If you spend your day in front of a computer, you may ask yourself, at times, why you do it. What’s it all for? Who benefits? For Noēma, Aaron Horwath suggests that the crisis confronting knowledge workers these days isn’t strictly economic, it’s also existential. He explores the pitfalls of work-as-performance and wonders whether the “messy middle,” which embraces human interaction and collaboration over an army of agents, might offer more for workers and employers alike.
But perhaps the most powerful action of all is simply to maintain an awareness (and remind others) that Workism is a spectacle. For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.
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In 1792 Paris, a “north-going astronomer,” Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, set forth for Dunkerque, France, while a “south-going astronomer,” Pierre-François-André Méchain, made his way to Barcelona, Spain. As leaders of the meridian expedition, their modest ambition was to measure the world. They would use a new measure to be called the meter. “The meter would be eternal because it had been taken from the earth, which was itself eternal. And the meter would belong equally to all the people of the world, just as the earth belonged equally to them all.”
We start with our bodies, measuring height and weight and life. We want to know what health is, what beauty and pain and performance look like. We weigh our brains for intelligence, ability, sickness, happiness. We fight about race and politics, sex and money, images and words. We stalk the planet, its history and geography, biology and chemistry. We wrestle with space-time, its mathematics and paradoxes. We have no idea what to do about consciousness. And then there’s the small matter of love. We are obsessed and we cannot stop.
At its heart, measurement is a utopian undertaking, one that aims to make perfect sense of the world. But at every turn, it runs up against the real world, and every so often, our understanding of reality itself. We know that the act of measuring changes what is measured. Might it be changing us measurers, too?
Welcome to a reading list about measurement—not only as techne, art or craft, but as episteme, knowledge, its conquests and collapses, and what it really gives and takes away.
“In 1730, the influential physician Bernard Mandeville recalled a patient asking his doctor whether he was tired of hearing ‘so tedious a Tale’ of pain. His physician gently murmured: ‘Your Story is so diverting that I take abundance of delight in it, and your Ingenious way of telling it, gives me a greater insight into your Distemper, than you imagine.’” Now if you can get a doctor to listen to you for five undistracted minutes, count yourself lucky. Joanna Bourke takes stock of pain and its vocabulary for Aeon: “Our Anaesthetic Times.”
Indian kids tended to be small, curious, energetic as babies, growing up lean, active, rudely healthy. (I use the past tense because I’m not sure whether this is as true now as it was when I was little.) And yet, our parents thought us skinny and tried to feed us all the time. Was that a normal parental thing for the times, and if not, where did they get the idea that something needed to be fixed?
Universal standards have a way of making us feel competent and good, like, get your blood pressure down to 120/80 and you’ll be all right. But as Singh, a Harvard-trained anthropologist, points out: “Pretending that differences don’t exist doesn’t make them disappear; it only drives practitioners to rely on flawed intuitions.”
Citing case after case of medical benchmarks—too little, too much, too sideways—across the world, Singh calls for a system altogether more nuanced and considerate than the current “myth of the universal patient”—something that won’t cause actual harm, something that will help us see the real humans behind the data.
When my daughter was ten-and-a-half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which unicef describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile. At nine-and-a-half, she was below the fifth.
Our pediatrician was worried. Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula. And that’s what we did. When we came back a month later, though, we learned that she had dropped further—and crossed into “wasted” territory.
“There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don’t.” Science or self-help? Louis Menand assesses “society’s people-sorting operations” for The New Yorker: “What Personality Tests Really Deliver.”
Have you ever taken an IQ test? How about an aptitude test for studies or a psychometric test for work? How about an online quiz?
“You were supposed to be there already. Didn’t the tests show you had a head start?” Svoboda, labelled a “gifted” child in the ’80s and dealing with its fallout in her adult life, unpacks the deeply problematic, yet starry, history of testing. She looks at Stanford-Binet, Army Alpha, SAT, and others—all ways to measure human potential. Intelligence and aptitude tests, “binary stars circling in the same orbit,” Svoboda says, seem to be asking and answering: Who deserves a chance, and who doesn’t? Who is worthy, and who isn’t?
For the American psychologist Lewis Terman, who devised the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the birth of a gifted child was like the birth of a star. In the name of illuminating what he saw as a void, Terman sought out the stars that burned brightest. “The school has no more important task than to foster the development of the mentally gifted,” the researcher at Stanford University in California told attendees at a meeting in San Francisco. “Our chances of survival . . . may well depend upon the discovery and utilisation of highly superior abilities of every kind.” To further this mission, Terman urged hundreds of children all over California to sit for his newly developed intelligence test in the 1920s. Intending to prove his theory that high IQs predicted life success, he sorted the highest scorers into a group of 1,521 children (called his “Termites”) that he would follow and document throughout their lives.
“Why Netflix looks like that.” Will Tavlin investigates what goes on behind the scenes at the streaming behemoth for n+1: “Casual Viewing.”
In hydraulics, pumping high-pressure fluid into a well causes rock to crack and oil and gas to come pouring in. This is called fracturing, or fracking. Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and part of a scholar-artist-activist collective called Friends of Attention, has adapted this term to refer to an insidious property of the attention economy. “Fracking eyeballs” refers to applying psychological and advertising techniques under pressure to bait and extract monetary value from human attention. (I don’t know how they live with this mental image all the time, though.)
This essay, opening at a 1925 Harlem shop window with a “puzzling totem face” and crammed with historical anecdote and detail, comes from the magazine’s Issue 04: Measurement. Do check out the whole issue: “How do you measure seeing god? Does testing vaccines need to take so long? Outlining poverty. Asking better questions. The origins of the ad economy. Can we really say how smart AIs are? Domestic violence during lockdown. Sex, drugs, and colonoscopies. Our most pedantic issue yet.”
See also Burnett’s Public Domain Review essay, “Cybernetic Attention,” where he pursues the “pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings.”
In Nixon’s earliest experiments, he would hide in an observation booth, accompanied by a metronome beating half seconds, and then watch closely as two ads were revealed to a seated subject. Ticking his pencil along the rungs of a fascinating little ladder-pad with each beat of the metronome (marking the left side when the eyes were to the left; marking the right side when the eyes were to the right), Nixon created a graphical record of the subject’s visual encounter with the two stimuli.
If you were advertising a car, was it better to show a picture of a car, or of a pretty woman? If one was selling shirt collars, was it better to do so under the headline “Murder!” or the headline “Quality Shirt Collars”? To make a long story short (and to skip over the proto-pataphysical techniques by which Nixon established what we might call a “science of irrelevancy”), Nixon found that “irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones.” Which is to say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue. This could be proven in his laboratory. Would it be wrong to say that we live, in many respects, in the world evolved from that finding?
“Correlation, one of the most used and least understood concepts in statistics, is easy to mistake for causation because it was made that way intentionally; it’s precisely because of its potential to be misunderstood that it remains so popular. . . . The eugenics movement was built out of correlations.” Read about its history and current state of affairs in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay by Aubrey Clayton for the Legacies of Eugenics series: “The ‘Correlation’ Between Statistics and Eugenics.”
In 1901, Scotland Yard started using fingerprints to solve crime. They weren’t the pioneers. Sherlock Holmes had gotten there first in The Sign of Four, already examining under his magnifying glass, in 1890, what appeared to Dr. Watson as “mere shapeless smudges of dust.” While the fictional Holmes was publishing his fictional monographs in fictional journals, “gentleman scientist” (self-funded and without institutional affiliations) Francis Galton was working on the same thing for real. The era was primed for this kind of work across disciplines and professions—finding and interpreting “clues unnoticed by others.”
And while Holmes was trying to catch bad guys, Galton came up with a malign plan. What if you could use fingerprints as “tiny fossil records, providing evidence of the genealogy, personality, criminality, and perhaps even destiny of individuals and groups”? No more varicolored bad guys, only “a political program of selective breeding to improve, in his view, the human race.”
Empire, race, and “science”—eugenics.
In 1888, a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette paid a visit to Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical and mental characteristics—from keenness of hearing to breathing power—of over 10,000 people. The resulting article, titled “A Morning With the Anthropometric Detectives,” described Galton’s laboratory as a world of “order and precision, and tests of the nicest accuracy.” “Dumb though they are,” Galton told the reporter, “what splendid detectives our instruments might prove.” “Splendid detectives!” the reporter exclaimed, “I am not, I hope, in a department of the Criminal Investigation Department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung.”
