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Creative and fun, Mizetto’s Summer 2023 Collection lives somewhere between work and play. The brand has pushed its own capabilities, exploring new materials, production methods, and functionality. Made in Sweden, the latest release includes a wood chair, a versatile table with attachments, a leaning piece, modular planters, and a trash/recycling bin. All share the qualities of clean lines and curves and leave you wanting to experience each for yourself. Known for its color combinations, Mizetto has also added five new “Nordic noir” hues: rusty burgundy, cloudy latte, forest green, latte, and dusty blue.
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Perhaps the most curious addition is Lumber by Addi, a piece meant for leaning, lingering, and loitering. The soft beam’s release marks the first upholstered product introduced by the brand. It’s a great answer to adding seating to small spaces, and we can’t help but note its resemblance to a dynamic piece of gymnastics equipment. A quick place to stop on the go for a coffee or email check, Lumber’s small tray-like table adds further functionality to a piece with no obvious front or back. It can even be hung on a wall for maximum space saving. Lumber’s upholstery is flameproof wool, with a cover that’s fully removable, repairable, and exchangeable. The legs are powder coated metal.
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Embrace Chair by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
A wooden chair is new territory for Mizetto, so they turned to an expert for help – Finish-Swedish furniture designer and woodworker Sami Kallio. The Embrace armchair was a result of the brand lacking seating in their own spaces, and shortly after, Kallio walked in with a fully functioning prototype.
“A few alterations later, Embrace was born; a chair that seemingly hugs its user. I love how it can be hung on a tabletop and stacked, but still provide us with all the beauty and comfort we seek in a piece of furniture,” said Rickard Muskala, founder, and chief of product development.
Kallio is also behind the multi-purpose table in the Embrace series.
Embrace Chair + Embrace Table by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Embrace Chair + Embrace Table by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Embrace Chair by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Plant Here by addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Playful, fun, and modular, Addi’s Plant Here gives our green friends a pedestal fitting of their mood-enhancing ways. The planter pays attention to the various needs of different varietals through its accessible design, whether you’re a balcony or office gardener. Features include a generous depth, transparent inner pot for easy planting, different heights, shapes, sizes, and colors. Combine two or more to form endlessly possible installations.
Plant Here by addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Pelican by Studio Nooi
Trash and recycling bins are a necessity, but that doesn’t mean they have to look like one. Pelican by Studio Nooi turns them into minimal decorative objects with touchless interaction. Their semicircular shape allows for modular design, creating an oval when placed back to back. Pelican’s design is suitable for residential as well as commercial spaces, and comes in two sizes and a variety of colors.
Pelican by Studio Nooi
Pelican by Studio Nooi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Pelican by Studio Nooi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Pelican by Studio Nooi
To learn more about Mizetto’s Summer 2023 collection, visit mizetto.se.
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Cindy Campos reads the book "Stay Safe" to one of her sons in Dallas.
Medical workers treating patients with Covid-19 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in January 2022, when the Omicron wave was in full force.
Students wearing clear backpacks outside a school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. A Michigan school district has gone even further and banned backpacks altogether.
Guest post by Brandon Bolte
On April 15, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) surprised many Western observers when it launched an assault against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Khartoum. Led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”), the RSF previously fought for the Sudanese regime against rebels for years. In 2019, it participated in a coup alongside General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF that ousted Sudan’s long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Both generals have since been on a transitionary council meant to shape a new government before popular elections take place. In the 11 days since the violence in Khartoum began, over 400 people have been killed, thousands are trying to flee the capital, and there are signs of the conflict spreading to other parts of the country.
Transitions to democracy are usually rocky, but coups can lead to democratization when coupled with the kind of popular mobilization seen in Sudan. The irony of the current situation is that at one point the RSF was considered by al-Bashir as his “praetorian guard,” meant to deter the SAF from staging a coup. Coup-proofers aren’t usually successful coup-perpetrators. Moreover, the current rupture was caused by a disagreement between the two generals over how the RSF might be integrated into the army’s command structure. Why is the proposed merging of forces so contentious? What do we expect the long-term outcome of this conflict to be?
