“In the millennia before European colonizers invaded the Amazon rain forest, throngs of Indigenous people moved mountains of dirt to create some 10,000 yet-to-be-identified earthworks across the region. That’s according to new research published on Thursday in Science that identifies two dozen sites where massive amounts of dirt formed circular and rectangular geoglyphs, settlements and religious sites. Based on what the researchers knew about such structures, they estimated the huge number of these mysterious constructions that are likely hidden somewhere beneath still unsearched forest. The model supports theories that hold the Amazon, which covers a huge swath of South America, was densely populated before colonization, and it may strengthen political efforts to uphold the modern sovereignty of the forest’s Indigenous inhabitants. To look for these sites, the researchers found data gathered for other studies of biomass in the northern, central and southern regions of the Amazon rain forest. Those studies relied on a so-called light detection and ranging (lidar) system that bounces an airborne laser off Earth’s surface as it passes overhead, measuring trees’ canopies but also revealing the ground below them.”(Meghan Bartles/Scientific American)
“A campaign using artificial intelligence to impersonate Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has received hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, adding online confusion to a country torn apart by civil war. An anonymous account has been posting what it says are ‘leaked recordings’ of the ex-president since late August. The channel has posted dozens of clips - but the voice is fake. Bashir, who has been accused of organising war crimes and was toppled by the military in 2019, hasn't been seen in public for a year and is believed to be seriously ill. He denies the war crimes accusations. The mystery surrounding his whereabouts adds a layer of uncertainty to a country in crisis after fighting broke out in April between the military, currently in charge, and the rival Rapid Support Forces militia group. Campaigns like this are significant as they show how new tools can distribute fake content quickly and cheaply through social media, experts say. ‘It is the democratisation of access to sophisticated audio and video manipulation technology that has me most worried,’ says Hany Farid, who researches digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US.” (Jack Goodman and Mohanad Hashim/BBC)
“If you’ve found this week’s spectacle in the US House of Representatives gripping and more than a little baffling, imagine how it looked for the people of Ukraine, whose life-and-death struggle to defend their country from Russia’s invasion risks suffering yet another demoralizing and dangerous blow as the result of the Republican Party’s mind-boggling infighting. As is well known by now, a band of far-right GOP legislators removed now-former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday night, days after he prevented them from shutting down the government by reaching a deal with House Democrats to fund operations for 45 days. That late Saturday night agreement left out urgently needed military funding for Ukraine. Ukrainians reacted with anxiety. And that was before McCarthy was dethroned and the Speaker’s chair was left empty, with the outlook for support for Ukraine in limbo as the result of almost-incomprehensible political games in Washington. When asked by CNN staff in Kyiv, Olha Hrubryna, 60, said she’s been following events on Capitol Hill. ‘I think it’s awful, because the safety of our people depends on financial support,’ she said Wednesday. ‘We will fight to the last, naturally, but (lack of support) means a lot of losses.’ Volodymyr Kostiak, a Ukrainian serviceman, called it all political games related to the 2024 US elections, telling CNN, ‘We [Ukrainians] are hostages to this process.’” (Frida Ghitis/CNN)
“A FABULOUS FAILURE’S MOST NOVEL and important contribution is in refocusing the narrative of late 20th-century history to show that the fall of the Berlin Wall was more significant to the U.S. and global economy, as well as the maturation of neoliberalism, than the election of Ronald Reagan. The book is notable as the rare study of neoliberalism that successfully connects domestic and global contexts and issues. Lichtenstein and Stein persuasively argue that the end of the Cold War was initially significant because it left no serious alternative to capitalism, which shifted the entire policy process toward pursuing market-based solutions to social problems. Second, it opened Eastern Europe and East Asia to export manufacture, which would fundamentally reshape the labor market and economy both domestically and globally. Examinations of economic globalization in the 1990s have tended to concentrate primarily on NAFTA, and give China merely a passing reference. While Lichtenstein and Stein contend that NAFTA was politically and ideologically important, it was the Clinton administration’s approach to China that was far more wide-reaching for the structure of the American economy. The authors convincingly argue that the Clinton’s administration’s decision to delink human rights and trade and grant China ‘most favored nation’ status in 1994 set in motion a chain of events that would lead to China’s admission to the World Trade Organization seven years later.” (Lily Geismer/TAP)
“Marty Peretz is a money guy. Sure, he lectured at Harvard and blogged for The New Republic, but the main reason we know his name is how he spent his money—most visibly, bankrolling TNR for more than thirty years, during which the magazine’s Third Way liberalism and hawkish foreign policy became ascendant in the Democratic Party. There are lots of money guys out there, but most of them prefer not to be seen, heard, or read. Peretz is an exception, and now he has a memoir, The Controversialist, that brazenly insists on his own centrality to recent history. Peretz has largely avoided the spotlight since 2010, when a group of students and affiliates of Harvard ambushed him on camera and confronted him with placards bearing incendiary racist quotes about Black Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims from his TNR blog. Despite pressure from activists and prominent journalists like the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, Harvard still accepted a $700,000 endowed fellowship in Peretz’s name.” (David Klion/The Baffler)
