Leettaschmidt

You may have noticed the world getting excited about the capabilities of ChatGPT, a text-based AI chat bot. Similarly, some are getting quite worked up over generative AI systems that can turn text prompts into images, including those mimicking the style of particular artists. But less remarked upon is the use of AI in the world of music. Music Business Worldwide has written two detailed news stories on the topic. The first comes from China:

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) says that it has created and released over 1,000 tracks containing vocals created by AI tech that mimics the human voice.

And get this: one of these tracks has already surpassed 100 million streams.

Some of these songs use synthetic voices based on human singers, both dead and alive:

TME also confirmed today (November 15) that – in addition to “paying tribute” to the vocals of dead artists via the Lingyin Engine – it has also created “an AI singer lineup with the voices of trending [i.e currently active] stars such as Yang Chaoyue, among others”.

The copyright industry will doubtless have something to say about that. It is also unlikely to be delighted by the second Music Business Worldwide story about AI-generated music, this time in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) market:

MENA-focused Spotify rival, Anghami, is now taking the concept to a whole other level – claiming that it will soon become the first platform to host over 200,000 songs generated by AI.

Anghami has partnered with a generative music platform called Mubert, which says it allows users to create “unique soundtracks” for various uses such as social media, presentations or films using one million samples from over 4,000 musicians.

…

According to Mohammed Ogaily, VP Product at Anghami, the service has already “generated over 170,000 songs, based on three sets of lyrics, three talents, and 2,000 tracks generated by AI”.

It’s striking that the undoubtedly interesting but theoretical possibilities of ChatGPT and generative AI art are dominating the headlines, while we hear relatively little about these AI-based music services that are already up and running, and hugely popular with listeners. It’s probably a result of the generally parochial nature of mainstream Western media, which often ignores the important developments happening elsewhere.

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Hopefully, you already know who Tom Lehrer is, and are already familiar with his music, but if you’re somehow in the dark, I suggest you read this excellent profile, or visit his unofficial official YouTube channel. Or, visit his website where you can download everything for free (he even begs you not to send him money).

We’ve written about Lehrer twice before, both regarding his views on effectively releasing his music in the public domain. Back in 2014, we wrote about how a fan had basically put all of his works on YouTube, and then contacted Lehrer to apologize. Lehrer told him there was nothing to apologize for: he was glad the works were out there. The fan then asked if he needed to do something to make sure that no one would ever copyright strike the videos, and Lehrer again says not to worry, as far as he’s concerned it’s all in the public domain, and he has no heirs to cause problems after he dies:

While Lehrer has made startlingly little effort to ensure a future for his work, a handful of superfans have filled in the gap. One is Erik Meyn, a Norwegian who manages the Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel on YouTube, a feed of performance videos and playlists that has received more than 10 million views since 2007. Meyn originally posted content to the channel without Lehrer’s permission and called him from overseas in December 2008 to apologize, a conversation he later posted on the “Tom Lehrer!” Facebook page. An excerpt:

TL: Well, you see, I’m fine with that channel.

EM: You’re very kind. But my question is: Who in your family will take care of your copyright and your songs in the distant future?

TL: I don’t have a family.

EM: OK, but what do you think will happen to the channel and your songs? And if you have someone who will act on your behalf, could you give them my name in case they’d want the channel taken down?

TL: Yes, but there’s no need to remove that channel.

EM: I was just wondering what will happen in the future, because you’re certainly going to continue to sell records.

TL: Well, I don’t need to make money after I’m dead. These things will be taken care of.

EM: I feel like I gave away some of your songs to public domain without even asking you, and that wasn’t very nice of me.

TL: But I’m fine with that, you know.

EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?

TL: No, I won’t. They’re mostly rip-offs.

Then, in 2020, we wrote about him again, noting that he had put up a website where he had announced that all of his lyrics had been officially dedicated to the public domain, and he encouraged people to do what they wanted with them. At the time, we noted that this did not cover the actual music, but Lehrer had suggested he would add that at a future time.

Apparently, that future time has come. Lehrer has expanded the letter on his website, now dated to November of 2022, even if much of it is identical to what we wrote about two years ago. But the big difference is that he’s now including all of the music in the public domain dedication:

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.

The latter includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.

Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.

Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

As I said, much of this statement reflects what was on the site before, but now it covers the music as well as the lyrics. He’s also basically put up everything you need. You can download the music as MP3s, you can stream albums, you can download lyrics as PDF files. It’s… pretty comprehensive. And pretty impressive.

Of course, there’s also this semi-ominous warning:

THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.

I hope that someone (hey, Internet Archive?) is making sure that this page, and all the music is preserved long after Lehrer removes it.

Either way, it’s another lovely gift, and it’s a strange one, given that in these days of ever expanding copyright terms, most artists never live to see any of their works enter the public domain. Lehrer should be celebrated for his music and wit, of course, but also for making sure his works are really in the public domain while he’s still alive, which is an amazing contribution to public culture.

Of course, as we’ve discussed for years, there is no official way under US copyright law to put works in the public domain. The best you can do is effectively make clear that you are giving up any rights to enforce your copyrights, which is what Lehrer has done here. It’s a shame that US law does not allow for an official public domain dedication, but maybe one day that will happen.

It has now been more than two decades since the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998, formally ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But the most recent attempt by the British government to “deal with the past” – the legacy and reconciliation bill – is itself provoking conflict.

The bill, currently going through the House of Lords, seeks to “promote reconciliation” by establishing an Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery. It plans to limit criminal investigations, legal proceedings, inquests and police complaints, extend the prisoner release scheme, and provide for experiences to be recorded and preserved and for events to be studied and memorialised.

Victims’ groups, Northern Irish political parties, the Irish government, and Americans and Europeans involved in the peace process are all against the bill in its current form, especially the effective amnesty for unresolved Troubles killings. Nonetheless, the bill is still widely expected to become law early next year. What will the Catholic Church do if it does?

Conflict, religion and politics

Northern Ireland endured almost three decades of the deadly Troubles, which many outside of the country believed was caused by religion. Throughout the conflict, the British government regularly met with religious leaders to ask their opinions on policy initiatives and to gauge the mood of the people.

British Catholics and Protestants alike wrote to Catholic bishops demanding action to end the violence. But when their efforts failed, it was thought a lack of application on the bishops’ part rather than a lack of influence was to blame. However, even a rare public intervention from the Pope was not enough.

John Paul II’s much-celebrated three-day visit to the Republic of Ireland in September 1979 included addressing a 250,000-strong crowd 30 miles from the border at Drogheda. But his appeal for “all men and women engaged in violence” to “return to the ways of peace” fell on deaf ears.

Attempts to stop the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike through meetings with the queen and the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, were unsuccessful. The sending of a papal envoy to speak with lead hunger striker Bobby Sands and British government officials, also ended in failure.

Catholic bishops faced regular questions from the British press asking why IRA members had not been excommunicated. Officially excluding someone from participation in the sacraments and services of the Christian church is not common practice in the modern era.

As the blatantly sectarian cartoon on the cover image of my book, The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles 1968-98, demonstrates, there were those in the British press who perpetuated the idea that republicanism and Catholicism were willing bedfellows. But the church knew that excommunicating IRA members could isolate sections of the Catholic community who felt the republican paramilitaries provided protection from perceived corrupt police and British Army forces.

Those who conflated the conflict with religion viewed the lack of excommunication of republican paramilitaries as the church’s compliance and support for violence. This reluctance to tackle the excommunication issue led to missed opportunities for unity.

Hopes for interfaith cooperation were dashed by other issues, too: chiefly the Church’s insistence on segregated education for Catholics, and the 1970 Vatican apostolic letter Matrimonia Mixta which emphasises that children born of “mixed” Catholic and Protestant marriages should be raised Catholic.

IRA paramilitary funerals were another dilemma for the Catholic Church. Irish priests who ministered and conducted these ceremonies were regularly accused of condoning, if not actively supporting, violence. Differing Catholic and Protestant church practices and theologies around death, funerals, and the afterlife exacerbated inter-community tensions.

For Catholics, the dead would be judged when they met their maker and not by those on earth. Therefore it was difficult for the Irish Catholic Church to deny IRA members a funeral and requiem mass. In the late 1980s, Bishop Edward Daly of Derry attempted to ban the bodies of republican paramilitaries being present at their requiem mass but quickly had to reverse his decision when republican mourners brought the coffins to the cathedral and were granted entry.

A carrot and stick approach emerged among the Catholic clergy. Some priests acted as mediators between the Provisional IRA and the British government, resulting in the 1974-75 ceasefire. Priests were supposed to embody neutrality and had historically adjudicated between different Irish groups.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, priests like Father Alec Reid and Father Gerry Reynolds provided rooms in the Clonard Monastery for Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume to meet privately. At the same time, priests like Father Denis Faul publicly denounced the IRA’s violence. However, revelations of clerical child abuse in the 1990s shattered the moral authority of the Catholic Church and drastically reduced institutional church involvement in the peace process.

Reconciling or deepening divisions?

Depending on the final shape of the Reconciliation and Information Recovery bill, will the Catholic Church back the oral history projects? Will it support researchers writing thematic reports? Will it be inspired to open its own archives? Or will it boycott the bill in solidarity with victims’ groups?

Archbishop Eamon Martin, the Roman Catholic primate of all Ireland, along with the queen, took part in a service of reflection and hope in Armagh in 2021 alongside Protestant church leaders to mark the centenary of partition and the creation of Northern Ireland. But the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, declined the invitation, saying he was “not in a position to attend”.

While this may indicate a willingness for the Catholic Church to be a part of the legacy process, Archbishop Martin and another Church of Ireland archbishop, John McDowell, jointly warned the bill would “deepen divisions” in the north.

Should the bill go forward in its current form, Church leadership will either have to back the British government or push against it, a doubtless tricky position for an institution declining in influence.

Margaret Scull received funding from the Irish Research Council as a postdoctoral fellow between 2018-2020.

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

Chanta Restaurant is a dreamy culinary gem in Tampa. The food here is exquisite, but the charming team behind Chanta put a lot of TLC into making sure the experience and aesthetic inside match the power of its menu. The website Cheapism recently listed the coziest restaurants in every state, and Chanta is number one in Florida. Another notch in Tampa’s foodie belt.

This family-owned spot is known to close for weeks at a time so the team can go back to Europe; make sure you’re following them on Facebook for the most up to date hours.

Chanta is family-owned and super charming

“But when Chanta’s owners are in town they serve a mean goulash soup; Romanian stew with polenta, cheese, and fried egg; or wiener schnitzel, delivered to charming rough-hewn wooden tables surrounded by brick and leaning wagon wheels,” writes review Alisha.

One of the most coveted seats in the city is the cozy chair in front of the fireplace. Need an even warmer invitation to visit Chanta? Just read this note from the owners:

“We would like to invite you to enjoy dinner in little Europe. Our restaurant is fully family-owned. You will meet the grandma who’s cooking everyday at the restaurant, you will enjoy our freshly baked bread and delicious food!”

