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TechCrunch	[ "accelerate africa", "Africa", "GoTime AI", "resilience17", "Y Combinator", "yc" ]	# As YC retreats from Africa, alumni launch accelerators to fill the gap By Tage Kene-Okafor December 7th, 2024 03:15 PM --- The influential accelerator Y Combinator made a splash in Africa in 2020 when it shined its light on the market and began to accept startups from the region into its cohorts. The move was huge: in this nascent market, startups especially rely on programs like these to find their feet and connect with investors, and YC is the platinum standard for that process. Fast forward to today, though, that attention has started to look a bit fickle. These days YC is going after big problems in areas like manufacturing, defense and climate, and it has quietly reduced its focus on developing markets. Yet in Africa, some are taking this as an opportunity. Local accelerators — backed by none other than African YC alumni — are emerging to fill the gap. The new wave of accelerators is coming at the same time that the model favored by older local startup accelerators is changing. Co-creation HUB (CcHub), Flat6Labs, Baobab Network, and MEST Africa seeded companies for years alongside global accelerators, providing a pipeline of startups for bigger investors, including foreign ones, during the venture boom. Now with foreign investors pulling away, it's forced local players to rethink how to tap and cultivate startups on the continent. "My opinion is that instead of shadowboxing US firms (who don't care about Africa anyway and were merely being opportunistic), the community has to come together to fund pipeline under $1 million in a programmatic way just like Techstars, YC and 500 startups did all those many years," wrote Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of YC-backed Flutterwave, on LinkedIn recently. Accelerate Africa, launched by Aboyeji, is one such initiative. With 20 startups in its portfolio already, the year-old accelerator spun off from an in-house program at Future Africa, Aboyeji's venture capital firm (where another co-founder of Accelerate Africa, Mia von Koschitzky-Kimani, is also a partner). Aboyeji's ambition is to become 'The YC of Africa' — simply described, if not simply executed. Indeed, African startups are currently at a crossroads. Successful African founders who have been through YC are unequivocal about the value of getting selected for programs with international profile. "Everyone who knows me has heard me say, 'The YC of Africa is YC," Aboyeji, who also founded SoftBank-backed Andela, told TechCrunch in a recent interview. "That's my go-to response whenever someone mentions joining an accelerator. I always tell them, 'YC is the standard and let me help you prepare your pitch so you can apply there.'" Yet the reality is that no African startup made it into Y Combinator's most recent summer batch; and the three batches prior to that had just three startups each from the continent. Contrast that to years prior, when the Summer 2021 batch had 10 African startups, Winter 2022 had 23, and Summer 2022 featured 8 (and fully remote COVID-19 years had even more). YC's change of tune isn't just because what it's looking for has shifted: it's also scaled back the size of its post-pandemic cohorts since 2022 (when at its peak it had 400 startups in one batch), and it's gone back to in-person, with international founders in turn more susceptible to stricter U.S. visa policies. Startups in Latin America and India have also seen big declines in acceptances. "YC has and will continue to fund startups and founders from around the world, including Africa. During COVID batches, we were funding global companies via Zoom," a YC spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Today, we require all YC startups to move to San Francisco, which has naturally changed the composition of startups that apply to YC. We remain interested in speaking with and welcome applications from the best startups around the world." ## Prioritizing local capital, partners and public markets Foreign funding, which includes VCs and development finance institutions, has typically made up around 77% of all venture funding in Africa over the last decade, according to the African Private Capital Association, and so the decline of foreign interest has had a direct impact on the amount invested in Africa. The first half of 2024, it said, saw the value of startup investments overall decline by a startling 65% compared to a year before. Aboyeji believes Africa's startups have two paths forward: continue relying on external funding sources (and hope they return); or take bold steps to build a local capital base. "It starts with a pipeline of exceptional early-stage startups that the ecosystem and bigger companies have access to, and then it builds up from there. And I can say this confidently because I watched it happen when YC was getting built," said Aboyeji, referring to his experience watching Erik Migicovsky, a friend and founder of Beeper and Peeble, participate in the accelerator's early days. "I watched [YC] build and grow and become what it is today. And I think to myself, it's possible for us to do it here." Some corporate VCs like Orange Ventures — linked to the French telco — exist, but local corporations have yet to embrace the venture asset class collectively. Accelerate Africa's aim is to forge partnerships between its portfolio companies and local banks, telcos, and others, not solely through direct equity investments, but through mentorship, resources, and services. Its aim is to get its portfolio companies to $1 million in revenue. "We're working closely with these corporates to create exit paths and help our companies solve problems unique to their markets rather than copying Silicon Valley's funding model," said Aboyeji. There are large Africa-focused funds like Partech Africa, Norrsken22, Algebra Ventures, and Al Mada. Collectively, these have raised nearly $1 billion to invest on the continent, but they have yet to deploy extensively. Building stronger companies at the early stage will get more of them around the table with these larger investors. There is still a question of exits. Tech listings on local African markets remain rare, with only two startups — Flutterwave and Interswitch — currently floating the idea of IPOs. ## There's AI in Africa, too. Alongside investor appetite, startups in Africa are facing a different problem: they've gone out of style. Generative AI is currently the hottest trend in tech, but Africa and other emerging markets have so far lagged behind their Western counterparts across North America and Europe when it comes to building AI startups. Tellingly, over half of the 92 African companies that have been through YC focused on fintech — the top sector in YC before AI's boom. Just one of Accelerate Africa's portfolio companies, CDIAL.AI, is building a conversational AI that fluently understands and speaks African languages. The startup represents one of the few efforts from the continent and underrepresented communities to join the global generative AI discourse. There is an accelerator now in Nigeria aiming to reverse that trend. GoTime AI, based out of Lagos, is aimed at founders developing AI products in Africa. Using Nigeria as its launchpad, it has five startups in its cohort. GoTime AI is the brainchild of Olugbenga Agboola, another co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave, via his early-stage venture capital firm and studio Resilience17 (R17). "AI is the most impactful global megatrend that has emerged in the last 20 years since mobile," Hasan Luongo, general partner at R17, told TechCrunch in an interview. "It's still early, so we want to move this engine forward. It's not like a copy-paste from YC, but it's simply the recognition that it's not just Silicon Valley that's excited about AI." This underscores an interesting shift. In the past, leading startups in emerging markets have succeeded by cloning, tailoring Silicon Valley models to fit regional needs in sectors like fintech, logistics, and health tech. AI, on the other hand, is undeniably a global play, much like SaaS — a challenge but also an opportunity. Luongo, who leads GoTime AI's efforts, believes Africa has an opportunity to build AI products at a lower cost than in Western markets, which could make AI startups here more attractive to acquirers, especially as they command lower valuations. "That's our bet—that they will measure up. We're betting on the talent here being on par with, or even better than, that in other countries while benefiting from a lower cost of operations," Luongo argued. "Also, the companies here will likely not have high valuations, so global companies could probably pick them up for less but still get great talent and their products." ## Fixing the pipeline: Check or no check? Unlike Accelerate Africa, GoTime AI isn't aiming to be the next YC on the continent. Instead, the accelerator is positioning itself as a stepping stone for AI startups to strengthen their footing in accessing opportunities from early-stage investors. The accelerator plans to expand its program across Africa and scale to accept 15 to 20 startups per cohort, depending on the success of its inaugural cohort in Nigeria. AI applications for legal, compliance, and sales/customer relationship management—trends also seen in YC's recent batches—feature in the GoTime AI and Accelerate Africa's portfolios. Both accelerators are starting with two cohorts annually, though their deal structures differ significantly. GoTime AI invests up to $200,000 in exchange for 8% equity, structured as $25,000 upfront, $75,000 at Demo Day, and $100,000 at startup's first fundraise. The accelerator also offers its startups mentorship, workspaces, and access to API and cloud computing credits to train AI models and test products. Accelerate Africa, which currently operates with a grant of less than a million dollars, does not provide upfront funding or take equity upon admission. "The utility of these first two cohorts is storytelling, halo effect, community, not money. Once the money comes in, we'll probably change the model," said Oji Udezue, venture partner at Accelerate Africa, to TechCrunch on the accelerator's decision to not provide funding to its startups. Instead, its sister fund, Future Africa, may co-invest $250,000 to $500,000 after the program through its standard investment process. Despite not offering funding upfront, Accelerate Africa boasts a 1.4% acceptance rate and claims to have helped startups in its first cohort raise over $5 million. "We have a quality bar; we don't want to build an accelerator that's not better than YC in Africa," remarked Udezue.
CBC News	[ "Middle East crisis", "Damascus", "Jordan", "Syria", "War and unrest", "Civil wars", "Army", "Human rights and civil liberties" ]	# Syrian rebels advance on heavily defended city of Homs and Damascus suburbs December 7th, 2024 03:14 PM --- UN special envoy for Syria calls for urgent talks to ensure 'orderly political transition' Syrian rebels continued their lightning advance on Saturday, with news they were active in the suburbs of the capital Damascus and were also closing in on the key central city of Homs, where government forces were dug in, to try to save President Bashar al-Assad's 24-year rule. Since the rebels' sweep into Aleppo a week ago, government defences have crumbled across the country at dizzying speed as insurgents seized a string of major cities and rose up in places where the rebellion had long seemed over. Besides capturing Aleppo in the north, Hama in the centre and Deir al-Zor in the east, rebels said they have taken southern Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida im the south and advanced to within 50 kilometres of the capital. Government defences were focused on Homs, with state television and Syrian military sources reporting big airstrikes on rebel positions and a wave of reinforcements arriving to dig in around the city. Meanwhile, the rebels extended their control to almost the entire southwest and said they had captured Sanamayn on the main highway from Damascus to Jordan. The Syrian military said it was repositioning, without acknowledging territorial losses. Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents are now active in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. He added that opposition fighters on Saturday were also marching from eastern Syria toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta. Underscoring the possibility of an uprising in the capital, protesters in Jaramana tore down a statue of Assad's father, the late president Hafez al-Assad. In other suburbs, soldiers changed into civilian clothes and deserted their posts, residents said. The pace of events has stunned Arab capitals and raised fears of a new wave of regional instability, with Qatar saying on Saturday it threatened Syria's territorial integrity. ## UN envoy calling for talks The UN's special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, has called for urgent talks in Geneva to ensure an "orderly political transition" in Syria. Speaking to reporters at the annual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the talks in Switzerland would discuss the implementation of a UN resolution that called for a Syrian-led political process. Resolution 2254, adopted in 2015, called for the establishment of a transitional governing body, followed by the drafting of a new constitution and ending with UN-supervised elections. Pedersen said the need for an orderly political transition "has never been more urgent" and said the situation in Syria was changing by the minute. Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad's rule, dragged in big outside powers, created space for jihadist militants to plot attacks around the world and sent millions of refugees into neighbouring states. Western officials say the Syrian military is in a difficult situation, unable to halt rebel gains and forced into retreat. Assad had long relied on allies to subdue the rebels, with bombing by Russian warplanes while Iran sent allied forces including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraqi militia to bolster the Syrian military and storm insurgent strongholds. But Russia has been focused on the war in Ukraine since 2022 and Hezbollah has suffered big losses in its own grueling war with Israel, significantly limiting its ability or that of Iran to bolster Assad. ## Russia promises to stop 'terrorists' Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was doing all it could to stop "terrorists" prevailing in Syria, and called for dialogue between the Damascus government and the legitimate opposition, without saying which groups this included. Russia has a naval base and airbase in Syria that have not only been important for its support of Assad, but also for its ability to project influence in the Mediterranean and Africa. Hezbollah sent some "supervising forces" to Homs on Friday but any significant deployment would risk exposure to Israeli airstrikes, Western officials said. Israel attacked two Lebanon-Syria border crossings on Friday, Lebanon said. Iran-backed Iraqi militias are on high alert, with thousands of heavily armed fighters ready to deploy to Syria, many of them amassed near the border. Iraq does not seek military intervention in Syria, a government spokesperson said on Friday. Iran, Russia, and Turkey, which is the rebels' main foreign supporter, discussed the crisis in Doha. Lavrov said they had agreed there should be an immediate end to the fighting. A top Iranian official, Ali Larijani, met Assad in Damascus on Friday, an Iranian news agency reported a lawmaker as saying. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said "no specific decisions have been made regarding a horizon for Syria's future." ## Battle for Homs includes airstrikes The rebels said they were "at the walls" of Homs after taking the last village on its northern outskirts late on Friday. Inside Homs, a resident said the situation had felt normal until Friday but had grown more tense with airstrikes and gunfire clearly audible and pro-Assad militia groups setting up checkpoints. "They are sending a message to people to keep in line and that they should not get excited and not expect Homs to go easily," the resident said. Seizing Homs, an important crossroads between the capital and the Mediterranean, would cut off Damascus from the coastal stronghold of Assad's minority Alawite sect, and from a naval base and airbase of his Russian allies there. A Syrian military officer said there was a lull in fighting on Saturday morning after a night of intense airstrikes on the rebels and that a large convoy of troops and vehicles had redeployed from Palmyra to aid the Homs defense. A coalition of rebel factions that include the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham made a last call on forces loyal to Assad's government in Homs to defect. "Homs is the key. It will be very hard for Assad to make a stand but if Homs should fall, the main highway from Damascus to Tartus and the coast will be closed, cutting the capital off from the Alawite Mountains," said Jonathan Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma. In the south, the fall of Deraa and Suweida on Friday, followed by Quneitra on Saturday, could allow a concerted assault on the capital, the seat of Assad's power, military sources said. Deraa, which had a population of more than 100,000 before the civil war began, holds symbolic importance as the cradle of the uprising. It is the capital of a province of about one million people, bordering Jordan.
Voice Of America	[ "Extremism Watch", "South & Central Asia", "TTP", "Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan", "Afghanistan", "Pakistan" ]	# Clashes kill 6 Pakistan troops, 22 militants near Afghan border By Ayaz Gul December 7th, 2024 04:36 PM --- Pakistan said Saturday that a predawn assault on a security post and intelligence-driven counterinsurgency raids in its northwestern province bordering Afghanistan killed at least six troops and 22 militants. The military's media wing said that the violence occurred in several districts, including Tank and North Waziristan. The statement identified the slain militants as "khwarij," a term employed by the government to categorize insurgents affiliated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, a globally recognized terrorist organization. Area security officials said that dozens of heavily armed TTP militants staged a multipronged attack on the security outpost in the town of Thall, resulting in the deaths of six paramilitary troops and injuries to several others in the ensuing gun battles. The TTP reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack but did not comment on its casualties in the reported military raids elsewhere. Intensified TTP-led attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and separatist ethnic Baloch insurgents in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province, which borders Afghanistan, have resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives, including many security personnel this year alone, according to official data. Pakistan alleges TTP leaders and fighters orchestrate terrorism from Afghan hideouts with the support of the neighboring country's Taliban government, which is not recognized by any country. Taliban leaders reject the charges, saying they are not allowing anyone to use Afghanistan to threaten other countries, including Pakistan.
