Right down to its production design, the Oscars have not always felt like the most welcoming place for the disabled. “I’ve always seen that stage with its stairs as a symbol that they don’t expect people who had mobility issues to be nominated or to win an award,” said Jim LeBrecht, the co-director and co-star of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp. “It’s always been this kind of negative tacit statement.” This year shows signs of change. LeBrecht, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, will attend the April 25 ceremony. So will Robert Tarango, the deaf-blind star of the nominated short, Feeling Through. The victors’ podium will be accessible for both. And LeBrecht hopes that will become a permanent change, both literally and figuratively. The two films, along with Sound of Metal, nominated for six awards including best picture, have the people behind them hoping their Oscar moment can become a catalyst for Hollywood to stop using the disabled as sources of inspiration, objects of pity or twisted villains. “I think that the goal is to alleviate the fear,” Tarango said through a translator, “to open the doors so that executives don’t look at our ability to hear or not to hear and to see that somebody who is blind, deaf-blind, who has any kind of disability is just part of the world and can be part of these films.” The academy, under pressure, has pushed for greater race and gender inclusion in recent years. The disabled can too often be forgotten in that discussion. “It’s time that people need to recognize that diversity should include the disabled, the deaf-blind and the deaf community,” Marlee Matlin, an executive producer on Feeling Through and the only deaf actor to win an Oscar, said through a translator. “I hope that it’s not just the
Magic mushrooms have a long and rich history. Now scientists say they could play an important role in the future, with their active ingredient a promising treatment for depression. The results from a small, phase two clinical trial have revealed that two doses of psilocybin appears to be as effective as the common antidepressant escitalopram in treating moderate to severe major depressive disorder, at least when combined with psychological therapy. “I think it is fair to say that the results signal hope that we may be looking at a promising alternative treatment for depression,” said Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the center for psychedelic research at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study. Carhart-Harris said psilocybin was thought to work in a fundamentally different way to escitalopram. While both act on the brain’s serotonin system, he said escitalopram seemed to work by helping people tolerate stress more easily. “With a psychedelic it is more about a release of thought and feeling that, when guided with psychotherapy, produces positive outcomes,” he said, adding participants given psilocybin had often reported feeling they had got more fully to the root of why they were depressed. However, Carhart-Harris cautioned against seeking out magic mushrooms — a class A drug in the UK — for DIY treatment. “That would be an error of judgment,” he said. “We strongly believe that the … psychotherapy component is as important as the drug action.” The ￡1 million (US$1.37 million) trial builds on previous work by the team exploring how psilocybin affects the brain, and an earlier clinical trial in which the drug helped alleviate treatment-resistant depression in 12 patients. Over the six-week trial, 30 out of 59 adults with moderate to severe major depressive disorder were randomly allocated to receive two 25mg doses of psilocybin three weeks apart — a dose that Carhart-Harris said was
Listen Before You Sing (聽見歌再唱) employs almost every device from the handbook of heartwarming and inspirational drama. While it works — as evidenced from the sniffles in the theater — it also results in a cliched and predictable production, albeit one that is hard to dislike. It’s even more moving that the plot is based on the true story of Aboriginal Bunun educator Bukut Tasvaluan and his Vox Nativa choir, which went from a ragtag group to a highly acclaimed outfit showcasing Aboriginal culture and singing techniques while fostering pride and confidence in its members. They have won numerous awards, and their signature Let’s Clap Together was featured in the late Chi Po-lin’s (齊柏林) 2013 Golden Horse winning documentary Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (看見台灣) and has since been performed across the world. First-time feature director Yang Chih-lin (楊智麟) made a documentary on the subject in 2009, and spent the next decade trying to dramatize the tale (part of the struggle was getting Bukut’s approval). It is set in a modern day remote Bunun village, whose elementary school is in danger of closing due to rural flight and the nation’s plummeting birth rate. The school must demonstrate that it has “special characteristics” to stay open, and one might cringe and question where this film is going when a Han Taiwanese teacher suggests, “Aborigines are good at singing, why don’t we have them form a choir and participate in some national competitions?” The kids immediately defy the stereotypes and prove to be terrible, and Teacher Fang (Umin Boya, a fictional Bukut), who volunteered to lead the choir, is a sports teacher who cannot read music. The issue of culture loss among the younger generation in these communities is a serious one, and Bukut is seen speaking to elders in Bunun and children
