Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, known for its tightly packed high-rises. But to cram all those gleaming towers and nearly 6 million people into a land mass half the size of Los Angeles, it has sacrificed many things, including food production. Farms make up no more than 1% of its total land (in the United States it’s 40%), forcing the small city-state to shell out around $10 billion each year importing 90% of its food.
Here was an example of technology that could change all that.
The specter of mental decline among the nation’s judges has been a real and thorny issue for decades. Federal judges are appointed for life, and they often serve well past 70. Some states have sought to address the threat by instituting mandatory retirement ages, though such measures don’t typically contemplate that a younger judge could be stricken with dementia. To date, there are few if any formal mechanisms for evaluating the health of judges or for reporting health-related concerns about them or their decisions.
That unusual day in Simpson’s court in 2019, Cruz guessed something was wrong, and he wrote to prosecutors from prison, asking them to recognize the obvious and intervene somehow.
At 82, Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o — a towering figure of contemporary African literature and theory — is as fiercely prolific as ever. For nearly six decades, he has been building a mountain of work that ranges from novels, plays and memoirs to groundbreaking essays on language and literary decolonization.
Kreskol, the setting for Max Gross’ witty and sagacious debut novel, “The Lost Shtetl”, has been forgotten by history. That’s mostly a blessing: The Jewish hamlet, tucked in a Polish forest, was neglected by the Nazis during World War II, sparing its residents the “infinite death” of the Holocaust.
But as the novel opens, the present has come crashing in on Kreskol, noisy and terrifying — and bearing some of the anti-Semitism it was spared generations before.