Rachel Strohm

“In a recent paper we presented at an indigenous language conference in Japan, we analysed 18 stories from around Australia’s coast. All tell tales of coastal flooding. We argue that these stories (and probably many others) recall coastal inundation as sea levels reached their present level at least 6,000-7,000 years ago.”

"Treating the disabled badly is a false economy for the travel industry. One in five Americans and one in six Britons, with a total of one billion people worldwide, have a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial negative effect on their ability to carry out normal daily activities. But although the plight of the disabled traveller has improved markedly in recent decades, major obstacles still exist. So-called “accessible” hotel rooms have roll-in bathrooms but not enough space to manoeuvre a wheelchair around the bed; floor numbers are written in braille in lifts but room numbers on doors are not, and travellers are often left stranded on at the bottom of steps, on trains or alone in unfamiliar places. "

“As someone who had been studying Japanese fathers for more than 20 years by the time the government came knocking in 2006, Ishii-Kuntz knew that Japanese men were spending about an hour a week on childcare and household duties, while women were spending 30 to 40 hours a week, numbers that had not shifted as the country had become more dependent on women’s labor outside the home. But that story wasn’t as simple as just “those lazy men who don’t want to help out around the house,” either. When the Ministry of Labor surveyed working fathers in 2008 it found that a third of them wanted to spend more time with their kids and wanted to take paternity leave, but felt that it would be frowned upon by their bosses: for the older generation, spending time with children was just not something men did.”

“Overdoses always go up on the first and fifteenth. I know more about social security checks than I do about cancer for sure. And people who have run out of resources, who are lost and scared and alone, will always vastly outnumber people who happen to be having a stroke or a heart attack. There’s just more of them. So as long as 911 remains free, and fast, the bulk of our work will never be about rapid transport.”

“Sure, Williams is financially loaded compared to most of us, and surely has a team of people to help her (providing cooking, and cleaning, and child care, and athletic training, and medical care, for starters). But the fact that she has hit bumps along the way in spite of all her resources shows just how challenging the transition to being a working mother is.”

“At the Royal Opera House in London, home of the Royal Ballet, art is fusing with science to revolutionise the way dancers prepare. In the glass-panelled healthcare suite, ballerinas are standing on high-tech force platforms which analyse their leg power, and gripping barbells fitted with linear encoders to track their lifting velocity. This is how modern dancers fortify their joints and boost the dazzling height of their grands jetés.”

“What I want to propose is a null hypothesis for political punditry: Outside of truly extreme proposals, there’s basically no plausible position a politician or political party can endorse or enact that will have a meaningful impact on their likelihood of retaking political power. The US has for decades had a stable system where liberal and conservative policy coalitions (which have sorted out under the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively) semi-regularly alternate in power, with long periods of divided rule and gridlock in the middle. Dramatic shifts in the ideological makeup of both parties during that same period did not upset that alternation of power. It continued apace.”

“After the abolition of slavery, Britain paid millions in compensation – but every penny of it went to slave owners, and nothing to those they enslaved. We must stop overlooking the brutality of British history.”

“The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.”

“Thought for the Evening: The Notion of Militia in Scottish Enlightenment Thought”

“But political considerations aside, there are also critical policy advantages to achieving universality via a single-payer, as opposed to multi-payer models.”

“Taken together, these results show that while gender inequality in education has declined massively over the past 30 years, child-related gender inequality has persisted and, as a consequence, appears to explain most of the earnings inequality between men and women remaining today.”

“Although women have always endured institutional degradation in this country, there’s something new about the cruel paradigm adopted by this administration. On Trump’s watch, women are simultaneously infantilized and demonized, seen as both desperate for government guidance and unworthy of its support, forced to give birth but reviled when they do, and deserving of physical suffering for almost any perceived infraction.”

“A recent survey by scientists affiliated with Ocean Cleanup, a group developing technologies to reduce ocean plastic, offers one answer. Using surface samples and aerial surveys, the group determined that at least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest.”

“As I discovered, the everyday sexism of the parenting world was far more demoralising and commonplace than anti-gay sentiment.”

“It took plastic cocoons and anti-anxiety pills, bravery and providence to save the soccer team. “So many things could have gone wrong,” said one official.”

“The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience.”

“In MenCare couples, husbands spent 2 hours and 15 minutes on household chores per day – nearly an hour more than those in the comparison group. Wives were more likely to use contraceptives, and there was more equality in making financial decisions, according to the study by Promundo, Rwanda Biomedical Center and Rwanda Men's Resource Center.”

“This is the key to understanding the mixed research findings on “the” impacts of immigration. Those impacts depend crucially on who comes, where they come from, the circumstances of their departure and arrival, what local communities they arrive in, what legal barriers and obligations they face, how natives’ own mobility is regulated, and many other decisions.”

