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 S50There are more than 300 ways to work flexibly - here are four tips to make it work for you   Did you know that, according to a recent study, there are more than 300 ways to work flexibly? The list of possible flexible work practices used by an increasingly diverse and ageing workforce has grown significantly since many people were forced to work from home during COVID lockdowns. Before the pandemic, you may have associated flexible work with things like working from home, part-time work or reduced hours. Now? You might work a compressed week or reduced hours, job share, or take flexi time or special leave, such as a sabbatical. There are also location-based forms of flexibility, like flex-place and hybrid working.
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S69One Manâs Fight to Close the Racial Wealth Gap, in âThe Barber of Little Rockâ  Arlo Washington peers out the car window as he drives through the capital of Arkansas. He wears a royal-blue polo; his Afro is close-cropped. With soft, alert eyes, he surveys the city, glancing from building to building as though he's looking for something he can't quite find. One of the locations he passes is Little Rock Central High School, the same institution that Dwight Eisenhower had to send federal troops to in 1957, when the state's governor and a roiling mob tried to stop nine Black students from integrating the school. The opening scenes of "The Barber of Little Rock" show Washington moving through his home town while his voice-over describes the issue he's dedicated his life to: "Economic justice is actually having an opportunityâa real opportunity."John Hoffman and Christine Turner, the film's directors, told me via e-mail that, when they started work on the project, they knew they wanted to focus on the racial wealth gap. Through Mehrsa Baradaran's book "The Color of Money"âwhich examines the ways in which segregation and Jim Crow laws negatively impacted, and continue to negatively impact, Black communitiesâthey learned about community-development financial institutions, which strive to create economic growth in underserved communities. "We thought if we could embed in one of these places, we would be able to witness the effects of racial economic inequality first-hand and those everyday, on-the-ground people committed to narrowing it." Enter Arlo Washington. "Here was a guy running a nonprofit loan fund out of a converted shipping container in the parking lot of his barber college," they wrote. In 2008, Washington started his Washington Barber College, an institution that has to date helped fifteen hundred licensed barbers. Later, in 2014, he founded People Trust, a nonprofit fund for those who struggle to get loans from traditional banks. The organization offers loans for, among other things, medical emergencies, sudden job loss, rental assistance, rapid rehousing, and for people trying to start their own small businesses. Its Web site provides resources on financial education, and includes a link to an emergency-savings guide for children.
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S63Hearing the voices of Indigenous people with neurodevelopmental disabilities  Community Support Specialist, Shkaabe Makwa Centre for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Wellness at CAMH, Doctoral Student, University of Toronto Indigenous Peoples with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDDs) and mental health challenges are among the most marginalized groups in the country. NDDs include things like autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
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S59S46Many survivors aren't sure what to do after a sexual assault - here's what you need to know  Millions of people have experienced sexual violence and abuse in England and Wales, but many do not know where to go, or who to turn to afterwards. Shame felt by victims and survivors of sexual violence can be reinforced by the responses of family members and others. This means many find it difficult to get help, sometimes carrying the burden of abuse for years. As one survivor I spoke to put it: “My parents didn’t want to know when I spoke to them about it. I grew up in the age of where everything was hidden. So, I kept this totally from everybody until 2021.” Perpetrators count on survivors of abuse not being heard.
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S67âAll of Us Strangersâ Is a Romantic Fantasy About Filmmaking  In the British director Andrew Haigh's earlier filmsâ"Weekend" (2011), "45 Years" (2015), and "Lean on Pete" (2017)âthe images did much less of the work than the script and the actors. There has been something literal about his filmmaking that undercuts the intense emotion of the stories he films. His new movie, "All of Us Strangers," is a little different and a lot better. The fact that it's a kind of ghost story, a drama centered on fantasy, spurs Haigh to shoot in a way that conveys a distinctive, alternate realm of experience. Even if one didn't know that he has strong personal associations with the story (and I didn't, until after I'd seen the film), it's clear that the confluence of this private investment and fantastical elements of the narrative impart new tone and shape to Haigh's image-making. If his previous films have felt like mere renderings of their scripts, this one is a genuinely cinematic experience."All of Us Strangers" is a filmmaker's movieâor, rather, a screenwriter's one. That's the job of the protagonist, Adam (Andrew Scott), and, when the action begins, he's struggling with it. Living alone in a high-windowed flat, keeping the TV on for distraction and inspiration, moving from the blank screen of his laptop to the snoozy refuge of his sofa, Adam is enduring writerly frustration, heightened by the subject he has taken on: his own past, his own family. And his current circumstances are inflicting a deeper solitude: a single gay man, he lives in a new apartment tower with few other tenants. He does catch a strange glimpse of one, however, when, during a building-wide fire alarm, Adam goes outside half-dressed in the middle of the night. Looking up at a lighted window, he notices a neighbor who refuses to budge from his sixth-floor apartment. When Adam goes back home, he gets a knock on the door from that neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), who comes bearing a bottle of whiskey, but Adam sends him away.
