A new Pew Research Center report finds religious hostilities increased for the third consecutive year worldwide, while government restrictions remained near record highs and questions remain about how smaller faith communities are represented in the data.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a religious liberty case examining home worship and zoning laws. Although centered on an Orthodox Jewish prayer group, the ruling could shape legal protections for Wiccan covens and other minority faith communities that gather in private homes.
As researchers and investigators, using credible sources and verifying our findings has always been a big part of the job. What’s changed, though, is that it’s getting harder to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not.
Thanks to AI tools and other technology, the scammers and manipulators have reached a new level of sophistication. We used to worry about whether an information source was biased or up-to-date. Now we have to ask whether it’s real.
Information is becoming easier to distort, and fakes are becoming harder to spot. But these distortions and fakes are easy to spread, and they show up in a few different ways:
Misinformation – False or inaccurate information that’s shared without the intent to deceive. Think of a well-meaning person forwarding a social media post that turns out to be wrong or an editor missing a few mistakes. No malice, just error.
Disinformation – False information that is deliberately created and spread to deceive. Someone behind disinformation knows it’s false and wants you to believe it anyway. It’s used in influence campaigns, corporate sabotage, and fraud, and it’s strategic.
Deepfakes – Audio, video, or images, generally created with the help of AI tools that easily manipulate facial expressions, replace faces, or synthesize speech. You might see a fake CEO pitching a fraudulent investment or Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump for president. The technology has come a long way, and what once required significant resources can now be produced with free tools.
And here’s where the lines blur: disinformation campaigns increasingly use deepfakes as their delivery mechanism. A piece of disinformation wrapped in a convincing video is far more persuasive than a text post. And misinformation? Sometimes it starts with a deepfake that someone shares in good faith, not knowing it wasn’t real.
If your work depends on gathering facts, verifying identities, or reconstructing events, misinformation, disinformation, and deepfakes are a big problem. Consider the ways we rely on news articles, social media posts, and video footage. Any of it can now be compromised in ways that weren’t possible a few years ago, and it makes our jobs more complicated.
In this new information environment, we need to be even more diligent about sources and how we evaluate and report our findings. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Misinformation confuses, disinformation deceives, and deepfakes distort. Together, they don’t just complicate investigations, they redefine them. Our value as investigators lies in knowing what’s fake and what’s real.
The post Misinformation, disinformation, and deepfakes: What every investigator needs to know appeared first on Marcy Phelps and Associates.
Tampa is a city of readers, and there’s a new bookstore for locals to add to their list. The long-awaited debut of Bookends: Literature and Libations in Historic Ybor City […]
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Diego Rascon said that while he is finishing his last year at USF Sarasota-Manatee, the campus transfer to New College of Florida has left him and other students feeling uncertain about how they’ll complete their degrees. “It is definitely going to make things different for me,” Rascon, a senior biomedical sciences major, said. “I chose […]
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Howdy, howdy, folks.
For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper – from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.
This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another – they represent the owner’s idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.
These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I’m nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.
The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word ‘slop’ but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:
Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit, and that’s with ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which, by the way, also makes it appear entirely not of this world. Were it not for the photos of the empty interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.
In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don’t warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what’s in these images isn’t real.
Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.
By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It’s basically a sunroom.
Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.
Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the “grindset tiktok video kitchen.” This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.
Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that it was an early harbinger of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one’s will to question reality, what one sees with one’s own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this – lying to impress – it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I’m living in. These chairs are not my problem.
It’s actually AMAZING how much of what’s in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it’s hard to say from just pictures. I don’t even trust the floors!!
Ok if you haven’t read Kelly Pendergrast’s amazing essay “Merchandizing the Void” about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.
Please, I’m very cold.
Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.
The pre-print website arXiv has announced that researchers who put their names to papers which included errors clearly generated by artificial intelligence (AI) will face a year-long ban and ongoing restrictions.
The move is a response to a growing influx of AI-generated papers faced by scholarly journals as well as sites such as arXiv, which serve as unofficial platforms for research publication ahead of peer review.
However, not everyone agrees that arXiv’s response to the problem is appropriate – and the solution to the flood of AI slop research may involve more AI, not less.
AI-generated text is on the rise everywhere. A study released last week suggests half of new articles published online are now “primarily AI-generated”.