In a study published in International Studies Quarterly, I unpack the politics of how governments try to manage, regulate, and contain militias like the RSF. I describe how and why states and professed pro-state militias compete for power at one another’s expense. Viewed in this light, the outbreak in Khartoum is part of a predictable, if not inevitable, vicious spiral of poor militia management politics over the course of the last two decades.
Pro-government militias are commonly defined as organized armed groups allied with the state but are not formally part of the official security forces. These groups range from well-equipped paramilitaries designed to supplement the regular army to localized civil defense forces meant to hold territory and extract local information about insurgents. Sometimes they are tasked with carrying out human rights violations like mass killings or genocide, allowing the government to evade accountability. Professionalized militias are also used by certain types of dictators to counterbalance the official military in order to prevent coups d’état.
The challenge for governments employing militias is that militias themselves are perfectly aware the state could eliminate them once they are no longer needed. This is why governments often keep their auxiliaries contained in some way, by actively monitoring them or restricting their capabilities. Otherwise, these militias could switch sides in a conflict, restart a war, be more difficult to disintegrate or integrate, or otherwise undermine the state’s long-term ability to govern.
Weak states facing capable rebellions, however, are usually unable to regulate and contain their militias. Instead, they have to focus on short-term threats from insurgents, allowing militia allies to have free reign. The consequence is that militia groups have incentives to take advantage of these windows of opportunity to “bargain” with the state for resources that they can eventually use to stave off their own future demise.
The RSF is a reorganization of disparate Arab militias called the Janjaweed, which were remobilized from scattered murahileen groups after a coalition of rebel groups shocked Khartoum by seizing an air force base in 2003. The SAF and Janjaweed militias then perpetrated a genocidal campaign in Darfur, leading to over 200,000 deaths.
Over time, the combination of weak state capacity and a significant rebel threat drove al-Bashir’s regime to become dependent on militias for survival. Militia leaders knew this and pursued their own interests unabated. Many leaders profited from looting and extortion during the war, so when the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) was signed in 2006 with a provision to disarm the Janjaweed, many, including Hemeti’s faction, revolted against the state. Eventually, Khartoum weakened Hemeti enough to force him to negotiate. There the government again co-opted Hemeti by providing his militia more weaponry, financial rewards, and eventually legitimacy by reorganizing it into the RSF. Al-Bashir soon brought the RSF out from under the command of the National Intelligence and Security Services, ensuring the group’s independence from the constraints of the state.
In the end, al-Bashir’s failure to contain these militias was part of a vicious cycle of his own doing. His growing dependency on militias like the RSF afforded Hemeti multiple windows of opportunity to increase his own capabilities, which he then used to resist his group’s demobilization. Now, even integration is worth resisting for Hemeti, since it would effectively represent the dissolution of his autonomy and influence.
A durable resolution can only occur if the RSF loses its bargaining power. This may require immediate international commitments by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to stop supplying weapons to the RSF and/or the SAF suppressing Hemeti’s forces to a point where the latter has incentives to negotiate but not retreat to remobilize for large-scale war. Unlike the immediate post-DPA period, however, appeasement cannot come in the form of greater autonomy, resources, and capabilities if the end goal is political stability. Al-Burhan knows this, and given the SAF’s own involvement in repression and mass killing, the military will resist appeasing Hemeti in an effort to signal to the pro-democracy movement a desire to turn a new leaf.
The problem is that the RSF is situated with considerable bargaining leverage and has every incentive to use force to preserve the status quo. “Power is as power does.” Temporary ceasefire efforts notwithstanding, until the RSF is demobilized or neutralized, Sudan’s pro-democracy advocates will be sidelined while military strongmen violently compete to fill the void in Khartoum.
Brandon Bolte is a 2022–23 Peace Scholar Fellow with the US Institute of Peace and a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Penn State University. He will start as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield in the fall. The views expressed in this commentary are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Institute of Peace.
Mourners cried during a candlelight vigil at Public Square Park in Nashville on March 29 honoring the victims of the shooting.
What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in?
This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally.
A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation.
The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?