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S43Studying engineering is tough: 6 insights to help university students succeed  University of Johannesburg provides support as an endorsing partner of The Conversation AFRICA.Engineering courses are a popular choice among South African university students. But these courses are also gruelling and the attrition rates are high. The Council on Higher Education reports that half of the engineering students enrolled at South African universities do not complete their studies. That figure is similar in other parts of the world.
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S56Vale 'sister suffragette': how Glynis Johns became a pop-culture icon in the story of votes for women  Glynis Johns, most famous for her role as the suffragette mother Mrs Winifred Banks in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964), passed away last week at the age of 100. A fourth-generation performer who made her stage debut in London when she was only three weeks old, Johns inherited her Welsh father’s love of acting. She appeared with him in The Halfway House (1944) and The Sundowners (1960) and argued for the establishment of a Welsh National Theatre as early as 1971.
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S645 dental TikTok trends you probably shouldn't try at home  TikTok is full of videos that demonstrate DIY hacks, from up-cycling tricks to cooking tips. Meanwhile, a growing number of TikTok videos offer tips to help you save money and time at the dentist. But do they deliver?Many TikTok videos provide tips to whiten teeth. These include tutorials on making your own whitening toothpaste using ingredients such as hydrogen peroxide, a common household bleaching agent, and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate).
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S47S37Plagiarism is not always easy to define or detect  Quite a few high-profile careers in higher education have been upended as of late amid questions of academic integrity. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who had served as president of Stanford University for seven years, stepped down in 2023 after it was determined that he had co-authored several academic papers that contained manipulated data. The latest casualty is Claudine Gay, who resigned her presidency at Harvard after questions arose about her scholarship, in addition to her response to antisemitism on campus following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel by Hamas.In the following Q&A, Roger J. Kreuz, a psychology professor who is working on a manuscript about the history and psychology of plagiarism, explains the nature and prevalence of plagiarism and the challenges associated with detecting it in the age of AI.
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S58S45Plant roots mysteriously pulsate and we don't know why - but finding out could change the way we grow things  You probably don’t think about plant roots all that much – they’re hidden underground after all. Yet they’re continually changing the shape of the world. This process happens in your garden, where plants use invisible mechanisms for their never-ending growth.What we do know is this oscillation is a basic mechanism underlying the growth of roots. If we better understood this process, it would help farmers and scientists design or choose the best plants to grow in different types of soil and climate. With increasingly extreme weather such as droughts and floods, damaging crops around the world, it is more important to understand how plants grow than ever before.
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S7010 Years Ago, Hideo Kojima Broke Metal Gear's Most Important Rule -- And It Worked  When anyone mentions Konami’s Metal Gear series created by gaming auteur Hideo Kojima, fans often think of elaborate stealth strategies, delightfully absurd cutscenes, and an increasingly cynical, gravelly-voiced Solid Snake. Since the release of the first Metal Gear in 1987, Konami has woven an unshakeable franchise legacy, one that meditates on the philosophies of battle while popularizing stealth mechanics that feel integral to the storyline. However, among the 17 Metal Gear games available, only one stands out as an unforgettable anomaly. I’m talking about the absolutely bonkers, endlessly enjoyable Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.Revengeance isn’t technically a Konami game. While Konami retained control of the narrative (the events take place four years after that of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots) and published this project, PlatinumGames took on development and introduced noticeable changes to the franchise’s DNA and gameplay. Kojima still worked on the game as well but as a designer rather than director. The result is a no-holds-barred hack-and-slash extravaganza with katana-wielding cyborg Raiden going berserk at the epicenter of this chaos.
