Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It’s a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.

Moral ambition begins with a simple realisation: you’ve only got one life. The time you have left on this Earth is your most precious possession. You can’t buy yourself more time, and every hour you’ve spent is gone for ever. A full-time career consists of 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.

So what do you want on your résumé? Do you go for a respectable, if bland, list? Or do you set the bar higher? Morally ambitious individuals don’t move with the herd, but believe in a deeper form of freedom. It’s the freedom to push aside conventional standards of success, to make your own way along life’s path, knowing that it’s a journey you can only make once.

So I ran a marathon at the weekend.

I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see.

I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected in a super interesting way.

Goals: (a) get round and (b) hit a target time of 3:45 if poss.

My time was 3 hours 40 minutes 12 seconds. I’m proud of that ngl (and wish I’d done better).

Age: Fairly new.

Appearance: Either sensible or boring, depending on your point of view.

If this is about influencers wearing shoes made of glass, I swear to God … No, calm down. This isn’t quite as reckless as that. It’s primarily about bedtimes.

I don’t follow. It’s been reported that more and more young British women who go out drinking prefer to be back home and tucked up in bed by midnight.

They do? Yes. According to research by skincare brand No7, 51% of women like to go to bed early after a night out, 65% would rather have an evening at home and just 5% claimed that their perfect night involves going dancing with friends.

You young people are such wimps. There’s probably more to it than that. Over the past five years, 400 nightclubs have closed around the country due to rising costs, a reduction in people’s disposable income and a marked generational decrease in drinking culture that is led, in part, by a growing awareness of alcohol’s effects on mental and physical health.

Amateurs. You don't use alcohol to party till dawn. Still, it's interesting to see such shifts through the lens of economic stress.

I've had many years of involvement with /r/AcademicBiblical and /r/AskBibleScholars (I am the founder of the latter). A few of us endeavored to create a YouTube channel for public education purposes. It turned out to be more difficult than we expected. Therefore we shuttered the project. Below is the second draft of the script that would have become our first video.

There can be quite the confusion when people learn that the regular Bible they know is considered a different religious text from the Hebrew Bible. But rather than generate more controversy than the Bible as a whole has in history, it is only right to seek to understand what the less-understood Hebrew Bible is all about and what it means to its particular audience, the Jewish religion.

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t just present as a primary documentation of historical events and context for understanding the New Testament the way the Christian Bible does. In this video, we will delve into what the Hebrew Bible is primarily about and give you a beginner's understanding of its role in Judaism and Christianity.

The Hebrew Bible consists of various books written by different authors. The writing of the books spanned long periods and were composed in many different places by people with varied backgrounds, occupations, and interests. But a major challenge facing anyone who wants to understand these profound works is that they are written in Hebrew. Many people with little experience with the language used to find this barrier an almost impossible one. Fortunately, plenty of resources can help you break through the problem of language barrier so that you can continue exploring this rich collection of religious literature in the future. The first step on your journey begins here:

To fully appreciate the process through which the Hebrew Bible came into being, we must first become familiar with the culture and background of the scribes who produced it. The scribes who created the Bible were professional writers associated with the Jerusalem Temple. They were considered the elites of their time.

The Israelites' culture was primarily oral. The capacity to write down a name or read a letter was widespread, but this does not imply that Israel was a literary community. Like most cultures in ancient times, stories of the origin of legends of ancestors and heroes, dos and don'ts, professional skills, and wisdom were almost always passed down orally.

The Hebrew Bible is a library of twenty-four books divided into three sections: The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, sometimes abbreviated as Tanakh.

There is general agreement among scholars that "Torah" is the proper name for the first section of the Hebrew Bible. However, many people also refer to this Hebrew Bible collection as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses. This is because the Five Books traditionally attributed to Moses are the first portion of the Hebrew Bible. It consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Jewish people believe that much of the information found in the Torah is God's very words. Scholars believe the Torah was written down around the 10th century BCE, about 3,000 years ago.