It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time.
But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right."
So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming.
Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE.
This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy:
Enlarge (credit: Corey Gaskin)
The Forerunner 955 continues that tradition. It sits atop the Forerunner series as the most feature-packed watch in the bunch, and this year it gains some modern touches like a touchscreen and daily exercise readiness assessments (à la Fitbit's Daily Readiness feature, but free to users), while introducing new features not present on any other Garmin watch. That includes the higher-end Fenix series of watches, from which the Forerunner 955 is also starting to steal some cues, like solar-charging options and multi-band GPS.
We trained with the Forerunner 955 for a few weeks to see how its newest features improve on a platform we already love and to determine just how afraid Garmin should be about Apple or Fitbit catching up.
Enlarge (credit: Arm)
What's in store for the future of chip maker Arm? The company's owner, Softbank, has been in financial trouble lately, and that has caused Arm to bounce from one dramatic possibility to another. Initially, Arm was put up for sale, and Nvidia was the front-runner to buy the company. That plan was shut down by regulators, and now "Plan B" is an IPO, which is supposed to happen on the New York Stock Exchange sometime this year. If you want to succeed on the stock market, you've got to show revenue, and while Arm enables the sale of billions of dollars of devices around the world, the company's chip licensing scheme only brings in a comparatively small amount of money—around $500 million a quarter.
The Financial Times has a report on Arm's "radical shake-up" of its business model. The new plan is to raise prices across the board and charge "several times more" than it currently does for chip licenses. According to the report, Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product.
Let's say Motorola makes a phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm chip. Previously, Qualcomm would have signed a deal with Arm for an Arm license, and that license would extend to anyone that buys a Qualcomm Arm chip, like Motorola. Qualcomm contributes a lot to its own chip designs, but when it comes to the Arm license it is basically an Arm reseller. Arm would now want a licensing fee from Motorola (and not Qualcomm?), and it would ask Qualcomm to not sell chips to anyone that doesn't have a licensing agreement with Arm.
INNESS is a boutique country refuge located in Accord, New York, designed by Post Company in partnership with restaurateur and trained architect Taavo Somer, development team Michael Barry, CBSK Ironstate, and Lee Pollock. Named after renowned American landscape painter George Inness, the retreat was brought to life by the aforementioned group of designers and developers.
The 225-acre property features 40 hotel rooms distributed between a 12-room farmhouse and 28 cabins. Amenities include a restaurant and lounge, a 9-hole golf course by King Collins, a sports outfitter, swimming pools, tennis courts, hiking trails, an events barn, a farm shop, and a 3-acre organic farm designed by landscape architect Miranda Brooks. Slated for 2023, the wellness building will offer a spa, gym, and spaces for movement classes and yoga.
The property’s central theme revolves around the contrast between the cultivated and the wild. The grounds are anchored by social hubs designed for both aesthetic appeal and communal function, while also offering ample space for exploration and discovery. Inspired by the region’s Colonial Dutch architecture, the buildings showcase a minimalist design that highlights the picturesque landscape. Rustic details and an emphasis on local materials unify the structures, which are further enhanced by Miranda Brooks’ carefully balanced landscaping that seamlessly blends wild growth with manicured elegance.
The farmhouse serves as a central hub, featuring a communal lobby bar, guest kitchen by Plain English, library room, and game room. A coffee service and continental breakfast are available for guests and members throughout the week. The farmhouse rooms offer mountain views, modern amenities, and are furnished with a mix of vintage and custom furniture – including pieces by Sixpenny – artwork, and wares to create a cozy, lived-in atmosphere.
