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It’s common knowledge that Henry VIII had six wives. But the cataclysmic love triangle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn gets all the airtime, while wives three to six are an afterthought.
In director Alexander Korda’s rollicking film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Katherine Parr (wife six) was reduced to a throwaway joke in the film’s last moments. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s upcoming film Firebrand is the first to bring Parr to centre stage – and not before time.
Right on cue, new evidence has come to light giving an intriguing glimpse into Parr’s relationship with her capricious husband. Namely, the discovery of Henry’s notes in a book authored by his wife.
Katherine Parr was unlike her five predecessors. Aged 30 and already twice widowed in 1543, the king made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, forcing her to break off another planned marriage. The increasingly disabled Henry had finally stopped pursuing nubile broodmares and sought out a companion instead.
Parr deftly navigated the tangled politics of the royal family, brokering a reconciliation between the king and the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he had declared to be bastards. She may even have helped in restoring them to the line of succession.
Henry certainly came to trust her judgment. When he set off for his final, futile war in France in 1544, he made her regent in his absence. Part of the appeal, it seems, was her bookish piety. Parr was the first English queen to publish a book and the first English woman to publish under her own name.
Her three books were pious exercises, beginning with a safe collection of translated texts titled Psalmes or Prayers (1544) and becoming more daring thereafter. The Lamentation of a Sinner (1547) was written during Henry’s husband’s lifetime, but its theology was too assertively Protestant to be published until he was safely dead.
The earlier books, though, seem to have delighted the king. He inscribed the queen’s own copy of Psalmes or Prayers: “Remember this writer / when you do pray / For he is yours”. He had always been theatrically pious and in his last years – brooding, in pain, nurturing his many humiliations – he turned to religion with melancholy intensity.
We know what Henry thought religion should mean to his subjects: a tough, moralistic faith without much room for forgiveness, whose keynote was obedience to himself. But what about his personal faith?
Enter a new discovery by Canadian literary scholar Micheline White.
Queen Katherine ordered a few luxury copies of Psalmes or Prayers printed on vellum, with delicate hand colouring. One of these, now in Buckinghamshire’s Wormsley Library is festooned with marginal markings and “manicules” – little doodled hands with fingers pointing to a passage some reader wanted to emphasise.
White has established, by meticulously comparing these distinctive manicules with others whose provenance we know, that this attentive reader was none other than Henry VIII.
It’s no surprise Henry should have taken comfort in the Biblical psalms. They were supposedly the work of a pious but lecherous king, David, with whom he strongly identified.
The passages Henry marked are a telling glimpse of the extent – and the limits – of his self awareness. His illness and other troubles are much on his mind: he marks prayers to “take away thy plagues … turn away thine anger”.
He is also drawn to prayers lamenting sin and asking God for wisdom. “Give me a new heart, and a right spirit, and take from me all wicked and sinful desires.”
The sentiments indicate a man who was serious both about his kingly responsibilities and personal spiritual predicament. Unlike many other murderous narcissists, Henry VIII did know he was a sinner who needed forgiveness. But his confidence “that my sins may be purged” suggests tension between the eagerness with which he sought grace and his refusal to countenance mercy – royal or divine – for his subjects.
Queen Katherine, as the popular rhyme tells us, “survived” her marriage, but it was a close run thing.
In 1546, the last summer of Henry VIII’s life, she was suspected – on good grounds – of nurturing a nest of religious radicals at court. Henry allowed himself to be persuaded that all her pious talk was actually an attempt to allure him into heresy.
According to a late but well-informed account by the martyrologist John Foxe, she got wind of the danger and immediately threw herself on his mercy. Katherine protested that she, a “poor woman so much inferior in all respects of nature unto you”, had simply been seeking his religious guidance.
“Not so, by Saint Mary,” Henry replied. “You are become a Doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed, or directed by us.”
No, she protested: she had only sought to distract him with talk during “this painful time of your infirmity” and had in the process learned a great deal from his wisdom. With someone else, that might have been laying it on too thick, but she knew her man.
“And is it even so, sweetheart?” Henry replied. “Then perfect friends we are now again.” The arrest warrant was cancelled.
Months later, the king was dead. Unfortunately, Queen Katherine married the man she’d kept waiting with almost indecent haste – only to be cold shouldered when she fell pregnant and left to die in childbirth. History is thin on happy endings.
Alec Ryrie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The recent coronation of King Charles III was a high-profile example of when facial recognition technology has been used to monitor a crowd, but there are plenty of others. The technology is used by law enforcement all over the UK and other countries.
It’s now common in US airports. It’s being used to monitor refugees and identify dead bodies in Ukraine. Even Beyoncé fans have been subjected to it.
And there’s more to come. The UK government is reportedly planning to add facial recognition to the police’s body-worn devices, drones and numberplate cameras. It may soon be very difficult to leave your house without having your face scanned.
There are serious questions about whether the benefits of this technology outweigh such concerns. But steps could be taken to address the issues people are worried about.
Facial recognition can be used by police to scan many faces in a crowd and compare them with a “watch list” of known criminals. This “live facial recognition” is used with the aim of reducing crime. It can also be used retroactively on recorded CCTV footage.
In the UK, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 provides a legal basis for the use of surveillance camera systems in a public place.
And according to the government’s surveillance camera code of practice, it’s justifiable to use facial recognition systems in decisions that could negatively affect people, such as whether to arrest them, so long as there is a human in the loop to supervise and make decisions.
So the use of facial recognition systems, or those for other types of biometric information, cannot be used for autonomous decision making, such as automatically tracking a suspect across multiple camera feeds.
But why should this be of concern to law-abiding citizens? Civil liberties groups argue facial recognition use in public places affects our privacy and freedom, particularly in terms of its ability to track individuals at mass gatherings and to potentially engage in racial profiling.
Security cameras have long captured us as we went about our daily lives. However, authorities easily being able to put a name to a face in the video footage is something we’re not so used to.
The technology creates a situation where many more people could get caught in the sights of the authorities than before. A person’s casual indiscretions or errors of judgement can now be easily tracked and linked to a name and address.
Those with a criminal record could be targeted in public based on their past, regardless of whether they intend to carry out any illegal activity. The technology could provide new opportunities for racial profiling, where authorities track or suspect people based on their background, rather than because of specific information about them.
Facial recognition could also be used against people with no criminal past or plans to commit a crime but who the police simply want to stop, such as protesters. The Metropolitan Police may have announced that facial recognition would not be used to target activists at the coronation, but they also provoked outrage for arresting anti-monarchy demonstrators who were later released without charge.
It’s also important to recognise facial recognition technology still suffers from inaccuracies, which can result in false positive matches where an innocent person is mistaken for a known criminal.
With facial recognition posing such perceived threats, it could have a chilling effect on free speech and demonstrations
However, there are ways that the technology could be used more safely. Law enforcement teams could perform two preliminary steps – activity recognition or event detection – before they resort to face recognition. This approach can help minimise the potential for privacy violations and false positive matches.
Activity recognition refers to the process of identifying and categorising human activities or actions based on CCTV or other sensors. It aims to understand and recognise the activities of individuals or groups, which can include standard activities such as running, sitting or eating.
On the other hand, event detection focuses on identifying specific events or occurrences of interest within a given context. Events can range from simple events like a car passing by or a person entering a room to more complex events like accidents, fights, or more unusual behaviour. Event detection algorithms typically analyse CCTV and other sensors to detect and locate events.
Hence, activity recognition or event detection should be the first step before applying facial recognition to a surveillance camera feed.
Ensuring the data from cameras remains anonymous can also enable police to study the activities of people in the crowd while preserving their privacy. Conducting regular audits and reviews can ensure that the collected data is handled responsibly and in compliance with UK data privacy regulations.
This can also help to address some of the concerns related to transparency and accuracy. By using activity recognition or event detection as a first step, it may be possible to give people more clarity – through signage, for example – about what exactly is going on during police surveillance in a public place.
It is the responsibility of the state to ensure the privacy and security of its citizens in order to foster a healthy society. But if facial recognition is implemented in a way that a significant proportion of citizens feel infringes their rights, it could create a culture of suspicion and a society where few people feel safe expressing themselves publicly.
Nadia Kanwal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published by Quanta.
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of tropical forest on the planet. They began counting every tree that had a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks, and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the trees, examined saplings, and recorded it all in sprawling spreadsheets.
As they looked at the data accumulating year after year, they began to notice something odd. With some 300 species, the tree diversity on the tiny 15-square-kilometer island was staggering. But the distribution of trees among those species was also heavily lopsided, with most of the trees belonging to only a few species.
Since those early studies, that overstuffed, highly uneven pattern has been seen repeatedly in ecosystems around the world, particularly in rainforests. The ecologist Stephen Hubbell of UCLA, who was part of the team behind the Barro Colorado surveys, estimates that less than 2 percent of the tree species in the Amazon account for half of all the individual trees, meaning that 98 percent of the species are rare.
Such high biodiversity flies in the face of predictions made by a leading theory of ecology, which says that in a stable ecosystem, every niche or role should be occupied by one species. Niche theory suggests that there are not enough niches to enable all the species the ecologists saw to stably exist. Competition over niches between similar species should have sent the rarities into extinction (or led them to adapt to slightly different niches).
A new ecological modeling paper in Nature by James O’Dwyer and Kenneth Jops of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains at least part of this discrepancy. They found that species that should seemingly be head-to-head competitors can share an ecosystem if details of their life histories—such as how long they live and how many offspring they have—line up in the right way. O’Dwyer and Jops’ work also helps explain why one of the most successful ways to model ecologies often arrives at accurate results, even though it glosses over almost all we know about how organisms function.
Back in 2001, the paradoxically high biodiversity on Barro Colorado Island inspired Hubbell to propose the groundbreaking neutral theory of ecology. Traditional ecology theory stressed the competition for niches between species. But Hubbell pointed out that species might not really matter in that equation because, in effect, individuals compete for resources with members of their own species too. He suggested that patterns of diversity in ecosystems might largely be the products of random processes.
[Read: A basic premise of animal conservation looks shakier than ever]
For a theory that dealt with biodiversity, Hubbell’s neutral theory was sparse. It ignored variations in life spans, nutritional quirks, and other details that distinguish one species from another. In models based on the theory, every individual in a theoretical ecosystem is identical. Once the clock starts, the ecosystem evolves stochastically, with individuals outcompeting and replacing one another at random. The theory was completely at odds with species-based approaches to ecology, and it provoked impassioned debate among ecologists because it seemed so counterintuitive.
Yet surprisingly, as the random walks in the neutral models progressed, they reproduced key features of what Hubbell and his colleagues saw in their data from Barro Colorado Island and what others have seen elsewhere. In this modeling that almost perversely acknowledges no differences, there are flashes of the real world.
