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And why simple manners can transform your relationships

Most people don't notice I'm polite, which is sort of the point. I don't look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches. Still, every year or so someone takes me aside and says, you actually are weirdly polite, aren't you? And I always thrill. They noticed.

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And why simple manners can transform your relationships Most people don't notice I'm polite, which is sort of the point. I don't look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches. Still, every year or so someone takes me aside and says, you actually are weirdly polite, aren't you?

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Shaylene is a psychologist who think that learning stayles are a popular myth. Learning hasn't ant relevance to auditory or visual intallagent

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Stretching Exercises for Men Who Sit All Day

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Stretching Exercises for Men Who Sit All Day

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This article describes exercises that we can do at anytime. We can do exercise where we are sitting on the chair. And also we can do stretching when we are reading something.

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Desk jobs have their perks. You're off your feet, sheltered from the elements, and quite possibly have access to free coffee. But they're also slowly killing you. Sitting all day, it turns out, is quite bad for your body. Specifically, prolonged sitting causes a shortening and tightening of your hip flexors - those hinge-like muscles just below your hip bones that expand and contract as you walk. With yours constantly in the contracted (sitting) position, it begins to take a toll. Similarly, long bouts of staring at a computer screen encourage a shoulders-hunched, bent-over posture that is magnified with age. Combined, all this means that when you stand up at the end of the day, everything is tight and your movement is limited.

Fortunately, a few easy stretching exercises can go a long way to limbering up your body. Start with these seven moves, which can be done in your living room (or at your desk, if you're feeling bold).
Stretch 1: The Chair Stretch
Consider this a warm-up to the real deal, or a quick fix if you're locked into your seat for another hour of work. From sitting, reach both hands behind your head and clasp fingers together. Inhaling deeply, turn palms to face the ceiling and push upward, straightening your arms and pushing your chest forward as you do. Hold for 10 counts. Exhale deeply and release the stretch. Do as many times as necessary.
Stretch 2: Back Arch
This basic move elongates your abdominal muscles and stretches the hip flexors and chest. There are a few variations of this move, depending on how flexible you are. Start standing with your back about a foot from a wall, feet shoulder-width apart. Reach your arms overhead and raise your face skyward, feeling a stretch in your torso. Arch your back and reach arms behind your head, aiming to touch the wall behind you. (You can bend elbows slightly to aid your cause.) If you have the flexibility, let your hands touch the wall, and using this for support, push your hips out in front of you, feeling a deep stretch in your hip flexors. Hold for 30 seconds then release.
Stretch 3: Hamstring Stretch
This move requires an exercise band, towel, or a necktie. Lie on your back, knees bent, feet flat on floor. Lift your right foot off the floor and slip the band or towel under the arch, grasping one end in each hand. Slowly straighten your right leg keeping tension on the band. Do not lock your knee. Gently pull the band toward your chest, raising your right foot toward the ceiling. Stop when you reach a point of comfortable stretch in your hamstring. Hold for 10 seconds, release, and repeat two more times. Then repeat the sequence on the opposite side.
Stretch 4: Cobra
Lie face down on the floor, elbows bent and hands by your shoulders. Push through your arms to raise your chest off the floor. How far you can lift depends on how tight your chest area is. Raise yourself to a comfortable stretch, keeping your head up and eyes raised. Hold for 30 seconds, then release.
Stretch 5: Figure 4
Start facing something you can hold onto for support, like the edge of a table, towel rack, or back of a couch. Cross your right foot over your left knee, keeping your bent right knee out to the side so that your legs form the shape of the number "4." Holding the support in front of you, bend your left knee and sink into the stretch, which you'll feel in your glutes and iliotibial band (along the outside of your leg). To achieve a deeper stretch, bend the left knee more. Hold 30 seconds, then repeat on the opposite side.
Stretch 6: Lunges
Stand with feet shoulder-width apart. Take a big step forward with your right leg. Shift your weight forward and bend right knee, feeling a stretch along your left quad and hip flexor. If your flexibility is limited, you can also bend your left knee so that it touches the floor, then lean deeper into the stretch from here. Hold 30 seconds, repeat on the opposite side.
Stretch 7: Wall Stretch
Stand facing a wall, about three feet away. Place hands against the wall and lean into it, keeping your legs straight and your body in one long line. Feel a stretch in your calf muscles as you press your heels into the floor. For a deeper stretch, try shifting your weight from one foot to the other, allowing the resting leg to bend slightly as you toggle back and forth.

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Your Chair Is Killing You. Here's How to Fix It

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Desk jobs have their perks. You're off your feet, sheltered from the elements, and quite possibly have access to free coffee. But they're also slowly killing you. Sitting all day, it turns out, is quite bad for your body.

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First black hole image could change everything we know about the universe!

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First black hole image could change everything we know about the universe!

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Yeah, yeah, I know what you thinking: "I've seen thousands of pictures of black holes." We always imagined about black hole who we have never actually seen a black hole.

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Black holes are some of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe, inspiring entire libraries of both scientific research and science fiction, from Einstein to the movie Interstellar. Yet despite the hold their inconceivable gravity has on our imaginations, as well as our understanding of physics, humans have never actually seen a black hole.

That appears set to change Wednesday with the impending release of the first image taken of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. (Editors' note, April 10: As it turned out, the black hole image that astronomers released was of the object at the center of the Messier 57 galaxy. They're still processing the data on Sagittarius A*.)

It's a landmark moment for both science and technology made possible by the Event Horizon Telescope, which is actually an array of telescopes spread out across the Earth. You watch it here.

Yes, I know what you're thinking: "I've seen plenty of pictures of black holes."

Perhaps you're thinking of something like this:

All these images we've seen from NASA and other scientific organizations are just illustrations created with the help of artists, although many of them are actually based on data from real telescopes. The above one comes largely from data gathered by NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope, which is able to detect the super-heated matter being pulled toward the event horizon, or perimeter of a black hole.

So that beautiful illustration is kind of like drawing a hurricane based on wind speed data from the outer edges of the storm. To actually see a satellite image of a brooding and sprawling tropical cyclone is another thing altogether.

But to really capture a direct image of a black hole, or at least the shadow of one outlined by the bright material being pulled toward it, requires some serious collaborative engineering.

Here a telescope, there a telescope

The EHT is actually an array of radio telescopes on different sides of the globe that are linked to create what's called a Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) the size of the Earth itself. The basic idea here is that radio telescopes in different locations are combining their signals to boost their power.

If you've seen pictures of the Very Large Array in New Mexico (featured prominently in the 1997 movie Contact) with its multiple telescopic dishes all working together, then you can visualize the concept: Just imagine Jodie Foster tapping into an array of dishes that are separated not by meters but by thousands of miles instead.

This planet-sized observatory is necessary because, as the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory explains in the below animation, while Sagittarius A is 4 million times as massive as our sun, it's still really far away -- a distance of about 26,000 light years.

This is, of course, good news for all people interested in not getting sucked into a black hole, but it makes the thing very hard to photograph; it would be comparable to trying to see the dimples on a golf ball in Los Angeles... from New York. Better get out your super zoom lens, which is also kind of what the Event Horizon Telescope is.

The EHT's array of observatories includes telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, Arizona, Mexico, Spain and the South Pole, all precisely synchronized to collect several petabytes of data, all of it combined with the help of a supercomputer to create the first image of Sagittarius A.

The image we expect to see Wednesday comes from data that was actually collected back in 2017. Part of the reason for the delay is that while we've become much better at processing huge amounts of data in recent years, the internet still isn't quite quick enough to zap petabytes' worth of information around the world on demand. Each EHT location stored its observation data on a physical hard disk that had to be transported to a data-processing center and combined with data from the other observatories.

So now we have a phalanx of scientists excited about looking at a black hole on the other side of the galaxy -- it's no exaggeration to say that the entire universe is at stake here... or at least our fundamental understanding of the universe.

Proving Einstein right

That's because the shape of the black hole's event horizon in the EHT image could prove Albert Einstein's theory of how gravity works, or cast new doubt upon it.

In a nutshell (although one of seemingly immense density), Einstein said that gravity can actually warp the fabric of space-time, which is most easily thought of as the background that the Earth, the sun and everything else is moving through. So when a large star collapses on itself and turns into a very dense object with intense gravitational pull it has some serious warping power.

This crazy-dense super sucker is called the "singularity" at the center of the black hole. The singularity is so powerful that it warps space-time and bends light near the event horizon. So the singularity causing all this chaos is actually hiding somewhere behind the shadow of the black hole created by its own, spacetime-warping, light-consuming massiveness.

It all sounds a little insane, but there's lots of reason to believe Einstein has it right: most recently, the first observations of gravitational waves predicted by his theories helped to bolster those theories. But Einstein's theory of gravity, which seems to hold up when we look at big objects like stars and galaxies, is not compatible with quantum mechanics, the study of the bizarre, infinitesimal particles that make up atoms at the heart of everything.

According to Einstein's math, a singularity also has to be a really bizarre place. Being able to study images of the black hole it creates could lead to a better understanding of what's going on there, and maybe even new theories that bridge the gap between Einstein and the quantum world.

As astrophysicist Karan Jani put it in a wonderful tweet-lecture:

"The singularity of a black hole is a point of infinite density. All the laws of physics as we know break down here. But can such singularity exist in the real Universe? Or is it simply that our knowledge has not advanced enough to understand it?"

