A New Museum Dedicated to Frida Kahlo’s Early Years and Family Life Is Coming to Mexico City The Museo Casa Kahlo will be located beside the popular Museo Frida Kahlo. It will display letters, artworks and mementos that shed light on the Mexican artist’s childhood Frida Kahlo in 1944 Bettmann via Getty Images A new museum dedicated to the early life of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is opening in Mexico City. Located in the city’s historic Coyoacán district, the Museo Casa Kahlo will tell the Mexican painter’s story through letters, toys, artworks and other personal items. “This museum isn’t just about her work—it’s about her world,” Frida Hentschel Romeo, Kahlo’s great-grand-niece, tells Vogue’s Chloe Schama. “It’s about how the people closest to her shaped who she became. And it’s also about the living family—those of us who carry her legacy forward.” The museum will occupy a building known as Casa Roja, a home belonging to the Kahlo family. It’s next door to the already famous Casa Azul, the family home built by Kahlo’s father in 1904. The Museo Frida Kahlo, which occupies Casa Azul, has been open since 1958. Andrew Hasson / Getty Images Born in 1907, Kahlo grew up in Casa Azul and later shared it with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera. She purchased the neighboring red house (also owned by her parents) for her sister Cristina’s family. Four years after Kahlo’s death in 1954, Casa Azul was converted into the popular Museo Frida Kahlo, which displays art and objects from Kahlo’s adult life alongside rotating exhibitions. Casa Roja has remained in the Kahlo family, passed down by Cristina’s descendants. “Cristina was by her side through so much,” Hentschel Romeo tells Vogue. “Traveling with her to New York for her first major exhibition, supporting her through surgeries and recovery.” Frida Kahlo photographed by her father in 1932 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Pain was a constant throughout Kahlo’s life. After sustaining serious injuries from a bus accident at 18, she endured chronic symptoms for the rest of her life. Despite these challenges, Kahlo thrived as an artist, garnering international acclaim for her vibrant, wrenching self-portraits. Some of Kahlo’s most famous paintings are painful depictions of women’s suffering, her own injuries and her turbulent marriage to Rivera, who had countless affairs (including one with Cristina). Casa Roja was eventually passed down to Cristina’s granddaughter, Mara Romeo Kahlo, who is Kahlo’s closest living relative, reports the New York Times’ Robin Pogrebin. Romeo Kahlo volunteered the red house to host the new Museo Casa Kahlo, which will open in late September. Its development is being overseen by Fundación Kahlo, a nonprofit recently established by the Kahlo family, which aims to “preserve Frida’s legacy and promote Mexican, Indigenous and Latin American art and culture on a global scale,” according to its website. “For the first time, the voice of the family will be at the heart of how Frida’s story is told,” Hentschel Romeo tells Vogue. As Romeo Kahlo explains to the Times, “The family was very important for Frida because it was her support.” While Casa Azul focuses on Kahlo’s adult life, the new museum will focus on her early development. Visitors will examine never-before-seen personal artifacts, such as childhood photographs, dolls, letters, jewelry, clothes and a piece of embroidery Kahlo sewed when she was 5. Other highlights include the artist’s only known mural and her first oil painting.Hentschel Romeo tells Vogue that Kahlo showed this painting to her husband, asking him to judge whether she had the talent to be a painter. “It is incredibly moving to see up close,” she adds. “This is a dream long held by our family,” Romeo Kahlo says in a statement. “Frida’s legacy belongs to the world, but it begins here—on this land, in these homes and in the culture that shaped her. Museo Casa Kahlo will allow us to tell new stories, share family secrets, host new voices and build a future that honors her spirit.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

In the centre of the building, a ceremonial room is a calming space that invites community meetings and healing.   TEXT Elsa Lam PHOTOS doublespace photography Fifty years ago, four grandmothers founded the organization Anduhyaun—Ojibwe for “Our Home”—to respond to the needs of the city’s Indigenous women. The organization used a city-owned heritage house in the Annex to offer shelter to women and children suffering from the traumas of violence and homelessness. Last year, they moved to a building designed by LGA Architectural Partners.  The architects took the organization’s name to heart, aiming to provide not just basic shelter, but a place of nurture and grounding. The organization’s long-time executive director, Blanche Meawassige, told the designers that the building needed to feel like it was alive. “From Blanche, we understood that a shelter is a place where rehabilitation—growth and healing—begins,” says architect Brock James, partner at LGA. “Yes, it’s a roof over your head and safety, but it’s also where that spiritual part starts; it has to be about growth and life.” A curved ceiling-to-wall transition brings a unique quality to the bedrooms This thinking shows in the bedrooms, 16 of which are compact, single-occupancy rooms and two of which are designed for families with up to three kids. (Some rooms can also be interconnected, to accommodate larger families or to provide a physical link between friends.) Each room has its own bathroom, a wooden desk, adjustable lighting, and a curved ceiling-to-wall transition that reflects daylight through the space. The curve, says James, “makes the room very ‘here’. It’s only here. It’s not generic.” Curved, tiled walls define the circulation areas on the ground floor Curves recur on the main floor, where seafoam-coloured tiles sweep along flowing walls, adding to the building’s sense of aliveness and alluding to Indigenous teachings about water. The curves lead to a large communal kitchen and a central ceremonial space, currently known as Nookomis, or “grandmother.” The interior of Nookomis, the building’s main ceremonial space Many details illustrate LGA’s commitment to creating specialness with economical means. Nookomis, for instance, is clad with cedar shingles that came in pre-cut profiles. (“It’s just a matter of coming up with a pattern, which I did in my living room during the pandemic,” says James.) The burgundy walls of Nookomis’s interior are made, in part, with a simple foam in a custom colour. (“It’s a straightforward product that’s not good if you were touching it—but up high, controlling the sound, it works.”) A skylight caps the space, like a full moon casting a soft glow from above. Meawassige originally asked for the outside of the building to be anonymous, but later decided that the Indigeneity of the interior should be expressed outside, too. The architects created a design with a similarly elevated attention to detail. They achieved a high level of airtightness in the envelope, and composed a façade made out of standard Vicwest metal, applied in a pattern that ensures that the 300-mm width of the panels would stay intact, with no cuts.   “Good design, an elevated section, beautiful tiles: it’s things like that that makes it feel like somebody cares,” says James. “When I think about aesthetics, we can have lots of stories about them, but I know that it’s communicating that Anduhyaun cares. This is their building, and it’s emoting that they care.”  As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine  The post Our Home, Toronto, Ontario appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Cosmology of Kyoto is a first-person horror exploration game where players navigate a deeply haunted yet surprisingly educational terrain. Originally released in 1993, Cosmology of Kyoto and its disturbing depictions of suffering have since become a cult classic. Roger Ebert, known hater, loved the game so much that he spent weeks playing it. Despite its acclaim, though, the game was a commercial failure and never got a sequel. At least, that’s what many people believed until now. In 2023, a game called TRIPITAKA 玄奘三蔵求法の旅 was listed on Yahoo Japan. The game was sold for $300 to an unknown party who, despite embarking on a bidding war that culminated in hundreds of dollars, didn’t really share anything publicly about it. The transaction was originally noticed by Mark Buckner, who brought it up in a discussion between fans about the original eerie Japanese game. Though diehard aficionados had a suspicion that the Cosmology developers had considered a follow-up, concrete evidence of it was scant. The only apparent mention of a sequel lied in the resumes of two Cosmology producers, Hiroshi Ōnishi and Mori Kōichi. Fans also spotted mention of it in an old website for a 1999 museum exhibition on the Silk Road. Though it was a work of fiction, Cosmology was rooted in the history of 10th century Japan and provided players with an in-game encyclopedia. It would make sense for a potential sequel to have enough an educational focus worthy of a museum exhibition. Despite these rumblings, it was unclear if the game had ever been published, or how far into production it got. Knowledge of the auction prompted video game academic Bruno de Figueiredo to track down the auction winner. The hope was that whoever bought it might share a copy of the game online. After all, up until this point, few knew what this game was and its mere existence lay in doubt. But if it did exist, then it was obviously significant from a historical perspective. Fans would be eager to play it. But getting collectors to share copies of rare games is tricky. If a game is widely accessible, then it’s no longer rare. Holding on to a copy ensures that it retains its aura as a prized possession. Hoarding also means that the value of a game won’t drop — in fact, it might rise. Not all collectors see their possessions as commodities, though. Holding on to a culturally significant game might be motivated by the desire to preserve it for future generations, which is relevant in instances where a copy of a game is still sealed. Uploading a game that you did not develop is also likely to be legally dubious. In this case, the owner declined to share the game in a form that others could play. The collector did however upload an hour’s worth of footage on YouTube. The game was called TRIPITAKA, and though it did not outright classify itself as a sequel, the art style, historical focus, and slightly unnerving vibe placed TRIPITAKA in a similar realm as Cosmology of Kyoto. Fans considered it a spiritual successor. Cosmology itself had been developed with the help of Japanese museums. For some, it was enough to get more of a game they loved. Even if they couldn’t personally control the gameplay, the TRIPITAKA video was lengthy enough to give a sense of what the experience would be like. Others were enraged: Couldn’t the collector see how important this game was? “I cannot understate just how disgusted I am that this piece of culture and art (that I am a huge fan of) isn’t being preserved and spread for the enjoyment of others,” one commenter on YouTube wrote. “Shame on you.” Undeterred by this roadblock, Bruno de Figueiredo continued his pursuit of TRIPITAKA. In 2025, his efforts bore fruit. On X, the expert on obscure Japanese games revealed that he had finally convinced the collector to share the game online after “years of appeals.” Figueiredo has since uploaded a playable ISO of the game online alongside a full three-hour playthrough of a game that had once been considered lost media. Figuerido did not respond to a request for comment. In a blog post, he emphasized the significance of this find by stating that “the importance of this footage could hardly be overstated.” He continued: I am delighted to have played a minor role in the unraveling of this thirty year old mystery, and can hardly contain my enthusiasm, as I now find myself equipped with sufficient information to produce a full post concerning a game about which I could not have written more than a sentence, just last year. Figuerido refers to TRIPITAKA as one of the rarest games ever made, and it’s true inasmuch as there appears to be only one known copy of it. Value and rarity are also fluid concepts that are ultimately determined by interested audiences. At the same time, TRIPITAKA’s fate and availability is shockingly ordinary when you consider how poorly the gaming industry preserves its own history. If the lack of care is evident with significant games that have arguable merit, it’s doubly true for average games. This is how a game with mixed reviews from twenty years ago suddenly