That tension between the models and reality has long interested O’Dwyer. Why did neutral theory seem to work so well? Was there a way to bring in information about how species function to get results that might look still more realistic?
One of the things that make neutral models appealing, O’Dwyer told me, is that there really are deep universalities among many living things. While animal species are not identical, they are remarkably similar at the level of, say, the circulatory system. According to a principle called Kleiber’s law, for example, the metabolic rate of an animal generally increases with its size, scaling as a power law—the same power law, no matter the species. (Several theories about why Kleiber’s law is true have been offered, but the answer is still debated.)
Given those signs of underlying order, O’Dwyer wondered whether some details of how organisms live matter more than others in determining how successfully species will compete and survive over evolutionary time. Take metabolism again: If an ecosystem can be seen as an expression of its inhabitants’ metabolisms, then the organisms’ sizes are special, significant numbers. The size of an individual may be more useful in modeling its fate over time than any number of other details about its diet or species identity.
O’Dwyer wondered whether one of those crucial, privileged factors might be captured by life history, a concept that combines species statistics such as average number of offspring, time until sexual maturity, and life span. Imagine a plot of 50 individual plants. Each has its own life span, its own pattern of reproduction. After three months, one plant might produce 100 seeds, while another, similar one produces 88. Maybe 80 percent of those seeds will germinate, producing the next generation, which will go through its own version of this cycle. Even within a species, individual plants’ numbers will vary, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, a phenomenon called demographic noise. If this variation is random, in the manner of Hubbell’s neutral theory, what patterns will emerge over successive generations?
O’Dwyer knew he had found someone who could help him explore that question when Jops joined his lab as a graduate student. Jops had previously studied whether models using life histories could predict a vulnerable plant species' survival. Together, they started to hammer out the math that would describe what happens when life history meets competition.
In Jops and O’Dwyer’s model, as in neutral models, stochasticity—the influence of random factors on deterministic interactions among the species—is important. The life histories of species, however, can amplify or reduce the effects of that randomness. “Life history is a kind of lens through which demographic noise works,” O’Dwyer said.
When the researchers allowed their model to progress through time, putting each simulated individual through its paces, they found that certain species could persist alongside each other for long periods even though they were competing for the same resources. Looking deeper into the numbers for an explanation, Jops and O’Dwyer found that a complex measurement called effective population size seemed useful for describing a kind of complementarity that could exist among species. It encapsulated the fact that a species could have high mortality at one point in its life cycle, then low mortality at another, while a complementary species might have low mortality at the first point and high mortality at the second. The more similar this measurement was for two species, the more likely it was that the pair could live alongside each other despite competing for space and nutrition.
[Read: One of evolution’s biggest moments was re-created in a year]
“They experience demographic noise at the same amplitude,” O’Dwyer said. “That’s the key for them to live together a long time.”
The researchers wondered if similar patterns prevailed in the real world. They drew on the COMPADRE database, which houses details about hundreds of plant, fungal, and bacterial species collected from a variety of studies and sources, and they zeroed in on perennial plants that all lived together in the same research plots. They discovered that, as their model had predicted, the plant species that lived together had closely matching life histories: Pairs of species living in the same ecosystem tend to be more complementary than randomly drawn pairs.
The findings suggest ways in which species that are in competition could work well alongside each other without invoking distinct niches, says Annette Ostling, a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin: “The coolest part is that they are highlighting that these ideas … can extend to species that are pretty different but complementary.”
To William Kunin, a professor of ecology at the University of Leeds in England, the paper suggests one reason the natural world, for all its complexity, can resemble a neutral model: Ecological processes may have a way of canceling each other out, so that what seems like endless variety can have a simple outcome he described as “emergent neutrality.” Hubbell, for his part, appreciates the expansion of his initial work. “It offers some thoughts on how to generalize neutral models, to tweak them to put in a bit of species differences, expanding and contracting to see what happens to diversity in a local community,” he says.
This is just one bite out of the problem of understanding how biodiversity arises and why it persists, however. “In ecology, we struggle with the relationship between pattern and process. Many different processes can produce the same pattern,” Ostling says. O’Dwyer hopes that in the coming years, more data about the real world can help researchers discern whether effective population size is consistently able to explain coexistence.
Kunin hopes that the paper will inspire others to keep working with ideas from neutral theory. In a field where the unique qualities of individuals, rather than their commonalities, have long held sway, neutral theory has forced ecologists to be creative. “It’s kicked us out of our mental ruts and made us think about which things really matter,” he says.
Hubbell, who unleashed neutral theory on ecology so many years ago, wonders whether truly immense data sets about real forests could yield the kind of detail needed to make the relationship between life history and biodiversity clearer. “This is the kind of building on neutral theory that I was hoping would happen,” he says of the new paper. “But it’s only a baby step toward really understanding diversity.”
Want to buy a new Mac and don’t want to spend a fortune? Buying a new Mac is an expensive business, but there is a way to get a new Mac for less money.
We don’t mean buy a second-hand Mac from someone on eBay. We mean you can get a brand-new Mac directly from Apple for less money. Read Should I buy a secondhand Mac?
Want to know how? Shop at Apple’s Certified Refurbished Store. On the Refurbished Store you can find Macs from the past few years all with money off Apple’s usual price. See just how much you can save here: How much can you save at Apple’s Refurbished Store.
The price isn’t the only reason to shop at Apple’s Certified Refurbished Store though. Here we’ll tell you all the reasons why you should buy a refurbished Mac.
Apple’s not the only place that sells refurbished Macs. We discuss the Best place to buy a refurbished MacBook or Mac in a separate article and also make some recommendations below.
You might be thinking that buying from Apple’s Refurbished Store is a bit like buying secondhand, assuming that the Mac had a previous owner and for one reason or another they returned their Mac to Apple. Your concern might be that this means there is something wrong with the Mac, but as you will see from the point below, Apple will have identified and fixed any faults.
The Mac you are buying probably hasn’t come straight from the factory, but its interlude with a prior customer will have been brief. The previous owner may have exercised their consumer rights and returned it unused within 14 days (which is the extent of Apple’s refund and exchange policy). Or the Mac might have been used as a demonstration model, but this doesn’t mean that it will have been used by lots of people and it is unlikely to have undergone any intensive processing.
You can save money on the current generation of Macs if you shop in the Refurbished Store.
For example, in July 2023 we found a refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 chip for $929, which is a saving of $170, and less than the M1 MacBook Air still sells for.
It usually takes a few months before Apple starts selling the current generation of Macs on the Refurbished Store, but Apple started selling refurbished M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pro and M2 Mac mini in the refurbished store in May 2023, about four months after they initially went on sale in January 2023.
Apple
Buying from the Refurbished Store is a great way to get a more powerful Mac than the current entry-level for less money.
If you shop for your Mac in your local Apple Store, at an Apple Authorized Reseller, or in Apple’s online store, you can only buy the newest version of a particular Mac. Turn instead to the Refurbished Store and you will find Macs from the past few years at a lower price than their successors.
The really enticing thing is that these older Macs often aren’t a lot different from the current models. Sure, the newer Mac might have the next-generation processor, but if you had the choice of an M2 or an M1 Pro then the M1 Pro would still be a more powerful option. See our Mac processor comparison.
For example, we took a look at the Apple Refurbished Store in July 2023 and found a refurbished 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip (14-core GPU, 512GB SSD, and 16GB Unified Memory) for $1,539. This is a saving of $360 on the $1,899 price it had when it was new. But the deal is even better when you consider that a brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 chip, configured to have the same 512GB SSD and 16GB memory, would cost $1,699 and would be a less powerful Mac with a 10-core GPU.
Typically you can see the following savings at Apple’s Refurbished Store for the current generation and older generation Macs:
There are also some big savings to be had on Intel-powered iMacs.
You might be thinking that this is all very well, but these are Macs that are likely to have been returned to Apple due to a fault with them. Would it be unwise to buy a Mac that has already proven to be faulty?
The great news here is that you can be sure that any fault will have been rectified by Apple. The company says that all refurbished Macs include “full functional testing, genuine Apple part replacements (if necessary),” as well as “a thorough cleaning”.
The Mac you are buying will have had more checks than any Mac coming straight from a factory so you can be sure that any problems will have been caught.
Apple
Even better, you get a one-year warranty, so if anything does go wrong getting it fixed will be easy and free.
You also get complimentary technical support, which means you will be able to phone Apple up if you have any problems with setup, installation of software, and any connection problems.
You can also extend the one-year warranty up to three years if you buy AppleCare protection when you purchase your refurbished Mac.
If you buy secondhand from another source you will only have any remaining warranty left over–and since the model you are buying is likely to be more than a year old this protection will have expired.
Because you are buying the Mac from Apple directly it comes with other benefits. For example, not only will there be no shipping costs associated with your new Mac (Apple will dispatch it to you for free).
You will also be protected by Apple’s 14-day returns policy, which means that if you change your mind you can send it back, no questions asked, within two weeks.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Another benefit is that if the Mac is in stock at your local Apple Store you could pick it up today. And if you would prefer that it was delivered to you, it could arrive as soon as tomorrow.
If you don’t have the money right now you can still get your new Mac. Apple offers financing options. In the U.S. Apple offers its own Apple Card which brings the advantage of 3% Daily Cash Back when you buy from Apple.
The Apple Card isn’t available in the U.K., but Barclays and PayPal Credit provides finance if you want to buy a new Mac. You just need to apply for financing when you check out.
You can also trade in an old product to get credit toward your new purchase. You could get up to $775/£615 credit for trading in a MacBook Pro, for example.
Dealing with Apple is a real benefit. You don’t need to deal with a previous owner who might not be completely honest about problems with the machine, or might be difficult if later on you experience problems.
Dealing with Apple directly should give you peace of mind that you are buying exactly what is advertised and that if there are any issues they will be dealt with professionally.
Apple isn’t the only place you can buy a refurbished Mac. There are a number of Apple Resellers and Refurbishment specialists who will also sell you a secondhand Mac that has been thoroughly checked over.
We’d advise that you are a little more cautious if it isn’t Apple selling the refurbished Mac, and we recommend that you don’t buy a very old Mac, even if it has been refurbished, but this can be a good way to get a reasonably new Mac for less.
These refurbished stores will have thoroughly checked the Mac so you can be confident it will work!
In the U.S.:
In the U.K.:
If you want to know more about buying a refurbished Mac, read this: Where to buy a Refurbished Mac.
We also have Best Place to buy a Mac and When is the best time to buy a Mac.
For advice about which Mac to buy read out Best Mac Buying Guide
And if you want a deal on a new Mac, read: Best MacBook Pro deals or Best iMac deals
Today we’re offering a brief history lesson (and a brief themed diversion). But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
With the Fourth of July comes all the complexities of collective observance—patriotism, fireworks, picnics, apathy, resistance. The holiday has always been one of dualities. It has also always been political.
