Climate change has transformed the American West into a tinderbox. Temperatures since the start of the century have averaged 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than any other point in the historical record since 1895. Unprecedented drought conditions and decades of ineffective public land management practices have led to massive blazes.

The same can be said for Pacific Gas and Electric, Northern California’s local power monopoly/serial arsonist. The company has faced multiple civil and criminal charges in recent years after causing some of the largest and most damaging wildfires in California history — like 2018’s Camp Fire, which killed 68 people, or 2021’s Dixie Fire which caused $1.5 billion in property damage. In fact, an investigation by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection found that the company’s equipment started at least 17 of the state’s 21 fires in 2017, MSNBC reports.

A significant portion of the state is probably going to be alight for the next few months. Regardless of whether you live in a coastal city, on the urban-wildland interface or out in the middle of rural anywhere, those fires are going to have an immediate impact on your life. It could be the enduring hassle of weeks-long rolling power outages, it could be the health consequences from air pollution, it could be slaloming through walls of flame in a desperate bid to escape an engulfing firestorm — either way, you’re probably going to have a bad time. So here’s some gear and techniques to help with this summer’s fire season. Good luck.

It’s just like camping, but involuntary!

Your individual needs will depend on the emergency, your location and your access to resources. What you’ll need to successfully ride out an extended power outage in the comfort of your own home will be different than if you have to fit your life into an automobile trunk or hiking backpack. Below, we’ll discuss five categories of products that no go-bag should be without.

Packing and preparation can seem daunting and overwhelming but resources are available from the federal government to help. FEMA’s Ready.gov website offers information and advice in 11 languages for any number of emergency situations both in digital and physical formats. The FEMA app for Android and iOS offers the same information directly from your mobile device, as well as real-time emergency broadcasts and directions to nearby Disaster Recovery Centers. In the sections below, we’ll talk about the gear you’ll need to ride out the emergency until you can get to one of those centers, set out across seven broad categories.

Lighting

In wilderness survival situations, there’s an order of importance in doing things: find shelter, then water, start a fire and finally procure food. This is very good advice that could save your life, but when the emergency alert system goes off at night and you stumble out of bed to find that the power’s already out, you aren’t going to be thinking about water bottles, you’re going to want a flashlight, so let’s start there.

When my family was camping out in the driveway for a week after the Big One in ‘89, we were stuck with old-school Mag-Lites — incandescent bulbs, ran on six D-batteries, heavy enough you could beat a rhinoceros to death with it — you know the ones. Thankfully, technology has advanced in the convening years and today’s LED and Li-ion driven torches are much more luminous and lightweight.

You have a choice between flashlights and headlamps. Headlamps are great if you need your hands free and want light wherever you’re looking, hand torches offer more flexibility in their use and won’t blind whoever you’re looking at.

Fenix, Biolite, Petzl, Thrunite, and Black Diamond all make solid flashlights and headlamps. The $70 Petzl Actik Core headlamp, for example, will run on either AAA or Li-ion batteries, weighs less than 3 ounces and outputs 450 lumens. The $20 Black Diamond Astro 300 Headlamp, on the other hand, outputs 300 lumens but you’ll have to purchase the rechargeable battery separately. Just don’t go overboard with the lumen rating, 500 lumens is bright enough to see nearly 100 feet in complete darkness — you’re trying to illuminate what’s in front of you, not blind aircraft pilots.