Science is not immune to this trend. Last month, the journal Organization Science published a study of how the rise of AI has affected submissions and peer reviews since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Reporting a dramatic rise in submitted papers and a drop in quality, the authors conclude that “the current state of AI tools, amplified by existing publish-or-perish incentives, appears to be pushing the system toward an equilibrium of more rather than better research”.
A common problem in AI-generated research writing is hallucinated citations: references to other research that does not exist.
The traditional safeguard against poor quality in scholarly publishing is peer review: another expert in the subject at hand reads the research paper and interrogates the work behind it before it can be published.
However, the peer review system was already struggling before AI. Pressured researchers often have little time or incentive to do the unpaid work of peer review.
And on arXiv, which publishes preprints – articles which have most often not been peer-reviewed – even this system is not available. Last year, flooded with AI-generated submissions, the site stopped accepting certain types of article.
A study published in January (itself a preprint) estimated around 1 in 8 papers in biomedical science now contain AI-generated text.
Most researchers would agree that AI-generated text is not a problem in itself. The problem is the lower-quality work that AI can make easy to produce.
The ArXiv announcement doesn’t come out against AI use, but rather says
If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.
This may be true as far as it goes. But the penalty – a year-long ban for all authors listed on a paper – may be out of keeping with current research practices.
In the past, research was often carried out by people working alone or in groups of two or three. In these circumstances, it seems reasonable to expect each author to take responsibility for the whole.
But research is now more collaborative than ever before. Many papers have four or five authors, and in a growing number of extreme cases papers may be credited to groups of hundreds of scientists working together, each working on their own speciality and trusting their colleagues to be doing the same.
In a case where one author of dozens or hundreds included an AI-hallucinated reference in their part of the paper, banning the lot seems harsh.
And there are no equivalent sanctions for publishing other problematic material. There’s no ban for pushing fringe or discredited theories, or using poor quality evidence and illogical arguments, for example.
The rise of AI produces problems for publishers and quality assurance. And the idea of some kind of sanctions for reckless use of AI, such as included hallucinated references, is a good one.
But ArXiv’s particular choice seems drastic. If the goal is to improve peer review and quality assurance, AI systems themselves can play a role.
Modern AI systems are quite capable of taking a list of references and checking everything on it is a real paper available on the internet. Any references flagged as suspect can then be checked by a human.
AI can even be useful for carrying out quick sense-checks of things like a paper’s statistical analysis.
Perhaps this is the way forward, rather than harsh sanctions for relatively minor AI-related infractions.
Vitomir Kovanovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
USF students walking through the Tampa Library could see two floors with a furniture facelift by the end of the month. Todd Chavez, the dean of the USF Libraries, said the Tampa Library is refurbishing its third and fourth floors to standardize furniture and improve study spaces for students. Both floors are collaborative study floors […]
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Mosaic, a Tampa-based fertilizer and agricultural company, is seeking federal approval to expand one of its waste piles by 180 acres — raising concerns among Tampa Bay environmental advocates and USF students. Mosaic’s Riverview East Stack waste pile is a hundreds-feet-tall phosphogypsum stack that contains radioactive waste left over from fertilizer production, according to the […]
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USF’s generative artificial intelligence ethical guidance policy covers how programs can be used academically — but it leaves enforcement and implementation to professors. The university’s Guidance for Ethical Generative AI Usage refers to GenAI, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, which can automatically create content including writing, pictures, videos and code. USF’s syllabus templates allow […]
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Three new USF-themed murals now greet students who walk through the university’s libraries. USF Libraries spokesperson Zibby Wilder said new murals were rolled out across all USF campuses in mid-to-late March. Wilder said USF Sarasota-Manatee’s Information Commons received the first mural the week before spring break, followed by the USF Tampa Library over the break […]
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USF and its chapter of the United Faculty of Florida reached a tentative agreement on April 6 after two years of bargaining negotiations. USF President Moez Limayem shared the news with faculty via email and during a faculty town hall the same day. The university’s UFF chapter negotiates Collective Bargaining Agreements that define the terms […]
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In my first class back from spring break this semester, I noticed something odd. One of my classmates decided that during the lecture was the perfect time to catch up on season three of Jujutsu Kaisen. That’s when it really hit me that a lot of USF students just aren’t engaged in the classroom. Obviously, […]
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USF’s Student Government Senate unanimously approved a resolution in February to install duck crossing signs at the Tampa campus at the intersection of USF Holly Court and USF Myrtle Drive. Kaylee Ortega, a junior biology major, drafted the resolution after working on a similar passion project that collected roadkill data by driving around Temple Terrace […]
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One of the region’s tastiest spring traditions is back. Keel Farms is hosting its annual Blueberry Festival for three straight weekends in April, beginning this weekend. The experience is free […]
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In the middle of a huge year for concerts in Tampa, news came out today that the city is getting a sparkling new mid-sized venue, albeit in the somewhat distant […]
The post Ybor City is getting a 4,300-seat, theatre-style music venue in Gasworx District appeared first on That's So Tampa.
