“Archaeologists excavating a Renaissance building in Rome, Italy, have discovered the remains of Nero’s Theater, an imperial structure that has been described in ancient Roman texts, but never located. Since 2020, researchers from the Special Superintendence of Rome have been digging in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Rovere in the run-up to a renovation. The building, mere steps from the Vatican, houses the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, which has leased the space to the Four Seasons, due to open in 2025. The team uncovered structures, including rare African marble columns, stucco walls painted with gold leaf, and storage rooms, mirroring descriptions of the theater where the Roman emperor rehearsed his poetic and musical performances. ‘The size of the building, the beauty of the decorations and the materials used suggest an imperial commission, so we can presume that it is Nero’s theater, just as Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus had described it,’ said Alessio De Cristofaro, one of the team’s archaeologists, in a statement. Nero ruled the Roman Empire from 54 to 68 C.E., during which time he erected the theater to reflect his status as a powerful ruler and lover of the arts. Most of our extant descriptions of the structure come from chroniclers Suetonius, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder, the latter of whom wrote that the theater was ‘large enough to satisfy even Nero’s desire to sing before a full house.’ Tacitus’s writings further suggest that Nero sang at the theater during the Ludi Juvenales scenic games, and more notoriously, watched Rome burn from its vantage point in 64 C.E.” (ArtNet)
“Hamas’s precise aims and motivations remain unclear, but the drivers of its action are evident. The organisation is less cohesive than it looks from the outside: its Gaza-based military wing, which has been ascendant in recent years, grew distrustful of a political leadership that is largely based abroad. The responsibility for governing Gaza felt like a trap insofar as it could have operated to weaken the group’s ethos of resistance and further split the fates of Gaza and the West Bank. The intensification of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem exposed the haplessness of the secular Palestinian Authority (PA) and did not deter several Arab states from normalising relations with Israel. Israeli–Saudi normalisation, which to many seemed imminent, would have been a symbolic humiliation and strategic setback. The attack settled the debate about Hamas’s identity: resistance prevailed over governance. It elevated the group’s domestic and regional profile, as Hamas entered the premier league of non-state armed groups, joining the likes of Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia militant group, among the stalwarts of the Iranian-backed muqawama front, or ‘axis of resistance’. Hamas has also decisively overtaken the beleaguered PA in standing and credibility. It has achieved notable psychological and political effects, shattering Israeli perceptions of its own power, the competence of its security services and political leadership, and the manageability of its immediate neighbourhood. Hamas’s prospects will depend largely on how it emerges from the Israeli response.” (IISS)
“It’s a cold December day and Sara Ziff is sitting in her bright, airy kitchen in Bed-Stuy, sipping chamomile tea. It is perhaps the most relaxed I have ever seen the 41-year-old, an intense and cerebral native New Yorker and advocate for the rights of fashion models — of which she was one for more than a decade. Ziff usually interacts with reporters at rallies and press conferences, where she favors a uniform of a tan suit and low ponytail. But today she is in work-from-home mode, wearing loose-fitting mom jeans and a hoodie bearing the logo for her nonprofit, the Model Alliance. Around her are the colorful giveaways of a toddler in the house: scribbled drawings, scattered toys, a craft table in disarray. On her couch, her rotund rescue dog, Tillie, snores softly. The family has only recently moved here from a smaller apartment a block away, and Ziff tells me they were just able to host Thanksgiving: For the first time since moving in together, she and her husband have a full-size oven.Despite the casual setting, Ziff is overprepared, pulling up a list of notes as we talk about the Adult Survivors Act — a bill the Model Alliance helped pass in 2022, which opened up a yearlong ‘look-back window’ for sexual-assault survivors to file civil lawsuits outside the statute of limitations. The look-back window has just closed, bringing with it claims against prominent figures like Donald Trump, Eric Adams, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, and Russell Brand, as well as a lawsuit from Ziff herself, accusing former Harvey Weinstein associate Fabrizio Lombardo of raping her in 2001. In all, more than 3,000 suits were filed under the act.” (Emily Shugerman/The Cut)
