'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Nobel Prize-winning researcher Katalin Karikó

https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/10/penn-katalin-kariko-university-relationship-mistreatment

Scales also said that Penn's approach of giving minimal funds to Karikó followed a similar model to most peer institutions. He said many research institutions provide some degree of startup funds, and the expectation is for researchers to acquire external grants otherwise.

All of those interviewed commended Karikó for winning the Nobel Prize alongside Weissman.

“I think it’s a testament to her fortitude,” Sobol said. “Now that you look back on the calendar, you see that she was 20 years ahead of where everyone is now.”

Scales said he hopes that Karikó's win will prompt changes to funding allocations in research.

“I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said.  

The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. 

I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/international-world/gaza-idf-israel-veterans.html

All our casualties and the suffering brought on Palestinians in Gaza accomplished nothing since our leaders refused to work on creating a political reality in which more violence would not be inevitable. While I believe in self-defense, fighting in Gaza taught me that if my government doesn’t change its approach from crushing Palestinian hope to committing to Palestinian independence, not only will this war kill an untold number of Israelis and Palestinians in addition to the thousands who already have died, but it also will not decisively end terror. A ground invasion is doomed to failure.

The attacks on Israel, and the response.

https://www.readtangle.com/israel-attacks-hamas-palestine-war/

And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza. 

Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this. 

Texas state representative James Talarico explains his take on a bill that would force schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom

https://v.redd.it/tj9xa36qektb1

Doesn't just discuss separation of church and state, also talks about being a Christian and praying in secret.

Ways of Knowing: Lessons on Agroecological Transitions from a Pothwari Farm

https://blog.castac.org/2023/07/ways-of-knowing-lessons-on-agroecological-transitions-from-a-pothwari-farm/

As a researcher and self-identifying ‘citizen planner,’ I was curious if new methods of agriculture could make the sector remunerative enough to counter the desire to convert agricultural land into real estate. Since I was familiar with the emerging significance of agroecology and regenerative agriculture  in climate adaptation, I was motivated to understand what it would take to help us transition towards practices closer to agroecology.

Thread on homeschooling

https://twitter.com/sugar_boogers/status/1711903253615505669

The Dark Side of Courtship

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/the-dark-side-of-courtship.html

In complementarianism, women have limited spiritual authority. Once Shannon married and became first the youth pastor’s wife and then the senior pastor’s wife, what little power she did have was over other women. “I was given a small group of women to lead in my new role,” she wrote. The first task she was given was to tell a new pastor’s wife that her new position meant she could not pursue her dream career in veterinary medicine. The idea made her sick. “But I did it,” she wrote. “This time I was the cruel one, forcing obedience and conformity on a person I was supposed to love and care for.”

I asked if she perceived a tendency to pit women against one another in the church. “I do think conservative Evangelicalism falls under this model,” she said, “because it’s a hierarchical community,” one in which she had to show people what they were supposed to be like. “I do think women are used,” she continued. “They’re a part of the reason why we got stuck in it. Because women themselves are being mistreated, but they don’t see it and then they pass it on because we believe it’s noble and we believe it’s good. And so we’re literally selling it to our own kind, and it’s hurting us all and we don’t see it.”

It’s complicated, she added: “When you are limited in your power and then you are given a place where you can be powerful, I think different kinds of people are going to respond differently. They might not see that they don’t have power in other ways. I certainly didn’t totally understand the full scope of my situation.”

 

How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/

A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

Emily Wilson on 5 crucial decisions she made in her ‘Iliad’ translation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/20/emily-wilson-iliad-translation-terms/

The challenges of producing a new metrical verse translation of a viscerally emotional, richly varied ancient epic poem go far beyond any individual word. An epic is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. An English word that seems promising in itself may not work for the register of the text as a whole, or may feel implausible in the mouth of a particular character, or may be metrically impossible with the rest of the line, or may awkwardly clash with other elements of a passage. The words must create a grand harmonic music together. And yet the whole experience of an epic is composed out of thousands of individual verbal choices. Here are just a few of the words I wrestled with in creating my translation of “The Iliad.”

Why people go the "word of mouth" route

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/16nji9k/the_man_who_raped_me_was_charged_with_the_highest/k1emkfv/

I am in the same boat. He now teaches swimming classes to kids after he raped me when I was 14 (he was ~40).

Police said there was not enough proof and it would ruin his life. I also got a threat of him sueing me for putting dirt on his name (idk the english word).

I gave up because they made it very clear that I had no chance. I go the word of mouth route now. Hard to prove the source for that.

MEMORIAL DAY

 https://michaelbarnicle.substack.com/p/memorial-day

Three weeks later my grandmother, Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, sat on the stoop of our house accompanied by her parish priest and a Western Union employee. She held a telegram from the War Department notifying her that Lt. Gerald J. Barnicle was missing in action. In late July she received another telegram notifying her that her youngest son had been killed in action.

Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, born and raised in Cork, Ireland, emigrated to the United States in 1916. She died in 1961 at 84. She witnessed two world wars, suffered through a depression, lost twin daughters aged one, her husband in 1936, her oldest son Francis in 1941, went to Mass every day of her life and always, till the day she died, held out the futile hope - a dream really - that Gerald would return home some day.

For her, every day was Memorial Day because the root of the word is memory. Like so many other parents touched with the grief, the shock, the tears and toll of burying a child she never got over his loss and never lived another day without thinking about her brave boy.

