I am African Australian—the one is not exclusive from the other. I am a daughter of the Wajita people of Tanzania, and now I live in Melbourne, Australia. I am a daughter of the land that belongs to the Wurundjeri and Boon-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. The creative space where I tell stories is literary speculative fiction: I write and perform short stories, novels, novellas, prose poetry, creative nonfiction. I write across genres.

The road to publication has, for me, been fraught because I was not always at ease with the self and other—until I realized the power of fiction. Speculative fiction is a safe space that can, like any fiction, help us understand other perspectives. It allows for a different kind of writing with foundations to cultivate inclusive worlds.

According to a joint statement published last month by over 240 international human rights organizations, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed and almost 4,000 injured for trying to access aid at GHF sites. Israeli forces and armed groups routinely open fire on starving civilians seeking food. GHF massacres have been documented by firsthand Palestinian accounts and Israeli soldiers who admitted they were ordered to open fire on unarmed Gazans seeking aid. U.S. aid sites have been called “killing fields,” “death traps,” and “the concentration camps of our time.”

Out of these dire conditions, Palestinian organizations in the solidarity movement brought a direct ask to Jewish Voice for Peace: Center the forced starvation of Gaza in their organizing. This message was disseminated at the JVP National Members’ Meeting in May, where local JVP leaders — including those from Chicago — were directed to discuss specifics with their chapters.

“In conversation with the chapter, we decided there is no better way to highlight what starvation is doing to the people of Gaza than to do a solidarity hunger strike,” Bohrer said. They saw the hunger strike as an intuitive way to refuse any pretense that Jewish life is more important than Palestinian life. The message was simple and effective: “While Gazans cannot eat, we will not eat.” This escalation had the dual purpose of centering the forced starvation in Gaza in public discourse and pressuring politicians into action.

In response to the same crisis, but with a broader scope, JVP-Chicago launched its own indefinite hunger strike on June 16 during a press conference at Federal Plaza, visible from the offices of their elected officials. Over the next 18 days, they co-organized 23 events with 36 movement organizations. Fourteen solidarity strikes were launched across the country, and a network of 60 local volunteers stepped up to support the hunger strikers, while JVP-Chicago took the fight to their senator’s doorstep.

It's a very delicate thing to try to understand a public figure's mental health from afar. But unless Lewis is engaging in some form of highly experimental performance art that defies easy explanation — he didn't reply to our request for comment, and hasn't made further posts clarifying what he's talking about — it sounds like he may be suffering some type of crisis.

If so, that's an enormously difficult situation for him and his loved ones, and we hope that he gets any help that he needs.

At the same time, it's difficult to ignore that the specific language he's using — with cryptic talk of "recursion," "mirrors," "signals" and shadowy conspiracies — sounds strikingly similar to something we've been reporting on extensively this year: a wave of people who are suffering severe breaks with reality as they spiral into the obsessive use of ChatGPT or other AI products, in alarming mental health emergencies that have led to homelessness, involuntary commitment to psychiatric facilities, and even death.

Psychiatric experts are also concerned. A recent paper by Stanford researchers found that leading chatbots being used for therapy, including ChatGPT, are prone to encouraging users' schizophrenic delusions instead of pushing back or trying to ground them in reality.

Lewis' peers in the tech industry were quick to make the same connection. Earlier this week, the hosts of popular tech industry podcast "This Week in Startups" Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm expressed their concerns about Lewis' disturbing video.

[...] Crossman turned to a third technique—a test for a set of genes called ZFX and ZFY that show up on the X and Y chromosomes. In Eau10b, Crossman found both genes, confirming that the animal had a Y chromosome. But the whale’s DNA also contained a double dose of ZFX, the gene carried on the X chromosome. The result revealed that Eau10b had a Y chromosome and two X chromosomes, meaning the animal was neither male nor female. Eau10b was an intersex whale—the first of its species known to scientists.

This combination of sex chromosomes occurs when a cell receives an extra copy of the X chromosome during cell division. A similar event can lead to female offspring with three X chromosomes, or males with one X chromosome and two Y chromosomes.

