The true story behind the US' first federal monuments

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The true story behind the US' first federal monuments     "Are you sitting down? I have news for you." Gwen Marable's cousin from the US state of Ohio called her at home in Maryland about 27 years ago. "We are descended from the sister of Benjamin Banneker, Jemima."The Banneker family, which numbers over 5,000 known descendants today, only learned about this astonishing connection to their ground-breaking but little-known ancestor through the wonders of DNA testing. As such, no personal stories about him, no artifacts, were handed down through the generations. Continued here

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How Will You Measure Your Life?     Harvard Business School’s Christensen teaches aspiring MBAs how to apply management and innovation theories to build stronger companies. But he also believes that these models can help people lead better lives. In this article, he explains how, exploring questions everyone needs to ask: How can I be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationship with my family is an enduring source of happiness? And how can I live my life with integrity? Continued here

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Spain's ingenious fairy-tale houses     Deep in Spain's north-western corner, the windswept Ancares mountains are dotted with centuries-old houses that look straight out of a fairy tale – or the Asterix and Obelix comic-book series – but that are cleverly suited to the harsh realities of this remote region.Known as pallozas, the round huts are made of stone and topped with a teardrop-shaped roof of rye straw. There are more than 200 scattered among Galicia's and Castile-León's rural villages, including Piornedo, Balouta, O Cebreiro and Balboa. Many of these homes were built 250 years ago, though their architectural roots stretch back millennia – some historians contend that pallozas are pre-Roman, an evolution of Celtic and Iron Age constructions. Continued here

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The mysterious Viking runes found in a landlocked US state     "[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone," said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. "She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings."Faith Rogers, an environmental-science intern and volunteer at the Heavener Runestone Park, led me down a cobblestone path toward one of the 55-acre woodland's biggest attractions – which is also one of the US' biggest historical mysteries. We were deep in the rolling, scrub-forest foothills of the Ouachita Mountains in far eastern Oklahoma, and we were on our way to view a slab of ancient sandstone that still has experts scratching their heads and debating about the eight symbols engraved on its face.  Continued here

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After 211 Years, the State of Maryland Just Made a Very Big Mistake     And we checked the website, right? Continued here

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Sardinia's mysterious beehive towers     Expecting not to find much more than a pile of big stones, I followed the sign off the motorway into a little car park and there it was, rising from a flat, green landscape covered in little white flowers, with a few donkeys dotted around: Nuraghe Losa. From a distance, it looked like a big sandcastle with its top crumbling away, but as I walked towards it, I began to realise the colossal size of the monument in front of me.Nuraghi (the plural of nuraghe) are massive conical stone towers that pepper the landscape of the Italian island of Sardinia. Built between 1600 and 1200BCE, these mysterious Bronze Age bastions were constructed by carefully placing huge, roughly worked stones, weighing several tons each, on top of each other in a truncated formation.  Continued here

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How Tech Startups 'Fake It Until They Make It' -- Or Until They Go To Jail     It's OK to promise the moon, but you'd better deliver. Continued here

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Meta's Quest 3 Announcement Makes It Official: Apple Is Living Rent-Free in Mark Zuckerberg's Head     There was no reason to try to get in front of what Apple might announce on Monday. Continued here

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5 Lessons From Founding CEO Who Led A Startup To $51 Billion     Turn lemons into lemonade, adapt your style to each scaling stage, let go to grow, keep adding value to customers, and build bench strength Continued here

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The ancient remains of Great Zimbabwe     Walking up to the towering walls of Great Zimbabwe was a humbling experience. The closer I got, the more they dwarfed me – and yet, there was something inviting about the archaeological site. It didn't feel like an abandoned fortress or castle that one might see in Europe: Great Zimbabwe was a place where people lived and worked, a place where they came to worship – and still do. It felt alive. Great Zimbabwe is the name of the extensive stone remains of an ancient city built between 1100 and 1450 CE near modern-day Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Believed to be the work of the Shona (who today make up the majority of Zimbabwe's population) and possibly other societies that were migrating back and forth across the area, the city was large and powerful, housing a population comparable to London at that time – somewhere around 20,000 people during its peak. Great Zimbabwe was part of a sophisticated trade network (Arab, Indian and Chinese trade goods were all found at the site), and its architectural design was astounding: made of enormous, mortarless stone walls and towers, most of which are still standing. Continued here