10. The singularity of a black hole is a point of infinite density. All the laws of physics as we know break down here. But can such singularity exist in the real Universe? Or is it simply that our knowledge has not advanced enough to understand it?

The latter imo is the answer. pic.twitter.com/4RgYxNPw4q
- Dr. Karan Jani (@AstroKPJ) April 8, 2018

There are also other weird things going on at black holes, like the counterintuitive and powerful jets of near-light-speed particles that seem to be blasting across the universe. And what's on the other side of a black hole, anyway? Is it a white hole? A wormhole? A portal to another universe? These ideas might sound ludicrous, but at the moment they're all technically on the table, at least until we get a much better idea of what's going on beyond the event horizon.

And starting Wednesday, we just might enter that new era of understanding.

Originally published on April 8.

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First black hole image could change everything we know about the universe

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Black holes are some of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe, inspiring entire libraries of both scientific research and science fiction, from Einstein to the movie Interstellar. Yet despite the hold their inconceivable gravity has on our imaginations, as well as our understanding of physics, humans have never actually seen a black hole.

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My Wife Is Pregnant and I’m Not Ready to Be a Father. How Do I Get There?

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My Wife Is Pregnant and I’m Not Ready to Be a Father. How Do I Get There?

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In article, a man who is going to be dad telling his fears. He is afraid of this situation because he thinks he'll lose his friend and his relationship with his friend. And the writer says keep calm. Your partner feels uncomfortable like you. Think about her. She has some pains which are because of baby. The baby is symbol of your love.

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My wife just popped. You know that moment where the stomach starts to show and it all gets real? We're there, and everything hit me. It happened way fast and I realized I'm going to be a dad. My life will never be the same. I'm not excited anymore - that part has worn off because I'm pretty sure my life is pretty much over. I don't think I'm being dramatic here. I have a life that I really like. I have a bunch of friends who are single or dating, some married, none with kids, and we hang out a bunch. We have a flag football team. We play Wednesday and Saturdays and always hit the bar after. On Saturdays, we stay for hours talking, playing Buck Hunter and having a great time. I live for it. I haven't even considered until now that I might have to give this up for the kid. I mean, I could maybe go to the game, but then I'll be that guy - showing up for the least fun part and skipping for the night of catching up and revelry. I'm facing that reality and it just sucks. It also sucks that I have no one who will understand. My friends' joke that I'm gonna have to retire my numbers and that they'll Livestream the fun from the bar. My wife, well, there's no way she'll have sympathy. She's into the kid and is sorta hinting she wasn't all that into the flag football team. My parents... well, they are so excited for the kid that I'm avoiding their calls.
Congratulations, both on the upcoming birth of your child and the inevitable death of your selfish and repressed bachelorhood. I don't know if I'm going to get you to celebrate both, but I'm damn sure going to try.

First, you need to understand that your fears are valid. A life that you were once accustomed to is going to end. Good for you. There's a name for the changes you are experiencing. It's called personal growth and, you're right, it is really hard. But it's also basically what keeps us from becoming boring assholes.

Change is always stressful. Having a baby is one of the most stressful life changes that a person can go through. You will absolutely need to take care of yourself in order to not lose your mind. But, importantly, it will have to look different than the way you are taking care of yourself now.

I can see that flag football is part of the way you care for yourself. You've got some good exercise and some great camaraderie. Spending time with friends and getting your heart rate up are both great ways to combat stress and depression. So I'm loathe to suggest that you ditch the activity completely. But the way it's structured, man... Let's just say it will be incompatible with your new way of life.

Sure, you could try and save your fun flag football times, but there would surely be something else that you'd be required to sacrifice. So you'll need to find a way to preserve the benefits without falling down the path of resentment. Because being born to a resentful father has some serious Dickensian overtones. Your kid deserves better than a dad who's twisted up because his Wednesdays and Saturdays were "ruined."

The worst trap you could possibly get into is believing that your partner is somehow complicit and responsible for the fact that you no longer have a self-care regimen. So, before things come to a head - a.k.a. your baby crowning - you need to talk with her about what's going on.

I wouldn't lead with the whole "not feeling excited" thing. As you know (I hope you know) she is dealing with a lot of hormonal fluctuations right now. That means you need to enter the conversation with as much positivity as you can. Smile. Be gentle. Let her know you want to get this right, but you're afraid that you're going to be a stressed-out dad and you're worried about losing your friends and exercise time. It's important to let her know this is an issue that you want to solve with her help.

My assumption here is that you actually like your partner, and hopefully, you love her too. That's probably why you've decided to have a baby in the first place. That kid is a symbol of the love you share, the trust you place in each other and your desire to collaborate on long term projects. If that's not the case, then you've got bigger problems to figure out, which will likely require the skills of a professional therapist.

The solution that you and your wife find will be unique to your circumstances. And frankly, they will be unique to the way you plan on raising your child and your planned division of labor. There's a really good chance that the ideas you have about how to keep up the social exercise with your friends will change drastically after your baby arrives. The important part is that everyone is on the same page and oriented to the concerns before the kid shows up.

Look, there is a significant chance that once you have your kid in your arms, flag football will feel like the least of your concerns. You may be so exhausted in the first months that it makes zero sense to go romp in the park with your buddies. In other words, the issue may solve itself. But it might not. In that case, you need your partner on board and you need to be working as a team. It'll be easier for her to do that if she's not surprised.

Despite the fact that you seem to be a guy who likes his routine, you'll probably have to find some flexibility and take the opportunities to exercise and hang with friends where you can find them. If you have good friends, they'll understand. If your friends are dicks about it, then you might need to find some friends who understand your circumstances. There are tons of new parents groups that you can join with your wife. It might help to hang out with people who are going through similar circumstances. You might even find another dad who is missing his buddies.

Yes, the life you knew is going to be over. But that doesn't mean your life is over. It just means that it has changed. It changed for your parents and it changed for their parents. Go ahead and give them a call. I'm sure they'll tell you the same.

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My Wife Is Pregnant and I'm Not Ready to Be a Father

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My wife just popped. You know that moment where the stomach starts to show and it all gets real? We're there, and everything hit me. It happened way fast and I realized I'm going to be a dad. My life will never be the same.

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Some adverts inform how the parents tell harm of global warming who think future of their children. The people who have information about this topic are very worried. This article give tip to adult for growing up their children better.

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Some adverts inform how the parents tell harm of global warming who think future of their children. The people who have information about this topic are very worried. This article give tip to adult for growing up their children better.

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There is a playbook for how to talk to children following a major tragedy like a mass shooting so that they can start to cope without being traumatized: be honest, no matter how young; don't be too graphic; and emphasize their support networks.

These same rules apply to how we talk to children about the climate crisis. Young activists including 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden dominated news coverage during the U.N. summit and strikes across the world last week, but discussing global warming can be complicated because of the immediate and long-term anxieties surrounding the climate crisis. And kids can be affected even when they aren't direct victims of a weather incident.

"I look at it through two lenses," said pediatrician Samantha Ahdoot, a lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on Global Climate Change and Children's Health. "Through the mental health consequences of extreme weather events, and through the effects of living in a world that is changing and the fear that it invokes in children."

Thanks to decades of research, it is clear now that environmental disasters, like hurricanes and wildfires, contribute to mental health conditions among victims.

"Rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse things tend to increase after you've experienced an event like that," said Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist at The College of Wooster in Ohio, who co-authored a 2017 from the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica 2017 entitled " Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance."

But mainstream media coverage can also mentally stress those who witness these tragedies from afar, in what's known as vicarious psychological trauma.

Here are a few "what to do's" for parents of climate crisis generations, according to a psychologist, a pediatrician and a school counselor, interviewed by the PBS NewsHour.

For a child who has lived through a climate- or weather-related disaster

Since 2014, weather-related disasters have displaced around 100 million people worldwide, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. In the U.S. alone last year, two climate-fueled hurricanes ( Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Florence) and two wildfires ( Woolsey and Camp fires in California), created more than 1 million extreme weather migrants - those who had to move either temporarily or permanently after the disasters.

Ahdoot said she's seen a number of children who were impacted by the recent hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico in her pediatric clinics in Alexandria, Virginia. They are struggling to verbalize the feelings associated with escaping the disasters, she said.

That's likely because extreme weather events can devastate the social foundations of children's mental health and well-being. Children lose family members, their homes or schools, or even access to resources like their doctors. Surviving the fallout of a weather disaster - such as living in a shelter or needing to relocate, even temporarily - can cause significant mental health consequences.

Rising temperatures themselves have also been tied to mental health issues outside of storms and fires, Clayton said. While it's harder to trace, increases in heat have been tied to upticks in aggression and crime, increased suicide and more hospitalizations for mental, behavioral and cognitive disorders. In one study in Australia, researchers found drought - which can be more frequent and more extreme thanks to global warming - was associated with suicide rises among rural farmers.

Clayton and Ahdoot recommended that parents tailor their responses to these kinds of events to fit the age of the child. For infants, they recommend that parents try to save so-called comfort objects - any toy, blanket or other item to which a young child has a special attachment - if it can be done safely.

"If they lost that, maybe get a get them a substitute," Clayton said, because doing so can reinforce social support. Reminding children of these support networks is one of the most crucial steps after a disaster, she added. "Whatever they can be provided with in terms of family or social support will help them."

The stakes are higher the younger a child is, because experiencing early trauma can permanently change the way a person responds to trauma later in life. Early exposure to trauma can make it more difficult to regulate emotional responses and increase a child's chances of depression and PTSD.