Photos by Adrian Gaut.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Pablo Neira
If the interests of sentient animals matter, then there are (at least pro tanto) reasons to prevent the harms they suffer. There are many different natural harms that wild animals suffer, including hunger, disease, parasitism and extreme weather conditions (Singer 1975; Clark 1979; Sapontzis 1984; Cowen 2003; Fink 2005; Simmons 2009; Horta 2010; McMahan 2010; Ebert and Mavhan 2012; Keulartz 2016; Palmer 2013; Sözmen 2013; Bruers 2015; Tomasik 2015; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021). One of these (on which I will focus in this paper) is the suffering caused by predation. Predation is an antagonistic relationship in which a predator obtains energy by consuming a prey animal—either wholly or partially—which is alive when it is attacked (Begon et al. 2006, 266). The harms predation cause to prey animals can vary greatly, depending on the kind of injuries they suffer in the process and how painful they are, the amount of time it takes them to die, the release of endorphins that reduce pain or the extent to which psychological suffering—mostly distress—affects them during the process. In addition, beyond the pain of predation itself, there are other substantial harms related to predation. It has been argued that death itself may harm animals because it deprives them of any possible future positive experiences (Nagel 1970; Višak and Garner 2016). However, we do not need to agree that death harms animals in order to consider predation a harm, as the suffering it causes to animals is sufficient in its own right. Moreover, some animals may survive predation and yet suffer serious injuries that cause them pain for a prolonged period of time, sometimes chronically (Schoener 1979; Engh et al. 2006; Jonhson et al. 2006). They may also live in fear of being attacked by predators (Lima 1998; Holbrook and Schmitt 2002; Mashoodh 2009). Thus, the pain experienced by sentient animals when they are attacked in nature should not be overlooked. In this essay, I will argue that it is permissible, and perhaps obligatory, to intervene to prevent predation. Moreover, if we accept this, it leads us to consider predation prevention as a cause area to take action seriously from Effective Altruism.
Predation: A Thought Experiment
Consider the following thought experiment:
Trapped Animals. An antelope is trapped between branches and abandoned by its herd. A hyena finds the antelope and begins to devour different parts of its body while it is still alive. This lasts several hours, until the antelope finally dies. Anna is near the antelope and, without placing herself in danger, could untangle the branches so the antelope could escape.
According to some deontological or virtue ethics perspectives,[1] it can be argued that Anna’s intervention would be incorrect. This position can be defended by arguing that there is a rule that prevents intervention or that it is not virtuous to intervene. The idea that we should prevent predation may seem odd and wrong to some people at first. At the same time, based on other deontological approaches, we may have positive duties to animals (including wild ones), which we would fail to honour if we do not aid them when they are in need. Similarly, based on some virtue approaches, refusing to help animals would be contrary to what a virtuous person would do. In fact, that seems to be the case if we do not help the antelope here. Meanwhile, according to a consequentialist perspective, if Anna intervenes she would be acting in the correct manner, as long as her action leads to the best possible consequences all things considered. A counterargument could be that if we save the antelope, the hyena will starve, and thus Anna would be harming the hyena. This supports people’s intuition against preventing predation. However, consider the following alternative:
Trapped Animals 2. The situation is the same as in Trapped Animals, except that Anna is physically close to the antelope, and, without exposing herself to danger, she could place a vegetable meat alternative on the ground with identical characteristics to antelope meat. The hyena would eat this alternative and leave the antelope unharmed. Anna could then untangle the branches so the antelope could escape.
In this case, again, a consequentialist perspective would imply that if Anna intervenes, she will act correctly, as the best outcome will be achieved all things considered. Deontological and virtue ethics arguments could reach a similar conclusion, as we saw in the Trapped Animals case. Therefore, our initial intuition against preventing predation may be shown to be misguided simply by introducing a small modification to the scenario. This is because our intuition against predation may still be present when we consider this case, despite the fact that all relevant considerations would lead us to conclude that we should save the antelope. In addition, our intuition against preventing predation could also be challenged by the following variant of the same case:
Trapped Animals 3. Everything is the same as in Trapped Animals 2, except that instead of an antelope it is a human being that is trapped.
When we include a human in the scenario, our intuition changes significantly. It no longer seems merely permissible but obligatory for Anna to act. It could be argued that this has no relevance for the previous cases, as there is a crucial difference between wild animals and humans. Indeed, it has been argued that wild animals possess certain capacities that allow them to use their natural abilities to survive, while humans do not (Simmons 2009, 19–21). However, this objection does not seem to work, as in the cases we are considering both the human being and the nonhuman animal will surely die if Anna does not act. Thus, the antelope cannot adequately deal with the threat. So, if we are not speciesist, it seems we should hold a similar position in all cases.