One of the most unique dining experiences in Tampa

Celebrated appetizers include the grilled eggplant spread, deep fried zucchini, and homemade bread with butter.

Something almost totally unique to Chanta is their Romanian stew with polenta. You won’t find this delicious specialty anywhere else in the city. The combination between the pork stew, the polenta (made out of corn), the fried egg and the feta cheese on top is to die for.

I’m a dessert person, so I highly recommend you save room for a jam-stuffed crepe, or maybe a slice of apple cake. Visit their website to browse the entire menu.

Chanta Restaurant, 113 South Hyde Park Avenue

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The post Tampa’s Chanta Restaurant is the coziest in the state of Florida appeared first on That's So Tampa.

The site of a former Sweetbay grocery store in New Tampa is going to turn into the popular Lotte Plaza Market Asian Grocery Store. Lotte has confirmed they will be opening a location off Bruce B. Downs, though an official opening timeline is still TBA. New photos recently posted in the Tampa Bay Asian Foodies Facebook group show the official Lotte Market signage up at 17605 Bruce B Downs Blvd.

Lotte Plaza currently operates in Orlando, and this will be its first ever Tampa location. “Since 1976, Lotte Plaza Market has strived to be the premier source for Asian groceries in Maryland and Virginia,” writes the ownership team in its company mission statement. “Our desire to continuously improve customer relations and contribute to the community we serve has helped us grow from a single store in 1989 to 12 locations throughout Maryland, Virginia, and Florida.” Their goal is to open 50 Lotte Plaza Market locations by 2030.

The store offers fine meats, seafood, produce and specialty products from the most popular brands. Lotte’s owners strive to provide quality products at affordable prices, and change their selections as their customers’ tastes change. Packaged teas, unique sauces and fresh fruits and vegetables all have a home at this market.

All the highest quality groceries and specialty products made in Korea are found inside Lotte. From noodles and rice, to unique cooking ingredients, from snacks to ready-to-eat meals, they have a complete selection of the foods and brands for the entire family.

Visit Lotte’s website to learn more about the market.

17605 Bruce B Downs Blvd

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The post Lotte Plaza Market opening in New Tampa in 2023 appeared first on That's So Tampa.

The copyright clock keeps ticking

This is the second day of January and, for many Americans, the first Monday and work day of 2023.

For The Legal Genealogist, it’s the second day of 1927.

No, that’s not a typo. I really do mean 1927.

The year that books like Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Franklin W. Dixon’s The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book) and Agatha Christie’s The Big Four were all published for the first time.¹

The year that “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Ol’ Man River” were first available as sheet music.²

The year that films like The Jazz Singer — the first-ever full-length feature film with synchronized dialogue — was first released.³

And because that’s the year they all were released to the public, they are now all — without exception — free of copyright restrictions. On 1 January 2023, along with thousands and thousands of other books, sheet music, films, photos and more, they entered the public domain in the United States.

A whole year’s worth of materials, wonderfully free for all of us to use in our research, our blogs, our presentations, our publications without having to try to find the copyright owner and secure permission. Remember, that’s what public domain means: when copyright expires and a work goes into the public domain, we’re allowed to use it freely, any way we want, for any purpose (with some limits⁴), without needing permission from or payment to the creator of the work.⁵

This really is A Very Big Deal — and it really shouldn’t have been one.

Because of the way the copyright law works, providing protection only for a set number of years, a number of copyrights should have expired every year and we should have been getting a whole year’s worth of materials released into the public domain every year. But that copyright clock stopped ticking in 1998.

There’s a whole long backstory as to why it stopped ticking, and it was basically because the Disney people didn’t want the film where Mickey Mouse made his debut, Steamboat Willie, to become public domain. The copyright statute was changed to add 20 years of protection to all then-copyrighted works — and it provided that the copyright clock would stop, dead, on anything then-copyrighted and wouldn’t start to run again until 12:00.01 a.m. 1 January 2019.⁶

At that point, the statute said, after those additional 20 years, for most things, the clock would start moving again and, as it ticked over into 2019, the law said we should get an entire year’s worth of published works — everything legally published in the United States during 1923 — transferred into the public domain.⁷

Of course, since copyright law is a matter of statute, and any statute can always be amended, at any time up until midnight on 31 December 2018 — “the end of the calendar year in which (copyrights) would otherwise expire” — Congress could still have bollixed this up. So, as 2018 drew to a close, all of us who watch copyright issues held our collective breath.

And — somehow, astonishingly — Congress didn’t manage to foul it up. On 1 January 2019, thousands and thousands of items passed from copyright-protected status into the public domain. And we could all then say that the public domain included “everything legally published in the United States before 1924” (instead of the “before 1923” we’d been saying for 20 years).⁸

And then we started worrying. Because, of course, since copyright law is a matter of statute, and any statute can always be amended…⁹ Yeah, as of 1 January 2020, we were supposed to get another year’s worth of goodies. But — ulp — Congress could still foul it up.

Amazingly enough, as that year drew to an end, the clock kept right on ticking and, as of 1 January 2020, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1925. Then, as of 1 January 2021, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1926. And as of 1 January 2022, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1927.

And — may miracles never cease — Congress didn’t manage to foul it up last year either. In copyright terms, 1927 finally got here. As of 1 January 2023, we can now say that copyright has expired for works published before 1928. And on 1 January 2024, we can include works published before 1929. And so on.¹⁰

For now, at least, that copyright clock is still ticking…

Welcome to 1927 — and the wealth of now-out-of-copyright materials produced that year.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Welcome to 1927!,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 2 Jan 2023).

SOURCES

Note: Today is Public Domain Day; the day that we celebrate new works that have entered the public domain. This year, we welcome works first registered or published in the United States in 1927. Works published during that time, that met all required formalities, enjoyed a maximum term of copyright protection of 95 years. With copyright term running to the end of the calendar year, works first published in 1927 officially enter the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2023.

Because public domain works are free of copyright, they may be freely copied, distributed, performed, displayed, and adapted. This blog post, by Heidi Bowles, discusses popular adaptation of public domain works.

Copyright in Derivative Works

Copyright provides authors with a bundle of exclusive rights in their creative works, one of which is to create—or authorize others to create—adaptations of their work. When a work enters the public domain, it becomes free for creators to adapt without worrying about seeking permission, paying royalties, or meeting an exception under copyright law. The lack of copyright restrictions makes it easier for authors to use public domain works for their adaptations. It is important to note that copyright terms can vary from country to country, so materials that are in the public domain in one country may still be protected by copyright in another.

Derivative works, in terms of copyright, are any works that are based on preexisting material.[1] When an author creates a derivative work, they only own the copyright in their new creative expressions (assuming that they used the work lawfully—any unlawful use of copyrighted material is not protected by copyright). Authors of derivative works do not have any copyright in the underlying work or in the elements of their new work that they took from it.[2] For a list of common types of derivative works, see the U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular on Derivative Works and Compilations.

Take, for example, Kenneth Branagh’s delightful and faithful 1993 movie adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. This film used Shakespeare’s original dialogue and setting, which is in the public domain. No adaptation can create a new copyright in the original work. There is, however, a new copyright in the typesetting of the script and recording of the performed dialogue, which could make distributing a copy of the script or film a copyright infringement. However, because the elements taken from the original work remain free from copyright, anyone is free to transcribe Shakespeare’s original dialogue from the movie and distribute it without worrying about copyright.

Less faithful works have more independent and copyrightable elements, like Disney’s 1994 animated movie The Lion King, adapted from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. In a loose adaptation like this, it is more complicated to determine which elements are public domain and which belong to Disney, but essentially, the copyrightable elements taken directly from Hamlet remain public domain, while the new original elements added by Disney are protected by copyright.

Copyright does not protect ideas or concepts, only their tangible, fixed expression. It can be helpful to consider which elements of a story could be copyrightable:[3]

Not copyrightable:

• Scènes à faire (elements that are customary or obligatory for a genre)
• General themes
• Overall plot
• Names, titles, slogans, short phrases, and catch phrases

Copyrightable:

• The specific expression of scènes à faire, an idea, theme, or overall plot
• Characters
• Dialogue
• A recording of the performance

Therefore, Disney does not have an exclusive right in Hamlet retellings with an animated animal cast, but they do have an exclusive right in the particular way that they did it.

The iconic scene where Scar kills Mufasa is a good example to look at. Disney does not have a copyright in the idea of the king being killed by his brother so the brother can take his place, which was taken from Hamlet (neither would Shakespeare, for the record, if there had been copyright laws in 1600—fratricide is a common and intangible idea and therefore not copyrightable). They also would not likely have a copyright to Scar’s final words to his brother, “Long live the king,” even if they were original to them, because as a short phrase it is not likely substantial enough to be copyrightable. They do, however, have a copyright in other specific elements that they used to express this plot point—Scar holding Mufasa up by his claws, sneering, and dramatically letting go so that Mufasa falls off the cliff into a stampede blow. This specific and original expression of fratricide is what is copyrightable, not its use in the story.

Fair Use

Public domain materials are not the only available option for creating derivative works without the rightsholder’s permission. There are exceptions in the law that allow copyrighted works to be transformed without paying royalties or asking permission from the copyright owner.

The fair use doctrine allows for the use of copyrighted works in certain circumstances, which is determined using a four-factor test that considers the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality used, and the effect of the use on the market for the copyrighted work. Fair use is purposely vague to avoid unnecessarily limiting the use of copyrighted materials, but this vagueness could also result in uncertainty about whether a use is a fair use or an infringement until it is challenged in court.

So, while there are certainly many derivative works that are considered fair use, the lack of certainty with the fair use doctrine could mean that some creators would prefer the option of using public domain materials when creating derivative works.

Other Examples Based on Public Domain Works

DISCLAIMER: this list is nowhere near comprehensive and is heavily biased in favor of my personal tastes

Shakespeare’s plays have been frequently adapted. A musical adaptation of one of his best-known plays, Romeo and Juliet, gave us one of the most recognizable love themes in modern American culture (Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture” TH. 42, which itself is in the public domain and used in many movies and TV shows). Some other notable adaptations of Romeo and Juliet include:

• West Side Story (1957, 1961, and 2021)
• Gnomeo and Juliet (2011)
• The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998)

Other popular movies adapted from Shakespeare’s plays include 10 Things I Hate About You (1999; Taming of the Shrew), She’s the Man (2006; Twelfth Night), and Ophelia (2018; Hamlet).

Jane Austen’s classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, is another frequently adapted story. Some recognizable works adapted from Pride and Prejudice include:

• The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012)
• Fire Island (2022)
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)
• Bride and Prejudice (2004)
• Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).

Other Notable Movies and TV Shows:

• Clueless (1995; Jane Austen’s Emma)
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975; legend of King Arthur)
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000; Homer’s The Odyssey)
• Anne With an E (2017-2019; Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables)
• Treasure Planet (2002; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island)
• Shrek the Third (2007; legend of King Arthur)

For more information on when a work becomes public domain, see Copyright Term and the Public Domain from Cornell Libraries. For a discussion of what is fair game and what is infringement in similar stories, see Protecting Your Stories by Mark Litwak.

