This is a personal reflection on growing up and establishing a career in China, and how that experience shaped how I think.

Based on my own journey through school, university, and the tech industry, I explore a paradox: how a system that limits certain kinds of questioning can still produce innovation at scale.

It’s not just about China — it’s a philosophical look at what critical thinking really means, and what happens when it becomes optimised for answers rather than questions.

(emphasis mine)

Though the parades in Rio are world-famous, attracting a global audience for Carnival each year, the greatest show in the world still belongs to these communities, where the parades—a pivotal part of the season’s festivities—originated. It is also here that these samba schools work hard year-round to honor the parades’ original purpose: bringing marginalized histories that aren’t taught in Brazilian schools to the national stage.

“Since the 1930s, samba schools have been addressing themes closely related to Brazilian history,” historian Luiz Antonio Simas tells The Conversationalist. “This created a tradition in which Brazilian history, important figures from Brazilian history, and the country’s natural beauty became recurring themes [at each parade].”

A fascinating look at the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

Was reading an article and realized the quality feels really low. The speed and pay to publish method seems suspicious at best.

This particular article has many typos and spacing issues and an overall lack of content.

I enrolled in MUS 253: Classical Guitar out of desperation. I’m an English professor, and since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, things have changed. I watched students, staff, colleagues, and administrators outsource their thinking to the machine, and the academy soon became a sham to me, a farce of its former self. I once taught students to spend time inside sentences, to wrestle with difficulty, to make productive use of their uncertainty by paying close attention to how language works on the page. We once sat inside paragraphs, dwelt inside language in its richness and complexity.

But the ease of AI has devalued language, difficulty, and the work and perseverance and focus necessary to make meaning out of words. Believing a writer should write her own sentences and a reader should read instead of relying on AI summaries, I have become Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, the work of teaching and learning, reading and writing seemingly pointless in the face of the juggernaut offering to do my students’ work for them. After years of this, I descended into a severe depression marked by panic attacks, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. A complete loss of meaning in your life’s work will do that.

A therapist once told me that one way to manage the hollow of depression is to find an activity that creates pleasure but also demands mastery—something like baking, or the arts, or sports. Such pursuits engage both mind and body, reorienting your focus away from the myopic self-obsession of depression and toward, instead, something beyond the self, some palpable problem that can be worked through and, with enough time, eventually solved. There is peace in that, my therapist said; satisfaction too. And, he added, these activities tend to be much better for you than the many vices people often turn toward to fill that emptiness when stressed, anxious, and depressed.

So I signed up for guitar lessons. I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery. I also wanted to retreat into a familiar role, to become a student again, and to rediscover what it means to, and how one does, learn. I hoped that, in the long hours of practicing, I might somehow cast aside the cynicism and despair overtaking my teaching and so rekindle my love of the classroom—and of life.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for authorization to use military force in south-east Asia. His resolution passed unanimously in the House, and only two voices dissented in the Senate. As for the public, 77% of Americans said they trusted the government to do what is right, and more than 60% supported war.

It is common today to hear that the US war in Vietnam was unpopular, but it certainly did not begin that way. It took several years, billions of dollars, tens of thousands of deaths, and constant anti-war mobilization before Americans changed their minds.

The reality is that Americans have historically backed their government’s wars. Let’s not forget that most Americans not only falsely believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, but also supported the illegal US war on Iraq. A month after the invasion, support for the war increased to 74%.

Not any more. President Donald Trump did not even bother seeking congressional approval to attack Iran. Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose the Israeli-US war, and only 17% trust the government to do what is right. And the war is only a month old.

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”

The severity of the resulting injury depends on, among countless other variables, how the electricity enters the body, and where, and the path the current takes through it. Direct strikes are the deadliest, but most strikes are indirect—a side flash coming off a tree, a current running through the ground, a streamer rising up from below—and most people survive these.