Cute cartoon animals have been at the heart of Hong Kong clothing brand Chickeeduck since 1990, displayed on everything from t-shirts and tote bags to baby rompers and pillows. But owner Herbert Chow is now struggling to get his designs made in China, where his avian characters have been seized by authorities for “advocating violence.” Chow, 57, was preparing for the Lunar New Year shopping season earlier this year when he was informed that a shipment of some 10,000 Chickeeduck items had been seized in mainland China. “My manufacturer said the customs department found the products were advocating violence in social movements,” Chow said after recently deciding to go public. At first glance, the contraband cartoons might seem innocuous. They included cushions with yellow birds holding umbrellas alongside “I love HK” speech bubbles, and canvas bags featuring five ducklings swimming on one side and a flag-bearing chicken on the other. But for those who know Hong Kong’s recent tumultuous politics, the designs are a clear nod to the city’s democracy movement, which is now being swept away by China’s crackdown on dissent. Chow makes no secret of his messaging. The tote bag, for example, was a reference to the popular protest slogan “Five demands, not one less.” But he says he is baffled that such designs would be deemed illegal. “I don’t see what’s wrong with the message,” he said. “I don’t know what business the Chinese authorities have in trying to stop something like this from going to Hong Kong.” GROCERY CHAIN RAID Chow’s predicament illustrates how much the landscape has changed in semi-autonomous Hong Kong since 2019’s huge and often violent pro-democracy protests. Certain speech and views can instantly land people — and businesses — in hot water. As Chow was speaking with AFP, Hong Kong’s Customs Department held a press conference to announce the seizure of nearly
Few species in the animal kingdom can change the size of their brain. Fewer still can change it back to its original size. Now researchers have found the first insect species with that ability: Indian jumping ants. They are like catnip to researchers in the field. In contrast to their cousins, Indian jumping ants colonies do not perish once their queen dies. Instead, “chosen” workers take her place — with expanded ovaries and shrunken brains — to produce offspring. But, if a worker’s “pseudo-queen” status is somehow revoked, their bodies can bounce back, the research suggests. Typically, whether an ant will be a worker or a queen is decided at the larval stage. If fed generously and given the right hormones, the ant has the chance to become a big queen. If not, then it is stuck with a career as a sterile worker deprived of the opportunity to switch — unless it’s part of a species such as the Indian jumping ant. “They have this ability to completely transform themselves at the adult stage, and that makes them interesting to try to understand,” said lead author Clint Penick from US-based Kennesaw State University. Social insects such as ants typically inhabit a caste-based society — the queen reigns as the sole reproducer by secreting pheromones that thwart female worker ants from laying eggs. The other ants work hard: foraging and hunting for food, cleaning, caring for the young and defending the nest. But unlike typical colonies that wither away on the death of their queen, Indian jumping ant colonies are functionally immortal. Within hours of the queen’s death, a frenzied “ritualized combat” commences, in which workers engage in fierce duels that involve jamming antennae into each other’s faces. While this tournament persists up to a month — the chosen workers are the multitaskers who can duel
