In an era when a cold beer and a hot dog define the quintessential baseball experience, it’s hard to imagine a time when the former could cause an all-out riot. But the annals of baseball history are not only filled with double plays and home runs; they also record moments when the game spiraled out of control. One such incident, the infamous “Ten Cent Beer Night,” is a tale of caution recounted with both horror and fascination by the channel Weird History, and detailed by Grace Johnson and Samuel Trunley in an article for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

The promotion by the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) was deceptively simple: entice fans to a baseball game by offering Stroh’s beer cans for just 10 cents, significantly below the standard price of 65 cents. On June 4, 1974, this ploy worked a little too well. The Indians were in a slump, and a Tuesday night game would usually draw a crowd of 12,000 to 13,000 fans. That night, the lure of cheap beer attracted over 25,000 spectators, who consumed an estimated 60,000 cups of beer.

The stage was set for chaos even before the first pitch. Earlier that season, the Indians and the Texas Rangers had been involved in a heated brawl, leaving tensions high. Add to that the social conditions in Cleveland—economic downturn, factory closures, environmental crises—and you had the perfect storm for trouble.

UW college roommate just sent this my way after we were talking about nickel beer night a mile or two from the ASU campus.

I consider no activity more luxurious than posting up at a bar solo with a good book. The creasing of a paperback in one hand, the weight of a wine glass in the other, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people all make for a lovely evening. Or at least, I thought so, until recently, when two twentysomethings approached me during this ritual. “Are you reading alone?” one asked. “I could neverrrr,” the other said, and then uttered the universal mean girl slight: “I wish I had your confidence.”

Reading in public – not cool. Or at least “performative reading”, as it’s been dubbed on social media, is worthy of ridicule.

Not long ago, during the peak years of corny millennial humor, we celebrated @HotDudesReading, an Instagram account-turned-book that showed attractive men toting books on trains and park benches. Now, god forbid anyone (hot dudes included) enjoy a moment of escapism during the capitalist grind, or else they might end up in someone’s mocking post. To quote the caption of one popular meme depicting an anonymous train passenger reading a Brit lit classic: “Poser art himbo on the subway barely 10 pages into his performative copy of Frankenstein.”

When I started college, in 2012, I felt like a virginal freak. Rather than warn me off of sex, the pearl-clutching over hookup culture had left me desperate to have it.

Yet had I come of age in the late 2010s and 2020s, I would have fit right in. In 2021, only 30% of gen Z respondents told the CDC they’d had sexual intercourse – a 17% drop from when I was in high school. In a 2022 survey conducted in part by the Kinsey Institute, one in four gen Z adults also said they had never experienced partnered sex. Stunningly, even masturbation is somehow on the decline among adolescents.

“Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” a headline in the Atlantic wailed in 2018. After the pandemic, a New York Times opinion essay linked young Americans’ poor mental health and stunning levels of loneliness to their lack of sex. “Have More Sex, Please!” the headline pleaded.

It’s been over two decades now, but as I remember it: the floor was sticky with peanut shells and beer.

I could feel a crunch underfoot amid the din of garbled conversation as my young, righteous girlfriends and I made our way to a wobbly table at the Haufbrau in Bozeman, Montana.

I was there to hear a friend play guitar and sing at open mic night. As it turns out, so was my future spouse. I was emboldened by the emotion of a recent breakup, the energy of a girls night and, perhaps, liquid courage.

Maybe it was also the magic of the bar, because when I spotted him across the room, I flicked a peanut at him. Within a matter of hours, we were parting, and he was saying “I love you.”

These days instead of a group of friends, I come with a lot of media equipment – straps, cords, cameras, laptop, and a black paper journal and pen – as I set out to explore dive bar culture in Montana.

I begin my reporting at the Filling Station, located on the outskirts of now trendy Bozeman, a few miles from my home. Inside, the walls are covered with vintage license plates, street signs, a large red flying horse at ceiling height, a buffalo mount with a Hawaiian lei and a stuffed deer head ridden by a skeleton.

