That’s why DiPasquale likes taking Border Encounter groups to the old river crossing. There, he doesn’t focus on current events or political polarization. Instead he tells stories of Chinese migrants in the 1880s, of the once-vibrant Black Wall Street in the early 1900s, of El Pasoans who can trace their ancestry to Jewish refugees and Arabic-speaking migrants.
Human history recycles the same old themes, DiPasquale said. Who’s wanted and who isn’t? Who belongs and who doesn’t? “There’s something in getting a little bit of distance from the present day, where we can start self-reflecting on issues. We need a little historical distance, to see a little clearer looking back and go, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe that happened then.’ And then even, ‘Wait, you know, what are the ways I might be doing that right now?’”
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/november/sami-dipasquale-change-way-we-see-immigration-el-paso-abara.html?share=FfPdCClFTqd157YzqwKhIRDdGOaAxGRI&utm_medium=widgetsocial
In an age of remarkable secularization that is dying with a whimper, religious mediation is likely to return with a vengeance… and that is for both good and ill, as anyone who has suffered at the hands of Islamist zealots or been in a mass shooting by a Christian extremist could tell you.
When your spouse is the only person in your life you are supposed to be able to depend on, natural points of friction in a relationship go from mildly annoying to terrifying. When a fight with your spouse is a threat to your entire support system, it’s so existentially stressful that it becomes impossible to confront.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/12/15/the-load-bearing-relationship/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Most folks I know would acknowledge the above reality, yet it is sad to me how little action I see undertaken to truly maintain a community or even a decent number of friends. Life is hard, yes, but one thing I firmly believe is that you lose friends as you get older for a variety of reasons, and that as the loss rate accelerates as you age, you must keep working on being a good friend and part of your various communities as part of your duty in life.
Being Jewish was an integral part of my parent’s identity that they amputated when they moved to America, and they almost certainly suffered phantom pain in that missing limb. It also contributed to a kind of social isolation. They cut themselves off from other Jews, the people they could most easily relate to. Certainly, they made friends with non-Jews, but it was harder than it might otherwise have been because they had to pretend to be something they were not.
https://quillette.com/2023/11/22/they-told-me-so/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter
Even some of my well-read pals who are very well versed in history have noted to me they think in the current conflict they are more on the side of the Palestinians than the Israelis, although what precisely they think of Hamas is hazy. What I find difficult to understand is the lack of sympathy for Jews in general – even if you presume they have become the persecutors of Palestinians, the Palestinians are not a class of people who have been historically disenfranchised worldwide, with several attempts at what could be deemed genocide in some cases and of course one infamous genocide that sought to rid the earth of them. There simply is no historical comparison for Jewish people. So what are they to do when their historical homeland is offered to them, after the worst genocide in recorded history? What are they to do when there are series of wars seeking to crush or diminish their new homeland? I’m not hand-waving away Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians – they should have brokered a smarter solution via diplomatic channels years ago. But since Hamas came into being, this type of conflagration was inevitable. And now, it could well be the beginning of World War 3.
The precise implications of the handoff from hexatic to nematic order aren’t yet clear, but the team suspects that cells may exert a degree of control over that transition. There’s even evidence that the emergence of nematic order has something to do with cell adhesion, they said. Figuring out how and why tissues manifest these two interlaced symmetries is a project for the future — although Giomi is already working on using the results to understand how cancer cells flow through the body when they metastasize. And Shaevitz noted that a tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity could be related to embryogenesis — the process by which embryos mold themselves into organisms.
If there’s one central idea in tissue biophysics, Giomi said, it’s that structure gives rise to forces, and forces give rise to functions. In other words, controlling multiscale symmetry could be part of how tissues add up to more than the sum of their cells.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/biophysicists-uncover-powerful-symmetries-in-living-tissue-20231025/?mc_cid=9ae6d18810&mc_eid=f83944a043
Increasingly, I suspect that symmetry across disciplines is going to be a key toward understanding the mind-boggling complexity of our world. Silos in science need to be dissolved. The challenge, of course, is acquiring expertise in a given discipline is hard enough already; forging multidisciplinary insights will be quite difficult.
https://www.thefp.com/p/defense-tech-values-fight-for-america-boyle
- You win a war against America when fentanyl pours across our borders, manufactured by an adversary that still remembers the Opium Wars, and delivered by cartels that have no respect for human life. One hundred thousand of our countrymen and women are dead every year in a silent epidemic that’s being met with a collective shrug.
- You win a war against America with toys like TikTok that give our adversaries direct access to the anxious minds of teenagers. You win a war against America when you invest billions of dollars in the CCP’s tech ecosystem and pretend that’s just the way business works.
It’s tough sometimes to not be a tetch cynical about pieces such as this, but on the whole, sometimes you have to take things at face value. I’ve worked with clients that tout all of these values… but they ultimately fessed up to pushing just the interests of extant big tech companies because those were who paid the bills, though it is hard to see what Apple, Google or Facebook have done that is truly innovative in quite a while. That said, the sentiments may be compromised but they are correct: the US continuing to foster technological innovation and trade so as to spread its wealth is currently the best shot to cut down on wars breaking out, nurture human flourishing, improve wealth worldwide, etc. If you subscribe to the line of thought that the US is the real warmonger of the past several decades, I would encourage you to look at global conflict rates and casualties prior to the US hegemony. Hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty in the past 30 years because we exported US jobs and the US consumer became globally dominant. We can do better, however.
She first called on the woodsman during a power outage, a regular occurrence in upstate New York, two winters ago. An older couple had burned through their “last stick of wood”. Within hours, the woodsman came to the rescue. “They said they and their spouse were huddled under the blankets upstairs, the fire long gone out, freezing cold, when they saw headlights in their drive and the soul-warming sound of wood being thrown on to the gravel. He got them through until the power was restored.”
The woodsman considers his volunteerism a cheap form of therapy. “I’m sort of a quiet guy,” he said. Giving away wood “does draw me out, pushes me out. When you interact with people, and I listen a lot, you do you learn their stories. And I’m moved by every one of them.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/new-york-winter-helping-neighbors-stay-warm-wood-burning
I need to do a better job contributing to my community beyond fostering some networks of friends, and boy, this is such a simple, powerful example of someone doing so.
Legend has it that the idea for the moka pot came from a laundry boiler, though that’s not confirmed. What is known is that the La Pavoni device was very trendy, and there was also a precedent for a smaller coffee machine: the napoletana. The napoletana is a small metal device with three sections: a chamber of water, a small puck of coffee in the middle, and a chamber on the other end for brewed coffee. Water is heated up with the water chamber on the bottom, and then the entire device is flipped upside-down, allowing the hot water to drip through the coffee beans and gather as coffee in the previously empty chamber. No pressure is involved.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/make-coffee-moka-pot?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=design
The best design is the simple and brilliant that you may not have ever even thought of – even though I own a few different methods of making coffee and primarily do a pour over in the AM, we still own a moka pot simply for its beauty and utility.
