“The most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way contains incredible images of over 1.5 billion objects within our galaxy. The 200,000 images were collected by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile over the course of over 13 years, from 2010 to 2023, as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey and its companion project, the VVV Extended Survey (VVVX). The images were combined to form the record-breaking map, which covers an area of the sky equivalent to 8,600 full moons (as seen from Earth). For context, it contains ten times more objects than a similar 2012 map released by the same team of scientists. ‘We made so many discoveries we have changed the view of our galaxy forever,’ project leader Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at the Universidad Andrés Bello, said in a statement … The new map of the Milky Way covers objects such as stellar nurseries packed with newborn stars still cocooned in their natal envelopes of gas and dust. These include the stellar nursery NGC 6357, also known as the ‘Lobster Nebula,’ located around 5,900 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Another of the star-forming regions of the Milky Way observed by VISTA as part of the survey is Messier 17, also known as the ‘Omega Nebula.’ Located around 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Sagittarius, this cloud of star-forming gas is around 15 light-years wide, but it is part of a wider cloud of matter that is about 40 light-years wide … Many of these are found in conglomerations called ‘globular clusters.’ There are around 150 of these tightly packed ancient stars located in the Milky Way, thought to have formed from the same collapsing clouds of gas and dust. One example of a globular cluster seen by VISTA as part of the 13-year-long survey is Messier 22, also known as NGC 6656, located around 10,000 light-years away from Earth. The stars of Messier 22 are thought to be leftovers from the early universe. That makes them some of the oldest known stars.” (Robert Lea/Space.com)
“Archaeologists in Morocco have discovered the earliest known farming society in northwest Africa – a finding that reshapes our understanding of Mediterranean history. The region, known as the Maghreb, is perfectly located to serve as a major hub for cultural development and intercontinental connection, scientists from the University of Cambridge said. While the North African region’s importance during the Iron Age and Islamic era is well known, researchers said there is a significant gap in knowledge about its archaeology between 4000BC and 1000BC. The latest fieldwork carried out in Oued Beht, Morocco, revealed that it was the largest African agricultural complex outside of the Nile region between 3400BC and 2900BC. The discovery, researchers said, indicates the presence of a large farming settlement in the region, ‘similar in size to Early Bronze Age Troy.’ ‘This is currently the earliest and largest agricultural complex in Africa beyond the Nile corridor,” they said in a study published in the journal Antiquity. ‘For more than a century the last great unknown of later Mediterranean prehistory has been the role played by the societies of Mediterranean’s southern, Africa shores west of Egypt.’” (Vishwam Sankaran/Independent)
“In 2016, I experienced the desolation of my candidate for president losing after the most respected polling experts told me she had a 71.4 percent, 85 percent, 98.2 percent, and even 99 percent chance of winning. As a historian, I was studying how Ronald Reagan’s runaway landslide in 1980 was proceeded by every pollster but one supremely confident that the race was just about tied. I’ve just finished a fine book published in 2020 that confirms an intuition I’ve been chewing on since then. It turns out this is practically the historical norm. W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic. That was the accomplishment of a magazine called The Literary Digest between 1924 and 1932. They sent as many sample ballots as existing technological infrastructure would allow—in 1932, some 20 million—on postcards that doubled as subscription ads. Then, with the greatest care, they counted the ones that came back. For three straight elections, they got it so right the Raleigh News and Observer half-joked that it ‘would save millions in money and time’ to ‘quit holding elections and accept the Digest’s poll as final.’ In 2008, that was the accomplishment of Nate Silver, who called 49 out of 50 states; in 2012, he notched 50 for 50, scored a best-selling book, and reportedly accounted in the run-up to the election for 20 percent of the traffic for his new employer, The New York Times. In part two of the cycle, yesterday’s miracle suffers a spectacular failure—as in the poll-crazy year of 1936, when modern political polling was invented by the triumvirate of George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley, who all called it for Roosevelt over Alf Landon, where the Digest only gave him 41 percent of the popular vote. Their technical revolution (directly querying a representative sample of the electorate) seemed so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before. The same with Silver’s model of aggregating, then evaluating and weighting for accuracy, existing state polls.” (Rick Perlstein/TAP)
“At long last, after decades of development, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is meeting its public. But who, or what, constitutes its public? The movie doesn’t seem poised to do well at the box office, and one could argue that thanks to its festival screenings and fancy preview events, much of its intended audience — namely, film geeks — have already seen it. Critics have been mixed on the $120 million epic since its Cannes premiere. Maybe mixed isn’t strong enough a term. Let’s say wildly divided. Sometimes, they’re wildly divided within the same review. Not long ago, I talked to one filmmaker who said that they watched Megalopolis alternating between gazing at the screen with awe and holding their head in their hands from secondhand embarrassment. That’s pretty close to how I felt when I saw Megalopolis at Cannes in May. The movie has genuine passages of great beauty but often falters at basic storytelling. It has some wonderful set pieces, but just as many scenes feel overlit and flat, uninspired and awkward. Its conceptual peculiarities — the dialogue in verse, the neo-Roman hair and costume design — can be endearing, but the performances are all over the place, and not every actor appears to have gotten the memo. Of course, critics will not agree on what that memo even was. Is Aubrey Plaza’s self-consciously vampy, campy performance a sly part of the film’s nutty design? Or is it just misguided overacting?” (Bilge Ebiri/Vulture)
“Every time I think the members of the religious right can’t really be that nuts, I learn something that moves the line. JD Vance’s ravings about the psychopathy and inherent civic worthlessness of single cat ladies are just the tip of the iceberg. Take, for example, his friend, admirer, and conservative influencer Rod Dreher, a one-time Catholic convert who played a small role in shepherding seeker JD into Catholicism. Dreher himself had found the Catholic church ‘too feminized’ for his spiritual needs and so, converted to Orthodox Christianity, a sect to which Putin belongs, and moved to Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s white nationalism felt more amenable than American heterogeneity. The Christian Orthodoxy pod of the Slavic world, he has stated ‘manages to be a masculine expression of Christianity without being macho.’ (A stellar apostle of that un-macho masculinity would be the late, glamorously be-robed Russian Orthodox cleric who called live-in girlfriends ‘unpaid prostitutes.’) Yesterday we learned that Kevin Roberts, the cosplaying Y’all Qaeda coal roller truck driving, Lucchese cowboy boot-wearing president of the Heritage Foundation whose Project 2025 preaches the centrality of ‘the family’ as the foundation of American society, a foundation to be achieved in part by forcing impregnated incest and rape victims to give birth, is so far astray from the teachings of Jesus that he reportedly once bragged about killing a neighbors’ dog with a shovel. This month, these men and other weird characters are more on my mind as I researched an article for New York Magazine about the power moves of a curious, self-flagellating Catholic organization that exists today at the red-hot center of the judicial and right-wing donor world in Washington D.C.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out. Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially. They’ve touted the company’s unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives. OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission: keep humanity safe. But this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI. In an announcement that hardly seems coincidental, chief technology officer Mira Murati said shortly before that news broke that she was leaving the company. Employees were so blindsided that many of them reportedly reacted to her abrupt departure with a ‘WTF’ emoji in Slack. WTF indeed. The whole point of OpenAI was to be nonprofit and safety-first.” (Sigal Samuel/WIRED)
“Among women, Harris led by 58 to 37 percent—a net difference of 21 percentage points. By way of contrast, in 2016, the last time Trump faced off against a female rival, Hillary Clinton led women by 54 to 39 percent, a net difference of 15 points. Among men, the NBC poll has Trump leading by 52 to 40 percent, 12 points ahead. This is a slight improvement of Trump’s position in the 2016 results, where Trump led Hillary Clinton 52 to 41 percent, an 11-point difference. In other words, compared to 2016, Trump is doing markedly worse with women and slightly better among men.” (Jeet Heer/The Nation)