The New Yorker	[ "translation", "writing", "literature" ]	# What Does a Translator Do? By Max Norman December 7th, 2024 06:00 AM --- Damion Searls, who has translated a Nobel laureate, believes his craft isn't about transforming or reflecting a text. It's about conjuring one's experience of it. Jon Fosse's "Septology," the seven-novel sequence about art and God that helped win its author last year's Nobel Prize in Literature, stars two men and a dog. The men are both painters, and, confusingly, both named Asle. The dog, however, is quite straightforward: he's called Bragi. He is the all-comprehending, inky-eyed companion to the first Asle, though he belongs to the other Asle, who's ill and can't look after him. The novel's lazy river of a narrative is punctuated, much in the way of real life, whenever Bragi needs to be let out to do his business, or has licked his water bowl dry, or, with a laughable but also slightly troubling frequency, takes a tumble when Asle stands up without remembering that the dog is lying on his lap. Asle's gruff love for Bragi, his physical closeness to the little creature, is written with such simple feeling that you can tell Fosse is, among his other distinctions, a dog-lover. In the original Norwegian, Bragi is spelled Brage (pronounced BROG-eh). Damion Searls, Fosse's translator, is responsible for the new vowel. Brage is the Norse god of poetry, something Searls didn't realize until Fosse told him, since the name is traditionally spelled, in English, with an "I." If he used the Norwegian spelling, Searls reasoned, Anglophone readers might think the word rhymed with "rage" or "page"—distinctly uncute words for a very cute canine. Using the typical English version would let those in the know understand the mythical association, and it had the added advantage of rhyming with "doggie," if you squint. "I will never know for sure, but I am convinced that English-language readers would not have loved Brage as much as they love Bragi and that changing the name was one of the best translation decisions I made in those books," Searls writes in his new essay on the craft, "The Philosophy of Translation" (Yale). Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work. Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up, and many would agree with George Eliot's pronouncement that "a good translator is infinitely below the man who produces good original works." (Eliot herself translated from German and Latin.) George Steiner's chaotic and brilliant "After Babel" was the first comprehensive treatment of the subject when it was published, in 1975. Some translations, and translators, did indeed achieve their own fame—Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid, Alexander Pope's Homer, C. K. Scott Moncrieff's Proust—but Lawrence Venuti's landmark 1995 treatise "The Translator's Invisibility" pretty much summed up the history of translation in its title. In the United States, it's estimated that about three per cent of books published annually are translations, and less than five per cent of the titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, according to one study, were originally written in languages other than English. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have become literary celebrities for their translations of the Russian classics, as has Ann Goldstein for her Elena Ferrante, and Edith Grossman for her "Don Quixote." Emily Wilson, the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, was profiled in this magazine, and in just about every other media outlet. Translators have become more vocal, too. In 2021, Jennifer Croft, the English-language translator of the Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, declared that she wouldn't agree to translate a book unless her name was printed on the cover. "Not only is it disrespectful to me," she wrote on Twitter, "but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they're going to read." A new subgenre has emerged of books by translators about translation, including manifestos like Edith Grossman's "Why Translation Matters" (2010) and Mark Polizzotti's "Sympathy for the Traitor" (2018), theoretical studies like David Bellos's "Is That a Fish in Your Ear?" (2011), and memoiristic essays like Kate Briggs's "This Little Art" (2017), Polly Barton's "Fifty Sounds" (2021), and Daniel Hahn's "Catching Fire: A Translation Diary" (2022). Earlier this year, Croft even published "The Extinction of Irena Rey", a novel about a meeting (a babel?) of literary translators who go in search of the author whose work they each render into different tongues. Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a "philosophy" of translation. More precisely, he offers a "phenomenology" of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator's experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is "something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options." "There are no rules," Searls writes, "only decisions." "Translation" wasn't always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might "turn" (vertere) a text, or "render word for word" (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the "translation" of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like "to derive from." The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true. It's not just that translation was called something different: it also meant something different. In Searls's account, which draws heavily on the work of the twentieth-century French theorist Antoine Berman, translation was first a matter of content, and only later a matter of form. Cicero believed that sense should be translated for sense, not "counting out words for the reader," but "weighing them out." A few centuries later, St. Jerome, author of the great Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued that translations of the mysteries should be word for word, but everything else should be, like Cicero advocated, sense for sense. There was an easy confidence in antiquity, and all the way up to the Renaissance, that translation was indeed possible—though the more modern language may need to be stretched to accommodate the semantic richness, and classical authority, of the original. Around the time Columbus discovered the New World, translation began to take on something like its contemporary scope. "Now the object of translation was the work," Searls writes, "with its indissoluble fusion of content and form, body and soul, and translation became the task of preserving the soul or essence of the original in an entirely new body." In the Renaissance, translation went into overdrive as humanists rediscovered the ancient Greek language, translated copiously into Latin, and started bringing literature, philosophy, and history into the spoken tongues of Europe. At the same time, religious reformers, like William Tyndale and Martin Luther, and, later, a committee of translators assembled by King James, translated the Bible into the languages of everyday people. Translation was, then, much riskier than today: a bad review would be the least of a translator's worries. In 1536, Tyndale was burned at the stake. Ten years later, Étienne Dolet, a French translator and an early theorist of the art, was accused of heresy for his version of Plato; he was hanged and, just in case the point wasn't clear, also burned at the stake. These are, as Mark Polizzotti points out, translation's first martyrs. The problem wasn't that they translated poorly but, rather, that their translations destabilized the Catholic Church's near monopoly on the reading and interpretation of the holy writ—or directly challenged the Church's dogmas. At the same time, however, translation—first from provincial languages like Hebrew and Greek into the universal tongue of Latin—helped the Bible spread beyond its local origins. From the start, translation has been something of a Faustian bargain. Things changed, as they were wont to do, in the spiritual soup of Sturm und Drang, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. The German Romantics associated the idea of the "mother tongue" with "race" and the burgeoning nation-state. In their thinking, language evolved from a mere means of expression into the means "by which man gives form simultaneously to himself and to the world," as Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of Alexander, and a translator and linguist, put it. The modern ideological stakes of translation—as a fraught operation transposing the utterances of a person enmeshed in a unique cultural fabric—begin here. So does the basic framework that theorists, and indeed many translators and critics, still use. A key moment came in Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On the Different Methods of Translating," a lecture from 1813. Schleiermacher, a German philosopher, stated that "either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him." In this view, translation is at best a tug of war, at worst a zero-sum game. Lawrence Venuti glossed these alternatives as "domestication" and "foreignization." A "foreignizing" translation—one that brings you closer to the text, that never lets you forget that it's a translation—might productively unsettle readers but maybe also put them off, whereas a "domesticating" translation could do violence to the source. What this means, practically, can be hard to say. How much cultural literacy can you assume from a reader? "Goulash" doesn't need to be translated as "paprika meat soup," Searls notes. On the other hand, I've read thousands of pages of Norwegian literature and I still don't really know what lutefisk is. Style is a harder problem. Clearly the gargantuan single sentence of the "Septology" is intentionally extreme. But how long does a translated sentence of Proust need to be to be Proustian without being perverse? What do you do with dialect, or dirty jokes? How much translation is too much? Scholars like to remind you that one of the ancient Greek words for translation is metaphora. Translation is metaphor, and it can be trapped by the conceptual frames used to describe it. Take, for instance, the military overtones of the commonly used term "target language." Or consider the notion of the "faithful" translation, which, as Emily Wilson has written, implies that the translation is gendered female, that it might betray the male original (hence the old Italian phrase, traduttore, traditore, "translator, traitor"). Cervantes, in "Don Quixote," compares reading a translation to "viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side," where "the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured." Searls seeks a reset, and finds it in phenomenology. In phenomenological terms, there is no boundary between mind and world: the two are intertwined. Searls gives the comfortable example of a chair. When you see one, you're not "being confronted with 'sense data,' as philosophers like to say, which my supercomputer brain then processes." Rather, you're simply seeing "a place to sit. That is what seeing a chair is." You recognize a chair as the thing you sit in. That's its "affordance," Searls says, borrowing a term coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who initially conceived it during the Second World War, while studying how fighter pilots perceive their environment. This approach to perception has the benefit of breaking down the distinction between self and world: a chair in all of its chairness doesn't exist without a perceiver to see it as something to sit in; a chair is the affordance of a place to sit. What does this have to do with translation? Reading, Searls points out, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn't just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. "All the philosophical dilemmas about whether translation 'reflects' or instead 'transforms' what's in the original need to be swept aside," Searls declares. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is neither found nor created through experience but revealed, developed, Searls writes, as if it were a photograph. He suggests that translation does something similar, "developing" the original as if it were a photographic negative. Practically, then, the translator reads with an eye to understanding the affordances offered by a text—to re-creating its potentialities, rather than merely offering a lexical equivalent. "We don't translate words of a language, we translate uses of language," Searls writes. The point is not to capture merely what a text means but to reproduce how it means in context. One way that Searls describes this, borrowing a term from Gertrude Stein, is as the text's "force." "In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English," Searls writes. He points to his retranslation of Max Weber's "Vocation Lectures," delivered before general audiences between 1917 and 1919—a work filled with ideas, yes, but also a lot of rhetoric. In one passage, an existing translation read, "We can see very clearly that the latest developments are moving in the same direction as ..." (Nun können wir ... mit Deutlichkeit beobachten: daß die neueste Entwicklung ... in der Richtung der [X] verläuft). Searls sashimied this down to "The clear trend is toward ..." He believes that his version does what the original does: it gets us from one idea to another in plausible academese. But it does so in the way Weber might have if he were giving the speech in English, today, rather than rendering the early twentieth-century German in English. Conceiving language as something you flirt and fight with, rather than a dry dictionary's worth of words, also helps resolve the old cocktail-party question of whether everything can be translated. What do you do with some triple-barreled German compound, or the fabled forty-ninth Eskimo term for snow? Searls relates a story from a talk he gave with the Austrian dramatist Clemens Berger, who told the audience about a word (mamihlapinatapai) from an Indigenous language (Yagán) in southern Patagonia. Berger explained that the word referred to "well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I'm interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that." The audience laughed—and Searls pointed out that, in relating how mamihlapinatapai can't be translated, the playwright had in fact just translated it: it didn't fit into a single word, but the term did what it was supposed to do. Thinking this way lets a translator cut through, or simply ignore, a lot of knotty problems. Searls's philosophy is ultimately one of freedom— to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says. In other words, freedom to do what good literary translators have always done. Some might find this liberty surprising, even alarming, particularly when it comes to texts whose meaning is not merely a product of the reader's experience but inheres closely in their precise verbal structure. (A philosopher reviewing Searls's edition of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" observes that the translation's occasionally revelatory "fluency" could also lead to "sometimes downright misinterpretation.") But for Searls it's inevitable that any translation will be deeply subjective. "All translators are faithful," Searls writes, "but to different things: to whatever they feel is most important to preserve." It can be something as big as gender politics in the Odyssey, or as small as that "I" wagging like a tail at the end of Bragi's name. This is also, then, a philosophy of trust. Readers must take translators on their word that the translated version has anything to do with the original, and authors—well, authors just have to buckle up and hold on. Translators also need to trust themselves, and to commit to rendering their experience of a novel or an essay or a poem, rather than trying to make themselves disappear in the no man's land between languages. In fact, visibility may be the key to their survival as A.I.-driven translators improve, and transcend the mere equivalence-hunting of tools like Google Translate. As is often the case, A.I. isn't so much changing the game as exaggerating a dynamic already at work: good translation draws on as much of life and experience and personality as good writing does. Robert Frost is reported to have said that "poetry is what gets lost in translation." But, Searls might say, that's only true if the translator gets lost, too. ♦
Wired	[ "review", "reviews", "music", "audio", "shopping" ]	# SEO: Korg MicroKorg 2 Review: Better, Not Best By Terrence O'Brien December 7th, 2024 10:03 AM --- This tiny synth is a solid upgrade, but it lives in a sea of excellent competitors. Introduced in 2002, the MicroKorg became one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. But a lot has changed since then. In the last 22 years Korg has actually tried to update this early 21st century classic a few times, but they haven't caught on the way the original did. The oxymoronically named MicroKorg XL, the MicroKorg S (which added speakers and not much else), and the MicroKorg XL+ (just a MicroKorg XL with a facelift) all failed to usurp the OG. But Korg is hoping the MicroKorg 2 will be the true successor to the crown. The MicroKorg 2 is an improvement on the original in almost every way, that much is clear. What's less clear is whether or not Korg has a winner on its hands, or if the MicroKorg 2 is an uninspired attempt to cash in on a classic. There are so many great smaller synths these days, I'm not sure that this will be the answer for everyone. ## Modern Sound One of the biggest changes from the original MicroKorg is the sound engine. At its core, the MicroKorg 2 is a virtual analog synth (it's digital but aims to sound analog), just like its predecessor. But the scope of its sound-shaping power is much broader. In addition to standard waveshapes like sine and saw, the MicroKorg 2 has a configurable noise source and access to a library of PCM samples that can be used to add a transient to the start of a patch, similar to what you might find on classic '80s Roland synths like the D-50. The MicroKorg 2 also has three oscillators (instead of two on the original) and a continuously morphing multimode filter. The MicroKorg 2 is also a multitimbral synth with double the number of voices (eight versus four), compared to its predecessor. This gives it the ability to create complex layered patches (say, an arpeggio and a pad simultaneously) or lush expansive chords. Add to this an expanded six-slot mod matrix with many more sources and destinations, plus a broader selection of effects, and you've got an instrument that clearly outclasses its namesake. What's truly impressive is that it manages to be far more powerful, but also much easier to program than the original. While the big-knob and genre-based patch browsing remain, gone is the obtuse system where you're forced to look up parameters on a giant table when trying to tweak presets or craft a sound from scratch. The MicroKorg 2 is nowhere near knob-per-function, but the 2.8-inch screen and contextual buttons make it much easier to find your way around. In fact, I'd go as far as to say building patches on the MicroKorg 2 is actually fun. This is definitely not something anyone would have ever said about the original. ## Not Great Navigation The genre-based patch navigation does feel outdated, though. It was questionable in 2002 and now seems downright bizarre. The way it's broken up—four categories with eight banks and eight programs in each bank—feels unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, of the 256 slots, only 64 are reserved for user patches, which is annoying for folks who like to customize for live shows. That being said, if there isn't a giant knob with the words "hiphop" and "trance" around it, is it really a MicroKorg? Just like on the first MicroKorg, the factory presets are a mixed bag. Some sound great, some sound aggressively cheesy, and everything is decidedly digital. While the MicroKorg line are virtual analog instruments, they lean into the "virtual" part of that pretty hard. Even with three oscillators at its disposal and the ability to stack sounds in multitimbral mode, the MicroKorg 2 can sound thin at times. This can leave it sounding unimpressive on its own, but makes it very easy to place in a mix. None of this is to say the MicroKorg 2 sounds bad; it excels at the sort of bread-and-butter synth sounds that would be at home in almost any genre, and it's quite a bit more versatile than the original. The vocal processing has also received a big upgrade, but it does leave something to be desired. In addition to a vocoder, the MicroKorg 2 now features hardtune (Autotune) and harmonizer effects. When they work, and when combined, they can sound pretty decent. But the hardtune on its own isn't great and struggles to deliver consistent results. It doesn't help that the included gooseneck microphone is pretty terrible. While I appreciate Korg including a mic, you basically have to eat the thing for it to pick up your voice at all. You're definitely better off just bringing your own mic to the party. It's also worth noting that the MicroKorg 2 has an arpeggiator but no sequencer. Instead it has an audio looper. It's an interesting choice that encourages you to approach composing on the MicroKorg 2 slightly differently than you would on most synths. Since you can record with one patch, then switch sounds and record over it, pretty much forever, you can create complex loops that just wouldn't be possible on a standard mono-timbral synth with a sequencer. I do have one serious nit to pick: There's no free mode. Instead you need to set the BPM and the number of bars beforehand in a menu. This can make it hard to lock something in during a quick moment of inspiration. ## A Better Keybed The original MicroKorg had its charms, but its keyboard was not one of them. Its keys were tiny, even by mini-key standards, and they were unpleasantly spongy. The new version isn't exactly a revelation, but it's certainly a massive improvement on the original. The keys are slightly wider and deeper, and have a pretty standard synth-action feel. Like the original, the MicroKorg 2 is surprisingly sturdy considering its price. While it's certainly not a premium instrument, it feels like it would withstand the rigors of regular gigging. The buttons and potentiometers all feel robust, as do the pitch and mod wheels. The chassis is mostly plastic, and it's pretty light, but there's no alarming flexing even when you start putting some real body weight on it. Then there's the looks: While in general I think the MicroKorg 2 is more aesthetically pleasing than the original, I will say I do miss the wooden cheeks. They would not only add a classy touch to what is a pretty utilitarian design, but it would also bring a slightly more premium feel befitting its $550 price. ## Stiff Competition Ultimately the biggest issue for the MicroKorg 2 isn't that it is bad, it's simply how much more competition it faces in the $500 to $600 range in 2024 than there was in the early oughts. The ASM Hydrasynth Explorer and Arturia MiniFreak are both $599 and offer far more robust modulation options and arguably more powerful sound engines in general. While both of them are pretty easy to program, neither are quite as approachable and friendly as the MicroKorg 2 with its colorful graphics and weird trophies celebrating your use of the instrument. $580 would get you another Korg modern classic: the Minilogue. It's definitely a simpler device and has only half the voices, but it gives you true analog synth sound. If you're willing to forgo a keyboard you could also get the Minilogue XD desktop module for $550, which gives you both analog and digital voices, plus customizable effects and oscillators through the logue SDK. Plus there's the Roland Gaia 2 and JD-Xi ($600), all the small Moog semi-modular units ($600), and more Behringer knockoffs than anyone ever asked for. You're spoiled for choice at this tier of the synth market. What the MicroKorg 2 delivers is a selection of pretty bread-and-butter synth sounds, plus usable vocal effects in a very fun and user-friendly package. If Korg had managed to keep the price the same ($430), it would be a no brainer. But, with so many other options at this higher price, you'll have to decide whether you want something simple (MicroKorg 2), something deep (Hydrasynth), something weird (MiniFreak), or something warm (Minilogue). The good news is that the world is your oyster.
Wired	[ "shopping", "household", "sleep", "rants and raves", "wired's favorite gifts" ]	# Skip the Viral Hatch Restore 2 for This Brighter, Cheaper Clock By Nena Farrell December 7th, 2024 09:02 AM --- After testing many, many sunrise alarm clocks, I recommend the Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300 for your perpetually sleepy loved one. Everytime someone finds out I write about sunrise alarm clocks, they ask me if I've tried the Hatch. Specifically, the Hatch Restore 2 ($170), which I've seen on gift guides left and right this holiday season. It's a good device, but personally, I think you can do better. The Hatch Restore is great for falling asleep, and great if you want a sound machine. But if you really want to wake up easier, it's not the one I recommend. My favorite sunrise alarm clocks both sell for over $200, which might be a bit more than you'd want to spend. But if you're looking for something a little cheaper (and cheaper than the Hatch's $170 price tag!) that can do all the same tricks, look no further than the Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300. ## Bedtime Brightside The way sunrise alarm clocks work is that they slowly brighten over the course of a set amount of time. Both the Lumie and Hatch default to start at around 20 minutes, and you can customize it to be longer or shorter to slowly wake you up. It simulates a sunrise, but right next to your face and at your preferred time rather than whenever the sun will actually be rising. It's especially handy in these dark winter months, and if you need black-out curtains to fall asleep (or if you have a room with no windows, as I once did in college). A sunrise alarm clock is supposed to replicate the sunrise, the very thing that makes life possible. So the ability to get nice and bright is a clear necessity. That's my problem with the Hatch—it doesn't get bright enough to wake me up in the mornings. I don't have that problem with the Shine 300, which gets bright enough not only to wake me up, but to double as my bedside lamp in the evenings. It just has one range of sunrise-like shades of yellow and white that it can perform, while the Hatch can do a full rainbow of lights like a smart bulb, but I found I really didn't need green or purple mood lights on a daily basis. What I needed was something bright enough to wake me up, especially as a non-morning person. It also has a wind-down routine, letting you customize a routine with sounds and dimming the light over your preferred course of time to help you get nice and sleepy. It's one of my favorite features as someone who has just as much trouble falling asleep as she does waking up. I also like that I can click a button and activate the routine on the Shine 300 whenever I'm ready. ## Little Quirks The main downside to not getting a Hatch is losing out on Hatch's larger library of sounds. The Hatch Restore 2 gives you access to 13 wake-up sounds and 24 sleep sounds, plus you can get extra content if you subscribe to Hatch+ ($5 a month). Everything with Hatch is set up through its app, which is easy to use. The Shine 300, and any other Lumie product, doesn't have an app. Instead, you set it up manually on the device, clicking through its menus to customize your settings for both your morning and evening routines. Setup isn't hard, but you'll definitely want to check the instructions to find out which buttons do what. It's a nice option for anyone who doesn't want a Wi-Fi device at their bedside. It has an FM radio built in too, letting you choose to fall asleep or wake up to your favorite station. (The Lumie Bodyclock Luxe 750FM ($220) has multiple station-saving buttons, if you want a full-fledged radio experience with your sunrise alarm.) There's a smaller library of 15 sounds, ranging from the classic white noise and waves to the sound of goats bleating and a bustling café. There's your true classic alarm beep, too. For wake-up routines, the sound kicks on once the Shine 300's light has fully brightened, while the evening routine will play your sound of choice the entire time. The weirdest thing about Shine 300 is that it only tells military time. This is true for all of Lumie's products. While it's not ideal, I got used to it quickly, and friends of mine who have tried a Lumie sunrise alarm have reported the same thing. It's a funny little quirk that I think is well worth it, considering the rest of its features.