“The arduous process of Martin’s work divorces art from its aesthetic. It reduces compositions of great prestige or high beauty to their very particles; it frees Martin up to think of art as pure matter. In this way, he comes closer to the artist than anyone has before, often becoming only the second person to think as intensely about the materiality of the object, about the chemical nature of its pigments or the physical properties of its canvas. The art he analyses derives its worth from unique, flashing inspiration. His own talent, if anything, has more in common with the forger. It lies in his capacity to be unflashy but diligent – to perform a step time after time without a slackening of attention, to never leave a molecule unturned, to never conclude more about a work than what it tells him about itself.”

"But a backlash is building. In March a group of women knitted hundreds of red pussyhats and wore them to a protest against violence in the capital on International Women’s Day. In May a women’s group held a performance of the Vagina Monologues, translated into Mongolian.

In 2016, after years of lobbying by activists and female lawmakers, the country made domestic violence a crime for the first time. Now a consortium of NGOs is pushing for sexual harassment in the workplace to be included in the country’s labour laws."

“Traffickers are then bailing women out of detention. Once released, the women are told they must work as prostitutes or have their bond rescinded and be sent back to jail.”

“Out of the desolation flow the cleansing, balmy waters of the Ahwar, Iraq’s marshes. Barely an hour’s drive north on the highway from Basra, left at a derelict paper mill, and beyond an army checkpoint, herds of water buffalo slide into the cool shallows and bathe between the bulrushes. I went there in February, as spring was coming, and found Razaq Jabbar, a wizened boatman in a traditional black tunic crisply buttoned to the neck, waiting by his motorized mashoof, or gondola. He invited me and my traveling companions—Jassim al-Asadi, a director of Nature Iraq, which works to revive the wetlands, and my guide, Abbas al-Jabouri, and his teenage son—aboard, and steered his boat through a maze of reeds that bristled above marshlands stretching reassuringly beyond the horizon. As he sailed, he regaled us with the same songs he had sung a few months earlier to the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, in the same boat. He moaned for lovers lost forever in the harsh desert and delighted in new ones found among the wetlands. We clapped in accompaniment as he turned primordial fertility myths into song.”

“These systems were designed to work on controlled-access freeways, and, in the vast majority of cases, stationary objects near a freeway would be on the side of the road (or suspended above it) rather than directly in the car's path. Early adaptive cruise control systems simply didn't have the capability to distinguish the vast majority of objects that were near the road from the tiny minority that were on the road.”

“Most of the protocols appeared to inflict severe harms on the animals, with 13 percent of the studies failing to report use of anesthesia and 97 percent making no mention of pain-relieving drugs. Overall, they found, the studies were poorly designed, which meant they couldn’t contribute conclusive findings toward clinical benefit. In such cases, “any suffering endured by animals loses its moral justification,” Pound and Nicol wrote in an email to me.”

“In the U.S., there is adult jail and there is school, and the two rarely go together. Most juvenile detention centers have educational programs, and prisons often have GED or college classes. But since August, the New Orleans jail has offered something unusual: a full-day high school that’s part of the public school system and offers real credits. The only others are in the nation’s largest cities, such as Chicago and New York.”

“And the situation is getting worse. By 2030, water availability will be half what India needs. The thinktank quoted predictions that up to 6% of GDP could be lost to extreme water scarcity. Put another way, millions of Indians could be too thirsty, or sickened by contaminated water, to study, work or live.”

“Women who drink excessively also tend to develop addiction and other medical issues more quickly than men. It’s a phenomenon called ‘telescoping’: women with alcohol struggles tend to start drinking later in life than men, but it takes them much less time to develop alcohol addiction. Women are also faster to experience liver disease and damage to their hearts and nerves.”

“Critically endangered eels hyped up on cocaine could have trouble making a 3,700-mile trip to mate and reproduce—new research warns.”

“If I can convey a message I have learned from this bestowal, it would be this: Talk with your mate, your children and other loved ones about what you want for them when you are gone. By doing this, you give them liberty to live a full life and eventually find meaning again. There will be so much pain, and they will think of you daily. But they will carry on and make a new future, knowing you gave them permission and even encouragement to do so.”

“The word I hear from Paul, from everyone, is “re-traumatized.” You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.””

“The Sapere method was developed in the 1970s by a French chemist as a way to educate children about eating. A growing number of countries, from Finland to Britain, are adopting it. Children are taught about the five tastes using all five senses. They are encouraged to try new foods and to find words to describe their experiences. Changes to the climate may force us to consider more seriously eating things that for many initially elicit shudders. Warming seas mean the numbers of jellyfish are growing. Eating them (above) could be one answer. With a bit of determination and a few more tasting sessions, even my daughter might get on board.”

“I usually paint water. Watching water move is a time-honored way of moving into the present moment. My goal is to feel the water move in the painting, but water has rules, and I have to pay attention to motion in establishing the composition. Water is defined by time: the length of time it takes for a wave to pass a set point. At around a second, you have a ripple; over 10 seconds, a swell, and in between a wave. Once I get the composition down, I can begin to pay attention to the rhythm of the painting.”

“This has important policy implications. Denmark is often the embodiment of the idea that countries can develop through cooperation in the countryside. It undermines the assumption that a country with a lot of peasants and cows (Ireland at the turn of the 20th century, for example, or India after WWII) can simply cooperate its way out of underdevelopment. Denmark got to Denmark not simply by having hard-working peasants and a democratic countryside, but on the shoulders of landed elites. Moreover, this process took more than 100 years to complete.”