This conclusion is further reinforced by the following case:
Trapped Animals 4. Everything is the same as in Trapped Animals 2, except that Anna is a biologist and knows that the antelope has a highly contagious disease. If the hyena eats it, this disease could infect other mammals, including humans.
Again, in this case it seems that it would not only permissible but obligatory for Anna to act. But, it is not clear whether there is a relevant difference between this case and the previous ones. We can only claim that there is if we maintain that the interests of humans are important in a way in which the interests of other beings are not.
Practical Implications: The Case for Effective Altruists
We may also conclude that this is an important cause, considering (as effective altruists do) its scale, neglectedness and tractability (Singer 2016, 19–20; MacAskill 2019, 12–15; Timmerman 2019, 166–68; Berkey 2020, 368–70). Regarding the scale, it is difficult to determine the exact number of wild animals that exist,[2] although we can estimate that the number is vast. Most suffer due to natural factors, and many are killed by predators. The overall amount of pain will be several orders of magnitude greater if we consider a long-term perspective, as the number of sentient animals that will live in the future is likely to be greater than the number of sentient animals that are alive now and have lived in the past as a whole. As for neglectedness, it is evident that this topic (and that of wild animal suffering in general) has received very little attention from animal charities or other organisations (for an exception, see Animal Ethics 2020). Finally, regarding tractability, there are different courses of action that could be implemented to prevent predation. I will now consider four of them. The first two are more speculative, and their expected results would need to be researched in far more detail before they could be implemented, which should first occur through pilot programmes. Meanwhile, the third and the fourth ones could be applied immediately and are much less controversial.
First, it has been argued that resources could be devoted to researching how to perform interventions similar to the natural evolution that led to the herborisation of some previously predatory species (e.g. the giant panda). This could be done by genetically modifying predators so that their offspring gradually becomes herbivorous, consequently changing their predatory behaviour (Pearce 2009; Palmer 2013; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021).
Second, resources could be devoted to organising the gradual extinction of predatory species (Pearce 2009; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021), for example, by administering contraceptives to predators and allowing them to gradually disappear. Depot-contraception (a form of contraceptive injection that prevents ovulation in females) could be administered to carnivores, causing predatory animals to disappear within a few generations, and the resulting population effects on predated spices could be managed through more selective forms of contraception. Such advanced contraceptive techniques could be controlled by computer programs, which would be tested first on a small scale and then applied on a larger scale.
Third, the resources currently used to promote the conservation of predators (which are sometimes significant) could be allocated elsewhere, potentially having a better impact, while allowing the predators to disappear naturally (Cowen 2003).
Fourth, reforestation plans could be designed so the resulting ecosystems contain less rather than more predation. Different types of plants can support different types of animals. Accordingly, we could choose to plant types of vegetation that are less likely to support predators (Animal Ethics 2020).
If the arguments made in the previous sections are correct, then all the courses of action indicated above should be considered acceptable. However, many people will find this counterintuitive in the first two cases, despite the arguments presented above. Nevertheless, the latter two approaches could be considered acceptable by anyone willing to give at least some weight to the interests of wild animals. This means that preventing predation is tractable, at least in some ways.
Conclusion
I have argued that intervening to prevent harms to animals resulting from predation is morally right. Those who argue that we should not act in cases of predation must rely on ad hoc responses to intervention in scenarios in which such action seems to be the right choice. Admittedly, this will likely be a counterintuitive conclusion for many people, although the arguments I have presented appear to imply it. However, while some of the approaches for preventing predation may appear contrary to intuition, that is not true for all of them.
Notes:
[1] It could be also be defended from a rights perspective, wild animals can certainly harm each other, but they cannot violate the rights of others (Regan 1983; Jamieson 1990; Cohen 1997; Milburn 2015); of capacities, the capacity of specific species to flower, requiring a type of predation (Nussbaum 2006; Schlosberg, 2006; Cripps 2010); or of the community of animals, as it is reasonable to assume that wild animals are fully competent to address the challenges they face (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011).