Martha Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship to become the only woman journalist to land on Normandy Beach on D-Day. She carried stretchers before writing her harrowing account of the invasion.
The New Yorker’s famously epicurean writer A.J. Liebling subsisted on military rations and came under fire during World War II to describe what it was like for the soldiers and sailors at war.
Syndicated columnist Ernie Pyle died, in a helmet and Army fatigues, among some of the troops whose names and hometowns he carefully included in his dispatches. “At this spot, the 77th Infantry lost a buddy,” read the makeshift sign posted at the place where a Japanese machine gun bullet felled him.
Those reporters told stories of war in all its gore and its glory, its exhilaration and its ennui. Others have laid bare the anxiety and doubts.
Veteran Vietnam correspondent Neil Sheehan broke the story of the Pentagon Papers, which showed how government officials deceived the public about the Vietnam war. Sheehan won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” which chronicled the war’s impact on idealists who once believed in it, through the story of his relationship with an inside source.
Well before bombs started dropping on Iran and President Donald Trump began to tease the notion of a ground invasion, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, began putting obstacles in the way of the reporters with the most experience covering the nation’s military. While Hegseth’s moves haven’t stopped the reporters from doing their jobs, it has made it harder for them to keep the public informed.
As someone who worked as a Washington correspondent for decades, I worry that these obstacles could limit the number of reporters who have the experience with – and trust of – key sources to do the kind of in-depth, nuanced journalism that a war, with its price in lives and resources, deserves.
Generally, war correspondents need the cooperation of the military they are covering to get to the front. For the U.S. press, that requires relationships and credibility at the Pentagon.
Early in 2025, Hegseth ordered major news organizations to give up their desks in the Pentagon press room to MAGA favorites. NPR’s desk went to Breitbart News. Roaming the hallways, where reporters sometimes found sources who would deviate from the company line, became verboten.
Eventually, the area in the Pentagon where reporters were allowed was circumscribed to a single corridor outside the press room – even though the public affairs officers who worked most closely with reporters were in an office on the other side of the 6½-million-square-foot building.
Then Hegseth conditioned the issuance of press credentials on reporters, effectively giving military brass the right to censor or sanitize their reports.
As a result, almost the entire Pentagon press corps, which included outlets ranging from The Associated Press to The New York Times to Fox News and USNI News, which covers the Navy, moved out of the building in October 2025. Some have been invited back for the press briefings Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have begun to give on progress of the battle in Iran.
But after the first of these briefings, the Pentagon abruptly banned photographers from attending, reportedly because Hegseth’s staff found some of their images of him to be unflattering.
Gone are the off-camera “background” briefings where Department of Defense brass could give trusted reporters greater context and nuance for battlefield decisions. Gone are the impromptu hallway meetings where reporters have, with luck or persistence, picked up information that deviates from an administration’s agreed-upon script.
Also not in evidence, at least not so far: the deployment of the kind of journalistic embed program that the Pentagon used during the Iraq war to give the American people an up-close look at troops in the conflict zone.
How might that affect what you, the public, gets to know? It was a combination of an anonymous tip and insider access that led the legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the devastating story of My Lai, the American soldiers’ massacre of civilians during the Vietnam War.
At the made-for-TV briefings he does hold, Hegseth devotes most of the session to questions from outlets such as the Epoch Times, The Daily Caller and LindellTV – owned by Mike Lindell, the head of the well-known pillow company.
At one recent briefing, one of the favored new cadre tossed Hegseth a shameless softball. Referring to American troops in the Middle East, the questioner asked: “What is your prayer for them?”
Yet as hostilities drag on, even some among Hegseth’s chosen press corps have begun to ask irksome questions about the war. The normally Trump-friendly Daily Caller ran a less-than-flattering piece about the president berating a reporter for asking about troop deployments.
