Nov 14, 2025 GOATReads:Politics

The case for and against counting castes in India

Counting castes in India has always been about more than numbers - it is about who gets a share of government benefits and who doesn't. The country's next national census, scheduled for 2027, will - for the first time in nearly a century - count every caste, a social hierarchy that has long outlived kingdoms, empires and ideologies. The move ends decades of political hesitation and follows pressure from opposition parties and at least three states that have already gone ahead with their own surveys. A 2011 survey - neither run nor verified by census authorities or released by the government - recorded an astonishing 4.6 million caste names. A full count of castes promises a sharper picture of who truly benefits from affirmative action and who is left behind. Advocates say it could make welfare spending more targeted and help recalibrate quotas in jobs and education with hard evidence. Yet in a provocative new book, The Caste Con Census, scholar-activist Anand Teltumbde warns that the exercise may harden the deeply discriminatory caste system, when the need is to dismantle it. The argument cuts against the prevailing view that better data will produce fairer policy. For Mr Teltumbde, castes are "too pernicious to be managed for any progressive purpose". "Caste is, at its core, a hierarchy seeking impulse that defies measurement," he writes. Mr Teltumbde sees the modern caste census as a colonial echo. British administrators began counting castes in 1871 as a "deliberate response to the post-1857 unity of Indians across caste and religion", turning it into an "effective tool of imperial control". They held six caste censuses between 1871 and 1931 - the last full caste enumeration in India. Each count, Mr Teltumbde argues, "did not merely record caste, but reified and hardened it". Independent India, in Mr Teltumbde's reading, preserved the system under the moral banner of social justice, "while effectively evading its core obligation of building the capacities of all people, which is a prerequisite for the success of any genuine social justice policy". The obsession with counting, he says, bureaucratises inequality. By turning caste into a ledger of entitlements and grievances, the census reduces politics to arithmetic - who gets how much - rather than addressing what Mr Teltumbde calls the "architecture of social injustice". He sees the demand for a caste census as a push for more reservations - a cause driven by an "upwardly mobile minority", while the majority slips into deprivation and dependence on state aid. Nearly 800 million Indians, he notes, now rely on free rations. Affirmative action quotas were first reserved for Dalits - formerly known as untouchables - and Adivasis (tribespeople), India's most oppressed groups. But soon, the less disadvantaged "other backward classes" (OBCs) began clamouring for a share of the pie. Politics quickly coalesced around demands for new or bigger caste-based quotas. Mr Teltumbde's deeper worry is that enumeration legitimises what it measures. Political parties, he warns, will exploit the data to redraw quotas or convert caste resentment into electoral capital. For Mr Teltumbde, the only rational politics is one of "annihilation of caste", not its management - echoing what BR Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, argued when he said that caste cannot be reformed, it "must be destroyed". But in an India where even its victims "see value in its preservation", that goal feels utopian, the author admits. The looming caste census, Mr Teltumbde argues, will not expose inequality but entrench it. Many scholars don't quite agree, seeing the census as a necessary tool for achieving social justice. Sociologist Satish Deshpande and economist Mary E John call the decision not to count castes "one of independent India's biggest mistakes". Today, they note in a paper, caste has come to be seen as the burden only of India's lower castes - Dalits and Adivasis - who must constantly prove their identity through official labels. What's needed, they write, is "a fuller, more inclusive picture where everyone must answer the question of their caste". This isn't an "endorsement of an unequal system", they stress, but a recognition that "there is no caste disprivilege without a corresponding privilege accruing to some other caste". In other words, the lack of reliable caste data obscures both privilege and deprivation. Sociologist and demographer Sonalde Desai told me that without a fresh caste census, India's affirmative action policies operate "blindly", relying on outdated colonial data. "If surveys and censuses could shape social reality, we would not need social policies. We could simply start asking questions about domestic violence to shame people into refraining from wife-beating. We have not asked any questions in the census about caste since 1931. Has it eliminated caste equations?" she asks. Political scientist Sudha Pai, however, broadly agrees with Mr Teltumbde's critique that counting castes can solidify identities and distract from deeper inequalities based on "land, education, power and dignity". Yet she acknowledges that caste has already been politicised through welfare and electoral strategies, making a caste census inevitable. "A caste census would be useful if the income levels within each caste group are collected. The government could then use the data collected to identify within each caste the needs of the truly needy and offer them the required benefits and opportunities, such as education and jobs for upward mobility," Dr Pai says. "This would require moving away from simply using caste as the parameter for redistribution of available resources, to use of both caste and income levels in policymaking." Dr Pai argues that if done "thoughtfully" - linking caste data to income and educational indicators - it could shift India from a "caste-based to a rights-based welfare system". Yet, scholars warn that counting castes and interpreting the data will be fraught with challenges. "It won't be painless. India has changed tremendously in the century since 1931. Castes that were designated as being poor and vulnerable may have moved out of poverty, some new vulnerabilities may have emerged. So if we are to engage in this exercise honestly, it cannot be done without reshuffling the groups that are eligible for benefits," says Professor Desai. Another challenge lies in data collection - castes have many subgroups, raising questions about the right level of classification. Sub-categorisation aims to divide broader caste groups into smaller ones so the most disadvantaged among them receive a fair share of quotas and benefits. "Castes are not made of a single layer. There are many subgroups within a single caste. What level of aggregation should be used? How will the respondents in a census respond to this question? This requires substantial experimentation. I do not believe this has yet been done," says Prof Desai. Mr Teltumbde remains unconvinced. He argues that endless enumeration cannot remedy a system built on hierarchy. "You will be counting all your life and still not solve the caste problem. So what will be the use of that counting?," he wonders. "I am not against affirmative action, but this is not the way to do it." Source of the article

Nov 13, 2025 GOATReads: Science & Technology

Astronomy’s first gap-clearing planet fills in our “missing link”