The Torah describes Israel's prehistory, from creation to Moses' death, before entry into the promised land. Genesis, "the Beginning," also known in Hebrew as Bereshit, is the opening book of the Tanakh. Genesis 1 to 11 covers primeval history, from creation through the deluge and the Tower of Babel. Whereas Genesis 12 to 50 tells the patriarchal account of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's sons. The story of Joseph, found in Genesis 37 to 50, is a discrete block of material in the Hebrew Bible. It is a transitional story that describes how Israel came to be in Egypt and sets the stage for the exodus. Exodus 1 to 18 narrates the story of the Israelites' deliverance from Egypt. Then Exodus 19 to 40 and Leviticus present the revelation at Mount Sinai. The wilderness journey is described in Numbers. Finally, Deuteronomy, is Moses' final discourse with a new generation of Israelites and his call to obedience and serving God. In this season in the lives of the Israelites, Moses gives them various instructions to sustain their relationship with God in the new territory they are about to enter, teaching us that with every new blessing comes a set of instructions for sustaining them; much like a manufacturer’s manual helps us maintain the integrity of the accompanying product. One of the instructions Moses gave the Israelites was with regard to their relationship to men who posed as oracles of God; the prophets.

The Prophets is a section of the Hebrew Bible that is not part of the Torah. Some scholars debate whether the first three books of the Prophets are actually prophetic books that are distinct from other books in the Hebrew Bible or if they are actually part of the Torah. The Prophets have two major divisions: the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets.

The Former Prophets are divided into four books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. However, remember that 1 and 2 Samuel and Kings each count as one book. Furthermore, the books of the Latter Prophets were Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Haggai, Zechariah, the last being Malachi. The Twelve Minor Prophets were traditionally considered as one book.

The Writings or the Nevi'im, the objective is to record the history of the Israelites and their acts within God's covenant connection. The books are extremely diverse and cover many events and topics. The story of Job, for instance, is about a righteous man who God severely tests. One of the primary lessons of Job’s story is that suffering is not necessarily the result of sin but rather a willful test from God to increase our faith and prepare us for a new set of blessings. This section also comprises the Psalms, a collection of writings praising God. The Writings are divided into eleven books: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah as one book, and Chronicles.

The Septuagint, the Masoretic Text, and the Targums are the three major versions of the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretic writings are based on ancient Jewish manuscripts from the 10th and 11th centuries CE. The Masoretic text is the most extensively used in today's Jewish world. The Septuagint, which was significantly more popular in the ancient Greek-speaking world, is a translation of the Tanakh into Greek commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Ptolemy II was the King of Egypt in the first half of the third century BCE. Finally, the targums are paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible that spread following the Babylonian exile, resulting in many Jews who did not know Hebrew.

It now appears that the entire Hebrew Bible gained its current form during the Second Temple period. The books of Joshua through Kings, which comprise the Former Prophets in the Tanakh, are known in contemporary academia as "the Deuteronomistic History." These volumes were modified in light of the book of Deuteronomy, no earlier than the sixth century BCE, despite the events they record reportedly stretching from around 1200 BCE to the destruction of Jerusalem. The first great prophets, Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah, lived in the ninth century. The book of Isaiah, on the other hand, contains not just oracles from the original prophet but also much material that was undoubtedly penned after the Babylonian exile.

The Hebrew Bible can be read in several different ways, but most people read it in the form of chapters and verses. This is helpful when looking up specific terms or concepts in the Bible. But reading it from chapter to chapter is not the same as reading it chronologically or in the order in which the events occurred or were written.

It may appear more straightforward to pick and choose well-known stories or easy-to-understand passages to read while studying the Bible, but taking the time to work through the Bible in the order in which the events actually occurred is both wise and helpful because it establishes the connections between the stories. Understanding a story or a particular idea in the Bible is helpful, but understanding how all the stories fit together and what they mean could help understanding Christianity.

One mistake most people make is approaching the Bible as a scientific book instead of a faith book. To the Jew, the Hebrew Bible is a story of God and man; his revealed works of creation, provision, judgment, deliverance, covenant, and promises. Moreover, the Hebrew Bible looks at what happens to people in light of God's nature, which is righteous, faithful, merciful, and loving.

On the contrary, humankind's key themes are rebellion, perversion, and estrangement; humankind's redemption, forgiveness, and reconciliation are all portrayed as gracious acts of God. So, the Hebrew Bible is an excellent introduction to Judaism and, by extension, Christianity.

Sources

John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (2014)

Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible - Volume 1 - The Five Books of Moses (2019)

Karel Van Der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (2007)

Stephen L. Harris, Understanding the Bible (2011)

Michael D. Coogan, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2018)

Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?