[2] Specifically, there are estimated to be 1011–4·1011 birds, 1011–1012 mammals, 1011–1014 reptiles, 1011–1014 amphibians, 1013–1015 fish, 1014–1017 earthworms 1014–1017 mites, 1015–1018 polyps, 1017–1019 terrestrial arthropods, 1017–1019 rotifers, 1019 gastrotrichs, 1018 copepods and 1020–1022 nematodes (Tomasik 2019).
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The furry green fry fella known as Uncle O'Grimacey was introduced into the fantastical world of McDonaldsland in 1975. McDonald's had introduced the limited-edition green Shamrock Shake only 8 years earlier, and it proved to be so popular that in fact the shake alone was responsible for funding the very first Ronald McDonald House. — Read the rest
Looking deeper into the catalysts for violent crime. How an Iraqi U.S. Army interpreter became an underground drug kingpin. What plants have to teach us about life, both real and artificial. Aging, but with vitality and grace. How one Iceland town comes together to help baby puffins take their first flight, and our first-ever audience award. Here are five + one stories to kickstart your weekend reading.
Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project | March 2, 2023 | 7,750 words
When we look at the face of a criminal in a mug shot or in a courtroom, what do we see? Many adults facing the death penalty have been shaped by childhood trauma or violence they experienced or witnessed in prison as juveniles. Mitigation specialists work to uncover traumas and dig into the personal and family histories of people on death row — not with the aim to excuse or justify their crimes, but to help paint more complete portraits of them as human beings. Maurice Chammah spends time with mitigation specialist Sara Baldwin as she works on the case of James Bernard Belcher, a man on death row for the 1996 murder of Jennifer Embry. It’s a complex story that Chammah reports and tells with great care and empathy, and highlights a little-known profession that helps to illuminate why people hurt one another and are led to violence. —CLR
Benoît Morenne | Wired | March 9, 2023 | 5,403 words
There’s an old episode of Portlandia in which the city’s mayor goes on the dark web to buy fireworks, and of course winds up buying rocket launchers instead. Buffoonery and prosthetic noses aside, that was the impression most people have always had of the dark web: a place where you could buy absolutely anything with total anonymity. Alaa Allawi was one of the people making the first part of that impression come true. After becoming a U.S. Army interpreter at age 18, Allawi developed an impressive proficiency for low-level cybershenanigans — and when he ultimately left his native Iraq for the U.S., those cybershenanigans became his way out of poverty, courtesy of selling counterfeit Xanax online. But it turned out that “total anonymity” wasn’t quite right, and after the real fentanyl in his fake pills led to overdoses and a campus cop took notice, there wasn’t a prosthetic nose big enough to save him. With precision and a relentless chronological tick-tock, Benoît Morenne details Allawi’s rise and fall, as well as the federal investigation that slowly tightened around him. Sure, you’ll find bitcoin and giant champagne bottles and Lil Wayne cameos, but the kingpin stereotypes are few and far between. This story has no heroes, anti- or otherwise. That’s the point. —PR
Amanda Gefter | Nautilus | March 7, 2023 | 4,890 words
Professor Paco Calvo used to study artificial intelligence to try and understand cognition. However, he concluded that artificial neural networks were far removed from living intelligence, stating “what we can model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition. Biological systems are doing something entirely different.” The abilities of AI have been dominating many a headline of late, making Amanda Gefter’s essay on Calvo’s theories a refreshing read. Calvo claims we have much more to learn from plants than AI. Plants sense and experience their environment, learn from it, and actively engage with the world, which he sees as the key to consciousness. His theories may be a little out there (I am not convinced neurons are not necessary for thought), but this essay did make me consider the significance of our interactions with our external environment in the thinking process. Rather than leave you with these Big Thoughts, I will end with Calco’s joyful description of plants: “Upside-down, with their ‘heads’ plunged into the soil and their limbs and sex organs sticking up and flailing around.” You will never look at your roses in the same way. —CW
Jane Miller | London Review of Books | March 16, 2023 | 1,999 words
What makes time meaningful? Is it time spent with a book? Learning something new? Maintaining your fitness routine? Doing things for others? What’s the relationship between meaningful time and being satisfied and happy? How does the definition of happiness and satisfaction change over your lifetime? If you’re anything like Jane Miller, age 90, you might ask yourself these and other questions, reflecting on the one resource we share on earth: time. At the London Review of Books, Miller ponders all this and more. “When I was 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool,” she writes. While I can’t relate to her need to swim a kilometer a day, I can empathize with owning a body much closer to its “best before” date than its birth and the constant need to evaluate how I spend my time. In sharing her boredom and anxieties, Miller’s given me much to think about. —KS
