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Haitian community in Springfield demands dignity and better rights for immigrants as ICE crackdown ramps up

Michaelle Louis’s feet and legs are aching. She can barely walk.

Surrounded by corn fields and the distant hum of a busy highway, the native of Haiti and dozens of other activists are 23 miles into a 45-mile march from Springfield to Ohio’s statehouse in Columbus to demand better rights for Haitian immigrants.

One man’s campaign finance operation in Wisconsin exemplifies the opacity of the US political funding system

In the summer of 2024, a non-profit called the Green Dragon Coalition wired the last $20,000 of a $445,000 grant to a Super Pac. Its tax return for that year would describe the purpose of the transfer as “educational”.

The same day, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, the Super Pac spent $8,000 attacking Celeste Maloy, the Republican congresswoman for Utah’s second district, four days before the primary that would decide whether she kept her seat. It had already spent more than $400,000 promoting her challenger, Colby Jenkins, who was running to her right with the endorsement of the rightwing Utah senator Mike Lee.

The conflict that tore through New England 350 years ago was the bloodiest per capita in colonial or US history

Massachusetts is proud of its ties to the American Revolution. From Paul Revere’s Ride to the siege of Boston, the past year-plus has been devoted to celebrating 250 years of US independence. Yet during this time, the state, and New England in general, has given far less attention to an older, more complex remembrance: The 350th anniversary of King Philip’s war.

King Philip, or Metacom, was an Indigenous leader from the Pokanoket people. Alarmed by English colonists’ infringement of Indigenous rights, from seizing land to proselytizing, Metacom led an alliance of New England tribes – including the Pokanoket, Nipmuc and Narragansett – in an existential struggle for control of the region. He gave his name to the conflict, but paid with his life – as did many others, soldiers and civilians alike. With an estimated 800 dead on the colonial side, and three to five thousand Indigenous slain, the war claimed more deaths per capita than any other in colonial American or US history.

Holyhead, Tremadog and Bangor UPCCs may shut as Betsi Cadwaladr University health board struggles with funding

A struggling Welsh health board could close urgent primary care centres at three hospitals, citing funding and recruitment issues, prompting widespread criticism.

Betsi Cadwaladr University health board, which serves about a quarter of Wales’s population, said it was consulting on ending urgent primary care centres (UPCCs) at Ysbyty Penrhos Stanley in Holyhead, Ysbyty Alltwen in Tremadog and Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor by April 2027.

Venison casserole is as autumnal as fallen leaves, a glass of red and a fire in the grate. But who makes the best version?

Because I don’t eat it very often, I always forget how much I like venison. Or, rather, how much I like it in certain contexts: the natural leanness of a wild animal doesn’t naturally lend itself to soloing in juicy burgers or sausages, but, when slow-cooked, it’s fabulous – rich in flavour, and soft enough to eat with a spoon, should you so desire. It also tends to be good value both in season and frozen for the rest of the year, and, as red meat goes, a pretty climate-friendly option (though not straightforwardly so, as this piece explains) that pairs beautifully with seasonal spuds and kales, and is even better when made ahead of time and reheated. In fact, it’s the perfect autumn and winter entertaining option, even if the only people you’re entertaining are yourselves, the dog and the cast of Celebrity Traitors.

Есть жанр проектов, где самое интересное — не то, что сделано, а то, что сознательно не сделано. Этот как раз такой.

Речь о системе «Цифровой аватар спортсмена» (ЦАС): верифицированный профиль спортсмена, методическое ядро тренера, аренда методик с роялти, кабинеты спонсора и федерации. Звучит как очередная «экосистема», и на этапе презентации обычно всё заканчивается слайдами. Мне было интересно другое: собрать работающий прототип, в котором каждое заявленное утверждение можно проверить двумя кликами, а не поверить на слово.

Ограничения были заданы заранее и жёстко:

Разработка инди-игры - это постоянная борьба с ресурсами. Обычно не хватает времени, денег, людей и, желательно, ещё пары часов в сутках.