Public libraries are often seen as “opportunity institutions,” opening doors to, and for, the disenfranchised. 6 People turn to libraries to access the internet, take a GED class, get help with a resumé or job search, and seek referrals to other community resources. A recent report by the Center for an Urban Future highlighted the benefits to immigrants, seniors, individuals searching for work, public school students and aspiring entrepreneurs: “No other institution, public or private, does a better job of reaching people who have been left behind in today’s economy, have failed to reach their potential in the city’s public school system or who simply need help navigating an increasingly complex world.” 7

The new Department of Outreach Services at the Brooklyn Public Library, for instance, partners with other organizations to bring library resources to seniors, school children and prison populations. The Queens Public Library employs case managers who help patrons identify public benefits for which they’re eligible. “These are all things that someone could dub as social services,” said Queens Library president Thomas Galante, “but they’re not. … A public library today has information to improve people’s lives. We are an enabler; we are a connector.” 8

The need for physical spaces that promote a vibrant social infrastructure presents many design opportunities, and some libraries are devising innovative solutions. Brooklyn and other cultural institutions have partnered with the Uni, a modular, portable library that I wrote about earlier in this journal. And modular solutions — kits of parts — are under consideration in a design study sponsored by the Center for an Urban Future and the Architectural League of New York, which aims to reimagine New York City’s library branches so that they can more efficiently and effectively serve their communities. CUF also plans to publish, at the end of June, an audit of, and a proposal for, New York’s three library systems. 12 New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, reflecting on the roles played by New York libraries during recent hurricanes, goes so far as to suggest that the city’s branch libraries, which have “become our de facto community centers,” “could be designed in the future with electrical systems out of harm’s way and set up with backup generators and solar panels, even kitchens and wireless mesh networks.” 13

[...]What programs and services are consistent with an institution dedicated to lifelong learning? Should libraries be reconceived as hubs for civic engagement, where communities can discuss local issues, create media, and archive community history? 20 Should they incorporate media production studios, maker-spaces and hacker labs, repositioning themselves in an evolving ecology of information and educational infrastructures?

These new social functions — which may require new physical infrastructures to support them — broaden the library’s narrative to include everyone, not only the “have-nots.” This is not to say that the library should abandon the needy and focus on an elite patron group; rather, the library should incorporate the “enfranchised” as a key public, both so that the institution can reinforce its mission as a social infrastructure for an inclusive public, and so that privileged, educated users can bring their knowledge and talents to the library and offer them up as social-infrastructural resources.

archive.is link

The most influential promoter of antisemitism in the United States isn’t Elon Musk, who appeared to Sieg heil at Trump’s inauguration; nor is it Kanye West, who famously tweeted that he loved Hitler, or the podcaster Candace Owens, who has promoted the blood-libel conspiracy theory. The pro-Israel lobbying organization Stop Antisemitism wants you to believe the real danger is actually a lady in overalls and a pink headband who sings about how bubble gum is sticky.

The organization that has spent the past year and a half publicly identifying pro-Palestine protesters is now coming after Ms. Rachel, a beloved YouTuber known for her videos for babies and toddlers. In a letter posted to social media on Monday, StopAntisemitism asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Ms. Rachel is “being funded by a foreign party to push anti-Israel propaganda to skew public opinion” and referred to her as an “amplifier” of pro-Hamas content.

This is an insightful short video essay that talks about how we cope as people during these difficult times we are all facing.

I really enjoy the artistic style and editing of his videos as well which alone I think is worth sharing.

In the forests of eastern Australia, satin bowerbirds create structures known as “bowers.”

The males gather twigs and place them upright, in two bundles, with a gap in the middle, resulting in what looks like a miniature archway. All around the bower the bird scatters small objects – shells, pieces of plastic, flower petals – which all possess the same property: the color blue.

Studies suggest that the purpose of the bowers is to impress and attract females. But their beauty and intricacy has left some researchers wondering whether they shouldn’t be considered art.

Of course, figuring out whether something is a work of art requires answering some tricky philosophical questions. Are animals even capable of creating art? And how can we tell whether something is a work of art rather than just a coincidentally beautiful object? As a philosopher and artist who’s interested in aesthetics and biology, I recently wrote about the evolution of behaviors in animals that could be seen as art.

