Link Roundup #10

Texas’ partnership with Turning Point marks the latest attempt by Republican officials to push education further to the right, after years of them accusing public schools of indoctrinating students with left-leaning beliefs about race and gender. The state, for example, has passed laws requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms — an effort currently facing legal challenges — and imposing restrictions on how educators teach America’s history of slavery and racism.

A draft version of the report obtained by News4 describes members of the department as repeatedly downgrading and misclassifying crimes amid pressure to show progress. MPD’s “official crime statistical reporting mechanism is likely unreliable and inaccurate due to misclassifications, errors, and/or purposefully downgraded classifications and reclassifications. A significant number of MPD reports are misclassified,” the draft report says

The vote represents a watershed moment in the national fight over transgender rights, transforming what has largely been a state-level effort to ban gender-affirming care for minors into a federal mandate with sweeping implications for medical practice, family autonomy, and constitutional law. Democrats in the Senate are expected to reject the measure and attempt to block or delay its passage.

“No Men in Women’s Bathrooms” was printed on yard signs, repeated in radio spots, and in numerous TV ads. In one, former Houston Astros star Lance Berkman, who is related by marriage to Tucker Carlson, referenced his wife and four daughters, before claiming Proposition 1 “would allow troubled men to enter women’s public bathrooms” and “put them in harm’s way.” In another, a young girl was followed by a man into a restroom stall behind text reading “any man any time” and “registered sex offenders.” The Investigative Reporting Workshop found no evidence of crimes against women in restrooms by men posing as transgender as the result of anti-discrimination policies in the last ten years. One case referenced by conservative activists involved a male student in a skirt sexually assaulting a female student in the girls bathroom of a Virginia high school in 2021, though the assault occurred before a policy allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice was put in place.
The progressive research group MediaMatters contacted experts in a dozen states with such policies, and later school systems, and found no instances of sexual assault. It did find a case of supposed harassment that was debunked. PolitiFact, run by the Poynter Institute, similarly said it could find no instances of criminals convicted of using transgender protections as a cover in the U.S.

Using a metabolic engineering technique called growth coupling, the scientists created a mutation that makes Pseudomonasputida bacteria—a commonly used industrial model strain—unable to survive unless they produce xanthommatin. That’s because the engineered bacteria require a one-carbon molecule called formic acid, a by-product of xanthommatin synthesis.

It might not have been at the same level as pardoning Thanksgiving turkeys, or January 6 US capitol attack participants – but the mayor of Miami-Dade had her own Donald Trump moment on Tuesday in ritually sparing the life of a pig named Six Seven.

Part of the video’s pull might be the sense that it seems to depict a flicker of actual reality shining through the “nice” facade of lifestyle influencer posting. Are we seeing something “real” between the cuts? This sense of reality might come from the fact that we seem to bear witness to more than we’re meant to, more than they themselves saw while editing the video. It comes, in part, from the sense that we’re hovering over mistakes and raw humanity, rather than carefully photographed images of buff men in tight tank tops moving house plants.

Kumar tells WIRED that Facebook Dating will soon launch Vibe Check, a “kind of fun, kind of spicy” weekly questionnaire that pairs people based on identical responses. The feature is being tested but is expected to roll out in December. Vibe Check is part of Kumar’s mission to “find more meaningful and interesting ways” for compatibility. This year the platform also launched Meet Cute, an AI-selected recommendation of someone that is personalized to your interests; it’s similar to Standouts on Hinge, except Hinge requires users to buy “roses” to show interest if they are sending more than one a week.

Lappegård, the sociologist in Oslo, agreed and told me there’s been a general lack of interest in studying men among demographers in her field. “I’ve been screaming that we need more research about men for the last 20 years,” she told me. “If we want to really understand what’s going on with women then we not only have to compare them with men, but also men have their own independent voice in this.” This knowledge gap exists partly because many scholars have seen the study of men and masculinity as inherently conservative — a pretext to rolling back women’s rights or centering men’s wounded feelings over women’s material concerns. But, if we want to understand why men’s attitudes toward sharing domestic work have stagnated even as women’s expectations have shifted, then we’ll need to delve deeper into questions about how men see their place in the world. And if we want to ultimately move towards more equality and connection, then the question of what masculinity can and should be isn’t one we can avoid.

