The “great American road trip” has often been romanticized in popular culture. For Black travelers, however, navigating the highways around the United States has never been easy, as they tend to encounter racism just for driving while Black. In the Jim Crow era of segregation, when there was no safe place for them to eat, Black travelers would pack premade meals and nonperishable food items in shoeboxes for lunch. The Negro Motorist Green Book, also known simply as the Green Book, was published in 1936 by postal employee and travel writer Victor Hugo Green to address this issue. This book was born out of the idea of helping Black travelers to find safe places to eat and sleep while traveling across the United States, especially in the South, where Jim Crow was the law of the land.

The legacy of these hospitable gas stations is rooted in Black resilience and resourcefulness, highlighting the determination of Black travelers to enjoy their journeys despite the discrimination they face. Over time, some communities and businesses have made efforts to support Black travelers, like the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, now known as ExxonMobil. Not only were stops at Standard Oil throughout the South featured in the Green Book; the company also encouraged Black people to open franchise gas stations starting in the 1950s.

Horatio Thompson became the first black man to own an Esso franchise in the South after he opened Horatio’s Esso Service Station #2 in the 1940s in Scotlandville, Louisiana. According to food writer and historian Deb Freeman, Southern gas station food and Black culture intersect thanks in part to the Green Book and to Black gas station owners serving traditional Southern meals that one might cook at home, like fried chicken, corn bread, okra, and collard greens.

“We have a culture around eating, and it doesn’t matter if you have to drive 20 minutes,” said Freeman. “I think that there’s just a really special relationship where we want to make sure that we can have proximity to good food at all times. The gas station restaurant serves as a source for feeding the community.”

Today Southern gas stations are a food mecca that reflect the diverse culinary traditions of the region. When I was traveling from New Orleans to Houston on a Greyhound bus in 2017, I was able to get my hands on the tastiest boudin ball, a regional snack of fried boudin sausage mixed with cooked pork, rice, onions, and seasonings at Rascal’s Cajun Express in Rayne, Louisiana. The I-10 highway between Baton Rouge and Texas is where you’ll be able to find some of the best boudin balls and sausage at most gas stations.

Given my age, I of course went through D.A.R.E. It's been a while, but all I remember were the cops creating outlandish fictional scenarios and then seeing if we'd do as told.

This is a very interesting look into the program's history.

This is, of all things, a Texas legislator working on a master's in divinity. Watch someone actually be Christian with a sermon of love, inclusivity and hope.

It's from October 2023, so the shit hasn't hit the fan yet, but the warning is stark and telling.

Apologies for the link to The Site That Shall Not Be Named, but the thread was far more interesting than the story.

The crisis is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.

On warm summer evenings, the groundhog who lives beneath my deck likes to climb atop a bench and look across the field. As I watch, I sometimes wonder what is on her mind while she surveys her domain. The simple explanation is that she is scanning for predators, and given the realities of groundhog life, this is quite likely. But is that all there is to it? Might she also enjoy the sight of grasses swaying in the breeze and the sound of rustling leaves? Might she even find them beautiful?

Such sensibilities are an essential, everyday part of human experience. They have also been largely denied to other animals. ‘Sensitivity to beauty and making or doing things that are perceived as “beautiful” are among the traits that elevate man above the brutes,’ wrote the great evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962. It’s a statement emblematic of scientific attitudes past and present. Even though research on animal intelligence has flourished, the aesthetic capacities of other species have received little attention. Today, we are comfortable describing these animals as having self-awareness, complex emotions, language-like communication, and even culture, but we hesitate to say they have a sense of beauty.

Assisted dying is now lawful under some circumstances, in jurisdictions affecting at least 300 million people, a remarkable shift given that it was unlawful virtually everywhere in the world only a generation ago. Lively legislative debates about assisted dying are taking place in many societies, including France, Italy, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Typically, the question at hand for these legislatures is whether to allow medical professionals to help individuals to die, and, if so, under what conditions. The laws under debate remove legal or professional penalties for those medical professionals who help individuals to die.

Having conducted research into the ethics of death and dying for more than a quarter of a century, I am rarely surprised by how the debates unfold.

On one side, advocates for legalised assisted dying invoke patients’ rights to make their own medical choices. Making it possible for doctors to assist their patients to die, they propose, allows us to avoid pointless suffering and to die ‘with dignity’. While assisted dying represents a departure from recent medical practice, it accords with values that the medical community holds dear, including compassion and beneficence.

