“I Am the Only One”: Trump’s Messianic 2024 Message - Under threat of prison, the master of fear and anger takes another dark political turn. - link
Ukraine’s Counter-Offensive, and What Comes After - Zelensky has mounted a major effort to take back territory seized by the Russians. But he’ll have to do more than prevail on the battlefield. - link
Is Donald Trump Scared? - At the former President’s arraignment in Miami on Tuesday, it was impossible to say whether his fate was more likely to be a return to the White House—or prison. - link
What Justice John Paul Stevens’s Papers Reveal About Affirmative Action - Twenty years ago, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, in a draft opinion, that white applicants could not be favored over Asian Americans. Why did she delete those lines—and why did Justice Clarence Thomas adopt them in his own opinion? - link
Why Isn’t Joe Biden Getting More Credit for a Big Drop in Inflation? - Throughout the past year, the rate at which prices are rising has fallen dramatically, but public perceptions are lagging, perhaps because many prices are still a lot higher than they were in 2020. - link
From Vox
In Lorrie Moore’s new book, a man and his dead ex-girlfriend go on a road trip -
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. | Knopf
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is weird, funny, gross, and tender.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the latest novel from beloved short-story writer Lorrie Moore, resists analysis. This is a novel made out of air, unstructured, unskeletoned. There’s a central storyline, sort of, but summarizing that doesn’t quite get at what the experience of reading this weird, funny, tender, and occasionally gross book is like.
Here goes: Finn is a high school history teacher visiting his dying brother in hospice care. We can see immediately that Finn is not entirely well himself. He’s been put on leave from his job for reasons he is cagey about. He has developed the habit of seeing how the comments he leaves in the New York Times opinion section play to the commentariat, and then judging his sanity for the day by their reception. He can’t stop talking about his ex-girlfriend, Lily, who left him for another man one year before. “I feel sorry for you, man,” his dying brother tells him.
Before Finn has done much for his brother besides getting the TV in his room tuned to the World Series, he gets a text. Lily, a therapeutic clown who struggles with depression, is in trouble. (Lily “wore floppy shoes, the laces of which she had once used to strangle herself,” Moore informs us.)
At once Finn drops everything, leaves his brother’s bedside, and drives from the Bronx toward Lily in Illinois. But by the time Finn makes it to his hometown, Lily has already died by suicide. She’s buried in a green cemetery in an unmarked grave.
“I was hoping you’d get here soon,” Lily says when Finn arrives at the cemetery. She emerges shrouded and in her clown shoes, wiping dirt off her face, not “deeply dead” but “death-adjacent.” The worms have just begun to start on her.
Lily and Finn agree that they hate the green cemetery. So Finn loads Lily’s slowly decaying corpse into his car to drive her to a body farm in Tennessee, where they will donate Lily’s body to forensic science. What ensues is part Lolita, part American Gods, with a dash of Borges for good measure.
In between chapters, we read letters written by a Reconstruction-era innkeeper named Libby to her own long-dead sister. Libby has a new guest she finds suspicious, a classical actor with secessionist sympathies. In the present, Finn, who harbors a weakness for old-fashioned conspiracy theories (“ones that put groups and systems back into the situations where individuals were taking the rap”), entertains doubts about what really happened to John Wilkes Booth.
Libby’s letters are gripping — Moore can really write a 19th-century pastiche! — but don’t expect the Booth stuff to become a mystery or the key to the plot. There isn’t a plot. This is the kind of book where not all that much happens, but all of it seems to matter.
The engine of this novel comes from Lily’s rotting flesh, which provides a ticking clock of sorts: The more her body falls apart, the vaguer her presence in Finn’s life becomes. Lily’s body is also where Moore indulges in her most extravagant language, lavishing us with metaphor. Lily’s skin “resembled the gray-green yolk of an overcooked egg,” her eyes “gold as chicken fat,” lips with “the shimmer and slip of fish skin.”
Finn loves Lily’s corpse ardently. He cradles “the sweet dense rot of her” in his arms and gently washes her failing skin in rest-stop bathrooms. When they have sex in the car, he notes that “her shifting organs and her stoop would be of use in this particular situation.” To love in this novel is to love the body that will rot away and decay, the mind that may sometimes long for rot.
