Wired: Photos of Brooklyn Before and After the Hipsters

Chatelain moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint in 2006 and fell in love with all the Polish mom-and-pop shops that lined its streets. She’s a history geek as well as a photographer, and she loved how the past seemed to permeate every building facade and sidewalk crack. “I’m drawn to the idea that other people have been there and have left something visually interesting behind,” she says. “Back in the day, those streets would have been busy with all kinds of maritime and industrial activity, and now so many of the buildings sit empty and the streets are broken up with glass bottles and trash.”

She knew change was coming, and started documenting her favorite locations in Greenpoint and neighboring Williamsburg to “see how long they would last.” On sunny afternoons, she wandered around with her Canon 5D, looking for doorways and building facades with a unique combination of light, color, and texture—places she knew she’d miss if they disappeared. They often did. Bodegas closed, replaced by third-wave coffee shops. Storefronts that once housed family businesses became bars serving $18 cocktails prepared by mixologists who use artisanal ice. Rents got so expensive that even some of the designer boutiques closed. “Some people blame Girls,” she says of the gentrification. “But who knows?”

Chatelain captured locations again whenever she noticed they had changed. Some were utterly remade within months; others transformed over years. In a few cases, Chatelain couldn’t recognize locations she’d already photographed. She’d been visiting Brooklyn Winery—which offers “gourmet nibbles”—for months before realizing she’d photographed it before the renovation. Her excitement about the neighborhood fell in direct proportion to rents rising.

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Quartz: Scientists just observed chimpanzees doing something we’ve never seen them do: going fishing

Scientists have observed chimpanzees doing something we’ve never seen them do before: going fishing.

This footage of chimpanzees fishing for algae was captured in a remote part of Guinea. It’s from a research project called ‘The Pan-African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee,” where scientists have recorded thousands of hours of footage of chimpanzee habitats in remote parts of Africa.

Scientists believe there’s a lot to learn from chimpanzees about human evolution. Like people, the animals have advanced problem-solving skills and can adapt tools for different circumstances. Scientists are trying to gather as much information as possible, noting that chimpanzees are endangered.

They have so much footage to sort through, that they’re asking the internet to help. Visitors to the site Chimp & See can assist in research by sorting through, identifying, and tagging the different animals in the videos.

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Mic: What the fight against AIDS looks like around the world

In June, President Barack Obama made a speech on the anniversary of the first AIDS diagnosis in the United States, which made news 35 years ago. While at the time, the HIV/AIDS crisis was exactly that — a crisis — over the past three decades, the country has made strides in prevention and education (though African-Americans, and especially gay black men, are still being diagnosed with the virus at alarming rates), in addition to having improved the quality of life for many of the 1.2 million Americans who live with what remains an incurable disease.

"We've seen that testing, treatment, education and acceptance can not only save and extend lives, but fight the discrimination that halted progress for too long," Obama said at the time. He pledged his commitment to ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.

The fight against the spread of HIV in the United States, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. As of the end of 2015, a staggering 36.7 million people worldwide live with the virus, many in places with fewer resources and where people have less access to health care. In those countries, the fight against HIV/AIDS can look a little different. 

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CityLab: How Sacramento Rolled Out a Mobile Restroom for the Homeless

Until recently, that is. This past June, Harris spearheaded a six-month pilot project called Pit Stop that put a portable bathroom for the homeless population at a River District intersection close to organizations that serve them, such as Women’s Empowerment. A truck brings the three-stall unit to the location every day at 8 a.m. and hauls it away at 6 p.m. Two attendants staff the bathroom, which also functions as a collection site for needles and dog waste.

Culp says that since the program began, she and her staff have seen a 90 percent decrease in the amount of waste around their building. City statistics support her anecdotal evidence. In the first four months of the project, people used the facility more than 9,000 times, and over 600 used needles were collected. [...]

The pilot program has cost the city close to $175,000: $75,000 more than was budgeted. As a result, the city council has agreed to explore less expensive ways of maintaining the project, such as partnering with organizations in the River District to use their existing restrooms. [...]

Most of Sacramento’s funding for the homeless goes towards programs with longer-term objectives, such as “rapid rehousing,” in which those in need receive rental subsidies for a number of months until they’re able to pay on their own. “Pit Stop addresses a short-term, urgent crisis,” Halcon says. “The idea is that it’s a type of program that will no longer be necessary in the future.”

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The Guardian: Brexit chaos could change the political map of Britain

The Lib Dems had run their entire campaign in this wealthy part of west London suburbia, in which 72% of people had voted Remain on June 23, on an anti hard-Brexit message. “For the first time I can remember we were not the pot-hole party. We were promoting our views on the EU, on internationalism, tolerance, what sort of country we want to be,” said one party insider. [...]

Later voters began to explain why they had switched from Goldsmith to the unknown politically inexperienced accountant Sarah Olney. “It was a shame, really. Zac was always really diligent,” said Susannah, a young mother who did not not give surname, on the school run in Mortlake. “But the Brexit stuff was the most important issue. Lots of people here still can’t really believe Brexit is happening. It was much harder to vote for Zac knowing he’d supported the people who got us here. It’s made a lot of people like me change our votes.” [...]

For Theresa May and the Tories, despite their assertion that Richmond changes nothing, it is a warning shot that Brexit is shifting the landscape, in profound, if very different, ways across the country. May’s already wafer-thin Commons majority has been cut to just 14, and if more byelection losses were to follow, her ability to govern effectively would be called ever more into doubt. Today, a group of former Tory ministers and senior MPs warn that if the prime minister panders too much to anti-EU hardliners, the party will lose middle ground voters en masse as they did in Richmond, and risk defeat at the next general election.

The tactical counter to that is that a soft Brexit will deliver ammunition to Ukip, under its new leader Paul Nuttall, particularly in the Midlands and the north where they pose a threat to both the Tories and Labour. For Labour the dilemmas are just as acute. They were never expected to do well in Richmond, but their miserable tally of votes there has sounded loud alarm bells nonetheless. The fear among Labour MPs is that the party led by Jeremy Corbyn, a lukewarm supporter of the EU but a keen advocate of free movement and defender of immigration, risks being trampled between a newly resurgent Lib Dem party in pro-Remain seats in urban areas and the south, and Ukip in Leave strongholds. As one senior Labour MP put it: “Our leader seems to be anti-markets and lukewarm about the EU on the one hand, yet gives an unqualified pro-immigration message on the other. It is the worst of both worlds electorally.” Yesterday, in a speech in Prague, Corbyn said it was vital that parties on the left did not respond to the surge of rightwing populism by scapegoating refugees and migrant workers, again refusing to be allied to those in his party who argue it is a problem that needs addressing.

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