Monk

By Jocelyn Noveck | Associated Press “Why are you teaching us to be so rude?” the elderly village woman asks a Bhutanese election official in “The Monk and the Gun.” It’s a question both poignant and biting, because the “teaching” this woman is resisting is something much of the outside world considers a basic human right: the right to vote. For a piercing refresher lesson on democracy, one wouldn’t necessarily think of rural Bhutan as the first place to look. For one thing, democratic elections only came to the tiny,…

Nina Metz | Chicago Tribune Rare is the reboot that captures the magic of the original. But sometimes it’s nice to catch up with familiar characters years later, and the TV movie “Mr. Monk’s Last Case” (on Peacock) is one such opportunity, with Tony Shalhoub returning as the obsessive-compulsive crime solver he played on “Monk,” the USA series that ran for eight seasons from 2002 to 2009. Monk’s germaphobia has always been central. So what does his life look like now, amid an ongoing pandemic caused by an airborne virus?…

Medieval monks were, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early Christians who had shown remarkable commitment to their work. There was Sarah, who lived next to a river without ever once looking in its direction, such was her dedication to her faith. James prayed so intently during a snowstorm that he was buried in snow and had to be dug out by his neighbors.But none of these early devotees could ward off…

Why would someone join an institution that removed the option of family life and required them to be celibate? Reproduction, after all, is at the very heart of the evolution that shaped us.  Yet many religious institutions around the world require exactly this. The practice has led anthropologists to wonder how celibacy could have evolved in the first place.Some have suggested that practices that are costly to individuals, such as never having children, can still emerge when people blindly conform to norms that benefit a…

Google Photos is rolling out new Real Tone filters that let you better represent your skin tone color in images. The new skin tone filters will be available to users on Android and iOS mobile apps as well as the Photos web client.Google first announced this feature for Photos at its I/O 2022 developer conference earlier this month. The company said its photo sharing and storage service will get the new Real Tone filters “later this month”. The promised rollout has now begun.Once you have the feature, you can apply the…

Google has adopted the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale for use across its software and products to ensure all kinds of skin tones are accurately portrayed and represented on the internet. The MST Scale is the work of Harvard professor and sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk, and is a 10-point scale that help machines better understand and therefore better represent more varied skin tones. It’s a considerable step up from the six-point scale commonly used online today. The 10-point scale has been validated through a U.S. study…