Universal Basic Income (UBI) sounds like a modern idea, but its roots go back centuries. Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, for instance, has everybody receiving a guaranteed income.
“Utopia” of course means “no place,” an idealized vision of human society. But when better to talk about utopian ideas than in dystopian times? And how pie-in-the-sky is it, really, when many countries already have basic income systems for some? Think child support payments for the parents of young children, think old-age pensions. These were once radical ideas, too. UBI would extend such payments as a right to all. The idea is to lift people out of poverty, meet their basic needs, and make the pursuit of happiness attainable.
Economists J. E. King and John Marangos use Belgian political philosopher-political economist Phillippe Van Parijs’s definition of Basic Income—also called Citizen’s Income, unconditional basic income, and UBI—positing it as “an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of a society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.”
King and Marangos write that the “case for Basic Income” really boomed during the eighteenth century. The French were all over it, both before the Revolution and during it. The authors focus on two English-language writers who made arguments for basic income in the tumultuous 1790s, when French radicalism fanned radicalism, as well as fierce reaction, across the English Channel.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) is the more famous of the two. To deal with the problem of poverty, the English-born American Founding Father argued initially in The Rights of Man (1791–1792) for payments to children up to the age fifteen and to those fifty and older. In his Agrarian Justice (1795) he moved on to a broader proposal. This pamphlet was written after Paine narrowly escaped execution during the Terror. On his mind too was the Bishop of Llandaff’s recent theological justification of poverty.
“All preaching that has not this for its object [doing good or making God’s creation happy] is nonsense and hypocrisy,” Paine wrote.
Paine proposed a lump sum payment of £15 (£2,306 in 2025) to everyone reaching the age of twenty-one and a £10 (£1,537 in 2025) annual pension for the blind and lame, as well as for those fifty and older. Paine was “keen to stress the moderate nature of his proposal,” write King and Marangos. It would have been “fully costed” (a modern phrase he used) and financed by death duties. “The plan here proposed will benefit all, without injuring any,” Paine argued.
A wealthy country like the United States needs a solution for improving the supply and fairness of work overall. Is universal basic income the way to go?
Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was imprisoned for selling Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1792,found Paine’s second basic income plan too conservative. Spence was a radical land reformer, believing land should be communally owned (locally, not by the state). From the “hive of liberty” at No. 8 Little-Turnstile, High Holborn, London, Spence turned out a penny weekly called Pig’s Meat; or lessons for the swinish multitude. The title and subtitle were “in sardonic allusion” to Edmund Burke’s labeling of common folk as the “swinish multitude.”
Spence wrote The Rights of Infants (1797) before he read Agrarian Justice. Upon reading what he called Paine’s “contemptible and insulting proposal,” he added a preface, conclusion, and appendix to his own work to make his argument for a form of basic income in opposition to Paine’s. Spence argued that since “Land is the common Property of Mankind” rents for land should be paid to the community, not aristocrats or other (tellingly named) landlords.
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This should provide a surplus for payments, he wrote, “fairly and equally among all the living souls in the parish, whether male or female; married or single; legitimate or illegitimate; from a day old to the extremest age.”
With revenues “derived immediately from their common property,” and spread to all, Spence believed that “government must of necessity be democratic.” Aristocracy, the rule of elites relevant in his day—when less than five percent of the population could vote for Members of Parliament—was obviously antithetical to democracy.
Arguments for UBI today are obviously more in keeping with our times than with the late eighteenth century, but it’s always good to check in with the roots.
Following the Long Depression from 1873 to 1879, Wasilewski writes, new technologies and developments spurred export-driven growth in the US economy. But company owners kept the resulting gains for themselves, leading to strikes and labor unrest demanding better pay and shorter hours. Many workers viewed immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as part of the problem, since employers often used them as strikebreakers, relying on their desperation and the difficulty of uniting workers across lines of language and culture.
At the same time, some European immigrants were active labor organizers. It was members of this group who were targeted in the 1886 Haymarket Affair. Following a deadly bombing during protests for the eight-hour day, immigrant union leaders and radical journalists were blamed, with little evidence, and four were executed.
Newspapers suggested that they were secretly working with the German government toward “the destruction of the American trade union movement.” This conveniently positioned foreigners and their ideology as the enemy of both American capital and American labor.
Following the trial, Wasilewski writes, this framework spread to media discussions of immigration generally. Most newspapers positioned themselves as allies of working Americans. But some argued that workers should advance their own interests through explicitly American organizations like the Knights of Labor, while still others suggested that the system would naturally work for them as long as they worked hard and conducted themselves in correct, patriotic fashion.
The stock figure of the “anarchist” is a bomb-thrower or assassin, but political scientist Kathy E. Ferguson argues it should be a printer.
In practice, the media often treated any labor activism, and any criticism of business elites, as the result of scheming or ignorant foreign actors.
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At The Washington Post—a paper that had previously pushed for the expulsion of Asian immigrants—one columnist wrote that anarchism wouldn’t attract US workers because “the native American is without a doubt the most perfect existing form of humanity.” The Post, along with The New York Times and other papers, supported raising a special tax on immigrants to “get rid of the anarchist element.”
During the 1887 congressional election, Wasilewski writes, Republican candidates and parties called for banning and deporting immigrants who were politically or otherwise objectionable. Future president William McKinley proposed allowing “well-oriented and entrepreneurial immigrants” while addressing immigration that threatened the nation’s “peace and order” or the “integrity and character of its citizens.”
