“Buried in a variety of cemeteries around the basin as long as 4,000 years ago, the naturally mummified corpses were first unearthed by European explorers in the early 20th century. Over time, more and more of the Tarim bodies were unearthed, along with their spectacular cultural relics. To date, hundreds have been found. The earliest of the mummies are about 2,100 years old, while more recent mummies have been dated to about 500 B.C … Another of the most famous of the bodies is that of the so-called ‘Princess’ or ‘Beauty’ of Xiaohe, a 3,800-year-old woman with light hair, high cheekbones, and long, still-preserved eyelashes who seems to be smiling in death. Though she wore a large felt hat and fine clothing and even jewelry in death, it is unclear what position she may have occupied in her society.” (National Geographic)
“When autoworkers walked out of three assembly plants on Thursday at midnight, they made history. For the first time, the United Autoworkers are striking at once Detroit’s Big Three: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler. They’re seeking general wage increases in addition to higher cost-of-living allowances, an end to wage tiers, pension increases, the restoration of pensions for new hires, and ‘a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay,’ the Associated Press reported. In doing so they plan to end concessions made during the 2008 recession to help automakers survive — and build back their own power as workers. As Jacobin’s Alex Press recently explained, the Big Three have posted around a quarter of a trillion dollars in profit over the last ten years while CEO pay has risen by 40 percent over the same decade. Adjusted for inflation, autoworker wages over the same period have declined by 30 percent. Now workers have started a reckoning.” (Sarah Jones/Intelligencer)
“‘Kevin McCarthy has less spine than all the previous Republican speakers put together,’ says Norman Ornstein, senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. In dealing with the rabid impeach-and-see-what-happens Freedom Caucusers, McCarthy is in a no-win bind, Ornstein argues: ‘There’s nothing he can do that’s going to get them to be fearful of him or respectful of him. He’s put himself in a box, where he’s tried to dance around things like a shutdown and the debt-ceiling issue. But it’s like throwing a pack of rabid, vicious, hungry dogs whatever bone you can find, which in this case is the impeachment inquiry.’ Former GOP insiders concur. ‘Once he won the speaker fight, even if the most irrational, insane, and performative boobs in the caucus were aligned against him, he had the leash,’ says Tim Miller, communications director for the 2016 Jeb Bush campaign. But, Miller notes, the perverse calculus of power in today’s GOP is that the more you let actual governing that occurs on your watch, the more you’re treated as a traitor to the sacred cause of tearing shit down: ‘The more of those deals you do over the objections of the MAGA side of the caucus, the more vulnerable you become.’” (Chris Lehmann/The Nation)
“The chaos in Congress has spawned strange bedfellows. The latest collaboration appears to be between some members of the Republican Main Street Caucus and the House Freedom Caucus who are working together to stave off a government shutdown. Republican Reps. Kelly Armstrong, Stephanie Bice, Byron Donalds, Chip Roy, Scott Perry, and Dusty Johnson met Wednesday night to discuss the contours of a stopgap funding measure with the expectation that the House will continue to negotiate additional appropriation bills, per a Republican lawmaker and a House GOP aide. The group reconvened Thursday after each caucus met individually. The unifying issue is border spending. ‘The Republican Main Street Caucus and the House Freedom Caucus are working together in good faith to establish a plan to lower spending, secure the border, and avoid a government shutdown. The talks have been productive and we’ll continue to work toward a deal,’ Main Street Chair Dusty Johnson and Vice Chair Stephanie Bice said in a statement. Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Republicans that they’ll remain in session until they approve a stopgap funding measure that averts a shutdown. Behind the scenes, Republicans were growing increasingly exasperated at the lack of progress on approving spending bills. They pulled the plug on passing Pentagon funding legislation this week, and McCarthy faced another threat of a right-wing revolt that could cost him the gavel.” (Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Kadia Goba/semafor)