One of the longest and heaviest trains in the world, the 1.8-mile beast runs from the mining center of Zouerat to the port city of Nouadhibou on Africa’s Atlantic coast. The train is the bedrock of the Mauritanian economy and a lifeline to the outside world for the people who live along its route.

Passenger cars are sometimes attached to freight trains, but more often passengers simply ride atop the ore hopper cars freely. Passengers include locals, merchants, and occasionally some adventure tourists. Conditions for these passengers are incredibly harsh with daytime temperatures exceeding 40°C, night-time temperatures approaching freezing, and death from falls being common.

It started to become clear the previous April, when a man who had been pursuing me canceled a dinner at the last minute. There was a scheduling mix-up with his son’s game. I understood. I’m a hockey mom; I get it. Still, I went. I wore what I would have worn anyway. I took the table. I ordered well. And I watched the room.

Only two tables nearby seemed to hold actual dates. The rest were groups of women, or women alone, each one occupying her space with quiet confidence. No shrinking. No waiting. No apologizing.

That night marked something. Not a heartbreak, but an unveiling. A sense that what I’d been experiencing wasn’t just personal misalignment. It was something broader. Cultural. A slow vanishing of presence.

I’m 54. I’ve been dating since the mid-80s, been married, been a mother, gotten divorced, had many relationships long and short. I remember when part of heterosexual male culture involved showing up with a woman to signal something — status, success, desirability. Women were once signifiers of value, even to other men. It wasn’t always healthy, but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.

That dynamic has quietly collapsed. We have moved into an era where many men no longer seek women to impress other men or to connect across difference. They perform elsewhere. Alone. They’ve filtered us out.

I recently experienced a flicker of possibility. With James. We met on Raya, the dating app. There was something mutual from the start — wordplay, emotional precision, a tone that felt attuned. It was brief, but it caught light. I remember saying to him, “Even fleeting connections matter, when they’re mutual and lit from the inside.” I meant it.

There was just enough spark to wonder what might unfold. Enough curiosity to imagine a doorway. But he didn’t step through it. Not with a plan. Not with presence. He hovered — flirting, retreating, offering warmth but no direction.

Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori spent six years living in the western Amazon. He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master’s thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD on the music of eight Indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the local Shipibo tribe and settled down.

“I did not have a lot of money,” he told me, “so I had to make my living there.” He became a teacher. He built a house. He and his wife had children. That rare experience of joining the community, he said, forced him to realise that many of the assumptions he had picked up as an anthropologist were wrong.

Like most outsiders, Brabec de Mori arrived in Peru thinking that ayahuasca had been used in the western Amazon for thousands of years. This is the standard narrative; look up resources on ayahuasca, and you’re bound to run into it. “Ayahuasca has been used in the Peruvian Amazon for millennia, long before the Spanish came to Peru, before the Incan empire was formed, before history,” states the website of the Ayahuasca Foundation, an organisation founded by a US citizen that offers ayahuasca retreats.

Yet with time, Brabec de Mori came to see just how flimsy this narrative was. He discovered “a double discourse, which happens in all societies where there is tourism”, he said. “People start to tell the tourists – and I found that most Shipibo people did not distinguish tourists from researchers – the stories they think are interesting for them and not what they really live with.”

His research showed just how large the discrepancy was. He discovered that, in their traditional stories about ayahuasca’s origins, many Shipibo-Konibo people said the brew came from the Kukama, one of the first peoples to be missionised and resettled during the Spanish conquest. Other peoples from the region remembered adopting it in the last 50 years. When he examined old reports of travellers, Brabec de Mori found that he could connect the historic diffusion of ayahuasca to the movements of missionaries and the spread of the rubber industry through the western Amazon.

Then there was the linguistic evidence. Peoples in the Peruvian Amazon speak a dazzling variety of languages, but their words for ayahuasca and related activities are notably alike. The same goes for their music: lullabies, love songs and festive songs are varied, yet ayahuasca songs are very similar and often sung in non-Amazonian languages, like Quechua or Spanish. These patterns led him to conclude that ayahuasca hasn’t been in the western Amazon for millennia. Rather, it seems to have arrived and spread much more recently.