The New Yorker	[ "child birth", "covid-19", "photography" ]	# A Photographer's Intimate Chronicle of Home Birth By Jessica Winter December 7th, 2024 06:00 AM --- Maggie Shannon's black-and-white images of childbirth in the COVID era capture the awe-inspiring, quotidian experience of turning one person into two. In the early, terrifying days of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, many hospitals required pregnant women to labor while wearing a mask, or to give birth without partners or other loved ones present. Soon, midwives reported seeing a surge of interest from women who wanted to have their babies at home. The photographer Maggie Shannon began following some of these midwives in the Los Angeles area—including one who, for a time, performed prenatal checkups in outdoor tents in front of her clinic—and capturing their patients during labor. Babies born at home accounted for just one and a half per cent of total births in the U.S. in 2022 (the most recent year for which complete statistics are available). But this represented the highest over-all rate in some thirty years, and an increase of fifty-six per cent since 2016. The mothers-to-be whom Shannon photographed, she told me, were often "worried about laboring alone, or they thought that being in a hospital during a pandemic is pretty scary." Shannon's black-and-white images of childbirth in the COVID era eventually became a photo essay in the Times, and are now collected in a new monograph titled "Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy." In these pictures, women breathe through contractions in their own bathrooms and beds, or push out their babies in inflatable birthing pools set up in the middle of their living rooms. The ordinary stuff of domestic life is evident all around them: laundry drying outside a window, or an older sibling's toys strewn in a corner. In a quintessentially early-COVID image, a midwife sits alone in a cluttered kitchen, doing paperwork in an N95 mask. Childbirth is at once awe-inspiring and utterly quotidian in any context, but especially so when it's happening right where you usually brush your teeth or watch TV. One of the touchstones for "Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy," Shannon said, is W. Eugene Smith's famous photo essay "Country Doctor," published in Life magazine in 1948, about a heroically overextended general practitioner in rural Colorado. In both Smith's and Shannon's work, some of the pictures are imbued with rawness and urgency, while others have the artful angles and shadows of a still from a film noir. In one of Smith's most memorable images, the doctor looks up sharply from an injured toddler he is tending to, his eyes big and startled; he might be asking an attendant for assistance, or maybe he's simply taking a beat to steady himself. "Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy" has a rhyming shot: A father-to-be, bent over the birthing pool where his partner is sobbing in agony, looks over his shoulder, wearing a similar high-beam expression of stunned pause. "Country Doctor" has personal resonance for Shannon, whose mother is a nurse and whose father is a paramedic. "I always found their work to be incredibly interesting and intimate," she said. " 'Country Doctor' highlighted the sense of care that they provided—it feels like this is a doctor who really knows his patients." Shannon also sees "Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy" as of a piece with her photographs of patients, physicians, and nurses at a Maryland clinic that provides later abortions, which were published in The New Yorker, in February. "It's all health care—it's all wrapped together," she told me. A pregnancy can end in many ways, from a later abortion to a home birth. The watchful, gentle competence of the ob-gyns, midwives, and nurses who see a pregnancy through to its end is a refrain across Shannon's photographs, including one in "Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy" in which three midwives gather around a startled mother and her oven-fresh newborn, umbilical cord still attached. One of the midwives, Chemin Perez, is wearing the shy, proud smile of a job well done. Shannon told me that she wanted to foster a spirit of closeness and trust—even of collaboration—with her subjects, who were allowing a virtual stranger into one of the most vulnerable, private, and pivotal life events that a person can experience. In a gesture of thanks for the new mothers' generosity, she granted them a measure of editorial control in the form of veto power. "I showed them galleries of all the images beforehand to see what their comfort level was, and if there was anything they didn't want to have shown," she said. (Only one woman exercised her veto.) Shannon had been concerned that her photographs might be upsetting to one subject in particular, Lauren Sawson, who had transferred to a traditional hospital setting to avoid complications. But Sawson was quick to reassure her. "No, Maggie, I wasn't there—you captured this, and I want to see what happened, what it was like, because I was just on a different plane," Sawson recalled saying. A paradox of giving birth is that you are irrefutably there—no one has ever been more there!—and yet not there at all. In all but one of Shannon's images that portray a woman in the throes of labor, her eyes are shut: She cannot see what is happening because she is what is happening, turning one person into two. In studying these photographs, I suddenly remembered the moment, just after my second child was born, when I stood up too fast and looked down, completely unfazed, to behold myself covered in blood. Great bright globs of gore, falling splat-splat on the linoleum. Blood all over my arms and legs, blood stuck in my hair and crusting on my throat. Whose blood is this? How did this happen? It didn't seem to matter much, now that the baby was here. But "Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy" made me realize, for the first time in the seven years since that night, that I wouldn't have minded the chance to review some photographic evidence of how I got that way. The science journalist Meehan Crist, writing about the birth of her son, describes her "conscious everyday mind ... floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now laboured, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access." It is perhaps beyond any artist's abilities to intrude fully upon this world. Instead, the photographer can document the bright, hectic surface while the mother is consumed with her work deep underground. "It felt really good," Shannon said of Sawson, "to be able to offer a different viewpoint of her experience that she feels like she missed."
TechCrunch	[ "evergreens", "GenZVC", "venture capital" ]	# New York's top VCs under 30 By Dominic-Madori Davis December 7th, 2024 03:09 PM --- The next generation of New York City investors are already making their mark in the Big Apple. They come from big-name venture firms like Female Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau and smaller ones like Chai Ventures. They work in areas like growth, consumer, and health. They canoe, hike, and play pickleball on the weekends. We chatted with some of the young investors — think, under 30 — who are helping to shape the future of venture capitalism in New York City. Here's who is on the list so far. (This list will be updated periodically.) ## Layla Alexander — Female Founders Fund Background: Alexander, 25, first entered the industry through an internship with Cleo Capital and Harlem Capital, before landing at FFF as an investor in 2022. Why this VC is notable: She's excited about the care economy, enterprise climate tech, and healthcare (all very buzzy — and lucrative — sectors these days). Her firm's portfolio includes the astrology app Co-Star and model Winnie Harlow's Cay Skin. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, reading, the sauna, and Pilates. She's looking for founders who deeply know their market, retain users, and have research that shows their companies can scale. ## Talia Askowitz — Deerfield Management Background: Askowitz, 26, is a principal at Deerfield Management where she became the firm's youngest partner at just the age of 25, according to Forbes. She previously worked at AMC Health as a business intelligence intern and was a volunteer research assistant at Mount Sinai Health Systems. Why this VC is notable: She made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 and, according to the outlet, has helped deploy over $500 million in capital. Fun facts and interests: She co-authored three papers while at Mount Sinai Health Systems. ## Lori Berenberg — Bloomberg Beta Background: Berenberg, 29, worked in technical and product management roles after college until she caught the eye of Bloomberg Beta. Transitioning from product management to venture capital was a risk, but she says her background gives her a unique perspective while evaluating startups, allowing her to "bridge the gap between technical innovation and go-to-market," she told TechCrunch. Why this VC is notable: One of the features she led while working at MongoDB as a product manager is now awaiting a patent. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include needlepoint and vintage fashion. She wants to back companies with the potential to be more than great. "It needs a shot at the extraordinary." ## Alex Chung — Chai Ventures Background: Chung, 26, got into the venture industry through her mentor, Serena Dayal, a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, who shared tips on how to navigate the ecosystem. "Most importantly, she imbued me with confidence," Chung told TechCrunch. Why this VC is notable: She's into women's health, identifying it as an area for much potential as the sector — and its need for innovation — steps into the national spotlight. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, racquet sports, and needlepointing. ## Besart Çopa — Antler Background: Çopa, 27, started at Antler just this year. He previously held an internship at a16z, then started Chestr, an online shopping platform. The company closed and Copa then joined Antler. He thought about founding another startup but felt he didn't have an idea he was passionate about, "so the second best thing was to support others who did." Why this VC is notable: He's a founder turned principal investor at one of the hottest accelerator programs around. "If I hadn't chewed glass myself, I would have found it impossible to truly sympathize with the journeys of the founders I support." Fun facts and interests: He disagrees with the industry's seeming obsession with young founders. "Let teens be teens," he said. "Fall in love. Watch the stars. You can still build on the side. If you have an idea you feel in your bones that it must exist, then go for it. Otherwise, you can always start a B2B SaaS [company] later." His hobbies include reading history and painting. As a pre-seed investor, he has a founder-centric approach to investing and says he's looking for those who are building focused solutions for niche user problems. "The more niche, the better!" ## Ethan Daly — Shine Capital Background: Daly, 27, started out in investment banking before moving to Shine, where he has been for the past four years. He is now a partner at the firm. Why this VC is notable: He was recently promoted to partner at Shine. Fun facts and interests: Shine Capital's portfolio includes the collector community Flamingo and the workplace platform Notion. ## George Easley — Outsiders Fund Background: Easley, 29, started at Outsiders Fund in 2021 and is now a principal at the fund where he helps lead investments in sectors such as AI and robotics. He was previously a senior analyst at ICONIQ Capital, as well as held associate and analyst roles at Bridgewater and Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, respectively. Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2025 and, according to Forbes, he's helped invest more than $25 million in companies such as Breedr and Cercle. Fun Facts and Interests: According to his LinkedIn, he studied history and geography at Dartmouth, where he played both tennis and table tennis. ## Marina Girgis — Precursor VC Background: Girgis, 29, started out on the finance side, researching data and semiconductors. She loved learning about emerging tech but said she wanted to have more of a direct impact on the companies she researched, so she pivoted and has since become quite bullish on investing in companies at the pre-seed stage. "I chose to become a generalist and invest at the earliest stage possible, idea-stage companies, so I could get to know the people behind the companies and witness their transformation from the very beginning," she told TechCrunch. Why this VC is notable: Known for her knack at picking pre-seed companies, like AI security startup Edera, and for moving fast to make the end-to-end investment process feel seamless. Fun facts and interests: Her outside hobbies include jigsaw puzzles and reading murder mysteries. One thing she would like to see change in the industry is rigid thinking on what type of founders to back. "There are no hard and fast rules in venture," she said, adding that anyone can fail regardless of background. "You should learn from your past experiences as an investor, but my hope is to stay open-minded." ## Laura Hamilton — Notable Capital Background: Hamilton, 26, has been an investor at Notable Capital since 2023. She got her start in the industry by sending many cold emails and making cold calls to alumni. She landed her first VC job by applying cold on LinkedIn, "proving the hustle strategy works," she told TechCrunch. Why this VC is notable: At Notable, she's focusing on data, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and cybersecurity. "Right now, I'm especially interested in agent infrastructure," and she is looking to back more founders with deep passion and purpose. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hosting a podcast called Partner Path, where she dives into the success stories of rising investors and founders. She also helps run FemBuild Collective, a community for female engineers and technical founders in the City. ## Emily Herrera — Slow Ventures Background: Herrera, 25, is an investor at Slow Ventures, whose portfolio includes delivery service Postmates, women's footwear brand Birdies, and the social app Citizen. She previously worked at Night Ventures and specializes in consumer investing and the creator economy. Why this VC is notable: Her forward-thinking approach to creator economy investing came as others were still pondering the sector's impact. Fun facts and interests: She has a long history in venture, interning everywhere from Harlem Capital to Dorm Room Fund. Fast Company hailed her as one of the "savviest creator economy investors" in 2022 for her work at Night Ventures, which backed companies such as influencer marketing platform Pearpop and NFT app Zora. ## Bryce Johnson — Primary Venture Partners Background: Johnson, 25, spent time working in software and product at Big Tech. He heard Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital speak at an event one year and became fixated on the idea of early-stage investing. He pivoted to management consulting and used that network to land an analyst role at Primary. Why this VC is notable: One of the only junior VCs at his firm, he is known for being an advocate for diversity within VC. Fun facts and interests: He loves classical music and backpacked Southeast Asia last summer. For work, his focus is in healthcare, consumer, SMB tech, and vertical SaaS. ## Bradford Jones — SignalFire Background: Bradford, 28, is a principal at SignalFire. Before that, he was an investor at Insight Partners. Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2025 and Forbes reports that he leads SignalFire's NYC office, where he focuses on the intersection of applied AI and SaaS, helping lead investments into companies like Tofy and Shade. Fun Facts and Interests: According to his Linkedin, he played D-1 football at the University of Michigan ## Will McKelvey — Lerer Hippeau Background: McKelvey, 29, partnered with a few classmates and raised a fund to start backing startups while attending UC Berkeley. After graduation, he moved to New York and joined Lerer Hippeau. Why this VC is notable: Launched a student venture fund at Berkeley that is still making investments. Fun facts and interests: One thing he would like to change about the industry is the amount of ego and arrogance that persists, which can cause investors to miss out on opportunities and talent. "Many VCs have always been the star student, went to the fancy schools, and got the fancy job, so they misguidedly carry that attitude into this role," he continued. "This industry could use a heavy dose of humility." His hobbies include softball, basketball, and beach volleyball. He wants to know two things from the founders who pitch him. "What is the insight you have that everyone else is missing, and how did you unearth it?" he said. "What is driving you to take on the titanic effort of building a company from scratch?" ## Mason Murray — NEA Background: Murray, 28, joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He's mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers. Why this VC is notable: Unprompted, three people on this list asked to make sure he was included. According to NEA's website, he has made six investments, including in the newsletter company beehiiv and AI video company Tweleve Labs. Fun facts and interests: He joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He's mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers. He's bullish on AI and wouldn't mind seeing more AI founders coming to New York. "We have talent, customers, capital, and great academic institutions," he told TechCrunch. "I'm bullish on New York." In his personal life, he's a hobby collector, musician, singer, and amateur cook. In his professional life, he's looking for founders with a clear vision on how the world can be different, "paired with a precise hypothesis on what it takes to get there." ## Zehra Naqvi — Headline Ventures Background: Naqvi, 25, worked at a few consumer startups before officially becoming an investor for Headline last year. Why this VC is notable: She's known around town for her popular venture capital newsletter No GPs Allowed, which offers networking opportunities to investors around New York. Fun facts and interests: She loves being an investor and says even though the market is down in the consumer sector right now, "history has proven time and time again that now is the best time to double down on investing in the future of consumers," she told TechCrunch. "Be a contrarian." Her hobbies include going to art galleries, traveling, playing tennis, and watching movies (she's an AMC Stubs member). She's looking for founders in the consumer space, in both tech and consumer packaged goods, between pre-seed and Series A. ## David Ongchoco — Comma Capital Background: Ongchoco, 28, has a background in tech, sales, and investing, working for places like Dorm Room Fund, interning at Learn Capital, and working in sales and growth at Amplitude and Rutter. Why this VC is notable: Ongchoco is a co-founder of Comma Capital, which invests at the pre-seed and seed stages. Fun facts and interests: He, alongside his co-founder Adarsh Bhatt, made Forbes' 30 Under 30 this year for their work in venture capital. Comma has backed more than 50 companies to date, some of which have gone on to be acquired by companies like Stripe and Airtable. ## Will Robbins — Contrary Background: Robbins, 27, is a general partner at Contrary. According to his LinkedIn, he previously worked for various tech companies doing machine learning and held general roles at startups. Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025, with the outlet reporting that he has helped raise four funds worth millions. Investments include the unicorn Zepto and Alloy Automation. Fun Facts and Interests: Forbes also says he helps provide startup opportunities to underrepresented youth. ## Michael Shepard — Insight Partners Background: Shepherd, 29, is a principal at Insight Partners. Before that, he held roles at iCapital Network and Levine Leitchman Capital Partners. Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 and worked his way up from an intern at Insight Partners to a partner. He focuses on SaaS in Europe and North America, with investments including Kabal and Colab. Fun facts and interests: His LinkedIn says he is the founder of the startup Lagom.io which creates homepages for browsers. ## Alexandra Sukin — Bessemer Venture Partners Background: Sukin, 27, got her start in the industry while at Harvard, where she was involved with various on-campus activities like Harvard Ventures and was a founding member of the VC firm Contrary Capital. After graduating, she joined Bessemer. Why this VC is notable: She's a vice president at Bessemer, and her investments include the fintech Truebill (acquired by Rocket Technologies) and enterprise companies Unito, Rewind, and Contractbook. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hiking and skiing, and she loves spending time out West, as her father's side of the family is from Montana and Colorado. "While I'm investing a lot these days in vertical and SMB software, I am also really excited about AI enabling a wave of consumer companies," she said. ## Mark Xu — Lightspeed Venture Partners Background: Xu, 24, is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, whose investments, according to his LinkedIn, include Glean, Stripe, Wiz, and Anduril. Why this VC is notable: One of the youngest to ever be promoted to partner at Lightspeed Ventures. Fun facts and interests: Attended the Juilliard School for the violin before heading to Harvard University to study math. Had a background in business development and investment banking before joining Lightspeed Ventures. ## Claire Zau — GSV Ventures Background: Zau, 27, is one of the youngest investors ever to become a partner at GSV, where she helps lead AI investments, according to Forbes. She previously held internships at Red & Blue Ventures, Julius Bear, and Baring Private Equity Asia. Why this VC is notable: She made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2025 with investments including Pace AI, Magic School, and Paloma. Fun facts and interest: She has an AI newsletter called "GSV: AI & Education" that has more than 6,000 subscribers. ## Vincent Zhu — General Catalyst Background: Zhu, 25, is an early-stage investor at General Catalyst and, according to his LinkedIn, loves working with founders "building for the digitally native generation." Why this VC is notable: He's made a name for himself around town, hosting events and helping founders get intros. Fun facts and interests: After college, he worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before joining General Catalyst two years ago. The firm's portfolio includes Stripe, Canva, and Warby Parker. This piece was updated to reflect Mason Murray's most recent investments.