While no anti-immigrant legislation passed immediately, the issue festered until the passage of a new law in 1903 aimed at “the uncertain element,” including anarchists.
I started watching a lot more Power Rangers again when I started my not-new-anymore-new job because I needed something easy to watch, something I didn't need to think about, something I could fall asleep in front of. I also started watching a lot more of it because I realised that I had to work every time I watched a magical girl now because of these entries that no one has asked me to write and, above all things, I just want an easy life.
According to CIA veterans, the most loathed Director of Central Intelligence was James R. Schlesinger. Schlesinger was head of the CIA for President Richard Nixon for 150 days in 1973, one the shortest directorships in the Agency’s history. It was also likely the most combative, with some staffers going so far to call Schlesinger’s leadership a “reign of terror”—an interesting turn of phrase for people involved in establishing actual reigns of terror around the world.
By accounts, Schlesinger was “abrasive.” His Harvard classmate and fellow Nixon administration member Henry Kissinger, no shrinking violent himself, “conceded him pride of place in arrogance.” Made assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget by Nixon in 1969, Schlesinger quickly built a reputation for slashing budgets and not caring what people thought about it. Or him.
“An avid birdwatcher, he kept binoculars by his office window so that he could spy on the car park and reprimand staff who arrive late for work,” Moran writes.
But it wasn’t just Schlesinger’s personality and budget-cutting that alienated CIA staffers and threw the Agency into turmoil.
Schlesinger had outright disdain for the CIA’s can-do cowboy culture. He thought the future was in SIGINT (signals intelligence), not human intelligence (HUMINT). The era of “Wild Bill” Donovan, first head of the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was over—along with nutty schemes like trying to make Castro’s beard fall out.
Then there was Schlesinger’s order for a list of all activities, past or present, that “might be interpreted as being outside the CIA’s legislative charter.” This was because the break-in at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex in June 1972 had CIA fingerprints all over it: two of the burglar/wiretappers were CIA veterans, a couple others had been anti-Castro Cuban CIA assets.
The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.
The resulting report, nearly 700 pages in length, came be called the “Family Jewels.” The revelations included instances of the CIA’s violating its charter with assassinations, coups, dirty tricks, human drug experimentation, and domestic spying, especially on opponents of Nixon’s war in Southeast Asia. The report had long-term implications for the agency’s reputation, its oversight, and debates over the place of secret services in democracies. It would be leaked to Seymour Hersh in 1974; by then, the man who had pulled the report together for Schlesinger, William Colby, was DCI, but Schlesinger was blamed for dredging it all up in the first place. (The report wouldn’t be officially released until 2007.)
If Schlesinger had stopped here, he might be considered a great CIA director by those outside the agency. But Schlesinger was also “Nixon’s axe man,” and as such, he worked hard to make the CIA a tool of the administration.
Nixon held a personal grudge against the CIA. Moran describes it as a “pathological hatred.” The East Coast prep school/Ivy-League country club types who dominated the early CIA were, Nixon believed, “Langley liberals.” He blamed them for tipping the closely-run 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy.
In theory, intelligence shouldn’t be political, but intelligence officials have to answer to politicians, not least as their budget-masters. This has resulted in some messy relationships. Scandals about cooking the evidence for political agendas have battered intelligence agencies here and abroad.
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And when a president acts above the law? An intelligence service can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of someone like Nixon, whom Moran describes as “mean-spirited, sore loser, bad temper, vindictive.” In the hands of an avowed autocrat, of course, it’s an even greater threat to democracy.
When DCI Richard Helms wouldn’t comply with Nixon’s demand that the CIA stop the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, Nixon pushed him out and replaced him with Schlesinger.
“I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon,” Schlesinger declared on his first day at Langley. Seven percent of the workforce was immediately fired or forced into early retirement. Moran notes that the purge may have “accelerated Nixon’s resignation by encouraging angry employees to leak” details of the Watergate cover-up. Blow-back can come in many forms.
Between 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 killed an estimated 18 million people around the world and sickened many more. Beyond the sheer loss of life and health, it transformed people’s experiences of the world in less obvious ways. In a 2021 article written in the midst of the chaos of the pandemic, philosopher Marcelo Vieira Lopes argues that one way to discuss these changes is as loss of trust.
For Lopes, trust isn’t a matter of believing intellectually in the honesty or goodwill of another individual or institution. Instead, he describes it as a “peculiar type of background existential feeling” that structures our thoughts and actions even if we rarely think about it.
Some researchers argue that this background sense of trust is developed in childhood as a person interacts with caretakers. An individual’s bodily, non-conceptual feeling of trust underlies more specific intentional forms of trust such as a belief in one’s own abilities or a faith that someone else will do as they say.
“Trust thus emerges as a general sense of confidence that enables our being at home in the world,” Lopes writes.
Trust is such a baseline part of our existence that it’s most obvious when it’s lost. And Lopes argues that that’s just what happened when COVID struck. People lost the ability to casually interact with others without considering the risk of infection and adopted new daily rituals such as masking and social distancing. Many experienced doubts about everyday experiences, wondering if they had washed their hands well enough or if a slight soreness in their throat was a sign of a potentially life-threatening illness. All this manifested as an uncanny feeling caused by missing the trust in daily life of which we were never consciously aware.
Government distrust has been on the decline for decades, but a recent poll shows a slight increase.
