tidy | The Wichita Eagle The Wichita Eagle:

In December 2012, Kerri wrote to her father for the first time in five years.


She told him she would never forget his crimes or be at peace with
what he’d done. But she wrote that she was at peace with the man who
raised her. That man was a good man, whatever else he’d become.


And then she wrote of her life, which he would never see.


She wrote of the grandchildren he would never meet.




“I have come to terms with what happened with you and laid it to rest. I am never going to understand it but I forgive you.


“I don’t know if I will ever be able to make it for a visit but know that I love you and hope to see you in heaven some day.”




After that letter to her father, Kerri changed.


“Before she forgave him, she thought of herself as BTK’s daughter,” Darian said later.


“But as soon as she forgave him, she was Kerri again.”


But forgiveness is not tidy.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/special-reports/btk/article10809929.html#storylink=cpy

for whom the rules bend | Fredrik deBoer

for whom the rules bend | Fredrik deBoer: I’m going to make an observation now that will surely be taken by some as an insult to that very bout of public mourning. It isn’t; I personally have no reason at all to question the popular narrative of Carr’s life and death. I simply want to point out: one of the crimes that Carr was guilty of, during his years as an addict, was serial domestic violence. That’s a matter of public record, of his own recording. And I will further say that this is one of those crimes that is usually treated, by the amorphous but powerful group that polices norms online, as unforgivable. For most public people, having repeatedly beaten women would be the end of their good reputation, no matter if it was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, no matter how many years ago it happened in the past. More, many of the people who would enforce that damage to reputation are the same who mourn Carr now. Again, some people will assume I’m saying that Carr’s reputation should be similarly damaged. I’m not. I’m just observing a discrepancy, and asking: what makes this person, in this time, exempt from the usual rules?

he-man free speech defenders policing my speech | Fredrik deBoer

he-man free speech defenders policing my speech | Fredrik deBoer: Hard to believe the irony. A bunch of people rallying to the banner of free speech shared my post out of the conviction that it helped to defend the principle of free exchange. Some of them take time as they do so to mutter darkly about the potential consequences for my expression. And they do so in a way that acts as if I’m not capable of using my adult self-control to know who and what I’m targeting in a political debate. “People will think you’ll be that harsh in your teaching!” Like I can’t sort out a teenager who I have the express duty to teach and help grow from an established, successful, adult political writer whose job it is to argue about politics. You might say that these people are just criticizing me, not trying to police my language. And you might say the exact same thing about critics of Jon Chait’s.

House of Cards: Feds aim to ban online gambling

House of Cards: Feds aim to ban online gambling: 


Many critics of the bill point to the overwhelming influence of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, known for sinking tens of millions of dollars into former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign to win the Republican nomination for president.


Poker industry insiders say the bill Adelson supports would ban
online gambling, a significant competitor to Adelson’s string of
casinos.


“Adelson pledged to ‘spend whatever it takes’ to pass this
legislation, and he’s making good on that pledge — at least the spending
part,” said Muny. “He and Las Vegas Sands Corp. lobby Congress
extensively for this bill.”

darthrevan comments on The full documentary aired by BBC after getting banned in India. "India's Daughter"

darthrevan comments on The full documentary aired by BBC after getting banned in India. "India's Daughter": That's the thing with "evil". People try to make it into some kind of magical substance that only certain people have. It allows them to think "Oh, I would never do things like that. I'm not capable of it. I'm a good person. Only evil people do things like that, people who have evil inside them."



 That is not what evil is. The root of evil is becoming so locked into your own personal beliefs about reality that you start seeing it as reality. You start thinking you have what's Absolutely Right and Absolutely True, so you then feel justified in harming or punishing other beings for being "wrong".



Watch the movie Downfall. It's about Hitler's last days in a bunker in Berlin. There was such discomfort in Germany about that movie, for many understandable and valid reasons, but one of the most interesting reasons was because no one wanted to admit that Hitler was actually a human being.

The religious states of America, in 22 maps - The Washington Post

The religious states of America, in 22 maps - The Washington Post: Last year, for the first time ever, Protestants lost their majority status in an annual survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. Only 47 percent of America identifies as Protestant, with rates as high as 81 percent in Mississippi and as low as 10 percent in Utah.

While that shift toward being in the minority isn’t a surprise—other surveys have spotted it as far back as 2012—it does confirm the broad and ongoing cultural shifts underway in America.