Planets grow from protostellar material in disks, leading to full-grown planetary systems in time. At last, the final gap has been filled. Here in our Universe, one thing we could have been certain of, even before we began to examine or even detect worlds beyond our own, is that the Universe does have a mechanism for creating planets and planetary systems in orbit around stars. We have some supremely strong evidence that indicates there must be a pathway for that to occur: the existence of Earth and the other planets orbiting our own Sun. Because we exist, and our planet and the other planets in the Solar System exist, then the Universe must have some way of creating these planets. So how is it, exactly, that planets actually form within our Universe? To answer that question, we need to look to the Universe itself. Sure, we have theories that detail how planets could form, and by combining two fields of astronomy that might seem barely related — cosmology and exoplanet studies — we can learn an awful lot about the cosmic story that brings planets into existence. But even with all we learn from that, including the conditions under which stars can come to possess planets, we still have gaps in our understanding. In an ideal world, we’d have no gaps at all: we’d be able to trace the story of planet formation, step-by-step, from a pre-stellar cloud of material to a fully grown-up and evolved system of mature planets. Since we don’t have tens of millions of years to sit around and watch a system form and evolve, this might seem like an impossibility. But with the new discovery here in 2025 of planet WISPIT 2b, we’ve finally filled in the last “missing link” in the cosmic story of planet formation. Here’s what we know and how we got there. From a cosmic perspective, we know that the very first stars in the Universe couldn’t have had planets at all. In the aftermath of the hot Big Bang, the Universe went through several important phases in its early evolution. An early quark-gluon plasma state cooled, creating bound hadrons: specifically leading to a dense, expanding sea filled with protons and neutrons. Slightly later, nuclear reactions began occurring, as protons and neutrons fused together without immediately being blasted apart, creating an initial abundance of the light elements and their isotopes. And then, significantly later, neutral atoms formed, followed by the gravitational growth of overdense regions. Once enough matter accumulates in one pocket of space, star-formation, for the first time in the Universe, can finally occur. But back in these early stages, planet formation is impossible. When these new stars form, sure, there’s going to be abundant reservoirs of material surrounding them: material that you’d think could wind up forming a planet. However, that material is almost exclusively hydrogen and helium: some 99.99999991% percent hydrogen and helium, by mass. With so few heavy elements, whatever doesn’t become a star simply gets blown away. What would it take to enable planets to form, then? We’d need, at the very least, for sufficient enrichment of that star-forming material to enable the existence of planets at all. Here in our own Solar System, where we have the eight known planets, we can be confident that we’re above that enrichment threshold. But is there a hard line, above which we’re all but guaranteed to form planets, while below it, planet formation is forbidden? To answer that question, we have a way of finding out: we can look at the stars in our vicinity and search for planets around them. Then, at the same time, we can measure the heavy element content (what astronomers call “metallicity”) of the parent star (or stars), and see which stars do and don’t have planets. As it turns out, here in our modern Milky Way, about 80-90% of the stars that we can detect are consistent with having planets around them, but not 100%. It appears that, if you have about 25% or more of the heavy elements found in our Sun, you’re almost guaranteed to have planets. If you go down to between 8% and 25% of our Sun’s heavy elements, you may or may not have planets. And if you look down at star systems with below 8% of the Sun’s heavy elements, very few of them have planets, with no systems below 1% having any planets at all. With over 6000 detected exoplanets in the book, this tells us where planets have and haven’t formed. That information serves as the starting point for our big planet-formation question: how do we go from a cloud of gas that’s going to collapse to form stars to a full-fledged star system with a system of planets around it? Before we get to the evidence, we should be fair to the theorists, and note that there’s been at least an outline of a theory for planet formation that’s many decades old: older than any of the observational evidence we have for how planets actually do form. In sequence, the steps that should occur look like the following. First, a cloud of gas collapses and fragments, leading to the existence of many different sites within a gas cloud where either a new star (singular) or a system of new stars (two or more) will form. Next, around these protostars, a disk-like distribution of gas and dust — made from the same elements that the star and its progenitor gas cloud are made from — comes to surround them. After some time as a homogeneous disk, instabilities begin to appear, including gaps, spirals, and dense rings of material, leading to feature-rich structure within those disks. At some point, usually after the protostar’s ignition into a full-fledged star, that circumstellar material (i.e., material that surrounds the star) gets blown away, eliminating the protoplanetary disk and leaving just a series of planets, plus the remnant dusty debris. And finally, later in the star system’s life, the dusty debris gets eliminated as well, leaving just a mature planetary system behind. That is, in theory, at least, how planets ought to form. Many of these steps have strong evidence supporting them. For example, as you can see in the above image, you can look inside of star-forming regions and observe the protostellar cores of a variety of newly forming stars found within. What we find by doing so is extremely reassuring: that gas clouds that collapse to form new stars do indeed undergo fragmentation. When we see a newly formed star cluster, with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of new stars inside, it’s easy to assume that it’s only much later — when the cluster dissociates — that our modern star systems mostly made of singlet, binary, and trinary star systems (with a few larger multi-star systems) arise. But this modern, high-resolution data, acquired with telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA), shows that binary and trinary systems are common even from the earliest stages of star-formation, and that while singlet stars are still the majority, it’s mostly the low-mass stars that form singlets, while the highest-mass stars tend to wind up in multi-star systems. It looks like, based on the best observational data we have, that the first theorized step in forming planets has gotten it exactly right: gas clouds collapse and fragment, leading to the existence of many different, disconnected sites where new stars and protostars arise. Then, we can look into slightly more evolved star-forming regions, such as the nearby Orion Nebula, and find young stars and protostars that still have protoplanetary disks around them. Indeed, these systems are incredibly common wherever ongoing new star birth is happening, with the Orion Nebula simply representing the closest location to us where a large amount of new star-formation is still ongoing. Over 100 protoplanetary disk-containing objects — young stars and protostars — have been spotted in the Orion Nebula alone with the combined data from Hubble, JWST, ALMA, plus other infrared and radio telescopes. Originally, these protoplanetary disks appeared to us as mere blobs: as dark silhouettes in visible light and as bright sources of emitted light at infrared wavelengths. However, as we began to leverage better techniques, with high-resolution imagery enhanced by modern instrumentation and through the technique of very-long baseline interferometry, we began to probe these protoplanetary disks for features within them. Particularly useful when the disk is seen face-on (as opposed to edge-on or highly inclined), we sometimes saw uniform, featureless disks, but at other times we’d see features like spiral waves, rings, or gaps within these disks. Starting in the early 2020s, we began to see an age difference between the systems that were featureless and the ones that exhibited non-uniform features. In particular, there were three categories that these protoplanetary disks fell into: systems under 0.5 million years in age, all of which appeared to have uniform disks, systems older than 2 million years, all of which appeared to have feature-rich disks, and systems between 0.5-and-2 million years, where some have uniform disks and some display features. Also, systems that were significantly older than 10 million years in age tended to lack protoplanetary disks entirely, indicating that the process of planet formation begins early and completes in relatively swift fashion in the Universe. Finding features such as “gaps” and “rings” in protoplanetary disks are relatively common, and it’s generally suspected that the reason for these gaps-and-rings is simple: those are regions where the protoplanetary material has been “vacuumed up” by planets and protoplanets that are forming in precisely those locations. There’s no material there anymore because it has already formed into a planet; the young planet has already cleared its orbit of potentially planet-forming material. This was bolstered in 2023, with the detection of exoplanets PDS 70b and PDS 70c in the same system: found in the inner portions of a cleared-out young star system, one that still had an extant outer protoplanetary disk. At still later times, of course, we’ve detected many fully mature planets within planetary systems — including via direct imaging when they’re well-enough separated from the parent star — both within systems that still have a debris disk and in systems whose dusty debris disk has fully evaporated. It would seem, then, that we’ve come a phenomenally long way in learning where exoplanets come from. Protostar cores form from gravitational collapse, those protostars develop circumstellar disks, those disks develop instabilities which lead to gaps in the disk, where protoplanets and eventually full-fledged planets form within those disks, the disks themselves then evaporate, leaving mature planetary systems behind. However, there’s been a missing link in this chain of understanding for a long time now. Although we can image the disks and see the gaps within them, and we can directly image planets at later stages of evolution orbiting their stars, we’ve never seen a disk, with gaps, that also contains an observable planet within those gaps. In other words, we’ve only suspected the presence of planets within these gaps in protoplanetary disks; we’ve never detected one directly. Or, at least, that was the case until just a couple of months ago here in 2025, when the first planet within a protoplanetary disk gap was discovered: WISPIT 2b. In a pair of papers recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, high-resolution direct imaging of the protoplanetary disk around the solar-analog star WISPIT 2 revealed many different properties. There is: an extended disk, spanning hundreds of times the Earth-Sun distance, with a multi-ringed substructure within the disk, hinting at the presence of planets in the gaps between the rings, and a young, massive protoplanet embedded within one of the gaps and co-moving along with its host star. That planet, WISPIT 2b, is the first unambiguous planet found within a multi-ringed disk, with an impressive mass of 4.9-5.3 times the mass of Jupiter. It’s well below the threshold for becoming a brown dwarf (which requires at least 13 Jupiter masses), the age of the parent star is consistent with the previously uncovered timeline of planet formation (it’s about 5 million years old), and the star itself is relatively nearby at 133 parsecs (~430 light-years) distant. The studies also suggest that mass is continuing to accumulate onto this young planet, growing at a rate of 4.5 quadrillion tons per year, or approximately by the mass of Mars’s larger moon Phobos on a daily basis. Although there’s also circumstantial evidence for a second, innermore, even more massive planet (around 9 times the mass of Jupiter) located closer to the parent star, the big news is that the most significant “missing link” in the planet-formation story — the disconnect between where gaps form and when planets appear — has now been filled in with the discovery of WISPIT 2b. Now, we can be certain: yes, there is indeed evidence that when we see a gap in these protoplanetary disks, we can be confident that planets do indeed form those gaps. The fact that the size of the gap and the mass of the planet are both compatible with theoretical models of the physics at play only strengthens the science case for this interpretation. Excitingly, this suggests that high-resolution direct imaging observations carried out for nearby young stars with current technology can reveal, at the very least, the most massive new planets to form in these star systems. Where we see gaps in protoplanetary disks, we now have direct evidence linking the presence of planets to the existence of those gaps: perhaps even a full 100% of gaps in these disks are caused by planets. The WISPIT survey, standing for Wide Separation Planets in Time, leverages the SPHERE instrument aboard the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the University of Arizona’s MagAO-X adaptive optics system aboard Carnegie science’s Magellan telescope: two of our current generation of flagship-class telescopes. It’s almost a certainty that more planets will be found in protoplanetary disk gaps in the coming years, giving us our first end-to-end confirmation of a scenario for how the majority of planets in the Universe actually form. Source of the article