Have any questions? Contact Copyright Services at libcopyright@osu.edu.

This post is authored by Heidi Bowles, current student at the UC Davis School of Law and former research assistant at Ohio State University Libraries’ Copyright Services.

————————————————————————————————————————————-

[1] “Derivative work” is defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101 as “a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ‘derivative work.’”

[2] 17 U.S.C. § 103

[3] For more information on the scope of copyright, see the Copyright Office’s Circular on Works Not Protected by Copyright.

January 1st is Public Domain Day, my favorite day of the year. Today marks the end of copyright for books, movies, and music first published in the U.S. in 1927. Now that these works are in the public domain, everyone is free to use, reprint, quote, remix, and adapt them without permission or payment.

For many years, only works published in the U.S. through 1922 were in the public domain because of retroactive copyright extensions like the 1998 Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended copyright terms of works published before 1978 from 75 to 95 years and works created on or after that date to the life of the author plus 70 years. Without that extension, these 1927 works would have entered the public domain twenty years ago, in 2003. It wasn’t until January 1, 2019 that copyright protection finally ended for 1923 works, and every New Year’s Day the public domain gains another year’s worth of treasures.

Some notable 1927 literary works now in the public domain include: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (containing the last two original Sherlock Holmes stories), Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women, William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, to name just a few.

The full texts of the 1927 books that have been scanned by the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, and other digital archives should soon be publicly available on their websites.

I highly recommend that you visit the Public Domain Day 2023 website created by Jennifer Jenkins from Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain to read important news and information about copyright and the public domain and to explore some of the 1927 works that you can now use as you like. But as Jenkins notes, the celebration is bittersweet because of what could have been:

“This site celebrates works from 1927 that are in the public domain after a 95-year copyright term. However, under the laws that were in effect until 1978, thousands of works from 1966 would be entering the public domain this year. Under current copyright terms we will have to wait until 2062. In fact, since copyright used to come in renewable terms of 28 years, and 85% of authors did not renew, 85% of the works from 1994 might be entering the public domain! Imagine what the great libraries of the world—or just internet hobbyists—could do: digitizing those holdings, making them available for education and research, for pleasure and for creative reuse.”

Novelist Charlotte Brontë was devastated when her sister Emily died from tuberculosis on December 19, 1848.

Emily’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, had been published just a year earlier. In a letter to her publisher, composed on Christmas Day, Charlotte wrote that Emily was:

Rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers … sweet is rest after labour and calm after tempest.

The popular account of Emily’s last day envisions her dying on the sofa in the family’s dining room (now the home of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire), stubbornly refusing to take to her bed. But ambiguity surrounds the precise details of her death.

Because there is no writing by Emily about her illness, Charlotte’s account has become the dominant one. In letters from October to December that year, she documented Emily’s decline in detail.

Accepted at face value, they suggest that Emily was stubborn in sickness. Charlotte describes trying to persuade her sister to permit medical assessment and treatment and writes of Emily’s consistent refusal.

Besides a “mild aperient – and Locock’s cough wafers” (a product that claimed to offer “instant relief” to “all disorders of the breath and lungs”), Emily rejected all other forms of medical intervention, dismissing at least one proposed treatment (homeopathy) as a “form of Quackery”. She declared that “no poisoning doctor” should come near her.

To many biographers, Emily’s behaviour has not only been interpreted as stubborn, but as evidence of a “violent display of denial” about her illness and as “brittle contempt” for her sister tantamount to “a subtle emotional blackmail”.

But there is another way to understand Emily’s resistance to aid and refusal to speak with Charlotte.

Tuberculosis and the Victorians

Today tuberculosis is understood as a highly contagious disease of the lungs that attacks the body’s organs and circulatory system. But in the 1840s, medical knowledge of the disease was speculative.

It was only in 1882, many years after Emily’s death, that Robert Koch showed that tuberculosis was caused by infection by a virulent bacterium.

By late 1848, tuberculosis had claimed the lives of three Brontë children: Branwell, Maria and Elizabeth.

Through the fictional figure of Helen Burns, Charlotte immortalised her older siblings in Jane Eyre. Helen tells Jane: “We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful: it is gentle and gradual; my mind is at rest.”

When Emily began displaying symptoms she, like Charlotte, had access to their father’s copy of Graham’s Domestic Modern Medicine. The book describes in graphic detail the stages of the disease and the patient’s prognosis.

From the book Emily would also have known that, despite Charlotte’s suggestions, there was no cure.

Read more: How the stigma of contagion keeps alive Romantic notions of how the Brontës died

As historian of medicine Carolyn A. Day notes: “Once the disease was plainly evident, the patient had passed the stage at which medical authorities believed they could affect any alteration.”

In Wuthering Heights, Emily writes of a similar tubercular situation. Dr Kenneth warns Hindley that he can no longer help his sick wife, as “his medicines were useless at that stage of the malady”.

Brontë sibling tensions

Charlotte does not explain why Emily refused to speak of her illness.

One reason could be that, as Charlotte’s letters show, she was revealing intimate details of her sister’s ill health without Emily’s consent.

Intrusion into Emily’s privacy was a pattern for Charlotte and suggests a logical reason for Emily’s resistance to sharing with her older sister. Charlotte had previously invaded Emily’s privacy when she had read her private notebook containing the poems that inspired the 1846 collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

The letters also reveal tension about Emily’s behaviour. In Charlotte’s mind, Emily was “unfit” to maintain her normal routines (sitting up late and insisting on feeding her dog Keeper and their sister Anne’s dog Flossy). Charlotte was keen to make herself the nurse and her sister the patient – Emily did not want that.

Rewriting Emily’s death

The trauma Charlotte suffered from Emily’s passing was compounded by Anne’s subsequent tuberculosis diagnosis.

Anne accepted her elder sister’s “remedies”, but a letter from a specialist to Charlotte advises her not to indulge false hope about a recovery. Anne died in May 1849.

The loss of three siblings within nine months (their only brother, Branwell, had died just three months before Emily) must have been overwhelming for Charlotte.

Still, in the aftermath of Emily’s death she knowingly misrepresented her sister’s final months.

Charlotte misdated and edited Emily’s poetry in the posthumously published Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell, falsely presenting the poem No Coward Soul is Mine as “the last lines my sister ever wrote” when she “knew it was not”.

Emily’s behaviour during her illness may have been (as novelist Stevie Davies puts it) “lacerating to those who loved and cared for her”, but she was perfectly within her rights to behave the way she did. Neither Emily nor Victorian medicine could control how tuberculosis ravaged her body. But rather than judging her behaviour as selfish or stubborn, we should view Emily’s suffering with more compassion, appreciating her strength of character in the face of her own mortality.

Claire O'Callaghan 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.

After 18 months investigating, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol held its final public meeting on Dec. 19, 2022. The panel recommended that the U.S. Department of Justice bring criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

The House committee recommended that the Justice Department pursue four main charges against Trump – obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to make a false statement and inciting or assisting an insurrection. The committee also recommended that the House Ethics Committee sanction four Republican members of Congress who refused the committee’s subpoena requests to provide information about the events of Jan. 6.

But what does that all mean? The Conversation asked Margaret Russell, professor of constitutional law at Santa Clara University, to help explain why these recommended charges are important, where they fall short – and what could come next.

1. What are the biggest takeaways from these referrals?

People have wondered whether the proceedings would have any strong result. Now it is clear that the committee does not see these proceedings as primarily about making a historical record. They have done more than that.

One big takeaway is that Trump is at the top of the pile. When the proceedings began it was not clear – though many people suspected and alleged – how much he knew, when he knew it, what he said before Jan. 6, what he knew and said before the election’s certification, and whether he knew he really had not won the election. It is now clear Trump was the architect of most of this conspiracy – and the committee is urging specific accountability for him and other people who played a part in it.

It is also interesting to think about the committee urging criminal prosecution. It really means it reached the brink. This bipartisan committee, which comprised seven Democrats and two Republicans, decided unanimously that backing away from criminal charges would be a dereliction of its duty to recommend, based on what it has found. Committee members are not telling the Department of Justice what it has to do – they can’t. But in their investigatory role they concluded that in order for there to be accountability, they needed to recommend charges.

2. Do these referrals have any legal teeth?

The magnitude of these recommended charges, particularly the insurrection one, is unprecedented. Rather than saying they don’t have legal teeth, I think they certainly have very strong teeth in the sense of urging the Department of Justice to make sure that there is accountability. Accountability is a word that jumped out to me in committee members’ statements on Dec. 19 – there must be accountability, even though this committee, of course, cannot force the Department of Justice to do anything.

The charges, of trying to overthrow the government, essentially, go right to the heart of the Constitution. There is no historical precedent for this. The Justice Department’s determination to pursue the referrals would depend on the validity of the House commitee’s findings. And since the department has been doing its own investigation of Trump, it wouldn’t be starting from ground zero. The committee’s work could be added to what it has.

3. Will the new GOP Congress have any say in these referrals?

Now that the report has been handed over and the referrals made, I would imagine the Department of Justice will start considering it. And, so, when there is a difference in leadership of the House there won’t be any way to undo it. The House can conduct its own investigations, but it cannot stop the Department of Justice and it cannot undo this report and its recommendations. Attorney General Merrick Garland has clearly sent a message that the department he runs is not influenced by outside factors. And he has tried to insulate any prosecutions from accusations of political influence by appointing a special counsel to oversee the Trump investigations.

4. Were lawmakers who ignored the subpoenas legally required to obey the committee’s request for testimony?

I think the answer is yes. The Constitution (Article I, Section 5) states that each chamber makes its own rules that bind its members. The Supreme Court has underscored this constitutional power as well as the legal legitimacy of the congressional subpoena. The consequences of ignoring a congressional subpoena might ultimately wind up within the purview of the Ethics Committee, but there are consequences.

5. Does the House committee’s report increase the likelihood that Trump will be charged?

I think it makes a strong argument in the public sphere for the prosecution of Trump, which is what a lot of people have been waiting for. It doesn’t guarantee a prosecution, but it spells out, I think meticulously, why Trump is included in this and at the forefront.

The House committee’s message of accountability – that if the nation is to consider itself to be a democracy that works there must be accountability for Trump and others – was made very powerfully. As committee member Adam Schiff said on Dec. 19, “I think the day we start giving passes to presidents or former presidents or people of power or influence is the day we can say that this was the beginning of the end of our democracy.”

Margaret M. Russell 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.

For many people, Christmas dinner is not complete without a side helping of brussels sprouts. Indeed, they are Britain’s favourite Christmas dinner vegetable. But if you’re not a convert, perhaps these health benefits will convince you to give them a second chance.

Sprouts belong to the wholesome family of cruciferous or brassica vegetables, including cabbage, kale and broccoli. As with all brassica, brussels sprouts are packed with fibre, which is good for keeping the beneficial bacteria in your gut happy.

