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Cocaine Bear review: A B-movie about a drug-crazed bear
In 1985, a US drug dealer threw 40 packages of cocaine out of a small private plane and down into the Tennessee/Georgia forest below. One of those packages was eaten by a black bear, which died of an overdose soon afterwards. If that weren't enough of an indignity, the bear was stuffed and put on display in the Kentucky For Kentucky Fun Mall, which sounds like something Nicole Kidman's character planned to do in the first Paddington film. It's a tawdry tale of humanity's selfish mistreatment of the natural world, but you can see how it might be the basis of a very different type of story: a raucous action comedy about an enormous fanged beast going on a drug-crazed rampage through a national park. And that's what Cocaine Bear is – or what it tries to be, anyway. Directed by Elizabeth Banks and written by Jimmy Warden, the film opens by introducing the dealer (Matthew Rhys), who is flying high in more ways than one. It isn't entirely clear why he is getting rid of duffel bags whose contents are worth millions of dollars apiece, but it's a rollicking sequence with a hilariously nasty twist ending. Then there's a scene in Georgia's Chattahoochee National Park – an area called Blood Mountain, ominously – featuring a happily engaged pair of European hikers. "We have such good luck in nature," coos one of them when she spots a Baloo lookalike in the distance. But she and her fiancé soon notice that the bear is "demented", and they try desperately to make sense of the ursine code of conduct: "If it's black, fight back. If it's brown, lay down." Continued here |
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Women's rights exist only on paper in Nigeria: Five core issues a new president needs to address urgently
Violence against African women and the widespread violation of their basic human rights is shaped by societal and cultural barriers. In Nigeria, women’s rights appear to be protected. The country is a signatory to many international conventions and norms such as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa. Yet this protection is mostly on paper. In a recent book chapter about African women in politics, I’ve noted that an African woman is too commonly labelled by her marital position as a wife of an African man. She is seen as an appendage of that man, a mere shadow. Continued here |
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Is the Loch Ness monster real?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. An amazing and wonderful thing about people is our imagination. Indeed, it’s one of the qualities that makes us human. Continued here |
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In Search of the Sacred: Pico Iyer on Our Models of Paradise
“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Milton wrote in his immortal Paradise Lost. With these human minds, arising from these material bodies, we keep trying to find heaven — to make heaven — in our myths and our mundanities, right here in the place where we are: in this beautiful and troubled world. We give it different names — eden, paradise, nirvana, poetry — but it springs from the selfsame longing: to dwell in beauty and freedom from suffering. With soulful curiosity channeled in his ever-lyrical prose, Pico Iyer chronicles a lifetime of pilgrimages to some of Earth’s greatest shrines to that longing in The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise (public library). He begins in Iran, replete with monuments to Omar Khayyām, who built “a paradise of words” with his poems while revolutionizing astronomy — a place of uncommon beauty and uncommon terror, with roots as deep as the history of the written word, and living branches as tangled as the most contradictory impulses of human nature: Continued here |
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Work-From-Home Regulations Are Coming. Companies Aren’t Ready.
Debates over the trade-offs of remote work arrangements have tended to focus on challenges related to maintaining worker productivity, building company culture, and upholding boundaries between work and home. Now, employers are faced with an additional challenge: complying with a growing set of regulatory frameworks governing remote work. For most workers, working from home was once a seasonal perk or a special arrangement their employer offered. Now, what started as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic has become routine. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of people working primarily from home increased from 5.7% to 17.95% of all workers in the United States and from 14.6% to 24.4% in Europe. With new data showing that remote work could save companies up to $10,600 per employee annually, and major employers such as 3M, SAP, and Spotify committing to making remote work programs permanent, the trend looks like it's here to stay. Continued here |
The myth of the 'compassionate layoff'
The first wave of large-scale job cuts began with some of the biggest names in technology – including Google, Meta and Twitter – axing thousands of employees in the final months of 2022. And the layoffs have continued into the new year around the globe; tracker Layoffs.fyi has recorded 359 tech companies laying off more than 100,000 employees since January 2023, compared to about 160,000 positions cut in all of 2022. Now, however, layoffs are creeping into other sectors, including finance, media, automotive, retail and more. As the economy remains precarious, layoffs show few signs of slowing. Many companies are reportedly expected to announce more layoffs due to financial uncertainty and declining revenues; others may likely conduct “copycat layoffs” – the practice of executives following suit when competitors conduct fresh rounds of layoffs. Continued here |
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EO: Cinema's ultimate scene-stealers
In a landmark 2009 essay, the influential author John Berger argued that capitalist societies had commodified images of animals, reducing them to pictures of innocence. In our daily lives, he wrote, animals had been consigned to the realms of family or spectacle – most obviously, as pets or in zoos. EO, the latest feature from the Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, departs from the historically showy, contrived and stunt-packed performances of animals in cinema, from the early caper Bout de Zan Vole un Eléphant (1913), in which a child steals an elephant from a circus, to Fearless Fagan (1952), where a newly enlisted soldier brings his pet lion to the barracks. In his understated and yet emotionally devastating new film, Skolimowski, director of Le Départ (1967), creates instead a more subtly crafted portrayal of an animal's experience. With shots that linger on EO's pensive, wistful eyes and shot-reverse-shots that capture his gaze, the film makes a blisteringly compelling case for what it might be like to experience the world as a donkey. Continued here |
