The 'Dance of the 41' changed the way that Mexico interpreted gender and sexuality forever. The number 13 is commonly considered unlucky, but in Mexico, the number 41 has been seen as taboo and avoided—at one point the Army left the number out of battalions, hotel and hospital rooms didn’t use it and some even skipped their 41st birthday altogether. The reason has to do with a party held in a secret location in Mexico on November 17, 1901. On that night 41—possibly 42—men gathered under the cover of night to dance together. Though some may not consider this scandalous by today’s standards, fallout from “The Dance of the 41,” as it was called by the press, was controversial enough to change the landscape of sexuality in Mexico.
Is there a cure for disinformation, propaganda, and other offenses against the truth? Twitter’s answer has been to add fact-checks to misleading statements, a move that has led to a showdown with Donald Trump. While this fight has been framed as an issue of free speech, ancient Greek philosophers, who worried deeply about what “fake news” meant for their own societies, would say it’s much more profound and more urgent than that. As technologically advanced as the fight between Twitter and Trump now seems, this dilemma is not new at all.
When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6, 2021 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version. Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.
Archaeologists uncover trove of ancient Egyptian artifacts they had uncovered a trove of ancient artifacts at the necropolis of Saqqara near Cairo, including mummies and bronze statues dating back 2,500 years. Among the treasures were 250 sarcophagi — or painted coffins — with well-preserved mummies inside, unearthed during recent excavations at a burial ground outside Cairo, said Mostafa Waziri, the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