Nov 12, 2025 GOATReads: History

The Indian Guru Who Brought Eastern Spirituality to the West

A new biography explores the life of Vivekananda, a Hindu ascetic who promoted a more inclusive vision of religion One morning in September 1893, a 30-year-old Indian man sat on a curb on Chicago’s Dearborn Street wearing an orange turban and a rumpled scarlet robe. He had come to the United States to speak at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, part of the famous World Columbian Exposition. The trouble was, he hadn’t actually been invited. Now he was spending nights in a boxcar and days wandering around a foreign city. Unknown in America, the young Hindu man, named Vivekananda, was a revered spiritual teacher back home. By the time he left Chicago, he had accomplished his mission: to present Indian culture as broader, deeper and more sophisticated than anyone in the U.S. realized. Every American and European who dabbles in meditation or yoga today owes something to Vivekananda. Before his arrival in Chicago, no Indian guru had enjoyed a global platform quite like a world’s fair. Americans largely saw India as an exotic corner of the British Empire, filled with tigers and idol worshippers. The Parliament of the World’s Religions was meant to be a showcase for Protestantism, particularly mainline groups like Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Episcopalians. So the audience was astonished when Vivekananda, a representative of the world’s oldest religion, seemed anything but primitive—the highly educated son of an attorney in Calcutta’s high court who spoke elegant English. He presented a paternal, all-inclusive vision of India that made America seem young and provincial. “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance,” he declared on September 11, 1893. “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.” Vivekananda was well-equipped to bridge cultural divides. As a young man named Narendranath Datta, he’d attended Christian schools where he’d been steeped in the Bible and European philosophy. According to one story, his introduction to Indian spirituality came by way of a lecture on English romantic literature. A professor, a Scottish clergyman, mentioned the ecstasies of a nearby guru called Ramakrishna during a discussion of transcendental experiences in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Excursion.” The students ended up paying Ramakrishna a visit, and Datta went on to embrace Ramakrishna as his guru and adopt a renunciate’s name, Vivekananda, which meant “the bliss of gaining wisdom.” Now, in Chicago, Vivekananda’s words were warm and inviting, but they were also the words of an activist. That same year, Mohandas Gandhi had arrived in South Africa, where he upended the social order by walking on whites-only paths and refusing to leave first-class railroad cars. Vivekananda likewise wanted to show the world that Indians would no longer be demeaned and defined by European occupiers. He found sympathetic audiences in America, a country that liked to think of itself as anti-colonialist (even as it was on the verge of annexing Hawaii and the Philippines). After speaking to the crowd in Chicago, Vivekananda traveled to Detroit, Boston and New York; he met people who’d been exploring new belief systems, including Christian Science. Many of his listeners were women who applauded his message that the divine was present in every human being, transcending gender and social status. Sarah Ellen Waldo, a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson, later recalled the experience of strolling through Manhattan with Vivekananda by her side: “It required no little courage to walk up Broadway beside that flaming coat. As the Swami strode along in lordly indifference, with me just behind, half out of breath, every eye was turned on us.” Another female enthusiast was invigorated by “the air of freedom that blew through the room” when Vivekananda debated the president of Smith College. The woman’s father disapproved of her interest in the Indian guru, but when a new calf was born to her family, she defiantly named it “Veda” (after the Hindu scriptures of the same name). Vivekananda spent many of his remaining years traveling around the U.S. and Europe. He died of mysterious causes in 1902, at the age of 39. But generations of Indian gurus who traveled to the West went on to follow his highly successful approach, whether visiting British spiritualist societies or lecturing to middle-aged audiences in Los Angeles living rooms. In the 1960s, the Beatles launched a more youthful wave of interest when they visited India. But the underlying message of teachers from the East has changed little since Vivekananda’s first visit: The individual is cosmic, and meditation and yoga are universal tools for experiencing that underlying reality, compatible with any culture or religion. Such stories and insights about Vivekananda’s life come alive in Guru to the World, a rich and insightful new biography by Ruth Harris, a historian at the University of Oxford’s All Souls College. Smithsonian spoke to Harris about Vivekananda’s travels through the West and how they gave rise to a kind of Eastern spirituality that most Westerners would recognize today. Source of the article

Nov 11, 2025 GOATReads:Politics

COP30: Trump and many leaders are skipping it, so does the summit still have a point?

There is a photograph, taken ten years ago in Paris, that today seems like something of a relic. In it, dozens of men and women line up in dark suits, in front of an enormous sign that reads COP21 Paris. Right in the middle the UK's then-Prime Minister, David Cameron, grins widely, as he stands beside the future King Charles III, just in front of China’s Xi Jinping. Far off to the right is the then US President Barack Obama, deep in conversation with someone who is cut off from the frame - because there were so many leaders lining up that day that it was difficult for the photographer to capture them all at once. What a far cry from the family photograph taken on Thursday with this year's line-up at the COP30 summit in Brazil. Xi and Modi were no-shows, along with the leaders of around 160 other countries. And notably absent was the US President Donald Trump. In fact, the Trump administration has exited the process entirely and has said it will not send any high-level officials this year. Which raises the question, why have a two-week-long multinational gathering at all if so many leaders aren’t there? Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN's climate process under whose leadership the Paris Agreement was struck, said during last year's gathering that the COP process was "not fit for purpose." "The golden era for multilateral diplomacy is over," agrees Joss Garman, a former climate activist who now heads a new think tank called Loom. "Climate politics is now more than ever about who captures and controls the economic benefits of new energy industries," he tells me. So, with carbon dioxide emissions still rising even after 29 of these meetings - which are, after all, aimed at bringing them down - will more COPs make any difference? Trump and the climate 'con job' On his first day back in office, Trump used his trademark marker pen to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, the 2015 UN treaty under which nations agreed to work together to try to keep global warming below 1.5°C. "This 'climate change' - it's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world," he told the UN General Assembly in September. "If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail." He has rolled back restrictions on oil, gas, and coal, signed billions of dollars of tax breaks for fossil fuel firms, and opened up federal lands for extraction. Plus Trump and his team have called on governments around the world to abandon their "pathetic" renewable energy programmes and buy US oil and gas - in some cases with the risk of punitive tariffs if they don't. Japan and South Korea as well as Europe have agreed to buy tens of billions of US hydrocarbons. The objective is clear: Trump says he wants to make the US the "number one energy superpower in the world". Meanwhile, he has set about dismantling his predecessor Joe Biden's clean energy agenda. Subsidies and tax breaks for wind and solar have been slashed, permits withdrawn, projects cancelled. Research funding has been cut too. "Wind power in the United States has been subsidised for 33 years - isn't that enough?" US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said when I asked him to explain the administration's policy when we met in September. "You've got to be able to walk on your own after 25 to 30 years of subsidies." John Podesta, a senior adviser on climate to both Obama and Biden, sees it differently. "The United States is taking a wrecking ball to clean energy," he argues. “They're trying to take us back not to the 20th Century, but the 19th." Last month, a landmark deal that would have cut global shipping emissions was abandoned after the US, along with Saudi Arabia, succeeded in ending the talks. Many supporters of the COP talks are concerned. What happens if the US path leads to other countries dialling down their commitments? Anna Aberg, a Research Fellow in Chatham House's Environment and Society Centre, describes COP as "taking place in a really difficult political context" given Trump's position. "I think it's more important than ever that this COP sends some kind of signal to the world that there are still governments and businesses and institutions that are acting on climate change.” It’s too late to win at table tennis Trump's strategy puts the US on a collision course with China, which has also been working for decades to dominate the world's energy supplies - but through clean technology. In 2023, clean technologies drove roughly 40% of China's economic growth, according to the climate website Carbon Brief. After a slight slowdown last year, renewables accounted for a quarter of all new growth and now make up more than 10% of the entire economy. And, like Trump's America, China is engaging internationally well beyond participation in COP - it is taking its entire energy model global. The split has transformed the climate debate. It is now one that pits the world's two superpowers against each other for control of the most essential industry on Earth. And it leaves the UK and Europe - as well as major emerging powers like India, Indonesia, Turkey, and Brazil - caught in the middle. Speaking at this year‘s conference, a source in government at a major developed country said: “Of all the things they're most terrified of, the biggest is being seen to criticise Trump.” The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, warned last month that Europe must not repeat what she termed the mistakes of the past and lose another strategic industry to China. She called the loss of Europe's solar manufacturing base to cheaper Chinese rivals "a cautionary tale we must not forget". The European Commission has forecasted that the market for renewables and other clean energy sources will grow from €600bn (£528bn) to €2 trillion (£1.74tn) within a decade and wants Europe to capture at least 15% of that. But that ambition may come too late. "China is already the world's clean-tech superpower," says Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Policy Institute. Its dominance in solar, wind, EVs, and advanced battery technologies, he says, is now "virtually unassailable”. He likens it to trying to beat the Chinese national team at table tennis: "If you want to surpass China, you had to get your act together 25 years ago. If you want to do it now, you have no hope." China produces over 80% of the world's solar panels, a similar share of advanced batteries, 70% of EVs, and more than 60% of wind turbines - all at phenomenally low prices. The EU's recent move to raise tariffs on Chinese EVs reflects the scale of the dilemma. Open the market and Europe's car industry could collapse; close it and green targets may not be met. Restricting Chinese access to these markets may slow emissions reductions, says Joss Garman, but he argues, "If we ignore questions about economic security, jobs, national security, that risks undermining public and political support for the entire climate effort." COP: New purpose or pointless? Now, with these shifts in direction of global politics and priorities, Anna Aberg says she expects COP to become an annual forum for "holding to account" countries and other organisations, something she believes remains an "important role”. The gathering in Brazil follows the acknowledgement by UN Secretary-General António Guterres that the 1.5°C target set in Paris will be breached - this, he has said, represents "deadly negligence" on the part of the world community. Last year was the hottest ever recorded, and 60 leading climate scientists said in June that the Earth could breach 1.5°C in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions. Yet more people are questioning the need for an annual gathering. "I think we need one big COP every five years. And between that, I'm not sure what COP is for," says Michael Liebreich, founder of energy consultancy Bloomberg New Energy Finance and host of a green energy podcast, Cleaning Up. "You can't just expect politicians to go and make more and more commitments. You need time for industries to develop and for things to happen. You need the real economy to catch up." He believes it would be much more productive for the discussions to happen in smaller meetings focused on removing barriers to clean energy. But he also believes that some issues, like implementation, need to be discussed in places he deems more relevant - like on Wall Street "where people can actually fund stuff” - as opposed to on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. Even so, this will be important negotiations at this year's COP. Among other things, it aims to get an agreement for a multi-billion-dollar fund to support the world's rainforests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin. Michael Jacobs, who advised Gordon Brown on climate policy and is now a politics professor at Sheffield University, believes that continued collective support for the process is crucial. "It's a big political message, because Donald Trump is trying to undermine the collective process, but it's also a message to businesses that they should continue to invest in decarbonisation because governments will continue to enact climate policies." The UK's Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband believes these meetings have delivered real progress by getting countries to engage with tackling climate change and enact policies that have made the renewable revolution possible. "It's dry, it's complicated, it's anguished, it's tiring,” he says - “and it's absolutely necessary”. Many now do, however, accept there is a strong argument for these international gatherings to be scaled down. Ultimately, however, the real choice underlying it, for so many nations in attendance, simply comes down to the extent to which they align with a China-led clean energy revolution - or double down on the fossil fuels–first agenda. Which is why many observers say the process of decarbonisation is going to be less about the multi-country commitments of COPs past, and far more about big-money deals between individual countries as we look ahead to this year’s summit - and how COPs may well play out in the future. Source of the article

Nov 10, 2025 GOATReads: Arts and Culture

How Did Food Stamps Begin?