“Lucky is the writer upon whom misfortune smiles, especially when it’s a relatively minor misfortune from which a lot of narrative mileage can be wrested. Take, for instance, the ‘personal-branding meltdown’ that has recently befallen Naomi Klein. A prolific writer and activist, Klein became notable at a youthful age for having written a mega-best-selling anti-branding manifesto, No Logo, in 1999, which naturally led to her becoming a massive brand herself, a twist of fate about which she’s both amusing and astute. But fate proved to have a further irony up its sleeve: Beginning in the 2010s, Klein would also spend more than a decade being chronically mistaken, online and off, for the increasingly unhinged writer, conspiracy theorist, and former feminist Naomi Wolf—both being attractive Jewish public intellectuals named Naomi, and current attention spans being what they are.” (Laura Kipnis/The Nation)
“Doppelganger is both more literary and more personal than Klein’s other books. She reads Freud and Poe and Ursula Le Guin and Dostoevsky, and gets over her loathing of Philip Roth’s misogyny to find a surprising richness in the Bundism-Zionism face-off dramatised in Operation Shylock (1993); her bad back, her son’s neuroatypicality, the No Logo seam-rippers she handed out on her first ever book tour, all are given their little parts to play. But really, Klein’s purpose is to use her doppelganger adventures as ‘a narrow aperture’ into what she calls the Mirror World: an alternative-media ecosystem of blogs and podcasts, e-books and newsletters largely ignored by liberal-to-left-leaning, highly educated bien pensants, but which has been ballooning, especially since the coming of Covid-19.” (Jenny Turner/LRB)
“Rudolph W. Giuliani had always been hard to miss at the Grand Havana Room, a magnet for well-wishers and hangers-on at the Midtown cigar club that still treated him like the king of New York. In recent years, many close to him feared, he was becoming even harder to miss. For more than a decade, friends conceded grimly, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking had been a problem. And as he surged back to prominence during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, it was getting more difficult to hide it. On some nights when Mr. Giuliani was overserved, an associate discreetly signaled the rest of the club, tipping back his empty hand in a drinking motion, out of the former mayor’s line of sight, in case others preferred to keep their distance. Some allies, watching Mr. Giuliani down Scotch before leaving for Fox News interviews, would slip away to find a television, clenching through his rickety defenses of Mr. Trump. Even at less rollicking venues — a book party, a Sept. 11 anniversary dinner, an intimate gathering at Mr. Giuliani’s own apartment — his consistent, conspicuous intoxication often startled his company.” (Matt Flegenheimer and Maggie Haberman/NYT)
“Campbell Brown is leaving Facebook. So is news. The news industry has itself to blame. When Campbell came to Facebook, the company's relationship with journalists was at rock bottom. Google under Richard Gingras had done great work building constructive relationships with the industry, holding Newsgeist conferences (the latest last weekend), establishing training initiatives, and giving news organizations money via its Google News Initiative. Campbell had to catch up but she did much to improve the place of journalism at Facebook, incorporating news into the platform, building relationships and hiring excellent staff to manage them, and giving away money, too. Some of that money came through my school as we regranted funds to others' projects to fight disinformation and trained journalists.” (Jeff Jarvis)
“Matt Gaetz is a product of America's broken information environment. Not so long ago, a young Florida congressman with no major legislative achievements to his name would hold little power in Washington. Such a person would certainly not wield enough power to overthrow the Speaker of the House. But as the media landscape has dramatically shifted, particularly in the right-wing information space, so have the power dynamics in Washington. In our present day, because of a warped media incentivization structure, the Republicans who carry real power and drive the party are the performers who work in conjunction with partisan media, not those who wish to govern. Gaetz is not an anomaly. He is the direct consequence of this twisted construct.” (Reliable Sources/Oliver Darcy)
“In an upcoming biography, Elon Musk says a private K-12 Santa Monica school is at fault for the anti-wealth views of his transgender daughter who regrets being related to the billionaire in any way, the Daily Mail reported. In the Wall Street Journal excerpt from author Walter Isaacson’s book ‘Elon Musk’, 19-year-old Vivian Jenna Wilson’s spiteful views of her father is described as Musk’s most painful experience since the sudden death of his 10-week-old firstborn. According to the book, Musk didn’t show disdain for his daughter’s gender transition. It was while she attended the Crossroads School of Arts and Sciences, with annual tuition costs as much as $50,000, when she began to voice Marxist-leaning views. ‘She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,’ Musk told the author. The South African-born entrepreneur also compared Crossroads to Twitter’s platform, saying it had ‘become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right wing and anti-establishment voices,’ LA Magazine reported. A conviction that led to Musk’s infamous 2022 Twitter takeover.” (Zach Armstrong/Santa Monica Mirror)
“The data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics offered yet another snapshot of the job market’s remarkable strength, with the unemployment rate holding at 3.8 percent and wage growth outpacing inflation in a boost to workers. But it was also the latest example of an economy that simply refuses to slow down, despite the Federal Reserve’s aggressive attempts to get prices and hiring closer to normal levels. The economy’s defiance has worked out for now, with a recession nowhere in sight. But that could change if the Fed is forced to keep interest rates high for an extended period.” (WashPost)
