Covid Loves Music Festivals, Pls Don’t Shoot Firefighters, Psychotherapy Over Zoom … and More

Health officials are investigating Covid-19 outbreaks tied to two recent outdoor music festivals in Michigan and Oregon, raising new concerns about the safety of events with tightly packed crowds, even outside, as live music surges back and the more transmissible Delta variant spreads. Officials in Michigan say at least 96 cases can be traced to the Faster Horses Festival, which took place in Brooklyn, Michigan, from July 16th to 18th, while authorities in Oregon are looking at 62 cases tied to July 10th’s Pendleton Whisky Music Fest in Pendleton, Oregon. “These events are the warning shot across the bow,” says Dr. Emily Landon, executive medical director for infection prevention and control at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She also points to the numerous cases reportedly tied to July’s Verknipt Festival in the Netherlands, which was also held outdoors. “I think we’re finding it does matter what you do outdoors,” Landon adds. “And even though people are vaccinated, it looks like we may need to be more careful with super-crowded events.”

More than three weeks after it ignited in a remote canyon, the monster Dixie fire continued to break records Friday, leapfrogging Oregon’s Bootleg fire to become the largest burning in the U.S. and the third largest in recorded California history. Law enforcement has issued evacuation orders for thousands of residents whose communities were under siege, yet some are choosing to stay behind, posing more challenges. Greg Hagwood, a Plumas County supervisor, said that in the last 72 hours, as fire has swept through or threatened small mountain towns including Greenville, the evacuations have grown tense — in some cases, residents have met law enforcement with weapons. “They are met with people who have guns and [are] saying, ‘Get off my property and you are not telling me to leave,’” he said. In response to those who flatly refused to evacuate, he said, deputies were asking for next-of-kin information so they would have someone to notify if the holdouts died.

It’s been nearly 17 years since Nicholas Negroponte unveiled his grandiose plan to provide computers for children across the world in a bid to squash digital illiteracy, but also revolutionize the industry at the same time. The end product, the OLPC XO laptop, was supposed to cost $100 and, by and large, is considered as a commercial failure, having shipped only a few million laptops since its inception. OLPC’s ambitions were noble but at the end of the day, cold-, stone hearted capitalism was is where the solution came for a brand new, ultra affordable, high performance computing platform that’s safe and secure to use with guaranteed global availability was going to come from. In 2021 and for the foreseeable future, so-called 8464 (8-core, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage) devices will be the baseline for ubiquitous personal computing, be it for consumers or businesses. While the X96 Pro is not, strictly speaking, a business smartphone, the presence of a fingerprint reader and Android 11 indicates that it is - in theory - a secure platform.

Egypt has transported the Pharaoh Khufu's intact solar boat dating back some 4,600 years to the country's soon to be unveiled grand museum, the antiquities ministry said on Saturday. The boat was commissioned by Khufu, a Fourth Dynasty monarch who ruled during the Old Kingdom. The ministry boasted that the 42-metre (138-foot) long and 20-tonne solar boat is "the biggest and oldest organic artifact made of wood, in the history of humanity". Its journey on a special remote-controlled vehicle imported from Belgium began late on Friday and took 10 hours, the official MENA news agency reported. Egypt has touted the anticipated opening of the GEM at the Giza plateau, home to the famed pyramids, as an important archaeological landmark housing its most precious antiquities.

Negative reviews are fun to read—just asks the scores of film fans that have purchased Roger Ebert’s bestselling collection of them, . Truth is, they can be very fun to write, too, at least for a critic who finds cathartic pleasure in chronicling their own torturous experience with a bad movie, book, meal, etc. But there is an art to penning a pan—and maybe a code of conduct the critic should follow, lest scathing analysis shade into mean-spirited invective. On this week’s very inside-baseball episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife take the listener behind the curtain of their critical process and discuss how to write about bad movies right.

Though plenty of patients will no doubt resume in-person sessions when it’s safe for them to do so, online therapy isn’t going anywhere. The question for mental-health practitioners is how ready they are to not just “make do” with Skype and Zoom sessions, and instead capitalize on the full potential of the technology. Skeptics argue that by connecting over a teleconferencing platform, therapists and their clients might lose the “human” connection they traditionally shared. Moreover, they say, mental health professionals may not as easily key in on body language or other tells that a client is in crisis. Art Cooksey, CEO and founder of telehealth technology provider Let’s Talk Interactive, has a counter to these concerns: “Telehealth technology provides more eye contact and facial cueing, because you’re not monitoring the rest of the body,” he says.