New images from Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu-starring Doctor Who S02E06: "The Interstellar Song Contest" were released - here's a look!
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Dear Students,
Again, my sincerest apologies for offering Classics and Contemporary American Culture this semester. When I pitched this class to the English department chair, I believed Harris would win and we’d spend the semester making interesting literary connections to her sober policy choices. I didn’t foresee that the canon itself would leer at our nation’s pathetic descent into discount fascism.
God knows how many more years of this nightmare we’ll have to endure, but this class is mercifully at an end. Here are the answers to the final exam. Feel free to grade yourselves, and then take full advantage of the open bar at my desk during final office hours this week.
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1. Compare the characters at the end of Our Town to ourselves on January 19, 2025. Is Emily right when she says that the living didn’t know how good they had it?
No.
2. Where is Dorian Gray’s portrait, now that it has left the attic?
Giving a presser on the new, Qatari-Royal-Family-gifted Air Force One.
Republicans' tax-cut bill could eliminate the government's popular free tax-filing system and pay off the president’s tax-prep industry donors.
Back during the pandemic two things happened with students. Overall they committed more suicides, BUT when schools were closed, suicide rates went down. (I predicted the latter at the time.)
Then there’s this lovely chart:
Well, well, well. Seems forcing people to do what they don’t want to do, in what is usually a socially oppressive environment, is bad for them.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, once a founding member of ISIS, is now Syria’s president and set to meet Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia. The summit comes as Damascus cracks down on Palestinian leaders and Gaza solidarity networks in a bid to appease Israel and win American support.
The post Trump to Meet Former ISIS Leader in Saudi Arabia as Syria Moves to Appease Israel appeared first on MintPress News.
In these first 100-plus days of the nation’s 47th presidency, President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk have cast a frightful spell over the country. As if brandishing wands from inside their capes — poof! — offices and their employees, responsibilities and aims, norms and policies have simply disappeared. The two have decreed a flurry of acts of dismantlement that span the government, threatening to disappear a broad swath of what once existed, much of it foreshadowed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for drastically reorganizing and even dismantling government as we know it during a second Trump administration. To my mind, the recent massive removals of people, data, photos, and documents remind me of the words of... Read more
Source: Poof! It’s Gone appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Staffers said Trump is “lobotomizing our agency” by forcing thousands into buyouts and politicizing notions like environmental justice.
The post “Intense Culture of Fear”: Behind the Scenes as Trump Destroys the EPA From Within appeared first on The Intercept.
NEW COLUMN ALERT: A late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman and 1980s preschool dropout identifies every moment from her past that filled her with shame, and mutters, “Yep, that tracks. I see it all now.”
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If I think of Autism as Place, then I arrive late at age 41, a bit timid, uncertain of the right words to say, but certain in what I know to be true: “Hi, I’m new here. And I’ve always belonged here. And I meant to come here. I want to be here. But I have to be honest, you’ve been hard to find.”
If an official time of entry exists, a record of belonging that doesn’t hinge on my awareness, then I suppose it’s 4:25 p.m. on a Wednesday in 1983 under the direction of a Midwestern doctor who wears glasses and jokes, “She’s got a good set of lungs, Brenda, that’s for sure!” Brenda is my mom.
The Prime Minister's 'unutterably depressing' decision to follow Nigel Farage into the gutter of inflammatory anti-migrant rhetoric is a terrible error, argues former UK diplomat Alexandra Hall Hall
Although he was a soldier captured at a military outpost, U.S. news outlets rarely described Edan Alexander as a prisoner of war.
The post The Media Calls Israeli Captives “Hostages” and Palestinians “Prisoners” appeared first on The Intercept.
“President Trump on Monday defended the US government’s plan to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family to be used as Air Force One, describing it as a ‘great gesture’ and saying that it would be ‘stupid’ to turn down, despite growing ethical concerns over the gift.” — The Boston Globe, 5/12/25
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Once again, Democrats are up in arms about a supposedly unethical thing President Trump has done. This time, they’re claiming that Qatar giving the president a $400 million plane to use as Air Force One violates the Emoluments Clause. But the truth is, the Founding Fathers would have wanted President Trump to accept a luxury airplane from a foreign royal family.
The number of people in the UK without work that want it
- by Eliane Glaser
The novelist and poet Ursula K Le Guin shows we can reject nihilism and naive optimism by practising our collective freedom
- by Alexis Shotwell
The quest to map a costly weather phenomenon
The post Storm Chasers on the Hail Trail appeared first on Nautilus.
Chemical analysis of a bird’s feathers offers a reliable way to tell whether it was captive-born or wild-caught
The post Feather Forensics Could Help Nab Poachers appeared first on Nautilus.
Despite the latest forecasting science, climate change threw a wrench into this writer's latest seafaring voyage
The post Sailing Weather Gets Weird appeared first on Nautilus.
The hitherto US-centric economic model has exhausted itself, and Trump’s government is pushing to restructure the international economic architecture to maintain US hegemony. China is the main rival in this new reality, while the Europeans are becoming an impoverished appendage to the US. The Europeans could chart a more favourable path forward, except that they […]
The post Our New Economic World Order & Europe’s Suicide: In discussion with Glenn Diesen appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Successive UK Governments have refused to pursue prosecutions against those suspected of war crimes abroad
On the morning of 22 April 2025, the familiar sight of demolition machinery on the outskirts of Tuwani sent a wave of tension through the South Hebron Hills. Families froze, holding their breath as the destruction machinery slowly passed through the village. Children pressed against school windows, watching bulldozers drive by, their education interrupted by […]
We propose algorithms for conducting Bayesian inference in structural vector autoregressions identified using sign restrictions. The key feature of our approach is a sampling step based on 'soft' sign restrictions. This step draws from a target density that smoothly penalises parameter values violating the restrictions, facilitating the use of computationally efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. An importance-sampling step yields draws from the desired distribution conditional on the 'hard' sign restrictions. Relative to standard accept-reject sampling, the method substantially improves computational efficiency when identification is 'tight'. It can also greatly reduce the computational burden of implementing prior-robust Bayesian methods. We illustrate the broad applicability of the approach in a model of the global oil market identified using a rich set of sign, elasticity and narrative restrictions.