James' World 2

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Streetsblog reported last week that Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue Open Street, one of Brooklyn’s most popular, has lost its sponsor and is now in search of a new one in order to open as planned this year. Another, Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, will be cutting its overall operating hours by 40 percent, reducing its season by two months (from May to September instead of April to October), and ending five hours earlier on Sundays. The programs, which close blocks to traffic to create more public space, have been celebrated, somewhat controversial, and undeniably successful. They are also expensive to maintain.

The Department of Transportation funds Open Streets, but local business groups and volunteers share costs for staffing and programming. With the expiration of pandemic grants, those partners say coming up with the money to run a thriving Open Street has become a challenge. The head of the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, which is bowing out of the program, told Streetsblog that the group had to kick in about half the costs of the open street. Last year, that was $40,000. “All those pots of money have gradually dried up,” the group’s executive director, Joanna Tallantire, told Streetsblog, “so we don’t actually have any money to do the program this year.” (Another group is trying to step in and raise funds, and the Department of Transportation says it intends to find a new partner.) The head of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council cited a similar strain, telling Streetsblog that the funding it receives from the city “is only a fraction of what’s necessary to run something like Vanderbilt Avenue.” The people behind the 31st Avenue Open Street in Astoria told me they would likely also have to scale back this year. “We may need to consider operational changes,” they wrote in an email. “We’re collecting donations from the local community and taking out personal loans to keep the Open Street going as strong as possible while waiting for the city funds to come through.” (Others, like Jackson Heights’ 34th Avenue Open Street, which is owed $20,000 from last year, are waiting for reimbursement from the city, according to Streetsblog.)

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Photo: Photo: New York City Department of Transportation/Flickr, Mural: Cara Lynch

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When The Sims debuted in February 2000, the average house price in the U.S. was just over $200,000. I was 8 years old, and I would spend hours at my best friend’s house, taking turns on her PC to design our dream homes.

The Sims felt like a trial run for adulthood, exploring how you’d make use of your future autonomy. Much of this validated the importance of personal space: how to lay out a room, how to choose a sofa that balanced aesthetics and comfort, how to make a house a home.

My friend and I made liberal use of the cheat code, granting limitless funds. Rosebud, we’d type whenever the coffers were running low. Rosebudrosebudrosebud. Or else, when we were really strapped: motherlode.

Today, the average price of a home is nearly $490,000. The ratio of home price to median household income has jumped from 4.33 to 7.57 (as of November). Everything is more expensive, and wages have failed to keep pace. Roughly half of millennials in the U.S. are still renting, a far larger share than in past generations. Forget cheat codes and vibromatic heart beds, the likes of which I splurged on for my Sims. Adulthood, for me and many people my age, has been defined by moving from rental to rental. My childhood dream of designing a dwelling that reflects me from top to toe has instead, for years, been squeezed into shared living spaces and whittled down by prescriptive leases. I’ve not even been able to hang things on the wall without my landlord’s permission.

When I learned that The Sims had recently released a For Rent expansion pack enabling people to play as tenants or property managers, I felt the kind of commingled hurt, umbrage, and morbid curiosity that you might experience when confronted by a cynical remake of your favorite childhood film.

The official trailer for The Sims 4: For Rent emphasizes the potential of “multiunit life,” promising “ample opportunity … [for] eavesdropping, snooping, or even breaking and entering”—a description that instantly evoked memories of my worst roommates.

Its view of landlords, on the other hand, is benevolent, exhorting players to “be more than a property owner—be a community builder” (with the reassurance that, should your community be late with rent payments, “you can even take their stuff!”).

The original Sims seeded a fantasy of independent adulthood across an entire generation. Why would millennials, unable to own their own places, sully the site of our nostalgia by playing as landlords? Was turning the tables, if only in our imaginations, meant to be somehow cathartic?

EA declined to put forward a game designer for interview but did extend to me For Rent for review—and so, for the first time since I was a child, I returned to the simulated world that had made me so anticipate adulthood.

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The Australian psychologist was living in Northern Ireland at the time and had always wanted to witness the spectacle in person.

She was in between her Masters and PhD studies in her 20s when, in 1999, the path of totality happened to cross nearby over the southern coast of France.

“I thought it was going to be just my first – my only – experience of an eclipse,” Ms Russo said. “Something you haven’t experienced, and then you do, and you’re like, ‘that’s pretty cool.'”

Instead, what she saw that day changed her life forever, sparking a life-long journey of studying and chasing solar eclipses around the globe.

On Monday, Ms Russo will watch her 14th total solar eclipse, this time in Uvalde, Texas. She is one of many eclipse chasers who have arrived in North America in recent days.

Experts estimate that more than a million people from inside and outside North America will travel towards the path of totality.

Many are individuals who have combined their love of astronomy, exploration, science, and travel into a mission to see as many eclipses in their lifetime as possible.

