Humanities & Cultures

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.

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.