All posts tagged: making

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

Published by José

Dur­ing World War II, Walt Dis­ney entered into a con­tract with the US gov­ern­ment to devel­op 32 ani­mat­ed shorts. Near­ly bank­rupt­ed by Fan­ta­sia (1940), Dis­ney need­ed to refill its cof­fers, and mak­ing Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da films did­n’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numer­ous occa­sions, Don­ald Duck was called upon to deliv­er moral mes­sages to domes­tic audi­ences (see The Spir­it of ’43 and Der Fuehrer’s Face). But that was­n’t the case with Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi, a film shown in U.S. movie the­aters in 1943. Based on a book writ­ten by Gre­gor Ziemer, this ani­mat­ed short used a dif­fer­ent line­up of char­ac­ters to show how the Nazi par­ty turned inno­cent youth into Hitler’s cor­rupt­ed chil­dren. Unlike oth­er top­ics addressed in Dis­ney war films (e.g. tax­es and the draft), this theme—the cul­ti­va­tion of young minds—hit awful­ly close to home. And it’s per­haps why it’s one of Dis­ney’s bet­ter wartime films. Spiegel Online has more on Dis­ney’s WW II pro­pa­gan­da films here, and you can find some of these films in the Relat­eds below. Also …

Humanists Making a Difference: Celebrant Jessica Dapson

Humanists Making a Difference: Celebrant Jessica Dapson

Published by skeptic

Humanists Making a Difference is our regular series highlighting humanist professionals and the communities they serve. Learn more about the work of celebrants, chaplains, invocators, and lay leaders–and find an endorsed humanist professional near you–at The Humanist Society. What motivated you to become a celebrant?  The idea was first proposed back in 2014 by a friend and colleague whom I met when I was serving on the board of the Central New York Humanist Association. Initially, the goal was to have me serve as a celebrant for non-religious and humanist couples seeking to wed in the Syracuse area, but I was also motivated to assist LGBTQ+ couples who wished to wed. New York legalized same-sex marriage in 2011 while it wasn’t legal in all 50 states until 2015. I come from a very long line of freethinkers, all of whom had engaged in challenging the notion that tradition is best and reform is the enemy. I proudly carry that torch and intend to pass it on to my children. Why did you seek endorsement with …

Three steps to making adolescence meaningful again

Three steps to making adolescence meaningful again

Published by skeptic

More from this theme Recent articles While my day job is as Edge’s executive director, I recently celebrated 10 wonderful years volunteering with the Scouts. With this combined experience, I’ve watched the national response to the Netflix series, Adolescence with some concern. The show has rightly dragged the issue of young people’s use of social media and its potentially devastating consequences into the public awareness. It has clearly resonated with a worry shared by many adults, namely that disengaged young people are retreating into online spaces with their own rules, hierarchies and behavioural codes.  Adolescence explores this to its most extreme and tragic conclusion. But a deeper question remains: Why are young people going online in the first place? Nowhere to go One obvious answer was explored in a review of the Netflix drama in Schools Week: the decline of guided spaces for young people to socialise. Youth organisations like the Scouts, cadet programmes, sports teams and mentoring initiatives provide essential support. Outside these spaces, many young people turn to social media for guidance. Worryingly, recent …

Humanists Making a Difference: Celebrant & Chaplain Elisa Rosoff

Humanists Making a Difference: Celebrant & Chaplain Elisa Rosoff

Published by skeptic

Elisa Rosoff Welcome to TheHumanist.com’s new regular series highlighting humanist professionals and the communities they serve. Learn more about the work of celebrants, chaplains, invocators, and lay leaders and find an endorsed humanist professional near you at The Humanist Society. What motivated you to become a celebrant? I am a clinical, professional chaplain endorsed by the Humanist Society with Board Certification through APC/BCCI, Inc. In this role, I am often a consultant for people planning to demarcate major life transitions. Naturally, I facilitate various programs and ceremonies, however a lot of the celebrant work I do as a prison chaplain happens behind-the-scenes assisting people with discernment about next steps in their lives. My goal, as a Humanist-endorsed Clinical Professional Chaplain and Celebrant in the prison and prison reentry sectors, is to raise awareness about the realities of incarceration in this country and the many barriers people face upon release as they reenter their communities. People transitioning from incarceration have paid their debt to society. They can become successful, productive citizens with compassionate, holistic support that …

The Wild Trump Theory Making the Rounds on Wall Street

The Wild Trump Theory Making the Rounds on Wall Street

Published by Sam

To the untrained eye, Donald Trump’s tariff policy over the past two months has looked like an incoherent, inconsistent, self-destructive mess. But have you considered the possibility that it is, in fact, the first step of a carefully orchestrated master plan to revive American manufacturing, reduce the national debt, reconfigure the international-alliance system, and deliver the greatest geopolitical deal of the century? That is the thrust of a new theory that has been gaining currency in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the financial press. The grand bargain that Trump is supposedly planning to strike has even been given a name: the Mar-a-Lago Accord. The outline of the theory was first articulated not in a MAGA subreddit, but in a November paper by Stephen Miran, an economist who now chairs Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Many of the theory’s basic tenets have also been endorsed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In its telling, Trump’s flurry of new trade barriers isn’t intended to achieve a particular strategic concession or short-term economic benefit. The goal is instead …

