Linkage

The achievement is a rare one. Chess.com reports that there are only 846 active WIMs globally, a small fraction of the millions of chess players worldwide. Established in 1950, this title recognizes the accomplishments of women in the game. While women are equally capable as men in intellectual and skill-based pursuits like chess, the women’s category aims to encourage female participation in a sport where women are significantly underrepresented. Women often face challenges due to sexism, differences in monetary support, training, and participation in a predominantly male-dominated field.

The achievement also comes after a significant controversy in FIDE. In August of 2023, FIDE announced that under new rules, transgender women had “no right to participate” in women’s chess. Instead, the organization would evaluate trans participation in a process that could take up to 2 years, and all transgender players would have a “transgender” mark in their files. Likewise, trans players could only compete with updated legal identification documents - a major problem given that many political bodies have removed the ability of transgender people to update their identification. It was later revealed that the change was pushed, in part, by anti-trans conservative influencer Riley Gaines in the United States.

A master class in framing:

The project needs enough density (which, remember, are homes we badly need) to make financially viable all the expensive public costs and aspirations, including heritage restoration. It also needs the kind of population that will attract retailers to give a vibrant second life to those heritage buildings. And let’s be clear — retailers won’t provide those local, walkable shops and services without that population density.

Preserving community heritage and character isn’t about preventing badly needed and responsible change, or claiming to be OK with a different proposal that actually isn’t viable at all. It’s about doing change well, with smart design, while understanding the real-life requirements and balancing acts that achieve many important public goals.

The heritage buildings aren’t threatened by the proposal. The proposal is how they will be preserved and rehabilitated, remaining the defining features in this new urban place, with exciting new purposes.

There’s a reason why the site has seen little activity since the previous 2008 zoning was put in place — that zoning wasn’t viable or buildable.

Plenty of arch invective here worthy of a Taibbi Vampire Squid Award:

It would be foolish and exhausting to speculate on the role that Times editor-in-chief Joseph Kahn (Harvard '87, Harvard M.A. '90) played in pushing this story; there is nothing to do but speculate, there. Power works in different ways, and if Ackman–style public meltdowns are the loudest and most overt expression of that work, and Rufo's store-brand Rasputin act are the most obviously motivated, they are not the only ones. There is also the Times' understanding of itself as the author of the discourse, and all that ostentatious invisibility—the decisions about what is and is not a story, or what is and is not up for debate, that only show up in the negative.

You already know how that works; we are soaking in it. Someone at the institution decides that there is or ought to be, say, a debate about the safety or advisability of trans health care where no such debate actually exists, and then the debate is manufactured to suit that sense—in and through stories about that debate. And then, at some point down the line, some laws are promulgated that reflect that debate's terms. 

When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine banned trans health care in his state last week, he did not do it by signing a heavy-handed law passed through his state's legislature. He vetoed that, and then effectively did the same thing in a way that reflected all the deep and vexing complexities and risks that the Times has repeatedly insisted exist. He mandated a process that would force people seeking that care to navigate a series of onerous administrative requirements, and to compel the services of an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist, and a mental health specialist—to make sure that care is not given too fast. "It needs to be lengthy," DeWine said of the counseling component, "and it needs to be comprehensive."

So what begins as irresponsible, ideological, but plausibly deniable discourse shows up down the line as policy. It's rarely quite as easy to see as it is in this instance, when irresponsible, ideological, plausibly deniable discourse is the policy. The debate can only ever continue; the resolution will arrive without any visible fingerprints, as a story about something that just happened.

Public works departments know how to fix a dangerous stroad. We put it in a five-year capital improvement budget. We do a big study of the conditions. We mock up several design alternatives, and we hold public workshops where we ask constituents for their feedback and preferences. We send out (typically useless) surveys. A design is selected by the city council, and over the next couple years, it’s built.

The end result of this approach is typically very pretty. There are curb bulb-outs planted with flowers. There are flashing beacons and refuge islands at newly painted crosswalks. The street is calmer, it’s safer, and it actually feels better to drive on, as well as walk along. It’s hailed as a big step forward, a boon to the neighborhood’s quality of life. Everybody is happy. This example from South Minneapolis, of a nasty stroad rebuilt after a deadly crash and public outcry, is typical of my experience.

Okay. So, we know how to do that. Now do it 1,000 times.

