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R. Kelly Is Found Guilty on All Counts, Twenty-five Years Too Late - The verdict leaves several questions unanswered, including how the many people Kelly victimized will begin to heal. - link
Republicans Are Gambling Recklessly on the Debt Limit - While Democrats haggle over priorities, Republicans take an ominous tack: threatening a financial cataclysm amid a global pandemic. - link
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From Vox
See where birds are migrating in real time, in one map -
BirdCast is a forecast for migrating birds. | Van Doren and Horton/BirdCast
This bird forecast is way more fun than any weather app.
If you’re like me, you’re probably easily fed up with the weather forecast. It’s often wrong or shows me what I don’t want to see.
I’m here to tell you that there’s a better forecast out there — a forecast for birds.
Called BirdCast, the forecast provides a three-day outlook of how many birds will be flying overhead across the country — and where. After sunset on Tuesday, for example, BirdCast estimates that 74,000 of them will journey through the skies of New York City. The tool, which was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a handful of other universities, also shows where large numbers of birds are cruising through the sky in close to real time. In other words: It’s radar, but for birds.
This kind of predictive technology is especially useful as fall migration nears its peak in North America. Each autumn, billions of migratory birds travel south in search of food and warmer weather, some flying several thousand miles. The famous Arctic tern makes an epic journey of more than 12,000 miles from the Arctic to Antarctica — a distance that surpasses the world’s longest nonstop commercial flight.
Migration offers something of a fleeting backyard paradise even to novice birdwatchers. You can see all kinds of unique species in your local patch of green as they’re passing through, such as warblers, thrushes, and sparrows in New York City’s Central Park.Forecasting maps like BirdCast help by revealing migration hot spots, from southern Texas to the Great Lakes region.
These tools are also a boon for birds. Hundreds of millions of them die each year from colliding with windows, and disorienting lights are a big part of the problem. Forecasts can help cities pinpoint when to turn off the lights, allowing more of the winged passersby safe passage.
Courtesy of the Field Museum
Chicago’s Field Museum has collected tens of thousands of birds that collided with buildings downtown. These four are from its collection.
See where birds are flying overhead
Our ability to map and forecast birds is rooted, like so many innovations, in war. Engineers developed radar technology during World War II to detect enemy aircraft, which basically involves broadcasting microwaves and seeing what they bounce off of — not unlike how a bat might use sonar to map out a dark cave. During the war, radar operators began noticing strange dots — known as “angels” — appearing on their screens. The operators, some of whom were birders, eventually figured out that the dots weren’t bomb- carrying planes at all. They were birds.
The discovery sparked a revolution in ornithology. In the eight decades since, scientists have used radar technology to detect birds and swarms of insects in the night sky, just as meteorologists have used it to map out hurricanes and rainstorms. More recently, major advances in computing have made it easier to process large amounts of data, allowing scientists to put together detailed migration forecasts in a short period, said Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who leads the BirdCast project. We’re now in the era of radar ornithology, he said.
Van Doren and Horton/BirdCast
BirdCast’s live map shows where birds are migrating. Warmer colors indicate higher numbers of birds are passing through an area.
First launched in 2000, BirdCast runs on software that analyzes weather radar to discern what’s a bird versus a cloud or another object. That analysis produces a map of the US that shows where birds are migrating in the sky, like the one above, with warmer (oranger) regions showing where there’s more bird traffic — that is, more birds moving through an area at a given time. Pretty neat, right?
BirdCast also produces three-day forecasts, which estimate nighttime movements because the vast majority of North American birds migrate after dark. Researchers have a good idea of how weather affects their journeys — temperature, which affects the speed and direction of wind, is especially important for determining when birds travel, Farnsworth said. By leveraging weather forecasts, BirdCast estimates where birds might migrate in the near future. (You can find the forecast and “live” migration maps here.)
Van Doren and Horton/BirdCast
BirdCast’s migration forecast for Thursday, September 30.
You can use these maps to go birdwatching, though keep in mind that they show the number of birds in the sky — not on the ground — and that the forecast is for nighttime migration. Where the predictive power really comes into play is in helping cities,big and small, reduce the number of birds that die from smashing into buildings.
How bird forecasts can cut down on window collisions
Each year in the US, between 365 million and 988 million birds die from running into buildings, researchers estimate. It’s the second-leading cause of avian death in North America after predation by house cats, and light pollution is a big part of the problem. Lights can attract and disorient birds, causing them to crash.
