A video shared on Facebook claims to show the Taliban shooting down a Pakistani helicopter. Verdict: False The video allegedly shows Kurdish militants shooting down a Turkish helicopter. It is not related to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Fact Check: A group of unknown militants attacked a Pakistani security outpost near the Afghan border, leading to the deaths of […]

The Supreme Court unanimously held Thursday that the National Rifle Association (NRA) “plausibly alleged” that a New York official violated its First Amendment rights, finding that government officials cannot “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” The justices allowed the NRA to pursue its First Amendment claim against former superintendent […]

'It’s very disappointing to see this happen'

"I have asked the Attorney General's Office of the State of Guerrero to carry out the pertinent investigations to apply the full weight of the law to him or those responsible for this crime."

'Could not have picked a worse time'

Books book review Drowned Worlds and High Rises: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa A review of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s new science fiction novella. By Mahvesh Murad | Published on May 30, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Lost Ark Dreaming is set in the near future, after the seas have risen dangerously, West Africa has been swallowed by the Atlantic, and climate change has flooded Nigeria. All that remains are the Fingers, and those who live within these five high rises that stand in the sea, tower block buildings that are divided by levels, by class, by strict socio-economic hierarchy. Many levels exist submerged under the sea, populated by those who have less, who live without windows, without daylight, but continue to work to keep the towers functioning, until the towers, too, fall—all but one. That the towers always were a highly capitalist system is made clear early on, and what remains of society is still very much the same. There is a stark divide between those who have, and those who have not, and Nigerian writer Suyi Davies Okungbowa makes it clear that “This, friend, is the way the world always ends, has always ended since we have watched it together: with those who Have choosing demise—always demise—for everything but themselves.” The story takes place in the only remaining tower, The Pinnacle, “a metal container, and its inhabitants… cockroaches captured and bottled up inside it. No matter how good any of them had it, it was only a matter of time before they would come erratic, strained, stretched taut to the limits of their sanity.” But things seem to be functioning well enough in the Pinnacle when we meet a “Midder” analyst Yekini, who is tasked with accompanying “Upper” bureaucrat Ngoni to the lower, submerged levels where the tower appears to have sustained some damage. Once they meet the level nine “Lower” foreman Tuoyo, it soon becomes clear that there has been a breach in the tower, potentially by a Child—a creature from the deep, a being almost mythical but feared by all. Things quickly accelerate until the three main characters from different levels are forced to work together not just to survive but also to change the status quo of their society. Or at least attempt to.  