At 4 a.m. on June 21, South Philadelphia residents were awoken by the sound of a large explosion: The Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery was on fire for the second time in two weeks. Neighbors watched as the flames turned into a giant mushroom cloud and as the mushroom cloud turned into a thick blanket of black smoke. The explosion was so big it was recorded by a satellite in space.
“I could hear it from my house,” said one resident, PennEnvironment Executive Director David Masur. “We were two blocks out of the shelter-in-place radius.”
The explosion occurred close to where a large volume of hydrofluoric acid was stored ― and if that had caught fire, it could have done devastating damage to the community, Masur explained.
“If that had exploded, you would have had a huge hydrofluoric acid cloud, which has all sorts of negative health effects depending on exposure. We would have had to evacuate a 7- to 10-mile radius, that’s 1.1 million people. It would have been catastrophic.”
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Matt Rourke/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A South Philly resident watches as the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery goes up in flames on June 21.
Last December, a series of presidential hopefuls began courting Yvanna Cancela.
At 31, the former political director of the state’s legendarily powerful culinary workers’ union and campaign operative for then-Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is Nevada’s first Latina state senator.
Ultimately, it was former Vice President Joe Biden who won the sweepstakes: When he called shortly before announcing his candidacy in April to talk about the state’s politics, Cancela cut him off and offered her endorsement, citing his “leadership” qualities as the determinative factor.
Any campaign would kill to have her making its case in this city’s union halls and community centers because her endorsement comes with much more on-the-ground political know-how and muscle than most, and, as a young woman of color who has fought for workers and gone to war with drug companies, she’s both a practitioner of the David-vs.-Goliath populism that ignites the party’s base and an embodiment of sought-after demographics.
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Biden aides believe his position on health care will appeal to Latino voters.Frederic J. Brown / AFP – Getty Images
It’s possible that success is at least partly about whom you know. But success is definitely about what you know, and what you actually do with the knowledge you gain.
So what can you do if you need remember something important?
Adam Grant took a deep dive into memory research to found a simple answer. (Adam is an organizational psychologist, best-selling author, host of the superb podcast WorkLife, co-founder of Givitas, and nice enough to provide a blurb for my book.)
The heat wave gripping large swaths of the Midwest and Northeast has killed at least three people, forced the evacuation of about 250 residents from a retirement home, and sparked the cancellation of major public events.
Other severe weather in the upper Midwest meanwhile left more than 200,000 households and businesses in Michigan without power Saturday morning. High winds and storms in the state on Friday knocked out power lines, with utility crews working to repair the outages as quickly as possible.
In Maryland, health officials said a Prince George’s County man and a Worcester County woman died this week from extreme heat. Earlier this month, a Baltimore City man and an Anne Arundel County woman died.
Kudos to the fans. One of the nominees for the Hugo Awards this year is Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction archive containing nearly 5 million fanworks—about the size of the English Wikipedia, and several years younger. It’s not just the fanfic, fanart, fanvids, and other fanworks, impressive as they are, that make Archive of Our Own worthy of one of the biggest honors in science fiction and fantasy. It’s also the architecture of the site itself.
At a time when we’re trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from.
Here’s a problem that AO3 users, like the rest of the internet, encounter every day: How do you find a particular thing you’re interested in, while filtering out all the other stuff you don’t care about? Most websites end up with tags of some sort. I might look through a medical journal database for articles tagged “cataracts,” search a stock photo site for pictures tagged “businesspeople,” or click on a social media hashtag to see what people are saying about the latest episode of #GameOfThrones.
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Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
After years in which efforts at resolving America’s longest war ambled slowly forward, if at all, they now appear to be galloping toward the finish line.
American and Taliban negotiators are thought to be close to a deal that would see the 14,000 American troops remaining in Afghanistan return home, after they lost more than 2,400 of their ranks and had thousands more maimed.
But the Trump administration’s rush to withdraw will leave Afghanistan at the mercy of an extremely ascetic Islamist movement that has done little to change its ways since the U.S. invaded nearly 18 years ago.
Peak District National Park is in central England.Steep limestone valleys like Dovedale, with its famed stepping stones, and Lathkill Dale characterise the park’s southern area, which is known as White Peak. North, the Dark Peak area has dramatic gritstone ridges and stark moorland plateaus like Kinder Scout, the park’s highest point. The nearby village of Edale marks one end of the iconic Pennine Way footpath.
The chatroom was populated by a motley crew of teens and young adults, spread out from California to Tennessee to Massachusetts. They didn’t know each other independently, but they were brought together by a single, unifying force: bright, effervescent 17-year-old Bianca Devins.
The teenager from Utica, New York, loved her cats and had a way of creating community. Her friends ― most of whom she’d never met in real life ― gathered on her server on Discord, a messaging app for gamers, to discuss true crime, talk about cryptozoology, play Minecraft and dish about their daily plans.
Bianca, who was tall and slender, could come across as shy in person, even a little awkward. At Thomas R. Proctor High School, she often retreated to the art room to work on projects during lunch. Albert Shaw, her teacher for three years, said she stood out as a naturally gifted artist. “Whatever she did, it was amazing,” he said. “It was always the best in the class.
Online, uninhibited by anxiety, her creativity shone. She sent her friends silly homemade videos set to music and posted artistic selfies with quirky compositions ― her face surrounded by skulls and bats, or paired with ironic text. She often switched up her look, experimenting with pink hair and dramatic makeup. She liked modeling but her long-term plan was to get a degree in psychology so she could help adolescents with mental illness, which she struggled with herself. She was set to attend Mohawk Valley Community College in the fall.
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Instagram: A photo Bianca Devins shared on her Instagram account.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
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An image of the Peak District England
To the moon
