nearly all libraries have a ghost, but medical libraries frequently have a ghost and a skeleton
i’ve been reminded that most people don’t know about the ghost
‘ghost reading’ means collecting usage stats for books which are used within the library, without being checked out (which would automatically generate usage data).
This is often done by checking out the book to a dummy user account belonging to The Library Ghost before it’s reshelved. (After being returned ofc. Ghosts read very fast.)
Due to ghost reading, most libraries ask that you do not return books to the shelves yourself, even if you’re confident of where they go - there will instead be somewhere they’ll ask you to leave them (or just leave them out on a surface somewhere) so they can be collected and ghost read.
I knew about leaving books out after you read them, but I didn’t know about the ghost account thing! Thank you for explaining that 👍
Kelly T. Clements is the deputy high commissioner for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency.
Classes taught under trees, overstretched clinics offering the most basic health care, long walks to reach clean water, and the chilling shadow of sexual violence … These were just some of the privations recently relayed to me by refugees in Chad’s remote eastern border with Sudan.
Since armed conflict erupted in Sudan last year, over 8.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes, seeking safety wherever they can find it, inside or outside the country.
Most of the refugees arriving in this arid region in the last year — almost half a million individuals — wouldn’t be alive today without the United Nations, its donors and partners. And yet, as the world turns to other preoccupations, financial support for the U.N. humanitarian agencies — and hence, millions of refugees — is dwindling.
It’s not just funding that’s waning — moral backing is eroding too. We hear it argued that the U.N. should be scrapped, that it makes no difference; is broken, bureaucratic and corrupt.
Some of this is longstanding griping coming from those who will never want tax dollars spent outside their own neighborhoods or countries. Some of it is also misinformation — like reports wrongly suggesting that the U.N. is encouraging people on the move to head to the United States border.
Yet, my agency carries out lifesaving humanitarian work — from Ukraine to Yemen to the Darién. It provides life-sustaining aid to tens of millions of the most vulnerable people. And it also provides hope.
Sustaining such a massive global response requires skilled and brave staff, intricate contextual knowledge of crises — and significant funding. Much of the work is behind-the-scenes and highly specialized. And, as someone who has been immersed in humanitarian responses my entire career — most recently at the U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR — I’m privileged to have a close-up view.
Over the years, aid agencies have traveled far — often pushed by donors and affected people — in improving accountability and removing opacity. We’re now better at learning from and working with business. We do not fear reform.
The U.N.’s humanitarian work with partners is more important and complex than ever — not just in terms of saving lives, but also stabilizing communities and countries. And what we do in Chad does matter to those in Chicago, Copenhagen or Canberra, even if it’s far.
Within days of the Sudan conflict starting, for example, UNHCR and partners were deploying to the borders, finding ways through. U.N. logistics have been built over time and currently outstrip the abilities of the private sector and state agencies to reach those in need — whether via the U.N.’s Humanitarian Air Service, or trucks and ships from supply warehouses in regional hubs. And the work is complicated: Solutions require time, planning, local agreements, negotiating access, procuring aid and stretching budgets. In addition to that, logistics are expensive, as remote areas are sometimes only reachable by air — and Sudan has 7,000 kilometers of borders.
Even through political storms, the work continues. In Ukraine, UNHCR provides cash, housing and relief items. In Afghanistan, we reached 29 of 34 provinces last month with protection, shelter kits and essential winter items for women and children. U.N. agencies specializing in refugees, food, health and children work through local organizations, via structures and relations that have been built over decades, supporting host communities.
Humanitarian work can also be exceedingly dangerous and stressful, and aid workers make enormous sacrifices — away from their families, working in dangerous conditions that can shorten life expectancy. UNHCR personnel were victim to more than 450 security incidents last year. For our sister agencies, losses can be much greater.
Yet, our funding model is creaking. Last year, UNHCR was only able to raise half of what it needed for basic planned programs. We face impossible decisions to meet the greatest demand we’ve ever seen.
This year’s outlook is even bleaker, with costs rising everywhere. So, we have been cutting — our own staff, the vital aid we offer: cash for Syrian refugees in Jordan, female hygiene kits in Uganda, protection monitors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo … The human costs are immediate.