Buy the Book Lost Ark Dreaming Suyi Davies Okungbowa Buy Book Lost Ark Dreaming Suyi Davies Okungbowa Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget “The Children” are those who were left for dead when the seas rose, and have adapted to survive, an ancient power giving them life and memory. In the new world’s lore they are Yemoja’s children, Yemoja being the Yoruba goddess of creation, of water, of motherhood. The Pinnacle Leadership has made sure that the inhabitants of the tower fear any contact with these outsiders, providing special briefings for analysts in the Pinnacle’s temple, where “an elderly master cleric sat them down and told them the history of the devil spawn that was Yemoja’s Children and what they were capable of.” Some people think of them as “monster ghosts who could slip though walls. Some thought of them as magma-spitting demons, complete with tentacles and horns. Some thought of them as shape-shifting ancient warriors with shark-like teeth… The only thing everyone agreed upon was that they looked obviously humanlike and could pass for one.” But are the Children actually any of these things, or are they something more? Yekini and the others have to question everything they have been taught, and explore their deeply personal reasons for wanting to make their mark in a way that may require them to go against the Pinnacle’s Leadership.  The narrative shifts between the perspective of the three main characters, as well as brief interludes that fill us in on the past via poetic memories or recorded history from archives. While these help round out the worldbuilding (which can otherwise feel limited at times, mainly restricted by the novella’s length), they sometimes feel like a lot of exposition. We still don’t see a lot of what happens in the tower, its society, on a day to say level; we are told, but we are not shown. Most worldbuilding concerns and questions are addressed, albeit briefly, but because this is a novella, some sacrifices must be made. Yoruba culture and spirituality shine through of course, and therein lies the novella’s strength: It is its own unique take on climate change fiction, from a non-eurocentric perspective we are only just starting to see more of.  There are a lot of valid, pertinent points being made in Lost Ark Dreaming, which packs quite a punch for its length, with some weighty subjects and high concept ideas. It condemns imperialism, capitalist power structures, and colonial powers exploiting poorer countries’ resources while hiding their own massive contribution to the climate change crisis; it touches on themes of displacement, generational trauma and memory, all the while keeping up the pace of a thriller, of a sensitive, nuanced rage against the machine rebellion.  Sometimes novellas bite off more than they can chew, but Lost Ark Dreaming handles many big ideas well, though it does lean rather heavily on similar narratives, some quite recent, like Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Snowpiercer. It also feels like a contemporary take on J.G. Ballard’s High Rise for a post climate-apocalypse world, if High Rise was set in an organised, totalitarian tower block rising from the sea. All three of these stories are given credit in the acknowledgements, too. Okungbowa doesn’t shy away from didacticism to get his point across at times, either. Sometimes via the interludes, sometimes straight from the characters mouths, we are reminded of how the only way to survive our impending climate apocalypse is to be less selfish; we are told of “stories of civilisations just like yours and mine, fallen because they could not each recognise a world—worlds, even—beyond themselves. Peoples so limited in thinking that they were happy to be subjected to the slim imagination of a few, if only it offered them safety in a world too big for them to comprehend.” It is our stories, our shared human history that will bring us together, if we take the risk to tell them.  “We are but messengers,” the Child says to Tuoyo, “every once in a while, we perish at the mercy of the weighty stories we carry. But sometimes—sometimes, we prevail, and the stories we carry change the world.” It is these stories that Lost Ark Dreaming is attempting to carry—ambitiously, astutely. [end-mark] Lost Arc Dreaming is available now from Tordotcom Publishing.Read an excerpt. The post Drowned Worlds and High Rises: <i>Lost Ark Dreaming</i> by Suyi Davies Okungbowa appeared first on Reactor.

