Will > Books: nonfiction‎ (503)

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or ex

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. - from Wikipedia

Be There and Be Square - Nerd Nite logo

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

…deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and

…deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and in many ways, they actually prefer to share habitat with us. All across North America, as in many other parts of the world, we exist in intimate proximity to deer.

The FAA considers white-tailed deer more hazardous to U.S. civil aircraft than any other animal.

I’d had an inkling, even before writing the book proposal, that deer were involved in all manner of controversies, contradictions, and human strivings. That was what got me interested in them. But I didn’t know too many specifics. When I started researching, one of the first things I did was to set up news alerts on deer and several other related terms.

Within a week, I had a rough outline of some of the major roles deer play in our world. They are victims; they are pests; they are something to hunt as well as something to study and protect. They are the targets of culling operations and the objects of sentimental love. They are trophies and intruders. It was all there in the news cycle. - From the Lithub article

I did start the book from a fairly cerebral place where I thought, “Oh yeah, great subject. Like, this will bring up all kinds of great questions, and I’ll be able to go down all these roads in terms of the research and make these points, and it’s gonna be a really great opportunity to dig into these intellectual questions.”
What I wasn’t expecting was how much it would change me as a person. - from the Phoebe Journal interview

If the American project was, in part, to make a pastoral landscape out of a wilderness, deer benefited from that project in a cultural sleight of hand. We thought of them as part of the wild, but we had misconceived them. Their secret was that they, like us—like squirrels, corn, apple trees, clover, ands sparrows—would flourish in our human garden.

What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on

What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?

What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.

I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interview

I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.

AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.

She has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” her four part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIREDand many other places. Kurzweil has taught widely for over a decade. See her website (amykurzweil.com) to take a class with her.

… a chemical is not intrinsically, good or bad, it’s just a chemical. What differs is the intent with which the chemical is used: either to preserv

… a chemical is not intrinsically, good or bad, it’s just a chemical. What differs is the intent with which the chemical is used: either to preserve life – – or to take it.

Within the annals of crime, murder holds a particularly heinous position. And among the means of killing, fewer methods generate such a peculiar morbid fascination as poison. Compared with hot blooded spur of the moment, murderers, the planned and cold calculations involved in murder by poison, perfectly fit the legal term malice aforethought. Poisoning requires planning and knowledge of the victim’s habits. It requires consideration of how the poison will be administered. Some poisons can kill within minutes; others can be given slowly, over time, gradually accumulating in the body, but still leading inexorably to the victim’s death.

Neil Bradbury grew up fascinated by murder mysteries and poisons. He is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the University of Wales School of Medicine, with degrees in Biochemistry and Medical Biochemistry. Although he grew up in the UK, he now lives and works in Illinois, USA, where he’s a scientist, teacher and writer. He also gets to play with nasty chemicals every day (during scientific experiments of course). - from his site

…in France in the late 1600s, the effectiveness of arsenic and disposing of wealthy relatives who had the temerity to remain alive, was so widespread that it gained the name Poudre de succession, or “inheritance powder.”

I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of t

I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of the sensory world.”

Synesthesia has been incorrectly defined, in my humble opinion, as “crossed wires in the brain” or “mixed-up senses.” In fact, synesthetes have the same primary response to a stimulus as neurotypical people do. If the numeral 5 appears in newsprint, I know that it is black on a white (well, somewhat beige) background. However, simultaneously, I see navy blue around that number and above that number it, like an aura. Therefore, I’ve created what I believe is a much better definition: Synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses.

Patricia Lynne Duffy, a member of the United Nations Staff 1 Percent for Development Fund committee, was safely ensconced in her Manhattan office, but when she read the proposals before her, she felt the pain of the world’s most fragile people.

There’s plenty of evidence that humans are adapting to, even passing, machines by using their senses. Just look at the mind-meld young people have with their personal devices and the manual deftness with which they use them compared to older generations. Maybe the singularity moves in two directions, and we meet somewhere along the way. There’s a human-based component not yet considered. And since we’ve recently learned that human sensory potentials are far greater than we knew, perhaps we have a little more time to think about the value of being Homo sapiens.