If a toddler or elementary-age child asks about what is happening, Clayton recommended speaking frankly because even young children can demonstrate a profound amount of resilience. But don't offer too much detail.

"I would not lie to them, of course, but emphasize that things are gonna be O.K.," Clayton said. "Just say 'Well, sometimes big storms happen and we thought we were ready, but this was worse than we thought. We're going to make sure that we're safe from weather in the future."

Older children can handle a broader explanation of the disaster and its consequences because most are exposed to current events and have some awareness of the issues. Teenagers also do not respond well when adults are not transparent with them and they learn the facts on their own, Clayton said.

"Even teenagers need security so they don't feel like things are completely out of their control," Clayton said.

For a child worried about the Earth's future

A growing number of Ahdoot's pediatric patients are also expressing general unease over the Earth's environmental trajectory. She recalled one teenager who visited her clinic last year after a trip to Germany to visit her mother's family.

"The hotel didn't have air conditioning so she said she spent most of the trip in the house taking baths because that was the only way that they could get cool," Ahdoot said.

Another patient had a similar experience after visiting France this summer during record heat waves. In both cases, the children were exposed to the consequences of a warming world in a way they weren't at home. Those kinds of episodes - especially when contrasted with the knowledge that their parents didn't face the same kind of challenges growing up - can be frightening for kids, Ahdoot said.

Combine those omens with regular news coverage of the climate disasters, Clayton said, and it is easy to comprehend the views of young climate activists toward older generations.

In an effort to prove the severity of the climate crisis and its effect on her generation, Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic to New York to speak during the United Nations General Assembly last week.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean," Thunberg said during her speech at the U.N. Climate Summit in New York City on Monday. "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."

To help minors cope with what they're seeing in popular media, parents and other adults should speak to them at a level that they can understand.

"A high school student in most cases is going to be able to handle more information," said Eric Sparks, assistant director for the American School Counselor Association, whereas with younger students, what you say needs to be more general.

For example, if a young grade schooler exclaims something like, "The world is on fire, so what's the point of doing anything anymore" - as my young nephew did two weekends ago - Clayton said one should correct them in terms they can understand.

"You could say that, 'Our atmosphere is like a blanket and it keeps the Earth warm, which is a good thing. It's just that the blanket is too thick now because of gases we put in the air," Clayton said. "Give them some simple metaphor, so they have a better sense of what's actually happening."

For all age groups, Ahdoot, Clayton and Sparks said parents should avoid defeatism because the world isn't doomed. They also said to emphasize that there is still time to waylay the worst outcomes through environmental actions. A young child, for instance, could be taught how to compost their scraps, the value of growing vegetables or the benefits of switching to reusable water bottles.

"An elementary school child can understand why it's better to walk to their friend's house instead of being driven, or why they can wear a sweater in the house instead of just cranking up the heat," Ahdoot said. "Parents can convince their schools to bring clean energy to their energy supply. They can testify to the town or even to the United Nations."

What if you don't want your child to be exposed to climate stories?

This week, conservative pundits responded to Thunberg's speech at the U.N. Climate Summit with a range of criticism and attacks, including one said that the 16-year-old is instilling "fear in millions of kids around the world."

Such assertions raise the question of whether parents should avoid talking about climate change with their children altogether.

Ahdoot, Clayton and Sparks said that trying to sidestep such discussions is a fruitless task because climate change is an empirical reality - backed by decades of study.

"We don't need to hide reality from them," Ahdoot said. But "we need to be cautious about how we presented it to them."

Graphic media coverage of a disaster - like a mass shooting - can have deleterious mental effects. But trying to conceal the truth can also generate fear, harm a child's ability to trust and skew their objectivity. Along those lines, Clayton and Ahdoot said it's important to provide minors with reliable sources of climate information.

"Children get worried when they feel like something's being kept from them because that means the problem is so bad that people aren't talking about it," Clayton said. "If you think one of your parents is sick and nobody's telling you about it, then you really start to get scared."

As they can with sexual education, parents can always opt out of pieces of climate curriculum. But there's no real way to insulate students from the climate conversation.

"A school's responsibility is to build a place where students can have and share differing viewpoints," Sparks said. "It's probably unrealistic to think that a student could be completely shielded from the climate issue."

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How to talk to your kids about climate change

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There is a playbook for how to talk to children following a major tragedy like a mass shooting so that they can start to cope without being traumatized: be honest, no matter how young; don't be too graphic; and emphasize their support networks. These same rules apply to how we talk to children about the climate crisis.

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Did you hear ever a F.E.T ?
It ıs so interesting subject. Many people believe this strange and crazy opinion. OK, why ?
Firstly, our modern age's people

don't trust each other. People it was poisoned. The leader system which controls the every media, education, politics

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I have an op-ed in today's Globe and Mail, " Why do people believe the Earth is flat?" wherein I connect the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle liners to the opioid epidemic.

In a world where official processes are understood to be corruptible and thus increasingly unreliable, we don't just have a difference in what we believe to be true, but in how we believe we know whether something is true or not. Without an official, neutral, legitimate procedure for rooting out truth -- the rule of law -- we're left just trusting experts who "sound right to us."

Big Tech has a role to play here, but it's not in automated brainwashing through machine learning: rather, it's in the ability for conspiracy peddlers to find people who are ripe for their version of the truth, and in the ability of converts to find one another and create communities that make them resilient against social pressure to abandon their conspiracies.

Fighting conspiracies, then, is ultimately about fighting the corruption that makes them plausible -- not merely correcting the beliefs of people who have come under their sway.

They say that ad-driven companies such as Google and Facebook threw so much R&D at using data-mining to persuade people to buy refrigerators, subprime loans and fidget-spinners that they accidentally figured out how to rob us of our free will. These systems put our online history through a battery of psychological tests, automatically pick an approach that will convince us, then bombard us with an increasingly extreme, increasingly tailored series of pitches until we're convinced that creeping sharia and George Soros are coming for our children.

This belief is rooted in a deep and completely justified mistrust of the Big Tech companies, which have proven themselves liars time and again on matters of taxation, labour policy, complicity in state surveillance and oppression, and privacy practices.

But this well-founded skepticism is switched off when it comes to evaluating Big Tech's self-serving claims about the efficacy of its products. Exhibit A for the Mind-Control Ray theory of conspiratorial thinking is the companies' own sales literature, wherein they boast to potential customers about the devastating impact of their products, which, they say, are every bit as terrific as the critics fear they are.

Why do people believe the Earth is flat? [Cory Doctorow/The Globe and Mail]

When a corporation is investigated for malfeasance -- cheating or hurting customers or workers, say -- the DoJ sometimes allows it to enter in a deferred prosecution agreement (DPAs) or a non-prosecution agreement (NPAs): the company admits wrongdoing, pays a fine, and promises not to do it again; after 2-3 years of good conduct, the [...]

Anna Merlan has made a distinguished journalistic career out of covering conspiracy theories, particularly far-right ones, for Gizmodo Media; her book-length account of conspiratorial thinking, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, is a superb tour not just through the conspiracies that have taken hold in American public discourse, but [...]

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Why do people believe the Earth is flat?

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I have an op-ed in today's Globe and Mail, "Why do people believe the Earth is flat?" wherein I connect the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle...

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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things:Mirror

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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things:Mirror

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This article about the history of which wee see ourselves every time we look at it ,mirrors.This article talk about how mirror is invented, who invented and its development process.

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In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.
Previously: the grisly sides of perfume, angora, and pearls.
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Eight thousand years ago, a craftsperson sat inside their mud-brick house in Turkey and rubbed a piece of obsidian with their hands, smoothing the surface carefully, polishing the stone until it shone darkly in the hot sun, burning a piece of volcanic rock into something miraculous. In this piece of black stone, they could see their reflection, surrounded by the walls of their dwelling, built on the bones of their ancestors, the painted plaster walls rendered colorless by the obsidian's deep gloss. But they weren't done. They took white plaster and applied it to one side of this stone disk in a conical shape. Eventually this stone came to rest in a grave, alongside a woman from the early agricultural society. There it stayed until archeologists found it in the 1960s. It is, as far as we know, one of humankind's first mirrors.

According to archeologist Ian Hodder, who oversees the hilly, 34-acre archeological site at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, there have been "five or six" obsidian mirrors found there, all located in the northeast corners of tombs belonging to women. "They are beautiful things," he says of the Neolithic mirrors. "Nobody really expected there would be things like mirrors in those early days. These are the first sort of settlements after people have been living as hunters and gathers. In many ways, these were quite simple societies, so it is odd." Yet these early proto-urban people clearly wanted to look at themselves - or at something. It's possible they were used in rituals by shamans or other religious figures. "One of the most commonly suggested for the time period is that they're something to do with predicting the future or understanding the spirit world through reading images in the mirrors," says Hodder. We just don't know. We'll probably never know.

With a name taken from the Latin mirare and mirari ("to look at" and "to wonder at, admire," respectively), a mirror can be any reflective surface created for the purpose of seeing oneself. They can be made of stone, metal, glass, plastic, or even water. Throughout history, we've constructed mirrors from all those substances, to a varying degree of efficacy, for various reasons. Some were used as ceremonial items, others were used to repel malevolent spirits, and still others were used for the simple pleasure of examining one's countenance.

