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The Robots of Orphan Black

NOAH BERLATSKY The Atlantic
Throughout pop-culture history, clones and robots have served similar purposes, exploring anxieties about class and labor.

Teachers union, LAUSD reach tentative contract agreement

Craig Clough LA School Report
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the second largest teachers union in the country, has reached a tentative agreement with LA Unified, according to an announcement issued by UTLA late last night. The new contract would includes a 10 percent raise over two years, likely bringing to an end the threat of a strike that has been in the air since the summer.

When the Student Movement Was a CIA Front

Aryeh Neier The American Prospect
With the passage of half a century, it may be difficult to understand why so many political and cultural organizations, led by individuals with a generally liberal or leftist outlook, covertly collaborated with the CIA in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, before exposés in Ramparts and other publications put an end to most such arrangements. This was also a period in which many other Americans with similar views collaborated with the FBI.

Irwin Schatz, 83, Rare Critic of Tuskegee Study, Is Dead

Sam Roberts The New York Times
“These researchers had deliberately withheld treatment for this group of poor, uneducated, black sharecroppers in order to document what eventually might happen to them. I became incensed. How could physicians, who were trained first and foremost to do no harm, deliberately withhold curative treatment so they could understand the natural history of syphilis?”

How Syrians Saved an Ancient Seedbank From Civil War

Lizzie Wade Wired
As soon as the fighting started in the spring of 2011, the genebank’s staff switched gears from collecting and distributing seed samples to devising a rescue plan. People there became very familiar with northern Syria’s back roads as they drove the seeds out of the country.

Jimmy Page: How Stairway to Heaven Was Written

Stairway to Heaven was one of the biggest rock songs of the 1970s - loved, imitated and sometimes parodied. Guitarist Jimmy Page gives a personal account of how a rock anthem came together.