They also provide essential minerals, such as potassium and calcium, to keep your muscle and bones healthy. They are rich in vitamins K and C, supporting a healthy immune system and bones.

Pound for pound, you’ll get more vitamin C from them when eaten raw than from oranges. Cooked brussels sprouts still contain vitamin C, though – about the same pound for pound as you’d get from orange juice and raw oranges.

The bitter, the better

Most importantly, brussels sprouts are rich in a wide range of natural chemicals, such as carotenoids and polyphenols, that have been linked to good health. They are particularly abundant in sulphur-containing compounds called glucosinolates.

Think back to when you last cooked brussels sprouts, cabbage or cauliflower. Have you stopped and wondered what that pungent smell is? That is the sulphur compounds in the sprouts being broken down. They are also what gives brussels sprouts that characteristic bitter taste. So to get your fill of these beneficial chemicals, the bitter, the better.

So you may wonder why these chemicals are so special. Several scientific studies have shown that these sulphurous compounds are potent antioxidants that can promote health by preventing cell damage.

Several studies have also shown that consuming more of these glucosinolates from cruciferous vegetables, including brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale and cabbage, are associated with a reduced risk of developing a wide range of cancers. Research continues collecting more evidence of their benefits, but the best advice to keep in mind is to try to consume roughly five portions of brassica vegetables weekly and to vary the options.

The bitter sulphurous compounds are part of a brussels sprouts’ sophisticated defence system, known as the mustard oil bomb, that repels insects from biting them but attracts those insects that allow pollination.

And because plants are clever, about 200 different glucosinolates exist in brassica vegetables, and each of these vegetables has different combinations, giving them their characteristic flavour. This is why the following vegetables, which belong to the brassica family, have different tastes: broccoli, cabbage, kale, swede, wasabi, horseradish, turnip, rocket, watercress, cauliflower and mustard.

How to cook them

For convenience, brussels sprouts are often boiled. But if you boil them for too long, not only will they lose their nutritional value (some of the glucosinolates will be destroyed by heat and lost into the water), but it will also give sprouts an unpleasant smell and taste.

So what are the other options?

You could simply fry sprouts in a pan with some olive oil or butter and a smidgen of garlic and herbs. An alternative would be to steam them or microwave them. But make sure they keep their crunch.

Or why not try being adventurous and trying something new by having them raw, cut into small pieces, and adding sprouts to a salad?

Next time you pass along the supermarket’s fruit and vegetable section, don’t forget to give brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage a try. Brassicas like brussels sprouts are for life, not just for Christmas.

Maria Traka has received research funding (as a co-Investigator and principal investigator) related to research on benefits of glucosinolates in human health.

Federico Bernuzzi 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.

The US reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has marked a significant transformation in US foreign policy during 2022. President Joe Biden’s wide-ranging backing for Ukraine has met with support from both Democrats and Republicans. In doing so, it has ended any question of a return to his predecessor Donald Trump’s isolationism.

In his inaugural address in January 2021, Biden announced that the US would “repair our alliances and engage with the world once again”.

US leadership on environmental issues started on the first day of his presidency when the US rejoined the Paris climate agreement. Biden’s continued determination to lead on international issues could also be seen through the US’s agreement to the creation of a “loss and damage” fund at Egypt’s COP27, after a 30-year long objection. The fund is designed to compensate poorer countries for climate damages.

Swivel from Trump’s policy

During the Trump presidency, the US withdrew from international treaties and adopted an “America first” attitude towards international affairs. Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal which had removed sanctions on Iran in return for a restricted nuclear programme.

In addition, he withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and coerced Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) in a way that disproportionately benefited the US.

Nafta, which established a free trade zone between the US, Canada and Mexico, had been in place since 1994. Trump was a long-term critic, calling it “the worst trade deal signed anywhere”.

Trump’s determination to put America first led to a decline in the US’s global leadership. Some commentators have gone further and suggested that this decline undermined Ukraine’s sovereignty.

It is no surprise that the US has taken a more central role in international affairs under Biden’s leadership. In his presidential campaign, he promised to restore America’s “respected leadership on the world stage”. Experts have identified Biden’s foreign policy as an explicit repudiation of Trump’s “America First” legacy in favour of “the restoration of the multilateral order”.

But it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that meant the US had to take the lead in international diplomacy again. Throughout the conflict, it has been resolute in its support of Ukraine – supplying more than US$68 billion (£56 billion) in military and humanitarian aid while encouraging its global partners to add their support.

Internally, there has been considerable bipartisan support for Biden’s policy towards Ukraine. The only sustained Republican opposition has come from the extreme right of the party, mostly consisting of Trump loyalists.

These opponents, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, have vowed that “not another penny” would be sent to Ukraine. But this opposition is a small minority and significantly outnumbered by those, on both sides of the political divide, who have pledged to continue supporting Ukraine’s defence.

Public opinion on Ukraine

Surveys have shown that the American public generally supports Biden’s response to Ukraine. The most positive responses praised his avoidance of direct conflict with Russia, while the most negative suggested more technologically advanced weaponry should be supplied.

However, foreign policy decisions have not all gone well for Biden. In August 2021, US forces withdrew from Afghanistan in a chaotic manner. This was quickly followed by the collapse of the US-supported Afghan government. The US withdrawal brought international and domestic criticism and undermined Biden’s attempts to re-establish American global diplomatic leadership.

Although Biden was blamed for the manner of this withdrawal, Trump’s ceasefire agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, and subsequent signposted withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, has been identified by experts as the catalyst for the collapse of the western-backed Afghan government.

After the midterms

In the recent midterms, surveys indicated that Biden’s support of Ukraine – and his foreign policy in general – failed to register as a priority issue with voters. The US support is not some populist policy but a determination to fulfil Biden’s promise of “a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security”.

Almost two years later, it’s clear that Biden has no intention of diminishing the US’s role in international affairs. In his latest National Security Strategy, he declared: “Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been.”

The new Congress, with a Republican majority in the House, is unlikely to hinder America’s re-emergence into international affairs. Biden is very experienced in working with Republicans in Congress, and that will likely continue in the immediate future.

And Biden has been active in deciding Nato’s position on Ukraine. When questioned at a Nato summit in June, he said on behalf of all the allies that they would “stick with Ukraine, as long as it takes, and in fact make sure they are not defeated”.

A move to become more active in international affairs is welcomed by observers, with a degree of caution. US involvement needs to be enough to be effective, but not too much to be dominating. And this has been backed by recent opinion polls on US foreign policy.

Rather than attempting to build democratic nations overseas, the Biden administration is adopting what some are calling “fortress liberalism” – the protection of democracy where it already exists, such as Ukraine.

Mindful of public concerns over the possibility of boots on the ground, Biden’s approach stops short of resuming the military operations of the Bush and Obama administrations.

Whether the level of support for Ukraine is enough remains to be seen. Experts warn that a severe economic downturn for the US could reduce public support for the amount being authorised. What is clear, however, is that support for Ukraine will continue in one form or another, as Biden continues to repair America’s relationships with the rest of the world.

Dafydd Townley 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.

At the top hat’s turn to roll, the dice land on ‘Chance’ and it’s a one-way ticket to Mayfair. Aged just ten years old, I won my first game of Monopoly, but I strangely didn’t feel a sense of joy. I was rich, very rich indeed. But I was the sole proprietor of the houses, hotels and lots left behind by a fictional society of which I was the last remaining survivor.

Perhaps even back then, I suspected that the true lesson of Monopoly was that capitalism (in its most radical form) would lead most of us either to solitude, if we were lucky, or to bankruptcy, if we weren’t.

And this is exactly what the game’s creator was trying to tell us all along.

The birth of Georgism

At its inception, in 1903, the initial version of the game of Monopoly, which was then called The Landlord’s Game, was intended as a warning against the ills of capitalism. Just like in the modern version, players would play until the last card was drawn and the last hotel was placed.

Unlike its current format, however, the original allowed two jaded and frustrated players to team up against this brutal social experiment. They could revolutionise the game-play by setting alternative rules such as nationalising the bank, converting the jail into a school or giving all stations free state access to water and electricity. But don’t be fooled; this was in no way a proletarian revolution, as all players remained the individual proprietors of their hotels, houses and assets in a sort of balance between state-run and private property.

Although now largely unknown, this utopian model was once popular in the United States under the name of Georgism. The movement advocated a world where individual success and the American dream could be achieved as tangible, real concepts, while countervailing state power would prevent the emergence of large monopolies and help redistribute wealth. Georgism supported the idea of a single tax on land, minerals and inheritances, which would allow us all to reap the fruits of our labour and do away with unearned income. This brings us neatly to our household game, which strove to show how monopolies would generate misery and poverty, whereas opposing models of economic management would ensure well-being and prosperity for all. In the Georgist world, winning the game meant getting rich without causing others to go bust.

Elizabeth Magie: social justice pioneer

The Landlord’s Game was the brainchild of the much-unsung Georgist activist and feminist Elizabeth Magie, whose story is chronicled in The Monopolists by American journalist and author Mary Pilon. The book tells how Magie was never able to enjoy the rewards of her ingenious creation and how her name was lost to the annals for decades. Although Magie’s game did not sell well and was poorly promoted, it was met with avid acclaim from those who shared her Georgist ideals. As the game spread along the East Coast, activists and fans copied the model and passed on the rules by word of mouth, playing in university dorms, parks, smoking rooms and even in the lecture hall. Magie’s game bore many names on its journey to becoming the now-familiar Monopoly.

This game made tangible comparisons between capitalism and Georgism, using the material forms of wealth, banknotes and assets. We can only guess at how many young minds of Princeton and Columbia might have experienced this new rhetoric of numerals, but we know for sure that one of them was Harold Hotelling. A gifted statistician, outstanding economist and devotee of Georgism, Hotelling went on to become the thesis advisor of two Nobel Prize winners.

Hotelling enjoyed playing Monopoly with his family, with students, and even alone at night before succumbing to sleep. His chosen version was, naturally, the original Georgist one. Eventually and no doubt subconsciously, he began incorporating the game into his later-renowned economic models. Following a consistently similar writing structure, Hotelling’s articles dealt with subjects as disparate as taxation, non-renewable resources, geographical economics and social welfare.

Hotelling’s social optimum

Firstly, Hotelling defined a model for society and proposed to study the effects that capitalist policy would have on it. He then compared these potential effects with those offered by alternatives such as socialist management. The resulting blend was what he coined the “social optimum”, his choice of policy that would help achieve the best for society as a whole.

Aspects for us to optimise always depend on the issue at hand, whether this be maximum well-being, more efficient geographical distribution or optimal exploitation of resources. But regardless of topic, Hotelling’s models consistently drew correlations between the social optimum and Georgist policy. To be clear, Hotelling never actually wrote of “Georgism” in his articles, instead concealing his ideology behind rigorous mathematical proofs. He expressed his ideas by describing ever-accumulating sums of money, leaving aside everything except solid logic and discussing it all in terms of social welfare. However, an ingeniously playful theme runs through his articles, whereby he compares various social utopias by replicating them into the microcosm of the board game.

