The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors - With the world’s focus on Gaza, settlers have used wartime chaos as cover for violence and dispossession. - link
What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet - Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it? - link
A Professor Claimed to Be Native American. Did She Know She Wasn’t? - Elizabeth Hoover, who has taught at Brown and Berkeley, insists that she made an honest mistake. Her critics say she has been lying for more than a decade. - link
Inside North Korea’s Forced-Labor Program in China - Workers sent from the country to Chinese factories describe enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be “killed without a trace.” - link
The Vatican and the War in Gaza - A rhetorical dispute between the Church and the Israeli government shows the limits—and the possibilities—of the Pope’s role in times of conflict. - link
From Vox
Why elite colleges are bringing the SAT back -
Scott Eisen/Getty Images
Yale and Dartmouth are bringing testing back — but thousands of other schools aren’t.
America’s colleges and universities are embroiled in yet another debate about admissions.
This time, they’re rethinking their positions on standardized testing.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, several elite colleges made the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional for applicants.
Testing had become a hassle, with limited testing locations and time for students to get prepared. The anti-testing movement had long contended that standardized tests reinforce racial and economic inequality and that reliance on them harms students from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the pandemic, those students faced additional roadblocks. Schools loosened restrictions to simplify the process for everyone.
But last week, Yale University announced that it was reversing course.
Going forward, students must include test scores with their applications, and for the first time, the school is allowing applicants to report Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam scores in place of SAT or ACT scores.
The move follows two others reinstating testing requirements of some kind: Dartmouth College earlier this month and MIT in 2022.
So why are (a few elite) school leaders changing their minds?
They’re pointing to new research that says that test scores are actually helpful for admissions decisions — and beneficial for marginalized students.
Do standardized tests make school admissions more or less fair?
A study from Opportunity Insights, a group of Harvard economists, found that “students from low-income families and other less advantaged backgrounds have lower standardized test scores and are less likely to take the test than students from higher income families” due to “differences in school quality, neighborhood exposure, and many other environmental conditions.”
But that wasn’t their central finding. They and the other researchers fueling the recent admissions reversals have found that test-optional practices harm students from low-income backgrounds.
That’s because when given the option to submit scores, these students decided not to submit them out of fear that their scores weren’t perfect.
Instead, admissions counselors have found that strong scores from students of lower-income backgrounds are an indicator that they would excel academically in college.
What does the research say about how universities use test scores?
One thing college admissions officers consider when evaluating a potential student is: Will they succeed here? And researchers have tried to determine the connection between test scores and that college success.
In one study, Dartmouth researchers found that test scores were a better indicator of college performance than grades, essays, or teacher recommendations.
And importantly, researchers found that test scores help admissions officers better pick out high-achieving less-advantaged applicants.
Under the test-optional policy, “many high-achieving less-advantaged applicants choose not to submit scores even when doing so would allow Admissions to identify them as students likely to succeed at Dartmouth and in turn benefit their application,” the researchers wrote.
The Opportunity Insights researchers similarly examined the connection between test scores and student success at IvyPlus institutions (the eight Ivy League colleges plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago).
They found that “Even among otherwise similar students with the same high school grades, […] SAT and ACT scores have substantial predictive power for academic success in college.” These researchers also found that higher high school GPAs are not associated with higher college GPAs.
Yale’s research has identified the same thing. In its announcement, the school wrote, “test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT.”
In short, according to Opportunity Insights’ findings, it can be the case that tests reinforce inequality generally but also allow schools to identify individual kids who are academically prepared despite challenging circumstances.
What happens next
Yale and Dartmouth have emphasized that test scores are simply one part of their whole-person review processes.
Using test scores in the years before the pandemic had not harmed Yale’s diversity efforts, the university said in its announcement, citing gains in the number of admitted first-generation college students and under-represented minority students.
And it’s worth pointing out that some of the wealthiest applicants never stopped testing and submitting scores when possible.
Adam Nguyen, who founded Ivy Link, a firm that helps students gain admission to selective colleges, never changed the advice he gave to clients.
“I can tell you that a number of things on the application are ‘optional,’ but to get into the Ivy League and other elite colleges, an applicant has to go above and beyond the minimum requirements,” he said.