“(Hannah Arendt) wrote her first poems when she was a teenager; some of these early literary efforts were addressed to her teacher—and lover—at the University of Marburg, Martin Heidegger. Those early love poems remained secret, like the affair that produced them, until after her death. Reading them now, we can see the intimate association of poetry and philosophy during this formative period in Arendt’s life. Yet her poems, unlike her philosophy, remained a private affair for Arendt to the end. We don’t know if she ever showed her poems to her close friends Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and W. H. Auden in New York; to our knowledge, only her second husband, the poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher, read her verse. The final poem to be found in the Library of Congress archive is labeled ‘January 1961, Evanston.’ Its author was about to depart from a residency at Northwestern University to attend Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. What she saw there may have marked the end of poetry for Hannah Arendt.” (Srikanth Reddy/The Paris Review)
“The investigations and resignations swirling around New York City mayor Eric Adams have multiplied nearly nonstop for the past year. For that whole time, the disclaimer has been consistent whenever I asked his possible political challengers and their advisers about plans for challenging the mayor in a 2025 campaign: Only if Adams himself is indicted … The city’s history of political corruption is long and tawdry, but this is a first: No sitting mayor has ever been formally accused of criminal acts. Adams insists that any charges are ‘entirely false’ … Calls for Adams’s resignation are escalating, but, so far at least, they’re mostly from Adams’s already declared reelection opponents or his long-standing adversaries, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Working Families Party. Key players to watch are Governor Kathy Hochul, who has had a friendly relationship with Adams but who has often miscalculated the city’s political dynamics; Senator Chuck Schumer, whose relationship with Adams has been cordial if mostly distant (though Schumer’s reaction to the indictment was fairly ominous: ‘No one is above the law, including the mayor of New York City’); and House Democratic majority leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries is plenty busy at the moment, marshaling campaign troops to try to win New York congressional races in November, but he and Adams, both from Brooklyn, have very different personalities and politicians, and they have clashed in the past.” (Chris Smith/VF)
“After historic voter turnout in the 2020 election, baseless allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities sparked an unprecedented wave of legislation that made voting harder in early 2021. While the wave crested that year, it never fully receded; 2024 has been the second most active year for restrictive voting legislation in at least a decade. This fall, in more than half the states, millions of voters will face hurdles to vote that they have never before encountered in a presidential election. As discussed in a recent Brennan Center analysis, some of these laws contain multiple restrictive provisions … A key trend this cycle is that many states have gone sharply in one direction or the other on voting accessibility. While some states enacted both restrictive and expansive laws, in many states, it is clearly harder or easier to vote than it was four years ago. Florida and Texas, for instance, curbed several forms of voting access, whereas extensive voting expansions enacted in New York (18 laws), Michigan (12 laws), and Virginia (12 laws) have made it easier to vote compared to four years ago. In this presidential election, voters in 29 states. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Since 2020, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas have used single bills to enact an array of restrictions, imposing limits across the entire voting process. This will be the first presidential election in which voters in these states will navigate these wide-ranging barriers.” (The Brennan Center)
"Traffic stops by Chicago police have more than doubled over the past nine years in what the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights group, is calling the ‘new stop-and-frisk.’ Stop and frisk is when officers stop and search people based on ‘reasonable suspicion’ that they are involved in criminal activity. The practice has been documented to disproportionately target Black and Latino people – not only in Chicago but also in New York and across the United States. In Chicago, it has declined sharply since a 2015 reform agreement between the ACLU and the Chicago Police Department. Meanwhile, traffic stops have surged in Chicago, rising from less than 200,000 in 2016 to over 570,000 in 2023. And much like stop and frisk, police disproportionately stop Black drivers in Chicago, according to our latest study examining racial bias in traffic enforcement. Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police. Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road. For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.” (The Conversation)