On March 4, 2026, Hegseth accused journalists of focusing on war casualties to make “the president look bad.” On March 13, Hegseth castigated as “more fake news” CNN’s report that the Trump administration had underestimated the impact of the war on shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth concluded, adding fuel to the speculation that a Trump supporter who won a bidding war for CNN’s corporate parent is going to turn the network into a more administration-friendly outlet.
Soon after, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr threatened network broadcast licenses over coverage critical of the administration’s conduct of the war. Echoing Carr’s threats the next day: the president himself.
The Trump administration is not alone in its disdain for a free press: Israel has long been notorious for restricting press access from areas where it is conducting military operations.
Leaders of the theocratic Iranian regime are even worse; the country is cited by press freedom advocate Reporters Without Borders as “one of the world’s most repressive countries in terms of press freedom.”
But the United States has historically distinguished itself by making freedom its calling card, even – or perhaps especially – in wartime.
“The news may be good, or bad. We shall tell you the truth,” Voice of America, a U.S. government-launched radio network, promised – in German – in its very first broadcast to Nazi Germany in 1942.
Now, however, the Trump administration, is busy trying to undermine the editorial independence of Voice of America, which broadcasts news to countries that don’t have a free press.
Pentagon reporters are continuing to find ways to get around the propaganda. NPR’s Tom Bowman told me that he takes inspiration from a pep talk he overheard a military source deliver to another reporter crestfallen over the lack of access.
“Quit whining and be a Marine,” the official said. “Go over, under or around the obstacle. Find a way to do it.”
Most reporters and their organizations are doing just that, finding sources outside the administration, like the ones in Congress who told The Hill how much money the war is costing taxpayers per day. And they’re continuing to get information from sources on the inside, like the ones who told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s military advisers warned him that Iran might block the Gulf of Hormuz, but that he opted for war anyway.
So far, neither Hegseth’s obstacle course nor threats from the White House and the FCC have stopped the press from reporting stories or asking questions that the administration would rather not see or hear.
But restrictions on press freedom have a corrosive effect. We already have seen how Trump, using lawsuits and licensing threats, has used his power to make corporate media owners think twice about pursuing news he doesn’t like.
Seasoned Pentagon reporters will still find ways to get to sources they already have. But Hegseth’s tactic of blocking press access to the military keeps reporters from developing new sources and keeps new reporters from building the relationships they need to become seasoned Pentagon reporters.
Americans have long been able to understand the triumphs and tribulations of American troops at war, and to make intelligent decisions about whether they approve of a war’s cost, because a free press has been able to tell the story – good or bad. That tradition is now at risk.
Kathy Kiely does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Tampa Theatre has been one of the city’s most beautiful and iconic buildings for nearly 100 years, and the local gem is only getting better as it hits the […]
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Some of us remember having more energy in our 20s. We could work late, sleep badly, have a night out, recover quickly and still feel capable the next day. By our 40s, that ease has often gone. Fatigue feels harder to shake. It’s tempting to assume this is simply the ageing process – a one‑way decline.
The truth is that the 40s are often the most exhausting decade, not because we are old, but because several small biological changes converge at exactly the same time that life’s demands often peak. Crucially, and optimistically, there is no reason to assume that energy must continue to decline in the same way into our 60s.
In early adulthood, multiple systems peak together.
Muscle mass is at its highest, even without deliberate training. As a metabolically active tissue, muscle helps regulate blood sugar and reduces the effort required for everyday tasks. Research shows that skeletal muscle is metabolically active even at rest and contributes substantially to basal metabolic rate (the energy your body uses just to keep you alive when you’re at rest). When you have more muscle, everything costs less energy.
At the cellular level, mitochondria – the structures that convert food into usable energy – are more numerous and more efficient. They produce energy with less waste and less inflammatory byproduct.
Sleep, too, is deeper. Even when sleep is shortened, the brain produces more slow‑wave sleep, the phase most strongly linked to physical restoration.
Hormonal rhythms are also more stable. Cortisol, often described as the body’s stress hormone, melatonin, growth hormone and sex hormones follow predictable daily patterns, making energy more reliable across the day.
Put simply, energy in your 20s is abundant and forgiving. You can mistreat it and still get away with it.
By midlife, none of these systems has collapsed, but small shifts start to matter.
Muscle mass begins to decline from the late 30s onwards unless you exercise to maintain it. This in itself is a top tip – do strength training. The loss of muscle is gradual, but its effects are not. Less muscle means everyday movement costs more energy, even if you don’t consciously notice it.