Early on in this memoir the author comments on Taiwan’s rich flora — that it came from many places, washed ashore or was borne on the winds. Two Trees make a Forest in general takes up this theme with regard to Taiwan’s human population, and proceeds to investigate the author’s ancestors though reference to the nation’s trees and climbing plants. Jessica Lee’s grandparents moved to Taiwan from China along with the influx of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) forces in 1949. They subsequently moved to Canada, via Wales, though experiencing a strong desire to return to Taiwan in their final years. In the event, Jessica and her mother come to Taiwan in 2017, after the death of her grandfather Gong. They begin to explore the island, starting in the extreme south, with a special interest is the fauna and flora. Taiwan, they discover, is awash with endemic plant species — those found nowhere else — and 60 percent of its mammals (the Formosan black bear, the Formosan macaques) are unique to the country. Islands encourage this kind of independent evolution, they decide, citing Darwin’s Galapagos Islands and Madagascar. Interspersed with such thoughts are evocations of Jessica’s grandparents’ arrival in Canada in 1974. Central, too, is a letter left unopened from her grandfather. Its significance is at the beginning a mystery. An earthquake near the Canadian province of Ontario leads the author to thoughts on how mountains are formed, and how they will, after eons of time, be brought low. Then we’re back to history, to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and its place in the Pacific “ring of fire” that links it, for better or worse, with its neighbor to the north. Thoughts on landslides follow — facilitated by earthquakes followed by the extremely heavy rain brought by typhoons. Family anecdotes alternate with researched information
In 1999 I sat in a Vancouver cafe with a group of anti-capitalist activists. They’d just returned from protesting the WTO in Seattle to find a new, far stranger foe in town — David Icke. He was there to lecture about how the ruling elite are actually child-sacrificing, blood-drinking pedophile lizards in human disguise. Nobody had ever suggested such a thing before, and the activists were working to get his books seized and destroyed. They were alarmed not just by the echoes of anti-semitism but because something startling was happening. Icke was beginning to win over people who should have been on their side. I wrote back then that they were “seeing an omen of the blackest kind, the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land.” But this wasn’t prophecy on my part. I thought they were probably being overdramatic. I spent much of the late 1990s chronicling the embryonic world of Satanic Hollywood lizard pedophile conspiracy theories for my book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, which turns 20 this week. Lately, of course, the theories have proliferated wildly — radicalizing unparalleled swathes of YouTubers, inspiring an insurrection and reportedly in the past two years at least one murder and a suicide bombing. I feel lucky to have been there at its inception, but annoyed with myself for not anticipating quite how vast and malevolent things would get. Looking back, were there clues? It was a tip-off from a militant Islamist that alerted me to that fledgling world. In 1995 the director Saul Dibb and I began filming Omar Bakri Mohammed, who had just announced that he wouldn’t rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. “Maybe,” our editor at Channel 4 said, “it’ll be the Islamic fundamentalist version of following around Hitler the watercolorist.” Omar
Nomadland, Chloe Zhao’s elegiac drama about the life of ageing van-dwellers in America, has confirmed its position as Oscars frontrunner with four wins at the 74th British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, including best film. Zhao took best director, making her only the second woman — following Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 — to pick up the award. Nomadland also won cinematography and leading actress for Frances McDormand. McDormand did not attend the ceremony, even virtually, which took place in a deserted Royal Albert Hall, drenched in red light, with co-hosts Edith Bowman and Dermot O’Leary wrangling a handful of in-person presenters and scores of video-linked nominees. A select audience attending through their laptops provided often eerie laughter and applause. Zhao, 39, who Zoomed in wearing a plaid flannel shirt and dungarees, thanked the community of real-life nomads who welcomed her and her crew. “Thank you for showing us that aging is a beautiful part of life,” she said. “A journey that we should all cherish and celebrate. How we treat our elders says a lot about who we are as a society and we need to do better.” FOR THE WIN In fact, the BAFTAS accorded considerable respect to its more venerable members, with Anthony Hopkins, 83, becoming the oldest-ever male acting winner, beating favorite Chadwick Boseman, who had been expected to win posthumously for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Hopkins won for his role in The Father, Florian Zeller’s adaptation of his stage play about a man with dementia. The eldest acting winner, Emmanuelle Riva, was 84 when she won for her role in another dementia drama, Michael Haneke’s Amour. Hopkins also did not appear to accept his award but did pop up on video at a press conference later, saying that he was “astounded” to receive his third best actor BAFTA.
In Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow’s classic analysis of technological systems and the accidents they foster, Perrow observes that “when we have interactive systems that are tightly coupled, it is ‘normal’ for them to have this kind of accident, even though it is infrequent.” Such accidents are an “inherent property” of technological systems, and we have them because our industrial society is full of tightly coupled, interactive systems with great potential for catastrophe. Here in Taiwan the omnipresence of tightly coupled systems — systems in which a failure in one leads to failure in another — operating in an atmosphere of intense production pressures and a lax safety culture has caused me to reflect often on Perrow’s insights. Everywhere you look, you see normal accidents. ACCIDENTS ALL TOO COMMON Last week there was yet another catastrophic train accident, predictably attributed to some operator (in this case, of the truck), predictably seized upon by the Chinese Nationalist Party to criticize the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, predictably causing outrage that will predictably re-focus on the next inevitable normal accident. Only the pain of the dead and injured, rippling across the tightly-knit communities of the east coast, will linger. Two systems, the road and the train, usually separated, interacted thanks to some minor neglect by the truck’s driver. With the tight coupling on the train line between trains leaving every 20-30 minutes a train was bound to come along. Additional safety features, such as a simple fence of concrete blocks along the road and/or rail line, had long been neglected. The 2018 train accident near Sinma (新馬) Train Station in Yilan County, which killed 18 (including 8 in one family) and injured over 180, was the catalyst for some reforms, including the creation of a Taiwan Transportation Safety Board out of the old Aviation Safety Council. The
April 12 to April 18 Hsieh Hsueh-hung (謝雪紅) stuffed her suitcase with Japanese toys and celebrity photos as she departed from Tokyo in February 1928. She knew she would be inspected by Japanese custom officials upon arrival in Shanghai, and hoped that the items would distract them from the papers hidden in her clothes. Penned with invisible ink on thin sheets, it was the charter of the Taiwanese Communist Party (台灣共產黨, TCP), which Hsieh and her companions would launch on April 15 under the directive of the Soviet-led Communist International with the support of their Chinese, Japanese and Korean counterparts. The ruse worked. The young and homesick Japanese inspector stared longingly at the photos, upon which Hsieh said, “You can have these if you want.” She was cleared immediately. The short-lived party was ill-fated from the very start. Just 10 days after its formation, the Japanese police raided its headquarters in the French Concession, arresting several members, including Hsieh, and confiscated the charter. The TCP later regrouped in Taiwan and continued their mission, but it was plagued by factionalism and government suppression. In June 1931, having finally obtained the list of members, the Japanese authorities launched a massive crackdown on the party, essentially destroying it within a few months. A total of 49 people were convicted. IMPORTANT MISSION After training for nearly two years at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, whose alumni include Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) and Ho Chi Minh, Hsieh and classmate Lin Mu-shun (林木順) departed for Shanghai on Nov. 13, 1927 with big plans. A month earlier, Japanese Communist Party (JCP) cofounder Sen Katayama approached Hsieh and Lin on behalf of the Communist International and tasked them with launching the TCP. Hsieh was to lead the operation with
Charles Baudelaire, whose 200th birthday yesterday was celebrated with stamp issues, new editions of his poetry and virtual events, is arguably more famous for his concept of the flaneur — an aimless stroller or ambler — than for his writing. That’s partly because reading his volumes Les Fleurs du Mal or Le Spleen de Paris requires a degree of application, but also because the idea of an individual moving through the city streets and finding aesthetic pleasure in the teeming crowds, appeals to us and continues to chime. At least, it did until spring last year, when the crowds were told to stay at home. But even in a ghost city, it’s possible to think and walk like a flaneur. Rainer Hanshe has translated several of Baudelaire’s books into English — including Belgium Stripped Bare, about the French author’s visit to Brussels just before it was struck by a cholera epidemic. He notes: “The flaneur is a figure who, while immersed in the urban throng, is simultaneously separate from it. If more empty than not, our streets are still to some degree populated, and we can engage in the form of communion that Baudelaire referred to as a mysterious intoxication.” This involves trying to get inside the heads of others — an act of ecstatic empathy that “peoples” the solitary walker’s imagination. It’s a radical idea that envisions the mind as a sponge or, perhaps, a social media channel. Baudelaire’s most memorable phrase for the flaneur was “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Some of his ideas need updating. The flaneur might be “a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes,” but what about the princesses? Janet Wolff of the University of Manchester has written of the “invisible flaneuse,” of “respectable” women’s absence from public arenas in modern cities. In her 2016 book Flaneuse:
