If you sit at the James E. Foy Information Desk in the Melton Student Center at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?”

A little later, the phone will ring again, and the caller might ask, “Who is the most famous person in the world?” Your next question: “How do you get the Super Serum in Call of Duty?” And finally, when you pick up the phone close to eleven o’clock, quitting time, you might hear someone blow a giant raspberry then hang up.

I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk, where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn’s then dean of stude

Two hours of history I'd never heard before. Something of a fascinating romp.

For example, I'd no idea that Normans were Vikings who integrated with the French partially by adopting Christianity, which -- in turn, as this is centuries ahead of the Reformation --curried favour with the church.

If you need something interesting to settle in with for the evening, you could do worse.

Najin and Fatu had two horns each—one large at the very front of the snout, and a smaller one behind it. But Fatu’s had been lightly trimmed, blunted, to prevent her from jabbing Najin, who is too elderly now to keep up with Fatu’s play. With two armed guards always by their side, the rhinos looked both inviolate and fragile.

But there is more to the lives of these two rhinos than meets the tourists’ eyes. Behind the scenes, veterinarians, cell biologists, and entrepreneurs are rushing to avert their imminent extinction through gene editing and in vitro fertilization. They believe it is still possible to restore the population of northern white rhinos to the African landscape by using surrogates of a closely related species (the southern white rhinoceroses) impregnated with lab-generated embryos from Fatu.

A partner in the rhino project is Colossal Biosciences, with a valuation of $10 billion, which made headlines this spring with its claim to have “resurrected” dire wolves,

In each of these essays, a citizen of Georgia’s capital argues for one way we could make our city better.

Sometimes the ideas will be serious. Other times? A little more lighthearted. From infrastructure to food trucks, public transit to wildflowers, nothing is off limits. Consider these essays the wish list of a bunch of ATLiens who want more for their city.

How I’d Fix Atlanta is a free newsletter sent on a Thursday of most months. Each writer is paid $800.

Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It’s a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.

Moral ambition begins with a simple realisation: you’ve only got one life. The time you have left on this Earth is your most precious possession

So I ran a marathon at the weekend.

I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see.

I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected in a super interesting way.

Goals: (a) get round and (b) hit a target time of 3:45 if poss.

My time was 3 hours 40 minutes 12 seconds. I’m proud of that ngl (and wish I’d done better).

Age: Fairly new.

Appearance: Either sensible or boring, depending on your point of view.

If this is about influencers wearing shoes made of glass, I swear to God … No, calm down. This isn’t quite as reckless as that. It’s primarily about bedtimes.

I don’t follow. It’s been reported that more and more young British women who go out drinking prefer to be back home and tucked up in bed by midnight.

They do? Yes. According to research by skincare brand No7, 51% of women like to go to bed early after a night out, 65% would rather have an evening at home and just 5% claimed that their perfect night involves going dancing with friends.

You young people are such wimps. There’s probably more to it than that. Over the past five years, 400 nightclubs have closed around the country due to rising costs, a reduction in people’s disposable income and a marked generational decrease in drinking culture that is led, in part, by a growing awareness of al

I've had many years of involvement with /r/AcademicBiblical and /r/AskBibleScholars (I am the founder of the latter). A few of us endeavored to create a YouTube channel for public education purposes. It turned out to be more difficult than we expected. Therefore we shuttered the project. Below is the second draft of the script that would have become our first video.

There can be quite the confusion when people learn that the regular Bible they know is considered a different religious text from the Hebrew Bible. But rather than generate more controversy than the Bible as a whole has in history, it is only right to seek to understand what the less-understood Hebrew Bible is all about and what it means to its particular audience, the Jewish religion.

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t just p

Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?

Public libraries are often seen as “opportunity institutions,” opening doors to, and fo

archive.is link

The most influential promoter of antisemitism in the United States isn’t Elon Musk, who appeared to Sieg heil at Trump’s inauguration; nor is it Kanye West, who famously tweeted that he loved Hitler, or the podcaster Candace Owens, who has promoted the blood-libel conspiracy theory. The pro-Israel lobbying organization Stop Antisemitism wants you to believe the real danger is actually a lady in overalls and a pink headband who sings about how bubble gum is sticky.

The organization that has spent the past year and a half publicly identifying pro-Palestine protesters is now coming after Ms. Rachel, a beloved YouTuber known for her videos for babies and toddlers. In a letter posted to social media on Monday, StopAntisemitism asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Ms. Rachel is “being funded by a foreign party to push anti-Israel propaganda to skew public opinion” and referred to her as an “amplifier” of pro-Hamas content.

This is an insightful short video essay that talks about how we cope as people during these difficult times we are all facing.

I really enjoy the artistic style and editing of his videos as well which alone I think is worth sharing.

In the forests of eastern Australia, satin bowerbirds create structures known as “bowers.”

The males gather twigs and place them upright, in two bundles, with a gap in the middle, resulting in what looks like a miniature archway. All around the bower the bird scatters small objects – shells, pieces of plastic, flower petals – which all possess the same property: the color blue.

Studies suggest that the purpose of the bowers is to impress and attract females. But their beauty and intricacy has left some researchers wondering whether they shouldn’t be considered art.

