Hersh wrote on Substack earlier this month, based on a single anonymous source, that the U.S. was involved in the sabotage of the pipelines.
Asked by Bream whether the administration would have an obligation to inform Congress of such an operation, Kirby said: “Obviously, we keep Congress informed appropriately of things both classified and unclassified. But I can tell you now, regardless of the notification process, there was no U.S. involvement in this.”
Hersh is a Pulitzer-winning journalist best known for his expose of the 1968 My Lai Massacre committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam and the Pentagon’s efforts to cover it up. In 2004, he chronicled the military’s torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But he has also drawn criticism for some of his reporting in recent years, including his challenges to the official U.S. account of the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine a year ago this week, has relied on its income from energy exports to fund the war. President Joe Biden sanctioned the Russian company behind the pipelines last year.
David Cohen contributed to this report.
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#John #Kirby #denies #U.S #sabotaged #Nord #Stream #pipelines
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Wang has heavily criticized the Biden administration shooting down the Chinese spy balloon as a “weak” and “near-hysterical” response that amounted to an “excessive use of force.”
The discussion between the two leaders was “a forthright, very candid exchange” which “laid bare our deep concerns about what they did,” Kirby told Fox host Shannon Bream.
He maintained that the manner in which the Chinese balloon was shot down allowed the U.S. to collect its debris.
“Now we have that debris, and we’re going to exploit that debris. We’re going to learn more about this system,” Kirby said.
The U.S. downed the surveillance balloon off the coast of the Carolinas earlier this month, after it crossed the continent over the course of a week.
“We acted accordingly, and believe me, the message was clearly sent to China this is unacceptable,” Kirby said Sunday.
Since then, the administration has directed three additional objects to be shot down, but those are now believed to have been benign, Kirby said earlier this week. “Nothing right now suggests that they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country,” President Joe Biden added on Thursday.
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#John #Kirby #Dont #surprised #Chinas #balloon #bluster
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
There are significant differences between then and now, not the least of which is a far different climate around depression and how we treat mental health issues.
Back then, the very idea that an important political figure was seeking psychiatric help — much less electric shock treatment — was astonishing. We have since learned, from novelist William Styron and from CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace, among others, that depression can stalk the successful, the high achievers, the famous. That reality has hit close to home here; on Jan. 10, New York Times journalist and former top POLITICO editor Blake Hounshell took his life; worldly success, a close family, and a legion of friends and admirers was not enough to stave off depression. Just last week, Times columnist David Brooks wrote a moving account of an old friend’s losing battle. We also know that depression is treatable; therapy and medicine can lead to a productive, fulfilled life.
There’s another crucial distinction been the Eagleton and Fetterman episodes: candor. Eagleton did not tell his constituents at any point that he had been hospitalized. Crucially, he did not tell the McGovern campaign when he was being vetted for the vice-presidential nomination. When McGovern said he would have chosen Eagleton even if he had known of the senator’s past medical history, it moved McGovern’s Credibility Meter into the bright red zone, further undermining his candidacy. In sharp contrast, Fetterman’s office disclosed the information promptly, with no euphemistic evasion. It was his office that described the symptoms as “severe.”
By another measure, however, the differences may prove challenging. Eagleton’s hospital stays were six and 12 years old by 1972. There was no indication of any further incident requiring such treatment. (That did not, of course, prevent a barrage of questions about Eagleton’s health, nor it did it stop the merciless piling on. One insensitive jab: ‘VOLT FOR EAGLETON”)
Fetterman is coping with his condition now, at the start of a congressional session where his party has a one-seat advantage. He will be facing questions — fair questions — about how long he will be absent. The questions may well have reassuring answers, and he is hardly the first senator to be sidelined by illness. Last year, when the chamber was evenly split, New Mexico Democrat Ben Ray Luján spent more than a month recovering from a stroke. In 2012, Illinois Republican Mark Kirk spent a year and a half in therapy recovering from a stroke.
Those examples raise a related question: Just a week ago, the New York Times published a detailed story about how Fetterman was coping with the consequences of the “near-fatal stroke” he suffered last May. According to the Times, it hasn’t been easy, from both a physical and mental standpoint.
It is absolutely true that senators and other top politicians have served with all manner of disabilities, many of them physical. (Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth is a double amputee; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is a paraplegic. And you may recall a president named Roosevelt). Further, technological advances have enabled Fetterman to adapt with a diminished ability to hear and comprehend speech.