Когда я начал делать Morveyn - пошаговую RPG для Telegram, вдохновлённую классическими фэнтезийными стратегиями вроде King's Bounty, - довольно быстро выяснилось, что написать игру и наполнить её контентом - две совершенно разные задачи.

С технической частью всё было относительно понятно: Next.js на фронтенде, Java на бэкенде, игровая логика, взаимодействие с сервером, генерация карты. Это привычная территория разработчика.

А вот графика оказалась отдельным приключением.

Игре нужны десятки, а в перспективе сотни изображений: юниты, портреты персонажей, здания, объекты окружения, тайлы глобальной карты, иконки и элементы интерфейса. Причём всё это должно выглядеть так, будто создано одним художником для одной игры.

Нанимать художника для каждого экспериментального ассета на стадии MVP было нерационально. Поэтому я решил попробовать генеративный AI.

В итоге основным инструментом стал Gemini.

И тут началось самое интересное.

Итан Сигел (американский астрофизик‑теоретик и научный журналист, автор рубрики «Спросите Итана», один из пропагандистов современных научных знаний), считает, что все наши научные теории когда-либо будут заменены более точными. И делает при этом несколько утверждений, например, об отрицании возможности лабораторного происхождения ковида...

@avshkol перевел эту статью, как содержащую вполне разумные утверждения в целом, но довольно спорные утверждения в частности. Итак, что же делать, если ваш конкретный опыт противоречит научному консенсусу? Если каждый близнец, которого вы встречали, отлично владеет языком, но не деньгами, а каждый телец — наоборот, и это для вас статистически значимый факт?

Как проект на “выходные” превратился в полноценный стартап.

После многих лет работы в крупных IT-компаниях на фоне сокращений я решила больше не полагаться на найм и создать для себя дополнительный источник дохода.

Всё началось с разработки Telegram-бота за пару выходных для личных задач. В итоге проект растянулся на несколько месяцев и вырос в полноценный сервис.

Рассказываю, как создавала его вместе с ИИ, с какими проблемами столкнулась и что из этого вышло.

High prices are straining budgets for both a small business owner and a single mom in a rural part of Va.'s 1st Congressional district. They explain how they're handling the economic stress of these times.

(Image credit: Melissa Gray)

У тех, кто рос в 80-е, есть одно общее воспоминание. Мама сидит в парикмахерской, а на голове у неё шлем, как из фильма про космос. Мама листает журнал, поправляет воротник и никуда не торопится. Корабль, судя по всему, стартует ещё не скоро.

Был и домашний вариант этой космической штуки — фен «Улыбка». Серый или светлый чемоданчик с мотором, гофрированная труба, шапочка на голову. Сейчас эта конструкция вызывает много разных мыслей и вопросов. Главный: получится ли улыбаться, сидя в такой штуке?

Почему всё, чем в СССР сушили волосы, было таким угловатым и громоздким? Ведь обычный фен-пистолет делает то же самое быстрее, а места занимает в разы меньше. В быту ходит примерно такая версия: промышленность была заточена под военку и просто не умела в лёгкие гражданские вещи. Звучит не очень убедительно.

И вот что важно.

Стоит открыть каталог американской бытовой техники 50-х или зайти в немецкий технический музей, и выясняются очень любопытные вещи. Там те же шлемы, те же чемоданы со шлангами. И это довольно увесистые металлические приборы, которые не слишком удобно держать в руке.

Но в своё время эти форм-факторы были куда практичнее привычных нам пистолетов.

Почему? В какой момент в сушке волос случилась настоящая революция? И как так вышло, что советский фен за ней не поспел? Давайте разбираться.

Editor’s note, November 1, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary. The one below was originally published in August 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I’ve had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a “bland” diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table.

I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don’t want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this?

Dear Would-Be Vegetarian, 

You’re not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they’re vegetarian or vegan. What’s more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren’t even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face. 

So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you’re really wrestling with this. I’ll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory. 

There’s a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, “always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.” From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you’re treating the animal as a means to an end. 

Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands. 

Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it’s “always treat others as ends in themselves” or “always maximize happiness.” 

A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it’s incredibly soothing to think, “If I just do X, then I’ll know for sure that I’m being a good person!” 

But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really? 

Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging. 

I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),” Anderson writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

In other words, Anderson doesn’t think there’s some universal rule like “eating animals is inherently morally wrong.” It’s our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn’t believe there’s a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That’s because moral evaluation isn’t just about animals’ intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild. 

It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, “We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.”

Anderson’s point is not that animals’ intelligence and sentience don’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a “purist” diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a “reducetarian” diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously. 

The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others. 

For one thing, if you’re eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America’s meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They’re also often mutilated without pain relief: think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they’re in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish.

A pasture-raised label doesn’t mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn’t guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they’ll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end.

It’s a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it’s better than farmed.

The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you’ll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label “Certified Humane,” that’s genuinely higher-welfare — but don’t mistake it for “American Humane Certified,” which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like “cage-free” or “free-range.” They’re better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they’re not as meaningful as you might think. Here’s a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin. 

Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That’s both because of how miserable chickens’ lives are on factory farms and because, as my former colleague Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow.

That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don’t want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too.

Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers). 

But assuming you’re going to eat meat, it’s a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, “I’ll reduce how much meat I eat,” but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you’d intended. So it’s probably better to commit to something like “weekday vegetarian” or “vegan before six” — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions. 

At the end of the day, remember that there’s a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don’t think you need to feel bad about that. That’s because you won’t be shirking your values: You’ll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you’re doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• The blogger Bentham’s Bulldog published a piece titled “How to cause less suffering while eating animals.” It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn’t: “offsetting” your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities. I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it’s worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet. 

• This Aeon essay answers a question I’ve often wondered about: Why haven’t other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don’t they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I’m grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer.

• I can’t stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified “helpful assistant” character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, “Gee, that really tickles my circuits!”). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.

Companies have rushed to supply the drug as a wellness treatment, but patients with serious illnesses aren’t able to get NHS prescriptions

In 2022, a prodigiously talented young artist named Louis Petit was preparing to return to the UK, having been effectively exiled in the Netherlands as a teenager so he could access the medical cannabis he needed to control his epilepsy. Six years earlier, Louis, then 12, had been diagnosed with a rare form of the neurological disease when medical cannabis was still illegal in the UK.

But in Rotterdam, where it was legal, doctors helped him discover that a medical cannabis oil called Bedrolite, in combination with the right mix of anti-epileptic treatment, could slow and eventually stop his seizures. This was something his neurologists in the UK had previously considered impossible.

Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University and the author of The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Вчера звонил Сатана. Оказывается, в аду зачитываются фанфиком про Gachinetes. Они давно хотели улучшить систему своих пыток, сделать ее более клиентоориентированной и подстроенной под каждого посетителя.

По словам Люцифера, им понадобился подходящий инструмент для пыток продуктовых команд Яндекса. Взамен он обещал, что после смерти найдет мне местечко в подземелье Вана, чтобы я не слишком страдал в аду, а даже радовался загробной гачи-жизни. Предложение было слишком привлекательным, чтобы отказываться. Да и Веельзевул мужичонка солидный, иметь таких в пуле должников весьма полезно.

Так появился особый дистрибутив для инженеров Яндекса, попавших в ад, Яnetes.

Все обсуждают, заменит ли ИИ программистов, но почти никто не обсуждает, что будет, если не заменит

Чтобы объяснить почему, сначала придется честно поговорить о том, за что нам вообще платили

• Mageean won 2024 European 1500m title in Rome

• Athlete described as ‘an inspiration to so many’

The Irish middle-distance runner Ciara Mageean, who won European gold and competed at two Olympic Games, has died aged 34, her family have announced.

The athlete, from Portaferry in Northern Ireland, died at 6.30am on Sunday. In a post on social media, her family said she was surrounded by her loved ones, adding: “A beloved daughter, sister, wife, friend and inspiration to so many, she will be deeply missed.”

