A mysterious cosmic emblem hangs over the entrance to a building in Bloomsbury, at the heart of London’s university quarter. Depicting concentric circles bound by intertwined arcs, it represents the four elements, seasons and temperaments, as mapped out by Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century bishop and scholar of the ancient world, as well as patron saint of the internet. What lies within is not a masonic lodge, though, or the HQ of the Magic Circle, but the home of one of most important and unusual collections of visual, scientific and occult material in the world. Long off-limits to passersby, the Warburg Institute has now been reborn, after a £14.5m transformation, with a mission to be more public than ever.
Notes:
This sounds like a really fascinating place, and while some of the best repositories of historical artifacts and info aren’t necessarily the most interesting to visit (they’re optimized for reference and archival purposes), I think it’s smart that they seem to have invested in a little of both with this upgrade, making historically obscure and secret objects and knowledge public, and thus, less mysterious.
Prominent U.S. Democratic senators on Tuesday called on the Biden administration to crack down on a popular duty-free customs program after Reuters reporting revealed how drug traffickers use the streamlined entry system to sneak Chinese-made fentanyl chemicals into the country virtually unchecked.
In a letter addressed to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the lawmakers urged the agencies to use their statutory authority to prohibit e-commerce shipments from entering the U.S. under the so-called de minimis rule, which allows merchandise valued under $800 to come into the U.S. duty free, and with minimal paperwork and inspections. This customs channel is widely used by retailers and online shopping platforms to ship foreign-made goods directly to U.S. consumers.
Notes:
This is interesting in part because of what it might mean for the opioid epidemic in the US, which has died down a little, but which still rages in many communities, causing all sorts of harm. But it’s also interesting because it might represent a bi-partisan means of cracking down on cheap-Chinese-goods importers like Temu and Shein, which take advantage of the de minimis rule to bypass US duties, keeping their goods at times bizarrely cheap, but messing with the intended competitive landscape in all sorts of industries as a consequence.
Asheville, North Carolina, often shows up on lists of “climate havens”—cities that can supposedly avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The city, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is elevated enough that extreme heat is still relatively rare. It’s nowhere near the coast, so sea level rise isn’t an issue. Asheville’s population is quickly growing, and one of the reasons is that people see it as a “safe” city. One retired couple told the New York Times in 2022 that they’d chosen to move to Asheville after living in Florida—where they had to evacuate from hurricanes eight times—and California, where they faced drought and wildfires.
In a 2022 survey, nearly a third of Americans said that if they moved in the next year, climate change would be a factor. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t possible to move away from climate impacts.
Notes:
I decided to set up a home base in Milwaukee, Wisconsin because of it’s seeming climate haven nature, but I also recognize that (as this article argues) it’s simply not possible to avoid the impacts of climate change, and we’re witnessing the leading edge of such impacts already.
I sometimes joke that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a hurricane here in Wisconsin, where we’re more prone to blizzards and sometimes wildfires, and the periodic tornado, but so far the main shift has been in the heat—we’ve set all sorts of records the past several years, and I only expect that to become more extreme in the near-future.
When two American billionaires blocked the newspapers they own from endorsing Kamala Harris this month, they tried to frame the decision as an act of civic responsibility.
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times, said. He emphasised that though some might assume his family is “ultra-progressive”, he is a registered “independent”.
At the Washington Post, which reported that its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was behind the decision, publisher William Lewis described the retreat from making presidential endorsements as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.
Notes:
This has been written about a lot already, with a lot of good arguments on all sides, but in essence we’ve got more newspapers (including vital newspapers of note and reach) owned by billionaires, those billionaires have business interests with the US government, that government could be run by someone who likes to punish his enemies after this next election, and his competitor is less likely to punish people who oppose her, if she wins, so the business math seems to indicate it’s smart not to come out against the guy who keeps an enemies list.
These decisions—probably made based on those business concerns—looked weak-willed to many, like these billionaires folding under the possibility of being punished for allowing their papers to do their normal thing, in terms of endorsing candidates.
On the flip-side is the (also valid) argument that papers endorsing candidates isn’t really journalism: it’s editorial. And the focus on editorial, in the minds of some, is part of what’s inflaming tribalism and conflict in the US political system.
So it could be said that this is maybe the right choice made at a questionable time, and made based on rationales beyond those (arguably) good reasons. Which is part of why this has been such a hot-potato issue, of late.
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Colin Wright.
