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Reimagining The Twilight Zone for the 21st Century

Sophie Gilbert The Atlantic
With a theatrical adaptation opening in London, and a planned CBS revival helmed by Jordan Peele, what can the Rod Serling anthology series say about modern life?

The West in Flames in 2017, a Constant Reminder of Climate Change

Natasha Geiling ThinkProgress
Disastrous wildfires have engulfed the Western US
One of the biggest climate stories of 2017, the disastrous wildfires that engulfed the West. Fires burned millions of acres in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Montana. Then the fires came first to Northern and then to Southern California.

Voices from Bonn: System Change not Climate Change

Anna Gyorgy Women and Life on Earth
For delegates in Bonn from Nov. 6-17, the goal was to define and firm up terms and goals of the Paris Agreement, drafted with much fanfare at COP21 in Paris in 2015.

2017 Year in Review: Turning Lemons into Lemonade

Alexandra Bradbury, Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
Labor still has the power to throw sand in the gears of exploitation. The next step is for all these disparate troublemakers to start seeing their workplace struggles—from defending pensions to defending refugees—as part of the same bigger movement.

Swags

Joyce Parkes Creatrix
The Australian poet Joyce Parkes brings us the word “swags,” meaning the bedding rolls used by homeless persons, asking why in a wealthy country so many remain homeless.

New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning

Natalie Wolchover Quanta Magazine
cartoon dog with its neck caught in a bottle
A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.

Let the Kids Lead

Mike Males Yes! Magazine
demonstration made up of young people
Younger people consistently see human rights—racial, immigrant, gender, LGBT—as important and uncontroversial.