Moore’s short stories frequently deal with death and illness and hospitals. The stories are shaggy, like this novel, but compact; the constraints of the medium grant them shape and form, as though Moore has poured her lovely sentences like water into the vessel of the short story. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, she seems to have poured her sentences out onto the ground, where they spread and stretch and sink into the soil. This is a strange and beautiful book, and when you try to catch it in your hands, it dissolves.
The hottest new perk in tech is freedom -
Small tech companies are way more likely to let employees work remotely than big ones. | Getty Images/Westend61
How small tech companies are using remote work to compete with the big guys.
It used to be that Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Apple led the way when it came to workplace advantages. On top of great pay, they offered freebies like gourmet meals, massages, and on-site laundry. Then, when the pandemic made the office a physical danger, those same companies were among the first to offer the ultimate perk: the ability to work where you wish.
But, as their stock prices have suffered, Big Tech has not only dialed back on many on-site perks, they’ve also called workers back to the office. Facing hard times, they’ve retrenched into what they knew before the pandemic, typically asking workers to come into the office three days a week. Google is even factoring office attendance into performance reviews.
Smaller tech companies have since picked up the mantle of remote work. They are much more likely than their larger peers to allow people to work fully remotely, with 81 percent of those with fewer than 5,000 employees either allowing remote work or only having remote options, according to new data from Scoop Technologies, a software firm that builds tech to help hybrid teams coordinate and also tracks the office policies at major companies. Meanwhile, just 26 percent of companies with more than 25,000 employees are fully flexible.
Tech has the greatest variation in fully remote policy by company size than any other industry. This suggests that remote work is completely possible in the tech industry, but different-sized companies have settled on different policies based on how they think it benefits them or not. And their reasons for doing so might depend, in part, on how they want to portray themselves to the outside world.
Why the so-called “flexibility divide” among tech companies?
Tech companies with fewer employees are using remote work as a way to pull in more talent in what had been a notoriously difficult hiring environment and to signify that they, unlike Big Tech, are where progress is happening. People in the tech industry, especially, are more likely to be lured by remote work, according to Gartner, which has found that better work-life balance and greater flexibility were the top benefits tech employees would choose over 10 percent higher compensation.
That’s a big deal for smaller tech companies, which haven’t always been able to compete with the Googles of the world in terms of salary. Airbnb, which employs more than 6,000 people, has used its work-from-anywhere policy to attract not only more applicants — its career page saw twice the traffic last year as it had the year before — but also more diverse ones, with 21 percent of new hires being under-represented minorities.
“We want to hire the best talent we can all around the world,” Dave Stephenson, Airbnb’s CFO and head of employee experience, told Vox. “If we narrow that definition of getting the best talent around the world to being 50 miles around San Francisco, that’s going to put us at a disadvantage.”
At the same time, Airbnb has cut its office footprint by half, slowed attrition, and marked its first full year of profitability. The company pays to fly in its far-off employees — about 20 percent of its workforce — to be together from time to time. But this only happens if the company’s “ground control” team has deemed that there’s an important project that requires them to be in person.
“If they’re satisfied with their ability to balance their personal lives with their work lives, I think we get more effective performance out of people,” Stephenson said.
The situation is similar at Yelp, which also lets its 5,000 workers choose where they work and notched its sixth straight quarter of record revenue last quarter while also rolling out products like AI-powered search. The company says that remote work hadn’t hurt sales goals or engineering productivity but had caused a huge spike in its talent pipeline.
“I think we saw pretty early on during the pandemic that, wow, this is actually working,” said Carmen Whitney Orr, Yelp’s chief people officer, who joined the company remotely last year. “Happy employees are productive employees and that means happy customers.”
The ability to work remotely is most common among the smallest tech companies.
“If you can demonstrate that you’re able to create a team that is just as productive, if not more, by being remote, then there’s really no reason to not do it,” said Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of tech compensation comparison platform Levels.fyi, which has nine workers. Levels.fyi was founded as a remote company in 2017, which Musa says makes it easier to continue working remotely.
In turn, remote work has meant the company has had better access to talent than it would if it demanded office attendance.
“If you require someone to move to a certain location, you are inherently limiting the talent pool that you’re going to be working with,” he said.
Getty Images/Westend61
That could be what Big Tech is doing.