A very small subset of the neurological outliers known as mirror-touch synesthetes have extreme empathy for machines. They are sometimes able to feel the mechanisms in their own sensitive bodies. I call them machine synesthetes or machine empaths.

“We genuinely experience scent as the emotion we have attached to it,” one sensory educator said. “Our hearts lift at the aroma that reminds us of a happy day at the beach, or our hearts break a little when we smell the aroma of a long-dead relative’s soap.”

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he handed them back.
“And just where was it you wanted to go,” he asked.
She had been rehearsing her response ever since her credentials first arrived in the mail.
“As far forward as you’ll let me,” she replied.
“Be here at 0600, tomorrow,” he said.

…good intentions have rarely paved such a direct route to hell.

She slept in Bedouin tents in the Algerian desert, and in the foxholes she dug herself in the hills overlooking Beirut. She rode in picket boats between battleships off the coast of Iwo Jima and flew in a nuclear-armed jet stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Aegean sea. On New Year’s Eve 1958, she patrolled the Soviet border with the Turkish infantry. On New Year’s Day 1959, she photographed Fidel Castro’s army as they entered Havana. She jumped out of planes over America, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. She heard bullets flying over her head in Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, and knew that they all sounded the same.

I side with prisoners against guards, enlisted men against officers, weakness against power.
—Dickey Chapelle

Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and their points of intersection.
Her writing has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Perfect Strangers, and Narratively, among other publications…When not writing she can be found photographing the natural world impinging upon the urban landscape or digging in the dirt with her husband and two sons in Santa Barbara, California. She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity, the transmission of knowledge into the sentient mind is an uninterruptible process of ebbings and flowings. There are times—in infancy, or when at school in youth—during which the rate at which knowledge is gathered becomes intense and urgent, a welling tsunami of information ever ready for the mind to process. At other times, maybe later in life, the inbound knowledge drifts in more slowly, set to adhere and thicken like moss, or a patina.

Digital amnesia, for example, is now widely agreed to be a phenomenon, a thing. It is a condition that posits that words looked up online are often forgotten almost as quickly as they are acquired. Information that we know can easily be Googled needs never be known, or if it is known, needs never to be retained. Telephone numbers, for example, once so often known and the more cherished ones remembered, need not even be known at all now. The name of the person to be called is all that is required. The name is hyperlinked to the phone’s dialing system and merely touching the name gets the distant phone to ring.

A Chinese school final exam is to the American SAT as Go is to Go Fish.

…knowledge has long been seen as far too precious to treat with casual disregard. It needs to not just be kept, but kept safe and secure. For almost as long as language, especially written language, has existed, we have sought ways of collecting, storing, and safeguarding this endlessly swelling body of what is known, of what has been learned, and of all that can then be taught, discussed, challenged, debated, and decided. The most widely recognized and most ancient means of storage is the institution that derives its English name from the Latin word for the inner bark of a tree, on which early works were said to have been written. The Latin word for this bark is liber; by way of centuries of etymological convolution, the English word, used since Chaucer’s time, is, of course, the library.

Why…did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?

What can and may and will happen next to our mental development if and when we have no further need to know, perhaps no need to think? What if we are then unable to gain true knowledge, enlightenment, or insight—that most precious of human commodities, true wisdom? What then will become of us?

How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade? Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought—care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it? Does anybody? How does a world function if no one within it is wise?

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion. The formal analysis of this incredible phenomenon has only just begun, but the emerging science reveals that these factors are mere subjugates to our primal instinct to be a member of a tribe. This “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery—honed by millions of years of evolution—that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes. But now that our species spans billions across the globe, does this adaptation continue to serve us, or is it mismatched to its environment? In other words, what happens when humans become either tribeless or destructively consumed by tribalism?