На рынке ИТ сейчас всё печально, особенно если ушел в 46 лет с позиции CTO. И вот, находясь в поиске работы, точнее в борьбе с HRами, коих ненавидят больше чем риэлторов, решил я, чтобы время не терять, попробовать пойти поучиться на агента по недвижимости, почему нет, тем более до этого самостоятельно нашел, сторговал 10% и купил участок под домик на пенсию, да и до этого опыт покупки‑продажи и даже строительства был, причем не только в России.

Первый мой вопрос наставнику был «что мы собственно продаем?». Ответ типа «услугу по продаже или покупке недвижимости» меня не устроил. В агентстве узнали слово «декомпозиция», а как иначе?

A truce has cooled the trade conflict, but neither country has done anything to limit the outbreak of new hostilities

Donald Trump’s trade wars have largely fallen off the headlines. Fears of new tariffs flare up from time to time when the US president goes off the rails – for instance, threatening to end US trade with countries with which it has a deficit unless the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates. But the sense that the world’s two largest economies are plowing ahead into an overt economic conflagration has taken a back seat to other, more salient fears, about Trump ending American democracy, AI killing us all and stuff like that.

The sense of calm is misleading. Under the radar, the world is marching toward an economic war of potentially epic proportions, one that, history suggests, could well spill over into the real thing.

Today’s crop of smooth talkers tap directly into a specific evolutionary vulnerability. Here’s how to defend yourself

Recently, I was alone in a bar waiting for a friend. To pass the time, I started chatting to a stranger. He had an easy, confident way of speaking, which I admired. We discussed topics I know little about: the instability of modern economies, the feasibility of commercial space travel, the likelihood of a coup in Russia. I found myself leaning in and asking questions: I felt as if I could learn a lot from this person. We eventually got to psychology, which is more my wheelhouse. I brooded about how easy it’s become for people to accept strange ideas. “Some people will believe anything,” he observed. “Some people even believe the Earth is round!”

It’s increasingly difficult to ignore how fragmented and bizarre our beliefs have become. We live in our own echo chambers, defined by the channels, feeds and influencers we follow. As a result we can arrive at very polarised conclusions about vaccines, the climate, gender, geopolitics, the shape of the Earth and everything else. Disagreements on topics like these frequently damage relationships, alienate friends and estrange loved ones.

From the cheesecake factory discourse to the double Dan Sullivans, campaign season has been ridiculous

Chances are, as you’re reading this, your bunker is fully stocked, your doors are locked, and you’re peeking at your computer screen through gaps between your fingers.

After all, it’s election day on Tuesday. Once again, democracy will be tested – like Beavis & Butthead taking the SATs. I’m not looking forward to it, and I’m sure you aren’t either.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

• United 17th in Premier League after Chelsea defeat

• No change expected until international break

Michael Carrick is poised to remain in charge of Manchester United for the Champions League game against Roma at Old Trafford on Tuesday despite the 2-0 defeat at Chelsea on Saturday.

United have not won in nine games and have made their poorest start to a season since 1988, but Carrick’s position is expected to be reviewed again during the international break after the next round of Premier League matches, in which United host Aston Villa next Sunday.

She thinks the answer to the climate crisis is cutting CO2, he favours population control and North Sea oil and gas extraction. Can they make it through a meal together?

Sam, 29, central London

Occupation Compliance officer
Voting record Sam is American so can’t vote in the UK yet, but when she can she intends to vote Green
Amuse bouche She is an expert knitter. She started when she was five and makes socks, mittens, hat, jumpers – if you know Sam, she’s knitting you something

The novelist receives passionate AI-written emails almost every day – but when he decided to take up one sender’s offer to find him new readers, the story took a darker turn

There’s no humble way to say it: I get a lot of fan mail. Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from passionate and well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. They have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some of them are straightforward enthusiasts while others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off her messages “warm chaos”. Some love the “deadpan genius” of my novels while others admire my nonfiction’s “moral courage”. What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money. They promise to promote my work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities, if only I transfer a few hundred dollars to cover costs.