Over a million years in the making, the outdoor playground that is Kaohsiung’s Shoushan (壽山), commonly known as “Monkey Mountain,” is a rich geological and ecological resource that visitors to the city should be sure not to miss. Many are familiar with the area’s hiking trails and resident monkey population, but even locals may be surprised to learn of the extensive system of caves here, full of classic examples of speleothems like stalactites, stalagmites, draperies and flowstones, as well as cave-dwelling fauna. These caves are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of erosion slowly dissolving the mountain’s limestone. There are hundreds of such cavities, some extending dozens of meters into the mountain. To this day, no complete survey has ever been done. The stone itself was laid down by corals in nascent Taiwan’s shallow coastal waters over a million years ago, before being driven upwards by tectonic action. Indeed, marine fossils are common all over the mountain. NATIONAL PARK In 2011, Monkey Mountain, along with a few other nearby hills, became protected as Shoushan National Nature Park. With the establishment of the Park, the “Wild West” days of Monkey Mountain came to an end, and the vast system of limestone caves on the mountain, formerly a spelunking free-for-all, became mostly off limits. Currently, public access is officially limited to four caves, only between the months of November and April, and only when accompanied by a park-certified guide (details below). The other hundred-odd caves are not gated in any way to prevent access, but according to the law such access is now forbidden. Our group was led through all four caves last month by cave guide Chin Nan. WALKING UNDERGROUND Our first stop was Orangutan Cave (猩猩洞), named after several ape-shaped rocks found inside. The high ceiling and flat floor make this the safest
A French documentary has cast fresh doubts over the world’s most expensive painting, the Salvator Mundi credited to Leonardo da Vinci, revealing a resulting diplomatic tussle between France and its Saudi owner. The painting of Jesus Christ, nicknamed the “male Mona Lisa,” was sold at a 2017 Christies auction in New York for a record US$450 million. Its secret buyer was later revealed to be Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, though this is still denied in Riyadh. But there have long been questions over whether it was entirely the work of da Vinci. The issue resurfaced when the painting failed to appear as planned at the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum in 2018, and then at a blockbuster da Vinci show by the Louvre in Paris the following year. Now a documentary, The Savior for Sale by filmmaker Antoine Vitkine, to be premiered on French TV next week, sets out to reveal what was going on behind the scenes. In the film, senior officials from President Emmanuel Macron’s government, appearing under pseudonyms, confirm that the Louvre’s scientific analysis of the painting concluded that while it was produced in da Vinci’s workshop, the master himself only “contributed” to the painting. This apparently went down badly with the Saudis. ROW OVER AUTHENTICITY “Things turned incomprehensible,” says one of the French officials in the film. “The request by “MBS” [bin Salman] was very clear: show the Salvator Mundi next to the Mona Lisa, and present it as 100 percent a da Vinci.” The Saudis offered various deals, the official says, but his recommendation to the Elysee was that this would amount to “laundering a US$450 million artwork.” The documentary alleges that some members of the French government, including Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, lobbied on behalf of bin Salman’s request. They were concerned about the impact on France’s wide-ranging strategic
The Brave Girls were losing courage just weeks ago, on the verge of breaking up and abandoning their dreams of K-pop stardom after years of going nowhere. Then a pseudonymous YouTuber called Viditor uploaded a compilation of them performing on South Korean army bases — and saved their careers. Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’/I am waiting for you/Babe just only you, they chant, as wildly enthusiastic uniformed conscripts dance and wave glow-sticks. It went viral and struck millions of chords across the country. Less than a month later the song reached number one in South Korea and topped the Billboard K-pop 100 in the US, four years after it was originally released — with their popularity reinforced by their story of struggle against the odds. The fan-led ascent is a reversal of the usual K-pop model, where bands are usually assembled, trained intensively and launched by record companies, whose marketing and promotion is crucial to their success. “At the start of this year I thought it was time for us to call an end to it,” lead singer Kim Min-young said. “Reaction to our songs had always been cold... It seemed like no one wanted to see us on stage,” she added tearfully. The Brave Girls started out as a five-piece a decade ago, but fell largely on deaf ears. They were relaunched as a septet in 2016, but the reshuffle did nothing to boost their popularity. Their five singles and two mini-albums were misses rather than hits, and departures over the next few years whittled them down to four members. They were reduced to performing on army bases, the South Korean equivalent of a daytime appearance on a side stage at a music festival. “Our members all felt an emotional burden,” said Kim, 30. “I wasn’t brave enough to give up on my career or start something new.