The program was designed to aid American farmers and businesses—as well as the hungry—and had its largest expansion under a Republican president. The U.S. food stamp program was launched at a time when the nation was facing a tragic paradox: As millions of Americans suffered from hunger during the Great Depression, the country’s farmers agonized under a crushing bounty. The economic collapse of the 1930s had sapped food consumers of their purchasing power, so farmers found themselves with a glut of crops and livestock. That glut, in turn, sent agricultural prices plummeting. In order to create artificial scarcity and boost prices, the U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Franklin D. Roosevelt initially paid farmers to plow under their fields and slaughter their pigs. The destruction of food at a time when so many stomachs rumbled sparked an outcry that prompted the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC), a New Deal agency established in 1933, to instead purchase excess food and distribute it directly to the needy at little or no cost. This initiative, however, dampened business for grocers and food wholesalers, who complained of government interference and unfair competition in the marketplace. Facing the triple problems of farm surpluses, weak sales for grocers and hungry citizens at a time of 17 percent unemployment, the FSCC hoped tiny paper squares could solve its trilemma. Rochester, New York, then became the petri dish for a new government-run economic experiment. Food Stamps Debut in Rochester, NY On the morning of May 16, 1939, FSCC officials watched anxiously as they opened their doors inside Rochester’s old post office to launch the country’s latest relief measure. As newspaper reporters and photographers jockeyed for position to document history in the making, the first person in line approached a cashier window. Ralston Thayer, a 35-year-old machinist who had been out of work for nearly a year, handed a clerk $4 from his latest unemployment check and received $4 of orange stamps in return as well as $2 of blue stamps for free. The orange “food stamps” could be redeemed at any of the 1,200 participating Rochester groceries for any goods on the shelves, while blue stamps could only be used to buy surplus agricultural items such as butter, eggs, prunes, flour, oranges, cornmeal and beans. Grocers could exchange the food stamps for money at commercial banks and FSCC offices. “I never received surplus foods before, but the procedure seems simple enough and I certainly intend to take advantage of it,” Thayer told reporters. Throughout the day, approximately 2,000 Rochester residents followed in Thayer’s footsteps. For every $1 of orange stamps bought, they received 50 cents worth of blue stamps for free, thereby expanding their purchasing power by 50 percent. That afternoon, waves of customers poured into Rochester’s grocery stores with their crisp new booklets of orange and blue stamps in hand. Food stamp recipients approved of the new program, which gave them greater choice in what to eat, beyond just the surplus items being handed out by the government. “Now we’ll get the best in food,” one woman told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “We can take our pick on these surplus commodities instead of taking what they give us.” Rochester grocers benefited as well as recipients channeled $50,000 into their coffers during the program’s first four days. “I was cleaned out of flour when the stamp rush started,” grocer Joseph Mutolo told FSCC officials when he became the first retailer to redeem the stamps. “That certainly is different from the old days when you gave food away at the big food depot. Then, when you gave away flour or butter, I sold none. Now it seems I can’t keep stocked up.” Building on the initial success, the food stamp program was rolled out to additional pilot cities and expanded to half the counties in the United States. Eligible Americans could buy between $1 and $1.50 in orange stamps weekly for each family member. The program fed 20 million Americans until it was discontinued in 1943 when the economic stimulus provided by World War II eased unemployment and crop surpluses. Food Stamps Revived Under JFK, Expanded Under Nixon President John F. Kennedy, who had been struck by the poverty he had witnessed in West Virginia during the 1960 Democratic primary campaign, revived food stamps as a pilot program as one of his first actions upon taking office in 1961. While recipients were still required to pay for their food stamps, the special stamps for surplus goods were eliminated. The Food Stamp Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 31, 1964, codified and expanded the program. “The food stamp plan will be one of our most valuable weapons for the war on poverty,” Johnson proclaimed at the signing ceremony. Although launched by Democratic presidents, the food stamp program saw its largest expansion under the stewardship of a Republican president, Richard Nixon, in the wake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s highly publicized trips to the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, the Poor People’s Campaign of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1968 CBS documentary “Hunger in America,” which shocked viewers with images of starving children with sunken features and bloated bellies. “That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable,” Nixon asserted in a May 1969 message to Congress that expressed his determination “to put an end to hunger in America for all time.” During the course of Nixon’s presidency, the food stamp program grew fivefold from 3 million recipients in 1969 to 15 million by 1974. “Nixon was actually very supportive of many social programs, proposing the Family Assistance Program that would have benefited the working poor and expanding Social Security. Nixon’s expansion of food stamps is in line with his larger efforts,” says Matthew Gritter, a political science professor at Angelo State University and author of the book The Policy and Politics of Food Stamps and SNAP. The food stamp program continued to receive bipartisan support in the years that followed. Republican Senator Bob Dole and Democratic Senator George McGovern spearheaded the passage of the Food Stamp Reform Act of 1977, which strengthened anti-fraud provisions and eliminated the requirement that recipients purchase food stamp coupons. Food Stamps Become Electronic, Renamed SNAP Beginning in 1990, electronic benefit transfer cards, similar to debit cards tied to benefits accounts, replaced paper food stamps. The measure further reduced fraud, since recipients could no longer sell stamps instead of using them to purchase food. With the elimination of paper food stamps came a 2008 change in the program’s name to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Gritter says the biggest misconception about the history of the food stamp program is that it grew only with Democratic support. “Food stamps really owe a great deal to Republican presidents. George W. Bush expanded food stamps, particularly in the 2002 Farm Bill that restored eligibility for legal immigrants. Republicans like Nixon and Dole expanded the program. During the welfare reform debate of the 1990s, Republicans such as the moderate Senator Richard Lugar also stood up for food stamps.” The SNAP program served an average of 41.7 million Americans per month in 2024. Food producers and retailers also continued to benefit. UBS Analyst Michael Lasser estimated that Walmart derived about 4 percent of its U.S. sales from food stamp purchases in 2018. According to purchase-analysis data from 2025, Walmart captures about 24 percent of SNAP-household spending—underscoring how food assistance's relationship to large food-retail chains. Source of the articel