Voice Of America	[ "Europe", "United Kingdom", "storm darragh" ]	# Power cuts, train cancellations as Storm Darragh batters UK By Agence France-Presse December 7th, 2024 04:06 PM --- Tens of thousands of people across the U.K. were left without power Saturday morning after Storm Darragh hit the country with strong winds and caused pre-Christmas travel disruptions. The U.K.'s Met Office issued a rare red alert for high winds overnight to Saturday morning, covering parts of Wales and southwest England. The government warned 3 million people living in the area with a siren-like alert on their phones to stay at home Friday night. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the storm posed a "challenging situation." "About 3 million homes will have had the emergency alert system to their mobile phone. I would just encourage anyone who has had that to follow the advice," Reynolds told Sky News on Saturday. Darragh, the fourth named storm of the season, is also expected to bring heavy rain through the weekend, with more than 100 flood warnings and alerts in place across the U.K. One man died after a tree fell onto his van during the storm, said police in Lancashire, northwest England. In Wales, the Met Office estimated gusts of up to 150 kph, which knocked out power for over 50,000 people, according to the PA news agency. Power cuts affected 86,000 homes in England, Scotland and Wales, according to the Energy Networks Association. Trains were disrupted or suspended on several routes, including from Glasgow to Edinburgh in Scotland and between Cambridge and Stansted Airport in eastern England. Rail operator CrossCountry put a "do not travel" notice in place for Saturday due to cancellations and severe delays. Network Rail Wales suspended trains on the Welsh northern coast due to a "fallen tree blocking the line," and several bridges in southern England and Wales were closed for safety reasons. A separate amber warning, which is less serious than the red alert but still poses "potential risk to life and property," covering a larger stretch of the Britain and Northern Ireland is in place until Saturday night. In Northern Ireland, thousands were left without power, and several bus and train services were suspended or delayed. Christmas markets and sporting events were postponed, including the Merseyside derby between Premier League leaders Liverpool and Everton. In Ireland, which issued an "orange" wind warning, 400,000 people were left without electricity, according to the RTE news agency. Dublin Airport said a "a number of flights scheduled for Saturday morning have been cancelled by airlines" due to the storm. Darragh comes two weeks after Storm Bert battered much of Britain, causing flooding in parts of Wales and knocking out power to thousands of homes in Ireland.
CBC News	[ "Japanese Canadian internment", "first person", "British Columbia", "Edmonton", "Kaslo B.C.", "Toronto", "Vancouver", "University of British Columbia", "Harbours", "World War II", "Education", "Students" ]	# My Japanese grandpa questions my decision to return to B.C. — the place where he lost so much By Nicole Ing December 7th, 2024 09:00 AM --- Returning to the place my family was forced to leave during the internment brings conflicting feelings This First Person column is written by Nicole Ing, who lives in Vancouver. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ. Dec. 7 is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese that precipitated the entry of the United States into the Second World War. "She's stupid." I was shocked to hear my grandpa jokingly describe me this way as I announced my new job and resulting relocation from Toronto to Vancouver; not only because he usually is more kind than this, but also because he is typically one of the more neutral and stoic people I know. I shouldn't have been surprised though, given his experiences as a Japanese Canadian who had lived in B.C. My grandpa, Naoyuki (Nick) Yoshida, is one of more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians wrongly interned by the Canadian government shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Imperial Japanese Navy on Dec. 7, 1941. Eighty years have passed and, even now, I feel the hurt and defiance in his voice when he describes being labelled an "enemy alien" at the time. Grandpa Nick was born in 1926 in Vancouver. Over family meals, he often would describe rich memories from his early childhood in the coastal village of Steveston, south of Vancouver: the sounds and smells of fresh salmon being processed at the cannery, running along the wooden plank sidewalks and playing with other children, mostly of Japanese descent. It was difficult for me to comprehend his experiences after his journey eastward began. I listened in disbelief when he described how Prime Minister Mackenzie King's government villainized Japanese Canadians. My grandpa's family house and his father's fishing boats were seized by the government (and later auctioned off) and the entire family was exiled to Kaslo, B.C., a small village about 730 kilometres inland from Vancouver. I can viscerally feel the bedbugs he recalled feasting on his legs, the icy winter winds howling through paper-thin walls and the waves of cockroaches scuttling across the wooden floors of a cramped room. During the internment, Nick's family endured inhumane living conditions. Five of eight children would succumb to infections. Nick's resourceful mother made an agreement with a nearby Caucasian Canadian family to have a bit of land for a vegetable garden, which Nick swears is what enabled him to survive those brutal years without starving. His mother also recognized education as the most promising avenue to escape their poverty-stricken lives and encouraged Nick in his studies. Grandpa Nick was, and still is, a sharp man. As a bright young student, he obtained his high school diploma by taking correspondence courses and became a teacher for other children in the camp. In 1945, at the age of 18, he applied to the University of British Columbia and was offered a scholarship to pursue a bachelor's degree in engineering. However, two weeks later, the offer was rescinded by UBC following instructions from the B.C. Security Commission, prohibiting Japanese Canadians from returning to the West Coast even though the Second World War had ended. My grandpa still has the yellowed message on UBC letterhead to prove this happened. Even though he has shown it to me, I still struggle to imagine a world where this was acceptable. It is hard to believe this was not very long ago. The following year, he applied to and was accepted by the University of Alberta. Although Nick received a gold medal for graduating at the top of his class, he faced trouble finding employment because of lingering racial discrimination. His journey eastward continued. He obtained his master's in Toronto and went on to have a successful career as a chemical engineer for a mining company in Ontario. He spent his final working years in Toronto's Commerce Court tower, the downtown atmosphere a far cry from his internment days. While pursuing his career, he also met his wife, my grandma May. She was a professor at the University of Toronto and also a former Japanese Canadian internee. Before the internment, her family lived in Vancouver and owned several grocery stores, all of which were taken from her family. The largest store was named Busy Bee and was on Robson Street, in the heart of what has endured as the upscale retail sector in downtown Vancouver. They had two children — my mom, Winnie, and her younger brother, Chris. Grandpa Nick built a beautiful life for himself and our family. He cultivated a love of dry gin martinis, golf and travel. He was able to retire early, allowing more free time to enjoy these pleasures. Yet in all those years, he never again set foot in B.C. Nor did my mom or my uncle because Grandpa Nick didn't encourage it. I was raised in Toronto and lived a very short drive away from my grandpa. I grew up listening to his experiences in B.C. and how he was still able to achieve a comfortable life later on. It was always a difficult but necessary and inspiring topic highlighting his resilience. When I accepted my new job in B.C., it crossed my mind that this return signified something for us as a family. I can understand my grandpa's need to move forward and to not return to a place that carries so much pain. Even writing this essay two generations later, it's difficult as a Japanese Canadian to unearth the past and dwell on the injustices that we experienced. Why bother contemplating our dark history when our country has moved on? Why share the Japanese Canadian story with acquaintances and strangers when I know it'll ruin the party? And do I need to share my grandpa's traumas as a preamble to his successes, when those successes can fully stand on their own? When I reflect on my own experience both growing up as a Japanese Canadian and now living in Vancouver, I realize how fortunate I am to even choose to ask these types of questions. My access to education, stability (economic, familial and environmental) and general acceptance by society as a Japanese Canadian have allowed me this opportunity to come back to Vancouver. I owe my grandpa a debt of gratitude for much of that. It's been almost a year since I made the move to Vancouver. I visit Steveston, my grandpa's childhood village, every couple months. The experience is bittersweet. I feel a sense of belonging and even ownership of the area, and yet some guilt for enjoying the place where my family was forced to leave. I try to recapture my grandpa's good memories. I have a favourite sushi spot to enjoy the fresh fish that my grandpa remembers and I walk in the same places where he likely ran around with his friends as a child. Still, I choose to see our family's legacy as not a sad story about my grandparents' experiences, but rather, a triumphant one. They lost their family members, community and hard-earned material belongings, yet kept their dignity, overcame adversity and thrived. I'm sure many Canadians descended from immigrant families will understand the drive to do justice for generations before them, continue their legacy of resilience and hard work and never take the good things in life for granted. Nowadays, my grandpa has accepted my move out west and is just happy to know that I'm doing well with the adjustment. When I call him, he always asks how my job is going and asks when I'll visit Toronto. One thing we always talk about is the weather — he remembers how much it rains in Vancouver! Do you have a compelling personal story that can bring understanding or help others? We want to hear from you. Here's more info on how to pitch to us.
The BBC	[ "Social media", "TikTok", "China", "Apps", "Donald Trump", "United States" ]	# US TikTok ban: When and why could the app be outlawed? By Liv McMahon July 20th, 2020 11:34 PM --- TikTok has suffered a setback in its fight against a law which will ban it in the US unless it is sold by ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. In December, a court in the US rejected its attempt to appeal the law, passed in April- paving the way for its potential ban. The video sharing app has millions of users worldwide, but has faced questions over the security of data and links to the government in Beijing. ## Who wants to ban TikTok in the US and why? Lawmakers from both major US political parties supported a law that bans TikTok unless ByteDance agrees to sell to a non-Chinese company. They fear the Chinese government could force ByteDance to hand over data about TikTok's 170 million US users. TikTok insists it would not provide foreign user data to the Chinese government. In April, following approval by Congress, President Joe Biden signed a bill paving the way for TikTok's forced sale. Previous attempts to block the app in the US on national security grounds have failed. Donald Trump tried to ban the app while he was in the White House in 2020. But he criticised the new legislation during his successful bid to return as the US president in the 2024 US election, arguing that limiting TikTok would unfairly benefit Facebook. ## When could TikTok be banned? Mr Biden signing the bill into law did not mean an immediate US ban for TikTok, but it did start a ticking clock. The legislation gives ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok to a new buyer, with an additional three-month grace period, before any ban would take effect. TikTok said this could mean it is either forced to sell or shut down in the US by 19 January 2025. But the company's fight against the legislation in court, which began when it sued to block the law in May, could take years. Trump's victory in the 2024 US Election may also throw TikTok a lifeline. The president-elect said in the run-up to the November elections that he would not let a ban take effect. ## How would a TikTok ban work? The most straightforward way for the US to ban TikTok would be to remove it from app stores, such as those operated by Apple and Google for iOS and Android devices. App stores are how most people download apps on to their smartphones and tablets, so the ban would stop new users from getting TikTok. It would also mean that people who already had the app would no longer be able to get future updates designed to improve security or fix bugs. The bill forbids applications controlled by US adversary countries from being updated and maintained in the US. It gives broad powers to the president to limit apps with ties to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. ## What has TikTok said it will do about the ban? TikTok has previously called the law "unconstitutional" and said it is an affront to the US right to free speech. Its arguments were heard by a three-judge panel at a Washington DC federal appeals court in September. TikTok's lawyers told the court that a ban would have a "staggering" impact on the free speech of its US users, and creators opposing the law also voiced concerns about its impact on their work. But its appeal was rejected by the DC court in a ruling issued on Friday 6 December, which found in the favour of the law. The platform said it will take its legal fight to the US's highest legal authority, the Supreme Court. "The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans' right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue," a TikTok spokesperson said. They added the law was based on "inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information" and that a ban would censor US citizens. TikTok's boss Shou Zi Chew told users in a video, external at the start of its legal fightback that "we aren't going anywhere". ByteDance would also have to seek approval from Chinese officials to sell TikTok, but Beijing has vowed to oppose such a move. ## How have TikTok users in the US responded? Many US creators and users have criticised the potential ban. Tiffany Yu, a young disability advocate from Los Angeles, told the BBC at a protest outside the White House the platform was vital to her work. In March 2024, TikTok asked its 170 million US users to contact their political representatives and ask them not to support the bill. But the deluge of "confused" calls from TikTok users to congressmen and senators seemingly backfired. Several politicians said the campaign worsened the concerns they had about the app, and strengthened their resolve to pass the legislation. ## Is TikTok banned in other countries? It is thought the US TikTok bill could inspire similar moves elsewhere. TikTok is already banned in India, which was one of the app's largest markets before it was outlawed in June 2020. It is also blocked in Iran, Nepal, Afghanistan and Somalia. The UK government and Parliament banned TikTok from staff work devices in 2023, as has the European Commission. The BBC also advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of security fears. ## How does TikTok work and how much user data does it collect? At the heart of TikTok is its algorithm, a set of instructions which determines which content is presented to users, based on data about how they engaged with previous material. Users are offered three main feeds on their app - Following, Friends and For You. The Following and Friends feeds present users with content from people they have chosen to follow and who follow them back, but the For You feed is automatically generated by the app. This curated feed has become the main destination for users looking for new content, and creators hungry for the millions of views TikTok videos can clock up if they go viral. Critics say the app collects more data than other social media platforms in order to power its highly personalised system. This can include information about users' location, device, the content they engage with and keystroke rhythms they exhibit while typing. But popular social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram collect similar data from users.
Associated Press News	[ "One Extraordinary Photo" ]	# One Extraordinary Photo: A cow grazing in a garbage dump in Ghana By MISPER APAWU December 6th, 2024 09:29 AM --- ACRA, Ghana (AP) — Misper Apawu is a photographer based in Accra and works across West Africa. She focuses on exposing social issues with an emphasis on narratives about women, sports and the environment. She's been making photos for The Associated Press for two years. Here's what she has to day about this extraordinary photo. ## Why this photo? This dumpsite is in an informal settlement, a low-income community called Old Fadama in Accra. It is the largest dumpsite where textiles and other waste are disposed of. I have read about this place and heard stories, but I have never visited it myself. To highlight how second-hand clothes pollute our environment, I decided to visit this community to share its story. What struck me at the dumpsite was the contrast and irony of the scene. Cows, typically associated with green pastures and rural landscapes, were seen feeding off the waste at the dump. I spoke with the dumpsite manager and asked why the cows could graze there. He explained that there were no green pastures available in the settlement. ## How I made this photo I asked the dumpsite manager if I could climb to the top of the dumpsite, and he permitted me. Once there, I counted about eight cows and some men who brought in waste. I took some photographs, but they turned out boring. I wanted to capture the vastness of the dumpsite, so I descended and continued to use my wide lens, but the images didn't stand out when I viewed them on the back of my camera. I switched to my 70-200mm lens for a different perspective. I patiently waited for a moment when one of the cows would raise its head. In a split second, it happened! I captured just two frames: the first was when the cow opened its mouth slightly, and the second was this photograph. After that, the cow bowed its head again, and I waited for another moment, but it didn't happen. Eventually, it moved away. ## Why this photo works The photograph sparks conversations. I intentionally made the cow stand out. Although my goal was to highlight the harsh reality of the environmental impact of second-hand clothing, the scenes of cows feeding on a waste dump instead of a green pasture raise significant concerns for both animal and human health. These cows will ultimately be slaughtered and sold to consumers. For more extraordinary AP photography, click here.
