Required Reading

​​‣ As part of a movement to pass a bill protecting the rights of trans and nonbinary Colombians, photographer Camila Falquez took tender snapshots of 70 members of the community. Ana Karina Zatarain writes about the project for the New Yorker:

The bill, Ley Integral Trans, may face a long and contentious path, but it has now been introduced in Colombia’s Congress. “For the first time as an artist, I’m not just left with the manifestation of impossible scenarios, hoping they somehow inspire change,” Falquez told me, describing her excitement about the project. It’s possible that her involvement strengthened the bill’s standing. The language of legislation is often dry and repetitive; it can turn vulnerable individuals into faceless abstractions, their struggles and ambitions collapsed into jargon. In Falquez’s portraits, however, life saturates each frame. Together, the photographs display the kaleidoscopic nature of gender identity, giving flesh and narrative to the different forms it can embody.

​​‣ For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, yoga is a chilling tool to sanitize the sinister reality of his violently anti-Muslim, Hindu nationalist policies. Karim Zidan explains in his substack Sports Politika:

Modi’s use of yoga as a means to spread Hindutva, the right-wing ethno-nationalist political ideology position that strives to make India an overtly Hindu state, has spread across the world. A 2023 investigation by The Nation found that an organization with ties to India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Association, or RSS), a Hindu supremacist group, has established a network of affiliates around the world, some of which use yoga events to spread their ideology. 

Meanwhile, India has also embraced yoga as a means of diplomacy with other Muslim-majority nations such as Saudi Arabia. While Modi speaking to Muslim students in Kashmir during the 10th International Day of Yoga, the embassy of India in the Saudi capital of Riyadh hosted a yoga session in collaboration with the Saudi government.

​​‣ The Israeli military’s recent explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon this week killed over 20 people and wounded at least 3,300 others. It’s a terrifying act of state violence in a technological age, and as the Intercept‘s Nikita Mazurov writes, it’s not the first example of explosives hidden in electronic devices:

Field Manual 5-31, titled simply “Boobytraps” and first published by the U.S. Department of the Army in 1965, describes the titular objects as explosive charges “cunningly contrived to be fired by an unsuspecting person who disturbs an apparently harmless object or performs a presumably safe act.” The 130-page manual provides an array of intricate wiring diagrams and cross-sectional schematics for booby-trapping various devices ranging from office equipment like desks and telephone list finders (early phone directories) to kitchenware like pots and kettles, as well as items like televisions and beds. 

​​‣ The Washington Post‘s Pranshu Verma and Shelly Tan teamed up with researchers to calculate the amount of water and electricity ChatGPT needs to write a 100-word email. How does the saying go — “An AI-generated email a day keeps the natural resources away”?:

Data centers also require massive amounts of energy to support other activities, such as cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has only increased that load, Ren said. If a data center is located in a hot region — and relies on air conditioning for cooling — it takes a lot of electricity to keep the servers at a low temperature. If data centers relying on water cooling are located in drought-prone areas, they risk depleting the area of a precious natural resource.

In Northern Virginia, home to the world’s highest concentration of data centers, citizen groups have protested construction of these buildings, saying they are not only loud energy hogs that don’t bring in enough long-term jobs, but also eyesores that kill home values. In West Des Moines, Iowa, an emerging hotbed of data centers, water department records showed that facilities run by companies like Microsoft used around 6 percent of all the district’s water. After a lengthy court battle, the Oregonian newspaper forced Google to disclose how much its data centers were using in The Dalles, about 80 miles east of Portland; it turned out to be nearly a quarter of all the water available in the town, the documents revealed.

​​‣ Speaking of, a new study found that Black teens are twice as likely to have their work falsely flagged as AI-generated than their peers. It’s a chilling extension of historically deep-seated biases against Black students, particularly those from working-class backgrounds. Mizy Clifton writes for Semafor:

The findings aren’t surprising, Robert Topinka, a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck, University of London told Semafor in an interview.

Part of the problem is that AI detection software is “wholly unreliable,” he said. It’s trained to flag generic and formulaic phrasing using pattern matching, but can’t distinguish between ChatGPT and spelling and grammar checkers like Grammarly, which means students risk being penalized even for using approved tools. And because learning disabilities like dyslexia are underdiagnosed in Black students, they are more likely to be falsely accused of cheating, he said.

Plus, white students are more likely to enjoy “tech privilege” in the form of access to AI technologies, as well as paraphrasing software that masks its use — which in turn “makes it easier [for them] to not get caught,” Topinka said.

​​‣ Moo Deng, an absolute unit of a baby pygmy hippo, has taken the world by storm, but her zookeepers are worried about her safety after “fans” threw items into her enclosure. This is why we can’t have nice things, y’all. Mithil Aggarwal reports for NBC:

A video on TikTok showing Moo Deng’s caretaker playing with the hippo has been viewed more than 33 million times, with more than 2 million likes. “That baby hippo looks like he was just hatched,” one comment reads.

Other videos of Moo Deng on the TikTok account also have millions of views. Another 29-second video posted on X showing Moo Deng chomping away on her daily veggies has been viewed more than 15 million times. 

But her caretakers are increasingly concerned for her safety, as some fans have thrown water and other objects at Moo Deng. The zoo’s director has threatened legal action.

​​‣ In a charming piece of lunar news, the moon is getting a buddy. Jaweed Kaleem explains the “mini-moon” that will complete exactly one orbit around Earth this fall for the Los Angeles Times:

The object is part of the Arjuna asteroid belt.

Speaking to Space.com, Universidad Complutense de Madrid professor Carlos de la Fuente Marcos — one of the people who discovered the mini-moon — described Arjuna as “a secondary asteroid belt made of space rocks that follow orbits very similar to that of Earth at an average distance to the sun of about 93 million miles.”

He said that some objects in the belt can come close enough to Earth and at velocities low enough (roughly 2.8 million miles away and 2,200 miles per hour) to allow them to temporarily orbit Earth.

Other scientists even think that, based upon its past trajectory, the asteroid might be a piece of Earth’s moon that flew off after a previous impact.

​​‣ TikToker @yapybara on the vocabulary around homelessness and why the distinctions between “sheltered,” “unsheltered,” and “unhoused” matter:

​​‣ The death of “graphic design is my passion”:

​​‣ This might actually be Terry Gross: