"At the end of the event, Rona Ramon, Ilan's widow, spoke last. Steeling her emotions with grace and clarity, she spoke elegantly and briefly. She thanked all for coming. And then she talked of her husband, and the flight of the lost shuttle. "Our mission in space is not over" she told the hushed audience. "He was the first Israeli in space -- that means there will be more."
Keith's note: This was a very sad day. I lost track of number of the TV interviews I did. At one point I was doing 2 simultaneously while standing on top of a milk crate on the sidewalk outside of NASA HQ. No one knew anything other than the fact that the crew was gone. So what was I supposed to say? I managed to make it through the first 24 hours before I finally teared up and almost lost it during a CTV interview when I started to think of all my friends at NASA who had to deal with this loss on a personal level. Six months later on Devon Island a bunch of space people tried to encapsulate that day's grief into something that would last for a long time.
"Our task was a somewhat solemn one. We were here to erect a memorial to Columbia astronaut Michael Anderson. Two memorials have already been erected by members of the HMP Team. The memorials take the form of an inukshuk, a stone sculpture in rough human form used by the Inuit to mark territory. These stone structures serve as reference points for those who traverse this desolate place. As we establish these memorial inukshuks, we do so for the very same reason the Inuit do: to aid in future exploration - in this case, of Devon Island. As such, these memorials will show the way for future explorers."
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (L), D-MI, high-fives US Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (C), D-WA, with US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-MN, as they speak to supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders at a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, on January 31, 2020.
JIM WATSON/Getty Images
Rep. Rashida Tlaib did not hesitate to boo when Hillary Clinton was mentioned during a campaign event for Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa. Near the end of a panel discussion Friday night alongside Reps. Ilhan Oman and Pramila Jayapal, the moderator, activist Dionna Langford, mentioned Clinton and her recent claim that “nobody likes” Sanders. That led to boos from the audience before Langford cut them off: “We’re not gonna boo, we’re not gonna boo. We’re classy here.”
Tlaib made clear she did not agree with Langford’s plea to the audience. “I’ll boo,” she said. “Boo.” Tlaib laughed and looked at her fellow lawmakers. “You all know I can’t be quiet,” the Michigan lawamker said with a laugh. “No, we’re gonna boo.” Tlaib then said that history would prove them right: “The haters will shut up on Monday when we win.”
On Saturday morning, Tlaib issued a statement in which she said that she allowed her “disappointment with Secretary Clinton’s latest comments about Senator Sanders and his supporters get the best of me.” Tlaib emphasized she will work to “not react in the same way” in the future while vowing to do everything possible to unify the party and beat President Donald Trump in 2020.
The comments put on center stage how the tensions from the 2016 presidential campaign appear to be spilling over into the 2020 Democratic contest. Earlier this month Clinton was asked whether she stood by earlier comments she made about Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” When the Hollywood Reporter asked Clinton whether “that assessment” still stands, Clinton did not hesitate. “Yes, it does,” she said. Clinton once again criticized Sanders in an interview Friday, accusing the senator of not doing enough to unify Democrats after the primary. “All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with his campaign were urging people to vote third party, urging people not to vote,” she said in an interview with the podcast Your Primary Playlist. “It had an impact.”
Reactions to Tlaib’s comments were decidedly mixed on social media, with some praising the lawmaker for speaking her mind and claiming there was a double standard among those who praised Clinton for speaking honestly about Sanders while criticizing Tlaib. Others, however, said Tlaib was only helping to divide the Democrats and taking the focus away from Republicans by criticizing someone who has defended her in the past.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Did you detect a ripple in the space-time continuum? Oh wait, that was just the Future Tense newsletter coming back to bring our “citizen’s guide to the future.” In the months since we hit pause on the newsletter, we published Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow, the first anthology of our fiction, and continued to ask you, dear reader, to consider how emerging technologies are transforming the way we live. Now that we’re back, we’ll be sending out the newsletter on Saturdays, every other week.
Speaking of fiction: Last Saturday, we published our latest short story, “The Truth Is All There Is,” by Emily Parker. Blockchain cheerleaders say that the technology can revolutionize everything from spotting fake news to tuna conservation (seriously—check out this long list Future Tense published a while back). But Parker’s story, about a future in which the blockchain provides perfect transparency, shows the folly here. In the response essay, blockchain expert Jill Carlson writes, “We can record false claims on a blockchain. We can omit data. Suddenly, that source of truth does not appear so honest.”
Josephine Wolff is an assistant professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a fellow at New America.
Margaret: What’s the area of data vulnerability we don’t talk about enough? All the different forms online extortion can take —not just ransomware but also using bits of information about people (e.g., stolen passwords or personal files/photos) to make online extortion demands and all the possible ways that can be used to compromise individuals.