Out of the Lab and Into a Product: Microsoft’s Eric Boyd
As a partner with OpenAI — the company that recently wowed the tech world and the general public with its DALL-E image generator and ChatGPT chatbot — Microsoft helped to make those generative AI tools possible. But Microsoft has long invested in developing its own artificial intelligence technologies, for internal and external customers alike. And even when AI is not the centerpiece of a specific software program, it's often driving how that tool — such as the company's Bing search engine — works. As corporate vice president of Microsoft's AI platform, Eric Boyd oversees product and technology teams that build artificial intelligence and machine solutions for the company's Azure platform and its AI services portfolio. Eric joins Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh on this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast to talk about how Microsoft builds AI tools and embeds the technology in its various products, AI's potential for helping to expand people's creativity, and the democratization of AI. Eric Boyd leads the AI platform team within Microsoft's Cloud + AI division. This global organization includes Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and internal platforms that provide data, experimentation, and graphics processing units cluster management to groups across Microsoft. Continued here |
All presidents avoid reporters, but Biden may achieve a record in his press avoidance
Bill Clinton was in a major scandal – based in large part on getting caught in a deception during a media interview – and successfully outsourced his White House press briefings to legal counsel to avoid having his press secretary or himself trapped by tough media questioning. Barack Obama campaigned on being the most transparent president in history and then prosecuted reporters as criminals. Continued here |
Can Gen Z make friends in the pandemic era?
Nayomi Mbunga always wanted to live in a big city, so she was thrilled when she landed a tech job in Toronto. The 24-year-old grew up in Ireland, and was eager to “meet people of all walks of life”, she says. But that was a challenge when she started her job in January 2022, as she spent the first few months working remotely and isolating because of Covid-19 cases. Mbunga liked her colleagues, but didn’t have much of a chance to get to know them without meeting in person, which they weren’t able to do for months into her starting the job. She got along well with her roommates, one of whom she knew from back home, but she wanted to expand her social circle. Continued here |
Genomics has helped identify a new strep A strain in Australia - and what has made it dangerous
Group A streptococci, also known as “strep A”, has been on the rise around the world with a new strain reported in the United Kingdom and Europe. This variant has been linked with surges of scarlet fever and a marked increase in life-threatening invasive strep A infections. Strep A is a common bacteria carried by people primarily in their throat. It can cause mild illness including sore throat, scarlet fever (named for the red rash it causes) and impetigo (“school sores”). But it can also cause “invasive” disease, such as sepsis. Repeated strep A infections can lead to other serious conditions including acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease. Continued here |
Britain's most chaotic traditions
Once a year, on the island of South Ronaldsay, off the north coast of Scotland, the community prepares for two traditional events: The Festival of the Horse and the Boys' Ploughing Match. Families reach into cupboards and bring down the richly decorated costumes that the town's girls will wear in a parade through the streets. Passed down through generations, the dresses mimic the trappings of the majestic Clydesdale working horse, with embellished yokes and harnesses, and little woollen fetlocks. Meanwhile, the boys gather on the broad scope of Sands o' Wright beach where, using exquisitely-made miniature ploughs, they carefully draw "furrows" in the sand. The lad with the most finely tilled furrow wins. The Festival of the Horse dates back to the 1800s, when other Orkney villages performed their own versions; today, South Ronaldsay is the last. It is anything but fading: "When I went there, what I found incredibly moving was that the entire community was involved," says Simon Costin, director of the Museum of British Folklore. "The grandparents, the parents, everyone would be rallying the boys on from the side." The costumes, old but constantly evolving, are another sign of this resilience. "Over the years, they get increasingly embellished – with pieces of jewellery, Christmas decorations, bells; anything that catches the light." says Costin. "They become emblems of how the community chooses to express itself." Continued here |
Australia has a new cybersecurity agenda. Two key questions lie at its heart
The federal government is pursuing a new cybersecurity agenda in the wake of last year’s major cyber breaches with Optus and Medibank. “For businesses these days, cybersecurity is as important as having a lock on the door”, said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in opening the government’s cybersecurity roundtable in Sydney on Monday. There, Minister for Cyber Security Claire O’Neil released a discussion paper that seeks to answer questions about the role the government should play in order to improve Australia’s cyber resilience. Continued here |
Cough syrup can harm children: experts warn of contamination risks
The recent deaths of over 300 children in Africa and Asia have prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to warn about the use of “substandard and falsified” medical products. The organisation called for more efforts to protect children from contaminated medicine. Toxicologists Winston Morgan and Shazma Bashir unpack the story. Over the last five months the WHO has issued three alerts warning people not to use specific over-the-counter medicine for children. The warnings came after the deaths of at least 300 children in various countries including The Gambia, Indonesia and Uzbekistan. Continued here |