But no matter what they're made of, mirrors are objects of mystery, obsession, and fear. They're simple yet complex. They've been used for purposes both sacred and profane. We love them, yet we're loath to admit it. Even their creation has been shrouded in secrecy and aided by willful ignorance and sometimes outright violence; mirror making was once a toxic affair, and its secrets were guarded by laws and punishable by death. Long reserved for the wealthy few, we now walk around with compact mirrors in our pockets, and even if you left yours at home, there's always a cell phone screen that can function, if you want it to, if the light is right, as a mirror.

Often, when objects become mundane, they lose some of their luster. But mirrors retain their ability to hold our attention, and they retain a certain amount of power over us. We're still interested in seeing our reflections, and we still want to know what the future holds. Yet we've lost the reverence we once had for them. We no longer bury our dead with hand mirrors, and we don't often speak of the control a mirror can exert over a person. Instead, we allow this force to alter our perceptions, to diminish our happiness, while denying its power. Looking in a mirror is just something you do - just something women do. We're so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking. We've forgotten how to face our reflections not with judgment or fear, but with a sense of joyful discovery, a sense of hope. We can see our reflections anywhere, yet still face the mirror with a certain amount of suspicion, as though desiring knowledge of how the world sees you is somehow wrong.

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Some scientists have theorized that our attraction to reflections has an evolutionary purpose. Supposedly, we like gemstones that sparkle and objects that reflect because they remind us of life-giving water. This is just one theory, but I find it interesting. It explains, in part, the seemingly global allure of glitter, polished metals, and atoms arranged in a crystalline structure. Even infants are more likely to shower attention on shiny plates (which they show by picking them up and licking them) than on dull ones, according to a 2003 study from UC Davis. Even cultures that never had to compete with their neighbors for resources hoarded gold and gems, although they had no need to accumulate symbols of wealth or worry about trading. For these people, gold should have been just another rock. But it wasn't, because we like shiny things.

We also like seeing images of ourselves, and we have for eons. It's impossible to know exactly when humans first discovered our reflections, though many have tried to imagine the moment. In his 2003 book Mirror, Mirror, Mark Pendergrast paints a wavering, dreamlike picture of a hominid drinking from a pool of water. "The scene: an African savanna after a torrential seasonal rain," he writes. With brow furrowed in curiosity, the unnamed figure expresses puzzlement at the "fellow creature looking back at him." First, he is cautious. "Is it an enemy?" he wonders. Then, he is playful. The man winks at himself, touches his nose, and bares his teeth. "He understands, on one level, at least," Pendergrast concludes. "They are the same, yet they are different."

Looking in a mirror is just something you do - just something women do. We're so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking.

Sure, this could have happened. It could have happened a million times over with various early hominids, figures that looked surprisingly like us. Despite our many advancements, the "human bodily form has not altered appreciably in 100,000 years," explained paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to Pendergrast. "The Cro-Magnon people are us - by both bodily anatomy and parietal art - not some stooped and grunting ancestor." One by one, they could have slowly fallen in love with their reflections, as the Greeks imagined in the story of Narcissus. They could have drowned gazing into their own eyes, so dark, so mysterious.

Or they could have acted like dolphins do, or elephants, or magpies. According to animal psychologist Diana Reiss, animals go through several stages of mirror self-recognition. Animals first try to look behind the mirror, and then often go through a "Groucho stage," where they repeat odd movements to figure out the relationship between the motions of their bodies and the reflections. Upon realizing that what they're seeing is, in fact, their own body, many animals begin using the mirror to see previously unobserved parts of themselves.

Maybe rather than falling in love with his twin, Narcissus showed the pool his butt, peering over his beautiful shoulder to get the view from behind. Yet we prefer to think of Narcissus gazing at his lovely face for hours, wasting away (or drowning, depending on your mythological source) because he needs to be punished for his self-love. It's a story with a moral, one that cautions against vanity and beauty. It's also a story about the power of reflection, and we keep telling it because it keeps being relatable. We've all been drawn to our own reflection. We've all felt fascinated by the image of our own selves, captured in silver or water or glass. The way we look matters, whether we want it to or not: It alters our job and mating prospects, contributes to our quality of life. We value different human bodies differently, and the ugly truth is that the ones that fit the prevailing culture's definition of beautiful are evaluated at a higher worth. There's both a power and a survival necessity in seeing yourself the way the world sees you.

Perhaps this is why mirrors have long been associated with magic. If they can let you see something you normally can't - yourself - maybe they can permit you to see other things beyond your vision. Spirits, perhaps, or ghosts, or maybe even visions of the future. Cultures across the globe have, independently of one another, built their own mythologies around reflective surfaces. The Wiccan's Dictionary of Prophecy and Omens features a listing for "catoptromancy," defined as the "art and practice of divination by means of a special lens or magic mirror." According to this text, the ancient Greeks used a mirror to catch the light of the moon, and gazing into it, were able to see visions of the future. (Another kind of divination practiced during the same era involved looking at birds - "ornis," a word that birthed our modern term "omen.") The Roman "blindfolded boys" were special diviners who could call forth images of the future from a thin haze of condensation on the surface of a mirror; one legend has a blindfolded boy predicting the death of Didius Julianus after gazing in a reflective surface, performing incantations, exhaling deeply, and watching as visions of the emperor's untimely end appeared in the moisture. Even the Book of Genesis (believed by some scholars to have been written at a point between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE) contains a reference to what some Biblical scholars believe was a type of reflection-based divination, with Joseph supposedly looking into a silver cup in order to receive divine knowledge from god. (Many have contested this interpretation, arguing that Joseph received his words from god in dreams and that the silver cup was a mere bit of ancient Hebrew theatrics.)

The idea that one could gaze into a mirror to glean paranormal knowledge has stuck with us, reemerging time and again in mythology and folklore. In Mesoamerica, mirrors made of iron ore, obsidian, and magnetite were used for both decorative purposes (adoring ceremonial costumes) and for magical means. In the 1940s, archeologists found seven concave stone mirrors dating back to 600 BCE in a tomb in Mexico, which they believe were worn (there are holes drilled in the top of the circular discs, indicating that they were most likely hung, possibly as a chest ornament) and functioned as both fire-starters and status symbols. For the Olmec people, mirrors were religious items (possibly linked to the sun god) and revered for their ability to bring life-giving flames.

Hundreds of years later, the Mayans would continue this tradition. They buried mirrors with their dead, and contemporary researchers believe that these reflective artifacts were used as "mystical devices" by "elite individuals" for "divinatory scrying." In Manufactured Light: Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm, researcher John J. McGraw follows the lead of anthropologist Marc Blainy in suggesting that the ancient Maya understood reflections as a "window into an alternate dimension," a place where their gods and ancestors both dwelled. This other-land was filled with powerful forces, hidden from sight, yet highly influential. "The scrying tool permits a window into this world and in the uncanny experience of finding a spark in a crystal or a face in the surface of the water, the diviner communicates with these powers," writes McGraw.

Like the Olmec, people in ancient China celebrated the light-enhancing properties of mirrors. For them, mirrors were tools of both physical observation and spiritual protection. The practice of making mirrors from metal began in China around 4,000 years ago. Craftspeople created circular bronze mirrors that were typically polished to a shine on one side, while the other was inscribed with intricate patterns and pictures depicting animals real and imagined, significant plants and flowers, and symbols meaning "sunlight" and "clear and bright." Expensive and adored, these totemic objects were snapped up by the wealthy few. Some were used exactly as we use mirrors now - to apply makeup, to tame the eyebrows, to see yourself clearly. But many were also imbued with magical or religious significance. It was also traditional to cover or remove mirrors from a house after a death had occurred. (Jewish mourners still observe a similar practice during shiva.) Mirrors were a "favorite burial accessory" in China, according to the Australian Museum, because it was believed that they could dispel evil spirits and keep homes (or tombs) safe from crime and misfortune. In Taoism, "monster-revealing" mirrors are a tool to help priests practice magic, explained Ma Jinhong of the Shanghai Museum. "Even now," adds Ying, "Chinese people pay great attention to the placement of mirrors at home, which is fundamental in feng shui. Mirrors are believed to shift the flow of qi (energy flow)."

There's both a power and a survival necessity in seeing yourself they way the world sees you.

Nostradamus, the 16th-century French astrologer and seer whose writings, some purportedly believe, predicted the election of Donald Trump, was famous for his scrying abilities. According to legend, the gout-ridden oracle used either a black mirror or a pool of dark water as one of several methods for gathering occult knowledge. And mirrors still play a role in contemporary Western religions. Spiritualists practice scrying, using the same techniques as ancient people down to the obsidian mirror. Some believe that scrying can allow you to see into alternate dimensions, while others trumpet scrying as a way to unlock the mysteries hidden within oneself or believe that scrying will reveal the future. Like Victorian ladies begging the mirror to reveal their one true love, people all over America are still gazing into mirrors with the hopes that they'll fast-track success.

Today, you can buy a simple polished obsidian mirror online for less than $30. The item is not terribly different from the mirrors of Çatalhöyük. You can also book an appointment to learn how to scry with a black mirror from a New Orleans witch for just $50. If you haven't the pocket money, you can always watch tutorials on YouTube and DIY scry with your own polished black stone. All you need is the desire to look, long and hard, into the depths.