That’s what makes bird forecasts so useful: When we know a large number of birds are set to pass through a particular region, it’s clear that we can prevent strikes by turning off at least some of the lights in buildings at night. It’s really that simple — and we know it works.
One study published this summer,for example, found that halving the area of windows that are illuminated at a large convention center in Chicago during spring migration led to 11 times fewer collisions. The authors further concluded that dimming lights during migration could reduce the number of collisions at the center by about 60 percent. You rarely come across wins of that magnitude in conservation — and literally overnight, at that.
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/7oVby_33DOT65cQJnUuZPwIcUg4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22884691/lights_out.jpeg" /> Van Doren and Horton/BirdCast
BirdCast has a feature called “lights out alerts,” which reveal which cities should prioritize turning out the lights, and when.
Across the US, more than 40 cities now have Lights Out programs, and some, including New York, have passed legislation requiring that buildings be more bird-friendly — such as by using glass with patterns that make windows more visible to birds. BirdCast, for its part, has a feature called “lights out alerts” (shown above) that can help cities figure out when to go dark.
Similarly, researchers have proposed using forecasts to help reduce bird strikes at airports, which cause more than $1 billion in damage each year globally. In one recent study, scientists analyzed plane-bird collisions at three New York City airports and found that weather radar can “accurately predict the probability of bird strikes.” Theoretically, airports could use that information to make flying safer and less costly.
What radar is revealing about birds
Bird radar isn’t just useful for birdwatchers and collision prevention. It’s also helping scientists answer some of ornithology’s biggest questions, such as how climate change is affecting the timing of migration.
Results from a radar- based 2019 study, for example, found that rising temperatures are shifting spring migration about two days earlier per decade in the US, on average. (The changes are much greater as you move farther north.) That may not sound like much, but migrations are carefully planned events where timing is a matter of life and death.
Birds have adapted to arrive at particular locations at particular times — for example, “when the pulses of spring insect blooms are peaking,” Farnsworth said. “With earlier rising temperatures, birds may arrive after the pulse of food availability, creating a growing mismatch. If this happens rapidly, bird populations may not be able to keep up.”
Researchers are also using radar to more closely investigate some of the unknowns of migration, like what happens to birds during a big thunderstorm or when wind patterns suddenly change. They previously thought storms might bring migration to a halt, Farnsworth said, but radar suggests otherwise. “The thought that rain automatically stops migration is totally wrong,” he said. “Birds are moving in all kinds of conditions.”
Yet despite all of the advances in radar ornithology, one major mystery remains largely unsolved. How do birds navigate, anyway?I still get turned around in my hometown, so it’s hard to imagine that birds can travel thousands of miles to a destination they’ve never seen or visited. To pull off such a feat, they likely use some combination of the sun, the stars, Earth’s magnetic field, and possibly even their sense of smell. But exactly how they piece all that information together to navigate is “a total mystery,” Farnsworth said. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near beginning to understand it.”
Biden could end the debt ceiling — all by himself -
A protester opposing a debt default near the Capitol, on October 16, 2013, during a government shutdown. | Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
Minting the trillion-dollar coin, the 14th Amendment, and other ways to finally kill the debt ceiling.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in less than a month, the US will hit the debt ceiling, a legal limit on how much outstanding debt the federal government can hold. The Democratic president and his party want to raise it, but Republicans in Congress are promising to block them. If nothing happens, the debt ceiling will be breached and the US likely plunged into recession.
This sort of fight happened in 2011, again in 2013, and is set to happen yet again this year — on October 18, per Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress want to raise it, but the Senate GOP has successfully filibustered an increase.
The debt ceiling has become a kind of apocalyptic Groundhog Day in American life. Everyone knows that breaching the ceiling would be almost incomprehensibly bad. The specific ramifications are hard to estimate, but Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, was hardly alone in 2017 when she predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy.”
And yet America keeps doing this. For years, Republican leaders, almost always including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have filibustered or otherwise blocked bills to increase the debt ceiling as a way to embarrass or extract concessions from the Democratic administration.
Luckily, there is a way out of this dilemma: ending the debt ceiling once and for all.