Amid economic uncertainty, flagging stock prices, and years without major innovation, larger tech companies are using their calls back to the office to signify to shareholders that they are grown-up and responsible corporations. Gone are the days of ping-pong-playing engineers and squandered profits. Here are the days of penny-pinching and strict oversight, probably in an office environment.
In other words, what were once considered the most innovative and forward-thinking companies are behaving a lot more like their stodgy non-tech corporate counterparts.
When it comes to allowing fully remote work, policies at big tech companies are closest to their non-tech peers, like Citigroup and Starbucks. Like their non-tech counterparts, many tech companies have quickly shifted to a structured hybrid model, where workers have to come in a set number of days per week. The share of large tech companies that are doing hybrid (65 percent) is nearly the same as large companies overall (60 percent), as is the number of days per week they want people in (2.5 on average), according to Scoop.
“Bigger companies, more complex companies, are more likely to be looking for more professional types of management,” said Kathy Harrigan, a professor of corporate management at Columbia University’s business school. “Investors expect that.”
And professionalism to them means butts in chairs. Harrigan says in-person work is necessary to coordinate the complicated, varied businesses these tech conglomerates now operate. The move to AI has only made in-person coordination more of a necessity, she said.
“They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.
One could argue that companies like Google, Meta, and Apple all ran very complex businesses during the pandemic, when they recorded record profits while their workers toiled from home.
“In the face of volatility and uncertainty, it is human nature to want to revert back to something that is a known quantity,” said Caitlin Duffy, a research director at Gartner, about the push to return to the office. “And so there might be some psychological things happening that may be overriding the evidence in front of them.”
The evidence, she says, shows that offering flexibility in where people work makes them happier and, by extension, more productive and innovative. Accounts to the contrary were “unfounded.” What’s worse, Duffy said, is that arbitrarily calling people back to the office might actually hurt workers’ productivity and innovation by driving fatigue and burnout.
Whether their back-to-office plans ultimately end up harming these companies remains to be seen. Big Tech companies, of course, might be able to sit back on their brand names and giant salaries to attract talent. But to some extent, with their flexible remote policies, small tech companies are expressing their ability to innovate and grow, just like the big guys used to do.
The decline of American playtime — and how to resurrect it -
Experts say kids’ freedom to play has been declining since the 1980s. | Jorm Sangsorn via Getty Images/iStockphoto
The world can be terrifying. But we should still give kids the freedom to explore it.
About 30 years ago, something happened to the way kids play.
While American children had once commonly enjoyed the freedom to run around outside with minimal adult interference, they began to spend more time indoors where their parents could watch them. When they did go outside, they were more often accompanied by a grown-up; unstructured roughhousing and roleplaying were replaced by supervised play dates or carefully shepherded trips to the park. Kids began to spend more time in organized activities, like dance or sports, and less time in the kind of disorganized milling-about familiar to generations past.
The reasons for this shift were many: fears of kidnapping, stoked by a series of highly publicized cases; an increase in the length of the school year; parental anxieties about children’s futures in a time of growing income inequality and economic insecurity. The result was a 25 percent drop in children’s unstructured playtime between 1981 and 1997, setting in motion a pattern of less freedom and more adult surveillance that historians and child psychologists believe continues to this day. “All kinds of independent activities that used to be part of normal childhood have gradually been diminishing,” said Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College who studies play.
The decline in kids’ unstructured time is bad for fun as structured activities like classes and sports in which adults are evaluating and judging kids’ performance can be more like work than play, Gray said. It’s bad for learning, because children need playtime to develop motor and social skills. And it could be hurting kids’ health — in a commentary earlier this year in the Journal of Pediatrics, Gray and his co-authors argue that the decline in play and independence could be one reason children and teens have reported skyrocketing levels of anxiety, depression, and sadness in recent years.
In a time when parents can be arrested for letting children play unsupervised, and threats to children, both real and perceived, seem only to multiply, giving a kid the freedom to roam can seem impossible. Still, experts say there are ways families can grant children more autonomy, as well as structural changes that can make schools, communities, and the country as a whole more friendly to children’s freedom. After all, “if you take away play from children, they’re going to be depressed,” Gray said. “What is life for anybody without play?”