TechCrunch	[ "Enterprise", "venture capital", "Y Combinator", "AI", "enterprise startups", "enterprise tech", "artificial intelligence" ]	# The four startups from YC's Fall batch that enterprises should pay attention to By Rebecca Szkutak December 7th, 2024 03:00 PM --- Notable Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator held a Demo Day for its inaugural Fall cohort this week. The 95 startups in this latest batch looked quite similar to recent YC cohorts in the sense that it includes many AI startups. If I did my math right, 87% of the startups in this batch are AI companies. Similar to YC's summer and winter batches this year, there was a noticeable focus on customer-service-related AI and AI agents. But among these, four companies piqued my interest, and they all had something in common: They are building tools to help companies monitor their AI applications to quickly solve or prevent inaccuracies, which is preventing more widespread adoption of AI tools by enterprises. And enterprise companies should keep an eye on them. ## HumanLayer What it does: API that enables AI agents to contact humans for help and approval. Why it is a fave: AI agents can make a big difference when it comes to productivity — if they are working as intended. Having humans in the feedback loop helps prevent AI agents from going off the rails, but too much human oversight can slow down processes and diminish the efficiencies these AI agents are supposed to bring. HumanLayer seems like a nice happy medium; it brings in human oversight just when it's needed and doesn't require it when it is not. ## Raycaster What it does: Research agent for enterprise sales. Why it is a fave: This is the first enterprise sales lead gen software I've had reason to get excited about (sorry). Raycaster's approach is to find very specific details on a potential sales target, like what lab equipment the company uses or what the company's CTO discussed at a recent conference, to pitch them at the right time and in the right way. This stands out among a wave of lead gen startups that seem to still be focused on just aggregating surface-level information. ## Galini What it does: Compliance guardrails for AI applications. Why it is a fave: Galini gives enterprises a tool that makes it easier to set up AI guardrails based on both company policies and regulations for their AI applications. Plus, putting these controls in the hands of enterprises gives them more freedom and allows them to evaluate how effective the guardrails are. ## CTGT What it does: AI tool set that helps enterprise customers manage hallucinations. Why it is a fave: AI hallucinations are a big problem without an easy fix. While CTGT can't prevent all hallucinations, its approach of actively monitoring and auditing an enterprise's models, allowing it to better spot abnormalities and potential hallucinations, seems like a nice upgrade to the other options out there. The fact that the company is already testing its tech with Fortune 10 companies is also a good sign that potential customers are looking for a tool like this.
Wired	[ "shopping", "review", "reviews", "laptops", "computers", "asus", "windows" ]	# Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED Review: A Simple and Effective Laptop By Daniel Thorp-Lancaster December 7th, 2024 08:30 AM --- It's not flashy, but this Asus laptop has all the power you probably need plus a crisp OLED display. It's easy to get caught up in the flashiness of laptop specs and designs in the high-end segment, but sometimes you just want a smooth experience without much flair. That's exactly what the Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED delivers, offering some great hardware in a rather unassuming shell. It's also priced reasonably well at $900, which is out of the budget laptop range but strikes a nice balance between performance and not hurting your wallet. The model Asus sent me for review is the Vivobook S 14 OLED (S5406MA-AS96), which includes an Intel Core Ultra 9 Series 1 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of solid-state drive storage. Another version trades the processor out for a Core Ultra 7 Series 2 processor and 32 GB of RAM for $1,200. If that isn't confusing enough, yet another model foregoes Intel altogether for an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor at $1,200. ## Simple Powerhouse The base model reviewed here is likely more than enough horsepower for most people. The Core 9 processor handled nearly all my daily tasks without breaking a sweat. You'll want to look elsewhere if you do any graphically intense work (like video editing or gaming). We aren't yet at a point where 16 GB of RAM is restrictive, and the amount of storage on board leaves plenty of breathing room for the long haul. I really like the screen, though it isn't the brightest display I've used on a laptop. The crisp OLED panel gives you vibrant colors and infinite contrast, making it great for kicking back and watching a movie or YouTube marathon. The 16:10 aspect ratio also offers more vertical screen space at the cost of width, which makes it great for documents but means you'll see horizontal bars with fullscreen video. The camera setup is another bright spot that, frankly, surprised me at this price. You get an HD webcam that looks clear on video calls and does well in low-light situations. It also has face recognition you can use with Windows Hello to speedily log in to your PC, while an easily accessible privacy shutter ensures you can cover the camera quickly when it's not in use. The Vivobook has a nice selection of ports, with nearly everything you could want from a modern laptop. There are two USB-A ports for legacy accessories, two Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports, one HDMI 2.1 for external monitors, and a microSD card reader. There's also a 3.5-mm headphone jack if you haven't jumped on the wireless headphone bandwagon yet. I haven't always been a fan of Asus keyboards, but the company did well with this Vivobook. The chiclet-style keys have nice travel and bounce that keeps typing feeling good for hours. You also get RGB backlighting, so you can tweak the color to add flair to an otherwise staid design. Battery life was excellent throughout all of my testing. I regularly hit between 10 and 12 hours through the normal shuffle of work and play, shifting between writing and video streaming. When you're ready to charge back up, the laptop can fast-charge up to 80 percent in a little over an hour. ## Fingerprint Magnet The one major downside to the Vivobook S 14 OLED is that it's a massive fingerprint magnet. That's a shame, because the black chassis looks sleek and stealthy when it's free from the plague of fingerprints, but they're a permanent feature the second you start handling it. I'd recommend carrying a good microfiber cloth and a cleaning spray if this is the type of thing that bothers you. Aside from that, the laptop's exterior is well built, with metal making up the bulk of the machine. The rear vents look particularly nice and do a good job directing heat, though the laptop got a little warmer than I was comfortable with on my lap while under load. It wasn't much of a problem when I was lightly browsing the web and writing, but the temperature shift was noticeable while streaming video. Overall, the Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED is a great middle-of-the-road laptop that doesn't go out of its way to awe you with a flashy design or the most hardcore specs. Instead, it's a rather unassuming computer that does its job well at a good price. If you want a laptop that doesn't compromise much, then the Vivobook is a good buy.
CBC News	[ "Northback Holdings", "Alberta Municipal Government Act", "Grassy Mountain Coal Project", "Alberta", "High River", "Alberta Energy Regulator", "Government of Alberta", "Municipal District of Ranchland", "Municipality of Crowsnest Pass", "Town of High River", "Blair Painter", "Brian Jean", "Craig Snodgrass", "Danielle Smith", "Lisa Sygutek", "Ron Davis", "Coal mining", "Coal mining", "Environment", "Mountains", "Democracy" ]	# After 'Yes' vote on coal, Crowsnest Pass council now wants to annex land of proposed mine By Joel Dryden December 7th, 2024 01:00 PM --- Relations with nearby district have been 'cold' recently, Crowsnest Pass mayor says Crowsnest Pass Mayor Blair Painter says council will explore an annexation of the nearby Municipal District of Ranchland, the site of the proposed coking coal mine at Grassy Mountain. Last week, Crowsnest Pass residents voted decisively in a non-binding vote in favour of the Grassy Mountain coal project, with more than 70 per cent of voters voicing their support. But the site of the coal project is not actually in Crowsnest Pass, but in the nearby southwestern ranching community. Ranchland has stood in opposition of the coal project for months. Painter said relations with the M.D. have been "cold" in recent months. "Our municipality is quite narrow. We were looking for avenues to move to the north. South is a park," he said. "We need more housing. So there's a bunch of different reasons why we feel it would maybe be good to do that [annexation]." Painter added deliberations around a possible annexation are still in their early stages. Coun. Lisa Sygutek made the motion to look into the move, and the next step will be to seek a legal opinion on how to move forward. "We're going to do some investigating, and that's as far as it's got right now," he said. WATCH \| Crowsnest Pass residents vote in favour of Grassy Mountain coal project: Ranchland has a small population of just more than 100 residents, compared to around 6,000 living in the Crowsnest Pass. Ron Davis, reeve of the M.D. of Ranchland, said he viewed Crowsnest's recent vote as being "quite preposterous." "The Crowsnest Pass has attempted this in the past, actually, and it was actually turned down abruptly because of the guidelines for annexation have to be met," David said. "And none of them were met in that instance. And I doubt if they would be met in this in this instance, either." Crowsnest Pass previously attempted to annex Ranchland in 2013. Under the provincial Municipal Government Act, any annexation process must be transparent, requires public consultation by the initiating municipality and "good faith negotiations" between the municipalities involved. "We've very concerned that one municipality can try and determine what happens in another municipality. In this case, the Crowsnest Pass is trying to decide what happens in our municipality, and we don't feel that's the proper way to go about it," Davis said. "They're trying to amp up their popular vote in their community, suggesting that this project should go ahead. Of course, we don't agree with that type of democracy, I guess." ## Hearings took place this week This week, the Alberta Energy Regulator has been holding a public hearing tied to exploration permits from Northback Holdings, the company behind the mine project. Those hearings are set to continue on Jan. 14. But Ranchland has argued the AER shouldn't have accepted the applications from Northback at all. The Alberta Court of Appeal released a ruling in August, stating it would hear arguments on the matter. WATCH \| Regulator hears arguments for and against coal mining on Rockies' eastern slopes: Meanwhile, other Alberta communities have voiced split opinions on the proposed mine. Craig Snodgrass, the mayor of High River, previously told CBC News that council had voted unanimously to send a letter to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, stating all Alberta communities' views should be considered before the project move ahead. The office of Minister of Energy and Minerals Brian Jean has said the government is looking to strike a balance between preserving the environment and water while making sure there are stringent regulations to allow for responsible coal development.
The New Yorker	[]	# President Emmanuel Macron Has Plunged France into Chaos By Lauren Collins December 7th, 2024 06:00 AM --- Lawmakers have toppled the government for the first time since 1962. How did we get here? At the end of July, Lucie Castets was planning to go to Italy with a group of friends. Every year, they rented a house and followed the same ritual: pool, spritzes, a viewing of "Gladiator." For the past year, Castets had worked as the finance director for the City of Paris. On July 22nd, shortly after noon, she was in the bike garage of her office building, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, when her phone started buzzing. The caller was Olivier Faure, the head of the French Socialist Party. Just before picking up, Castets texted her wife, then took the call. "What does he want?" her wife wrote back. "I don't know," Castets replied. "Maybe he's gonna ask you to be Prime Minister or something." "Haha." After Castets hung up, the text conversation continued. "Actually, he is," she wrote. "No shit?" her wife replied. Soon, Castets would burst onto the political scene in what the French press took to calling her "Warholian summer" of instant notoriety. For the moment, however, practically no one knew who she was. After the phone conversation, Faure ran Castets's name by his fellow party heads in the left-wing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire, or N.F.P. "Who?" one of them replied. But Castets made an appealing candidate: a thirty-seven-year-old woman from civil society, fresh-faced and sincere, yet not without a streak of swagger; impeccably credentialled and indisputably of the left, but obscure enough to have neither a record that would raise hackles nor political enemies of consequence. As the party heads deliberated, Castets went on with her day. She got on her bike and pedalled across the neighborhood, arriving at a restaurant where she was supposed to meet an acquaintance. It had already been a wild summer in France. In three days, the Paris Olympics would begin, superimposing live contests of might and savvy over a grunting, deadlocked struggle for political power that had transfixed the country for weeks. Castets didn't know the person she was having lunch with very well, so she said nothing about Faure's call. "I think I had a poke bowl," she told me. That weekend, the plane to Italy took off without her. On December 4th, members of the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, passed a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier, toppling the country's third government of the year only twelve weeks after it had been formed. "It's a singular moment, because the vote of no confidence is accompanied by huge questions about what happens next," Christophe Bellon, a parliamentary historian at the Catholic University of Lille, told me. Messy though France's politics currently are, it is easy to trace the evolution of the turmoil, and to pinpoint when the political situation tipped from uncertain yet orderly into surrealistic and totally unpredictable. Back in June, a little more than a month before Castets received the unexpected call, French people went to the polls to elect representatives to the European Parliament. The outlook was not particularly good for the group anchored by President Emmanuel Macron's party. Macron had squandered a large mandate since taking office, in 2017, as a paradigm-busting centrist who would govern not from the left or the right but, as he liked to say, from the left and the right "at the same time." The promise of Macronism was social progressivism and economic liberalism. The practice of Macronism was the tenacious pursuit of economic reforms at the expense of sweeping social programs, which were always just about to materialize. Macron had reduced unemployment from more than ten per cent to around seven per cent, made France a far more attractive place for foreign investment, and streamlined a complicated retirement system. But his comparative neglect of such areas as health care and housing, combined with the fact that he instituted a tax policy that favored the rich and that he raised the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, had eroded support in the left-leaning part of his coalition. In the eyes of many voters, he was a centrist President tacking ever rightward, hardening his stances on immigration and Islam as the extreme-right party, the Rassemblement National, or R.N., soared in polls. Many French people, whatever their politics, loathed Macron personally, citing his arrogance, exemplified by comments such as one that he made to an unemployed gardener: "I could find you a job just by crossing the street." On a good day, his approval rating was around thirty per cent, considerably lower than Joe Biden's. The party that is now the R.N. was founded in 1972, in the aftermath of the Algerian War, by the torture apologist and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen. "Tomorrow, immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup, and sleep with your wife, your daughter, or your son," he once warned. The party is essentially a family firm, now fronted by his more politically supple daughter Marine Le Pen. It has never produced a President or a Prime Minister, but it is getting closer. Since 2022, the R.N. has constituted the largest opposition party in the Assemblée. Domestically, the R.N. espouses a form of nationalist populism—more deportations, lower taxes on gas. In recent years, Le Pen has tried to detoxify the party's reputation, but some members still promote colonial nostalgia and racist theories such as the "great replacement." Regarding foreign policy, the R.N., historically a reliable friend to Vladimir Putin, could fairly be called more Europhobic than Euroskeptic. After years of lobbying to withdraw from the eurozone, the party reversed its position, but it continues to rail against, per its platform, "the woke excesses imposed by Brussels." Le Pen is sometimes compared to Donald Trump, but the analogy is not quite apt. Certainly, their movements share an anti-immigrant, selectively isolationist brand of nationalism—"Les nôtres avant les autres" ("Ours before others") is the R.N.'s version of "America First." Both have ties to strongmen and a taste for tariffs and fossil fuels. But Trump is more plutocratic than populist when it comes to policy. And, whereas the Republicans romanticize a bygone world, the R.N. is keen to present itself as a forward-looking concern. Trump is a soft man obsessed with seeming tough; Le Pen is a tough woman forever trying to project a soft touch. "With Le Pen, in France, you have a strong element of continuity with historical fascism that doesn't exist with Trump in the U.S.," Jean-François Drolet, a professor of politics and international relations at Queen Mary University of London, told me. But, he added, "increasingly these far-right-wing movements share a sense of global interconnectedness. They all understand that in order to pursue their domestic programs they have to destroy the liberal international agenda as we know it." Elections for the European Parliament are paradoxical, in that the parties that enjoy disproportionate success in them often question the value of the entire European project. Le Pen's party has historically fared better in these races than in France's Presidential or legislative elections. This summer's vote was the first since the implementation of Brexit, with wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and the R.N. was projected to pull ahead of Macron's group. But when the results came in, on June 9th, they were unexpectedly lopsided: 31.5 per cent for the R.N. and just 14.6 per cent for Macron's group. This represented the R.N.'s largest victory ever in a nationwide race, and the best performance by any French party in a European election since 1984. Libération called the results an "earthquake." Macron's response was to shake things up further. Just before eight o'clock that evening, his office announced that he would address the nation. Millions of screens lit up with speculation as the political class and regular citizens alike tried to figure out what the President could possibly be up to. In the control room at BFMTV, one of the country's leading news channels, correspondents found themselves at a loss. "We joked that maybe he was going to do a referendum on banning mobile phones in schools," Philippe Corbé, then the channel's editorial director, told me. Roland Lescure, Macron's industry and energy minister, was on a radio show discussing the election results when a journalist, during an ad break, asked him about a rumor that Macron was planning to call a snap election. "No way," Lescure responded. At nine o'clock, cameras cut to the Élysée Palace, its rooftop flag flapping melancholically under a pink-and-black sky. More than fifteen million people—sixty-five per cent of the French viewing public—watched as Macron appeared onscreen, perched on a balcony with the plane trees of the palace gardens behind him, filtering the day's last light. After a curt denunciation of the extreme right, Macron got to the point: he was dissolving the Assemblée Nationale and holding new legislative elections, with a first round of voting in just three weeks. "At the end of this day, I cannot act as if nothing happened," he said. His plan, he claimed, would provide an "indispensable clarification." Never mind that the people had just spoken, rather unmistakably. Macron, leading boldly from behind, would force them to think hard about whether they really meant what they said. "To be French," he reminded them, is "to choose to write history rather than to submit to it." And, with that, he was gone. Libération called the news a "double earthquake." The French constitution gives the President the power to dissolve the Assemblée and call new elections whenever he wants to, up to once a year. If successful, dissolution can break a stalemate or deliver a majority for the President. But the maneuver is so risky that, since the Fifth Republic was established, in 1958, it had been used only five times. The move can backfire spectacularly, leading to a rare situation that the French call "cohabitation," in which the offices of President and Prime Minister are held by different parties. (Unlike many European countries, France concentrates power in an unusually strong President and has little tradition of coalition government. And, unlike the U.S., France has no midterm elections.) The most recent dissolution, in 1997, saddled President Jacques Chirac with a hostile Assemblée for five years. Macron pitched the dissolution as "an act of confidence," but it radiated desperation. "He