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Here in the Netherlands, citizens regularly tear up sealed surfaces and plant flowers in an effort to combat overheating and flooding. The government not only accepts this practice, which is known as tegelwippen — it actually provides support.

Tegelwippen is about more than just planting pretty flowers. As the climate crisis increases heat, drought and heavy rainfall, urban, concrete-covered areas can’t easily adapt to the changes. Buildings and sealed surfaces heat up and contribute to further warming of the climate. Yet more and more ground is sealed over, preventing rainwater from seeping into the ground. New houses are built, along with parking lots, roads, shopping centers, airports and commercial buildings. According to the European Environment Agency, between 2000 and 2018, around 6,178 square miles were sealed in the European Union, more than twice the area of the London metropolitan region.

Though the annual increase has fallen slightly in recent years, around 270 square miles are still added every year — the equivalent of over 90,000 soccer pitches. In Asia, the growth rate is even higher. And in North America, the area covered by impervious surfaces nearly doubled between 1985 and 2020.

The more cities are paved over, the greater their need for cooling and areas where rainwater can seep away and be stored. This is why in the Netherlands, citizens are taking matters into their own hands.

Tegel means tile in English. Wippen means rocking or picking up. In the last five years, Tegelwippen has developed into a mass movement across the country. The aim is to unseal as many surfaces as possible, whether in private gardens, schoolyards, driveways, public squares or sidewalks, as in the Katendrechtse Lagendijk.

The 69th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest kicks off this week in Basel, Switzerland, and as always, it promises a heady mix of pomp, power ballads and geopolitics. While fans gear up for a week of camp performances and dramatic key changes, this year’s competition is also weighed down by controversy over Israel’s continued participation, with questions about who gets to perform—and why—looming larger than ever.

Israel has competed in Eurovision since 1973 and has won four times—most recently in 2018 with Netta’s viral hit “Toy”—and this is not the first time its participation has been contentious. Several Arab nations, including Tunisia and Lebanon, have historically chosen not to compete because of broadcast regulations against airing content affiliated with Israel. It has also been accused of using Eurovision as a form of pinkwashing—promoting an image of LGBTQ2S+ tolerance while drawing attention away from its human rights record. For example, Dana International became the contest’s first openly trans winner when she competed for Israel in 1998. In interviews, the singer has admitted that “there’s something to that” accusation that she has been used for pinkwashing Israel’s image.

In 2019, when Tel Aviv hosted the contest after Netta’s win, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement urged people to skip that year’s competition. While no broadcaster ended up withdrawing, protests punctuated the event. Madonna’s performance during the broadcast of the final included a dancer wearing a Palestinian flag and Iceland’s entrant Hatari held up a pro-Palestine banner during the televote—both in violation of the contest’s ban on political statements. Calls for Israel’s exclusion have intensified since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in 2023 and Israel’s ensuing invasion of Gaza, which have prompted accusations by organizations like Amnesty International that the country is responsible for a genocide against Palestinians. This year, Israel is represented by Yuval Raphael, a singer who survived the Oct. 7 attack. Her song, “New Day Will Rise,” is framed as a message of resilience, but amid ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank, some see it as a “provocation.” One Eurovision blogger wrote that the song “can’t be construed as anything but political.”

Israel’s continued participation represents a stark contrast to how the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the contest, handled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, Russia was expelled from Eurovision. Why, many ask, does Israel get to stay?

In the year in which the groundbreaking activist would have turned 100, a new book looks at the enduring impact of his words and how they resonate today

The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a new book about the great Black leader who was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, 100 years ago; who in the 1950s converted to Islam and dropped his “slave name”; who rose to fame as the militant voice of the civil rights era; and who was assassinated in New York in 1965, aged just 39.

The book is not a biography. As the author, Mark Whitaker, puts it, his book tells “the story of the story of Malcolm, the story that really made him the figure he is today, even more so than what he accomplished while he was living.

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I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.

This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better.

Supporters of Jack Mazurek gathered on Monday morning at the Fulton County Courthouse—where a hearing was scheduled to take place in Mazurek’s criminal case—to demand that prosecutors drop their political prosecution against Mazurek and all individuals facing charges for their opposition to Cop City.

Mazurek was arrested in February 2024 during an early morning raid conducted by Atlanta Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the FBI. He was then detained without bail in the notoriously deadly Fulton County jail for a month, before spending another month in Cobb County jail. Since then, he has been released pending trial on highly-restrictive 24-hour house arrest.

“People are gathering to support Jack because no one should face these charges alone“ said Charlie, a member of Jack’s support team. “The police have been surveilling and intimidating Stop Cop City activists for years, but no one can scare us away from showing up for each other.”