And while most of our funds currently come from the U.S., the European Union and a handful of others, we’re trying to diversify to the private sector and other parts of the world. But this shift takes time.
For those who argue that charity begins at home, there’s another stark lesson to be learned from Chad: If we cannot facilitate people living and becoming more self-reliant where they are, they will move.
On Sudan’s border, 27 year-old Mohammed — a married refugee with two children — told me he planned to make the dangerous crossing to Europe. “What is there for me here?” he asked. I found myself struggling to answer.
A proper response to Mohammed will take time and effort. We will need new actors, investors, funding models and approaches to create the conditions that will allow individuals to rebuild when they’re uprooted. And for that all to happen, the U.N. needs support. Starve us of funds, these structures will disappear.
Standard measures are so ubiquitous today that it is hard to imagine that every town once had its own definitions of lengths, weights, volume, and even time. They were usually displayed in a public location so that the public could easily make their own copies, and measure the products that they bought. In Leuven, these measures were carved into the walls of the town hall.
Leuven's town hall dates back to 1439 and is known for its detailed facade and the dozens of statues that decorate it. These days it is mainly used for ceremonies such as weddings and formal gatherings, but back in the day it was the beating heart of the city and housed an army of clerks ready to help (and tax) whoever came through the door. One of the duties of the city was to provide a clear definition of units of measurement, so that people would not be swindled out of their money by a clever merchant.
In the back of the easternmost room, some remnants of such measures can still be seen in the form of deep carvings on the wall. These carvings represent the Leuven foot, the Leuven inch, and the Leuven el. There is some difference in these measures than today's standard measurements; One foot is defined as 30.48 centimeters, while a Leuven foot measures 28.55 centimeters, about 6.5 percent shorter.
Peter Beinart goes into considerable detail in this essay exploring the growing tension between liberal and left politics and support for Zionism, especially for younger American Jews. The conclusion sums up his argument:
For many American Jews, it is painful to watch their children’s or grandchildren’s generation question Zionism. It is infuriating to watch students at liberal institutions with which they once felt aligned treat Zionism as a racist creed. It is tempting to attribute all this to antisemitism, even if that requires defining many young American Jews as antisemites themselves.
But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain compatible should ask themselves why Israel now attracts the fervent support of Ms. Stefanik but repels the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Automobile Workers. Why it enjoys the admiration of Elon Musk and Viktor Orban but is labeled a perpetrator of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and compared to the Jim Crow South by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why it is more likely to retain unconditional American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.
For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.
There’s an added layer of painful complexity here, which is to the extent that support for Palestinian nationalism is also support for that movement’s current political leadership, then such support is also fundamentally incompatible with liberal and left broader political commitments, since that leadership is also committed to the creation of a theocratic ethno-state, in which expulsion or extermination of the other is an implicit and sometimes explicit goal.
A particularly mordant detail from the essay:
American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having their liberal credentials challenged.
The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials into greatest doubt. In 1984, the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said argued that in the West, Palestinians lack “permission to narrate” their own experience. For decades after he wrote those words, they remained true. A study by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nassar found that of the opinion articles about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 2000 and 2009, Palestinians themselves wrote roughly 1 percent.
I don’t doubt that LGM’s comment section can get all this sorted out, perhaps with some help from renowned diplomatic savant Jared Kushner, who was just given an award by the Anti-Defamation League.
I have been involved recently in some activities labeled “feminist foreign policy.” A podcast on “the intricate world of feminist foreign policy” caught my eye, not least for the strange adjective.
The page for the podcast, along with the promotion above, which came in an email, are not promising. The two featured speakers are men: William Alberque, the Director of Strategy, Technology, and Arms Control for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and Louis Reitmann, a Research Associate from the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation since 2022. Both are given short bios. And oh yes, also included are Mara Zarka and Federica Dall’Arche, identified as Reitmann’s colleagues at the Vienna Centre. That’s all that is said about them. No titles, no bios.
I checked the Vienna Centre’s website. Mara Zarka is a Research Associate and Project Manager and has been at the Centre since 2013. Federica Dall’Arche is a Senior Research Associate and an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Italy. Looks like both are senior to Reitmann.