would say it's de Gaullian, but it's Bonapartian," Corbé told me. "It's this idea that you can get on your horse and take your sword, that even when you're stuck somewhere there's always a way to escape." Given the massacre of the European Parliamentary elections, Macron's decision seemed more akin to falling off his horse, losing his sword, and still insisting he held a strategic advantage. Had he done nothing, he would have had to swallow a humiliating loss, but he could have continued to govern more or less as before. Now he was risking his group's relative majority and opening a path for the R.N. to take power. If the R.N. gained a majority, Macron would have little choice but to allow the party to select a Prime Minister. The R.N.'s leaders quickly announced their pick: Jordan Bardella, the party's scrubbed and dimpled twenty-eight-year-old dauphin. Biographically, Bardella is a godsend, one that the R.N. has been searching for for decades. He was born in Seine-Saint-Denis, France's poorest department, and grew up in a housing project, the "little white kid" dodging drug dealers, he says, while his mother struggled to make ends meet as a nursery-school assistant. His maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants from Turin, and, according to Bardella, they gratefully embraced their new country. "If Iolanda and Severino's integration worked, it's because it was European," he writes in a new memoir, contrasting his family's culture to that of "populations from the other side of the world," particularly Muslims, some of whose ideas are "profoundly contrary to who we are." Bardella's opponents point out that he has never had a job outside of politics, other than briefly working at a vending-machine company owned by his father. They dismiss him as "Monsieur Selfie," for his constant presence on social media, where he posts videos of himself eating Haribo gummy bears. Recent reporting has complicated his backstory, establishing that he spent weekends with his father in a well-off suburb, and that his paternal lineage includes an Algerian-immigrant great-grandfather. Politically, Bardella owes everything to Le Pen, whom he calls his "second mom" (and whose niece he long dated). French commentators sometimes refer to him as "the ideal son-in-law," though they often fail to specify of what kind of family. Macron's decision to call the snap election elicited shock and clichés: he was playing with fire, rolling the dice, holding a gun to the country's head. Seemingly on a whim, he had thrown the country into political pandemonium, making more probable than ever the scenario that French voters had been fending off for decades—the ascendance of the extreme right. Even Macron's own people were stupefied. On television, the finance minister memorably described the clique of advisers who had urged the President to dissolve as "wood lice," munching up "the palaces of the Republic." The announcement also surprised the sitting Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, whom Macron had informed only an hour before. At thirty-five, Attal had been in office for just six months. Like Bardella, he has hardly had a job outside of politics. He is tousle-haired and mediagenic (despite a minor slipup during the Olympics, when, after meeting Lady Gaga, he accidentally disclosed her engagement). Because of their common youth and charisma, Bardella and Attal are often referred to as the "fraternal twins" of French politics, popping out of their respective party wombs at roughly the same time. But, if Bardella is the ideal political son-in-law, Attal seemed to be dealing with degenerating family ties. At a cabinet meeting shortly before the President's public announcement, Attal sat staring at Macron with what Vanity Fair France described as "the look of a serial killer." He was so stung by the betrayal that he went M.I.A. for twenty-four hours. At a later meeting, Roland Lescure, the industry and energy minister, raised his hand. "Mr. President, you said, rightly, that an election is a matter of dynamics," he began. "Well, we just lost one." The twenty-one-day scramble toward the snap election promised to be chaotic, and in the wake of the announcement Macron's popularity plunged to new lows. "It was unprecedented, rickety, baroque," someone close to Attal told me of the period. "Nobody knew what was going to happen." Attal, citing a sense of duty, ultimately agreed to lead the campaign. Internally, hopes for victory were modest. The person close to Attal, borrowing a slogan from Dua Lipa, characterized the Prime Minister's attitude as "radically optimistic." When Jacques Chirac dissolved the parliament, in 1997, Dominique de Villepin was one of the President's top advisers. On a rainy afternoon, I went to see him at his office, on one of the grandest streets in Paris. Americans remember de Villepin as the most quintessentially French of politicians, publishing volumes of poetry and sparking the "freedom fries" foolishness of the early two-thousands with a now historic speech opposing the invasion of Iraq. Dressed in a suit and tie, his silver mane undiminished, he took my coat and offered me a glass of water, which an employee delivered as we settled into deep couches in a vast salon filled with sculptures and masks. De Villepin, who later served as Chirac's Prime Minister, told me that he had long believed Macron's hauteur would be his downfall. Watching his showy, solitary stride across the Louvre courtyard on the night of his first victory, in 2017, de Villepin recalled, "I realized that we weren't in France—we were in Hollywood." De Villepin told me, "Lots of French people voted for him not because they supported him but by default, because they didn't have a good choice. And he never understood that." Since his dramatic entry into electoral politics, Macron had explicitly positioned himself as a bulwark—the bulwark—against the extreme right. Yet although he owed both of his elections to a ramshackle coalition of voters, he had insisted on managing France "by certitude," talking much but listening little to traditional partners such as local officials and trade unions. "He doesn't change, he doesn't learn, and he doesn't draw lessons from his failures," de Villepin said. When I asked other political observers what had just happened and how to understand it, they, like de Villepin, often wanted to talk about Macron's character. "I think he's a narcissistic pervert," Marine Tondelier, the head of the Green Party, told me. "He enjoys manipulating people. Everyone thinks it, but I'll say it out loud." At the end of the summer, Jean-Michel Blanquer published a juicy memoir of his five years as Macron's education minister, recounting how his initial appreciation for the "snake charmer" President had given way to dismay at his egocentrism, his inability to know when enough was enough, and his willingness "to fly blindly without culture, without vision, and without values." Blanquer writes, "Like a fallen angel of politics, Macron began to carry a black light." Blanquer told me that the book could help people understand the masochistic side of Macron's personality: "How could a strong, intelligent guy do something so destructive to himself?" (Macron's office did not respond to requests for comment.) Several interlocutors insisted that Macron was "having a midlife crisis." Others wanted to talk about the influence of Brigitte Macron, his wife, who, as the political debacle continued, attended a Dior fashion show in a branded look and appeared on "Emily in Paris," agreeing to a selfie with the show's protagonist, an apparently tolerable immigrant. "Can you imagine Mrs. Nixon starring in 'Columbo' in the middle of the Watergate affair?" Le Nouvel Obs wrote. The word I heard about Macron more than any other was "isolated." News reports, too, drew a picture of a sequestered and susceptible leader, huddled over late-night whiskeys with a dwindling boys' club of flatterers. This was a far cry from the progressive, transparent leadership that Macron had once promised. When I interviewed him in 2019, I was struck by his appetite for transgression. He had fallen in love with his high-school drama teacher and married her. He had backstabbed mentors and shunned traditional left-right party affiliations, blowing up the political system to launch his first Presidential bid. The dissolution seemed like confirmation of his tendency to think that he could always brazen it out. "I think we have a duty not to abandon any of our idealism but to be as pragmatic as the extremists are," he told me in 2019. "This is a battle. And, even if you die with good principles, you die." Macronology could go only so far, though, in explaining why France found itself in such a fix. De Villepin spoke emphatically about the President's disconnect from "anxieties, concerns, and situations that he largely neglected"—things like the plight of farmers and fisherman, who were fighting double crises of climate and inflation, or the prospects of residents of the banlieues, whom he had promised to "emancipate," commissioning a major report that he then cast aside. Like many democracies, France is grappling with immigration, globalization, electoral polarization, and a changing media landscape that concentrates power in the hands of billionaires. Many people have the sensation that their quality of life is declining, that they are working harder for thinner rewards, while plutocrats skim the foam off the café crème. In 2018, this phenomenon of déclassement, or being downgraded, real and perceived, brought hundreds of thousands of French citizens into the streets during the "yellow vests" popular uprising. Macron threw money at the problem, granting tax concessions and wage increases to the protesters. He did the same during Covid, promising the French people that "the state will pay." Macron's strategy of blunting financial pain through profligate spending allowed him to survive in the short term. Unlike the United States government, the French government responded to inflation by capping prices on energy and some food items, and, unlike Joe Biden, Macron wasn't widely blamed for the cost of eggs, even as French people told pollsters that purchasing power was their top priority. However, Macron's bills were coming due. With 2025 budget deliberations approaching, officials were projecting massive shortfalls, and Macron's ability to buy his way out of a tight spot was clearly constrained. The looming fiscal crisis cast doubt on his mastery of the economy, previously his greatest strength. On the evening of June 10th, a third earthquake rumbled the political landscape. After hours of deliberation, representatives of the major parties of the notoriously fractured French left emerged from the Green Party's headquarters, in the Tenth Arrondissement, and announced to a vigil-keeping crowd that they had reached a surprise accord. In tribute to the antifascist Front Populaire of 1936, they were forming a coalition, to be called the Nouveau Front Populaire. Its mission was "to avoid the trap that has been set for us"—the forced choice between technocracy and demagoguery, rightish and righter, Macron and Le Pen. Taken together, the six main left-wing parties had garnered about thirty per cent of the vote in the European Parliamentary elections. But few people—including, putatively, Macron—had guessed that they would succeed in putting aside their stark differences. For some mainstream leftists, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the hard-left party La France Insoumise, posed a particular obstacle. A former teacher and a Trotskyist, Mélenchon is known for marrying erudition to aggression in fiery orations against finance, NATO, and American imperialism, while admiring Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. He is one of few high-profile French politicians to treat French Muslims as a desired constituency, not as a problem to be solved. One poll suggests that sixty-nine per cent of Muslim voters supported his 2022 Presidential bid. Mélenchon's detractors accuse him of antisemitism, which he has denied, and point to a worryingly autocratic tendency. In 2018, when police showed up to search his party's headquarters on funding matters, Mélenchon yelled into an officer's face, "La République, c'est moi!" (He was convicted on charges of "intimidation and rebellion.") In 2023, a less ambitious leftist alliance exploded over Mélenchon's refusal, after October 7th, to denounce Hamas's acts as terrorism. (His party has called October 7th "an armed offensive by Palestinian forces" and prefers the designation "war crimes.") Yet now, in the span of twenty-four hours, every significant voting bloc to the left of Macron had joined together. "It was a miracle, even though I prefer not to use religious language," Tondelier, from the Green Party, told me, leaning back in a chair in her office at the party's headquarters. Over the summer, Tondelier emerged as one of the N.F.P.'s stars—a hard-core tactician who wasn't afraid to cry a few hot tears in public, or to wear a bright-green jacket everywhere if it helped get her point across. "We're the anti-Macron and the anti-R.N.," she told me. Within days, the alliance settled on a single candidate for almost all of the country's nearly six hundred legislative districts and hammered out a common platform, calling for a minimum-wage hike, a price freeze on energy bills, and the reinstatement of wealth taxes that Macron had cancelled. The former President François Hollande, a Socialist who had long refused to associate with Mélenchon, emerged from political retirement to offer his benediction. Then, as Le Monde noted, he added "the final brick" to the coalition, announcing that he would return to public life, running in his home district as an N.F.P. candidate. The situation was "more serious than it has ever been," Hollande told reporters. "Never has the extreme right been so close to power." Facing an unexpected threat from the left, Macron denounced the coalition as an "extreme" movement, to be ostracized and rebuffed in equal measure to the R.N. At Second World War commemorations in Brittany, Macron called the N.F.P. "totally immigrationist," parroting a phrase used by the far right. He accused the coalition of being obsessed with identity politics, and said that it would encourage "grotesque things like going to change your sex at city hall." The first round of voting took place on June 30th. Turnout was enormous, the highest in more than thirty years. The R.N. emerged in first place, but another round of voting was still to come the following week, and in many districts three or four candidates qualified. Immediately, the N.F.P., joined by Macron and most of the center right, called for the deployment of a front républicain—a sort of electoral firewall constructed by parties all along the spectrum to retract vote-splitting candidates and encourage people who would have voted for them to throw support to anyone but the R.N. On Election Night, the R.N. invited supporters to a swank venue in the Bois de Vincennes. They were expecting a victory party. For months, Bardella and his colleagues had been putting together a "Matignon plan" (referring to the Prime Minister's residence), and there was hope that his group might even secure an absolute majority, giving the R.N. control of the Assemblée Nationale. The faithful gathered in cocktail attire, continually refreshing Swiss and Belgian Web sites, which aren't subject to a rule that restricts French outlets from reporting on election results until 8 P.M. But when the hour arrived, Le Monde reported, "there was a great silence in the ranks." And then disbelief made itself heard: "The French are dumbasses!" "Fuck, we're third." Over at République, the square where the leftist coalition had gathered, a cheer went up. Not only had the front républicain held but the N.F.P.—the miracle alliance, the improbable and not entirely wanted child of electoral necessity—had finished in first place. Supporters scaled the base of a statue representing Marianne, the personification of the French Republic, and hung an enormous French flag bearing the words "LA FRANCE EST TISSU DE MIGRATIONS." The slogan meant "France is woven from migrations," but it played on the phrase issu de l'immigration, a way of saying that a person or his parents were born abroad. The words affirmed the reality of French diversity, rebuking the R.N.'s racism and xenophobia. "Everyone hates fachos! " the crowd chanted. "First generation, second generation, third generation—who cares! We're chez nous! " It was a rapturous evening for the left, yet voters hadn't handed the coalition a clean victory. The N.F.P. had won the most seats, but the new legislature was still almost evenly divided between the N.F.P., Macron's group, and the R.N., leaving no faction with a majority. It was a three-way parliamentary stalemate. Instead of providing an indispensable clarification, the election had utterly muddied the situation. The constitution gives the President the right to name the Prime Minister, but it specifies no criteria or timetable. Custom dictated that Macron nominate someone from the majority party, but, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, there wasn't one. The only thing constraining Macron, really, was what he could get away with. It was likely that, in nineteen days, the Paris Olympics would begin with no one at the wheel of the government. Would there be a sports minister? Or, for that matter, anyone with the power to appoint one? In the absence of clear guidelines, Mélenchon rushed to emphasize the importance of the N.F.P.'s first-place finish. "The President must invite the Nouveau Front Populaire to govern," he proclaimed, standing behind a lectern at his party's headquarters, in his signature carmine tie. His deputies, arrayed behind him, looked as though they could barely contain their glee as he thundered, "The Nouveau Front Populaire will implement its program, nothing but its program, and all of its program!" Instead of choosing a Prime Minister quickly, Macron dragged the process out through the summer, announcing a political "trêve"—a truce or rest period—to last through the Olympics. It was a revelation to learn that someone could press Pause on politics—the jockeying and squabbling and speculating—and it would just go away, at least for nineteen days. There was hardly a public mention of the crisis, save for a sign that a pair of fans held up at the men's two-hundred-metre breaststroke final, paying tribute to the star swimmer Léon Marchand and to the rugby player Antoine Dupont, sometimes called Toto: "LÉON, PRESIDENT. TOTO, PRIME MINISTER." The Olympics ended on August 11th, with Macron still no closer to resolving the dilemma of who would lead the government. At one point, Attal, the lame-duck Prime Minister, was spotted playing with a lightsabre in Matignon's gardens. Some observers suspected that Macron was trying to run out the clock, hoping that the N.F.P. would fall apart. The coalition had first put forth Lucie Castets in late July, just an hour before Macron was scheduled to give a prime-time television interview. Asked whether he would appoint her, he brushed the possibility aside, saying that what mattered wasn't a particular name but, rather, who could muster a working majority to pass legislation. N.F.P. leaders were livid—they had finished first, they had found a candidate, and now Macron was shooting her down on live TV without so much as a discussion. Someone Castets knew offered her a back channel to communicate with the President, but she declined. "We took him by surprise," she recalled. "I think he was embarrassed. Let him deal with it, right?" When I met Castets, on a sunny terrace at a local café, she drank an espresso and reflected on her supposedly Warholian summer. It had been more of a grind than people imagined: with no formal staff or funding, she shouldered media requests and policy research largely alone, and the selection process dragged on so long that she was forced to resign from her job at city hall. The experience reminded her less of the Factory than of giving birth. "I just dissociated," she said. Within Macron's camp, some agreed that he should appoint Castets out of respect for the election result, even though the numbers showed that the opposing parties could, and probably would, find the votes to oust her immediately. "It's like a series," Roland Lescure told me. "If you don't have Season 1, you can't have Season 2." Another point of view held that Macron should skip straight to a viable government that might be hospitable to preserving his most cherished policies. At the end of August, Macron invited Castets to the Élysée. She arrived in black pants and boots, flanked by a dozen of her partners from the coalition. By all accounts, the ninety-minute meeting went smoothly and Castets confidently passed what the media called her "grand oral exam," answering the President's questions on everything from the budget to the French territory of New Caledonia. Centrists accused the left of refusing to compromise. Castets told me that her most profound disagreement with Macron was about disagreement itself. "It doesn't hold up for long to pretend that the right and left can be similar and that there is no conflict or interests in politics," she said. "It's all about conflict and interests." Macron's attempt to create a political synthesis, she continued, had accomplished the inverse of what he aspired to. His legacy, culminating in the dissolution, would be the repolarization of the electorate. She said, "I think he's in a very bad position, and he did exactly what he wanted to avoid." Days later, Macron announced that, seeking "institutional stability," he was eliminating Castets from the running. Le Gorafi, the French equivalent of The Onion, captured the brutal anticlimax to the left's remarkable run with the headline "Emmanuel Macron Asks Lucie Castets, Leaving the Élysée, to Take Out the Trash." As ever, personal explanations competed with political ones. Macronologists saw a control freak contending poorly with the attrition of his authority—"a shrunken, confused power, who still dreams of himself as a Machiavelli," as Le Figaro put it. People interested in policy pointed out that Macron was hellbent on protecting the reforms that had taken him years to pass—particularly the retirement overhaul—and that, even if an N.F.P. government was doomed to fall, Castets could have used executive orders to obstruct the reforms within weeks. Whatever Macron's rationale, the left argued, the decision amounted