But consider this unhappily prescient paragraph from the Times story: “The stroke — after which he had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted — also took a less apparent but very real psychological toll on Mr. Fetterman. It has been less than a year since the stroke transformed him from someone with a large stature that suggested machismo — a central part of his political identity — into a physically altered version of himself, and he is frustrated at times that he is not yet back to the man he once was. He has had to come to terms with the fact that he may have set himself back permanently by not taking the recommended amount of rest during the campaign. And he continues to push himself in ways that people close to him worry are detrimental.” Just last week, Fetterman was hospitalized overnight for observation after feeling “lightheaded.”
The candor so far displayed by Fetterman and his staff will need to continue: Can he find the conditions he needs to heal from depression as a sitting member of the Senate? Does the combination of depression and the fallout from a stroke pose a special set of difficulties? Or can the advances in treating depression, along with a far more accepting climate, mean that, as his office promised, “he will soon be back to himself?”
The political fallout of however this story concludes may be somewhat modest: With a Democratic governor in Pennsylvania, Senate control will remain unchanged whatever the outcome. And it would take a special level of malevolence for anyone of any political persuasion not to root for Fetterman’s full recovery. But neither can reasonable questions be dismissed by charges of ableism. These questions flow from circumstances no one would wish on anyone. But there they are.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
If you wanted to see how SailGP is changing the culture of sailing, last month’s event in Singapore offered a perfect visual. Each of the boat’s crews carry two grinders, usually a pair of towering men with Popeye biceps whose arms can generate the same power output as an Olympic rowers’ legs. When the US boat won the second race of the heats, however, there was a woman at the winch. She was 5ft 4in and 19 years old.
“I’m probably the world’s smallest grinder,” says a laughing CJ Perez, the team strategist who also grinds when winds are especially light. “The first time I did it, two years ago, I was gassed afterwards.”
She took herself to the gym and worked on her strength. After the race in Singapore, she screamed with delight as they crossed the finish line. “I was just so happy, I felt I had helped the team a lot.”
This is season three of SailGP, the global competition designed by the America’s Cup legend Russell Coutts to be the Formula One of sailing. In its roster of “grand prix”, foiling catamarans fly around courses at such high speeds that their hulls never need to touch the water and sailors are pinned to the sides of the craft by the G-force. On Saturday and Sunday, spectators will flock to the Sydney shoreline to watch the spectacle, promising everything from physics-defying manoeuvres to dramatic capsizes and, occasionally, collisions.
Natasha Bryant, strategist for Australia SailGP, at the Spain Sail Grand Prix in September. Photograph: Ricardo Pinto for SailGP
Not so long ago, there was no such thing as a professional racing career in sailing. The apex of the sport, the America’s Cup, takes place every four years and opportunities to take part have always been restricted to a handful of athletes. They have always been men.
SailGP’s inaugural season in 2018 was an all-male affair, but when it returned for its second edition in 2020-21, the rules required every team to take to the water with at least one female crew member. Their “women’s pathway programme” was intended to open up elite racing and its immediate success proves how powerful such structural interventions can be.
Perez grew up in Honolulu, but while all her friends surfed she never tried watersports until six years ago. “I didn’t come from a family of sailors,” she says, “and I don’t want to say I was clueless, but all I wanted was to get on the water and go fast. It wasn’t until I started going abroad and racing internationally that I saw, wow, there aren’t enough females in the sport.”
A natural from the moment she stepped in a boat, Perez won her first world title within two years. Jimmy Spithill, captain of SailGP’s USA team, was the youngest winner of the America’s Cup in 2010 and when he saw videos of Perez he knew he was looking at a future star. In 2021, she made her SailGP debut, the first Latina and the youngest woman in the competition.
She admits to more than a few rookie mistakes. “The first day I went on the F50 I had put my wetsuit on backwards,” she says. “The guys on the chase boat pointed it out. The logos were all on my butt.”
The generation gap with the rest of the crew (at 43, Spithill is old enough to be her father) makes for equally amusing culture clash at the team’s HQ, where the soundtrack is usually 80s music and country. “I want to listen to hip-hop and talk about boys, but I don’t think they’re into that.”
Natasha Bryant, of the Australia team, is three years older than Perez. Growing up in north Sydney, her ambition was to play soccer for her country. “I had my heart set on being a Matilda,” she says. “But my brother was getting competitive with his sailing and he needed a training partner.”
