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.