And for wealthy students, that can mean paying firms like his tens of thousands of dollars to help curate outstanding extracurricular resumes, design showcase projects, and bolster their grades. Comparatively, he said, “standardized tests are probably the avenue where kids” can excel with fewer resources.
Meanwhile, the anti-testing movement has said the attention to the test-optional reversals is excessive. An overwhelming majority of US colleges and universities remain test-optional.
At least 1,825 four-year colleges in the US — or more than 80 percent of them — will not require SAT or ACT scores for fall 2025, according to FairTest, an organization that advocates against testing requirements.
“Despite a media frenzy around a single Ivy League school reinstating testing requirements, ACT/SAT-optional and test-blind/score-free policies remain the new normal in undergraduate admissions,” said FairTest executive director Harry Feder.
Can Biden contain the fallout from his Gaza policy in Michigan? -
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaks alongside Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, at a press conference calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East, outside of the US Capitol on December 14, 2023, in Washington, DC. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign is testing Arab American voters’ loyalty in Michigan and beyond.
Arab American activists and their allies are urging voters to cast ballots as “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday in protest of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. They’re unlikely to change the result of the contest, in which Biden is the only major candidate, but they’re hoping to signal their anger — and send a warning — to Democrats in one of the most critical swing states on the 2024 map.
Michigan is home to more than 300,000 people who claim Middle Eastern or North African heritage, many of them concentrated in the city of Dearborn — one of the largest Arab American communities in the US. These are voters who helped deliver Michigan to Biden in 2020, when his margin of victory in the state was just over 154,000 votes. In Wayne County, where Dearborn is located, as well as Oakland County, where Arab Americans also make up a significant share of the population, voters backed him at rates of about 69 and 56 percent, respectively.
Those days, however, are over. Biden is currently losing to former President Donald Trump in seven major polls conducted in Michigan since the beginning of the war. There are multiple reasons for that, including falling support in the powerful auto workers union, which endorsed Biden glaringly late in the game this year, but Arab Americans and young progressive voters in the state have also cited Gaza as an important factor, and most Michiganders support a ceasefire.
Arab American officials in Michigan have become prominent critics of the US’s support for Israel’s campaign, which has killed about 30,000 Palestinians since the October 7 attack by Hamas. The mayor of Dearborn — Abdullah Hammoud, who has Lebanese ancestry — wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times Wednesday that “We don’t have to imagine the violence and injustice being carried out against the Palestinian people. Many of us lived it, and still bear the scars of life under occupation and apartheid.” US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian member of Congress, has explicitly told voters not to support Biden.
Tlaib’s sister, Layla Elabed, is now heading up the “Listen to Michigan” campaign to encourage at least 10,000 Michiganders to vote “uncommitted” in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. Now endorsed by progressive organizations including Our Revolution and the Democratic Socialists of America, the campaign has been conducting text and phone banking, buying digital ads, knocking on doors, and sending out mailers throughout Michigan.
“This is a protest vote against genocide,” Elabed said. “The resounding sense in a lot of Arab American communities and Muslim American communities is that our voices don’t matter here. And our lives don’t matter abroad.”
Even if the organizers of the uncommitted campaign succeed, they won’t affect Biden’s chances of securing his party’s nomination. But depending on how large the uncommitted vote is in Michigan, it could spell trouble for Biden in the fall, should Arab Americans and their allies stay home or cast a ballot for Trump in a state Biden, currently in a tight contest nationally, will likely need to win.
Biden has faltered on Arab American outreach
The uncommitted campaign is the product of what Arab American leaders say is the White House’s failure to listen to them and address their concerns through traditional outreach channels. Since October, Arab American leaders have been trying to no avail to get an audience with Biden to voice their concerns about the war, said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, who grew up in Dearborn.
Biden quietly hosted a group of five Muslim leaders in late October at the White House, where they told him that he had failed to show empathy for the acute suffering in Gaza. But that was seen as a slight by the ethnic constituency of Arab Americans, who are also Christian, Druze, Jewish, Mandaen, and other faiths, as well as secular, Berry said. And in February, Biden skipped a scheduled stop in Dearborn while visiting Michigan, instead meeting with auto workers in the Detroit metro area.
“For months, we’ve been asking for meaningful engagement on policy, and, frankly, are being ignored,” Berry said.
The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee did not respond to requests for comment.