Aged 11, she went out on the water with him every day after school, a sibling rivalry that pushed them both. Their next-door neighbour and babysitter Jason Waterhouse, who won a silver medal at the 2016 Olympics, was their sporting role model. He’s now Bryant’s crew-mate on the Australia team.
CJ Perez, strategist for the USA team, after a practice session for the Denmark SailGP. Photograph: Ricardo Pinto for SailGP
Like Perez, Bryant had been surprised by the small pool of female talent. “At our first youth world championships there were 250 boats and less than 20 of those were girls’ teams.” Having missed out on selection at her first SailGP trial, she found herself on an F50 a few weeks later and was handed the wheel by the Australia captain, Tom Slingsby.
“I was there as the reserve sailor, so I wasn’t even sure if I’d get on the boat,” says Bryant. “But Tom didn’t give me any time to think about it, he just said ‘here you go’… I was really naive. Everyone laughs at me, but I’d only been in dinghies before, so I’d never sailed anything with a wheel. I was thinking: ‘OK, it’ll be kind of like driving a car.’ It wasn’t.”
Skippering an F50 is like nothing else on earth. Flying speeds of up to 60mph (Olympic-class boats top out at less than 20mph) require quick thinking and nerves of steel. They also demand perfect communication between the crew, especially the wing trimmer, responsible for managing the windpower to the boat, and the flight controller, whose job is to keep the boat off the water and gliding on its foils. Two grinders work on the winch handles to move the wing back and forth as required.
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The remaining role, which all of the women on the pathway programme assume, is that of strategist, feeding information that helps the team make best use of conditions and anticipating the movements of the other boats to find the driver the fastest route. “The races are so short that if you collide or get stuck with traffic it’s really hard to get out of it,” says Bryant. “And everything happens so quickly that the further ahead you can plan the easier it is to have a smooth clean race.”
For Hannah Mills, the role came naturally. She and Ben Ainslie are the most successful British Olympic sailors of all time and their skills complement each other well. “Ben used to be a single-handed sailor, whereas I have always sailed double-handed,” she says. “I came from Tokyo with a lot of skills and experience in communicating in a team.”
Hannah Mills at the San Francisco SailGP last year. Photograph: Thomas Lovelock for SailGP
Bryant found the most urgent lesson was when to talk and when not to. “In my first few races I got so nervous I was a little bit quiet.” The encouragement of her more experienced male teammates gave her confidence. “Now I pretend I’m the one driving and think: ‘What input would I like to hear right now?’”
All three women want to become drivers and they can achieve that only by gaining experience on the F50s, which is hard when the athletes sail the boats for only three days each race weekend. “The lack of training time is the biggest challenge,” says Perez.
“The organisers have talked about putting in a training block next season to have the women on the boat for longer, but you need funding to do that.” She will miss the next two races to give other women on the US team the opportunity to sail.
The Australia GP will be Mills’s third race; she debuted in 2021 before stepping back to have her first baby. Off the boat, she took responsibility for a number of gender equality and sustainability projects including the Athena Pathway, which she and Ainslie launched last August to fast-track female athletes into high-performance foiling and encourage young people into careers within the sport. It is the engine room for the British campaign to win the first Women’s America’s Cup and defend the Youth America’s Cup in Barcelona next year.
Returning post-pregnancy was a feat of physical preparation. “I was nervous because I’d gone from being in the best form of my life at the Tokyo Olympics to a very different body,” says Mills. In Singapore, she had her ankles taped to combat the softening of ligaments that occurs when breastfeeding.
Motherhood contributed to her decision not to launch an Olympic campaign for Paris 2024, but the opportunities afforded by SailGP are also a factor. Bryant, who missed out on selection for Tokyo, says even a year ago she never imagined any career in sailing beyond the Olympic Games. “It was what I wanted to do for so many years and it’s weird to change my mind, but SailGP has given us an avenue I never really thought was possible. I enjoy being with this team and I’m learning so much.”
Thanks to her fellow crew, Bryant owns her first Moth, a foiling dinghy for single-handed racing, while Perez will soon be in Miami, trialling for the USA team for the Women’s America’s Cup. “In high school I didn’t even think sailing was a profession,” she says. “This is history in the making.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
A sequel to Cain’s Jawbone, a literary puzzle that has only been solved by a handful of people in the almost 90 years since it was published, is to be released.