The structure of the podcast echoes that emphasis. The two men talk for twenty minutes before the women are allowed into the conversation. To be fair, the women get 2/3 of the time, but the conversation is directed by Alberque sharing his ideas about what feminist foreign policy must be – peace and disarmament, no? The women, as many of us have done, gently suggest that the purpose of a feminist viewpoint is to critique existing structures and perhaps disrupt them. Alberque tries hard to get an affirmation that deterrence might serve peace and fails. He’s also concerned that that word “feminist” maybe puts people off and should be replaced by “human rights.”
So yes, one more man who doesn’t get it doing his best not to get it. Two more podcasts are said to be in preparation for this series.
The term “feminist foreign policy,” however, to some degree supports Alberque’s misreadings.
As in many fields dominated by men, the phrase “foreign policy” has been taken to imply “objective foreign policy.” The absence of women, people of color, and others from the field has produced gendered thinking, and that gender is male. The field is also dominated by white Europeans and Americans. That is changing slowly. Adding an adjective like “feminist” makes it less.
Critiques of foreign policy are possible from many points of emphasis. Realist critique of foreign policy. Ecological critique of foreign policy. Monetarist critique of foreign policy. Humanitarian critique of foreign policy. Feminist critique of foreign policy.
But when an adjective is added to “foreign policy,” it limits the topic and suggests a program: Realist foreign policy, ecological foreign policy, monetarist foreign policy, humanitarian foreign policy, feminist foreign policy. Some in the field of feminist foreign policy develop programs and policies. But, as the women in the podcast point out, the field also includes a critique of existing foreign policy. Feminism as an analytic tool can point out where things are going wrong and how policies might be improved.
The critique has been neglected but is badly needed. Foreign policy has been dominated by men since its inception as a field, and remains overwhelmingly male today.
The podcast contains some useful information. But its structure comes right out of the old playbook for keeping women down, and the neglect to identify them on the page is an insult. Not too long ago, IISS had a strong woman as Deputy Director-General, Kori Schake. Apparently things have changed.
Critiques of foreign policy are possible from many points of emphasis. Realist critique of foreign policy. Ecological critique of foreign policy. Monetarist critique of foreign policy. Humanitarian critique of foreign policy. Feminist critique of foreign policy.
But when an adjective is added to “foreign policy,” it limits the topic and suggests a program: Realist foreign policy, ecological foreign policy, monetarist foreign policy, humanitarian foreign policy, feminist foreign policy. Some in the field of feminist foreign policy develop programs and policies. But, as the women in the podcast point out, the field also includes a critique of existing foreign policy. Feminism as an analytic tool can point out where things are going wrong and how policies might be improved.
The critique has been neglected but is badly needed. Foreign policy has been dominated by men since its inception as a field, and remains overwhelmingly male today.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in its first major abortion case since overturning Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago. The legal challenge focuses on the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, one of two pills used in medication abortions. The Court will now determine whether to reinstate restrictions on the drug’s use that were in place before 2016, including requiring that mifepristone be administered in person by a physician, banning it from being shipped by mail, and limiting its use to up to seven weeks of pregnancy. Health experts say these restrictions are medically unnecessary, and whatever the Court decides will determine the drug’s availability across the U.S. — not just in red states.
Abortion opponents and supporters alike are deeply invested in whether people can access medication abortions as pills are now used in more than two-thirds of abortions, according to a recent study. They have also been at the center of an increase in self-managed abortions taking place outside the formal health-care system, which have helped make up for the loss of clinician-provided care in states that banned or heavily restricted the procedure after Dobbs.
Arguing the case before the Court were Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the government; attorney Jessica Ellsworth, representing Danco Laboratories, the mifepristone manufacturer; and attorney Erin Hawley, representing the anti-abortion plaintiffs, a group of advocates and physicians backed by Alliance Defending Freedom, the same conservative Christian legal organization that helped overturn Roe (she is also the wife of Republican senator Josh Hawley). Here’s what they said about the arguments over abortion-pill access.
The justices seemed skeptical that the plaintiffs even had standing to bring the case.