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefited our species. — CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN, 1993

The core of the mismatch is that modern society has made us more physically isolated by decreasing our social support; all the while it has made us more mentally unstable by increasing social pressure, tricking us into thinking that low grade online and institutional social interaction is good enough to live a healthy and fulfilling life. In this sense, the people who dwelled in the first tribes were not challenged as much as we are today. Their units were glued together in a common struggle for survival, not the weak ideological grounds many use as the foundation to their tribal social identities today.

The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship. . . . Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar. — ROBIN DUNBAR, 1996

When we grow, develop, and live in a world where everything is geared toward the individual, how can we help but view the world with a more narcissistic lens? When we live with other people, share resources within the environment, and work through problems together, the outcome is an individual that is less self-centered and more psychologically flexible.

”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup

The truth isn’t enough. Most people are

”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup

The truth isn’t enough. Most people aren’t even listening for it.

The aim of that book [The Ungrateful Refugee] was to really look back on my own experience, and what people go through now to make some sense of the modern displacement experience. One of the sections of the book is about asylum storytelling, and I had so many stories of people getting disbelieved for the stupidest reasons, and the way that the asylum officers listen to the stories. It was very shocking. I wanted to write a lot more about that and, with this book, I wanted to expand that out to just how the vulnerable are listened to, versus people who are very privileged. - from the Ms Magazine interview

For most migrants [asylum attorney Maleha Haq] explained, credibility isn’t the reason for rejection. In fact, the issue of credibility is cleverly avoided by using the claimant’s own lack of knowledge about the definition of a word. What is a refugee? Before he is believed, an asylum seeker must choose the right story out of many, the relevant part of a complicated life. It’s like being asked to cut a circular disk from a cylinder. You have many stacked circles, but if you cut at the wrong angle, you have an oval. You’ve failed to present the desired thing.

Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed—how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts.

…belonging is a performance with a script

The Reid Technique begins with an assumption of guilt. It was originally intended to be used only when the interrogator is absolutely certain of guilt. Even then, it was intended not to extract a confession that might condemn the suspect on its own (the technique is, after all, so torturous that even its creators didn’t believe it would cause an innocent person to confess, they seemed aware of that risk), but to uncover new, unknown details—intimate ones about the why and the how—that could then be corroborated. It was that supporting physical evidence that would convict the guilty—a body, a weapon, some real proof.

this variability in judicial standards is one of the greatest flaws of the American asylum system. Why should the weight of any kind of evidence vary by judge? Should one’s fate depend on the compassion or politics of the judge assigned? Should it vary by administration?...asylum grant rates go up and down based on who the attorney general is. That’s not just at the judge level but at the screening stage. The number of people found to have credible fear and entitled to be seen by a judge depends on political pressure.

The real Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet. The real Poe was best known in his lifetime as first a tremendously tough critic, secon

The real Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet. The real Poe was best known in his lifetime as first a tremendously tough critic, second a poet, and third as the author of tales of mystery and horror. Our perception of Poe has reversed that order.

“Poe was no saint, and he wasn’t always easy to be around,” novelist Matthew Pearl said. “He had difficulty with friendships. He could push people away who were genuinely fond of him and wanted to help him. He could be charming, courtly, witty, and gracious, but he also could be sensitive, petty, suspicious, jealous, and resentful. He wanted to be noticed and appreciated, but he had a difficult time with processing appreciation.”

It is, in fact, a double-barreled mystery. What was the cause of Poe’s death, and what happened to him during those missing days before he was found “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore, wearing ill-fitting clothes that were not his own? Why did he look so disheveled, his hair unkempt, his face unwashed, and his eyes “lusterless and vacant”? Pale and alternately described as both cold to the touch and burning up with fever, Poe in his delirium held conversations with what resident physician Moran said were “spectral and imaginary objects on the wall.” Sound like the description of a character in one of his stories? It also sounds like a mystery worthy of Poe’s master detective (and the model for so many super sleuths to follow), C. Auguste Dupin.

Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7th, 1849. The doctor labeled his cause of death as “phrenitis” (inflammation of the brain) which was commonly used when the true cause of death was unknown. Because of these mysterious circumstances, and the persona of Poe, there is much speculation about the true manner of his death. There are over 26 published theories on his demise, so far. - from The Poe Museum

Poe scholar Steve Medeiros puts it more vividly: “If you could look through the peephole and see who was knocking, and could see that it was Poe, you wouldn’t answer the door, because he would want something. As much of a genius as he is and as charming as he could be, he could also be a real pain in the ass.”

"Most people think of Poe as a gloomy pessimist, but, in reality, he was the eternal optimist. No matter what life threw at Poe, he always was kind of like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, sure that something was going to turn up. He always believed that. He never gives up.”

Profile - from Dawidziak’s site
Mark Dawidziak is the author or editor of 25 books, including three acclaimed studies of landmark television series: The Columbo Phile, The Night Stalker Companion and Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone. He also is an internationally recognized Mark Twain scholar, and five of his books are about the iconic American writer…A journalism graduate of George Washington University, Dawidziak worked as a theater, film and television critic for many newspapers across the USA in his 43-year journalism career.

…it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.

We don’t live in a cos

…it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.

We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.

As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.

Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.

Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy.

Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensa

Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensationalized mundane.

These days, we can clearly see the fallout from decades of declining public trust, the result, at least partly, of so many years of the press being undermined and of undermining itself. What is that fallout? Americans no longer share a common basis of reality. That’s dangerous because American democracy, government by the people, simply can’t function this way.

It’s high time to ask how public trust in the press steadily plummeted from the years following the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s—when seven of ten Americans trusted the news—to today’s rock-bottom lows.

The Times had certainly treated the FBI’s two investigations of the 2016 presidential candidates very differently. It shouted one from the rooftops, and on Trump and Russia the paper used its quiet inside voice, playing right into the Republican candidate’s hands. With a little more than a week to go before the election, the Times published a story with the headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” If anyone was concerned about Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin, their fears might be put to rest by that soothing headline, though the story itself was considerably more nuanced. Even that reporting, not very damning for Trump, appeared on an inside page of the paper, a far cry from the emails coverage splashed all over the front page, day after day. We now know, of course, that Russia had set out to interfere with the election, and did so very effectively.

The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.

The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.

…consciousness is not something passed on or recycled--like single molecules of water, which are retained as they move about the earth as ice, water, or dew--from one living creature to the next…instead consciousness should be grown from “scratch” with only a few well-timed molecular parts from plans laid out. It is not drawn from a recycled tap of special kinds of cells or dredged from the vein of free will. No, the darn thing grows. From its own rules. All by itself. And we have no idea how or why.

The book is a collection of possible mechanisms, histories, observations, data, and theories of consciousness told nineteen different ways, as translations of a few moments described in a one-page scientific paper in Nature, published in 1998, titled “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter.” The idea is an homage to a short book of poetry and criticism, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes the poem “Deer Park” by Wang Wei and analyzes nineteen different translations of it in the centuries since it was originally written.

There is no one such thing as “consciousness,” and the attempt to study it as a singular phenomenon will go nowhere.

There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly st

There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly stays America and a democracy or if it becomes a fascist dictatorship. If the Democrats lose the House and the Senate, then it is all over. There may never be another free and fair election in America. If the Republicans take control, we may be teetering on the edge of an American dictatorship. - from The Guardian interview

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Twilight Zone." - One of several introductions used for the show

By Election Day 2020, the Trump-dominated Republican Party solidified itself for what it perceived was a battle to change the soul of America permanently. Trump’s financial backers saw endless opportunity for tax cuts and limitless, tax-free profits. The stock market saw a president who would ruin nearly a century of regulation and allow them unimaginable capital gains that they could pass on to their children without paying taxes. The party investors saw a middle and lower class that would pay for virtually everything Republicans wanted and divest from virtually every social program liberals wanted. In their eyes, the average American would see none of the profits of America but literally pay for the wealth and prosperity of the richest of the rich. In fact, Trump and his lieutenants managed to do precisely that in his first four years. By the end of his administration, money allocated for education, childcare, and mental health would pay for mega yachts. In Trump’s America, executive jet purchases were tax free.