Cheryl Katz | Smithsonian | February 14, 2023 | 3,125 words
Every year Bloomberg Businessweek publishes what it calls the Jealousy List, featuring articles that authors wish they’d written or that editors wish they’d assigned. If I were to have my own jealousy list for 2023, this piece by Cheryl Katz would be on it. I love it so much. Seriously, drop what you’re doing and read it. Katz’s story is about a village in Iceland where, every year, residents young and old work together to save baby puffins, also known as “pufflings.” The wee birds that look like they’re wearing tuxedos often get lost leaving their burrows and struggle to fly out to sea as they’re supposed to. Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carries them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate.” Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carry them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate. As climate change does its worst to the earth, ushering pufflings into the sky has never been more important. I’m jealous I didn’t get to write this story. Or maybe I’m just mad I’m not in the Puffling Patrol. They get to do good for the world by communing with adorable baby birds. How often is something so essential also so joyful? BRB, Googling flights to Iceland. —SD
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Pro Publica | November 16, 2022 | 13,808 words
This story starts with a house fire in 2013, then takes readers on a journey from the 1970s to the present, tracing the parallel yet wholly different existences of Todd Brunner, the landlord of the property, and Angelica Belen, the woman who lived there with her four young kids. Riveting and infuriating, Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong’s work has been nominated for a 2023 National Magazine Award for feature writing. —SD
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A 6-year-old boy shot and injured his first-grade teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., on Jan. 6, the authorities said.
At a conference hosted by Haaretz on Wednesday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out. I think that the State of Israel needs to do that—not, God forbid, private individuals.” Hawara has been in the news lately because of an Israeli assault that claimed the lives of ten Palestinians and injured over one hundred. Although Smotrich prefers to see Hawara’s demise through public and legal means, his horror about vigilantes belies his consistent protection for rampaging settlers who commit acts of terrorism. He and the National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are both disciples of Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach Party was banned in Israel and labeled a terrorist organization by the US State Department. Ben-Gvir was convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist group and Smotrich has been under suspicion for planning terrorism.
The interviewer offered Smotrich several opportunities to walk back his comments, but he abstained. And his comments were not off-the-cuff. Smotrich was clear that much of his current thinking is part of his 2017 paper on “Israel’s decisive plan that advocates `disproportionate’ retribution to Palestinian terror,” specifically “transfer”—otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. This is not a fringe idea: about 50 percent of Israeli Jews support expulsion. The ideas contained in Smortich’s paper, which were once considered fanciful, unimaginable, and reprehensible, are now part of the conversation.
Smotrich might be an outlier because he has yet to learn that there are things you can and cannot say as a government official, but he is still in office and he is part of a government in which ministers and members of parliament have advocated violence against Palestinians. Moreover, these are not empty threats. Last year more than 170 Palestinians, including at least 30 children, were killed by Israelis and Israeli forces across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In January 2023 alone, at least 29 Palestinians, including five children, were killed, and the current total is sixty-six, including Palestinian fighters and civilians. In addition to the dead, there are scores more who have been injured, maimed, and suffered considerable property damage, including the loss of their livelihoods.
This current situation is alarming. Israel’s control over the territories has already produced a long list of alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, but the current atmosphere has upped the ante and could be the progenitor of crimes against humanity and even genocide. The Genocide Convention defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Over the last thirty years genocide research has exploded, led in part by the contemporary genocides in Bosnia, Somalia, Darfur, as well as the past genocides against the European Jews and Armenians.
