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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Why Do Christians Think Jesus Was The Son Of God?



Why Do Christians Think Jesus Was The Son Of God?

Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God based on their interpretation of the teachings of the Bible. The belief in Jesus as the Son of God is a central tenet of Christian faith. Here are some reasons why Christians hold this belief:

1. Biblical teachings: Christians believe that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, contains the inspired Word of God. The New Testament portrays Jesus as the Son of God who was sent to Earth to save humanity. According to Christian teachings, Jesus is described as the Word made flesh, the one through whom God revealed Himself to humanity.

2. Jesus' own claims: In the New Testament, Jesus makes several claims about His relationship with God the Father. He refers to Himself as the Son of God and claims to have a unique and intimate relationship with the Father. For example, in the Gospel of John, Jesus states, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), and He often refers to God as "my Father."

3. Miracles and authority: Christians believe that Jesus performed various miracles during His earthly ministry, such as healing the sick, raising the dead, and demonstrating power over nature. They see these miracles as evidence of Jesus' divine authority and His unique connection to God.

4. Resurrection: Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus. According to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified, died, and was raised from the dead after three days. His resurrection is seen as a confirmation of His divine nature and the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.

5. Early Christian testimony: The early Christian community, including Jesus' disciples and apostles, testified to His divinity. Their accounts, as recorded in the New Testament, provide the foundation for the Christian belief in Jesus as the Son of God.

It's important to note that these reasons represent the beliefs of Christians and their interpretation of religious texts. Other religious and philosophical traditions may have different perspectives on the nature of Jesus.

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Why Do Muslims Think Jesus Was A Prophet And Not The Son Of God?



Why Do Muslims Think Jesus Was A Prophet And Not The Son Of God?

Muslims believe that Jesus (known as 'Isa in Arabic) was a prophet and messenger of God, but not the literal Son of God. The Islamic perspective on Jesus is rooted in the teachings of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, and the Hadith, which are the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.

There are several reasons why Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet:

1. Monotheism: Islam strongly emphasizes the concept of monotheism (tawhid), the belief in the oneness of God. Muslims believe that associating partners with God, such as considering Jesus as His literal Son, is a form of polytheism (shirk) and goes against the principle of monotheism.

2. Quranic teachings: According to the Quran, Jesus was chosen by God to be a prophet and messenger, similar to other prophets like Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad. The Quran portrays Jesus as a miraculous figure, emphasizing his virgin birth, his ability to perform miracles, and his role in preaching the worship of God alone.

3. Prophethood lineage: Muslims believe in a long line of prophets, starting with Adam and ending with Muhammad. Jesus is seen as part of this lineage of prophets who were sent to guide humanity and convey the message of monotheism. Muslims respect and revere Jesus as one of the great prophets of Islam.

4. Denial of divinity: Islam rejects the idea of any human being, including Jesus, being divine or having a divine nature. Muslims believe that God is transcendent and does not beget children. To claim divinity for Jesus would contradict the concept of God's oneness and uniqueness.

It's important to note that these beliefs stem from Islamic theology and may differ from the beliefs held by Christians, who consider Jesus to be the Son of God and part of the Holy Trinity. Religious beliefs are deeply personal and can vary among individuals and communities.



https://claude.ai/

There are a few key reasons why Muslims view Jesus differently than Christians:

- In Islam, the central belief is that there is only one God (Allah) and Muhammad is his final messenger. Jesus is revered as a prophet and messenger of God, but not the Son of God or divine himself. The Quran states that the notion of Jesus as the Son of God is blasphemy.

- Muslims believe God is absolutely unitary and indivisible. The concept of the Trinity in Christianity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) is incompatible with the strict monotheism of Islam.

- The Quran and Hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) affirm that Jesus was born of a virgin birth, but did not die on the cross. Muslims believe God raised Jesus up to heaven and delivered him from crucifixion. Therefore, the central narrative of Jesus' redemptive sacrifice is rejected.

- According to Islamic teachings, Jesus was a human prophet who preached the Oneness of God, as a precursor to the final prophet Muhammad. Jesus is not the incarnation of God, nor part of the Triune Godhead, but a beloved messenger of God.

So in summary, the Islamic view of Jesus aligns more with Judaism's view of Jesus as a prophet and teacher, rather than the Christian concept of Jesus as divine Son of God and savior. The theological divergences stem from differences on the nature of God and monotheism.