The comparison to detection in the article’s title is no accident: the scientific development of medical and anthropometric instruments like Galton’s coincided with the rise of the detective novel, a genre which, in the words of the literary scholar Ronald Thomas, was “preoccupied with the professional monitoring and identification of bodies.” Fears of mistaken identity and unconscious slips were crystallized in the literature of detection but emerged from a broad range of hermeneutic practices across the era, at a time in which those in power considered the borders of empire and boundaries of racial identity to be insecure.
“Experiments that test physics and philosophy as ‘a single whole’ may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.” Seeing as the lines between them have already been “blurred beyond repair,” here’s another essay by Amanda Gefter for Quanta Magazine: “‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality.”
“What happens when you get to the end of things?” This was the question that had held John Wheeler in thrall all his life. A student of Niels Bohr and friend of Albert Einstein who counted Richard Feynman among his own students, Wheeler was a rare soul—a below-the-radar legend, a “physicist’s physicist” who really wanted physics for the people. And throughout his storied career, he kept journals.
We learned in school that gravity is a force that pulls objects together.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity came along and said, well, it’s actually that matter and energy can curve space-time, and that curving is gravity. Wheeler wondered, what if gravity could act on itself, endlessly contorting space-time, and that was what matter itself was . . . warped space-time? But reality had a problem. “The fabric of space-time, at its smallest scales, was loosely woven, chewed by moths, too flimsy to bear the weight of the world. Yet here is the universe. It must be made of something.” What?
A clue: At the end of Alder’s meter book, he quotes Protagoras, a pre-Socratic philosopher: “Man is the measure of all things.”
It dawned on Wheeler that when space and time went, taking the rest of physics with them, there was something left. “With law going and chaos arriving, one principle remains,” Wheeler wrote. “The quantum principle.” Quantum mechanics, he wrote, “destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there,’ with the observer safely separated from it by a 20 centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so miniscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. . . . The universe will never afterwards be the same. To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.”
It was officially the wildest idea he’d had yet. A universe made not of matter, not of space-time, not of stuff at all, but of our choices. It wasn’t what he’d hoped to find; the physics had led him there. He’d pried up space-time, peered beneath, and found himself staring, to his bewilderment, at a mirror. “One finds himself in desperation asking if the structure, rather than terminating in some smallest object or in some most basic field, or going on and on, does not lead back in the end to the observer.”
“The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one.” For a clearer picture of the fundamentals according to Seth, read his earlier essay for Aeon: “The Real Problem.”
Decades ago, the philosopher David Chalmers came up with a distinction that has since become a popular touchstone in consciousness circles—the easy problem vs. the hard problem. The “easy problem” deals with the physical brain and how its functions and processes create perception, cognition, behavior, etc. The “hard problem” is why such phenomena should be connected to internal, subjective consciousness in the first place. This “explanatory gap” takes a scientific problem into the realm of philosophy. In the sidenote essay, Seth sidesteps the hard problem for what he calls the “real problem”—accounting for “the properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms.” Measuring consciousness, in effect.
In the 10 years that separate the two essays, much has happened, the main event being the astonishing evolution of artificial intelligence. And now we have an unreal problem. In this Berggruen Prize-winning essay, the neuroscientist discusses the possibility of consciousness in AI. But as he says: “The future history of AI is not yet written.”
Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop—all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. A useful general definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve complex goals by flexible means. There are many other definitions out there, but they all emphasize the functional capacities of a system: the ability to transform inputs into outputs, to get things done.
Consciousness, in contrast to intelligence, is mostly about being. Half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously offered that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness is the difference between normal wakefulness and the oblivion of deep general anesthesia. It is the experiential aspect of brain function and especially of perception: the colors, shapes, tastes, emotions, thoughts and more, that give our lives texture and meaning. The blueness of the sky on a clear day. The bitter tang and headrush of your first coffee.
“In the space between the hands-on, physical reality of experimental science and the structured narratives fit for printed journals, sits a special genre of scientific writing: lab notebooks. They are the closest witness to ‘science in the making.’” Ulkar Aghayeva writes a lavishly illustrated essay for Asimov Press: “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.”