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Sometimes, human material culture involves traces of other animals, too. Zooarchaeologists like me are trained to identify the remains of other species from archaeological sites by analysing bones, teeth and shells. We use these remains to gain insight into what people in the past ate and how they hunted. We learn where and when wild species were tamed or domesticated, and how animals’ bodies were used as resources, whether for tools and adornments or as potent symbols in human societies. We are not, generally, interested in the histories of the animals themselves, but rather how animals have intersected with human histories. We certainly don’t ask what kinds of things bears may have discovered and forgotten centuries ago. To put it simply: zooarchaeology is the study of animals as material culture, not an archaeology of animals and their material culture.

This is based on a well-established belief: humans make and do things because only we have culture, and when those things we make and do change over time, we call it history. When animals make and do things, we call it instinct, not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it evolution, not history. Anthropologists have pointed out that this is an unusual way of thinking: at what point did we stop merely evolving from our long line of hominid ancestors, cross an irreversible threshold from nature to culture, and kickstart history?

The unique trajectory afforded to humans compared with all other animals is evident in paleoanthropologists’ use of the phrase ‘anatomically modern humans’. This terminology tries to make sense of the fact that there were members of our species hundreds of thousands of years ago who had the same morphological characteristics and physical capacities that we have today, but who seemingly had not yet taken the step into a new world of culture. By contrast, as the British anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, we never speak of ‘anatomically modern chimpanzees’ or ‘anatomically modern elephants’ because the assumption is that those species have remained entirely unchanged in their behaviours since they first took on the physical forms we see today. The difference, we assume, is that they have no culture.

But what if archaeologists and zooarchaeologists found traces that told a different story? What if some of the cultural making and doing that we consider to be uniquely human was being done by animals first?

In several caves in France, such as Bara-Bahau, Baume-Latrone and Margot, human-made finger flutings or ‘meanders’ follow earlier cave bear scratches. Some of these long lines of finger-combed grooves are superimposed directly over claw marks. Others are located near the bear-made traces, echoing their orientation. In Aldène cave in the south of France, human artists ‘completed’ earlier animal markings. More than 35,000 years ago, a single engraved line added above the gouges left by a cave bear created the outline of a mammoth from trunk to tail – the claw marks were used to suggest a shaggy coat and limbs. In Pech-Merle, the same cave where Lemozi mistook cave bear claw marks as human carvings of a wounded shaman, a niche within a narrow crawlway is marked by four cave bear claw marks. These marks are associated with five human handprints, rubbed in red ochre, that date to the Gravettian period, about 30,000 years ago. For Lorblanchet and Bahn, the association between the traces of cave bear paws and human hands is no accident: ‘It is remarkable (and the Gravettians doubtless noticed it),’ they wrote, ‘that a rubbed adult hand, with fingers slightly apart, leaves a trace identical in size to that of an adult cave bear clawmark.’

Nonhuman carvings laid the literal and figurative foundations for human art.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In a letter published the next day, a reader asked teasingly if this use of “gotten” – and another writer’s reference to a “faucet” – were signs the Guardian had fallen into line with Donald Trump’s demand that news agencies adopt current US terminology, such as referring to the “Gulf of America”.

Another, who wrote to me separately, had first seen the article in the print edition and expected subeditors (or copy editors, if you wish) would eventually catch up and remove “gotten”, which “is not a word in British English”. She was surprised to find the online version not only unchanged but with the phrase repeated in the headline.

... and I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for you pesky kids and your mangy dog.

In an era of escalating censorship, disinformation, and the erosion of public trust in institutions, Wikipedia may seem like an unlikely site of resistance. But at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and other institutions across the country, a quiet revolution is taking place, one edit at a time.

