Archbishop of Canterbury Delivers Message About Kate Middleton in Easter Sermon

During his Easter Sunday sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby delivered a message acknowledging the struggles King Charles and Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, as they both battle cancer. 

 “In each of our lives, there are moments which change us forever,” he said in the service held at Canterbury Cathedral in the English county of Kent. “We’ve watched and sympathized with and felt alongside the dignity of the King and the Princess of Wales, as they have talked of their cancer, and in doing so by their lack of selfishness, by their grace and their faith, boosted so many others.” 

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Both the King and Princess have said that they chose to share their own diagnoses publicly in part to support others facing the disease.  

King Charles was diagnosed with an undisclosed type of cancer during a recent treatment for an enlarged prostate. “His Majesty has chosen to share his diagnosis to prevent speculation and in the hope it may assist public understanding for all those around the world who are affected by cancer,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement on Feb. 5. Following his disclosure, the NHS reported a jump of over 50% in the number of visits to a webpage offering advice on the signs and symptoms of cancer.

On March 22, the Princess announced she had been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing “preventative chemotherapy.” In a video message sharing the news, Kate offered support for all those whose lives have been touched by the disease.

“At this time, I am also thinking of all those whose lives have been affected by cancer. For everyone facing this disease, in whatever form, please do not lose faith or hope. You are not alone,” she said. 

King Charles attended Easter church service at St George’s Chapel Windsor on Sunday, along with his wife Queen Camilla, marking his first major public appearance since his cancer diagnosis was shared by Buckingham Palace. Kate, who first stepped back from royal responsibilities in January after undergoing a planned abdominal surgery, was expected to return to royal duties after Easter, though her return has been postponed until she is given medical clearance.

The Archbishop previously spoke out against the conspiracies that surrounded Kate’s absence from public life in an interview with Times Radio released on March 21, just a day before she shared the news of her diagnosis.

“We are obsessed with conspiracy and we have little sense of the humanity of those who are caught in the glare of the news,” Welby said when asked whether the conspiracy theories surrounding her public absence pointed to a moral issue. “It doesn’t matter who it is, people should be allowed to be ill, have an operation, whatever it is, and to live their lives in peace without everyone demanding that they prove something every other day.”

source https://time.com/6962204/archbishop-of-canterbury-easter-sermon-kate-middleton-diagnosis/

King Charles Greets Crowds at Easter Service In First Major Public Appearance Since Diagnosis

King Charles greeted the public after Easter church service at St George’s Chapel Windsor on Sunday, marking his first major public appearance since his cancer diagnosis was shared by Buckingham Palace on Feb. 5.

The King and his wife, Queen Camilla, waved to a crowd of onlookers outside the chapel, and chatted with the visitors after the service. They were joined by the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh—Prince Edward and Sophie—and their son, James, Earl of Wessex, along with the King’s sister, Princess Anne, who was joined by her husband, Sir Timothy Laurence. Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, were also in attendance.

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King Charles was diagnosed with an undisclosed type of cancer during a recent treatment for an enlarged prostate. He has continued to carry out many of his royal commitments in private, though he had temporarily paused public-facing duties at the advice of his doctors.  

Just a few days ago, the King spoke of his “great sadness” at missing the traditional Maundy Thursday service in a recorded audio message that was played at the service at Worcester Cathedral. Queen Camilla, who attended the service alone, has largely been solely carrying out public engagements that might otherwise fall on her husband.

The Easter service was a smaller affair than usual this year. Absent from the celebration were the Prince and Princess of Wales and their three children. Catherine, the Princess of Wales, has been absent from public royal engagements since Christmas, after undergoing a planned abdominal surgery in January. On March 22, the Princess announced she had been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing “preventative chemotherapy.”

In January, when it was first announced by Kensington Palace that Kate would be stepping back from royal duties, she was expected to return to royal duties after Easter, though her return has been postponed until she is given clearance by her doctors.

source https://time.com/6962170/king-charles-easter-service-greetings-public-appearance/

U.K. Counterterrorism Police Investigate Attack on Iranian TV Presenter in London

LONDON — British counterterrorism police are investigating the stabbing of an Iranian television presenter outside his home in London as concern grows over threats to a Farsi-language satellite news channel long critical of Iran’s theocratic government.

Pouria Zeraati, a presenter at London-based Iran International, was stabbed in the leg Friday afternoon and is in stable condition at a hospital, the station said. His condition is not believed to be life-threatening.

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London’s Metropolitan Police Service said Zeraati’s occupation, together with recent threats to U.K.-based Iranian journalists, triggered the counterterrorism probe, even though the motivation for the attack is still unclear.

“While we continue to assess the circumstances of this incident, detectives are following a number of lines of inquiry and our priority at this time is to try and identify whoever was behind this attack and to arrest them,” Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said in a statement.

“I appreciate the wider concern this incident may cause — particularly amongst others in similar lines of work, and those from Iranian communities.”

Iran International spokesman Adam Baillie said the stabbing was “hugely frightening.” Although the channel’s journalists have been threatened in the past, this is the first attack of its kind, Baillie told the BBC.

“It was a shocking, shocking incident, whatever the outcome of an investigation reveals,” he said.

Mehdi Hosseini Matin, Iran’s charge d’affaires in the UK, said “we deny any link” to the incident.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Pouria Zeraati (@pouriazeraati)

Police say they have disrupted “a number” of plots to kill or kidnap people in the U.K. who were seen as enemies of the Iranian government. Officers are working with intelligence agencies to disrupt future plots and provide protection for the targeted organizations and individuals, police said.

Early last year, Iran International temporarily shut down its operations in London and moved to studios in Washington, D.C., after what it described as an escalation of “state-backed threats from Iran.” The station resumed operations at a new location in London last September.

An Austrian man was convicted in December of attempting to collect information likely to be useful for terrorism after security guards spotted him carrying out surveillance on the former headquarters of Iran International. Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev, 31, was sentenced to three years and six months in prison.

Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, expressed concern that Britain still isn’t doing enough to protect opponents of the Iranian government.

“Whilst we don’t know the circumstances of this attack, Iran continues to hunt down those brave enough to speak out against the regime,” Kearns said on X, formerly Twitter. “Yet I remain unconvinced that we and our allies have clear strategies to protect people in our countries from them, and protect our interests abroad.”

Earlier this month, Foreign Secretary David Cameron condemned the conviction in absentia of 10 journalists from the BBC’s Persian service on propaganda charges against the Islamic Republic of Iran, calling it “completely unacceptable.”