The prosecution of Mazurek on arson charges, without any meaningful evidence, is part of the state’s broader attempt to repress the movement against the militarized police compound known as Cop City, which has faced broad opposition from Atlanta residents for years.

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In the Opinion video above, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.

Over the past two decades, the housing market has emerged as a powerful means by which capitalism can exploit the working class. At our workplaces, capitalists profit from their ability to control our labor; and then we go home, where we are exploited by the landlords who profit from their control over housing. And if the answer to our oppression in the workplace is labor unions, the answer to our oppression in our homes is tenant unions.

From early 2022 to early 2024, I was involved with a tenant union campaign at a large apartment complex in north-west San Antonio, via the now-dormant Tenant Union San Antonio (TUSA). While the campaign failed in its overall goal – to organize the tenants of the complex into a self-sustaining, democratic, and militant union – the efforts nonetheless secured some improvements for tenants, and provided organizers with an important and fulfilling learning experience.

The past week has presented an upsetting montage of what happens when an authoritarian executive, motivated by naked racism and nativism, activates a highly militarized “unitary executive police force” across the country to storm into apartments and restaurants, throw kids onto the ground, and whisk people away with their kids still in the car.

Why would local police support ICE operations that appear violent and unjustified?

ICE and the immigrant criminalization system, to a large extent, do not operate the way most local criminal legal systems do. Warrants don’t require the same scrutiny to be actionable. The burden of proof is different. There is no real “statute of limitations” – you can be deported for something that happened decades ago or deported before you are convicted. People facing deportation and detention are not guaranteed defense attorneys. And, as we now have seen so clearly, ICE is not required to say who they have detained or why (although they are supposed to post who is being held in ICE detention). Thus, we have an immigrant criminalization system that is perfectly designed to disappear people in a horrific way, that leaves loved ones in confusion and dismay, that criminalizes people for movement.

Democrat John Ewing unseated Republican Mayor Jean Stothert in Tuesday's officially nonpartisan election to lead Omaha, a victory that ends the GOP's 12-year hold on Nebraska's largest city.

Stothert conceded the race after 9 PM local time with Ewing ahead 54-46, though more votes remained to be counted.

Ewing, who will be Omaha's first Black mayor, overcame a large fundraising disadvantage in his campaign to deny Stothert what would have been an unprecedented fourth term.

But Ewing, who serves as Douglas County treasurer, benefited from voters' unhappiness with the incumbent. The challenger argued Stothert had failed to solve the city's transportation problems and strengthen the police force during her long tenure.

Ewing also sought to tie the mayor to Donald Trump, whom Stothert has tried to avoid associating with during her time leading this Democratic-leaning city. Ewing additionally enjoyed the support of former state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a Democrat-turned-Republican who came in third during the first round of voting.

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

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In August, Warner Bros. announced it was taking a $9.1 billion charge, writing down the value of its traditional TV networks, which include, along with the Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network, the Food Network, TBS and TNT. Warner Bros. doesn't break out the individual financial performance of each channel, but Cartoon Network's struggles have certainly contributed to the downturn. According to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the annual advertising revenue for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, its spinoff animation brand for grown-ups, plummeted from $668.3 million in 2014 to $133.7 million last year. > The viability of the Cartoon Network brand in streaming doesn't look much more promising. A few years ago, network executives were touting Max as the next natural step in Cartoon Network's evolution. But since its debut five years ago, a string of programming misfires and increased competition from YouTube have meant that Max has largely failed to emerge as a go-to destination for young viewers. According to data from PreciseTV, a video advertising firm, only 13% of 10- to 12-year-old viewers have recently watched programming on Max, versus 32% for Hulu, 57% for Disney+ and 72% for Netflix. Among preschool audiences, the numbers for Max are even worse. The company recently decided that children's programming is no longer a core part of Max's strategy, further clouding Cartoon Network's prospects.

Cartoon Network’s struggles have been playing out at a time when animation at large has arguably never been more popular. From Dog Man and Inside Out 2 to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, animated features continue to rule the box office. Bluey—a cartoon series from Australia that Cartoon Network executives once unsuccessfully sought to license—has been a huge hit for Disney+. And animated shows such as Peppa Pig and CoComelon regularly attract big audiences of youngsters on Netflix. The global anime market is projected to grow from $34.2 billion in 2024 to $60.1 billion by 2030, according to research by Jefferies Financial Group Inc. Surely, many animation fans still hope, there is room for the Cartoon Network brand to flourish once again.