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S35S65The Arts Center at Ground Zero Is Finally Here. Can Bill Rauch Make It Work?  Bill Rauch became obsessed with the survival of theatre as an undergraduate at Harvard, in the early nineteen-eighties. He'd already decided that he wanted to be a stage director, and was spending much of his time putting on plays wherever he could: the basement of his dorm, the freshman dining hall, in a Volkswagen bug on the street that leads to Harvard Yard. Then he heard a professor describe theatre as "a dead art form" and assert an alarming statistic: just two per cent of Americans, apparently, were regularly going to the theatre. Rauch had been told that the three pinnacles of theatre as a popular art in the Western world were Greek tragedy, English Renaissance drama, and American musicals. As a senior, he founded his own theatre company, and mapped out a mashup of "Medea," "Macbeth," and "Cinderella"âone exemplar of each styleâso that they could be performed simultaneously. It was a way of seeing what they had in common, and how theatre could return to its populist roots.After he graduated, Rauch and a college friend, Alison Carey, concocted another plan for attracting people to the stage. Funding from the Virginia Commission for the Arts allowed them to teach workshops by day and direct community theatre at night, starting with "Our Town" in Newport News. After that production was over, Rauch, Carey and their friends, calling themselves the Cornerstone Theater Company, drove to North Dakota, where they recruited locals to put on "Hamlet" in an old vaudeville theatre. At one point, Carey took over pouring drinks in a bar so that the owners could perform. The locals they recruited worried that Shakespeare's language was too arcane, so the company modernized it, converting "arrant knave" to "downright prick," for instance. (They ultimately changed that one: "downright prick," they were told, was something "smart-ass college kids" would say. A rancher suggested "horse's rear," and that went into the script instead.)
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S33S57S40Some believe the 1889 Russian flu pandemic was actually caused by a coronavirus - here's why that's unlikely  COVID-19 was the first coronavirus pandemic. The original Sars virus from 2003 and the Mers virus that created a health emergency in South Korea in 2015 were both coronaviruses, but fortunately failed to turn into pandemics in the way that COVID did. Four years on from its appearance, Sars-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) now seems to be making the transition to an endemic virus: one that circulates in humans all the time, at least somewhere in the world. As is common in respiratory viruses, it also seems to be developing a seasonal preference for the colder, wetter times of the year.
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S54S61Small-scale solar has key benefits, and one critical weakness, over large solar farms  A new study shows size matters in solar energy. The first ever life-cycle analysis comparing big and small solar photovoltaic systems has concluded that small-scale solar systems are in fact better for the environment than even the largest, and most efficient, solar farm. Historically, solar electric systems were so expensive that many felt they could not pay for themselves. Today’s reality could not be more different with renewables now the cheapest form of energy in the global mix. Not only that, solar panels can now easily repay the energy invested in their production many times over.
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S52S36Voters don't always have final say -- state legislatures and governors are increasingly undermining ballot measures that win  When voters want something done on an issue and their elected officials fail to act, they may turn to citizen initiatives to pursue their goals instead. The citizen initiative process varies by state, but in general, citizens collect signatures to have an issue put directly on the ballot for the voters to voice their preferences. Nearly half the states, 24 of them, allow citizen initiatives. These measures, also called “ballot initiatives,” often focus on the controversial issues of the day. Citizen initiatives on same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization have been on many state ballots through the years. Abortion rights have repeatedly been on the ballot since 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional protection for abortion, and more voters can expect to vote on the issue in 2024.