starts commanding hundreds of dollars on resale sites; the scarcity happens because nobody felt a game was worth holding on to. “There are many extremely rare (and even lost) games for personal computers which, unlike consoles, don’t have any central control over who can publish a game, or what the minimum number of manufactured units needs to be,” says Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving video games. Cifaldi notes that games in the 80s and 90s in particular, some of which were self-published and never got widespread circulation to begin with, are particularly prone to the type of obscurity that can lead to only a single copy of a game. “I would further suspect that there were many games and multimedia objects from Japan during this era that are just as rare, but we don’t hear about them because of their lack of historical significance in the West,” Cifaldi says. “I would bet good money that if you surveyed the collection at the Game Preservation Society in Japan, you’d come up with dozens of ‘only known copies’ of 1980s microcomputer games.”

Tumor Has ItJun 1, 10:00 AM EDT / by Noor Al-Sibai400 Women Are Suing Pfizer Over Birth Control Shot That Allegedly Gave Them Brain TumorsThe pharmaceutical giant allegedly knew about the risks... but didn't warn patients.Jun 1, 10:00 AM EDT / Noor Al-SibaiImage by Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty / FuturismRx/MedicinesRecent research has linked Pfizer's widely-used Depo-Provera birth control shot to massively increased risk of developing brain tumors — and hundreds of women are suing the pharmaceutical giant over it.According to a press release filed on behalf of the roughly 400 plaintiffs in the class action suit, the lawsuit claims that Pfizer and other companies that made generic versions of the injectable contraceptive knew of the link between the shot and the dangerous tumors, but didn't properly warn users.The suit follows a study published by the British Medical Journal last year that found that people who took the progestin-based shot for a year or more were up to 5.6 times more likely to develop meningioma, a slow-building brain tumor that forms, per the Cleveland Clinic, on the meninges, or layers of tissue that covers the brain and spinal cord.Though Pfizer attached warning labels about meningioma to Depo-Provera sold in Canada in 2015 and the UK, Europe, and South Africa after the 2024 study was published, no such label was deployed in the United States — a failure which according to the lawsuit is "inconsistent [with] global safety standards."In an interview with the website DrugWatch, one of the suit's plaintiffs, who was identified by the initials TC, said that she had been "told how great Depo-Provera was" and decided to start it after an unplanned pregnancy that occurred when she'd taken the since-discontinued birth control pill Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo."I thought it would be more reliable and convenient since I wouldn’t have to take it daily," TC told the site, referencing the four annual injections Depo-Provera requires. "I had no idea it would lead to such serious health problems."After being on the contraceptive shot for three years — and experiencing intense headaches, months-long uterine bleeding, and weight gain — the woman finally consulted her doctor and was diagnosed with meningioma. She's since been undergoing treatment and experienced some relief, but even that experience has been "physically and emotionally draining" because she has to get regular MRIs to monitor the tumor, which likely isn't fatal but still greatly affects her quality of life."It’s a constant worry that the tumor might grow," TC said, "and the appointments feel never-ending."That fear was echoed by others who spoke to the Daily Mail about their meningioma diagnoses after taking Depo-Provera. Unlike TC, Andrea Faulks of Alabama hadn't been on the shots for years when she learned of her brain tumors, which caused her years of anguish.Faulks told the British website that she'd begun taking the medication back in 1993, the year after it was approved by the FDA in the United States. She stopped taking it only a few years later, but spent decades having splitting headaches and experiencing dizziness and tremors. After being dismissed by no fewer than six doctors, the woman finally got an MRI last summer and learned that she had a brain tumor — and is now undergoing radiation to shrink it after all this time."I know this is something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life, as long as I live," Faulks told the Daily Mail.Currently, the class action case against Pfizer on behalf of women like Faulks and TC is in its earliest stages as attorneys representing those hundreds of women with brain tumors start working to make them whole.Even if they receive adequate payouts, however, that money won't take away their suffering, or give them back the years of their life lost to tumors they should have been warned about.Share This ArticleImage by Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty / FuturismRead This Next

In April, Paul Graham, the founder of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, sent a tweet in response to former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman had just bid a public goodbye to GPT-4 on X, and Graham had a follow-up question.  “If you had [GPT-4’s model weights] etched on a piece of metal in the most compressed form,” Graham wrote, referring to the values that determine the model’s behavior, “how big would the piece of metal have to be? This is a mostly serious question. These models are history, and by default digital data evaporates.”  There is no question that OpenAI pulled off something historic with its release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022. It set in motion an AI arms race that has already changed the world in a number of ways and seems poised to have an even greater long-term effect than the short-term disruptions to things like education and employment that we are already beginning to see. How that turns out for humanity is something we are still reckoning with and may be for quite some time. But a pair of recent books both attempt to get their arms around it with accounts of what two leading technology journalists saw at the OpenAI revolution.  