“So much of the physical evidence of humanity’s existence has been erased, eroded, buried, dynamited and in other ways obliterated. Enter the archaeologists. Decades ago they had to rely to a great degree on shovels, brushes, magnifying glasses — painstaking field work, one bone or pottery fragment or chunk of charcoal at a time. That kind of work continues, but archaeologists today also employ an astonishing suite of 21st century technologies to unearth the past. These new tools include artificial intelligence, DNA sequencing, satellite imagery, the airborne technology known as LiDAR, drones carrying thermal infrared cameras and tiny robots that can crawl down a tomb shaft. Remote sensing technologies, as well as the use of AI and machine learning that rummage through big datasets greatly boost the likelihood that a site targeted by archaeologists will yield important artifacts and not be a waste of effort … LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging. By airplane, helicopter or drone, a LiDAR system aims rapid pulses of laser light at the surface and the reflections are processed to create a three-dimensional map. Advances in LiDAR have improved its ability to penetrate tree canopies and create precise images of the terrain below, revealing features that suggest past human activity. That’s been revolutionary for scientists probing the rainforests of Central and South America, especially as LiDAR has become cheaper and easier to deploy. ‘A decade or two ago you needed to charter a flight just to hold all the equipment. But now you can put the technology on a relatively cheap and lightweight drone,’ said University of Florida anthropologist Nicolas Gauthier … So much of science is incremental, adding a thin layer of knowledge to a broad foundation built by earlier generations of researchers. But the new technologies have enabled some stunning discoveries at the macro scale: A college student recently employed AI to read ancient scrolls from 2,000 years ago; archaeologists discovered an ancient roman military camp at the top of a mountain; and a lost city was discovered in the Honduran rainforest … Recently scientists used a particle accelerator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to send beams of X-rays through fragments of Roman concrete. That helped reveal the concrete recipe that allowed Romans to build things that wouldn’t collapse for 2,000 years such as the Pantheon.” (Joel Achenbach/WashPost)
“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were ‘weather weapons’ unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and ‘truth seeker’ accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was ‘spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton’ in order to ensure maximum rainfall, ‘just like they did over Asheville!’ As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption ‘WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!’ The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on. Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis.” (Charlie Warzel/The Atlantic)
“The risk of international spread from Rwanda of the highly virulent Marburg disease is almost zero as the East African nation’s quick and highly co-ordinated response has brought its first-ever outbreak under control. ‘We are expecting to see Rwanda out of this outbreak very soon,’ Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya said in a briefing Thursday. He outlined how rapid isolation of people displaying symptoms of the illness, which can cause hemorrhagic fever, as well as rigorous contact tracing have enabled this. Regionally, the agency is reinforcing its capacity to detect various diseases early. This helps reduce disease spread and gives countries time to prepare, he said. Rwanda has conducted almost 3,000 Marburg tests. There have been 58 confirmed cases in Rwanda, making this one of the largest Marburg outbreaks. The disease has killed 13 people in the less than two weeks since the country’s first case was reported. That brings the case-fatality rate to 22%, about a quarter of what’s been recorded in other Marburg outbreaks. At least 12 people have recovered. Rwandan authorities are investigating the origins of the outbreak with sequencing and doing serology testing. The results will be ready in a few days and a conclusion on where it started is expected soon, Rwandan Health Minister Sabin Nsanzimana said in the same briefing. The country is doing active exit screening and has prohibited people who are contacts of confirmed cases from leaving the country until 21 days after exposure, which is Marburg’s incubation period, he said.More than 200 people received an experimental vaccine for the Ebola-like infection in the three days since its rollout began, Nsanzimana said. Health-care workers and contacts of people who have tested positive for the virus are among those receiving the initial shipment of 700 doses. More are expected soon, he said.” (Janice Kew/Bloomberg)
