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And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents. … The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate. … An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits. It would calibrate our national and international responses to the magnitude of the dangers that face us. It would limit the influence of terrorists, school shooters, decapitation cinematographers, and other violence impresarios. It might even dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world.

Fearfulness obscures the distinction between real threat on one hand and on the other the terrors that beset those who see threat everywhere. … A “civilian” Kalashnikov can easily be modified into a weapon that would blast a deer to smithereens. That’s illegal, of course, and unsportsmanlike. I have heard the asymmetry rationalized thus: deer can’t shoot back. Neither can adolescents in a movie theater, of course. … As for America, we have a way of plunging into wars we weary of and abandon after a few years and a few thousand casualties, having forgotten what our object was; these wars demonstrate an overwhelming power to destroy without any comparable regard to life and liberty, to the responsibilities of power, that would be consistent with maintaining our good name. We throw away our status in the world at the urging of those who think it has nothing to do with our laws and institutions, impressed by the zeal of those supernumeraries who are convinced that it all comes down to shock and awe and boots on the ground. This notion of glory explains, I suppose, some part of the fantasizing, the make-believe wars against make-believe enemies, and a great many of the very real Kalashnikovs.

By the second week I feel catatonic. There is no institutional support for a holdout, even though a trial that does not reach consensus is an inevitable outcome of the jury system. Being in the minority is excruciating. I question whether I have the stomach for it.

The tortoise dies. The tortoise dies because you were too busy blaming him for his situation instead of helping him.

As prolific and internet-known as Meechie and his crew are, they are multiple steps removed from owning, in a tangible sense, their art, leaving them vulnerable to both YouTube’s whims and to having their creativity lifted by outsiders. Atlanta, where Meechie is from, is legendary as a place where teens generate culture, and then go uncompensated as their style and tastes are usurped by a corporate machine hungry for Black Cool. Cultural sharing is ancient. That the speed and relative borderlessness of the internet makes cross-platform, global dissemination seem like a consequence of tech is a convenient amnesia. The propensity to share predates the young black creators doing so online. But they ought to claim lineage. Remember, for instance, the blues. … Part of the reason the originators of viral content are stripped from their labor is because they don’t technically own their production. Twitter does, Vine does, Snapchat does, and the list goes on. Intangible things like slang and styles of dance are not considered valuable, except when they’re produced by large entities willing and able to invest in trademarking them.

On a warm November morning last month, I was in the grandstands for the Japanese Eastern Command’s Parade of the Eastern Army. As the seats around me slowly filled before the performance, I noticed a pair of young men in puffy down jackets on the tarmac below. Peering more closely, I could make out the action figure of a female heroine from an anime series between them. One of the young men took a photograph of the toy and, apparently satisfied with his framing of the mini-skirted cartoon girl against the backdrop of military vehicles, returned the figure to his companion’s satchel and then mounted the stands.

An interview with Drew Fairweather about The Worst Things for Sale.’ Q: Does a tiny part of you think it's sort of wonderful that these horrible things exist, and that someone out there presumably owns them? A: Absolutely not. The issue I'm trying to get at with this body of writing is that our happiness has been pulled from us bit by bit, by industry, by labor, by law, and is being sold back to us at a profit. I have empathy for the seven billion people in the world that try to quiet their own sadness by purchasing products. The products themselves are a global self-perpetuating emotional and economic problem.

Steve Albini and his wife and friends dedicate their Christmas to directly helping poor people.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Our Enemies From Being a Burden on the Rest of the Country.

It isn’t an issue of race because there is anything inherently flawed with racialized people but because there is something inherently flawed with white supremacy. That’s what affirmative action was about and what it continues to be about. Can you design an integrated social, economic, cultural, and institutional system of privilege that delimits access to colleges and universities as a normal course of business and be not-for-profit, state-supported, and culturally legitimate? Because that’s what U.S. higher education did and what it continues to do. Whether black or hispanic students do not like the culture, drop out, transfer, get an F in freshman comp is not the issue. The issue is not individual performance but institutional exclusion. Of course, these universities could agree that the mismatch is just too great to bear.

Allows you to merge terms, set term parents in bulk, and swap term taxonomies.

People are entitled to their taste and you can’t help who you fall in love with, right? Totally right! Except for this one, teensy, tiny exception: Race. Oh I’m sorry, did I say teensy tiny? I meant monumental and indicative of an entrenched and deeply troubling societal prejudice that we have been unable to overcome throughout the course of human history. … We are not the passive victims of our own internalized biases. We have governance over our actions. As author and psychologist James Giles writes, “That is not to say that romantic attraction is fully under our control, but only that it is not fully beyond our control.” So when are our love lives going to start reflecting that? Studies have shown that we are attracted to what we know and are used to, but as Deborah Ward writes, “Repeated exposure to certain people will increase our attraction toward them.” This means that a conscious change in behavior will impact subconscious desires.

The article that started the band. By "fingerprinting" DNA of the ant species - Mycocepurus smithii - they found them all to be clones of the colony's queen.