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S68When Lee Miller Took a Bath in Hitlerâs Tub  On April 30, 1945, the photojournalist Lee Miller took a bath in Hitler's tub. A correspondent for British Vogue, Miller had posted up in the Führer's abandoned apartment in Munich along with a group of G.I.s from the 179th Regiment. That morning, she had been among the first to enter the newly liberated Dachau. Her lover at the time, the Life photographer David Scherman, captured her bathing, and in time the picture he took would become famous as a kind of apt visual metaphor for the end of the war. The same day, across Germany in a Berlin bunker, Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, took their own lives. In a letter to her Vogue editor, Miller described Dachau's "great dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feetâfeet which ached and shuffled and stamped away the cold and shifted to relieve the pain and finally became useless except to walk them to the death chamber." In Scherman's photograph, some of that same dust has tracked from Miller's boots onto Hitler's white bathmat.Miller had been photographed many times before, and not just by Scherman. When she was growing up, in Poughkeepsie, New York, her father, an amateur photographer, made a series of frankly sensual portraits of Miller in the nude, a fact that her biographer, Carolyn Burke, deemed "disturbing" but in keeping with his eccentric bohemianism. Later, the story goes, Miller was crossing the street in New York City one day when she almost got hit by a car. The man who helped her up was the publisher Condé Nast. As in a fairy tale, her likeness was soon on the cover of Vogue. She was photographed by Edward Steichen, among many others. There was no word for it then, but she might have been called a supermodel. Eventually, having grown bored of being in front of the camera, she made an impulsive move to Paris with the aim of apprenticing with Man Ray, and she became his muse, his student, and his collaborator. A recent exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, "Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends," contextualized Miller's photographs alongside the work of artists from her social milieu, including Picasso, Max Ernst, Henry Moore, and the British Surrealist and art historian Roland Penrose, whom Miller married after the war.
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S51S62How security at the 1976 Montr  With the countdown to the Paris 2024 Olympics in full swing, it’s an ideal time to reflect on legacies of past Olympic Games, including Canada’s past experiences hosting the Games. The legacy of the Montréal Olympic Games is especially relevant this year, as the city is hosting the Olympic trials for swimming and track and field.The Montréal 1976 Summer Olympics remains the largest sporting event in Canadian history. It is remembered for many things: it was outrageously expensive, costing over $1.5 billion. It took 40 years to pay off the debt, despite Mayor Jean Drapeau’s claim in 1970 that the “Olympics could no more have a deficit than a man could have a baby.”
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S39Meat and dairy industry's attempt to change how we measure methane emissions would let polluters off the hook  Lobbyists from major polluting industries were out in force at the recent UN climate summit, COP28. Groups representing the livestock industry, which is responsible for around 32% of global methane emissions, want to increase their use of a new way of measuring these emissions that lets high polluters evade their responsibility to make big emissions cuts.Not all greenhouse gases are created equal. Carbon dioxide, the biggest driver of global warming, will build up in the atmosphere when continuously emitted, warming the Earth for centuries to come. Methane, the second-biggest driver, is more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere, but most of it naturally breaks down a couple of decades after being emitted. The damage from a single burst of methane is intense but limited.
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S41Taiwanese election may determine whether Beijing opts to force the issue of reunification  When the votes are being tallied in Taiwan’s presidential election, it won’t be only the 23.6 million inhabitants of the island eagerly awaiting a result – in Beijing and Washington, too, there will be some anxious faces.The vote of Jan. 13, 2024, is seen as a litmus test for the future of cross-strait relations, coming at a time when the status quo over Taiwan – a territory Beijing claims as an integral part of “one China” – is being challenged. If Taiwan’s incumbent, independence-oriented party stays in power, Chinese leader Xi Jinping might feel he has no choice but to force the issue of reunification.
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S44S66Thank Goodness for Joan Acocella  A new piece by Joan Acocella was reason enough to cancel plans. What had she chosen to tackle this time? Balanchine? The Book of Job? Harry Potter? Arsenic? There seemed to be no subject that she couldn’t take on. A little over a year ago, I hoped to review a book on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. No dice; Joan had claimed it. Annoyance at not being able to write turned instantly to gladness at being able to read. Now I am doubly glad. Joan died last weekend, at seventy-eight, from cancer; that essay was the last she published in this magazine. She herself might not have been so deferential. “Remember: if I do not get to review it, I will throw myself out the window with a note pinned to my chest saying that this was all your fault,” she once wrote to an editor, of a history of tap dance. “Happy new year! May you be rich and happy!”That humor was pure Joan. No writer was funnier, or more original. “Clang! Clang!” her essay on Martin Luther begins; that is the sound of the hammer nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the church. Her own sound was singular, in life as in print. If you called her, as I often did while working with her as a fact checker, a decade ago, and then as an editor’s assistant, you got used to waiting out a dozen rings and the answering-machine greeting—she screened the old-fashioned way—followed by the sudden burst of that rich, deliberate voice picking the conversation up midstream. (She might hang up just as suddenly to rush out to the movies with her partner, Noël Carroll, whom she liked to call “my boyfriend.”) Sarah Larson, who did transcription work for her back in the day, remembers Joan swanning out from her bedroom mid-afternoon-nap in nightgown and eye mask to intercept a message from Mikhail Baryshnikov. “In him there is simply more to see than in most other dancers,” she wrote in a Profile, to the point as ever.
