James' World 2

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In modern times, clocks underpin everything people do, from work to school to sleep. Timekeeping is also the invisible structure that makes modern infrastructure work. It forms the foundation of the high-speed computers that conduct financial trading and even the GPS system that pinpoints locations on Earth’s surface with unprecedented accuracy.

But humans have likely lived by some version of the clock for a very long time. The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago. Before that, people likely tracked time with devices that did not survive in the archaeological record—such as an upright stick in the dirt that acted as a primitive sundial—or no device at all, says Rita Gautschy, an archeoastronomer at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

“It’s really difficult to get a grip on when people started with timekeeping,” Gautschy says. Simply by observing the location of the sunrise and the sunset each day and by watching how high the sun reaches in the sky, a person can construct a primitive calendar. These early human efforts at understanding the flow of time left no trace at all, she says.

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An ancient Chinese sundial is located at the Beijing Ancient Observatory in China. Credit: Penn Song/Getty Images

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By the time they enter kindergarten, most American children believe that being “thin” makes them more valuable to society, writes journalist Virginia Sole-Smith. By middle school, Sole-Smith says, more than a quarter of kids in the U.S. will have been put on a diet.

Sole-Smith produces the newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. In her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, she argues that efforts to fight childhood obesity have caused kids to absorb an onslaught of body-shaming messages.

“The chronic experience of weight stigma … is similar to the research we see on chronic experiences of racism or other forms of bias,” Sole-Smith says. “This raises your stress level. This has you in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and stress hormones are elevated. That takes a toll on our bodies for sure.”

Sole-Smith says parents can combat American diet culture by reclaiming — and normalizing — the word “fat.” Instead of shushing a child in the grocery store who asks why a stranger is so fat, she advises parents to explain that bodies come in lots of shapes and sizes, some fat, some thin.

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My first child, Penelope, was born at 6 a.m. As a result, our insurance covered two nights in the hospital. On our second night—when my husband had gone home to rest and prepare the house for our return—the nurses took Penelope for some tests and returned her at 2 a.m. I was sleeping. The nurse switched on the light and rolled the bassinet in; in addition to Penelope, the bassinet had a little sign: Breastfeeding Only.

“We weighed her,” the nurse said, “and she’s lost 11 percent of her body weight. Our limit is 10 percent, so you’ll have to start supplementing with formula. If you don’t, you probably won’t get to take her home tomorrow.” I felt rising panic—not take her home?—and also some confusion. 10 percent versus 11 percent? These seemed pretty similar—was that one percent really enough to prevent an otherwise healthy baby from coming home?

Obviously, you want your baby to thrive, and weight is an important metric. But many new parents are not expecting the tremendous focus doctors and hospital staff place on infant weight gain or loss. If you have happily given birth to a healthy baby after a relatively uneventful delivery, the vast majority of your hospital conversations will now revolve around the baby’s feeding and weight. That might sound like a fine idea, but remember this is not a moment you are at your most laissez-faire. When you’re just postpartum and trying to breastfeed for the first time, it can be incredibly tense. It can feel like you are failing—you did such a great job growing this baby inside you, and now that it’s out, you are a failure. (You’re not!! That’s just how it feels.)

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Illustration by Doris Liou.

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Life doesn’t always go your way. This is one of the hardest and most universal lessons we learn as we move out of toddlerhood and into childhood and later adulthood. While it’s normal for a small child to throw a tantrum when they don’t get what they want when they want it, as kids get bigger, the ability to tolerate discomfort is an important skill to master. They need to wait their turn, lose gracefully, deal with hunger, sensory stimulation, and have someone side with someone else’s argument.

If your child seems to lose their cool more often than their peers or be unable to “deal” with aggravation or irritation in a developmentally appropriate way, you may want to help them build their frustration tolerance. We spoke with psychiatrist and parent coach Jess Beachkofksy about ways you can help your child grow these skills.

Spotting frustration before they blow

You know what a tantrum looks like, but to help your child build frustration tolerance, begin to notice early signs that they are getting overwhelmed and likely to have a meltdown. Then, help them start to notice how they feel in these moments so they can start to find ways to cope. “Kids need to be able to identify when they are getting frustrated so that they can implement the skills that will help them work through it,” Beachkofsky says.

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Photo: Prostock-studio (Shutterstock)

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From calfskin crowns to a throne so sacred it can never be sat on, here’s a look at how some of the world’s remaining monarchies celebrate their kings and queens.

“Monarchy runs on ritual and ceremony”, says Dr. Elena Woodacre, a reader in renaissance history at the University of Winchester.

“There are elements you tend to see in different coronations”, she explains, “there’s always some kind of installation or enthronement. There’s usually regalia or ritual clothing and the sacred elements like the anointing.”

“These elements are important both for reaffirming the sovereign’s role but also reaffirming the relationship between the monarch and the subject”, she adds.

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Elephants parade near the Grand Palace in Bangkok to celebrate the Thai King’s coronation

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The fate of Hitler’s Black victims–whether Afro-German or African-American soldiers and citizens–is often overlooked in studies of World War II.  The genocide of six million Jews is the central tragedy of the Holocaust and more recent studies point to the persecution of the disabled and homosexuals. Yet there is much more to be learned about Nazism from research on Nazi racial policies, particularly regarding Afro-Germans.  Racial prejudices in Germany grew dramatically after World War I, as did anti-Semitism. Those who had lived in German colonies in Africa lost their positions under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and brought back racist ideologies. Racial hysteria erupted with the occupation of the Rhineland by African and South Asian soldiers in the French colonial army, who were enforcing the reparations. The Nazis tragically built on this pre-existing German and Anglo-Saxon fear, distrust, and hatred of Blacks to justify even greater persecution.  By 1937, the sterilization of and then murder of hundreds of Afro-Germans, as well as black soldiers, became an important, tragic, and still misunderstood component of Nazi policy.