In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao tells the story of the company’s rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Meanwhile, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, by the Wall Street Journal’s Keach Hagey, homes in more on Altman’s personal life, from his childhood through the present day, in order to tell the story of OpenAI. Both paint complex pictures and show Altman in particular as a brilliantly effective yet deeply flawed creature of Silicon Valley—someone capable of always getting what he wants, but often by manipulating others.  Hao, who was formerly a reporter with MIT Technology Review, began reporting on OpenAI while at this publication and remains an occasional contributor. One chapter of her book grew directly out of that reporting. And in fact, as Hao says in the acknowledgments of Empire of AI, some of her reporting for MIT Technology Review, a series on AI colonialism, “laid the groundwork for the thesis and, ultimately, the title of this book.” So you can take this as a kind of disclaimer that we are predisposed to look favorably on Hao’s work.  With that said, Empire of AI is a powerful work, bristling not only with great reporting but also with big ideas. This comes across in service to two main themes.  The first is simple: It is the story of ambition overriding ethics. The history of OpenAI as Hao tells it (and as Hagey does too) is very much a tale of a company that was founded on the idealistic desire to create a safety-focused artificial general intelligence but instead became more interested in winning. This is a story we’ve seen many times before in Big Tech. See Theranos, which was going to make diagnostics easier, or Uber, which was founded to break the cartel of “Big Taxi.” But the closest analogue might be Google, which went from “Don’t be evil” to (at least in the eyes of the courts) illegal monopolist. For that matter, consider how Google went from holding off on releasing its language model as a consumer product out of an abundance of caution to rushing a chatbot out the door to catch up with and beat OpenAI. In Silicon Valley, no matter what one’s original intent, it always comes back to winning.   The second theme is more complex and forms the book’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. The idea is that the large AI companies act like traditional empires, siphoning wealth from the bottom rungs of society in the forms of labor, creative works, raw materials, and the like to fuel their ambition and enrich those at the top of the ladder. “I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires,” she writes. “During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment.” She goes on to chronicle her own growing disillusionment with the industry. “With increasing clarity,” she writes, “I realized that the very revolution promising to bring a better future was instead, for people on the margins of society, reviving the darkest remnants of the past.”  To document this, Hao steps away from her desk and goes out into the world to see the effects of this empire as it sprawls across the planet. She travels to Colombia to meet with data labelers tasked with teaching AI what various images show, one of whom she describes sprinting back to her apartment for the chance to make a few dollars. She documents how workers in Kenya who performed data-labeling content moderation for OpenAI came away traumatized by seeing so much disturbing material. In Chile she documents how the industry extracts precious resources—water, power, copper, lithium—to build out data centers.  She lands on the ways people are pushing back against the empire of AI across the world. Hao draws lessons from New Zealand, where Maori people are attempting to save their language using a small language model of their own making. Trained on volunteers’ voice recordings and running on just two graphics processing units, or GPUs, rather than the thousands employed by the likes of OpenAI, it’s meant to benefit the community, not exploit it.  Hao writes that she is not against AI. Rather: “What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from—indeed will ever emerge from—a vision of the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project … [The New Zealand model] shows us another way. It imagines how AI could be exactly the opposite. Models can be small and task-specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices and the all-consuming extractivism of producing and running massive supercomputers.”  Hagey’s book is more squarely focused on Altman’s ambition, which she traces back to his childhood. Yet interestingly, she also  zeroes in on the OpenAI CEO’s attempt to create an empire. Indeed, “Altman’s departure from YC had not slowed his civilization-building ambitions,” Hagey writes. She goes on to chronicle how Altman, who had previously mulled a run for governor of California, set up experiments with income distribution via Tools for Humanity, the parent company of Worldcoin. She quotes Altman saying of it, “I thought it would be interesting to see … just how far technology could accomplish some of the goals that used to be done by nation-states.”  Overall, The Optimist is the more straightforward business biography of the two. Hagey has packed it full with scoops and insights and behind-the-scenes intrigue. It is immensely readable as a result, especially in the second half, when OpenAI really takes over the story. Hagey also seems to have been given far more access to Altman and his inner circles, personal and professional, than Hao did, and that allows for a fuller telling of the CEO’s story in places. For example, both writers cover the tragic story of Altman’s sister Annie, her estrangement from the family, and her accusations in particular about suffering sexual abuse at the hands of Sam (something he and the rest of the Altman family vehemently deny). Hagey’s telling provides a more nuanced picture of the situation, with more insight into family dynamics.  Hagey concludes by describing Altman’s reckoning with his role in the long arc of human history and what it will mean to create a “superintelligence.” His place in that sweep is something that clearly has consumed the CEO’s thoughts. When Paul Graham asked about preserving GPT-4, for example, Altman had a response at the ready. He replied that the company had already considered this, and that the sheet of metal would need to be 100 meters square.