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Liveblog: All the news from Apple's WWDC 2023 keynote     CUPERTINO, Calif.—At 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm EDT) this Monday, June 5, Apple will host the keynote presentation at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The streaming/in-person hybrid event will include new announcements about iOS, macOS, and much more—probably including Apple's new mixed reality headset. We'll be liveblogging all the updates as they happen right here. Continued here

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How Parking Ruined Everything     When you’re driving around and around the same block and seething because there’s nowhere to put your car, any suggestion that the United States devotes too much acreage to parking might seem preposterous. But consider this: In a typical year, the country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments. Even the densest cities reserve a great deal of street space to store private vehicles. And local laws across the country require house and apartment builders to provide off-street parking, regardless of whether residents need it. Step back to assess the result, as the Slate staff writer Henry Grabar does in his lively new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, and it’s sobering: “More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.”That Americans like driving is hardly news, but Grabar, who takes his title from a Joni Mitchell song, says he isn’t quibbling with cars; his complaint is about parking—or, more to the point, about everything we have sacrificed for it. All those 9-foot-by-18-foot rectangles of asphalt haven’t only damaged the environment or doomed once-cherished architectural styles; the demand for more parking has also impeded the crucial social goal of housing affordability. This misplaced priority has put the country in a bind. For decades, even as rents spiraled and climate change worsened, the ubiquity and banality of parking spaces discouraged anyone from noticing their social impact. Continued here

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The other, more important Renaissance you never learned about     In the mid-15th century, Pope Nicholas V was wading through the bowels of the Vatican archives when he stumbled across a dusty manuscript titled De Medicina, or On Medicine. It was written in the 1st century AD by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the finest physician of the Roman Empire, and it contained chapters on the benefits of exercise and the treatment of pneumonia, among other topics. It was thought to have been lost centuries ago, and would have stayed lost were it not for the curiosity of the pope.  On Medicine is one of several ancient texts whose rediscovery facilitated the Renaissance. This movement, which lasted roughly from 1300 until 1600, is often discussed in relation to Italy — and for good reason, as many of those aforementioned texts ended up there through Roman conquest. Italy was also the home of many a Renaissance star, including Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Michelangelo, whose contributions to humanity were funded by the fortunes that Italian merchants accrued along the Silk Road. Continued here

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Barack Obama Says Using This 6-Word Phrase Will Accelerate Your Success     It's the one sentence he always wants to hear. Continued here

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Duna de Bolonia: The Spanish sand dune hiding Roman ruins     Near the southern tip of Spain's Cádiz province, where Europe lunges into the Strait of Gibraltar as if reaching out for the North African coast, the Duna de Bolonia is one of the continent's largest sand dunes. Rising more than 30m high and sprawling 200m wide, the white mound spills into the azure sea and appears as if someone has dumped a massive pile of sugar atop the surrounding Estrecho Nature Park's protected green forest.Like all sand dunes, Bolonia is a constantly moving ecosystem that shifts with the winds. But as climate change has intensified the hurricane-force gusts coming from the east, the dune has increasingly migrated inland towards the ecologically important cork and pine forests and scrubland – revealing remnants of the many past cilivilisations who have passed through here in the process. Continued here

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The Maine lake full of sunken steamboats     "A hundred years ago there were dozens of these things cruising around here," said a man who'd suddenly appeared next to me at the dock as I watched the approaching steamboat. He'd startled me out of my reverie, my gaze caught somewhere between the shimmer that dances across Moosehead Lake and the seaplanes taking off toward Mount Katahdin.I grew up in the US state of Maine at a smaller lake not far from here, and I spent many summers taking day trips to Moosehead Lake with my family. But this was the first time I boarded the historical Steamboat Katahdin, the last of a once-numerous fleet that used to ferry hordes of well-dressed elites from nearby train depots to the area's luxury resorts for their summer holidays.  Continued here

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The city with gold in its sewage lines     "He burned the sari and from it, handed us a thin slice of pure silver," said my mother, describing a moment that had taken place 30 years ago at her home in the city of Firozabad. The man in her story was no magician, but an extractor. Like many similar artisans in my mother's hometown, he'd go door to door collecting old saris to mine them for their precious metals. Until the 1990s, saris were often threaded with pure silver and gold, and I remember digging into my mother's wardrobe, searching for her glittery outfits like treasure. But as she told me, the extractors were looking for something even more valuable than clothing – they were looking for trash, and a kind of trash specific to this city. Continued here

