#Winfred Rembert, "Hard Labor," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Have you ever seen a Black person tap-dance in front of white people just to show humbleness?"
"The white boys really turned the prison camp into a chain gang." "The chain gang is one of the most ruthless places in the world. The state owns prisoners, so there are rules and regulations, but the country owns the chain gang, and there are no rules and regulations."
"They put you in this wooden box, where you can't stand up and you can't sit down. You're in a crouch. You can't see out. It's dark, except for daylight coming in trough the cracks, and it's real hot in there -- sweating hot." Rembert found a way to avoid being put into the box: he would do crazy things, prompting everyone to say: 'that nigger crazy!' "One thing is for sure -- when inmates think you're crazy, you can survive. They don't mess with you. That tells you something about prison life. When you look at it from the outside, you can't see what's going on, but when you're up close you realize what you're up against."
Rembert has one observation from his years serving on a chain gang that may be controversial: he says that "because the white prisoners were a threat to run, the guards would shackle them to each other."
#Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The U.F.O. Papers," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. "Its officials were evenly split between those who thought that the 'flying discs' were of plausibly 'interplanetary origin,' and those who chalked up the sightings to rampant misperception."
Deputy Secretary of Defense, David Norquist, publicly announced the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, whose report is anticipated in June.
"Astronomers have determined that there may be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable exoplanets in just our galaxy." "The government may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma. But in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo."
#Matthew Hutson. "Growing It Back," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "In the past half century, scientists have come to see the brain with its trillions of neural interconnections, as a kid of computer. But Michael Levin, a development biologist at Tufts University, argues that the cells in our bodies use bioelectricity to communicate, and to make decisions among themselves about what they will become." (Salamanders can regenerate their several limbs and tails; if you remove a leg and graft on a tail, the tail morphs into a leg.)" "Cell groups, [Levin has said] are capable of following lots of different plants; they shift their goals depending on what their neighbors are doing."
None of the developmental biologists that Matthew Hutson spoke with expressed any doubt that we would some day be able to regrow human limbs.
#Sam Knight, "Separation Anxiety," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Om September 18, 2014, the people of Scotland voted no to independence by fifty-five to forty-five per cent, a margin of slightly less than four hundred thousand votes." The Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is explicitly pro-immigration -- it wants Scotland's population to be more attentive to the rights of children, refugees, and trans people.
Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland and leader of the S.N.P., would like to introduce a universal basic income, and wants Scotland to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, five years ahead of the U.K.
ADDENDUM:
*Rebecca Mead, "A Giant Mystery," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Hill figures, or geoglypha, are scattered across southern England, whose chalk downs offer ready-made canvases to landscape artists." "The sample taken from the deepest layer of the giant dated from between 700 and 1100 A.D., most likely near the midpoint of the range, around the tenth century."
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