Excellent Reads

While incarcerated, Alexei Navalny wrote extensively to journalists, politicians, scientists, activists, and people from all walks of life across the globe.

Between the summer of 2022 and autumn 2023, when he was held in the IK-6 high-security prison near Vladimir, this was relatively straightforward thanks to Russia’s prison e-mail service, FSIN-Letter, which allowed for correspondence to be exchanged within days.

However, his transfer in December 2023 to the IK-3 maximum security prison in the tiny village of Kharp in the Russian Arctic, meant online services were unavailable, and all communication became paper-based, significantly slowing down delivery. Consequently, some of Navalny’s replies only reached their intended recipients after his death—weeks, and in some cases, months later.

Mediazona publishes a selection of these letters here, alongside accounts from those who received them.

An investigation by CBC’s The Fifth Estate uncovered a key internal document that provides a minute-by-minute account of how authorities believe the 2023 gold heist at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport was planned and executed, alleging a highly organized group of individuals relied heavily on a well-placed insider.

Economists predict that, ultimately, consumers will bear the burden of the burgeoning trade dispute between the U.S., Canada, China, and Mexico. Here are a few ways consumers can prepare for the rising prices that could follow suit.

Cross-posted from "‘Our meth was so realistic it got stolen’: Breaking Bad, Industry and Euphoria’s makers on how TV does drugs" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Weed? Moss tied in thread. Crack? Organic shea butter. Cocaine bricks? Shrink-wrapped foam blocks. Designers reveal the secrets of faking drugs onscreen – from popping sugar pills to snorting vitamin D

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

From claims that Jews kill children to make matzo, to accusations that immigrants in Ohio are devouring neighbors’ pets, the myth of the blood libel is a nightmare that never ends. —Ákos Szegőfi

Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. Now anthropologists are advocating to pay similar respects to primates.

(...) 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.