Cain’s Jawbone is a murder mystery in which six people die, and was written by Edward Powys Mathers, known as Torquemada, who was the Observer’s cryptic crossword compiler at the time of the book’s release in 1934.
The mystery, originally published as part of The Torquemada Puzzle Book, can only be solved if readers rearrange its 100 pages in the correct order. It became a literary phenomenon after book fans on TikTok discovered it.
Tiktoker Sarah Scannell shares her puzzle quest. Photograph: @saruuuuuuugh/ TikTok
Since its publication, the puzzle has been solved by a small group of people and only four of them have been publicly identified; the most recent was British comedy writer and the creator of BBC Radio 4’s Cabin Pressure, John Finnemore, who figured out the solution when the book was rereleased in hardback by crowdfunding publisher Unbound in 2019.
Finnemore has now written an official sequel to Cain’s Jawbone, which will be published by Unbound next year. Currently known as Untitled Mystery, the title will be revealed to those who pledge during the crowdfunding campaign. A locked room mystery, Finnemore’s new whodunnit hinges on a person found stabbed to death in the study of a complete stranger. The room was securely locked from the inside, but no weapon – or murderer – has ever been found, and the police investigation discovered no credible suspects or likely motive.
Edward Powys Mathers AKA Torquemada. Photograph: Unbound
The murderer keeps, safely locked in a drawer, a box of 100 picture postcards. If arranged in the correct order and properly understood, these postcards will explain the murder in the study, and nine others that took place the same year. Readers need to re-order the postcards, one side of which features text, the other an image which is also a clue, in sequence to correctly solve and explain the 10 murders.
In a blog about Untitled Mystery, Finnemore said: “The picture side puzzles allow me to do two things: firstly, compensate for the arrival of the internet since 1934. You may now be able to Google an obscure Walt Whitman quotation, but you can’t Google ‘How on earth is this picture of a tree a puzzle?’
“Secondly, if Cain’s Jawbone had a flaw (which I don’t admit) it’s that it’s a little off-putting and seemingly impenetrable until you make a certain breakthrough. I think a lot of people had a brief look, thought ‘Well, that’s impossible’ and gave up. I certainly did, before lockdown came along and invited me to have another go. So the picture puzzles – which are also, to be clear, ridiculously difficult – give the solver something they can immediately get their teeth into, while they’re grappling with the madness on the other side.”
Untitled Mystery teaser cover.
The crowdfunding campaign for Untitled Mystery has already been supported by 580 people, in just five days. Cain’s Jawbone has now sold 500,000 copies of its English-language paperback, according to publisher Unbound, and is a bestseller in six other countries.
John Mitchinson, publisher and co-founder of Unbound, tells me that he could not “have predicted quite how enthusiastically readers and puzzlers all over the world would embrace Cain’s Jawbone”. And that there is no one better than Finnemore, “to lay down an even more absurdly difficult challenge”.
“Not only does Untitled Mystery offer us 100 pages to re-order but also 100 images to decipher for further clues,” he continues. “It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of this project that he won’t even tell us its real title.”
Two people solved Cain’s Jawbone shortly after the novel’s publication – Mr S Sydney-Turner and Mr WS Kennedy – winning £25 each. When a copy of The Torquemada Puzzle Book was presented to the Laurence Sterne Trust in the late 2010s, Patrick Wildgust, curator at the trust’s home Shandy Hall, set out to solve it. Once he’d done so, Unbound reissued the title with a £1,000 prize to anyone who could solve it within a year; Finnemore was the only person to do so.
The Torquemada Puzzle Book.
Unbound launched a second phase of the competition with the publication of the paperback edition in February 2021. An undisclosed number of people managed to solve the puzzle by the end of 2022, although Unbound has decided to keep entries open for another year. Those who got the puzzle right have been invited to be founder members of The Cain’s Jawbone Club. The club is only open to those who have officially solved the puzzle, who will receive a certificate and a badge which carries a symbol that will only be meaningful to solvers. They will also be invited to a one-day conference this summer at Shandy Hall.
Last year Unbound partnered with AI platform Zindi to challenge people to use artificial intelligence to solve Cain’s Jawbone. They gave people 75 pages of the novel and asked them to put them in the correct order using natural language processing algorithms. Natural language processing is a branch of AI that looks at the interactions between computers and human language. No one was able to accurately place all 75 pages in order. Zindi data scientist Amy Bray says this was partly because the algorithms “are trained on recent works so there is the hiccup that they probably wouldn’t work as well on language from the 1930s.