“And also, when I last met the Iranian foreign minister, I raised the case of the fact that Iran was paying thugs to try and murder Iranian journalists providing free and independent information for Iran TV in Britain,” Cameron said in the House of Lords. “On both counts, in my view, they are guilty.”

source https://time.com/6962101/pouria-zeraati-attack-london-uk-counterterrorism-police-investigate/

Trump Criticized After Posting Video With an Image of President Biden Hog-Tied in a Truck

Former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump has been criticized after sharing a video on his social media platform, Truth Social, of a truck bearing the image of President Joe Biden tied up.

The video, posted on Friday, March 29, showed two vehicles decked out in American flags, a Blue Lives Matter flag—showing support for law enforcement—and other images. “Trump 2024” is seen on the side of the black pickup truck. The caption on the post appeared to indicate that the trucks were spotted in Long Island, New York, on Thursday, where Trump attended the wake of an NYPD officer who was shot and killed.

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But what alarmed critics the most was the image of a hog-tied President Biden on the rear of the vehicle, giving the illusion he was being held in the back of the truck.

“This image from Donald Trump is the type of crap you post when you’re calling for a bloodbath or when you tell the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by,’” Michael Tyler, the Communications Director for the Biden campaign, said in a statement emailed to TIME. “Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously—just ask the Capitol Police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6.”

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told NBC News that the “picture was on the back of a pickup truck that was traveling down the highway,” and said “Democrats and crazed lunatics” had called for violence against Trump. He added that they were “weaponizing the justice system against him.”

TIME has reached out to the Trump and Biden campaigns for comment.

Trump has repeatedly been accused of inciting violence due to his rhetoric since his 2016 campaign for President. Federal officials previously warned Trump to refrain from rhetoric that could “incite violence or civil unrest.”

source https://time.com/6962075/donald-trump-video-president-biden-tied-up-truck/

Everything to Know About Beyoncé’s Collaborators on Cowboy Carter

Beyoncé’s music always features a long list of collaborators, songwriters, and credits for samples and interpolations. In Renaissance, only two songs had officially credited features, but the credits tell a much deeper story. Her latest album, Cowboy Carter, is no different. The list of collaborators is just as expansive. Multiple songs feature country music acts, including newer ones like Tanner Ardell and Shaboozey and legends of the genre, Willie Nelson, Linda Martell, and Dolly Parton. On the technical side, she worked with major hit-making producers like DA Got That Dope, Ryan Tedder, and Pharrell Williams.

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The BeyHive started reading the tea leaves on Wednesday afternoon, when Beyoncé uploaded a cryptic tracklist to her social media pages. The track listing “Jolene,” confirmed that Beyoncé used Dolly Parton’s famous song in some way after the country singer told Knox News that Beyoncé recorded a version of her song. Listeners got a taste of what was to come when Beyoncé released the lead singles off the album, “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” in February. She had Rhiannon Giddens playing the banjo and viola on the former and Robert Randolph playing the steel guitar on the latter.

Renaissance featured a similarly long list of credits as Beyoncé paid homage to the queer Black pioneers of house music. Songs like “COZY” and “Break My Soul” feature the voices of TS Madison and Big Freedia, while “PURE/HONEY” samples tracks from Moi Renee, Kevin Aviance, and Kevin Jz Prodigy. The album uplifted the underrepresented icons who made the genre what it is today. Cowboy Carter, which came out on March 29,  spans across country music, and Beyoncé made sure to not only highlight those who came before her, but uplift newer artists as she pushes the genre’s boundaries into new directions.

Here are all the features, samples, interpolations, prominent songwriters, and producers Beyoncé worked with on Cowboy Carter. 

Who is featured on Cowboy Carter?

The album features appearances in the form of spoken word interludes from country music legends Willie Nelson, Linda Martell, and Dolly Parton. The latter had her song “Jolene” covered by Bey, with many of the lyrics changed. Parton is also featured briefly in the intro to “Tyrant.” Nelson joins in as a radio host for two interludes titled “Smoke Hour” and “Smoke Hour II,” whereas Martell is featured on “Spaghettii” and an interlude titled “The Linda Martell Show.” Martell is known as being the first Black female artist to achieve commercial success in the country music genre and made history as the first Black female artist to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. For features, Beyoncé enlisted a diverse set of artists. 

Post Malone makes an appearance on a song called “Levii Jeans.” Shaboozey hops on “Spaghettii” and “Sweet Honey Buckin’,” and Willie Jones is featured on “Just For Fun.” On the song “Blackbiird,” Bey enlists the help of four young singers—Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts. Adell had a viral hit with her country/hip hop slammer, “Buckle Bunny.” One of the most surprising additions to the featured artists list is Miley Cyrus, who has no issue harmonizing with Bey on “II Most Wanted.” Following in her sister Blue Ivy’s footsteps, Rumi Carter is featured on the intro of the song “Protector.”

“Take these broken wings and learn to fly”

I cannot believe it. God is so good. I’m on a @Beyonce record. And not on one but TWO songs. You can catch me on those harms on Tyrant too!

Thank you Beyoncé for shining your light. Thank you thank you thank you😭 pic.twitter.com/ErNmO3eND1

— Tiera Kennedy (@TieraMusic) March 29, 2024

What songs does Beyoncé sample or interpolate on this album?

There are few samples and interpolations spread out across the album. The song “Blackbiird” is a cover of the 1968 song by The Beatles, which Paul McCartney wrote in the summer of that year, inspired by the civil rights movement. He said in a 1997 book written by Barry Miles called Many Years From Now that he wrote this song with a Black woman in mind. He said, “Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a Black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”

The second cover we hear on Cowboy Carter is “Jolene.” While the essence of the original Dolly Parton song is still there, Beyoncé took some liberties with the lyrics on the new version. She’s much more defensive of her man on the song, adding lines like “I’m warnin’ you, woman, find you your own man” and “I’m still a Creole banjee b–ch from Louisianne (Don’t try me).”

Later on in the album, we hear Beyoncé interpolate “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys and Nancy Sinatra’s version of “These Boots Are Made For Walking” on the song “YAYA,” sample “Oh Louisiana” by Chuck Berry on the interlude of the same name, and the song “Sweet Honey Buckin’” sees Beyoncé covering Patsy Cline’s 1961 country-pop hit, “I Fall To Pieces.” Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé’s collaboration seemingly interpolates the chord progression of Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 song, “Landslide.” We also hear two songs on Nelson’s “Smoke Hour” interlude: Berry’s “Maybellene,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Down by the River Side” and “Don’t Let Go” by Roy Hamilton.

source https://time.com/6961812/beyonce-cowboy-carter-collabs/

U.S. Changes How it Categorizes People by Race and Ethnicity for the First Time in 27 Years

(ORLANDO, Fla.) — For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.