On the other side, much of the opposition to assisted dying has historically been motivated by religion (though support for it among religious groups appears to be growing), but today’s opponents rarely reference religious claims. Instead, they argue that assisted dying crosses a moral Rubicon, whether it takes the form of doctors prescribing lethal medications that patients administer to themselves (which we might classify as assisted suicide) or their administering those medications to patients (usually designated ‘active euthanasia’). Doctors, they say, may not knowingly and intentionally contribute to patients’ deaths. Increasingly, assisted dying opponents also express worries about the effects of legalisation on ‘vulnerable populations’ such as the disabled, the poor or those without access to adequate end-of-life palliative care.

The question today is about how to make progress in a debate where both sides are both deeply dug in and all too predictable. We must take a different approach, one that spotlights the central values at stake. To my eye, freedom is the neglected value in these debates.

Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won’t pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death – that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of how we die – should be central to this conversation. Developments both technological and sociocultural have afforded us far greater freedom over death than we had in the past, and while we are still adapting ourselves to that freedom, we now appreciate the moral importance of this freedom. Legalising assisted dying is but a further step in realising this freedom over death.

I'll believe that from German researchers when LLMs start shoehorning four nouns together instead of just delving.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany published a non-peer-reviewed preprint copy of research they say detects that words that ChatGPT uses preferentially have started to appear more frequently in human speech since the bot was unleashed on the world in 2022.

So-called "GPT words" include comprehend, boast, swift, meticulous, and the most popular, delve. After analyzing 360,445 YouTube academic talks and 771,591 podcast episodes, the team concluded words like delve, swift, meticulous, and inquiry were just a few examples of terms that began appearing in more podcasts and videos across various topics.

I'd like to nominate "authenticity" as the vapid word of the year.

“You get a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of what people are going through, of the highs and lows of the human experience.

I mean, it could make you laugh on one page and make you cry for the next page. And seeing that variety of humanity reminded me of another book that I read and finished recently, which is called Humankind, A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. A friend of mine had given it to me because he said it had changed his whole view on the world.

And so I wanted to talk about some of the concepts that I picked up in that book, like the origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most people are actually pretty decent, and the problems with some of the narratives of our wickedness.”

For the first time, on November 20, 2024, the Dia da Consciência Negra (Black Consciousness Day) was recognized as a national holiday in Brazil. The date marks the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of the largest Brazilian quilombo, who was beheaded in 1695 by the Portuguese Crown—his head displayed as a trophy in a public square (to dispel, it is said, the myth of his immortality). The quilombo was a community of enslaved people who escaped from white-owned plantations, where they were kept imprisoned in the senzalas, the quarters designated for them—hence the name of a classic (and controversial) Brazilian text, Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933), by sociologist Gilberto Freyre.

The day aims to celebrate the fight for racial equality, to commemorate the resistance of Afro-descendant peoples, to promote concrete actions of reparation, as well as to increase Black representation in Brazilian society. The documentary Black Rio! Black Power!, directed by Emilio Domingos, achieves this goal by telling the story of a cultural movement that remains underappreciated. The culmination of 10 years of research, the film has screened at 24 international festivals and won several awards. When talking about Rio de Janeiro, the most obvious associations are samba, bossa nova, and, more recently, funk—little is said about soul. However, not recognizing the thread of continuity between them—and also with hip hop—would be like calling funk “a child of an unknown father.” And Furacão 2000, the record label and producer of the dance parties from that era, represents exactly this line of continuity.

According to journalist Silvio Essinger (O Batidão do Funk, 2005):

the choice of 1976 as the milestone of the movement is because it was the year it became visible beyond its own attendees, thanks to the report Black Rio: the (imported) pride of being Black in Brazil, by Black journalist Lena Frias, a specialist in Brazilian popular music, and photographer Almir Veiga, published in Jornal do Brasil.

In reality, these were years in which “the phenomenon of Black dance parties on the outskirts of Rio” began to draw the attention of the authorities. Brazil was under a dictatorship, and the military viewed with suspicion a movement that brought together more than 15,000 young Black people from the suburbs, who not only danced but also organized politically.

In June, the world’s largest psychedelics conference returned to Denver. Eight thousand participants gathered to hear 500 presenters over the course of a week.

Psychedelic Science, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), brought together people from 50 countries. They discussed such diverse topics as decriminalization initiatives, therapeutic and commercial regulation, electronic music raves, artificial intelligence, racial and social justice, and the genocide in Gaza.