“There were also items only humans would have understood, such as the shortening of names,” she says. “This made for a tricky machine-learning challenge but left me feeling reassured. Applying machine learning to one of the hardest problems, you still needed human intervention to get it over the line.”
For those who find it impossible – with or without AI – Unbound is planning an official Cain’s Jawbone Handbook, which will offer a step-by-step guide to solving the puzzle, due to be released in late 2024 or early 2025.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Now Bolton, who is weighing a 2024 presidential run, promised to “ask for all the details, top to bottom, on what the record indicates about Chinese or other aerial incursions during the Trump administration.”
“I want to know whether overflights during the Trump administration were detected or not detected. If they were detected, what were they assessed to be, and who made that assessment? How far up the chain of command did the information and assessments go?” he continued.
Bolton first discussed his upcoming briefing with NBC News.
The former U.N. ambassador blasted Biden’s team, specifically National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, for continually bringing up the Trump-era balloon flights. “If the White House thinks this is a way to build confidence in their response to the recent incursions, it is sadly mistaken,” he said.
Kirby responded to Bolton’s comments during a session with reporters Tuesday. “All we’re doing is speaking the truth. This is a well-funded, deliberate program to collect intelligence on other nations, including us,” he said. “The reason we know that is because of the work we’ve done since we came into office to understand this program” and “decipher how these balloons operate”
Kirby further told reporters that the three objects hovering above the U.S. and Canada and shot down by the military last weekend could be “balloons tied to some commercial work.”
Biden administration officials briefed senators Tuesday morning on the latest information regarding the Chinese spy balloon and the downed objects.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Mumbai: Actor John Abraham, who stars as the antagonist in Shah Rukh Khan’s box office blockbuster ‘Pathaan’, recently during the film’s success event wittily corrected a fan who was cheering “Shah Rukh Khan is back.”
Shah Rukh’s latest release ‘Pathaan’ has concluded the Bollywood superstar’s 4-year long hiatus and has proved to be a box-office breaker.
During the event, when one of the fans shouted ” Shah Rukh is back,” to which John gave a witty reply. He said, “Just one correction. Shah Rukh Khan isn’t back. He had just gone for a loo break.”
SRK also revealed the story behind taking a break for 4 long years to do a film.
He said, “The four, actually 2 years have some good parts and some bad parts like in all our lives because of Covid. This is exactly the same for me. I didn’t work, I wanted to be with the children. The good thing was for the first time I could see my children grow, Aryan, Suhana and AbRam. I could spend time with my family and friends. The second good thing was my last film didn’t work and people started saying that now my films.
He jokingly said “I thought of an alternative business. And thought of opening a restaurant and for that started cooking. I started cooking to open a restaurant. And thought to name it Red Chillies food eatery. Then I learned to cook Italian cuisine and that went well.”
He added, “Siddharth who loves to eat and for 10 days I made him ear pizza as he was not happy with my work. The good thing was that also when I came to know that John is doing Pathaan with me. I have never worked with him. We have done small endorsements together. John is a very old friend of mine, when I came to Mumbai we got to know each other but unfortunately we have not worked together.”
Shah Rukh continued, “Its nice to be back. I am not in a hurry to finish the film. Its always been my desire to spread happiness among people and make films to entertain. Whenever I fail to do so, nobody feels as bad as me. I am very happy that I was able to spread the happiness and especially to those who are close to my heart – Aditya Chopra and Siddharth. And those who gave me the opportunity as you will notice the film is a very big film, it will be an expensive film. But to get me and give me a chance to come at the time I was not working and allow me to be a part of this film. I will ever ever be grateful to Aditya Chopra and Siddharth. And also to Deepika. I have forgotten those 4 years in these 4 days.”
John also shared his experience working with Shah Rukh. He said, “I got to work with Shah Rukh for the first time. I don’t think he is an actor anymore he is an emotion. It is wonderful to have Shah Rukh back like this after 4 years. Earlier I felt like I was an action hero, but I think Shah Rukh Khan today is the number 1 action hero of the country. It’s going to be my biggest hit for a long time.”
John received a lot of appreciation for his negative portrayal in the film. During the event, SRK mentioned John as the backbone of the film and appreciated his work.
‘Pathaan’ is on a record-breaking run at the domestic and overseas box office as it collected Rs 542 crore gross worldwide in just 5 days.
