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‘I feel like a slave’: St Louis’ workhouse denounced as a modern-day debtors’ prison
A campaign called #closetheworkhouse describes ‘unspeakably hellish conditions’, but officials defend it as a ‘kind-of rescue’
‘I feel like a slave’: St Louis’ workhouse denounced as a modern-day debtors’ prison
A campaign called #closetheworkhouse describes ‘unspeakably hellish conditions’, but officials defend it as a ‘kind-of rescue’
Pictured above: Inez Bordeaux, who was once incarcerated in St Louis’s Medium Security Institution known as the workhouse, is an organizer fighting for the facility to be closed.
Inez Bordeaux was at times left broke, homeless, and living in a halfway house over the years of unpleasant interactions with the criminal justice system in St Louis, Missouri. But the only time she ever felt hopeless was during the month she was incarcerated in the city’s infamous “workhouse” jail in 2016.
“I might not come out on the other side of this,” Bordeaux recalled thinking to herself. Her first three days were spent in solitary confinement after staff witnessed her crying, and deemed her a suicide risk.
“They took all my clothes and gave me a suicide smock, I couldn’t call anyone, talk to anyone, or read anything,” Bordeaux said.
A registered nurse and mother of four, Bordeaux was being held in the workhouse on a technical probation violation. Like 98% of inmates there, she was legally innocent but Bordeaux was being detained pre-trial because she couldn’t afford her $25,000 bail.
She describes the rest of her month in the workhouse as full of black mold, rats and blocked toilets churning up fetid waste. She was denied any outdoors time and basic feminine hygiene products.
“I say all the time that the workhouse is a hopeless place,” Bordeaux said. “When you first walk in you can feel the hopelessness. You can feel the desperation.” …
Striking Satellite Images of Cities on the Brink
A fresh perspective on the fragility and resilience or our world.
The riparian buffers flanking the Niger River in Timbuktu, Mali, appear in red.
From the window of her office in New Haven, Connecticut, Karen Seto sees a sea of green. A professor of geography and urbanization science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Seto can observe in that scene seemingly countless different shades, shapes of leaves, and natural textures. It’s familiar and pretty, but there’s only so much that our eyes can wring from a view like that. There’s a lot that we can’t see.
If Seto could see in the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum—outside of the range of human vision—a glance would reveal a wealth of other information. She could ascertain which leaves are overheated, or parched. In the adjacent buildings, she could peer beyond brick, glass, or steel, to the materials that comprise them. And if she could take this all in from space, she could see how her view fits in among the university’s Gothic roofs, sports fields, and criss-crossing walking paths.
But we can see like that, with the right technology. “Just as dogs can hear sounds inaudible to humans, sensors aboard satellites are able to ‘see’ what our eyes cannot,” write Seto and her coauthor Meredith Reba, a research associate, in their new book, City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet. Seto and Reba dove into a trove of largely open-access satellite images of cities, then used image processing tools to adjust them, and highlight hidden dynamics or patterns that emerge over time. They can show the way heat bakes different parts of an urban area, how much sediment is building up in stagnant water, or how a landscape sprouts back to life in the aftermath of a disaster.
The massive quantities of raw data produced by these sensors can be overwhelming, so Seto and Reba began fiddling to home in on specific spectral combinations. Their tinkered-with images are thrillingly uncommon ways to see a place—familiar or otherwise—and document what happened there or what could lie ahead. Some of their formulas put the spotlight on environmental challenges—from melting ice to standing water to the long tail of nuclear fallout. The images they produced can be stark and startling. …
Neuropathology Brain Museum
India’s only Brain Museum displays over 200 fascinating ways that your brain might kill you.
A formalin-fixed human brain.
Sections of human brains, gathered by pathologists during autopsy between the late 1970s and today, are preserved in formalin solution and encased in hard, clear plastic. That means that the specimens—be they examples of trauma, cancer, infection, infestation or birth abnormalities—can be turned, and viewed from all angles.
