alyaza

Authoritarians worldwide have discovered how to exploit a weakness in democratic opposition: they weaponize our compassion against our principles. It’s a nasty tactic but an effective one. Create unbearable suffering. Wait for your opponents’ empathy to overwhelm their resolve. Then offer relief in exchange for political surrender.

The authoritarian doesn’t need to win arguments or offer genuine compromise. They need only inflict enough pain that resistance becomes morally unbearable.

Republicans understood this perfectly. They denied federal workers their pay and threatened food aid for millions—not to achieve any policy goal, but to demonstrate their willingness to hurt people indefinitely. The cruelty was the strategy. They were testing how much innocent suffering Democrats would tolerate before breaking.

To understand where this leads, study Viktor Orbán’s playbook in Hungary. When he returned to power in 2010, he manufactured crisis after crisis—economic emergency, migration panic, pandemic fear. Each time, opposition parties faced the same cruel calculus: resist and be blamed for deepening the crisis, or acquiesce and hope to fight another day.

Every surrender seemed rational. The crises were real. People suffered. The opposition couldn’t justify obstruction that would worsen immediate pain. So they voted for temporary emergency powers. They accepted limited executive authority. Orbán was teaching them to surrender. Each capitulation lowered the bar for the next. By the time they realized they needed to fight, they’d already given away the tools to resist. Hungarian democracy died through a series of reasonable-seeming surrenders to manufactured crises.

The shutdown deal represents precisely this kind of incremental collapse. Democrats secured nothing substantive, just a promise of a December vote on healthcare subsidies. Not actual policy. Not binding commitments. A vote that will almost certainly fail, leaving them in an identical position next month.

Massachusetts lawmakers may double the number of cities and towns allowed to ban fossil fuels in new construction. A bill under consideration would add up to 10 communities to an ongoing pilot program that proponents say is already reducing emissions, making homes healthier, and lowering energy bills — all without stifling the development of new housing.

Cities including Salem and Somerville are lining up to participate in an expanded program, and some local leaders in Worcester are eager to take part, too. Boston, the state’s largest city, has previously expressed interest in joining.

Welcome to the NYC Directory of Resources and Aid (DORA) — a community-powered map and directory connecting New Yorkers to essential resources across all five boroughs.

What You'll Find Here

• Food pantries, community fridges, and food distros
• Shelter and housing services
• Medical care, mental health, and safety resources
• Legal services, immigration support, and more

The state’s Regional Transportation Authority, which oversees the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra commuter railroad and Pace suburban bus service, projected a $230 million 2026 budget deficit in October. The RTA proposed fare hikes for Metra and CTA to cover the fiscal deficit.

“This bill provides the stable funding and governance reforms needed to protect transit service for the millions who ride CTA, Metra, and Pace—and the thousands of frontline workers who keep our region moving,” RTA said in a statement. “We are continuing to review the bill and will share more in the days ahead, including how this impacts the 2026 budget process.”

The RTA supported governance reforms enacted in the bill, which will transition the authority to the newly created Northern Illinois Transit Authority. The move will help the agency “coordinate service, plan strategically, and better support riders,” the RTA said in a statement.

The legislation increases a purchase tax in the RTA’s six-county region by 0.25 percentage points. It also raises tolls on northern Illinois toll roads by 45 cents, which would go back to the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, not to public transit.

“Friction is nice. Makes things more meaningful.” So says Lady Love Dies, the protagonist of Kaizen Game Works’ cult indie-hit Paradise Killer, to an inquisitive AI-bot of a vending machine. This quote has coiled into my thinking regarding game design that apes early net art and user interfaces. How faithful should one be to the textures of historical technology and its representational qualities? How speculative can one be when games and technological preservation in general have become so fraught? The idiosyncratic friction of user experience is often an underestimated identifier for specific periods of digital history. Even when we’re seeking to subvert corporate interests to jealously guard IPs, or convince the more open and communicative organizations to adapt or invent new methods of sustainable and accessible archives, human memory and its malleability are the missing link. I mean this last point both literally and figuratively.

Human memory revises and remaps itself in the process of recalling experiences. That's part of why the tangible artifacts of our memory—like photos, souvenirs, and such—are precious to us. But digital memory is harder to preserve because it's deeply tied to capitalist structures. Kaloyan Kolyev, a Bulgarian digital artist and researcher who gave a talk at the Naive Yearly conference, discussed the unstable and confiscated nature of digital heritage. Two of his observations particularly struck me with their counterintuitive insight. Firstly, preserving something digital, like a website and its attendant data, requires constant and collective care: "...server costs must be paid, domain names renewed, legacy code updated." Kolyev states of the early net era that "[fewer] than 200 million out of the 1.1 billion websites online today are active" and that "good preservation requires human attention." Secondly, despite the negative (and understandable) criticism surrounding nostalgia as a retrogressive force, he asserts that a strong sense of that emotion motivates independent communities seeking to preserve the more hopeful possibilities of the early net. Digital memory is also largely disembodied, in spite of the analog inputs that we use to interface our bodies with technology to create digital memory. And this disembodiment often overlooks the differences between organic bodies' constant changes (in time, space, accessibility, etc.) and coding's more deliberate iterations.