The “1,000 times” problem may actually be the primary reason why we can expect local governments to be resistant to adopting an approach like the Crash Analysis Studio as policy. If you truly acknowledge that a deadly crash is not a fact of life, but an anomaly that shouldn’t have happened, and a condition that should be corrected, then you suddenly have a to-do list a thousand miles long.

Nobody is going to say out loud, “We can’t come close to fixing all of them, so it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge that there’s an urgent imperative to fix any of them.” But I’ll bet a lot of traffic engineers have thought it.

Khan launched Right to Buy-back in July last year to boost London’s supply of council homes. It gives boroughs the funds to purchase former council homes that have been sold into the private market through the government’s Right to Buy programme.

Since then 14 London boroughs have been given £152 million to purchase 1,577 market homes that have been or will be converted to social rent or to house homeless families. A total of 1,756 council homes in London were sold through Right to Buy in 2021.

According to the New Economics Foundation, the scheme has led to an average net loss of 24,000 social homes a year since 1991.

The mayor’s office says it has already exceeded his previous target of starting 10,000 new council homes this year. Khan now aims to start a further 10,000 homes in a significantly shorter time – a total of 20,000 new council homes by 2024.

Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to keep inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling rental prices, partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as short-term holiday rentals or being kept strategically vacant by property speculators, the Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte.

Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population.

The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle, has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law. The American Heritage Children's Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster's Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. The Escambia County School District says these texts may violate HB 1069, a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2023.

HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that "depicts or describes sexual conduct," as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic. Rather than considering complaints, the Escambia County School Board adopted an emergency rule last June that required the district's librarians to conduct a review of all library books and remove titles that may violate HB 1069.

[…] 

Along with dictionaries, the books removed from Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process include eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses, and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records. Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall are also locked in storage.

Classic texts like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile are no longer available to Escambia County students. Twenty-three novels by Stephen King have been removed. The dragnet has also swept up books popular with the political right including Atlas Shrugged and two books by conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly.

The vulnerabilities, reported Tuesday by researchers from security firm Nozomi, reside in the Bosch Rexroth Handheld Nutrunner NXA015S-36V-B. The cordless device, which wirelessly connects to the local network of organizations that use it, allows engineers to tighten bolts and other mechanical fastenings to precise torque levels that are critical for safety and reliability. When fastenings are too loose, they risk causing the device to overheat and start fires. When too tight, threads can fail and result in torques that are too loose. The Nutrunner provides a torque-level indicator display that’s backed by a certification from the Association of German Engineers and adopted by the automotive industry in 1999. The NEXO-OS, the firmware running on devices, can be controlled using a browser-based management interface.

Nozomi researchers said the device is riddled with 23 vulnerabilities that, in certain cases, can be exploited to install malware. The malware could then be used to disable entire fleets of the devices or to cause them to tighten fastenings too loosely or tightly while the display continues to indicate the critical settings are still properly in place.

Er… I think you'll find they can.

“We are in possibly the second-biggest surge of the pandemic if you look at wastewater levels,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a long-Covid clinic at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and has had ongoing Covid symptoms since August 2022. “There is no urgency to this. No news. No discussion in Congress. There is no education.”

[…]

Since the Biden administration declared the end of the national emergency in May, Americans across the political spectrum have largely followed the example set by the government and entirely disposed of any level of Covid precautions. Liberal and left-wing outlets have participated in the normalizing of Covid too, dismissing or even ostracizing people who still take precautions as if they are tin-hat conspiracy theorists. “We can’t be in lockdown forever,” has become a common refrain, as if wearing a mask on the subway constitutes “lockdown.”

In September, Biden himself participated in the spread of this kind of harmful disinformation when he declared the pandemic “over” on 60 Minutes. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” This is, essentially, governing via “vibes”—so much for “following the science

 The words "killed" and "died" were more likely to be linked to Palestinian people. The study provided examples of sentences where both of those words were used, and found the BBC was more likely to link the active “killed” to Israeli deaths in that context.

Examples included:

   "About 700 people have been killed in Israel since Hamas launched its attack on Saturday, with a further 500 having died in Gaza in retaliatory air strikes."
   "Some 1200 people have been killed in Israel, while more than 1000 have died in retaliatory air strikes on Gaza."
   "More than 700 people have been killed in Israel since Saturday and over 500 people have died in Gaza."

Researchers said: "This work aims to shed light on bias in BBC reporting on Palestine in a way that is both transparent and reproducible."