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Our ability to read and write -- to organize information and engage with the written word in a state of “deep attention” -- is what makes humans rational beings, writes Cloe Axelson. 
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For the first time ever, more children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 worldwide are obese than underweight. This was announced by UNICEF at the beginning of September. According to UNICEF, around 188 million schoolchildren and adolescents worldwide are obese, while only around 180 million are underweight. In total, more than 420 million children of all ages are overweight. At the same time, an estimated 370 million children globally are underweight, almost half of them under the age of five and suffering from stunting or wasting due to food shortages and poor nutrition.
This chart shows the estimated proportion of underweight/overweight children and adolescents worldwide, by age group.
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Fights over free speech have taken up a lot of space in the zeitgeist lately. People on both the left and right claim to be the defenders of free speech, while pointing fingers at the other side for censorship and encroachments. So what is actually going on?
This week on the podcast, we explore where the idea of free speech comes from, how the concept has changed meaning in the hands of different people, and why fights over freedom of speech are often actually fights about power.
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The Observatory » Area » Language From journaling to essay writing, the simple act of writing is one of the most powerful tools for improving clarity, creativity, and critical thinking.#1 in Guide to Language Arts and WritingnextThis article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent...
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In 2024, a mass die-off of western monarchs occurred at an overwintering site in Pacific Grove, California. When researchers visited the site, they found pesticides in all of the dead butterflies they studied. Every single one.
With monarch butterflies inching dangerously close to extinction, the new research poses an important question: What more can we do to protect monarchs from toxic pesticides?
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The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is among the most recognized, studied, and loved of all of North America’s insects. Awareness of the monarch butterfly’s life cycle and habitat requirements is essential for their survival and an important step in the conservation of this animal.
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The City Assembly of Toyoake, Japan, a city with 68,000 residents, recently introduced a rule limiting the use of digital devices to two hours per day outside of work and school. The idea was introduced by mayor Masafumi Kouki. He’s grown concerned that residents, particularly children, have become addicted to digital devices. The new law…
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"The more significant the date is for a person, the more they are likely to feel the date’s energy and to be affected by it."
Rainy days are harbingers. The rain nourishes the plants, the trees, fields and flowers and to the whole of flora and fauna and it dies by showering itself onto these. It again rises from the water bodies through evaporation. Thus, it is cyclical… immortal. It was raining when I heard on the radio that Marvin Gaye had died. I remember the day (Sunday) and how I curled up in bed listening to the radio DJ play his tribute to the fallen singer. It was also raining yesterday when I found out D’Angelo had passed away. It rained all day. As I scrolled through the various social media posts, I realized October 14th was also the birthday of George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed African American man, by Minneapolis, Minnesota police during an arrest.
Harbingers can be specific events or messages from God intended to alert people to impending disaster if they do not repent. In a broader sense, biblical harbingers are not just omens, but also opportunities for people to heed the warnings, repent, and avert disaster. D’Angelo’s third album Black Messiah was also a harbinger, a sign of things to come. There is a historical through-line evident to the listener between the police killing of Fred Hampton in 1969 and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. In the past five years more deaths have occurred. The protests that rocked America in 2020 resonate deeply within this history. Four years earlier, D’Angelo released Black Messiah.
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"The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they traveled through the computer. Ships, motorcycles. With the circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day… I got in."
— Kevin Flynn
They finally got it right. TRON: Ares is so good and the soundtrack is AWESOME! I was a pre-teen when I watched the original TRON, a 1982 action sci-fi film that was one of the first films from a major studio to use extensive computer graphics. Only 20 minutes of computer animation was used in the first film and mostly in scenes that show digital terrain, or patterns, and vehicles such as light-cycles, tanks and ships. The computers used at the time could not perform animation, so the frames had to be produced one by one. TRON was one of the sparks that led me to major in computer graphics at Pratt Institute a several years later. That BFA program at Pratt was also one of the first.
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On March 20th, 2000, during an electrifying live performance at Radio City Music Hall, we were swaying along with the ‘neo-soul’ music performed by D’Angelo & the Soultronics, when suddenly my mind picked up on an entailment that only musicians of their caliber could initiate:
The phrase “free your mind and your ass will follow” (see Parliament-Funkadelic or P-Funk) means that by letting go of the need to conform, creativity and authentic self-expression can flow freely, leading to a more genuine and fulfilling life. Today, I remembered this concert that coincided with the release of Voodoo: it was one of three highly acclaimed albums and each one was a chapter in D’Angelo’s Afro-modernist, Black music manifesto.
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Find out what’s inside Trump's settlement demand letter to UCLA, which the public has known about, but now has access to after UC faculty sued.