“Not that this deterred the Kaiser. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia—the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II (a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” according to Wilhelm, fit only “to grow turnips”) into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered.”

“Some cities, such as Baltimore and Chicago, solve so few homicides that vast areas stretching for miles experience hundreds of homicides with virtually no arrests. In other places, such as Atlanta, police manage to make arrests in a majority of homicides — even those that occur in the city’s most violent areas.”

“By contrast, the persistent centrality of elite politics and sectarianism continues to obscure the political significance of similar societal dynamics in Iraq. In 2015, when I began researching Sadrist-leftist cooperation, I was struck by the degree of social and cultural interaction between less senior figures and outside formal institutional or party structures.”

“There’s a word for what’s happening here: misogyny. When school officials and parents send a message to children that “boyish” girls are badass but “girlish” boys are embarrassing, they are telling kids that society values and rewards masculinity, but not femininity. They are not just keeping individual boys from free self-expression, but they are keeping women down too.”

"By all indications, China has at least officially enforced the international sanctions that have been imposed on the North to curtail its nuclear weapons program. But on the border, the signs of North Korea’s economic dependence on China are evident in a shadow economy of cash couriers, short-term workers and gray-market trading that has persisted despite the sanctions.

And with President Trump’s summit meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, back on track, excitement is growing about the opportunities that could open up should the sanctions be eased."

“Mr. Trump’s harsh words about the nation’s closest allies stood in stark contrast to his expression of sunny feelings toward Mr. Kim, a brutal dictator who is known for human rights abuses and who ordered the execution of his own uncle.”

“The attempts to intimidate and drive out a nomadic community from their village has exposed the horrors faced by Muslims in India, where supporters of Hindu groups continue to be emboldened by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Moazum Bhat reports from the Pir Panchal mountains in the Indian-administered Kashmir.”

“Experts frequently blame this on the high prices charged by doctors and hospitals. But less scrutinized is the role insurance companies — the middlemen between patients and those providers — play in boosting our health care tab. Widely perceived as fierce guardians of health care dollars, insurers, in many cases, aren't. In fact, they often agree to pay high prices, then, one way or another, pass those high prices on to patients — all while raking in healthy profits.”

“Despite monopolizing Iran’s politics, the educational system, the courts, the security forces and most news media outlets, Iran’s conservative leaders have long been in retreat. While the laws are rarely changed, the flagging public support makes enforcement of the rules increasingly complex, with many former taboos now tolerated by society.”

““Being a medic is not only a job for a man,” Razan al-Najjar, 20, said in an interview at a Gaza protest camp last month. “It’s for women, too.”

An hour before dusk on Friday, the 10th week of the Palestinian protest campaign, she ran forward to aid a demonstrator for the last time.”

“The race to rebuild the world’s largest refugee camp, where monsoon rains threaten flooding, landslides and disease.”

“2,500 religious artefacts, Benin visual history, mnemonics and artworks were sent to England, auctioned to pay for the costs of the conflict. So Benin Bronzes can be found in museums and collections worldwide. The wealth of Benin sits in glass cases while we talk of African poverty and how to help Africa. In 1990, one single Benin head was sold for US$2.3 million by a London-based auction house.

There is no record of the dead. There is no record of the number of Benin people who died in the invasion of 1897.”

“The answer to the central question at the heart of modern science, ‘Is nature continuous or discrete?’ is as radical as it is simple. Space-time is not continuous because it is made of quantum granules, but quantum granules are not discrete because they are folds of infinitely continuous vibrating fields. Nature is thus not simply continuous, but an enfolded continuum.”

“Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the establishment candidates, found that the value of their political inheritance had collapsed; in a sense, they were the last scions of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump marked the return of the repressed: the reemergence of two varieties of popular politics that were common until the 1940s but were eventually crushed under the pressure of the long cold war. Socialism was no longer anathema, as memories of the Soviet Union faded, but neither was white nationalism in all its terror and intensity. For good and for bad, a door had been unlocked. Today, the country is more ideologically open than it has been since the 1940s.”

“It is not the disappearance from bando of shark’s fin or pig liver that bothers Lin Ming-tsan, the second son of Lin Tian-sheng, who was perhaps the most famous banquet chef in post-war Taiwan. Nor is it the appearance of QR codes and non-traditional fare such as sashimi and lamb. Rather, it is the gradual loss of local culinary know­ledge, much of which has never been written down.”

“Not heard at Wuterich’s trial was the one account of the bedroom killings provided by someone who wasn’t a suspect. The defense had asked permission to introduce a videotaped deposition of Safah at the court-martial, but the government objected. Her story — of a Marine who found a room full of women and children and returned to kill them — was never treated as anything more than a footnote in both the pre-trial hearings and the news. She was 12 at the time of the massacre. Her entire family died that day. Her father’s body would’ve been the last she saw as she fled the house.”