Can mass atrocities be prevented? This course attempts to answer the question
Mike Brand is affiliated with the University of Connecticut and George Mason University’s Raphaël Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program. Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. Continued here |
Seneca on Science, Nature, and the Key to a Fulfilled Human Destiny
Until the word scientist was coined for the polymathic mathematician Mary Somerville, the term for those who devoted their lives to the contemplation and investigation of the wonder of reality was natural philosopher — the study of nature fell within the domain of philosophy and was indivisible from the humanistic concerns of morality. Two millennia ago, when the universe revolved around an Earth many still considered flat, before anything was known of galaxies or genomes, of atoms or antibodies, the great Stoic philosopher Seneca placed what we now call science — that shimmering systematic curiosity about how nature works — at the heart of a fulfilling life. In a selection of advice to his pupil Lucilius, grouped under the heading Natural Questions and included in Seneca’s altogether indispensable Dialogues and Letters (public library), he considers how the passion to know reality on its own terms — the passion we call science — focuses a life: For Seneca, the study of nature is the closest we get to a true theology — a way of reclaiming God: Continued here |
Kim Jong-un purges: why North Korea is such a dangerous place to be successful in politics
North Korea celebrated the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army in February. As it showed off 12 of its massive intercontinental ballistic missile in a military parade, expert Korea-watchers spotted there appear to have been some significant changes in the country’s military and political hierarchy. Choe Ryong-hae, the chairman of the standing committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly, was reportedly the only member of the politburo presidium not in attendance. But the Workers’ Party of Korea (North Korea’s sole and ruling political party) has reportedly recently replaced five of the 12 officials in the party secretariat and seven of the 17-member politburo. This is according to South Korea’s unification ministry, which exists to promote the reunification of the two countries. Continued here |
Join the Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon's postmodern epic Gravity's Rainbow at 50
Books age at variable rates. Some, indexed to topicalities with mayfly longevities, are decrepit before they’re published. Others, lively and seductive on first appearance, are dry husks a decade later. More durable works may still feel noble a century hence, if suspended in aspic. The rarest, bristling with baffling arcana and elaborate design, make brave bids for immortality. Their fate is the worst of all. It is the fate Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) and Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) discuss in Knives Out: Continued here |
Three big numbers that tell the story of secularization in America
According to a 2022 Gallup survey, the percentage of people who believe in God has dropped from 98% in the 1950s to 81% today; among Americans under 30, it is down to an unprecedented 68%. Up close, the trend looks even more dramatic. Only about half of Americans believe in “God as described in the Bible,” while about a quarter believe in a “higher power or spiritual force,” according to a Pew poll. Just one-third of Generation Z say they believe in God without a doubt. Continued here |
Lidia Thorpe's Mardi Gras disruption is the latest in an ongoing debate about acceptable forms of protest at Pride
Independent senator for Victoria Lidia Thorpe’s temporary blocking of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade on Saturday night has again brought to the surface discussion on the role of protest and police discretion. Amplification through media is one way of hopefully raising awareness of intractable social issues, such as Indigenous rates of incarceration and the role of police in that process. Peaceful protest, such as temporarily blocking the parade, might be a way to gain rare exposure in a cluttered 24-7 news cycle. Continued here |
Cyclone Gabrielle hit NZ's main fruit-growing region hard -- now orchardists face critical climate choices
Hawke’s Bay, one of New Zealand’s most productive regions and the hub of the fruit-growing sector, is among the areas worst hit by Cyclone Gabrielle and ongoing rain. Horticulture underpins the local economy, with apple earnings alone contributing around NZ$700m annually. The immediate destruction of crops from the heavy wind and rain is obvious. But the full extent of the long-term damage to trees and vines themselves is yet to fully assessed. Continued here |
The Unphotographabe: Walt Whitman on Birds Migrating at Midnight
There is singular magic to seeing a mass of creatures move in unison along the vector of a common purpose, as if commanded by a single mind. In those ultimate instances of unselfing, we are reminded that all of nature is one grand synchrony, in which we are mere particles existing in conviviality and consanguinity with every other particle. A century and a half before Richard Powers painted in words the majestic migration of sandhill cranes, Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) channels one such spectacle of humbling grandeur in Specimen Days (public library) — the exquisite collection of prose fragments that also gave us his reflections on democracy, music, and the wisdom of trees. Did you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies, changing their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be forgotten. A friend called me up just after 12 last night to mark the peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating north (rather late this year.) In the silence, shadow and delicious odor of the hour, (the natural perfume belonging to the night alone,) I thought it rare music. You could hear the characteristic motion — once or twice “the rush of mighty wings,” but oftener a velvety rustle, long drawn out — sometimes quite near — with continual calls and chirps, and some song-notes. It all lasted from 12 till after 3. Once in a while the species was plainly distinguishable; I could make out the bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, white-crown’d sparrow, and occasionally from high in the air came the notes of the plover. Continued here
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