Women weren’t allowed to officially serve in combat jobs when Emelie Vanasse started her ROTC program at George Washington University. Instead, she used her biology degree to serve as a medical officer — but it still bothered Vanasse to be shut out of something just because she was a woman. “I always felt like, who really has the audacity to tell me that I can’t be in combat arms? I’m resilient, I am tough, I can make decisions in stressful environments,” Vanasse said.By 2015, the Obama administration opened all combat jobs to women, despite a plea from senior leaders in the Marine Corps to keep certain frontline units male only. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters that, “We cannot afford to cut ourselves off from half the country’s talents and skills.”The policy change meant that women could attend Ranger school, the training ground for the Army Rangers, an elite special operations infantry unit. When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to graduate from the school in 2015, Vanasse taped their photos to her desk and swore she would be next, no matter what it took. She went on to become one of the first women to serve as an Army infantry officer and graduated from Ranger school in 2017. After the Pentagon integrated women into combat jobs, the services developed specific fitness standards for jobs like infantry and armor with equal standards for men and women. Special operations and other highly specialized units require additional qualification courses that are also gender-neutral. To continue past the first day of Ranger school, candidates must pass the Ranger Physical Fitness test, for which there is only one standard. Only the semi-annual fitness tests that service members take, which vary by branch, are scaled for age and gender.Despite that, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to insist that the standards were lowered for combat roles. In a podcast interview in November, Hegseth said, “We’ve changed the standards in putting [women in combat], which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit.” (Despite Hegseth’s remark, many women worked alongside male infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing the same dangerous conditions.)In the same interview, Hegseth said that he didn’t believe women should serve in combat roles.In March, Hegseth ordered the military services to make the basic fitness standards for all combat jobs gender-neutral. The Army is the first service to comply: Beginning June 1, most combat specialties will require women to meet the male standard for basic physical fitness, something most women serving in active-duty combat roles are already able to do.Vanasse told Noel King on Today, Explained what it was like to attend Ranger School at a time when some men didn’t want to see a woman in the ranks. What is Ranger School?I went to Ranger School on January 1, 2017. I woke up at 3 am that day in Fort Benning, Georgia, shaved my head, a quarter-inch all the way around, just like the men. Took my last hot shower, choked down some French toast, and then I drove to Camp Rogers, and I remember being very acutely aware of the pain that the school would inflict, both physically and mentally. I was also very aware that there was kind of half of this population of objective graders that just kind of hated my guts for even showing up. They hated you for showing up because you’re a woman?Back in 2016 and 2017, it was so new to have women in Ranger School. I used to think, I don’t have to just be good, I have to be lucky. I have to get a grader who is willing to let a woman pass. I had dark times at that school. I tasted real failure. I sat under a poncho in torrential rain and I shivered so hard my whole body cramped. I put on a ruck that weighed 130 pounds and I crawled up a mountain on my hands and knees. I hallucinated a donut shop in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains and I cried one morning when someone told me I had to get out of my sleeping bag. But I think all of those experiences are quintessential Ranger School experiences. They’re what everyone goes through there. And I think the point of the school is that failure, that suffering, it’s not inherently bad, right? In a way, I like to think Ranger School was the most simplistic form of gender integration that ever could have happened because if I was contributing to the team, there was no individual out there that really had the luxury of disliking or excluding me. When you wanted to give up, what did you tell yourself? What was going through your head? I don’t think I ever considered quitting Ranger School. I just knew that it was something that I could get through and had the confidence to continue. I had a thought going in of What could be so bad that would make me quit? and the answer that I found throughout the school was, Nothing. Did you ever feel like they had lowered the standards for you compared to the men who were alongside you?No. Never. I did the same thing that the men did. I did the same Ranger physical fitness test that all the men took. I ran five miles in 40 minutes. I did 49 pushups, 59 situps, six pullups. I rucked 12 miles in three hours with a 45-pound ruck. I climbed the same mountains. I carried the same stuff. I carried the same exact packing list they did, plus 250 tampons for some reason. At no point were the standards lowered for me. Whose idea was it for you to carry 250 tampons? It was not mine! It was a misguided effort to have everyone very prepared for the first women coming through Ranger School.In Ranger School, there’s only one standard for the fitness test. Everybody has to meet it, and that allows you to get out of Ranger School and say, “Look, fellas, I took the same test as the men and I passed.