“Staffers that I spoke to, who acknowledged that a divorce with Disney seemed inevitable after Bob Iger's infamous comments earlier this summer that the television asset ‘may not be core’ to the company, were apprehensive about how quickly a potential sale appeared to be progressing. The ABC News'ers suggested that they are frustrated that they remain in the dark about the future of their company. Instead of hearing directly from Disney leadership, they're instead reading in the press about what the House of Mouse plans to potentially do with the company. That might soon change. I'm told that Iger — likely recognizing the frustration radiating out of the news division — is expected to make a visit to his ABC News troops next week in New York City. But, for obvious reasons, he is likely limited on what he can say about the future of the outlet.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“They say a lot of things, those theys, they say don't travel alone, don't make plans on the fly, don't talk to strangers, don't forget to let someone know where you are! I did none of the above, besides sending postcards from each country I tramped through, I felt I was singlehandedly supporting the postal services around the world. Otherwise, my goal was simple, I wanted to feel freedom and that involved disappearing.” (Christina Oxenberg)
“In recent years, as liberalism has faltered, universities have been dragged into political conflicts to which they are ill-suited. Conservative parties and campaigns have a clear incentive to appeal to non-graduates, who are in a majority and of a higher average age, and therefore more likely to vote. To this end, all manner of phoney ‘culture war’ issues have been manufactured, and ‘woke’ university lecturers blamed for the moral and cultural degradation of the nation. Paranoid references to ‘cultural Marxism’ have been a mainstay of the American far right for decades, but the phrase now crops up in the speeches of more mainstream conservative politicians, while ‘critical race theory’ is presented as a university-led conspiracy against white people that is now infecting schools and public services. Reactionary intellectuals such as Douglas Murray have identified Black feminist theories of ‘intersectionality’ as the root of the West’s current malaises. This rhetoric is far from harmless, as attested by the censorship of gender studies by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, and similar efforts by Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida.” (William Davies/LRB)
“We parked in the searing noon sun at the El Malpais National Monument, and took a short walk over to a massive sandstone arch. When we returned to the car, we learned you can reheat last night’s pizza on the dashboard quite nicely. We also hiked out into the burning, strange lunar landscape of the Bisti Badlands, an eroded sedimentary basin exposing the largest Cretaceous-Paleogene fossil bed in the world. Farther north, we passed through the Grants Mining District, a capital of the American uranium mining industry. During the Cold War, from roughly the late 1940s to the late 1990s, Navajo miners were hired to excavate the deadly mineral that helped the United States maintain its position as Leader of the Free world against the Soviets, who were stockpiling the same weapons at the same rate and probably doing similar damage to their environment. By 1989, the world nuclear stockpile was at 70,300 weapons. (Read Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control about the accidents and near disasters and you will, if you are an atheist like me, wonder if there really aren’t supernatural beings protecting the human race from its folly).” (Nina Burleigh/American Political Freakshow)
“The first bit of (Virginia) Woolf merch I ever bought, in Woolworths in about 1975, was a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Waves. On the cover was a portrait of the author by someone called Vanessa Bell. I couldn’t read what was inside, gave up after about five pages, and never tried again. Around the same time, I bought similarly lovely editions of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I did get through, under compulsion, at university, though I struggled with the preciousness, the sense of someone walking—writing—around on tiptoe. That was pretty much it for me and Woolf’s fiction until the pandemic when I was nudged toward it by an unlikely enthusiast from the American West. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry writes of how, after a serious illness, he found, for the first time in his adult life, that he couldn’t read fiction—unless it was by Proust or Woolf. I picked up the novels again and, despite McMurtry’s lobbying, failed to make any progress. Which was surprising because I had, by then, come around to Woolf in several ways. In 2003 I’d gone to see Patti Smith perform at Charleston, the home of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa. This was one of several rustic hubs of Bloomsbury life, and it’s obvious, as you are shown around the bright rooms with their painted furniture, the sanctuary and liberation this place offered from the oppressive dreariness of English life between the wars. The handmade look is like a precursor of the make-do aesthetic I was familiar with from London squats in the eighties, which remains my ideal of interior design. This fitted in well with Smith’s performance when she read passages from The Waves, which sounded much better as Virginia’s clipped English ‘yellow’ became Patti’s New Jersey ‘yellah.’ If it sounded almost impossibly cool and contemporary that was because in places the original had given way seamlessly to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations.” (Geoff Dyer/The Paris Review)