A large part of the justices’ questioning focused on whether the plaintiffs, who claim they were injured as a result of the FDA’s regulations on mifepristone, have legal standing to bring the case. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch hinted that they see a mismatch between the moral harm the doctors claimed they experienced and the remedy they are seeking: restrictions on mifepristone that would impact patients nationwide. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out, only two of the seven physicians who shared their experiences in the lawsuit explicitly said they had experienced moral and emotional harm when they treated patients who had taken abortion pills, and she questioned whether those physicians had evidence of “actually participating in the abortion to end the life of the embryo or fetus.”
Alito and Thomas brought up a 19th-century law that could lead to a de facto national abortion ban.
Out of all the justices, conservatives Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas seemed eager to allow for the restrictions on mifepristone. Both also brought up the Comstock Act, which the plaintiffs claim bars the FDA from allowing mifepristone to be sent through the mail. The federal anti-obscenity law dates back to 1873 and outlaws the mailing of “every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance.” Anti-abortion advocates have argued the measure could be used to create a national abortion ban without input from Congress by prohibiting the mailing of pills and other instruments used to terminate a pregnancy.
During the arguments, Alito referred to the statute, 18 USC 1461, rather than the law’s name, calling it “a prominent provision … not some obscure subsection of complicated obscure law” — even though Comstock has remained dormant for half a century. Thomas made explicit reference to the measure, asking Ellsworth whether Danco is violating the statute by “mailing your product and advertising it” since the measure “is fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours.” (In his concurring opinion to Dobbs, Thomas argued the Court should reconsider its previous decision establishing the right to contraception. Comstock also originally banned the mailing of birth control.)
The justices dwelled on the drug’s safety record.
During questioning, several justices debated whether they should even be determining whether mifepristone is safe given that they do not have medical expertise. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether that responsibility falls under the FDA’s purview, and Prelogar agreed. Alito asked whether an increase in emergency room visits after the FDA lifted the restrictions at the heart of the case was of “no consequence” to the agency. The solicitor general responded by acknowledging that, while visits to the ER had increased, “that didn’t equate to additional serious adverse events and, in fact, [in] one of the studies, half of the women who went to the emergency room didn’t get any treatment at all.”
Both Prelogar and Ellsworth pointed out that research overwhelmingly shows medication abortion to be safe and effective with less than 0.4 percent of patients experiencing serious complications that require hospitalization. (Tylenol and Viagra are riskier drugs, to put this in perspective.) Ellsworth also noted that a medical journal recently retracted two studies claiming to prove mifepristone’s harms, which a federal judge in Texas referenced in his ruling that sided with the plaintiffs last year. The journal cited flaws in the study design and the analysis of the data as well as the authors’ conflicts of interest as reasons for the retraction.
The justices referenced a case they will hear next month on emergency abortion care.
The mifepristone challenge isn’t the only abortion case the Court is hearing this term. Next month, justices will hear arguments in a pair of consolidated cases — Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States — that focus on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. The law requires that emergency departments at hospitals that receive federal funding treat patients in need of emergency care. After Dobbs, the Biden administration issued guidance affirming that the measure applies to treating patients in need of emergency abortion care.
Barrett brought up the case as she asked about the anti-abortion doctors’ standing in the mifepristone challenge. She asked the solicitor general whether EMTALA would require these physicians to treat patients who have taken abortion pills even if they had moral objections to abortion care. It would not, Prelogar responded, because EMTALA applies to hospitals, not individual doctors, and federal law already allows doctors to opt out of care if they have conscience-based objections.
The Court is expected to issue a ruling on both cases in late June.
The Cut offers an online tool you can use to search by Zip Code for professional abortion providers, including clinics, hospitals, and independent OB/GYNs, as well as for abortion funds, transportation options, and information on remote resources such as receiving the abortion pill by mail. For legal guidance, contact Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812 or the Abortion Defense Network.
The Cut offers an online tool you can use to search by Zip Code for professional abortion providers, including clinics, hospitals, and independent OB/GYNs, as well as for abortion funds, transportation options, and information on remote resources such as receiving the abortion pill by mail. For legal guidance, contact Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812 or the Abortion Defense Network.