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It may seem surprising that there is still a market for mirrors made of stone now that we have other options. Stone mirrors don't sound as if they would work, yet according to Hodder, the Çatalhöyük mirrors were surprisingly reflective. As part of their research, his team recreated modern versions of the obsidian mirrors. In a matter of hours, they were able to sand, rub, and polish several pieces of obsidian to glossy perfection using the same techniques and materials that they believe the original craftspeople would have likely used. In the bright light, you could see yourself fairly clearly in them - the lines and planes of your face, at least. You could apply makeup, check your teeth, and address any issues of hair placement. Sure, you couldn't see colors, but these mirrors did work.

Of course, when it came to issues of personal maintenance, metal mirrors worked even better, but it took some time for people to figure out how to melt and pour globs of ore. Cultures figured it out at slightly different rates. Copper mirrors in Mesopotamia have been dated back to 4000 BCE, and the ancient Egyptians were making mirrors from the same metal by at least 2000 BCE. These mirrors were lighter in weight than their stone counterparts and could render colors slightly more accurately, though they were by no means perfect. In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, the Roman author described glass mirrors made in Sidon (in modern-day Lebanon) that dated back to the first century, though historians have only been able to find evidence of glass mirrors going as far back as the second century. There's evidence of early glass mirrors in ancient Egypt, Rome, and some in Western Europe, tiny and not very well made. They were lumpy and uneven, and they measured no more than three inches across. The glass wasn't particularly clear, and the process of applying a metal coating to the back hadn't been refined yet.

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Mirror history stalled out at this point. While metal mirrors remained popular among the nobility in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, making glass mirrors either wasn't a very high priority, or craftspeople couldn't figure out the secret to effectively coating large sheets of glass with reflective metal alloys. It also took a few centuries for these early glassblowers to figure out how to create flat sheets of translucent glass - they could produce spheres, but concave or convex mirrors produced distorted reflections, not the perfect, true image the viewer wanted - so metal mirrors remained important signifiers, hoarded by the wealthy and given as gifts during momentous life events. (At the end of the 17th century, one countess supposedly sold a large swathe of fertile land, which "brought in nothing but wheat" for a small mirror, according to social philosopher Saint-Simon who reported on the shocking sale. "Did I not work wonders," she said, "some wheat for this beautiful mirror?")

It wasn't until the 1400s that glass mirrors began to replace metal ones in European households. The first great glass mirrors came from the Italian island of Murano, in the Venetian lagoon. Venice had been the place for glassmakers since the 13th century, and the city drew talent from throughout Europe, all pulled to Venice by the promise of a better life. "The Venetian Republic nurtured them and treated them more like artists than artisans," writes Sabine Melchoir-Bonnet in The Mirror: A History. "It protected and monitored them, and granted them many privileges, such as the right to marry daughters of nobles."

It's not entirely clear who came up with the formula for Venice's famed translucent glass, nor is it known who first applied a mixture of molten metals to the back of the panes to make the first modern mirror. The glassmakers at Murano jealously guarded the tricks of their trade, as did the Venetian government; spilling trade secrets was punishable by death, and if a glassmaker dared to leave Murano, their family was sometimes held hostage in attempts to hasten their return. But even within the reticent community of craftspeople, there was collaboration and experimentation. The mirror makers were always looking for ways to enhance the beauty of their objects, as well as formulas for creating larger and more impressive mirrors. Some added lead to their glass; others embedded glimmering bits of gold leaf within the surface. They lined their mirrors with silver, which had been polished and flattened, or with a tin-mercury amalgam. These materials weren't terribly safe to work with; mercury, in particular, is highly toxic. Workers who inhaled mercury fumes might develop behavioral and personality changes. Their kidneys might fail, their hands might begin to shake. They might begin to experience what is termed in the 2017 publication Occupational and Environmental Health, "pathological shyness, increased excitability, loss of memory, insomnia, and depression ... in severe cases, delirium and hallucination." If you've heard of mad hatters, you know about these symptoms, which were just as prevalent in mirror makers as milliners. And they knew precisely what was causing their pain, yet often lacked the economic mobility to make other choices. In 1713, Bernardino Ramazzini documented the ailments of mirror makers: "Those who make mirrors become palsied and asthmatic from handling mercury. At Venice, on the island called Murano, where huge mirrors are made, you may see these workmen ... scowling at the reflection of their own suffering in their mirrors and cursing the trade they have chosen."

Still, for several centuries Venetian mirrors were considered the height of luxury, so naturally everyone in Paris wanted one. According to Melchoir-Bonnet, a "Venetian mirror, framed in a rich border of silver, was worth more than a painting by Raphael: the mirror cost 8,000 pounds, the painting only 3,000." With mirrors in such high demand, a few well-placed Frenchmen began to scheme. Anyone who could introduce the industry to France would be rewarded richly, both by King Louis XIV and by the mirror-mad populace.

'At Venice, on the island called Murano, where huge mirrors are made, you may see these workmen ... scowling at the reflection of their own suffering in their mirrors and cursing the trade they have chosen.'

In the early 1660s, Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, successfully lured several glassmakers away from Murano to start a competing workshop. But in 1667, they began to die. One got sick with a sudden fever and died after several days of suffering. Another experienced mysterious stomach pains before perishing. They were working with heavy metals and toxic fumes, yet their deaths weren't blamed on the workplace conditions, and fear began to permeate the air and seep into the minds of the surviving mirror makers. Colbert's factory had lost "two of its best artisans, and their deaths paralyzed the factory," writes Melchoir-Bonnet. "An autopsy was requested, and Dunoyer, the head of the factory, wasted no time in voicing his suspicion of the Venetian Republic's hand behind these sudden deaths."

As it turned out, this wasn't the beginning of the mirror-based violence or the end of it. Two Venetian workers had been assassinated in 1547 after they attempted to emigrate to Germany, notes Melchoir-Bonnet, and others had seen family members condemned to work on galleys for their choice to leave the county (a sort of punishment by proxy, though it was more common to fine families or seize their property than to jail them). The volley of violence and intrigue went on for the better part of a decade. Italy sent spies to France, France sent spies to Italy. France attempted to bring over the workers' wives, and Italy tried to thwart this tactic (France won the battle in the end, thanks to the malingering of Venetian women, who were all too ready to pretend illness if it meant they could escape under the cover of darkness to new lives abroad). Both countries suspected the other of murdering glassmakers, who were well compensated but shackled to the whims of mercurial rulers. In 1670, the French royally backed company finally figured out how to blow, flatten, coat, and polish large panes of glass through "a combination of experience and accident," Melchoir-Bonnnet writes. The cat was out of the bag, and Colbert's workers soon began spreading that knowledge to French craftsmen. And in 1684, with the unveiling of Versailles's Hall of Mirrors, it became obvious to everyone that the closely held secrets of mirror making had truly and irrevocably escaped from Murano.

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The Hall of Mirrors is, depending on your aesthetic leaning, either a gaudy, gilded nightmare or a sumptuous tribute to the Sun King. Either way, it feels infinite, thanks to 306 panes of French-made glass (aka Façon de Venise) lining the walls. Now, we use mirrors to brighten small spaces, or to shine light on other, more worthy pieces of art. Then, mirrors were art, as valuable and significant as a marble nudes. But like modern halls of mirrors (which are typically found at carnivals or in fun houses or other places designed to erode your sense of reality) the Hall at Versailles was eerie. Writers of the day remarked on how awkward and uncertain visitors seemed in the dazzling hall. According to Melchoir-Bonnet, some described it as an "architecture of emptiness." "At Versailles," she writes, "the walls have eyes, and the galleries covered in mirrors create a fearsome visibility. ... The mirror substitutes reality with its own symmetrical replica, a theater of reflection and artifice."

The history of mirrors is ugly not just because of the poisonous mercury that lined their backsides, or because of the purported murders that ran like a bloody thread through 17th-century Europe. Though these things are certainly hideous, the slow, quiet suffering caused by our obsession with reflection is even more disturbing.

When mirrors were associated with gods and magic, we had more reverence for the power of the object. When they were nearly priceless, mirrors were recognized for what they were - objects of beauty, objects of emptiness. We still believe in hidden forces and invisible powers, as many readers of The Secret or believers in the Illuminati might attest, but magic itself is relegated to the fringes and mirrors have become simple symbols of vanity. Instead of seeking a deeper self or a connection to ancestors or a link to higher powers, a woman looking in the mirror is commonly understood as seeking one thing: the image of herself. Once hoarded by male kings, mirrors are now seen as primarily feminine items, despite the fact that everyone uses them. Mirrors, when stripped of their magic, become nothing more than shiny surfaces, which makes it even easier to deride women for their mirror-gazing habits. While Hodder isn't able to say exactly what purpose the Çatalhöyük mirrors served in the daily life of the community, he doesn't believe it's an accident that all six were found in women's graves. Archeologists also found evidence of early maquillage in the same houses, "little shells full of ochre, evidence of face make-up stuff." It's possible they were using these obsidian mirrors to look at their faces, to examine their eyes and lips while they painted them with blue and red pigments drawn from the earth.

This isn't exactly groundbreaking - any student of art history will stumble across hundreds images of women gazing lovingly into mirrors. Titian, Degas, Courbet, and Manet and likely a thousand other painters have used their skills to show feminine bodies, doubled in a silvered surface. Some (Titian, Hans Memling, Auguste Toulmouche) have even gone so far as to title their pieces Vanity or Allegory of Vanity (Antonio de Pereda) failing to see the significance of mirror gazing for women; it was (and still is) a survival technique. In reality, a woman at the mirror is practicing. She's seeing herself how men see her, how society sees her. She's assessing her value and figuring out how to enhance her worth, her power.