TITUS is a pre-rebellion political-paramilitary alliance that intends to use politics, instability, and violence to meet its goals. The number one goal is reestablishing the Trump dynasty as the primary operating system for America. Then they will use the power of the government to punish their enemies. The political wing of TITUS, the Trump-dominated Republican Party, has already initiated a dangerous plan to embrace the launch of protracted political warfare in America.

Discussing the impeachment of President Trump on Meet the Press, Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado, said most members of the GOP are “paralyzed with fear.” He continued: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. . . . A couple of them broke down in tears . . . saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.

Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps.

…several Republican legislatures including in Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri have made the murder of protesters by running them over in a vehicle legal.

In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on th

In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court, asked a series of questions that pressed the government’s lawyers about the true extent of the Border Patrol’s authority on American highways deep inside the United States. Unsatisfied with the response, Marshall finally asked if the Border Patrol could legally stop and search the vehicle of the president of the United States without any evidence or suspicion whatsoever. When the lawyer said “Yes,” Marshall concluded, “Nobody is protected.”

The Border Patrol in their green uniforms, patrols between crossing points. Customs was renamed the Office of Field Operations, its agents, in blue uniforms, work at crossing points and in airports. Agents of a third unit of CBP, Air and Marine Operations (AMO), wear brown uniforms and manage the agency’s aircraft and ships. AMO’s authorization in the U.S. code differs from the Border Patrol in that it does not include any geographical limits, so they are able to operate anywhere in the country.

Willard Kelly, the Border Patrol chief at the time, told a Presidential Commission in 1950 that “Service officers were instructed to defer apprehensions of Mexicans employed on Texas farms where to remove them would likely result in the loss of crops.” Instead, they would focus on the period after the harvest in order to send the workers back to Mexico. Similarly, during economic downturns, the Border Patrol would step up enforcement to ensure the state did not have to provide for the unemployed laborers. These roundups would often happen just before payday, so agribusinesses got the labor and the agents got their apprehension quotas, but the Mexican workers were not paid.

In addition to failing to properly search for missing people in the border zone, the Border Patrol also actively disrupts efforts by humanitarian agencies. Beyond the destruction of water drops and aid stations, they often refuse to provide location information to other rescuers, deny access to interview people in Border Patrol custody who were with the missing person, and harass search teams in the border zone.

As No More Deaths volunteer Max Granger, explained, “The agency itself is causing the deaths and disappearances. Any response, even if it is a more robust response, is going to be inadequate. Their entire overarching prevention through deterrence policy paradigm requires death and suffering to work. They are not invested in saving people’s lives.

Despite the transformation of the border in the public imagination, the people arriving there are largely the same as they always were. The majority are still migrant farm and factory workers from Mexico. In the past few years, they have been joined by entire families fleeing violence in Central America. These families with small children, who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol as soon as they step foot in the United States, in order to apply for asylum, pose no threat and deserve humane treatment. However, that is not what they have received. As journalist Garrett Graf memorably put it, “CBP went out and recruited Rambo, when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.”

“At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in you

“At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in your lives, yards, neighborhoods, jobs, relationships, or mental health?” That’s the question that Tajjia Isen and I asked the contributors to this anthology. We wanted to hear their personal stories, allow then to serve as witnesses of this incredibly complex moment in history. - from the Introduction

This is what climate change is. It’s what it does to the psyche, along with the body and the places we love. It’s nearly invisible until the moment something startles you into attention. A creeping catastrophe waiting with arms outstretched to deliver a suffocating embrace. And once the knowledge is gained, there is no unknowing it. You are no longer climate blind. You see and cannot unsee.