The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This evolving process often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as a wish for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.

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“You can’t underestimate the emotional impact this has on people,” said Meeta Anand, senior director for Census & Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It’s how we conceive ourselves as a society. … You are seeing a desire for people to want to self-identify and be reflected in data so they can tell their own stories.”

Under the revisions, questions about race and ethnicity that previously were asked separately on forms will be combined into a single question. That will give respondents the option to pick multiple categories at the same time, such as “Black,” “American Indian” and “Hispanic.” Research has shown that large numbers of Hispanic people aren’t sure how to answer the race question when that question is asked separately because they understand race and ethnicity to be similar and they often pick “some other race” or do not answer the question.

A Middle Eastern and North African category will be added to the choices available for questions about race and ethnicity. People descended from places such as Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and Syria had been encouraged to identify as white, but now will have the option of identifying themselves in the new group. Results from the 2020 census, which asked respondents to elaborate on their backgrounds, suggest that 3.5 million residents identify as Middle Eastern and North African.

“It feels good to be seen,” said Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando whose parents are from Iran. “Growing up, my family would check the ‘white’ box because we didn’t know what other box reflected our family. Having representation like that, it feels meaningful.”

The changes also strike from federal forms the words “Negro” and “Far East,” now widely regarded as pejorative, as well as the terms “majority” and “minority,” because they fail to reflect the nation’s complex racial and ethnic diversity, some officials say. The revisions also encourage the collection of detailed race and ethnicity data beyond the minimum standards, such as “Haitian” or “Jamaican” for someone who checks “Black.”

Read More: At Census Time, Asian Americans Again Confront the Question of Who ‘Counts’ as Asian. Here’s How the Answer Got So Complicated

The changes to the standards were hammered out over two years by a group of federal statisticians and bureaucrats who prefer to stay above the political fray. But the revisions have long-term implications for legislative redistricting, civil rights laws, health statistics, and possibly even politics as the number of people categorized as white is reduced.

Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, recently alluded to arguments made by people who allege Democrats are promoting illegal immigration to weaken the power of white people. As president, Trump unsuccessfully tried to disqualify people who were in the United States illegally from being included in the 2020 census.

Momentum for changing the race and ethnicity categories grew during the Obama administration in the mid-2010s, but was halted after Trump became president in 2017. It was revived after Democratic President Joe Biden took office in 2021.

The changes will be reflected in data collection, forms, surveys and the once-a-decade census questionnaires put out by the federal government, as well as in state governments and the private sector because businesses, universities and other groups usually follow Washington’s lead. Federal agencies have 18 months to submit a plan on how they will put the changes in place.

The first federal standards on race and ethnicity were produced in 1977 to provide consistent data across agencies and come up with figures that could help enforce civil rights laws. They were last updated in 1997 when five minimum race categories were delineated — American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander and white; respondents could pick more than one race. The minimum ethnic categories were grouped separately as not Hispanic or Hispanic or Latino.

The interagency group that worked on the latest revisions noted that categories are sociopolitical constructs, and race and ethnicity are not defined biologically or genetically.

Racial and ethnic categories used by the U.S. government reflect their times.

In 1820, the category “Free Colored People” was added to the decennial census to reflect the increase in free Black people. In 1850, the term “Mulatto” was added to the census to capture people of mixed heritage. American Indians were not explicitly counted in the census until 1860. Following years of immigration from China, “Chinese” was included in the 1870 census. There was not a formal question about Hispanic origin until the 1980 census.

Not everyone is on board with the latest revisions.

Some Afro Latinos feel that combining the race and ethnicity question will reduce their numbers and representation in the data, though previous research by the U.S. Census Bureau did not find significant differences among Afro Latino responses when the questions were asked separately or together.

Mozelle Ortiz, for instance, is of mixed Afro Puerto Rican descent. She feels the changes could eliminate that identity, even though people can choose more than one answer once the race and ethnicity questions are combined.

“My entire lineage, that of my Black Puerto Rican grandmother’s and all other non-white Spanish speaking peoples, will be erased,” Ortiz wrote the interagency group.

Others are unhappy about how some groups of people such as Armenians or Arabs from Sudan and Somalia were not included in the examples used to define people of Middle Eastern or North African background.

Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said that while she was “incredibly happy” with the new category, that enthusiasm was tempered by the omissions.

“It is not reflective of the racial diversity of our community,” Berry said. “And it’s wrong.”

source https://time.com/6961576/us-race-ethnicity-category-change/

How Beyoncé Changed the Music Industry

On Friday, Beyoncé will release Cowboy Carter, the much anticipated album that signals the beginning of the second part of a three-act project, following Renaissance, a sparkling celebration of house and dance music. When the country album was announced during Beyoncé’s appearance in a Verizon Super Bowl commercial back in February, accompanied by two country singles, “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” it declared a new era for the artist. And it’s one that positions her, rather boldly, in a genre that has been less than welcoming to her. (See, for starters, the reception to a country song included on her 2016 album, Lemonade, and her performance of it alongside the Chicks at the CMAs later that year.) With Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé reinforces a truth that has embodied her career: she defies easy definition. 

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Over the course of her three-decade career, the musical superstar has challenged industry conventions and superficial assumptions about her art by doing things on her terms—and in doing so, she has changed the way we think about music and the artists who make it. Hallmarks of the world of music as we know it now, like the visual album or rollout methods like the surprise release, Friday release, or a fully digital drop, were pioneered by Beyoncé. If she didn’t invent them, her influence helped to make them industry standard. 

Read more: Beyoncé Has Always Been Country

There may be no other artist of her generation who has personified music industry changes quite like Beyoncé, whose career moves have helped to rewrite the playbook for artists. Though many of the changes that have shaped the past decade in music were inevitable, from the decline of radio’s influence amid the rise of streaming to the importance of social media, Beyoncé has remained relevant because of her willingness to evolve alongside them. Her embrace of new ideas and practices have set her apart as a leader in the industry and a veritable trendsetter. 

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For Rawiya Kameir, a music critic and journalism professor at Syracuse University who teaches a class on the politics of Beyoncé, the superstar’s impact stems from the excellence of her craft and her commitment to her creative vision. To Kameir, Beyoncé’s innovation is an extension of the work she puts in behind the scenes to produce her art, from production to research. 

“Not only does she do things her own way, she does things really well. The extent to which she’s able to pull this stuff off relies on not just the ideas, but the fact that the execution is still top-notch: the Virgo ethos of it all, her attention to detail, the depths of the research—all of that is really important because you can’t pull off these impactful changes without having the art to back it up.”