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S34LGBTQ+ workers want more than just pride flags in June  Every year, more and more companies seem to recognize Pride Month. But a recent analysis shows that LGBTQ+ workers expect more than this once-a-year acknowledgment from their employers. In fact, some employees actually criticize such behavior as mere pinkwashing.So, what do LGBTQ+ workers want? In 2023, the jobs website Indeed conducted a survey of LGBTQ+ full-time workers from across the U.S., and the results provide a clear picture of their needs.
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S53Viruses aren't always harmful. 6 ways they're used in health care and pest control  Thea van de Mortel teaches into the Master of Infection Prevention and Control program at Griffith University. We tend to just think of viruses in terms of their damaging impacts on human health and lives. The 1918 flu pandemic killed around 50 million people. Smallpox claimed 30% of those who caught it, and survivors were often scarred and blinded. More recently, we’re all too familiar with the health and economic impacts of COVID.
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S49Encyclopedia Britannica once published a catalogue of humanity's '102 Great Ideas' - and it created more questions than answers  In its January 26 1948 issue, Life magazine published a feature showcasing the “102 Great Ideas” of western civilisation. The project was the brainchild of Mortimer Adler, a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago and his boss, Robert Maynard Hutchins, then the university’s chancellor and the director of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which the university had owned since 1943. In the double-page group portrait heading Life’s extended feature, Adler and the encyclopedia’s William Gorman pose on either side of the gathered indexers. Between them sit 102 index-card boxes, labelled alphabetically.
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S26The human touch AI virtual assistants can't replace  On Sunday 7 January, Ayo Edebiri won Best performance by a female actor in a television series – musical or comedy at the 2024 Golden Globes. In her acceptance speech, she put the invaluable work of her agent's and manager's assistants front and centre, thanking them for their behind-the-scenes work, including answering her "crazy, crazy emails". Assistants play a critical role in helping high-profile names and leaders do important daily buisness (think Donna Paulsen on Suits, for instance). Yet as technology becomes more sophisticated, an increasing number of poeple are asking: will AI ever be able to organise your meetings, find and book a venue for your big company offsite, prioritise your inbox (including those "crazy, crazy emails"), order your favourite lunch and gently nudge you to step away from your desk, lest you show up late for your child's football game? Many administrative professionals around the world are waiting for an answer.
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S32What Taoism teaches about the body and being healthy  New Year’s resolutions often come with a renewed investment in making our bodies healthier. Many may take to the newest diet plan or sign up for a health club membership, but it is worth taking some time to consider what actually constitutes a healthy, happy body. Rituals and bodily techniques are used to align one’s individual body with surrounding social and natural environments. These concepts of the body can inform individuals on their relationship with our environment and on what it means to be healthy.
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S38S25UAW auto strike: Why US Automotive CEOs make more than global competition  At 23:59 on 14 Sept, roughly 13,000 workers at three of the largest automakers in the US went on strike. After eight weeks of unsuccessful negotiations among the United Auto Workers union (UAW) and the companies – General Motors (GM), Ford and Stellantis – workers walked off the job when contracts expired. Thousands more workers have since joined the strike in 38 locations across 20 states, and President Biden is expected to show support by walking the picket line this week.At the top of the UAW's demands is a 40% pay increase across four years (that number was lowered to 36% a few days after the strike began, after ongoing negotiations). Union president Shawn Fain has made the canyon-like gap between CEO and worker pay the foremost banner of the strike.
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