Many Silicon Valley firms are scrambling to hire executives to focus on diversity — there’s an opening at Airbnb right now for a ‘‘Head of Diversity and Belonging.’’ But at the biggest firms, women and minorities still make up an appallingly tiny percentage of the skilled work force. And the few exceptions to this rule are consistently held up as evidence of more widespread change — as if a few individuals could by themselves constitute diversity. … Why is there such a disparity between the progress that people in power claim they want to enact and what they actually end up doing about it? Part of the problem is that it doesn’t seem that anyone has settled on what diversity actually means. Is it a variety of types of people on the stages of awards shows and in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies? Is it raw numbers? Is it who is in a position of power to hire and fire and shape external and internal cultures? Is it who isn’t in power, but might be someday? … Over the past few years, numerous editors have reached out to me asking for help in finding writers and editors of color, as if I had special access to the hundreds of talented people writing and thinking on- and offline. I know they mean well, but I am often appalled by the ease with which they shunt the work of cultivating a bigger variety of voices onto others, and I get the sense that for them, diversity is an end — a box to check off — rather than a starting point from which a more inte­grated, textured world is brought into being. I’m not the only one to sense that there’s a feeling of obligation, rather than excitement, behind the idea. DuVernay herself hinted at this when she, too, admitted that she hates the word. ‘‘It feels like medicine,’’ she said in her speech. ‘‘ ‘Diversity’ is like, ‘Ugh, I have to do diversity.’ I recognize and celebrate what it is, but that word, to me, is a disconnect. There’s an emotional disconnect. ‘Inclusion’ feels closer; ‘belonging’ is even closer.’’

For years, saying you liked Enya was enough to get you laughed out of town. Recently, though, her implicit presence has been everywhere (whether intentional or not). A recent example would be Julia Holter's 'Horns Surrounding Me', a kissing cousin to Watermark's 'Cursum Perfico'. Or how about early Laurel Halo, Julianna Barwick, Grouper; even new Burial track 'Rival Dealer' has an Enya passage, as if his night bus had got lost up a country lane. She's surely ripe for a reappraisal.

The book is an adventure tale whose reward is always bats.

For any discoveries that Murphy makes, the road ahead is paved with obstacles. Safety testing, animal testing, and then finally, the hope that a drug company and its investors can be persuaded to gamble hundreds of millions on the chemical passing the multiple stages of human clinical trials, before it can be turned into an over-the-counter product. The odds seem slim, but with the annual global mortality rate from antibiotic resistance predicted to hit 10 million in the next 35 years, scientists remain hopeful that the politicians will come to better agreements on how to finance antibiotic development. The question is, will they get around to doing so before it’s too late?

The lesson of that kind of reading is a simple one. It has taught me that my own life is ephemeral. Despite all the heroic myths about the unique, irreplaceable preciousness of our daily lives, I am absolutely convinced that someone, someday 50 or 100 years from now, will be working at a computer near where I am seated right now, and he or she will come across the address of my office mentioned in this article—902 Broadway—and will read with amusement or wonder or puzzlement about my experiences. I greet you, and the people who follow you, and the ones after them, and I hope that I give you a moment’s satisfaction, and that you take as much pleasure from your search as I did.

Bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin prescribe fiction for healing and self-exploration. … Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.”

This is the watch Lauren got me for Christmas in 2012.

Simulate the world. In emoji.

We can no longer tolerate the way “both sides” are given equal weight in the media or the lukewarm reactions of check-the-box “pro-choice” candidates. There is a real war going on, a battle for access to basic health care—to a procedure that one in three people who can get pregnant will need in their lifetimes. One side is willing to arm themselves and to murder not just doctors, but bystanders.

What's the real threat to the U.S.? Here's a partial sampling of all the horrible things that have gone down while anyone turning on the news could hear someone arguing that Syrian refugees pose the biggest existential threat to public safety the country faces today. 1. Mass shooting at Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado 2. Armed protesters intimidate mosque in Irving, Texas 3. Bomb hoax at Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia 4. Five arrested in plot to bomb black churches and synagogues 5. Mosque shot at in Connecticut 6. Alleged white supremacists shoot five at Black Lives Matter rally in Minneapolis

Violent white nationalism has not been so effectively mainstreamed since the 1920s. If Trump wins the nomination and the economy turns down next year, I'd give him a decent chance of victory. Even if he is only a sort of "fascist idiot savant" without much true organizing ability or program, he clearly has a good instinct for the basic psychological impulses underlying previous fascist success. It's time to start taking this seriously.

On the wives of whalers and their dildos, AKA “he’s-at-homes.”

The weird, slightly grim history of the sensory deprivation tank.

Yes, we should all hope—demand, even—that the workplace of the future will be governed more by respect and sensitivity than cupidity and the Peter Principle. But until that day comes, we should embrace not the meaningfulness of work, but its meaninglessness. The cold, unromantic transaction. The part that keeps food in our bellies and a roof over our heads. The part that, theoretically, gives us our nights and weekends. Let’s demand that recompense, first and foremost, and deal with the rest later. With unemployment falling to pre-recession levels, employees are hopefully gaining the leverage to say enough. The prayer is that the line will be drawn, and managers will then see that the way forward is actually very simple: Hire good people. Treat them well. Help them succeed. Compensate them fairly. Let them go home.

A Q&A with an expert who studies the relationship between mental illness and violence.

The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system—religious or humanist—in which the human mind is the center of the universe. There is a tendency nowadays to think of the world in which we live as an artefact of mind or language: a human construction. For Lovecraft, human beings are too feeble to shape a coherent view of the universe. Our minds are specks tossed about in the cosmic melee; though we look for secure foundations, we live in perpetual free fall. With its emphasis on the radical contingency of the human world, this is a refreshing alternative to the anthropocentric philosophies in which so many find intellectual reassurance. It may seem an unsettling view of things; but an inhuman cosmos need not be as horrific as Lovecraft seems to have found it. He is often described as misanthropic, but this isn’t quite right—a true misanthrope would find the inhumanity of the universe liberating. There is no intrinsic reason why a universe in which people are marginal should be a horror-inducing place. A world vastly larger and stranger than any the human mind can contain could just as well evoke a sense of excitement or an acceptance of mystery.

Since 1980, more than 260,000 black men have been killed in America. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, is on a crusade to stop the killing.