Beyoncé changes the album release

Like she raps on the 2014 track “Feeling Myself,” there’s no denying that Beyoncé “changed the game with that digital drop.” The biggest example of Beyoncé’s impacts on the business are encapsulated by 2013’s Beyoncé, the pivotal visual album that Kameir calls an “inflection point.” The album was a marked departure from industry norms, from its surprise release with no advance promotion to its early Friday morning drop, which flouted the usual Tuesday album release date convention. (Albums for decades had typically been released on Tuesdays in the U.S. largely because the Billboard charts were published on Wednesday, and because this allowed distributors to get their stock to retailers, who had a week to prepare it for sales ahead of the weekend). 

Leaks of physical albums spurred Beyoncé’s decision to initially do a digital-only drop of the album, but the move also foreshadowed the obsolescence of radio and physical copies to come. With a wholly digital drop, Beyoncé had no need to observe a Tuesday release date to accommodate stocking physical copies. Her decision to release the album on Friday was symbolic on multiple levels; first, it showed that she was confident enough in her art to release it later, despite having only four days, as opposed to seven, to accumulate album sales for her first week. Second, having a Friday release meant that all fans, no matter where they lived, got to experience music at the same time (other countries released on different days from Tuesday, which meant that there was a greater chance of pirating and leaks). And finally, a Friday release also felt celebratory—new music on a Friday felt like an invitation for fans to fully let loose, go out and enjoy the album (and themselves) in its totality. 

Read more: Everything We Know About Beyoncé’s New Album Cowboy Carter

Her decision more than paid off—Beyoncé debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, still holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling album on iTunes, and has been RIAA certified platinum five times. Other artists, from Drake to Taylor Swift, also turned to the surprise drop in the years following Beyoncé’s self-titled album, finding similar success on the charts. And perhaps most significantly, the record industry made a collective decision in 2015 to release albums worldwide on Fridays, to have more uniform distribution and to crack down on piracy, a decision that almost certainly was spurred by Beyoncé’s release. 

“I didn’t want to release my music the way I’ve done it (before). I’m bored with that,” Beyoncé said in a statement following the album’s surprise release. “I feel like I’m able to speak directly to my fans. There’s so much that gets between the music, the artist and the fans. I felt like I didn’t want anybody to give the message when my record is coming out. I just want this to come out when it’s ready and (for it to be) from me to my fans.”

Beyoncé pioneers the visual album

The decision to create a visual album that had to be purchased in full was key to the album’s success. Although there were clear predecessors to visual albums, like Prince’s 1984 film Purple Rain which incorporated all of the songs from the album of the same name, and even Beyoncé’s own 2006 album B’Day which included visuals to accompany every song, her decision to release the album with no singles and no option to purchase songs individually made the album more like a narrative feature and compelled fans to listen to it in full.

“It wasn’t the first time that she had released a video for every song on an album, but so many things happened that year culturally both in terms of technology and politically,” Kameir says. “What made it feel like a particular pivot point was that everything about it was different—the surprise drop, the fact that you could only buy it, you couldn’t stream individual songs, the music videos for each song making a built-in narrative. And ever since then, pretty much everything she’s done again has felt like an extension of that particular moment.”

Read more: What Beyoncé Gave Us

In the years that followed the release of her self-titled album, Beyoncé released two other visual albums, 2016’s Lemonade and 2020’s Black Is King, while other artists, from Janelle Monaé and Jennifer Lopez to Frank Ocean and Drake, have released high-concept visual albums of their own. 

Also integral to the album’s success was Beyoncé’s use of social media to promote the project on the day of its release. She tapped Instagram, then a fairly new app, and Facebook to run ads, bypassing the traditional media interviews that would accompany an album release. While the integration of social media in music marketing was well under way in 2013, Beyoncé’s decision to use social platforms as the primary way of promoting her album was a prescient example of what album promotion would look like in the future.

The wisdom of longevity

Kameir believes Beyoncé’s outsize influence on the music industry is also due to her longevity. Beyoncé’s experience over 30 years has made her uniquely attuned to not only the logistics of the industry, but also its evolution. Beyoncé’s innovative decisions were the result of someone who was carefully observing and studying the changes of an industry she more or less grew up in from the time she was a young girl.

“She was around during the days when radio promotions were super important, but she also is young enough to see the impact of the various digital media, so she has this advantage to respond to or get ahead of trends without losing her own sense of self and control,” Kameir says. “A lot of the innovations that she’s made that have taken off aren’t just random experiments—they’re part of the legacy of an artist who really believed in the full album experience, during the pre-Internet era. She’s finding ways to tie the things that she cares about as an artist in the industry, to various evolving trends.” 

Read more: Beyoncé’s Album of the Year Snub Fits Into the Grammys’ Long History of Overlooking Black Women

Kinitra Brooks, an English professor at Michigan State University who co-edited The Lemonade Reader and the forthcoming The Renaissance Reader, echoes this sentiment. “She spent years paying her dues as a part of Destiny’s Child and she’s been in the business since she was a girl,” Brooks said. “We have to give credit for the longevity of being a veteran in the business. She knows where the pitfalls are and has survived the pitfalls of many of her contemporaries.” 

Marrying business and creative decision-making

Brooks points to Beyoncé’s evolution not just as a veteran artist but as an insightful businesswoman, with her business decisions and creative choices working in tandem. She points to moves like starting Parkwood Entertainment, which mostly keeps her business and creative processes in-house, affording her ample creative control when it comes to trying things like the visual album that a label might veto due to cost or deviation from standard practice.

“Beyoncé is a very shrewd businesswoman who’s learned to hire people who keep her business close, who have worked with her for a very long time,” Brooks tells TIME. 

She also points to her ability to tap into the zeitgeist and engage with the current discourse. Like Kameir, Brooks says that while some of the industry-shifting practices weren’t created by Beyoncé, the innovation lies within her ability to pinpoint a trend or a moment and amplify it. 

Read more: In Her Renaissance Tour Movie, Beyoncé Chooses Freedom Over Perfection

“One of her great talents is being able to see the cultural zeitgeist coming and being able to catch that wave by putting her twist on it in a way that’s interesting,” Brooks says. “A lot of times what Beyonce does is open up and expose people to new things that they never would have been exposed to and there are politics involved in that because Beyonce is bringing something to the fore.” 

An independent ethos

For Kameir, one of the most impactful ways that Beyoncé has shaped the music industry is the example she’s set for artists to stay true to their creative instincts. “For a lot of artists, she has demonstrated that there is possibility in terms of building a lane for yourself,” says Kameir. “Even though she’s very much a product of the major label system, there is a kind of independent ethos to her that I think artists can borrow from and her greatest impact is in demonstrating this potential.”

