Meanwhile, Kim’s US publisher, Disney, is continuing to support Dreamslinger‘s rollout in American bookstores while organising a “belated” in-person tour towards the end of the year, “with the hope that the landscape has shifted somewhat by then”.
American here, I think the idea that things here will have shifted in any sort of positive way by the end of this year is a staggering level of optimism.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll *wreck* the country that was snipped out.
This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.
Have you tried smiling more?
I’ve had a similar experience overall. The breaking point for me was about 2 weeks after I set up Apple Intelligence I had a vacation planned and important details were on my calendar (flights, hotels, rental car, etc). My wife and I were discussing logistics of the day we were leaving and she wanted to know what time our flight departed so I asked Siri “What time is my flight on Saturday?”
It was literally one of two items on the calendar that day and she couldn’t answer the question. She kept resorting to trying to search the web for “flights for Saturday.” I tried a lot of other things also before disabling the feature but it was just useless for most basic things.
Language isn’t always about logic. Discussing things in terms of male/female is fine in many contexts but is often done when discussing science or medical topics. Ex: the male pelvis has a different, narrower shape than the female pelvis. It’s also used in situations where people are deliberately ‘othering’ people. Watch any police bodycam footage and you’ll see that cops frequently say “male/female” when discussing non-police individuals.
In daily life, most people use men/women for non-scientific discourse. The women’s restroom. A group of men at the restaurant. Etc.
But here’s the thing. Male/female are used for any species (a male beetle), but man/woman are only used for humans.
Assholes like Tate push a twist in this dynamic so that men are called men but women are called females because it can be dehumanizing to women. When you say female you could be talking about an insect, but a man is human. It’s a succinct example of their philosophy. That’s why people consider it derogatory.