Importantly, these changes affected whole communities at once. To understand the significance of this fact, Lopes draws on extended mind theory, and, specifically, the idea that our background emotions depend on proximity to other people and a sense that we share the same feelings.
“I somehow feel that my fellow human beings are also feeling suspicious, or have lost some level of global trust, because of the spread of the virus,” he writes.
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At the same time, the modes in which people encounter each other and share their feelings changed as social distancing encouraged the increasing adoption of internet-based communication. In general, the internet makes other people’s emotions more consistently and visibly present in our lives. Reading and watching news about infections, social media posts on failed public health responses, and conspiracy theories reinforced the felt sense of widespread social distrust.
Combined with a lack of in-person social supports, widespread unemployment, collective mourning, and other disruptions to people’s mental health, these changes to our baseline feeling of trust disrupted our mental and emotional lives. Lopes ends his paper by suggesting that the task going forward is to “rebuild measures that foster trust, and, as a result, hope.”
The War of the Rohirrim and The Rings of Power are both nominated in one of the most prestigious music awards competitions.
According to Variety, which has the entire nominees list, two The Lord of the Rings projects are individually nominated in their respective categories. Bear McCreary (Instagram) is nominated for Season 2 of The Rings of Power, and Stephen Gallagher (Instagram) is nominated for The War of the Rohirrim. This marks the first time in history that Tolkien adaptations in both TV and Film are recognized for excellence at the same time.
World Soundtrack Nominees
Here are the categories LOTR is competitive in for 2025 World Soundtrack Awards.
Television Composer of the Year
Volker Bertelmann – “The Day of the Jackal”; “Dune: Prophecy”; “The Count of Monte Cristo”
David Fleming, Gustavo Santaolalla – “The Last of Us” (Season 2)
Ariel Marx – “Dying for Sex”
Bear McCreary – “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Season 2)
Martin Phipps – “Black Doves”
Theodore Shapiro – “Severance” (Season 2)
Public Choice Award
“Buio come il cuore” (Dark Is the Heart) – David Cerquetti
“Hola Frida” – Laetitia Pansanel-Garric
“Ni chaînes ni maîtres” – Amine Bouhafa
“Reagan” – John Coda
“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” – Stephen Gallagher
Want to talk more about music from The Lord of the Rings? Join the Discord where members alerted us to this news first!
Police misconduct obviously undermines the public’s belief in the legitimacy of the police as well as trust in the criminal justice system. But it can do more than that.
since direct police abuse shatters any sense of fairness, outrage at police misconduct—whether perceived or experienced—may be more significant in reducing citizens’ loyalty towards the overall regime than failures in tackling crime.
The core of the classic model of the state is a monopoly on the use of force. The unwritten agreement between state and citizen is that the state will use a measure of force for the protection of the citizen, for the benefit of society. This gives the state a supposedly legitimate use of violence. But there’s a fine line, a razor’s edge, to the relationship. History, race, class, and definitions of citizenship all play their roles in complicating the relationship. Abuse of the monopoly, as with any monopoly, works to undermine its legitimacy—and the core of the state’s legitimacy.
“The police play a fundamental role in any political regime,” Cruz writes. Whatever the form of government
[w]hether an authoritarian regime or a liberal democracy, police actions are intertwined with regime performance as they showcase the state’s response to day-to-day issues. […] Citizens’ perceptions of the police, therefore, can be an essential component of regime legitimacy, sometimes contributing as much or more than other political institutions.
Cruz defines police misconduct as all types of “illegal police behavior.” Examples include bribery, drug-trafficking, working with organized crime, brutality, and extra-judicial killings. In Central American countries with authoritarian histories, examples “of misconduct do not appear to be isolated cases of individual deviance, but systematic forms of abuse perpetuated by entire units and organizations.” The onset of democratic rule did “little to transform these relations of domination of the streets,” meaning the “pervasiveness of police corruption under the era of authoritarian regimes continued during post-transition regimes.”
This is a critical problem. As examples of police misconduct, Cruz cites the suspension of all the officers of Honduras’s national investigation unit in 2013 for corruption. Other examples include the Guatemalan and Nicaraguan police chiefs charged with links to organized crime. The first woman to lead a Guatemalan law enforcement institution was arrested in 2009 for her involvement in extra-judicial assassinations.
In states transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy, resistance to police abuses can make or break the larger democratic project, explains one social scientist.
In 2008, 65.9 percent of survey respondents in Guatemala, 48.8 percent in El Salvador, and 47.2 percent in Honduras said that they believed the police in their countries were involved in criminal activities.
“The urgent need to tackle rising levels of crime and to placate public outcry over insecurity have not helped to strengthen police institutions in Central America,” writes Cruz. This is because “tough-on-crime” stances seem to “strengthen corrupt and abusive elements within the police.”
Meanwhile, “police adherence to the rule of law creates confidence towards the regime and enhanced people’s allegiance to the democratic political order.”
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“The less the police employ public use of force, the less likely it is that government will find itself justifying some abuses,” writes Cruz. “Hence, gross police misconduct may have a direct influence on political stability not only because if affects public safety and order, but because it showcases the regime’s willingness to abuse its power.”
Ultimately, “police wrongdoings can effectively subvert the prospects of democratic governance and affect the cultural reserves of political stability,” concludes Cruz. “A law-abiding police force is a not a sufficient condition for political stability or for democratic governance, but a corrupt police force may be a significant deterrent to democratic consolidation.”