Nov 7, 2025 GOATReads: Miscellaneous

7 Polite Phrases That Are Still Worth Saying

May we borrow a moment of your time to review basic niceties? You might think you’ve heard them all before—because you have—but certain polite lingo is dropping out of the modern lexicon. That’s bad news for everyone, experts agree. “It’s really important to mind our manners—and I don't say that as a scold, but I do say it with encouragement,” says Lizzie Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute (and great-great-granddaughter of renowned etiquette expert Emily Post). “It’s so amazing how good manners can make such an impact on other people’s days—and they catch like wildlife. That person holds the door for you, and you hold the door for the person behind you. It breaks the cycle of stress and rudeness and lack of awareness of others.” In order to coexist as peacefully as possible, we asked Post and other experts for a refresher on which polite words still matter the most—and why. “Hello!” When you walk into a coffee shop in the morning, your first words shouldn’t have anything to do with your order. Start your interaction with the barista with a friendly greeting—because “not acknowledging someone’s humanity before asking them something is pretty rude,” says Nick Leighton, who co-hosts the etiquette podcast Were You Raised By Wolves?  “Greetings in some places are so important—like in France, saying ‘Bonjour’ when you walk in a store is crucial,” he adds. “In America, we walk in and we’re like, ‘Oh, give me a croissant,’ and we don’t say hello first.”  This advice transcends interactions with customer-service workers: It’s also a good idea to get in the habit of saying hello to all of the coworkers you pass when you arrive at work every day, or, for example, the receptionist in your apartment lobby. “Please” Saying “please” transforms a demand into a request. “It acknowledges someone's choice of participation in something, and the impact that their participation might have on their own life,” Post says. It shows respect and consideration, and makes it clear that the other person has autonomy in whether they choose to oblige. Still, Post understands why, in some situations, people don’t say it. “I think we've leaned away from ‘please’ because we're worried that in so many of the text messages we send daily, it can come across like, ‘Please get this done,’ because any magic word can be said the wrong way,” she says. “You can do a sarcastic please or a non-genuine please. It's possible to make these words nasty with our tone, but when we don't—when we use them politely and positively—they have profound effects.” “Thank you” (with a caveat) Rita Kirk, a professor of corporate communications and public affairs at Southern Methodist University, invites lots of guest speakers to her class. After every visit, she instructs her students to write a thank-you letter—but before forwarding them to the recipient, she reads and grades each one. There’s an art to writing a good thank-you note, Kirk says, and rule No. 1 is that “thank you” should never be your very first words. Instead, explicitly express your gratitude by describing what the gift, insight, or time meant to you, and why you’re thankful for it. If you were sending thank-you notes after a baby shower, for example, you might write: “I cannot wait to see what the babe is going to look like in her new Western outfit. I promise to take a picture and send it to you. Thank you so much for the thoughtful gift!” Getting into the habit of sending thank-you notes can, literally, pay off. Kirk remembers one former student who sent her a note that started like this: “Damn you.” “It was pretty funny," she says. “She said that all those times in class when she had to write thank-you notes, she rolled her eyes and cursed my name.” Yet after graduating, the woman landed a job she really wanted, and eventually asked her employer why her name had risen to the top of the list. Her boss replied: “You were the only one who sent a thank-you note.” “May I?” This question is “the ultimate phrase of respect,” says Jacqueline Whitmore, an etiquette expert who founded the Protocol School of Palm Beach and author of Business Class: Etiquette Essentials for Success at Work. It’s permission-seeking rather than presumptive, which instantly softens the tone of any request, and it communicates deference and awareness of another person’s space or time. Plus, it’s versatile enough for all kinds of situations: Use it before giving a colleague feedback on their presentation, Leighton suggests, or when ordering a meal at a restaurant. One of his pet-peeves is ordering like this: “I’ll take the salmon.” Rephrasing as “May I order…” “definitely sounds less like, ‘Fetch me this,’” he says, a kindness your server will surely appreciate. “My pleasure” Whitmore always opts for “my pleasure” over the more transactional “you’re welcome." “It conveys joy in service—that the act of helping wasn’t a burden but a delight,” she says. Plus, “Rather than putting the spotlight on the other person—‘You're welcome’—you're taking ownership. It's my pleasure to do that for you.” Etiquette experts almost universally shy away from one common response to an expression of gratitude: “No problem.” “To me it sounds like there was a problem to begin with,” Whitmore says—and insinuates that someone's "thank you" is, in a way, an apology. There’s simply no need to bring even the idea of a problem into the exchange, she says. “Excuse me” or “pardon me” In some ways, these phrases are like mini-apologies, Post says. If you burp, you might follow-up with an “excuse me,” and if you inconvenience someone by asking them to pull their chair in so you can squeeze by, you might issue a quick “pardon me.” “They're both used to excuse a mistake or acknowledge an interruption,” she says. “It’s a way of acknowledging that our behavior might not be the most polite, or to get someone's attention.” These two simple words, Leighton adds, signal that you’re aware of and appreciate the fact that other people exist in the world. “We could all use a little more of that,” he says. “Friend” or “neighbor” Terms of endearment were once used far more liberally than they are now. People would address each other as “friend” or “neighbor,” or even, in church and other situations, “brother” or “sister.” These types of terms can be attached to any greeting, question, or remark: “Hey, neighbor! Want some apples?” Or: “Hey, friend, great to bump into you here.” “It makes both people feel good,” Kirk says. “The real message is that I see you and I value you, and those are not messages that we send very often to other people. We put up these walls to protect ourselves,” which doesn’t exactly foster a sense of community or connection. If we make an effort to address one another with kindness and affection, on the other hand, well-being will flourish. That, dear reader, is a mission worth pursuing. Source of the article

Nov 6, 2025 GOATReads: Science & Technology

The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers

“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says. The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives. Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.” Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not. I’ve discovered that pages downloaded by Common Crawl have appeared in the training data of thousands of AI models. As Stefan Baack, a researcher formerly at Mozilla, has written, “Generative AI in its current form would probably not be possible without Common Crawl.” In 2020, OpenAI used Common Crawl’s archives to train GPT-3. OpenAI claimed that the program could generate “news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans,” and in 2022, an iteration on that model, GPT-3.5, became the basis for ChatGPT, kicking off the ongoing generative-AI boom. Many different AI companies are now using publishers’ articles to train models that summarize and paraphrase the news, and are deploying those models in ways that steal readers from writers and publishers. Common Crawl maintains that it is doing nothing wrong. I spoke with Skrenta twice while reporting this story. During the second conversation, I asked him about the foundation archiving news articles even after publishers have asked it to stop. Skrenta told me that these publishers are making a mistake by excluding themselves from “Search 2.0”—referring to the generative-AI products now widely being used to find information online—and said that, anyway, it is the publishers that made their work available in the first place. “You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” he said. Common Crawl doesn’t log in to the websites it scrapes, but its scraper is immune to some of the paywall mechanisms used by news publishers. For example, on many news websites, you can briefly see the full text of any article before your web browser executes the paywall code that checks whether you’re a subscriber and hides the content if you’re not. Common Crawl’s scraper never executes that code, so it gets the full articles. Thus, by my estimate, the foundation’s archives contain millions of articles from news organizations around the world, including The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic. Some news publishers have become aware of Common Crawl’s activities, and some have blocked the foundation’s scraper by adding an instruction to their website’s code. In the past year, Common Crawl’s CCBot has become the scraper most widely blocked by the top 1,000 websites, surpassing even OpenAI’s GPTBot, which collects content for ChatGPT. However, blocking only prevents future content from being scraped. It doesn’t affect the webpages Common Crawl has already collected and stored in its archives. In July 2023, The New York Times sent a notice to Common Crawl asking for the removal of previously scraped Times content. (In their lawsuit against OpenAI, the Times noted that Common Crawl includes “at least 16 million unique records of content” from Times websites.) The nonprofit seemed amenable to the request. In November of that year, a Times spokesperson, Charlie Stadtlander, told Business Insider: “We simply asked that our content be removed, and were pleased that Common Crawl complied.” But as I explored Common Crawl’s archives, I found that many Times articles appear to still be present. When I mentioned this to the Times, Stadtlander told me: “Our understanding from them is that they have deleted the majority of the Times’s content, and continue to work on full removal.” The Danish Rights Alliance (DRA), an organization that represents publishers and other rights-holders in Denmark, told me about a similar interaction with Common Crawl. Thomas Heldrup, the organization’s head of content protection and enforcement, showed me a redacted email exchange with the nonprofit that began in July 2024, in which the DRA requested that its members’ content be removed from the archive. In December 2024, more than six months after the DRA had initially requested removal, Common Crawl’s attorney wrote: “I confirm that Common Crawl has initiated work to remove your members’ content from the data archive. Presently, approximately 50% of this content has been removed.” I spoke with other publishers who’d received similar messages from Common Crawl. One was told, after multiple follow-up emails, that removal was 50 percent, 70 percent, and then 80 percent complete. By writing code to browse the petabytes of data, I was able to see that large quantities of articles from the Times, the DRA, and these other publishers are still present in Common Crawl’s archives. Furthermore, the files are stored in a system that logs the modification times of every file. The foundation adds a new “crawl” to its archive every few weeks, each containing 1 billion to 4 billion webpages, and it has been publishing these regular installments since 2013. None of the content files in Common Crawl’s archives appears to have been modified since 2016, suggesting that no content has been removed in at least nine years. In our first conversation, Skrenta told me that removal requests are “a pain in the ass” but insisted that the foundation complies with them. In our second conversation, Skrenta was more forthcoming. He said that Common Crawl is “making an earnest effort” to remove content but that the file format in which Common Crawl stores its archives is meant “to be immutable. You can’t delete anything from it.” (He did not answer my question about where the 50, 70, and 80 percent removal figures come from.) Yet the nonprofit appears to be concealing this from visitors to its website, where a search function, the only nontechnical tool for seeing what’s in Common Crawl’s archives, returns misleading results for certain domains. A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a “no captures” result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls. I also discovered more than 1,000 other domains that produce this incorrect “no captures” result for at least several of the crawls, and most of these domains belong to publishers, including the BBC, Reuters, The New Yorker, Wired, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and, yes, The Atlantic. According to my research and Common Crawl’s own disclosures, the companies behind each of these publications have sent legal requests to the nonprofit. At least one publisher I spoke with told me that it had used this search tool and concluded that its content had been removed from Common Crawl’s archives. In the past two years, Common Crawl has been getting cozier with the AI industry. In 2023, after 15 years of near-exclusive financial support from the Elbaz Family Foundation Trust, it received donations from OpenAI ($250,000), Anthropic ($250,000), and other organizations involved in AI development. (Skrenta told me that running Common Crawl costs “millions of dollars.”) When training AI models, developers such as OpenAI and Google usually filter Common Crawl’s archives to remove material they don’t want, such as racism, profanity, and various forms of low-quality prose. Each developer and company has its own filtering strategy, which has led to a proliferation of Common Crawl–based training data sets: c4 (created by Google), FineWeb, DCLM, and more than 50 others. Together, these data sets have been downloaded tens of millions of times from Hugging Face, an AI-development hub, and other sources. But Common Crawl doesn’t only supply the raw text; it has also been helping assemble and distribute AI-training data sets itself. Its developers have co-authored multiple papers about LLM-training-data curation, and they sometimes appear at conferences where they show AI developers how to use Common Crawl for training. Common Crawl even hosts several AI-training data sets derived from its crawls, including one for Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world. In its paper on the data set, Nvidia thanks certain Common Crawl developers for their advice. AI companies have argued that using copyrighted material is fair use, and Skrenta has been framing the issue in terms of robot rights for some time. In 2023, he sent a letter urging the U.S. Copyright Office not “to hinder the development of intelligent machines” and included two illustrations of robots reading books. But this argument obscures who the actors are: not robots but corporations, and their powerful executives, who decide what content to train their models with and who profit from the results. If it wanted to, Common Crawl could mitigate the damage done by those corporations to authors and publishers without making its data any less accessible to researchers. In his 2024 report, Baack, the ex-Mozilla researcher, pointed out that Common Crawl could require attribution whenever its scraped content is used. This would help publishers track the use of their work, including when it might appear in the training data of AI models that aren’t supposed to have access. This is a common requirement for open data sets and would cost Common Crawl nothing. I asked Skrenta if he had considered this. He told me he had read Baack’s report but didn’t plan on taking the suggestion, because it wasn’t Common Crawl’s responsibility. “We can’t police that whole thing,” he told me. “It’s not our job. We’re just a bunch of dusty bookshelves.” Skrenta has said that publishers that want to remove their content from Common Crawl will “kill the open web.” Likewise, the AI industry often defends its presumed right to scrape the web by invoking the concept of openness. But others have pointed out that generative-AI companies are the ones killing openness, by motivating publishers to expand and strengthen their paywalls to defend their work (and their business models) from exploitative scrapers. Promoting another dubious, feel-good idea, Common Crawl has said that the internet is “where information lives free,” echoing the techno-libertarian rallying cry that “information wants to be free.” In popular usage, the phrase is frequently stripped of its context. It comes from a remark made by the tech futurist Stewart Brand in 1984. In a discussion about how computers were accelerating the spread of information, Brand observed that “information sort of wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” But, paradoxically, he said, “information almost wants to be free” because computers make the cost of distributing it so low. In other words, it’s not that information should be free—rather, computers tend to make it seem free. Yet the idea is deployed today by secretive organizations such as Common Crawl that choose which information “lives free” and which doesn’t. In our conversation, Skrenta downplayed the importance of any particular newspaper or magazine. He told me that The Atlantic is not a crucial part of the internet. “Whatever you’re saying, other people are saying too, on other sites,” he said. Throughout our conversation, Skrenta gave the impression of having little respect for (or understanding of) how original reporting works. Skrenta did, however, express tremendous reverence for Common Crawl’s archive. He sees it as a record of our civilization’s achievements. He told me he wants to “put it on a crystal cube and stick it on the moon,” so that “if the Earth blows up,” aliens might be able to reconstruct our history. “The Economist and The Atlantic will not be on that cube,” he told me. “Your article will not be on that cube. This article.” Source of the article

