alyaza

For the first time, on November 20, 2024, the Dia da Consciência Negra (Black Consciousness Day) was recognized as a national holiday in Brazil. The date marks the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of the largest Brazilian quilombo, who was beheaded in 1695 by the Portuguese Crown—his head displayed as a trophy in a public square (to dispel, it is said, the myth of his immortality). The quilombo was a community of enslaved people who escaped from white-owned plantations, where they were kept imprisoned in the senzalas, the quarters designated for them—hence the name of a classic (and controversial) Brazilian text, Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933), by sociologist Gilberto Freyre.

The day aims to celebrate the fight for racial equality, to commemorate the resistance of Afro-descendant peoples, to promote concrete actions of reparation, as well as to increase Black representation in Brazilian society. The documentary Black Rio! Black Power!, directed by Emilio Domingos, achieves this goal by telling the story of a cultural movement that remains underappreciated. The culmination of 10 years of research, the film has screened at 24 international festivals and won several awards. When talking about Rio de Janeiro, the most obvious associations are samba, bossa nova, and, more recently, funk—little is said about soul. However, not recognizing the thread of continuity between them—and also with hip hop—would be like calling funk “a child of an unknown father.” And Furacão 2000, the record label and producer of the dance parties from that era, represents exactly this line of continuity.

According to journalist Silvio Essinger (O Batidão do Funk, 2005):

the choice of 1976 as the milestone of the movement is because it was the year it became visible beyond its own attendees, thanks to the report Black Rio: the (imported) pride of being Black in Brazil, by Black journalist Lena Frias, a specialist in Brazilian popular music, and photographer Almir Veiga, published in Jornal do Brasil.

In reality, these were years in which “the phenomenon of Black dance parties on the outskirts of Rio” began to draw the attention of the authorities. Brazil was under a dictatorship, and the military viewed with suspicion a movement that brought together more than 15,000 young Black people from the suburbs, who not only danced but also organized politically.

Mar Menor, a 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) lagoon in southern Spain, is the only ecosystem in Europe that can be named a victim in a legal case. In September 2022, the Spanish Senate granted the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean legal personhood. From then on, any human who wanted to help Mar Menor could represent it in court.

For those in the budding Rights of Nature movement, who recognize the planet and all its ecosystems as living beings with inalienable rights, the Mar Menor victory was a breakthrough. The first body of water in Europe granted legal personhood, the move caught the region up to similar legal successes elsewhere, such as with Colombia’s Atrato River in 2016 and New Zealand’s Whanganui River in 2017.

Protection for Mar Menor came after a series of mass die-offs ravaged the ecosystem. In 2016, excessive nutrient runoff triggered a massive algal bloom that turned parts of the lagoon a misty green and killed 85 percent of its marine vegetation. Then in 2019, and again in 2021, nutrient runoff stripped the lagoon of oxygen, suffocating thousands of fish and crustaceans, and littering its shores with creatures gasping for air.

Spurred by the crises, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents banded together. They collected around 640,000 signatures and, in 2022, successfully pushed a citizen initiative through the Spanish parliament’s upper chamber. Their efforts resulted in a new law granting Mar Menor and its surrounding basin rights in every sense of the word: the right to live and flourish; the right to be protected; and the right to recover. The law’s Article 6 was particularly groundbreaking. It stated that any person or relevant legal entity “is entitled to defend the ecosystem of the Mar Menor.”

“The right to recovery is no longer something that depends on a ministry wanting to do it, but it is a right of the Mar Menor,” says Teresa Vicente. A law professor at the nearby University of Murcia, Vicente earned the Goldman Environmental Award, often called the Green Nobel, for the key role she played in driving the initiative and writing the law that gives personhood to Mar Menor.

But three years on, Mar Menor is still waiting for humans to act on their promises. So I visited this famous coastal lagoon—the name of which translates to Minor Sea—and chatted with some of its protectors to find out what was happening on the ground.

Much change is underway on the food and agriculture front, to put it mildly. But it’s also summer, a time to step back, relax, and recharge. Toward that end, we at Civil Eats offer our annual summer book guide. These 23 new or forthcoming titles run the gamut, from big-picture examinations of food-system issues and food philosophies to histories, memoirs, and cookbooks. This year, we’ve included two illustrated titles, too: a graphic memoir about the American ginseng industry and an illustrated children’s book about the life of restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.

We’re always looking for books that propose solutions to challenges in the food system, and this year we’re recommending several, including a guidebook to saving the planet, a collection of life lessons from chef and restaurateur José Andrés, and a look at what we can learn from the lives of honeybees. Happy reading!

The sound of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” and the stomping of boots on hardwood echoed against the neon-bathed walls of O’Donnell’s in Lockhart’s town square. This Pride of Caldwell County dance night was one of eight events that the organization hosted over the last week of June, and with the bar packed from end to end with line dancers, onlookers singing along, and laughter, there was no shortage of celebration in this small Texas town.

Nestled in the heart of Central Texas, Caldwell County is better known as the barbecue capital of the state. But over the past few years, it’s also become home to a growing and visible LGBTQ+ community, a transformation sparked, in part, by a conversation among friends in 2021.

That year, a group gathered in Lockhart Arts and Craft, a bar just around the corner from O’Donnell’s, and laid the foundation for what would become Pride of Caldwell County, a grassroots nonprofit organization committed to building LGBTQ+ community and visibility in the region.

“Even just a few years earlier, there was so much more hesitation about starting something like this,” said Haley Fort, one of Pride of Caldwell County’s board members. “Pride did not have the same presence back then and we didn’t have stickers showing safe spaces or anything.”