Black holes are massive, strange and incredibly powerful astronomical objects. Scientists know that supermassive black holes reside in the centers of most galaxies.
And they understand how certain stars form the comparatively smaller stellar mass black holes once they reach the end of their life. Understanding how the smaller stellar mass black holes could form the supermassive black holes helps astronomers learn about how the universe grows and evolves.
But there’s an open question in black hole research: What about black holes with masses in between? These are much harder to find than their stellar and supermassive peers, in size range of a few hundred to a few hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun.
We’re a teamof astronomerswho are searching for these in-between black holes, called intermediate black holes. In a new paper, two of us (Krystal and Karan) teamed up with a group of researchers, including postdoctoral researcher Anjali Yelikar, to look at ripples in space-time to spot a few of these elusive black holes merging.
Take Me Out to the (Gravitational Wave) Ball Game
To gain an intuitive idea of how scientists detect stellar mass black holes, imagine you are at a baseball game where you’re sitting directly behind a big concrete column and can’t see the diamond. Even worse, the crowd is deafeningly loud, so it is also nearly impossible to see or hear the game.
But you’re a scientist, so you take out a high-quality microphone and your computer and write a computer algorithm that can take audio data and separate the crowd’s noise from the “thunk” of a bat hitting a ball.
You start recording, and, with enough practice and updates to your hardware and software, you can begin following the game, getting a sense of when a ball is hit, what direction it goes, when it hits a glove, where runners’ feet pound into the dirt and more.
This principle of recording sound and using computer algorithms to isolate certain sound waves to determine what they are and where they are coming from is similar to how astronomers like us study gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that allow us to observe objects such as black holes.
Now imagine implementing a different sound algorithm, testing it over several innings of the game and finding a particular hit that no legal combination of bats and balls could have produced. Imagine the data was suggesting that the ball was bigger and heavier than a legal baseball could be. If our paper was about a baseball game instead of gravitational waves, that’s what we would have found.
In each event, two “parent” black holes merge into a single, more massive black hole. Using LIGO data, scientists can figure out where and how far away the merger happened, how massive the parents and resultant black holes are, which direction in the sky the merger happened and other key details.
Most of the parent black holes in merger events originally form from stars that have reached the end of their lives—these are stellar mass black holes.
The Black Hole Mass Gap
Not every dying star can create a stellar mass black hole. The ones that do are usually between about twenty to 100 times the mass of the Sun. But due to complicated nuclear physics, really massive stars explode differently and don’t leave behind any remnant, black hole or otherwise.
These physics create what we refer to as the “mass gap” in black holes. A smaller black hole likely formed from a dying star. But we know that a black hole more massive than about sixty times the size of the Sun, while not a supermassive black hole, is still too big to have formed directly from a dying star.
The exact cutoff for the mass gap is still somewhat uncertain, and many astrophysicists are working on more precise measurements. However, we are confident that the mass gaps exist and that we are in the ballpark of the boundary.
We call black holes in this gap lite intermediate mass black holes or lite IMBHs, because they are the least massive black holes that we expect to exist from sources other than stars. They are no longer considered stellar mass black holes.
Calling them “intermediate” also doesn’t quite capture why they are special. They are special because they are much harder to find, astronomers still aren’t sure what astronomical events might create them, and they fill a gap in astronomers’ knowledge of how the universe grows and evolves.
Evidence for IMBHs
In our research, we analyzed eleven black hole merger candidates from LIGO’s third observing run. These candidates were possibly gravitational wave signals that looked promising but still needed more analysis to conclusively confirm.
The data suggested that for those eleven we analyzed, their final post-merger black hole may have been in the lite IMBH range. We found five post-merger black holes that our analysis was 90 percent confident were lite IMBHs.
Even more critically, we found that one of the events had a parent black hole that was in the mass gap range, and two had parent black holes above the mass gap range. Since we know these black holes can’t come from stars directly, this finding suggests that the universe has some other way of creating black holes this massive.
A parent black hole this massive may already be the product of two other black holes that merged in the past, so observing more IMBHs can help us understand how often black holes are able to “find” each other and merge out in the universe.
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LIGO is in the end stages of its fourth observing run. Since this work used data from the third observing run, we are excited to apply our analysis to this new dataset. We expect to continue to search for lite IMBHs, and with this new data we will improve our understanding of how to more confidently “hear” these signals from more massive black holes above all the noise.
We hope this work not only strengthens the case for lite IMBHs in general but helps shed more light on how they are formed.
Title: Growing Down Universe:Yuugen Jikkou Sisters Shushutorian Prompt:Power Rangers Ninja Steel: S24E03 - Live and Learn Character(s): Yamabuki Yukiko, Yamambuki Tsukiko, Yamabuki Hanako, OC Rating: U Warnings: N/A Summary: At first, she did not recognise the three girls standing at her door in the hallway. She thought there was something familiar about them, something she recognised in others, in members of her family even, but she did not know them for who they were. Three girls, descending in age: 16, 14, 12. Slowly, realisation dawned. She lifted a hand to cover her mouth. Length: 784 words Author's Notes: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TANAKA NORIKO!! 🎉💖🍰🎊🎂 also: external link.