Nov 5, 2025 GOATReads: Science & Technology

A Blood Test Can Now Predict a Mother’s Risk of Postpartum Depression

Scientists are learning more about this leading complication of childbirth, and treatments are improving Like many first-time mothers, Lisette Lopez-Rose thought childbirth would usher in a time of joy. Instead, she had panic attacks as she imagined that something bad was going to happen to her baby, and she felt weighed down by a sadness that wouldn’t lift. The San Francisco Bay Area mother knew her extreme emotions weren’t normal, but she was afraid to tell her obstetrician. What if they took her baby away?    At about six months postpartum, she discovered an online network of women with similar experiences and ultimately opened up to her primary care doctor. “About two months after I started medication, I started to feel like I was coming out of a deep hole and seeing light again,” she says. Today, Lopez-Rose works at Postpartum Support International, coordinating volunteers to help new mothers form online connections. About one in eight U.S. women go through a period of postpartum depression, making it among the most common complications of childbirth. It typically occurs in the first few weeks after delivery, when there’s a sudden drop in the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone. As scientists unravel chemical and genetic changes caused by those shifting hormones, they are discovering new ways to diagnose and treat postpartum depression, and even ways to identify who is at risk for it. The first-ever drug for postpartum depression, containing a derivative of progesterone, received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2019. That marked a new approach to the disorder. This winter, in another major advance, a San Diego-based startup company will launch a blood test that predicts a pregnant woman’s risk of postpartum depression with more than 80 percent accuracy. The product, called myLuma, will be the first commercially available test to use biomarkers—molecules in the body, in this case the blood—to predict onset of a psychiatric disorder, much in the way that blood tests can detect signs of diseases like cancer and diabetes. Pregnant women who learn they are at risk for postpartum depression could take preventive steps such as taking antidepressants after childbirth or arranging for extra support. A blood test could reduce the stigma that keeps many women from seeking help, says Jennifer Payne, a reproductive psychiatrist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and a lead investigator on the studies that led to the new test. She is a founder and member of the scientific advisory board for the company that makes myLuma, Dionysus Health. “If we have a blood test, it brings psychiatry down to the level of biology, which I think your average person can understand as something that needs treatment and that isn’t just in somebody’s head,” she says. Unpredictable effects of hormones Payne was a fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health in 2001 when she became intrigued by postpartum depression as a window into the onset of mood disorders. That led her to a key question: Why does the sudden drop in hormones after childbirth greatly affect some women but not others? While it’s not uncommon for women to experience transient feelings of anxiety and sadness within days of giving birth, only in some does a deeper and more persistent depression take hold. As Payne’s research evolved, she teamed up with Zachary Kaminsky, then a colleague at Johns Hopkins University, who studied the effects of estrogen on mouse brains. Kaminsky is an epigeneticist: He researches how small chemicals called methyl groups can attach to genes and affect how active they are. Environmental factors from pollution to nutrition can influence the extent of this reversible methylation. By comparing female mice given high levels of estrogen with those without it, Kaminsky found that estrogen caused specific gene methylation patterns inside cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that helps control mood. Those findings suggested what to look for in blood samples Payne had collected from 51 women with a history of mood disorders. The women had been tracked throughout their pregnancies and afterward, with some developing postpartum depression within four weeks of childbirth. Two estrogen-sensitive genes emerged from the research—HP1BP3  and TTC9B. More than 80 percent of the women who had postpartum depression showed a distinctive pattern of greater methylation on one gene and less methylation on the other. What’s more, the changes in the genes could be detected throughout each trimester of pregnancy, says Kaminsky, now at the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research at the Royal; he also is a co-founder of Dionysus. In other words, even early in pregnancy, Kaminsky says, “You can predict the women that are going to get postpartum depression.” Kaminsky, Payne and collaborators repeatedly replicated those findings. As reported in a 2016 paper in Neuropharmacology, they found that through the methylation patterns of those genes, they could correctly predict more than 80 percent of the cases of postpartum depression in 240 pregnant women who had no history of psychiatric disorders. In another collaboration published in 2020 in Psychiatry Research, scientists at Johns Hopkins, Emory University and the University of California, Irvine, including Payne and Kaminsky, tested blood samples from 285 pregnant women and also confirmed the findings. That epigenetic research forms the basis of the myLuma test, which also incorporates additional biomarkers that improve its accuracy, says Kaminsky. Beginning in January 2026, it is expected to become available at some doctors’ offices in three states: Florida, Texas and California. Though it isn’t yet FDA-approved, doctors are permitted to use such lab tests to help make clinical decisions. Zeroing in on steroids Not everyone with postpartum depression has these epigenetic changes, so Payne and other researchers continue to hunt for other biomarkers to understand how hormonal changes trigger postpartum depression. They are zeroing in, for example, on neuroactive steroids, which the body makes from molecules like progesterone in the brain and other tissues. One of those metabolites, called allopregnanolone, has a calming effect—it affects a receptor in the brain called GABA-A, which is known to be involved in stress reduction. Allopregnanolone rises during pregnancy and drops swiftly after delivery. Another neuroactive steroid, pregnanolone, has similar properties. A third, isoallopregnanolone, tamps down the antidepressant effect of allopregnanolone, increasing feelings of stress. In a study of 136 pregnant women published in 2025 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, women with an imbalance in pregnanolone and isoallopregnanolone during pregnancy were more likely to develop postpartum depression. Measuring the ratio of these chemicals in the blood could be another way to predict postpartum depression, says reproductive psychiatrist Lauren M. Osborne of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, who co-led the study with Payne. Allopregnanolone, meanwhile, has already proved to be a valuable tool for treatment. A synthetic version called brexanolone was developed by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sage Therapeutics and was approved by the FDA in 2019—the first drug approved specifically for postpartum depression. Originally provided via IV infusion, it has been replaced by an oral version, zuranolone, which was received FDA approval in 2023. These are “transformative therapies” because they work rapidly, write the authors of a 2025 article in the Annual Review of Medicine. Women at high risk of postpartum depression might even benefit from proactively taking zuranolone, though that hasn’t yet been tested, says article co-author Samantha Meltzer-Brody, a reproductive psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina who was an academic principal investigator in studies of brexanolone and an investigator in zuranolone trials. The availability of a blood test, she adds, “opens up that entire line of questioning on how do you get ahead of it, so you don’t have to wait until someone starts suffering?” There are other possible targets for a postpartum depression test. In a 2022 article in Molecular Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Sarven Sabunciyan, with Osborne, Payne and Morgan Sherer, then an immunologist at Johns Hopkins, described a small study in which the types of RNA carried through blood in fatty bubbles were different in women who developed postpartum depression—both in pregnancy and afterward. In particular, there was a decrease in kinds of RNA related to autophagy—the cleansing of debris from cells. Autophagy has been linked to other psychiatric disorders. In another potential lead, Eynav Accortt, a clinical psychologist specializing in perinatal mental health at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, found a pattern of altered proteins in plasma samples of women who developed perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, a group of conditions that includes postpartum depression. This included proteins involved in neuron function and in inflammation, which is known to play a role in depression. As researchers continue to explore these possibilities, Payne is leading a large clinical trial that will provide more detailed information on the predictive value of the myLuma test. For example, it will explore the rates of false positives (women who are identified as at-risk who do not develop postpartum depression) and false negatives (women who develop postpartum depression but weren’t identified by the test). That is a necessary step toward FDA approval, which could make the test available directly to pregnant women. Lopez-Rose remembers how scared she felt in the months after her daughter was born. In those dark times, she quit her job, barely slept and was overwhelmed by negative thoughts. She had many self-doubts, but she now knows that reaching out for help was a sign that she was a good mother. Today, her daughter is 4—and thriving, as is Lopez-Rose. But a blood test, she says, would have warned her of what to look out for, “instead of it being so shocking when I was going through my depression.” Source of the article

