Leave with something worth knowing.

Anthony LaPaglia’s new memoir, The Life We Choose, contains a Hollywood what-if with a sharp edge. In 2011 he was invited to meet Quentin Tarantino about playing an Australian slave trader in Django Unchained, and he read with Jamie Foxx for the part. He says he passed on the role to go shoot an independent project for Australian TV.

LaPaglia writes that Tarantino was genuinely astonished at the choice, and quotes him pressing: “Can’t you get out of it?” The anecdote is less a scandal than a character note: the actor who chose the Australian TV shoot over the Tarantino film, and the director who could not quite believe it.

Utilitarianism assesses actions and institutions by their effects on human happiness, and in one formulation tells us to maximize that happiness. That can sound like a cold calculus, but its historical progressivism came from two commitments: universal scope, the insistence that everyone’s happiness matters, and impartiality, the insistence that it matters equally.

When utilitarian principles were applied to social institutions, they tended to challenge traditional class and privilege and to support egalitarian reforms.

Since the end of the Cold War, more than 30 comprehensive peace agreements have been signed around the world, but few, if any, have succeeded in building a durable peace, according to an Aeon essay.

The dominant model, the essay argues, focuses almost exclusively on stopping direct violence through ceasefires, weapons handovers, disarmament and individual reintegration, on the assumption that democratic institutions and free markets will naturally produce lasting peace.

Its sharp claim is that peace as currently practised doesn’t break the cycle of injustice that leads to war in the first place.

More than 2,000 salon owners, among them Marcus Perkins, have signed an open letter asking Chancellor John Healey to cut VAT on hair and beauty services from 20% to 10% in this week's Budget.

Perkins says rising costs are making it harder for businesses to employ staff and invest in apprenticeships, and that more salons are turning to self-employed models to survive.

A Future of Hairdressing report found that 53% of salon owners reported reducing the number they trained, with financial pressures and concerns about inconsistent training standards cited as causes. A VAT cut may ease the cost pressure; reversing the training decline is a separate problem.

The modern soft reboot is distinctive for self-consciousness, winking at viewers attuned to the monetization of nostalgia.

That self-reference is meant as a salve: it applauds fans' intelligence and celebrates their love of a fictional universe.

The Force Awakens makes the move explicit: Rey, an orphaned scavenger, is a surrogate for the series' most devout fans. The wink is the reboot's way of making nostalgia feel like a shared joke rather than a transaction.

US singer Chris Brown was given an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for 12 months, over an attack at the private members' club Tape in Mayfair in the early hours of 19 February 2023.

The sentence means he will not be imprisoned unless he commits another offence during the 12-month suspension.

Judge Baumgartner said repeated use of a glass bottle, especially aimed at the head, was plainly dangerous and carried the risk of a more serious injury than was sustained.

The Associated Press reports that the Israeli military pressed ahead Sunday with a large operation in the occupied West Bank, displacing hundreds of Palestinians and placing major restrictions on movement after a gun attack that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three.

The operation focused on Hebron, the site of Friday's attack, and came in the final days before an election widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership and security policies.

The Hebron municipality said the operation displaced more than 2,600 people. No militant group has taken responsibility for the attack.

NASA says it and its commercial partners Blue Origin and SpaceX have streamlined lander designs and changed the concepts of operations for future crewed landers. The agency has redefined Artemis III to demonstrate rendezvous and docking between test versions of each company's lander and the Orion spacecraft in low Earth orbit next year.

For the accelerated 2028 landing mission, Blue Origin will defer propellant transfer and use three transfer stages to send its Blue Moon Mark 2 Alpha Lander to the Moon.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. is celebrated for millions of dollars in land and money donated to the park that saved the Palisades. Less well known is that he made the forty-two-mile-long Palisades Interstate Parkway, which runs the length of the park, a condition of that generosity.

As Lutz explains, Rockefeller Jr. was an ardent conservationist and also a firm believer in the automobile and its place in nature.

Rockefeller quietly organized a large land-buying program around Fort Lee and nearby New Jersey towns after construction of the George Washington Bridge set off a development frenzy, then gave the land to the commission.

White phosphorus, also called yellow phosphorus, gives off a faint light as it slowly reacts with oxygen in the air. The effect is chemiluminescence—light from a chemical reaction, not evidence of supernatural energy. Phosphorus is not a safe chemical: it is toxic if swallowed, and inhaling its fumes can also be harmful.

In November 1857, at a séance in Jersey City, the medium Leah Brown claimed her body produced luminous particles. The next evening, particles found in soil where she had pressed her hands were identified as phosphorus. Brown admitted the phosphorus was there but insisted her body had produced it.

