There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.
How ‘Dune’ Became a Rallying Cry For the New Science of Ecology
Harvard Law Prof Ruth Okediji: Music And Faith Foster Hope In Difficult Times
Articles of Note
The Argentine writer and perennial Nobel candidate César Aira writes for hours before revising. The result is an obscene number of books... more »
New Books
The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »
Essays & Opinions
“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more »
THIS IS HARDLY NEWS: Taking the stairs may up the odds for a longer life. “Folks who regularly climb stairs have a 24% reduced risk of dying from any cause, and a 39% reduced risk of dying from heart disease, compared to those who always take the elevator, researchers found. Stair climbing also is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease or suffering a heart attack, heart failure or stroke, results show.”
Of course, healthier people are more likely to take the stairs to begin with.
THE RISE OF “PRESCRIPTIVE RACISM.”
I tell it because I am now a mid-career college professor, and these types of bullies have not gone away. They are now academics and administrators at prestigious universities; they are now running HR departments; they are chief editors of prestigious journals. They are prizewinners for their work in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Once, I committed the sin of saying that knowledge of standard written English may be valuable to all students, regardless of skin color. For this, I endured vitriol. Because standard English came from England and was used by imperialists and slaveholders, I was told, it was inherently racist to teach it to nonwhites. On a now-defunct academic listserv, I was accused of white supremacy, of being unconcerned with how such thoughts, coming from my Black body, were doing harm to other Black people.
These academics would deride me to each other while ignoring my explanations and clarifications. Many who did not participate in these online degradation ceremonies cheered on those who did. For wanting to teach standard English, and for wanting to have a real conversation about its efficacy in American life, I was deemed a pariah.
It was remarkably reminiscent of the bullying I experienced while growing up.
Oh, they were bullied in their youth, too, they’re just savoring the opportunity to turn it around. Plus:
To be clear, I was not being denigrated for simply having a particular outlook; my transgression was having that outlook while Black.
This story illustrates a distinct kind of racism that goes unacknowledged in its particularity. I am describing a kind of racism that more easily masquerades as magnanimity, empathy, and righteousness. I am describing a kind of racism that, often, is unwittingly embraced by its very targets. I am describing “prescriptive racism.”
New government heat risk tool sets magenta as most dangerous level
AP: “…Heat is by far the No. 1 weather cause of death in the United States, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Rick Spinrad, citing CDC data of 1,200 deaths per year. Last year was the hottest year on record globally. Both the weather service and CDC will put versions of the tool on their websites. Enter a ZIP code on the CDC dashboard to get more focus on health risks and air quality and zoom in on the weather service map online for more detailed forecasts and explanations. Both versions include heat risk for the next seven days and there is a Spanish edition. The CDC site is https://www.cdc.gov/heatrisk and the weather service version is https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/heatrisk/There are numerous other meteorological indexes for heat, Graham said. Those include the heat index, which factors in humidity; wet bulb globe temperature, which is aimed at outdoors heat stress in the sun; and universal thermal climate index, which brings in radiation and other urban heat factors.”
Should you take vitamin D? Here’s the science
PopSci: “Nutritional science is supposed to chart a course to our healthier selves. But contradictory scientific results and interpretations can muddy the waters—and few nutrients have recently demonstrated that more clearly than vitamin D.
At one point, it seemed that everyone should be taking vitamin D supplements, and that doing so would protect against a whole host of maladies, from bone problems to heart disease and cancer. More recently, new studies appear to have debunked many of those claims. But a closer look at the research reveals a more nuanced message around vitamin D supplements: They can be key to correcting deficiencies, though people who already have enough—which is most of the American public—are generally unlikely to see benefits from taking large doses.
Experts have come to worry about supplement enthusiasts overdosing in the belief that more is better or, at the other extreme, some nutrient-deprived people shunning them altogether. Ultimately, says Roger Bouillon, an endocrinologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, “it’s like for most things. You need an optimal amount: not too little, not too much.” Yet working out who needs vitamin D supplements, how much, and what the specific health benefits are, remains tricky, with questions remaining. Here’s some of what we know…”
Deepfakes in the courtroom
Ars Technica: “US judicial panel debates new AI evidence rules Panel of eight judges confronts deep-faking AI tech that may undermine legal trials. On Friday, a federal judicial panel convened in Washington, DC, to discuss the challenges of policing AI-generated evidence in court trials, according to a Reuters report. The US Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, an eight-member panel responsible for drafting evidence-related amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence, heard from computer scientists and academics about the potential risks of AI being used to manipulate images and videos or create deepfakes that could disrupt a trial. The meeting took place amid broader efforts by federal and state courts nationwide to address the rise of generative AI models (such as those that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion), which can be trained on large datasets with the aim of producing realistic text, images, audio, or videos. In the published 358-page agenda for the meeting, the committee offers up this definition of a deepfake and the problems AI-generated media may pose in legal trials..”