“McCarthy’s reputation as unprincipled and untrustworthy, as having few policy chops or deep beliefs in anything except himself, is what caused him to fail in his first bid to become speaker when Boehner exited, and it’s what led to 15 agonizing votes over several days to win in January. As TNR’s Timothy Noah wrote, here’s how Bill Thomas, McCarthy’s mentor and Republican predecessor representing California’s 20th congressional district, described McCarthy to The New Yorker shortly before McCarthy was elected speaker: ‘Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie, if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?’ McCarthy’s behavior around January 6—calling Trump when the Capitol was overrun and demanding that he call off his shock troops, which Trump coldly declined, but then voting that the election had been stolen; calling Trump out on the House floor soon thereafter, and then, two weeks later, traveling to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring—infuriated Democrats and not a few Republicans. When he followed that by harshly punishing the two Republicans who stood up to Trump, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and embracing radicals like Marjorie Taylor Greene, it demonstrated the truth of Thomas’s observation. If anything, the surprise was that only eight Republicans voted to oust him.” (Norm Orenstein/TNR)
“Almost immediately after the cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded last November, an agent e-mailed Hollywood buyers to reveal that the writer Michael Lewis just happened to have spent the previous six months hanging around Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis, the agent noted, “hadn’t written anything yet,” but the recent developments had provided “a dramatic surprise ending to the story.” Nobody would have argued that point. But Lewis didn’t appear to regard this unexpected climax the way everyone else did. According to the agent, the writer had likened Bankman-Fried’s archrival, Changpeng Zhao—who had helped set in motion the bank run that brought FTX down—to ‘the Darth Vader of crypto’ and Bankman-Fried to Luke Skywalker. This might not have been a particularly weird thing to say a month earlier. But it was a very weird thing to say at a moment when Bankman-Fried’s alleged misdeeds had made him not simply the ‘main character’ on Twitter but in much of the actual world. Bankman-Fried stood accused of having defrauded his exchange’s customers of something like eight billion dollars, which he had apparently used to prop up his flailing crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research. Furthermore, he had funnelled, or attempted to funnel, his illicit gains into all sorts of nonsense: naming rights to stadiums, Bahamian luxury real estate, a Pacific island where his confederates might ride out one minor apocalypse or another.” (Gideon Lewis-Kraus/TNY)
“A couple weeks before, (Robert) Kennedy had responded to an interview request by calling and expressing exasperation at various hatchet jobs in mainstream media and skepticism that a correspondent for Vanity Fair, a card-carrying member of the legacy media, might be fair to him. 'Your editor won’t let you write anything positive,' he promised. Kennedy had had a rough ride since the summer started (he was virtually set ablaze by New York magazine) and so I proposed that instead of raking over his many controversial ideas—like his belief that the media has been infiltrated by the CIA, as he told the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe in an interview this year; or his claim that pesticides in drinking water are causing 'sexual dysphoria' in boys, as evidenced by a frog study—we meet up at the Kennedy compound and talk about his family history. Lean into his Kennedyness, have a little fun. I was scheduled to be on Cape Cod for vacation anyway and figured I’d go take the cut of his jib. 'So you’re saying this won’t be a hit piece?' he wrote back. And so Kennedy agreed, reasoning that since we had a mutual friend in the late Peter Kaplan, his college roommate from Harvard and a mentor of mine in the journalism business, I would treat him fairly. “ (Joe Hagan/VF)
“Anyone who hopes to become the next speaker must first attempt to settle a raging debate inside the GOP conference: Should one House member maintain the power to pull another Matt Gaetz? A growing number of Republicans, led by allies of Kevin McCarthy, are demanding major reforms to prevent a rerun of the historic ouster that Gaetz (R-Fla.) pulled off — using a power that McCarthy handed to his right flank to win the gavel in the first place. Unless the House limits the ability of one member to force a vote on booting the speaker, these GOP lawmakers say, it simply can’t function.” (Politico)
“Thanks to AI tools, a backroom employee at a Walmart supercenter now spends two-thirds less time figuring out whether a product inside a box is needed on store shelves. What used to require a manual scan of every single package is now done by a smartphone app, which uses augmented reality to scan a wall of boxes and immediately tell a worker whether they contain items that are out of stock. Walmart, the largest U.S. private sector employer, has a growing arsenal of AI software that its 1.6 million employees use. It could provide a case study in how AI might affect workers, at least in the short term. Despite the AI-powered boost in efficiency, the company’s Secaucus, N.J. store — one of the top 20 in the company for product volume — still employs about the same number of people as it did before the tech was rolled out, the company said during a tour of the 190,000-square-foot superstore this week. Walmart and its labor policies are closely watched; most recently, it reduced the starting pay for some roles like personal shoppers and people who stock shelves, which are some of the jobs that increasingly utilize AI. In January, Walmart increased its hourly minimum wage from $12 to $14.” (JD Capelouto/semafor)
Magical Mary Richardson (Christina Oxenberg)