The 2018 Midterms and the Specter of Voter Suppression Read: The ‘hubris’ of the Supreme Court’s voting-rights ruling On Saturday, President Donald Trump ensured that the issue would be front and center as Election Day approached. “All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING,” he tweeted. “Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!”
Hamilton Vs. Burr: What Really Happened? - by Amelia Onorato Beyond Hamilton: How the friends turned into political rivals, and finally into mortal enemies by Amelia Onorato Posted Yesterday Rise and Shine. The World is Doomed. The Nib, delivered to your inbox every AM. The Revolutionary Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is About To Set Sail On a Wednesday afternoon in a sprawling lot on a former naval air station in Alameda, California, across the bay from San Francisco, workers are welding a massive black tube together. The tube–roughly the length of a football field–is one piece of a larger system that will set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch this summer, where it will begin collecting some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic trash brought there by ocean currents. Six years ago, the technology was only an idea presented at a TEDx talk. Boyan Slat, the 18-year-old presenter, had learned that cleaning up the tiny particles of plastic in the ocean could take nearly 80,000 years.
More acidic oceans 'will affect all sea life' Image copyright JAGO-TEAM/GEOMAR All sea life will be affected because carbon dioxide emissions from modern society are making the oceans more acidic, a major new report will say. The eight-year study from more than 250 scientists finds that infant sea creatures will be especially harmed. This means the number of baby cod growing to adulthood could fall to a quarter or even a 12th of today's numbers, the researchers suggest.
Rare photographs that changed lives Twenty-four photographs from the Lewis Hine archive have been auctioned in New York. The rare prints were from the collection of the late New York photographer Isador Sy Seidman. American sociologist Hine was one of the most important documentary photographers of the 20th Century. Because the notion of photojournalism and documentary did not exist at the time, Hine called his projects "photo stories", using images and words to fight for the causes he believed in. The prints span Hine's career and many are from his most well-known projects, centring on the poor and disadvantaged from the Carolinas, New York and Pittsburgh.
Meet the People Planting Trees After Canada's Lumber Harvest Luc Forsyth can’t decide which memories best illustrate the glorious hardship of his six seasons as a tree planter in Canada. Maybe it was his first day, when his crew leader told him to “deal with it” after hours of work in new boots had shredded his feet. Maybe it was years later, when his hands were so stiff after seemingly endless days of cold rain that he urinated on them in a desperate attempt to defrost himself. Or perhaps it was the many raucous nights in the nearest logging town, shooting pool and doing laundry with the rest of the planting crew, a group of strangers bonded by adversity. (Here are five ways people are using trees to save the world.)
Growing Up Surrounded by Books Has a Lasting Positive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Scientific Study Image by George Redgrave, via Flickr Commons Somewhere in the annals of the internet--if this sprawling, near-sentient thing we call the internet actually has annals--there is a fine, fine quote by filmmaker John Waters: We need to make books cool again. TIMELINE: Chinese Books, Manuscripts, Maps, and Prints The Xiping Stone Classics These engravings of the seven Confucian classics were set up outside the National University Gate, located on the south side of Loyang, the capital city, in the Eastern Han dynasty. They were created between 175 and 183, after Cai Yong and a group of scholars successfully petitioned the emperor to have the Confucian classics carved in stone in order to prevent their being altered to support particular points of view. They are also called the “Han Stone Classics” and the “Single-Script Stone Classics." The seven classics -- The Book of Changes, The Book of Documents, The Book of Poetry, The Rites, The Spring and Autumn Annals, The Gongyang Tradition, and The Analects – were copied and engraved in the standard clerical script of the Han period.
A Moment of Possibility and Peril – Bono I know it’s unusual having a rock star hanging out at the UN Plaza but I’ll tell you what’s really unusual: having a load of ambassadors jumping up and down shouting their heads off at a rock and roll show. That is unusual, very unusual, and that’s what we had last night. At least you were not shouting at each other; I thought that was good. It is an honor for this troubadour to be in such esteemed company. I couldn’t be prouder to share the stage with this Taoiseach and this Tánaiste, who are, infuriatingly, younger than me — younger than the rock singer, and smarter! I also have to say that I’m excited to be on a stage with the real rock star around here, Mary Robinson. How Native American tribes are bringing back the bison from brink of extinction On 5,000 hectares of unploughed prairie in north-eastern Montana, hundreds of wild bison roam once again. But this herd is not in a national park or a protected sanctuary – they are on tribal lands. Belonging to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck Reservation, the 340 bison is the largest conservation herd in the ongoing bison restoration efforts by North America’s Indigenous people. The bison – or as Native Americans call them, buffalo – are not just “sustenance,” according to Leroy Little Bear, a professor at the University of Lethbridge and a leader in the bison restoration efforts with the Blood Tribe. The continent’s largest land mammal plays a major role in the spiritual and cultural lives of numerous Native American tribes, an “integrated relationship,” he said. Only a couple of hundred years ago, 20 million to 30 million bison lived in vast thundering herds across North America.
Hamilton Vs. Burr: What Really Happened? – The Nib Beyond Hamilton: How the friends turned into political rivals, and finally into mortal enemies by Amelia Onorato The Trump era won't last for ever. But we must do our part to end it I keep the newspaper clipping inside a Milan Kundera novel: it shows demonstrators in Prague in 1989, one of them carrying a badly chipped bust of Stalin around whose neck hangs a placard that says nic netrvá věčně: nothing lasts forever. It’s not a war cry, nor a prophesy, but a bald statement of fact at the moment when the Soviet bloc Stalin had been critical in establishing was falling apart and Czechoslovakia was liberating itself. It must have seemed like forever to those who lived under totalitarianism until all of a sudden “forever” crashed and burned.