“Almost a year into the war, few Israelis or Palestinians believe it will end anytime soon. Previous Israeli campaigns in Gaza lasted a few weeks at most, but this one appears to be a war with no endgame. The Israeli government’s unwillingness to discuss the ‘day after,’ its empty slogans about ‘total victory,’ and the escalation in Lebanon have normalized the abnormal for Israelis: uncertainty, grief, and displacement. In Gaza, of course, the impact is much worse than the other battle zones, with tens of thousands dead and nearly the entire population internally displaced. In the West Bank, where I do my reporting, Palestinians see the destruction in Gaza and wonder if it’s their future as well. Since Oct. 7, Israel has regularly used aircraft to strike in the West Bank—something it had done only rarely in the preceding two decades. Residents of the Nur Shams refugee camp have watched Israeli military bulldozers grind up their streets—suspecting they might be booby-trapped—and compared the images to the destruction in Gaza. In the village of Qaryut near Nablus, a father whose 13-year-old daughter was shot dead in their home by the Israeli military told me he was thankful he could bury her in one piece, unlike those in Gaza whose loved ones are often dismembered in Israeli strikes. But even as the West Bank is undergoing Gazafication, Gaza faces the possibility of becoming more like the West Bank: permanently occupied. For Israelis, the idea of maintaining a military presence in Gaza has become increasingly mainstream since the war began. Another idea gaining traction is of Israelis settling in Gaza—erecting civilian communities there, similar to those in the West Bank. While it remains a minority position among Jewish Israelis, its advocates include members of the far right who wield substantial power in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration.” (Hagar Shezaf/FP)
“Pollsters consistently find that swing voters and even some Republicans don’t take Trump seriously. They don’t believe he is more than a blustery politician — not the leader of a violent authoritarian personality cult who will really carry out mass deportation of supposed undesirables and retribution against his domestic political enemies. A visceral new documentary — available digitally starting next week — filmed from inside the front lines at the January 6 insurrection and melees in the months before, is a critical reminder to anyone who forgot or never believed Trump is capable of unleashing political violence. The film, 64 Days, premiered in New York last week and will begin to stream digitally next week. Nick Quested, a British documentary maker who worked with the American author Sebastian Junger on an award-winning film in Afghanistan, gathered such revealing footage that the House January 6 committee brought him in to testify. Quested and his team set out to cover BLM rallies in the summer of 2020, making what he thought would be a film about the divisions in America, but ended up covering what he calls ‘a division worse than I ever feared, a division stoked further by Donald Trump’ in the months after the election. He ended up embedded with the Proud Boys. This slice from two months of American political mayhem is presented chronologically with election day 2020 as Day 1 and Day 64 being January 6. Quested narrates part of it and also lets people he interviews tell the story, starring Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio — now serving 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The filmmakers spent a lot of time around two leaders, Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, men with curiously matching feral underbites. The two men — understudy and mastermind — fronted Stop the Steal, ‘a call to arms’ that Stone had schemed up four years prior, in the event Hillary won.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“On Monday, John Morales, a veteran meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami, was on air tracking the progression of Hurricane Milton, which the National Hurricane Center had just described as a category 5 storm. ‘It has dropped fifty millibars in ten hours,’ Morales said. This technical language might not in itself have been very memorable, but the way Morales said it was: his voice trembling; his eyes red. ‘I apologize,’ he said. ‘This is just… horrific.’ Keeping his composure, Morales talked about the storm’s wind speeds and the fact that it was gaining strength as it passed over ‘record hot’ waters in the Gulf of Mexico. ‘You know what’s driving that, I don’t need to tell you,’ Morales said. ‘Global warming. Climate change.’ Morales told other news outlets afterward that the climate emergency, and his frustration that the world has not done more to curb it, contributed to his emotional moment on air, in addition to his shock and fear about Milton’s intensification and the people in its path. According to the New York Times, Morales has long worked to incorporate climate science into his day-to-day weather forecasts, but the moment reflected ‘a recent shift’ in his approach—from ‘striving to be a ‘non-alarmist’ weathercaster to one who freely admits to being horrified by the mounting threats of global warming.’ Not all viewers have taken kindly to this approach: after Hurricane Helene, itself a devastating storm, made landfall last month, Morales wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where he is a columnist, that one person responded to his warnings by calling him a ‘climate militant.’ ‘Perhaps those who have known me as the just-the-facts non-alarmist meteorologist can’t get used to the new me,’ Morales wrote. ‘That’s why they bicker and accuse me of overhyping emerging weather threats.’” (Jon Allsop/CJR)
“Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters—Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love—are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one’s intentions are pure. No one’s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding—a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages.” (Merve Emre/The Paris Review)