In some cases, the damage is immediately apparent. Lightning, in addition to being very bright and very loud, is very hot—the air around it can hit temperatures about five times hotter than the surface of the sun—and so it can singe or burn people. The shock wave from the strike can fling victims a great distance, breaking bones or causing concussions as they land. The current inscribes some victims’ skin with mysterious scarlike patterns called Lichtenberg figures, which resemble the limbs of a barren tree—or the branching structure of lightning itself.

Just as often, though, survivors manifest no burns, bruises, or scars. Even Lichtenberg figures generally vanish within a few days; no one knows exactly why. On the outside, survivors look normal. Which doesn’t mean they feel that way.

I remember my very first online search, back in 2001: “What is the meaning of life?”

I remember clicking through to a mysterious minimal website that told me all points of consciousness were facets of the divine wishing to perceive itself.

This striking idea, which I discovered through Internet Explorer, profoundly affected me. Given developments in AI, it makes sense to return to my old search, seeking new answers.

My editor has fed ChatGPT the collected wisdom of humanity just for me. The goal: to find an answer to the ultimate question of why we are here. I belong to no one faith, but find beauty in many spiritual paths. If the truth is in fragments of all of them, this is our best chance of seeing it. I’m strangely nervous.

HolyGPT, as we call it, incorporates the complete texts of the Abrahamic religions, Dharmic traditions (including Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism), Indigenous wisdom (where available in the public domain), as well as works of esoteric mysticism, poets and secular philosophers.

‘What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke [and] you can drink Coke, too … The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is.”

Fifty years later, it’s still true that the Diet Coke Donald Trump is chugging by the caseload in the Oval Office is exactly the same stuff his public can buy in a local shop. But the idea that mass consumerism is characterised by equality is about as dead as Warhol is. There are precious few products or experiences that haven’t been segmented into multiple tiers, from “embarrassing pauper” to “ultra-VIP”, in order to extract as much money from the consumer as possible.

Airlines are the most obvious example of this, of course. What used to be a standard experience (a free checked bag and snacks) are often now add-ons. And the airline model is steadily infiltrating other spaces, even the cinema. Paying for better seats is already common in the UK, in chains such as Odeon and Vue, but now it’s rolling out across the US. Earlier this year Adam Aron, the CEO of the cinema chain AMC, said on an earnings call that paying members of its VIP loyalty programmes will soon get priority access to seats with the best “sightline”. Which, honestly, seems a shortsighted strategy considering cinema attendance is dropping. But I don’t get paid $11m to $25m a year, depending on how shares are doing, like Aron does, so what do I know, eh?

My phone beeped, alerting me to a ride. I clicked to accept, and a few minutes later I pulled up beside an older lady in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, about half an hour outside Washington, DC. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with the man who was waiting with her in the early-morning darkness and then slid into the back seat of my Subaru Outback. The fare was going to earn me less than $7.

“Buenos días,” I said. She said the same to me and was chatty, unlike the people I had picked up earlier. She was born in Peru, she said, and her husband had died two years ago. He used to take her everywhere and now he was gone, so she used Uber to get to work. I dropped her at the front door of a hotel.

It was my first morning as an Uber driver, and everyone I picked up was Latino or South Asian and heading to work. My first three customers were schoolteachers. Then I dropped a young woman at a hospital and her mother at a grocery store that had yet to open. I brought a young man to a large auto mechanic’s garage, another to a Panera Bread chain restaurant, and a woman to the open back door of a strip-mall diner.

I made $130 in a little less than five hours. Since I’m 55 and have the bladder of a 3-year-old, I had to find a place to pee three times. “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America,” I muttered to myself as I whipped into a city park to take a leak behind a tree.

I didn’t know the immigration status of any of my clients. But I wondered: How is the misguided and aggressive targeting of the very people who serve us breakfast, teach our children, fix our cars, clean our hotel rooms, and comfort our sick “making America great”?

