The Globalist (April 3, 2024): Emmanuel Macron hosts Antony Blinken in Paris for talks on Ukraine and Gaza, and EU leaders head to Lithuania while Belarus conducts military drills near its border.
Plus: we discuss Bassirou Diomaye Faye as he is sworn in as Senegal’s youngest president and explore the world of Heath Ceramics with studio director Tung Chiang. Also in the programme: the first politician generated by artificial intelligence.
The attack on clearly marked vehicles run by the World Central Kitchen shows how dangerous relief work has been during the war, and adds fuel to accusations that Israel has bombed indiscriminately.
Al-Shifa Hospital lies in ruins after a battle there between Israeli soldiers and Gazan gunmen. Shortly before withdrawing, the Israeli military brought journalists from The Times to witness the damage.
Housing advocates and even some homeowners in wealthier neighborhoods say New York’s property tax system is unfair. A court case could force the city to make changes.
Perfusion keeps a donated organ alive outside the body, giving surgeons extra time and increasing the number of transplants possible.
AIs will make health care safer and better, reports Natasha Loder. It may even get cheaper too
The Globalist (April 2, 2024): Join Monocle’s Emma Nelson as she goes through the current affairs stories of the day, including Portugal’s new prime minister being sworn in and a review of the front pages with analyst Charles Hecker.
Plus: aviation news with FlightGlobal’s Greg Waldron in Singapore.
The airstrike on an Iranian Embassy building was one of the biggest attacks yet in a shadow war that has increasingly been moving into the open.
The G.O.P. speaker’s proposed conditions for sending a fresh infusion of military assistance to Kyiv are the strongest sign to date that he plans to defy critics in his own party and push through the aid package.
The Florida Supreme Court found that the State Constitution’s privacy protections do not extend to abortion. But it also allowed a ballot question on whether to expand abortion access.
Ending many of his rallies with a churchlike ritual and casting his prosecutions as persecution, the former president is demanding — and receiving — new levels of devotion from Republicans.
Meena Danishmal asks if Seneca’s account of the good life is really practical.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘stoical’ means “resembling a Stoic in austerity, indifference, fortitude, repression of feeling and the like”. This gives us some idea of what it is like to be a Stoic. Indeed, the key teaching, arguably the fundamental point, of Stoicism, is that we should focus on controlling the things that are under our control, such as our thoughts, emotions, and actions, whilst accepting those things we cannot control, such as most things that are happening in the world. How did they get there?
To consider this question let’s look at the ideas of the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (4 BCE-65 CE). As a top advisor to the paranoid and murderous Emperor Nero, he probably found Stoicism a particularly practical guide to life.
As a Stoic, Seneca believed the soul (Latin: anima or animus) to be a finer form of matter than the body; but matter it is. It was also described as a spark of the fire which had consumed the original matter. With such an understanding of the soul, where does the soul reside within the body? Stoics provided a rather simple answer: everywhere. The soul was considered to be a vital force that animates the whole body. The soul was also the source of reason, virtue, and moral character, which is what Stoic philosophy is built upon, as the rational soul guides individuals towards living in accordance with nature.
For us to understand this concept further, it’s vital to grasp the Stoic conception of reality. Stoics see the universe as interconnected and interwoven, and this unified cosmos as governed by rational principles. Within this holistic perspective, the soul is seen as part of the divine rational order of the universe. This understanding forms the basis of Stoic ethics, which emphasises the importance of cultivating reason and virtue in all aspects of life. This encouragement to align thoughts, actions, and desires with principles of reason, is a way for the soul to flourish.
What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
The Globalist (April 1, 2024): Voters head to the polls in Turkey to vote in local and mayoral elections in what’s being seen as a test for President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan.
Plus: the return of Isis, Australia’s diplomatic deficit and Austria’s vacancy tax.
Former President Donald J. Trump has taken different approaches to those who may testify at his trials. Some, he attacks publicly. Others he rewards for loyalty.
Thousands have taken to the streets of Israel to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be replaced.
Cases of trisomy 18 may rise as many states restrict abortion. But some women choose to have the babies, love them tenderly and care for them devotedly.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 30, 2024):
A new, high-tech approach called ECPR can restart more hearts and save more lives. Why aren’t more hospitals embracing it?
By Helen Ouyang
Greg Hayes, an emergency first responder in Chanhassen, Minn., was picking up takeout sushi when a 911 call came in: A 61-year-old had stopped breathing at home. Hayes and his team jumped in their ambulance and were soon pulling up in front of a suburban two-story house, where paramedics and other first responders were also arriving. All of them grabbed their equipment and raced through the open garage to find a man, gray and still, on the living-room floor with his wife and stepdaughter nearby.
We want to hear from you for a New York Times Magazine feature about how this transition can affect marriages and long-term relationships.
When people think about stages of life that can strain relationships, they often reflect on the first sleepless years of child rearing or the phase of parenting that involves rebellious teens. Retirement, typically anticipated as a time of relaxation, might not come to mind, but this transition away from work can also be stressful, coinciding with reinventions and re-evaluations that can cause couples to suddenly experience new tensions. It can also be a time of renewed connection and relationship growth. Often, it’s both at once.
Boomers Daily 