A throughline of Beyoncé’s career over the years has been reinvention. From girl group member to her stylized Sasha Fierce alter ego to her Renaissance disco queen persona, she’s no stranger to transformation and no friend to easy categorization. (This was amply apparent at the 2023 Grammys, where she was nominated in both the Dance/Electronic and R&B categories.) Brooks points to her current foray into country music with Cowboy Carter, which Beyoncé described on Instagram as being born out of a “deeper dive into the history of Country music” and the Black musical archive, as proof of her dedication to her vision and a rejection of a system that could never imagine an artist like her. 

“It’s this idea that, ‘I don’t have to play the game this way,” Brooks says. “Like, ‘Why did I fight so hard to get to the top if I’m not going to change some rules?’”

source https://time.com/6961069/beyonce-music-industry/

A Faster Spinning Earth May Cause Timekeepers to Subtract a Second From World Clocks

Earth’s changing spin is threatening to toy with our sense of time, clocks and computerized society in an unprecedented way — but only for a second.

For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a “negative leap second” — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.

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“This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal,” said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”

Ice melting at both of Earth’s poles has been counteracting the planet’s burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.

“We are headed toward a negative leap second,” said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn’t part of the study. “It’s a matter of when.”

It’s a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time.

Earth takes about 24 hours to rotate, but the key word is about.

For thousands of years, the Earth has been generally slowing down, with the rate varying from time to time, said Agnew and Judah Levine, a physicist for the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Read More: Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation

The slowing is mostly caused by the effect of tides, which are caused by the pull of the moon, McCarthy said.

This didn’t matter until atomic clocks were adopted as the official time standard more than 55 years ago. Those didn’t slow.

That established two versions of time — astronomical and atomic — and they didn’t match. Astronomical time fell behind atomic time by 2.5 milliseconds every day. That meant the atomic clock would say it’s midnight and to Earth it was midnight a fraction of a second later, Agnew said.

Those daily fractions of seconds added up to whole seconds every few years. Starting in 1972, international timekeepers decided to add a “leap second” in June or December for astronomical time to catch up to the atomic time, called Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Instead of 11:59 and 59 seconds turning to midnight, there would be another second at 11:59 and 60 seconds. A negative leap second would go from 11:59 and 58 seconds directly to midnight, skipping 11:59:59.

Between 1972 and 2016, 27 separate leap seconds were added as Earth slowed. But the rate of slowing was tapering off.

“In 2016 or 2017 or maybe 2018, the slowdown rate had slowed down to the point that the Earth was actually speeding up,” Levine said.

Earth’s speeding up because its hot liquid core — “a large ball of molten fluid” — acts in unpredictable ways, with eddies and flows that vary, Agnew said.

Agnew said the core has been triggering a speedup for about 50 years, but rapid melting of ice at the poles since 1990 masked that effect. Melting ice shifts Earth’s mass from the poles to the bulging center, which slows the rotation much like a spinning ice skater slows when extending their arms out to their sides, he said.

Without the effect of melting ice, Earth would need that negative leap second in 2026 instead of 2029, Agnew calculated.

For decades, astronomers had been keeping universal and astronomical time together with those handy little leap seconds. But computer system operators said those additions aren’t easy for all the precise technology the world now relies on. In 2012, some computer systems mishandled the leap second, causing problems for Reddit, Linux, Qantas Airlines and others, experts said.

“What is the need for this adjustment in time when it causes so many problems?” McCarthy said.

But Russia’s satellite system relies on astronomical time, so eliminating leap seconds would cause them problems, Agnew and McCarthy said. Astronomers and others wanted to keep the system that would add a leap second whenever the difference between atomic and astronomical time neared a second.

Read More: John Kerry’s Four Decades of Raising Climate Awareness on the World Stage

In 2022, the world’s timekeepers decided that starting in the 2030s they’d change the standards for inserting or deleting a leap second, making it much less likely.

Tech companies such as Google and Amazon unilaterally instituted their own solutions to the leap second issue by gradually adding fractions of a second over a full day, Levine said.

“The fights are so serious because the stakes are so small,” Levine said.

Then add in the “weird” effect of subtracting, not adding a leap second, Agnew said. It’s likely to be tougher to skip a second because software programs are designed to add, not subtract time, McCarthy said.

McCarthy said the trend toward needing a negative leap second is clear, but he thinks it’s more to do with the Earth becoming more round from geologic shifts from the end of the last ice age.

Three other outside scientists said Agnew’s study makes sense, calling his evidence compelling.

But Levine doesn’t think a negative leap second will really be needed. He said the overall slowing trend from tides has been around for centuries and continues, but the shorter trends in Earth’s core come and go.

“This is not a process where the past is a good prediction of the future,” Levine said. “Anyone who makes a long-term prediction on the future is on very, very shaky ground.”

source https://time.com/6961120/earth-spin-leap-second-clocks/

Cell Phone Pouches Promise to Improve Focus at School. Kids Aren’t Convinced

When the students at Eastlake High School in Colorado Springs, Colo., returned to their school building in January 2021 following the COVID-19 lockdowns, principal Cassandra Berry noticed that they were glued to their phones even more than before. Students texted throughout classes, ignoring teachers. Fights broke out, sparked by nasty missives sent over DMs and posted on social media. 

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“We had a couple of fights, and unfortunately, one of them was taped by a student in the classroom and posted on social media,” Berry says. “We wanted to make sure to nip that in the bud.” 

After mulling different solutions, Berry signed a contract this year with Yondr, an ed-tech company that sells locked pouches for cell phones. Berry learned about them when she went to a Dave Chappelle comedy show that required audience members to stow their phones during the performance. She liked the experience and thought it could be effective for her students as well. 

Eastlake High School now is one of thousands of schools across the world that have turned to Yondr in order to combat phone addiction and distraction. Founded in 2014, Yondr has rapidly expanded since the pandemic and now serves more than 1 million students in 21 countries. The company has had more than a tenfold increase in sales from government contracts since 2021, from $174,000 to $2.13 million, according to GovSpend, a data service. 

Some teachers swear by Yondr, saying it has dramatically transformed their classrooms to allow students to actually focus on learning. But many students have decried it as invasive and paternalistic, and some parents argue that phones are a safety tool, especially given the proliferation of school shootings. Some experts also worry that the money spent on Yondr could be better spent on other resources. 

“I would call into question if you’re putting it into schools that are quote-unquote under-resourced academically,” says Tanji Reed Marshall, CEO and principal consultant of Liaison Educational Partners. ‘“So you don’t want to support my academics, but you want to put my money on buying a tool to keep me off my phone?’”

