All posts tagged: rewriting

Rewriting the Ceremony: A Conversation with Humanist Celebrant Katherine Hunter

Rewriting the Ceremony: A Conversation with Humanist Celebrant Katherine Hunter

Published by Sam Flores

Katherine Hunter does not just officiate weddings; she builds them. Working as a humanist celebrant, she creates ceremonies that reflect the values, identities, and relationships of the couples she works with, often outside the bounds of religious tradition. In a space historically shaped by faith, Hunter’s work offers something different: ceremonies grounded not in doctrine, but in human connection. In conversation with the American Humanist Association, Hunter spoke about how she found her way into this work, what it means to create meaningful secular ceremonies, and why humanism often resonates with couples, even when they don’t name it. How did you become a celebrant? I happened to be coming out of a period of not being employed, and celebrant work just neatly fit a skill set of mine. I’m comfortable with public speaking, I’m comfortable with writing, and I’m very curious about how people see the world and make sense of it. I’m also very drawn to emotional intelligence. Those things ended up being really strong assets. That’s kind of how I got my start. …

Expanding catalog of black hole collisions is rewriting the history of the universe

Expanding catalog of black hole collisions is rewriting the history of the universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Between May 2023 and January 2024, a global network of gravitational-wave detectors picked up 128 new cosmic signals, more than doubling the entire catalog built across the previous decade. The universe, it turns out, is not quiet. It is constantly shaking. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, an international partnership spanning observatories in the United States, Italy, and Japan, has published its fourth gravitational-wave catalog, GWTC-4.0, in a forthcoming special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. The collection represents the most comprehensive census yet of colliding black holes and neutron stars, and it is already pushing physics into territory no one has mapped before. “The beautiful science that we are able to do with this catalog is enabled by significant improvements in the sensitivity of the gravitational-wave detectors as well as more powerful analysis techniques,” said Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and a member of the collaboration. The timeline of observing runs covering a time span starting from 2015 and lasting up to the beginning of O4b on 2024 April 10. The periods in which …

How Donald Trump is rewriting US history

How Donald Trump is rewriting US history

Published by Sam Flores

Young punk musicians demonstrate outside the Kennedy Center, to which Donald Trump added his own name, in Washington, January 11, 2026. EMILY ALFF/SIPA On January 11, Donald Trump posted his official portrait on the Truth Social platform, with the caption: “Acting President of Venezuela.” The message appeared in the format of a Wikipedia entry. The fake page said he had been in office since January 2026, which the US president shared one week after the abduction of his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro, in blatant disregard for international law. Nine days later, just hours before leaving Washington for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where European leaders awaited him in shock, Trump posted another meme in the middle of the night, this time about Greenland. The photo showed him planting an American flag on the ice sheet, accompanied by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A sign in the image read, “Greenland. US territory. Est. 2026,” blatantly disregarding the sovereignty of an allied nation. Trump has turned provocation, and the chaos …

Anthems, agency and arias: baritone Davóne Tines on rewriting his role – and the rules | Classical music

Anthems, agency and arias: baritone Davóne Tines on rewriting his role – and the rules | Classical music

Published by Sam Flores

In performance, Davóne Tines is electrifying. In the first concert of the US bass-baritone’s 2025-26 residency at London’s Barbican Centre, he appeared at the back of the auditorium and then slowly descended towards the stage, spotlit and subtly miked. His unaccompanied voice fractured into stentorian booms, spat-out consonants and the violent crackle of mouth noises. This, unmistakably, was the musician whom the New Yorker announced back in 2021 was “changing what it means to be a classical singer”. Since then, Tines has been named Musical America’s vocalist of the year, he has won a 2024 Chanel next prize for “international contemporary artists who are redefining their disciplines”. And he was awarded the 2025 Harvard arts medal for distinguished alumni of the Ivy League university who have demonstrated achievement in the arts. Recent winners of the latter include architect Frank Gehry and novelist Margaret Atwood. Unlike those cultural figureheads, Tines is not yet 40. Davóne Tines may have the voice of an opera singer, but he talks like a philosopher. Other singers win major awards, of …

How Elon Musk is rewriting the rules on founder power

How Elon Musk is rewriting the rules on founder power

Published by skeptic

Elon Musk has merged SpaceX and xAI, creating what might be the blueprint for a new Silicon Valley power structure. With his $800 billion net worth already rivaling historic conglomerate GE’s peak market cap, and Musk being vocal about his view that “tech victory is decided by velocity of innovation,” the question isn’t whether a personal conglomerate can be built, but rather how far Musk himself is going to take it.  Watch as Equity dives into this new era of the “everything” business, whether we’ll see others like Sam Altman follow suit, and more of the week’s headlines.  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Source link

Trump 2.0’s Baby-Faced Comms Squad Is Rewriting the Rules of Government Communication

Trump 2.0’s Baby-Faced Comms Squad Is Rewriting the Rules of Government Communication

Published by Sam Flores

The comms cabal also has strong Christian roots. Micah Bock, Homeland Security’s deputy assistant secretary for strategic communications, graduated in 2020 from Patrick Henry College, an evangelical Christian school. That same year, Dietderich graduated from Hillsdale College, another Christian school. And both Nixon and Aubrie Spady, who serves as the deputy press secretary at the Department of Interior, graduated from Liberty University in the past few years. “My broad sense is that they are surprisingly religious,” says Bart Hutchins, the chef and co-owner of Butterworth’s—high-society MAGA’s own version of the Cheers bar where Kassam is also a partner—about the young staffers. “They make up a larger percentage of our early reservations than they do our late reservations.” Whatever their bedtimes, they’re fluent in two languages: internet vernacular and Trump’s own communication style. The two are largely simpatico. Gone are the days of sanitized, fact-checked, carefully worded statements from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and now the same goes for federal agencies. Their boss’s ruthless rants and edgy memes mirror (and inform) the comms crew’s own feeds. It …

MAGA Is Already Rewriting the ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

MAGA Is Already Rewriting the ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

Published by skeptic

Trump administration officials and MAGA world are attempting to rewrite the shooting in Minneapolis. The shooting took place on Wednesday morning when several masked agents—later identified by Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin as members of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency—approached a vehicle. Video footage shared on social media appears to show a masked agent ask the driver to get out of the vehicle before grabbing the door handle. At this point, the driver appears to reverse, before driving forward and turning. A third masked federal officer, standing near the front of the vehicle, pulls out a gun and fires at the vehicle, killing Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman. The masked officer who fired at the vehicle was identified by the Minnesota Star Tribune as ICE agent Jonathan Ross. McLaughlin did not immediately respond to an email asking if DHS could confirm the Star Tribune’s reporting. Almost immediately, federal government officials portrayed Good as the perpetrator. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called Good’s actions an act of “domestic terrorism,” adding that the …

JWST spots a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar — rewriting the rules of planet formation

JWST spots a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar — rewriting the rules of planet formation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Surprised astronomers just discovered a world that blurs the line between planet and stellar remnant, hiding in a system known as a “black widow.” Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington studied a Jupiter-mass companion circling a millisecond pulsar, PSR J2322–2650. What they found was a chemical outlier, with an atmosphere dominated by helium and molecular carbon chains that almost never survive in a typical planet’s air. “This was an absolute surprise,” said study co-author Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington. “I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s extremely different from what we expected.” The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, describe PSR J2322–2650b as a world with soot-like clouds and carbon chemistry so extreme that researchers think carbon could condense deep inside and form diamonds. The biggest puzzle is not what Webb saw. It is how this object formed at all. …