The obvious solution, proposed by Georgetown Law professor and congressional procedure expert David Super, would be for Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to eliminate the debt ceiling with a majority vote in the Senate. That path faces myriad procedural obstacles, though, and unless Congress moves decisively toward pursuing it, the Biden administration needs to start thinking about backup options.
Some of these options might seem unacceptably extreme. But an absurd crisis calls for absurd solutions. The Biden administration should, if Republicans in the Senate continue to promise a filibuster of a debt ceiling increase, unilaterally abolish the ceiling using executive powers.
There are at least four available to Biden, each with their own advantages and disadvantages:
Minting super-high-value coins to fund the government
Invoking the 14th Amendment to nullify the debt ceiling
Issuing more debt as the “least illegal” option available to the Treasury
Creating a new class of bond to fund the government while it cannot issue Treasury bonds
Each of these actions would effectively make the debt ceiling law a dead letter. Congress (or a minority thereof) would no longer be able to threaten default as a means of extracting concessions from the president, and the single biggest source of inter-branch conflict in the federal government would cease to exist.
The short-term politicalimplications could be tough for the Biden administration to bear. But if the choice is between default and a presidential power grab, a power grab is the only defensible course of action. A responsible leader does not plunge his people into a wholly preventable financial crisis. If backed against a wall, Biden mustn’t flinch. He must kill the debt ceiling once and for all.
The debt ceiling, for beginners
The US debt ceiling is, in international terms, very unusual. Out of the OECD group of wealthy democracies, only Denmark and Poland join the US in having a hard legal limit on debt. Peer countries like Japan, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany get along just fine without debt ceilings. They just pass laws setting up their tax and spending policies, and issue debt to make up the difference.
The US is different. Congress has to both regularly pass tax and spending laws, and then manually increase the debt ceiling — literally the amount of debt the federal government can hold — to make sure it’s keeping up with those laws. If Congress doesn’t keep up, the effects could be incredibly dire. At “best,” the US stops making legally mandated payments, like salaries for members of the military or benefits for veterans. At worst, it stops making interest payments on existing debt, meaning default, a move that could cause a global financial crisis.
“There’s no historical basis for modeling what happens if a country voluntarily chooses to put itself in this position,” Jason Furman, a former top Barack Obama economic aide involved in that administration’s debt ceiling talks, told me. That means analysts can’t responsibly put hard numbers to the cost of breaching it — but it also means Americans can’t properly prepare for a breach, given we have no idea what could happen next.
The debt ceiling has always been a point of partisan contention. As far back as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidencies, House Republicans were overwhelmingly voting against their opponents’ debt ceiling hikes (Senate Republicans were more prudent). But until the Obama administration, most votes against raising the limit were cheap talk. Voting against an increase allowed politicians (including first-term Sen. Barack Obama) to posture as serious about balancing the budget, but the ultimate passage of the measure was never in jeopardy.
2011 marked a turning point. House Speaker John Boehner and his new Republican majority explicitly held the debt ceiling hostage to gain leverage and force concessions from the Obama administration. It worked: on July 31, just two days before the Treasury Department’s stated deadline for raising the debt ceiling, Obama and Boehner reached a deal in which a debt ceiling increase would be paired with big spending cuts.
Thus a precedent was set. What used to be a routine bit of governance has now become a recurringdrama in Washington.
The best way around the debt ceiling
McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, has repeatedly stated that he has no interest in helping Democrats raise the debt ceiling, which he and his caucus backed up by filibustering a proposed increase this week. McConnell hasn’t even demanded concessions this time — he’s just pushing Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to raise the debt ceiling on partisan lines, in hopes that a vote to authorize more debt will come back to bite them in the 2022 midterms.
Let’s be clear: With a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate, Democrats have every tool they need to raise the debt limit. It is their sole responsibility. Republicans will not facilitate another reckless, partisan taxing and spending spree.
Love or hate him, McConnell is right about this much: Democrats can absolutely raise the debt ceiling on their own, using the reconciliation process. Importantly, they can also do this without involving the large omnibus spending bill they also hope to pass through that process.
A decent summary of the budget reconciliation process is that Congress has to pass one piece of legislation per budget cycle with only 50 Senate votes, rather than the 60 needed to clear a filibuster. But that summary elides some important details. The Congressional Budget Act allows three uses of reconciliation per budget resolution: one to affect taxes, one to affect spending, and one to affect the debt ceiling. Usually major legislation affects both taxes and spending; the omnibus reconciliation bill that Democrats are preparing does this.