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is saying that Army combat jobs should only have one standard of fitness for both men and women. And there’s part of me that thinks: Doesn’t that allow the women who meet the standards to be like, look, We met the same standards as the men. Nothing suspicious here, guys. I think gender-neutral standards for combat arms are very important. It should not be discounted how important physical fitness is for combat arms. I think there’s nuance in determining what is a standard that is useful for combat arms, right? But it’s an important thing. And there have been gender-neutral standards for combat arms. In things like Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course, which is the initial basic training for officers going into the infantry, there are gender-neutral standards that you have to meet: You have to run five miles in 40 minutes, you have to do a 12-mile ruck. All of those standards have remained the same. Pete Hegseth is specifically referring to the Army Combat Physical Fitness test, and to a certain extent I agree, it should be gender-neutral for combat arms. But I think there’s nuance in determining what exactly combat arms entails physically.Secretary Hegseth has a lot to say about women, and sometimes he says it directly and sometimes he alludes to it. What he often does is he talks about lethality as something that is critically important for the military. He says the Army in particular needs more of it, but he never really defines what he means by lethality. What is the definition as you understand it? There’s a component of lethality that is physical fitness and it should not be discounted. But lethality extends far beyond that, right? It’s tactical skills, it’s decision-making, it’s leadership, it’s grit, it’s the ability to build trust and instill purpose and a group of people. It’s how quick a fire team in my platoon can react to contact. How well my SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon] gunner can shoot, how quickly I can employ and integrate combat assets, how fast I can maneuver a squad. All of those things take physical fitness, but they certainly take more than just physical fitness. There’s more to lethality than just how fast you can run and how many pushups you can do.To an average civilian like myself, I hear lethality and I think of the dictionary definition, the ability to kill. Does this definition of lethality involve the ability, physically and emotionally and psychologically, to kill another person? Absolutely. And so when Secretary Hegseth casts doubt on the ability of women to be as lethal as men, do you think there’s some stuff baked in there that maybe gets to his idea of what women are willing and able to do?Yes, possibly. I think the [secretary’s] message is pretty clear. According to him, the women in combat arms achieved success because the standards were lowered for them. We were never accommodated and the standards were never lowered.What’s your response, then, to hearing the Secretary of Defense say women don’t belong in combat? It makes me irate, to be honest. Like, it’s just a complete discounting of all of the accomplishments of the women that came before us. Do you think that if Secretary Hegseth could take a look at what you did in Ranger School, and he could hear from you that there were no second chances, there were no excuses, there was no babying, the men didn’t treat you nicer just because you were a woman, do you think he’d change his mind about women serving in combat? I’d like to think he would, but I’ve met plenty of people whose minds couldn’t be changed by reality. I’d love it if he went to Ranger School. He has a lot of opinions about Ranger School for someone who does not have his Ranger tab.What is a Ranger tab, for civilians? A Ranger tab is what you receive upon graduating Ranger School, which means you have passed all three phases and you are now Ranger-qualified in the military.You have that. And the Secretary of Defense doesn’t. He does not, though he has a lot of opinions about Ranger School.See More:

Banksy Unveils New Lighthouse Mural With the Words ‘I Want to Be What You Saw in Me’ in France The anonymous street artist announced the uncharacteristically personal artwork on May 29. It’s located on a wall in the French city of Marseille The new Banksy mural is on a wall beside a covered street in Marseille, France. Viken Kantarci / AFP via Getty Images After a five-month hiatus, Banksy is back with a new lighthouse mural in France. Compared to many of his previous works, the piece is uncharacteristically personal. The anonymous street artist announced his latest creation in an Instagram post on May 29. Located on a beige wall beside a sidewalk, the black lighthouse appears to merge with a painted shadow of a nearby metal safety post. Stenciled over the artwork are the words, “I want to be what you saw in me.” “There is no official explanation for the phrase,” write the Associated Press’ Thomas Adamson, Bishr Eltoni and Jill Lawless. “But its emotional pull is unmistakable—a quiet plea for recognition, love or redemption.”Banksy’s post appeared on Instagram with no caption, initially leaving the new mural’s location a mystery. However, BBC Verify, a team of investigative journalists and fact-checkers, quickly deduced that the mural is located on a backstreet called Rue Félix Frégier