I have had a lot of questions since I returned to the United States to live and work on July 4, after having been away for 28 years. After serving as Reuters’s Ottawa bureau chief for five years, my job was eliminated in a cost-cutting drive. I wanted to stay in Canada, where I owned a home and my kids attended the local schools, but I was unable to find a new job that would allow me to. Crossing the border didn’t feel like a homecoming. America is as foreign to me today as Italy had been in 1998, when I started working there as a foreign correspondent.

One of the things people tend not to get is there was, in fact, a time when journalism was fun and exciting. When people tell me to "just get a fucking job" that I'll no doubt despise, they seriously cannot register the idea that there are jobs that don't suck. I'm considered stuck up for continuing to want what I've already experienced.

I was raised on the scripture of the 1990s: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. It was the Golden Rule. The dating equivalent of Slip, Slop, Slap. Whispered at sleepovers. Bolded in the margins of Dolly magazine. Never pick up on the first ring. Never say you’re free on a Saturday. Be the prize, not the contestant.

In my 20s, this felt like power. (It was mostly fear in better lighting but I didn’t know that yet.) I mastered breezy indifference. I timed my texts to the minute: double the time he took, plus 10 for mystery. I thought I was teaching men my value. I thought I was training them to love me.

But I am 51 now. Looking back on that first year of dating after divorce at 50 – the apps, the profiles, the quiet violence of being matched and discarded by an algorithm – I realise something uncomfortable: I wasn’t training them. I was hiding.

There is a specific humiliation in dating at midlife that we rarely discuss: the dissonance between who we are in the world and who we become the moment a man with a nice jawline delivers the modern cruelty of the read receipt – the blue tick that confirms he saw your message, and chose silence.

In my real life, I am capable. I have interviewed politicians for the BBC. I have managed budgets. I have navigated the death of parents and the collapse of a marriage. I am a woman of substance. Yet give me a “maybe” from a man I met on an app, and I regress three decades. I stare at my phone. I debate the semiotics of an emoji with a girlfriend who is also a high-functioning professional. We analyse the silence like Kremlinologists.

Meeting people sucks in midlife.

Over the decades, technological devices have been gradually integrated into language learning, as is recently the case with generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Does the sophistication of these tools eventually render pencils and pens obsolete? Or can digital uses be combined with manual writing? How does writing keep its value for the human being?

Handwriting has long been associated with memory and learning. It was in 1829 that the keystroke first appeared. It, thereafter, became common in 1867 thanks to the first manual typewriter. While students of the past learned to write exclusively by hand, today’s students alternate between screens and paper. However, research shows that these modalities do not have the same effects on memorisation and retention, and essentially, the acquisition of knowledge.

In a 2014 study, students were better able to answer analytical questions if they took their notes by hand. A 2017 study found that 20-25-year-old students retained the information they wrote by hand longer than the information that they typed on a keyboard.

Interesting. Apparently, I'm a Gemini, sted Cancer. My first wife is a Taurus, sted Gemini. And my second wife is a Leo, sted Virgo.

I don't believe in any of this shit, but it's interesting to see just how unscientific it is.

As a teenager, I loved reading my horoscope in gossip magazines. But even then my friends and I knew it was nonsense. For us, this was a fun pastimes for bored teens. So I was surprised when my hairdresser recently asked me my star sign. When I shared my opinion on astrology and horoscopes, she simply replied, “Typical Taurus.”

Astrology is currently experiencing a remarkable renaissance—especially on social media, where posts about “Geminis,” “Leos” and “Virgos rising” are everywhere. The trend may partly reflect how deeply people want to identify with personality types and, in the process, gain some insights into an uncertain future. And perhaps surprisingly, many astrology posts come from people who consider themselves to be scientifically inclined.

It’s no secret that Israel is losing ground in American public opinion on both the left and the right, even as many American Jews feel newly besieged by rising antisemitism. On much of the left, activists and intellectuals increasingly interpret Israel and Zionism through anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks, casting the conflict in the moral language of oppressor and oppressed.

