My Kid Wants to Be an Influencer. Is That Bad? | How to make NYC work better for its winged inhabitants | One of Berlin’s star attractions is closing for 14 years | The "war schizophrenia" of Israel’s peaceniks

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My Kid Wants to Be an Influencer. Is That Bad? - WIRED

“Whenever my 6-year-old daughter gets asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she says, ‘An influencer.’ The thought of it freaks me out. What should I do?”

For philosophical guidance on encounters with technology, open a support ticket via email; or register and post a comment below.

Your question made me think about Diana Christensen, a main character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network, played by Faye Dunaway. Christensen is a young network news executive who is meant to represent the moral bankruptcy of a generation that was raised on TV (one character calls her “television incarnate”). While charismatic and highly capable, she is also rampantly amoral, viciously competitive, and so obsessed with ratings that she famously has an orgasm while discussing viewership numbers. The character clearly piqued a pervasive cultural anxiety about TV’s corrupting influence, though with a little distance it’s hard not to see her depiction in the film as moralizing and heavy-handed. As The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael put it in her review, “What Chayefsky is really complaining about is what barroom philosophers have always complained about: the soulless worshippers at false shrines—the younger generation.”

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How to make NYC work better for its winged inhabitants - The Economist

EARLY-RISING NEW YORKERS may spot an unusual patrol group in Manhattan this autumn. They sport sensible shoes, latex gloves and an armful of brown paper bags. As in spring, they comb the streets for migrating birds that have struck windows. They are Project Safe Flight volunteers, out to save the injured and count the dead.

It is a tough gig. Fruzsina Agocs saw her first yellow-billed cuckoo, a shy species that is hard to spot, dead on the pavement. “That was not the way I wanted to see it,” she says. But she is cautiously optimistic that she will have fewer such encounters in the future. In the past couple of years New York has moved to the forefront of a push to make cities more welcoming to their avian neighbours.

New York—like Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington—sits underneath the “Atlantic Flyway”, an ancient migration route travelled by millions of birds, from teeny warblers to long-legged shorebirds, every spring and autumn. Up to a quarter of a million of them die colliding with windows in New York every year, according to New York City Audubon, the bird charity that organises Project Flight Safe. Birds confuse reflections of sky or vegetation for the real thing and fly straight for them.

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One of Berlin’s star attractions is closing for 14 years - The Economist

What is 14 years? A mere flash, compared with the antiquity of a 7,000-year-old female figurine from Syria, or a processional hallway from Babylon, or the façade of an ancient Roman market. But in the life of a busy city such as Berlin, the time between now and 2037 could feel like an eternity. To museum lovers it certainly will, because that is how long much of the Pergamon Museum, home to the treasures described above and many more, will stay shut once it closes for renovations on October 23rd.

The Pergamon is the most famous of the quintet of national museums that straddle Museumsinsel (Museum Island), a tourist-thronged isle in the River Spree at the heart of Germany’s capital. But the century-old building, which houses a legendary collection of ancient Near-Eastern, Hellenistic and Islamic artworks, is in sad shape. The ceilings leak. Heavy nets on the museum’s exterior walls protect visitors’ heads from crumbling masonry. Indeed, half the Pergamon’s galleries have been closed for repair since 2014, including the biggest draw, a spectacular marble frieze from the Greek city of Pergamon (now in Turkey) depicting a battle between gods and giants.

If it took Paris just four years to reshape the Louvre around the iconic glass pyramid that opened in 1989, why must Berlin wait until 2037? Barbara Helwing, director of the Pergamon’s Near-East collections, explains the trouble started below ground. Central Berlin was once a bog, and the island is essentially a sandbank. The museums rest on rusted iron pilings that need to be replaced or meticulously repaired. A master plan for all five museums envisages linking them with underground passages, much like the Louvre. The Pergamon will be enlarged, with a light-filled gallery changing its U-shape to a square. All this must be done with minimum vibration.

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The “war schizophrenia” of Israel’s peaceniks - The Economist

It became too much when they published David’s name, address, phone number and photograph along with the words: “The next one to get it.” He left his home and borrowed a house from a friend. “I deleted all my social-media accounts,” he told me. “I don’t answer my phone to any number I don’t know.” David is a film-maker living in Tel Aviv, who describes himself as “ultra-progressive, left-wing, anti-Zionist, pro-peace”. His views were minority ones before Hamas’s attack; now they have provoked threats. After his personal information was published on a right-wing Israeli Telegram channel, David was forced into hiding. “If you dare to show solidarity or compassion towards the Palestinian people in Gaza nowadays you are literally risking yourself in Israel. It’s serious shit,” he said.

David wanted it made clear that he was appalled by Hamas’s rampage. He volunteers as a driver for Road to Recovery, an organisation that ferries Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to Israeli hospitals for treatment. More than a dozen volunteers and their family members were killed or kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th. “You are talking to a devastated man. I know some of those killed and kidnapped and injured. I have been to funerals and memorial services. I have seen people I know who have lost everything they had. My heart is broken for them.” But, he added, “My heart is broken for the [thousands of] Palestinians in Gaza who have lost their lives and the more than [hundreds of thousands] who have had to leave their homes. For me there is no contradiction.”

It’s an irony not lost on peace activists in Israel that those who suffered most from Hamas’s atrocities – the inhabitants of the kibbutzim on the border and the young people dancing at the Nova music festival – tended to be left-wing. Many prominent voices in Israel, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister who leads a far-right coalition, have called for Hamas to be destroyed. Some have even demanded Gaza be razed. Advocates for human rights and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians now find themselves challenged by the unfolding events – emotionally, morally, even physically. “It’s very heavy,” Yuval Roth, the founder of Road to Recovery, told me. “It’s very complicated to experience this war from two points of view. It’s like war schizophrenia. You have to work hard all the time to keep your moral compass.”

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