Helmed by Siddharth Anand, ‘Pathaan’, which was released on January 25, also stars Deepika Padukone and John Abraham in the lead roles. Apart from “seeti maar” dialogues and high-octane action scenes, it’s Salman Khan’s extended cameo as Tiger that has made the film more special.
It is the fourth instalment in the YRF Spy Universe and is SRK’s comeback film after Zero (2018). The film has created history as it has overtaken SS Rajamouli’s ‘Baahubali 2’ and Yash-starrer ‘KGF 2’ to become the fastest film to enter Rs 200 crore club. It collected Rs 429 crore gross worldwide in four days, said production banner Yash Raj Films (YRF) on Sunday.
Some claim that the first day in the third week of January is the most depressing one in the calendar. This year, Blue Monday arrived with added cruelty – for those of us who happen to be single, at least. A financial services firm chose just that miserable moment to reveal how much more expensive it is to live on your own than in a couple.
If you’re currently alone, and the post-holiday slump already has you feeling down about it, you may want to look away now. According to the brokers Hargreaves Lansdown, the cost of living premium for being single comes in at an average £860 a month, factoring in typical expenses from rent and energy bills to groceries, wifi and TV subscriptions.
That’s a whopping figure in isolation – an additional £10,000 a year in outgoings – and it wounds even deeper when you compare it with what your partnered friends are paying. The average couple spend £991 per person, so if you’re living alone you’re spending nearly twice the amount they are on the exact same goods and services. For those who didn’t choose their solo state, it’s adding impecuniousness to injury.
As a long-term single, I’ve become inured to the injustice of the single supplement – the one that demands I pay extra for eating less breakfast and soiling fewer towels. I scoff at the misleadingly titled “discount” I receive from the council, which taxes me 75% of the married rate for using only 50% of the services (and arguably less, because I’m childless).
Still, I’ve rarely wasted much time wondering how life without a partner affects my finances. That’s not because I’m comfortably cushioned by personal wealth (which would be nice) but because I have always assumed these things even out overall.Since I don’t share my worldly goods with another person, I have never watched my bank account being depleted by someone making purchases I neither want nor need. Nor have I copped the eye-watering expense of raising children or had to stump up the galling legal fees and potentially lifelong financial commitments of a divorce.
There is another reason I’ve resisted contemplating the economic disadvantages of living alone. Women are already conditioned to perceive the unpartnered life as one of lack or absence, if not downright misery. Challenging that Bridget Jones default can be hard work and a poor-me mindset doesn’t help. As someone who always pictured herself married, I have learned the hard way not to fixate on the negatives of singlehood.
Today’s climate of uncertainty, inequality and inflation is making the issue impossible to ignore. Much as I’ve loved Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters, I can’t watch Sharon Horgan’s Eva living alone in an enormous family home without wondering how she affords to heat it. Seeing last week’s figures in stone cold print has finally shaken me out of my state of denial. An extra 10 grand a year? The comparative financial benefits of singledom and coupledom aren’t swings and roundabouts at all, they’re snakes and ladders.
More noteworthy than the vast disparity itself, one that the majority of single people have long intuited, is how we respond to it. Whatever sympathy the news may elicit for ourselves or our single friends is soon followed by a sense of impotence or even outright ambivalence. This isn’t the kind of inequality we feel compelled to challenge or change. Maybe it’s because we see singleness as a temporary status. Or maybe because we can’t shift the suspicion that a solo life is a self-indulgent one.
In the 18th century, social commentators in Britain argued for a tax on bachelors and spinsters, who were considered to contribute nothing concrete to the productivity of the nation. Frances Brooke, writing a series of articles as “Mary Singleton”, proposed that unmarried men over the age of 30 pay a shilling in the pound and unmarried women sixpence. “The very circumstance of having no burden upon their fortunes, but what merely concerns themselves, makes them of all others, the fittest to be assessed extraordinarily,” she wrote, adding that she would herself pay such a due “with the greatest pleasure”.
Living alone is a privilege, but it can also be a burden. In her brilliant book about spinsterhood, She I Dare Not Name, Donna Ward argues that “the crucial conversation to have is about the reality of this life – the social, psychological and financial implications of it and the way legislators, friends, family and neighbours can support those living it”. Most single people are living on one income in a dual-income economy – and one whose lawmakers make the fallacious assumption that they have more disposable income than their coupled counterparts.