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The debate over whether phones belong in schools has raged for more than a decade. A 2015 study found that test scores rose by as much as 6% after cell phone bans were enacted. Phone usage has only escalated since then: A Pew Research Center study last year found that a third of teens were on social media “almost constantly.” 

A majority of parents support limits on cell phone usage in schools, one study found, and many schools already have cell phone bans in place. But the same study found that parents are largely skeptical of taking phones away from kids outright. And many students have tried to resist these more restrictive measures. At least 80 petitions calling for schools to stop using Yondr have been created on Change.org. “They are inconvenient and a waste of money,” reads one petition started in January 2023, which has garnered over 600 signatures. 

Nevertheless, some U.S. school districts, including in Holyoke, Mass., and Akron, Ohio, have mandated it for middle and high school students, and legislative efforts may be coming as well: Both Republican and Democratic Senators have flagged tamping down cell phone use as a priority this congressional year. Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton told CBS News, “Teachers dislike cell phones the way the devil hates holy water.”

A Yondr spokesperson addressed student concerns in an email, writing, “There will always be students who try to push boundaries, but in our experience, we see 90/95% compliance in the vast majority of our schools, practically overnight….Yondr is not a punishment, we know that when students are given the opportunity to experience a phone-free school environment, they feel the benefits and can then fully understand why it’s a good idea to have regular breaks from their phones/social media.” The spokesperson added that the company’s reach in schools is expected to “grow significantly” for the next academic year. 

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At the start of every day at Eastlake High School, students turn off their phones and put them in individual Yondr pouches. They keep their ensconced phones on them and then unlock them by tapping them on a magnetic device at the end of each day as they leave. After more than a month of Yondr usage, Berry says the experiment is helping students focus. “We had a young lady who half the time she’s engaged and half the time she’s not. After we started doing Yondr, one day she told the teacher, ‘Well, I guess I gotta do classwork, because I don’t have anything else to do,’” Berry says. 

Berry says the number of fights between students has decreased, because there are fewer impetuses to start them. “They don’t have to worry about what someone’s saying about them or what someone thinks about them, because they don’t see it throughout the day,” Berry says. “They’re all working on their work.” 

Yondr typically costs $25 to $30 a student. Berry says that Eastlake High School used Title IV funds to pay about $2,400 for 80 pouches. She acknowledges that Eastlake’s small size—fewer than 100 kids—allowed them to keep the costs down.  

One public school teacher in New South Wales in Australia, who was contacted by TIME via Reddit direct message, has also been very happy with Yondr since their school district implemented it two years ago. “We know that a number of students don’t use them correctly and still have their phones accessible, but they’re rarely being brought out and used in class or during breaks, which was a significant problem before,” the teacher wrote. “I’m not paranoid about students filming or photographing me during class to then post on social media and rant about me. We’ve also noticed that our students are far more active and social during their breaks.” (The teacher, who teaches 12- to 18-year-olds, asked TIME not to use their name because they were not authorized to speak about school policies.)

But Yondr’s rollout has been far from perfect. Marshall consulted for a large public school in Massachusetts that tried to introduce it last fall. For a while, the effort was successful: “The administration found that the building didn’t have as much high energy, because their weekend drama isn’t coming to school with all the texting,” Marshall says. 

Within weeks, however, students began to fight back against the program, which they perceived as a control mechanism—especially because the other two schools that shared the same building did not require the pouches. “The students felt put upon. They didn’t feel as though they were part of the process and felt this was targeted towards Black and brown kids in schools that are under-resourced,” she says. 

And once students started to rebel, they found ways to get to their phones in spite of the pouch.  “Students were very adept at adapting to this new environment,” Marshall says. “They found ways to keep phones and pretend they had Yondr. They found ways to break into the Yondr; they found ways to ignore it altogether.” Within 60 days, Marshall says the teachers at the school stopped enforcing the use of Yondr. 

Similarly, Regina Galinski, a New York City parent, says that her child’s school’s use of Yondr has been relatively ineffective. “It’s pretty useless, since kids have access to Chromebooks and just chat that way,” she wrote over Facebook Messenger. “It helps in the lower grades when kids follow rules, but as they get older, they are pointless. If you hit the pouch hard enough, it pops open.” 

“The pouch is very durable,” a Yondr spokesperson said, “and schools are provided with guidance and processes in which they can ensure students are compliant.” 

Improving schools via technology and other novel solutions has proved challenging. A February 2024 report examined a $1.4 billion Department of Education initiative to develop and test new ideas in the classroom and found that only a quarter of those innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms.

Marshall says she’s not against Yondr but believes it needs to be rolled out in a conscientious way, and with the buy-in of everyone involved: students, parents, and teachers. “Yondr is neither good nor bad,” Marshall says. “It’s as good or bad as the systems and the conditions around which it is meant to operate.”

source https://time.com/6959626/yondr-schools-cell-phones/

Trump’s Social Media Company Soars Nearly 50% in First Day of Trading on Nasdaq

(NEW YORK) — Shares of Donald Trump’s social media company jumped nearly 50% in the first day of trading on the Nasdaq, boosting the value of Trump’s large holdings in the company as well as the smaller stakes of fans who purchased shares as a show of support for the former president.

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Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. was acquired Monday by a blank-check company called Digital World Acquisition Corp. Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, has now taken Digital World’s place on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Before trading began, Trump Media had a market value of about $6.8 billion, a figure that will rise significantly if the early gains in the shares hold. The shares are trading under the ticker symbol “DJT.” Trump holds a nearly 60% ownership stake in the company. As of 9:55 a.m. ET, the shares were up 47% to $73.50.

Read More: Why Is Trump’s Truth Social Worth Billions? Experts Have Theories

Many of Trump Media’s investors are small-timers either trying to support Trump or aiming to cash in on the mania, instead of big institutional and professional investors. Those shareholders helped the stock of Digital World more than double this year in anticipation of the merger going through.

These investors could experience a bumpy ride. For one, they’re betting on a company with vague prospects of turning a profit. Trump Media lost $49 million in the first nine months of last year, when it brought in just $3.4 million in revenue and had to pay $37.7 million in interest expenses. In a recent regulatory filing, the company cited the high rate of failure for new social media platforms, as well as the company’s expectation that it will lose money on its operations “for the foreseeable future” as risks for investors.

Truth Social launched in February 2022, one year after Trump was banned from major social platforms including Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He’s since been reinstated to both but has stuck with Truth Social.

On Monday, Trump appeared in court in New York at hearing for a criminal case involving hush money payments made to cover up claims of marital infidelity. Afterwards, Trump told reporters that “Truth Social is doing very well. It’s hot as a pistol and doing great.”