After 1776, the day was celebrated throughout the Revolutionary War. “The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and, at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression,” the historian David Waldstreicher wrote in 2019—the year then-President Trump ordered a military parade, complete with tanks, to observe the day.
After the Civil War, Black Americans in the South transformed the date into a celebration of emancipation, according to the historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, complete with martial displays, dedicated performances, and food and drink. “The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out,” they explained in 2018.
In the decades after the Civil War, the Fourth gradually lost its civic character and was marked in many cases by drunken, raucous affairs, rife with gunfire, injury, illness, and death, our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum wrote in 2011. The public-health solution in New England? Massive public spectacles—bonfires—in lieu of smaller gatherings. Today, that tradition lives on in the form of public fireworks displays.
Whether you’re waiting for fireworks, working, traveling, or resting at home today, join us for another time-honored tradition: a game of trivia. Below are five clues drawn from The Atlantic’s archives.
“A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other,” this president observed in his first inaugural address, “but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”
Assessing this film in 1996, Roger Ebert called it “in the tradition of silly summer fun, and on that level I kind of liked it.” Our staff writer Megan Garber wrote that it was, “in the era before cowboy diplomacy and the isolationist impulses that sprang from it, a comically blithe rendering of American exceptionalism.” (Bonus points if you can name the director.)
The first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence contains a crucial typo that has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the document intended, the political theorist and scholar Danielle Allen has argued. This typo comes midway in the famous sentence that begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Can you complete it?
This country gained independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, after almost half a century of American colonial rule. “In 1776, the United States sought to escape the rule of one empire. On its way out the door, its representatives proclaimed that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. After 1898, the United States acquired an empire of its own. And between that latter outcome and the former words gaped an uncomfortable contradiction,” David Frum wrote in 2021. “That contradiction was no less apparent a century ago than it is today.”
This American author and abolitionist is perhaps best known for writing the anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (a five-stanza poem that The Atlantic paid $5 to publish in February 1862), but she was also a noted pacifist and advocate for women’s rights. Her work for The Atlantic shows “the point of view of a woman before modern feminism—the point of view of someone who wants to pitch in but must do so from the confines of the home,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote. Her poem “The Flag,” for instance, goes:
My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.
Related:
In 1902, Bliss Perry contemplated the beginnings of American imperialism and the waning of patriotic spirit.
Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.
By Adam Frank
The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.
That’s the takeaway from [the recent] remarkable announcement that scientists have detected a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. If the result bears up as more data are gathered, it’s a discovery that promises to open new windows on everything from the evolution of galaxies to the origin of the universe.
Scientists had been awaiting such a discovery for decades. More than 100 years ago, Einstein introduced his radical general theory of relativity. For Einstein, space and time were a single entity, “space-time,” comprising a flexible fabric that could be stretched and compressed, bent and warped. In general relativity, matter makes space-time bend, and space-time, in turn, guides how unconstrained matter will move. Because space-time is flexible, you can make it wave. Just like snapping a bedsheet, if you move enough matter around fast enough, a wave of distorted space-time will ripple outward into the universe.
Read. Written on Water, a collection of essays first published in 1944 by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang, whose observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history.
And if you want to pick up something new but only have short stretches of time, Morgan Ome recommends five essay and short-story collections that are easy to read at your own pace.
Watch. Crash Course in Romance, on Netflix, a drama series featuring an all-star cast of Korean actors that aptly depicts the pressures students face in hypercompetitive academic environments.
Play. Our new print crossword puzzle puts a fresh narrative spin on a classic, as our crossword-puzzles editor Caleb Madison explains. The deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes.
Three American presidents notably died on Independence Day—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—and one was born on this day. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who throughout his life wrote frequently for The Atlantic, shares this birthday too. Hawthorne even did a fair bit of reporting: In this 1862 essay, for instance, he traveled from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to interview civil and military leaders during the Civil War.
— Shan
As Twitter continues to figuratively kneecap itself by limiting tweet views, Meta is hustling to bring its Twitter rival to reality. A listing for an app called Threads was spotted on the iOS App Store with an estimated release date of July 6th. In May, a report said the microblogging service was nearing completion and could be out as soon as the end of June. While an end-of-June launch didn't quite happen, the app could arrive when Twitter users are more willing (and maybe even eager) to finally jump ship.
Twitter boss Elon Musk announced at the weekend that verified accounts — which translates to paying users — can read 6,000 posts daily, while non-paying users can only read 600. He said the website is adopting the measure to "address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation."
From both the app listing and rumors, we’re expecting Threads will migrate your followers and circles from your existing Instagram handle, ensuring you should have an active timeline right from the outset. That is, if you’re an Instagram user.
– Mat Smith
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Since smartphones started eating casual photography’s lunch, camera makers have focused on devices designed for very specific uses. Action cams provide sharp, fluid video. Compact cameras target both tourists and vloggers. And DSLRs are available at some of the best prices we’ve seen. Then there are mirrorless cameras, which continue to improve their autofocus and video. And that’s where some guidance helps. Whether you’re a creator looking for just the right vlogging camera, an aspiring wildlife photographer or a sports enthusiast, we’ll help you find the perfect camera to match your budget and needs.
Remember the early days of the AI hype train, when everyone spent their time making stupid images using text prompts? If you want to recapture the nostalgic haze of, uh, late 2022, Picsart has you covered. The popular image editor just launched an AI-powered animated GIF generator, calling the tool its “most unhinged” platform yet. Type a bunch of nonsense into the chat box, wait a minute or so and marvel at your “chaotic and eccentric” creation. The platform’s integrated into the regular Picsart app and is available for iOS, Android devices and on the web.
If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues since it started limiting the daily number of posts users could view. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, TweetDeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of TweetDeck the main version. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck."
There really is an HBO show on Netflix. All five seasons of Issa Rae's highly acclaimed comedy-drama series Insecure are now streaming on Netflix in the US. Even more HBO shows are on the way, too. Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under and Ballers are also coming to Netflix as part of the deal, the company told Deadline. Meanwhile, Netflix users outside the US can stream True Blood on the service.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-metas-instagram-linked-twitter-rival-could-arrive-this-week-111508536.html?src=rss
Threads
Screenshots of the iPhone screen showing a new app called Threads by Meta.
Enlarge / Artist's conception of the early Solar System, which was at risk of a nearby supernova. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Stars are thought to form within enormous filaments of molecular gas. Regions where one or more of these filaments meet, known as hubs, are where massive stars form.
These massive stars, located nearby, would have put the early Solar System at risk of a powerful supernova. This risk is more than just hypothetical; a research team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, led by astrophysicist Doris Arzoumanian, looked at isotopes found in ancient meteorites, finding possible evidence of a massive star’s turbulent death.
So why did the Solar System survive? The gas within the filament seems to be able to protect it from the supernova and its onslaught of radioactive isotopes. “The host filament can shield the young Solar System from stellar feedback, both during the formation and evolution of stars (stellar outflow, wind, and radiation) and at the end of their lives (supernovae),” Arzoumanian and her team said in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Nostalgia is usually an unproductive emotion. Our memories can deceive us, especially as we get older. But every so often, nostalgia can remind us of something important. As we celebrate another Fourth of July, I find myself wistful about the patriotism that was once common in America—and keenly aware of how much I miss it.
This realization struck me unexpectedly as I was driving to the beach near my home. I am a New Englander to my bones. I was born and raised near the Berkshires, and educated in Boston. I have lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now I have settled in Rhode Island, on the shores of the Atlantic. Despite a career that took me to New York and Washington, D.C., I am, I admit, a living stereotype of regional loyalty—and, perhaps, of more than a little provincialism.
I was awash in thoughts of lobster rolls and salt water as I neared the dunes. And then that damn tearjerker of a John Denver song about West Virginia came on my car radio.
The song isn’t even really about the Mountain State; it was inspired by locales in Maryland and Massachusetts. But I have been to West Virginia, and I know that it is a beautiful place. I have never wanted to live anywhere but New England, yet every time I hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” I understand, even if only for a few minutes, why no one would ever want to live anywhere but West Virginia, too
That’s when I experienced the jolt of a feeling we used to think of as patriotism: the joyful love of country. Patriotism, unlike its ugly half brother, nationalism, is rooted in optimism and confidence; nationalism is a sour inferiority complex, a sullen attachment to blood-and-soil fantasies that is always looking abroad with insecurity and even hatred. Instead, I was taking in the New England shoreline but seeing in my mind the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt moved with wonder—and gratitude—for the miracle that is the United States.
[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]
How I miss that feeling. Because usually when I think of West Virginia these days, my first thought tends to be: red state. I now see many voters there, and in other states, as my civic opponents. I know that many of them likely hear “Boston” and they, too, think of a place filled with their blue-state enemies. I feel that I’m at a great distance from so many of my fellow citizens, as do they, I’m sure, from people like me. And I hate it.
Later, as I headed home to prepare for the holiday weekend, my mind kept returning to another summer, 40 years ago, in a different America and a different world.
I spent the summer of 1983, right after college graduation, in the Soviet Union studying Russian. I was in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a beautiful city shrouded in a palpable sense of evil. KGB goons were everywhere. (They weren’t hard to spot, because they wanted visiting Americans like me, and the Soviet citizens who might speak with us, to see them.) I saw firsthand what oppression looks like, when people are afraid to speak in public, to associate, to move about, and to worship as they wish. I saw, as well, the power of propaganda: So many times, I was asked by Soviet citizens why the United States was determined to embark on a nuclear war, as if the smell of gunpowder was in the air and it was only a matter of time until Armageddon.
I was with a group of American students, and we were eager to meet Soviet people. The city is so far north that in the summer the sun never truly sets, and we had many warm conversations with young Leningraders—glares from the KGB notwithstanding—along the banks of the Neva River during the strange, half-lit gloom of these “White Nights.” Among ourselves, of course, our relations were as one might expect of college kids: Some friendships formed, some conflicts simmered, some romances bloomed, and some frostiness settled in among cliques.
If, however, we ran into anyone else from the United States, perhaps during a tour or in the hotel, most of us reacted as if we were all long-lost friends. The distances in the U.S. shrank to nothing. Boston and Jackson, Chicago and Dallas, Sacramento and Charlotte—all of us at that point were next-door neighbors meeting in a harsh and hostile land. It is difficult today to explain to a globalized and mobile generation the sense of fellowship evoked by encountering Americans overseas in the days when international travel was a rarer luxury than it is now. But to meet other Americans in a place such as the Soviet Union was often like a family reunion despite all of us being complete strangers.
[Read: What if America had lost the revolutionary war?]