Mitochondria still produce energy, but less efficiently. In your 20s, poor sleep or stress could be buffered. In your 40s, inefficiency is exposed. Recovery becomes more “expensive”.
Sleep also changes. Many people still get enough hours, but sleep fragments. Less deep sleep means less repair. Fatigue feels cumulative rather than episodic.
Hormones don’t disappear in midlife – they fluctuate, particularly in women. Variability, not deficiency, disrupts temperature regulation, sleep timing and energy rhythms. The body copes better with low levels than with unpredictable ones.
Then there is the brain. Midlife is a period of maximum cognitive and emotional load: leadership, responsibility, vigilance and caring roles. The prefrontal cortex – responsible for planning, making decisions and inhibition – works harder for the same output. Mental multitasking drains energy as effectively as physical labour.
This is why the 40s feel so punishing. Biological efficiency is beginning to shift at exactly the moment when demand is highest.
Later life is often imagined as a continuation of midlife decline; however, many people report something different.
Hormonal systems often stabilise after periods of transition. Life roles may simplify. Cognitive load can reduce. Experience replaces constant active decision‑making.
Sleep doesn’t automatically worsen with age. When stress is lower and routines are protected, sleep efficiency can improve – even if total sleep time is shorter.
Crucially, muscle and mitochondria still adapt surprisingly well into later life. Strength training in people in their 60s, 70s and beyond can restore strength, improve metabolic health and increase subjective energy within months.
This doesn’t mean later life brings boundless energy, but it often brings something else: predictability.
Across adulthood, energy shifts in character rather than simply declining. The mistake we make is assuming that feeling tired in midlife reflects a personal failing, or that it marks the start of an unavoidable decline. Anatomically, it is neither.
Midlife fatigue is best understood as a mismatch between biology and demand: small shifts in efficiency occurring at precisely the point when cognitive, emotional and practical loads are at their highest.
The hopeful message is not that we can reclaim our 20-year-old selves. Rather, it is that energy in later life remains highly modifiable, and that the exhaustion so characteristic of the 40s is not the endpoint of the story. Fatigue at this stage is not a warning of inevitable decline; it is a signal that the rules have changed.
Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Join us THIS WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21 for three different ways to celebrate the creative works from 1930 and the sounds recordings from 1925 that have entered the public domain in the US:
10am PT – VIRTUAL party: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1977502652667
6pm PT – IN PERSON film screening & party at the Internet Archive: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1977503818153
7pm PT – LIVESTREAM film screening: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1980757251259
Theo Unkrich (he/him) is a member of Internet Archive’s Patron Services team. His love of media preservation persists outside of Internet Archive in his writing and game design projects, which play with queerness, networks of community, and the Old Web.
This year’s cohort of films entering the public domain is one of the last of the pre-Code era: enjoy those depictions of excess liquor and “lustful embraces” while you can! From 1934 until 1968, the rigid guidelines known formally as the Motion Picture Production Code and more commonly as the Hays Code limited not only what could be depicted on screen, but also how, lest depictions of such immorality have the wrong effect on audiences.
To my delight, Morocco (1930) is one of the many pre-Code films that entered the public domain on January 1st of this year. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, Morocco tells the story of French Foreign Legion soldier Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) and performer Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich), who meet, flirt, and eventually fall in love (despite the best efforts of wealthy suitor La Bessière, a jilted lover, and the ongoing war).
Watch Morocco:
The film is also famously queer, thanks largely to Dietrich’s performance as Amy Jolly in a scene in which she dons a top hat and full men’s evening wear to serenade the cabaret’s attendees. Most famous of all is the shot where Amy, with all the confidence and swagger in the world, bends to kiss a female audience member on the lips in one of the earliest same-gender kisses on screen. Marlene Dietrich herself was about as openly bisexual as one could be in the 20th century, and her work in this film carries the confidence of someone comfortable both with flouting and playing up gendered expectations of desirability.
Morocco does its best to ensure that neither Dietrich’s drag performance nor her kiss are mocked. The catcalls at the beginning of her performance are explicitly not a reaction to her gender presentation – per La Bessière, “If I remember correctly, this audience shows its usual discriminating kindness by receiving its newcomers rather unpleasantly” – and the audience’s boos quiet immediately once she begins to sing. Dietrich’s kiss is genuine and passionate, and the female audience member’s embarrassment reads as flustered, not outraged.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also talk about Private Tom Brown’s role in this performance. While the majority of his time on screen, Tom is the model of 1930s masculinity (not much of a reach for Gary Cooper), in this scene, he takes on a much softer role. He appears enamored with her performance not in spite of her masculine presentation, but because of it: Tom is the only member of the audience to leap to his feet in applause after her kiss, and he receives the flower she tosses to him with a near-religious reverence.
