“New research has pinpointed the likely time in prehistory when humans first began to speak. Analysis by British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that early humans first developed rudimentary language around 1.6 million years ago – somewhere in eastern or southern Africa. ‘Humanity’s development of the ability to speak was without doubt the key which made much of subsequent human physical and cultural evolution possible. That’s why dating the emergence of the earliest forms of language is so important,’ Dr Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, told The Independent. Until recently, most human evolution experts thought humans only started speaking around 200,000 years ago. Professor Mithen’s new research, published this month, suggests that rudimentary human language is at least eight times older. His analysis is based on a detailed study of all the available archaeological, paleo-anatomical, genetic, neurological and linguistic evidence. When combined, all the evidence suggests that the birth of language occurred as part of a suite of human evolution and other developments between two and 1.5 million years ago. Significantly, human brain size increased particularly rapidly from 2 million BC, especially after 1.5 million BC. Associated with that brain size increase was a reorganisation of the internal structure of the brain – including the first appearance of the area of the frontal lobe, specifically associated with language production and language comprehension. Known to scientists as Broca’s area, it seems to have evolved out of earlier structures responsible for early humanity’s ability to communicate with hand and arm gestures.” (David Keys/The Independent)
“As global conflicts worsen, energy infrastructure and shipments from Europe to the Middle East to Asia are increasingly coming under attack. But the energy sector is also shaping the conflicts themselves—and the diplomatic efforts to manage and mitigate them. With the future of clashes such as the Russia-Ukraine war or the Israel-Hamas conflict deeply uncertain, energy acts as a key weather vane. Perhaps no geopolitical hot spot has highlighted the importance of the energy sector more than the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted a major rewiring of global energy flows as the European Union has accelerated efforts to diversify away from Russia, which made up 40 percent of the bloc’s natural gas imports prior to the war. Now that number has been drastically reduced, with imports falling by more than 50 percent in 2023. Russia, meanwhile, has ramped up energy exports to non-Western countries since the start of the war, most notably China and India. The Kremlin has pursued politically motivated energy cutoffs to Europe while the United States and EU have ramped up sanctions against the Russian energy industry. But the fight for energy has also taken on new battlefield significance—Russia has attacked critical energy infrastructure in Ukraine through drone and missile strikes, and now Ukraine is utilizing similar tactics against Moscow. Ukrainian drones have targeted energy facilities throughout western Russia, damaging and disrupting Russian oil refineries and prompting the Kremlin to institute a ban on gasoline exports for a period of six months. Attacking enemy supply lines and logistics is not unusual during times of war, but this strategy is becoming a key feature of the conflict because revenues from energy exports are a major source of funding for Russia’s war efforts. Kyiv has decided to directly target that source in a bid to shift momentum in the conflict.” (Eugene Chausovsky/FP)
“In 2017, on the eve of his inauguration, Donald Trump made a bold and unintentionally hilarious prediction: His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was going to bring peace to the Middle East. ‘If [Jared] can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Trump said, adding, “All my life, I’ve been hearing that’s the toughest deal to make, but I have a feeling Jared is going to do a great job.” Unfortunately, Jared did not do a great job, and failed to even come close to bringing peace to the region, despite reading ‘25 books’ on the topic. Yet, he still apparently believes his insights on the matter are valuable, and recently offered Israel a big piece of advice: It should get rid of everyone in Gaza so it can focus on developing hot ‘waterfront property’ on the strip. Yes, in a February interview at Harvard that was posted online this month and uncovered by the Guardian on Tuesday, Kushner opined that the Gaza Strip could be ‘very valuable’ from a real estate perspective, if Israel could forcibly remove everyone currently living there to develop ‘waterfront property.’ Speaking to Harvard professor Tarek Masoud, Kushner said: ‘It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.’ Where does Kushner suggest these people go? Ivanka Trump’s husband explained that if he were in charge of Israel, his top priority would be removing the people living in Rafah—a Palestinian city in southern Gaza—and moving them into Egypt ‘with diplomacy.’” (Bess Levin/VF)