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Mexico's 1,500-year-old unknown pyramids     From a distance, the grey volcanic rock pyramids and their encircling stonewalls looked like something that Mother Nature had wrought herself. Located in Cañada de La Virgen (The Valley of the Virgin), an area about 30 miles outside the city of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico's central highlands, the stone formations blended into the arid, desiccated landscape like a diminutive mountain range.But as I got closer to the largest of the three structures, there was no doubt it was man-made. A staircase of identical steps, etched into the hard, dark rock, had clearly required a skilled mason's hand. The other two pyramids, smaller and less well-preserved, bore a similarly unmistakable human touch. The timeworn edifices were erected by a civilisation long gone. Continued here

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Is Santa Claus buried in Ireland?     Amid green hilly pastures dotted with grazing sheep and a cemetery with graves dating back to the 13th Century, the ruins of St Nicholas Church tower over the family home of Maeve and Joe O'Connell. Among those resting eternally here are early inhabitants of the estate, parishioners of the church and – according to local legend – St Nicholas of Myra. Yes, the St Nick who inspired Santa Claus.Today, the O'Connells are the owners and sole (living) human inhabitants of Jerpoint Park, a 120-acre deserted 12th-Century medieval town located 20km south of the town of Kilkenny, Ireland. Located along the crossing point of the River Nore and Little Arrigle River, the settlement (formerly called Newtown Jerpoint) is thought to have been founded by the Normans, who arrived in Ireland around 1160 CE. According to a conservation plan compiled by Ireland's Heritage Council, the town flourished into the 15th Century, with archaeological evidence revealing homes, a marketplace, a tower, a bridge, streets, a mill, a water management system and nearby Jerpoint Abbey, which still stands today. But by the 17th Century, the town's occupants were gone, likely from a combination of violent attacks and a plague. Continued here

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In 'Tears of the Kingdom,' the Depths Are Where the Action Is     In the years since The Legend of Zelda's 1986 release, director, producer, and co-designer Shigeru Miyamoto has described the game as an attempt to replicate what he felt during childhood explorations of the countryside outside of Kyoto, Japan, where he was raised. In making the first installment of what would go on to become one of Nintendo's most beloved series, his foundational memories of inspecting foreboding caves or happening upon unexpected lakes provided a framework for what would become a global sensation.Three decades later, when a team at Nintendo sought to rethink Zelda's design ethos after years of working within an increasingly calcified format, its members returned to that first game and its sense of free-spirited exploration for inspiration. The result was 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which, more than any series entry before it, imparted a feeling that players were wandering an expansive fantasy world as awe-inspiring and invigoratingly dangerous as the mental landscape of a great childhood adventure. Continued here

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The Best Laptop Backpacks for Work (and Life)     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDThe number of backpacks out there is endless, and they range in price from under $50 to several hundred dollars, but finding a life-changing bag isn't easy. Whether you're commuting to an office or school, working from coffee shops, or going on a weekend trip, a good backpack will carry your stuff and keep it organized. It's also easier on your neck and shoulders than an overstuffed purse, duffle, or briefcase. Continued here

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The Novelist Who Truly Understood the South     A new collection of Charles Portis’s work makes the case for his place in the American canon.A punch-drunk love of American language swells throughout the Coen brothers’ films: the rapid-fire New York dialogue in The Hudsucker Proxy, the nasal timbre of the upper Plains in Fargo, the California dude-speak in The Big Lebowski. In 2010, that passion drew them to reprise True Grit, based on the novelist Charles Portis’s tour de force about a teenage girl’s quest to avenge her father’s death. Set in 1870s Arkansas and the Choctaw lands of present-day Oklahoma, the book brims with colloquialisms and cadences that are best read aloud. Continued here

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What a Therapist Wants You to Know About Remote Therapy     In March 2020, I, like everyone else, did my best to accept the bizarreness of quarantine living. Within a few days of nestling into my home, I started getting urgent texts from my clients, including a barrage of emails from people in far-flung places, all with some version of “I've got the virus. I'm isolated and can't pull myself away from the terrifying news. Please tell me you do remote sessions!”I'd been aware of Zoom for a few years before the pandemic. I'd even participated in dozens of Brady Bunch-style talking head meetings with friends and colleagues. But none of those smacked as potentially dangerous if the power shut off or my internet service went out. I quaked at the thought of my computer glitching while a client was in the midst of a teary catharsis.  Continued here