Linguistics undergrads learn about the vocal system and how your anatomy moves and contracts to form human speech. You begin to see vocal cords as a reed and your head as a resonant chamber. I remember my own classes at University of Kansas making me hyper aware of the way people spoke, even imagining corresponding phonetic symbols as subtitles. Like my Swedish friend whose accent sounds like a whisper. To me, “raspberries” is /ˈɹæzˌbɛɹiz/ where the s’s had hard /z/ sounds but for her it’s /ˈɹæsˌbɛɹis/ where the s’s had soft sound. The only difference between these sounds is that your vocal cords are either vibrating /z/ or not /s/. The Swedes are quite literally soft spoken people.

These phonetic symbols are characters from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a universal system for transcribing human speech. Each depicts individual units of sounds (called phones). It works for every language and vocal sound, from Berber to beat-boxing. You can even write the sound of a kiss [ʘ], known as a bilabial click. It considers all of the ways air can be manipulated in a human vocal system, leaving no sound unaccounted for — unless you have an anatomical adaptation.

I’m so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment”. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.

How great that Maga identities have Project 2025 to explain to them the gender roles they’re so rigorously policing. Should we be concerned that the campaign to politically erase trans people – so en vogue both in America and among America’s political lemmings in the Australian right – is a symptom of their endgame of reducing “men” and “women” to binary 1950s stereotypes that didn’t even reflect the reality of their time? Yes.

The thing that really gets me is how these "manosphere" complainers seem to have not considered alternatives such as being respectful in interactions -- why learn to be a better person when grievance is so much fun? The classic "I've tried nothing, and it isn't working" applies heavily here.

Asserting dominance as an introduction is for animals, not people. Fuck, you don't even do that within the BDSM/kink scene, where dominance may play an outsized role once you've established a dynamic based on respect. Not that these woe-the-hell-is-me-I-can't-get-women-to-do-whatever-I-want-as-soon-as-we-start-talking complaints are anywhere near kink, just a failure to grow up.

“Hundreds of people have come in this room under addiction and sat there and drummed or sat there and listened to songs and changed,” says Aldo Garcia, whose traditional name is Puxtunxt, gesturing around a room at Painted Horse Recovery where he leads Wellbriety meetings. Garcia is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, with Assiniboine Sioux, Siletz and Miwok descendancy. “That’s just what this represents today, it’s just nurturing to this community.”

For Garcia, practicing the Native American Washut faith and learning traditional songs have been a key part of his commitment to sobriety. Now, he helps to share these songs and raise his kids in the Washut faith, through the drumming group he co-founded, PDX WALPTAIKSHA.

Every Friday, community members gather in a room at Painted Horse Recovery, adorned with hand drums that hang on the walls, to practice drumming and singing traditional Washut songs. They hold services every Sunday, creating a space of healing and connection.

“There’s a heartbeat that comes with the song. There’s a story that comes with that song,” Garcia says. “There’s a living portion of that song that’s actually with you, that’s supporting you.”

Most Muslims in Ukraine are Crimean Tatars who are Indigenous to Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. It set off the war that ramped up with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

Many Crimean Tatars fled the peninsula. Some left the country altogether. For those who stayed in Ukraine, this Ramadan, which ends this weekend, is their fourth in wartime. Many say the circumstances have only strengthened their faith.

Tamila Tasheva, a Crimean Tatar herself, and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, was in attendance at the recent Musafir meal.

She said that life has been challenging for her community since the conflict began.

“My parents and mostly my relatives and friends, they live under occupation, and honestly speaking, we don’t speak about politics because it’s dangerous,” Tasheva said. “They live in the territory [in] fear. If you speak something openly, you could [be arrested] by occupying authorities, that’s why mostly people sit silently.”

Tasheva is a strong advocate for Crimean Tatars, and for all Ukrainian Muslims who make up 1% of Ukraine’s roughly 40 million people.

Just a few days earlier, Tasheva helped organize an iftar event attended by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who expressed his “respect and gratitude to the Ukrainian Muslim community.”

