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Dear Miss Julie,

As you’re about to discover, we’re sending Lionel back to preschool today after his two-week-long illness-related absence. Although we had a wonderful time hanging out with our boy twenty-four hours a day, taking him to multiple doctors’ appointments, neglecting urgent deadlines, and waking up intermittently at night to pin him down while injecting syringes of ibuprofen into his mouth, he’s finally well enough to return to school, according to a telemedicine appointment with a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Holistic Healing Center receptionist temp. A few small notes:

River bank or bank account? How chatbots learned to make the quantum leap to context by training on billions of prompts

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Though natural selection favours self-interest, humans are extraordinarily good at cooperating with one another. Why?

- by Saira Khan

Read at Aeon

Conversation is a game with rules about politeness and norms. To move beyond small talk, you need to risk breaking them

- by Idil Çakmur

Read at Psyche

In a July day in 1795, a crowd of women approached a bread cart on a road outside Delph, near Manchester. The cart was stopped and the loaves in it taken. Its driver, Richard Broome, probably thought he was being robbed, but then the bread was sold to onlookers for two pence a pound and […]

Keir Starmer's Government is set to implement a long-dormant requirement for political parties to publish diversity data about their candidates

Post Keynesian authors have offered various classifications of uncertainty … A common distinction is that of epistemological versus ontological uncertainty, with the former depending on the limitations of human reasoning and the latter on the actual nature of social systems … Models of ontological uncertainty tend to hinge on the existence of information that is […]

Domestic violence charity Refuge's CEO Abigail Ampofo says that the Government's decision to end rehabilitation courses for some offenders is 'deeply troubling'

Sam Christie and Aniruddha Rajan Sudden contractions in credit supply can trigger and amplify recessions – a reality made painfully clear by the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). However, quantifying these real economic effects is challenging. In this post, we demonstrate a novel way to do so using Granular Instrumental Variables (GIV), focusing on the … Continue reading GIV us some credit: estimating the macroeconomic effects of credit supply shocks →

AN ENGAGED crowd of nearly 300 packed the Coast Hotel at Coffs Harbour last Friday night for “Politics in the Pub” featuring the first Independent Senator for the ACT David Pocock, and two-time Federal candidate for Cowper, Caz Heise. Despite the sweltering conditions and standing-room-only crowd, the audience remained enthusiastic, directing a wide range of...

The post Independents join forces at Coffs Harbour’s ‘Politics in the Pub’ appeared first on News Of The Area.

AN 86-year-old cyclist has celebrated his birthday aboard his bike, in a pedalling party of friends. Dressed in high-viz lycra, the Dorrigo, Urunga, Bellingen Bicycle User Group’s (DUBBUG) very own “Poppy John” enjoyed a birthday ride that included a stop off for morning tea where his wife Pam joined in. Advertise with News of The...

The post ‘Poppy John’ celebrates his 86th birthday cycling with friends appeared first on News Of The Area.

PROGRESS on the Coffs Harbour bypass will be explained in a series of webinars next month. Webinars will provide an update on construction progress of bridges, tunnels and earthworks, and participants will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of each presentation. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for...

The post Webinars to explain Coffs Harbour Bypass progress appeared first on News Of The Area.

Today (February 20, 2025), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for January 2025. Employment growth was relatively strong and concentrated on full-time employment, which is a good sign. It was, however, unable to keep pace with the underlying population growth and the rising participation rate and as a…

You’d think Trump would because of his family history. But no. Greg Sargent writes today about the latest atrocity at the NIH: [O]ne downsizing just started attracting notice among insiders at the National Institutes of Health, because it seems particularly inexplicable: According to people familiar with the situation, approximately one-tenth of the workers have now been let go at the NIH’s Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias, or CARD, including its incoming director, a highly regarded scientist credited with important innovations in the field. What makes this particularly jarring is that it could set back efforts to treat and develop cures for these awful afflictions, as these insiders and other experts fear. But it’s also that the potential for this center to do good—and the importance of the broader cause of battling Alzheimer’s—have both been championed by Republicans.

“In the first case to reach the Supreme Court arising from the blitz of actions taken in the early weeks of the new administration, lawyers for President Trump asked the justices on Sunday to let him fire a government lawyer who leads a watchdog agency.” — New York Times

Look, I get it. You’re stressed. Trump’s executive orders are coming in fast and furious. Birthright citizenship? On the chopping block. Federal agencies? Slashed to bits. A ketamine-addled billionaire demolishing social security? Yeah, not great.

Things are pretty stressful right now, but don’t freak out. Our democracy was built for this.

Remember what you learned in civics class about checks and balances? The three equal branches of government? The separation of powers? The restraints on executive overreach?

Aviation and antitrust expert Bill McGee breaks down recent airplane disasters and reveals the real risks to our airspace.

Aviation and antitrust expert Bill McGee breaks down recent airplane disasters and reveals the real risks to our airspace.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon