For farmers in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh it is cheaper than pesticides and gets the job done just as well. The product? Pepsi or Coca-Cola.
Last week, a NYTimes article by Kate Taylor entitled “Sex on Campus: She Can Play that Game Too” made its rounds throughout the Internet, and especially the University of Pennsylvania community, the backdrop setting for Taylor’s article.
I think both of these articles are necessary and important: necessary for dialogue, necessary for gaining perspective, and important in ushering change to create safer spaces for everyone both at Penn and nationwide.
Having read Jalabi’s piece, grateful for her publicly speaking up and out, I’ve decided to share a statement I wrote last week in response to Taylor’s initial article:
I found Kate Taylor’s article to be everything from triggering, disturbing, lacking sexual diversity, and deeply heterosexist, to necessary and important. I kept thinking about my own experience as an undergraduate at Penn, a four-year period I cherish, during which I built incredible and lasting friendships, learned from awe-inspiring mentors and educators, and solidified my personal and professional passions and dreams.
Yet, my time at Penn was also coated by both traumatizing and empowering sexual journeys. After my first month at Penn, I was date raped on my dorm room floor by a male stranger while I was drunk (a non-Penn student in town visiting a friend on campus); days before graduation, after a year and a half of chosen celibacy to heal from the aforementioned and other traumas, I had a positive and consensual one-night stand with a male Penn student, transitioning me into a sexual narrative that has since remained positive, consensual, and empowering.
Amongst the host of reasons I chose to attend Penn was their Classical Studies department and The Kelly Writer’s House. Others went for Wharton Business School, Penn’s Nursing School, to play basketball, to join an acclaimed performing arts group, or myriad other academic and extracurricular activities, taught and overseen by top notch educators offering world-renowned facilities.
Penn has spent billions of dollars on academic, research, financial aid, scholarship, scholarly, and creative endeavors. I hope that the Penn community - current students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumnae, and alumni - take this article as an opportunity to approach sexual experiences on campus, sexual identity on campus, sexual orientation on campus, heterosexism on campus, sexism on campus, sexual violence on campus, drinking on campus, drugs on campus, and student life on campus with the same care, funding, and seriousness that are given to matters of the mind.
Penn students, faculty, staff, alumnae, and alumni seek to be leaders in world thought, innovation, and change.
So let us.
Let this be an opportunity to embrace dialogue. To wear Kate Taylor’s article vulnerably on our sleeves. To pioneer a revolution awakening from the silence on these matters and the endless oppressions that jeopardize students’ safety and well-being. To ensure the next time someone writes a feature article in the New York Times about female student sexuality on Penn’s campus it lets go of anonymity and includes LGBTQ, male, and other gendered voices, and welcomes perspective from other campus spaces left entirely overlooked.
May we cease to shame others.
May we cease to harbor shame upon and within ourselves.
May we cease to feel threatened by sharing our stories.
May we ignite a dialogue through and with compassion and empathy.
May our bodies receive the same dignity we demand of and for our minds.
An ancient Roman bust from around the first century that had been missing for decades has finally made its way into the San Antonio Museum of Art, and all it took was for one artist to buy it from a Texas Goodwill for under $40.
In 2018, art collector Laura Young was shopping at a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas when she stumbled upon a sculpture on the floor beneath a table, according to the San Antonio Museum of Art. Someone that looks for undervalued or rare art pieces, Young told The Art Newspaper she bought the piece for $34.99, and a picture of it after she bought it shows it buckled up in her car with a price tag on its cheek.
After buying the bust, Young noticed it looked very old and worn, so she wanted to find out when and where it came from. Read more.
why would this article leave out the best part she named the bust after dennis reynolds from iasip
We’re grateful and honoured to be featured and share more about A Summer’s End and what It means to us as a LGBT+ story with Eurogamer and Lottie Lynn. It was a wonderful discussion and interview. We’re so thankful and appreciative of their invitation. We’re glad we could take part.
« There is a direct line connecting early 20th-century eugenics with 21st-century transhumanism. The link is clearest in the eugenicist and “scientific humanist” Julian Huxley (1887-1975). In 1924 Huxley wrote a series of articles for the Spectator, in which he stated that “the negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro from the white body”. By the mid-Thirties, Huxley had decided that racial theories were pseudoscience and was a committed anti-fascist.
He had not abandoned eugenics. In a lecture entitled “Eugenics in an Evolutionary Perspective”, delivered in 1962, Huxley reasserted the value of eugenic ideas and policies. Earlier, in 1951, in a lecture that appeared as a chapter in his book New Bottles for New Wine (1957), he had coined the term “transhumanism” to describe “the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition”.
Huxley is a pivotal figure because he links eugenics with its successor ideology. [H]e illustrates a fundamental difficulty in both eugenics and transhumanism. Who decides what counts as a better kind of human being, and on what basis is the evaluation made? The fundamental ethical objection to eugenics is that it licenses some people to decide whether the lives of others are worth living. […]
[Transhumanism] is not normally racist, and typically involves no collective coercion, only the voluntary actions of people seeking self enhancement. But like eugenicists, transhumanists understand human betterment to be the production of superior people like themselves. True, the scientific knowledge and technology required to create these people are not yet available; but […] someday they may be. [And] the likely upshot of transhumanism in practice – a world divided between a rich, smart, beautified few whose lifespans can be indefinitely extended, and a mass of unlovely, disposable, dying deplorables – seems to me a vision of hell. »
The world is spending at least $1.8 trillion every year on subsidies driving the annihilation of wildlife and a rise in global heating, according to a new study, prompting warnings that humanity is financing its own extinction.
From tax breaks for beef production in the Amazon to financial support for unsustainable groundwater pumping in the Middle East, billions of pounds of government spending and other subsidies are harming the environment […]. This government support, equivalent to 2% of global GDP, is directly working against the goals of the Paris agreement and draft targets on reversing biodiversity loss, the research on explicit subsidies found, effectively financing water pollution, land subsidence and deforestation with state money.
The authors, who are leading subsidies experts, say a significant portion of the $1.8tn could be repurposed to support policies that are beneficial for nature and a transition to net zero, amid growing political division about the cost of decarbonising the global economy.
“Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity,” [the former head of the UN climate change convention] said. “[…] The report highlights how redirecting, repurposing, or eliminating subsidies could make an important contribution to unlocking the $711 billion required each year to halt and reverse the loss of nature by 2030 as well as the cost of reaching net zero emissions.”
« Within 60 seconds of joining Meta’s (Facebook) metaverse platform Horizon Venues, London-based Nina Jane Patel said a gang of three-four avatars sexually harassed her. “They essentially, but virtually, gang-raped my avatar and took photos as I tried to get away,” Patel, co-founder and vice-president of metaverse research Kabuni Ventures, wrote in a post on Medium.com.
She added that virtual reality had been designed so that the mind and body can’t differentiate virtual/digital experiences from the real world. “My physiological and psychological response was as though it happened in reality,” she recalled.
In an email interview with CNBC-TV18, Patel said she froze as things got out of her hand fast. “I fumbled with the controllers to try to use the safety features, i.e. block and report. […]” Patel pulled off the virtual reality headset, but she could still hear her attackers’ laughter and voices coming through, saying, “don’t pretend you didn’t like it”.
“[…] The comments on my post were a plethora of opinions from – ‘don’t choose a female avatar, it’s a simple fix’, to 'don’t be stupid, it wasn’t real’, 'a pathetic cry for attention’, 'avatars don’t have lower bodies to assault’, 'you’ve obviously never played Fortnite’, 'I’m truly sorry you had to experience this’, and 'this must stop’.”
The global meta universe […] is facing growing criticism about its misuse. On the Oculus website, a user named janet.woodville said: “Someone kept following me around last night. I went into Venues this morning, and I am running into too many perverts. I can’t go back in until Oculus cleans it out of all the perverts and bullies.”
[…A]nother user said: “Most of the times I’ve come to watch a show or fight, there were either kids being obnoxious or someone following me around being inappropriate. I know they are avatars but trying to kiss my avatar… is completely out of hand. I couldn’t even get to the menu to report him or get out of there because his avatar was in the way.” […]
Commenting on Patel’s experience, a Meta spokesperson told CNBC-TV18 over email: “We are sorry to hear this happened. […] We will continue to make improvements as we learn more about how people interact in these spaces […].”
‘Loki’ Creator and Tom Hiddleston on Covering ‘New Emotional Ground’ in Season 2(Exclusive)
Following last year’s debut to critical and fan acclaim, Loki has been renewed for season 2. Now, as anticipation builds for new episodes from the MCU spinoff series, creator Michael Waldron and star Tom Hiddleston talk to ET about “getting the band back together” and peeling back even more layers of the titular mischievous superhero.
With production reportedly starting in June, just one year after the series debuted on Disney+, Hiddleston is eager to dive back into the world of the character he’s played since first appearing in 2011’s Thor.
“We’re starting very soon. Almost as soon as I leave this room. Not quite, but it’s around the corner,” the actor said while promoting his new Apple TV+ series, The Essex Serpent, in which he plays the pastor in a small town possibly haunted by a mythological sea serpent.
“We’ll certainly be going in the summer,” he continued, adding thathe’s “excited to get the band back together.” That band, of course, refers to his season 1 co-stars, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Owen Wilson, both of whom have confirmed they’ll be returning as Ravonna Renslayer and Mobius M. Mobius, respectively.
Meanwhile, Waldron, who also wrote Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, teases what’s in store for the upcoming season, which he has dubbed in previous interviews as “emotional.”
“Without getting too specific, it’s just a continued evolution of the character. That’s what was always important to Tom and that’s what was important to me,” Waldron said when asked to elaborate on the emotional element of the new episodes.
“If we’re going to continue [the first season story] in a second season, we have to cover new emotional ground,” he continued. “And the great news is that that character keeps revealing new layers of texture and complexity.”
As for how the most recent film installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe influences the future of the Loki series, Waldron teased that after “everything that happened in this movie there’s probably some branches going all over the place.”
“I imagine Mobius is out there watching this on a monitor, having to light up a cigarette and saying, ‘Oh my god,’” he continued, joking that the Time Variance Authority agent might be bowled over by all the unexpected events. “I guess we’ll have to wait and find out what that means for those guys.”
Until then, Waldron said, “It’s really a joy to get to work with Tom and continue to bring Loki to life.”
Three nominations for Loki at the MTV Movie & TV Awards!
BEST SHOW Euphoria Inventing Anna Loki Squid Game Ted Lasso Yellowstone
BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE Alana Haim – Licorice Pizza Ariana DeBose – West Side Story Hannah Einbinder – Hacks Hoyeon – Squid Game Sophia Di Martino – Loki
BEST TEAM Loki – Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson Only Murders in the Building – Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, Martin Short Spider-Man: No Way Home – Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire The Adam Project – Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell The Lost City – Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Brad Pitt
“I witnessed my friend Amber Heard go through the most devastating period of her life as her marriage ended last year. What I saw was not what the rest of the world saw. I simply could not fathom the level of vitriol and aggression that was aimed at her by paparazzi and online trolls—and how that almost broke her spirit. As a photographer there are times when I have to decide if it’s appropriate to invade a moment with my camera. This was one of those times. I shot this photograph in Amber’s apartment, where she was with the small group of women who’d been by her side during the chaos, just after she learned that her divorce had finally been settled. It was a moment of joy, relief, and sadness all in one.” - Amanda de Cadenet(Glamourmagazine)
“The Museum of Anything Goes is a very surreal game from 1995 made by Wayzata Technology.
Perhaps best characterized as an Environmental Narrative Game minus the narrative, the game presents the player with the eponymous museum, where they can enter the various paintings strewn about and come across quirky FMV clips and interactive segments. The FMV clips were primarily filmed around the Chicago area.”
“A game that shows the sad reality of Chicago school system from the 90s … more like it was inspired by it and was created because of it … a mini game collection that should inspire you … more or less
and here is my longplay-mini presenting the whole game in a mini format”
[22:22 in the playthrough is where the reference to the Chicago school system comes in. The creator of the game was a substitute teacher, one of the few bits of known information on him]
Such magical, mythical words… the book fair! A place for insiders only, an event happening behind the scenes. Publishers and bookstores come together to decide what’s in store (literally and figuratively) for the coming months. Which books get the publishers excited? What kind of promotions do they have in mind to tempt us? And what are we going to choose to display in our stores? The Dutch book…