“There is a long tradition of Black men taking symbols of elite spaces and repurposing them, sometimes just to be humorous, but sometimes [to express] identity and sometimes for defiance,” said Jones, 28, who grew up in Austin and studied sociology at Cornell University. “We take something that wasn’t meant for us, and we make it ours, and we make it even more relevant and cool.”

The scale of Clair Obscur’s victory is unprecedented, and not fully encapsulated by the factoid that it beat The Last of Us Part 2’s previous record of seven wins by two. Its dominance across the categories was so crushing that no other game scored more than a single win, and Nintendo was the only publisher other than Kepler to take home multiple awards (it won two). Sony, the most successful publisher in Game Awards history, which had led the table with 19 nominations, went home empty-handed — unless you count the Best Adaptation win for season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us. So did superstar director Hideo Kojima, whose Death Stranding 2 had seven nominations.

That a company with no idea what it’s doing in games would now own even more games feels like a recipe for disaster. If Netflix is actively interested in WB's game offerings at all, it could want them for the same reason WB wanted them–for the tie-ins– but it’s already shown itself to be unable to handle the opportunities it currently has in that space. Not that WB is a model of success here either; it closed three studios back in February, including one working on a Wonder Woman game. At both Netflix and WB, the men in suits seem to get as far as “people like video games, and also movies and TV” and then have no idea what to do next, costing games workers their jobs in the process.

But as a teacher, Mr. Polk must use StudySync, which centers on excerpts. Many colleagues do not believe students will read whole books, he said, though he noted his own experience had not borne that out.

He still assigns several longer works each year, and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns,” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just a matter of setting those expectations.”

It wasn’t until a famous friend (Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer H.E.R.) nudged Caton to audition for a movie that called for a musical prodigy with deep reverence for the blues that he considered the idea. But he had no idea the world of opportunity it’d lead to. For his first acting gig, Caton had the privilege of sharing the screen with seasoned vets like Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku and Jack O’Connell. Still, even as a newcomer, the budding star emerged as, perhaps, the biggest standout of Coogler’s film, for both his impressive acting chops and musical contributions — the original songs “I Lied to You” (accompanied by that unforgettable juke joint montage) and “Last Time (I Seen the Sun),” the latter of which he also co-wrote.

It’s not that the flashback episodes themselves are bad. Like all stand-alone episodes, some are abysmal, some mediocre, and some, like in The Last of Us and The Crown, are the best parts of a whole series. But when the entire season is built around a late-stage reveal that transforms one-dimensional characters into nuanced people or clarifies which specific trauma kicked off all the action, the whole show is made worse because of it. Characters can be three-dimensional from the start. Traumas, buried or otherwise, can be meaningful backstories without getting put up high on a pedestal of narrative significance.

She added that she’s seen shops “lose their business because of seasons.” Banks having beef with the concept of seasons is not a celebrity feud I could have ever predicted, but that’s why Tyra has endured as long as she has: She keeps you guessing. She also addressed the viral videos of her “Santa SMiZE” performance at that Sydney gay bar, noting that it was all part of her master plan. “People were like, ‘Tyra has lost her mind.’ And finally, we presented the world with this video to show: Tyra is crazy, but she ain’t insane.” I would say the evidence, after a night of hot ice cream and “Santa SMiZE,” was inconclusive.

Dupe enthusiasts lean on the same rhetoric that the internet is built on: that wider accessibility is a democratizing force. But unlike democratizing the media industry through citizen journalism, or learning video editing via YouTube tutorials, a dupe begins by picking up an existing work or idea. A dupe is valuable precisely because of the value of the original, and without it, the dupe is just another tube of lip gloss. For some consumers, dupes are proof that the original is overpriced and taking advantage of the consumer. If a company can make a dupe that’s $10 less, the originator must be ripping us off, the thinking goes; the creative work of making something new in the first place is worthless, reduced to a game of who can do it cheaper.

A 2023 study by energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie commissioned by The New York Times found that Texans’ electric bills had risen nearly 5%, or $1.8 billion per year, due to the increase in demand on the state power grid created by crypto mines. Residents living near crypto mines have also complained that the amount of job creation promised by the facilities has not materialized and the noise of their operation is a nuisance.