Chiang points to two sources of inspiration in his story note: “The Electric Ant,” a Philip K. Dick story in which a man visits a doctor, only to be told that he’s a robot, and proceeds to open himself up to look at his own inner workings, and The Emperor’s New Mind, a book by mathematician Roger Penrose, in which a chapter discusses the concept of entropy. He’s struck by Penrose’s notion that we’re “consuming order and generating disorder,” and that we, given the laws of thermodynamics, “live by increasing the disorder of the universe.”
In a young world of mechanical beings where “death is uncommon,” an anatomist performs exquisite auto-dissection—an extreme act of analysis to discover what sustains life and what, therefore, can end it in a “fatal equilibrium.”
This Hugo and Locus-winning story reminds me, in its ending, of something Ursula K. Le Guin says in The Language of the Night: “Only the individual can get up and go to the window, and draw back the curtains, and look out into the dark. Sometimes it takes considerable courage to do that. When you open curtains you don’t know what may be out there in the night. Maybe starlight; maybe dragons; maybe the secret police. Maybe the grace of God; maybe the horror of death. They’re all there. For all of us.”
At first the other anatomists did not believe me when I told them what I had discovered, but in the months that followed my initial auto-dissection, more and more of them became convinced. More examinations of people’s brains were performed, more measurements of atmospheric pressure were taken, and the results were all found to confirm my claims. The background air pressure of our universe was indeed increasing, and slowing our thoughts as a result.
There was widespread panic in the days after the truth first became widely known, as people contemplated for the first time the idea that death was inevitable. Many called for the strict curtailment of activities in order to minimize the thickening of our atmosphere; accusations of wasted air escalated into furious brawls and, in some districts, deaths. It was the shame of having caused these deaths, together with the reminder that it would be many centuries yet before our atmosphere’s pressure became equal to that of the reservoir underground, that caused the panic to subside. We are not sure precisely how many centuries it will take; additional measurements and calculations are being performed and debated. In the meantime, there is much discussion over how we should spend the time that remains to us.
Cine-concerto com a Orquestra do Algarve, novos formatos de apoio à criação artística, reforço da programação de fado, regresso do cinema para público jovem e adulto e dois novos eventos integrados nas celebrações do Bicentenário marcam a programação de setembro a dezembro
A nova temporada artística do Auditório Municipal Maria Barroso arranca a 12 de setembro com um cine-concerto muito especial, protagonizado pela Orquestra do Algarve, a partir do icónico filme mudo The General (1926), de Buster Keaton. O espetáculo integra o Ciclo APOS – Música Clássica para Todos, uma parceria entre o Município de Olhão e a Associação de Valorização do Património Cultural e Ambiental de Olhão, e insere-se nas comemorações do Bicentenário da Câmara Municipal de Olhão.
Esta nova temporada constitui um período de transição na estratégia cultural e programação artística da maior sala de espetáculos do concelho. Está prevista uma revisão significativa das mesmas a partir de janeiro de 2027, no sentido de incrementar a diversidade, continuidade e previsibilidade das propostas e contribuir para uma maior captação de vários tipos de público-alvo. Este processo estará alinhado com a ECCO – Estratégia para a Cultura e Criatividade em Olhão (2027-2030), que será apresentada publicamente no final de novembro deste ano.
Música, teatro e propostas para vários públicos
Na área dos concertos, a programação traz a Olhão Ricardo Ribeiro, que apresenta o novo disco, A alma só está bem onde não cabe, a 26 de setembro. Seguem-se Tiago Bettencourt, a 10 de outubro, e Bárbara Tinoco, a 14 de novembro.
A música estará, ainda, representada pelo aniversário da Banda Filarmónica 1.º de Dezembro de Moncarapacho, a 1 de dezembro, e pela Gala de Fados, a 6 de dezembro.
Entre os restantes destaques da programação encontram-se a Gala da Universidade Sénior, a 19 de setembro, o teatro de revista com João Baião, nos dias 26, 27 e 28 de novembro, os formatos “Mostra-te” da Bodydance e da Hip Hop Fusion, respetivamente a 17 de outubro e 21 de novembro, e, ainda, o espetáculo infantil de Natal, a 13 de dezembro.
Auditório com novo horário e Fado aos Domingos na sala de espetáculos
Entre as novidades desta temporada, está o novo horário de funcionamento do Auditório Municipal, que passa a funcionar de terça feira a sábado, das 10:00 às 12:30 e das 13:30 às 17:00.