In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation. Most writers I know are receiving a steady stream of emails like this. The messages are often sophisticated enough to bypass a spam filter and reach our inboxes, leaving us no option but to read them and ask the painful question: would any real, living person feel this strongly about my work? Or, as one writer friend put it, the reason I know they’re fake is because they’ve actually read all my books.

A truce has cooled the trade conflict, but neither country has done anything to limit the outbreak of new hostilities

Donald Trump’s trade wars have largely fallen off the headlines. Fears of new tariffs flare up from time to time when the US president goes off the rails – for instance, threatening to end US trade with countries with which it has a deficit unless the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates. But the sense that the world’s two largest economies are plowing ahead into an overt economic conflagration has taken a back seat to other, more salient fears, about Trump ending American democracy, AI killing us all and stuff like that.

The sense of calm is misleading. Under the radar, the world is marching toward an economic war of potentially epic proportions, one that, history suggests, could well spill over into the real thing.

The ACA health insurance marketplaces — find yours at HealthCare.gov — open Nov. 1 for 2027 coverage. Getting an early start may be especially important this year.

(Image credit: Tassanee Vejpongsa)

С 2026 года тысячи небольших компаний на УСН впервые стали плательщиками НДС. Порог освобождения опустили до 20 млн рублей в год, дальше он судя по всему будет только снижаться. Компания, которая вчера жила с одной книгой доходов и раз в год отчитывалась перед налоговой, теперь каждый квартал сдает декларацию по НДС и разбирается, чем счет отличается от счета-фактуры, а УПД со статусом 1 от УПД со статусом 2.

Налоговую часть уже подробно разобрали бухгалтеры. Меня интересует другое: что происходит с потоком документов внутри компании и как его разобрать так, чтобы бухгалтер или собственник не тонул в этом потоке каждый конец квартала. 

We often pick up hobbies to add some fun to our lives. We join a book group, take up knitting, or commit to finally learning how to play pickleball. But before long, what started out as leisure can begin to feel like just another obligation to execute and perfect: We fall behind in the reading, can’t stop dropping stitches, or the tournament schedule gets overwhelming.

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the United States. Our obsession with productivity may feel new, especially when it crosses over to our hobbies, but according to Gary Cross, a historian and author of the book Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal, Americans have been trying to make the most of our time for a while now. “A lot of it is that old Protestant work ethic that was part of the early migration to the United States,” he told Vox. “They were predominantly Protestant Christians who saw work as a kind of a special calling from God.”

As Cross explains, this attitude kicked into high gear alongside industrialization. “The capitalists really were all about increasing productivity. Time away from work begins to be seen as in some ways wasted time,” Cross said. And when the labor movement helped win workers some free time for hobbies around the turn of the 20th century, the same mentality made the jump into our leisure time.

That time is something that writer Jenny Odell has thought a lot about and explored in her books Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  “I think both of my books came out of observing the daily experience that I and the people I knew were having, where our relationship to time felt so painful — this unending intensity that was so exhausting,” she said. “There has to be another way.”

Odell says that one of the ways to shift our relationship with time is through cultivating hobbies — without falling into the trap of relentless quantification and optimization. So how do we learn to truly enjoy our leisure time, and why should we all consider failing a little more along the way? We learn that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Odell, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

How is our pursuit of hobbies connected to how we think about time?

Hobbies are a place where you can see different ways of thinking about time battling each other. There’s a very fine line between someone who pursues a hobby for the sake of doing it versus someone who feels that they need to optimize it, perhaps even make money off of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but these are different ways of thinking about the activity that you’re doing.

People read the title How to Do Nothing and they think that I’m a person who literally doesn’t do anything. I love to do things and I love to learn things. I think a lot of people start hobbies because they want to learn. 

In American culture, a lot of us stop being given opportunities to learn after we’re children or after we’re students. I think it’s really beautiful that adults seek out ways to learn, often leaning into communities where they’re learning with other people. And learning has progress in it. You do get better at things when you learn them. 