Crossman doesn’t know how many southern right whales with XXY sex chromosomes might be out there. Even Eau10b’s fate is unknown, since the researchers didn’t identify the whale when they took the DNA sample in 1989. But southern right whales can live up to 70 years, so Eau10b may be wintering off Valdés Peninsula to this day.

While intersex animals are often infertile and unable to produce offspring to help a population grow, Velocci says that in social species such as whales, intersex animals likely play important nonreproductive roles that benefit the population in other ways.

Studying intersex animals has helped scientists better understand how genes and hormones shape individuals as they develop. Through the process of domesticating livestock, people have known about intersex cows for thousands of years. On Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, islanders nurture a unique strain of intersex pigs prized for their delicate spiraling tusks. More recently, researchers have also documented intersex horses, dogs, moose, sheep, fish, and many different types of invertebrates. Intersex animals are rare across species, Crossman says, but they’re “more common than we historically thought.”

The largest-ever survey of trans Americans reaffirms what the trans community has been saying for ages: trans people who go back to living as their sex assigned at birth do so because of transphobia, not because of doubts about gender or transition.

Approximately 92,329 binary and nonbinary trans Americans aged 16 and older — including 84,170 adults — participated in the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey (USTS), which was spearheaded by the trans rights organization Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE). Researchers then used survey findings to compile a trans health report titled “Health and Wellbeing: Findings from the 2022 US Trans Survey.”

Only 9% of respondents said that they had gone back to living as their sex assigned at birth at some point in their lives. Of that 9%, the most common reason for doing so was that it was “just too hard to be trans in my community” (41%). Meanwhile, 37% cited pressure from a parent, 24% cited pressure from other family members, and 33% cited facing too much harassment or discrimination for being trans.

“Social and structural explanations dominated the reasons why respondents reported going back to living in their sex assigned at birth,” the report reads. “[...] Only 4% of people who went back to living in their sex assigned at birth for a while cited that their reason was because they realized that gender transition was not for them. When considering all respondents who had transitioned, this number equates to only 0.36%.”

Zohran Mamdani’s victory wasn’t a fluke. Right now, it is being built upon in Seattle, three time zones from the Big Apple. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has been gliding along a path toward reelection. He has garnered the support of developers and tech oligarchs. All the opinion leaders are along for the ride with the mayor. Of course, he is going to win.

But weirdly, a vote of the people has challenged that wisdom. Last year, Seattle housing activists had gathered signatures for the City Council to pass a tax on excess compensation to fund social housing. The tax, to be paid by employers, levies a 5 percent tax on individual compensation greater than $1 million. Raising $60 million, and with bonding, this will enable the production of thousands of economically integrated housing units in which no tenants will pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.

The City Council set a vote on this measure for February 11, expecting a low and conservative turnout. The council also put a competing measure on the ballot, which took $10 million from an existing fund for low-income housing to build a few units of social housing.

The corporate community, led by Amazon and Microsoft, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into an opposition campaign. Mayor Harrell got into the act, with his face on all the opposition literature. The die seemed to be cast for a victory of the status quo over actual social progress. Only it wasn’t. The election resulted in a 26-point victory for social housing over the mayor’s proposal.

That got Katie Wilson, the founder and general secretary of Seattle’s Transit Riders Union, to rethink the 2025 elections. Katie had already launched the Transit Riders Union, gaining free transit for school kids and low-income people. She organized successful minimum-wage campaigns in Seattle suburbs. She developed the Jump Start tax, a tax on employers when individual compensation exceeds $189,371. Without this tax, Seattle would have been savaged with cuts in public services.

So Katie decided it was a good time to become mayor, to gain the power progressives need to transform our city. She embodies the policies and hopes and dreams of most of us in Seattle who can’t figure out how to pay for childcare and rent increases and healthcare, or those of us who recognize and want to provide the solutions for these issues.

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.

This is one of those classic weeks in a Trump presidency where too many stories are moving too fast for an individual writer to keep up. There are new tariffs, expansion of deportation operations, a will-he-or-won't-he dance about firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and, of course, the sudden about-face on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's many crimes, personal connections, and sudden death in 2019.