In the spring of 2020, when AT&T finally rolled out HBO Max (later rechristened Max), sign-ups were sluggish. “Pricing is high, the buzz is not there,” industry analyst Michael Nathanson said a few days after the app appeared, noting that his own children were totally indifferent to it. Somehow a company with three celebrated animation studios and one of the world’s largest collections of cartoons had failed to generate much interest from young viewers. “Nobody came to me yesterday and said, ‘We should get HBO Max now, Dad.’ ”

Zaslav, now dealing with his new company’s ballooning costs and vaporized cash flow, implemented a multibillion-dollar cost-cutting plan that touched every part of Warner Bros.’ business. It particularly irked creatives, including cartoonists who felt they were even more vulnerable to the scythe-swinging than their peers in live action. When cuts hit Turner Classic Movies, for example, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese jumped on a Zoom with Zaslav and ultimately won some concessions for the cherished classic-film channel. Who would ride to Cartoon Network’s rescue?

The animation industry’s stars weren’t famous actors or silver-tongued directors; they were fictional characters—by and large a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and bug-eyed misfits with nebulous executive function skills. Samurai Jack and Gumball couldn’t exactly roll up to the boss’ mansion and sweet-talk budget protections over cocktails and sign autographs for the nephews. Quite possibly, the cartoonists were screwed.

In 2023, Warner Bros. revealed that it would be shutting down Cartoon Network Studios’ home in Burbank and moving the remaining staffers into the “Iceberg,” the company’s glistening, Frank Gehry-designed offices a few miles away. What little remained of the network’s prized independence was over. Workers came in, painted over the treasured mural of graffiti on the stairwell walls and pried the Cartoon Network logo off the building’s facade. Van Partible, the creator of Johnny Bravo, went back for one final, dispiriting look around. “It was just really sad,” he says.

Last fall, Cartoon Network began airing Barney’s World, a sugary-sweet reformulation of PBS’s onetime live-action show, starring the soft purple dinosaur. In the decade and a half since the original series went off the air, the toymaker Mattel Inc. had snapped up the Barney IP and concocted a plan to revive it for the benefit of toddlers and shareholders. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that people at Cartoon Network would have once made fun of,” says Simensky, the former Cartoon Network executive.

If there remains a source of hope for Cartoon Network’s more disillusioned fans and alumni, it exists some 2,000 miles away in Atlanta, where the Adult Swim team still resides. On a Tuesday morning in February, Michael Ouweleen, president of Cartoon Network and head of Adult Swim, strolled through the hallways at the Williams Street studio. If you squinted, it almost felt like the heady days of Peak Cartoon. Ouweleen went past a gaggle of young art-school grads in training and a room with a guy animating a scene of a tree falling on a screaming character. He walked into a windowless room where, amid a smattering of tripods, cameras and papier-mâché, workers were preparing an elaborate April Fools’ stunt for the amusement of the network’s fans. (Several weeks later, on April 1, Adult Swim would broadcast a half-hour special of its hit show Rick and Morty reimagined as live-action theater sketches.)

Ouweleen, who helped to start Adult Swim more than two decades ago and has worked in almost every aspect of animation series creation, from programming to marketing, says its mission essentially remains the same: Find talented artists with a unique point of view and help them realize their vision. He points out that it still maintains a shorts program to act as a pipeline for new talent. Under the current iteration, artists can get between $6,000 and $8,000 to develop brief videos—roughly 50 of which are presented on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel every year.

Ouweleen isn’t worried about the future of animation at Warner Bros. and beyond. The entire history of cartoons, he points out, has been marked by almost nonstop technological disruption. “Animation is amazing at adapting to a different economic reality or a different consumption habit,” he says. Even so, Adult Swim will have to continue to grapple with the same downward viewership pressure that is affecting all of cable TV. According to Variety’s yearend analysis of Nielsen ratings data, in 2014 Adult Swim averaged 1.3 million total viewers in prime time. By last year that figure had dropped to 210,000.

Fortunately, Adult Swim’s shows tend to live easily these days alongside the kind of prestige HBO dramas, edgy comedies and indie A24 movies that have come to largely define Max’s core offerings. In February, Adult Swim began airing Common Side Effects, a comedy caper about an amateur scientist who discovers in the mountains of Peru magic mushrooms capable of healing just about every human ailment and is subsequently hunted down by a shadowy cabal of big pharma execs. The bloody, paranoid gonzo show seems perfectly engineered for the current “Make America Healthy Again” moment. It’s the output of an impressive creative pedigree that includes a former writer for Veep, the co-creator of Scavengers Reign and Mike Judge, from King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head.

Following its debut, Common Side Effects regularly appeared in the top 10 most popular series on Max, and among critics it has received the kind of effusive praise often reserved for auteur-driven serialized dramas. In March, Warner Bros. announced it was re-upping the show for a second season—a rare bit of good news amid the broader funk hanging over the industry.