Books Mark as Read In Search of Big Feelings What book last reduced you to tears? What took your breath away or made your heart race? By Molly Templeton | Published on May 30, 2024 “A Wife” by John Everett Millais (c. 1860-3) Comment 0 Share New Share “A Wife” by John Everett Millais (c. 1860-3) Lately, I’ve been in limbo. Entertainment limbo, a modern purgatory for a Goldilocks who has too many options, none of them quite right. This show is too slow. This show came out all in one drop and now feels irrelevant. This movie is too long; that one, too restrained. Books are a little more accessible, to my unsatisfied brain. So many of them are many things at once: terrifying, wise, funny, prophetic, clever, beautiful. I find it easier to give books a chance than movies or series, which is not how my brain usually works. I like a balanced diet, you know? A little bit of everything. But everything isn’t working. Do you know that feeling? When you want an experience, but you want to know it’s going to be An Experience? A bundle of feelings, thrown in your lap, undeniable? So I went to see Children of Men on the biggest movie screen in Portland. This was not the experience of seeing that movie in a tiny, afterthought of a theater in a shopping mall when it arrived in 2006. This was large, and immersive, and still, after all these years, astonishing. It remains an artistic and technical triumph, and also one of the greatest examples of how an adaptation can, in fact, improve upon its source material. When I left the theater, walking out into incomprehensible daylight—surely it had gotten dark; surely it was night, by now, better to hide my expression—I asked, out loud, “Why did I want to do that again?” And then the answer: “Because I wanted all those feelings.” I am in search of big feelings. But not just any big feelings. The big feelings once associated with characters saving the world have dimmed and shrunk; too many stories about saving the world, the galaxy, the universe; too many teams of interchangeable heroes; too many ever-more-grandiose villains trying to enact their outrageous evil plots via powers that should make them unstoppable—but lo, the heroes pull it off! When you repeat the same big feelings formula too many times, it takes the edge off. Everyone is saving the world, on screen. Out here it just makes me despondent: The planet’s enemies are more subtle than Thanos. Not subtle at all, really, but still more subtle than that guy. I wonder, sometimes, if the desire for big feelings is part of the lure of the thriving romantasy subgenre. Those, too, are specific big feelings, and not usually the ones I’m looking for. But they resonate with so many: big love affairs, maybe some big world-saving on the side. Good and evil and grand sweeping gestures and grand sweeping wingspans. I’m a little bit jealous of the romantasy lovers; they’ve got big feelings on a platter right now. But I’m happy for them, too. Where do you look for big feelings? I’ve been thinking about feelings, and feelings in pop culture, nonstop since reading Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly piece from earlier this month. “The Rise of Emotional Divestment” is about so many things I find it impossible to sum up. It’s about everything we’re experiencing these days: the ignored but still present pandemic, the world’s horrors, the world’s indifference to said horrors, the picking apart of mistakes, the distance from other people. (Havrilesky also wrote a great and related piece in The New York Times in defense of tearjerkers.) One of many sentences that grabbed me: “These days, we digest sadness alone with our phones.” This is not always true, no; nothing is always true. But do you want to pick a sentence like that apart for every letter of truth or imperfection, or do you want to think about how often it is true? I can’t tell you how many times a day I am staring in horror at something on my phone or laptop, and no matter how many other people are also staring in horror at that thing, somewhere, many of us are sitting alone. We look, and we look, and then there’s another thing, and another, and then eventually you close the app or the tab, and then what? You’re still alone. I understand that for some of us, everything happening in the world right now has the opposite effect: fewer feelings, please. Please, put some back. But I want those fictional feelings that become real as they bubble and steam in my chest. They are like practice feelings; they are at once an escape and an outlet for “real-world” feelings I don’t know what to do with. Horror and grief goes into the reading or watching experience, and comes out the other side a little changed, somehow. Not easier—I am not looking for easy—but like I have discovered some unexpected nuance in my own ability to feel. There’s more to it. And sometimes I just want to feel a big feeling that isn’t horror or fury. Sometimes I want sneaky feelings, like the ones tucked into The Good Place when you least expect them. Sometimes I too wish to give no fucks. To lie on the ground, inert, unfeeling. To take a little emotional nap from all of it: real feelings, fiction feelings, the cumulative grief of the last immeasurable span of time. But then I rise up, again, in search of the big feelings, the ones that don’t feel manufactured or paint-by-numbers or like the latest watered-down offshoot of something that elicited big feelings in people some time back. I want the fresh, vibrant, vulnerable, messy, terrible, crushing, incredible big feelings we are all, still, feeling, somewhere, even when they’re hard to access. I want catharsis.  “We don’t have the patience for anything, let alone the slow unfolding of human emotion,” Havrilevsky writes. This is it: this is the big feeling I want. The slow unfolding of a character’s reaction to their world. Micaiah Johnson’s narrator, in Those Beyond the Wall, leaps off the page, a mess of feelings and fury, but the extent of her story unfolds slowly, changing the novel from a murder mystery to a revolution. Wicked, the book, is a slow unfolding of grief. It is hard to say, really, exactly which books, which stories, fit this bill, because that unfolding works differently for everyone. I’ve read two books that aren’t out yet—Rakesfall and The Mercy of Gods—in which the unfolding is so intense that I haven’t yet worked out what feelings, exactly, they unfold within me. And that’s a thing to treasure: a story delivering feelings that take time to understand. I catch myself, while writing about big feelings, trying to refrain from yelling and shouting, like one must be calm and reasonable while thinking Please I would just like something that makes me sob, but in a good way! I want to know where you find that. What book last reduced you to tears? What took your breath away or made your heart race? What left you pondering humanity’s own horrors alongside those of an alien culture? What filled your well, inspired you, reminded you that someone else has been through loss and rejection and sadness? Where are the big feelings hiding?[end-mark] The post In Search of Big Feelings appeared first on Reactor.