Officials from the Biden campaign and the White House, as well as Biden surrogates, have visited Michigan multiple times in the last two months with the intent of smoothing things over with the Arab American community. In January, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held small meetings with some Arab American leaders after others made clear that they were too angry to be open to dialogue in a planned larger meeting. And even after adjusting the plan, there was one meeting in which all 10 to 15 people invited declined to attend in protest.
To Elabed, the fact that Biden sent his campaign manager to Michigan signaled that he was more interested in securing Arab American votes than talking “about how this failed policy is affecting our communities,” she said.
In February, a group of White House officials, including USAID administrator Samantha Power, also visited Michigan to highlight how the administration is trying to get humanitarian aid to Palestinians. In a closed-door meeting, deputy national security adviser Jon Finer reportedly admitted that the administration had “misstepped in the course of responding to this crisis” and “left a very damaging impression, based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration, the country values the lives of Palestinians.”
Biden ally Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) — who supports a ceasefire in Gaza and cutting off further aid to Israel — met with Arab and Muslim leaders in Michigan earlier this month to talk about how to build support for their policy demands in Washington.
But Elabed said it still doesn’t feel as though Biden is adequately responding to the concerns of the Arab American community. His sharpest critique of Israel’s campaign came only earlier this month, when he said that it was “over the top” and that civilian suffering and death “had to stop.” Meanwhile, the US recently vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations for the third time since the start of the war. The Biden administration continues to push for a $14.1 billion supplemental aid package for Israel on top of the approximately $3.3 billion it already receives annually from the US, and is continuing to make major arms sales while offering unconditional military support to Israel.
“For Joe Biden to ignore the very communities that largely brought him Michigan in 2020 is a slap in the face,” Elabed said. “It does feel so dehumanizing that a party that I have supported my whole adult life is now ignoring the deaths and murder of my people and the destruction of my ancestral land.”
Arab Americans say blame Biden if Trump wins a second term — not them
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is urging voters in her state not to vote uncommitted. “It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” she said on Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.
But many Arab American activists are arguing that Whitmer and others critiquing uncommitted voters should instead lay the blame at Biden’s feet.
“If the outcome is that we have another Trump presidency, it is going to be Joe Biden and his administration and the Democratic Party that hands over the White House to the Trump administration,” Elabed said. “Because when you ignore your core constituency … you have no one to blame but yourselves.”
Many Arab American voters fear a second Trump presidency — not just on the issue of Gaza — and acknowledge that his foreign policy was disastrous for Palestinians and the Arab world, Berry said.
He moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017 — a choice made in recognition of the fact that Israel had made unified Jerusalem its capital but a decidedly controversial one given that control of Jerusalem has historically been a key sticking point in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. The US recognized the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights under Trump and reaffirmed it under Biden.
The Trump administration also argued in 2019 that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bankare not necessarily illegal, lending legitimacy to Israel’s claims on the territories, but the annexations and moves toward it are widely regarded as illegal under international law, and no other country has recognized them.
None of this is news to Arab American voters. But activists argue it’s still hard for them to justify voting for Biden when the Biden administration has in their minds failed to adequately push back on the slaughter of Palestinians after October 7.
“We fought back for those four years,” Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said. “We pushed back and we found ways to fight back against [Trump’s] policies. But the one thing we didn’t have was a genocide.”
Berry said her organization is pushing hard to ensure that Arab Americans don’t just sit this election out as a result of anger with Biden, which she said is not how the community’s best interests are served, but isn’t encouraging that they vote any particular way. The alternatives include voting for third-party candidates or casting a ballot for Trump. Many Iraqi Chaldean Christians in Michigan’s Macomb and Oakland counties already backed him in 2020, when he promised to shield them from deportation.
“We’ll speak to [Trump]. And if he does the right moves in the campaign … we don’t mind voting for him,” Ayoub said. “Those dead family members, those dead bodies, those images we’re seeing … That’s enough for them to say, give me a few bad tweets and a few mean words and let my family members live.”
What does all of this really mean, in Michigan and nationally?
The national contest between Biden and Trump, who is all but assured the GOP nomination, is tight. As one of six major battleground states in 2024, Michigan could determine the outcome of the election overall, and Biden can’t afford any significant splintering of his coalition there.