to a subversion of democracy. "I think that the President has decided to declare war," Fabien Roussel, the head of the Communist Party, proclaimed. Sarah Bennani, a nineteen-year-old student who had found time between schoolwork and a nannying job to get out the vote in working-class areas like Seine-Saint-Denis, where the abstention rate had previously reached almost seventy per cent, told me that she felt "sad talking about what finally happened," and even conflicted about having urged her friends and neighbors to vote. "Those arguments aren't valid anymore," she said. "The government betrayed the people who we encouraged to give politics a chance." Macron continued to float names. So did the media. They were all over the place, in terms of both profile and ideology: younger, older, inexperienced, experienced, rural, urban, left, right, completely out of left field. The longer he procrastinated, the less time whomever he selected would have to try to put together a budget and a working majority to push it through. Talking with voters, I heard many versions of the same complaint: He gave us twenty-one days to keep the fascists out of power, but allows himself the luxury of eight weeks of deliberation. Finally, on September 5th, Macron announced that he had come to a decision: the new Prime Minister would be Michel Barnier, a septuagenarian political hand who had previously served as minister of the environment (1993-95), minister of European affairs (1995-97), minister of foreign affairs (2004-05), and minister of agriculture and fisheries (2007-09) before acting as the European Union's chief Brexit negotiator (2016-21). Barnier hailed from the traditional right and called himself a "social Gaullist." Statuesque and snowy-haired, he was best known to many French people as the co-president of the Albertville Olympics, which took place in 1992 in his home region of Savoie. Despite a late-career anti-immigrant turn, he was a reasonably consensual figure, with a kitsch factor that worked in his favor. It was kind of like bringing back Bob Dole. Yet, seen from a certain angle, Barnier's appointment was a provocation. His center-right party had finished fourth in the snap election, garnering a mere five per cent of the vote. Worse still, his appointment required the blessing of Marine Le Pen—who signalled that she wouldn't immediately vote to oust Barnier—and the stability of his government would depend on the tacit approval of her deputies, who crowed that Barnier would have to work under their "surveillance." Dominique de Villepin marvelled, "It proves the Gospels right—the first will be the last, and the last will be the first." Effectively, French voters had narrowly chosen the left-wing N.F.P. only to get a right-wing government, serving at the pleasure of Le Pen. In October, I flew to Nice to attend an R.N. rally. I started the day at the market, where a man handed me a flyer encouraging me to say "no to the explosion of real-estate taxes." I bought a slice of pissaladière and a chard frittata and ate them on an embankment facing the Mediterranean Sea, then took the tram to the Palais Nikaïa, an exurban theatre where the R.N.'s stars, including Le Pen and Bardella, were set to appear for their first big event since the snap election. When I got there, another man handed me another flyer. It featured a lot of blue, white, and red and an angry-looking eagle hovering over a Marianne. "We are the best of the youth because we defend our COUNTRY, our frontiers, and our PEOPLE in the face of the system changes and the demography that lie in wait for them," it read. The theatre would soon be hosting a Beatles tribute band and a Celtic Legends dance performance. Inside, some five thousand people were settling into their seats as Charles Aznavour's "Emmenez-moi" played on the sound system. In the row in front of me, three generations of one family—grandmother, daughter, grandson—nudged one another in excitement as a blockbuster-style trailer filled the screen. Then a handful of deputies took the stage for panel discussions. The conversations weren't the barn burners one might have expected. They were heavy on acronyms, and on shopkeeperish concerns of neighborhood safety and personal finance. Anyone who had been following Le Pen, however, would know that this sandpapered discourse was the outcome of a decade's work of dédiabolisation, or "undemonizing" the party—a campaign that had resulted in the R.N.'s legislative presence growing from eight deputies to a hundred and twenty-six in just seven years. Given these electoral successes and the unprecedented defection of mainstream politicians to the party, the dédiabolisation phase was effectively over. Now it was all about désenclavement, or opening the party up to a wider audience. The journalist Tristan Berteloot writes in his new book, "La Machine à Gagner" ("The Winning Machine"), that the R.N. quietly maintains links with neo-Fascist and white-supremacist movements, but that recently it has been far more disciplined publicly as it tries "to break the 'glass ceiling' that, according to it, has prevented it from gaining power." (The R.N. denied these claims through a spokesperson.) R.N. members now undergo media training. But, in the tumult of the snap election, dubious and outright vile comments came pouring forth. "I have a Jew as an ophthalmologist and a Muslim as a dentist," one R.N. candidate asserted, by way of refuting accusations of racism. Others called immigrants "pieces of shit" and said French people of North African descent "didn't belong in high office," railed against vaccines, and questioned the moon landing. Confronted in an interview, Bardella acknowledged that there were four or five "problematic" candidates, but minimized them as "casting errors," the inevitable by-products of a rushed nomination process. It was harder to minimize the damage inflicted by the party's proposal to bar French citizens who hold other nationalities from certain public jobs. The party had floated the idea in the legislature early in the year, but by the summer it was obvious that the plan was widely unpopular. Le Pen then claimed that binational employment was "a completely microscopic subject" that would involve only about thirty jobs of high sensitivity, even though, in 2011, she'd advocated for doing away with dual nationality altogether. "We are Algerian or we are French," she once declared. Despite obvious commonalities with the U.S. Republican Party, it's not entirely clear what stance the R.N., should it come to power, would take toward a second Trump Presidency. Le Pen—a cat lady, though not childless—holds a breeder's diploma and lives with six feline companions: Jazz, Paloma, Shadé, Shalimar, Oural, and Piccolina. She has defended reproductive rights, writing that although she would like to reduce abortions, she finds it "ineffective and cruel to do so by coercive measures," particularly when poor women are most likely to suffer. In 2016, she welcomed Trump's election fulsomely, but last month she offered only a bland tweet, and told a reporter, "At a moment when the United States is clearly going to defend its interests in an even more vigorous manner, Europe is going to have to wake up." Drolet, the professor of politics and international relations, told me, "The French right is obviously pleased that you now have a much less Atlanticist America. Trump's election also leaves more room for national autonomy and can be seen by the right as an opportunity for Europe to assert itself." The belief that Le Pen and Trump hold most fervently in common is actually the one that is likeliest to keep them from ever becoming too cozy: nationalism is a zero-sum project. At the rally, Le Pen spoke before Bardella. The fact that she was essentially serving as his opening act seemed to reflect an evolving power dynamic. Le Pen delivered a searing account of the political drama that had consumed the country since June 9th. "I'm not going to go back into the delays and the tricks of these past few months," she said, "but I believe that the French people will remember with acuity the manner in which the political class twisted their arms during the legislative elections and has sought to invisibilize them ever since." She paused a moment, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "The aspirations of the French have been ghostées"—ghosted—"as the youth say." Then Bardella descended from the heavens—or such was the implication, as he emerged from the upper reaches of the auditorium and floated down through the rows, flanked by bodyguards, while cheering fans waved flags and pawed at his clothes. As he strode onto the stage, resplendent in navy tailoring, I thought of him not as a well-scrubbed son-in-law but as a kind of launderer, spot-cleaning stains of racism and nepotism so that the R.N. wouldn't have to get new clothes. Bardella said that he was there to speak to "all those whose heart bleeds when they look at the state of France." "The left to the guillotine!" someone in the audience yelled. The R.N., one former high-level civil servant told me, is "at a very different and quite difficult point in its life cycle. It has to remain the party of angry people while demonstrating that it can be relied upon to govern." Macron's position as the party's primary villain, it seemed, was receding along with his share of votes. Bardella spent far more time talking about the danger of Mélenchon's "regressive left," supposedly stuffed with asinine diversity hires and terrorism apologists swaddled in Palestinian flags. "Dirty cunt!" the grandmother in front of me cried out, slicing a hand through the air. The atmosphere was growing febrile. I had the weird sensation that I'd seen someone with a Confederate flag, and, indeed, it later turned out that a man had shown up in a jacket decorated with a patch featuring the Stars and Bars, posing for a picture with an R.N. deputy. "If it wasn't for wokeism, nobody would care," the man said. Bardella wrapped up his speech with a call for "the people" to keep pressing on, promising that "our victory is not cancelled but deferred." "We are impatient to govern," he declared. "The time of power is not far off." The first weeks of December were supposed to be a triumph for Macron, a respite from the churning negativity of the political crisis. On the second Sunday of Advent, five years after a fire nearly burned Notre-Dame de Paris to the ground, the fully renovated cathedral was set to reopen to the public. The restoration was Macron's personal project; almost as soon as the flames were out, he promised that the cathedral would be rebuilt by 2024. He had fulfilled that vow, and the result was a marvel, a vindication of French aesthetic splendor and technical prowess and even, yes, a certain headstrong style of leadership. Yet, in the first days of December, from the moment that the Monday-morning talk shows kicked off and the legislative session opened, it became clear that this accomplishment was likely to be eclipsed by a rapidly deteriorating situation at the Assemblée Nationale. The immediate problem was the budget. In the fall, it emerged that the national deficit was even bigger than anyone had admitted publicly—a gaping hundred and sixty-seven billion euros. Debt-related expenses were estimated to exceed next year's education budget. Ratings agencies had downgraded France's credit rating, and, at more than six per cent of the G.D.P., the deficit considerably exceeded the European Commission's three-per-cent cap. A government spokesperson admitted in October, "The risk, for France, is to become Greece in 2010." The revelations only aggravated the instability of the Barnier government, built on the wobbliest base of any since the start of the Fifth Republic. The N.F.P. had already called for a no-confidence vote in early October, in protest of Barnier's appointment. I sat down with Manuel Bompard, a deputy and the national coördinator of Mélenchon's party, in his spartan office just before the vote. Even though the motion was almost certain to fail, and eventually did, Bompard saw it as a necessary riposte to the "democratic trauma" that he believed Macron had inflicted on the country. "The idea is not to do things only when we are sure that they will work, that they will succeed, but also to fight battles even when we're not leading, or that we can't win," Bompard told me. Because the left-wing coalition had declared itself unwilling to work with Barnier's government from the beginning, and the centrist bloc didn't have the numbers to go it alone, Barnier needed the support of the R.N. to pass a budget bill, which he had to do before the end of the year. He made significant concessions to the R.N., agreeing not to raise taxes on electricity, and to remove a measure that would have reduced insurance coverage for some medications. His gestures, however conciliatory, were not enough to satisfy Le Pen. Without sufficient support, on December 2nd, Barnier resorted to a maneuver known as the 49.3, by which a Prime Minister can push a bill through without a vote. "The French have had enough of being fleeced and mistreated," Le Pen told reporters, outside the legislative chamber. "Maybe some thought that with Michel Barnier things would change—well, it's even worse than it was." Her party would join the N.F.P. in voting to oust his government. It behooved Le Pen to keep public attention focussed on the budget fight: she and twenty-four co-defendants are being tried in a Paris criminal court, accused of using the E.U. as a piggy bank for the party and funnelling funds to apparatchiks. (The defendants have denied all allegations, and some of Le Pen's supporters have complained that she is being targeted by "a government of judges.") In mid-November, prosecutors announced that they were seeking heavy penalties, including a two-year prison sentence for Le Pen and a ban on running for public office for five years, which would make her ineligible for the 2027 Presidential election. After Le Pen's announcement, time seemed to accelerate. By Wednesday, just forty-eight hours later, Barnier was up for a no-confidence vote. As the debate opened, the Assemblée was rowdy and restless, crackling with the heady feeling of history being made. The left spoke first, denouncing the government's betrayal, its rebuff of the N.F.P.'s priorities, and its pandering to Le Pen. Then Le Pen got up, intense as ever, dismissing Barnier as an "optical illusion" and charging his group with displaying "intransigence, sectarianism, and dogmatism." An impassioned last-minute plea by Attal to the conscience and sense of responsibility of the deputies—"It's not too late!" he implored—did nothing to forestall Barnier's fate. Hours later, it was official: three hundred and thirty-one deputies had voted to support the motion, toppling the government for the first time since 1962 and rendering Barnier the shortest-lived Prime Minister in the Fifth Republic's history. "It's a huge waste," the centrist deputy Mathieu Lefèvre told me. Barnier "tried to find the compromises necessary to construct a budget despite a very restricted timetable. Unfortunately, he had to face an alliance of opposites who are harmful to our country and its stability." It remains to be seen whether France will descend, as some experts have predicted, into a deeper chaos of financial turbulence and social unrest. The Constitution contains provisions that prevent a total government shutdown in the absence of a budget, permitting the country to carry out basic functions such as collecting taxes and paying civil servants. But French people are likely to face uncertainty about pension payments and tax rates, as well as jittery financial markets. Farmers from the Burgundy area have already announced that they will pay "a visit" to deputies who voted to bring down the government and, in doing so, deprived them of eagerly awaited measures to ease their financial plight. Still, for some deputies, the prospect of starting over is cause for optimism. "I voted without hesitation, but with a certain gravity," Arthur Delaporte, a Socialist deputy, told me. "It's not an anodyne gesture, to topple a government. But it's meant to enable the return of a regime that functions differently." Macron will have to appoint a new Prime Minister—once again, of his own choosing. This time, he says, he will do it within days. If another government falls, however, calls for his resignation are likely to grow deafening, and he may have a difficult time justifying his viability as the head of an executive branch that changes Prime Ministers more often than many people see their hairdressers. In a recent poll, sixty-four per cent of French people indicated that they want Macron to resign, but he says unequivocally that he will finish out his term, which ends in 2027. Le Pen professes, for now, to be uninterested in forcing Macron out, but an early election could be advantageous, given her legal problems. Already her party has begun to deploy what one R.N. deputy called "the slow poison" of suggestion, letting the idea seep into the public consciousness that Macron should step down. Mélenchon, who makes no secret of his desire to depose Macron ("Even with a Barnier every three months, Macron won't last three years," he quipped soon after the vote), is focussed on finally getting a left-wing Prime Minister. Only days ago, he vowed that the N.F.P. would insist that Macron appoint the candidate of its choice—Lucie Castets. But in France at the moment, today's ultimatum is tomorrow's obsolescence. On Friday, the Socialists declared that they were ready to negotiate with Macron's group and the center right, throwing the fate of the N.F.P. into question and rejiggering the political landscape once again. ♦
The New Yorker	[ "animals", "pets" ]	# The Animals That Made It All Worth It By Naomi Fry December 7th, 2024 06:00 AM --- This year, it was hard to feel good about humans. Moo Deng, Crumbs, and Pilaf kept us sane. Like many Internet users, I love nothing more than animal content. In the decade or so since I've joined Instagram, I've probably spent dozens of hours liking and commenting on posts documenting the trials and triumphs of, let's say, to take a few totally fictional but totally plausible examples, a three-legged West Sussex cat who likes to take a bus to a fish-and-chip shop for a daily visit with the patrons, a skunk found by the side of an Alabama road who's become best friends with its rescuer's elderly beagle, or a disabled Angora bunny fitted with a tiny wheelchair, using it to tool around its Auckland sanctuary. There was always a dash of soothing escapism to my scrolling, but this past year it struck me that what had always seemed a wholesome pastime might be turning into a little bit of a problem. The issue was that now I only wanted to look at animals. Looking at people had become too stressful, too painful. War, greed, abject idiocy—I was sick of them. And it seemed to me that I wasn't the only one experiencing this malaise. It's true enough that every year in recent memory has had its share of famous critters—who could forget Grumpy Cat (R.I.P.!) or Roger, the heavily muscled kangaroo (also R.I.P.!)—but, this year, I sensed a new, fevered desperation in our tendency to cling to the zoological world. The sculpture "Dinosaur"—a gargantuan aluminum pigeon by the Colombian artist Iván Argote, which was installed recently on Manhattan's High Line—seemed to embody this kind of desire. We were so small, so helpless: for better or worse, we needed animals to distract us, even save us. What follows is a rundown of some of the year's main characters. Were this a competition (which it's not: all animals are equally beautiful), Moo Deng would come in at No. 1. Who even knew what a pygmy hippo was before encountering this glossy, compact mammal? Not I. But, like many others, I discovered the breed in September, after Moo Deng—the name means "bouncy pig" in Thai—took the Internet by storm. Born in July in the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, in the Si Racha district of Thailand's Chonburi province, Moo Deng achieved viral fame only a couple of months later, thanks to her feisty shenanigans and moist, fleshy appearance. From the jump, Moo Deng loved to raise hell. With her skin as sleek and lubed-up as that of young Arnold Schwarzenegger during his "Pumping Iron" days, and her toothless maw seemingly always ajar, she became a sensation: videos of her biting anything and anyone in her vicinity, slithering repeatedly out of her keeper's grasp, or frolicking clumsily around her enclosure, have received many millions of views on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. In early November, she even ventured into politics when she was presented with two cakes made of fruit—one decorated with Donald Trump's name and the other with Kamala Harris's—and chose to eat the former, correctly predicting the American election's outcome. Somehow, she seemed to know better than us what was going on. But if Moo Deng was this year's Eros, Crumbs the cat was its Thanatos. Rescued in September from the basement of a Russian hospital, the ginger feline had been overfed to such an extent that he'd reached a weight of thirty-eight pounds, and was unable to walk. (An aside: there's just something about too-chunky animals. For instance, Pesto, the abnormally large king penguin living at the Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium, or Fat Albert, the heaviest polar bear in Alaska.) Crumbs—called Kroshik in Russian—was then taken in by the Matroskin Shelter in Perm, where he was put on a strict diet and exercise regime. In an attempt to evade his fate, Crumbs reportedly tried to escape, but was foiled by a shoe rack. (He was discovered by staff while stuck in the contraption, his face flush against the footbed of a Croc.) These high jinks sadly came to an end in late October, when Crumbs died suddenly. His ample flesh, it turned out, was hiding cancerous tumors that appeared to lead to organ collapse. Poor Crumbs! But, if nothing else, his saga gave us the gift of the Post's coverage, which I sincerely could not have loved more. (Imagine managing to get "tubby tabby," "lardy lad," "beefy boy," and "portly puss" into a single article.) Speaking of dead animals, this was a big year for them. For one, who could forget Trump claiming, falsely, that Haitian immigrants were feasting on their neighbors' pets? ("In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats," he said, during the Presidential debate with Harris.) Then, too, they kept cropping up during Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,'s Presidential run. In the course of the Health Secretary nominee's campaign, we learned that he once picked up bear roadkill and dumped it in Central Park; decapitated a dead whale on a Hyannis Port beach, with a chainsaw, and took its head home; and even suffered from a parasitic worm, which, he said, had eaten part of his brain. In July, Vanity Fair also reported that Kennedy had texted a friend a picture that suggested he was eating barbecued dog, though the candidate vociferously denied that this was the case. (He claimed that it was actually barbecued goat.) Meanwhile, both a dog and a goat were the victims of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor, whom Trump had reportedly considered as his running mate. In a memoir published this spring, the Republican politician got animal lovers up in arms after she wrote of shooting dead her family's "untrainable" wirehaired pointer, Cricket, as well as an uncastrated male goat who was "nasty and mean." With so many passed-away pooches making the news, it was good to see that some dogs, at least, were still living their best lives. Jam, the puppy owned by Mikey Madison, the star of Sean Baker's "Anora," was seen strutting alongside his mistress on a couple of very glamorous walks; Pilaf, Demi Moore's tongue-out-at-all-times Chihuahua, was toted around in a sling to seemingly dozens of high-profile events (With her front-row status and diminutive scale—per Vogue, she weighs only 1.2 pounds—Pilaf put me in mind of Emperor Caracalla's memorably teeny monkey in a dress in "Gladiator II"); and Vito, a plush two-year-old pug from North Carolina, wore an expression of quiet pride on his adorably smooshed-in face when he became the first of his breed to win Best in Show at the National Dog Show, last month. ("He's very smug—I do think he knows," his handler told NBC Sports, as Vito blinked contentedly in his arms.) The comforts of domesticated living proved harder to maintain, however, for two other animals this year. Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl who last year fled from his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo to the hard streets of Manhattan, died in February after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side. (A necropsy performed after his death confirmed that he also had high levels of poison in his system, owing to a street-rat-heavy diet.) And P'Nut, a squirrel who was taken in as a baby, seven years ago, by the OnlyFans creators Mark and Daniela Longo, and who delighted the couple's many social-media followers by wearing little novelty hats and eating waffles, was confiscated and euthanized, along with his housemate Fred the raccoon, by agents from the Department of Environmental Conservation; many people, including J. D. Vance, deemed the move an example of governmental overreach. (It's illegal to keep wildlife in New York State, where the Longos live, and the two pets were suspected—wrongly, it turns out—of carrying rabies.) But if the shuttling between wilderness and domestication proved fraught for poor Flaco and P'Nut, I'd like to end with a more hopeful story of another such transition. The cat rescuer Beth Stern has long used her reach and means as the radio personality Howard Stern's wife to advance her animal-advocacy work, and has fostered countless felines in her own home—efforts I've been following religiously on her popular Instagram account for the past several years. A couple of months ago, Stern began posting videos of a distinguished-looking male tuxedo cat she named Bud, who was living outside on her property. Bud was feral, and extremely apprehensive. The Sterns would leave out food for him, but the weather was getting colder, and Bud was too skittish to make use of the insulated cat houses that the couple had set up. After a few failed attempts, Stern managed to coax Bud into the house, and I've found the ongoing record of his slow acclimatization to indoor life as soothing as a Xanax. As Stern's Instagram posts have shown us, Bud has learned to use his litter box in front of the duo, has begun to accept cat treats from a human hand, and has even been purring in response to some gentle petting. Though he appears to have not yet socialized with other cats or approached a human lap, the anticipation of these further developments has been giving me something to live for. It might not be much, but sometimes it feels like just enough. ♦
Wired	[ "how-to", "tips", "mac", "software", "macos" ]	# Try These Tricks to Free Up More Screen Real Estate on a Mac By Justin Pot December 7th, 2024 07:30 AM --- There are several ways to keep the elements on your Mac's screen from getting in the way of your work. Try these tips to free up some visual space. Does your Mac's desktop feel ... crowded? Is there not enough room on the screen for all the apps and tools you need to be productive? You might think your only options are to get a MacBook model with a larger screen or buy an external display. Both of those tactics would certainly help, but before you spend a bunch of money know that you can give yourself quite a bit more screen real estate by tweaking your software settings. To get started, open the System Settings app on your Mac, which you can find by clicking the Apple logo in the top-right corner then clicking System Settings. Head to the Displays section in the left sidebar. You'll see a few size options, ranging from Larger Text to More Space. Click the More Space option and everything on your Mac's screen will become a little smaller. It will suddenly feel like you have way more space to work with. Now, this won't be ideal for everyone. If you have vision trouble, then making everything on the screen smaller is going to have some downsides. Others simply may not like it. But the trade-off is that you can fit a lot more on the screen at once. I recommend giving this tweak a try. There are a few other things you can do to free up space. The Mac, by default, shows the dock on the screen at all times. This means that a little bit of space is taken up by the dock's string of app icons at all times. If you want that space back, you should consider hiding your dock. In System Settings head to the Desktop & Dock section and check the Automatically hide and show the Dock option. After doing this the dock will disappear, allowing you to use that space for whatever you're working on. When you want to use the dock, you can just move your mouse pointer to the space on the screen where it used to be, and it will pop up. You can get a little more space by also hiding the menu bar. Within System Settings, go to the Control Center settings, then set the Automatically hide and show the menu bar option to Always. This will hide the menu bar at the top of the screen the same way you hid the dock before. Now, obviously, this gives you less space than hiding the dock does, and some people aren't going to love not having a clock on their screen at all times. But it's a little bit more space, and I find that not seeing all of my menu bar icons makes it a little easier to focus. Need even more space? If you have an iPad you can use it as a second monitor for your Mac, as I explained here. Basically, if your iPad is nearby, you can head to Displays in System Settings, click the + button, and add your iPad as a display. I really like using this while on the road—it gives me a little bit of extra space to work with when I'm away from my desk and my external monitor.
CBC News	[ "Walt Disney Company", "France", "Paris", "Agnes Poirier", "Bradley Stephens", "Michel Picaud", "President Emanuel Macron", "Victor Hugo", "Fiction", "Movies", "Fires", "Roman Catholicism" ]	# Notre-Dame Cathedral to reopen after 2019 fire. It's not the first time it needed saving By Jonathan Ore December 7th, 2024 09:00 AM --- French landmark was nearly demolished before Victor Hugo's 1831 novel argued for its historical importance This weekend's reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris is the culmination of a repair and restoration effort more than five years after it was gutted by a catastrophic fire. Notre-Dame is one of the Western world's most recognizable and beloved buildings — but it hasn't always been that way. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the 18th century, it was in such a state of disrepair that Paris officials considered demolishing it. According to historian Bradley Stephens, it was author Victor Hugo who helped restore both its structure and reputation with his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris — better known by some by its original English title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "Hugo was arguing that the cathedral still had huge symbolic value both for French culture, but also for French national identity," Stephens, a professor of French Literature at the University of Bristol, told CBC Radio's Day 6. Echoes of those arguments could be found in French President Emanuel Macron's declaration immediately after the April 2019 fire devastated the cathedral, which positioned it as a nation-building exercise to unite the French people. During the French Revolution, Notre-Dame had suffered several "mutilations," as Hugo described them. Many of its stained glass windows were smashed or stolen. The metal bells installed in its towers were melted down to be cast into cannons. "Previously, Parisians were concerned that this cathedral had become quite ugly. You had aesthetic purists who felt that its mix of Romanesque and Gothic styles made it quite irregular, that it wasn't uniform, it wasn't in keeping with more neoclassical tastes that have been prevalent in more recent history in France," Stephens explained. "And Hugo says to his readers, 'No, these are the strengths of the cathedral. The cathedral's mixture of styles, the fact that it's been around for so very long testifies to a natural wonder and dynamism, and it also helps bear witness to France's changing history.'" ## Following the blueprint The novel helped galvanize the small, but growing number of people who shared Hugo's views. In the early 1840s, King Louis-Phillipe commissioned architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc to oversee the cathedral's repair and restoration — a project that would take several decades. Viollet-le-Duc's work remained the blueprint for the cathedral's modern restoration, including its now-iconic 19th-century spire. "He was a genius," Philippe Villeneuve, the cathedral's chief architect since 2013, said of Viollet-le-Duc. "My role was to ensure that vision endured." After the fire, Macron made a decree to begin the most ambitious restoration in modern French history — to restore an edifice that took nearly 200 years to build originally, in just five years. Villeneuve and his team installed cutting-edge fire safety systems in the cathedral to help protect it from future fires or other disasters. The attic, now divided into three compartments — choir, transept, and nave — features advanced thermal cameras, smoke detectors, and a revolutionary water-misting system. Unlike traditional sprinklers, this system releases a fine mist of water droplets designed to extinguish flames while minimizing damage to the fragile wood and stone. "The mist saturates the air, reducing oxygen levels to smother fires without harming the wood or stone," Villeneuve explained. "These are the most advanced fire safety systems in any French cathedral. We had to learn from what happened. We owe it to the future." ## The people's palace Macron's announcement to repair the cathedral in just five years sparked unprecedented global support, with donations quickly nearing $1 billion US. Michel Picaud, president of the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris charity, said his group's donor list ballooned from 700 before the fire, to nearly 50,000 after with thousands of them coming from over 60 countries — including hundreds of supporters and donors from Canada. The charity formed in 2017, to support restoration efforts that had begun shortly before the fire. Picaud noted that wide support came in large part from people who are interested in Notre-Dame beyond its role as a Catholic place of worship. Some see it as one of France's most attractive tourist locales. Others respect its place in French political history. Still others drew their fondness from Hugo's novel and its adaptations, including the 1996 Disney animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Stephens did note that Hugo was irked that his novel was retitled The Hunchback of Notre Dame in English, as it took much of the focus away from the cathedral itself in favour of Quasimodo. "Of course, Quasimodo is the human figure in the whole story that ... appeals to our sense of humanity as this maligned, hunchbacked bell ringer is ostracized by society but demonstrates his kindness and his inner beauty," he said. "Whilst Hugo, of course, wanted that to be integral to the tale he was telling, at the same time, he was concerned that by changing the title and narrowing the focus just onto the hunchback, readers might miss the broader significance of where the cathedral fits in." Its importance beyond Catholicism can be traced back to its original construction, according to Agnes Poirier, journalist and author of Notre-Dame: the Soul of France. "Unlike other gothic cathedrals at the time, the aristocracy and the kings paid quite little towards its construction," she told The Current's Matt Galloway. The funding came from various sources including the bishop of Paris, revenue from its fertile farmlands, and donations from the bourgeois, prostitutes and more, making it "the people's palace," in Poirer's words. Revolutionaries used it for various roles including a polling station and a university, which was notable since the rebels were atheists. "After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Notre-Dame chimed and rang for the cartoonists that were killed, although they were fiercely anti-clerical," Poirer said. "So she belongs to everyone, and she accepts everyone." Stephens says Notre-Dame de Paris's greatest trials have parallels to France's own tumultuous history. In the 19th century, Hugo wrote a novel exalting its importance just as people were wrestling with the legacy of the French Revolution. "Now, in the 21st century, what we have is a historically Catholic and imperial power trying to find its place in a multicultural, multi-religious and post-colonial world at a time when the country is beset with fears about a possible waning international influence as well as growing national discord at home domestically," said Stephens. "The importance of Notre-Dame, then, can be to help find common ground, to unify rather than divide."
TechCrunch	[ "social media", "age", "Yoti" ]	# As Australia bans social media for kids under 16, age-assurance tech is in the spotlight By Natasha Lomas December 7th, 2024 02:00 PM --- Age assurance, an umbrella term that refers to technologies for verifying, estimating, or inferring an internet user's age, is being thrust into the global spotlight thanks to a blanket ban on social media use for people under 16 in Australia. The law, which is expected to come into force in Australia in November 2025, will require social media platforms to take "reasonable steps" to ensure they verify users' age and prevent minors from accessing their services. The legislation was passed before key details were defined — such as the definition of "reasonable steps." Australia will try out age-assurance technologies next year to help regulators (its eSafety Commissioner is the relevant body) set some of the key parameters. This trial is likely to be closely watched elsewhere, too, given widespread concerns about the impact of social media on kids' well-being. Other similar countrywide bans could follow, which will also require platforms to adopt age-assurance technologies, setting up the sector for growth. Companies offering services in this area include the likes of U.S. identity giant Entrust (which earlier this year acquired U.K. digital ID startup Onfido); German startup veteran IDnow; U.S. firm Jumio, which actually started out as an online payments company before pivoting to digital identity services; Estonia-based Veriff; and Yoti, a 10-year-old U.K. player, to name a few. Yoti confirmed to TechCrunch it will be taking part in the Australian trial, saying it will seek to have its facial age estimation tech, Digital ID app, ID document, and Liveness tested. The term "liveness" refers to digital ID verification technology that's used to detect whether a person pictured on an ID document, for example, is the same person as the one sitting behind the computer trying to access a service , and typically relying on AI-based analysis of a video feed of the user (so looking at things like how light plays on their face as they move). ## The three types of age assurance The Australian trial is being overseen by a U.K. not-for-profit, the Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), which does compliance testing and certification for providers of age-assurance technology. "We are an independent, third-party conformity assessment body that tests that ID and age check systems work," explains ACCS' CEO and founder, Tony Allen. "We do ID verification, age verification, age estimation, testing and analysis of vendor systems all over the world. So this project was very much up our street." While the Australian trial is grabbing headlines at the moment, he says the ACCS is doing age-assurance testing projects "all over the world" — including in the U.S., Europe, and the U.K. — predicting the technology is "definitely coming" to much more of the internet soon. Per Allen, age assurance breaks down into three different areas: age verification, age estimation, and age inference. Age verification confirms the exact date of birth of the user, such as matching a person to a government-issued ID or obtaining this information via a person's bank or health record. Age estimation provides an estimate or range, while inference relies on other confirmed information — like a person holding a bank account, credit card, mortgage, or even a pilot's license — to demonstrate that they are older than a certain age. (A minor certainly isn't going to have a mortgage, for example.) At its most basic, an age gate that asks users to self-declare their date of birth (i.e., "self-declaration") technically falls under age assurance. However, such an unsophisticated measure is unlikely to suffice for the Australian law as it's exceptionally easy for children to circumvent such mechanisms. More robust measures that are increasingly targeted based on things like behavioral triggers could end up being a requirement for compliance both in Australia and other places where kids might be going online. U.K. regulator, Ofcom, for example, is pushing platforms for better age checks as it works to implement the Online Safety Act, while the European Commission is using the bloc's Digital Services Act to lean on major porn sites to adopt age-verification measures to boost minor protection. The precise methods in Australia are still yet to be determined, with social media giant Meta continuing to lobby for checks to be baked into mobile app stores in a bid to avoid having to implement the tech on its own platforms. Allen expects a mix of approaches. "I would expect to see age verification, age estimation, and age inference. I think we'll see a mix of all of those," he says. ## Privacy in demand Allen explains that privacy has become a selling point for newer forms of age assurance. "Age verification has been around for years and years and years," he suggests. "Online it's been around since gambling went online in the 1990s. So the process is nothing new — what's new in the last few years has been working out how to do it in a privacy preserving way. So instead of taking a regular picture of your passport and attaching it to an email and sending it off into the ether and hoping for the best, the tech now is much more designed around privacy and around security." Allen downplays privacy concerns over data being shared inappropriately, saying that "generally" speaking, third-party age-assurance providers will only provide a yes/no response to an age-check ask (e.g., "Is this person over 16?"), thereby minimizing the data they return to the platform to shrink privacy risks. Allen argues that wider concerns over age assurance as a vector to enable mass surveillance of web users are misplaced. "That's people who just don't understand how this technology works," he claims. "It doesn't create anything that you can carry out surveillance on. None of the systems that we test have that central database concept or tracking concept, and the international standard specifically prohibits that happening. So there's a lot of myths out there about what this tech does and doesn't do." ## Growing industry Yoti declined to "second-guess" the trial results ahead of time, or the "methods or what thresholds" that Australian lawmakers may deem "proportionate" to set in this context. But the industry will be closely looking at how much margin for error will be allowed with techniques like facial-age estimation, where the user is asked to show their face to a camera. Low-friction checks like this are likely to be attractive for social media firms — indeed, some platforms (like Instagram) have already tested selfie-based age checks. It's a lot easier to convince camera-loving teens to take a selfie than it is to make them find and upload a digital ID, for example. But it's not clear if lawmakers will allow them. "We do not know yet if the regulator will set no buffer, or a 1-, 2- or 3-year buffer for facial age estimation," Yoti told us, making the case for more wiggle room around the margin of error for facial-age checks. "They may consider that if there are fewer government-issued document alternatives for 16-year-olds, with high security levels no buffer is proportionate." With increasing attention from lawmakers, Allen expects more age assurance technologies and companies will pop up in the coming years. "There's an open call for participation [in the Australian age assurance trial] so ... I think there'll be all sorts coming out," he suggests. "We see new ideas. There's one around at the moment about whether you can do age assurance from your pulse ... Which is interesting. So we'll see whether that develops. There's others around, as well. Hand movement and the geometry of your fingers is another one that we've been seeing recently."

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