Some years later, I returned to a more liberalized U.S.S.R. under the then–Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was part of an American delegation to a workshop on arms control with members of the Soviet diplomatic and military establishments. We all stayed together on a riverboat, where we also held our meetings. (A sad note: The boat traveled the Dnipro River in what was still Soviet Ukraine, and I walked through towns and cities, including Zaporizhzhya, that have since been reduced to rubble.) One day, our Soviet hosts woke us by piping the song “The City of New Orleans” to our staterooms, with its refrain of Good morning, America. How are ya? It was like a warm call from home, even if I’d never been to any of the locations (New Orleans, Memphis … Kankakee?) mentioned in the lyrics.
Today, many Americans regard one another as foreigners in their own country. Montgomery and Burlington? Charleston and Seattle? We might as well be measuring interstellar distances. We talk about “blue” and “red,” and we call one another communists and fascists, tossing off facile labels that once, among more serious people, were fighting words.
I am not going to both-sides this: I have no patience with people who casually refer to anyone with whom they disagree as “fascists,” but such people are a small and annoying minority. The reality is that the Americans who have taught us all to hate one another instantly at the sight of a license plate or at the first intonation of a regional accent are the vanguard of the new American right, and they have found fame and money in promoting division and even sedition.
These are the people, on our radios and televisions and even in the halls of Congress, who encourage us to fly Gadsden and Confederate flags and to deface our cars with obscene and stupid bumper stickers; they subject us to inane prattle about national divorce as they watch the purchases and ratings and donations roll in. Such people have made it hard for any of us to be patriotic; they pollute the incense of patriotism with the stink of nationalism so that they can issue their shrill call to arms for Americans to oppose Americans.
[Tom Nichols: Gorbachev’s fatal trap]
Their appeals demean every voter, even those of us who resist their propaganda, because all of us who hear them find ourselves drawing lines and taking sides. When I think of Ohio, for example, I no longer think (as I did for most of my life) of a heartland state and the birthplace of presidents. Instead, I wonder how my fellow American citizens there could have sent to Congress such disgraceful poltroons as Jim Jordan and J. D. Vance—men, in my view, whose fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to personal ambition, and whose love of country I will, without reservation, call into question. Likewise, when I think of Florida, I envision a natural wonderland turned into a political wasteland by some of the most ridiculous and reprehensible characters in American politics.
I struggle, especially, with the shocking fact that many of my fellow Americans, led by cynical right-wing-media charlatans, are now supporting Russia while Moscow conducts a criminal war. These voters have been taught to fear their own government—and other Americans who disagree with them—more than a foreign regime that seeks the destruction of their nation. I remember the old leftists of the Cold War era: Some of them were very bad indeed, but few of them were this bad, and their half-baked anti-Americanism found little support among the broad mass of the American public. Now, thanks to the new rightists, an even worse and more enduring anti-Americanism has become the foundational belief of millions of American citizens.
I know that such thoughts make me part of the problem. And yes, I will always believe that voting for someone such as Jordan (or, for that matter, Donald Trump) is, on some level, a moral failing. But that has nothing to do with whether Ohio and Florida are part of the America I love, a nation full of good people whose politics are less important than their shared citizenship with me in this republic. I might hate the way most Floridians vote, but I would defend every square inch of the state from anyone who would want to take it from us and subjugate any of its people.
When I returned from that first Soviet excursion back in 1983, we landed at JFK on July 4—the finest day there could be to return to America after a grim sojourn in the Land of the Soviets. By the time my short connecting hop to Hartford took off, it was dark. We flew low across Long Island and Connecticut, and I could see the Fourth of July fireworks in towns below us. I was a young man and so, naturally, I was too tough to cry, but I felt my eyes welling as I watched town after town celebrate our national holiday. I was exhausted, not only from the trip but from a summer in an imprisoned nation. I was so glad to be home, to be free, to be safe again among other Americans.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Independence Day in a divided America]
I want us all to experience that feeling. And so, for one day, on this Fourth, I am going to think of my fellow citizens as if I’d just met them in Soviet Leningrad. Just for the day, I won’t care where their votes went in the past few elections—or if they voted at all. I won’t care where they stand on Roe v. Wade or student-debt forgiveness. I won’t care if any of them think America is a capitalist hellhole. I won’t bother about their loves and hates. They’re Americans, and like it or not, we are bound to one another in one of the greatest and most noble experiments in human history. Our destiny together, stand or fall, is inescapable.
Tomorrow, we can go back to bickering. But just for this Fourth, I hope we can all try, with an open spirit, to think of our fellow Americans as friends and family, brothers and sisters, and people whose hands we would gratefully clasp if we met in a faraway and dangerous place.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it.
“I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.”
It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him.
In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point.
But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.)
[Read: ‘It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality’]
He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans.
Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen.
Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so.
But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too.
[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]
For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well.
Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too.
But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.”
For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.”
[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]
This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.”
Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all.
But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.”
Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened.
George Orwell, review of Mein Kampf (1940):
Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Google has updated its privacy policy to state that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models. The tech giant has changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched "AI models" for "language models." It also stated that it could use publicly available information to build not just features, but full products like "Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities." By updating its policy, it's letting people know and making it clear that anything they publicly post online could be used to train Bard, its future versions and any other generative AI product Google develops.
The tech giant has highlighted the changes to its privacy policy on its archive, but here's a copy of the pertinent part:
Critics have been raising concerns about companies' use of information posted online to train their large language models for generative AI use. Recently, a proposed class action lawsuit was filed against OpenAI, accusing it of scraping "massive amounts of personal data from the internet," including "stolen private information," to train its GPT models without prior consent. As Search Engine Journal notes, we'll likely see plenty of similar lawsuits in the future as more companies develop their own generative AI products.
Owners of websites that could be considered public squares in the digital age have also taken steps to either prevent or profit from the generative AI boom. Reddit has started charging for access to its API, leading third-party clients to shut down over the weekend. Meanwhile, Twitter put a restriction on how many tweets a user sees per day to "address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-updated-privacy-policy-states-it-can-use-public-data-to-train-its-ai-models-095541684.html?src=rss
Close up or woman using smart phone
It’s got more top-end ports than any other dock we’ve tested and a built-in SSD enclosure so you can add up to an extra 8TB of storage, yet it is one of the most affordable docking stations available.
$299.99
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s SuperDock! But what makes Sonnet’s latest Thunderbolt 4 laptop docking station so super?
The super-ness is not the 19 top-end ports, although these are certainly impressive. It’s not the 2.5x faster Ethernet connection. And it’s not the backward-compatible Thunderbolt 4 technology that is certified to the very latest Intel standards.
What makes the Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock so super is its built-in M.2 NVMe SSD slot which means you can add up to 8TB of SSD storage to your system without connecting an external storage device to the dock or computer.
But first, let’s look at the abundance of ports this dock boasts to connect devices at top speed.
Foundry
The Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock has a copious 19 ports. The “20” in the Echo 20’s name includes the power supply port, which we don’t usually count in our port countdown.
The Echo 20 has more ports than we’ve seen with any docking station. Even the Caldigit TS4 Dock has only (!) 18, and it’s this kind of Thunderbolt 4 docks that Sonnet is gunning for. Read our fuller roundup of our other recommendations for the best Thunderbolt docks for Mac.
All the Echo 20’s USB ports are at least 10Gbps (twice the bandwidth of the many docks’ USB ports). The TS4 has as many (8) but the Echo 20 has one more USB-C, while the TS4 has the extra USB-A. As more devices eschew Type A for Type C, we applaud Sonnet for having as many USB-C as USB-A.
You can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices via the two downstream Thunderbolt 4 ports, although the devices connected will be sharing the 40Gbps bandwidth upstream to the laptop.
Rather than add the maximum possible three downstream Thunderbolt 4 ports, Sonnet includes two plus a high-end HDMI 2.1 video port so the user can add a direct external display without the need for an adapter.
If you plan to connect an HDMI display, that makes more sense than a third Thunderbolt 4 port.
Foundry
The Echo 20 doesn’t ship with an SSD, so you need to purchase one yourself. A 1TB SSD can be found for under $50, 2TB for around $100, 4TB for $250. 8TB SSDs can cost between $800 and $1,000.
If you were configuring a new MacBook with 8TB of internal storage, Apple would charge you $2,200, so adding it to your connected docking station at half the price makes a lot of sense, and you can swap it out with other capacities as you desire.
It must be an M.2 NVMe SSD. With the right SSD, transfer and access data rates are up to 800MBps.
Foundry
SSD installation is simple if you know how to use a screwdriver and don’t have shaky hands. Unscrew the two screws securing a panel cover on the back panel of the dock. Insert the SSD and re-secure the bottom cover.
However, we would have preferred Sonnet to include the correct screwdrivers with the dock as what you need—a tiny crosshead—may not be in the average toolbox.
The Echo 20 isn’t heavy but even with its compact power supply it’s not particularly portable, so what you store on that SSD isn’t going with you when you disconnect the laptop from the dock. It’s great for backups, archiving, and for large files you don’t need with you on the road.
There’s also a fast SD card reader for more portable storage…
The Echo 20 features just one SD card reader for portable storage, while the TS4 has both SD and MicroSD readers.
Having both formats offers more flexibility, and the two slots can be used at the same time, so the TS4 wins if you prefer portable storage to be installed.
Most MicroSD cards come with an SD adapter so the lack of MicroSD doesn’t stop you from choosing between the two memory-card formats on the Echo 20. MicroSD cards are usually cheaper than full-size SD.
Tiny memory cards were once the preserve of professional users such as photographers who use them to quickly transfer files. However, anyone can buy a quality 512GB card for around $75/£75, and they offer an inexpensive way of upping the storage in your laptop and are super portable, too.
The Echo 20’s UHS II SD card reader is rated fast at 312MBps—the same as the TS4’s.
As with other docks, if you prefer portable storage there are other options, too. For example, you could add a pocketable SSD enclosure, such as Ugreen’s M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure Adapter, available for around $30 (also not including the SSD itself).
Foundry
You can connect an external display via the HDMI 2.1 port (without the need for an adapter), and another screen via one of the Thunderbolt ports, or two via both the downstream Thunderbolt ports.
Dual-display support means M1/M2 Pro, M1/M2 Max and M1/M2 Ultra Macs can hook up either a single 4K/5K/6K screen or two HD/4K/5K/6K displays.
A Mac with an M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chip can support up to a single 8K display at 60Hz, or two HD/4K/5K/6K displays (both 4K at 60Hz).
Windows PCs and Chromebooks sporting Thunderbolt 4 can support up to a single 8K display at 60Hz, or two HD/4K displays at 60Hz.
If you install DisplayLink software you can run two displays off connected plain M1 and M2 Macs, which otherwise are limited to one display. Learn more about adding multiple screens to M1 or M2 Macs in our tutorial and solution recommender.