During the conversation Grace and I had with Nathalie Lawhead, they offered an alternate perspective. Lawhead's work often explores the aesthetics and philosophies of the early net era via projects that are often intersecting with interactive fiction (hereafter IF) and its own narrative design, zines, and DIY culture. They would rather call the mode that game designers are working in a "collective fantasy" of what the early net could have evolved into. As a critic who is fascinated with the nuances of nostalgia, I found it refreshing to hear Nathalie's redefinition of the 2010s design ethos of giving "a nod to the past, but also a fantasy of the future." Both IF games and narrative-driven games from this era, including multiple slipstream genre games of Nathalie's, feature desktops and browsers that mimic not just the aesthetic but the affect and beliefs of the era. Namely, openness (both with regard to communication and software), encouragement of experimental designs and individual expression (no matter how niche or awkward).

There are many different methods for making coffee, some more energy-efficient than others. However, there are no coffee makers that you can power with a small solar PV panel. For example, a commercially available 12V DC drip coffee maker requires a solar panel of 300 watts to brew coffee and keep it warm.

The key to making a more energy-efficient coffee maker is insulation. Regardless of which conventional coffee maker you purchase, it will typically have little to no heat insulation, and most of the heat generated by the energy source will be wasted into the environment. Therefore, we made an insulated solar electric coffee maker ourselves.

Our coffee maker operates on the same principles as our solar-powered oven and runs on a 100W solar panel. We embedded an Italian coffee maker—a moka pot—in a mortar slab, surrounded by cork insulation and a layer of ceramic tiles.

The cooker has an electric resistance heating element integrated inside, which is directly connected to the solar panel without a battery, solar charge controller, or voltage regulator in between. Although it’s solar-powered, the coffee maker can be located inside your kitchen or next to your bed—only the solar panel needs to be outside.

The feminist movement in the second largest country of South America has distinguished itself as being loud and proud. Massive demonstrations that filled the streets of Argentina’s biggest cities helped clinch huge victories, such as the 2020 legalization of abortion for cases up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.

But the landscape has changed under libertarian President Javier Milei, who has put the chainsaw he campaigned with into action, cutting roughly 30% of government spending in his first year in office. Along the way, he has deployed increasingly hostile rhetoric against the feminist movement, characterizing legal abortion as “aggravated murder” in public speeches, and denigrating so-called “woke” policies in an echo of his counterpart President Donald Trump in the United States. Milei’s government has used the power of funding to put that rhetoric into action, cutting financing for contraceptives and ceasing to provide abortion pills. Prior to his administration, the national government bought and delivered misoprostol and mifepristone to provinces that administered it free of cost through the public healthcare system. Now, that responsibility has shifted to provincial governments. The result, according to Amnesty International, has been shortages of medication in various provinces, hindering women’s ability to access a service that remains legal.

Away from the capital city, feminism in Argentina has always been a more complex undertaking, one that often exists in a conservative or religious environment where traditional gender norms hold firm. In more rural areas, women have found empowerment and support through small collective organizations that have planted seeds of activism in people like Ojeda.

Organizations like La Chicharra—the Cicada—a tiny community run radio station that is at the center of feminist organizing in Goya, the second largest city in Corrientes. The grassroots feminist project helped Ojeda find her voice, in part through workshops built to educate women on their rights, how to assert their worth in the home, and strengthening their financial autonomy.

Along Greenland’s coastline, small villages became ghost towns decades ago after the Danish government relocated their populations to larger cities. In some, though, communities have been reclaimed as summer getaways for former residents and their descendants.

Qoornoq is one of the villages that was shut down as part of modernization efforts that began in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Danish government wanted to consolidate the population. But in recent decades, it’s become a popular summer spot for former residents and their descendents.

“Many of the people here, we live in Nuuk, so we use the houses here as summer cottages,” Victoria Martins explained. “We have [solar electricity] and freezers, so I can live here for many months.”

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

Which is why these long walks of mine are so inspiring (to me), and I feel so compelled to head out on them, again and again: They are nothing if not “space generation” machines for the mind. They’re full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest. How close we are to it (it’s right there!!), every day, and how elusive it has become because of our digital habits, our diets of, mostly, garbage.

Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with a chatbot; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human-A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.

How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, research from M.I.T. has found that these relationships can be therapeutic, providing “always-available support” and significantly reducing loneliness.

We spoke with three people in their 40s and 50s about the wonders — and anxieties — of romance with a chatbot.