In June, the world’s largest psychedelics conference returned to Denver. Eight thousand participants gathered to hear 500 presenters over the course of a week.

Psychedelic Science, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), brought together people from 50 countries. They discussed such diverse topics as decriminalization initiatives, therapeutic and commercial regulation, electronic music raves, artificial intelligence, racial and social justice, and the genocide in Gaza.

Psychedelic movements are at a crossroads, testing different and often competing strategies and ideas. The research field was dealt a major blow in 2024 when the United States Food and Drug Administration rejected an application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, one of the marquee MAPS initiatives of the last 20 years. MAPS itself has undergone major changes since then, cutting one-third of its staff. Its for-profit pharmaceutical arm Lykos, meanwhile, cut about three-quarters of its staff.

Denver, which also hosted the biennial conference in 2023, is a fitting venue. For years it’s been at the forefront of psychedelics liberation, and possession of naturally-occurring substances is largely decriminalized there. As the conference kicked off, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) announced a blanket pardon for anyone with a state-level conviction for psilocybin possession. He urged local governments across the state to follow suit.

It started with a dream: The Old Dykes Home.

Envisioned during beach trips with friends nearly 30 years ago, this is how Pat McAulay first thought of the concept that would become Village Hearth, the first LGBTQ cohousing community in the nation for people 55 and over.

“Any older lesbian you speak to has this dream of living together or living in close proximity and taking care of one another,” McAulay said. “Because people from our generation… come out of the closet and then have to go back in, in old age. That was the biggest fear, the treatment you’d get in a nursing home or some sort of a facility. And so that's where the idea came from: You take care of your own, as long as you can.”

In 2015, McAulay and her wife Margaret Roesch began seriously developing plans for Village Hearth, a sprawling fifteen-acre property in Durham, North Carolina, where lush gardens and 28 accessible, pastel cottages are now home to more than three dozen older LGBTQ adults and allies, some of whom The Flytrap met during a recent visit. Gathered in Village Hearth’s common house for coffee and cake, residents shared their many reasons for choosing cohousing, the challenges of close quarters and cooperative self-governance, and the model that Village Hearth can provide to other queer and trans people who want to support each other through the aging process.

“This isn’t for everyone,” McAulay laughed. “You have to be able to really listen. It can’t just be, ‘I’ve got this great idea to fix this problem and I’m going to do it.’ You have to be able to listen to everyone’s input, and adjust—it’s the only way to live in cohousing and it’s best for creating community.”

Have you ever looked at the map in a video game and thought: wow, I wish this was just the entire game? Or maybe you’ve found yourself playing a board game and thought: there’s not enough pixels in this? You’re in luck.

In the late 1980s, advancements in procedural generation tech gave rise to the booming “simulation” genre, which is characterized by games that model complex, real-world situations and environments. Players are often tasked with both responding to changes the sim throws their way while simultaneously trying to shape the sim to achieve their own specific goals: whether economic, civic, interpersonal, or in the art of war.

Although this subgenre of strategy games had been established prior to the modern moniker, the “4X” name (short for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) is believed to have originated from the 1993 release of sci-fi sim Master of Orion, wherein the four “Xes” were used to describe its gameplay mechanics. This snappy little device also perfectly described the typical gameplay verbs within other games in the subgenre… and it stuck. And if seeing a giant billboard for Sid Meier’s Civilization VII while driving on the 405 S the other day isn’t proof enough: this style of game has clearly stood the test of time. Yet for all the popularity of the modern Civ games, it’s one forgotten title from 1999 that would most accurately depict the arc of human civilization throughout the 21st century.

[...] Civilization: Call to Power (1999) was undeniably a Civ game based on its gameplay and its isometric, cobbled aesthetics, but when it isn’t forgotten by Civ players entirely, it’s best remembered for its many unique eccentricities. Despite being developed by an entirely different team with no involvement from Sid Meier or greater MicroProse whatsoever, the core elements of the 4X style remain firmly intact: players would begin on a small part of the map and must explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, all complete with its now legendary “Wonder” videos which played upon each unlock. A few standout features include the spy/stealth units in warfare, the slavery system (and subsequent “abolition” development), a rather pointed distaste for lawyers (hmm), and the very cool potential of building underwater or space-based cities in the later stages.

However, it’s this progression of the game’s timeline that makes some real deviations from the Civ formula. “You soon get the feeling that the game is rushing you through the early eras of the world – the ancient, classical and medieval – so that it can show you the crazy shit it has in store later on. ‘Who cares about bloody horses and spearmen and rickety chariots clip-clopping along dirt roads and uncharted lands?’ it seems to say. ‘You’ve seen all that crap before, haven’t you?’” writes Robert Zak at Rock Paper Shotgun.

Most Civilization games mark the completion of a campaign when the player reaches somewhere in the early 21st Century. This would be the “near future” for games released in the late 1990s, but Call to Power made the unique choice of making the end date the year 3000 instead. And the far future? It kinda sucks.

The Anti-Defamation League has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for 40 years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities, often over the objections of students, parents and educators.

Now, the three million-member National Education Association has finally said no.

On July 6, the NEA’s 7,000-member Representative Assembly voted to cut all ties with the ADL.

The body approved a measure that the NEA ​“will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or its statistics.” The reasoning: ​“Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”

Union members speaking on the floor rejected the ADL’s abuse of the term ​“antisemitism” to punish critics of Israel, its use of hyperinflated statistics on hate crimes to gin up fears about Jewish safety, and its characterization of calls for Palestinian rights as ​“hate speech.”