The U.S. Supreme Court returned to the subject of religious rights today, this time in the context of death row inmates who have asked that their spiritual adviser in the death chamber be able to pray and touch the condemned. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.

NINA TOTENBERG (SHS 1962), BYLINE: The subject of spiritual advisers in the death chamber has at times divided the court's conservative supermajority. And it's also at times embarrassed the court as minority religious advisers turned out to sometimes have been excluded from the death chamber.

Today's case involved John Ramirez, sentenced to die for stabbing to death a father of nine during a convenience store robbery while on a drug binge. Four years ago, he claims, he got religion. And since then, his execution date has been postponed four times as the courts and the state of Texas have wrestled with his desire to have his Baptist pastor with him in the death chamber and able to pray and touch his foot.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming, nations must measure and report progress toward their pledged reductions in emissions. They regularly submit greenhouse gas inventories, detailing emission sources as well as removals, or sinks, of the gases within their borders. These are then reviewed by technical experts.

The accounting process is intended to ensure transparency and build trust, but it takes time and the numbers can be far from precise.

But what if changes in emissions of the main planet-warming gas, carbon dioxide, could be reported more accurately and rapidly? That could be extremely useful as the world seeks to limit warming.

The American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) announced today the forthcoming launch of an online benefit auction presented in partnership with Artsy. The auction opens at 5:00 p.m. ET on November 3, 2021.

Over 50 artists have contributed artworks to this important initiative, including Cindy Sherman, Sanford Biggers, KAWS, Trenton Doyle Hancock, LeRone Wilson, Nicole Eisenman, Nicolas Party, Amy Hill, Marcel Dzama, Jenny Holzer, Karla Knight, James Siena, Polly Apfelbaum, and Betty Tompkins.

Regular Altercation readers will have noticed by now that one of this newsletter’s hobbyhorses is the manner in which the dangerous lunacy that currently rules the conservative movement has long been normalized as just one side in a “both sides” political debate in which truth (or even sanity) has no intrinsic value. I read a few MSM pieces this past week that offer some insight as to how we arrived at this benighted political moment.

The science of success is a complex field. Fortunately, the USC women's basketball program has a special kind of scientist hard at work concocting a working formula for a new realm at Troy. The 2021-22 USC roster, helmed by new head coach and basketball scientist extraordinaire Lindsay Gottlieb, is teeming with talent and balance — ingredients that Gottlieb is eager to formulate into a competitive and successful program.

"We have depth and versatility in ways that are exciting to me," Gottlieb said. "I have to go into my mad scientist mode to figure out how to use everyone effectively and turn what we have into a winning basketball team. I'm also excited that they are so bought in and willing to be pushed to reach a level we haven't reached yet."

We all want to do good. Well, a great many of us want to do good. We recognize that the climate is in peril, corporations are dangerously extractive, wealth disparity is at all-time highs, our kids are self-destructively addicted to social media, politics has descended into a reality TV show with paranoid features, and that civilization itself has only about another 20 years before some combination of the above threats makes life unrecognizable or even unsustainable.

The good news, at least according to the majority of invitations I get to participate in conferences and with organizations, is that there’s an app or technology or network or platform or, most often these days, a token that can fix some or all of this. The latest frame around the technosolutionist frenzy is called web 3.0, which has come to mean the decentralized sort of internet characterized by TOR networks (basically, Napster and BitTorrent where everything is hosted everywhere) and the blockchain (a new form of automated ledger).

Ten university teams designed and built systems intended to harvest water frozen below the surface of the Moon and Mars. The teams put their prototypes to the test during the 2021 Moon to Mars Ice & Prospecting Challenge held September 23-25 at the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Taking top prize of $6,000 was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team from Cambridge with HYDRATION III: High Yield Dihydrogen-monoxide Retrieval And Terrain Identification On New worlds.

"I think one of the determining factors in the MIT’s excellent performance was the test program they set up," said Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, MIT team faculty advisor and former NASA astronaut. "They tried to duplicate as closely as possible the conditions they would face in the actual competition, and that allowed them to refine the hardware, software, and procedures. They followed the famous advice we give to anyone working on a space project, test like you are going to fly, and fly like you tested!"

On October 5, more than 18 months after COVID-19 shut down Broadway, To Kill a Mockingbird will reopen at the Shubert Theatre. Aaron Sorkin’s hit adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, now the highest-grossing American play in Broadway history, will return with original stars Jeff Daniels, as Atticus Finch, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, in her Tony-winning performance as Scout Finch. But according to Sorkin, the show will not be exactly like it was during its first run. The Oscar-winning scribe and director Bartlett Sher have spent several weeks in rehearsals making subtle changes to the play that better fit the current time and the societal reckoning brought on by the Black Lives Matter protests that occurred during a global pandemic.

Six-time Tony and Emmy nominee Tovah Feldshuh (SHS 1966) will return to Boca Raton's Mizner Park Cultural Center on Saturday October 16th and Sunday October 17th for three performances of her acclaimed one woman show Tovah is LEONA! The show, in which Feldshuh assumes the persona of real estate mogul and hotelier Leona Helmsley, played to sold-out houses in January 2019.

As Helmsley, the disgraced doyenne comments and sings about anything and everything - from her meteoric rise from office temp to trophy wife, from wheeler-dealer to hotel magnate, to her relationship with real estate rival Donald Trump.

I only began to understand why I was so stubbornly devoted to running when I couldn’t do it anymore. That’s where I was when I woke up in an emergency room on the morning of April 6, 2020, with a traumatic brain injury sustained during a dumb middle-of-the-night fall.