Psychedelic movements are at a crossroads, testing different and often competing strategies and ideas. The research field was dealt a major blow in 2024 when the United States Food and Drug Administration rejected an application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, one of the marquee MAPS initiatives of the last 20 years. MAPS itself has undergone major changes since then, cutting one-third of its staff. Its for-profit pharmaceutical arm Lykos, meanwhile, cut about three-quarters of its staff.

Denver, which also hosted the biennial conference in 2023, is a fitting venue. For years it’s been at the forefront of psychedelics liberation, and possession of naturally-occurring substances is largely decriminalized there. As the conference kicked off, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) announced a blanket pardon for anyone with a state-level conviction for psilocybin possession. He urged local governments across the state to follow suit.

After its release in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Since then the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has significantly affected how we learn, write, work and create. But new research shows that it’s also influencing us in ways we may not be aware of—such as changing how we speak.

Hiromu Yakura, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, first noticed differences in his own vocabulary about a year after ChatGPT came out. “I realized I was using ‘delve’ more,” he says. “I wanted to see if this was happening not only to me but to other people.” Researchers had previously found that use of large language models (LLMs), such as those that power ChatGPT, was changing vocabulary choices in written communication, and Yakura and his colleagues wanted to know whether spoken communication was being affected, too.

The team’s results, posted on the preprint server arXiv.org last week, show a surge in GPT words in the 18 months after ChatGPT’s release. The words didn’t just appear in formal, scripted videos or podcast episodes; they were peppered into spontaneous conversation, too.

I've noticed that the more I use any given LLM, the more tedious the rigid idiolect becomes. The use of vocabulary generally reserved in conversation for extraordinary events feels shoehorned into more mundane matters.

I was doomscrolling through news articles one evening — this was June 2024, which feels simultaneously like yesterday and several epochs ago — when I saw a headline stating there was $2.8 million in school lunch debt across Utah.

So I called my local school district, because that seemed like the sort of practical thing a reasonably civic-minded adult might do. I had no particular plan beyond basic verification. The woman who answered sounded simultaneously surprised and unsurprised that someone would call about this, if that makes sense. Yes, lunch debt was real, she told me. Yes, it affected children in our district. Yes, it was about $88,000 just for elementary schools, just in my district. And then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that Bluffdale Elementary — a school I had no personal connection to — had about $835 in outstanding lunch debt.

$835.

The figure hit me like one of those rare moments of absolute clarity, utterly devoid of irony or ambiguity. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars was the cost of preventing dozens of children from experiencing that moment of public shame I couldn’t stop imagining. It was less than some monthly car payments. It was approximately what I had spent the previous month on DoorDash and impulse Amazon purchases. The grotesque disproportion between the trivial financial sum and the profound human consequence felt like a cosmic accounting error.

“Can I just... pay that?” I asked, half expecting to be told about some bureaucratic impossibility.

“Um, sure,” she said. “Let me transfer you.”

[...]I called another district. Then another. I started a spreadsheet, which is what middle-class professionals do when faced with systemic problems — we quantify things, as if converting human suffering into Excel cells might render it more manageable. I learned that some elementary schools had thousands in debt. I learned that, contrary to popular belief, most school lunch debt doesn’t come from low-income families — those kids generally qualify for federal free lunch programs. It comes from working families who hover just above the eligibility threshold, or from families who qualify but don’t complete the paperwork for various reasons, ranging from language barriers to pride to bureaucratic overwhelm.

I began to realize that the problem is both smaller and larger than I had initially understood. It’s smaller in that the per-school amounts were often relatively modest. It’s larger in that the entire structure of how we feed children at school is a tangle of federal programs, income thresholds, paperwork requirements, and local policies — all of which seemed designed to maximize shame and minimize actual nutrition.

The Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation began not with a mission statement or a business plan, but with a post I shared on social media asking people if they would be willing to chip in, along with the receipt I had been given for Bluffdale Elementary’s debt. Within a week, I’d raised $6,000. Within a month, $10,000. The mechanics were almost embarrassingly simple: I would call a school, verify their lunch debt amount, write a check, drop it off, repeat. People seemed to find the concrete nature of it satisfying — this specific school, these specific kids, this specific problem solved.

One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

I don’t have clean resolutions to these contradictions. What I do have is a growing conviction that the either/or framing is itself part of the problem. We live in a culture increasingly oriented around false dichotomies — around the artificial polarization of complex issues into two opposed camps. You’re either focused on immediate relief or systemic change. You’re either practical or idealistic. You’re either working within the system or fighting against it.

But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?

What if planting a tree wasn’t a CSR activity, a school punishment, or a presidential photo op, but a national obligation?