An interesting difference between the Echo 20 (HDMI 2.1) and the Caldigit TS4 (DisplayPort 1.4) is the choice of video port.
HDMI is the more popular port on displays but DisplayPort has traditionally been superior on the specs front. However, HDMI 2.1 has more than caught up with DP 1.4 so is a fine option even for high-end pros. HDMI 2.1 is a big leap up from HDMI 2.0, which is found on most other docking stations with a video port.
Visuals aren’t the Echo 20’s only strength. There are four audio ports available. At the front is a 3.5mm combo jack for either wired headphones or a microphone, and at the back are separate left/right channel RCA line-out jacks that can deliver a clean signal to powered speakers or an amplifier, plus an extra 3.5mm microphone jack.
The TS4’s three audio ports are all 3.5mm. While there is no noticeable difference in sound quality between RCA and 3.5mm connectors, a lot of consumer A/V equipment still supports RCA connectors, which also provide a more secure connection than 3.5mm connectors.
Audio enthusiasts would prefer a Digital Audio port to connect directly to their amplifier, speakers, or home theatre receiver for the highest-quality, pure audio playback. Caldigit’s Thunderbolt 3-based TS3 Plus dock has one, but the audio ports on the Echo 20 will be good enough for most users.
Another bid for “Super” status is the Echo 20’s super-fast 2.5Gb Gigabit Ethernet, which has the potential to be 2.5 times faster than standard Gigabit Ethernet. This again matches the wired-network port on the TS4.
To take advantage of the 2.5GbE speed, you need a connected device—such as a router/network switch—that is 2.5GbE or above
The 2.5Gb Ethernet port is backwards and forwards compatible with other speeds of Ethernet, so will work with a standard Gigabit Ethernet network.
With 100W Power Delivery (PD), the Echo 20 can keep even the largest connected laptop powered up in full use.
Each USB port on the Echo 20 has a minimum charging power of 7.5W, and the downstream TB4 ports can offer 15W to power connected devices.
While this is impressive, it’s one area where the Caldigit TS4 has more muscle. Its 230W power supply is the most powered-up docking station we’ve ever tested, and one of the front USB-C ports can charge at a generous 20W–enough, for example, for fast-charging an iPhone via USB-C.
The Echo 20’s 150W power supply should, however, be powerful enough to charge a 100W laptop and have enough left for a few connected devices.
Foundry
Docking stations either lie horizontally, like the Echo 20, or stand vertically, like the TS4. Vertical docks save desk space but horizontal docks can offer a cleaner look.
Personally, I prefer the vertical design, but most docks, if doing their job correctly, soon blend into their desktop environment anyway.
Most docks place the upstream Thunderbolt 4 port (to the host laptop) at the front, which means a trailing cable messing up your desk. Both the Echo 20 and TS4 handily position the upstream port at the back of the dock.
The Echo 20 is jet black, while the TS4 is metal gray, although this is unlikely to be a decider when choosing between these two excellent two docking stations.
Sonnet
The Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock costs $299.99, which measures up very favorably against the Caldigit TS4’s $399.99 and other Thunderbolt 4 docks such as Kensington’s SD5700T ($369.99).
Given its top-end specs, this is easily the best-value Thunderbolt 4 dock we have tested.
Note that there’s no SSD included with the Echo 20 so you need to factor in this if you want to add the internal storage, but it’s not even an option with other docks so doesn’t spoil the comparison.
Even if you don’t need the SSD enclosure now, the Echo 20 still represents great value for money.
We didn’t think that Caldigit’s TS4 could be beaten but the Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock is a very close match for the number and quality of ports but for $100 less.
It lacks a MicroSD card reader and doesn’t offer as much multi-device power, but it has other benefits—most noticeably the internal storage enclosure—and is specced high enough for most users.
The 19 ports are all top-end—Thunderbolt 4, 10Gbps USB-C and USB-A, 2.5Gb Ethernet, HDMI 2.1—and the inclusion of the onboard M.2 NVMe SSD slot gives the Echo 20 our crown as the new Thunderbolt 4 docking station of choice.
“Sustainable” design is a paradigm that emphasizes the impact that design practices and workflows have on the environment with the goal of reducing carbon emissions. The design decisions we make are reflected in our planet’s climate, from the energy consumption of the tools we use to how the products we build interact with the environment and plenty of other things in between. In this collection, we compiled resources to help you understand the principles of sustainable design and how to integrate them into the way we work and the things we make.
Design For SustainabilityThe EU Science Hub’s Sustainable Product Policy estimates that over 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase. But how can design teams ensure that sustainability is at the core of every design choice they make? To help their designers develop design habits about sustainability, IBM published “IBM Design for sustainability.”
At the heart of the framework is the idea that the user, community, and social value should outweigh any negative environmental and social impact in the present and the future. To achieve this vision, experiences need to be inclusive, easy to learn and use, and efficient for both users and overall power consumption.
The sustainability checklist is part of the framework and it gives practical tips for optimizing designs to meet these goals. It’s no rocket science, but the checklist does offer useful considerations that will help improve performance, speed, and responsiveness.
Sustainability Methods and Design PrinciplesThe Sustainability Guide from SVID is an overarching framework for sustainable design and development practices that contains sections wholly dedicated to methods and design principles that are centered around sustainable practices.
The design section illustrates the system-wide lifecycle of the design process, describing it as a circular system where everything in a product design is interconnected and linked by environmental criteria that is embedded at all stages.
The methods section is an archive of tools, resources, case studies, and expert advice that can be used to educate a team, as well as kickstart a team into sustainable environmental practices.
Sustainable Design StrategiesThe crux of sustainable design strategies, according to Leyla Acaroglu, is ensuring that the tools we use in a design workflow and how we use them today do not have a negative impact on the planet in the future.
What Leyla does in this extensive Medium post is curate an ecodesign strategy set that covers core considerations for product design that build sustainability into the process, from manufacturing and recyclability to efficiency and modularity. By including these considerations into the design lifecycle, it is possible to develop products and services that reflect sustainable practices, such as a product’s ability to dematerialize, how easily it can be recycled, how long it lasts, whether it can be dissembled by customers, and to what extent it can be repurposed for other uses.
Sustainable Web Design PracticesIs the admin experience as easy and intuitive as the front-end experience? Is the message useful for your target audience? Could a Progressive Web App be an efficient solution? A lot of questions need to be asked when you want to deliver digital products and services that respect the principles of the Sustainable Web Manifesto. The site Sustainable Web Design helps you find the right sustainability strategy for your project.
The strategies are divided into different categories: design, client and project ethos, content and marketing, development, hosting, and business operations. In each category, you’ll find questions worth considering and an explanation of why it matters. Links to further reading resources let you dive deeper into each aspect. A helpful guide that supports you on every step of the design process.
Sustainable Web Hosting CompaniesAccording to some estimates, the impact of the Internet and our gadgets on global greenhouse emissions is similar to that of the airline industry. To speed up the transition towards a green, fossil-free Internet, there’s a question we all can ask ourselves: Are our websites hosted green?
The Green Web Foundation built a checker to help you quickly find out if your hosting provider is using green energy or compensating for its services. All you need to do is enter the URL. If you want to make the switch to a green hosting provider, the foundation also published a directory of 478 green hosting companies in 35 countries. A small step that makes a difference.
Sustainability Score CalculatorSo, just how large is the carbon footprint of your website? The Internet uses electricity, of course, but it also relies on data centers that distribute information, and the energy to power each and every device that receives that information. Even a small website has a carbon footprint.
The Sustainability Score Calculator is one way to find out. Employing a methodology that takes energy-consuming attributes into account, this free calculator estimates the amount of carbon dioxide produced by a particular website. It looks at the weight of images on a page, whether web fonts are integrated, and any front-end frameworks in use, among other considerations, to inform its calculations.
The exact amount of carbon dioxide produced by a website can probably be evaluated in a number of ways, and this specific calculator makes its own assumptions. Regardless of the exact inputs used in the results, the fact that the Sustainability Score Calculator can come up with a rough estimate for a website’s carbon dioxide output on a per page view basis is a reasonable starting point for determining just how big of a footprint a site has on the environment.
Sustainable UX Design ToolkitThe Sustainable UX Design Toolkit is a resource produced by the Sustainable UX Network, a non-profit organization that has established a community of designers around sustainable environmental design practices.
The organization developed the toolkit as a Miro board that is freely available to clone into your own Miro account. Not a Miro user? You can still reference the embedded board and zoom into it to view the four-step process that walks you through concept to presentation, providing useful considerations, best practices, and even templates you can use right away.
Sustainability Nudges in UXIn the last few years, customers have become more and more aware of how important environmental friendliness and social responsibility are when making a purchase. But even with increased awareness, businesses still play a key role in informing, enabling, and encouraging sustainable behavior. In his post “7 behavioural UX approaches encouraging sustainable purchases,” Damien Lutz takes a closer look at how e-commerce businesses encourage sustainable purchases and what we can learn from them.
From Zalando’s sustainability filters and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly Hub to Qantas’ Green Tier membership and sustainable shopping assistants, Damien analyzes different strategies of nudging customers towards more sustainable decisions. Based on his observations from these real-life examples, he summarizes practical behavioral UX tips that help everyone create experiences that promote sustainability. Interesting insights are guaranteed.
Green the Web PodcastSince 2019, UX/UI designer Sandy Dähnert shares her passion for a sustainable web on her site Green the Web. Last year, she started the Green the Web Podcast on all things sustainable design best practices, ecological and social user research, information architecture, user interface design, and more.
Whether it’s sustainability-infused user journey maps, UX/UI factors for a lightweight website, or approaches for greener checkout, in the podcast Sandy shares her deep love of sustainable UX and UI design to encourage everyone to step into green design and play an active role in shaping this new design philosophy. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sustainable UX PlaybookThe Sustainable UX Playbook is a yet-to-be-released work in progress by the same folks who maintain the Sustainable UX Manifesto. The playbook is set to provide guidelines, best practices, and examples to help you and your team adopt an environmentally-centered design approach.
The exact date of when the Sustainable UX Playbook will be available is to be determined, but it will be published to SustainableUXPlaybook.com (which currently redirects to the Sustainable UX Manifesto) when it is ready.
Sustainability Figma KitThe Sustainability Figma Kit that Elisa Fabbian, Rachele Pedol, and Margherita Troilo created helps digital designers move from human-centered design to a more sustainable life-centered design approach. It consists of a learning guide, 23 action cards, and a flowchart.
The learning guide introduces you to the broader context and importance of designing products and services with a reduced environmental impact. The action cards explore problems you might encounter in different phases of the design process and how to solve them. Last but not least, the flowchart helps you find out which sustainability actions can be applied to the specific type of project you are working on by providing useful tips for designing in a more conscious way.