While these dude painters were creating lovely paintings of supposedly shallow objects, many male artists were also using the mirror in their compositions to show themselves, to reveal the creator behind the piece. In the Arnolfini Portrait, Jan Van Eyck uses the domed mirror to showcase his skill, depicting two witnesses in miniature (one of whom may be the painter himself), alongside a note that says, " Jan Van Eyck was here 1434." Diego Velázquez pulled the same move in La Meninas ("The Ladies in Waiting"). These painters used mirrors to cheekily assert themselves into a scene while also showing their technical prowess. Yet that same object, when paired with a woman's body, takes on a sort of belittling power. Art critic John Berger once famously wrote, "You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure." Whether she's the goddess of love or an anonymous model, women aren't shown working in their mirrored reflections, like male artists often were, but simply looking. The two subjects (reflections and women) have been linked so frequently, and depicted with such scorn, it's almost hardwired into our collective consciousness. (A recent 2015 Google event for women entrepreneurs rather thoughtlessly included a compact mirror in its swag bag, an act that some attendees considered "paternalistic" and "sexist.")

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In contemporary culture, there has been some motion toward rewriting the visual symbolism and reclaiming the act of looking in the mirror, primarily though embracing and supporting the art and power of makeup. Young YouTubers and Instagram celebrities frequently show themselves gazing into mirrors, carefully applying winged eyeliner, rainbow eye shadow, ombre lips, or mermaid makeup. For them, the mirror is a necessity, and their makeup isn't a way to conceal so-called "flaws," but rather an income-generating art form. Unlike the artists of old, who used their mirrors to more realistically depict the human face, these artists are using mirrors to transform the self into whimsical, fantastical creations.

Contemporary artists, too, recognize the potential inherent in a mirror. Photographer Michele Bisaillon has adopted the mirror as a primary tool in her creative process, composing pastel-hued images that show a single sliver of her body reflected in various small mirrors. She distributes these images through Instagram, for social media is a place where mirrors are less taboo, less restricted than in other realms. According to Dazed Digital, Bisaillon owns roughly 50 mirrors, which she uses "like telescopes. They're windows into other worlds for me."

While Bisaillon purchases mirrors to use as props in her surrealist compositions, other artists have reframed the mirror, both literally and figuratively. As part of a show in 2015, Michele Pred created a series of small pink hand mirrors (with the handle shaped like the Venus symbol) called Reflections. Each mirror was etched with a different word, including EQUALITY, FEMINIST, and POWERFUL. Similar in form but more elaborate in structure are ceramist Jen Dwyer's intricate porcelain clay objects. Dwyer builds elaborate Rococo-style mirrors and pairs them with symbols from antiquity, which she feels offer an "interesting way to represent our patriarchy." She told Architectural Digest that her pale pink and baby blue pieces are designed to play with the idea of the "female gaze," a term used to refer to the perspective brought to any project by a female creator. "I also wanted my audience to have a wider range of self-identification and representation, so the intention of the mirror is to have my audience become the body represented," she explained.

In her efforts to rewire the mirror-femininity circuit, Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos went larger than life, creating an 17-foot tall sculpture of a Carnival mask from dozens of gilded baroque-style mirrors. Titled I'll Be Your Mirror (2018), this piece was on view alongside other surreal sculptures, like The Bride (a monumental candelabra made from unused tampons) and Marilyn (a huge high heel made out of stainless steel pots and pans) as part of a 2018 show at the Guggenheim Bilbao. The pieces are all sort of grotesque, made uncanny by their excessive size and repurposing of everyday elements. Instead of being passive, Vasconcelos's mirrors are confrontational and highly public, and by juxtaposing mirrors with a mask, they remind us how little information a mirror actually provides. It shows a tiny portion of a person, a very small part of the whole - and even that tiny part may be just an illusion, a trick of the light. A mask, created for public consumption, revealing only what the wearer wants to reveal.

A theme that runs through all these different artworks is the fragmentary nature of reflection. Mirrors, even full-length mirrors, only show a part of the story. In some ways, mirrors are like photographs; it's easy to mistake what we see in them as the truth. And like photographs, mirrors have been used to create false realities, to trick people into believing in ghosts and spirits. We act as though what we see in the mirror is complete - a self fully formed and rendered truly. But the mirror is only capable of showing what others see. Mirrors reinforce the idea that a person's value lies on the outside of their body, that it's possible to learn our value by examining (and altering) our appearance. Mirrors remind us of the significance of our looks, and even though it may feel good to collect likes and compliments on a selfie, it still reinforces a system in which some physical features are more valuable than others. I know this logically, yet I am not exempt from the desire to be granted a market price, to be visually appraised by relative strangers and found acceptable, attractive, worthy. I look at my face in a mirror and I don't see myself - I see how others might see me, how others might know me, want me. Sometimes, I find myself substituting a camera for a mirror. I turn my iPhone toward my face and use its small screen to check my teeth before a meeting. In the screen, I am flattened and compressed, smaller than myself. I glean information from this image, but I can also get lost in it, or overwhelmed by it.

Stripped of magic and removed from scenes of worship, the image of the public-facing self is becoming even flatter and more compressed, and the space between the private person and the public image is narrowing. There's something claustrophobic about this. Everything is visible, but nothing really matters. We know the mirror is a trick and a trap, but we also know it's a tool to succeed in a system that is broken, a world that assigns value arbitrarily and penalizes those who can't adequately perform or conform. Perhaps that's the ugliest thing about mirrors. They reveal more about society than they do about individuals, and what they show isn't always attractive.

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Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She's also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Matt Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors

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In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with. Previously: the grisly sides of perfume, angora, and pearls.

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This article about Sadio Mane's professional and personal life. Sadio Mane is a football player who plays in Liverpool and Senegal national team. He is in 27 but already he proved himself. With his team friends Mohammed Salah and Roberto Firmino, they are unstoppable.

HASAN MERT KAPLAN

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Sadio Mane is a Senegalese professional footballer who plays as a winger for Premier League club Liverpool and the Senegal national team. He belonged to a small village of Bambali, and in 2002 when his country's footballers performed at their peak at the World stage, he decided to become a footballer.

He made his debut with French club Metz after which he joined an Australian club Red Bull Salzburg, where he led the team to lift the Austrian Bundesliga as well as the Austrian Cup. Moving ahead in his career, he was signed by English Premier League Southampton. His impressive performances for The Saints, made him attract from clubs all over and he became the most expensive African player of that time by signing a contract with Liverpool for 34 million euros in 2016.

He has also played for the Senegalese National team, leading them to quarterfinals in 2012 Olympic tournament. After missing out on the 2014 World Cup, Sadio Mane made a major contribution at the 2018 FIFA World Cup for his team. He was also the star performer at the AFCON 2019.

Sadio Mane was born on 10 April, 1992, Sedhiou small village of Bambali, Senegal, in a very poor family. He lived with his uncle because his house was small and he had too many brothers and sisters. This also forced the Sengalese and his family to sometimes sleep empty stomach. Sadio picked up interest in football at a young age of 2, and to make Sadio a professional footballer, the family sold all their crops. He worked hard and in 90 appearances in local football, he scored 131 goals, after which people started coming out to help him and his family to achieve his dream. At the age of 15, he was playing professional football in France

Sadio Mane Personal Life
Sadio Mane is one of the simplest footballers in the world. He is a Muslim devotee, who lives with his siblings and parents. S adio is a very focussed and committed football player, who has managed to keep curtains on his personal life. Sadio was rumoured to have a girlfriend, and was even rumoured to be dating journalist Melissa Reddy, but has preferred to keep himself away from all these talks and is still single.

Sadio is usually seen alone at public events, though he talks about his people and relatives in Senegal, a lot.

Sadio is a known philanthropist. Who actively involves himself in charity work and other community engagement and development initiatives. Sadio recently donated €270,000 to build a school in his hometown, Bambali in Senegal. He has also built a hospital for his people, and contributes 50,000 CFA Francs to different families in his town every month. To promote the game, he also contributed to construction of a stadium in his hometown.

Sadio Mane Professional Life
Just at the age of 15, he started playing professional football with Metz of France, where he played his 1st match as a substitute for Kevin Diaz in the 75th minute against Bastia in Ligue 2. On Aug 13, 2012, he was transferred to the Austrian team Red Bull Salzburg. Under his leadership, the team went on to win the Austrian Bundesliga. In 2014, he signed a four-year contract with Southampton. Liverpool then singed Mane for 34 million euros in 2016, making him the most expensive African player then. He is now the second most expensive African player behind teammate Mohammad Salah.

He represented Senegal at the Olympic tournament and was one of the key members of the team at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, and the AFCON 2019 in Egypt.

Red Bull Salzburg

Liverpool

Senegal

Sadio Mane Personal Details
Name: Sadio Mane
Nationality: Senegalese
Birth: 10th April 1992
Sun Sign: Aries
Age: 27
Playing Position: Winger

Physical Measurements
Height: 5ft 9in
Weight: 69kg
Hair Colour: Black
Eye Colour: Dark Brown
Chest: 40 in or 102 cm
Biceps: 14.5 in or 37 cm
Waist - 30 in or 76 cm

Sadio Mane Net Worth
Sadio Mane's Net Worth is estimated to be 8 Million dollars. He earns a salary of 6.5 million dollars and he has a mansion worth 2.5 million dollars.

