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But all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is wrong. Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with “a carnival parade of political forms.”

It’s a more accurate story, they argue, but also “a more hopeful and more interesting” one

Reviewing the book in The Nation, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber “a wildly creative thinker” who was “better known for being interesting than right” and asked if the book’s confident leaps and hypotheses “can be trusted.”

At first, they thought it might be a short book on the origins of social inequality.

“The more we thought, we wondered why should you frame human history in terms of that question?” Wengrow said. “It presupposes that once upon a time, there was something else.”

Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, write in the grand tradition of social theory descended from Weber, Durkheim and Levi-Strauss.

“We are all projects of collective self-creation,” they write. “What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim — that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people “almost invariably” chose to stay with them — “ballistically false,” claiming that the authors’ single cited source (a 1977 dissertation) “actually argues the opposite.”

Wengrow countered that it was Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong. And he noted that he and Graeber had taken care to publish the book’s core arguments in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals or deliver them as some of the most prestigious invited lectures in the field.

he said the two men had delivered a “fatal blow” to the already-weakened idea that settling down in agricultural states was what humans “had been waiting to do all along.”

But the most striking part of “The Dawn of Everything,” Scott said, is an early chapter on what the authors call the “Indigenous critique.” The European Enlightenment, they argue, rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.

“The Dawn of Everything” sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as “freedom to disobey.”

“We’ve reached the stage of history where we have scientists and activists agreeing our prevailing system is putting us and our planet on a course of real catastrophe,”

“To find yourself paralyzed, with your horizons closed off by false perspectives on human possibilities, based on a mythological conception of history, is not a great place to be.”

Japan’s complicated relationship with vaccines can be traced to successful class-action lawsuits brought against the health ministry by a small number of parents who claimed – without presenting evidence of a causal link – their children had experienced serious side-effects from the MMR vaccine in the 1990s.

“There was also an element of ‘negativity’ in spurring people to get vaccinated. People decided they should have the vaccine so they could tell other people that they were not a threat. It was a social courtesy, and to protect themselves, of course.”

Iwata has been critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic, but praised its approach to inoculations. “The Covid vaccination programme has been a great success,” he said. “I have never seen something implemented this pragmatically in the history of vaccinations in Japan.”

“Japanese bureaucrats are quite hesitant when it comes to advocating vaccines, however, particularly after the government lost lawsuits regarding side effects from the MMR vaccine,” he said.

Initially, however, even government politicians and health experts were cautious about encouraging people to have the Covid jab. The turning point came in the summer, as Tokyo was preparing to host the 2020 Olympics in defiance of public opinion.

The shift in attitudes is not limited to the Covid-19 vaccine. A panel on Friday said the health ministry should resume actively recommending the HPV vaccine – which is universally recognised as safe and effective – to teenage girls. Japan withdrew the recommendation – but kept the vaccine available free of charge – in 2013 after sensationalist media reports of alleged severe side-effects.

Although no causal link between the vaccine and side-effects was established, the rate of HPV inoculation fell from 70% in 2013 to less than 1%.

Sakikawa, who said she and almost all of her initially vaccine-hesitant friends were now fully jabbed, acknowledged that peer pressure had influenced their decision.

“There was definitely a feeling that we should have the vaccine, since everyone else seemed to be having it, and we promised we would meet up once we were double jabbed. Now it’s easier to go out and meet friends and do the all the things we couldn’t do before.”

The Wagner Group refers to a network of operatives and companies that serve as what the U.S. Treasury Department has called a “proxy force” of Russia’s ministry of defense. Analysts describe the group as an extension of Russia’s foreign policy through deniable activities, including the use of mercenaries and disinformation campaigns.

They ally with embattled political and military leaders who can pay for their services in cash, or with lucrative mining concessions for precious minerals like gold, diamonds and uranium, according to interviews conducted in recent weeks with dozens of analysts, diplomats and military officials in Africa and Western countries.

However, Russian foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov said in May on Italian television that Wagner was present in Mali “on a commercial basis,” providing “security services.”

“From Monday to Thursday, the killings didn’t stop,” said Hamadoun, a tailor working near the market when the helicopters arrived. “The whites and the Malians killed together.”

The death toll in Moura is the highest in a growing list of human rights abuses committed by the Malian military, which diplomats and Malian human rights observers say have increased since the military began conducting joint operations with the Wagner Group in January.

nearly 500 civilians have been killed in the joint operations,

Some abuses could amount to crimes against humanity, the U.N. said in one report.

The foreigners, according to diplomats, officials and human rights groups, belonged to the Russian paramilitary group known as Wagner.

Wherever there are Russian contractors, real or fictional, they never violate human rights.”

“They have no incentive to end the conflict, because they are financially motivated,”

“They are the government in the region,”

The mass executions began on the Monday, and the victims were both civilians and unarmed militants, witnesses said. Soldiers picked out up to 15 people at a time, inspected their fingers and shoulders for the imprint left by regular use of weapons, and executed men yards away from captives.

“cadavers everywhere.”

The soldiers and their Russian allies left on Thursday, after killing six last prisoners in retaliation for four who had escaped. A Malian soldier told a group of captives that the soldiers had killed “all the bad people,” said Hamadou.

The soldier apologized for the good people who “died by accident.”

Investigators from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali have so far been denied access to Moura. Russia and China blocked a vote at the U.N. Security Council on an independent investigation.

Some Malians in these regions are losing trust in the government.

Soon after, the militants returned and kidnapped the deputy mayor. He hasn’t been heard from since.

Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok

A chatbot is not an oracle; it’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate. Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society

We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI. I think a lot of the ferment that’s happening right now in the industry is venture capitalists putting money into business plans, and teams that are rapidly evaluating a whole lot of different things that could be done well. I’m sure that some things are going to emerge that I wouldn’t dare try to predict, because the results of the creative frenzy of millions of people is always more interesting than what a single person can think of.