Imagine if, like filing taxes or renewing your ID, every Kenyan was required by law or culture to plant a tree each year. Not as a suggestion. Not as a campaign. As a basic act of citizenship. You turn 18? Plant a tree. Want a business permit? Show us your sapling. Run for office? Let’s see your forest.

Wild? Maybe. But is it wilder than pretending we can survive ten more years of erratic rains, poisoned rivers, and cities that choke more than they breathe?

We have turned sustainability into an option. A luxury. A side show. But what if it became a rite of passage? A shared ritual that cuts across tribe, class, and county?

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/21033066

In which Mars-in-Theory🦋 goes into how 'common sense' and similar discussion terminating cliches are fascist and merely exist to maintain and prop up the status quo.

A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2

So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it. For example, forty years ago Terui-san, the owner of jazz kissa Kaiunbashi-no-Johnny’s up in Morioka, was like: Hmm, nobody is spinning wa-jyazu (Japanese jazz),3 so I’m only going to rock it. That led to a bunch of cool knock-on connections, not the least of which was a lifelong friendship with the incredible Akiyoshi Toshiko. That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

And so…

Well, I killed the whole thing.

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast episode that brought me to my knees.

One of my favorite financial voices – Katie Gatti-Tassin/Money with Katie – had a well-researched episode on money dysmorphia, or a warped perception about your finances. In the episode, Katie explains the roots of money dysmorphia – a riff on the medical diagnosis of body dysmorphia, where you see a different version of your physical appearance – and interviews a range of women who talk through their irrational insecurities about their finances.

And when I listened to each woman talk, I heard myself in them. I listened to the podcast on the run, and at certain points I found myself hunched over and sobbing. To all of you who saw that sweaty blonde girl crying in Myers Park, no you didn’t.

That’s me. I am incredibly insecure about money, and my insecurity has defined my life for as long as I can remember. And in the most twisted irony of all, I’m a market expert who makes a living off teaching people about money and investing. Essentially, how to become – and stay – rich.

There are mountains of research backing this up. A 2017 University of Michigan study found that children start developing spending and savings habits as young as five years old. There’s also a 2021 paper from Eastern Kentucky University researchers that suggests there’s a link between adverse childhood experiences (instances of abuse and neglect) and financial insecurity in adulthood. Money scripts are a popular tool used by financial advisors to help understand the unconscious bias that can push you to make otherwise irrational decisions.

All because of this insidious truth: early financial trauma can profoundly shape your relationship with money.

That's why personal finance can feel so illogical at times — why some of us may be set on paper but constantly fear losing it all.

Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests.

One study, led by Ivan Kroupin at the London School of Economics, asked how people from different cultures perceived a visual illusion known as the Coffer illusion. They discovered that people in the UK and US saw it mainly in one way, as comprising rectangles – while people from rural communities in Namibia typically saw it another way: as containing circles.

To explain these differences, Kroupin and colleagues appeal to a hypothesis raised more than 60 years ago and argued about ever since. The idea is that people in western industrialised countries (these days known by the acronym “weird” – for western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – a summary that is increasingly questionable) see things in a specific way because they are generally exposed to highly “carpentered” environments, with lots of straight lines, right angles – visual features common in western architecture. By contrast, people from non-“weird” societies – like those in rural Namibia – inhabit environments with fewer sharp lines and angular geometric forms, so their visual abilities will be tuned differently.

In an era when a cold beer and a hot dog define the quintessential baseball experience, it’s hard to imagine a time when the former could cause an all-out riot. But the annals of baseball history are not only filled with double plays and home runs; they also record moments when the game spiraled out of control. One such incident, the infamous “Ten Cent Beer Night,” is a tale of caution recounted with both horror and fascination by the channel Weird History, and detailed by Grace Johnson and Samuel Trunley in an article for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

The promotion by the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) was deceptively simple: entice fans to a baseball game by offering Stroh’s beer cans for just 10 cents, significantly below the standard price of 65 cents. On June 4, 1974, this ploy worked a little too well. The Indians were in a slump, and a Tuesday night game would usually draw a crowd of 12,000 to 13,000 fans. That night, the lure of cheap beer attracted over 25,000 spectators, who consumed an estimated 60,000 cups of beer.

The stage was set for chaos even before the first pitch. Earlier that season, the Indians and the Texas Rangers had been involved in a heated brawl, leaving tensions high. Add to that the social conditions in Cleveland—economic downturn, factory closures, environmental crises—and you had the perfect storm for trouble.

UW college roommate just sent this my way after we were talking about nickel beer night a mile or two from the ASU campus.