Sustainability Innovation FrameworkSustainability Innovation Framework is an effort from Sebastian Gier that is all about the planning phase of an effort to scope work for projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
The process is mapped to traditional design thinking, helping you start work by aligning objectives and documenting assertions before tying them into user needs. What makes this framework particularly useful is that it helps prioritize the ideas generated by the process by their environmental impact.
The entire framework is available as a collaborative FigJam board that can be cloned to your own Figma account.
EcoCards Game Workshop ToolkitOne of the most difficult hurdles to adopting a sustainable design process is figuring out how to discuss the topic as a team. Getting everyone on the same page about what it means to design sustainably and how to establish a process for it are paramount for any team.
That’s what makes the EcoCards Game Workshop Toolkit such a valuable resource. The toolkit is a collection of three card-based games designed to facilitate team discussion on sustainable design practices. Each game is framed as a “workshop” meant to take place at different stages in the design process, detailing the game rules with a series of steps using a plain deck of playing cards to move the discussion forward.
The EcoCards are created as a FigJam board that can be cloned to your Figma account. They are available in English and French translations.
Team Sustainability RetrospectiveOK, so perhaps your team has adopted a sustainable design process that aims to reduce carbon emissions. How do you know it’s working? That’s the purpose of the Team Sustainability Retrospective, a Miro template produced by Paddy Dhanda.
Rather than high-fiving your team for implementing a sustainable system, this set of templates will help you assess whether or not your efforts are paying off in a streamlined five-step process. This way, your team can re-group after the implementation of the design process and properly measure its impact with data that form actionable insights for improving the process even further.
World Wide Waste BookWorld Wide Waste is a book by Gerry McGovern, aiming to debunk the perception that being “digital” is akin to being “green.” It provides a healthy dose of statistics about the impact of digital products and services and details the crisis of energy consumption in the world.
For example, McGovern attempts to clear up the misunderstanding that cloud technologies are somehow ethereal elements that are carbon-free, but rather physical data centers that result in large quantifiable emissions. If nothing else, this book will equip you with the information you might need to help convince your team to adopt more sustainable practices with statistics and case studies to make the case.
Sustainable Web Design BookIf the World Wide Waste book is all about defining and diagnosing unsustainable design practices, then this offering from A Book Apart is aimed at curing those symptoms. Written by lead author of the “Sustainable Web Manifesto” Tom Greenwood, Sustainable Web Design is a collection of practical web design advice for everything from how to measure a website’s environmental impact and identifying low-carbon design practices to creating energy-efficient development processes and creating a hosting environment that helps reduce climate costs.
Like all A Book Apart publications, Sustainable Web Design is available in print and digital editions — just remember that the digital copy is not a carbon-free option, as many of the resources in this roundup have noted. Then again, the printed copy also has climate considerations due to the costs of transporting the book to your front door. Just buying the book is an excellent example of the conundrums of sustainable design.
Climate Tech Guide For DesignersIf you’re looking for help establishing yourself in a career in sustainable design, Enrique Allen and the Designer Fund team offer the Climate Tech Guide for Designers.
This guide is less about teams adopting sustainable design standards than it is a resource for helping you make a decision about where you work and who you work for. How passionate is the company about climate? What problems is the company trying to solve, and are the solutions based on climate technology and considerations? These are the types of questions that will allow you to find the right fit for your career.
What makes this Climate Tech Guide for Designers especially useful is that it goes beyond company considerations by offering advice for how to position yourself for a career in climate technology, capping things off with an extensive list of companies that demonstrate sustainable practices.
Ethical Design HandbookThe Ethical Design Handbook is a book we offer right here at Smashing Magazine. Written by authors Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen, and Kim Andersen, these guidelines serve as a roadmap to learn about adopting and integrating ethical design practices into a business model.
Wait, why are we talking about “ethical design” when we’ve been sharing resources on “sustainable design”? Ethical and sustainable design work hand-in-hand, as ethical design relies on sustainable digital business practices in addition to a slew of larger concepts that determine an organization’s ethical practices, from transparency in how data is collected to how inclusiveness is built into a design. In other words, ethical and sustainable design are united by a cause to prevent harm to people. A sustainable design process supports a healthy environment that, in turn, supports an ethical responsibility to care about the impact we have on the planet.
All in all, the Ethical Design Handbook is about leveraging ethical business practices as a market differentiator that can be used as a competitive advantage. Sustainable design principles are part of that matrix, demonstrating that sustainable practices can be aligned to — and even enhance — business objectives.
Ethical Design ResourcesAnother useful resource to help designers and developers live up to the responsibility of causing no harm and ensure that the experiences they build are inclusive, honest, and safe are the Ethical Design Resources which Lexi Namer maintains in collaboration with the Ethical Design Network and Kate Every.
On Ethical Design Resources, you’ll find articles, books, courses, frameworks, tools, talks, videos, podcasts, and more covering different aspects of ethical design. They help you assess the impact of your design decisions, uncover harmful practices, and support you in making design choices that respect your users.
And if you need more resources, take a look at Ethical Design Guide and Humane By Design.
Wrapping UpThere you have it, a deep collection of toolkits, frameworks, and resources you can use to learn about sustainable design practices and how to adopt them into your own design process. Notice how the collection reveals that sustainable design is a multifaceted topic that considers everything from how we work to the specific tools we use to work. It even covers product design as a whole and the decisions that impact the sustainability of a product, not to mention how business objectives influence environmental objectives.
There may not be a single silver bullet or resource that immediately aligns you and your work with sustainable design practices. That said, the resources provided in this roundup can help you make big and small gains alike, whether it’s reflected in something as seemingly small as the hosting provider you decide to use for your website or something more involved such as integrating environmental considerations at every stage of the design process.
It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
Enlarge / In 1900, Charles Stewart Rolls (one of the founders of Rolls-Royce) said, "The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean. There is no smell or vibration. They should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged." Now, that's happened, and they are indeed very useful. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
A fully electric Rolls-Royce has been some years in the making. Back in 1900, Charles Stewart Rolls proclaimed the electric motor's suitability for automobiles—silent, smooth, and exhaust-free are all great attributes for a luxury car. Back then, the problem was a lack of charging stations, something that appears to be improving 123 years later. That means the world is now ready for the Spectre.
As you might expect of a car wearing the pantheon grille and Spirit of Ecstasy mascot—subtly redesigned here for improved aerodynamic efficiency—there is little shy or retiring about the Spectre, particularly when it's a vivid purple, as was the case for our test car.
My favorite design detail isn't captured well, but the way the spoiler kicks up subtly at the rear is wonderful. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
It's a two-door, four-seat coupe, and big one, too: 215.6 inches (5,475 mm) long, 79.4 inches (2,017 mm) wide, and 61.9 inches (1,573 mm) tall, with a curb weight of 6,371 lbs (2,890 kg). Despite that, the somewhat Art Deco-inspired shape cleaves the air with a drag coefficient of 0.25—the shape spent more than 800 hours being refined in the wind tunnel, which is about twice as much time as F1 cars are currently allowed.
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Reading short novels and encountering a range of characters’ worlds in quick succession can be a singular pleasure, especially in the summertime.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Taut and Potent
My most controversial opinion is that most books should be either 100 or 1,000 pages. I am joking, obviously—sort of. Length is not a good proxy for quality, and a story should take the time it demands. But after years of gravitating toward baggy narrative journeys, I have lately become enchanted by novellas.
I admire short novels largely because I love witnessing the skill that goes into achieving an efficient word-to-idea ratio. But I also find it a lot of fun, especially in the summer, to dip into varied lives in rapid succession. I am not the only one turning to sparse texts: As Kate Dwyer reported in Esquire last week, slim volumes are having a moment. Dwyer identifies “a desire among general audiences for the concise, intense books that have been gaining momentum in the literary fiction and nonfiction categories in recent years.” She reports that Annie Ernaux’s Nobel win last fall played a role in calcifying the prestige of potent, short works.
I don’t think short books have intrinsic merit any more than long ones do. In recent years, I have read a number of sub-200-page novels that I found insufferable (another benefit of a short book: If it’s bad, it’s over soon). But many of the good ones, in my experience, rely on an intriguing sense of disorientation. The short novel can be an ideal format for narrative swerves.
Yesterday afternoon, lying in front of a box fan awaiting the humid summer rain, I finished Hanna Bervoets’s We Had to Remove This Post, a taut, haunting novel that weighs in at 144 pages. In the book, readers follow a content moderator as she navigates gory posts on the social-media site she works with and applies content rules that often feel arbitrary. This novel, in its singular focus on vulnerable workers and their relationships with one another, laces in a neat indictment of the corporation looming in the background. But the story is not about the technology, not really. It’s about the workers who suffer because of it. And late in the book, we discover darkness rooted more deeply in the protagonist than was apparent at the start. “You don’t get it, do you?” a former lover asks our narrator, confronting her. (As a reader, I too did not get it—until I did!)
By total coincidence, last month I finished another slim psychological novel in which our narrator is repeatedly told “You just don’t get it” by an ex: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (163 pages). I will not pretend that this echo is meaningful to anyone besides me. But that’s part of the fun of reading short novels back to back: the delight of building a constellation of references and patterns only apparent to oneself. You can do this with any type of book, in theory. But reading a bunch of slight texts back to back is a sure way to swiftly build up your own arsenal.
If you are looking for some short novels to get you started, here are a few I’ve read and loved over the past year. I think near-constantly about Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius, paired novellas about two fraught family relationships. In Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which follows a boarding-school girl in Switzerland, death lurks on each of the 101 pages. Adrian Nathan West’s My Father’s Diet, the hilarious tale of a young man whose divorced dad gets into powerlifting, is packaged in the perfect container for the scope of the story: 176 pages.
Short novels are even sneaking into works of long, complex fiction: In Lucy Ives’s labyrinthine Life Is Everywhere, the protagonist’s eerie novella, a riff on Hamlet, pops up hundreds of pages in. (And to continue the theme of fun personal tie-ins, I am currently in the midst of another uncanny and wry retelling of Hamlet, this time from the point of view of a fetus: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, which at 208 pages is on the longer end of what I’d consider truly short.)
In spite of my zeal for short books, I still mostly read longer novels. This year, I moved away from Goodreads, which I only ever updated haphazardly, seeking to gain privacy and stanch the flow of my personal data to Amazon. Now I track what I read in a spreadsheet. A bit of number-crunching tells me that the average length of the books I’ve read in print this year is 256 pages. That strikes me as a truly average length. (I also found it sort of fun, looking back at my reading list, to find that I read three books that are exactly 288 pages this spring.) Everything in moderation including moderation, I suppose. I love a short novel whose every page promises to be thick with meaning, and I love a shaggy epic full of beautiful prose. I feel grateful, as a reader, to have such a range to choose from.