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12: Vivek Ramaswamy



Vivek Ramaswamy Leans Into His Hindu Faith to Court Christian Voters The Republican candidate for president makes a pitch that the faiths have much in common, but for many religious conservatives, the difference is a hurdle. ........ “I looked up his religion and saw he’s Hindu,” he recalled. “I was going to vote for him until that came up.” What the country needs is to be “put back under God,” as Mr. Smith sees it, and he doesn’t want to take a chance on someone who is not a Christian. ......... At that point, he said, “I got back on President Trump’s train.” ........ He mentioned Mr. Ramaswamy’s list of 10 core “truths,” the first of which is: “God is real.” (The second: “There are two genders.”) ......... “He welcomes the deeper questions.” Mr. Ramaswamy is polling under 5 percent in most recent national polls. ........ Mr. Ramaswamy’s approach has been to confront the issue directly and argue that he has more in common with observant Christians than they might think. ........ Mr. Ramaswamy said his faith taught him that Jesus was “a son of God, absolutely.” (That “a” is a sharp distinction from the central Christian belief that Jesus is the son of God. Hinduism is a fluid and expansive tradition, and many believers embrace scores of deities, with some seeing Jesus as one teacher or god.) ............... He frequently mentions his experience attending a “Christian school” in Cincinnati (St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school). And he contrasts “religions like ours,” which have stood the test of time, with the competing worldviews of “wokeism, climatism, transgenderism, gender ideology, Covidism,” as he put it to an audience in New Hampshire. ............. Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign has disseminated clips of an Iowa pastor comparing him to the biblical figure of King David ............. The biggest objective now, Mr. Brody said, is combating “cultural Marxism” and correcting the course of “a country gone haywire.” ............ “The lazy narrative that he’s Hindu so he can’t appeal to evangelicals, I don’t buy it at all,” Mr. Brody said. ........... About half of American Protestants now say they prefer to attend a church with people who share their political views .......... Swami Vivekananda, who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, took pains to depict his faith as monotheistic, in contrast to the stereotypes of its followers as “heathen” polytheists. Although the faith has many deities, they are generally subordinate to one ultimate “reality.” Many Hindus and scholars say its theology is too complex to be described as either wholly monotheistic or wholly polytheistic. .............. He sees Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch against “wokeism” as a way to counter stereotypes associating Hinduism with hippies, yoga and vegetarianism. ............. Many evangelical voters embraced the crude, thrice-married casino magnate not because he was one of them but because they believed he would fight in the public square on their behalf. ............. Most Indian Americans, including Hindus, are Democrats. But some conservatives see an opening with a population that prioritizes family life, marriage and education. ........ there were more similarities among committed believers across traditions than between serious and nominal adherents within the same faith. .



At a Fourth of July event in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli Army had attacked “the most legitimate target on the planet — people who would annihilate our country.” He was referring to months of armed resistance against Israeli settlers by young men in the Jenin refugee camp. ......... More than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance. .......... a consensus among international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.......... With the absence of any hope for statehood, and with no viable political leadership to lead the struggle, some take matters into their own hands through armed and unarmed forms of resistance, others are apathetic or preoccupied with the crippling effort to support their families, and many live in fear. ........ In 2002, though round after round of American-mediated negotiations had faltered, there was still the hope — and the expectation — that a peace process would resume. The two-state solution was touted as the only option for peace. The framework of territorial partition — that Israel would withdraw from the territories it had occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors — was the dominant policymaking approach. ........... With Hamas’s rise to power in 2006, Israel, in coordination with Egypt, tightened a hermetic blockade on the strip, effectively severing it from the rest of Palestine, and experimented with military techniques to force the population into submission. .......... Alongside food restriction policies and an economic chokehold, this took the form of devastating military assaults. The military referred to this doctrine as “mowing the lawn,” the approach of using disproportionate military force to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance and manage a restive population chafing against Israeli control. ............ Last week, Israel turned this military approach, perfected in the Gaza Strip, onto the West Bank, as it cordoned off the refugee camp in Jenin, pummeled it from the air and ground and destroyed crucial infrastructure for water and electricity as a form of collective punishment. ........... In the time between the two invasions of Jenin, Palestinians throughout the West Bank have been systematically funneled — through land expropriation, home demolitions and expansion of settlements — into isolated urban centers surrounded by land occupied by Israel. Just like Gaza, most urban centers in the West Bank can now be, overnight, entirely severed from the ecosystem around them, as was witnessed in Jenin. ........... The transformation of Israeli political culture that accelerated after the violence of the second intifada and the impunity Israel enjoys internationally have culminated in the most right-wing government in Israeli history. .......... what Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has called “a regime of Jewish supremacy” in all the areas under their control. .............. a singular constant: Israel’s ability to sustain its settlement of Palestinian territory without accountability, while equating Palestinian resistance to terrorism ........ That this framing has long been accepted among the major Western powers is particularly galling for Palestinians in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where resistance to illegal occupation is hailed as heroic and supported by Western weapons and military training. .