I find the sequence incredibly moving: two people, who, for the majority of this film, are confined to the expectations of femininity and masculinity, are allowed to enjoy a world much vaster and more accommodating than the one the Hays Code prescribes. They become so real to me. I see myself in the woman’s bashful response to her first queer kiss, in Tom Brown’s standing ovation for butch performance, in Amy Jolly’s swaggering ease with which she dons her coat and tails.
Why should we care about access to pre-Code cinema? After all, it’s 2026; we’re far past that bygone era of media regulation when we were encouraged to self-censor depictions of justified revenge, villainous ministers of religious institutions, and “sex perversion.”
…Aren’t we?
Even with physical preservation efforts, without the public domain, there’s no guarantee that films like Morocco will always be accessible to audiences. Historically, when progress has been made towards marginalized representation in media, the hammer of the censor is swift and heavy: the late 1920s and early 1930s saw increasing depictions of queerness in film, only for Hays to call for a ban of gay characters from the screen in response.
When something belongs to everyone, it’s hard to make it vanish without someone noticing. The public domain takes stories like Morocco out of the control of copyright holders and places them in the hands of the people. It grants me the ability to watch, relate to, and share this scene with others who, like me, get to see their lives and the people they loved reflected in art almost 100 years old.
To celebrate the public domain this year, go watch Morocco and many more incredible works of art on the Internet Archive, and think about what else we can preserve for the future.
Todd Chavez, the dean of the USF Libraries, said he had been trying to secure funding for Tampa Library security renovations for about 10 years. But it was only when USF President Rhea Law visited the Library in mid-2024 that the project finally received a green light. Seeing the heavy traffic through the Library’s doors, […]
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From game day wins to changes at the university, USF has had a very interesting semester. The best part is that the USF’s The Oracle has been there to cover it all. As the semester wraps up and finals week takes priority in students’ minds, it is time to take a look at the heavy-hitting […]
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The Florida Board of Governors unanimously confirmed Moez Limayem as USF’s ninth president on Friday. Limayem, who serves as president at the University of North Florida, is set to start at USF in early 2026, according to a press release. He will take over for Rhea Law after she announced her resignation in February. The […]
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When the doors to The Shop closed this summer, hundreds of Tampa residents who relied on the day center for showers, laundry, mail, and a place to rest were suddenly left without a lifeline. But on Tuesday morning, those same doors opened once again — this time under a new name and new leadership. The Drop, located at 6220 N. Nebraska Ave., welcomed guests back inside for coffee, connection, and care.
The reopening wasn’t just a fresh coat of paint. It was the result of months of community determination led by WellBuilt Cities, a Tampa-based nonprofit founded by social entrepreneur Jon Dengler. When the center lost federal funding and faced permanent closure, Dengler and his network of partners refused to let it disappear.
“This reopening represents what’s possible when a community comes together,” Dengler said. “No single organization could have done this alone. Churches, volunteers, local businesses, and neighbors all stepped in because they knew this place matters—to the people it serves and to the city as a whole.”
Within just a few months, that collective effort raised more than $130,000, enough to take over the lease, refresh the space, and prepare for the reopening. Volunteers scrubbed walls, painted, replaced fixtures, and brought life back to a place that had long been a safe haven for people without homes.
For many, the return of the center — now called The Drop — marks more than a change in name. It’s a symbol of resilience, both for those who rely on it and for the city that rallied behind it.
“We chose the name The Drop because it captures both what we do and why we do it,” Dengler explained. “It’s short for drop-in center, but it also reminds us that small acts of love—the drop of coffee that starts your day, the drop of water that refreshes, or any ‘drop’ of hospitality—ripples outward into lasting change.”
That ripple effect is already underway. The Drop currently operates two days a week, offering essential services like showers, laundry, internet access, and a place to rest. Plans are already forming to expand to five or six days a week as funding allows.
Beyond daily services, Dengler and his team are working toward a larger vision: turning The Drop into a Community Resilience Hub. The space will not only meet everyday needs (“blue sky” days) but also serve as a coordination site for disaster response (“grey sky” days), providing shelter, supplies, and volunteer coordination through the Respond Together network of local churches.
