Curated Collection: Anthropology of Iran - Anthropology News Curated Collections highlight articles published in the last decade from our AnthroSource archives that speak to urgent issues in the present, offering

The AAA did a good thing here!

www.anthropology-news.org/articles/cur...

“Prince was my babysitter": Before the Legend, There Was Skipper - StoryCorps Yvette Thompson and her mother, Sue McLilly, remember the neighborhood boy they called Skipper, who would later become the musical icon Prince.

Here is a great story from StoryCorps from a woman who was babysat by Prince!! Who was called Skipper. Prince's mom was her godmother.
storycorps.org/stories/prin...

It will be extremely interesting to see what institutions like Fenway Health and NYU Langone do now. The ostensible reason for their ending of youth gender care is now gone - will they resume care for all the trans kids they abandoned?

Shocking news to most people, who will be very surprised to discover he wasn't a Republican already.

I've had a similar experience--I'm mostly on BlueSky and Reddit these days for social media.

Orrrr you could set an example for people to be better advocates. This is weak shit.

Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi's Trophy Stunt - emptywheel I’ve been closely tracking two sets of cases in Minnesota: (1) the Don Lemon conspiracy case, in which (among other things) DOJ arrested and then dismissed the case against the wrong woman, and (2) th...

From last night: Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi's Trophy Stunt

emptywheel.net/2026/04/18/m...

Jame was our evening songstress. She was also our orangest cat (blue torbie, had an apricot splash of sunshine just above her eyes).

It's been very quiet without her. I'd love some evening screaming again.

like maybe the public would be getting less frothy and toothy about this if big tech hadn’t spent the last three years constantly threatening the public with impoverishment and feudal control, idk

the thing about our current moment is that yes, the anti-AI and anti-big tech people are getting very reactive nowadays - but have you seen what they’re *reacting* to?

Yeah, that's the SW PA part of the 'burgh making itself clear, IMO (not a native myself, transplant of a decade). Not all of those affected are even Yinzers, though it's more likely with them.

A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.

A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.

For the kind of work I do, verification that applies the same standards to allies and adversaries, that scrutinises power on whichever side it sits, this worldview is structurally hostile. Symmetric verification becomes part of the cultural pathology the document wants reined in.

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

I just pitched some muffins where only some had spots... because if you can see it on some, it's in all. Meh.

I once challenged someone online to give me one example of an elected Democrat using the phrase "birth-givers" in place of "women" and they unearthed a single transcript of a three hour long hearing from the Congressional Black Caucus in which it appeared once.

My personal take on it is that CNN took INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT investigative journalism, and by seeding it with sensationalism, removed much of the power from the article.

It undermined them. It undermined the work of the investigative journalists. And most importantly, it undermined the victims.

not to be dramatic but i finally finished the mayonnaise essay,

found documentary proof of the spanish origins of mayonnaise,

and have faith in myself for the first time in months

Worth noting that Chipotle had a string of high-profile E. coli outbreaks from 2015-2017, and their pricing from around this time was part of a larger, aggressive campaign to preserve their customer base

It's hard to articulate the level of anger & rage I have about watching this happen. I first saw weev doxx people I love *TWENTY* years ago. I spoke to founders of multiple social networks about the risk of these people over 15 years ago. I wrote about it all a dozen+ years ago. They let it happen.

This article spends most of its word count focused on USPS not delivering care packages to supplement the lack of food and hygiene products and almost none on the fact that we have deployed thousands of troops for a Not War without the resources to provide for them.

The Art of War is very funny once you understand it for what it actually is, which is Warfare 101 For Dipshit Nobles

the intended audience is exactly people like Pete Hegseth

c'mon guys we've had "an army marches on its stomach" for hundreds of years, did you already fuck up the greatest logistics machine in the world so bad they can't keep sailors fed

Oh, I'm sure this won't end up being evil.

This logic suggests that men are incapable of controlling themselves and women must suffer the consequences. Women must decline professional networking and social relationships with men because they will be at fault if he rapes her.

This story is horrific. Worth noting that Target is not the only retailer using AI for theft prevention. It’s an entire industry. And if you’re looking for alternatives that are safer to shop at in this regard, you’re very likely out of luck. Small, non-corporate businesses probably your best bet.

And since everyone seems to be using this thread as an excuse to shame people who use self-checkout I am going to say yet again: you don’t know people’s lives, their needs, and why they make the choices they make. You’re not a saint and you make your own choices other people don’t approve of.

I can't believe I actually have to say this, but apparently I do: someone who is buying compromised Bluesky accounts from an account reseller marketplace is directly funding identity theft, fraud, and international crime. #BadActorBingo resurrection for an explainer of why:

something that’s really been wild to me, as someone raised in the ‘freedom of religion’ usa, is how my other nation, the U.K., quite literally has a state religion and is somehow a hundred times less religious functionally than the USA