One more note of praise for the short novel: Part of the joy is that you can stumble into them and stumble back out, enriched, a few hours later. About a year ago, meaning to order the entire Copenhagen Trilogy, I accidentally ordered just the first volume. Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen, arrived on my doorstep, all 99 pages of it. I was disappointed at first to realize my error. But then I read the book in maybe two sittings. It was lovely and brief. At some point I will probably read the other two volumes. But for now, I am content.
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Evening Read
Hip-Hop’s Midlife Slump
By Xochitl Gonzalez
In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.
What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito explores the psychic toll of class mobility.
Watch. Choose from 11 undersung TV shows that our culture writers wish had received more attention this year.
Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.
P.S.
I somehow totally missed the high-seas literary romp Let Them All Talk when the movie came out in 2020, so it was to my great pleasure and amusement that I ended up watching it on a long flight last fall. In case you also missed it: Basically, a novelist (Meryl Streep!) is sent on a transatlantic voyage, and her agent (Gemma Chan!) secretly follows her aboard to try to find out what’s going on with her next book. Streep brings along her nephew, played by the charming Lucas Hedges, and she’s also joined by two friends, because why not? Antics of a sort, along with conversations about literary ethics and making a life as a writer, ensue on board. The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was shot on the Queen Mary 2, and the actors improvise atop the story, which was written by Deborah Eisenberg. It’s a funny, if kind of unwieldy, tale that combines many elements I enjoy. I recommend it (streaming on Max) to supplement your short-novel reading on this holiday not-quite-weekend.
— Lora
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants.
“To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric,” the complaint alleges, “an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable.” Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired.
The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party. It calls the statements “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”
Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege
UC Santa Cruz’s requirement is part of a larger trend: Almost half of large colleges now include DEI criteria in tenure standards, while the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent of academic job postings required DEI statements, which were required more frequently at elite institutions. Still, there is significant opposition to the practice. A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. faculty members found that 50 percent of respondents considered the statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” And the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group composed of faculty members with a wide range of political perspectives, argues that diversity statements erase “the distinction between academic expertise and ideological conformity” and create scenarios “inimical to fundamental values that should govern academic life.”
The Haltigan lawsuit—filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-leaning nonprofit—is the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements. If Haltigan prevails, state institutions may be unable to mandate diversity statements in the future, or may find themselves constrained in how they solicit or assess such statements.
“Taking a principled stand against the use of the DEI rubric in the Academy is crucial for the continued survival of our institutions of higher learning,” he declared in a Substack post earlier this year.
Alternatively, a victory for UC Santa Cruz may entrench the trend of compelling academics to submit DEI statements in institutions that are under the control of the left—and serve as a blueprint for the populist right to impose its own analogous requirements in state college systems it controls. For example, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to help overhaul higher education in Florida, advocates replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness. If California can lawfully force professors to detail their contributions to DEI, Florida can presumably force all of its professors to detail their contributions to EMC. And innovative state legislatures could create any number of new favored-concept triads to impose on professors in their states.
That outcome would balkanize state university systems into factions with competing litmus tests. Higher education as a whole would be better off if the Haltigan victory puts an end to this coercive trend.
The University of California is a fitting place for a test case on diversity statements. It imposed loyalty oaths on faculty members during the Red Scare, birthed a free-speech movement in 1964, was a litigant in the 1977 Supreme Court case that gave rise to the diversity rationale for affirmative action, and in 1996 helped inspire California voters to pass Proposition 209. That voter initiative amended the Golden State’s constitution to ban discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 2020, at the height of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, voters in deep-blue California reaffirmed race neutrality by an even wider margin. This continued to block the UC system’s preferred approach, which was to increase diversity in hiring by considering, not disregarding, applicants’ race. Indeed, the insistence on nondiscrimination by California voters has long been regarded with hostility by many UC system administrators. Rewarding contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion is partly their attempt to increase racial diversity among professors in a way that does not violate the law.
[Read: The problem with how higher education treats diversity]
The regime these administrators created is a case study in concept creep. Around 2005, the UC system began to change how it evaluated professors. As ever, they would be judged based on teaching, research, and service. But the system-wide personnel manual was updated with a novel provision: Job candidates who showed that they promoted “diversity and equal opportunity” in teaching, research, or service could get credit for doing so. Imagine a job candidate who, for example, did volunteer work mentoring high schoolers in a disadvantaged neighborhood to help prepare them for college. That would presumably benefit the state of California, the UC system by improving its applicant pool, and the teaching skills of the volunteer, who’d gain experience in what helps such students to succeed. Giving positive credit for such activities seemed sensible.
But how much credit?
A 2014 letter from the chair of the Assembly of the UC Academic Senate addressed that question, stating that faculty efforts to promote “equal opportunity and diversity” should be evaluated “on the same basis as other contributions.” They should not, however, be considered “a ‘fourth leg’ of evaluation, in addition to teaching, research, and service.”
If matters stood there, the UC approach to “diversity and equal opportunity” might not face legal challenges. But administrators successfully pushed for a more radical approach. What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The shift circa 2018 from the possibility of credit for something to a forced accounting of it was important. So was the shift from the widely shared value of equal opportunity to equity (a contested and controversial concept with no widely agreed-upon meaning) and inclusion. The bundled triad of DEI is typically justified by positing that hiring a racially and ethnically diverse faculty or admitting a diverse student body is not enough—for the institution and everyone in it to thrive, the best approach (in this telling) is to treat some groups differently than others to account for structural disadvantages they suffer and to make sure everyone feels welcome, hence “inclusion.”
That theory of how diversity works is worth taking seriously. Still, it is just a theory. I am a proponent of a diverse University of California, but I believe that its students would better thrive across identity groups in a culture of charity, forbearance, and individualism. A Marxist might regard solidarity as vital. A conservative might emphasize the importance of personal virtue, an appreciation of every institution’s imperfectability, and the assimilation of all students to a culture of rigorous truth-seeking. Many Californians of all identities believe in treating everyone equally regardless of their race or their gender.
UC Santa Cruz has not yet responded to Haltigan’s lawsuit. But its chancellor, Cynthia K. Larive, states on the UC Santa Cruz website that the institution asks for a contributions-to-DEI statement because it is “a Hispanic-Serving” and “Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution” that has “a high proportion of first generation students,” and that it therefore seeks to hire professors “who will contribute to promoting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.” In her telling, the statements help to “assess a candidate’s skills, experience, and ability to contribute to the work they would be doing in supporting our students, staff, and faculty.”
Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.
This approach—one that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuit—was scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review. When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. “Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field,” he wrote. “As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.”
At UC Davis, 50 percent of applicants in some searches were disqualified based on their DEI statements alone. Abigail Thompson, then the chair of the mathematics department at UC Davis, dissented from its approach in a 2019 column for the American Mathematics Society newsletter. “Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual,” she wrote. “Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test.”
More striking than her argument was the polarized response from other academics, captured by the letters to the editor. Some wrote in agreement and some in substantive disagreement, as is appropriate. But a group letter signed by scores of mathematicians from institutions all over the United States asserted, without evidence, that the American Mathematics Society “harmed the mathematics community, particularly mathematicians from marginalized backgrounds,” merely by airing Thompson’s critique of diversity statements. “We are disappointed by the editorial decision to publish the piece,” they wrote. Mathematicians hold a diversity of views about mandatory DEI statements. But just one faction asserts that others do harm merely by expressing their viewpoint among colleagues. Just one faction openly wanted to deny such dissent a platform. Are members of that progressive faction fair when they score DEI statements that are in tension with their own political beliefs? It is not unreasonable for liberal, conservative, and centrist faculty members to be skeptical. And many are.
A rival group letter decried the “attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view,” adding, “If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it.”
The most formidable defender of mandatory diversity statements may be Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis. He’s participated in debates organized by FIRE and the Federalist Society (organizations that tend to be more skeptical of DEI) and recently won a UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community. In an April 2022 article for the UC Davis Law Review, he acknowledged that “certain types or uses of diversity statements would be indefensible from a constitutional or academic freedom standpoint” but argued that, should a university want to require diversity statements, it can do so in ways that violate neither academic freedom nor the Constitution. He has worked to make UC Davis’s approach to DEI statements more defensible.
Someone evaluating a diversity-statement regime, he suggests, should focus on the following attributes:
Soucek argues that the ability to help diverse students to thrive is directly relevant to a law professor’s core duties, not something irrelevant to legitimate educational or academic objectives. As for concerns that mandatory diversity statements might entrench orthodoxies of thought in academia, or create the perception that political forces or fear of job loss drives academic conclusions, he argues that those concerns, while real, are not unique to diversity statements—they also apply to the research and teaching statements that most job candidates must provide.
“Academic freedom, and the system of peer review that it is built upon, is a fragile business, always susceptible not just to outside interference, but also to corruption from within,” he wrote in his law-review article. But diversity statements strike me as more vulnerable to “corruption from within” than research statements. Although a hiring committee of chemists might or might not do a fair job evaluating the research of applicants, at least committee members credibly possess the expertise to render better judgments than anyone else—they know better than state legislators or DEI administrators or history professors or the public how to assess chemistry research.
[Read: What is faculty diversity worth to a university?]
On what basis can chemistry professors claim equivalent expertise in how best to advance diversity in higher education generally, or even in chemistry specifically? It wouldn’t be shocking if historians or economists or sociologists were better-positioned to understand why a demographic group was underrepresented in chemistry or how best to change that. Most hiring-committee members possess no special expertise in diversity, or equity, or inclusion. Absent empirically grounded expertise, academics are more likely to defer to what’s popular for political or careerist reasons, and even insofar as they are earnest in their judgments about which job candidates would best advance diversity, equity, or inclusion, there is no reason to afford their nonexpert opinions on the matter any more deference than the opinions of anyone else.
Ultimately, Soucek’s idealized regime of mandatory diversity statements—tailored to particular disciplines and judged by faculty members without outside political interference—strikes me as a theoretical improvement on the status quo but, in practice, unrealistic in what it presumes of hiring committees. Meanwhile, most real-world regimes of diversity statements, including those at campuses in the University of California system, lack the sort of safeguards Soucek recommends, and may not assess anything more than the ability to submit an essay that resonates with hiring committees. Whether an applicant’s high-scoring DEI statement actually correlates with better research or teaching outcomes is unclear and largely unstudied.
The costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements.
Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society. Academics may regret validating that premise in the future, if college administrators or legislators or voters want to judge them based on how they advance a different understanding of social progress, one that departs more from their own—for example, how they’ve contributed to a war effort widely regarded as righteous.
