Every Building Tested After Grenfell Tower Has Failed Safety Check: Here’s What We’re Reading
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Here’s what we’re reading today.
1. Every single building tested after Grenfell Tower has failed safety checks
Theresa May told parliament “that 120 buildings in 37 different local authorities across the UK have now been tested, with a 100% failure rate, as the government struggles to deal with the aftermath of this month’s devastating fire at the building in west London.
“May said she understood that the material that was failing the tests was not compliant with building regulations. As a result of the 100% failure rate, she said local authorities ‘should not wait for test results’ and should instead ‘get on with the job of fire safety tests’ on all at-risk buildings.”
2. Why the far-right wants to be the new ‘alternative’ culture
“The new reactionary ‘alternative’ movement is also keenly aware of power, but it craves it, worships it, is constantly devising plans to acquire it. It has traded a siege mentality for a war bearing; its platforms are less gathering places for expressions of dissent than staging grounds against the venues to which they’re opposed and against which they expect to win. Their rhetoric and style want to evoke, in some ghoulish upside-down way, heroic rebellion, regardless of how well their aims align with the powers that be. And so we get, for instance, the consummate ’90s outsider Alex Jones — against the world but also taking over the world, under attack from elites but also on the phone with the president.”
3. Childhood’s end
“Childhood is a relatively new and fragile thing in the history of humankind, and we are fucking it up. Less than a hundred years ago, we stuck children in coal mines or behind spinning mules to waste away for a sub-living wage. Before that, we didn’t expect most of them to live into adulthood. Now the young are the consumer vanguard of first resort, which both diminishes the discrete experiential character of childhood and fatally degrades whatever may remain of the dignity of adulthood.”
4. How Canadian media normalizes Islamophobia
“It’s not just The Rebel. Canada’s mainstream media has a problem.”
5. Eerily accurate facial reconstructions are allowing the dead to speak
“Researchers at Liverpool John Moore’s University have reconstructed the face of a man who lived in Dublin some 500 years ago. Incredibly accurate reconstructions like this are providing archaeologists with new way of studying the past—while also allowing them to visualize some of the most forgotten figures in history.”
– Gizmodo