Standing in a picturesque dip in the landscape beside Hadrian’s Wall, the 150-year-old Sycamore Gap tree was among the most beloved in England. Considered an iconic national landmark and frequently photographed, it co-starred with Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, appeared in a Bryan Adams music video promoting the film, and won Tree of the Year in 2016. Not a bad resumé for a tree. Tragically, however, it was illegally felled in September 2023, an act that sparked widespread outrage across the world.
The culprits were found guilty of criminal damage in May 2025; in July, a judge sentenced them each to more than four years in prison, noting that the two men were responsible for “a sense of loss and confusion across the world.” One of the defendants expressed disbelief at the public outcry. “It was just a tree,” he said. “[I]t was almost as if someone had been murdered.” Yet, the outcry wasn’t merely grief for a squandered natural wonder but a reflection of the deep-rooted symbolic power trees hold in our cultural memory.
For millennia, trees have stood as emblems of the profound interconnectedness of all living things, central to the universe’s structural integrity and humanity’s moral compass. A recurring archetype across world mythologies is the Tree of Life (alternately described as a world tree or cosmic tree), described by biologist J. Andrew McDonald as representing “the metaphysical principles of cosmogenesis, natural creation, eternal recurrence, and/or human hopes for everlasting life in the hereafter.” Such trees are spiritual barometers, their fate intertwined with the morality of the worlds to which they connect. In Norse mythology, the ash tree known as Yggdrasill binds together all nine worlds, from the underworld of Niflheim to the realm of the gods, Asgard. Its appearance and condition reflects the actions of the worlds’ inhabitants. As described in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse narrative poems, during times of peace and divine harmony, the tree is “ever green,” but in times of disorder, it “suffers anguish more than mortal has ever known.” Its roots are gnawed at endlessly by the dragon Níðhöggr, who is said in some interpretations of the poem Völuspá to burst free during Ragnarök, the end of the world, carrying the bodies of men on his wings.
Similarly, in Greek mythology, the tale of King Erysichthon asserts that the felling of a tree is an indicator of moral failure, which invites divine retribution. In Ovid’s version of the story, after cutting down a sacred oak, Erysichthon is cursed with insatiable hunger by the dryad nymph who inhabited it. Still unable to satiate his appetite after selling his daughter into slavery for food, he eats himself to death.
This deep connection between trees and morality is further evidenced in a trope of Western literature in which humans are transformed into trees, sometimes as an embodiment of sin. Philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir observes these metamorphoses as denoting “morally relevant transformations in a person’s relation to inhabited space.” One such example can be found in the Latin mythological text Fabulae, in which the sisters of Phaethon are transformed into poplar trees as punishment for yoking his chariot without their father’s permission. In other versions, this transformation is framed as a result of their intense grief consuming their bodies. The motif of losing one’s human body and becoming a vegetative entity, Zamir argues, is a moral contribution; as one’s inner self “erupts onto the surface, controls one’s body, and is transformed into an ungovernable entity,” we’re prompted to empathetically connect with another’s experience, as it prompts us to “deepen and redefine what acknowledging others might mean.”
In the modern city of Tokyo, mature forests and trees form a spiritual bridge between past and present.
Trees constituting the moral fabric of humanity recur in modern mythopoeia, particularly in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Drawing inspiration from Norse and other mythologies, the trees of Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings series are sacred beings, whose treatment stands as a moral litmus test. Mistreat a tree, and you’ll find yourself among the bad guys of Tolkien’s universe. Mordor, the realm of the dark lord Sauron, is depicted as a barren wasteland devoid of vegetation, as is Isengard, where armies of orcs felled trees and transformed the land into a hellscape of industrial horrors. Meanwhile, the virtuous, near-immortal elves of Lothlórien are depicted living peacefully in a realm of lush flora and elaborate tree-houses.
Writer Claudia Riiff Finseth credits Tolkien’s Catholic upbringing and interest in Anglo-Saxon literature to his appreciation of the tree’s rich symbolism. Some Christian legends, Finseth observes, refer to the “Quaking Aspen,” a tree that trembled upon realizing that it would be carved into the cross upon which Christ was destined to be crucified. The cross, a symbol that wards off evil, is mirrored in Tolkien’s use of the mallorn, described as a cross-shaped tree, as a place of refuge and protection. Recalling the English folk motif of the tree as possessing healing powers, a clump of soil dug up from an orchard in Lothlórien is used to replenish the scoured Shire. The deep, booming voice of Treebeard, the tree-giant of Fangorn who leads a rebellion of trees to flood Isengard, was said to be inspired by that of C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend and literary rival.
Lewis’s own fantasy epic, The Chronicles of Narnia, aligns with Tolkien’s tree-loving sentiments. In the final novel of the series, The Last Battle, the destruction of trees and dryads in Lantern Waste, a place tied to the creation of Narnia itself, is one of many portentous omens signalling the end of the world. By locating this cruel act at the site of Narnia’s origin, Lewis recalls the core principle of the cosmic tree, as tied to the birth and death of the world and contingent upon the moral actions of its inhabitants.
Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall, 2022. Getty
We can understand the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree through this complex lens of mythological, literary, and religious resonance. It was an act of vandalism not just toward the tree itself, but toward the cultural heritage and folkloric narratives it carried. As Robert Bringhurst writes, “stories are epiphytes: organisms that grow on other organisms, in much the same way staghorn ferns and tree-dwelling lichens…grow on trees.” To destroy a revered tree is to metaphorically sever a limb from the body of our cultural memory. As such, it has been the case throughout history that public outrage regarding the destruction of an important tree is underscored by a recapitulation of its folkloric and symbolic meaning.