But this nuance leaves open an option of addressing taxes and spending in the omnibus bill (to be passed later this fall after more negotiating), and separately raising the debt ceiling in a different bill that can pass with less drama.
By the same token, they could and should use this clean debt ceiling bill to eliminate the debt ceiling altogether. John Yarmuth, the House Budget Committee chair, has endorsed my idea of raising the debt ceiling to “a gazillion dollars” to render it inoperative, though he seems dubious this can be done in time this fall; David Super, the Georgetown professor, has proposed legally tying the debt ceiling to however much debt the US happens to have, so it’s never breached.
The difficulty, as Super explained to the Washington Post, is that Congress has to say it’s doing this in the budget resolution it passes. The fiscal year 2022 budget resolution has already been adopted, so Congress would have to reopen and amend it before it could pass changes to the debt ceiling this way.
But amending the resolution is easier said than done. Roll Call’s Paul Krawzak has written a very clear description of this problem if you need more details, but the upshot is that Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee could block an increase in the debt ceiling, just as Senate Republicans generally could block an increase from passing through normal, non-reconciliation procedures. If a single Republican on the committee — say, Sen. Mitt Romney — showed up to the hearing, the amended resolution could proceed and the debt ceiling could be raised with Democratic votes, but there’s no guarantee such a Republican would step up.
It’s still worth trying to get Romney or another Republican on board with assisting passage of a clean debt ceiling increase. But if there is no time, and/or no Republican desire to keep the government from defaulting, then Biden has to start thinking about more exotic options.
Last-ditch options to kill the debt ceiling
When the Obama administration was negotiating over the debt ceiling with Republicans in Congress, it repeatedly ruled outany options that would enable it to unilaterally ignore or nullify the debt ceiling. Furman told me that the administration’s assumption was that it would be forced to prioritize payments in the event of a debt ceiling breach, ensuring that payments were still made to owners of Treasury bonds, then paying Social Security checks and military salaries, while nearly everything else, from Medicare to the FBI to the Food and Drug Administration, went unfunded.
This is a smart negotiating posture for an administration, because it defines the cost of congressional inaction as armageddon, where the government and economy likely grind to a halt.
But any administration, if it were truly faced with such a calamity, would not actually be helpless. There are at least four different ways a president could nullify the debt ceiling without Congress.
None of these are free from risk, and all would likely spark considerable litigation. That litigation could in turn cause market turmoil as market actors debate the value of US debt issued under these conditions. But all would be preferable to defaulting on US debt.
If you were following the news during the 2011 and 2013 debt ceiling crises, you’ll remember this one. Way back in 2010, Carlos Mucha, a blog writer and commenter using the name Beowulf, noticed a strange federal law giving the US Treasury secretary the power to issue platinum coins of any value she wishes. The original intention behind the law, as its author, former Rep. Michael Castle (R-DE), told me back in 2013, was to make it easier to produce platinum coins for the international coin collector market. It had nothing to do with the debt ceiling.
But in 2011, Mucha revived the idea in the context of the debt ceiling standoff. The Federal Reserve, he noted, owns trillions in Treasury bonds. The Treasury secretary could issue, say, a platinum coin worth $2 trillion, deposit it into the Treasury’s account at the Fed, and use those funds to sustain the government until the debt ceiling is raised.
The best part of the “Mint the Coin” plan is that the idea of funding the government with a literal $2 trillion coin is extremely funny. The worst part is that it’s extremely funny, and thus seems insufficiently serious for the US government. That’s part of why the Obama administration rejected the idea.
You can also imagine more serious variations on the concept. Progressive economist Mike Konczal once proposed issuing a $20 billion coin every day to keep the government running, until Congress agrees to abolish the debt ceiling for good. And a $20 billion coin is a little less silly than a $2 trillion one, surely?
Invoke the 14th Amendment
Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War and partially dealing with debts incurred in financing the conflict, specifies that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.” Some legal scholars, notably Yale’s Jack Balkin, have argued that this clause renders the debt ceiling unconstitutional, as it threatens the validity of the US’s public debts by creating the possibility of default.