“Overall, I remain optimistic about the Continent’s economic prospects and cannot wait for policymaking in the region to rise to the occasion and address its pressing structural challenges. While the region’s countries face many similar challenges, the current upheavals in a select group of countries (see here, here, and here) are mostly symptomatic of internal idiosyncratic historical challenges rather than a generalized regional trend towards political disorder (though risks of spatial spillovers abound). It is true that African economies have experienced a slowdown since 2014. However, the effects on human welfare have been nowhere near the horrendous outcomes witnessed the last time this happened in the 1980s. This time is different, with the rebound already underway. Even Nigeria and South Africa, the two perennial ‘sick men of Africa,’ are beginning to produce some good news. With this in mind, African policymakers should avoid succumbing to the anti-progress cynicism that traps many otherwise smart people into majoring on minor things and the addictive tendency to catastrophize about the region. Instead, focus should be on the three imperatives of long-term state-building, achieving economic take-off, and entrenching accountable and responsive self-government. Importantly, and to channel Morten Jerven here, they should understand that what they hope to achieve has been done before; and that all they have to do is learn the right lessons from those who came before them.” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)
“Last year, a study conducted by the University of Michigan’s C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital found that the top two concerns for parents when it came to their children’s health were ‘overuse of devices/screen time’ and ‘social media.’ After the House of Representatives passed a bill, last week, that would force ByteDance—the Chinese company that owns TikTok—to sell the platform and its algorithms to a non-adversarial buyer or pack up and leave more than a hundred and sixty million of its American users behind, a YouGov poll found robust support among older Americans for a simple government ban of the app. Those findings reflect a palpable shift in public sentiment toward the social-media giants, especially when it comes to the effects that their addictive products have on children. The reasons are obvious enough, and can be explained without pointing to studies about skyrocketing anxiety, depression, and suicide rates among teen-agers. Nobody wants their kids to be addicted to their phones. We should resist a society in which every human interaction gets processed through an algorithm and broadcast out to a frequently nasty public.In the past couple of years, that resistance has started to take some shape, although it’s still difficult to discern how earnest or how effective it will be. Recently, a judge allowed a lawsuit against Snap, Inc., to go forward. A group of parents whose children overdosed on drugs are suing the company for facilitating communication between their children and drug dealers, hoping to hold the company liable. If the parents win, it would significantly reduce the power of Section 230, the federal law that says that Internet-service providers are not responsible for the content that their users post online.” (Jay Caspian Kang/TNY)
“Former President Trump may be on the verge of a windfall of billions of dollars — but it may not come soon enough to help him fend off his mounting legal problems. Trump stands to make over $3 billion as the company behind his social media platform Truth Social — Trump Media and Technology Group — is on the verge of going public. Trump Media is looking to accomplish that by merging with an existing shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corp. It's a process that allows a company to bypass all the hoops of a traditional initial public offering. The only step left now for a listing is for Digital World shareholders to formally approve the merger with Trump Media in a vote that's scheduled later on Friday. But the process of listing Trump Media has been a rather convoluted saga, much like the business and political career of the former president, marked by investigations, lawsuits and general chaos. But a lot of the value comes from the hundreds of thousands of rabid Trump supporters who have bought into Digital World in anticipation of the merger with Trump media. And that's why the stock is widely seen as a ‘meme stock,’ meaning shares that are driven by the whims of individual investors and not for any fundamental factors. Stock markets have seen clear examples of this in recent years, like retailer Gamestop or movie chain AMC, both of which have caught Wall Street by storm by experiencing spectacular rallies during the pandemic. Jay Ritter, Cordell professor of finance at the University of Florida says Digital World is not much different from the craze that enveloped those two stocks. ‘This is largely a meme stock where the price is divorced from the fundamental value of the company,’ he says.” (Rafael Nam/NPR)
“Senegal will hold elections on Sunday (Mar. 24) to choose a new president. Voters will choose from amongst 19 candidates approved by the Constitutional Council, Senegal’s top court. President Macky Sall, whose tenure will end on April 2, is not on the ballot having served two terms. Why is the election being held now? Initially scheduled for Feb. 25, the polls were postponed three weeks earlier by Sall in a controversial decision that cited irregularities with the court’s approved candidates. It sparked a month of tensions and some violence in Senegal, after which Sall reversed course on March 6 and scheduled the polls for the current date. Who are the contestants? Amadou Ba, 62, the immediate past prime minister in Sall’s cabinet, will run on the platform of the Alliance for the Republic party. Two other former prime ministers Idrissa Seck and Mahammed Dionne (both 64 years old) are in the race too, as is Khalifa Sall, a 68-year-old former mayor of Senegal’s capital city Dakar who is no relation to the president. Anta Babacar Ngom, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, is the only woman on the ballot.” (Alexander Onukwue/semafor)