The Arab American community in Michigan is small, making up slightly over 1 percent of the state’s population of 10 million. And outside the Arab American community, there are “not that many” voters who disagree with Biden’s policies in Gaza and even fewer are “so motivated in their anger against Biden that they would vote uncommitted in a Democratic primary,” Bill Ballenger, a longtime political pundit in Michigan, said.
But if the margins in Michigan are anywhere as close as they were in 2020 and 2016, “maybe the loss of support in the Arab American community could spell the difference between victory and defeat for Biden,” Ballenger said. “No wonder he’s worried.”
And while the war in Gaza looms large in Michigan because of its large Arab American community, it’s an issue that has resonated nationally among Arab Americans, who also have sizable and growing communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia. The movement to abandon Biden over his stance on Gaza has already spread to some of those states, and his campaign is struggling to secure surrogates and endorsements that could help bridge the gap with Arab Americans and young progressives. Nationally, Biden’s support among Arab American voters has fallen from 59 in 2020 to 17 percent after the war in Gaza broke out in October.
Democrats generally have also increasingly turned against the war in Gaza. About half of 2020 Biden voters said that they believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in a February poll by YouGov/The Economist.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll decide how to vote based on Biden’s response to the war; the economy remains a bipartisan priority for voters, and Democrats also citehealth care, climate change, poverty, racism, abortion, and women’s rights as top concerns. Biden is pushing the progress he’s made on the economy and trying to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on these other issues so far. But the number of uncommitted voters in Michigan could signal just how deep Democratic discontent is.
“This is not only isolated to Arab or Muslim voters in Michigan,” Aboud said.
Haleema Shah contributed reporting to this article.
How Sarah J. Maas became romantasy’s reigning queen -
Sarah J. Maas, London. | Getty
The sexy subversions of A Court of Thorns and Roses.
As BookTok goes, so goes publishing. The community of TikTokers who make videos about their favorite books is one of the only forces actively driving book sales in a contracting market — and right now, BookTok has a new favorite genre. Romantasy, the hybrid genre of romance-focused fantasy novels, has never been hotter. Every second pitch I receive from a publisher describes itself as romantasy. Bookstores are pushing tables of romantasy novels to the front of the shop. Grown-ups and teenagers alike are posting long videos about their favorite romantasy books. Many of them highlight Sarah J. Maas, the genre’s reigning queen.
Maas has been publishing since 2012, when at 26 she published Throne of Glass, the fantasy novel she started working on as a 16-year-old. In 2013, she scored her first New York Times bestseller, and in 2015, she began to pick up adult fans with the wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses. Now, Maas has two YA and one adult romantasy series (Crescent City, the adult series, began in 2020). Between all those titles, she’s sold more than 38 million books worldwide. Her most recent book, House of Flame and Shadow, came out at the end of January and has been on the bestseller list ever since.
Of all Maas’s series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) is her crown jewel. The TikTok tag #acotar has 8.9 billion views. Hulu has been developing a TV adaptation helmed by Ron Moore, although its current status is reportedly “murky.” Among fans, it is her most beloved work, the only Maas series so popular that it’s spawned its own spinoff novels. They say that ACOTAR has reignited their childhood love of reading, that these are the books that make other books feel worthwhile.
Reading through the first three volumes of ACOTAR recently, I began to understand why. These books go down like candy, silly and frothy and compulsively readable. Everyone in ACOTAR is beautiful, everyone is attractively damaged, everyone is pining with love for some inaccessible someone else. I read nearly 2,000 pages in a couple of weeks.
What is liveliest about Maas’s writing, though, is how well she knows her formula. Maas is a genius at cramming her books with the tropes of her hybrid genre — and then subverting those tropes just enough to thrill.
In his 2017 book Hit Makers, journalist Derek Thompson identifies a simple formula for popularity. Human beings, Thompson writes, tend to like things that are pleasingly familiar, with a gentle touch of surprise. That’s part of why romantasy is so popular. It takes two familiar trope-driven formulae — say, an enemies-to-lovers love story plus an epic battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil — and smashes them together to create something that feels new.
Identifying the pleasingly familiar and adding a surprise is something of a specialty for Maas. She likes to start her stories with classic fairy tales given a hint of a girl power twist. Throne of Glass is based on “Cinderella,” but Maas’s Cinderella is an assassin sent to kill the prince. A Court of Thorns and Roses is “Beauty and the Beast,” but Beauty is a deadly huntress.