The news is moving so fast that I've had to write this intro four times now to update the following sentence: The latest news, per the Wall Street Journal, is that Trump sent Epstein a birthday card in 2003 with a drawing of a naked woman with the words "we have certain things in common" and wishing him "may every day be another wonderful secret." Yikes!

Earlier this week, Trump said he was done with the Epstein issue and no longer wanted the support of people who voted for him because they thought he would release more information about the sex offender’s crimes and his conspirators. The president said his administration would not be releasing any more information about the investigation into Epstein. Currently on Polymarket, you can buy p(Jeffrey Epstein is actually alive) for 3% and p(Trump will appoint a special prosecutor) at 1%.

In the background of all this, polls show Trump's position plummeting. For this week's Chart of the Week, let's take a quick look at Trump's approval overall, and on tariffs, deportations, and Epstein. The size of the hole he is in on the Epstein case is maybe the worst number I’ve ever seen for a president.

When the government of Sri Lanka published the National Red List of threatened plants in 2020, my eyebrows shot up. We’ve all become accustomed, after all, to the grim news these reports periodically bring us. But here it was, in black and white: 128 species, not having been recorded in surveys conducted during the past century, were assessed as “possibly extinct,” while a further two each were assessed as “extinct” and “extinct in the wild.” This was good news indeed.

Just eight years earlier, the 2012 National Red List had assessed fully 177 species as possibly extinct, together with five extinct and two others extinct in the wild. Had 49 extinct species — species no one had recorded in more than a century — really been rediscovered since 2012? Clearly, someone had blundered. Not stopping to put the book down, I called up Siril Wijesundara at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS) in Kandy and the chairman of the committee of experts who conducted the assessment.

“Siril,” I said, “there’s a mistake in the number of extinct flowering plants in the new Red List.”

He laughed. “I thought that would get your attention,” he said. “But there’s no mistake. Himesh has rediscovered three of the officially extinct ones as well.”

“What’s Himesh?” I asked, thinking it to be the acronym of the institution that had magically rediscovered these species, which, after all, all previous surveys had missed.

“Himesh is an amazing guy,” Wijesundara said. “He spends his life searching for plants.”

To date, [Himesh] Jayasinghe has rediscovered more than 100 of the 177 possibly extinct species as well as three of the five extinct species and both species previously considered extinct in the wild. And the good news doesn’t stop there. He has up to now found some 210 species that have never been reported from Sri Lanka. About 50 of these were already known from India, while a further 20, though named in the historical literature, can now be added to the national floral inventory because they are supported by hard evidence: newly collected specimens as well as photographs.

And then there are the 150 species that appear to be entirely new to science. All these records are supported by specimens Jayasinghe has deposited in the National Herbarium, as well as thousands of photographs. Returning to an interesting plant again and again until he finds it in flush, in fruit and in flower, he has accumulated a photo library representing some 2,600 of the 2,850 species of flowering plants then known from Sri Lanka, and that’s omitting the grasses and bamboos, which he hasn’t begun working on yet. The 210 new records will now get added to those tallies.

The biggest ride-hailing companies globally are struggling to keep their electric vehicle promises.

In 2020, Uber, the world’s largest ride-hailing company, set a target for all its rides and deliveries to be zero-emission by 2040. As of 2025, only a few hundred thousand out of its 7.1 million drivers have adopted green rides.

Grab, Southeast Asia’s biggest ride-hailing company, is targeting carbon neutrality by 2040. Last year, 7% of all Grab rides and deliveries used low- or zero-emission modes of transport, including electric and hybrid vehicles, cyclists, and walkers.

While Uber, Lyft, and Grab don’t disclose the precise number of EVs in their fleets, each platform has less than 1% EVs globally, research and advisory firm Gartner estimates.

“Even though we have seen immense growth in EV adoption by these companies, it is highly unlikely they will achieve 100% EV adoption in the next decade,” Shivani Palepu, transport tech analyst at Gartner, told Rest of World. Palepu expects the shift to electric to vary “drastically” by region.

To paraphrase Mean Girls, "stop trying to make hydrogen happen."

For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it's hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles' exhausts. It's just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year.

Hydrogen's main selling point is that it's faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it's a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects.

But in reality, that's pretty far from true.