“(Sociologist Eric Klinenberg) notes a metric experts devised, pre-COVID, to address nations’ vulnerability to damage from infectious disease outbreaks. Under it, America was rated the best-prepared nation on Earth. The nation of Australia was far behind us. Except, came the pandemic, and ‘if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, 900,000 lives would have been saved.’ Like the U.S., Australia was then governed by a global warming–denying president, at a time of widespread national concern about increasing social distrust and ideological polarization. But the country was functional enough to enact normal good-government responses. President Scott Morrison brought together the heads of each state and territory and their respective health ministers, formed a task force that set forth a federal plan and charged the states to come up with their own ways to effectuate it, subsidized the public production and distribution of masks, initiated lockdowns far more encompassing than ours, and initiated contact-tracing protocols. Afterward, surveyors found trust in government, trust in science, and trust in other citizens went way up among Australians—as happened in many countries. Here, all these measures plummeted.” (Rick Perlstein/TAP)
“For months now, we’ve had Monday, March 25, circled on the calendar as the start date for the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president: The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, in Manhattan, for falsification of business records relating to hush-money payments before the 2016 election. The judge had denied Trump’s last-gasp (or, as it turns out, second-last-gasp) delay efforts, and the jury pool was ready to go. This thing was on, for real. Until it wasn’t. Suddenly last week, the hush-money case hit a procedural ditch. Now the Manhattan prosecution joins its three counterparts in suspended animation. Over the past month, the axis has tilted on all four pending Trump cases, generally for the worse for prosecutors. And while we still will probably see at least one Trump trial before the election, there’s a creeping likelihood that we won’t see any, or any of the Big Ones. As we head into the heart of the general-election campaign, let’s reassess where each case stands. I’ll violate a cardinal rule of legal prognostication here and give you scientifically precise, airtight numerical calculations of the likelihood each case gets tried before the election. No lawyerly hedging here; just hopelessly speculative mathematical precision prevails.” (Elie Honig/NYMag)
“The DOJ’s complaint opens by quoting an email exchange from 2010 between Apple cofounder and then CEO Steve Jobs and an unnamed ‘top Apple executive.’ It describes the executive emailing Jobs about a new ad for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, in which a woman first uses an iPhone to buy and read books using Amazon’s iOS Kindle app but later reads those books on an Android phone. The suit portrays this ad as triggering concern inside Apple. It says the executive wrote to Jobs about it, saying that one ‘message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.’ The suit doesn’t quote Jobs' response at length, but says he wrote that Apple would ‘force’ developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform. The DOJ alleges that the episode demonstrates an early instance of Apple using a playbook it has turned to repeatedly when facing competition, intentionally locking users and developers into Apple’s ecosystem. The lawsuit claims that practice has made switching to Apple alternatives more expensive than it’s worth, deterring competition.” (Tom Simonite/WIRED)
“This day job rhythm fueled an almost ambient thinking about the relationship between medieval manuscript illumination and what I still think of as ‘early Netherlandish’ panel painting, to use the art historian Erwin Panofsky’s now-antiquated phrase for this work created during the transition from the late medieval to early modern periods. In Borremans’s paintings, I saw a contemporary inheritance of this dawning moment. Borremans lives and works in Ghent, home to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Begun in the 1420s and completed in 1432 (probably primarily by Jan after Hubert’s death and following his initial design), this landmark historical artwork was one of the first paintings to use oil paint and a series of transparent glazes to create radical effects with light. Ghent is some twenty-five miles from Bruges, where Memling was the leading painter in the second half of the fifteenth century. In Memling’s work, the uncanny renderings of skin tones alive with light and paired with lushly textural treatments of often brocaded and jeweled clothing captivated me with their detail. Skin and clothing, faces and postures are also essential elements of Borremans’s work. As I pored over the reproductions of his paintings in those giant library books, I sensed a genealogical connection across generations to his geographically proximate forebears. This is not to say that his paintings are antiquarian-seeming curios; rather, he takes on figuration as if in a sort of dare, rendering his subjects with a freighted ambiguity. In Borremans’s work, it is as if the Catholicism of the early Netherlandish painters’ cathedral setting has fallen into ruin and been replaced with a desolate absurdist stage set. The people in his portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?” (John Vincler/The Paris Review)