in the French city of Marseille, according to BBC News’ Cachella Smith and Amy Walker. Reactions to the new artwork were mixed. As the Art Newspaper’s Anny Shaw writes, “It could be a defection from the commercialism he simultaneously critiques and profits from, but I guess I’ve been made to expect more—either by technique or by message—from an artist whose entire practice, cheesy as it may be, is enmeshed in social and class consciousness.” Banksy has been creating street art around the world for decades. Some of his most well-known pieces include Rage, the Flower Thrower, a commentary on war, and Girl With Balloon. The artist’s works have sold for staggeringly high prices at auction; his most expensive piece is Love Is in the Bin, which fetched more than $25 million in 2021. Last summer, Banksy completed a series of animal-themed paintings in London, including a pair of elephants, monkeys swinging from a bridge and a howling wolf painted on a satellite dish. Until the lighthouse, his most recent verified mural was a black-and-white painting of a veiled woman breastfeeding a baby—a reference to the Madonna and child—which he announced in an Instagram post on December 16, 2024. Much of Banksy’s career has been “politically charged,” drawing attention to issues like Palestinian suffering and the refugee crisis, writes the Art Newspaper. For instance, his recent London animal artworks may have been “a comment on the impact of humans on biodiversity.” Swinger, a mural Banksy painted in New Orleans in 2008 Infrogmation of New Orleans via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0 However, the new lighthouse mural is a departure for Banksy, who “seems to be getting more philosophical in his middle age,” per the publication. His latest work could be “a moment of rare self-reflection—after all, this is the first time Banksy has referred to himself in the first person in a public mural.” Nobody knows what Banksy’s intentions were, though many onlookers have theories. The Guardian’s Matthew Weaver suggests that “I want to be what you saw in me” may be a reference to a lyric from “Softly,” a 2001 country song by the band Lonestar: “I want to be what you see in me / I want to love you the way that you love me.” Banksy rarely includes text in his pieces. When he does, he “usually incorporates extant signage or graffiti when adding his touch rather than writing out his own phrases,” according to Hyperallergic’s Rhea Nayyar. “That being said, this particular text takes the street artist’s already on-the-nose symbolism to another level,” with the “heavy-handed captioning” coming across as “overly sentimental.” “Some commentators have said that at best, the latest offering attempts to open a vaguely profound conversation about being a ‘guiding light’ or ‘finding the light within.’ At worst, it veers into ‘live, laugh, love’ territory,” writes the Art Newspaper. “This message could be Banksy’s most personal yet—but its execution risks it also being his most banal.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The Netherlands is facing a growing cyber security crisis, with a staggering 66% of Dutch businesses lacking adequate cyber resilience, according to academic research.   As geopolitical tensions rise and digital threats escalate, Rick van der Kleij, a psychologist and professor in Cyber Resilient Organisations at Avans University of Applied Sciences, who also conducts research at TNO, says that traditional approaches have failed and a paradigm shift is urgently needed.  Van der Kleij suggests that cyber security provides the illusion of safety rather than actual protection for many Dutch organisations. His stark assessment is that the Netherlands’ traditional approach to cyber risk is fundamentally broken.  “We need to stop thinking in terms of cyber security. It’s a model that has demonstrably failed,” he says. “Despite years of investment in cyber security measures, the frequency and impact of incidents continue to increase rapidly across Dutch businesses.”  This reflects the central argument of his recent inaugural lecture “Now that security is no more”, where he called for a paradigm shift in how Dutch organisations approach cyber risks.  Van der Kleij describes “the great digital dilemma” of balancing openness and security in a country with one of Europe’s most advanced digital infrastructures. “How can entrepreneurs remain open and connected without having to completely lock down their businesses?” he asks.  The statistics are stark. Van der Kleij’s study found that 66% of Dutch businesses are inadequately prepared for cyber threats. Recent ABN Amro research confirms the crisis: one in five businesses suffered cyber crime damage last year, rising to nearly 30% among large companies. For the first time, SMEs (80%) are more frequently targeted than large corporations (75%), marking a significant shift in cyber criminal strategy.  Despite the numbers, a perception gap persists. Van der Kleij identifies ‘the overconfident’ – Dutch businesses believing their cyber security is adequate when it isn’t. While SME attack rates soar, their risk perception remains static, whereas large organisations show marked awareness increases (from 41% to 64%). This creates a “waterbed effect” – as large companies strengthen defences, cyber criminals shift to less-prepared SMEs which are paradoxically reducing cyber security investments.  Van der Kleij emphasises a crucial distinction: while cyber security focuses on preventing incidents, cyber resilience acknowledges that incidents will happen. “It’s about having the capacity to react appropriately, recover from incidents, and learn from what went wrong to emerge stronger,” he says.  