(archive.is link)

At the helm of the project is Adam Howard, a Colby professor and chair of its education department. Howard’s recent research has focused on elite all-boys institutions which he became interested in after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite allegations of sexual assault; one of the things Howard found was that sex education was almost entirely lacking at these institutions. While working with student researchers, he asked what the best way to disseminate their research findings would be. “They said TikTok,” Howard says. “The videos are providing really valuable information in really accessible ways.” Among that information: how to prioritize female sexual pleasure, what to do if you test positive for a sexually transmitted disease, and the difference between coercion and consent.

Sex Ed for Guys offers alternate programming. “Guys could be scrolling through their TikTok and Andrew Tate will pop up but as they scroll, maybe Sex Ed for Guys will pop up and it’ll start having them think a little bit differently,” says Christopher Maichin, 20, a junior at Colby. “I think the greatest part of it is that they are getting education without even knowing it. They’re watching a funny video but they’re learning about consent.” Howard says that the logic of disseminating his research findings on TikTok is two-fold: First, that’s where young people are (research shows 55 percent of TikTok users are under the age of 30) and second, it’s a way of offering a counter-narrative to other popular content. “They are learning what it means to be a man from Joe Rogan and the manosphere,” Howard says. “How can we provide a counter-narrative to that? How can we provide something different?”

Recently, video essayist F. D. Signifier released a short film on the paid streaming platform Nebula called Talking to "White" People which I highly recommend. In it, he interviews a variety of "white" mostly male mostly youtubers. Notably, he at no point actually tells us who anyone is beyond their racial identity, a cheeky parody of how often Black academics when interviewed about race are reduced to being nothing more than "A Black person."

Also notable is that all of the "white" people interviewed have some other identity other than "white" which they could take. They are Ashkenazi Jewish, Arab, Mixed-Thai, Italian, Polish, etc. and F. D. pushes each of them on their white identity, telling some of them explicitly "you are not white" which none of them are comfortable agreeing with. Regarding a man who identifies as a "European Mutt," F. D. Signifier is only willing to label the English contribution to his heritage "white" while declaring every other heritage "not white a hundred years ago."

The hesitancy to identify as something besides white comes with the fact that the alternative to white in our vernacular is "person of color" which certainly none of the interviewees are, except perhaps the olive-toned Italian, a darker shade within the bounds of what can be perceived as "white.' They all experience white privilege in most scenarios, and feel it would be unfair, stolen valor, or a lack of accountability to not own their whiteness as a major contributing factor to their life experiences.

Ask white people where they come from, and they will name a US state or city. Ask them for their ancestry, and they won't know, or will name multiple different ancestries. I am Ashkenazi-Irish, though genetically I doubt that's all of it. People intermixed in Europe too. We know that the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe definitely intermixed with Europeans more than we will acknowledge, otherwise we wouldn't be so light skinned.

Just as how most AfroAmericans cannot be traced directly to only being Yoruba, Akan, or Congolese, most EuroAmericans cannot be traced directly to only being English, German, or French. We associate the word Diaspora with people who have been scattered by circumstance, the African diaspora, the Asian diaspora, the Jewish diaspora—and so we don't usually speak of a European Diaspora. Yet when you look at the history of colonialism, not all the colonists were signing up to cross the ocean out of patriotic fervor for Mother England, many were poor, drafted by the military, or of an ethnic or religious minority. Especially in the 19th century, the European immigrants were not too dissimilar from the Chinese immigrants. It was American racism that privileged them over the Chinese, not socioeconomic class. It would be accurate to say that there is a European Diaspora, with diaspora cuisine and gestalt cultures. EuroAmericans are, arguably, a distinct cultural group, and they identify with "white."

But "white" is still not real. It's still a homogenizing social force, and not a singular culture. Perhaps European immigrants assimilate into EuroAmerican identity, but is that distinct from saying they assimilated into whiteness? Some calls for the dismantling of whiteness ask white people to instead identify with their specific national ancestries, but if you don't know your origin, or if you know it's eighty different places you know nothing about and don't identify with at all, then that's not a natural or easy thing for someone to do.

Conflicts in faraway lands and ideological differences make these three religious groups unlikely cohabitants in a shared space, but here the groups form a microcosm of peaceful coexistence united by tragedy. In January, the Pasadena synagogue burned down in the Eaton fire leaving its Jewish congregation in need of a place to grieve and worship.

The Methodist church, already a host to Islamic Center members as a satellite worship location, welcomed the Jewish congregation.

