The latest assessment of climate science is a “code red for humanity,” the head of the United Nations said Monday, as a body of scientists convened by the organization—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—warned of the “unequivocal” and in some cases irreversible effects of human influence on the planet. The climate is warming at a pace even faster than previously thought and, without stark emissions cuts, could surpass a crucial temperature threshold “up to a decade sooner than previously thought,” Axios notes. “Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach,” the IPCC said in a press release August 9, 2021. As report co-author Linda Mearns described it: “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, located in Montgomery, Alabama is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence. Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.
The 95th Academy Awards were held Sunday night at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the proudly weird sci-fi movie from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, swept most of the top categories, including best picture and directing. Michelle Yeoh, that movie’s star, won the best actress award, becoming the first Asian actress ever to win that honor. The other lead acting prize went to Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”), also a first-time winner. Perhaps the biggest winner of all: A24, the studio behind both of those movies.
Tom of Finland's real name is Touko - because he was born on May 8, 1920, on the south coast of Finland, and May in Finnish is "Toukokuu". His homeland had been independent for just three years when Touko was born, and outside its few cities the country was still rough and wild. The men who worked in the fields and woods, the farmers and loggers, were true frontiersmen, every bit as rough and wild as the countryside. Tom of Finland died on November 7, 1991 at the age of 71.