This requires four capabilities – prepare, respond, recover and adapt – yet most Dutch organisations focus only on preparation. The ABN Amro findings confirm this: many SMEs have firewalls but lack intrusion detection or incident response plans. Large companies take a more balanced approach, combining technology with training, response capabilities and insurance.  Uber’s experience illustrates the weakness of purely technical approaches. After a 2016 hack, they implemented two-factor authentication – yet were hacked again in 2022 by an 18-year-old using WhatsApp social engineering. “This shows that investing only in technology without addressing human factors creates fundamental weakness, which is particularly relevant for Dutch businesses that prioritise technological solutions,” van der Kleij adds.  Van der Kleij challenges the persistent myth that humans are cyber security’s weakest link. “People are often blamed when things go wrong, but the actual vulnerabilities typically lie elsewhere in the system, often in the design itself,” he says.  The misdirection is reflected in spending: 85% of cyber security investments go toward technology, 14% toward processes and just 1% toward the human component. Yet the ABN Amro research shows phishing – which succeeds through psychological manipulation rather than sophisticated technology – affects 71% of Dutch businesses.  “We’ve known for decades that people aren’t equipped to remember complex passwords across dozens of accounts, yet we continue demanding this and then express surprise when they create workarounds,” van der Kleij says. “Rather than blaming users, we should design systems that make secure behaviour easier. In the Netherlands, we need more human awareness in security teams, not more security awareness training for end users.”  Why do so many Dutch SMEs fail to invest in cyber resilience despite evident risks? Van der Kleij believes it’s about behaviour, not business size. “It’s not primarily about size or industry – it’s about behaviour and beliefs,” he says.  Common limiting beliefs among Dutch entrepreneurs include “I’m too small to be a target” or “I don’t have confidential information”. Remarkably, even suffering a cyber attack doesn’t change this mindset. “Studies show that when businesses are hacked, it doesn’t automatically lead them to better secure their operations afterward,” van der Kleij says.  The challenge is reaching those who need help most. “We have vouchers, we have arrangements where entrepreneurs can get help at a significantly reduced fee from cyber security professionals, but uptake remains negligible,” van der Kleij says. “It’s always the same parties who come to the government’s door – the large companies who are already mature. The small ones, we just can’t seem to reach them.”  Van der Kleij sees “relational capital” – resources generated through partnerships – as key to enhancing Dutch cyber resilience. “You can become more cyber resilient by establishing partnerships,” he says, pointing to government-encouraged initiatives like Information Sharing and Analysis Centers.   The ABN Amro research reveals why collaboration matters: 39% of large companies experienced cyber incidents originating with suppliers or partners, compared with 25% of smaller firms. This supply chain vulnerability drives major Dutch organisations to demand higher standards from partners through initiatives such as Big Helps Small.  European regulations reinforce this trend. The new NIS2 directive will expand coverage from hundreds to several thousand Dutch companies, yet only 11% have adequately prepared. Among SMEs, approximately half have done little preparation – despite Dutch police warnings about increasingly frequent ransomware attacks where criminals threaten to release stolen data publicly.  Van der Kleij’s current research at Avans University focuses on identifying barriers to cyber resilience investment through focus groups with Dutch entrepreneurs. “When we understand these barriers – which are more likely motivational than knowledge-related – we can design targeted interventions,” he says.  Van der Kleij’s message is stark: “The question isn’t whether your organisation will face a cyber incident, but when – and how effectively you’ll respond. Cyber resilience encompasses cyber security while adding crucial capabilities for response, recovery and adaptation. It’s time for a new paradigm in the Netherlands.”  Read more about Dutch cyber security

Science & technology | Blemish treatmentOld oil paintings are suffering from chemical “acne” Conservators are scrambling to rescue them Desperate for a spa dayPhotograph: Børre Høstland/The National Museum May 28th 2025WHEN AN OIL painting is dried and finished, it is supposed to stay that way. Yet when Ida Bronken, an art conservator, began to prepare Jean-Paul Riopelle’s “Composition 1952” for display in 2006, she noticed drops of wet paint were trickling down the canvas from deep within the masterpiece’s layers. Equally odd were the tiny, hard, white lumps poking through the painting’s surface, as if it had a case of adolescent acne. Other sections seemed soft and moist; some paint layers were coming apart “like two pieces of buttered bread”, Ms Bronken says.Explore moreScience & technologyThis article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Spot treatment”From the May 31st 2025 editionDiscover stories from this section and more in the list of contents⇒Explore the editionReuse this content