Sadio Mane Controversy
Ex-Liverpool midfielder Danny Muprhy labelled Sadio Mane a cheat for his contentious display against Crystal Palace. " I thought the referee got this right. There was contact. But the delay in going down meant for me it was a dive and a yellow card."

" I still think that's cheating and that's a dive and a yellow card."

Sadio Mane defended himself and claimed, " Honestly, I was thinking he was going to give a penalty."

" He didn't give it but I was not focused on that because it's part of what can happen. I could have been lucky but it's part of football. I was doing my best and in the end I scored a goal.

Social Media Profiles
Sadio Mane Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SadioManeLFC10/
Sadio Mane Twitter: @10SadioMane
Sadio Mane Instagram: @sadiomaneofficiel

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Sadio Mane Biography: Age, Height, Career, Facts and Net Worth

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Sadio Mane is a Senegalese professional footballer who plays as a winger for Premier League club Liverpool and the Senegal national team. He belonged to a small village of Bambali, and in 2002 when his country's footballers performed at their peak at the World stage, he decided to become a footballer.

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Poland lost %17 of their people during ww2, mostly during conquer of Warsaw and the great Warsaw upring by Nazis and Soviet army and thats why Poland demands compensation from Germany for the terrible losses

Rise up and hear the call
History calling to you, 'Warszawo, walcz!'' ( "Warsaw, Fight!")

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As world leaders head to Warsaw this weekend to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of World War Two, Poland has once again demanded compensation from Germany for the terrible losses it inflicted on the Polish nation during the conflict.

"We have lost six million people, many more than any other country that has received vast reparations. It is not fair. It cannot be this way," Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in an interview with German media.

A Polish parliamentary committee is still assessing the amount of compensation but it is likely to be more than a 1947 estimate by Poland's communist regime that set the country's wartime losses at $850bn (£700bn; €765bn) at current value.

"There is a lot to be analysed. The Germans razed to the ground over a thousand Polish villages. We will accurately determine the sum that we will demand," he added.

How the war began

At dawn on 1 September, 1939, Germany bombed the Polish city of Wielun, a town with no military significance. The aim was to sow terror among the civilian population.

Hundreds were killed, buildings were flattened and the remaining population fled.

Two days after the invasion, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Two weeks later, Poland suffered a second invasion, this time from the Soviet Union in the east.

It is not widely known but Polish casualties during the bombing of Warsaw by the Luftwaffe in 1939 were about the same as those suffered by the Germans in the British bombing of Dresden in 1945, when up to 25,000 died.

The German invasion of Poland heralded the start of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which the Germans killed millions of Polish citizens.

Estimates vary, but more than five million Polish citizens were killed during the war, perhaps as much as 17% of the population, including up to three million Polish Jews murdered by the Germans in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust year by year

Five states remember victims of WW2 'misery' pact

Polish government wins standoff over WW2 museum

After the failed 1944 uprising by Poland's underground Home Army against the German occupiers in Warsaw, in which more Poles were killed than Japanese during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hitler gave orders for the Polish capital to be destroyed.

When the Red Army drove out the German occupiers from Warsaw in 1945, Stalin installed a compliant communist regime in Poland, which endured until 1989.

Have Poles received reparations?

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed that German reparations to Poland should be made via the Soviet Union in the form of materials, infrastructure and food rather than cash.

Governing party MP Arkadiusz Mularczyk said his parliamentary committee was estimating the value of the reparations made to Poland after the war. "Those reparations were not adequate to our losses. It was a very, very small amount," he told the BBC.

"There are still old Polish people who have never received one euro in compensation and they feel very nervous. They are angry that Jewish people get compensation but the Poles get nothing," he added.

According to a 2018 German-Polish opinion poll, 46% of Poles supported demands for reparations whilst 76% of Germans opposed the claims.

Mr Mularczyk said the commission should present its report following Poland's parliamentary elections in October. The next step, he hopes, will be a discussion with Berlin about the issue.

What Germany says

Poland has yet to officially raise the issue with Germany. Indeed, the German government says the issue of reparations is legally closed.

In 1953, Poland signed up to an agreement between the USSR and communist East Germany stating that reparations would cease from 1954.

Mr Mularczyk said that agreement was not valid because Poland was "not an independent country" then and its prime minister, Boleslaw Bierut, was a Soviet agent. He said there were no governmental documents that proved Poland had waived its right to reparations.

Dr Agnieszka Lada, an expert on Polish-German relations from a Polish think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, doubts whether Warsaw will ever officially raise the matter with Berlin.

Poland avoids old property claims

Germany eases citizenship for WW2 refugee families

Russia warns Poland over WW2 memorials

"Germany recognises that morally Poland has the right to ask for reparations but it also is aware that this is a domestic game played by the government for its own voters," she told the BBC.

Indeed Mr Mularczyk acknowledges that raising the reparations issue is not only about compensation.

It also addresses the government's concerns that when the world's media inaccurately write about "Polish death camps" they are trying to rewrite the history of the period.

"This discussion about reparations is important for us because when objective journalists write about the Second World War they write about who the aggressor was and who were the victims," he said.

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Poland still counts losses from WW2 invasion

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As world leaders head to Warsaw this weekend to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of World War Two, Poland has once again demanded compensation from Germany for the terrible losses it inflicted on the Polish nation during the conflict. "We have lost six million people, many more than any other country that has received vast reparations.

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A second survey found that of 383 adults replicated the first, but added a section where participants had to read vignettes about children who were switched at birth from parents with one learning style to parents with another learning style.

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The idea that certain children learn better visually while others learn more effectively kinesthetically has clear appeal. It explains why some kids thrive in certain academic settings, providing a convenient excuse for poor performance as well as a way to couch failure in intellectual individuality. Unfortunately, it's nonsense. Scientists have more or less formed a consensus on the idea of learning styles , which they have labeled one of neuroscience's most pervasive myths . What is harder to explain is why, despite ample evidence to the contrary, parents and educators continue to believe catering to a certain style will help .

Maybe someone needs to draw them a picture.

"The learning style myth has been around for decades. We aren't too sure why it caught on in such a broad way," says psychologist Shaylene Nancekivell, who suspects that part of the appeal of the fallacy is that people are comfortable categorizing others into groups (and largely ignorant about neurology). Believing in learning styles allows for a comfortable sort of siloing. And it all makes sense if you don't actually understand what working memory is or how it, well, works.

"Working memory is the tool in your mind that allows you to hold information in use, say, while you are completing a task," Nancekivell explains. "Learning styles are a myth that suggests that people have a dominant way of learning information that maps onto visual, auditory, or kinesthetic domains."

after has demonstrated that this is not true and that self-reported learning styles do not help people process or retain information. Still, some 80 to 95 percent of adults polled believe in them, educators included. This represents a real problem. shows that when teachers believe in learning styles they divert disproportionate time and energy to framing lessons around them. This leads children to internalize the idea that there are different ways to learn and to start studying in ineffective ways. Teacher certification programs that incorporate learning styles have made the myth even more difficult to dispel by persistently peddling bad science to an audience with good intentions.

Very little work has examined why smart parents who want what's best for their kids continue to believe in learning styles, but Nancekivell has conducted two separate studies on people's learning style views. The first experiment surveyed 393 adults on if they thought people were born with learning styles, if these could change, if they were genetic, and if they predicted career choice or even success. A second survey found that of 383 adults replicated the first, but added a section where participants had to read vignettes about children who were switched at birth from parents with one learning style to parents with another learning style. Participants were asked to predict these children's learning styles.

"Overall, we found that educators were slightly less likely than the general public to believe in the myth. However, they were still highly likely to - around 90 percent," Nancekivell says.

Other results indicated that a majority of participants agreed: People are born with one of two predominant learning styles (visual or kinesthetic); different learning styles used different parts of the brain to learn; these styles are detectable in early childhood; and they predict educational outcomes - none of which, again, is true. However, most people thought that learning styles were not fixed, could be shaped by experience, and were not mutually exclusive. Views on learning styles were not as extreme as Nancekivell thought they might be, but she remains concerned that parents and educators are still wasting time and money tailoring programs to accommodate a phenomenon that isn't real.

Nancekivell hopes her current research and future studies will help parents and teachers focus on resources that actually help kids learn. For as much research that shows learning styles are a not a thing, there are just as many studies that showing that presenting information in multiple ways and teaching with a variety of approaches does help young learners.

"There is nothing wrong with parents encouraging children's strengths," Nancekivell says. "But learning styles don't exist, so they can't be a strength."

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The idea that certain children learn better visually while others learn more effectively kinesthetically has clear appeal. It explains why some kids thrive in certain academic settings, providing a convenient excuse for poor performance as well as a way to couch failure in intellectual individuality. Unfortunately, it's nonsense.

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When the Public Feared That Library Books Could Spread Deadly Diseases

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When the Public Feared That Library Books Could Spread Deadly Diseases

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This article explains how people who lived in the 18th century were afraid of catching deadly diseases from library books.

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"The great book scare" created a panic that you could catch an infection just by lending from the library

smithsonian.com

On September 12, 1895, a Nebraskan named Jessie Allan died of tuberculosis. Such deaths were a common occurrence at the turn of the 20th century, but Allan's case of "consumption" reportedly came from an unusual source. She was a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, and thanks to a common fear of the time, people worried that Allan's terminal illness may have come from a book.