“We are trying to cultivate an ‘island of grace’ in the midst of differences that we are told should divide us,” said Aitken.

Under this arrangement, all three Abrahamic faiths are worshiping under one roof at 500 East Colorado Boulevard.

“I can’t think of another church that can say the same,” said Aitken.

It's almost like people understand we all need each other as opposed to believing in this divisive bullshit.

I can't imagine what it's like to be in the left column. When those expectations are brought up, I generally quit.

The last thing a metal worker from Liège is expected to do is found a new religion. Yet that is just what Louis-Joseph Antoine did, in Jameppe-sur-Meuse, Belgium, in 1910. Antoinism, his namesake religion, is not nearly as popular today as it was in its early years — but to its latest followers, it remains as current as ever.

Bernard (not his real name) is an Antoinist healer, a sort of parish priest for the movement. He is elegant, slightly balding and quick to smile. His pseudonym is not intended to protect his identity, but to preserve the discretion about Antoinism required by his Council. Other Antoinists declined interviews, citing an unwillingness to proselytize. “Recruitment is not part of our statutes, writings, or belief system,” Bernard explained to me. “We do not wish to conquer the world or to tell people how to do better than they already are.” Antoine himself is said to have destroyed 8,000 booklets he had created to spread his word.

This attitude has helped to maintain an aura of mystery around Antoinism. But it may also have stymied its future. The insistence that the secrets and benefits of Antoinism can’t be explained, but must be experienced, does not have the same appeal today as it did at the religion’s inception. At the height of its popularity, Antoinism had 31 temples; today, only 10 are still functioning. For Bernard, the question has become: How to keep alive a faith that speaks to only a few?

The composer John Cage told us to “not discriminate against sounds.”

He challenged us to become interested in what we usually perceive as noise and incorporated it into his compositions. Actually he said that the main difference between experimental and non-experimental music is the inclusion of noise.

Cage didn’t own a smartphone. He didn’t constantly stream music.

In the age of WiFi and Bluetooth speakers, we seem to believe that every activity in life needs an idealized, artificial soundtrack, whether it’s working or unwinding, running or relaxing.

Tech corporations have instilled and nurtured that belief in us. Their aim is to “maximize engagement”. The longer we listen, the more indispensable they become – and the more profit they make.

archive.is link

After more than two and half centuries of slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment, Black people in America were no longer bound by the violent constraints of slavery — legally. Nonetheless, the transition from enslavement to life post-emancipation was not going to be easy. In an attempt to support this transition, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established.

This year marks 160 years since that bureau's creation, which makes this a great time to recognize its legacy, its unfulfilled promises, and what we can learn from it all. Although this agency was short-lived — lasting from 1865 until 1872 — its impact was huge, including the pivotal role it played for Black Americans transitioning from slavery to life as freedpeople and the stories it continues to illuminate about generations of Black folks and American history.

Over the last few decades, there has been a continued interest in whether engaging in brain-stimulating activities – even for short periods – may help “exercise” our brain. There have been claims that activities which engage our attention and memory could prevent cognitive decline in older age.

So, playing something like Wordle might seem a good way to warm our brains up, or help us improve at problem-solving. However, the purported benefits of “brain training” are hotly debated.

Research has shown workplace breaks make people feel more energetic and enthusiastic, and less fatigued. And, video games appear to create recovery experiences.

In a way, Wordle sparked a modern workplace watercooler conversation. These have long been thought to improve culture and collaboration.

Wordle workplace discussions have involved colleagues competing for the quickest solves, sharing hints and swapping strategies.

Games which require players to reach a solution may work well in generating conversation, or by simply incorporating fun in an otherwise humdrum work day.

This is a somewhat interesting look at, like, how seemingly useless words outside of context function.

For almost a century, cosmetic companies have tested their products on animals. But it’s an inhumane practice of questionable reliability, and countries around the world are beginning to recognize this. In 2023, Canada, Chile and Brazil all outlawed cosmetic testing on animals, as did the state of Oregon.

These developments notwithstanding, cosmetic testing on animals is still standard practice in the industry. This, even though there are more effective and humane alternatives to cosmetic animal testing out there. So why aren’t all brands using them?

Let’s take a look at what cosmetic animal testing is, why many cosmetic companies still use it — and the more humane paths forward for the industry.