Thanksgiving traces its roots to a 1621 harvest meal shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, but the holiday took its modern form in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday. Roughly 94% of Americans celebrate, most with a large meal featuring turkey and regional side dishes. The holiday has also become a major travel event, with nearly 82 million people expected to have journeyed 50 miles or more this year, including 73 million by car and almost 6 million by air. In total, Americans will consume around 40 million turkeys and tens of millions of pounds of cranberries.
True Spies
The Digital Silk Road
What happens when surveillance becomes an export?
Cyber threat analyst Charity Wright started out as a Mandarin linguist in the US Army and NSA, watching China from the inside. Years later, she’s tracking a different kind of expansion: the “Digital Silk Road”. Chinese-built cables, data centers, 5G networks, apps, and smart-city systems spread across Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Working as a “digital spy,” Wright builds false online personas, slips into forums and dark-web corners, and follows patterns in IP addresses and network traffic. The picture that emerges is unsettling. The same technologies that power mobile payments and city infrastructure can also siphon data back to Chinese servers or give governments turnkey tools for surveillance: from facial recognition cameras to platforms that track political dissidents and minority groups.
Join Charity Wright in this week’s podcast selection, 'The Digital Silk Road', as she goes threat-hunting across a new web of infrastructure built to move not just goods, but information.
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Thousands of rare American recordings, early jazz, blues, gospel, and other styles dating back more than a century, are now publicly available thanks to a partnership between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust‑to‑Digital Foundation. The project draws from roughly 50,000 fragile discs gathered over decades by founder Lance Ledbetter and a network of private collectors who preserved music that might otherwise have vanished.
UCSB’s Special Research Collections is digitizing the archive and adding it to the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings, giving listeners free access to a body of work that captures the sound of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and the origins of modern American music.
Articles
Behind Prague's Velvet Curtain
What secrets linger in a city shaped by surveillance?
Prague’s postcard charm hides a past shaped by occupation, resistance, and a state security service that monitored daily life for decades. From the belfry of St. Nicholas’ Church, once a Czechoslovakian secret police lookout tracking diplomats, to Cold War bunkers, improvised observation posts, and museums filled with covert gadgets, the city’s landmarks reveal how deeply espionage is woven into its streets. Former communist-era sites sit alongside film locations, research institutes, and archives that preserve the stories of those who lived under constant watch. In Prague, the lines between history, secrecy, and spectacle are often only a few steps apart.
Give your party guests an unforgettable experience designed to engage, entertain, and inspire. Our dedicated staff will be on hand to help, and you'll even get your own special roped-off zone to celebrate.
Can a single treatment change the course of a lifelong disease?
Researchers at the University of Manchester report that a 3-year-old boy with Hunter syndrome is showing a full recovery after receiving an experimental gene therapy earlier this year. The rare inherited condition, which affects about 2,000 people worldwide, prevents the body from producing an enzyme needed to break down certain complex sugars. Without it, those molecules build up in organs and the brain, causing progressive physical and cognitive decline.
Standard care requires weekly enzyme infusions and can’t protect the brain. This new approach removes a patient’s stem cells, corrects the faulty gene, and reinfuses the repaired cells, allowing the treatment to reach the brain for the first time. Results suggest the therapy may slow or halt the cognitive deterioration that defines the disease.
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