My feeling is just that that sense of forward movement and learning gets co-opted by this larger culture that we exist in that is also very American: needing to have something to show for your time. What starts out as wanting to learn something turns into something that you’re giving yourself a score on, without your ever having decided to do that.

I spoke with a historian who said part of the reason that we relate to our free time in this particular way in America specifically is the history of the Protestant work ethic. It’s just so ingrained in us. How do you help yourself break out of that mentality?

I have to shout out this book called The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. He talks about this very question. In that book he talks about games and how when you play a game, you take on a whole new set of values, and you do that for whatever couple of hours and then you put it away. It’s kind of this practice in taking values, putting them on, taking them off, putting them away. 

For me, either literally playing games or trying to have a more playful, experimental mindset about what it is that I’m doing can break that cycle. When you get closer to [a goal], it gets more and more seductive. Like “I want a higher number.” You just need something to break you out of that and be like, “What is this number even measuring?” 

For me, I’m a writer. Words per day are a measure. You think you want more words per day, but all words are not the same. There have been moments where I was trying to optimize words per day. I have to stop myself and think about what other ways I could value the situation. Like, “What were those words? Did I make some sort of breakthrough?” 

There’s all these other different ways that you could think about what it is that you’re doing.

Something I think a lot about when it comes to hobbies is failure. For instance, I’m getting back into photography. I did film photography in high school and this year I picked it back up with the goal to shoot a roll of film per month. 

The year’s almost over. I’ve done three rolls of film, one of which I must have unloaded incorrectly because it was completely blown out. What role does failure play in our hobbies and how we interact with that?

I love failure. I think it’s so underrated and games are very useful here. A good sports person is open to failure and knows that that’s fun.

I think that along with not having opportunities to learn as adults, we also aren’t given opportunities to fail. That’s probably been the case for a long time, but now with social media and things being more visible for a lot of people, we really are not used to failing. We think we don’t want it. 

I feel like I am actively now seeking out things that I’m bad at just so I can have that feeling. I’m a failure addict.

That is true. Once we leave school, what opportunities do we have to safely learn things and fail and try it again?

I don’t know how else to describe it: It’s really fun to be bad at something. Once you accept that you are bad at it, your reason for doing it has to be something else. 

I’ve been going to this native plant restoration thing for two and a half years now, so I definitely know my weeds and I am better than the day that I showed up, but I don’t go there to be the best at something. 

I showed up on day one and I wasn’t wearing the right clothes. I didn’t have gardening gloves. I had never gardened in my life. I had no idea what I was doing. It was this fascinating feeling. It’s just so different from being an adult who’s specialized in something.

What’s a way to help yourself fall back in love with hobbies if it’s been a while or if you’ve optimized so much, you want to find the joy in it again?

It’s like the equivalent of being right-handed and trying to write with your left hand. Anything you can do to relax the perfectionist grip that you have on this thing. 

That means throwing obstacles in your own way or trying to do things in a way you’ve never done them before. Rediscover the same thing from a new angle or in a different context with new people.

Chancellor John Healey fails to guarantee equalisation with adult wage will happen in timeframe set out in manifesto

Labour looks less likely to meet its manifesto pledge to equalise the minimum wage for younger workers before the next election, after the chancellor failed to guarantee the rise would happen within that timeframe.

John Healey said on Sunday the government was still committed to the increase but failed to spell out when it would be achieved. In the budget, a rise in the minimum wage was handed to adults – to £13.21– and under-20s – to £11.27 – but a larger rise for younger workers would have been needed to move towards equalisation.

• Briton beats 18-year-old Austrian Lilli Tagger 4-6, 6-3, 6-4

• Dart, a qualifier, was competing in her first WTA final

Harriet Dart won her first WTA title after the Briton came from a set down to defeat Lilli Tagger in the final of the Guangzhou Open in China.

Dart, who saved three match points in her semi-final against Sun Xinran to reach her first tour‑level final, edged a thrilling match against the 18‑year‑old Austrian 4-6, 6-3, 6-4.