Excellent Reads

(...) My plea to policymakers is simple: employ the same evidence-based science you use for health issues towards drugs and problem drug use.

Science and research can help in many ways, if given the chance. Some of it might seem radical, like providing safe drug consumption spaces. Some of it is more mundane, but vital – like tackling inequality, a clear driver of problem drug use across the world.

But while we often look to politicians to take the lead on change, it is people – us – that really hold the solution. By far the greatest threat to people and society from drugs is ignorance and bigotry. So many lives have been lost to drugs because of shame, either as a driver of drug use or a barrier to seeking help.

Beliefs are notoriously difficult to shift. As with climate change, the most powerful driver of change is personal experience. We know that when a family or community is affected by a drug overdose, their beliefs and perceptions change. But this is not the way any of us should want to see change happen.

Researchers have been looking at what happened when rivers were granted status as legal persons. In New Zealand, they are seeing particularly promising developments in indigenous peoples’ rights and conditions.

Sumud is the Arabic word for resilience and steadfastness. It’s also the collective Palestinian cultural value that fuels the fight to end the Israeli occupation.

Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky and Larry David. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage.

Antikythera: For a new speculative philosophy of computation (which is to say of life, intelligence, automation, and the compositional evolution of planets)

The road switches back and forth again and again as it climbs into Montchavin, perched in the French Alps at 4,100 feet above sea level. The once-sleepy mountainside village, developed into a ski resort in the 1970s, is dotted with wooden chalet-style condo buildings and situated in the midst of a vast downhill complex known as Paradiski, one of the world’s largest.

Well known to skiers and alpinistes, Montchavin also has grabbed the attention of medical researchers as the site of a highly unusual cluster of a devastating neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

ALS, brought about by the progressive loss of nerve function in the brain, spinal cord and motor neurons in the limbs and chest, leading to paralysis and death, is both rare and rather evenly distributed across the globe: It afflicts two to three new people out of 100,000 per year. Though Montchavin is flooded with visitors in winter and summer, the year-round resident population is only a couple hundred, and neighboring villages aren’t much bigger, so the odds are strongly against finding more than just a few ALS patients in the immediate area. Yet physicians have reported 14.

Defenders of politically correct language claim that it is a civilizing influence on society, that it discourages the use of words that have negative or offensive connotations and thereby grants respect to people who are the victims of unfair stereotypes. In this view, the purpose and effect of politically correct language are to prevent bullying and offensive behavior and to replace terms loaded with offensive undertones with allegedly impartial words. So, for example, people are discouraged from referring to someone with a mental disability as “men- tally retarded” and instead encouraged to refer to him as being “differently abled” or as “having special needs.” Similarly, one can no longer refer to “garbagemen” or even the gender-neutral “garbage collectors”—no, they are “environmental service workers,” thank you very much!

The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.

The Secret History of Risotto

The dish is governed by a set of laws that are rooted in tradition, rich in common sense, and aching to be broken or bent.

Li Jianxiong is convinced he has lived two lives. His first began in 1984, when he was born to impoverished farmers in China’s Henan province. Ambitious and daring, he took full advantage of the new economic reality that unfolded after the cataclysms of the Mao years. By 2017, he had secured a family, a house in Beijing and a reputation as one of China’s most talented young marketing men. His success, however, came at a cost. By then, China had become notorious for its “996” work culture – 9am to 9pm, six days a week – but Li was working something closer to 007: 24 hours a day, every day. While managing an all-consuming media crisis for his employer, a major tutoring company, he developed insomnia, heart palpitations and a severe rash that doctors attributed to a flagging immune system. He wondered more than once whether he might actually work himself to death.

In Li’s telling, his second life began in 2018, when he left his lucrative job. Feeling broken and beleaguered, he treated himself as an experiment in self-rescue. He dabbled in Freud, read around in positive psychology, and familiarised himself with the writings of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He absorbed biographies of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. He travelled to sacred Taoist sites in Hubei, an ecological healing village in Guizhou, a Buddhist charity house headquartered in Taiwan. He even moved to the US for a time, where he attended Christian self-development retreats and studied religion at Columbia University.

In April 2021, nine months after he returned to Beijing, Li founded a mutual-support community for burnouts that he called Heartify. The programme was loosely based on Alcoholics Anonymous, which he discovered while researching self-help groups in New York. Heartify began with 20 people meeting at a Taiwanese restaurant in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Today it employs 100 instructors, along with dozens of volunteers, to teach a “night school” that hosts classes and workshops dedicated to wellbeing. Customers pay the equivalent of £50 to attend six weekly two-hour seminars. Each course explores a different therapeutic method, from meditation and flower arranging to farming and ancient Chinese philosophy. In the three and a half years of Heartify’s existence, tens of thousands of people have participated in its programmes.

The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.

Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance.

Now, 80 years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria – a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and middlemen from the global south – the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. The authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter.

The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November. On the contrary, it is both these things, and others beside.

It is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years: its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism; its pugnacious superiority complex; its restless seafaring and trading; its cruel imperial enrichment; its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism, its postcolonial anxiety. All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects: a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness. The museum contains, in total, 8m objects. Or maybe 6m, depending on how you count them. (A collection of 1m cigarette cards bequeathed in 2006 is counted as a single item, for instance.) Either way, the collection is vast and grows every year. Add together everything owned by the Louvre, the National Gallery and the V&A, and you still have fewer than half the objects possessed by the British Museum.

https://archive.ph/Z81ga

Humming away in offices on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the White House is a technology that represents the pragmatism, efficiency and unsentimental nature of American bureaucracy: the autopen. It is a device that stores a person’s signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen.

Like many technologies, this rudimentary robotic signature-maker has always provoked ambivalence. We invest signatures with meaning, particularly when the signer is well known. During the George W Bush administration, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, generated a small wave of outrage when reporters revealed that he had been using an autopen for his signature on the condolence letters that he sent to the families of fallen soldiers.

Fans of singer Bob Dylan expressed ire when they discovered that the limited edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which cost nearly $600 and came with an official certificate “attesting to its having been individually signed by Dylan”, in fact had made unlimited use of an autopen. Dylan took the unusual step of issuing a statement on his Facebook page: “With contractual deadlines looming,” Dylan wrote, “the idea of using an autopen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.” He also acknowledged that: “Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately.”

Our mixed feelings about machine-made signatures make plain our broader relationship to handwriting: it offers a glimpse of individuality. Any time spent doing archival research is a humbling lesson in the challenges and rewards of deciphering the handwritten word. You come to know your long-dead subjects through the quirks of their handwriting; one man’s script becomes spidery and small when he writes something emotionally charged, while another’s pristine pages suggest the diligence of a medieval monk. The calligraphist Bernard Maisner argues that calligraphy, and handwriting more broadly, is “not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It’s meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness and variation within.”

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof.

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I don’t even care about Chicago’s sports teams but the pain was palpable from the writer/sportsfan.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/168662

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