I was working at the magazine [The New Yorker] as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues. I still wasn’t a doctor or engineer, but the publication cast a flattering light on them, revealing them to be open minded enough to let me pursue a non-traditional field, yet strict enough to propel me to its most rarefied strata. I liked to name-drop where I worked, too, especially when meeting someone for the first time, though I made a point of not bringing it up until I was asked. For almost two years, things went smoothly. I had insurance and I was making more money than ever before. At work, I checked a lot of the “back of the book” pieces, which often involved going to the movies or reading novels on company time. I would write emails suggesting minor corrections:

Almodóvar’s debut was released in 1980, not 79 as is written, and Penelope Cruz’s character has sex in the first ten, not five, minutes of the film. Screenshots with timings attached.

[...]

I stopped checking movie reviews and spent the ensuing months verifying how many people died in Palestine and the ways in which they died, calling people on the phone to ask how, precisely, their relative had been killed. The work fell to me because none of the other checkers spoke Arabic. At first, it seemed important to me that the language we used reflect the horror of what was happening. But I was defeated in trying to secure the most basic changes:

from: terrorist to: militant

add ‘occupied’ before ‘West Bank’

from ‘Israeli War of Independence’ to ‘the Nakba’

I wrote up a style guide and circulated it among the checkers and copy editors, though I don’t know if anyone ever used it. I started to feel a target growing on my back and stopped fighting as much. I was exhausted. The work was shredding me, and I was not sleeping well. I stayed up late scrolling Twitter and watching Al Jazeera, the tide of images of destruction and death washing over me, leaving me feeling raw and psychotic. When people asked how I was doing, I laughed. Horrible, I said, like it was a great punchline. Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling me a terrorist sympathizer.

Around four months into the war on Gaza, scholars of genocide were reaching a consensus that what was happening in Palestine was a genocide, the crime of crimes, and I waited for the magazine to say so, too. I tried to talk to the editor-in-chief about using the word in our coverage, but he said he didn’t think it was a genocide. The word’s conspicuous absence led me to suspect that he had prohibited its usage among the editors. This was a notable exception to the accepted epistemology; a few months into the job, I overheard another checker cold call an addiction scholar to confirm that gambling was, in fact, addictive. But I did not have it in me to keep fighting. I justified this to myself by saying that the war machine would not be halted by any linguistic alteration I might make in a magazine mostly skimmed over by American suburbanites while they pooped.

Yushy was on a packed tube on New Year’s Eve when he heard voices yell his name. He recognised their faces from the squat raves he had been photographing. “We’re going to a party right now,” they whispered. “I have my camera,” he said, and followed them. He didn’t know anything else about them. In the squat rave underground, which thrives on anonymity and secret locations, it didn’t matter. “They trusted me with them, and I trusted them to take me to the rave,” he says.

His new book, Section 63: Underground and Unmastered, documents three years in this London scene. Yushy started out as a fresher when he replied to a party promoter looking for a photographer. But he grew bored with the more mainstream events he was photographing, and started asking attendees about underground happenings. “I also asked around in group chats,” he says, “Which I later found out – once I was inside the official rave group chat – were placeholders for people to be approved. Purgatory, essentially!”

In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women’s bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as “influencing women in their daily lives”.

To her audience – approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women’s magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz – Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called “the cradle and the ladle”, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.

“There was a whole array of women’s magazines that glorified housewives” in Nazi Germany, says Koonz, a professor emerita of history at Duke University. “It would be the equivalent of social media today.” Frauen Warte contained nothing too political – just broadly appealing lifestyle content about keeping a clean and well-provisioned home while raising a healthy family, with occasional debates about how much makeup one should wear. A barefaced look was preferred – much like the “clean girl” trend of today. “In a censored society everyone needs debates about harmless topics,” says Koonz.

Koonz is well-acquainted with the ways political strongmen rely on women’s labor at the family level to implement state ideology. Her 1986 book, Mothers in the Fatherland, describes how the ordinary women of Nazi Germany “operated at its very center”, incubating ideals of white supremacy, female subordination and sacrifice at home.

In Costa Rica, a centralized system for street addresses does not exist, so people use landmarks as reference points in giving out directions. A short documentary by María Luisa Santos and Carlo Nasisse attempts to figure out why.

Boredom isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks explains why boredom unlocks creativity, activates a powerful brain network, and might even protect you from depression. Learn how the mind wanders—and why that’s a very good thing.

We ought to be honest that design reviews have not produced attractive mid-rise homes that the public appears to like en-masse. If anything, they might have contributed to the unattractiveness. In contrast, people generally like the architecture of new single-family developments and townhomes. Lennar Corporation is seen as the McDonalds of single-family home construction but few would argue their creations are unattractive. Lennar incorporate features that are aesthetically pleasing to Americans: shingles, ornaments, simple stone masonry, plastered on wooden paneling etc. I find some of these homes to look quite silly, but I don’t think the average American disapproves. So why can’t we build apartments in similar styles?