In 2022, we are witnesses to one of the most transformative moments in human history: a time when climate change is altering life on Earth at an unprecedented rate, but also a time when the majority of us can still remember when things were more stable. We are among the first—and perhaps one of the last—human populations to have memories of what life was like before. To us, the “new normal” is not how it’s always been. Our lives jostle against incongruous memories of familiar places. We are forced to confront, in strange and sometimes painful ways, how much those places have changed.

We must learn to become conservationists of memory. Otherwise, this damage we have done to our planet will cost us our past, as it may already have cost us our future. And without a past or a future, what are we? Nothing. A flickering violence of a species, here such a short time, insatiable, then gone. - Omar El Akkad

When I invited people, I typically would offer up various prompts. I definitely made it clear from the beginning that I was interested in [pieces] tha

When I invited people, I typically would offer up various prompts. I definitely made it clear from the beginning that I was interested in [pieces] that explored the ways in which alone time can be maddening and isolating and painful, but also pieces that explored the ways in which alone time can be a thrill, or a joy, or something that you crave but can’t access, which I think a lot of people also experienced during the pandemic. There was this simultaneous excess of loneliness and then absence of solitude, which is something I contemplated a lot. I feel like one thing I learned from making the book—but after it had already been printed, of course—is that our longing for solitude is also another kind of loneliness. I think it relates to my experience of the pandemic, and probably a lot of people’s experience of the pandemic. There was so much loneliness, but also the loneliness of not having solitude. Like, I have kids at home, and solitude is something that I crave. It’s like loneliness from oneself. A lack of connection to yourself. - from the CityLit interview

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. - Orson Welles

Even though it’s called The Lonely Stories, I definitely wanted it to encompass facets and permutations of being alone, including joy in solitude, how solitude can be replenishing and healing. So it felt like maybe sometimes I nudged things more in one direction or another and it was really important to me that the book tease out the distinction between the two, because loneliness is being defined as a lack, whereas solitude is kind of the art of feeling at home with oneself. There’s a quote for me that a friend reminded me of, that loneliness is a poverty of self and solitude is a richness of self. I feel that really nicely addresses the paradox of how being alone can be both maddening and joyful.

It’s the worst loneliness, I think, the loneliness we feel among those we feel we should be most like. Our tribe turns out not to be quite our tribe.

As the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Colonel-general A.V. Kartopolov remarked on Apri

As the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Colonel-general A.V. Kartopolov remarked on April 15, 2015, “if in the past war was 80 percent combat operations, and propaganda was 20 percent, then in wars today 90 percent of activities consist of information warfare.”

Russia’s information warfare is sustained and unceasing, and, therefore, so should be our defenses.

Moscow’s attempts to sow popular distrust in governance would not stop after the elections, which are only one event, but would continue after the elections when Russia may attempt to exploit socially divisive themes that could increase suspicion in democratic institutions. And drive communities further apart.

…this book analyzes under what conditions, in what contexts, and in what combinations with other nonmilitary and military measures Russia has employed certain types of cyber operations. In particular, this book explores what conditions have been associated with the employment of various types of Russian state-sponsored cyber operations against political IT infrastructure of NATO countries and invited members.

If we had paid more attention to Russian military doctrine, we could have been better prepared for what happened in 2016. [in Russia’s attack on the USA election] - from the JSOU presentation

Information warfare is applied through strategic media messaging disseminated through all media channels that reach the population of the targeted country. The aggressive party uses information technologies to engage public institutions in the targeted country, such as mass media, religions institutions, NGOs, cultural institutions, and public movements receiving foreign financing. To further help the demoralization of the population and ensure chaos, the adversary targets the disillusioned population and infiltrates these groups with provocateurs. Disinformation, or deliberate falsification of events, can also be considered among the principal information warfare components.