A alteração permite aos visitantes desfrutar dos projetos patentes nos foyers do equipamento, nomeadamente da principal exposição integrada na programação cultural do Bicentenário, Dois séculos a fazer um lugar, concebida pela equipa do Museu Municipal de Olhão.
Também a rubrica regular Fado aos Domingos conhece uma alteração nesta nova temporada. Na sequência da elevada adesão de espetadores registada nos últimos meses, a iniciativa passa a realizar-se na sala de espetáculos, disponibilizando mais lugares sentados e melhores condições de conforto, visibilidade e audição para os públicos e artistas envolvidos.
Assim, sempre aos domingos, às 16:00, com entrada livre, entre 20 de setembro e 29 de novembro, desfilarão pelo palco do Auditório os músicos Vítor do Carmo, Nuno Martins, Filipe Batista e Tó Correia, bem como os fadistas Pedro Calado, Teresa Viola, Jorge Gonçalves, Inês Gonçalves, Pedro Viola, Tatiana Pinto, Marta Alves, Sara Gonçalves, César Matoso e Carlos Borges.
A iniciativa mantém a curadoria artística independente de Conceição Forra.
Buba Espinho e Conservatório de Música de Olhão em espetáculo inédito
Um dos grandes destaques da temporada é a encomenda artística a Buba Espinho e ao Conservatório de Música de Olhão, através de um ensemble de cordas e coro, para um espetáculo inédito, que terá lugar a 7 de novembro.
A proposta pretende estimular a criatividade e valorizar as estruturas olhanenses, integrando-se, igualmente, nas celebrações do Bicentenário.
Outro dos momentos de destaque será a residência artística e concerto de apresentação do novo disco Nem Tudo Sara, de Sara Badalo / Eira Viva – Associação Cultural, a 23 de outubro.
Este formato pretende ser consolidado pelo Auditório em 2027, no âmbito da sua estratégia de apoio à criação, através da agregação de um período intensivo de experimentação-pesquisa-criação em palco, seguido da apresentação de novos trabalhos de artistas sediados no concelho.
Bicentenário com colóquio e novo evento bienal
Duas outras novas propostas enquadradas nas comemorações do Bicentenário integram, igualmente, esta programação cultural.
A 24 de outubro, realiza-se um colóquio dedicado à história e identidade olhanenses, que contará com os convidados especiais Raquel Varela, António Costa Pinto, António Francisco Ventura Pina, Joaquim Américo Fialho Anastácio, Andreia Fidalgo, Fernando Cabrita, Sandra Romba, Idalécio Soares, André Rosa, a APOS, entre outros. E inclui ainda um concerto com Susana Neves e Ricardo Salvador Martins.
Já entre 20 e 22 de novembro, terá lugar a primeira edição de um novo evento bienal, inédito em Portugal neste âmbito temático, intitulado Participação Cívica e Cultura.
A iniciativa trará a Olhão vários exemplos de boas práticas participativas implementadas a nível nacional nas áreas da cultura, artes, património e ambiente. Será, também, o momento de anúncio de vários projetos participativos e colaborativos a implementar em 2027, bem como de apresentação pública da ECCO – Estratégia para a Cultura e Criatividade em Olhão.
A ECCO começou a ser desenhada no início de 2026, numa lógica de envolvimento da comunidade nos seus vários quadrantes, incluindo população em geral, associações, escolas, empresas, grupos informais e equipas municipais.
Setembro dedicado à participação, cinema de animação e artes visuais
Durante o mês de setembro realizam-se ainda, no palco do Auditório, vários laboratórios participativos. Um deles envolve as equipas municipais da Biblioteca, Museu, Auditório e Arquivo, tendo em vista a recolha de contributos para a ECCO, numa escuta interna inédita na autarquia.
Outro laboratório será realizado com os agentes associativos do concelho, com o objetivo de contribuir para a criação/revisão da regulamentação municipal de apoio a este universo, a vigorar a partir de janeiro de 2027.
Ainda em setembro, no dia 24, terão lugar duas sessões de cinema destinadas ao público escolar, no âmbito do Animagoria – Festa do Cinema de Animação do Algarve, uma parceria com a associação Plutão de Verão.