This is anecdotal but condos (or owner-occupied housing) tends to look much better than even contemporary design apartments. Most new multi-family homes are rentals and the buyers of apartments are not average people but corporate landlords. Very few prospective tenants looking for rental listings are paying an ounce of attention to the building’s exterior. (If you do, you’re a bit weird or snobbish.) A condo and single-family developer’s market is mostly average people looking to own a home, so they care deeply about the exterior. Some developers are going to invest more money into hiring architects to build their projects with homey features or go for the neo-classic look.

Because architecture is subjective in attractiveness, it’s often hit or miss. Some developers hire architects that will get the job done cheap, with minor altercations of pre-existing designs from their portfolios. Others, in an attempt to appease architecturally critical communities, will hire architects that will use more expensive materials to achieve a pleasing design.

Design review as it currently exists doesn’t seem to make people happy and probably should be abolished entirely. Any design standards that aren’t directly about public safety or are extremely vague and lack explicit design features should probably be eliminated. D.R.s tend to be staffed with architects who tend to be snobby and can be in very insular conversations in their industry.

I grew up with this on CD from Deutsche Grammophon. I'd not realized it had been videoed. Wow, was '89 a weird year. You don't realize that at 10.

I'm somewhat amused by how bored the choir looks awaiting the fourth movement. I was once positioned behind the gong for a full run of Carmina Burana. Then I went to a production of it in Hamburg with my host family, who were quite confused that I knew the entire work. And thereafter, when I was getting help building out my van, the local NPR station was taking requests, and sure as shit, Carmina Burana came up as a suggestion. I looked at Eric and said "there's no way they're playing the full thing."

As one does, I just used my phone to broadcast the full piece. O Fortuna isn't particularly satisfying on its own.

As incoherent, unhinged, or even cringey as the Minneapolis shooter’s videos might seem, they are part of a familiar template of terroristic behavior—one that continues to spread in online communities dedicated to mass shootings and other forms of brutality. In these morbid spaces, killers are viewed as martyrs, and they’re dubbed “saints.” Really, they’re influencers.

These disaffected communities live on social networks, message boards, and private Discords. They are populated by trolls, gore addicts, and, of course, aspiring shooters, who study, debate, and praise mass-shooting tactics and manifestos. Frequently, these groups adopt the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—sometimes because they are earnestly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and sometimes because it’s the look and language that they’re cribbing from elsewhere. It’s always blurry, but it usually amounts to the same thing. In an article published by this magazine last year, Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine, summed it all up: “As you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!”

To understand the dynamics at play here, I spoke at length with Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies online extremism. He told me that the “proximate goal of these attacks is to entrench the shooter in the broader legacy of violence and propel the legacy further.” The idea, in other words, is to motivate someone else to become a shooter—by creating a public manifesto, leaving a trail of digital evidence, and even livestreaming attacks in some cases. “The more frequently the template shows up, the more likely it will repeat,” Newhouse said. “It’s not ideological in the sense that we tend to think about it. There may be anti-Semitic or fascistic elements therein, but the real incentive is the self-reinforcing legacy of these shooters.”

Even with its peeling white paint, Cabin 5 feels like home to Golda Shore. For two decades, the 96-year-old has left Florida each summer for a “Trip to Yiddishland,” a weeklong immersion in Yiddish language and culture.

Ms. Shore is one of 230 people, ages six months to 100, participating in this summer’s retreat about 70 miles north of New York City. Early risers can stretch into sunrise with “yoga and kvetch,” while the more dramatic attendees can dive into workshops on Yiddish theater and song. There are also six levels of Yiddish-language classes, from beginner to advanced.

“I look forward to it every year. I wouldn’t dream of missing it. I’ve been told I’m the first to register. Each time I think, ‘This will be my last,’ so when I return, I’m delighted,” Ms. Shore says

The daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Ms. Shore grew up in a Yiddish speaking household. “When I shopped with my mother, everyone spoke Yiddish – the deli, the appetizing shop, the kosher butcher. It was like a little shtetl.” For one week each summer, Ms. Shore is once again surrounded by the rhythms of her first language.

Now in its 20th year, Yiddishland is run by the Workers Circle, or Der Arbeter Ring. Founded 125 years ago by Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the organization has long blended labor activism, mutual aid, and cultural preservation. Today, Yiddishland does more than keep the language alive after the Holocaust. It sparks a new generation of enthusiasts.

A forlorn disco ball counting down the time remaining hangs at the entrance of the beloved Berlin club Wilde Renate, known only as Renate, which is rapidly heading into its final nights of wild abandon.

Unlike its more hyped cousin Berghain and posher late sister Watergate, Renate has long stood for a certain more relaxed type of Berlin-brand partying – more poor than sexy to borrow the capital’s lamented motto.