Paris-based MMM Film Sales has acquired international rights to Ecuadorian filmmaker Christian Rojas's debut feature “Princess” (“Ñusta”) ahead of its world premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The film follows Kallpa, a 12-year-old Indigenous girl from the Andes, as she prepares for her community's festivities, where the ñusta—or princess—is chosen each year. Kallpa dreams of participating but faces the reality that she was born in a boy's body. The story explores Kallpa's search for identity and gender transition, intertwined with her Indigenous roots, community and Andean worldview.

The Conversation Canada reports research focused on working conditions and overall job satisfaction among 50 tradespeople in the heat-pump and solar-panel sector across British Columbia.

When the workers were asked why they chose a career in the trades, they responded with things like: “I did it for the money.”

The article argues that if governments and environmental movements are serious about shifting away from highly polluting industries and creating green jobs, they must find ways to appeal to workers who don’t identify as passionate environmentalists. Electricians in the interviews also described the stresses of the “solarcoaster”—the ups and downs of clean-energy rebates offered by various governments. A green job that keeps changing its rules is a hard sell, whatever its environmental credentials.

In early October, Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Fla., as a Category 2 storm; conventional models initially had it heading farther west, toward southeastern Louisiana, while Google DeepMind's AI model called the western Florida Panhandle right out of the gate.

The DeepMind model topped other models on Isaias's track but did not match the National Hurricane Center's blended forecast on intensity, or strength. The center uses several proven models, both AI and traditional, when assembling its official forecasts.

The useful lesson is narrower than “AI wins”: a model can beat the field on one part of the forecast and still trail a blended forecast on another.

The FM-1 is billed as a pocket cousin of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, and it costs $59.72 after fees. At release, by the reviewer's account, it was a cool device that did what it said on the box, but not much else. The device is the M-Vave FM-1.

In July, tinkerers on Reddit's r/synthdiy board began reverse-engineering the FM-1's stock firmware to expand its abilities. By September, custom firmware began appearing.

Vaden Johnson entered care at 15 and cycled through emergency placements, group homes, and independent living arrangements. Johnson believes child and youth care workers are underpaid, under stress, and often unprepared for the job.

One operator was found to have sweeping concerns over inadequate supervision, staff using cell phones on shift, staff sleeping while on duty, and staff using alcohol. Gordon Hawkins acknowledges that concerns were raised in some reports but says the province has a stellar reputation internationally when it comes to child and youth care.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the 'father of modern capitalism' description accurate to some extent but overly simplistic and dangerously misleading. The Wealth of Nations is not a book on economics; its subject is 'political economy,' a much more expansive mixture of philosophy, political science, history, economics, anthropology, and sociology.

Smith was not an economist; he was a philosopher. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, sought to describe the natural principles that govern morality and the ways human beings come to know them.

With 100% of the vote counted, Brazil's electoral court announced that Lula had a lead of nearly 4.4 million votes over opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, giving him 51.8% of the total. Flávio Bolsonaro quickly refused to concede and asked for the election results to be annulled after an evening of chaos at some polling places that followed a last-minute decision to extend voting by two hours.

The electoral court's announcement ended an evening of confusion after Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ruled three minutes before the scheduled end of voting to keep polls open two more hours, following requests by both candidates.

There is a shortage of special educators in 45 out of 50 states, according to the Learning Policy Institute, an education research organization. The shortage is growing because the number of special education students is climbing: it is now more than 8.2 million, about 1 in 6 public school students. Bettini's research shows that special educators can feel isolated from other school staff and feel they have too many student needs to manage. The volume of required paperwork can be crushing, and these educators are often responsible for teaching across several subjects and grade levels.

Research shows burnout among all kinds of public school teachers is high, but it is even more acute for special educators.

Consultant psychologist Elena Touroni says confusion around anxiety creeps in because one word covers a wide spectrum: the nerves before a presentation, and the experience of someone whose anxiety shapes every decision, narrows their world and affects sleep, relationships and the ability to function.

James Howard, in Vancouver, takes three doses a day of daraxonrasib, a new pancreatic cancer drug that is not approved in Canada; he gets it from the U.S. at a cost of about $90,000 Cdn a month.

CBC reports that in the U.S., the government is barred from negotiating with drugmakers when they launch most new drugs — a rule eased slightly by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — leaving manufacturers to set their own price.

Wong called it “particularly galling” that Revolution Medicines set such a high benchmark price based on its clinical-trial results rather than what he considers a price that would support patient access.