This is hardly a consensus position among constitutional law experts (former conservative federal appeals judge Michael McConnell thinks the debt ceiling is clearly constitutional) but if Biden were to declare he was ignoring the debt ceiling because it’s unconstitutional, it’s not clear that anyone would have legal standing to sue Biden and challenge the decision. That helped encourage a number of political actors, from then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to former President Bill Clinton, to urge Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment during his debt ceiling showdowns.
Declare ignoring the debt ceiling to be the “least unconstitutional” option
University of Florida law professor Neil Buchanan and Cornell law professor Michael Dorf have, in a series of papers, proposed a way out of the debt ceiling that’s related to but distinct from the 14th Amendment option.
Buchanan and Dorf note that Congress, by setting spending and tax policy as well as a debt limit, has given the president three mandates: to spend the amount Congress authorizes; to tax the amount Congress authorizes; and to issue as much debt as Congress authorizes. When the debt ceiling is breached, it becomes impossible for the president to obey all three of these legal requirements.
Prioritizing spending on certain activities and cutting it elsewhere usurps Congress’s spending power, by cutting spending unilaterally. Raising taxes without congressional authority would usurp Congress’s taxing power. And ignoring the debt ceiling would usurp Congress’s power to set debt limits.
The last option — respecting Congress’s taxing and spending powers while ignoring its debt limit — is the “least unconstitutional” option, Buchanan and Dorf argue. This judgment would no doubt be challenged in court, but it’s arguably less dramatic than the president unilaterally declaring the debt ceiling a violation of the 14th Amendment.
Issuing quasi-debt while the crisis plays out
Steven Schwarcz, a professor at Duke Law and expert on capital markets, has proposed getting around the debt ceiling by having the Treasury Department create a “special-purpose entity” to issue new securities, distinct from traditional Treasury bonds, that can pay for government expenditures. Because they’re not Treasury bonds, these securities would not be subject to the debt limit.
This may seem bizarre, but Schwarcz got the idea from state and municipal finance in the US; many states raise most of their debt with special-purpose entities, rather than by directly issuing bonds, often so they can get around their own state debt limits.
The debt ceiling needs to end, one way or another
I am personally agnostic as to which of the four above options Biden should choose, if Congress fails to act, and it’s entirely possible there are other options to evade the debt ceiling not listed above. But Biden should choose one of them.
The debt ceiling is a structural feature of the US government that encourages risky, high-stakes crises. Even one former Republican negotiator from the 2011 standoff has urged repealing the limit, given the role it plays in encouraging political instability.
The ceiling is particularly dangerous in the context of the long-run erosion of democratic norms in the US. As scholars like Juan Linz have documented, presidential systems of democracy create two rival centers of legitimacy: the legislature and the president. Presidential systems consequently often experience crises in which these two institutions square off, with each having some claim to speak for the people, making a definitive resolution difficult.
And disturbingly often, these crises are resolved with a coup, either with the president asserting authoritarian powers (as in Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s autogolpeor “self- coup” of 1992) or Congress deposing the rightfully elected president (as in the Honduran coup of 2009).
The aftermath of the 2020 election demonstrated that a clear-cut ballot loss can be enough to prompt an attempted self-coup by a sitting president. The debt ceiling creates another such opportunity to delegitimize the government, one which sooner or later the president or Congress will likely seize.
It’s imperative, then, that Biden heads off such a crisis with an assertion of executive power. His opponents may call it a coup, or worse. But they will be wrong. It would be a modest and reasonable increase in executive powers needed to avert a much worse sequence of crises.
Such an action would not be costless. It will be challenged in court, and that could in turn roil the global economy. But the costs of keeping this law on the books are far greater. Biden needs to use all the tools at his disposal to end debt ceiling brinkmanship once and for all.
One Good Thing: A time loop video game that works like a Rube Goldberg machine -
Courtesy of Modern Storyteller
The Forgotten City, which began life as a Skyrim mod, gives you plenty of room to mess up and do better next time.
It would be hard to overstate the degree to which I’ve become addicted to video games during the pandemic. I’d played them steadily since I was a kid, occasionally becoming obsessed with this franchise or that throughout my 20s, but it wasn’t until I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody to do it with that this lightly pulsating rhythm beneath my day-to-day existence became a full-blown roar.
I’ve mostly found it comforting to play gigantic games — JRPGs (Japanese role-playing games) that can take hundreds of hours to complete — or open-world adventures where you can wander a fictional countryside and venture beyond the walls of your one-bedroom apartment for an hour or five.