PAMM’s Wikimedian in Residence Michaela Blanc has spent the last two years helping the museum’s digital team use Wikipedia to spotlight the work of underrepresented artists from Miami and beyond. From Latinx and Black painters to queer sculptors and feminist photographers, her work is filling gaps on the internet, but more importantly, preserving culture in a moment when history itself is under attack.

“Wikipedia is a role model for collaborative governance. It is basically the only corner of the internet today that is self-reliant and not an advertisement platform,” Blanc said “It’s just really like thinking about how to rescue the stories of these artworks.”

In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest enclosure, the process by which common land was parcelled into units of private property, stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. The land was bad – ‘nothing but a bare heath & sandy ground’, surveyors reported in 1650 – but the Diggers believed it could be made fruitful.

Over the coming weeks and months, they husbanded the earth, composting burnt turf, digging parsnips, planting carrots and beans. They even built cottages. Many knew the land well: the historian John Gurney estimated that about a third of the Diggers were local inhabitants. Their choice to join the Digger project was likely informed by years of local struggle: conflict with landlords, heavy Civil War taxation, the burdensome passage of troops through villages. But the object of their protest – enclosure – was hardly an issue confined to Walton: over several centuries, landowners across England had become ever more hungry to expropriate the commons from the commoners.

At first glance, this might seem like a local, intimate endeavour: Surrey men and women living and digging together, facing down attacks from manorial tenants and landowners animated, at least in part, by parochial resentments and rivalries. But the Digger imagination was vaster than St George’s Hill, than Surrey, than England even. The first Digger pamphlet, The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649), was addressed to ‘the powers of England and to all the powers of the world’. In it, Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers’ chief theorist, framed their digging as a means of claiming the whole ‘earth’ as a ‘common treasury of relief for all, both beasts and men’ (all quotes from the Christopher Hill edition, 1973). The scrubby, sandy Surrey ground would be the seed of an international revolution: ‘not only this common or heath should be taken in and manured by the people, but all the commons and waste ground in England and in the whole world …’ During four fervid years of textual and agricultural production between 1648 and 1652, Winstanley’s pamphlets laid out – and the Diggers enacted – a global vision of the commons, one that claimed to heed neither borders nor distinctions between ‘persons’.

Winstanley’s pronouncements are disorientatingly modern. The mid-17th-century writings of this smallish group of English brewers, artisans and farmers resonate with the words of later internationalists. Their vision of a border-crossing class of ‘common people’, on the brink of transforming the earth, chimes with the later address by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the ‘workers of the world’; Che Guevara’s calls for global, anti-imperialist struggle against the ‘oppressor classes’; the invocations of common cause among 21st-century resistance movements from Standing Rock to Palestine. How did the Diggers, sowing seeds in Surrey, come to understand themselves as part of a world-historical moment? How did they think about the threads tying their England to an increasingly tangled globe? What possibilities, what solidarities, did the Diggers’ global imagination encompass – and where was that imagination enclosed, fettered by borders and the world-shaping force of capital accumulation?

🔥A must listen for everyone hashtagged on this post 🙏🏾🔥

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https://inbedwiththeelephant.podbean.com/e/leilani-farha-former-united-nations-special-rapporteur-on-adequate-housing/

New research suggests that Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system may have been significantly influenced by the work of a 14th-century Muslim astronomer, Ibn al-Shatir. The study draws detailed comparisons between the planetary models of both figures and proposes that Copernicus’s ideas could have stemmed—directly or indirectly—from earlier Islamic scientific traditions.

Copernicus, the renowned 16th-century Polish astronomer, is widely credited with initiating the so-called Copernican Revolution by proposing that the Sun, not the Earth, lay at the centre of the universe. His work challenged the prevailing geocentric models derived from Aristotle and Ptolemy and helped lay the foundation for modern astronomy.

But according to a recently completed PhD thesis by Dr. Salama Al-Mansouri of the University of Sharjah, Copernicus’s model bears a remarkable resemblance to one developed nearly 200 years earlier by Ibn al-Shatir, a Damascene astronomer who served as the timekeeper of the Umayyad Mosque.