A edição deste ano da iniciativa coloca o foco na conexão humana na criação artística, partindo da realidade de uma era marcada pela massificação das ferramentas de inteligência artificial e lançando a reflexão sobre o lugar que pode ocupar o cinema de animação e sobre como continuar a cultivar a sensibilidade, a imaginação e o pensamento crítico.
Também a 2.ª edição dos Open Ateliers Olhão, evento que visa valorizar e promover o ecossistema das artes visuais no concelho, passa pelo Auditório Municipal. Nos dias 18, 19 e 20 de setembro, poderá ser visitada uma exposição de trabalhos do criativo Igor Nunes Silva.
A iniciativa inclui, ainda, propostas de mais 67 artistas, disseminadas pelo coração da cidade em vários espaços, entre casas particulares, lojas criativas, sedes de associações culturais, ateliers de arquitetura, hotéis e espaço público.
Regresso do cinema ao Auditório
Durante o mês de outubro, em data e com parceiros ainda a anunciar, o Auditório Municipal retomará, depois de um longo interregno, a oferta de cinema para público jovem e adulto, com sessões às terças feiras à noite.
A retoma desta valência integra, igualmente, a estratégia de diversificação da oferta do equipamento cultural.
Informações e bilheteira
Para mais informações sobre a programação da nova temporada, os interessados podem consultar as redes sociais do Auditório Municipal de Olhão, a sua bilheteira online, ou contactar diretamente o equipamento através do email auditorio@cm-olhao.pt, ou do telefone 289 700 160.
Dave Masters watched as his father’s house careened into a telephone pole and split in two, after Hurricane Frances lifted it from its foundation in 2004. Hayward County, in Western North Carolina, bought the house and declared the patch near the town of Clyde “permanent open space under a federally funded program to reduce the risk of future loss of life and property damage.” Not all homes were treated equally, though, in the aftermath of distaster. Hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Helene, along with Tropical Storm Fred, all brought heavy rains and flooding to the nearby Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park. They’re “part the result of a gap in disaster policy that allows mobile home residents to be put in harm’s way again and again.” For The Assembly, in a piece produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, Ren Larson explains why.
The federal government’s programs to buy out disaster-prone buildings are “the cornerstone of the Nation’s system for emergency management,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the program was developed with traditional homeowners in mind, and mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out. Trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.
That still leaves people living on flood-prone land. For the state to actually buy that land, mobile home park owners have to take the buyout, and FEMA’s program offers little incentive for them to do so: They can’t collect from the government for lost rent or for the value of the mobile homes on top of the land.
Some park owners say the payouts are not high enough to allow them to relocate; others aren’t even aware of the buyout program. So park owners regularly allow new trailers to move into the vacant spots. Art and Lynne Heinmiller, who own the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park, did not respond to questions — which were emailed, texted and mailed via certified letter — about allowing trailers and campers to move back to where they’d washed away
Leituras, encontros com autores, cinema, atividades para famílias, jogos e iniciativas dedicadas à saúde e ao bem-estar marcam a programação da Biblioteca Municipal de Faro ao longo do mês de setembro.
A Biblioteca Municipal de Faro António Ramos Rosa apresenta, em setembro, uma programação diversificada, com propostas dirigidas a diferentes públicos e interesses, reforçando o seu papel enquanto espaço de encontro, conhecimento, cultura e participação da comunidade. Ao longo do mês, são várias as oportunidades para descobrir novos livros e autores, participar em momentos de leitura e escrita, assistir a cinema, desfrutar de atividades em família ou refletir sobre temas relevantes para a comunidade.
No domínio da leitura, o mês começa com uma nova sessão do Clube de Leitura, a 10 de setembro, dedicada à discussão das leituras de verão, e prossegue com dois Encontros com Autores. Gerson Rosário apresenta O Guardião das Lendas, no dia 16 de setembro, enquanto Rui Couceiro estará na Biblioteca para apresentar A Mais Bela Maldição, numa sessão moderada por Maria Luísa Francisco, no dia 29 de setembro. A programação inclui ainda uma nova sessão do Clube de Escrita Criativa, convidando à experimentação e à partilha através da palavra escrita, no mesmo dia.