How kids lost the freedom to play
A lot of experts trace the decline of play back to a spate of high-profile kidnappings. It started with Etan Patz, a 6-year-old New York City boy who disappeared in 1979 on the way to the bus stop, argues Paul Renfro, a history professor at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State. His case was soon followed by the disappearances of Adam Walsh, Kevin Collins, and two Iowa paperboys — Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin — who vanished during their routes (then, as now, the victims whose stories made the biggest headlines were white).
The crimes weren’t connected, nor were they indicative of a wider increase in child abductions. But they received enormous media attention, with the boys’ stories, photographs, and interviews with their grieving parents featured on newscasts across the country. Some of the boys’ images also appeared on the backs of milk cartons as part of a campaign launched by the nonprofit National Child Safety Council in 1984. The campaign only lasted a few years, but it had an outsize cultural impact, inspiring the bestselling young adult novel The Face on the Milk Carton and creating a climate in which families were “surrounded by reminders of missing children,” Renfro said.
The fear was such that 72 percent of parents feared their children getting abducted, according to one 1991 study — in another study, conducted in 1987, 44 percent of children said it was likely or highly likely that they would be kidnapped at some point. Newscasters claimed that 50,000 children were abducted every year.
The real figure was closer to 100, Renfro said, and children have always been more likely to be kidnapped by family members or other adults they know than by strangers. Still, “stranger danger” gripped the American unconscious and didn’t let go.
At the same time, commentators across the political spectrum were pushing the idea that “the American family” — really the white nuclear family with two parents and 2.5 children, living in the suburbs — was at risk, Renfro said. In addition to kidnappers, supposed dangers included women entering the workforce, a decline in the prosperity that white families had enjoyed in the wake of World War II, and a burgeoning gay rights movement. “The narrative of the family under threat and, by extension, the child under threat really takes hold and is really appealing to people in this particular moment,” Renfro said. (That narrative continues to this day, and fears of stranger danger can be seen in QAnon conspiracy theories about child trafficking, Renfro said, and in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric about “grooming.”)
These anxieties collided with another worry: that American schoolchildren were falling behind the rest of the world academically. In the second half of the 20th century, the length of the school year increased by five weeks, Gray said. Kids began getting homework as early as kindergarten, and recess and lunch got shorter. To compensate for the lack of exercise in school, parents began putting their children in more sports and other organized extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, the growing wealth gap increased middle-class parents’ fear for their children’s economic futures, as well as the pressure to go to college in order to find a good job. “Children began to be pressured, even early on, to build the kind of resume that would ultimately get them into a fancy college,” Gray said.
The result of all of this was a shift in how Americans thought and talked about childhood. Prior to the 1980s, parenting advice had often emphasized the importance of independence, Gray said — allowing children to walk to school on their own, play unsupervised, and hold part-time jobs when they were old enough. Starting in that decade, however, conventional wisdom began to shift toward the idea that children should be watched all the time.
The last 20 years or so have also seen a rise in parents’ access to “technology that allows us to know or to think we’re supposed to know exactly what our kids are doing,” said Lynn Lyons, a therapist who specializes in anxiety disorders. That includes everything from cellphones (which a majority of kids now have by age 12) to AirTags (which some parents use to track children) to parent portals at schools and day cares (which can send notifications about something as small as a baby’s dirty diaper).
The effect of smartphones themselves on children’s play is complex. While many blame screen time for a decline in active play, some research suggests that smartphones can enrich kids’ outdoor experiences by, for example, allowing them to listen to music or stay in touch with friends. For parents, however, the constant stream of information can be the opposite of reassuring, and lead them to further monitor and restrict their kids’ movements. “Access to more information about everything that’s going on doesn’t make you feel better,” Lyons said. “It actually makes you more anxious.”
Meanwhile, Black parents in particular have also had to contend with the risk of police brutality and other racist violence. In interviews with researchers, Black moms of sons have expressed “a baseline of concern every time their child walked out the door,” said J. Richelle Joe, a professor of counselor education at the University of Central Florida. “The concern was, will people who engage with my son see him as a threat, and will he potentially be harmed or even killed just for existing?”
As a Black mom living in majority-white Orange County, California, Trina Greene Brown says she didn’t let her son play outside on his own. “Some people will call that helicopter parenting,” said Brown, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Parenting for Liberation. “I would say it’s not helicopter parenting; it’s because Black people have often lived in helicopter environments where our children and ourselves and our bodies have been under heavy surveillance.”