“Ibn al-Shatir was the first astronomer to have successfully challenged the Ptolemaic cosmological system of planets revolving around Earth and corrected the theory’s inaccuracies about two centuries before Copernicus,” says Dr. Al-Mansouri. Her study, now available through the Sharjah University Library, offers a critical textual analysis of the two astronomers’ work, focusing in particular on Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) and Ibn al-Shatir’s treatise Nihāyat al-Sul fī Taṣḥīḥ al-Uṣūl (The Final Quest Concerning the Rectification of Principles).

The research reveals “compelling correlations,” especially in the mathematical models used to represent planetary motion. According to the study, “Ibn al-Shatir’s astronomical manuscripts, particularly his work in Nihāyat al-Sul, demonstrate planetary models that predate and closely mirror those later proposed by Copernicus, indicating a shared mathematical lineage,” says Mesut Idriz, professor of history and Islamic civilization at the University of Sharjah and one of the study’s supervisors.

Despite these similarities, the study acknowledges that Ibn al-Shatir remained within a geocentric paradigm. However, Dr. Al-Mansouri argues that the precision of his refinements made them readily compatible with Copernicus’s heliocentric reinterpretation. “Our analysis reveals that Ibn al-Shatir’s treatise, though geocentric in intent, produced results so aligned with heliocentrism that Copernicus’s debt to him is undeniable—two centuries of separation could not erase this intellectual kinship.”

But how might Copernicus have encountered these ideas? Dr. Al-Mansouri surveyed Arabic manuscripts and their Latin translations preserved in European archives—including those in Kraków and the Vatican—where Copernicus studied and developed his astronomical theories. She reports that Nihāyat al-Sul was among the materials archived there in its original Arabic. “Though in its original Arabic version, the manuscript could not have escaped the attention of a scholar like Copernicus,” she writes.

This was a rabbit-hole discovery. It's over an hour and could have used some tighter editing, but it's truly fascinating stuff.

The Greeks used hour ranges, not specific times (i.e., 6 p.m. meant 6:00-6:59), the origin of the 24-hour, seven-day week stems from gods in Egypt where each one cycled through being in charge for the first hour of the day, the length of an hour varied by time of year because it was sundial days ... it's rare to run into a video where I knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter already.

It's admittedly trivia in the end, but this was one of those finds I had to share.

I have been thinking about this issue a lot considering the context of my life and the present political situation and have been planning to write my own essay, only to find that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written exactly was I was thinking decades ago just before he was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I think it's an important thought to spread and I'm curious as to what y'all think. This is the essay:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.

We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.

We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.

It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.

Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.

This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.

But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.

Source

Amid constant noise and spectacle, moments of stillness carry unusual weight. This short essay explores how the appearance of a global figure, not for what he said but for how he held space, reawakened something deeper than charisma.

It reflects on how silence, ritual, and presence still move people across cultures, even in our algorithmic age. Though the event was ecclesiastical, the response felt almost anthropological, collective, symbolic, and strangely intimate.

For those interested in how culture recognizes leadership not through volume but through gravity, it is a thought-provoking read.

It began in late September 2022. I was just recovering from a severe case of COVID-19 when Hurricane Ian hit my hometown in southwest Florida. My wife and I evacuated to Miami for a week and watched the damage unfold on various news channels. When we returned to our home in Fort Myers a week later, we were shocked by the devastation. The scenes were absurd. There were huge fishing boats suspended like toys from mangrove and palm trees, entire homes floating in the middle of San Carlos Bay, the famous causeway to Sanibel Island ripped in half, and the town of Fort Myers Beach utterly flattened. But our house, albeit without power, made it through the storm relatively unscathed.