However, Trump Media has yet to disclose Truth Social’s user numbers — although that should change now that the company is public. Research firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social had roughly 5 million active mobile and web users in February. That’s far below TikTok’s more than 2 billion and Facebook’s 3 billion — but still higher than other “alt-tech” rivals like Parler, which has been offline for nearly a year but is planning a comeback, or Gettr, which had less than 2 million visitors in February.

Besides competition in the social media field, Trump Media faces other risks — including to some degree Trump.

Trump Media, which is based in Palm Beach, Florida, said in a regulatory filing that it “is highly dependent on the popularity and presence of President Trump.” If the former president were to limit or discontinue his relationship with the company for any reason, including due to his campaign to regain the presidency, the company “would be significantly disadvantaged.”

Read More: Biden’s Campaign Is In Trouble. Will the Turnaround Plan Work?

Acknowledging Trump’s involvement in numerous legal proceedings, the company noted that “an adverse outcome in one or more” of the cases could negatively affect Trump Media and Truth Social.

Another risk, the company said, was that as a controlling stockholder, Trump would be entitled to vote his shares in his own interest, which may not always be in the interests of all the shareholders generally.

If recent trading activity is any indication, investors should expect the shares to be volatile. Digital World shares more than doubled this year ahead of a shareholder vote on the merger with Trump Media. After the vote Friday, shares dropped almost 14%, but Monday they rebounded strongly with a gain of 35%.

source https://time.com/6960682/trump-social-media-truth-social-trading/

America Needs a New Approach on Affordable Housing. History Offers a Guide

The U.S. has a housing crisis — one only growing more serious with each day. In the District of Columbia, a recent report by the Urban Institute found that 12% of the city’s population of more than 82,000 residents does not have stable housing. The majority of D.C. residents navigating housing insecurity are people of color, a reality reflected across the country.

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The Biden Administration has recognized that housing insecurity is a problem that it can’t ignore, in part because it affects the confidence Americans have about the economy. On Thursday, the Administration announced a bold series of policy proposals, which deployed a public-private approach focused on changing exclusionary zoning, expanding the financing options for affordable housing, and promoting the conversion of empty office space into apartments. These followed up on ideas Biden had proposed in the State of the Union address.

While it is important that the Administration is taking the affordable housing crisis seriously, the long history of attempts to address housing problems in the U.S. reveals these types of public-private initiatives have repeatedly enriched the private sector and done little to help those who need government action the most.

This history suggests that it’s time for the federal government to follow the lead of local and state housing activists and create programs that recognize housing is a right not a commodity. This means reconsidering an idea that is barely mentioned in the Administration’s 45-page proposal: public housing. In fact, on Thursday, the same day the Biden Administration announced its proposal, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders released their own plans to advocate for “Green New Deal for Public Housing” legislation — a sign that some legislators are starting to recognize the essential role that public housing will play if the Administration is to solve the housing crisis.

Public housing in the U.S had its origins in the New Deal. It began as an effort by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration to boost the construction industry and provide temporary housing support for struggling Americans. Until World War II, it remained a very small and highly segregated program that primarily benefited working-class whites.

Read More: Read President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address

After the war, that changed. The federal government allocated funds for a substantial increase in public housing units to address a national housing shortage and advance urban redevelopment. These funds fueled the construction of large-scale modernist developments like Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, which was the largest public housing project in the U.S. with over 4,000 units in 28 identical 16-story buildings. 

Initially touted by city planners as “palaces for the poor,” these projects experienced problems of segregation and discrimination almost from the outset and increasingly fell into disrepair due to the limited funds allocated for their initial construction and ongoing maintenance. In the 1960s, many city housing agencies exacerbated the pre-existing problems. They changed their policies to allow occupancy by single-parent households and welfare recipients. Meanwhile, Congress passed a law raising the cap on rents to 30% of a household’s income, which substantially increased the rent for people who worked and drove many them into the private market. This exodus transformed public housing into the option of last resort, inhabited exclusively by the poorest of the poor.

Instead of trying to improve the situation in the 1970s, the federal government turned away from constructing, owning, and managing public housing, and instead adopted private market tools such as vouchers and subsidies in an effort to make housing affordable. They also contracted with private management companies to run preexisting public housing, while greatly reducing the capacity and power of public housing agencies. By the 1980s developments like the Robert Taylor Homes became the sites of major drug and gang activity, turning them into proxies for the problems of public housing and the “inner city.”

In response, Bill Clinton promised to “end public housing as we know it” and introduced the HOPE VI program. HOPE VI became a hallmark of the Clinton years and largely amounted to privatization of public services. The initiative encouraged tearing down many existing federal projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and replacing them with lower-density townhouse style developments that combined market rate housing designed to appeal to the middle class with subsidized units for poor families. To qualify for the houses, poor families had to meet a stringent set of requirements, including having no criminal record and having a job or being enrolled in an employment training program.  

These projects benefited the private developers, who built the new housing and surrounding businesses, but only compounded the problems for tenants. The vast majority of former public housing residents found themselves displaced from their longtime homes. While many received Section 8 vouchers to rent homes, they confronted a highly discriminatory private rental market that left many former public housing residents with few options, most of them in racially-segregated, high-poverty areas. The end result was the exacerbation of housing segregation and economic inequality in many cities, while gentrification spread. 

Despite this mixed record, in the early 21st century, public-private projects like HOPE VI remained virtually the only housing initiatives that seemed viable.

That’s changed in recent years. Policymakers from Los Angeles to Rhode Island have launched a range of innovative campaigns to consider alternative ways to increase affordable housing that go beyond simply changing single-family zoning laws and allowing for the construction of Auxiliary Dwelling Units (ADUs). Many of these projects have taken inspiration from longstanding social housing programs in Western Europe, most notably Vienna, where more than half a million residents, both low-income and middle class, live in well-constructed social housing units, spending less than 10% of their incomes on rent.

Read More: How More Cities Worldwide Can Attract Remote Workers

The shape of new programs vary significantly. On one end of the spectrum, Montgomery County, Md., has broken ground on several new mixed-income, government-owned projects. But the projects still rely on a public-private model and contain many echoes of HOPE VI, making them unlikely to eliminate fully the problems of the past.

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On the other end of the spectrum, is the work being done by housing groups like Kansas City-based KC Tenants. The group has adopted a definition of “social housing” which points to a way of imagining housing outside the scope of the private market and unavailable for profit or speculation. In using the term “social,” KC Tenants seek to avoid the indelible stigma associated with public housing and to highlight that they envision something very different from the post-World War II massive housing projects or even the HOPE VI townhomes. They are crusading for construction of well-designed housing in desirable parts of the city that serves everyone but the most wealthy. KC Tenants co-founder Tara Raghuveer has deemed this form of “true public housing” the organization’s “north star.” The group is helping push Kansas City closer to that goal. In 2022, by a wide margin, the city passed a $50 million bond for long-term affordable housing.