Some are driven by their love of space and desire to understand the universe around them. Others, like Ms Russo, pursue the indescribable feeling that comes with seeing a total solar eclipse in person.

The 51-year-old recalled how standing in the shadow of the moon for the first time was an “immersive and emotional” experience.

A total solar eclipse, by definition, occurs when the moon’s shadow covers the sun’s rays entirely, plunging those in the shadow’s path into darkness for a few minutes.

But Ms Russo said experiencing it was much more than that.

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Australian psychologist Kate Russo has seen 13 total solar eclipses since 1999

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Day 1

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

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ICON of the SEAS

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A few years ago, President Xi Jinping started warning that a 100-year big storm is coming. As is typical of the early days of a hurricane, one can now feel it. The circumstances and the mood in China have indisputably changed to become more threatening. These changes are mostly due to big cycle forces.

The most joyous and productive environments are ones that have freedom, civility, and creativity, and ones in which people can make their dreams into great realities with prosperity that is shared by most people. This happened in China from around 1980 until around five years ago. It is quite typical for such booms to produce debt bubbles and big wealth gaps that lead the booms to turn into bubbles that turn into busts. That happened in China at the same time as the global great power conflict intensified, so China is now in the post-bubble and great power conflict part of the Big Cycle that is driven by the five big forces that have changed the mood and the environment. In this piece, I will first describe in brief how the Big Cycle has transpired over roughly the past century, and then I will explain the current picture of what is happening today, with a focus on the challenges that China is facing. This history and these dynamics are complex and important to world history and the global order—everything I write here is how I see it based on my own experience, relationships, and research.

In the 1930-45 period, there was the last 100-year big storm, which was driven classically by the confluence of 1) a debt bust that triggered a global depression, 2) a civil war in China between the rich rightist-capitalists and the poor leftist-communists (which ended in 1949 when the Communists won), 3) an international great power conflict-war that ended in 1945 when the United States (and, to a much lesser extent, Great Britain and Russia) won, creating the American-led world order, 4) many disruptive acts of nature, and 5) big technological changes. That period ended in the classic ways they end, with a debt and economic collapse, one side winning over the other in the great international war and the new world order beginning (in 1945), and one side winning over the other in the civil war and the new domestic order beginning (in 1949).

From 1949 (the year the new domestic order was created via the PRC being formed) until 1978 (the year Deng Xiaoping came to power), there was a typical post-war consolidation period led by Mao in the way he wanted via a domestic economic policy that was communist, a domestic political policy that was oppressive (dictatorial and designed to purge the opposition), and a foreign policy that was isolationist. That and big disruptive acts of nature led to many big challenges and big bad periods and few economic and technological advances. Mao and that era died in 1976.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, he reduced the one-man control and repressions, increased collective leadership, replaced hardcore autocratic communism with more free markets and increasingly larger doses of capitalism, and opened China up to foreigners to learn and earn from them. It was like sprinkling water on fertile ground that led to a great blossoming. From 1978 until Xi came to power, there was a classic capitalist rejuvenation that led to a boom in which the economy, living standards, and debt all grew greatly. At the same time, China was not perceived by other countries to be a threat to the leading great power (the United States) and its world order. As a result, China had a joyous and productive environment in which there was a relatively large increase in freedom, civility, and creativity, and in which people could make their dreams into great realities and most people benefited, though the rich benefited more than the poor. As is typically the case, these policies also produced greater wealth gaps and greater amounts of corruption. That began to end when Xi came to power, not because he came to power but because of where China was in its Big Cycle and how the new leadership approached it.

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People look at an exhibition featuring Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Military Museum in Beijing on March 3, 2024. Greg Baker—AFP/Getty Images

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Take a glance at our solar system and beyond, and outer space seems pretty orderly. Our eight planets travel around the Sun with apparent predictability, and even the stars themselves appear to march in orbit around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart. That’s why hundreds of years ago, astronomers and natural philosophers understandably referred to the cosmos as a kind of “Clockwork Universe,” one that was wound at creation and has been ticking along in complete perfection ever since.

A beautiful idea that’s also completely wrong.

In reality, the universe is filled with chaos, and nothing quite encapsulates that idea as perfectly as the Three-Body Problem. While enjoying some (long overdue) attention thanks Netflix’s new adaptation of a 2008 Chinese sci-fi novel of the same name, the Three-Body Problem is much more than some inventive sci-fi plotline — it’s a real-world astronomical conundrum that’s beguiled some of history’s greatest mathematical minds.

The problem itself is deceptively simple: Accurately predict the trajectory of three bodies (planets, suns, black holes, etc.), mutually attracted by gravity, when given their initial position and velocity. But despite the problem’s elegant simplicity, for centuries scientists have tried — and failed — to generate a solution, for the most part.

As is often the case with chaos mathematics, it’s complicated.

