A jeweler appraises a ring, 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I recently proposed to my girlfriend, and so I spent much of the past few years thinking about engagement rings. In Western culture, at least, the ring has taken on such symbolic significance that we casually and almost exclusively refer to a part of the human body in relation to its function as ring carrier the one true purpose of the
digitus quartus. Spend enough time shopping for engagement rings and one might come to believe that every aspect of a person’s being exists only to honor the extra-human perfection that is the ring. But spend some time in
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If you read nothing else on Wednesday, I hope you catch this genuinely epic saga from David Folkenflik at NPR. I freely admit that my cyber knowledge and my general tech savvy can be measured with an eyedropper, but I know a good story when I read one, and any tale that includes Falun Gong, Steve Bannon, several incomprehensible acronyms, and the overall incompetence of the previous administration is good to be going on with, as they say.
And specifically, it involves a fierce, months-long battle over whether the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the U.S. State Department should subsidize software developed by adherents of Falun Gong. The decision to prioritize this software stripped money intended for critical apps from a federal fund designed to bolster technology vital to dissidents overseas, officials say. On top of that, once approved for funding, over a six-month period the software served a grand total of four people. That s right, four.