Mandatory DEI statements send the message that it’s okay for academics to chill the speech of colleagues. If half of faculty members believe that diversity statements are ideological litmus tests, fear of failing the test will chill free expression within a large cohort, even if they are wrong. Shouldn’t that alone make the half of academics who support these statements rethink their stance?
Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others. Some aspiring professors are well suited to advancing diversity. Great! The time of others is better spent mitigating climate change, or serving as expert witnesses in trials, or pioneering new treatments for cancer. Insofar as all academics must check a compulsory “advancing DEI” box, many will waste time on work that provides little or no benefit instead of doing kinds of work where they enjoy a comparative advantage in improving the world.
And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessary—that if you’ve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. The scoring rubric for evaluating candidates’ statements that UC Santa Cruz published declares that a superlative statement “discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of the University that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing.” Do academics really want to assert that any value should be held by “every” faculty member? Academics who value DEI work should want smart critics of the approach commenting from inside academic institutions to point out flaws and shortcomings that boosters miss.
Demanding that everyone get on board and embrace the same values and social-justice priorities will inevitably narrow the sort of people who apply to work and get hired in higher education.
In that sense, mandatory DEI statements are profoundly anti-diversity. And that strikes me as an especially perilous hypocrisy for academics to indulge at a time of falling popular support for higher education. A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion engine—but not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivism’s sacred values.
The UC system could advance diversity in research and teaching in lots of uncontroversial ways. Instead, in the name of diversity, the hiring process is being loaded in favor of professors who subscribe to the particular ideology of DEI partisans as if every good hire would see things as they do. I do not want California voters to strip the UC system of more of its ability to self-govern, but if this hypocrisy inspires a reformist ballot initiative, administrators will deserve it, regardless of what the judiciary decides about whether they are violating the First Amendment.
Researchers say that nearly 336,000 devices exposed to the Internet remain vulnerable to a critical vulnerability in firewalls sold by Fortinet because admins have yet to install patches the company released three weeks ago.
CVE-2023-27997 is a remote code execution in Fortigate VPNs, which are included in the company’s firewalls. The vulnerability, which stems from a heap overflow bug, has a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. Fortinet released updates silently patching the flaw on June 8 and disclosed it four days later in an advisory that said it may have been exploited in targeted attacks. That same day, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration added it to its catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities and gave federal agencies until Tuesday to patch it.
Despite the severity and the availability of a patch, admins have been slow to fix it, researchers said.
There’s been a battle brewing over the past year or so between Matter and Readwise Reader over which is the better brand-spanking-new read later service. Here at The Sweet Setup, we try to pick the best apps and services in every category we can, but the TSS crew is split on this one, so today Josh and Matt are going to make their case for why they prefer each of these apps.
There were a few apps that brought delight to your iPhone and iPad in the early days. The clicks and sounds of the original Tweetbot for iPhone come to mind. I also loved that old quick note-taking app Scratch — it had a great icon, super fast opening, and simple UI. And we probably all remember when Sparrow came to the iPhone to handle your email. That app was awesome!
Matter is one of the few apps that fall into this category these days. I get a tinge of excitement every time I tap the Matter icon. From the simple, reader-first UI to the excellent Apple Pencil support, I love capturing and reading in Matter.
Matter isn’t without its competitors though — Readwise is right on its heels with many advanced features for the heaviest power users. Where I think Readwise could well be the pick for the power read-later user, Matter is the best option for the rest of us readers who want a beautiful place to read and relax in the later evening with a glass of wine.
Here are the three reasons why I choose Matter as my read-later app.
Matter feels like it was made for iPad first (specifically in portrait mode) and everything else after. There are very few hiccups, quirks, or janks in the app — tapping on a saved Youtube video takes you into a simple, viewer-first view, while text articles open immediately into a newspaper-like format, perfect for in-depth reading.
Both the iPhone and iPad app benefit from iOS-specific share sheet extensions, ensuring you can save anything from anywhere on iOS. The extension works well, too — tapping the Matter icon in the share sheet brings up the extension UI which can be dismissed with two quick swipes down when it’s all finished. Better yet, you can even jump straight into the article or highlight text from outside, make a note about the article in the share sheet extension, add tags, and more. A hallmark feature of a read-later app has to be a powerful share sheet extension, and Matter has this in spades.
I find myself saving more on iPhone and reading more on iPad, but this is me. Matter has this great read-out-loud feature so you can listen to your saved articles as well. This feature is probably more tuned for the iPhone and a pair of AirPods and is sure to please podcast listeners. You can also forward in your favorite RSS feeds and newsletters right into Matter and follow popular writers right in the app.
Finally, Matter has a neat feature to share your favorite articles with your Matter friends. By tapping the share button inside Matter, you can send the article or video straight to your friend’s Matter queue. It’s ridiculously simple to use and unearths a range of great reading from your online community.
In my experience, the Matter app on iPhone and iPad was rock solid. It surpassed any experience I’ve had with any other read-later app for iPhone and iPad, including Readwise.
Where the backend of the Matter app feels rock solid and iOS-first, the actual user interface is one of the best app designs on the market right now. Matter was designed for reading — and I think designed for reading on the iPad specifically — and it shows from top to bottom.
The app opens to your Queue, which is a list of all your saved articles, videos, and threads from across the web. The list is wonderfully spaced, with a perfect amount of text, iconography, color, black and white text, etc. to suck you in. There’s nothing overwhelming about the Queue and nothing that leaves you wanting.
When you ultimately jump into an article, Matter’s design prowess jumps out at you. Matter has a total of 10 different fonts to choose from, including New York, Valkyrie, Lyon, and Literata. I’m a Valkyrie fan, for sure. In its early days, Matter used Bookerly from Amazon, which has to be the prettiest reading font out there today.
You have four different themes to choose from for both light and dark system themes. Paper gives Matter a newspaper feel, especially if you are into serif fonts for reading.
Matter nails highlights, both in visual design and utility design. Highlight colors aren’t magnified on the screen, instead opting for a slightly more neutral yellow to ensure you aren’t distracted as you read. The pop-up contextual menu when you tap on a highlight is really nice as well — you can take a note on a highlight and share the highlight with a nice “quote shot” image. When you’re done reading an article, you can tap the note button in the top right corner to view all your highlights and notes from the article. I use this button all the time to share my notes into Apple Notes for saving.
Matter has my favorite app design on the App Store today. It reminds me of Things 3, Mimestream on the Mac, and Unread — all apps with their own unique, airy feeling that instill delight every time you open the app.
The last killer feature for me is Matter’s Apple Pencil support. And the Pencil support is very, very simple — if you put your Pencil to text anywhere in an article, the Pencil is a highlighter. There’s no pause to see what you’re going to do with the Pencil. There’s no press-and-hold to invoke the highlighter. You can just immediately highlight the text you want to highlight.
You can, of course, navigate with the Apple Pencil so long as you don’t first tap on text. You can use the Pencil to tap on a highlight and take a note, which then uses iPadOS-wide Pencil support for handwriting text recognition.
There’s something very analog-y about this experience. Inside Matter, Pencil is used as a pencil is used — to take notes and highlights — and your finger is best used for navigating the app. It’s a lot like a book, really, which is what it appears Matter wants to be in the best way.
If you want to read, Matter is the best app for reading I’ve come across in a long, long time.
There’s no way I can argue on the feel of Matter, because it really is top notch, but I do think that Readwise Reader has some really excellent features that could push it over the top for some folks.
Readwise started as a service for saving highlights from a bunch of different sources, so it’s probably not surprising that it has a longer list of features when it comes to highlights. One big advantage Readwise has is that it can sync in highlights from things that aren’t web articles. You can save highlights from books (via Kindle, Goodreads, Libby, Apple Books, etc.) as well as Medium, Twitter, and even otherwise closed systems like Discord. Heck, if you get tired of Readwise Reader, you can link your Instapaper, Pocket, or Omnivore accounts to Readwise to keep syncing your highlights all to the same place.
The highlighting built into Readwise Reader is top notch, especially if you’re a power user who loves shortcuts. Without going on and on, here’s a few clever ways you can highlight in Readwise Reader that I really appreciate:
FreshRSS 
h on your keyboard to highlight the currently-focused paragraph.
And if you’re an Obsidian user like I am and have your highlights syncing there, I’ve found Readwise’s plugin to be far quicker than Matter’s. After getting past a few hundred highlights in Matter, I really noticed it took a few minutes to sync each time I opened Obsidian, and it was just getting worse the more highlights I added. Readwise’s plugin is much faster for me, even though I presently have about 500 highlights in my Readwise account. I also really like that Readwise lets me customize the formatting of my Obsidian notes on the Readwise website, while Matter effectively doesn’t have an option to customize its format unless you are comfortable updating its plugin code directly (which will also get undone when the plugin updates).
Finally, Readwise has an email feature I really like that sends me an email every week with a few semi-random highlights I’ve saved before. This won’t be for everyone, but I find it really useful in helping retain some information that I read once and might have forgotten otherwise.
This is one I didn’t really expect, but I absolutely love. You can save YouTube videos to Readwise Reader and not only will this let you watch the video in your Readwise queue, it also imports the video’s captions, so all the text in the video is there to be highlighted and saved/synced like anything else you save to Readwise Reader.
The cherry on top here is that the app will highlight and scroll the text as the video plays so that you can easily follow along.
While I usually read articles on the screen, sometimes it’s nice to listen to them as if they’re a podcast. I have a dog who loves to walk, so I spend upwards of an hour each day walking that little guy, and it’s a great opportunity to listen to some articles along the way. Matter has text-to-speech as well, but I find Readwise’s voice to be more natural and easier to listen to for longer stretches of time.
I also really like the interface for listening to articles. If the app is on screen when you’re listening, you can follow along with real-time highlighting of each word as it reads to you. Matter is less precise here in my experience.
I also love that while the app scrolls the article as it reads to you, you can scroll backwards of forwards at will. Once you do, you can tap one button to zip back to where the voice is, or tap another button to have the voice skip to your scroll position.
Whenever you save something to Readwise Reader, the app will automatically generate a short summary of the article. It’s just 2-3 sentences, and is generated by GPT 3.5.
While these summaries are not at all replacements for reading articles written by humans, I do find them very helpful when my reading list has gotten too long (we’ve all been there, don’t pretend you haven’t!) and I need to trim it down to what I actually want to read.
Both Matter and Readwise have recurring subscription costs associated with them to use the full features. Readwise Reader currently costs $8/month (even if you pay for a year up front), while Matter is $8/month or $60/year, which means Matter can be a bit cheaper if you’re ready to commit for a year.
Ultimately, it probably comes down to what you value more: a smoother reading experience or easy and powerful highlighting features. Whichever works better for you, we’re all winners in a world where apps like these are competing to be the best they possibly can.
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