This concept of resistance was adopted during the French Revolution, where trees of liberty, or arbres de la liberté, were planted to show solidarity with the movement. To embolden a revolution through its connection to growing, living trees suggested that liberty itself was a vital force, strengthened at its roots by the shared ideals of community. Like its Bostonian predecessor, however, the arbres de la liberté were soon considered a threat and subsequently felled. An 1850 engraving shows the dismantling of a liberty tree, just two years before the establishment of the Second French Empire under Napoleon III. This clearing away of the symbolic backbone of revolutionary virtues marked a return to authoritarian rule.
In other cases, tree-fellings have conjured up folkloric history to fuel conservationist movements. In 1853, a giant sequoia in California’s Sierra Nevada, dubbed the “Mother of the Forest,” was brought down, its bark torn and sent away to be exhibited. The resulting anger directed at lumber companies sparked the beginnings of the conservation movement, paving the way for the founding of Yellowstone, the first national park. Its name is key here: It evokes the typical empathetic personification of Mother Nature, but it also predates what would later become a core principle in the tree conservation movement, the idea of networked “mother trees,” popularized by the research of forestry scientist Suzanne Simard. Vital to the ecosystems of forests, mother trees nurture the development of seedlings via fungal networks.
When a mother tree is felled, the survival rate of many of its seedlings may be drastically reduced, a process not unlike the reciprocal feedback loop of Yggdrasill, whose deterioration in response to discord in the nine realms spells cosmic collapse. During the 1970s, rural villagers in India, particularly women, responded to the invasion of loggers by embracing trees under threat, in what became known as the Chipko movement. Some activists read from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text which describes the roots of the Ashvattha, a sacred tree, as bound to human actions and karma. In 1973, the Tree of Ténéré, a 300-year-old acacia in the Sahara Desert, was mourned following its destruction by a truck driver, alleged to have been drunk. Considered one of the most isolated trees on the planet, miraculously flourishing in a hostile landscape, it was described by Commander of the Allied Military Mission Michel Lesourd as possessing “a kind of superstition, a tribal order which is always respected.” For generations, the tree had become familiar to passing travellers and caravans, fostering a sense of shared perspective and community. Its uprooting marked not only the loss of a helpful landmark but the loss of an emotional touchstone in an otherwise uninhabitable landscape. So devastated were the locals that the tree’s remains lie in the Niger National Museum, and a commemorative metal sculpture stands in its place. Its legacy still endures today, notably through a sculptural exhibit at the 2017 Burning Man festival, described by its designers as honouring the tree’s “ceremonial function to bring people together for ritual and rest.”
These events reveal a recurring truth: trees are never “just trees.” They’re living monuments to morality, resilience, and connection, whose destruction marks a betrayal of those treasured virtues. The grief felt over the Sycamore Gap tree wasn’t disproportionate; it was a deeply human reaction rooted in thousands of years of cultural and folkloric significance. The sycamore species itself carries symbolic weight in world mythologies, linked to Hera, queen of the Greek gods; the World Tree in Celtic tradition; and Hathor, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of love and beauty. In Christian lore, the sycamore also symbolizes repentance, humility, and forgiveness of one’s sins, evoked by the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus, who climbed one to see Jesus. Fittingly, the remaining stump of the Sycamore Gap tree has begun to sprout seedlings, perhaps a quiet echo of the spirit of redemption. Yet, as the estate manager of the Woodland Trust, Mark Feather, states, it will take anywhere from 150 to 200 years for it to come “anywhere close to what we have lost.” With this, a question emerges: will our moral obligation to trees endure 200 years from now, or will we, like Níðhöggr, continue to gnaw at the roots until it’s too late?
If you’ve ever worked as a freelance creator, you might understand the importance of constructing your material to meet your client’s tastes. It was no different in the early seventeenth century.
In 1601, James VI of Scotland traveled to England to claim the throne as James I of England, following the childless Elizabeth I’s death. James brought with him a wife, three children, a court of Scots, and a lot of eccentricities. One of those eccentricities was James’s obsessive fixation on witches. Star playwright William Shakespeare saw a golden opportunity to get into the king’s good graces and wrote a play with witches as a main plot driver.
The dark, starkly political story of the tragedy Macbethwouldn’t go anywhere without the three spooky witches, as Shakespeare scholar George Walton Williams outlines. The witches predict Macbeth’s ascension to the Scottish throne and launch him on a campaign of treachery and bloodshed, though they don’t help him perform his evil deeds. This was Shakespeare’s unique take on witches, who were usually cast in literature as more active villains. From Shakespeare’s perspective, an individual’s own decisions determine their destiny, not necessarily the interference of black magic.
Williams draws on the research of other drama critics to expand on this, proposing that
we must listen to the prophecy: the witches prophesied that Macbeth should be king hereafter. There is nothing here that indicates, as the late Professor Harbage has well said, that in order to be king hereafter Macbeth must be murderer first.
Shakespeare presented Macbeth to a superstitious king who feared magic and tended to blame witches for many of the ills that fell upon both his home and adopted country. Macbeth, also an unstable Scottish king, blames the witches for the ills caused by his own murderous decisions. According to historian Howell V. Calhoun,James I spent his own literary career defaming witches and accusing them of supposed crimes.