The American social psychologist Bella DePaulo has long campaigned for more awareness of the way that society invisibly discriminates against those without partners – expecting more of them in the workplace, for instance, then robbing them through a tax system that prioritises married and family units. Maybe it is time to make a fuss about that single supplement.
Emma John is a freelance author and writer. Her book Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life is published by Octopus
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
When Twitter first appeared in July 2006, I was enchanted by it. At one point, some geek created an app that logged tweets and geolocated them in real time on a map of the world, so you could watch little dots popping up all over the globe. (I even made a short video recording of my screen and set it to music, but didn’t put it online because I didn’t own the music rights, and now I can’t find it. Sigh – such is digital life.)
What I loved about Twitter at the beginning was that it enabled you to plug into the thought streams of people you liked or admired. Like all good things, though, that came to an end when the platform embarked on the algorithmic curation of users’ feeds to increase “engagement” (and, it hoped, profits). And from then on, it became increasingly tiresome, though I kept my account. But when it became clear that Elon Musk was going to buy the platform – and wreak havoc – I decided to explore possible alternatives.
Like many other people, my gaze alighted on Mastodon as a possible refuge from the Musk-induced madness. After all, it offered its users the same kind of microblogging facilities. But there the similarities ended. Twitter is a single site. Mastodon, in contrast, is a protocol – “a system of rules for spinning up your own social network that can also interact with any other following the same code”. So whereas Twitter is a universe, Mastodon is what has come to be called a “fediverse” – that is, a decentralised network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes, or as one observer put it: “A distributed network of Twitter-like services.”
That sounds intimidating, but in reality, it’s relatively straightforward. Joining Twitter involves just signing up on twitter.com; but to become a Mastodon user, you have to sign up to one of those semi-independent nodes. They’re basically just servers run by individuals or groups, and Mastodon helpfully provides a list of ones that you might consider joining. Once in, your identity is linked to the server on which you have an account. So if you’ve chosen the username “vici” on the server arsenalfc.social, then your username will be @vici@arsenalfc.social. And you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter what server they happen to be on.
From then on, it’s a bit like using Twitter – posting rather than tweeting, reposting, liking and so on. The big difference is you only see stuff that those whom you follow have posted: your feed is not algorithmically curated for some venture capitalist’s benefit. (Mastodon is open source and administered by a German-based non-profit company, Mastodon gGmbH.)
If you’re coming from Twitter, the first thing you’ll notice about Mastodon is that it seems quieter, somehow – there’s less shouting, less aggro, less posturing, less humblebragging. And of course it may also seem duller at first, because you’re only seeing what your “followees” (is that a word?) have posted or reposted. You’ll also notice that if one of your contacts wants to post something that they feel might be shocking or disturbing, they have been able to flag it beforehand so you don’t click on it.
So far, so good. But since this is technology, there are downsides. The most obvious one is that while you are no longer at the whimsical mercy of an erratic digital emperor called Elon, the administrator of your chosen Mastodon server may not be an angel (or a Democrat) either – as one blogger discovered. “I believed the Mastodon propaganda,” he wrote, “and picked out a small site from the list at joinmastodon.org. That small site turned out to be run by fascists and does not allow one to cancel one’s account. I left and moved on to a small political site… which kicked my moderate liberal ass out for being too radical. I then decided that being one bird in a large flock was a good idea and signed up for an account at mastodon.social, the Mastodon mother site.”
So is it a substitute for Twitter? I don’t think so, any more than avocados are a substitute for mangoes. Twitter is really for broadcasting – for letting the world at large know what you think, or alerting people to your forthcoming book/event/podcast, or complaining about potholes, Rishi Sunak, Brexit, the metaverse and the general awfulness of everything.
At its best, Mastodon seems to be more about conversation rather than shouting, and in that sense reminds me of the early internet – in the 1980s, before the world wide web – and in particular of Usenet, the network’s first global online discussion space. In which case, wouldn’t it be ironic if the Martian adventurer Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter turned out to be bringing us back to the future?
What I’ve been reading
Freedom of religion Remembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge is a fascinating editorial in Noema magazine by Nathan Gardels on the late pontiff’s debate with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas about democratic values.
Data protection Some really helpful advice on digital security from US cryptographer and technologist Bruce Schneier, who knows this stuff inside out, can be found in the Choosing Secure Passwords post on his Schneier on Security blog.
Grammar school A Civil War Over Semicolons is an entertaining piece by Gal Beckerman in the Atlantic about the arguments US biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, have been having for 50 years.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