The center’s new name also nods to activist Dorothy Day, whose philosophy of small, consistent acts of compassion continues to inspire Dengler’s work. Day once wrote, “People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.”
Keeping The Drop open and thriving will take continued effort. The team estimates it will need about $240,000 annually to operate sustainably. Donations can be made at WellBuilt.City/TheDrop, and every contribution, Dengler said, helps fuel that ripple effect.
“Every drop matters,” he said. “Each contribution helps ensure our neighbors continue to have a place of welcome—a space that refreshes, restores, and reminds us what community can be.”
For now, as laughter and conversation once again fill the bright, welcoming space on Nebraska Avenue, it’s clear that The Drop has already begun to make waves — one small act of love at a time.
The post From The Shop to The Drop: How Tampa Came Together to Reopen a Lifeline for the Unhoused appeared first on ModernGlobe.
A novel about a woman who throws off the yoke of patriarchy to become a witch.
Should you have to think twice before posting a protest flyer to your Instagram story? Or feel pressure to delete that bald JD Vance meme that you shared? Now imagine that you could get kicked out of the country—potentially losing your job or education—based on the Trump administration’s dislike of your views on social media.
That threat to free expression and dissent is happening now, but we won’t let it stand.
"...they're not just targeting individuals—they're targeting the very idea of freedom itself."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-counsel are representing the United Automobile Workers (UAW), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of noncitizens’ First Amendment-protected speech online. The lawsuit asks a federal court to stop the government’s unconstitutional surveillance program, which has silenced citizens and noncitizens alike. It has even hindered unions’ ability to associate with their members.
"When they spy on, silence, and fire union members for speaking out, they're not just targeting individuals—they're targeting the very idea of freedom itself,” said UAW President Shawn Fain.
The Trump administration has built this mass surveillance program to monitor the constitutionally protected online speech of noncitizens who are lawfully present in the U.S. The program uses AI and automated technologies to scour social media and other online platforms to identify and punish individuals who express viewpoints the government considers "hostile" to "our culture" and "our civilization". But make no mistake: no one should be forced to conform to the views of the state.
Your free expression and privacy are fundamental human rights, and democracy crumbles without them. We have an opportunity to fight back, but we need you. EFF’s team of lawyers, activists, researchers, and technologists have been on a mission to protect your freedom online since 1990, and we’re just getting started.
“You look so great! Have you lost weight?”
“Wow, you’re looking so healthy now! Good for you.”
As fat people, we’ve heard comments like this for most of our lives. At the times when our bodies were smaller, these comments made us feel proud and accepted. We felt like we were finally “good enough”.
But when we regained the weight, as happens for most people, we felt like our bodies were no longer “good enough” and that these well-intentioned comments were in fact harmful.
Through our work as size- and weight-inclusive researchers, we’ve come to understand it wasn’t just us – the extent of harm from comments such as these is far-reaching.
Both positive and negative comments about weight can lead to negative outcomes. Whether they lose weight or not, larger-bodied people are judged and criticised.
Women’s weight in particular is policed and considered fair game for comment. Consider the commentary about the recent weight loss of celebrities such as Lizzo and Serena Williams.
The effects can be even worse for those with multiple marginalised identities across race or ethnicity, gender, class and ability.
It’s time we stop “complimenting” weight loss, even when well-intentioned. Here’s why – and what to do instead.
1. It reinforces weight stigma
Complimenting weight loss sends the message that smaller bodies are better, and contributes to negative attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes about larger-bodied people.
This leads to unfair treatment of larger-bodied people in places such as school, work and social settings. For example, larger-bodied people, especially women, are often seen as less suitable for jobs.
These negative views can also be internalised, causing larger-bodied people to believe they are less deserving of respect or fair treatment because of their body size.
2. It links worth with appearance
Praising someone for losing weight reinforces the belief that the most important aspect of a person is the appearance of a smaller body, rather than valuing other qualities or achievements.
This also impacts children. Family-based weight stigma and parental comments about weight and dieting are associated with higher psychological distress in pre-adolescents and adolescents.
3. It overlooks natural diversity of body size
It holds onto the idea that there is only one “right” way for a body to look, and assumes everyone is aiming to be smaller, rather than recognising that bodies naturally come in all shapes and sizes.
4. It assumes intent
It ignores the fact that sometimes weight loss is unintentional and caused by health issues, stress, abuse, neglect or financial challenges. It’s better not to comment on someone’s body as you might inadvertently be praising illness or distress.
5. It can trigger disordered eating
It can send people who have struggled with their relationship with food back into ways of thinking that they may have worked hard to overcome. This can make old patterns of eating resurface or create new ones, particularly in adolescence, with the harm extending through to adulthood.
Read more: How we think about 'obesity' and body weight is changing. Here’s why
We’re not suggesting you stop complimenting people all together, as it can be beneficial to both the people receiving and giving the compliments. As Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said, “Whenever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.”
But we need to ensure our compliments truly are kind and not inadvertently harmful.
Instead of complimenting others on weight loss, share compliments on more important attributes, such as “You have such an infectious laugh” or “I always feel happier after seeing you”. You could also compliment someone on an achievement, such as “I really admire the way you created such a fantastic event.”
Likewise, irrespective of any change in your body weight, focus your self-compliments on improvements in your wellbeing. You could tell yourself “I’m proud of myself for getting stronger” or “It feels great to be more flexible now I’m moving more.”
It’s OK not to respond when someone “compliments” you on weight loss, or even to choose not take on the labour of explaining why it’s harmful. On the days it feels challenging to speak up, be kind to yourself. Try saying something like, “Yeah, I’d rather not talk about my body” or “I promise my weight is the least interesting thing about me.”
If you’re tempted to comment on your own or other people’s weight, learn more about the harms of weight-related comments from larger-bodied people and those who have experienced weight stigma. Organisations such as Size Inclusive Health Australia, the Butterfly Foundation, the Embrace Collective and the National Eating Disorders Collaboration are also good sources of information.
Comments on weight loss stay with you. They can have long-term impacts on your self worth, health and wellbeing, as well as your relationships with your family members, friends and others. So let’s not send the message that a peron’s worth is measured in kilos.
Evangeline Gardiner is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, exploring weight-inclusive approaches to public health. Her PhD is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Scholarship (RTP). She is a member of Size Inclusive Health Australia (SIHA) and works at the National Eating Disorders Collaboration (NEDC). Evangeline identifies as a larger-bodied person, drawing on her lived and professional experience to advocate for a health system that supports the health and wellbeing of individuals of all sizes.
Lily O'Hara has received funding from Queensland Health. She is affiliated with Size Inclusive Health Australia. She identifies as a larger-bodied person and has been involved in research and practice in size-inclusive health promotion for decades. Lily was the host of the 11th Annual International Weight Stigma Conference in 2025.
Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.
Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.
We are social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.
The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.
This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.
Our survey measured it on a scale of how much people agreed with sentences including “Following coronavirus prevention guidelines means you have backed down” and “Continuous coronavirus coverage in the media is a sign we are losing.” Our interpretation is that people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation – doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.
Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.
When people think symbolically this way, the literal issue – here, fighting COVID-19 – is secondary to a psychological war over people’s minds. In the minds of those who think they’re engaged in them, psychological wars are waged over opinions and attitudes, and are won via control of belief and messaging. The U.S. government at various times has used the concept of psychological war to try to limit the influence of foreign powers, pushing people to think that literal battles are less important than psychological independence.
By that same token, vaccination, masking or other COVID-19 prevention efforts could be seen as a symbolic risk that could “weaken” one psychologically even if they provide literal physical benefits. If this seems like an extreme stance, it is – the majority of participants in our studies did not hold this mindset. But those who did were especially likely to also believe in misinformation.
In an additional study we ran that focused on attitudes around cryptocurrency, we measured whether people saw crypto investment in terms of signaling independence from traditional finance. These participants, who, like those in our COVID-19 study, prioritized a symbolic show of strength, were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation and conspiracies, too, such as that the government is concealing evidence of alien contact.
In all of our studies, this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.
Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.
For example, President Donald Trump incorrectly claimed in August 2025 that crime in Washington D.C. was at an all-time high, generating countless fact-checks of his premise and think pieces about his dissociation from reality.
But we believe that to someone with a symbolic mindset, debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting, and are therefore weak. The correct information is easily available, but is irrelevant to someone who prioritizes a symbolic show of strength. What matters is signaling one isn’t listening and won’t be swayed.
In fact, for symbolic thinkers, nearly any statement should be justifiable. The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord – a contrarian online provocateur – or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”
Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.
It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. Political theorist Murray Edelman, known for his work on political symbolism, noted that politicians often prefer scoring symbolic points over delivering results – it’s easier. Leaders can offer symbolism when they have little tangible to provide.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