Even though Taiwan is surrounded by the ocean, its people have turned their backs on the sea for too long, writer and marine advocate Liao Hung-chi (廖鴻基) says in the documentary Whale Island (男人與他的海). Liao laments that due to a multitude of social and political factors, most Taiwanese don’t understand the ocean, which is often walled off by concrete tetrapods or coastal industrial zones. Through his life’s work, he hopes that Taiwanese can face the waves head on — both literally and figuratively. Beautifully shot by documentary filmmaker Huang Chia-chun (黃嘉俊), this tender and majestic ode to the sea follows Liao and Taiwan’s first underwater whale photographer Ray Chin (金磊) on their respective adventures, diving deep alongside them not just into the waters but into their souls, which yearn for freedom. Huang’s footage of the sea and its creatures is absolutely stunning, especially on the big screen, but this isn’t one of those films that just shows pretty pictures for two hours. It is Liao and Chin’s burning passion, their thoughtful musings and their relationships with the families they leave behind on land that present a compelling story. A literal translation of the Chinese, “Man and His Ocean,” may be more apt here as that’s what it’s really about. The two men don’t own the ocean or try to tame it, of course, but it belongs to them in an immensely personal way that drives their entire existence. The two come from different generations and their stories don’t actually intersect in the film. Liao is on a months-long drifting voyage through the Kuroshio current, while Chin is photographing whales in the Kingdom of Tonga. The narrative is a bit disconnected at first since they’re doing unrelated things, but soon the parallels emerge. As a writer, Liao’s narration is much more philosophical,
The auction of a series of sketches purportedly drawn by an artist at the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar was canceled Tuesday after groups protested it was offensive and immoral to profit off the misery of incarcerated people. The auction was halted by eBay hours before it was to conclude after company executives met with Japanese American groups who called the sale “hurtful, and a degrading reminder of the mass roundup and incarceration.” “It’s seems unethical and immoral to put this artwork up on eBay to the highest bidder,” said Shirley Higuchi, author of Setsuko’s Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration. “When you sell artwork created during an oppressive time for money ... that’s against what our society feels is moral.” The groups were led by the Japanese American National Museum and Japanese American Citizens League, which also led a successful effort in 2015 to block the auction of a much larger collection of items of internment art in New Jersey. In that case, hundreds of pieces were turned over to museums that commemorate the US internment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent for more than three years on the dubious claim they might betray America in the war. The artwork for sale on eBay were 20 pencil sketches from 1942-43 with the name Matsumura written at the bottom, along with the word Manzanar. The drawings depict mostly what appear to be Japanese landscapes, including one of Mount Fuji. The groups suggested the artist could be Giichi Matsumura, the subject of a series of stories first reported by The Associated Press about a Manzanar incarceree who died in a storm while sketching and painting in the high Sierra in the final days of the war. Several Matsumura families were held at the camp 290 kilometers north of
In October last year, a who’s who of the the anti-vaccine movement gathered for a virtual conference. Speaker after speaker hit on the same point: The pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to grow the movement — and they didn’t plan to waste it. In the eighth month of the global pandemic, it was clear the activists had a found their moment: The world had never been more receptive to their message. So how does the anti-vaccine extremists use the pandemic to grow their base? For years, those opposing vaccines had argued that safety issues with vaccines are too often ignored by manufacturers and government regulators who they believed were in league to rush out vaccines for their own gain. Then, suddenly, mainstream scientists were among those arguing a Trump-sponsored vaccine was getting hurried out the door, perhaps too quickly, in time for election day. That month, then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed her own skepticism of a Trump-ordered vaccine. Suddenly, confidence in