newyorker.com

In “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” from 2017, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a “digitally networked public sphere” had come to shape social movements. Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings, whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson. Whereas “older movements had to build their organizing capacity first,” Tufekci argued, “modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.”The speed afforded by such protest is, however, as much its peril as its promise. By contrast, since George Floyd’s death, cities have cut billions of dollars from police budgets; school districts have severed ties with police; multiple police-reform-and-accountability bills have been introduced in Congress; and cities like Minneapolis have vowed to defund policing.

The group’s annual budget of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is partly made up of contributions from New York City Council members, the Department of Corrections, the Administration for Children’s Services, and other government agencies. Which means you’re getting rid of black and brown people.”In New York, members of the City Council said, on June 12th, that they had identified a billion dollars in cuts to the police department’s six-billion-dollar budget. The political issue is all of the stereotypes and notions around identity-based criminalization—that are about black people, poor people, people with different health issues, people who are houseless,” Ejeris Dixon, an organizer and political strategist on racial justice, told me. The billions of dollars that the country has spent on policing in the past five years, he went on, have helped build forces that, on average, kill a thousand people every year; that spending may also have left the country’s health-care system unprepared to deal with an ongoing crisis.

The influx of cash has allowed you to become the proud new owner of a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot studio apartment in Nob Hill, which only set you back three billion dollars. a star member of three main-stage improv teams at Second City and the iO Theater, and you serve as the on-call entertainment for the best deep-dish establishment in town (not that one or the other one). Your main source of income is laughter and your biggest expense is sausages, but, if you ever need some extra cash, you know you can always become a placekicker for “da Bears. After spending just enough time making short films backed by your friends and family from Cleveland, while living in a rent-controlled apartment directly above a slice shop where everyone knows your name but calls you “boss” anyway, you have no choice but to move to Los Angeles and become rich, famous, and Instagram goals, whatever that means.

You don’t want to be the bad guy, but you also want to make sure that your child engages in other activities, like mammoth hunting and the gathering of rocks and bones with which to make tools. Reminding your children of the pleasures provided by these traditional activities can help reduce the seductive lure of the fire’s dancing flame. Deception: going off to secretly find/make fires; lying about fire usage when confronted • Anthropomorphization: talking to/interacting with the fire as if it were a sentient being, which the elders we consulted say is highly unlikely, though they have yet to entirely rule out the presence of powerful magical beings within the inferno Commit to non-fire family time If you can imagine what it was like a few thousand years ago, when the first humans started walking upright, and how much grief they probably got from their parents, you’ll have some empathy for your children’s unique place in the evolutionary narrative.