A highlight of a visit to the Brain Museum is the most hands-on anatomy lesson one could hope for this side of a medical school. Visitors are encouraged to take a real human brain into their bare hands, while a staff scientist introduces you to its geography. The tour may also include up-close-and-personal introductions to a lung, a heart, a liver, a bundle of spinal nerves, and sundry other human organs that the scientists who run the museum have served up for you to explore.
Unlike some other collections full of pickled anatomical things in jars—those of the Hunterian or Grant Museums in London, for instance—Bangalore’s Brain Museum boasts no antique vibes. It looks like a classroom because it sort of is.
The Museum is currently housed in a single room on the campus of the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS). The institute, founded in 1847 as the Bangalore Lunatic Asylum, is a major center of clinical medicine and postgraduate study in India. Originally conceived purely as a teaching and research tool, the Neuropathology Brain Museum opened to the public in 2010 when a new Neurobiology Research Centre afforded it the space to grow. The aim of the museum was partly to spread awareness about safe practices: expect to hear some grisly cautionary tales. …
5 Huge Twists You Never Noticed Were Spoiled From The Start
Foreshadowing is a tricky thing. Make it too obvious, and the audience will only roll their eyes when you finally get to the big reveal. But if you’re too subtle, then nobody will notice and no one will appreciate how clever you are and write fawning list articles about you on comedy sites. And if you can’t have that, then what’s the point in living? Ask these folks, since they got it right.
5. Leia Foreshadows The Coolest Moment In The Last Jedi
Oh man, remember that awesome hyperspeed kamikaze attack in The Last Jedi? Of course you do; it was the best part of the movie. And you can tell that Rian Johnson was proud of that scene too, because he made sure to hint at it as early as possible.
During the film’s opening battle, the First Order manages to wipe out the entire leadership of the Resistance by destroying the bridge of the starship that they’re on. Everyone is killed save Leia, who is jettisoned into space, facing certain doom … that is, until she flies back aboard using those Force powers everybody keeps forgetting about.
All she needs is a little black umbrella and a British accent.
As she glides through the destroyed bridge, Leia passes through a hologram of the Supremacy, the flagship of the First Order … in pretty much the same place which Holdo nails on the real ship later in the story.
Hey, why doesn’t everybody use hyperspace rockets as weapons?
…
A Highway in Cape Town Has Been Left Half-Finished for 40 Years
The spans just stop, mid-air.
Cape Town’s unfinished freeway bridge.
This week, we’re looking at unfinished infrastructure—places around the world where grand visions didn’t quite live up to their potential. Previously: the nuclear power plant in Crimea that Chernobyl stopped dead, Nikola Tesla’s giant electrical tower.
BACK IN THE 1940s, CAPE Town, South Africa, built the city’s waterfront out into the bay. From the beginning, this plan was meant to improve transportation in the city: South African Railways, which had a major station there, pushed for the expansion and an initial plan for the new land included more railway offices, as well as a 500-bedroom hotel for passengers. But as the vision for the new “Foreshore” area developed, city planners started imagining that the newly created land would include sweeping highways that would lift off over traffic in the central business district and make Cape Town a “modern city,” by mid-century standards.
By the 1960s, the city had approved a design for a new highway, and construction started on the Foreshore Freeway. By 1977, parts of the elevated highway had gone up and been paved. Then, without explanation, construction stopped. The freeway bridges were incomplete, and the spans simply… ended. Different sections in the eastern, western, and central parts of the proposed system remain disconnected from each other. And that’s been the case ever since.
Another view of the unfinished bridge.
In the four decades that Cape Town’s “unfinished highway” has stood downtown, locals have imagined all sorts of reasons why the bridges were never finished—hold-out landowners, engineering mishaps. But the official explanation is a simple one: Funding ran out, and it never seemed like a priority to finish the bridges. Over the years, the stubby bridges became a shelter for homeless people, until in 2013 the city cleared out the area under the bridges, built bus parking, and installed sharp stones to keep people from sleeping there. …
Tackle your life like it’s a Rubik’s Cube
LETS TWIST AGAIN
It’s a game.