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How Much Worry about Mass Shootings Is Too Much?     Mass shootings are causing widespread anxiety among Americans. A new screening tool could identify those who are impacted enough to need mental health supportA shopping mall in Texas, a private school in Tennessee, a bank in Kentucky and a dance studio in California: these are the sites of some of the public mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023 alone, representing just a slice of the presumed safe spaces rocked by these tragedies. As mass shootings in the country have risen, evidence is mounting that they are having a far-reaching mental health impact. A 2019 survey by the American Psychological Association (APA) found that 79 percent of Americans reported stress over the possibility of a mass shooting, and 33 percent said fear of a shooting prevented them from going to certain places. Continued here

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Islam has become less rational since its medieval Golden Age. What went wrong?     In 833 AD, the Abbasid Caliph, al-Mamun, was at the height of his power. He ruled a vast empire, and a clear majority of the world’s Muslims considered him the leader of the faithful. However, there was a problem. While he enjoyed considerable influence on questions of religious law and doctrine, the highest human authority in Islam wasn’t the caliph but an amorphous group of respected scholars, the ulema, who were supposed to reach a consensus on contentious issues. Membership of the ulema wasn’t by official appointment, but by something approaching popular acclamation. And, on some seminal matters, consensus proved impossible. For example, rationalist theologians, the Mutazilites, believed humans have free will. Ranged against them were some of the experts on Sharia law, who insisted that God had determined all things, including who was destined for hell. This meant debates could continue without agreement for centuries. Continued here

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A secret site for the Knights Templar?     In a hole in the ground beneath the Hertfordshire market town of Royston, dimly illuminated by flickering light, I was looking at a gallery of crudely carved figures, blank-faced and bearing instruments of torture. Cave manager Nicky Paton pointed them out to me one by one. "There's Saint Catherine, with her breaking wheel. She was only 18 when she was martyred," Paton said, cheerfully. "And there's Saint Lawrence. He was burnt to death on a griddle."Amid the grisly Christian scenes were Pagan images: a large carving of a horse, and a fertility symbol known as a sheela na gig, depicting a woman with exaggerated sexual organs. Another portrayed a person holding a skull in their right hand and a candle in their left, theorised to represent an initiation ceremony – a tantalising clue as to the cave's possible purpose. Adding to the carvings' creepiness was their rudimentary, almost childlike, execution. Continued here

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Tuscany's mysterious 'cave roads'     Wildflowers grazed my legs as I hiked down from the volcanic-rock hilltop fortress of Pitigliano into the Tuscan valley below. At the base of the hill, I crossed a burbling stream and followed a winding trail as it inclined. All of a sudden, I was walled in.Huge blocks of tuff, a porous rock made from volcanic ash, rose as high as 25m on either side of the trench I found myself in. I felt spooked – and I'm not the only one who's felt that way in vie cave like this. These subterranean trails have been linked with lore of devils and deities for centuries.  Continued here

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5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Career in the Age of AI     What can we do personally to stave off the displacement that may happen as a result of AI? In this article, the authors offer five strategies to future-proof your career in the age of intelligent machines: 1) Avoid predictability. It’s important to remember that AI isn’t generating new insights; it’s a prediction engine that merely guesses the most likely next word. 2) Hone the skills that machines strive to emulate. 3) Double down on “the real world.” 4) Develop your personal brand. 5) Develop recognized expertise in your field. Even if AI performs “first draft” functions, it still has to be double-checked by a trusted and reliable source. If that’s you, you’ll continue to be sought out because you have the authority to vet AI’s responses. Continued here

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A shocking number of birds are in trouble     Just about anywhere you look, there are birds. Penguins live in Antarctica, ptarmigan in the Arctic Circle. Rüppell’s vultures soar higher than Mt. Everest. Emperor penguins dive deeper than 1,800 feet. There are birds on mountains, birds in cities, birds in deserts, birds in oceans, birds on farm fields, and birds in parking lots. Continued here

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How to Find Those Files You Downloaded on an iPhone or Android Phone     Whether you downloaded an image you want to share or a document you need to sign, files can and do go missing on our smartphones. A reflex swipe of that download notification and you may struggle to find your file again. Don’t worry. It’s still there somewhere, and we'll show you how to find it on an iPhone or an Android phone.You might also want to check out some Hidden iPhone Tricks or Android Settings You May Not Know About. Continued here