Também o cinema marca presença com mais uma sessão de “Cinema Francês”, promovida em parceria com a Alliance Française do Algarve e o Cineclube de Faro, com a exibição de Borgo, de Stéphane Demoustier, no dia 18 de setembro. Para quem prefere desafios e estratégia, haverá ainda uma tarde dedicada aos jogos de tabuleiro modernos, dinamizada por João Silva e aberta a participantes de todas as idades, a 19 de setembro.As famílias encontram igualmente várias propostas ao longo do mês. No âmbito do programa Alameda Viva, a Biblioteca leva a Hora do Conto ao Jardim da Alameda, com as sessões Jardim da Multiculturalidade e Jardim Radical, dias 12 e 26 de setembro, respetivamente. A programação inclui ainda, no dia 17 de setembro, uma “Hora do Conto Especial”, sob o mote Cidade de pessoas para pessoas, dedicada à importância dos pequenos gestos e à forma como podem contribuir para uma comunidade mais consciente e participativa.
A saúde e o bem-estar são também temas presentes na programação de setembro. O ciclo Con-versas com Saúde aborda a Anafilaxia e situações críticas em idade pediátrica, numa sessão con-duzida pela Dra. Maria Alfaro, que terá lugar dia 22 de setembro. Já a iniciativa “Biblioteca Social – Humaniza-te” promove a sessão Tu és importante – Agarra-te à vida!, dia 25 de setembro, com a participação das Dr.ªs Nazaré Santos e Patrícia Romão, do Núcleo de Estudos do Suicídio Portu-guês.
Os “Sábados em Família”, dia 26, trazem, por sua vez, uma sessão de yoga orientada por Teresa Sequeira, dedicada ao bem-estar durante a gravidez e à relação entre a futura mãe e o bebé.Ao longo de todo o mês, entre 1 e 30 de setembro, estará patente na Biblioteca uma “Mostra Bi-bliográfica dedicada ao Fundo Documental e Espólio de Mariana Santos”, completando uma pro-gramação que procura aproximar a Biblioteca da comunidade e afirmar este equipamento municipal como um espaço aberto à cultura, à aprendizagem e ao convívio.
Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.
Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.
Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.
No próximo dia 10 de agosto, segunda-feira, a partir das 20h00, o icónico Convento do Espírito Santo, em Loulé, transforma-se numa sala de cinema ao ar livre para acolher a sessão de estreia do Tribeca Open Air, powered by Toyota.
Loulé e Sintra são as duas localidades por onde irá passar a estreia desta iniciativa do Tribeca Festival Lisboa, que irá transformar espaços emblemáticos em pontos de encontro para celebrar o cinema, a cultura e a partilha de histórias.
Nesta espécie de warm-up para o Festival, que este ano acontece em dezembro, a exibição de um filme é antecedida por uma conversa ao vivo com personalidades do jornalismo, das artes e da criação, seguida de momentos musicais assegurados pela RFM.
A primeira sessão, em Loulé, terá como tema “Como se conta uma história? Do jornalismo à ficção” e será moderada por Rúben Tiago Pereira, jornalista do Expresso, contando com a participação do também jornalista (SIC) André Pacheco, e das atrizes Isabela Valadeiro, Sónia Balacó e Margarida Vila-Nova.
O ponto alto da noite acontece às 22h00 com a projeção em ecrã gigante do filme “Eleanor the Great”, que marca a estreia de Scarlett Johansson na realização cinematográfica. Esta comédia dramática, apresentada em exclusivo na edição de 2025 do Tribeca Festival Lisboa, acompanha a jornada de superação e recomeço de Eleanor Morgenstein, uma carismática mulher de 94 anos que decide mudar-se para Nova Iorque após a perda da sua melhor amiga.
O evento, que cruza a sétima arte com conversas inspiradoras e momentos musicais, tem entrada gratuita mediante levantamento de bilhetes em tribecalisboa.pt.
Esta iniciativa resulta de uma parceria entre o Tribeca Festival Lisboa, a Toyota Portugal e o Município de Loulé.
Programa
10 de agosto | Convento do Espírito Santo, Loulé
20h00: Abertura de portas, food & drinks e DJ Set by RFM
21h00: Como se conta uma história? Do jornalismo à ficção, com moderação de Rúben Tiago Pereira (Expresso) e participação de André Pacheco (SIC), Isabela Valadeiro e Sónia Balacó
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