So, I got up did this and that and then, as I often do, went looking in the NYTimes for something to excerpt for New Savanna. I saw a bunch of stuff. So I decided to post a bunch of quick hits on a variety of items. The idea is to indicate the scope of things by “sampling the space.”
A U.S. Attack on Iran Would Show the Limits of China’s Power
When China helped negotiate a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023, it hailed the breakthrough as a victory for Chinese diplomacy and a sign that America’s chief geopolitical rival had emerged as a major power broker in the Middle East.
But as President Trump openly ponders deploying American forces to join Israel in attacking Iran, the limits of China’s clout in the region are coming into focus.
China has much to lose from a runaway conflict. Half of the country’s oil imports move in tankers through the Strait of Hormuz on Iran’s southern coast. And Beijing has long counted on Tehran, its closest partner in the region, to push back against American influence.
Seeking Jobs and Purpose, Fired Federal Workers Form New Networks
When Scott Gagnon was fired from his government job earlier this year, he and his laid-off colleagues kept in touch to vent, comfort each other and share job opportunities. It quickly turned into an informal but crucial support group.
And they happened to be uniquely qualified for the task, having worked at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a relatively small agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.
“It was very familiar territory for us to rally around each other, knowing that we’re all going through this trauma, being separated from jobs that we all loved very much,” Mr. Gagnon, 49, the agency’s former New England director, said in an interview.
Their ad hoc network, which meets virtually every couple of weeks, mirrors the way hundreds of laid-off federal employees are dealing with the stress and pain of abruptly losing their livelihoods as part of President Trump and Elon Musk’s slash-and-cut-some-more approach to reshaping the federal work force and government programs.
The Universe’s Darkest Mysteries Are Coming Into Focus
To reach the top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers take a drive of two hours up a winding, bumpy road. The lush greenery at the mountain’s base slowly gives way to the browns and yellows of the desert. Eventually, telescopes rise in the distance, the sun glinting off their metal domes.
The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built. For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it.
From that survey, astronomers hope to learn about the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, the mysterious matter comprising much of the cosmos, and how the universe evolved into its current arrangement. Perhaps they will even uncover clues about its fate.
They will also use the telescope to home in on millions of transient objects, “faint things that go bang, explode or move in the night,” said Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis. That includes gorging black holes and collisions of dense, dead stars.
Studio Ghibli’s Majestic Sensibility Is Drawing Imitators
Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues at Studio Ghibli craft pictures that are so delicately drawn and convincingly textured that it seems as if we should be able to step right into them. Think of the bustling bathhouse of “Spirited Away” or the bucolic Japanese countryside of “My Neighbor Totoro.”
But as viewers, we are never able to actually enter these worlds of tender emotions, whimsical characters and, perhaps above all, vivid locations that set the imagination ablaze. Movies are made from flat 2-D images; they remain tantalizingly out of reach. [...]
Enter video games, which allow players to explore immersive 3-D environments and satisfy many fantasies: the sword-wielding savior, the slayer of fantastical beasts, the fleet-footed time traveler.
The influence of Studio Ghibli — which turned 40 this week — can be seen throughout the industry, notably in recent additions to the Legend of Zelda franchise. Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023) each offer pastoral experiences tinged with menace, similar to many Ghibli pictures; their cel-shaded graphics also evoke the studio’s exquisite painterly style. In Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda’s devoted knight Link moves between floating land masses that evoke those in “Castle in the Sky.”
Kids Are in Crisis. Could Chatbot Therapy Help?
Ashland, Ohio, is a small rural city where Akron Children’s Hospital has one of its 46 pediatric clinics. Last winter, I met Kristin Seveigny, the clinic’s mental-health therapist, in her office there. The hospital hired her two years earlier, at a time when the pandemic had exacerbated a nationwide crisis in adolescent mental health. [...] Among adolescents, one in five reports having unmet health care needs.
The situation in Ashland mirrors those trends. The practice conducts 6,000 wellness checkups a year, each lasting 15 to 40 minutes. [...] “In this area, a lot of counseling offices are not taking any patients, or there’s a six-month wait.”
That lack of availability was a big reason that Seveigny and Cunningham agreed to try out an unusual tool: a smartphone chatbot, designed to teach coping skills to adolescents during their wait for an appointment with a therapist. Patients needed a referral to download the app, called Woebot, on their phone. Once they did, it would periodically ask how they were feeling; patients could also start a conversation with it anytime. [...]
Unlike ChatGPT and other popular chatbot models, Woebot was not “generative A.I.,” that is, capable of generating unique responses by consulting the internet; all its messages were preapproved by psychologists to deliver, primarily, a type of treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy, in which patients learn to identify and reframe negative thoughts. Seveigny and Cunningham couldn’t see what their patients wrote to Woebot, but the data — for instance, the time of day when users logged in and for how long — was stripped of identifying details by a third party and sent to the app’s parent company, Woebot Health, for analysis. [...]
Later:
“Right now, there’s clearly an A.I. arms race to make bigger, smarter A.I. models,” says John Torous, director of the digital-psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “Safety will have to unfortunately catch up.”
This is especially concerning when it comes to therapy chatbots geared toward children, who are among those with the greatest need and — as digital natives — among those for whom app-based therapy is most likely to resonate. One solution has been to hire people to supervise multiple A.I.-led conversations at a time.
Under Pressure, Officials in Western India Move Against Abuse in Sugar Fields
Authorities in western India are taking steps to improve labor conditions for sugar cane cutters after a court ruling and an investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project highlighted serious abuses of workers.
Journalists revealed last year that women in the Indian state of Maharashtra were pushed to get unnecessary hysterectomies as a way to keep them working in sweltering sugar fields, unencumbered by menstruation or gynecological ailments. The sugar cane-cutting system also has used child labor, pushes young girls into marriage and locks families into debt bondage.
The sugar industry is overwhelmingly controlled by the state’s political leadership. And major Western brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsico have profited from the system. Government officials, regulators and companies have for years done little or nothing to address these abuses. Politicians say that changing the labor system would cut into sugar profits and make it impossible for factories to compete.
In Harlem, a Juneteenth Celebration Revels in the Rhythms of Jazz
The sound of horns and percussion permeated Harlem, causing neighbors to poke their heads out of windows to listen to the colorful sounds of jazz.
It was Thursday night — Juneteenth — and the sun was shining after a brief downpour. The Big Band Jubilee, an annual live music celebration, had been delayed for a bit by the weather. But now it was in full swing, and musicians and dancers had taken to the streets.
Ava Johnson, 62, rocked to the rhythm of the music next to her sister, Peggy Salano, and a sea of people. Before the event, Mrs. Johnson had stood in the rain under a covering for an hour, anticipating a night of jazz in a historic Manhattan neighborhood.
“This is where it all started,” Mrs. Johnson said. “This is where our ancestors Dizzy, Louis, Ella and all of them, I’m sure, walked through this neighborhood and played their music. So it’s like coming back home to be here and to celebrate our history on this day.”
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