Within the stories themselves, Maas’s worldbuilding is full of hat tips to her predecessors. In A Court of Thorn and Roses, the faerie land is called Prythian, a nod to Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. In Prythian, faeries use a form of teleportation called “winnowing,” and their explanation of it will be familiar to anyone who loved Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. “Think of it as … two different points on a piece of cloth,” Maas writes (very much her ellipses). “Winnowing … it’s like folding that cloth so the two spots align.” If you’ve read the classics of YA fantasy before, you’ll recognize the sampling and remixing she is doing here.
Part of the pleasure of reading Maas is seeing these familiar YA fantasy references lie cheek by jowl with the tropes of romance novels. In A Court of Mist and Fury, the second volume of the series, two lovers who have not yet admitted their feelings for each other find themselves forced by cruel circumstance to fake date. Later, they end up at an inn with only one bed to spare, not once but twice. Across ACOTAR, Maas’s protagonist, Feyre, is torn between two boys. One is blond and sunny; one is dark-haired and brooding; both are impossibly beautiful, rich, and powerful; both begin as Feyre’s enemies.
Romance and fantasy also have their darker tropes, and Maas plays with these as well. Lots of books feature villainous sexual predators, but when such figures appear in ACOTAR, they are almost exclusively women. It’s an interestingly consistent move from Maas — one she appears to keep coming back to across her books because it feels counterintuitive while at the same time allowing her readers the satisfaction of a purely evil villainess to hate. It’s also a good excuse to give her male characters extra layers of sadness and vulnerability. Maas is not interested in dissecting all the ways sexual trauma can hurt a person, but she is interested in giving her romantic leads dark and violent backstories.
Maas’s biggest subversion, though, is also her most exciting. At the end of A Court of Thorns and Roses, she pulls out the rug from under her own love triangle, and the results are glee-inducing to read. Spoilers follow.
If the first volume of ACOTAR is a Beauty and the Beast story, then the Beast is Tamlin, the mercurial faerie lord who first pulls Feyre into Prythian. Tamlin, the High Lord of Spring, is angry and possessive in the way that tends to read as attractive in romance novels, especially romance novels based on this fairy tale. Tamlin has the ability to turn into a wolflike creature, and when he’s angry, he growls and claws shoot out of his fingers. When Feyre gets angry, he uses magic to restrain her.
None of Tamlin’s sins here are too far off the Edward Cullen norm, and with the first three-quarters of Thorns and Roses following the beats of a standard Beauty and the Beast love story so clearly, it’s easy to feel as though Maas is steering you toward thinking of Tamlin’s anger problem as romantic.
Feyre, who is recovering from a childhood of poverty and emotional neglect, falls rapidly for Tamlin, despite her initial hatred of all faeries. He showers her with fine food and clothes, gives her art supplies so that she can pursue her passion for painting. He is the first person Feyre has ever encountered who treats her as someone special and beautiful. His uncontrollable rage at the thought of her being in danger or with another man seems to her like yet more proof that she is special and beautiful. She is smitten. When the book ends with the pair kissing in a meadow full of wildflowers, it feels like just what you would expect.
Yet something bizarre happens about a hundred pages before that ending. Tamlin is kidnapped by a wicked faerie, and Feyre has to go on a quest to rescue him. That quest is normal for this story type — Beauty traditionally rescues the Beast, and Tamlin’s name is a nod to the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, in which a mortal girl rescues her lover from a wicked fairy queen. Done right, such a quest reads as incredibly romantic, a chance for the lovers to prove the strength of their connection against insurmountable odds. What’s so odd about this particular case is that instead, as soon as the quest begins, Tamlin becomes a nonentity within the story.
Feyre’s thoughts of Tamlin and how much she loves him become generic, vague on the details. Even when he is present on the page, he is passive, unemotive, no longer compelling. All the energy and the juice of the story has transferred itself over to a new romantic lead — Rhysand, the enigmatic and brooding High Lord of Night. In Thorns and Roses, Rhysand is ambiguously villainous, apparently allied with the wicked queen. Still, for purposes of his own, he’s willing to form an alliance with Feyre to help her rescue Tamlin.