Democrats Go Full Andrew Tate

A new paper taking a look at the Fermi Paradox using the Drake Equations has suggested an uncomfortable solution: maybe we are alone in the galaxy.If you haven't heard of the Fermi Paradox, it goes something like this: given the vastness of the universe and the probability that implies of life evolving elsewhere, how come no alien civilization has ever gotten in touch? We have found many exoplanets in the brief time we've been looking. Surely there must be someone else out there who, like us, desperately wants to find others?Since it was posed in 1950 by Enrico Fermi, there have been a range of answers, from the benign to the absolutely terrifying. One is that there simply hasn't been enough time yet. Alien civilizations may prioritize, as we do, searching for techno signatures, which we simply haven't been broadcasting for long enough. On the other end of the spectrum, it could be that the tendency throughout the universe is for civilizations to destroy themselves before they reach sufficient advancement to make contact.                              After the Fermi paradox came the Drake Equation, which attempts to quantify the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, or the universe. In it, we can place knowns or best guesses as to the number of stars that contain (for instance) planets in habitable zones, or best guesses as to how many of those will be able to sustain intelligent life. Using these equations, scientists attempt to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe, and depending on their input, have come up with answers ranging from 30 to 100,000. Drake himself estimated a figure between 1000 and 100,000,000 in our galaxy alone.As we get more information on exoplanets, and how life began here on Earth, we can at least refine our estimates, which is what a new paper attempts to do. These high estimates do not fit with what we see – i.e. no active, communicative civilizations (ACCs) – the researchers point out, and so perhaps we are missing some important variables. The team attempted to address this by looking at how life evolved on Earth. Like many others, they suggest that plate tectonics is crucial for complex animals to evolve. Plate tectonics, the team explained, likely accelerated biological evolution in several key ways. This includes delivering crucial elements for life like phosphorus to the surface."Tectonic processes exposing fresh rocks on the surface are crucial for enhancing delivery of [phosphorus] and other inorganic nutrients, because shielding of fresh rock surfaces by soil reduces nutrient fluxes due to chemical weathering," the team explains in their paper, adding that evidence for this is found in Earth's ancient history, where the emergence of plate tectonics created a more life-hospitable environment. "The addition of [phosphorus], [iron] and other nutrients from erosion and weathering of Ediacaran collisional mountains broke the Mesoproterozoic nutrient drought, stimulating life and evolution."The transition to plate tectonics may have been crucial in other areas too, including increasing oxygen levels in the atmosphere and ocean, moderating the climate (e.g. through subduction of carbon), and creating complex landscapes and climates that can stimulate diversity of life. "We further suggest that both continents and oceans are required for ACCs because early evolution of simple life must happen in water but late evolution of advanced life capable of creating technology must happen on land."It's possible that plate tectonics – as well as sufficient oxygen for a planet to have fire – is necessary for intelligent, communicative life to appear. Thus, we should look for planets with continents and plate tectonics that can be sustained over long enough time periods for life to evolve.The team then attempted to place restrictions on the amount of water that would need to be present on exoplanets in order to have surface water and continents, before attempting to use the Drake Equation to estimate how many planets in the galaxy contain these conditions (and others), making them potentially suitable to evolve ACCs. They came up with a figure ranging from less than 0.006 to less than 100,000. But this is not the only limiting factor to ACCs, with other potential "great filters" coming later for life, such as potential extinction events or societal collapse. Factoring this in, they put the figure between less than 0.0004 and less than 20,000. The team stresses that we should probably look at the lower end of this range, given that potential catastrophes could limit the amount of time alien civilizations are communicative for."It may be that primitive life is quite common in the galaxy," the team concluded. "However, due to the extreme rareness of long-term (several hundred of million years) coexistence of continents, oceans and plate tectonics on planets with life, ACCs may be very rare."There are, of course, a whole host of uncertainties within the Drake Equation that can be updated as we learn new information. Large planets are much easier to detect than Earth-sized terrestrial planets, due to the increased amount of dimming and wobble they produce on their host stars. Perhaps there is an abundance of Earth-like planets which we will find as detection improves, or other planets capable of hosting life. Or we could find that initial life is more likely than we thought, making it more likely that life could get through these great filters somewhere in the cosmos. Though plate tectonics may play a huge role in our own evolution, let's not lose hope that there are others out there with intelligence just yet.The study is published in Scientific Reports.