What will the future of elections look like for politicians that have been online their entire lives? We’ll get much more accustomed to seeing embarrassing types of personal information coming out around the time of elections, and I think we’ll see more people taking into consideration what they have online.
Should we all get a backup clamshell or other analog backup to the cloud? Yes, I think even a USB drive is a good idea for things that are special to you to have somewhere unplugged.
Besides The Crown, which is sorely lacking in sci-fi, my latest Netflix binge has been Ad Vitam, a fascinating French show about the downside of life extension. Thanks to a process called regeneration, people can live in perpetual health, looking like they’re in their 30s. But out of fear of overpopulation, the country begins pondering restrictions on child-bearing. Meanwhile, young people–considered minors until they’re 30–are angry at a world that refuses to make space for them. (They can’t even drink or do drugs to kill time, because it would mess up their future regeneration.) Despite the French angst, a sinister conspiracy, and the dystopian premise, it doesn’t feel as joyless or didactic as Black Mirror.—Torie Bosch, Future Tense editor
Upcoming Future Tense Events
If you’re in Washington, join us on Feb. 5 for “Kickstarting the Digital Heartland,” a lunchtime discussion of how to bridge the digital divide in America. And if you can’t make it in person, we’ll have a livestream. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website, where you can also watch the event from afar.
We’ll see you again in two weeks!
—Margaret from Future Tense
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Justin Hutchinson/the Image Bank/Getty Images Plus.
On a recent episode of How To!, Andy, a listener in Austin, Texas, is torn about moving out of state to follow his girlfriend, Cassie, to vet school. Charles Duhigg brings in Rachel Hollis, author of Girl, Wash Your Face, and her husband, Dave, to advise on putting your partner first; Dave gave up his lucrative job at Disney to support Rachel’s career. This transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Charles Duhigg: Let’s say you move to another state and you’re forecasting a year into the future after the move. What’s the worst-case scenario that you think happens?
Andy: Well, as it is now, Cassie and I live together, but I have friends and band practice and work, so I have a lot of buffers between us. So we do spend a lot of time together, but I wouldn’t say it’s as much time as we would be spending if we were living together in another state and I had to get my new friends and work and stuff together. We’re going to be spending a hell of a lot of time together. I’m afraid that we’re going to drive each other nuts.
Rachel Hollis: Yeah, and you probably will.
Charles: This is something that Rachel and Dave have thought about a lot because they themselves recently moved, and Rachel wanted to make sure that she had other social options. That she knew where she was going to make new friends before they arrived.
Rachel: I really, through social media, got dialed into the community before I ever came here. So I knew where I was going to go to the gym. Basically, the things that are valuable to me, I had established that through hashtags. I literally just started following hashtags, and I knew what I was going to do. I set it up so that we hit the ground running instead of the culture shock of “Oh, God, we’re here, now what?”
Charles: Moving to a new place, particularly when you’re moving there for another person, can be huge and scary, and if you’re not careful, it can cause resentment. So you have to do some work ahead of time. You have to do some research in advance and get to know the lay of the land so that you know that you’re making this move, not just for someone else, but for you. You have to figure out why you want this, why you should be excited, beyond just supporting your partner.
Dave Hollis: If you feel like you have to do this or that you do this out of an obligation or out of wanting to show loyalty, but not truly because of it being a thing that you feel driven to do, you will feel like it was being foisted upon you, a thing that you did not choose, and then you will not choose it.
Charles: Let’s say you decide to move with Cassie, and it’s a year in the future and things are going well with the relationship. You guys are together, you’re driving each other a little bit crazy, because you’re in a new place, you’re hanging out all the time, but she’s the same basic person that she is today. And let’s say nothing else works out. You try and get your woodworking business off the ground, and then you’re finding that you can only get worse jobs then you got in Austin. You want to find a new band, and you just don’t click with anyone, and you’re in a place that’s cold and there’s no good breweries around.
Put yourself in that head space. Do you feel like you still made the right choice, or do you think that it might be a mistake?
Andy: I don’t know. I love Cassie a lot, and so I’d be willing to put up with a situation like that for an extended period of time. But yeah, I feel like I would probably feel like it was a bad decision in the long run.
Rachel: But then you could just move back.
"We commit to working things out in real time instead of letting thingsfester."— Rachel Hollis
Andy: Yeah, that’s true. And we’ve talked about doing the long-distance thing. It was her idea, her moving and me staying here. And I feel like it would work, but I don’t know for how long.
