Month: February 2025

As Black History Month ends, a reading list for the rest of the year

As Black History Month ends, a reading list for the rest of the year

Published by skeptic

(RNS) — I always tell people that, as a college professor, I got to do the two things I loved best in the world — read and talk. One thing I miss most now that I am emerita is the opportunity to prescribe books for students to read. I not only recommended books to my students but had fantasies that they would run out to buy my recommendations and take them to the beach to read in the summer. Several years into teaching I discovered that some of my students were not only buying and reading the books I recommended, but they were sending them and the assigned reading for my courses home to their parents. Some parents actually thanked me at graduation for what they learned from the books their children had sent home.     I especially enjoyed teaching, and recommending, during Black History Month. Beginning as “Negro History Week” in 1926, Black History Month was created by Carter Godwin Woodson, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, …

These New Apple Intelligence Features Are Coming in iOS 18.4

These New Apple Intelligence Features Are Coming in iOS 18.4

Published by skeptic

iOS 18.4 was supposed to bring new Apple Intelligence Siri features, but Apple ended up needing to pull those capabilities from the update to continue testing. There are fewer new ‌Apple Intelligence‌ additions now, but there are still some new features that will make the update worth installing when it comes out in April. Priority Notifications Apple introduced Priority Notifications back at the June 2024 WWDC, and it’s another ‌Apple Intelligence‌ feature that we’ve been waiting on since the September iOS 18 release. With Priority Notifications, Apple analyzes your incoming notifications and highlights the ones that are important, based on context and time. If you’ve ordered food and your order is approaching, Apple will highlight that notification as a priority, placing it above other notifications. The same goes for anything that has a time-based component, or something else that needs immediate attention. Priority Notifications is opt-in in the iOS 18.4 beta, so it needs to be turned on by going to Settings > Notifications > Prioritize Notifications. When turned on, Priority Notifications show up first …

There Are No More Redlines

There Are No More Redlines

Published by José

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post almost 12 years ago, he went out of his way to assuage fears that he would turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he wrote at the time. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” For much of his tenure, Bezos kept that promise. On Wednesday, he betrayed it. In a statement posted on X, Bezos announced an overhaul of the Post’s opinion section, expressly limiting the ideology of the department and its writers: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In response, the Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned. This is the second time in the past six months that Bezos has meddled in the editorial processes of the paper—and specifically its opinion page. In …

Guggenheim Museum Announces Layoffs Amid Financial Struggles

Guggenheim Museum Announces Layoffs Amid Financial Struggles

Published by skeptic

Another round of layoffs has hit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, as the institution struggles to balance its books in an era of dwindling tourism and rising costs, the New York Times reported Friday. The museum said it was cutting 20 jobs—7 percent of its staff—across multiple departments. Senior leadership, however, will remain untouched, and curators have been spared from the cuts. The move comes despite efforts to steady the ship under Mariët Westermann, who took over as director and chief executive in 2024. Ticket prices have gone up, exhibition schedules have been trimmed down, and the museum’s endowment has grown—but not enough. “Our overall financial picture is not where it needs to be,” Westermann wrote in a staff letter, describing the layoffs as part of a broader “reorganization” meant to improve efficiency. Related Articles This marks the third round of job cuts at the Guggenheim in five years, following two previous waves that saw more than 30 staff members let go, including two deputy directors. The museum’s reliance on international tourism—a sector …

Tesla Drivers Overcome With Shame by Protesters

Tesla Drivers Overcome With Shame by Protesters

Published by José

Aggressive BMW drivers rejoice: you’re no longer the most hated motorists on the road. That mantle has roundly passed to the class of consumers unfortunate enough to have a Tesla parked in their driveway — though it has less to do with the car itself and more to do with the company’s owner, who’s undertaken a near-total public makeover from a milquetoast environmental figurehead to a boorish bully who epitomizes Americans’ growing disgust with oligarchy. What’s to be said about Elon Musk that hasn’t already been said? He’s the richest man in the history of currency, raised by a blood emerald magnate in apartheid South Africa who used taxpayer funds to create hugely successful corporations, then became the Trump administration’s unelected hatchet man in charge of slamming the door in the face of the next generation. Since seizing power, he’s decimated the federal government’s ability to provide for its citizens, haphazardly slashing crucial positions while positioning himself to secure huge government contracts at substantial benefit to his portfolio. And that’s without getting into his Nazi salutes and …