Driven by a tireless thirst for knowledge, Hotelling rose through the ranks of American academia and eventually achieved international renown. The apex of his career as an economist came in 1938 when he turned his attention to natural monopolies, referring to those that make any form of market competition nigh on impossible. These economic phenomena usually occur when initial investment costs are so high that it is extremely difficult and ultimately infeasible for two companies to invest and compete. Some examples are rail transport, electricity and drinking water. Yes, these are the very same companies present on the Monopoly board and no, this is not a coincidence.

Using some clever calculations to compare the level of well-being that would be created by different social models, Hotelling managed to demonstrate how much train tickets, drinking water and electricity would need to be subsidised in order to service the common good. Again, he drew comparisons between capitalist society and his social optimum. And again, the ideas of Elizabeth Magie became reincarnated as an economic model.

A flourishing hypothesis

Hotelling’s writings from 1938 on natural monopolies met with unexpected success. In France, after a turbulent discussion that culminated in a profound friendship with Hotelling, economist Maurice Allais used the idea to support a cogent political argument to change the face of French power and rail management. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Nancy Ruggle (another researcher whose work deserves more visibility) and a handful of other economists were gradually transforming Hotelling’s concepts into what we now know as the second theorem of welfare economics.

It was also because of Hotelling that one of Allais’s students, Gérard Debreu, came to the United States and brought a new topological angle to the issue at the heart of Hotelling’s 1938 idea. Debreu’s theories were fed by the ever more complex and impassioned debates that he was privy to with Hotelling and Allais. He later applied his method to what is now arguably the most celebrated economic theorem, the Arrow–Debreu model. Kenneth Arrow, a talented student of Hotelling’s, also took his teacher’s social optimum concept further and won a Nobel Prize for it. Another of Hotelling’s protégés was Will Vickrey, who also won a Nobel Prize and expanded on a number of his teacher’s ideas.

Although Hotelling was likely unaware of the existence of Elizabeth Magie, he never stopped playing Monopoly. To this day, the popular board game continues to hide references to a number of economic models, while Georgist ideals have found their way into modern economics under the guise of “social optimum”. So, Monopoly is celebrated and referenced every day by economists and academics the world over. Some will have no knowledge of Magie and her game, nor the teachings of Georgism. And yet, the game continues to creep unnoticed into their research, textbooks and lectures.

Translated from the French by Enda Boorman for Fast ForWord

Thomas Michael Mueller 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.

As the final report emerges from the congressional committee investigating the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, the focus is on the role of then-President Donald Trump and those close to him. That’s crucial information, but it leaves out another important chapter of the story.

There were thousands of people demonstrating on the streets of Washington, D.C., that day, whose actions are not recounted in detail in the congressional report. They carried a variety of political and ideological flags and signs. The Conversation asked scholars to explain what they saw – including ancient Norse images and more recent flags from U.S. history.

Here are five articles from The Conversation’s coverage, explaining what many of the symbols mean.

1. The Confederate battle flag

Perhaps the most recognized symbol of white supremacy is the Confederate battle flag.

“Since its debut during the Civil War, the Confederate battle flag has been flown regularly by white insurrectionists and reactionaries fighting against rising tides of newly won Black political power,” writes Jordan Brasher at Columbus State University, who has studied how the Confederacy has been memorialized.

He notes that in one photo from inside the Capitol, the flag’s history came into sharp relief as the man carrying it was standing between “the portraits of two Civil War-era U.S. senators – one an ardent proponent of slavery and the other an abolitionist once beaten unconscious for his views on the Senate floor.”

2. The yellow Gadsden flag

Another flag with a racist history is the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. A symbol warning of self-defense, it was designed by slave owner and trader Christopher Gadsden when the American Revolution began, as Iowa State University graphic design scholar Paul Bruski writes.

“Because of its creator’s history and because it is commonly flown alongside ‘Trump 2020’ flags, the Confederate battle flag and other white-supremacist flags, some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate – or even racism,” he explains.

It has been adopted by the tea party movement and other Republican-leaning groups, but the flag still carries the legacy, and the name, of its creator.

3. Powerful antisemitism

Another arm of white supremacy doesn’t target Blacks. Instead, it demonizes Jewish people. Plenty of antisemitic symbols were on display during the riot, as Jonathan D. Sarna explains.

Sarna is a Brandeis University scholar of American antisemitism and describes the ways that “[c]alls to exterminate Jews are common in far-right and white nationalist circles.” That included a gallows erected outside the Capitol, evoking a disturbing element of a 1978 novel depicting the takeover of Washington, along with mass lynchings and slaughtering of Jews.

4. Co-opted Norse mythology

Among the most striking images of the January riot were those of a man wearing a horned hat and no shirt, displaying several large tattoos. He is known as Jake Angeli, but his full name is Jacob Chansley, and he is serving a 41-month sentence in prison for his role in the riot.

Tom Birkett, a lecturer in Old English at University College Cork in Ireland, explains that many of the symbols Chansley wore are from Norse mythology. However, he explains, “These symbols have also been co-opted by a growing far-right movement.”

Birkett traces the modern use of Norse symbols back to the Nazis and points out that they are a form of code hidden in plain sight: “If certain symbols are hard for the general public to spot, they are certainly dog whistles to members of an increasingly global white supremacist movement who know exactly what they mean.”

5. An outlier, of sorts

Another flag was prominent at the Capitol riot, one that doesn’t strictly represent white supremacy: the flag of the former independent country of South Vietnam.

But Long T. Bui, a global studies scholar at the University of California, Irvine, explains that when flown by Vietnamese Americans, many of whom support Trump, the flag symbolizes militant nationalism.

“[S]ome Vietnamese Americans view their fallen homeland as an extension of the American push for freedom and democracy worldwide. I have interviewed Vietnamese American soldiers who fear American freedom is failing,” he explains.

This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives and is an update of an article previously published on Jan. 15, 2021.

If you're a fan of Run-DMC's classic holiday hit "Christmas in Hollis," then you'll definitely want to check out their lesser-known gem from 1992, "Christmas Is." While "Christmas in Hollis" is a banging anthem, "Christmas Is" is a more soulful and introspective track that celebrates the true spirit of the holiday season, that it's better to give than to receive. — Read the rest

You may have heard the phrase "big man history." Suppose you grew up in the United States. In that case, you might have learned that "Lincoln Freed the slaves" or that the "Robber Barons"— Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Pierpont Morgan, Jacob Schiff, and John D. — Read the rest

Adam from the YouTube nerd crafting channel, North of the Border, wanted to make an angel tree topper. But he didn't want no pretty euro-human in a diaphanous gown with fluffy wings, he wanted a more biblically accurate angel. So, he fashioned a multi-eyed ball of six-winged horror. — Read the rest

Elisha Bixler shows what happens when a honeybee changes it's mind after stinging and can CTRL-Z the disembowelment by "going round and around" to work the barbed stinger free.

To mark Lost Species Day, images of 39 recently extinct animals and their stories — from the aurochs to the ivory-billed woodpecker.

If you expected things to come to a grinding halt for a few months as winter takes hold in Ukraine and Russia, it looks as if you may need to think again. Military analysts are confidently predicting that Ukraine will intensify its counteroffensive in the south to drive through Russian forces and isolate Crimea ahead of a possible attempt to regain the territory it lost in 2014.

Now the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, has said he believes Russia may be gearing up for a fresh attempt at Kyiv, after its failure to take Ukraine’s capital in the early months of the invasion. “The Russians are preparing some 200,000 fresh troops. I have no doubt they will have another go at Kyiv,” he said in an interview with The Economist.

Meanwhile Ukrainian drones have continued to strike at military targets within Russia itself. In recent days a Russian airbase in Kursk, about 280 miles south of Moscow and well inside it’s border with Ukraine.

Last week Ukrainian drones struck air bases in the Saratov and Ryazan oblasts, both hundreds of miles inside Russia as well as destroying an oil storage facility near Kursk airbase. Ukraine has been careful not to claim responsibility for these strikes, preferring to maintain ambiguity over who is responsible for these attacks on sovereign Russian soil, which might prompt Russia to escalate dramatically.

Stefan Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, runs us through the likely outcomes of Ukraine taking the war into Russian soil using drones. He doesn’t believe drones alone can materially affect the result of the war, but writes that the attacks hand Kyiv a significant morale booster while showing the Russian people that Ukraine has the ability to strike back at them. He also notes the interesting position taken by Washington, which insists it “neither enabled nor encouraged” the attacks, but is reported to have tacitly approved the strikes.

Read more: Ukraine war: drones are transforming the conflict, bringing Russia on to the frontline

This is our weekly recap of expert analysis of the Ukraine conflict. The Conversation, a not-for-profit newsgroup, works with a wide range of academics across its global network to produce evidence-based analysis. Get these recaps in your inbox every Thursday. Subscribe here.

While we’re on the subject of drones, here’s an authoritative take on both sides’ use of the weapons from earlier in the conflict, by Brendan Walker-Munro of the University of Queensland, whose research has focused on the use of autonomous weapons and unmanned vehicles in war. Walker-Munro reminds us that in 2017, Vladimir Putin said of drones that “the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world”.

Ukraine is clearly keen to let Putin know that they, too, have drones and know how to use them.

Read more: Drones over Ukraine: fears of Russian 'killer robots' have failed to materialise

Away from the battlefield

It’s been a cold week across much of Europe, a reminder – if any were needed – of the importance of fuel in this conflict. In October, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU had replaced two-thirds of its Russian gas imports since February by switching to other suppliers.

Anastasiya Shapochkina, a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris whose specialism is energy, notes that Europe has a long way to go before it can claim to have energy security. She suggests the rest of the continent could do worse than Lithuania, which has pursued energy independence since Russia cut off its gas supplies in 1993 for non-payment. Lithuania responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by switching off imports of “toxic” Russian gas completely.

Read more: Could Lithuania hold the key to Europe's energy security?

If one of Russia’s tactics since the invasion began in February has been to mess with European economies through energy shortages and price hikes, the west’s main tactic, apart from supplying Kyiv with the latest advanced weaponry, has been to mess with the Russian economy using sanctions.

As we have noted before here, they have probably not achieved all they had hoped, as Russia is able to evade many of the sanctions via trade deals with the likes of China and India. And putting an embargo on billionaire oligarch’s yachts might well enrage the individuals concerned, but they don’t appear to have destabilised Putin, which was surely their aim.

But, as Robert Huish notes, we are finally starting to see some targeted sanctions which may prove to be more effective. Huish, an associate professor in international development studies at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, believes new measures announced this week, which target Russian shipping by denying P&I maritime insurance to Russian oil tankers, could really hit Russia where it hurts.

He says these are the sanctions which proved most effective when used against Iran and North Korea. There are now more than 3,000 Russian ships that are effectively stranded at sea.