“These are the hardest few weeks in a campaign, when the race is all but over and the one question anyone wants answered cannot be answered. Contradictory polls bombard us. Kamala Harris is up by three points in Michigan. No, wait, she is down by two. On the same day? Consult the polling average on the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Harris’s lead in the national polls over Donald Trump as of October 10th is 2.5 per cent. Her lead in the national polls over Trump on September 10th? It was 2.5 per cent. Welcome, once again, to the unbudging reality of a nearly fifty-fifty nation. Of course, that has not stopped both parties from doing what they always do. In Democrats’ case, this appears to be the week when their traditional preëlection panic has set in. Strategists are now warning that Harris has ‘plateaued,’ that she ‘needs to be more aggressive,’ and that she has to reinvent herself as a centrist to “seal the deal.” In recent days, I’ve read articles dissecting her challenges with male voters, Black male voters, Arab voters, Latino voters, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voters. She also, apparently, has a Biden problem, a Bibi problem, and a hurricane problem.” (Susan Glasser/TNY)
“Global fertility has plunged since the population explosion in the 1960s. For over two generations, the world’s average childbearing levels have headed relentlessly downward, as one country after another joined in the decline. According to the UN Population Division, the total fertility rate for the planet was only half as high in 2015 as it was in 1965. By the UNPD’s reckoning, every country saw birthrates drop over that period. And the downswing in fertility just kept going. Today, the great majority of the world’s people live in countries with below-replacement fertility levels, patterns inherently incapable of sustaining long-term population stability. (As a rule of thumb, a total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman approximates the replacement threshold in affluent countries with high life expectancy—but the replacement level is somewhat higher in countries with lower life expectancy or marked imbalances in the ratio of baby boys to baby girls.) In recent years, the birth plunge has not only continued but also seemingly quickened. According to the UNPD, at least two-thirds of the world’s population lived in sub-replacement countries in 2019, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. The economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde has contended that the overall global fertility rate may have dropped below the replacement level since then. Rich and poor countries alike have witnessed record-breaking, jaw-dropping collapses in fertility. A quick spin of the globe offers a startling picture. Start with East Asia. The UNPD has reported that the entire region tipped into depopulation in 2021. By 2022, every major population there—in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—was shrinking. By 2023, fertility levels were 40 percent below replacement in Japan, over 50 percent below replacement in China, almost 60 percent below replacement in Taiwan, and an astonishing 65 percent below replacement in South Korea.” (Nicholas Eberstadt/Foreign Affairs)
“If the election were held tomorrow, most recent polls in Arizona suggest that Trump would narrowly win the state. It is more than possible, however, that, as was the case in the 2022 gubernatorial race—which Democrat Katie Hobbs eventually won, after she had trailed Kari Lake for much of the election season—the polls are missing some crucial below-the-surface trends. Since July, UNITE HERE Local 11 canvassers, along with community members of the social welfare organization Worker Power, have knocked on nearly three-quarters of a million doors, many of them belonging to groups that have a low voting rate, such as young people, people of color, or poor or low-income people. It is the largest and most efficient canvas the group has ever done, says Brendan Walsh, executive director of Worker Power, who believes it is what will make a difference in the down-to-the-wire contest. In 2020, the UNITE HERE/Worker Power canvas knocked on over 1 million doors in Arizona, and was a vital component in Biden’s effort to win the state’s 11 Electoral College votes. This time around, using sophisticated voter-outreach software to reach out to Democratic-leaning, independent, and undecided voters, they have a target of knocking on 1.3 million doors and having conversations with a quarter of a million voters. They will almost certainly surpass these numbers. This week, Worker Power released data based on its interviews with close to 150,000 people across the state since the canvas launched in July. They found huge levels of concern around reproductive rights, especially among affluent suburban voters—and that 80 percent of voters for whom this was their number-one issue were planning to vote for Kamala Harris. They found that significant numbers of moderate, GOP-leaning voters in those suburbs—the sorts of voters for whom ex-senator Jeff Flake’s recent endorsement of Kamala Harris might actually matter—were planning to vote for Harris. And they found that among Democratic-leaning voters who said the economy was their number-one priority, most planned to vote for Harris. This finding suggests that Trump’s strategy of using economic concerns to peel off Democratic-leaning voters isn’t working out among key constituencies in the state. As importantly, given the purported power of immigration as a wedge issue in the 2024 election, the canvassers found that among the Democratic and independent voters they have contacted, it isn’t a top-three issue. It was crowded out by concerns about abortion access, the economy, and democracy.” (Sascha Abramsky/The Nation)