Nov 4, 2025 GOATReads: Arts and Culture

How This Italian Town Came to Be Known as the ‘City of Witches’

Centuries ago, it was said that Benevento was a gathering place for the occult. Today, superstitions still run deep Stepping off the train in the southern Italian city of Benevento is not a particularly haunting experience, in the sense that the air on a brisk October day yields nothing other than cloud cover and fog. That this is the so-called “city of witches,” the site where women from all over the country might have flown in the middle of the night to dance around a famous walnut tree and to learn, effectively, how to be a witch, is not immediately apparent. Where the witchiness of Benevento, a city of over 55,000 with a Roman theater and Arch of Trajan from ancient times, may be most felt is in the traditions of its residents, many of whom still hold close these passed-down superstitions. Depending on whom you ask, a curse of the evil eye must still be warded off with a specific ritual involving oil and water and a traditional prayer. Leaving a broom at your door is a good way to ensure the local witches, known as the Janare, won’t sneak under the threshold—they’ll be too distracted counting the strands of straw. And if you wake to find that your horse’s mane has been braided, a Janara must have taken it for a late-night ride. Even now, when Maria Scarinzi, an anthropologist and head of education programs at Janua, Benevento’s Museum of Witches, interviews older residents about their beliefs, she finds that they hesitate to share everything for fear of retribution. “They still believe that if you name the Janara, she will come to your house at night and she will harm you in some way,” Scarinzi says. “They still believe that if I tell you that I know the formula for getting rid of maggots, you will think that I am a Janara and you’ll distance me from society.” How Benevento became the city of witches Some researchers argue that this southern Italian town, a little more than two hours by train from Rome, became known for its witches because of its unique political position. But to understand the root of the myth, we have to go back to 1428. The hunting and persecution of so-called witches was a practice that began to take root in Italy in the late 1300s, supervised and carried out in many ways by the Catholic Church. By 1542, Pope Paul III had created the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which tasked the church with criminalizing those who would speak against the faith. It was an amorphous crime, because any misfortune to befall a person or town could be attributed to a witch—around 80 percent of the people charged with witchcraft in early-modern Europe were women. Academics estimate that 22,000 to 33,000 witchcraft trials took place in Italy, with very few of these ending in capital punishment. Witch hunting appeared to largely come to an end by the 18th century. The first reference to Benevento as a place where witches gather dates to 1428. It comes from the transcriptions of the trial of Matteuccia di Francesco, a 40-year-old woman who was eventually sentenced to death and burned at the stake for witchcraft by the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena in the Umbrian town of Todi. From Matteuccia, we receive the famous formula, or incantation, that has since become inextricably associated with Benevento: “Unguento, unguento / mandame a la noce de Benivento, / supra aqua et supra ad vento / et supra ad omne maltempo.” Translation: “Ointment, ointment/ send me to the walnut tree of Benevento/ over water and over wind/ and over all bad weather.” During the trial, Matteuccia confesses that she spreads a cream on herself and chants to be sent to the walnut tree of Benevento, which had demonic associations and was thought to be near the river Sabato. “From that moment on, the inquisitors try to make the witches confess that they went to Benevento, because it becomes a sort of indictment,” says Paola Caruso, who has published books on the folklore of Benevento. “If they went to Benevento, then that means they’re witches.” In fact, according to Caruso, after Matteuccia’s confession, nearly all the Italian witch trials of the 15th and 16th centuries reference, in some way, Benevento as a gathering place for witches. No records exist, however, of witch trials in Benevento itself, though this could be attributed to the World War II bombing of the city’s central cathedral that destroyed much of the ecclesiastical archives, Scarinzi says. By 1640, local medical examiner Pietro Piperno penned his historical treatise on, among other things, the walnut tree of Benevento, explaining the origins of its supernatural powers. He claimed, according to Caruso, that it is not those from Benevento who participate in the late-night gathering of witches around the walnut tree—but people coming from elsewhere. In many ways, this only reinforced the link between Benevento and the witches. Caruso’s research is built on the idea that Benevento became the “city of witches” because of its political isolation. Even when surrounded by the Romans, up until the third century B.C.E., the city once called Maleventum was ruled by the Samnites. It was eventually subsumed into the Romans’ dominion, but after the fall of the Empire, by the sixth century C.E., the Lombards arrived, establishing Spoleto in Umbria and Benevento as their two southern duchies. What made Benevento unique is that, despite its association with the Lombards, it managed to remain in large part independent from centralized control until the late 11th century C.E., when it was taken over by the papacy and largely stayed under papal control until becoming part of Italy in 1860. The fact that it had retained some sense of governing autonomy for so long sowed insecurity in the political leaders of the time. “We must imagine Benevento as a very rich city, a papal city, an obligatory halfway point—you had to pass through Benevento,” Scarinzi says. “We have to imagine it also as a kind of island in what was the Kingdom of Naples—difficult to conquer with all this wealth. So how can I discredit someone? It’s what we still do today: I speak ill of that person.” The targets of this abuse were generally local women known as healers, “almost women of science,” Scarinzi says, or practitioners of what would today be called herbal medicine. These were women who knew the medicinal value of herbs like St. John’s wort, lavender and dandelion, gleaned from information passed down to them through generations. “The negativity around these women was linked to the fact that people were afraid,” Scarinzi says, “because they were women who had a power, which, in many cases, was medicine.” The modern-day legacy The Museum of Witches, located in the Palazzo Paolo V off the city’s pedestrian Corso Garibaldi, is a testament to how the customs survive in the daily lives of its residents. For a couple of decades, anthropologists have been interviewing people about the history and customs of the larger province of Benevento. Part of this effort has been to talk with the elderly—mostly those 70 years and older—to preserve the superstitions and legends of the witches before they disappear. About 10 years ago, they had enough to open a museum. “Our goal was to recount the figure of the Benevento witch—that is, who the Janara is—for the people of Benevento,” Scarinzi says. “What is this magical world today, for older people, more than anything else, who continue to perform certain practices and certain rituals?” The museum opens with a short video punctuated by the voices of residents describing how the legend of the Janare has seeped into their way of life. Artifacts show the roots of rituals. A pair of small coffee cups tells the story of how a woman could entice the man of her dreams by serving a drop of her menstrual blood in his coffee. “The belief was that, in the moment in which the woman made her proposal of love, the man had to, naturally, accept, otherwise he would die,” Scarinzi says. “It was the Janara who gave the blood and the object a power.” A woman proposing rather than a man went against the customs of the time, but therein lay the power of the witch: She could rewrite the social order. A 19th-century prayer handwritten by a young child to protect her from any potential enemies is on display. At the time, children would have donned amulets and charms to ward off evil. Another display explains how laundry hung outside to dry should be taken in by dusk for fear that evil spirits might be present after the setting of the sun. The oral histories the museum has collected shed more light on the behaviors that have grown out of these beliefs. Scarinzi learned that some local women have never been to a hairdresser, concerned that their hair would be kept and used against them in a spell. Keeping the legend alive Outside of the customs and superstitions ingrained in the culture of Benevento, there’s a capitalist reason why the legend has survived: the Liquore Strega, founded in 1860 by Giuseppe Alberti, who opened his bar in the center of Benevento. “He decided to name the product after the legend of the city where it was born,” says Kenia Palma, marketing manager for Strega Alberti, the company that produces the liquor. Strega means “witch” in Italian. It didn’t take long for Strega to become a symbol of Benevento—the marketing of the yellow-colored liqueur, made in part with saffron, juniper and mint and bearing a slightly sweet yet smooth taste, was indelibly linked to the city and its witches. The label bears an illustration of witches dancing around a walnut tree. Today, its store is the first thing you see when descending from the train station. Palma notes that, on bottles of the liqueur, the location is even written as “near the train station,” because Benevento has long been considered an important junction that connected north and south. The Alberti family worked to make Liquore Strega a symbol of Italy itself. In the 1920s, the brand enlisted well-known Futurist artist Fortunato Depero to create stylized advertisements. After the war, Guido Alberti helped to start the country’s famous literary prize, Premio Strega, named in the brand’s honor. Source of the article