 

The “Black Horror: on the Rhine: German and U.S. Race Propaganda

Interracial relationships between German women in the Rhineland and Senegalese or other African soldiers from the French army led to the birth of several hundred mixed-race Afro-German children. These families and their children brought a new identity to interwar Germany.

However, some Germans, as well as Americans and British journalists and activists, used these relationships for their racist propaganda. They made films (such as “Black Horror on the Rhine”) and posters depicting Black soldiers as rapists who were a threat to the “purity” of white women and carriers of deadly venereal diseases. This racist propaganda was amplified by racist white Americans, as had been the case with the 1915 film Birth Of A Nation. That film was shown by the racist President Woodrow Wilson in the White House during his presidency and led to a rebirth of the KKK. White American racists influenced German and Nazi scientists, politicians, and others, and vice versa. America’s one-drop rule and laws against intermarriage between the races influenced the Nazis when they drafted the Nuremberg Laws (German laws that discriminated against Blacks, Jews, and other minorities). Additionally, Hitler blamed the Jews for African soldiers being stationed and reproducing in Germany with German women. Afro-German children who were a product of these relationships, were referred to as “Rhineland Bastards’’ and were seen as a threat to the “racial purity” of Germany. 

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Afro-German during the Third Reich. Photo: Propaganda-Pravada.

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In 1986, I left my native South Korea and came to Britain to study economics as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge.

Things were difficult. My spoken English was poor. Racism and cultural prejudices were rampant. And the weather was rubbish. But the most difficult thing was the food. Before coming to Britain, I had not realized how bad food can be. Meat was overcooked and under-seasoned. It was difficult to eat unless accompanied by gravy, which could be very good but also very bad. English mustard, which I fell in love with, became a vital weapon in my struggle to eat dinners. Vegetables were boiled long beyond the point of death to become textureless, and there was only salt around to make them edible. Some British friends would argue valiantly that their food was under-seasoned (err… tasteless?) because the ingredients were so good that you oughtn’t ruin them with fussy things like sauces, which those devious French used because they needed to hide bad meat and old vegetables. Any shred of plausibility of that argument quickly vanished when I visited France at the end of my first year in Cambridge and first tasted real French food.

British food culture of the 1980s was – in a word – conservative; deeply so. The British ate nothing unfamiliar. Food considered foreign was viewed with near-religious scepticism and visceral aversion. Other than completely Anglicised – and generally dire-quality – Chinese, Indian, and Italian, you could not get any other national cuisine, unless you traveled to Soho or another sophisticated district in London. British food conservatism was for me epitomized by the now defunct but then-rampant chain, Pizzaland. Realizing that pizza could be traumatically ‘foreign’, the menu lured customers with an option to have their pizza served with a baked potato – the culinary equivalent of a security blanket for British people.

As with all discussions of foreignness, of course, this attitude gets pretty absurd when you scrutinize it. The UK’s beloved Christmas dinner consists of turkey (North America), potatoes (Peru or Chile), carrots (Afghanistan), and Brussels sprouts (from, yep, Belgium). But never mind that. Brits then simply didn’t ‘do foreign’.

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Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty

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What is bullying?
It’s a sustained pattern of aggression by a person with more power, targeting someone with less power. The key, says Stella O’Malley, author of a ground-breaking 2022 book, Bully-Proof Kids, is that it’s repeated behavior. But beneath this simple definition lies a complex, multilayered situation that can be exceptionally tricky to unpack. What is the power, and where does it come from? With children, says O’Malley, it’s often that they have more social status, or have been led to believe they do.

One very big issue, which she returns to time and again in her book and in our conversation, is that bullying is always about more than what’s going on with two people: the bully and the target. What about the children O’Malley calls “wingmen”, the bully’s supporters, the kids who think the bully is the bee’s knees and want to stay in their favour? What’s happening with the kids watching silently – the bystanders? Who is seeing what’s happening, when it all starts to kick off, and getting out fast? Who’s calling out the injustice? To understand bullying, you have to see the whole picture.

Because, says O’Malley, bullying is about absolutely everyone in the group, room, office, or playground; even the bystanders – those who do or say nothing when bullying is taking place – because, as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, not to speak is to speak; not to act is to act.

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Photo by Feodora Chiosea/Getty Images

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The iconic image of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87—sometimes referred to as the “fuzzy, orange donut”—has gotten its first official makeover with the help of machine learning. The new image further exposes a central region that is larger and darker, surrounded by the bright accreting gas shaped like a “skinny donut.” The team used the data obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2017 and achieved, for the first time, the full resolution of the array.

In 2017, the EHT collaboration used a network of seven pre-existing telescopes around the world to gather data on M87, creating an “Earth-sized telescope.” However, since it is infeasible to cover the Earth’s entire surface with telescopes, gaps arise in the data—like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

“With our new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve the maximum resolution of the current array,” says lead author Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study. “Since we cannot study black holes up close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity.”

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New image of M87 supermassive black hole generated by the PRIMO algorithm using 2017 EHT data.

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Sarracenia X leucophylla.Credit…Laurence Gaume

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