“Pro-Islamic State groups have weathered months of counterterrorism operations across the southern Philippines that have killed top leaders and seemingly hollowed out their ranks. Yet the attacks continue. On December 2, the bombing of a Catholic Mass in Marawi City, which killed four and injured dozens, was claimed by the Islamic State as the work of its East Asia province. In the days since the attack, local pro-Islamic State groups have claimed responsibility for incidents across the Bangsamoro autonomous region (BARMM). These are not the death spasms of pro-Islamic State groups in the Philippines but a last-ditch effort to collapse the Bangsamoro peace process before the region’s first elections in 2025. If war returns to Mindanao, it will have dire consequences for Manila’s plans to re-posture its armed forces for territorial defense and what contributions it makes to recently beefed-up security agreements with the United States, Japan, and Australia. Failure to bring a lasting peace to the Bangsamoro region will trigger a cascading effect that will leave the Philippines torn between simultaneous domestic and foreign threats.” (Haroro J Ingram/The Diplomat)
“Shipping companies sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid Houthi attacks on the Red Sea face tough choices over where to refuel and restock, as African ports struggle with red tape, congestion and poor facilities, companies and analysts say. Hundreds of large vessels are rerouting around the southern tip of Africa, a longer route adding 10-14 days of travel, to escape drone and missile attacks by Yemeni Houthis that have pushed up oil prices and freight rates. The attacks by Iranian-backed militants have disrupted international trade through the Suez Canal, the shortest shipping route between Europe and Asia, which accounts for about a sixth of global traffic. South Africa's major ports, including Durban, one of Africa's largest in terms of container volumes handled, as well as Cape Town and Ngqura ports are among the worst performing globally, a World Bank 2022 index released in May found.” (Reuters)
“The world’s biggest computing companies and a raft of well-funded startups all agree: The future of computing is manipulating data with quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, governments, private companies, and venture capitalists have collectively invested billions of dollars into quantum computing, which aims to solve problems using a new type of logic enabled by harnessing quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement rather than ordinary 1’s and 0’s. Yet despite some prototypes capable of elementary operations, the hardware isn’t reliable enough to be practically useful. Researchers from Google and Colorado-based startup Quantinuum independently announced results this year that advanced a long-sought idea tipped to solve quantum hardware’s flakiness. Both teams demonstrated a mechanism needed for a component called a topological qubit, which should offer a way to hold onto and manipulate information encoded into quantum states more robustly than current hardware designs. But did the two companies actually make the long-sought component? It depends who you ask.” (WIRED)
“Fossil fuels are ending 2023 with a bang. On Wednesday, one week after world governments agreed at COP28 to “transition away from fossil fuels,” oil companies including Shell and Hess bid a collective $382 million for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico, the most for an auction there since 2015. The auction closely followed the release of data showing that U.S. oil production is now higher than in any country at any time in history, reaching about 13.3 million barrels per day in the fourth quarter. The dissonance between the political agreement at COP28 and the reality of the current oil market underscores the contradictory phase of the energy transition the global economy went through in 2023. The end of fossil fuels is on the horizon, but in the meantime global demand for oil and gas is rising and companies are responding accordingly. And yet, 2023 was also a banner year for renewables. The pace of global decarbonization is set by the tension between market signals favoring fossil fuels and those favoring clean energy, and in 2023 those signals clashed more directly than ever before.” (Tim McDonnell/semafor)
“Third and most importantly, Rowan’s campaign to overthrow (UPenn’s) administration has thus far been entirely successful, in part because of the total lack of organized pushback by its alumni population—4,000 of whom apparently signed Rowan’s open letter castigating university president Liz Magill for “platforming antisemitism”—but also because it was clearly and obviously a deliberate plot, waged not opportunistically on social media like Ackman’s but behind the scenes from his helm atop the Wharton Board of Advisors. Rowan began agitating to remove Magill shortly after she refused to cancel a Palestinian literary festival back in September. That timing alone tells you that the current shitstorm was in the works well before October 7, and as such, has an agenda much broader than anything that could have been inspired by the massacre Hamas inflicted on Israeli civilians that day. And while Rowan has publicly attempted to link the massacre to alleged sentiments expressed during the literary festival in Philadelphia, a jaw-dropping email he sent the University’s Board of Trustees last week in the wake of Magill’s resignation with the subject heading ‘Moving Forward’ articulates a much vaster, more existential agenda than anything most antisemitism hysterics have voiced.IN 18 SUGGESTIONS POSED AS (VERY LOADED) ‘QUESTIONS,’ Rowan called for: shrinking the university’s 48-member Board of Trustees and establishing a ‘risk committee’ to assess whether the ‘current political orientation’ of the university ‘has exposed UPenn to significant risk in the event of political realignment in Congress’; shutting down academic departments; doubling down on online education and something called ‘AI education’; incorporating ‘viewpoint diversity’ into its diversity, equity, and inclusion framework for hiring ‘faculty, our administrators and the remainder of the University community’; articulating its plan for complying with the Supreme Court ruling banning explicit race-based affirmative action; disciplining professors who in any way display ‘political and other leanings’ to students; and enhanced focus on branding.” (Maureen Tkacik/TAP)