Read more: Smart sanctions for a stupid war: The West finally gets clever about Russia

China may not have actively condemned the Russian invasion, but its president, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly stressed the importance of sovereignty and of protecting the integrity of national borders. All of which might imply there is indeed a limit to the apparently “no-limits friendship” the two countries declared when the two leaders met in Beijing during the Winter Olympics in February, just weeks before the invasion.

But Ariel Shangguan, an assistant professor in international relations at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in China, has had a closer look at this relationship. Shangguan, who studies the different linguistic and cultural context in international diplomacy, has particularly honed in on the term used to define this relationship.

In Russia the word used is “friendship”, while the Chinese have stuck with “friendliness”. This has been the same language used by the two countries ever since a treaty was signed between the pre-communist government of China and the Soviet Union in 1945. Shangguan recounts how the word “friendship” between the two countries came to imply an uneven power balance, with Russia as the dominant force. You certainly could’t say the same thing now.

Read more: China and Russia’s uneven relationship can be explained with one word

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All names of participants mentioned are pseudonyms to protect their identity.

In our recent study of 150 non-English speaking background migrants and refugees living in Australia, nearly 80% revealed using their birth names in their CVs led to fewer call-backs or no response at all.

This highlights language-based discrimination, and is an example of “name microaggressions” – negative assumptions based on ethnic-sounding names.

Our participants said experiencing microaggressions against their birth names has taken a heavy psychological toll on them.

What is name microaggression?

Name microaggression refers to a stigma based on negative assumptions associated with migrants and refugees, purely based on their ethnic-sounding birth names. Research has found more ethnic-sounding birth names can cause unfounded negative beliefs about the person, such as being less skilled or less capable than someone with a more Anglo-sounding name.

Name microaggressions can present as names being mispronounced, misspelled, misunderstood, misgendered, or mocked. A common occurrence is for some people choosing to use a more “English-friendly” variation of a migrant’s name instead of the person’s birth name if it’s not easy to say, spell or remember. This microaggression is an act of symbolic violence that is not always intentional, but is still hurtful and disrespectful.

Our participants talked about why name microaggressions are so hurtful, describing how their birth name carries crucial cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and family significance. Many participants suffered and continue to suffer from psychological distress and negative emotions such as embarrassment, self-shaming, fear, anxiety, and nervousness when they hear their names mispronounced.

Read more: As the 2022 AFLM season comes to a close, the game must ask itself some difficult questions – especially on racism

Name microaggressions are often barriers to employment

Our interview data found newly arrived migrants and refugees who use their birth names seem to be the most vulnerable. Because their birth name sounds different, looks odd or is hard to pronounce, their skills and qualifications are discounted or rejected in institutional contexts such as recruitment and employment.

Name microaggression is primarily found in the initial hiring process of recruitment when a candidate’s CV is examined before they decide whether to go ahead with an interview.

As a result, most migrants in the study claimed to have adopted a “CV whitening” strategy by using an alternative English name.

For example, one research participant, Oksana (pseudonym) from Ukraine, has altered her birth name by removing her heavily “post-Soviet sounding/looking” last name “Пугачева” (Pugacheva) to give a more Western feel. Instead she uses “Pugachev” in order to sound more Western.

Name microaggressions are not limited to job recruitment. We found most of our participants adopted “renaming practices” in every day life. This involves choosing new Anglo-sounding names instead of correcting their teachers, peers, friends, and colleagues when their names are mispronounced.

Some Chinese participants replaced their names with English names during their adolescent years while taking English classes in China.

As a result, many Chinese students offer alternative Australian-sounding names – Andy instead of Wang, Grace instead of Qian.

The wider (whiter) community needs to do better

The first step in maintaining an inclusive multicultural society is to start respecting migrants’ birth names. Names are identities and histories. Names not only specify and individualise their bearers but also serve as means of empowerment and belonging. This sense of belonging connects them to their respective cultures, and the correct usage of birth names can bring a feeling of belonging in society.

When educators, policymakers, or employers practise name microaggressions, they convey a message that people’s racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds don’t matter.

Most employers in Australia explicitly declare their commitment to diversity. But our research shows they still engage in these microaggressions against migrants. Someone’s birth name may not seem like a big deal, but it shows a significant expression of ignorance.

Workplaces, schools, colleges and universities need to improve their efforts to build an inclusive environment that accepts diverse names originating from many different languages.

Social justice, diversity and inclusion all start here.

Sender Dovchin 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.

Batteries are undoubtedly part of our energy future. Should you put one in your home now to store solar output, manage your energy use and cut costs? It really depends on what you want to achieve.

Studies in 2017 and 2021 identified key motivations for installing home batteries:

• using your own solar energy
• good for environment
• independence from the grid
• saving money.

With these goals in mind, our research suggests it’s hard to justify buying a battery right now on cost savings alone. If other reasons also matter to you, it might be justified.

Using your own solar

More than 30% of Australian homes have solar systems. They typically generate more than is needed during the middle of the day, less than is needed during morning and evening demand peaks, and nothing at night.

If you don’t have a battery, when you need more power than your solar system generates it’s imported from the grid. You can also export surplus energy to the grid and be paid for it.

But, as solar capacity grows, the maximum power new solar system owners are allowed to export is being limited in many locations. And if too many people in your street are exporting, the local voltage will go high and solar inverters will curtail generation.

Read more: Solar curtailment is emerging as a new challenge to overcome as Australia dashes for rooftop solar

One way you can avoid curtailment is by shifting some of your energy use to the middle of the day. Significant loads that could be shifted include:

• water heating
• pool pumps
• air conditioning
• appliances such as dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers
• electric vehicle charging.

If you still have surplus generation, it can be stored in a battery and used later to reduce the energy you import from the grid to cover loads you can’t shift. The energy you could transfer via a battery each day will be whichever is the minimum of your excess generation and the amount you normally import. For example, if you have 3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of excess generation in a day but import only 2kWh to meet your overnight loads, the maximimum energy you can transfer via a battery is 2kWh.

The graph below shows an example of the energy that could be transferred each day of a year, averaged over 40 houses at Lochiel Park, a precinct of low-energy housing in Adelaide.

For these households, a battery with an 8kWh capacity could handle the energy transfer most days. However, the average energy transferred each day is only 4kWh because some days have low surplus generation or low overnight demand. Households with large solar systems and large daily energy imports from the grid can transfer more.

The battery itself will limit rates of charging and discharging. If you are generating more power than it can handle, some of the surplus will be exported or the solar output could be curtailed. If your load is more than it can handle, you will need extra power from the grid.

Read more: When the heat hits: how to make our homes comfortable without cranking up the aircon

Environmental benefits

Storing surplus solar energy and using it instead of fossil-fuel energy from the grid will have environmental benefits.

Most home batteries are lithium-ion batteries. Despite concerns about the environmental impacts of a lithium-ion-led energy revolution, efforts are being made to reduce these impacts.

Other ways to reduce environmental impacts without a battery include:

• use less energy, and shift your load to match your clean energy supply

• choose a green retailer or buy GreenPower.

Independence

A 2017 study found nearly 70% of respondents wanted to eventually disconnect from the grid. Remote households have done it for decades, but need large solar systems and large batteries backed up by diesel generators and gas for heating and cooking.

Being connected to a grid has significant benefits. When not generating enough solar power you can get energy from somewhere else. And when generating more than you need, you can send the surplus somewhere else that needs it. Connecting many loads to many generators increases flexibility and efficiency.

A home battery can let you run your home when the grid fails, but you may need extra equipment to isolate it from the grid at such times. Being off-grid means you may also need to manage your battery differently to keep enough energy in reserve to meet your needs during outages.

Saving money

You could use a battery to reduce costs in two ways:

• store surplus solar energy during periods of a low feed-in tariff (the money you receive for exporting energy to the grid), then use it later instead of importing energy when the price is high

• join a virtual power plant (VPP).

Let us explain further.

The cost of electricity varies throughout each day, depending on demand and on available generation. If you have a meter that records when energy is used, time-of-use and dynamic tariffs will allow you to make the most of price fluctuations.

If the difference between your feed-in tariff and your peak import price is 40c/kWh, each kWh of solar energy you store then use during the peak period saves you 40c. The graph above showed an average daily transfer of 4kWh, saving $1.60 per day. But this household requires an 8kWh battery, costing about $9,600. The payback period is over 16 years – beyond the warrantied life of the battery.

In 2017 we simulated battery use for 38 houses with solar to determine the viability and payback period. Each dot in the graph below indicates the payback period for a particular household with given battery size. The horizontal axis shows the annual surplus energy it generated.

The payback period is better for smaller batteries, which cost less, and for houses with larger annual export.

We assumed a price difference of 40c/kWh between import price and feed-in tariff. We also assumed a future battery price of $600/kWh – we are not there yet (unless you can get a generous subsidy).

The other way of reducing the payback period, and supporting the grid, is to join a virtual power plant (VPP). A VPP is a network of home solar batteries from which the electricity grid can draw energy in times of need.

VPP operators typically offer discounts on the battery cost, its management to take advantage of the retail tariffs on offer, and payments for allowing them to use your battery to trade energy on the electricity markets. Subsidies and payments vary across VPPs.

Read more: Tesla's 'virtual power plant' might be second-best to real people power

Other options might be a better bet at this stage

Understand why you want a battery before you start looking. There are other options for making better use of your solar generation, getting clean energy and reducing your costs.

If you have a large solar system, high grid imports and can get a good subsidy, or if you just want cutting-edge energy technology, then you might be able to justify a battery.

If you don’t have solar already, the economics of a solar system with a battery can look attractive. But the solar panels will provide most of the savings.

Peter Pudney received funding from the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living.

Adrian Grantham works for APG Insights and CXC - undertaking contract work for AEMO.

Heather Smith chairs the Coalition for Community Energy. She has received funding from the Australian Government's Remote and Regional Microgrids and Preparing Communities programs and CSIRO. She consults as Changing Weather to community energy groups.

John Boland receives funding from the Regional and Remote Communities reliability Fund, and has in the past received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

on grayness in real estate

Allegedly, somewhere in Wake Forest, North Carolina, a 4 bed, 5.5 bathroom house totaling more than 6,600 square feet is for sale at a price of 2.37 million dollars. The house, allegedly, was built in 2021. Allegedly, it looks like this:

A McMansion is, in effect, the same house over and over again - it’s merely dressed up in different costumes. In the 90s, the costume was Colonial; in the 2000s, it was vague forms of European (Tuscan, Mediterranean), and in the 2010s it was Tudor, dovetailed by “the farmhouse” – a kind of Yeti Cooler simulacra of rural America peddled to the populace by Toll Brothers and HGTV.

Now, we’re fully in the era of whatever this is. Whitewashed, quasi-modern, vaguely farmhouse-esque, definitely McMansion. We have reached, in a way, peak color and formal neutrality to the point where even the concept of style has no teeth. At a certain moment in its life cycle, styles in vernacular architecture reach their apex, after which they seem excessively oversaturated and ubiquitous. Soon, it’s time to move on. After all, no one builds houses that look like this anymore:

(This is almost a shame because at least this house is mildly interesting.)