"The death of Miss Jessie Allan is doubly sad because of the excellent reputation which her work won for her and the pleasant affection which all librarians who knew her had come to feel for her, and because her death has given rise to a fresh discussion as to the possibility of infection from contagious diseases through library books," the Library Journal, published by the American Library Association, wrote in October of 1895.

Allan's death occurred during what is sometimes called the "great book scare." This scare, now mostly forgotten, was a frantic panic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that contaminated books-particularly ones lent out from libraries-could spread deadly diseases. The panic sprung from "the public understanding of the causes of diseases as germs," says Annika Mann, a professor at Arizona State University and author of Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print.

Librarians worried that Allan's death, which became a focal point of the scare, would dissuade people from borrowing books and lead to a decline in support for public libraries.

"Possibly there is some danger from this source; since the bacillus was discovered danger is found to lurk in places hitherto unsuspected," the Library Journal continues. "But the greater danger, perhaps, comes in over-estimating this source of danger and frightening people into a nervous condition."

* * *

Concerns about spreading disease through the lending of books would have serious impacts on the proliferation and growth of libraries. At a time when support for public libraries was growing nationwide, book-lending institutions faced a major challenge from the disease scare.

Illness was rife in this period in both Britain and the United States. Epidemics including "tuberculosis, smallpox and scarlet fever" were taking "a fearful toll in urban areas," according to scholar Gerald S. Greenberg's 1988 article " Books as Disease Carriers, 1880-1920." For a populace that was already on edge about fatal diseases, the idea of contaminated library books passing from hand to hand became a significant source of anxiety.

Books were viewed as possible vehicles of disease transmission for several reasons. At a time when public libraries were relatively new, it was easy to worry about who had last handled a book and whether they might have been ill. Books that appeared to be benign might conceal diseases that could be unleashed "in the act of opening them," Mann says. People were concerned about health conditions caused by "inhaling book dust," Greenberg writes, and the possibility of "contracting cancer by coming in contact with malignant tissue expectorated upon the pages."

The great book scare reached fever pitch in the summer of 1879, Mann says. That year, a librarian in Chicago named W.F. Poole reported that he had been asked whether books could transmit disease. Upon further investigation, Poole located several doctors who claimed to have knowledge of disease-spreading books. People in England started asking the same question, and concerns about diseased books developed "roughly contemporaneously" in the United States and Britain, Mann says.

A wave of legislation in the United Kingdom sought to attack the problem. Although the Public Health Act of 1875 didn't refer specifically to library books, it did prohibit lending "bedding clothing rags or other things" that had been exposed to infection. The law was updated in 1907 with explicit reference to the dangers of spreading disease via book lending, and those suspected of having an infectious disease were forbidden to borrow, lend or return library books, with fines of up to 40 shillings for such crimes, equivalent to roughly $200 today.

"If any person knows that he is suffering from an infectious disease he shall not take any book or use or cause any book to be taken for his use from any public or circulating library," states Section 59 of Britain's Public Health Acts Amendments Act of 1907.

In the United States, legislation to prevent the spread of epidemics through book lending was left to the states. Across the nation, anxieties were "localized around the institution of the library" and "around the book," Mann says. Librarians were victimized among the growing scare.

In response to the panic, libraries were expected to disinfect books suspected of carrying diseases. Numerous methods were used for disinfecting books, including holding the books in vapor from "carbolic acid crystals heated in an oven" in Sheffield, England, and sterilization via "formaldehyde solution" in Pennsylvania, according to Greenberg. In New York, books were disinfected with steam. A study in Dresden, Germany, "revealed that soiled book pages rubbed with wet fingers yielded many microbes."

An eccentric experimenter named William R. Reinick was concerned about multiple supposed illnesses and deaths from books. To test the danger of contracting disease, Greenberg writes, he exposed 40 guinea pigs to pages from contaminated books. According to Reinick, all 40 of his test subjects died. Elsewhere, experiments involved giving monkeys a drink of milk on a platter of ostensibly contaminated literature, as Mann writes in Reading Contagion.

All these experiments may have been extremely unusual, but they ultimately came to similar conclusions: However slight the risk of infection from a book might be, it couldn't be completely discounted.

* * *

Newspapers also referred to the dangers of disease-spreading books. An early reference in the Chicago Daily Tribune from June 29, 1879, mentions that the chance of contracting diseases from library books is "very small" but could not be ruled out entirely. The November 12, 1886, edition of the Perrysburg Journal in Ohio lists "books" as one of the items to be removed from the rooms of the sick. Eight days later, another Ohio newspaper, The Ohio Democrat, outright declared, "The disease [scarlet fever] has been spread by circulating libraries; picture books having been taken therefrom to amuse the patient, and returned without being disinfected."

As newspapers continued to cover the topic, "the fear intensified," Mann says, leading to "extreme phobia about the book."

By 1900, pressure was starting to mount. In January, Scranton, Pennsylvania, ordered libraries to halt book distribution to prevent the spread of scarlet fever, according to Greenberg. The use of chemicals to sterilize books became more common, even though such practices were also thought to harm the books. But as bad as sterilization was, a worse tactic loomed on the horizon: The Western Massachusetts Library Club recommended that books suspected of carrying diseases "should be burned and not returned to the library."

In Britain as well as the United States, books were incinerated to prevent the spread of disease. Recommendations from doctors that contaminated books be burnt were even featured in the Library Journal, Mann writes in Reading Contagion.

After much tribulation, reason eventually took hold. People began to question whether infection via books was a serious threat or simply an idea that has been spread through public fears. After all, librarians were not reporting higher illness rates as compared to other occupations, according to Greenberg. Librarians began to address the panic directly, "trying to defend the institution," Mann says, their attitude characterized by "a lack of fear."

In New York, political attempts during the spring of 1914 to have books disinfected en masse were roundly defeated after objections from the New York Public Library and a threat of "citywide protest." Elsewhere, the panic began to subside as well. Books that were previously thought to have been infected were lent again without further issue. In Britain, experiment after experiment by doctors and hygiene professors reported next to no chance of contracting a disease from a book. The panic was coming to an end.

The "great book scare" rose from a combination of new theories about infection and a distaste for the concept of public libraries themselves. Many Americans and Britons feared the library because it provided easy access to what they saw as obscene or subversive books, argues Mann. And while fears of disease were distinct from fears of seditious content, "opponents of the public library system" helped stoke the fires of the book scare, Greenberg writes.

Even as the panic subsided, the idea that books could spread disease lingered for some time. As late as February 21, 1913, the Highland Recorder newspaper in Virginia stated that "public library books may scatter scarlet fever." As late as the 1940s, Greenberg writes, medical professionals "in Britain, America and even Japan" were still debating whether books could unleash dormant diseases onto the public.

The perceived danger of public access to reading material, it seems, can take as much of a physical as an intellectual form.

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When the Public Feared That Library Books Could Spread Deadly Diseases

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smithsonian.com On September 12, 1895, a Nebraskan named Jessie Allan died of tuberculosis. Such deaths were a common occurrence at the turn of the 20th century, but Allan's case of "consumption" reportedly came from an unusual source.

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How the separation is hard

2 cusin lost each other but finally after 75 years they togher

The social media now strong more  than any thing its has a people and knowledge more than we think

The cusins lost each other when Nazi german attacked  concentration camps

But after 75 year they found each other on facebook and they meet in Tel Aviv

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By : Emma Rosemurgey On : 28 Sep 2019 16:35
Two Jewish cousins who were separated during the Second World War have been reunited.
A heartwarming video shoes the moment Morris Sana, 87, and Simon Mairowitz, 85, came face-to-face in Tel Aviv, Israel, after decades of believing each other was killed in concentration camps.

They were reunited last Thursday after their relatives realised the childhood friends were still alive after finding them on Facebook.

The cousins were fighting back tears and said they were happy to see each other 75 years later, but it was only Morris who recognised his old family member at first.
Simon later comforted him, telling his cousin:

Good to see you too after all these years. 75 years you waited. It's a long time, but we've got each other now.

Morris, who lives in Israel, and Simon from the UK, were separated after they escaped from Romania in the 1940s with their families when the government was overthrown and the country was forced to ally with Nazi Germany, reports.
The video was posted to Facebook by Morris' granddaughter, Leetal Ofer, who wrote:

This is one of the most moving things I've ever seen and I'd love to share it with you.

My mom recently found some of her long lost cousins on Facebook. To make a long story short...

My grandfather couldn't find his cousin and best friend after the Holocaust and was sure that he was killed at the concentration camps.

She added:

He hasn't seen or heard from his cousin in 75 years. We were able to arrange for the cousins to meet today.

The war tore so many families apart and to bring them together in Israel is so magical.

When World War II broke out in 1939, King Carol II officially adopted a position of neutrality for Romania. However, after the country was overthrown, Romanian troops were responsible for the persecution and massacre of up to 260,000 Jews in Romanian-controlled territories, although the majority of Jews living in Romania survived the horrendous conditions.

Morris and Simon are two of thousands who had no idea what happened to loved ones in the decades following World War II.

Their reunion is one of the most heartwarming thing we'll see this week.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via [email protected]

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Jewish Cousins Who Thought The Other Was Killed By Nazis Reunite After 75 Years

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By : Emma Rosemurgey On : 28 Sep 2019 16:35 Two Jewish cousins who were separated during the Second World War have been reunited. A heartwarming video shoes the moment Morris Sana, 87, and Simon Mairowitz, 85, came face-to-face in Tel Aviv, Israel, after decades of believing each other was killed in concentration camps.