"It was Fan Hui’s first major tournament after his loss to AlphaGo, and at the outset he felt uncertain. “Everything was broken,” he told me. But he went on to win all his games. At the final awards ceremony, while accepting his trophy, he bent back and let out a victory roar. He was flouting the usual decorum of Go tournaments, but the crowd rose to its feet anyway, applauding the man who had lost to the machine." New Yorker
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This is pretty great. From about 40s in, the big white dude starts getting thrown about like a rag doll
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Great post title: Make Buses Dangerous
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Very useful piece. I don't think school independence is in itself a bad policy. I think it would make sense, for instance, to have a school be controlled by a board consisting of representatives from teachers, students and parents (as opposed to a local authority). But the actual academy system being constructed doesn't in any way resemble this, and is actually a means for private interests to extract money from the public schooling system.
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This is coming from an (acknowledged) very privileged perspective, but has some good insights into why "love your work" ideology has become so entrenched amongst the professional classes at least.
"Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group’s distinguishing vices as virtues."
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"The study... found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography... The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige." NY Times
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Well this is an extremely worrying turn of events. Very obviously a targeted attempt to harass and gather intelligence on a part of the political opposition, as opposed to a simple robbery.
“We arrived to find the security guard handcuffed to the railing. He said that two men had entered the premises and had taken him to the basement. From there he made a phone call and white combi with four people, all of them well dressed and one of them with a shotgun, arrived. Three of them went upstairs and unlocked the security gate to our offices. A woman had a notebook and knew exactly what they wanted. They then received another call, took documents and the computers and they left,”
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Great profile piece on Jacobin Magazine and its editorial staff and policies
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"[Gentrification] brings newcomers to neighbourhoods with nonwhite populations, sometimes with atrocious consequences. Local newspaper The East Bay Express recently reported that in Oakland, recently arrived white people sometimes regard “people of color who are walking, driving, hanging out, or living in the neighborhood” as “criminal suspects.” ... What’s clear in the case of Nieto’s death is that a series of white men perceived him as more dangerous than he was and that he died of it." Guardian
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Wow, the level of frankness here...
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”"
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"I continue to believe that the political path of reconciliation forged by Nelson Mandela and the ANC was appropriate for the time: It was built on a commitment to peace, which was necessary during turbulent transition. As it came to power, the ANC exercised the gracious restraint that is the preserve of the victorious. But in a plural democracy such as ours, one where so much time and energy has been put into forgiveness, the voices of the hurt and the outraged have a place too." Guardian
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