The Next Battle Over Colorblindness Has Begun . Race gaps characterize nearly every dimension of U.S. life: life expectancy, maternal mortality, employment rates, income, wealth, environmental exposures, criminal justice involvement and many others. Policymakers routinely seek to close these gaps, even when debating policies that aren’t directly about race, such as environmental regulations, health policy and criminal justice reform. ......... a healthy democracy requires open debate. In a country shaped throughout its history by racial discrimination and disparity, excluding race from policy debate would impoverish our discourse and threaten to delegitimize the political process. .

The reason is that not all bomblets explode as they’re meant to, and thousands of small, unexploded grenades can lie around for years, even decades, before somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off. The weapons used today by Russia and Ukraine are said to leave as many as 40 percent duds lying around, and they will remain a threat to the people of Ukraine, no matter the outcome of this conflict. ........ As of today, 123 nations — including many of America’s allies — have agreed never to use, transfer, produce or stockpile cluster munitions. ......... But not Russia or Ukraine or the United States, which used cluster munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the United States actively opposed the treaty. ....... Together, these three nations have more than a billion cluster munitions stockpiled, far more than the number of weapons expected to be destroyed.” .......... But as the fighting dragged on and Ukraine proved increasingly capable of standing up to Russia, line after line has been crossed, with Washington and its allies agreeing to provide sophisticated weapons like the Patriot air-defense system, the HIMARS long-range rocket launcher, the Abrams tank and soon the F-16 jet fighter. ......... There is a legitimate debate about whether this amounts to the sort of mission creep that marked conflicts in Vietnam or Afghanistan. Sending cluster munitions to Ukraine amounts to a clear escalation of a conflict that has already become far too brutal and destructive. But the greater issue here is sharing a weapon that has been condemned by a majority of the world’s nations, including most of America’s close allies, as morally repugnant for the indiscriminate carnage it can cause long after the combatants have gone.

The John Roberts Two-Step Roberts’s view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions. ....... while Roberts may mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. .......... I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race). .......... “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” ..........

the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race.

......... To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize. ......... When read in its entirety, the dissent gives a picture of Harlan not as a defender of equality, but as someone who thinks the Constitution can secure hierarchy and inequality without the assistance of state law. It’s not that segregation was wrong but that, in Harlan’s view, it was unnecessary.

DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool........ once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive. ....... Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. ........ I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian......... Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.

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12: Benjamin Netanyahu



Ukraine war: fading support and internal divisions must push Nato to negotiating table Nato must realise Ukraine is not in a position where it can liberate its entire territory and successfully join the alliance at the end of the war ....... Commitments of support to Kyiv must also come with an acknowledgement of Russia’s security interests............ Fewer than half of US respondents – 48 per cent – to an Associated Press poll in February said they supported providing weapons to Ukraine, down from 60 per cent in May 2022, while 29 per cent were opposed. Polling in Europe last December showed 50 per cent support for providing Ukraine with arms, down from 56 per cent that March, with support dipping to 48 per cent in Germany and 36 per cent in Italy ......... Russia has largely been able to stay afloat despite being cut off from the global financial system, with the International Monetary Fund predicting the country’s economy to grow by 0.3 per cent this year. ............... Despite providing a supply of quality weapons, Nato must realise Kyiv is not in a position where it can liberate its entire territory and successfully join the alliance at the end of the war. Instead, its best chance of maximising its ability to exist and enter Nato will come from being partitioned along the Dnieper River and admitted into the alliance thereafter. ........... Some allies are looking to transform Ukraine into a bulwark against Russia by granting special defence agreements along the Israeli model but stopping short of giving it full Nato membership. ........... Israel has a 10-year defence agreement with the US which allows it to receive a steady supply of arms and ammunition in preparation for any potential conflict. Israel will receive US$38 billion from the US as part of its current agreement, and a similar model could be employed in Ukraine. Such an act would provide a well-defined support apparatus and prevent the war from being drawn out, as intended by Moscow. ............... in 1994, the US persuaded Ukraine, with assurances from Britain, to give up its 5,000 Soviet-era nuclear weapons. .

The West needs to prepare for ‘ugly’ Russian victory in Ukraine, which will reward China, leading US political scientist warns In an exclusive interview, John Mearsheimer tells My Take the war will drag on, and any ceasefire will at best lead to ‘a cold peace’ with significant gains for Russia .

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Tuesday, July 11, 2023

11: Google DeepMind



Why the Early Success of Threads May Crash Into Reality Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta’s might to push Threads to a fast start — but that may only work up to a point. ......... The year was 2011 and Google had just rolled out a social network called Google+, which was aimed as its “Facebook killer.” Google thrust the new site in front of many of its users who relied on its search and other products, expanding Google+ to more than 90 million users within the first year. .......... But by 2018, Google+ was relegated to the ash heap of history. .......... dislodge Twitter and make Threads the prime app for real-time, public conversations. ......... the numbers that Threads racked up “objectively impressive and unprecedented.” .......... Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, has appeared agitated by Threads’ momentum. With 100 million people, Threads is quickly surging toward some of Twitter’s last public user numbers. Twitter disclosed it had 237.8 million daily users in July 2022, four months before Mr. Musk bought the company and took it private. ......... On Sunday, Mr. Musk called Mr. Zuckerberg a “cuck” on Twitter. Then he challenged Mr. Zuckerberg to a contest to measure a specific body part and compare whose was larger, alongside an emoji of a ruler. Mr. Zuckerberg has not responded. ............ (Before Threads was announced, Mr. Musk separately dared Mr. Zuckerberg to fight a “cage match.”) ......... What Mr. Musk lacks at Twitter, Mr. Zuckerberg has in abundance at Meta: enormous audiences. More than three billion users regularly visit Mr. Zuckerberg’s constellation of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. .......... Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in a Threads post on Monday that there was a running list of new features to add to the new app that people have requested. “They say, ‘make it work, make it great, make it grow,’” he wrote, adding, “I promise we will make this thing great.” ............ Some saw Google+ as something that was forced on them while they were just trying to gain access to their Gmail. .......... Google+ mainly defined itself by “what it wasn’t — i.e. Facebook.” ........... Of course Mr. Zuckerberg could pull a Bill Gates with Threads. Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft, built his empire on Windows, the operating system that powered a generation of personal computers — and then successfully used that scale to crush competitors. ............. Once Windows dominated PCs, Mr. Gates famously bundled other products with the software for free. When he did that in 1995 by packaging the web browser Internet Explorer with Windows, Internet Explorer soon turned into the default browser on millions of computers, overtaking the then-dominant browser, Netscape, in just four years. .

A.I. Could Solve Some of Humanity’s Hardest Problems. It Already Has. Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of DeepMind, discusses how A.I. systems can accelerate scientific research. .

Why I Regret Debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo on why it’s a bad idea to debate conspiracy theorists. .

Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Know Whether He’s Coming or Going

The Flawed Moral Logic of Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine

The Next Battle Over Colorblindness Has Begun

The Tale of Two Invasions: What the Last Attack on Jenin Tells Us About Israel Now

Desperate to Debate: Why a G.O.P. Candidate Is Offering $20 for $1 Donations The candidate, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, is one of several Republican presidential candidates going to great lengths to reach a crucial threshold to qualify for the first primary debate. ..... the Republican front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, and his top rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. .

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11: ChatGPT's Code Interpreter



. What to Know About ChatGPT’s New Code Interpreter Feature Graphs, maps and data analyses? Now ChatGPT can do even more. ........ has wowed the world in recent months with the text it can generate. Now the chatbot is delighting users anew by creating charts, maps and turning images into videos. ............ Code interpreter is a new feature that allows ChatGPT to analyze data, create charts, solve math problems and edit files, among other uses. It also supports uploading and downloading files, which was not possible in ChatGPT before. .............. Code interpreter became available last Thursday to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, a service that costs $20 a month. ...............

The most common use of code interpreter is data analysis.

.............. With a prompt like “tell me what is interesting about the data,” ChatGPT can look through a user’s data, such as financial, health or location information, and produce insights about them. .......... Some people have also used code interpreter to convert the formats of files, such as turning images into videos or PDF documents into pictures. .

‘Several Things Have Shocked Me’: An Ex-Insider on Business in China Desmond Shum built a multibillion-dollar empire in the boom times, and says the economy is in far worse shape than outsiders realize. ........ Mr. Shum will testify next week in Congress about the challenges for U.S. businesses operating in China. .......... the outside world underestimates how badly the Chinese economy is deteriorating .......... People talk about “deglobalization,” but the proper term is “reglobalization minus China.” You won’t have one country replacing China, but operations are spreading to Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and elsewhere. Look at how many Taiwanese manufacturers are moving into Mexico on a large scale. And then you have friendshoring and nearshoring in Europe. .