“The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey. The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation’ plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel ‘have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.’ Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same. The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end. The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region. There was little dissent at the time.” (Branko Marcetic/Responsible Statecraft)
“The welcome given to China’s new ambassador, Zhao Sheng, in Kabul on September 13 was marked by exceptionally elaborate protocol. Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi described Zhao’s appointment as a ‘significant step with a significant message.’ Afghan officials see the arrival of this new envoy as a clear signal to other nations to step forward and establish relations with the Taliban-led government. Notably, China has become the first country to formally appoint a new ambassador to Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover. While there are other diplomats in Kabul holding the title of ambassador, all of them assumed their roles before the Taliban’s ascent to power. In contrast, some countries and organizations like Pakistan and the European Union have dispatched senior diplomats to lead diplomatic missions under the title ‘charge d’affaires,’ which does not necessitate presenting ambassadorial credentials to the host nation. China’s own embassy was run by a charge d’affaires until Zhao took up his post.While Beijing has not explicitly indicated whether the ambassadorial appointment signifies a broader move toward officially recognizing the Taliban government, it does lay the groundwork for intensified cooperation between China and Afghanistan.” (Ureeda Khan and Syed Baza Raza/The Diplomat)
“In 2017, Washington, D.C., therapist Paula Atkinson went mildly viral for posting flyers online and in doctors’ offices advertising a ‘Trump trauma’ support group. Trump, racial violence, and the crisis at the border had become daily topics in sessions, so she reasoned, ‘I wanted to get all these people, and this is when we could all be in the same room together.’ And then, despite the clicks and the jokes, she could not gather a quorum. ‘Thought of signing up,’ one person posted on Twitter, ‘But then I thought, ‘that’s what Twitter’s for.’ The popularity of TraumaTok and the easy discussion of trauma on social media limn the edges of how badly we’re coping with this thing: We are trying to find catharsis in atomization, automation, and the algorithm. We are avoiding deep vulnerability in favor of volume. But volume there is. The number of people describing themselves as survivors on social media doesn’t mean our definition of trauma is too large; it could mean it’s too small, only capturing those who are ‘out’ about a diagnosis that still carries a lot of shame.” (Ana Marie Cox/TNR)
“We have a huge challenge on our hands. In the military, suicides reached epidemic levels in 2009 that then migrated to the veterans community. And, within our society as a whole, there's been a 30 percent increase in suicides since 2000. This doesn't even factor in where we are today, in the aftermath of the pandemic. We may be done with the pandemic, but the pandemic is not done with us. What you're seeing now — given the factors of fear, social isolation, loss, grief and illness — is that our lives, our families, and our loved ones, even our workplaces, have been transformed in the process. I don't think we have a historic analog to turn to. We've had prior pandemics, we've had yearslong wars, we've had pieces of what we're experiencing now, but I would call what we are now in a trauma tsunami. And it is one for which our current mental health care system is ill equipped. There are some real glimmers of hope and that's where I'm putting my time and effort right now.” (Old Goats/Jonathan Alter)