Genocide is impossible to predict: there is no agreement on how the combination of preconditions, contingent paths, triggers, and entrepreneurs produce a form of violence once unimaginable. But research on genocide over the past several decades has provided insight into the preconditions, which provide a reasonable starting point.
Preconditions are not predictors. If we use them to predict genocides, we will overpredict. But a look at the UN’s report on atrocity crimes, which lists risk factors for genocide and “lesser” forms of organized violence, is illuminating. It lists eight common and six specific risk factors. The eight common factors are situations of armed conflict or other forms of instability; record of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law; weak state structures; motives or incentives; capacity to commit atrocity crimes; absence of mitigating factors; enabling circumstances or preparatory action; and triggering factors. These are, as the document states, general risk factors. Many states might qualify. Israel ticks all the boxes.
The six specific factors include the following. Intergroup tensions or patterns of discrimination against protected groups. Unequivocally. Signs of an intent to destroy in whole or in part a protected group. Also yes. In fact, just days ago an Israeli military commander referred to the attack on Hawara as a pogrom. Signs of widespread or systematic attacks against the civilian population. Yes—settlers have a yellow light that often turns green, and they are often aided and abetted by the Israeli government and army. Serious threats to those protected under international humanitarian law. Israel does not even recognize the application of international humanitarian law to the territories and has constructed settlements in the territories that are in major violation. Stern threats to humanitarian or peacekeeping operations is the only box that Israel does not tick, though some aid workers would suggest otherwise.
Other reports focus on other enabling factors that motivate individuals to imagine and unleash evil. One such factor is separation based on differences. Arabs and Palestinians have always been treated as a separate people and there is a growing consensus that Israel has many of the qualities of apartheid. There is classification—the creation of categories that serve to institutionalize, not only difference, but superior and inferior, and pure and impure. Israel has created a legal, political, and cultural difference between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians have different rights and responsibilities depending on their membership status: Israeli Palestinians are a step below Israeli Jews, while residents of the territories have few rights whatsoever. Israeli law and policy not only distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, but the state’s responses to terrorism differ depending on whether it is committed by Jews or Palestinians. To begin, few Jews are labeled as terrorists, but if they are their houses are not blown up and their families are not threatened with eviction. Just listen to how Israeli officials talk. You will hear not only perceptions of built-in differences but also another risk factor: dehumanization. Dehumanization justifies the brutalization of the other and using all kinds of violence that would not otherwise be conceivable. At this very moment, Israel is proposing that Palestinians convicted of terrorism against Israeli Jews be executed, but Jews need not worry of execution if convicted of the same crime. Israel abolished the death penalty in 1954 for murder, but kept it on the books for crimes against humanity and war crimes. In 1962 Israel hung Adolph Eichmann for the crime of genocide. Since then some who were convicted of terrorism were given a death sentence, but all had their sentences commuted.
No genocide can occur without preparation and organization, and the evidence suggests that Israel possesses these elements. Has there been preparation? This is often difficult to tell, not only in real time but also after the fact. Genocides often occur in the shadows of war and often appear spontaneous. Genocide research, though, concludes that what is often seen as spontaneous is quite organized and purposeful. Analysis of the violence raged against Palestinians in Hawara suggest this was not a crime of passion but rather a crime built with considerable planning and premeditation, just waiting for the right opportunity.
None of this is to say that Israel is on the verge of unleashing mass crimes against humanity and genocide. But the warning signs are there. These kinds of crimes often occur because of calculations by the perpetrators that they can get away with it, because either no one wants to or can stop them. Will those in positions of power take the signs seriously and stipulate the consequences of engaging in such heinous behavior, if Israeli officials consider this option? Probably not. States are reluctant to get involved, especially if it requires force. And perpetrators sometimes have friends in high places. The US, which is Israel’s primary supporter and defender, has aided and encouraged Israel’s drift to the right. Currently it responds to the attacks on Palestinians with statements in support of the two-state solution and defending Israel in the UN Security Council, which would be laughable if it was not such a serious abdication of moral leadership.
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