The Twitter Watch Party Is Over Ten years after “Sharknado” spun Twitter and TV together, the online water cooler is running dry. ......... There were, of course, many Twitters existing in parallel: Politics Twitter, Sports Twitter, Black Twitter, Weird Twitter. But Twitter and TV went together like extreme weather and marine predators. You might tweet after reading a book or going to a movie. Twitter especially fit the immediate, real-time experience of watching a TV show as it aired. ........... From its beginning, TV has been both an isolating medium — you in your living room with your stories — and a social one. When the first sets were rolled out as curiosities in the 1940s, spectators gathered in bars to watch boxing matches. The Super Bowl, the biggest TV show of the year, became a secular holiday gathering that rivals Christmas. And before the work-from-home era, networks were conscious of the “water-cooler effect” in offices. ............ Twitter made the watch party global. It invited comments and conversation from fans and critics; series creators logged on to engage, and sometimes fight, with the audience. It created a feedback loop for shows to respond to or push against. ................ TV Twitter wasn’t entirely about escapism. It promoted conversations, for instance, about how “Thrones” used and misused sexual violence. It lent itself to communal deconstruction of debates and election nights the same way it did to “American Idol.” ............ Social media is only as virtuous as the people using it. With Donald J. Trump in office, using Twitter as a cattle prod to shock the country to attention multiple times a day — often over cultural topics like N.F.L. protests or “Roseanne” — there was a sense that every day on the site was a battle. That attitude was reflected in users who saw themselves as soldiers, eternally fighting to shift the front lines of the discourse an inch or two in the correct direction. ............ Then came Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive and Twitter power user who paid $44 billion in 2022 for the dubious honor of becoming poster-in-chief. He ran the site haphazardly; there were new charges and limits and outages, as well as the restoration of tweeters banned for abuse and disinformation. ................ and I’ve scarcely posted since last fall — less out of business or political objections than from hating the way the site made me feel like an exposed nerve. .......... TV itself has changed since 2006. Streaming made it less live and simultaneous ........ Outside live news and sports, the conversation around TV is functionally more like that around film and books. .......... The social-media universe is different too. The energy has shifted to platforms like TikTok that divide the user base between creators and commenters, makers and consumers, instead of promoting conversations. Even the ventures looking to replace Twitter may not reproduce it, and they may not want to. ....... I was a heavy Twitter user for over a decade. I loved it until I didn’t. I made connections, grew a following, floated ideas, had fun. But it also became a second, often angry, voice inside my head. ............... the appeal of bringing the entire world into one big group chat might be over. This is the way a phenomenon ends — not with a sharknado but a whimper. .



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Wisdom Talk From Justin Welsh

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Sunday, July 09, 2023

9: Pakistan

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9: Bees



Bees Are Astonishingly Good at Making Decisions—and This Computer Model Explains How That’s Possible The only other animals known to beat the speed-accuracy tradeoff are humans and primates. ...... How then can a bee, with its tiny yet remarkable brain, be performing on a par with primates? ....... Our model is plausible for how bees are such effective and fast decision makers. What’s more, it gives us a template for how we might build systems—such as autonomous robots for exploration or mining—with these features. .

All Animal Intelligence Was Shaped by Just Five Leaps in Brain Evolution . Insects have recurrent brains. The brilliance of bees—their ability to quickly learn different types of art, to recognize abstract concepts, and to navigate to goal locations—is all enabled by their recurrent brains......... These networks of recurrent systems are why birds are so good at learning complex sequences in songs; why birds, rats, and dogs are great at learning what, where, and when things happen; and why monkeys can learn new ways to manipulate objects to solve problems and make rudimentary tools. ......... The human brain is reflective, and this capability has enabled our imagination, our thought processes, and our rich mental lives. It also opened the door for the use of symbolic language, which expanded our minds even further as it helped us communicate and coordinate so efficiently with each other. ....... Our story describes five fundamentally different types of brain. One is not better than another, each is just different. ......... We might like to claim we are the smartest animal, and depending how you measure it, perhaps we are. But a bee can do things a human simply cannot. .......... Our intelligence demands an extended childhood, in which we can’t even walk for a year; a bee is fully functional from the moment its wings dry as it emerges from its cell. A bee can learn to navigate for kilometers around its hive with less than 20 minutes of flight time; I still get lost walking home from the train. ....... And a jellyfish or a worm might not be Einstein, but they can tolerate a level of damage that would kill or paralyze a mammal. ....... Different types of brains suit animals to different lifestyles, and support different types of animal minds. These five transitions help us make sense of our place among the stunning diversity of animal intelligences.