Recently, though, thanks to a full- throated recommendation from my favorite video game podcast, I completely fell in love with a game that is the definition of small: barely 10 hours long, made by a team of only a handful of developers, and originally conceived as an add-on to a much, much larger game.
It’s called The Forgotten City, and if any of the following cultural products strongly appeal to you then you should stop reading this and just go play it without any additional context: The Legend of Zelda (Majora’s Mask, specifically), Lost, the immersive theatrical event Sleep No More, the sort of vague pre-teen conception of “mythology,” or gossip.
Here is about as spoiler-free a description of the game as I can manage: You as a modern-day protagonist find yourself thrown back in time to an almost-abandoned, seemingly ancient-Rome-adjacent city. In the process of figuring out how you got there and how to return to your own time, you get to explore the environs and talk to each of the few dozen residents you encounter, all of whom clearly have A Lot Going On. Almost right away, you learn that everyone in the city, including yourself, is bound by a single rule: If even one person commits a sin, everyone dies.
The game cleverly answers basically every question you might have right now, such as, “Wait, how do you define a sin?” and, “That seems like a raw deal, why don’t they all simply move?” Without giving too much else away, the gameplay functions as a loop, wherein you are able to replay the same day over and over again, attempting to unravel the various mysteries that stack up as you interview the city’s residents. It results in something like a Rube Goldberg machine of problems to solve and decisions to make; helping one person with one issue can reverberate across half a dozen seemingly unrelated plot points. Still, it never feels frustrating or repetitive, even when you make a mistake — it’s extremely possible to find yourself in the position of the sinner who ruins everything, but the game always gives you plenty of room to learn and do better next time.
The gameplay mechanic is tidy and legible, with an in-game checklist of tasks to accomplish — the ideal example of a to-do list you can play. It feels endlessly satisfying to reach these tiny milestones and to feel the tug of purpose alongside the sheer joy of exploring a beautifully rendered landscape and talking to extremely well-written characters. Mostly, though, it’s just fun, whether you’re solving puzzles, spreading rumors, or helping a kindly himbo run for political office. There’s a sense of urgency without stress, of propulsion at a manageable pace, and even moments that could be scary or unsettling or mechanically difficult can be approached from so many angles that it should feel accessible to folks who have never touched a video game before. (There’s a combat element, for example, that you can opt out of entirely without disrupting the game’s narrative, a feat of clever plot construction as much as it is just good sense.)
This is especially interesting given the game’s development history. It was originally conceived as a modification of Skyrim, the massive open-world game, back in 2016, and became a cult hit before a team of indie developers turned it into a standalone. I’ve honestly never been into Skyrim, finding it too big and overwhelming even for my often outsized sensibilities, but The Forgotten City is compelling enough that I sort of want to dust off my copy and experience the mod in its first iteration. Something else I’ve gotten into in quarantine is fanfiction (I think, at 31, that I’m probably the oldest first-time fic reader alive) and the question of how you take someone else’s characters and build worlds and turn them into something fresh is endlessly fascinating to me. The familiarity is comforting; the new context is exciting.
So, too, is replaying. I replay games that don’t have built-in time loop mechanics all the time (I’ve played Persona 5 Royal, a game that takes over 100 hours to complete, twice during lockdown already). The Forgotten City is designed to be revisited and re-experienced until you’ve encountered every possible ending. It provides a framework for going back that never feels stale or hopeless. In a time when those sensations are in abundance, when every IRL day feels the same, there’s a powerful fantasy in getting to live the same virtual day over and over on your own terms until you finally get it right.
IPL 2021 | Kuldeep Yadav undergoes successful knee surgery - “Surgery was a success and the road to recovery has just begun. Thank you so much to everyone for your amazing support,” Kuldeep Yadav tweeted
Cricket Australia to announce indefinite postponement of one-off Test against Afghanistan: official - The announcement comes after the Taliban banned Afghan women from playing cricket
Ocean’s 7: Kovalam’s quiet surfing revolution gets a boost as new surf schools open - Despite the stillness of lockdowns, a clutch of schools run by surfers from Kovalam’s fishing village launched. Now, this coastline attracts enthusiasts from across the country all year
Ashwin’s on-field altercation with Morgan brings back ‘Spirit of Game’ debate - Delhi Capitals skipper Rishabh Pant downplayed the confrontation incident saying it is “part and parcel” of the game
Curious to see what pink ball does in twilight period: Mithali - Women’s team goes into its first ever day-night Test against Austraia on September 30
From The Hindu: National News
CBI report on use of toxic chemicals in firecrackers very serious, violation of court’s orders: Supreme Court - The apex court noted that manufacturers such as Hindustan Fireworks and Standard Fireworks purchased barium in huge quantities and used these chemicals in the fireworks.