One evening amid the power outage, I happened to be outside on the patio reading by headlamp when I began noticing my jaw clenching and tightening up. I was suddenly having difficulty controlling my tongue, lips and jaw. I came inside and asked my wife if I might be having a stroke. Beyond my Covid experience and the wreckage of the hurricane, this was an extremely stressful time in my life. As a philosophy professor, I had just published a new book that was generating a modest buzz, and it seemed as if I was being invited to give talks all over the place. Always an anxious traveller, I was scheduled to fly in rapid succession from Madison, Wisconsin to Birmingham, England and then to Sweden for a talk in Stockholm, then to Linköping for another talk and back to Stockholm again for a third. This, in addition to my normal work duties and some major upheavals in my personal life, appeared to short-circuit me physically and emotionally.

My first thought was that I had temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) from excessive jaw clenching. I scheduled appointments with numerous dentists, who confirmed that I was a jaw clencher and created an occlusion splint to wear at night. But the movements continued, and the pain was getting worse. My tongue was moving constantly, and I noticed it affecting my speech with slurring and a pronounced lisp. I started chewing gum to occupy my tongue. The anxiety about what was happening to my body reached such a breaking point that I cancelled all my trips and gave my talks virtually via Zoom. I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist, who recommended I up the dose of the antidepressant Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a version of which I had been taking for well over two decades. But things got only worse. The increased dose of Zoloft made me feel dissociated and dangerously impulsive. Ativan was added to help take the edge off, but the spiral of depression and anxiety deepened. I considered checking into a psychiatric hospital. What was happening to me?

In a panic, I went to the emergency department of the local hospital to be checked out and was quickly dismissed as someone suffering from work-related stress and maybe needing some botulinum toxin injections (‘Botox’) to ease the movement of my jaw. Then my wife began to do some research and suggested that perhaps the uncontrolled facial movements were the result my long-term use of SSRIs, the dosage of which I had just increased. I was unconvinced, assuring her that those kinds of side-effects came from antipsychotic and neuroleptic medications, not the relatively benign SSRIs that nearly every friend and colleague I knew had taken at one time or another. But then I started doing some digging and read reports that, although rare, an abnormal movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia (TD) could emerge from long-term use of SSRIs. I went back to the emergency department the next day, received blood work and a CT scan, all of which came back normal, with a suggestion that it may in fact be TD, and a referral to a neurologist. It was at this point that I officially entered the dehumanising maze of the biomedical industrial complex and encountered the so-called ‘blind spot’ in neurology, where a neurological disorder exists that is incompatible with neurological disease.

Having suffered a massive heart attack in my late 40s, I am no stranger to dealing with health emergencies. But this experience has been different in kind. With a heart attack there are clear medical interventions, in my case, an angioplasty and a strict medication protocol. But over the span of a year and half, the many neurologists I saw didn’t just not know how to treat me; they couldn’t even come to a consensus about what I had. I left each consultation feeling more anxious and alone, to such a degree that I became suicidal for the first time in my life.

I slogged through my days and weeks trying to cope with my condition. My mouth, jaw and tongue felt uncanny, like foreign objects that didn’t belong to me and that I had no control over. This lack of control affected my ability to move through the world, anticipate future projects or even relate to others in my life. All of it was collapsing.

As my condition progressed, I found I could no longer eat without food falling out of my mouth, and I could no longer lecture with any of the fluency and precision that I had long taken for granted. The body that had propelled me effortlessly forward through a kind of tacit proprioception, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the ‘I can’ (je peux), was replaced with an awkward and debilitating sense of ‘I can’t’. This experience kept me from dissolving into the flow of everyday life, transforming me into what Sartre called a ‘body-for-others’ (corps pour autrui), a stigmatised object, self-conscious and filled with shame. And the more I internalised this judgment, the more I was sucked into a feedback loop of isolating behaviour and feelings of self-reproach that further intensified my suffering. I found myself chewing gum in a desperate attempt to disguise the uncontrolled jaw and tongue movements, and even took comfort in wearing pandemic masks when out in public. All of this illuminates the ways in which shame is fundamentally a social mood, felt by embodied beings who inhabit a shared world.