In the page time that earlier in the novel would have been accorded to Tamlin, Feyre thinks a lot about how much she hates Rhysand, and also how attractive he is. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Feyre is going to hook up with Rhys eventually, but the structure of the tropes here tells us that Tamlin is obviously Feyre’s endgame. He’s the Beast and she’s the Beauty! They end the book kissing in a meadow! Who’s going to mess with that?
Maas messes with it. With a merciless speed that I can only compare to Gilmore Girls making Dean illiterate as soon as Jess shows up, Maas reveals in the opening of A Court of Mist and Fury that Tamlin is a faerie Republican, ruling his court according to the laws of trickle-down magic economics and sparing no handouts for the poor. Feyre, with her background of childhood poverty, is outraged — and as Tamlin’s possessive rages become more and more violent, she loses patience with him. Before the end of the book, she has cast Tamlin aside and declared her love for Rhysand, who is revealed to be the most benevolent of all the High Lords of Prythian and who places a premium on Feyre’s independence to boot.
This kind of love interest switcheroo is common in the world of teen TV, where characters change partners according to the fickle winds of cast chemistry and writing staff changes. In YA books, however, love stories tend to be more aesthetically unified than they are on TV. You can usually tell who will end up with whom from early on in the narrative, and the satisfaction of reading comes from seeing how they’ll end up together. Watching a swap like this one emerge out of nowhere is a perfect execution of Thompson’s Hit Makers formula: a pleasingly familiar romance trope subverted when you least expect it; the love story structure of one medium ported over into another.
It’s popular among Maas’s fans to say that the switch is a politically evolved take on the problems of the Beauty and the Beast story. The Beast’s anger issues and violent tendencies, his decision to find a girlfriend by kidnapping her — these are revealed as red flags for an abusive relationship instead of romantic quirks. Feyre finds true love not with him but with someone who tells her constantly that she is always free to make her own choices.
I’m not sure, though, that the switch works as an effective political critique on Maas’s source material. Rhys, like Tamlin, initiates his relationship with Feyre by coercing her into a magical bargain that forces her to promise to come to his home. Like Tamlin, Rhys mistreats Feyre only to later reveal he was forced to do so by circumstances beyond his control. He withholds crucial information from her, and although he lets her make her own choices, he forces her to do so within artificially limited circumstances.
The switch is incredibly fun to read, yet it doesn’t criticize problematic old romance tropes so much as slightly tweak their angles. But then, if those romance tropes weren’t so satisfying to read, problematic or not, Maas wouldn’t have used them to begin with.
From The Hindu: Sports
Elena Norman quits as Hockey India CEO after 13 years - Talk of her quitting was around ever since the women’s Asian Champions Trophy in November, and her absence during the Olympic Qualifiers last month only added to it
Hyderabad marathoner runs on the world’s highest frozen lake - Dr Umesh Bhammarkar from Hyderabad ran one of the most difficult marathons on the frozen Pangong lake
Namibia’s Loftie-Eaton smashes fastest T20I century - Loftie-Eaton played a knock of 101 off just 36 deliveries, which included 11 fours and eight sixes at an amazing strike rate of 280.55.
Shami undergoes ankle surgery, set to miss IPL - Mohammed Shami, who last played for India in the ODI World Cup final against Australia on November 19, went under the knife in the London on February 27
How Anmol Kharb and other women shuttlers punched above weight to win first gold: Data - Teen sensation Anmol Kharb rescued India twice by beating opponents ranked 400 positions above her
From The Hindu: National News
Supreme Court comes down heavily on Patanjali for prima facie violation of undertaking on claims, ads - The Supreme Court cautioned Patanjali Ayurved and its officers from making any statements adverse to any system of medicine in the media, both print and electronic, in any form as they said in their undertaking before the court earlier
Study on cardiometabolic health status of CSIR-CFTRI employees undertaken -
Jolt to Congress in Gujarat as its Rajya Sabha MP Naran Rathwa joins BJP ahead of Lok Sabha polls - Rathwa is a tribal leader from Chhota Udepur in Gujarat. His tenure as the Rajya Sabha member is coming to end in April this year
Modi govt has ‘eclipsed’ dreams of students: Rahul Gandhi on paper leaks - “History will never forgive Narendra Modi for this crime”
Telangana CM formally launches two more guarantees: LPG cylinder refill at Rs 500 and up to 200 units free electricity - Govt firm on creating “Telangana model” in implementation of welfare schemes, says Revanth Reddy
From BBC: Europe
Prominent Russian human rights activist jailed - In his closing court statement, Oleg Orlov said Russia is “sinking ever more deeply into darkness”.