Exclusive Extract From Jon Ronson Book 'So You've Been Publicly Shamed'

Exclusive Extract From Jon Ronson Book 'So You've Been Publicly Shamed': In this exclusive extract from his timely new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson investigates a peculiar case of online retribution, and asks how we arrived at a situation where the fake indignation particular to social media can have such devastating real-world consequences

The next generation of civic designers — Medium

The next generation of civic designers — Medium:

In the world I work in, it’s about 1998. Think about what that means.

In
the late 1990s, the Web was becoming a thing, but large organizations
had yet to embrace it much. The back-end systems were moving to
client-server from mainframes. And the Dot Com bubble was growing and
about to burst a year or so later. Technology was a thing that happened
in the basements of enterprises and was very mysterious.

Ok,
to say it’s 1998 is actually not entirely fair. It’s more like 2005.
Before ubiquitous computing. Before wifi everywhere. Before smart
phones.

And this 2005 feeling is actually almost every day in
the here and now. Every day that I work in civic design, it feels like
I’m entering a time warp. I step through a door at a county office or a
city hall or a federal agency, and the light changes. I start in Oz and
go back to Kansas.

Antonin Scalia's unintentional humor | MSNBC

Antonin Scalia's unintentional humor | MSNBC:

SCALIA: What about Congress? You really think Congress is
just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences
ensue? I mean, how often have we come out with a decision such as the ­­
you know, the bankruptcy court decision? Congress adjusts, enacts a
statute that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time. Why is
that not going to happen here?

 

VERRILLI: Well, this Congress?

It’s Time for “House of Cards” to Come Crashing Down - The New Yorker

It’s Time for “House of Cards” to Come Crashing Down - The New Yorker: Running for election in an honest-to-goodness campaign is less fun than rigging the game by moving pieces on both sides of the board. And the trappings of the position are clearly beginning to grate: it is harder to sneak a cigarette; it takes a full security detail to get out for a midnight jog; there’s no good place in the White House residence to put his old rowing machine. It’s lonely at the top, and grim, and, to be honest, a bit dull for us to be there with him. But, after all his fun, and ours, perhaps we’ve gotten what we deserve.

Netanyahu's Real Targets: President Obama, and the Israeli Swing Voter - The Atlantic

Netanyahu's Real Targets: President Obama, and the Israeli Swing Voter - The Atlantic: 1. The speech had two targets, and neither one was Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader. The first set of targets consisted of President Obama, his secretary of state, John Kerry, and Kerry's chief Iran negotiator, Wendy Sherman. Netanyahu called them all out, though not by name, for being hopelessly, haplessly naive in the face of evil. "I don’t believe that Iran’s radical regime will change for the better after this deal," Netanyahu said. "Would Iran be less aggressive when sanctions are removed and its economy is stronger? If Iran is gobbling up four countries right now while it’s under sanctions, how many more countries will Iran devour when sanctions are lifted? Would Iran fund less terrorism when it has mountains of cash with which to fund more terrorism?" President Obama has argued that a nuclear deal may help turn Iran into a more responsible international actor. Netanyahu thinks otherwise.

This guy's light bulb performed a DoS attack on his entire smart house -- Fusion

This guy's light bulb performed a DoS attack on his entire smart house -- Fusion: “I connected my laptop to the network and looked at the traffic and saw that one unit was sending packets continuously,” said Rojas. He realized that his light fixture had burned out, and was trying to tell the hub that it needed attention. To do so, it was sending continuous requests that had overloaded the network and caused it to freeze. “It was a classic denial of service attack,” says Rojas. The light was performing a DoS attack on the smart home to say, ‘Change me.'”

On those we would hate

WhatsThatNoize comments on Ayyub Khalaf, the Iraqi policeman who threw his arms around a suicide bomber to save others: Never dehumanize them. No matter what atrocious acts they commit, no matter their targets, no matter their goals. Their struggles and pains are just as real - and their terrifying decisions are things they will have to live and die with.

The moment you declare them unfit for humanity is the moment you lose yours. Wars and atrocities happen because of this very fault in our collective moralities. This inability to empathize.

