Hasnain says:

“Yes, these are all public figures. An imperviousness to criticism and ridicule is a necessity for celebrities or anyone in the public eye. But no matter how thick your skin is or with how much wealth, fame and power you are cosseted, being the butt of a joke isn’t fun. Sometimes, it is intolerable. When you are constantly a target — of jokes, insults, incivility and worse — as most Black women are, the skin we’ve spent a lifetime thickening can come apart. We’re only human, and so, too, are the people who love us.”

Hasnain says:

““It makes clean indoor air a priority, just like clean water,” Michaels said.

The hospital industry, he said, has “always fought against having to treat infectious disease as airborne because they put people in rooms for the most part, put a curtain around them and put someone else in the bed 10 feet away, and they think the curtains are going to protect people.”

The White House “is saying that that’s not going to work,” he added.”

Hasnain says:

“From our party game we know that, given a set of vertices, it’s not always possible to form an odd graph. But it is always possible to form an odd subgraph. One boring way to accomplish this is to do what we did above: Just pick two vertices that connect to each other and ignore all their other edges. That makes an odd subgraph, but a very small one. Is it always possible to find a large odd subgraph?”

Hasnain says:

“At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness⁠10 because they do not attend schools that offer advanced coursework, cannot afford expensive enrichment opportunities, cannot expect lengthy letters of recommendation from their overburdened teachers, or are otherwise hampered by educational inequalities.⁠11 By using the tests as a tool⁠12 in the service of our mission, we have helped improve the diversity of our undergraduate population⁠13 while student academic outcomes at MIT have gotten better,⁠14 too; our strategic and purposeful use of testing has been crucial to doing both simultaneously.⁠”

Hasnain says:

Ugh.

“Workers called Tesla’s factory “the plantation,” and “the slave ship,” not just for the brutal work pace that everyone experienced, but especially because Black workers were routinely segregated into a corner of the factory that lacked air conditioning and work conditions were most crowded, Romby said.”

Hasnain says:

“Our failed pandemic response, which has resulted in a million deaths so far, has been predicated on the total replacement of shared moral or ethical values with individualistic assumptions about risks, benefits, and value. The realities of an infectious disease outbreak have proven deeply inconvenient for the privileged, the interests of capital, and the right-wing ideologues who work to justify those hierarchies. The rest of us must look to collective action and solidarity as the essential preconditions for meeting social needs, confronting planetary crises, and working towards a world that does not sacrifice the social good on the altar of self-interest.”

Hasnain says:

“In December, a team led by Hartmut Grote of Cardiff University reported in Nature that they had used a gravitational wave detector to look for scalar-field dark matter, a lesser-known candidate for the missing mass in and around galaxies. The team didn’t find a signal, ruling out a large class of scalar-field dark matter models. Now the stuff can only exist if it affects normal matter very weakly — at least a million times more weakly than was previously thought possible.”

Hasnain says:

“To a certain extent, the evolution of tomato soup cake over the decades mirrors shifts in the broader American gastronomic zeitgeist. What started as a relatively lean, eggless riff on an English pudding morphed to suit the prevailing tastes and socioeconomic conditions. In the 1950s, as the economy was booming and Americans were eager to forget about wartime scarcity, eggs and buttery frostings began showing up in tomato soup cake recipes. Since convenience foods, including canned soups, were fashionable, most of these recipes called for the addition of boxed spice cake mixes from Duff’s, Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, and Pillsbury.”

Hasnain says:

"This wave of companies trying to resume operations certainly feels like these societal and personal changes are being waved away as merely a phase. But that gets to Snowden’s broader critique of American institutions, from companies to government: We still want to get back to normal, and we can’t acknowledge the realities of our current world."

Hasnain says:

People continue to do sketchy things in the name of the spiritual and the supernatural. This was equal parts informative and horrifying. I do wish it wasn’t written from the slanted angle that it took though - would have appreciated a bit more background on the cultural and historical reasons for juju being this mainstream.

“Belief in magic often coexists with Christianity and Islam. Clerics from both monotheistic religions often refer to aspects of traditional African religions as evil - something real, but which can be defeated by prayer and their own higher powers.

Many pastors have become rich and famous on claims of having supernatural powers that can overcome juju and evil curses, something which many imams also practise.”