Depardieu faces new allegation of sexual assault - In the latest of a string of accusations, a set designer accuses the French actor of grabbing her in 2021.
Russian defeat in Ukraine vital for Europe - Macron - France’s president says European states will give Ukraine medium- and long-range missiles and bombs.
Sweden midfielder Olsson on ventilator in hospital - Sweden international and former Arsenal midfielder Kristoffer Olsson is on a ventilator in hospital after losing consciousness at his home on 20 February.
Sweden’s bid to join Nato clears final hurdle - Hungary ratifies Sweden’s application to the military alliance after delaying its approval.
From Ars Technica
Varda’s drug-cooking Winnebago will be remembered as a space pioneer - A small capsule containing pharmaceuticals made in space landed in Utah last week. - link
New data shows which states were more deadly for pedestrians in 2023 - Preliminary road-safety data for the first half of 2023 has been published. - link
SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle - “Several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically.” - link
Kagan: Florida social media law seems like “classic First Amendment violation” - In oral arguments, Justice Thomas asks who speaks when an algorithm moderates. - link
Surprising link found between niacin and risk of heart attack and stroke - Breakdown products of niacin, aka Vitamin B3, may spur vascular inflammation. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
There once was a man who had only one testicle -
There once was a man who had only one testicle, and whose given name was ‘Onestone’. He hated that name and asked everyone not to call him Onestone. After years and years of torment, Onestone finally cracked and said, ‘If anyone calls me ’Onestone’ again I will kill them!’
The word got around and nobody called him that any more. Then one day a young woman named Blue Bird forgot and said, ‘Good morning, Onestone.’
He jumped up, grabbed her and took her deep into the forest where he made love to her all day and all night. He made love to her all the next day, until Blue Bird died from exhaustion. The word got around that ‘Onestone’ meant what he promised he would do.
Years went by and no one dared call him by his given name until a woman named Yellow Bird returned to the village after being away.
Yellow Bird, who was Blue Bird’s cousin, was overjoyed when she saw Onestone. She hugged him and said, ‘Good to see you, ’Onestone’…..
Onestone grabbed her, took her deep into the forest, made love to her all day, made love to her all night, made love to her all the next day, made love to her all the next night, but Yellow Bird wouldn’t die!
I know we have a bad reputation but it’s not that bad. It’s actually quite fun down here. Did you ever drink when you were alive?
Of course.
Well, Mondays, you can drink as much as you want. Vodka, gin, tequila, rum…whatever! Make your own if you want. You don’t have to drive home. You don’t have to worry about your liver or alcohol poisoning. You’re already dead. Were you a smoker?
Yes, I was.
Tuesdays, smoke it up. We have all the cigarettes and cigars. Even the best Cubans. You don’t need to worry about lung cancer. You’re already dead. Did you get high when you were alive?
Sometimes.
Wednesdays, get as high as you want. Weed, coke, PCP, crack, LSD.. whatever! Make your own. Not like you’ll overdose. You’re already dead.
This actually does sound quite fun.
I know, right? It’s not so bad. Did you ever stick anything up your ass when you were alive?
A gay couple, was feeling hot n bothered on a plane and so decided to join the mile high club… -
“What if we had sex?” asks Jeremiah.
“Are you crazy? Here, on the plane? It would be awkward, everyone would watch us doing it…”
“Nobody is even paying attention to anything. Look!”
Jeremiah stands up and asks loudly:
“Could I have a napkin, please?”
Nobody gives a damn. Everyone is sleeping, reading, looking out the window, etc.
Flight attendants pretend to not hear them, as they also don’t give a damn.
“They really wouldn’t care then, would they?” says Timothy.
So Jeremiah and Timothy have wild sex on the plane.
Later, when the plane arrives to the airport and the people are leaving, the stewardess sees an old man who threw up all over his shirt, even his pants are soaking in the filth.
“Sir, you should’ve asked for a bag!”
“I didn’t dare” whispers the old man. "A few rows ahead I saw a man asking for a napkin and he got fucked in the ass.