Kids of color and low-income kids also face disproportionate structural barriers to spending time outside, from a lack of green space to levels of neighborhood crime. All these factors and more contribute to an environment in which, whether it’s for their sheer physical safety or out of concern for their economic future, kids are losing out on opportunities for free and independent play.
Playing is fun. It’s also necessary.
Such play, though, has a host of benefits, experts say. Free play helps develop kids’ executive functioning abilities, a set of skills that includes planning and self-control, Lyons said. It’s also important for building friendships. One study, conducted in Switzerland in the 1990s, compared children who played unsupervised in their neighborhoods to children who spent more time playing in parks with their parents looking on. The free-playing kids had more than twice as many friends as the park visitors, and had better social and motor skills — they also spent more time outside overall.
Play can also be a way for kids to develop a sense of autonomy, which in turn helps them feel good about themselves. Regardless of age, “people are happier and mentally healthier when they feel that they are in charge of their own lives,” Gray said. “When people feel that they’re not in charge, that other people are making their decisions for them, they don’t feel so good.”
Indeed, the presence of grown-ups seems to diminish the psychological benefits of kids’ activities, experts say. “The more that play for kids is organized and directed by adults, the less opportunities that kids have to develop some really important skills that we know are preventive for anxiety — and, because anxiety is so closely linked to depression, to depression as well,” Lyons said.
These and other mental health problems have been on the rise among kids and teens for decades — one in 11 American children today has an anxiety disorder, and a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year found that almost three in five teenage girls experienced persistent sadness in 2021, the highest level in 10 years. Experts and armchair commentators alike have floated explanations for this phenomenon from the advent of social media to climate change and economic insecurity, but Gray and others believe the drop in play — and in other measures of freedom like walking to school and holding part-time jobs — could be to blame. “What children need is freedom to be children,” Gray said, “to play and explore and interact with other kids.”
Adults can give kids back their playtime, but it will take work
Reintroducing unstructured play into children’s lives, however, is easier said than done. Just sending kids out to play until the streetlights come on is no longer a social norm. Families can face anything from social opprobrium to prosecution for letting kids play unsupervised, and the consequences are especially severe for parents of color and low-income parents, who are already subject to a disproportionate degree of surveillance around their childrearing choices.
Moreover, the events of the last few years, from the pandemic to wildfires to formula shortages and more, have contributed to a climate of intense anxiety among today’s parents — many of whom grew up in the milk-carton era and were anxious children and teenagers themselves. “Anxiety seeks certainty,” Lyons said. “The more that we restrict, the more that we don’t let our kids move into the world, the better we feel in terms of our own anxiety.”
However, there are ways parents can give their kids more freedom, even in a society that doesn’t make it easy. It starts with adults recognizing and coping with their anxieties, as much as they can. “I encourage parents to do their own work, engage in their own counseling to unpack whatever concerns that they might have, whatever fears that they’re holding on to,” Joe said. In addition to working with a therapist, if possible, it’s helpful to reach out to other parents for support and commiseration. “Then parents themselves feel less isolated with their concerns,” Joe said.
Parents can also take steps to avoid passing their anxieties to their children. They can limit what Lyons calls “safety chatter”: “the constant stream of be careful, get down, watch out” that can serve as the soundtrack to a playground trip or scooter ride. They can also work on letting kids take reasonable risks, whether that’s climbing a tree or just stepping into a situation that might be a bit uncomfortable at first. “We want kids to be pushed a little bit,” Lyons said. “We want to offer them things that feel challenging.”
Grown-ups can also resist the pull of tracking apps and other technologies that let parents keep tabs on kids at all times. “I work with parents that have baby monitors in their kids’ bedrooms, and their kids are 12 years old,” Lyons said. “We’ve got this idea right now that the closer we keep our kids, the more information we have, the more we direct, the more that we control, the better off our kids will be. And the research is showing the opposite.”
Parents can also band together to make their neighborhoods more hospitable for children’s play. One strategy would be for neighboring parents to agree to send their kids outdoors at certain times of the week, with one adult on hand just for safety, Gray said.
