Tracy Ullman does Angela Merkel (one of the outstanding world leaders of the past sixteen years) as Merkel’s assistant tries to get her to not roll her eyes at other politicians. (2 minutes 45 seconds):
Not often I can use both “Politics” and “Funny” tags on the same item.
Bret Devereaux (PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Teaching Assistant Professor) says that the extraordinary success of the Roman Empire was in considerable part due to the diversity of its citizens, and that accepting all kinds of people strengthened it:
Every sort of evidence we have for early Rome, from the legends of the Romans themselves to the geographic, linguistic and archaeological evidence of the site, points to early Rome as a sort of ‘frontier town’ – a place defined as the meeting point of many quite different cultural groups.
Understanding how Rome went from just one of Italy’s many self-governing cities to the dominant power in the Mediterranean requires understanding how the Romans handled all of those different Italian people as citizens and allies.
It turns out, by ancient standards, Roman citizenship was radically expansionary.
As the Romans slowly absorbed pre-Roman Italy into the Roman Italy of the Republic, that meant managing the truly wild variety of different peoples in their alliance system…
In short, Roman Italy under the Republic was preposterously multicultural (in the literal meaning of that word)…and it turns out that’s why they won.
https://acoup.blog/2021/06/25/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-ii-citizens-and-allies/. 9,900 words but well worth it.
Cultured meat — meat from real animals but grown in bioreactors — could (1) greatly reduce global warming and environmental issues, and (2) reduce animal cruelty. About 4,800 words:
https://time.com/6109450/sustainable-lab-grown-mosa-meat/
Eventually, says (Mark) Post, we would need only some 30,000 to 40,000 cows worldwide, instead of the 300 million we slaughter every year, without the environmental and moral consequences of large-scale intensive cattle farming.
…Mosa is in the process of applying for regulatory approval from the E.U. In the meantime, the company is already expanding into a new space with roughly 100,000 liters of bioreactor capacity, enough to produce several tons of meat every six to eight weeks.
We examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond’s sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3).
Original article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893921002167. It has sections:
1. Nightfall: sexual health
2. The man with the golden gut: food safety and infections
3. A flu to a kill: air and droplet borne diseases
4. The fly who loved me: arthropod-borne diseases
5. Dr nope: other vector borne diseases and neglected tropical diseases
6. Tomorrow in the skies: the problem of poor travel preparation
Also reviewed in Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/you-only-live-once-epidemiologists-analyze-health-risks-in-all-the-james-bond-films/.
Funding
There was no specific funding for this project. Given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.
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