The club, a ramshackle garden leading to a maze-like block of derelict flats playing EDM, house and techno handpicked by live DJs on each floor, has welcomed visitors from across the city and around the world for 18 years.

Instead of dress codes and picky or menacing bouncers, there were “welcoming” bartenders and a vibe like a “giant house party”, said guests on a recent Friday night. There were even rumours of a resident cat.

I'm increasingly glad my party days were back when it was affordable to go out. I never made it to Berlin, but it was already well-known as a hotspot for great dance clubs.

12 foot ladder- https://archive.ph/tHgmW

Until seven years ago, I had a really neat flat top. I was a volunteer in the playground at my kids’ school in Littleton, Colorado, and when the school announced they were going to have a Crazy Hair Day for dads, I said, “Let’s do a mohawk!” My kids thought it was a great idea. So I went to the barber shop and came back with a small mohawk.

My wife, Julie, wasn’t so keen, and I promised I’d shave it off the next day. But my hair went down really well in the playground and I decided to keep it like that for a while. The community we live in is a small one and very conservative, but everyone seemed to accept my new look, even though some people said I must be having a midlife crisis.

Julie works in education and had no real experience of styling anyone’s hair when she started helping with mine. Through trial and error she got really good at it – now she’s the artist and I’m her palette. I think the first picture mohawk we did was a phoenix, then an Irish flag to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day.

Today the Baniwa live in off-grid communities far from universities, libraries, and cities, with only limited internet access that arrived about three years ago. In the northwest of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, their villages lie within a vast mosaic of Indigenous lands accessible only with special permission from tribes and the federal government—a system put in place to safeguard Indigenous groups and help them maintain their sovereignty. Traveling to Nazaré from the closest town, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, requires a 5- to 10-hour journey on a motorboat.

In the nearly two centuries since [British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace]’s expedition, only a few other naturalists and scientists have visited the area. Like him, they sought out local knowledge to make valuable observations but didn’t leave behind a record of what they had learned. Now, spurred by a rediscovery of Wallace’s historic visit, the Baniwa are leading a communal effort to survey local birds and document cultural traditions at risk as modern influences mount. But this time, they’re doing so on their own terms.

Dzoodzo Baniwa, an Indigenous leader and teacher from a nearby Baniwa community, learned about Wallace’s legacy while visiting Nazaré. Another teacher there had told Dzoodzo about a book, given to him by a researcher decades earlier, that mentioned birds from the region. It was the account of Wallace’s journey, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.

As he read the book, Dzoodzo was struck by Wallace’s descriptions of Indigenous practices that are disappearing among younger generations, such as using zarabatanas, blowguns for shooting animals with poisoned darts. But mostly he was surprised by the fascination that Wallace, like the Baniwa, had with birds—especially the galo-da-serra.

The idea of resurveying local birdlife began forming in Dzoodzo’s mind. It took firmer shape when Damiel Legario Pedro, then president of Nazaré’s Indigenous association, mentioned to him that residents were afraid that the cock-of-the-rock population might be declining: It seemed to be harder to find nests. Dzoodzo, who travels and works often with outside groups (and who also goes by the Portuguese name Juvêncio Cardoso), proposed reaching out to non-Indigenous researchers to help the Baniwa document their local wildlife, as Wallace had done almost 175 years before.

Camila Ribas, an ecologist focused on birds at the National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus, remembers the day in 2019 when Dzoodzo knocked on her office door and asked her to collaborate. “It was a very unusual visit,” she recalls. Although most of the Indigenous population in Brazil lives in the Amazon, it’s still uncommon for natural science researchers studying the forest to partner with them, Ribas says. She accepted the invitation right away; the area where the Baniwa live, within Cabeça do Cachorro (“Dog’s Head”), is one of the most preserved and understudied parts of the forest. “It is a sample void,” says Ribas. “We know very little about the biodiversity there.”

After several long meetings with the researchers in Nazaré, the community decided to move forward with a survey. They also elected to create a bird guide that would list each species’ scientific name, Portuguese name, and name in two Indigenous languages. “Most of the books we have are in Portuguese,” says Pedro, who teaches in the village’s school. “What we really wanted was a book in our language.”

Lazy-ass 21st-century hed aside, the main takeaway I got was that no one at the Post had heard about what happens after buyouts -- somewhat confusing, given this wasn't their first rodeo.

A paper is only viewed as well as its institutional knowledge can support. By getting rid of all your tentpole writers, several high-level editors and -- of course -- perennial favourite for buyouts and layoffs, the copy desk, you aren't running a prestige newsroom anymore.

It becomes the college paper 2.0. People with no experience being overseen by people for whom serious news is of little concern doesn't grow your reader base.

There are so many fucking case studies on this, going back decades at this point, that feigning ignorance really isn't a good look.

Thinking "it can't happen here" isn't just an insular Post problem.

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.