In the 16th-18th centuries, vessels filled with nails, thorns, hair, and other materials, were used as a form of ritual protection against witches.
“James had firsthand experience with the malign activity of witches, and he left a careful record of it in his pamphlet Newes From Scotland declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian, a notable Sorcerer, which appeared in 1591,” Calhoun documents. “The whole affair hinged about the evil activities of Dr. Fian (alias John Cunningham), Agnis Sampson, and the North Berwick witches, in their attempt to destroy the ship on which James was returning from Denmark with his bride [Anne of Denmark].” James’s collection of “evidence” led to the violent persecution of accused party.
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And then there was James I’s three-book treatise Daemonologie, his magnum opus. As Calhoun summarizes, the first part
takes up the subject of magic and necromancy, the second treats of witchcraft and sorcery, and the third discourses of all kinds of spirits and specters. The king’s intention in this work was to prove two things, “the one, that such diuelish artes haue bene and are,” and the other, “what exact trial and seuere punishment they merite.”
Though Shakespeare certainly appealed to James’s interests with the Scottish play, the two men held divergent views on what witches did and not do. If James I of England had written Macbeth, the three witches would have met a rather grisly end. Shakespeare, however, leaves their fates unknown.
In her last promotional picture in 2017, Oshima Ryoka looks a lot like Watanabe Mayu. Not, I think, that they are similar in appearance, but around this time, wardrobe and makeup were eager to smooth out all members into this sort of comparative Sakamachi series appearance, a hope that they might reverse engineer some of the increasing popularity of Sony's rival group. Rest assured, she really doesn't really look like that in her brief appearance in 2014's Sailor Zombie drama.
Ryo-chan passed the auditions for AKB on the cusp of the group's big change and at the peak of their popularity. For a year, she numbered amongst the kenkyuusei, and then, in the big shuffle at Tokyo Dome in 2012 that comes up so much in these entries, as Maeda Atsuko bowed out from Team A, Ryo-chan joined their ranks, the team now under the captainship of Shinoda Mariko.
For a year, she remained with them, appearing in a campaign for JR East's Yokohama Line as part of the promotional unit, Team Kanagawa, alongside Okada Nana and Kawaei Rina, before eventually being transferred to Kuramochi Asuka's Team B at the next big shake-up at Zepp DiverCity in 2014. Later that year, Ryo-chan appeared in the senbatsu for the first time, standing alongside formerly graduated members, again with Kawaei Rina, for Kibouteki Refrain, which is a moment I've been thinking about a lot since oh my pumpkin! released.
By 2015, Ryo-chan had her first solo concert under her belt and had been appointed as co-captain of Team B, taking over from Oya Shizuka, and was one of the members to appear in Central Park in New York before 5,000 people as part of AKB's return to the city for the Japan Day celebrations. I can't imagine what it must have been like to stand on that stage; I can't even imagine what it must have been like to be in that crowd! Later in the year, she appeared one last time with Kawaei for the last single before the other girl graduated, the slightly overwrought Bokutachi wa Tatakawanai, the MV for which feels like Heisei era Kamen Rider and also marks the last appearance with AKB of Matsui Rena and Ikoma Rina. An interesting aside, but apparently Iriyama Anna was offered a role in the senbatsu for this single but she refused, possibly fearful of what attention it might bring after the attack on her and Kawaei in 2014. By this point, AKB was so big that the senbatsu for singles was functionally meaningless, an extra layer now added to the dynamic, the "media senbatsu", meaning that you could be in the line-up for the single and still not get the increased attention when it came to promoting it. Such was the case with Ryo-chan alas.
2016 was a quiet year, with Ryo-chan averaging an appearance in the senbatsu once a year. Tsubasa wa Iranai is very much indictive of the AKB of that era, Mukaichi Mion in centre position, Iriyama Anna returning once more to stand alongside Okada Nana and Kato Rena, AKS's first misguided push of NGT members. It feels a sad note to end mention of Ryo-chan's activities.
Growing up alongside Aigasa Moe, pretending to be AKB members in middle school before both girls made became part of the thirteenth generation, Ryo-chan and her peers made AKB what it was in that moment. We kind of gloss over these years now, thinking of the era of the Kami 7, and then the explosion of Team 8, and eventually, where we are now, the Oguri Yui era, but in writing these entries, I hope I can preserve a little of the AKB we too readily forget.
The Legend of Strongheart (Smithsonian Magazine)
by Eliza McGraw
Long before Lassie or Benji, Strongheart the German shepherd was a star of the silent screen—at a time when stardom as we know it was just beginning. His fame continued after his death as he became an icon of Spiritualism.
What Micrometeorites Can Teach Us (Eos)
by Katherine Kornei
Tiny bits of rock are falling from space onto Earth all the time. Looking at some of the ones that fell millions of years ago can provide clues to what life on our planet was like back then.
How Green Will China Get? (Yale Environment 360)
by Jeremy Deaton
In recent years, China has fought electricity shortages by rapidly bringing both coal plants and renewable power sources online. Now it’s reaching a decision point about which strategy to pursue.
Thinking about Consciousness in the Telegraph Era (Big Think)
by Thomas Moynihan
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophers questioned whether machines could think, whether greater-than-human consciousnesses had arisen on other planets, and if it might be possible for the entire cosmos to develop into a much greater kind of self-aware being.