The American Weather Forecast Is in Trouble

The American Weather Forecast Is in Trouble

Published by Sam

If you have tips about the remaking of American climate science, environmental policy, or disaster response, you can contact Zoë Schlanger on Signal at @zoeschlanger.99. At 4 p.m. ET yesterday, Andrew Hazelton got a form email telling him his work as a hurricane modeler at the federal government would be officially over at 5 p.m. that day. In his five months as a federal employee, his job was to help improve the models that serve as the basis for the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts. Now, he told me, “on my particular team, there won’t be hurricane expertise.” He had been hired specifically for his storm experience, which he had built over nearly nine years working for the federal government. Only, those were spent in contract positions. Before Hazelton joined NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, which keeps federal weather models running, he was on a team that developed NOAA’s next-generation hurricane-modeling system, which successfully predicted the rapid intensification of Hurricanes Milton and Helene last year. He also worked for a time on “Hurricane Hunters” missions that fly …

State and Federal Cuts to Arts and Culture Grants Threaten the Museum’s Future

State and Federal Cuts to Arts and Culture Grants Threaten the Museum’s Future

Published by skeptic

The Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in South Florida claims that that state and federal anti-LGBTQ policies have siphoned off the institution’s operating budget and scared off corporate investors, leaving the museum in financial peril. “This is stretching into places that we really have not seen before. Our future is threatened now,” Robert Kesten, the museum’s CEO, told Axios. The museum calculated that more than half of its $1 million operating budget could disappear. The museum’s troubles began last year when Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis cut over $32 million in arts and culture grants from the 2025 budget. That financial hit was exacerbated by President’s Donald Trump’s executive orders that called for an end to federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and the federal grants that fund them.  Related Articles Last week, a federal judge blocked large parts of the President’s anti-DEI orders. According to Kesten, the museum earlier this month received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for educational programs and exhibits. However, given the NEA’s recent emphasis on celebrating “the nation’s rich artistic heritage …

New Analysis Shows Book Bans Target Books With Non-White, Queer, and Disabled Characters

New Analysis Shows Book Bans Target Books With Non-White, Queer, and Disabled Characters

Published by skeptic

PEN America has released a new analysis of book bans, Cover to Cover, and it really makes clear the purpose of book banning—which, surprise surprise, is not what book banners say it is. For one, in the more than 10,000 book ban instances that PEN America looked at—which span across genres, fictional and nonfictional books, and even picture books— 36% involved books that featured fictional or real people of color. They also found that of the banned history and biography titles, 44% were centered around people of color, and 26% of banned books within the same category were about Black people, specifically. This, in addition to other facts, led them to the conclusion that the current deluge of book bans we’ve been seeing these past few years is based around white supremacist ideology. Books centering on the LGBTQ+ community are also being targeted. We’ve known this for a while, of course, but this new analysis gives us some new data to work with. Last year, 29% of all banned titles included LGBTQ+ characters or themes, …

DOGE’s Misplaced War on Software Licenses

DOGE’s Misplaced War on Software Licenses

Published by skeptic

Because agencies sometimes get bulk or government-specific discounts, it can also be more affordable to buy software licenses on behalf of their private contractors. “It’s a very clear way for agencies to manage costs,” the ex-official says. Every government agency has its own unique structure, including many subagencies or units, each with their own software needs. That could help explain other alleged licensing issues DOGE called out this week, including that GSA has “3 different ticketing systems running in parallel” and multiple tools for running unspecified trainings. In a separate post this week, DOGE called out the Department of Labor for allegedly licensing five cybersecurity programs, each for more than 20,000 users, despite having only about 15,000 employees. The post also cited the department holding 380 Microsoft 365 productivity software licenses with zero users, installing only 30 out of the 128 Microsoft Teams conference rooms it licensed, and using only 22 out of 129 Photoshop licenses. The post also referenced unused licenses for “VSCode,” the shorthand name for an entirely free Microsoft tool for writing …

It’s Like Virtual Reality Goggles for Your Mouth

It’s Like Virtual Reality Goggles for Your Mouth

Published by skeptic

Imagine you are video chatting with a distant friend who is eating lunch, and your pal’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor into the meal, and give you a taste? Remote snacking has moved a bit closer to virtual reality. In a paper on Friday in the journal Science Advances, Yizhen Jia, a graduate student in materials engineering at Ohio State University, his adviser Jinghua Li and their colleagues report that they helped volunteers taste flavors meant to represent distant samples of coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cake and fish soup. In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed a picture of him modeling one version of a device he and his colleagues built, which relies on microfluidics. Dangling from his lip are what look like five or six sauce packets that you’d add to instant ramen. The packets feed into a little tube slipped into his mouth. When miniature pumps in the packets receive a signal from a sensor dipped into a fluid far away, they get to work. …