The Rubik’s Cube, the geometric puzzle created in 1974 by a Hungarian architecture professor, has 43 quintillion possible positions and exactly one correct solution, which at the moment feels about as close as the nearest star.
I’m in a light-filled room in a restaurant at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where representatives from You Can Do the Rubik’s Cube have gathered a small group of journalists to talk about their educational mission. You Can Do the Rubik’s Cube is the humanitarian arm of Rubik’s Brand, the commercial enterprise that sells the original puzzle and variations including a five-by-five cube for masochists, and lighter, faster “speed cubes” for competitive cubers encumbered by the mechanics of the original toy.
The educational arm uses Rubik’s Cubes to spark 8- to 18-year-olds’ interest in math and engineering, and to boost kids’ confidence by showing them how to accomplish a seemingly difficult task. There’s a cube at every place setting, and at the signal we scramble the cubes, open up the illustrated solution manuals provided for our convenience, and twist away haplessly while certified Rubik’s Cube experts patrol the room and coach.
Even if you’ve never solved one or owned one, you have almost certainly picked up and fiddled with the six-colored geometric puzzle known as a Rubik’s Cube. More than 450 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold around the world. A company-commissioned marketing survey earlier this year found that more people have played with a Rubik’s Cube at some point than have purchased an iPhone or worn Converse All-Star sneakers.
I’ve never solved a Rubik’s Cube. I approach the Rubik’s Cube like I approach hula hoops: a few feeble attempts and then abandonment, because it’s irritating to be stumped by a child’s toy, and so easy as an adult to simply opt out of challenges that use unfamiliar parts of your brain. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Facebook’s global expansion has been linked to political turmoil overseas, so maybe their ads should focus less on how they “connect the world” and more on why connecting people isn’t always the best idea.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Donald Trump reportedly suggests that Spain build a border wall in Africa, two Boston Red Sox fans hold a banner hostage, and a Maine restaurant gets its lobsters stoned.
Tracey Ullman explains how she impersonates European political figures, why she became an American citizen, and what she thinks of the British royal family.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on When Animals Fight Back (Volume 5). Hope you’re havin’ a great day you legends!
もちろん、入っているまる。Of course Maru is in the box!
FINALLY . . .
The Food Truck That Invites You to Be the Cook
These traveling historians are hungry for your life story.
Janis Thiessen and Sarah Story await fresh recipes and stories from inside the Food History Truck.
IT’S NOT OFTEN A FOOD truck requires its customers to do the cooking. But this summer, a former FedEx truck outfitted with burners, deep-fryers, and a few friendly historians has been opening its doors to the public and asking its guests to dictate what’s on the menu. Led by Dr. Janis Thiessen, professor and Associate Chair of the Oral History Centre at the University of Winnipeg, the Food History Truck is not just a food truck, but an unconventional vehicle for research and community engagement. With the help of the Oral History Centre, Diversity Food Services, and collaborators Kimberley Moore, Kent Davies, and Sarah Story, Thiessen is circulating Manitoba to collect recipes and stories of how food has been produced, sold, and consumed throughout the Canadian province.
From the outside, the automobile looks a lot like any other food truck parked on the block. “We’ve had a few 12-year-old boys approach the truck and be completely devastated that we’re not selling hot dogs,” says Thiessen, “and to them I apologize.”
But what the Food History Truck lacks in frankfurters, it makes up for in function. In her previous research, Thiessen conducted interviews in factories, farms, and restaurants. But a lot of food production happens in the home, she says. In order to capture these stories without invading someone’s personal space, Thiessen and her team created a “public kitchen” in which diverse, safe, and often satiating interviews can be conducted and recorded.
Community members are invited to climb inside the truck and cook a small sample of a specific dish that’s meaningful to them. It doesn’t have to be complicated, or even particularly palatable, says Thiessen. It simply has to have a story. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?