American democracy is doomed - Vox

American democracy is doomed - Vox: In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.

fightingliger comments on Ayyub Khalaf, the Iraqi policeman who threw his arms around a suicide bomber to save others

fightingliger comments on Ayyub Khalaf, the Iraqi policeman who threw his arms around a suicide bomber to save others: It's an awful, beautiful look at humanity. One instant, two deaths, both made (somewhat) conscious decisions to die and one man is dying out of hate for others, the other is dying out of his love for them.

The Open Source Squad at the GSA | Developers | TechNewsWorld

The Open Source Squad at the GSA | Developers | TechNewsWorld: "I think there is a clear trend developing that shows an increasing openness in the federal government towards open source. That trend is not growing in a gradual way. I think it is a very steep incline up [to] being open to all sorts of open source solutions," said Godbout.

ZeroAccess comments on TIL that Reed Hasting started Netflix after receiving $40 in late fees when returning Apollo 13.

ZeroAccess comments on TIL that Reed Hasting started Netflix after receiving $40 in late fees when returning Apollo 13.: I worked at Blockbuster around 2006 and I could easily give you 10 things off the top of my head that would have helped them survive, but in the 2 years or so that I worked there I didn't see one noticeable change as they slowly died.

Why AWOL Soldiers Are Most at Risk in Canada -- NYMag

Why AWOL Soldiers Are Most at Risk in Canada -- NYMag: Walcott returned to North Carolina in 2006, but the nightmares and flashbacks followed him. He could be anywhere—at work, at home, even at the grocery store—when the memories flooded down. It began with the scent of death. “I smell blood, I smell burned flesh,” he said. “There’s a weird taste and smell to hospitals. It’s a whole building that smells like somebody just opened a fresh pack of Band-Aids. I can feel it on my tongue, the bandages, the gauze, the Vaseline.” After a flashback, Walcott would snap back to reality and discover that he was crumpled on the ground, gasping for air. “He gets scared when I go to touch him,” Vanessa said. “He jumps, and then he looks at me, then looks away and starts crying and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Tracing the Mysterious Path to Disappearance

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Tracing the Mysterious Path to Disappearance: Between them, the Independent Group members ran the available data through countless flight scenarios of differing speed and altitude, and in September, issued a report arguing MH370 most likely spiraled into the Indian Ocean 1,500 miles southwest of Perth. At the time, the ATSB had its priority search zone 600 miles north on the arc. On October 8, after refining its own analysis, the ATSB moved south, to almost the exact same spot.

This January, four ships were steaming methodically across 23,000 square miles of ocean, bouncing sonar waves off the bottom, which in some places is more than 14,000 feet beneath the surface. Eventually, maybe, one of those signals will hit a large metallic object—say, a Rolls-Royce Trent 892 turbo-fan engine—and the recovery of MH370 will begin. "We are very confident," Martin Dolan told me, "that if the aircraft is where we've calculated it to be, we'll find it."

The search is expected to be completed by May. And if they don't find it? "Then we'll go to the governments," Dolan said, "and say, 'We've got a problem. A very expensive problem.' "

Charges crumble after cell phone video uncovered

Charges crumble after cell phone video uncovered:

Supported by two of his prosecutors who were at the scene, Reed
formally charged Dendinger. Both prosecutors, Julie Knight and Leigh
Anne Wall, gave statements to the Washington Parish Sheriff's Office
implicating Dendinger.

With the bill of information, Dendinger's attorney Philip Kaplan said he got a bad feeling.

"It wasn't fun and games," Kaplan said. "They had a plan. The plan was to really go after him a put him away. That's scary."

The
case file that was handed to Reed and his office was bolstered by seven
witness statements given to Washington Parish deputies, including the
two from Reed's prosecutors.

CABINET // Wings of Desire

CABINET // Wings of Desire: Is it ironic or apt that a man who had dedicated much of his life to the future of wireless communication would fall for the ancient, living technology of a carrier pigeon? And is it ironic or apt that a man whose final years as an inventor were dedicated to a fearful direct-energy “teleforce” weapon (dubbed the “death ray” by the press) fell in love with the key symbol for peace?

Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education: When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims—back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t make my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.

Google’s artificial intelligence breakthrough may have a huge impact on self-driving cars and much more - The Washington Post

Google’s artificial intelligence breakthrough may have a huge impact on self-driving cars and much more - The Washington Post: Google researchers have created an algorithm that has a human-like ability to learn, marking a significant breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence. In a paper published in Nature this week, the researchers demonstrated that the algorithm could master many Atari video games better than humans, simply through playing the game and learning from experience.