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HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA — Amerindian communities in northeast North America formed a Confederacy of nations known as the Iroquois League, consisting of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. EPISODE 292 — Iroquois.
"Iroquois (poisonous snakes) is what the French called us; the five/six Nations is what the British called us; Haudenosaunee (we who are building a longhouse) is what we called ourselves."
quote of Jerome Majewski
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Beginning tonight, the Media 2070 project will co-host its fifth Black Future Newsstand (BFN) exhibition, with scheduled events running through mid-November.
This latest installment, which is happening in Houston, will once more ask attendees to imagine “what does a media system that loves Black people look and feel like in a future where reparations are real?”
It’s a question that Media 2070 has been asking since its founding in 2020 — and it’s a question we’ve posed to BFN attendees since our very first exhibit in Harlem in 2023.
Media 2070 and the Preserving Essential Cultural Archives & Narratives (PECAN) Project are co-hosting Houston’s BFN, where a front porch will serve as the latest example of a critical information ecosystem that exists in many Black communities.
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Ancient Roman gladiators are often imagined as chiselled, bronzed heroes of the arena, akin to today’s top athletes. But the truth was far more complex
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New research “suggests that dark energy may no longer be a cosmological constant” and that the universe’s expansion is slowing down.
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that took a bite out of life, appealed to the death drive, gave a yellow light to the universe, and produced hitherto unknown levels of cute.
First, it’s the most epic ocean battle: orcas versus sharks (pro tip: you don’t want to be sharks). Then, a scientific approach to apocalyptic ideation; curbing cosmic enthusiasm; and last, the wonderful world of tadpole-less toads.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Now, to the feast!
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It turns out that not all roads lead to Rome, after all – at least, not in a literal sense.
A new map of the empire's ancient land routes has nearly doubled the length of the confirmed ancient Roman road network, from 190,000 to 300,000 kilometers (118,000 to 186,000 miles) – with the major hubs located far from Rome itself.
And yet, the map – named Itiner-e, and made publicly available – represents, at most, just 3 percent of the entire Roman road network, says a team led by archaeologist Tom Brughmans of Aarhus University.
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Humanity’s evolution into a super predator has reshaped ecosystems and instilled a primal fear in much of the animal kingdom.
Hunting is considered critical to human evolution by many researchers who believe that several characteristics that distinguish humans from our closest living relatives, the apes, may have partly resulted from our adaptation to hunting, including our large brain size.
Over time, however, the need to hunt for survival has been replaced by greed, leading to the exploitation of natural resources, which is destroying the environment and causing the extinction of thousands of species.
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After 10 long days in a chrysalis, monarch butterflies break free, ready to spread their wings and take their first triumphant flight. But the world they fly into is increasingly toxic and unwelcoming.
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In August, the USDA announced a Rural Veterinarian Action Plan to address the shortage of production animal veterinarians in rural areas, adding to existing efforts being made by veterinary medicine programs at some Western universities.
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Underlying the 2022 war in Ukraine is another conflict, this one over the past.
In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote a long essay entitled, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” It laid out historical claims to the territory of Ukraine, walking through a specious reading of history beginning with the medieval period and moving through the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.
The rest of the world was uninterested in Putin’s article and his view of history. However, while it may not be a scintillating read, it lays out his underlying rationale for the war, and thus we need to understand the history he is talking about in order to correct Putin’s false claims that Ukraine “belongs” to the modern Russian state.
Medieval history is popular when it is turned into shows such as “Game of Thrones” and “Vikings,” but that of eastern Europe rarely registers on the radars of most Americans.
Ukrainians and Russians, (and Belarusians), trace their ancestry back to a medieval kingdom known as Rus. This kingdom was the largest territorially in medieval Europe, stretching from the Baltic in the north to near the Black Sea in the south.
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Afro-modernity shows the ways in which Black musicians moved beyond the rules, created new musical genres of influence with songs of social justice and sociopolitical freedom, undeniably shaped how modernism is understood, and, as Guthrie Ramsey writes in the closing of one chapter, how it “defined, for many, the aesthetic core of what was singular about American music culture.”
This entry moves from soul music into other territory, specifically rock & roll that was born from Black American genres like the blues and R&B, with pioneers such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard. However, during the 1960s, the music industry used radio and marketing categories to associate rock with white artists and R&B/soul with Black artists, effectively creating “parallel worlds” for music consumption.