On the right, a different but equally consequential shift is underway. Influential conservatives like Tucker Carlson have come to view Israel as a drain on American resources, setting up debates with Israel supporters like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and ambassador to Israel. But the criticisms go beyond the MAGA movement’s “America First” isolationism. The turn on the right isn’t just about geopolitics — it’s about theology.

“Christian Zionism,” as Carlson described it in his podcast interview with white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, is a “brain virus” and “dangerous heresy.”

For decades, one of the most reliable pillars of pro-Israel sentiment in the United States was not just Jews but conservative Christians. That support had a theological motor: Israel mattered not just as an ally on a Cold War map, but as a central actor on the map of the End Times. Put simply, Christians needed Jews to return to the homeland of Israel to usher in the second coming of Christ.

Intergenerational relations, or lack of them, is a subject I’ve been thinking about, on and off, since the financial crisis. I’ve read up on it, too – things such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report on intergenerational earnings mobility, which is wonky but full of fascinating information which needs some parsing. (Example: “While the educational attainment of ethnic minorities growing up in families eligible for free school meals is often higher than that of their white majority peers, their earnings outcomes show no such advantage.” Why not?) Another good source of data is the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s (OBR) report on intergenerational fairness – which, interestingly, is about the bluntest statement of fiscal unfairness that you can find. The OBR makes the point that “a current new-born baby would make an average net discounted contribution to the exchequer of £68,400 over its life-time, whilst future generations would have to contribute £159,700”. In plain English, people’s lifetime contribution to the state is going to double. That number is from 2011, and will definitely have got worse. In 2019, the House of Lords published a report on “Tackling intergenerational unfairness”, which doesn’t even bother pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. Mind you, not everyone agrees. A 2023 report from Imperial College Business School argues “there is more solidarity between generations than the ‘Millennials versus Boomers’ narrative would suggest”.

So this is definitely a question you can address through data – though there is a risk that you can use numbers to cherrypick your way to a conclusion you already held in advance. The other way of thinking about it is through lived experience. Not necessarily just your own. I often find myself thinking about the range of experiences and expectations in my own family, going no further than one generation back and one generation forward. I’m on the cusp between boomers and generation X. My children, both in their 20s, are firmly in generation Z. My parents were born in the 20s, in the west of Ireland and in South Africa. Between us, it’s a wildly different set of life stories, and chucking it into the capacious carpet bag labelled “generational differences” seems to me to be a violent oversimplification.

Damn, are those some long grafs.

Each day when you wake up, you come back to yourself. You see the room around you, feel your body brush against your clothes and think about your plans, worries and hopes for the day. This daily internal experience is miraculous and mysterious, and the subject of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.

It also may be under siege, Pollan said. He recently suggested that people need a “consciousness hygiene” to defend our internal world against invaders that are trying to move in. Our ability to sit with our thoughts and perceive the world, he argues, is increasingly disrupted by algorithms engineered to tickle our dopamine receptors and capture our attention. Meanwhile, people are forming attachments to non-human chatbots, projecting consciousness on to entities that do not possess it.

I spoke with Pollan over the phone about what consciousness hygiene looks like in practice. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.

The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making.

Both measures are purposefully vague on the timeline, procedure, and funding. “We are in difficult times,” said UT board of regents chair Kevin Eltife during the meeting at which the topics policy was approved. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

For the impacted students and faculty, this lack of specificity serves only to plunge their work and studies into a state of precarity. Reid Pinckard, a first-year PhD student in American Studies, said when the consolidation was announced on February 12, “it genuinely sucked the energy out of the office we were in.” In chats with other graduate students, the measure also caused a “frenzy,” he said. “There were questions like, ‘What are we supposed to do? How can we handle this?’ People that are graduating this semester were like, ‘Is my degree going to be in American Studies, or is it going to be this or that?’ That’s really what this is serving to do, which is to make people feel like they don’t know what’s going on.”