“A little over a week after John took his last dose of tianeptine, an unregulated supplement known as ‘gas station heroin,’ his girlfriend heard a loud ‘thud’ coming from the guest room of their upstate New York home. When she found him on the hardwood floor, the bridge of his nose was bleeding—he’d hit it on a bedside table on his way down—and he couldn’t stand or speak coherently. She called an ambulance. It was early morning on Labor Day and John didn’t wake up for 10 hours. He remained in hospital for four days, barely sleeping and riddled with shame … ‘As nice as the detox folks were on the phone, they admittedly weren't sure how they were going to help me… Not their fault. It's just our reality as tianeptine addicts.’ When John decided to quit, he opted for an at-home detox involving potent vitamin C capsules and an arsenal of other drugs and supplements. It was based almost exclusively on information he’d learned from a subreddit called r/QuittingTianeptine. Because tianeptine isn’t an approved drug, there’s a dearth of research on it and many doctors have never heard of it, leaving people who are addicted to fend for themselves a lot of the time. So they turn to Reddit.” (Vice)
“The opening pages of The Other America set out the problem: There was a ‘familiar America’ of postwar prosperity, of televisions and radios and automobiles and suburban homes, and then there was a shadowland—’another America’—of between 40 and 50 million people who lived in poverty. The poor might not be literally starving, as they were in other countries, but they were ‘maimed in body and spirit,’ their lives twisted and deformed by material lack, and their existence ‘invisible’ to the broader society. Matthew Desmond’s latest book, Poverty, by America, sets out from a very different starting point. In the early 1960s, when Harrington published his book, poor people were hardly part of political discourse at all; today, there are few who would be so naïve as to claim to simply not know poverty exists in American society. As a result, Desmond presents his book not as an exposé but as an effort to answer the question: Why? Why is there still so much poverty in the United States? Poverty for Desmond is not the result of invisibility, of being left behind. Rather, the root cause of poverty is exploitation. People are poor because other people benefit from the presence of poverty: ‘To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves.’” (Kim Phillips-Fein/TNR)
“In the book, (Mitt) Romney specifically rips freshman Vance for building a national brand on bashing Donald Trump only to later grovel for the former president’s endorsement when he ran for Senate last cycle. ‘I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,’ Romney told Coppins. Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment. As for Hawley and Cruz, Romney accused them of devious calculations in their support of Trump’s 2020 election lies and—following the Capitol riot—said he would likely never work with Hawley. ‘They know better!’ the outgoing senator argued. ‘Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.’ He added that the two senators ‘put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.’” (Caleb Ekarma/VF)
“Stats bros claim to be the foil: ‘epistemically modest’ purveyors of fact and reason. In reality, they conflate data and politics, taking their tools for precise descriptions of the actual world, all the while tending to the neuroses of the liberal electorate. In 2016, Silver’s statistical model gave Trump better chances than other predictors were willing to, grasping that working-class votes across the Midwest would cause a domino effect across the country. This fact is crucial to understanding our political landscape today, but it’s one part, not a whole: Silver’s model told us nothing about why Democrats fumbled the bag on the working class. Theodor Adorno accused philosophers called ‘positivists’ of the same mistake: They posited a reality and could not distinguish their methodology from the real world. Stats bros need to understand that politics isn’t data; it’s passion, stories, and rhetoric. When stats bros claim to be ‘epistemically modest,’ they’re articulating a politics we might call the ‘statistical center’—a voice that promises to provide knowledge backed up by ‘objective’ data to fight increasing misinformation. The promise is well-intended, but it has gone badly wrong.” (The Nation)
“Inside the briefing room there was consensus on the dais that the federal government’s regulatory might is needed. At one point, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who organized the briefing, asked his assembled guests, ‘Does the government need to play a role in regulating AI?’ ‘Every single person raised their hand, even though they had diverse views,’ Schumer continued. ‘So that gives us a message here: We have to try to act, as difficult as the process may be.’ The raising of diverse hands felt revelatory to many. ‘I think people all agreed that this is something that we need the government’s leadership on,’ said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. ‘Some disagreement about how it should happen, but unanimity [that] this is important and urgent.’ The devilish details are haunting, though. Because generative AI is so all-encompassing, a debate over regulating it can quickly expand to include every divisive issue under the sun, something that was on display in the briefing right alongside the show of unity, according to attendees who spoke to WIRED.” (WIRED)