‘High levels of maternal and child under nutrition continue to plague India’ - COVID-19 is interacting with under nutrition and exacerbating nutritional insecurities, says Arjan De Wagt, Head, Nutrition, UNICEF India
Lookout notice issued against Sessy Xavier - Accused of practising law without proper qualification
Punjab CM Charanjit Singh Channi reaches out to Navjot Singh Sidhu, offfers to talk it out - Navjot Singh Sidhu on Wednesday broke his silence, questioning the appointments of the DGP, Advocate General and “tainted” leaders
Government in Punjab reduced to ‘tamasha’; remove tainted ministers: Arvind Kejriwal - AAP will give a chief ministerial candidate “on which the entire Punjab will be proud of”, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal said
From BBC: Europe
La Palma volcano: Toxic gas fears as lava reaches ocean - Clouds of white steam are seen billowing at the Playa Nueva area of Spain’s La Palma island.
UK risks French anger over fishing permits - The UK grants just 12 licences from 47 applications for smaller vessels to fish in its territorial sea.
Greta Thunberg mocks world leaders’ words at Youth4Climate - Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, uses a speech to mock world leaders, including UK PM Boris Johnson.
Germany election: Merkel heir loses support as parties meet - Armin Laschet is facing mounting unrest within his party, after their historic election defeat.
Italy: Statue of scantily-clad woman sparks sexism row - The bronze statue to honour a 19th Century poem is called “offensive” and “humiliating” to women.
From Ars Technica
A Virginia company has connected mobile phones directly to satellites - Lynk will start with intermittent text messages and expand from there. - link
Physicists may have cracked the case of “Zen” stones balanced on ice pedestals - The stone creates shade, causing variations in sublimation of the surrounding ice. - link
Amazon’s indoor camera drone is ready to fly around your house - Amazon announces a million smart home devices. - link
Activision Blizzard settles discrimination lawsuit for a fraction of its yearly earnings - Compensation fund for affected employees is nothing compared to 2020’s $8.1 billion revenue. - link
Forget the looks, love the tech: The $83,200 BMW iX electric SUV - The iX has a range of 300 miles and all of BMW’s latest and greatest tech. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Mickey and Minnie Mouse Are in Divorce Court -
The Divorce Court Judge has just finished reviewing Mickey’s petition for divorce when he says to Mickey, “Now let me get this straight, you say you want to divorce Minnie Mouse because she’s crazy?”.
Mickey, visibly upset and very emotional responds to the judge: “No, No, No Your Honor. I don’t want to divorce Minnie because she’s crazy, I want to divorce Minnie because she’s fuckin’ Goofy!”.
A man goes to the beach and sees a woman with no legs and no arms, crying by the shoreline. -
He walks up to her and asks her what’s wrong.
She says, “I’ve never been hugged before.”
The man hugs her, says, “There, now you’ve been hugged,” and leaves.
The next day, another man goes to the beach and sees the woman with no legs and no arms, crying by the shoreline. He walks up to her and asks her what’s wrong.
She says, “I’ve never been kissed before.”
The man kisses her on the cheek, says, “There, now you’ve been kissed,” and leaves.
The next day, another man goes to the beach and sees the same woman with no legs and no arms, crying by the shoreline. He walks up to her and asks her what’s wrong.
She says, “I’ve never been fucked before.”
The man picks her up, throws her into the ocean, and says, “There, now you’re fucked.”
A man and a woman who had never met find themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a train. -
Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly, he in the upper berth and she in the lower.
At 1:00 AM, the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying,……….
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I’m awfully cold.”
“I have a better idea,’ she replied ‘Just for tonight,…… let’s pretend that we’re married.”
“Wow! That’s a great idea!”, he exclaimed.
“Good”, she replied. “Get your own fucking blanket.”
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