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"Let me tell you ‘bout the
—D’Angelo
Chicken dishes were popular among enslaved people before the U.S. Civil War, as chickens were generally the only animals these people were allowed to own, as well as being cheap and easy to raise. Although I’m a pescatarian now, I grew up in Kentucky eating fried chicken among many other dishes that are considered to be ‘soul food’ that has roots in the culinary traditions of West Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas. The importance of ‘grease’ in Black culture and life should never be underestimated. Saving the grease was a practice passed down through generations of Black cooks who migrated from the South. The flavorful grease was used to season and enrich a wide array of dishes, from cornbread and greens to fried eggs and potatoes.
"People actually ate while they played. Everything got greasy n loose, including the audience." — YahKnoyah
The colloquial phrase “chicken grease” originated in the 20th century, from a style of guitar playing that feels and sounds slippery as the players’ fingers and slipped and slid over the chords. Chicken grease was in blues music that emerged in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800s; it followed the second migration of Black Americans from the Deep South and evolved in urban nightclubs. In the early 1970s, hip- hop originated in the inner cities; by the late 20th century, it was sampled and appropriated as a global commodity. This entry follows one particular thread, the specific sound that put late Richmond, Virginia native Michael “D’Angelo” Archer in a circle with other highly influential figures in Black American music. So let’s start at the beginning.
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In the past several weeks, I’ve taken my time to understand the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and how the United States responded to it (first by arming the combatants, and then, most helpfully, by bombing Veracruz to try to prevent one party from receiving those same arms shipments, and then failing at that).
I was thinking this was all going to lead up to, “and that’s why the Mexicans started immigrating in significant numbers to the United States in the 1920s,” which in turn led in part to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924 and the eventual militarization of the border against Mexicans in particular. After all, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, whose work I’ve discussed before, asserted back in 2022 that “[the] refugee population that arrived in the United States between 1910 and...1920 is the foundation of the growth of the Mexican American population today. So many families across the United States today can trace their origins north of the border to the Mexican Revolution.”[1] I figured there was some sort of “you reap what you sow” type point to be made.
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An essay about the impact of the Old World on the New World. This is an essay about how the Dutch settlers changed and influenced the Iroquois through trade.
On the fourth April 1609, the ship de Halve Maen sailed out the port of Amsterdam. The captain, named Henry Hudson (1565-1610), went on an assignment given to him by the Dutch East India Company. Hudson was tasked to find a new shipping route to India. His original plan was to sail through the Artic, but the ice stopped him, so he sailed west. This caused him to arrive at the mouth of the river, which the Dutch called the Noortrivier (Hudson River). Hudson thought that he had found the mouth of river that would lead to Asia. Thus Hudson sailed al the way up the river until he reached current day Albany, here he discovered that the river was a dead end. The river wasn’t a gateway to Asia, but he did however discover rich fertile lands for farming and fur hunting that were easily accessible by boat.[1] In the following decades several traders and farmers would travel to the land next to this river. Most of them would settle in or around settlements called New Amsterdam (New York) or Fort Oranje and Beverwyck (present-day Albany). This river bound New World colony was called the New Netherlands and the Dutch owned it between 1609-1664.[2]
In the last few decades, more and more research has been carried out on New Netherlands as a stand-alone subject. Previously, New Netherlands was often dismissed as a failed forerunner of New York. It was also long thought that the Dutch influence was negligible on the development of New York.[3] This idea has recently been discarded by several historians.[4] Some of these historians are Wim Klooster the author of The Dutch in the Americas, 1600-1800[5], in this book he analyzes and describes what the Dutch did in colonial era North-America. Another historian named Russell Shorto wrote The Island at the Center of the World[6] in which he rediscovered the city of New Amsterdam and its diverse inhabitants. These two books are only the tip of the iceberg that’s called New Dutch History and the books and works in this growing iceberg all tell parts of the story of the Dutch colony in North America.
Nevertheless, New Dutch history is often written in the broader context of the Dutch empire and of other European American colonies. Although this way of working puts the Dutch colony in context to the wider world and the Dutch empire, this also leads to the loss of the small aspects in the big overall picture. So despite the recent works on the New Netherlands, the story of it’s influence on the indigenous peoples is a fragmented story that is spread over several books and articles by different authors. And therefore this essay will tell a part of the larger story about the interaction between the Dutch and the indigenous peoples in the area nowadays known as the state of New York.
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If you think human mummies are scary, wait until you meet dinosaur mummies.
Paleontologists have discovered the mummified remains of two duck-billed dinosaurs that belong to the species Edmontosaurus (go Oilers!) annectens, which lived 66 million years ago in what is now Wyoming.
The immaculate preservation of the animals—a 2-year-old juvenile and young adult that was roughly 5 to 8 years old—exposed unprecedented corporeal details, such as intricate polygonal scales, spinal spikes, fleshy contours, skin wrinkles, and the first hooves ever identified in a dinosaur (or any reptile), making them the oldest hooves in the fossil record.
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