Of course, figuring out whether something is a work of art requires answering some tricky philosophical questions. Are animals even capable of creating art? And how can we tell whether something is a work of art rather than just a coincidentally beautiful object? As a philosopher and artist who’s interested in aesthetics and biology, I recently wrote about the evolution of behaviors in animals that could be

Linguistics undergrads learn about the vocal system and how your anatomy moves and contracts to form human speech. You begin to see vocal cords as a reed and your head as a resonant chamber. I remember my own classes at University of Kansas making me hyper aware of the way people spoke, even imagining corresponding phonetic symbols as subtitles. Like my Swedish friend whose accent sounds like a whisper. To me, “raspberries” is /ˈɹæzˌbɛɹiz/ where the s’s had hard /z/ sounds but for her it’s /ˈɹæsˌbɛɹis/ where the s’s had soft sound. The only difference between these sounds is that your vocal cords are either vibrating /z/ or not /s/. The Swedes are quite literally soft spoken people.

These phonetic symbols are characters from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a universal system for transcribing human speech. Each depicts individual units of sounds (called phones). It works for every language and vocal sound, from Berber to beat-boxing. You can even write the sound of a kis

I’m so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment”. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.

How great that Maga identities have Project 2025 to explain to them the gender roles they’re so rigorously policing. Should we be concerned that the campaign to politically erase trans people – so en vogue both in America and among America’s political lemmings in the Australian right – is a symptom of their endgame of reducing “men” and “women” to binary 1950s stereotypes that didn’t even reflect the reality of their time? Yes.

The thing th

“Hundreds of people have come in this room under addiction and sat there and drummed or sat there and listened to songs and changed,” says Aldo Garcia, whose traditional name is Puxtunxt, gesturing around a room at Painted Horse Recovery where he leads Wellbriety meetings. Garcia is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, with Assiniboine Sioux, Siletz and Miwok descendancy. “That’s just what this represents today, it’s just nurturing to this community.”

For Garcia, practicing the Native American Washut faith and learning traditional songs have been a key part of his commitment to sobriety. Now, he helps to share these songs and raise his kids in the Washut faith, through the drumming group he co-founded, PDX WALPTAIKSHA.

Every Friday, community members gather in a room at Painted Horse Recovery, adorned with hand drums that hang on the walls, to practice drumming and singing traditional Washut songs. They hold services every Sunday, creating a space of he

Most Muslims in Ukraine are Crimean Tatars who are Indigenous to Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. It set off the war that ramped up with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

Many Crimean Tatars fled the peninsula. Some left the country altogether. For those who stayed in Ukraine, this Ramadan, which ends this weekend, is their fourth in wartime. Many say the circumstances have only strengthened their faith.

Tamila Tasheva, a Crimean Tatar herself, and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, was in attendance at the recent Musafir meal.

She said that life has been challenging for her community since the conflict began.

“My parents and mostly my relatives and friends, they live under occupation, and honestly speaking, we don’t speak about politics because it’s dangerous,” Tasheva said. “They live in the territory [in] fear. If you speak something openly, you could [be arrested] by occupying authoriti

(archive.is link)

At the helm of the project is Adam Howard, a Colby professor and chair of its education department. Howard’s recent research has focused on elite all-boys institutions which he became interested in after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite allegations of sexual assault; one of the things Howard found was that sex education was almost entirely lacking at these institutions. While working with student researchers, he asked what the best way to disseminate their research findings would be. “They said TikTok,” Howard says. “The videos are providing really valuable information in really accessible ways.” Among that information: how to prioritize female sexual pleasure, what to do if you test positive for a sexually transmitted disease, and the difference between coercion and consent.

Sex Ed for Guys offers alternate programming. “Guys could be scrolling through their TikTok and Andrew Tate will pop up but as

Recently, video essayist F. D. Signifier released a short film on the paid streaming platform Nebula called Talking to "White" People which I highly recommend. In it, he interviews a variety of "white" mostly male mostly youtubers. Notably, he at no point actually tells us who anyone is beyond their racial identity, a cheeky parody of how often Black academics when interviewed about race are reduced to being nothing more than "A Black person."

Also notable is that all of the "white" people interviewed have some other identity other than "white" which they could take. They are Ashkenazi Jewish, Arab, Mixed-Thai, Italian, Polish, etc. and F. D. pushes each of them on their white identity, telling some of them explicitly "you are not white" which none of them are comfortable agreeing with. Regarding a man who identifies as a "European Mutt," F. D. Signifier is only willing to label the English contribution to his heritage "white" while declaring every other heritage "not white a hundr

Conflicts in faraway lands and ideological differences make these three religious groups unlikely cohabitants in a shared space, but here the groups form a microcosm of peaceful coexistence united by tragedy. In January, the Pasadena synagogue burned down in the Eaton fire leaving its Jewish congregation in need of a place to grieve and worship.

The Methodist church, already a host to Islamic Center members as a satellite worship location, welcomed the Jewish congregation.

“We are trying to cultivate an ‘island of grace’ in the midst of differences that we are told should divide us,” said Aitken.

Under this arrangement, all three Abrahamic faiths are worshiping under one roof at 500 East Colorado Boulevard.

“I can’t think of another church that can say the same,” said Aitken.

It's almost like people understand we all need each other as opposed to believing in this divisive bullshit.