The last thing I remember I’d gone downstairs to the kitchen at 4 a.m. to get a snack. My husband heard a crash and found me unconscious, blood pooling from a large gash at the back of my head. When I woke up six hours later in an E.R., my left side was a bit weak, but more important, my muscles on that side couldn’t properly coordinate basic movements.

When it comes to art, September has usually been an especially busy time in the Valley, as college galleries and museums unveil new exhibits to welcome back students and faculty, and area galleries display their monthly changes as well.

Last fall, the pandemic shut down college art museums to the public and in most cases to students. But the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Smith College are now welcoming visitors back, and area galleries are offering new work, making September 2021 something of a return to normal.

Here’s a selected look at what’s on tap. Check for COVID-19 safety protocols and limitations for all venues.

To welcome visitors back, The Smith College Art Museum has three main exhibits on view. “SCMA Then/Now/Next” juxtaposes some of its earliest holdings with newer ones, and it’s also been arranged, staff say, to reflect the museum’s ongoing drive to give more exposure to art from previously underrepresented artists and cultures.

One of things I really loved about the early net was how open and free it felt. Before the internet was even the internet, Al Gore was talking about the possibility of an “information superhighway” connecting educators and researchers with one another as well as one another’s work. We never thought in terms of destinations. It was more about the journey, the search, and the connections.

The “places” online, if you could even call them that, were just repositories of files. One of the first times I was on the net, I was looking for some song lyrics. I did some Gopher searches (simple, command-line stuff) and ended up downloading the files I needed from a server in Tel Aviv. There was no sense of place. I didn’t go there.

History revealed plans to premiere the documentary feature Desert One from two time Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, American Dream) this September.

The film, which first premiered at TIFF in 2019, is produced and directed by Kopple, with David Cassidy and Eric Forman sharing producer credits.  Executive producers for History are Eli Lehrer and Zachary G. Behr.

Desert One tells the story of the failed US rescue attempt of American hostages being held at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran in 1980. It features interviews with senior members of the Carter administration, including President Jimmy Carter and late Vice President Walter Mondale, journalist Ted Koppel, former hostages, members of the Delta Force team involved in the rescue attempt, and Iranian hostage-takers and witnesses to the rescue attempt.

In her new agony aunt-style column, Leslie Cannold (SHS 1983) doesn't offer both sides of an argument. She lays her professional opinion on the line without fear or favour. Leslie Cannold has had enough of being even-handed and presenting Both Sides Now. She wants to cut to the chase: what’s the way to go? In her new column, Dr Cannold brings her ethical training to everyday dilemmas. Send your questions to [email protected] with “Dear Leslie” in the subject line. She might even reply…

Dear Disaffected, 

Yes, your friend could be compartmentalising which, for the uninitiated, is when a person suppresses certain thoughts and emotions so they can get on with work or carry on with a relationship, or both. 

While suppressing emotions may sound bad, compartmentalisation can be a useful, even essential, coping tool. When, for instance, a beloved spouse dies but with three small kids to care for the grieving wife compartmentalises her grief so she can function. Or when a doctor compartmentalises “patients” into a category of human towards which no sexual thoughts or feelings are allowed. 

Your friend’s significant other may be compartmentalising, too. In fact, one of the most common uses of this psychological defence mechanism is to allow a person engaging in deviant behaviour — like workplace sexual harassment and bullying — to maintain his view of himself and reputation as a “nice guy”. 

Diversity is easily thought of — and talked about — through the prism of identity, often through gender or race. USC women’s basketball head coach Lindsay Gottlieb thinks men’s college basketball programs can deliver better coaching to their players if they view diversity in a different way.

Speaking to Adrian Wojnarowski, Gottlieb very neatly made the point that diversity is not just a matter of gender or race; it’s a matter of life experience and giving human beings more ways of relating and connecting to each other.

Aaron Sorkin (SHS 1979) parted ways with his political drama The West Wing in 2003 - here's why the fourth season of the show was the creator's last. After a spontaneous pitch during a meeting with producer John Wells in 1997, Sorkin's idea of a TV show centered on White House staff members became a possibility. The project was put on hold in light of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and concerns about an audience's ability to take a White House drama seriously, but NBC eventually gave it a green light, and the pilot episode of The West Wing premiered in 1999. Sorkin remained the show's principal writer and one of its executive producers until he left after season 4.

Michael Sugar’s management and multimedia platform Sugar23 has added Douglas Rushkoff (SHS 1979) as “Futurist in Residence,” the company announced Tuesday.

In his new role, Rushkoff will serve as “sounding board and professor” for the firm, Sugar23 said in a statement. Rushkoff will help clients “who are looking to understand the greater contexts around what they are doing, to develop greater congruence between purpose and practice, or to develop a more rigorous approach to their work. Additionally, he will assist clients in understanding the changing shape of narrativity in the increasingly digital society, as well as helping them brainstorm on projects with specific story elements involving new or as-yet-uninvented technologies, future societies, or speculative scenarios.”

In Both Sides Now, author and ethicist Leslie Cannold (SHS 1983) presents two sides of an argument and then it’s over to you: what do you think is true, and what do you think Cannold really believes?

Today: Israel is doing it, and the UK has started to give a third COVID “booster” shot too. As the Sydney and Melbourne lockdowns drag on -- and other cities teeter on the edge -- Australians want to know what can be done to put an end to outbreaks for good.

Yes: It's simple. An extra vaccine booster is the only way out of rolling lockdowns. If we don't want to continue slogging through intermittent outbreaks and oppressive restrictions, then the science suggests we need greater protection -- and fast. No: No one is protected until everyone is protected, and if wealthy nations use vaccine supplies that could be donated elsewhere, struggling countries won't be the only ones hurting -- it means a breeding ground for new variants.