The Making of Emergencies | Caroline Elkins

The Making of Emergencies | Caroline Elkins

Published by skeptic

On October 28, 2024, in front of a packed crowd in Madison Square Garden, Donald Trump took aim at his “enemies from within.” Accusing Kamala Harris of having “violated her oath, eradicated our sovereign border, and unleashed an army of migrant gangs who are waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens,” he reiterated a central promise of his campaign: that on his first day in office he would vanquish some of those “enemies” by initiating “the largest deportation program in American history.” Less than two weeks after his victory, he confirmed how he planned to forcibly remove as many as 20 million people from the country. When a conservative commentator reported that the incoming administration planned to “declare a national emergency,” Trump gave an enthusiastic reply on his social media platform, Truth Social—“TRUE!!!” A poll conducted over the next several days suggested that many Americans supported him: 57 percent of respondents approved of “Trump starting [a] program to deport all immigrants in U.S. illegally.” Sixty-four percent supported using federal law enforcement agencies; …

Making Artifacts | Kaitlyn Greenidge, Merve Emre

Making Artifacts | Kaitlyn Greenidge, Merve Emre

Published by skeptic

Kaitlyn Greenidge has worked as a park ranger, a phone banker, and an app designer, all while writing the essays and reviews that launched her career. She maintains a refreshingly eclectic approach to her profession, freely and boldly cutting through categories—in discussing her work, it’s not quite right to separate the novelist from the critic from the editor. In an essay for The New York Times about the aesthetics and ethics of cultural appropriation, she draws on drafts of her first novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, and evaluates them with the disciplined passion of a critic.  As features director at Harper’s Bazaar, when she commissions an oral history about Black punk or a photo essay about protests held in defense of Black trans people, she edits with the fine-tuned ear of a novelist, placing different characters in conversation: protesters, performers, community organizers, models. Whether writing a profile of Solange Knowles or historical fiction about Susan Smith McKinney Steward—the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York state—she is alert to the nuances of region, race, …

How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

Published by José

We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of our age, espe­cial­ly since arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to be back on the slate of pos­si­bil­i­ties. While there would be no Sil­i­con Val­ley with­out sil­i­ca sand, semi­con­duc­tors are hard­ly the first mar­vel human­i­ty has forged out of that kind of mate­r­i­al. Con­sid­er the three mil­len­nia of his­to­ry behind the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, long known even out­side the Japan­ese lan­guage as the katana (lit­er­al­ly “one-sided blade”) — or, more to the point of the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, the 1,200 years in which such weapons have been made out of steel. How Japan­ese Mas­ters Turn Sand Into Swords In explain­ing the sci­ence of the katana, Ver­i­ta­si­um host Derek Muller begins more than two and a half bil­lion years ago, when Earth­’s oceans were “rich with dis­solved iron.” But then, cyanobac­te­ria start­ed pho­to­syn­the­siz­ing that iron and cre­at­ing oxy­gen as a by-prod­uct. This process dropped lay­ers of iron onto the sea floor, which even­tu­al­ly hard­ened into lay­ers of sed­i­men­ta­ry rock. With …

AI could help overcome the hurdles to making nuclear fusion a practical energy source

AI could help overcome the hurdles to making nuclear fusion a practical energy source

Published by skeptic

The pursuit of nuclear fusion as a clean, sustainable energy source represents one of the most challenging scientific and engineering goals of our time. Fusion promises nearly limitless energy without carbon emissions or long-living radioactive waste. However, achieving practical fusion energy requires overcoming significant challenges. These come from the heat generated by the fusion process, the radiation produced, the progressive damage to materials used in fusion devices and other engineering hurdles. Fusion systems operate under extreme physical conditions, generating data at scales that surpass the ability of humans to analyse. Nuclear fusion is the form of energy that powers the Sun. Existing nuclear energy relies on a process called fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Fusion works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one. While physicists are able to initiate and sustain fusion for variable periods of time, getting more energy out of the process than the energy supplied to power the fusion device has been a challenge. This has so far prevented the commercialisation of …

Bitwarden Is Making It Harder for Hackers to Access Your Passwords

Bitwarden Is Making It Harder for Hackers to Access Your Passwords

Published by skeptic

Password managers are a great way to store your login details, but if a hacker gets a hand on your master password, they’ll gain access to every account you’ve stored on them. Fortunately, Bitwarden is adding a feature that will make it much harder for hackers to access your vault, even if they know your password. Bitwarden Users Will Get Two-Factor Authentication Emails by Default Bitwarden As announced on the Bitwarden website, the password manager app has a new two-factor authentication (2FA) protection layer. Bitwarden users can always add their own 2FA methods via the settings for free, but this update specifically targets people who have yet to enable 2FA: Soon, after you enter your Bitwarden account email address and master password, if the device where you’re logging in is not recognized by the Bitwarden server and you do not have two-step login enabled nor are using enterprise SSO, Bitwarden will email a verification code to the email account on file. You will need to go to your email account to access the code and …