Read more: Renters Are in Revolt. This Tenant Union Plans to Get Them Organized

This vision of social housing has a chance to undo the mistakes of the postwar era, which stigmatized public housing, and produced substandard and segregated residences for only the poorest of Americans. But for such programs to truly solve the affordable housing crisis, the federal government needs to be involved. The scope of the problem is simply too large for states and localities to tackle. Imaging and designing a federal initiative will take policymakers who can think big, while learning from the mistakes of the post-WWII housing projects. Crucially, they should follow the lead of local housing activists who see housing as a right, not a commodity.

To do so, officials must abandon the narrative that public housing has been a failed social experiment. Instead, they need to sell the public on viewing it as a critical way for the federal government to serve the public good and build a better functioning system of social welfare. 

This approach will promote a just policy — one that addresses a problem that has festered for 75 years — and it could also provide a political boost for the Democrats in November and beyond. The poor, working, and middle-class Americans who would benefit most from this vision of public housing are some of the people most dissatisfied with the Biden Administration.

Fixing the housing crisis and creating a broad scale public housing program that makes these groups’ lives better promises to give these crucial constituencies a reason to turn out to vote.

Lily Geismer is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College where she focuses on political and urban history. She is the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/6900050/public-housing-biden-plan-history/

How Animals and Nature React to an Eclipse

Of all of the animals worth observing during a total solar eclipse, some of the most intriguing are humans. They stop what they’re doing; they stare skyward; they lower their voices to a hush. Some may gather their young close. Some may even shed tears. If you’ve ever witnessed a solar eclipse yourself, none of this comes as a surprise; indeed, you’ve surely exhibited some of these behaviors too. Other species of animals display other kinds of behavioral changes, as the weather and lighting and nature itself seem to turn on their axes. So what should you expect to experience on April 8, as a total eclipse crosses the U.S. from the southwestern edge of Texas to the northern tip of New England?

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Some of the greatest changes will occur far above us, in the ionosphere, the band of atmosphere that ranges from an altitude of 60 to 300 km (37 to 190 mi.). Defined by the abundant presence of electrically charged particles, or ions, the ionosphere is denser during the day, turbocharged by incoming radiation from the sun.

As NASA explains, that means that during an eclipse, the overall concentration of ions in the ionosphere falls. This reduction can lead to a cooling of the upper atmosphere, which in turn can cause local depletions known as “ionospheric holes.” That has an impact on populations on the ground as those cavities may disrupt the transmission of radio signals and lead to anomalies in GPS navigation systems. As researchers at Embry-Riddle University and Clemson University determined after the 2017 total eclipse, however, in most cases the GPS disruption is transitory and too mild for users to notice.

Read More: How Cities Around the U.S. Are Celebrating the Eclipse

Other natural changes are more universally detectable, not least the steady dimming of sunlight. The arc of totality across North America measures just 185-km (115 mi.) wide. In this band, a sort of deep dusk descends, with a much subtler darkening the farther you move from that central point. In 2017, a team from TIME traveled to Casper, Wyo. to record and report that year’s eclipse from a hillside overlooking the bowl of the city. Streetlights and headlights flicked on as the sunlight rapidly retreated. 

If you’re outside during totality, it may pay to have a sweater or a jacket with you. Temperatures can drop by anywhere from 2.8°C to 8.4°C (5°F to 15° F) as the sunlight retreats, according to the Weather Channel. Falling temperatures near the earth’s surface also may cause what’s known as an “eclipse wind,” or a slowing of the winds. That’s the result of low-level air becoming cooler than the higher level air above it—what’s known as a temperature inversion—which makes it harder for that more-elevated atmosphere to mix with the air closer to the ground, eliminating the temperature and density differences that lead to breezes and gusts. As totality ends, the winds pick back up.

Another effect falling temperatures may have will be the appearance of a fleeting thunderstorm, as cooler air closer to the ground pushes warmer more humid air upward, where moisture then condenses and rains out. The process is similar to the way ocean breezes can cause brief storms in the summer.

Read More: The ‘Devil Comet’ Will Be a Heavenly Co-Star During the Eclipse. Here’s What to Know

All of this affects non-human animals in multiple ways. Insects, bats, and birds that feed at night emerge as the sky darkens, sometimes in sufficient numbers to be detectable on radar, says the Weather Channel. Birdsong tends to grow quieter as darkness descends, rising back up as the light reappears. Crows, gulls, and sparrows that are in flight have been observed alighting on trees or on the ground and silencing any chirps, calls, or caws. Dogs may cower or exhibit other fearful behavior. Bees may return to their hives and domestic horses and cows may move to their stables, reports Liz Aguilar, a PhD candidate in biology in the University of Indiana’s evolution, ecology, and behavior program. In wild herds or in distant paddocks away from their barns, horses may also cluster and begin shaking their heads and tails—though it’s not entirely clear why they engage in these movements. Head-shaking and tail-swishing are far more common as an agitated response to flies, or to resistance to or discomfort from being ridden. So-called “photic head-shaking” actually occurs when horses are exposed to bright sunlight—precisely the opposite to what happens during an eclipse.

In a 2020 paper in the journal Animals, researchers observed both domesticated and zoo animals and recorded a range of eclipse-related behaviors. The cowering and other expressions of anxiety seen in dogs were also observed in baboons, gorillas, giraffes, and flamingos, as well as in parrots and other species of lorikeets. Tortoises, Komodo dragons, and other forms of reptiles, which already may be lying largely unmoving in the sun, grow more stationary still. 

Perhaps most striking though, was the behavior of a captive troop of chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Research Center on the campus of Emory University in Georgia, during an annular eclipse on May 30, 1984. As researchers reported in the American Journal of Primatology, the animals moved to the highest point of a climbing structure in their enclosure and turned their faces upward in the direction of the sun and the moon. One juvenile gestured toward the slowly vanishing sun. The chimps remained that way until the skies began to brighten, when they descended from the structure. No one can ever say with certainty how they were experiencing what they were seeing—whether they felt their own form of curiosity or wonder or even reverence. Clearly, though, they were captivated by it all. It is a reaction that is very much of a piece with what humans feel—one we may share with untold numbers of other species as the great solar sky show unfolds.

source https://time.com/6958452/how-animals-nature-react-solar-eclipse/