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9: India

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9: Putin



How Would Harvard Talk About My Kids? in order to maintain a vaguely defined notion of “diversity,” the schools’ admissions officials bumped up the chances primarily of Black and Hispanic applicants by undermining opportunities of another historically disadvantaged racial group — Asian Americans........ elite colleges’ affirmative action programs seemed “designed for a racially binary America” and “never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.” He argues that much of the public debate about the court’s decision seems stuck in that binary, too. ........ The Asian category could include applicants whose ancestors hailed from places as different as China, India, South Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Japan. An applicant who identifies as Hispanic could be a white person whose family came from Madrid, a Cuban immigrant from Miami or a person of Guatemalan Mayan descent. ............ Where do these categories come from? Gorsuch puts it pithily: “Bureaucrats.” ......... the records suggests that Harvard also treated racial categories quite like stereotypes: Applicants of Asian descent were more likely than members of other racial categories to be labeled “standard strong,” meaning that admissions personnel determined they were academically qualified but otherwise unremarkable. ........... Harvard’s use of such subjective criteria to curb the number of Asian students admitted smacked of its efforts a century ago to keep out Jewish applicants it deemed unworthy of its “character and fitness” standards. ........... affirmative action mattered most for only a small group of the most selective colleges ......... “The ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education”

Making Them Laugh, and Swoon A year ago, Matt Rife was just another struggling road comedian. Then he blew up on TikTok. ....... Buoyed by his online success, Mr. Rife sold 600,000 tickets for his upcoming tour in 48 hours......... “Last July, I was in Montreal for a festival I was not invited to,” he said. “I had to fly myself out, put myself up for no pay. I was sitting there at dinner with my friend and my manager. I’m about to post this video of crowd work. I was watching it, and I was like, This is so stupid. Why am I even doing this?” ......... During the exchange, Mr. Rife learned that the woman’s ex was an emergency room worker. “Oh, I’m sorry — you broke up with a hero?” he said, to roars of laughter. Despite his reservations, Mr. Rife posted the two-and-a-half-minute video on TikTok, which he had joined a few months earlier. He titled the clip “The Lazy Hero.” ....... “That video did 20 million views in two or three days,” he said. “It became this massive chain reaction and an explosion of an audience. From then on, every video I posted went viral.” ......... Over the next few months, Mr. Rife, 27, racked up 15.6 million TikTok followers. The online success allowed him to leap ahead of his fellow club comics, making him a significant draw. ........ When he announced his “ProbleMATTic World Tour” last month, he sold out 260 dates in North America, Europe and Australia in 48 hours. The flurry of sales — 600,000 tickets in all, each ranging between about $50 to $95, according to Live Nation — crashed the Ticketmaster website. Some resale tickets cost more than $500. .......... Although Mr. Rife has developed an easy stage manner, thanks to the countless hours he has spent at the mic, his popularity may have as much to do with his cheekbones as his comedic chops. ....... Mr. Rife is something rare in the comedy world: a heartthrob. ........ “This time last year, I couldn’t sell out one show in a town,” Mr. Rife said. “It’s still so new and exciting that I’m, like, ‘OK, you need to do everything.’” ......... his fondness for smaller markets. “They’re so nice and they’re so there for the show.” .......... Mr. Rife said his sex appeal, like his career surge, is relatively new. He described himself as a late bloomer and, indeed, photos from a few years ago show a gangly-looking youth whose strong jaw, high cheekbones and Jagger-esque lips had yet to coalesce into a pleasing whole. ......... “I was so ugly for so long,” Mr. Rife said on his “Only Fans” special. As a result, he continued, “I spent the first 22 years of my life building a personality. For what? You think I need to be funny now?” ............ Mr. Rife missed his junior and senior proms — he was on the road, doing gigs. Then came a decade of grinding. ........... and riffed on how, despite his online fame, he hates social media. ............. “It’s garbage, dude,” he said. “I’m canceled three times a week, bro.”

@matt_rife Not all heros are overachievers. #comedy #standup #standupcomedy #funny #crowdwork #improv #breakup #relationship #americanairlines ♬ original sound - Matt Rife
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