Rachel: Yeah. I think everybody tends to think when they’re trying to make a big decision that this is the end-all be-all. That they have to know the answer to the rest of their life right now. And the reality is you could choose to do this thing, and one or both of you could be like, “Well, holy crap, that didn’t work.” And then you would make another choice. And if that doesn’t work, then you make another choice. Nothing that you are going to choose is it forever.
Charles: And what studies show is that over time, our happiness tends to be shaped much more by those small, secondary choices, the adjustment choices we make, than by the big decision that when you confront it seems so important at the time.
Rachel: Dave always says, “People only get upset when they’re surprised.” So if she thinks, We’re getting engaged within the first three months because we’re moving to a new city together, and you think, This next 18 months is going to be the real test on whether or not this is it forever, you’re misaligned. And you’re both going to be frustrated.
Charles: Dave, before you left your job or before you moved, did you sit down and say, “OK, this is how roles and responsibilities and how we are together changes?”
Dave: Yeah.
Rachel: Oh, yeah. We had never worked together before, so just one thing that we committed to, more hardcore than ever, was we are going to communicate. If something feels weird, no more keeping it to yourself.
Dave: Radical candor.
Rachel: Radical candor. You have to tell each other. We commit to working things out in real time instead of letting things fester, because the question of taking a back seat to your wife’s career, your girlfriend’s career? There’s no back seat. This is a two-seater car. There’s no back seat, because I don’t know anybody in a relationship who is successful without the support of their partner.
In any romantic relationship, there are going to be seasons. And maybe this is a season right now where you’re showing out for her because this is her dream and you want to love on her and you want to be in partnership with this woman. And when she gets through school, and she has all that vet money, maybe that’s the season you’re building your small business. This is what partnership looks like. I don’t believe in a leader. I believe that partnership is two people choosing to do life together, and sometimes you’re the captain, sometimes you’re the navigator, sometimes you’re the hype squad. It just looks like different things at different times.
To listen to the entire episode, click the player below or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2u9yedx
via IFTTT
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
Izabella Kaminska, editor of FT Alphaville, joins the Slate Money hosts from London to discuss Brexit Day, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and LIBOR (London InterBank Offered Rate).
Plus: An extra-long Brexit segment.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3aUUZCu
via IFTTT
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Barbara McQuade, professor of law at the University of Michigan and former U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, to explore the ramifications of the last two weeks in the Senate.
Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the Slave Trade Act of 1788.
Library of Congress
In 2015, when Jamelle Bouie and I started thinking of putting together a podcast series on the history of American slavery, it had been one year since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri; two years since Black Lives Matter hashtags began appearing across social media platforms; and three years since Trayvon Martin died in Florida. Black history felt vital, present, everywhere. So we embarked on telling the story of American slavery and its historical injustice by looking at the lives of nine enslaved people, then exploring how the institution came to shape our country’s politics, economy, and culture.
Putting together this series, I often felt cognitive dissonance as I swung between sorrow brought on by immersion in this history of human cruelty and suffering, and appreciation of the many richly researched and well-argued books on the topic that have come out in the past few decades. And although we got some pushback from the usual suspects deploying the usual tired arguments, the otherwise positive response to the podcast reassured me that Bouie and I managed to convey something of the depth of the history we encountered during our research. After all our agonized decisions about what to include and what must, for the sake of time, be glossed over, I felt satisfied that we got something basic across: The history of slavery is complex, it’s inextricably embedded in American history, and it matters.
Then, a year after we finished the series, Donald Trump was elected president, and the voices of the worst racists and history deniers in the country got a megaphone. It feels like every day, somebody with a big media presence or a presidential pardon says something deliberately ignorant about slavery, the Confederacy, or civil rights.
Last year, we marked 400 years since the first enslaved Africans came ashore at Jamestown in 1619. Two of our nation’s biggest newspapers have produced weighty packages on the continuing meaning of slavery in American life (Jamelle has an essay in that one!) and on the teaching of slavery in American schools. But these big efforts to bring the history of slavery into public conversation have met with renewed resistance. In the past few months, the 1619 Project has become the catalyst for a new debate that’s about historiography, on its face, but also about the very foundations of American society and culture.
To which I say only: Let’s keep flooding the zone. The history of slavery in the colonies that became the United States still shadows our everyday lives; as the 1619 Project argued, slavery is the backstory to every contemporary issue in American society—income inequality, housing, health care, culture, even climate justice. We reissue Slate’s History of American Slavery podcast now as a way of adding our own voices to the commemorative chorus, and insisting that this anniversary shouldn’t pass unremarked. We hope that you enjoy it.
Get More of the History of American Slavery Podcast
Slate Plus members get extended, ad-free versions of our podcasts—and much more. Sign up today and try it free for two weeks.