But it can’t be just on individual parents to reverse a trend that took a whole society to create — especially since not all families have access to outdoor space, trees to climb, or affordable therapy options. Schools, too, can encourage freedom and exploration for kids by bringing back recess in places where it’s been curtailed, Gray said. Districts in Connecticut, New York, and elsewhere have also adopted what they call play clubs, an hour before or after school in which kids of all ages play together with minimal interference from teachers and “no rules except don’t hurt anybody,” Gray said. “Schools can play a big role, if schools can see themselves as places for play.”
Colorado, Nevada, and other states have also passed reasonable independence laws, spearheaded by Let Grow, a nonprofit co-founded by Gray. The laws protect parents from being prosecuted for letting their children do unsupervised activities like walking to school or playing outside.
If giving kids and parents more freedom is one side of the solution, though, another side is making society as a whole safer for kids to roam free. While stranger kidnappings may not be a common danger for kids, others, like shootings, car crashes, and family violence, all deserve attention, Renfro said. “If we’re serious about protecting kids, these are all matters that need to be discussed rather than shrugged away or ignored in favor of more sensational or salacious issues.”
Dismantling systemic racism in law enforcement, schools, and everywhere it exists is also an inextricable part of the conversation around children’s autonomy, Joe said. As long as Black parents have to worry about their children being harmed while playing in a park or walking home, “then Black families are still going to have the challenge of trying to encourage their children to be autonomous and independent within a context that’s not always so safe for them.”
White Americans also need to address the racist biases within themselves and their families that lead to Black children being perceived as less innocent or more adult than their age, and their play or simple existence being perceived as threatening. “As a Black parent who’s raising a child in a predominantly white community, I really need white folks to check their misunderstanding and adultification of Black children,” Brown, the Parenting for Liberation founder, said. “For me, it’s about, how do we think about the responsibility as a collective and not put the onus only on Black people to make sure that Black children are safe?”
Finally, there are ways of thinking about kids’ independence and autonomy within a larger context of their connections with others. “Whereas we often prioritize this kind of individualistic development where I take on the world,” Joe said, “that’s not what’s valued for many people in many communities.”
Indeed, a more collectivist approach, one embraced by many cultures both within the US and around the world, teaches children that “your existence in the world is intricately connected to other people,” Joe said. “That allows for the development of empathy, because we recognize we’re not out there living on our own.”
A collectivist view of children’s play might acknowledge that we all have a role in creating communities that are not just safe but joyful, that provide children with opportunities to grow and explore without fear. Most communities in the US don’t look like that right now, but Gray and others believe they can be built, if we have the will and the wherewithal to build them.
From The Hindu: Sports
Satwiksairaj hails doubles coach Boe, terms Indonesia triumph ‘one of the biggest achievements’ - BADMINTON | The champion says that he and doubles partner Chirag want to earn that kind of reputation of being invincible, instil that kind of fear and respect that opponents concede a few easy points
Paris Olympics 2024 headquarters searched as part of corruption investigations - The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office said the Paris 2024 headquarters were raided amid a preliminary investigation into contracts made by the Summer Games Organising Committee
Chelsea signs Christopher Nkunku from Leipzig on 6-year deal - Chelsea has signed France forward Christopher Nkunku from Leipzig on six-year contract
Daily Quiz | On Leander Paes - Leander Paes, one of India’s greatest sportspersons, turned 50 on June 17. A quiz on the life and career of this phenomenal tennis player
The Ashes 2023 | Rain delays start of final day to post-lunch - The Test won’t start before 1:10 p.m. at the earliest; Australia needs 174 more runs and England seven more wickets to win
From The Hindu: National News
TS received 15 mm rain as against normal of 83 mm so far this month - Nearly the entire State has reported a large deficient rainfall so far, according to the data collated by the Telangana State Development Planning Society
Special dental care services for differently abled - NIPMR aims at providing inclusive dental care services for individuals with mental, physical disabilities, catering specifically to the needs of differently abled children.
Three-day international pharma expo to begin in Hyderabad on July 5 - IPHEX will help showcase capabilities of Indian pharma industry and build confidence among stakeholders globally, says Pharmexcil DG Ravi Uday Bhaskar
Zero tolerance on spurious medicines, 71 firms issued notices: Mandaviya on cough syrup row - From June 1, a test has been made mandatory for cough syrups before they are exported
Congress, BJP spar over participation of government officials in RSS event in Madhya Pradesh - While Congress demanded that such officials be kept away from preparations for the Assembly polls due this year-end, a State BJP leader said this only shows the Congress’ “hatred” for the RSS
From BBC: Europe
Paris 2024 Olympics: French police raid organisers’ headquarters - French officials say the searches are part of two earlier preliminary corruption investigations.
