If the World Began Again, Would Life as We Know It Exist?
Scientists are conducting experiments to learn what might happen if we went back in time and life started over again:
Rather than attempt to reconstruct history with fossils, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University, decided to watch convergence and contingency unfold in real time, in the controlled environment of his laboratory. In 1988, he separated a single population of Escherichia coli bacteria into 12 separate flasks containing liquid nutrients, and let them each evolve separately. Every few months for the past 26 years, he or one of his students has frozen a sample of the bacteria. This archive of frozen microbes gives Lenski the ability to replay E. coli’s tape of life from any point he wishes, simply by thawing out the samples. Along the way, he can examine how the bacteria change both genetically and in ways that are visible under a microscope. Lenski says, “The whole experiment was set up to test how reproducible evolution was.”
Es Devlin’s Magic Circles
Inside the creative world of the set designer, who has worked with the Olympics, the opera, and Miley Cyrus:
There’s a philosophy that goes with all this, which Devlin lays out for me in an e-mail from a hotel room in Ipanema. “The environment and/or objects and light are chosen very specifically on a moment-by-moment basis. When it’s working, each constellation of word, prop, action, costume, character, light, plot and environment should chime towards a cumulative effect. For example: that shoe with that phrase with that light on that cup on that table in this room with this sound—and then that moment is over and we are onto the next one: that eye-shadow, with this music, with that fork, with that light on that face within the frame of that window wearing that T-shirt. It’s composed like notes on a stave—layers fusing together to form a whole sound, beat by beat.”
Joe Dorsey’s Big Fight: How An Unknown Boxer Knocked Out Segregation In Louisiana
In 1955, an African-American boxer named Joe Dorsey sued the state of Louisiana for the right to fight white opponents. His legal battles would lead to big changes:
In his dressing room that night, on July 22, 1955, waiting to fight Andy Mayfield, Dorsey was nervous. He dealt with the butterflies in his stomach the usual way: He fell asleep. When he woke up, according to the black newspaper Louisiana Weekly, he strode into the ring and knocked out Mayfield with a left to the midsection in the sixth round.
Then he prepared for his next fight: Six days after beating Mayfield, Joe Dorsey filed suit. He initially intended merely to provide more money for his family. But not only would he wind up avenging more than six decades of wronged African-American athletes, he would also lay the groundwork to integrate musicians and performers in one of the most culturally vibrant — but racially divided — places in America.
‘He Has Baptized 66 Umpires, Calling Them Safe in the Only Way that Matters’
Jon Mooallem meets Pastor Dean, who uses religion to help baseball umpires deal with what can be an emotionally difficult job:
Every day is Judgment Day for an umpire. In the early days of organized baseball, team owners actually encouraged fans to harass umps who made questionable, or just unpopular, calls – throw beer bottles at them, or even the occasional brick. The sadism of Orioles fans was especially well-known, according to the 2008 book Death at the Ballpark. “They broke the spirits of some fine men,” one ump later remembered. By the end of the 1920s, at least 10 umpires had been killed or mortally wounded on the field – in one case, an umpire was punched so hard in the face that a fragment of his jaw ripped through his brain like a spear. In 1911, a semipro player in Georgia got so tired of insisting that the umpire had the score wrong that he walked off the bench with a pistol and shot the man.
The Spirit and the Law
Hobby Lobby, a for-profit craft store with more than 23,000 employees, is fighting the provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide no-cost birth control through their insurance plans. The case of corporations and religious rights:
It’s one thing to argue that a Catholic college’s daily operations are imbued with a religious ethos. It’s another to contend that a corporation, competing in a secular marketplace, is so fundamentally guided by its owners’ faith that it should enjoy religious-liberty rights.
Becket’s attorneys are applying a similar logic in other cases. Among their clients are religious business owners, almost always Christian, who face discrimination charges for refusing to provide services associated with same-sex weddings. These lawsuits are the cousins of the so-called conscience cases, in which a religious pharmacist who declines to sell emergency contraception runs afoul of state law. Becket is litigating a couple of those, too.
From Snow White to Snowman: A Disney Reading List
Here’s a collection exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act.
Is Coding the New Literacy?
An argument for rethinking how we teach the basics of computer science to everyone:
“Code literate.” Sounds nice, but what does it mean? And where does literacy end and fluency begin? The best way to think about that is to look to the history of literacy itself.
Reading and writing have become what researchers have called “interiorized” or “infrastructural,” a technology baked so deeply into everyday human life that we’re never surprised to encounter it. It’s the main medium through which we connect, via not only books and papers, but text messages and the voting booth, medical forms and shopping sites. If a child makes it to adulthood without being able to read or write, we call that a societal failure.
Casanova’s Long Con
The long criminal career of a white-collar con man:
Natalie Sellner married Soutar a month after meeting him in Albuquerque in the summer of 1993, according to records. She flew to Germany at his urging in September. Soutar told Sellner he would meet her there for the vacation but never showed up. When she returned her possessions and money were gone. She annulled the marriage, filed for bankruptcy and requested a court order him to pay her $75,000 in damages.
The law was slowly catching up with the elusive con man. He faced a 1992 grand jury indictment for assault along with a September 1994 grand jury indictment on 12 counts of fraud, forgery and embezzlement.
More Punk, Less Hell!
An extraordinary political experiment took place in Iceland: anarchists governed the capital city of Reykjavik for four years – and the amateurs achieved some astonishing successes.
The Best Party emerged from an idea for a sketch show. In 2008, Gnarr created a slimy politician character who promised everything. The concept died when crowds demonstrated in front of parliament after the banking crash: the times were too serious for jokes.
But Gnarr liked his weasely politician character. Sure, he was a rogue, but a cheery one. So Gnarr uploaded a few clips to Youtube. The clips were popular, so he created a website with a parody of a party. He called it the Best Party and promoted it with the compelling slogan: «Why vote for second-best when you can have the best?»
Betrayal in Charlie Rangel’s Harlem
Rangel has been the face of the district for four decades. Then an ambitious preacher named Michael Walrond came along. Now they’re fighting over the future of America’s most symbolic black neighborhood.
At 11:30 a.m. sharp, Walrond, who normally preaches in jeans, arrived at St. John’s in a dark suit and tie, his bald head cleanly shaved. As the 30 or so people took their seats and the smell of waffles, bacon and salmon croquettes wafted in from the kitchen, Butts introduced his guest. Then, for 15 minutes, Walrond spoke about the various efforts he began at his church — an educational and wellness center, a program that feeds children before school, a food pantry that sought to serve 20,000 families a year — that he would like to expand, if elected to the House. He talked about his concerns with the local schools, particularly co-location, the disputed practice of housing several schools in one building. Then he threw open the floor to questions.
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