Denounced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,  Dr. Bilyana Lilly  managed projects on ransomware, cyber threat intelligence,  AI,  disinformation, and information warfare. She was a cyber expert for the RAND Corporation and has spoken at DefCon,  CyCon, the Executive Women's Forum and the Warsaw Security Forum. Dr. Lilly is the author of over a dozen peer-reviewed publications and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal,  Foreign Policy  and ZDNet.

Although progress is being made to reduce the pervasive cyber vulnerabilities of U.S. critical infrastructure, the unfortunate reality is that, for at least the next decade, the offensive cyber capabilities of our most capable adversaries are likely to far exceed the United States’ ability to defend key critical infrastructures. The U.S. military itself has a deep and extensive dependence on information technology as well, creating a massive attack surface.

As he left Agra behind, Lewis had no way of knowing that he was walking into one of history’s most incredible stories. He would beg by the roadside

As he left Agra behind, Lewis had no way of knowing that he was walking into one of history’s most incredible stories. He would beg by the roadside and take tea with kings. He would travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises. He would see things no westerner had ever seen before, and few have glimpsed since. And, little by little, he would transform himself from an ordinary soldier into one of the greatest archaeologists of the age. He would devote his life to a quest for Alexander the Great.

There’s an old Afghan proverb: ‘First comes one Englishman as a traveller; then come two and make a map; then comes an army and takes the country. Therefore it is better to kill the first Englishman.’ He did not know it yet, but Masson is the reason that proverb exists. He was the first Englishman.

His quest would take him across snow-covered mountains, into hidden chambers filled with jewels, and to a lost city buried beneath the plains of Afghanistan. He would unearth priceless treasures and witness unspeakable atrocities. He would unravel a language which had been forgotten for over a thousand years. He would be blackmailed and hunted by the most powerful empire on earth. He would be imprisoned for treason and offered his own kingdom. He would change the world – and the world would destroy him.

This is a story about following your dreams to the ends of the earth – and what happens when you get there.
Had he known what was coming, Lewis might have stayed in bed.

Edmund Richardson writes about the strangest sides of history. The Victorian con-artist who discovered a lost city. The child prodigy turned opium addict. Several homicidal headmasters. A clutch of Spiritualists. A prophet who couldn’t get the end of the world right. And Alexander the Great. He’s currently Lecturer in Classics at Durham University. Cambridge University Press recently published his first book, Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of the Ancient World.

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can infl

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can influence the data being captured. This is referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. But this two-way flow of information is not limited to sensation, or even our senses; it is a feature of how every tenet of our nervous system works.

…when we listen, what we hear is the result of the process of making sense of these pressure waves all around us, ascribing meaning to these tremblings of molecules. It is an early warning system, an awareness of what lies in wait immediately beyond our bodies or outside our field of vision. It is also an effective mode of communication. As the authors of the textbook Auditory Neuroscience state, ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity, as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations”.’

‘My favourite Tube station was Tottenham Court Road, because there’s so many lovely words in there. “Tottenham” produced the taste and texture of a sausage; “Court” was like an egg – a fried egg but not a runny fried egg: a lovely crispy fried egg. And “Road” was toast. So there you’ve got a pre-made breakfast. But further along the Central Line was one of the worst ones, that used to taste like an aerosol can – you know, the aftertaste you get from hairspray. That was Bond Street.’

not only is there an overlap between olfaction and emotion, but also olfaction and emotional memory. Those regions of the brain involved in olfaction and emotional processing also have a strong role in memory.

‘Perception is nothing more than a controlled hallucination.’ This is a commonly used sentence in the world of cognitive neuroscience. Essentially, our brains work as guessing machines, interpreting what is coming in through our senses in the context of our model of the world. What we perceive relates to our existing beliefs about the world, to how what the information our senses provide us interacts with our virtual-reality simulation of the universe.

the brain is not simply an absorber of information. It is a prediction machine. Our perception of the world is based upon predictions of how we expect our world to be, a necessary shortcut to deal with those three flaws, of data capacity, inherent delay and ambiguity.