If we return to the basic form of both houses, they are essentially the same: a central foyer, a disguised oversized garage, and an overly complex assemblage of masses, windows, and rooflines. No one can rightfully claim that we no longer live in the age of the McMansion. The McMansion has instead simply become more charmless and dull.

When HGTV and the Gaineses premiered Fixer Upper in 2013, it seemed almost harmless. Attractive couple flips houses. Classic show form. However, Fixer Upper has since (in)famously ballooned into its own media network, a product line I’m confronted with every time I go to Target, and a general 2010s cultural hallmark not unlike the 1976 American Bicentennial - both events after which every house and its furnishings were somehow created in its image. (The patriotism, aesthetic and cultural conservatism of both are not lost on me.)

But there’s one catch: Fixer Upper is over, and after the Gaineses, HGTV hasn’t quite figured out where to go stylistically. With all those advertisers, partners, and eyeballs, the pressure to keep one foot stuck in the rural tweeness that sold extremely well was great. At the same time, the network (and the rest of the vernacular design media) couldn’t risk wearing out its welcome. The answer came in a mix of rehashed, overly neutral modernism – with a few pops of color, yet this part often seems omitted from its imitators – with the prevailing “farmhouse modern” of Magnolia™ stock. The unfortunate result: mega-ultra-greige.

Aside from war-mongering, rarely does the media manufacture consent like it does in terms of interior design. People often ask me: Why is everything so gray? How did we get here? The answer is because it is profitable. Why is it profitable? I’d like to hypothesize several reasons. The first is as I mentioned: today’s total neutrality is an organic outgrowth of a previous but slightly different style, “farmhouse modern,” that mixed the starkness of the vernacular farmhouse with the soft-pastel Pinterest-era rural signifiers that have for the last ten years become ubiquitous.

Second, neutrals have always been common and popular. It’s the default choice if you don’t have a vision for what you want to do in a space. In the 2000s, the neutrals du jour were “earth tones” - beige, sage green, brown. Before that, it was white walls with oak trim in the 80s and 90s. In the 70s, neutrals were textural: brick and wood paneling. We have remarkably short memories when it comes to stylistic evolution because in real time it feels incremental. Such is the case with neutrals.

Finally, the all-gray palette is the end logic of HGTV et al’s gamified methodology of designing houses with commodification in mind: if you blow out this wall, use this color, this flooring, this cabinetry, the asking price of your house goes up. You never want to personalize too much because it’s off-putting to potential buyers. After twenty years of such rhetoric, doesn’t it make all the sense in the world that we’ve ended up with houses that are empty, soulless, and gray?

A common realtor adage is to stage the house so that potential buyers can picture their own lives in it. In other words, create a tabula rasa one can project a fantasy of consumption onto. Implied in that logic is that the buyer will then impose their will on the house. But when the staged-realtor-vision and general-mass-market aesthetic of the time merge into a single dull slurry, we get a form of ultra-neutral that seems unwelcoming if not inescapable.

To impose one’s style on the perfect starkness is almost intimidating, as though one is fouling up something untouchable and superior. If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality - at all - can only be seen as a detriment. Where does such an anti-social practice lead us? Back to the house that may or may not exist.

In my travels as McMansion Hell, I’ve increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn’t real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration. As this technology improves, fake sofa tables are becoming more and more difficult to discern from the real thing. I’m still not entirely sure which of the things in these photos are genuine or rendered. To walk through this house is to question reality.

Staging ultimately pretends (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) that someone is living in this house, that you, too could live in it. Once discovered, virtual staging erases all pretensions: the house is inhabited by no one. It is generally acknowledged (though I’m not sure on the actual statistics) that a house with furniture - that is, with the pretense of living – sells easier than a house with nothing in it, especially if that house (like this one) has almost no internal walls. Hence the goal is to make the virtual staging undiscoverable.

If you want to talk about the realtor’s tabula rasa, this is its final form. Houses without people, without human involvement whatsoever.

But what makes this particular house so uncanny is that all of these things I’ve mentioned before: real estate listing photography, completely dull interiors and bland colors all make it easy for the virtual furniture to work so well. This is because the softness of overlit white and gray walls enables the fuzzy edges of the renderings to look natural when mixed with an overstylized reality. Even if you notice something’s off in the reflections, that’s enough to cause one to wonder if anything in the house is real: the floors, the fixtures, the moulding, the windows and doors.

This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It’s cheap, it’s easy. But something about it feels like a violation. When one endeavors to buy a house, one assumes what one is viewing is real. It’s one thing if a realtor photoshops a goofy sunset, it’s another to wonder if anything in a room can be touched with human hands. I won’t know what, if any, part of this estate costing over 2 million dollars actually exists until I visit it myself. Perhaps that’s the whole point - to entice potential buyers out to see for themselves. When they enter, they’ll find the truth: a vast, empty space with nothing in it.

The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms. If you look at virtual staging in a non-neutral house it looks immediately plastic and out of place, which is why many realtors opt to either still stage using furniture or leave the place empty.

Due to the aforementioned photography reasons, I would even argue that the greigepocalypse or whatever you want to call it and virtual staging have evolved simultaneously and mutualistically. The more virtual staging becomes an industry standard, the more conditions for making it seamless and successful will become standardized as well.

After all, real staging is expensive and depends on paid labor - selecting furniture, getting workers to deliver and stage it, only to pack it back up again once the property is sold. This is a classic example of technology being used to erase entire industries. Is this a bad thing? For freelance and contract workers, yeah. For realtors? no. For real estate listings, it remains to be seen. For this blog? Absolutely. (Thankfully there is an endless supply of previously existing McMansions.)

The thing is, real estate listings no longer reflect reality. (Did they ever to begin with?) The reason we’re all exasperated with greige is because none of us actually live that way and don’t want to. I’ve never been to anyone’s house that looks like the house that may or may not exist. Even my parents who have followed the trends after becoming empty nesters have plenty of color in their house. Humans like color. Most of us have lots of warmth and creativity in our houses. Compare media intended for renters and younger consumers such as Apartment Therapy with HGTV and you will find a stark difference in palate and tone.

But when it comes to actually existing houses - look at Zillow and it’s greige greige greige. So who’s doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it’s the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment’s interiority to the point where we’ve ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.

Fortunately, after ten years or so, things begin to become dated. We’re hitting the ten year mark of farmhouse modernism and its derivatives now. If you’re getting sick of it, it’s normal. The whole style is hopefully on its last leg. But unlike styles of the past, there’s a real, trenchant material reason why this one is sticking around longer than usual.

Hence, maybe if we want the end of greige, we’re going to have to take color back by force.

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The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has given us a glimpse into the future of teaching and learning alongside artificial intelligence.

Educators immediately pointed out the chatbot’s ability to generate meaningful responses to questions from assessments and exams. And it’s often not possible to attribute these responses to a particular source – making it difficult to detect plagiarism.

Concerns didn’t go unnoticed. Shortly after ChatGPT’s release, OpenAI announced it was developing a “digital watermark” to embed into the chatbot’s responses. This kind of watermark is embedded as a digital signal that can identify the content as being AI-generated, and which (in theory) should be difficult to remove.

But as experts have pointed it, people will likely find workarounds. And it won’t be long before other AI models just as capable as ChatGPT pop up. What will this mean for our educational spaces?

It’s safe to say we can expect some challenging years ahead.

Read more: The ChatGPT chatbot is blowing people away with its writing skills. An expert explains why it's so impressive

But first, what is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is powered by GPT3, a large language model (LLM) trained on an enormous amount of text data — about 500 billion words to be precise. Large language models work by predicting the next most-likely word when given a list of input words (usually phrased as a question).

The model is trained using many billions of parameters that can represent the complexity of the world. By inputting real-world data, the algorithm readjusts its parameters until it can produce human-like responses to a range of questions. For example:

How many eggs can fit into a grain of rice?

It is not possible for eggs to fit into a grain of rice, as a grain of rice is much smaller in size than an egg. A grain of rice is a small, round seed that is typically less than a millimetre in diameter, whereas an egg is a much larger object that typically measures several centimetres in length and width […]

Although it’s not foolproof, ChatGPT’s capabilities both shock and inspire. It can write songs, programming code, and simulate entire job interview sessions. It even passed the Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, which typically takes 2-6 months to prepare for.

Perhaps what’s most alarming is the technology is still in its early stages. The millions of users exploring ChatGPT’s uses are simultaneously providing more data for OpenAI to improve the chatbot.

The next version of the model, GPT4, will have about 100 trillion parameters – about 500 times more than GPT3. This is approaching the number of neural connections in the human brain.

Read more: Everyone's having a field day with ChatGPT – but nobody knows how it actually works

How will AI affect education?

The power of AI systems is placing a huge question mark over our education and assessment practices.

Assessment in schools and universities is mostly based on students providing some product of their learning to be marked, often an essay or written assignment. With AI models, these “products” can be produced to a higher standard, in less time and with very little effort from a student.

In other words, the product a student provides may no longer provide genuine evidence of their achievement of the course outcomes.

And it’s not just a problem for written assessments. A study published in February showed OpenAI’s GPT3 language model significantly outperformed most students in introductory programming courses. According to the authors, this raises “an emergent existential threat to the teaching and learning of introductory programming”.

The model can also generate screenplays and theatre scripts, while AI image generators such as DALL-E can produce high-quality art.

Read more: AI art is everywhere right now. Even experts don't know what it will mean

How should we respond?

Moving forward, we’ll need to think of ways AI can be used to support teaching and learning, rather than disrupt it. Here are three ways to do this.

1. Integrate AI into classrooms and lecture halls

History has shown time and again that educational institutions can adapt to new technologies. In the 1970s the rise of portable calculators had maths educators concerned about the future of their subject – but it’s safe to say maths survived.

Just as Wikipedia and Google didn’t spell the end of assessments, neither will AI. In fact, new technologes lead to novel and innovative ways of doing work. The same will apply to learning and teaching with AI.

Rather than being a tool to prohibit, AI models should be meaningfully integrated into teaching and learning.

2. Judge students on critical thought

One thing an AI model can’t emulate is the process of learning, and the mental aerobics this involves.

The design of assessments could shift from assessing just the final product, to assessing the entire process that led a student to it. The focus is then placed squarely on a student’s critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills.

Students could freely use AI to complete the task and still be marked on their own merit.

3. Assess things that matter

Instead of switching to in-class examination to prohibit the use of AI (which some may be tempted to do), educators can design assessments that focus on what students need to know to be successful in the future. AI, it seems, will be one of these things.

AI models will increasingly have uses across sectors as the technology is scaled up. If students will use AI in their future workplaces, why not test them on it now?

The dawn of AI

Vladimir Lenin, leader of Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, supposedly said:

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

This statement has come to roost in the field of artificial intelligence. AI is forcing us to rethink education. But if we embrace it, it could empower students and teachers.