“When the British filmmaker Steve McQueen was considering making a feature film about a free man who was captured and sold into slavery, his wife, the Dutch journalist and historian Bianca Stigter, suggested he start with a true story. She found a 1853 memoir by a New York man who was kidnapped, sold and enslaved for 12 years in Louisiana, named Solomon Northup. McQueen was immediately intrigued. ‘What was so interesting about it was that the script was there,’ he said last week, over lunch with Stigter in Amsterdam. ‘I didn’t have to invent a story.’ His resulting 2013 feature film, ‘12 Years a Slave,’ adapted from Northup’s memoir by John Ridley, won three Academy Awards, including best picture. For the couple, it was just one example of a kind of creative symbiosis that has defined their 28-year relationship. In 2022, when Stigter made her first film, ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening,’ a documentary based on rare footage of a Polish village before the Holocaust, McQueen was a co-producer and ‘a sounding board,’ she said. McQueen’s latest film, the four-hour documentary “Occupied City,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Dec. 25, is the couple’s most extensive collaboration to date. He adapted the movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, from Stigter’s book, ‘Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,’ a 560-page historical encyclopedia that was published in Dutch in 2019, and she is one of the movie’s producers.” (Nina Siegal/NYT)
“Over the past year, demand for Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro has greatly outstripped supply, creating persistent shortages for patients who need them. (Technically, Ozempic and Mounjaro are approved for diabetes, while Wegovy and Zepbound are approved for obesity. In practice, all have been used for weight loss, and ‘Ozempic’—which was the first to market—has become a kind of shorthand for the class.) Suspected fake Ozempic pens have spread across Europe and caused several people in Austria to be hospitalized; in the U.S., some have turned to off-brand compounding pharmacies for their supply. Unfortunately, unreasonable beauty standards are driving some of the demand, showing us just how far we are from having truly healthy relationships with our bodies. People have used the drugs to get into wedding shape, and have taken out credit cards or second jobs to pay for them; wealthy Americans look around at thin neighbors and ask, ‘Who’s on Vitamin O?’ This spring, speaking to a crowd of annoyingly attractive actors at the Academy Awards, Jimmy Kimmel mused, ‘When I look around at this room, I can’t help but wonder: Is Ozempic right for me?’ … The Ozempic revolution could still disappoint us. For one thing, the medications don’t work for everybody … Ozempic and Wegovy can cause nausea, constipation, diarrhea, and other gastrointestinal symptoms.” (Dhruv Khullar/TNY)
“The Pentagon is marshaling a new international task force to combat Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, and not a moment too soon, it would seem, as it has been expending millions of dollars in munitions to intercept the militants' drones and missiles since Oct. 7. But is it essentially expanding the ‘target set’ for the Houthis, who are clearly bent on proving their own strength (with, of course, Iranian backing) and scoring political points against Israel? Will this task force, named Operation Prosperity Guardian, bring the U.S. one step closer to a regional war that will, in the end, cost Americans much more? According to the Department of Defense, the Houthis have conducted 100 drone and ballistic missile attacks since Oct. 7, targeting cargo vessels involving more than 35 flags from different nations in the Red Sea, including U.S Navy destroyers. Most have been intercepted, though some have hit their targets, causing minor injuries and damage. But with the hijacking of one ship, plus the major disruptions to shipping (the Houthis are blocking an estimated $10 billion in cargo a day) and resulting price hikes, the situation has put security in the region on high alert. It is also costing the United States a pretty penny to act as the key defender of these predominant global shipping lanes. Each munition used to shoot down the Houthi missiles and drones costs between $1 million and $4.3 million and the ships cannot reload at sea and will have to return to port — perhaps Djibouti? — to reload if the kinetic activity goes on much longer, according to experts that talked to Responsible Statecraft this week.” (Kelley Beauchar Vlahos/Responsible Statecraft)