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Last year, Emma, a 37-year-old teacher, broke up with her boyfriend. He had often taunted her for her weight, leaving snarky Post-it notes on her clothes and telling her she needed to eat better. “He told me I was so fat that no one else would ever love me,” she said. After they broke up, his words still haunted Emma (who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy). She spent a lot of time scrolling through #SkinnyTok, a growing community of weight-loss influencers, where she found Liv Schmidt.

A 23-year-old model in New York City, Schmidt encourages her followers to “live the Skinni Girl lifestyle” by following her weight-loss advice. When Emma stumbled on her TikTok, Schmidt had more than 600,000 followers. She was shocked by some of the things Schmidt said — in one video, she mocks women who wear sundresses to hide their “puffy face and bloated bodies,” and she once reposted a TikTok with the caption “girls be 300 pounds saying ‘I’m a snack.’ No megatron you’re the fkn vending machine.” Emma was intrigued. “I just figured, Okay, if she was able to get that thin, she could help me lose that last 15 pounds,” she told me. Emma signed up for the Skinni Société, Schmidt’s subscription-only Instagram group. For $20 a month, members gain access to exclusive content on Schmidt’s Instagram page, including recipes, workout videos, and diaries of everything she eats in a day. They’re also added to a group DM thread on the platform, where they share their weight-loss goals and progress. When Emma joined, she saw members posting their step counts, meal plans, and before-and-after photos. She couldn’t help but notice many were quite young; some appeared to be in college or high school, posting about graduation or sharing prom pics. “I felt like I was old enough to be their mother,” she said.

During her time in the Skinni Société, Emma’s life became dominated by a single obsession: food — and how to avoid eating it. She frequently felt weak and exhausted. At one point, she said, she had been on the treadmill at the gym for a minute when she had to get off; she was lightheaded and drenched in sweat. Every time she opened the app, she saw a new video or message from Schmidt urging her followers to “eat clean, feel light” or to chug water or green tea to trick their bodies into ignoring hunger cues. Her subscribers couldn’t get enough. “They’re all so obsessive, so it’s hard to not become obsessive too,” Emma said. “It’s, like, this little cult of being skinny.”

In interviews, Schmidt — who didn’t respond to requests for comment — has claimed she merely offers common-sense weight-loss advice. The goal of the Skinni Société, she says, is to hold members accountable and support their goals. But where is the line between embracing diet culture and promoting eating disorders? Inside the group, members post ridiculously high step counts and commiserate over the side effects of their low-calorie diets, like hair loss and dizziness. Though the group is technically closed to those under 18, when I joined I found more than a dozen members who are high-school students, one of whom is a freshman.

Last fall, Schmidt was kicked off TikTok after The Wall Street Journal asked the platform for comment on a story about her. Her fans rallied to her defense, and she made the ban part of her brand, arguing that she’s the victim of censorship. In April, the conservative women’s magazine Evie featured her in a glowing profile with the headline “Banned for Being Honest?” Now she’s more popular than ever and has quadrupled her follower count on Instagram. Air Mail recently estimated that Schmidt makes $130,000 a month from the 6,500 members in the Skinni Société. She takes the influencer playbook a step further, directly profiting from a little club of followers who encourage one another to eat, drink, and live just like Liv Schmidt. In March, she reposted a message from a follower who wrote a school paper about how much she looks up to Schmidt. “Her content has helped and continues to help so many young girls form a healthy relationship with food and exercise,” this fan wrote. “She truly exemplifies the values of what a role model should be.”

In January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.

Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.

“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”

“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

There are currently 43.7 million refugees worldwide. These are people who have been forced to flee their home countries due to severe threats to their lives, human rights and basic needs. Yet, having fled in search of safety, they have not always found it. Instead, the vast majority live in squalid and dangerous camps or face destitution in urban areas in regions neighbouring their own states in the Global South. In these conditions, refugees continue to face severe human rights violations. A small minority undertake perilous journeys to find adequate safety in the Global North. Thousands lose their lives on the way, every year.