Email Exchange Between Steve Jobs and an Apple Customer

https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/

From: [ ____ ]

To: Steve Jobs

Subject: ipod malfunctioning

Date: July 27, 2005, 11:16 p.m.

Hi, my name is [ ____ ], and my father has an ipod. recently (1-2 days ago), he was charging his ipod and then, the next morning, when he checked it, it wouldn’t turn on, he checked the hold button but it wasn’t it, so, he realized that the ipod had just “died”.

We live in venezuela and want to know where can we fix the ipod. I think its still on warranty, because, we bought it around 11 months ago, so we would like to know what to do, if theres any store autorized by apple here in Caracas-Venezuela, so we can take the ipod and check it to see whats wrong and if you guys can fix it. well thanks for the help.

[ ____ ]

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

From: Steve Jobs

To: [ ____ ]

Subject: Re: ipod malfunctioning

Date: July 28, 2005, 7:19 a.m.

Please “reset” the ipod by holding down the center button and the Menu button at the same time for at least 5 seconds. This should work.

Steve

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user

This isn’t just dating apps. Nearly all popular consumer software has been trending towards minimal user agency, infinitely scrolling feeds, and garbage content. Even that crown jewel of the Internet, Google Search itself, has decayed to the point of being unusable for complicated queries. Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time. Like old Victorian mansions in San Francisco they stand, shielded by a quirk of fate from the winds of capital, reminders of a more humane age.

How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?

In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User.

The Woman on the Line

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html

Every day, the calls come. She can tell quickly who might die.

My Brief Career as a Paid Pro-Paxton Propagandist

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/paid-paxton-influencers-impeachment/

I asked Woolley a question that had been bothering me. Why was I paid? I assumed it was a computer churning out checks without examining the content of posts, since my tweets weren’t offering an effusively pro-Paxton message. Did I dupe Influenceable? Not at all, Woolley replied. My tweets—and others—created engagement around the Paxton impeachment trial, in turn teaching the social media site algorithm that this was an issue users were interested in. In turn, my posts increased the likelihood that Twitter (or X, as it’s now known) would promote Paxton-related tweets. That would allow other paid posts that more effusively proclaimed Paxton’s innocence to spread further and wider. “The secret sauce on social media is getting things to go viral,” Woolley said. “Otherwise you’re just speaking into the ether. And so you’re contributing to allowing posts to not just go into the ether.”

Ezra Klein on the right of a certain form of conservatism

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-pippa-norris.html?showTranscript=1

....when I look at the time frame we’re talking about, this post 2010 period, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is the iPhone, the rise of social media, increased competitiveness in the broader media. And I think this is important because there is the question of the ways the culture and society are changing, but none of us have access to the entire society or culture, and most people aren’t sitting around reading polls about other people’s opinions about cultural issues.

So there’s this question of how do you end up feeling, like what leads somebody in a rural area of Wisconsin to feel like everything is different now. And it seems to me, in a lot of places, all around the world, at the same time, you have this rise in algorithmic media in highly engagement oriented media that is constantly confronting people with, usually, stories charged around identity, in many cases, at least, that really give, I think, often an outsized view of how quickly society is changing, but nevertheless are a very, very big part of a very rapid set of changing views, a sense of what you can and can’t say, because people are now yelling at you in the comments section of your own Facebook posts.

Something I felt was a little bit under theorized in the book is this dimension of the changes in media. 2010 is right around then with the rise of smartphones, is a signal event. And in my experience of it, it’s a signal event that tends to lead to people being confronted a lot more with whatever they fear most about the country they live in. And so the fact that would lead to a rise in these populist authoritarian figures seems pretty logical to me.

How a Sexual Assault in a School Bathroom Became a Political Weapon

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/magazine/loudoun-county-bathroom-sexual-assault.html

The particulars of Smith’s daughter’s case — an attacker in a skirt, a girls’ bathroom — posed an obvious threat to the new policy. And so, critics charged, school officials buried it, and because they buried it, more harm was done. When it all came to light months later, this theory of the case would galvanize a local conservative parents’-rights movement, help swing a governor’s race and rattle the politics of gender in America far beyond Virginia.

This was one version of the story of Loudoun County. But as prosecutors took up the matter over the next two years, a different story began to take shape — one that is told here based on court records and testimony, as well as months of interviews with participants in the events at the heart of the scandal, in some cases discussing them on the record for the first time, and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public-records requests. This evidence presents a much more complicated picture of what happened, in Loudoun County and beyond, in a period of escalating culture wars that have consumed the same communities and institutions that the combatants insist they want to save.

A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html

Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

Why Is Narendra Modi So Popular? Tune In to Find Out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/world/asia/india-modi-radio-mann-ki-baat.html

In his decade as prime minister, Mr. Modi has done away with traditional methods of information-sharing for the country’s top elected official. He has never held a full-fledged news conference; he dominates Parliament so thoroughly, with a large majority and a quick trigger to dismiss legislative sessions, that he speaks only when he wants.

Mr. Modi sets the agenda not just by choosing what to elevate — but equally by deciding what to keep a distance from, and what to let his lieutenants and digital army do for him.

He has stayed mostly mum, on the radio and elsewhere, as his right-wing supporters have increasingly turned to vigilante violence in enforcing their idea of Hindu supremacy, human rights organizations say. Mosques and churches have been attacked, interfaith couples have been dragged out of trains, and mobs have lynched Muslim men accused of transporting the meat of cows, which many Hindus see as holy.

The result is an environment of persistent combustibility in a nation with more than 200 million people who belong to religious minorities — many feeling alienated, humiliated or directionless.