Russia renews drone and missile attacks on Ukraine - A wave of air attacks is reported on Kyiv and other cities - but no-one is injured, officials say.
Andrew Tate charged with rape and human trafficking - Andrew Tate and his brother charged in Romania over human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Airbus experiments with more control for the autopilot - Airbus has been testing new automated technology that it says has the potential to improve flight safety.
Two international matches abandoned after alleged racist abuse - Two international matches, New Zealand v Qatar and Republic of Ireland U21 v Kuwait U22, are abandoned on Monday following allegations of racial abuse.
From Ars Technica
50 Years of Text Games parses the rich history of a foundational genre - Zork and MUD? Sure. But also Universal Paperclips, AI Dungeon and Lifeline. - link
Review: The Flash isn’t a terrible film—just a forgettable one - There’s nothing here we haven’t seen many, many times before—and frankly done better. - link
Even galaxies recycle - A quasar ejected the remains of stars, but another galaxy sucked them back in. - link
Parker Solar Probe images the launch of the solar wind - This discovery is literally the hottest thing in a while. - link
The sleeper hits of Summer Game Fest 2023 - Games about time travel, foam spraying guns, and… space hospitals? - link
The Maid asked the master’s wife for a pay raise!! -
The wife was very upset about this, and decided to talk to her about the raise. She asked “Now Maria, why do you want a pay increase?” Maria: “Well, Señora, there are tree reasons why I wanna increaze.” “The first is that I iron better than you.” Wife: “Who said you iron better than me?” Maria: “Jor huzban he say so.” Wife: “Oh yeah?” Maria: “The second reason eez that I am a better cook than you.” Wife: “Nonsense, who said you were a better cook than me ?” Maria: “Jor hozban did.” Wife, increasingly agitated: “Oh he did, did he?” Maria: “The third reason is that I am better at sex than you Wife: (Really boiling now and gritting her teeth): “And did my husband say that as well?” Maria: “No Señora….the gardener did. Wife: “So, how much do you think would be fair ??”
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar… -
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first mathematician orders a beer. The second orders half a beer.
“I don’t serve half-beers,” the bartender replies.
“Excuse me?” asks the second mathematician.
“What kind of bar serves half-beers?” The bartender remarks. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Oh c’mon,” says mathematician #1, “do you know how hard it is to collect an infinite number of us? Just play along!”
“No, you see, there are very strict laws on how I can serve drinks. I couldn’t serve you half a beer even if I wanted to.”
“But that’s not a problem,” chimes in a third mathematician, “at the end of the joke, you serve us a whole number of beers. You see, when you take the sum of a continuously halving function–”
“I know how limits work,” interjects the bartender.
“Oh, alright then. I didn’t want to assume a bartender would be familiar with such advanced mathematics.”
“Are you kidding me?” replies the bartender. “You learn limits in, like, 9th grade! What kind of mathematician thinks limits are advanced mathematics?”
“HE’S ON TO US!” mathematician #1 screeches.
Simultaneously, every mathematician opens their mouth and out pours a cloud of multicolored mosquitoes. Each mathematician is bellowing insects of a different shade.
The mosquitoes form into a singular, polychromatic swarm. “FOOLS!” it booms in unison. “I WILL INFECT EVERY BEING ON THIS PATHETIC PLANET WITH MALARIA!”
The bartender stands fearless against the technicolor horde. “But wait!” he interrupts, thinking fast, “if you do that, politicians will use the catastrophe as an excuse to implement free healthcare. Think of how much that will hurt the taxpayers!”
The mosquitoes fall silent for a brief moment. “My God, you’re right. We didn’t think about the economy! Very well, we will not attack this dimension. FOR THE TAXPAYERS!”
And with that, they vanish.
A nearby barfly stumbles over to the bartender. “How did you know that that would work?” he slurs.
“It’s simple, really,” the bartender says. “I saw that the vectors formed a gradient, and therefore must be conservative.”
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