How should states in the Global North respond to this situation? This question polarises debate. Some philosophers, like Peter Singer, argue that states must admit refugees until the point of societal collapse; others argue that states are not necessarily obligated to admit a single refugee. Some politicians advocate for expansive resettlement, others seek to prevent refugees from seeking asylum at the border, or even deport them. Some citizens march the streets proclaiming ‘refugees welcome here’, others attempt to burn down a hotel with refugees inside. Some states have welcomed more than a million refugees, others build concrete walls and barbed wire fences.

In the face of such volatile disagreement, there is an urgent need for an understanding and agreement on what an ethical response to refugees would be.

To reach agreement on obligations to such refugees, these obligations must themselves be based on widely shared core moral commitments (that is, basic commitments fundamental to common morality, as well as endorsed by all plausible normative ethical theories and the Abrahamic religions, to which the majority of the world adheres). The first commitment is the moral prohibition on harming or violating the rights of innocent people without substantial justification. For example, it is widely accepted that it would be wrong to physically abuse and then imprison an innocent person without trial for no adequate reason. This commitment grounds our negative moral obligations: obligations to not perform acts that would harm or violate the rights of innocent people. Such negative obligations are widely agreed to be particularly strong.

The second commitment is the principle (sometimes called the humanitarian or Samaritan principle) that if an innocent person is in desperate need of help and you can easily help them at little cost to yourself, it would be wrong to refuse to help and let them needlessly suffer. To take Singer’s famous example, if you saw a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save them simply by pulling them to safety, it would be wrong to do nothing, stand by and let them drown. This commitment grounds our positive moral obligations: obligations to perform acts that would help or otherwise benefit others. These positive obligations are also widely accepted.

So what are the obligations specifically owed to refugees? To answer this question, it is essential to focus our attention on the situation and experiences of refugees themselves. This will reveal morally significant features that ought to be recognised and taken into account, thereby helping us understand our obligations towards them. Once understood, these obligations will form the components of what an ethical response towards refugees would be.

But wedding lists should be to help couples build their first homes together. Oh please, that doesn’t happen any more. Say your best friend announced that they were getting married to someone who they didn’t already live with. How would you react?

I’d try to talk them out of it. Exactly. Everyone who gets married these days already shares a home, so the last thing they need is a duvet set or crockery.

But they’ll always need toilet paper. Well, and other stuff. The thinking behind the Tesco wedding list is that it’s much more practical to help a newly married couple out with their weekly shop.

It's rather nuts that in just 20 years, premarital cohabitation has gone from somewhat fringe to expected. Of course, housing costs may have something to do with that.

Recently, I accidentally overdrew my checking account. That hadn’t happened to me in years—the last time was in 2008, when I was running a small business with no safety net in the middle of a financial crisis. Back then, an overdrawn account meant eating canned soup and borrowing cash from friends only slightly better off than me. This time, I didn’t need to worry—I was able to move money from a different account. And yet all the old feelings—heart palpitations, the seizure of reason in my brain—came right back again.

I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.

According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?

For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why.

In the days after the training, I continued to communicate with my small group and other participants from the course. The collective high was initially palpable. Everyone was going to achieve it all. But as the days passed, the general mood drifted back down to earth, and gradually these channels fell silent.

Keen to understand what I had just gone through, I reached out to John Hunter, a research psychologist at Varsity College in South Africa, who studies what’s known as large group awareness trainings (LGATs), such as MITT.

Hunter maintains that even though there are “hundreds” of LGATs around the world, “most can be traced back to Lifespring” and its contemporaries. They hinge, he says, on significant stress followed by a social reward, and it is this process that generates the “transient experience of transformation”.

While most studies of LGATs suggest there are no long-term benefits derived from such trainings, I spoke with several graduates of MITT who felt they had reaped lasting rewards. Many of the benefits they described were intangibles, like confidence and positivity. But they also shared achievements that they linked directly to the training: getting a promotion, leaving an unsatisfying marriage, reconnecting with an estranged sibling.