the vaccine dropped significantly among Democrats. “All of the truths we’ve been trying to broadcast for many, many years— there are people hearing it and the impact and all the seeds are landing on very fertile ground,” Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, said at the conference. Kennedy ended his talk with a battle cry. “Let’s go to war,” he said. A report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, says that the roughly 150 leading anti-vaxx social media accounts gained more than 10 million followers, mostly on Instagram and YouTube, between 2019 and December 2020. Since then, platforms have taken steps to curb misinformation including removing some of the movements biggest names. Kennedy was kicked off Instagram in February. Kennedy responded on his organization’s website that, “Facebook, the pharmaceutical industry and its captive regulators use the term ‘vaccine misinformation’
In 1968, the year Hey Jude hit the charts, Richard Thompson turned down an invitation to Paul McCartney’s birthday party. On other occasions over the years, Thompson shared the stage with Jimi Hendrix. He also pranked Buck Owens. Those are among the fun facts found in Thompson’s new memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975. The British guitarist and singer-songwriter, who has long had a small but devout following, revisits his role as observer and participant in a consequential era of rock music. “I’d been wondering whether I was capable of writing something other than a three-minute song for some time,” he said from his home in Montclair, New Jersey. Thompson, 72, says he enjoyed writing his first book, which took three years. He chose to focus on the early part of his career in part because he’s often asked about the 1960s and ‘70s. “It does seem to have been an influential decade of music, and you’re still feeling the reverberations of that now,” he says. People are still reverential about some of the legendary music figures from that time. Many of those names pop up in Beeswing — also the title of a Thompson song that encapsulates the era. He was a member of the groundbreaking group Fairport Convention, which brought rock to the British folk tradition, and British folk to rock. His subsequent musical partnership with his first wife, Linda, produced the sublime songs that have served as the foundation of Thompson’s solo career, including Shoot Out the Lights and Wall of Death. Thompson laughs when asked why he said no to the McCartney invitation. “I saw the Beatles and the Stones as being an older generation — all of five or six years older than we were — and not being particularly relevant to the kind of music
It’s official: Trees are good for the mental health of city dwellers. According to a study published in Scientific Reports at the end of last year, individuals living within 100m of a high density of street trees in Leipzig, Germany, were prescribed antidepressant prescriptions at a lower rate than those who didn’t have many trees in their neighborhood. The study noted that more distant clusters of street trees didn’t appear to have any impact on antidepressant use, and that, even at 100m, the correlation was merely “marginally significant.” However, the researchers found, for individuals with low socio-economic status, trees no more than 100m from their homes “significantly reduced the probability of being prescribed antidepressants.” As the study puts it, “unintentional daily contact to nature through street trees close to the home may reduce the risk of depression, especially for individuals in deprived groups.” The Leipzig researchers speculate that the key benefit of roadside trees isn’t that they inspire people to be more physically active. Instead, “Previous research has found that people whose homes had views of high amounts of diverse vegetation had lower stress and greater [psychological] restoration.” None of this comes as a big surprise. Who doesn’t like trees? A 2011 study by Ihab Elzeyadi of the University of Oregon found that office workers able to see trees and nature from their desks took less sick leave than colleagues who couldn’t enjoy any view whatsoever. Trees and parks are especially important for people who live in Taiwan’s cities, because so few households have gardens. Unfortunately, the trees that do shade our sidewalks and roads aren’t well cared for, say local specialists. SOIL COMPACTION A July 30, 2017 post on the Facebook account of the Taiwan Greening Technology Association (wetrees.org) explains why urban trees are at particular risk in summertime: “When the soil
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