Nov 3, 2025 GOATReads:Politics

Care Work is Necessary for Anti-Imperialist Struggle

How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state? —Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being The Popular University for Gaza encampment at the University of Chicago was raided on May 7, 2024. Following a week of connection, building, and generativity, police officers invaded the physical and figurative structures we had built, ripping organizers out of tents and tearing down the protective walls surrounding them. Just hours afterward, we convened together to make sense of it all—to begin the processes of recovery and rebuilding. Through circles that met in-person and virtually in the weeks to come, my peers brought care to the forefront of our work, inviting rage, grief, hopelessness, longing, intimacy, and joy into the relationships forged during the encampment. Our encampment existed in its physical form for only eight days, but the work of caring for one another has extended far past the date on which our physical structures were destroyed by the police. Care work that was seeded within the walls of our Popular University has sprung up from the ashes of the camp. This foundation of care continues to shape the way we organize against all forms of state violence. As we collectively pursued divestment from arms manufacturers that directly facilitate settler colonial violence in occupied Palestine, we also developed and deployed principled care tactics. The history and politics of care work are inextricable from the tentacles of empire. For example, the gendered and racialized modes of commodified care that we often think of when we hear the word “caregiver” have roots in legacies of colonial and imperial exploitation. The long legacy of slavery, sharecropping, and domestic laboring in the United States is inextricably linked to the subjugation of Black American women. Caregivers in home health-care settings, nursing homes, and childcare facilities are often precariously employed and underpaid immigrant women or women of color. In this model of caregiving, marginalized care workers tend to the bodies of those insulated from economic and social vulnerability. Simultaneously, most psychotherapists and medical doctors—those who are treated as care experts—are white, hailing from socioeconomic backgrounds that allow them to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for their training. The cost to access this kind of expertise makes it extremely difficult for most of us to afford comprehensive health care and psychotherapy in the US. This is why a repositioning of care was necessary in the context of an anti-imperial encampment focused on demanding that the University of Chicago disclose investments in war, divest from genocide, and repair injustices perpetrated from Gaza to the South Side of Chicago. Far too often, care means that autonomy gets taken away from someone in need. The state’s violent role in stripping vulnerable people of their autonomy is often labeled “care” or “welfare.” The active repositioning of care as intramural at the Popular University for Gaza created opportunities for peers to care laterally for one another, rather than relying upon individuals positioned as experts or as care workers. Rather than devaluing care or maintaining the power relations that keep it financially inaccessible, our care for one another within the walls of our Popular University created a structure of mutuality and sustainability. Repositioning care as a tool available to all of us was a means of decommodifying it, of taking it out of the imperialist context in which it is normally encountered. This repositioning allowed us to deploy care as a direct and oppositional response to violence targeted at Palestinians and those who act in solidarity with them. Intramural care—care within the figurative walls of our popular university—generated new ways of relating to risk and relating to one another. As a tool for building political power, care allowed encampment members to negotiate risk together, to workshop and (re)develop strategies for sustainable organizing, and to inhabit a community with a shared commitment to mutual aid and protection. Encampments are not a new organizing tactic, nor is thinking about how to provide collective, non-hierarchal, and lateral forms of care. As the Care Collective underscores in their book The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, treaty camps (such as the one erected at Standing Rock in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline) also welcomed anyone who adhered to camp values, offering care that was “designed according to need, not profit”—food, education, health care, housing—for everyone in the community. Following this legacy, the Popular University for Gaza developed a robust care team. At the Popular University for Gaza, our care team comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, neighbors, faculty, and staff. We contributed to encampment operations as medics, group facilitators, mental health workers, conflict mediators, and food and water distributors. As critical as collecting and distributing vital resources was to the encampment, our care work went beyond mere resource provision. As a social worker, I realized that developing a peer support guide might be a wise way to help campers develop strategies for maintaining the mental and emotional resources needed to keep the encampment running. This guide offered some individual-level tools for emotional regulation and grounding, and it also provided an outline for running processing/decompression circles. These circles were the first opportunity that many of us had to get to know individuals from outside of our programs, student organizations, or housing situations at the encampment. Through this peer support guide, organizers who were not experienced in professionalized care provision were invited into a relational practice, a space of connection rather than a mystified series of expert techniques. These circles were also the first space where we were able to convene after our encampment was violently raided by the University of Chicago Police Department. I also developed a therapy referral network and the launch of a 24/7 on-call peer mental health line for organizers. To have built this infrastructure outside of the confines of health insurance or state surveillance feels exciting; when we think of care laterally, we realize our own capacity to provide for one another instead of risking increased involvement with a violent state apparatus. Our collective approach to care, drawing from practices of peer support and mutual aid, was a risk-responsive approach grounded in interdependence. Among the mental health workers on our care team, it was our philosophy that anyone who wanted to run a decompression circle should be able to do so—rather than requiring a license or degree to offer support to peers at the encampment, the only requirement for running a decompression circle was to have first attended one as a participant. With this structure, mental health work was taken up by encampment community members with a wide range of ages, varied prior experiences with mental health care, and a vast array of academic and personal backgrounds. This diversity of experience among decompression group facilitators also allowed us to run affinity spaces for decompression, attending to the more specific needs that might arise among community members of color or disabled community members, for example. Collective approaches to care at the Popular University for Gaza allowed us to use risk negotiation as a core organizing strategy. When determining our collective courses of action, conversations about arrest risk were central to our strategizing. An arrest obviously has different consequences depending on things like one’s citizenship status, prior criminal-legal contact, race. In the lead-up to any anticipated police presence at the camp, we spoke to one another frankly about who among us would be able to take on more risk, and we made safety plans for those of us who were unable to risk arrest. Lateral forms of care are also what allowed organizers to sustain over a week of encampment operations; by using a safety planning worksheet (from the Peer Support Guide) in mental health circles and conversations, organizers developed a sense of who they might reach out to in crises, in moments of overwhelm, and in moments of exhaustion. By prompting one another to concretely identify the human infrastructures of caregiving surrounding us, we were better equipped to tap in and rotate out as we struggled to meet the round-the-clock practical demands associated with maintaining and protecting our Popular University. Finally, a lateral approach to caregiving allowed us to extend our community beyond the parameters of the institutionally defined University of Chicago. A community member without a student, staff, or faculty affiliation was present in the early days of the encampment, helping with construction and encampment operations. He was targeted by university police, and in response, encampment organizers mobilized jail support and a care package for him upon his return. This exchange of care—in the form of care for the encampment’s physical infrastructure and in the form of care for a community member—exemplifies a decommodified mutual aid relationship built upon respect and recognition rather than charity. In writing about the role of care at the Popular University for Gaza, I do not want to lose sight of the way that these experiments were made possible because we were not under siege. We were not subject to snipers, airstrikes, famine, or water shortages. We had the resources and safety that so many Palestinians have not had access to for months or years. As I foreground my own experiences of care, healing, and building power, I do so with the recognition that this encampment was a political formation designed to disrupt one university’s ongoing investment in genocide. But the care tactics at the Popular University for Gaza have created an infrastructure for ongoing disruption. Without care, our anti-imperial movements run the risk of replicating the dynamics of colonialism and empire, pushing feminized and non-white individuals into unrecognized care roles and reifying the expertise of the so-called “helping professionals” for those organizers financially stable enough to access them. This experiment in caring laterally for one another is a mechanism to shift the dominant culture surrounding caregiving, turning care into a central organizing approach rather than an adjunctive resource for burnt-out organizers. Despite the successes of this experiment, there were also moments of failure: we failed to develop a robust set of norms for responding to harassment within the encampment, and we failed to sustain the level of security needed to protect ourselves from an armed police raid in the middle of the night. Although this was an imperfect experiment, it is one that connected me to people I would have otherwise never known, despite our overlapping involvement in the corporate entity known as the University of Chicago. It gave me a laboratory to think and rethink intramural care. On the morning of May 7, hours after riot police destroyed the tents, art, library, mental health space, medic area, and prayer spaces of our Popular University, I defended my dissertation proposal. After watching videos of my friends and loved ones getting dragged and shoved outside of the walls we had built within the academy—walls designed to foster different ways of relating to one another here—I stepped back into the walls of the University of Chicago. As a developing scholar of the welfare state, I began my proposal hearing with an additional citation, recognizing the learning that I had done in the prior several weeks as uniquely valuable to the work I hope to do in and outside of the academy. I study care provision within and around the walls of jails and prisons, but my approach to my work is forever changed by the relations of care that I witnessed and participated in during the encampment. After my proposal defense, I walked through the quad, noticing that new patches of grass had been rolled out almost immediately in the hours after police officers invaded and destroyed the Popular University. I paused to take a photo of one patch of yellowed grass in the rectangular shape of a tent; despite their best efforts, a trace of the encampment persisted past the violent attempts to remove it all. As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating—the various forms of intellectualization, silencing, and disengagement that I associate with neoliberalized higher education—the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid. It persists in the form of spray bottles and goggles that are distributed at actions this autumn, in the debriefing circles and therapy referrals that have continued for months since the encampment was torn down. As a means of protest and critique, this evidence of care has persisted despite the university’s attempts to exterminate it. This evidence of care demonstrates the ongoing commitment of my fellow encampment organizers: to continue using care as a tactic in our work against state violence, against empire. Source of the article