Is There a Future for Sacred Spaces? (Noema Magazine)
by John Last
Religious architecture, from Paleolithic caves to Orthodox churches, is designed to instill a sense of awe and even prompt spiritual visions. In a modern world of big-box churches and digital gathering places, what can sacred places look like?
Got a hot tip about a well-researched story that belongs on this list? Email us here.
Among other many cultural impacts, the musical Hamilton, which officially debuted on Broadway a decade ago, gave us the often-repeated phrase “immigrants, they get the job done.” The show made Alexander Hamilton an avatar for generations of people from around the world “comin’ up from the bottom” who contributed to making the United States a better nation. But, as historian Phillip W. Magness writes, the real story of Hamilton’s relationship with foreignness is considerably more complicated.
First of all, Magness writes, Hamilton wasn’t technically an immigrant at all. Born inside the British Empire on the Caribbean island of Nevis, his journey to the British colony of New York made him an internal migrant within the empire.
At one point in his political career, Hamilton did support liberal immigration policies. As Secretary of the Treasury in 1791, he proposed actively recruiting artists and manufacturers and generally trying to increase the country’s population through immigration.
But, over time, his Federalist Party took an increasingly xenophobic stance. They lashed out at Jeffersonians who supported the French Revolution and alleged that foreign-born people represented a security threat. In 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which—in addition to allowing the censorship of critics of the John Adams administration—curtailed the rights of immigrants. It increased the waiting time for new US residents to become citizens to fourteen years and allowed for the imprisonment or deportation of noncitizens from a country at war with the US—or those deemed “hostile” to the nation.
The biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow that formed the source material for the musical suggests that Hamilton was a reluctant supporter of the Alien and Sedition Acts. However, Magness argues that Hamilton pushed for the anti-immigrant measures and, after they were passed, complained that not enough deportations were taking place. In one letter, Hamilton wrote of his desire to see two foreign-born anti-Federalist newspaper editors expelled from the country. (One was the Scotsman James T. Calendar, who had publicized Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds.)
The handsome Founding Father has always had a robust fandom—even before the ten-dollar bill, or a certain musical.
Hamilton also lashed out at political enemies who were foreign-born, suggesting that they lacked loyalty to their adopted country. Some of them pointed to the hypocrisy here, given his own origins.
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In the first years of the 1800s, Hamilton argued for the maintenance of limits to immigration, claiming that, while immigration had benefited the nation in earlier decades, there were now enough Americans. In an 1801 pseudonymous newspaper editorial, he argued that the “experience of all ages” warns against “admitting foreigners to an immediate and unreserved participation in the right of suffrage.” He even attributed the fall of Rome to the extension of Roman citizenship to other Italians.
As it turned out, the restrictions were reversed and US immigration laws remained quite permissive until the anti-Chinese legislation of the 1870s. But it was no thanks to Hamilton.
“By the end of his life, his political beliefs actually placed him among the leading advocates of immigration restrictions in the Founding generation,” Magness writes.
Economic inequality rose dramatically beginning in the 1970s. At the same time, the percentage of private-sector workers in unions went into steady decline. Some scholars have argued that the two trends were both products of market forces that rewarded highly skilled and highly educated workers, but the decline of organized labor didn’t itself contribute significantly to inequality. Sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, though, made the case in a 2011 analysis that declining labor power contributed to rising economic inequality not only for union members but for all workers between 1973 and 2007.
The shifts in both economic inequality and union membership over those years were dramatic: Men’s wage inequality increased by 40 percent and women’s by nearly 50 percent. Private-sector union membership dropped from 34 percent for men in 1973 to 8 percent in 2007 and from 16 to 6 percent for women over the same period.
Strong unions can theoretically reduce inequality in multiple ways. They can reduce the gap between more- and less-educated workers by raising wages for the latter. They can increase pay within a heavily unionized industry as even nonunion employers seek to keep pace or avert union organizing efforts. And they can advocate for public policy such as, for instance, a higher minimum wage. Western and Rosenfeld argue that unions have more broadly contributed to a “moral economy,” promoting “norms of equity that claimed the fairness of a standard rate for low-pay workers and the injustice of unchecked earnings for managers and owners.”
Analyzing data from the Current Population Survey, Western and Rosenfeld find that declining union membership accounts for a fifth of the 40 percent increase in men’s wage inequality if only individual union membership is taken into account. Looking more broadly at the effect of unions on nonunion pay, the effect goes up, with the decline in union membership explaining a third of the total increase in wage inequality for men. For women, declining individual union membership doesn’t increase wage inequality, but the link between union strength and nonunion wages accounts for a fifth of the rise in inequality.
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People who point to education as a factor in growing wage inequality aren’t wrong: Education explains a substantial fraction of the shift. But overall, “the decline of the US labor movement has added as much to men’s wage inequality as has the relative increase in pay for college graduates.” For women, union decline has had half the effect on wage inequality as education. Education, then, doesn’t replace lower rates of unionization as an explanation for inequality. The two coexist.
The man who introduced mesmerism to the US was a slave-owner from Guadeloupe, where planters were experimenting with “magnetizing” their enslaved people.
“These results,” Western and Rosenfeld write, “suggest unions are a normative presence that help sustain the labor market as a social institution, in which norms of equity shape the allocation of wages outside the union sector.” Between 1973 and 2007, those norms of equity broke down and, without the “alternative to an unbridled market logic” unions had provided, economic inequality soared.
Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.
There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.
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