(this could have used another pass by a copyeditor)

Following horrifying revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic sexual assaults and trafficking of underage girls, the United States Department of Justice has been forced to publicly release millions of the late sex offender’s emails and texts.

I am an anthropologist of elites who conducted field work among the secretive community of nuclear weapons scientists. The Epstein files opens a window into the even more closely guarded world of capitalism’s 0.1 per cent.

Anthropologists study people through what renowned American anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “deep hanging out” — mingling informally and taking notes on what we see. We call this “participant observation.”

People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk do not welcome anthropologists bearing notebooks. But the Epstein files, where the global elite are talking to each other in private — or so they thought — open a peephole into their world.

Read more: Andrew’s arrest: will anything like this now happen in the US? Why hasn’t it so far?

And what do we find there?

On a mundane level, we can see how they spend sums of money most of us can only dream about.
A man with thinning dark hair.
Mortimer Zuckerman gives an interview in 2008. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

For example, we learn that in 2011, billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Post and U.S. News and World Report, spent US$219,000 on his collection of horses, $50,000 on skiing and $86,000 to insure his private art collection.

But the Epstein files are most interesting for what they reveal about a web of gifts, favours and financial transactions that knit together what would otherwise be a disparate sprawl of bankers, developers, tech bros, media personalities and high-profile academics.

Author:

• Hugh Gusterson | Professor of Anthropology & Public Policy, University of British Columbia

Influencers have had a bad time of it at restaurants recently. There they are, just trying to record a quick video and take a few pictures of their lunch, and restaurateur Jeremy King (of the Ivy and the Wolseley in London) goes and writes an article saying they’re ruining the dining experience of “bona fide guests” – something he says staff are “desperately trying to stop”. I’ve read pieces calling TikTok the end of the London restaurant scene. Friends’ parents have even said they would get up and leave if they were sitting next to anyone filming their meal.

This surprises me. I have worked as a waitress in restaurants for more than five years, a job I love, and the joys of which most often come from the customers I serve. Of course, for every 10 great customers, you’re bound to get one that’s not so great – I’ve come across my fair share of those.

And so I can confidently say that influencers are the least of my worries as a waitress. In fact, I’d rank them and their camera crews at the bottom of my list of the rudest types of customers I’ve come across. It’s a list which I’ll now be sharing with you, in the hopes that once you’ve read it, you’ll agree that influencers really aren’t the ultimate devil of the dining room.

From ancient times, people have always tried to pass on messages to others by drawing pictures. Sometimes these pictures are self-explanatory, like the drawings of mountains or trees on a map. Sometimes they represent quite complex ideas that need to be learned. Egyptian hieroglyphs are one example, mathematical symbols another.

Until recently, very few of these picture languages passed from one culture to another. But at the end of the 19th century something extraordinary happened: a movement began to create pictograms that would be recognisable everywhere, regardless of culture. It was a revolutionary idea: by using standardised pictures instead of words, it might be possible to transcend language altogether.

One of the first experiments in creating a universal picture language occurred in the Alpine regions of Italy and Switzerland, during the cycling craze of the 1890s. Cyclists’ touring clubs began to put up signs warning their members of upcoming hazards, such as sharp bends or steep hills. Picture symbols were chosen rather than words, partly because in these Alpine regions you could never be sure what language a cyclist might speak, and partly because those cyclists had to be able to take in the information quickly. Where words did appear they were short, bold and to the point: Stop, Danger, Slow Down.

By 1900, there was such a plethora of different systems that the International League of Tourist Groups decided to hold a conference in Paris to try to standardise them all. Nine years later, various national governments around Europe held another conference, this time to create standard signs for the growing number of motor vehicles on the roads. By 1928, the League of Nations had become involved, and the internationally standardised road signs of today began to take shape.

To appreciate the sheer amount of thought that has been put into road signs and symbols over the years, one needs only to look at some of those that failed to make the grade. [...]