An Impossible Problem

To understand why determining the trajectories of three orbital bodies is such an impenetrable mess of physics, it’s best to go back — way back — to the beginning of the problem (and to most things gravitational) as first posed by Sir Isaac Newton in his masterwork, Principia. In this treatise, the English polymath laid out his laws of motion and universal gravitation, and with these new discoveries, he worked out the details of Earth’s orbit around the Sun (a classic hierarchical two-body problem). But then Newton stumbled across a problem he couldn’t quite solve: What happens when you add a third body?

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It’s more than an intriguing sci-fi book and show — it’s also an astronomical conundrum that’s beguiled some of the world’s greatest minds for more than three centuries.

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Dirty Mess

Microplastics! They’re in everything, from our bodies to the ocean.

And apparently, they’re even found in sediment layers that date back as early as the first half of the 1700s, showing microplastics’ pernicious ability to infiltrate even environments untouched by modern humans.

A team of European researchers made this alarming discovery after studying the sediment layers at three lakes in Latvia, as detailed in a study published in the journal Science Advances.

The scientists were studying lake sediment to test if the presence of microplastics in geological layers would be a reliable indicator for the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch, defined in the study as starting in 1950 and meant to delineate when humans started having a large impact on our environment.

Scientists have long used layers of ash or ice to study past events on Earth, leading to the question of whether microplastics can serve as a reliable chronological marker for the Anthropocene.

Clearly not, according to this new research, which found microplastics in every layer of sediment they dredged up, including one from 1733.

“We conclude that interpretation of microplastics distribution in the studied sediment profiles is ambiguous and does not strictly indicate the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch,” the scientists wrote.

Trash Planet

Other than the study concluding that microplastics are a poor marker of geological age, it also shows microplastics’ remarkable ability to get absolutely everywhere.

Not even Antarctica, the most remote region on our planet, is immune. Scientists have found microplastics in several snow samples, having seemingly arrived there by the wind.

Perhaps most alarmingly, scientists have even found microplastics inside our organs, with researchers only starting to grapple with their deleterious impact.

Going forward, one of the biggest challenges we face is how we get rid of microplastics from our environment. Researchers are beginning to look at novel approaches, ranging from planting birch trees in polluted soil to water filters.

Judging from the ubiquity of microplastics and our ongoing addiction to plastic products, one thing’s for sure: it won’t be easy

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It can be hard to keep up with what’s “cool” in the tech world. Half the time, by the time you’ve figured it out, it’s already passé. Or it’s an Apple Vision Pro situation, where opinions vary on whether the device makes someone look cool or like a clown. One thing that is definitely not “cool,” it seems, is having a green text bubble.

On Apple’s iPhones, instead of conversations appearing in the typical gray and blue, text messages from non-Apple phones register as gray and a sort of hot green. Personally, I don’t entirely get the fuss over the green-bubble question in text messages, but I know it’s A Thing in American culture. A former coworker of mine has a whole rant about how on dating apps women would judge him for having an Android (well, that and living in New Jersey).

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Apple has spent more than 15 years fostering an in-crowd/out-crowd scenario with the iPhone. And for many Americans, it’s working.  Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

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It’s time to celebrate the pickle. No, it’s not quite National Pickle Day (and yet, every day is), but here at Lifehacker, the pickle is indeed precious. It’s a cucumber’s victory dance. It brings bright acidity, crunchy contrast, and a saline slap wherever it goes. It can save a sandwich or switch up a cocktail, and it’s even a pretty fun time on its own. Pickles come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and flavors. No matter which kind you have at the moment, here are some of the best things you can do with your tangy cukes. 

Pickle dip 

Kicking off the list in the best way possible is a dip composed of pulverized, caramelized pickles. This caramelized pickle dip is creamy, tangy, salty, and irresistible. It’s so good, legend has it, that it’s impossible to have leftovers. Browning the pickles properly takes a bit of time in a frying pan, but after that, the dip comes together quickly in a food processor.

Pickle pizza 

It’s expected to bedazzle your slice with some salty meats or a few veggies, but why stop there? A cheesy, salty pizza could use a few briny bites to balance things out, if you ask me. Throw some sour dills onto your pie. The pickle’s acidity mellows out slightly in the oven as the excess water evaporates, and you’re rewarded with slightly crunchy, briefly tangy morsels to look forward to. 

Pickles in blankets 

Sorry, pigs, but pickles need to stay warm too. While mini weenies have ruled crescent dough for quite some time, small, spritely gherkins work wonders as a replacement. In fact, switching out the cured meat for the brined veg makes pickles in blankets a vegan iteration of the party classic. (Always check the ingredient list to make sure.) For the ultimate party snack, I suggest pairing both pickles and cocktail weenies in one cozy pastry blanket. 

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Credit: Julia Sudnitskaya / Shutterstock.com

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