Vitomir Kovanovic 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.

Walking down a tree-lined street in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, one might easily miss a small bronze square set into the sidewalk. Stamped into the metal in the regional language of Catalan are the words: “Here lived Francesc Boix Campo, born 1920, exiled 1939, deported 1941, Mauthausen, liberated.”

Holocaust memorials like this one – which honors a Spanish Nazi concentration camp survivor – are part of a project that started in Germany but has expanded over the past few years across Europe and the United States.

These unassuming memorials hide a mighty purpose – making the victims of a traumatic past a visible and permanent part of the modern landscape.

In October 2022, Spain’s current progressive government approved a new law – called the Democratic Memory Law – that recognizes Spaniards who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.

Among other measures, the law will create a census and a national DNA bank to help people identify the thousands of Spaniards who were killed during World War II.

I am a scholar of Spain’s role in World War II and the Holocaust. The way the country has faced this disturbing past has evolved considerably in recent decades. Spain has publicly avoided the history of Spaniards killed in Nazi camps, who were victims of Adolf Hitler, but also of Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator from 1939 to 1975.

This new law marks a shift, recognizing that the Spanish government has a role to play in reviving the memory of all of the victims of Spain’s dark years.

From the Spanish Civil War to World War II

Spain underwent a civil war from 1936 to 1939, setting the stage for World War II. A band of military leaders headed by Gen. Franco rose up against the democratically elected Spanish government in 1936. Three violent years later, these fascist-leaning insurgents had won the war, and Franco was installed as dictator.

Spain’s allegiance with the Nazis began with the Spanish Civil War. Hitler sent Condor Legion planes to bomb the northern city of Guernica – memorialized in a famous painting by Pablo Picasso – in 1937. Hitler also helped arm the military uprising against the democratic government throughout the civil war. Just a few years later, during World War II, Franco would return the favor by sending raw materials used to produce weapons of war to Hitler.

In the spring of 1939, half a million refugees streamed over the border from Spain to France to escape the violence, including hundreds of thousands of veterans who had fought for Spain’s elected government in the civil war.

Forced into refugee camps with little access to food and clean water along the beaches in southern France, they were given a choice: Return to Spain, where they would be met with Franco’s violent revenge, or fight the Nazis.

Thousands enlisted as soldiers or manual laborers for the French army. Others joined the French Resistance.

When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Franco disowned the Spanish refugees he considered traitors. Germany deported 10,000 to 15,000 Spaniards to Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis killed about 60% of these Spanish refugees.

Bringing WWII victims out of the shadows

As many as 15,000 Spaniards were deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

But while politicians debate whether it is appropriate to remember Spain’s painful past or if the government is opening old wounds, groups of citizens have stepped in.

The Stolpersteine Project, a public art initiative started by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, memorializes Jews and other victims of the Nazis, like people persecuted for their political views, with a “stumbling stone” placed in the sidewalk outside the individual’s last known residence.

By recognizing non-Jewish political prisoners during World War II, Stolpersteine cements Spain’s partnership with the Nazis into the ground people walk on, demonstrating how a dark history can be brought into the light of day. The first memorials in Spain were placed in the small town of Navàs, about an hour north of Barcelona, in 2015.

The project has grown in the past seven years to commemorate more than 600 Spanish men and women in 96 cities and towns scattered across the country.

Sidestepping the political firestorm over Spain’s World War II history, Stolpersteine in Spain aims to bring victims out of the memory shadows.

The Stolpersteine project in Spain puts the names of people who suffered during each country’s violent past on public display. These plaques challenge people to consider who these victims were and what their own connection to this past might be. The Spaniards memorialized by Stolpersteine are not household names: They are men and women who fled Spain in 1939 and never returned.

Preserving the memory of a painful past

Spain is now experiencing the rise of Vox, a far-right political party. If Vox wins in the 2023 national elections, it will likely roll back the Democratic Memory Law – and the government’s initiative to reform historical education and map mass graves.

The Stolpersteine Project avoids the argument over who is responsible for remembering Spain’s past. Sticking to objective facts, every plaque contains the essential details of each individual political prisoner’s escape from Spain, journey through war-torn Europe and survival or death in a Nazi camp. The stone’s placement outside the prisoner’s last known home makes a connection with the street, city and region where they lived.

As Spaniards and tourists snap photos of the bronze squares they encounter and share them on social media, they begin a conversation about who these individuals were, what motivated them to leave Spain, and how they ended up in a Nazi camp.

Francesc Boix, for example, one of the people recognized with a memorial stone, was a a Spanish Civil War veteran and Nazi camp survivor. After fighting fascism in two wars, Boix was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria for four years. While in the camp, Boix worked as an assistant in the photography lab, where he stole negatives from the Nazis and later used them in his testimony at the Nuremberg trials.

Boix, who died in 1951, is one of the most well-known concentration camp survivors in Spain. His story illustrates the struggle against fascism, which he and his fellow Spanish Nazi camp prisoners fought on a daily basis.

Stolpersteine memorials in Spain are not only increasing the visibility of these largely unknown victims of Nazi violence. They are also connecting them to the residents and visitors who, decades later, walk along the same sidewalks.

Sara J. Brenneis receives funding from UNH Center for the Humanities to support a public humanities study of the Stolpersteine in Spain.

It is cold outside and there’s nothing quite like a hot drink to warm the cockles. In the history of British mixed concoctions, there are arguably more hot drinks than cold for one simple reason: central heating was not ubiquitous in the UK until the late 20th century. Before that, cold drinks were something of a novelty unless you frequented American bars, which specialised in iced drinks.

Here are five historical warming sips from Britain to see you through the bright lights of the holidays and the dark days of winter.

1. Tom and Jerry

Sportswriter Pierce Egan is credited with this precursor to the modern egg nog. It appeared in 1821 in his monthly serial Life in London, or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, which was adapted for the stage that same year.

The drink seemed to follow the play’s success as it traversed from London’s West End to New York’s Broadway in 1823. It was recognised as a Christmas classic in 1843 when it was revered in The Symbol, and Odd Fellow’s Magazine as a more refined version of “a long concocted beverage”, the Flip. It might seem a bit fiddly to make, but the result is worth the extra effort.

Ingredients for batter mix (makes about 40 servings):
3 eggs (whites and yolks separated)
15 ml rum ½ tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground clove
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp creme of tartar
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
120 ml caster sugar

Method: In one bowl, beat the egg whites to a stiff froth. In another bowl beat the yolks until they are as thin as water.

Mix yolks and whites and add the rum and spices. Thicken with sugar until the mixture attains the consistence of a light batter.

Ingredients for one serving:
60ml of Irish whiskey
Milk of choice
Grated nutmeg

To make one serving: Combine one tablespoonful of Tom and Jerry batter with Irish whiskey in a coffee mug. Fill the mug with hot milk. Garnish with a little grated nutmeg.

2. Gin Twist

Among the most popular gin drinks during London’s severe winter of 1822, Gin Twist was immortalised in several poems published in London newspapers. One such poem comprised 149 lines with each stanza comparing the tipple with other popular drinks at the time, such as this one about rum:

Ye Bailies of Glasgow! Wise men of the West!
Without your rum bowls, you’d look certainly tristes; Yet I laugh when I’m told, that liquor so cold Is as good as a foaming hot jug of gin-twist.

It is a remarkably simple drink made with gin, sugar, water and lemon juice, plus a lemon twist garnish to prove the concoction was made with fresh lemon juice – a true luxury back then. The Gin Twist still offers a superior drink today.

Ingredients:
50 ml gin
25 ml simple syrup (or a tablespoon of white sugar)
25 ml fresh lemon juice
75-100ml boiling water

Method: Combine ingredients in a teacup or Irish coffee mug. Stir. Garnish with a lemon twist.

3. Dog’s Nose

This might seem an odd combination to a modern palate more accustomed to sugary mixers such as cola or tonic water, but the blend of porter or stout, gin, and brown sugar or dark treacle makes for a remarkably good winter sip. The Dog’s Nose first emerged in Charles Dickens’s 1836 book The Pickwick Papers.

Thereafter, the potion was frequently mentioned in newspapers and magazines for nearly a century before its popularity waned. Served at Victorian-era room temperature or heated with a loggerhead (a red-hot poker heated in the fireplace), this drink warms both the heart and soul as the wintry snows settle on the ground.

Ingredients:
25 ml gin 100 ml porter or stout 10 ml dark treacle

Method: Combine gin and treacle in a rocks glass or tumbler. Stir to dissolve the treacle. Add the porter and stir gently once more. Warm in a microwave if you want to make the heated version.

4. Smoking Bishop

When Ebenezer Scrooge finally came to his senses in Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, he said to Bob Cratchit with a smile:

We will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!

There is a bit of mystery to this drink’s origins. While Dickens appears to have added the “smoking” to the name, the English literary critic George Saintsbury hypothesised in his 1920 Notes on a Cellar-Book that it was born at Oxford University.

Its earliest mention is in the 1827 edition of Oxford Nightcaps, the first British book devoted to drink recipes. That book calls it a traditional drink and cites its origins in antiquity – and its rich, spicy tones and imported ingredients may have indeed made it a favourite among the elite in late medieval England.

Ingredients:
6 Seville oranges
115 g caster sugar
1 bottle Portuguese red wine
1 bottle port
whole cloves

Method: Stud the oranges with cloves and roast them in a small metal bowl or baking tray until they are golden brown. Deglaze the roasting pan with wine. Combine the remaining ingredients with the roasted oranges in a pot, and simmer covered on a low heat for about 20 minutes. Optionally, you can also press the oranges in the pot and sieve the liquid before serving.

5. Brandy Toddy

To heat drinks before microwaves, many landlords opted for a loggerhead which took a Toddy from a cold drink to a boiling hot one in five seconds. Heated with a loggerhead, the toddy acquires a distinctive taste since the heat from the loggerhead is so intense it caramelises the sugars in the drink and fills the room with the aroma of toasting marshmallows.

You can occasionally find a loggerhead on Etsy or eBay mislabelled as a “fire poker”. The dramatic effect of heating a toddy with this antique device is a holiday visual treat, but they are quite dangerous so I advise caution. Here we recommend making this warming winter nightcap the modern way.

Ingredients:
1 tsp caster sugar
60 ml brandy or cognac
60 ml boiling water

Method: Pour brandy or cognac into a coffee mug. Add sugar and water. Stir to dissolve.

Anistatia Renard Miller 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.

President Joe Biden today signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which federally protects same-sex and interracial marriages and obliges states to recognize them—though not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

"For most of our nation's history, we denied interracial couples and same sex couples from these protections," Biden said.

A little over a year again, I began working on my first podcast for Double Elvis Productions — a combination true crime thriller and history lesson covering the early days and development of the Southern Rock movement. The rest of the season would take a similar approach to other musical genres, placing popular songs in the context of the time and place that spawned them. — Read the rest