Personally, I prefer to not strap LEDs to my face (nothing against headlamps but if I’m going to die in a natural disaster I’m not going do it looking like a huge dork), so I keep Thrunite’s TC15 V2 and Archer 2A V3 in my go-bag. The Archer runs on a pair of AAs while the TC15 is rechargable, giving me the redundancy my survivalist paranoia craves. They’re both waterproof, shock and drop resistant, and way easier to fit in a pocket than a Mag-Lite. You might also check out the waterproof, $66 Coast Polysteel 600R, which outputs 530 lumens, runs a claimed 35 hours on either a Li-ion pack or 4 AAs, and even includes a USB port for charging other electronics.

pongvit via Getty Images

If you’re at risk of long-term displacement, you’ll want to invest in a lantern. Black Diamond makes a slick LED lantern, the $25, 200-lumen Moji, that’s bright enough to illuminate a tabletop, tent or car interior. The $70 Moji Charging Station Lantern combines a 250-lumen LED lantern with a portable power block. It can run on AC (with an optional adapter), a rechargeable lithium ion battery or standard AAs while charging your other devices. The Goal Zero Lighthouse 600 is another good choice, offering 600 lumens of illumination and up to 180 hours of runtime. It can be recharged via USB, hand crank or an optional solar array. And if you would prefer something a bit more analog, it’s never a bad call to have a stash of long-burning emergency candles tucked away somewhere.

Also check out the Coleman Recharge 800. It outputs up to 800 lumens for as long as 45 hours straight thanks to a 4800 mAh lithium battery. I like it because it’s shaped like the old propane Coleman lanterns we used on family camping trips and that I still keep on hand for when the grid goes down for good. It’s half the price as the more modern design, propane is still easy to score and, again, redundancy is your friend. For an even more inexpensive option, take a look at the Texsport Single Mantle, currently $27 on Amazon. Or if you have access to a bulk propane tank (like what’s connected to your grill), Texport’s propane tree can fuel three gas-powered devices simultaneously — think lantern light, camp stove and tent heater — all from one supply, without having to swap connectors between them.

Shelter

If your domicile is still standing and you’ve just lost power for an indeterminate amount of time, congrats! That is what we call “an inconvenience” — keep living your life, enjoy drinking from your operational indoor plumbing and skip on down to the sections about energy storage and cooking because you’re good here.

Now, just because it’s California in the summertime doesn’t mean there won’t be a chill in the air by the time FEMA comes around. Keep a stock of warm and water resistant clothing in your go-bag, as well as a blanket or poncho that can work as both an insulation layer and ground cover. If you don’t mind the crinkle factor, SOL makes a variety of mylar emergency blankets for either personal or group use. Wool blankets (which don’t lose their insulation capacity when wet like cotton does) are another option. You can find them cheap on Amazon or at your local army surplus shop.

If you do find yourself displaced and in need of short-term accommodation, then it’s time to pitch yourself a little tent. The Litefighter 1X is an excellent three-season personal shelter that works as both a standalone tent with 18.2 sq ft of floor space, or as bug netting when affixed to a cot. It’s plenty spacious for a solo hiker plus their pack, and has lots of room for wet outer gear under the rain fly. An optional windbreaker attachment can provide enough added insulation to use the 1X during cold winter months as well. The Mountainsmith Morrison EVO is a cozy 17.25 square feet and $199 on Amazon, and LiteFighter also makes a larger 2-person tent with 34.5 square feet of floor space. At $400 and $450 respectively, the 1- and 2-person 1X series tents are a bit pricier than average. You can just as easily pick up a ​​REI Co-op Half Dome SL 2+ with 33.75 square feet for $329 or for the same price as the solo-occupancy 1X, you can get a 4-person REI Wonderland.

Brodi LeBlanc via Getty Images

You can also incorporate your vehicle into this temporary housing solution. Use it to securely store your gear while you sleep outside or as a mounting point for a rooftop tent like the $3,695 Roofnest Condor XL, the $1,750 Thule Tepui Low-Pro 2 or the $1,800 CVT Pioneer Bachelor (it’s small enough to fit atop a Mini Cooper!). If spending four figures to sleep on top of your car seems too risky a proposition, the $185 North East Harbor Universal SUV Camping Tent holds up to eight people and glomps onto the tailgate area.

EV owners whose vehicles have V2L capabilities — that’s “vehicle-to-load” and it’s offered in the Ford F-150 Lightning, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 — may not even immediately notice an outage thanks to their cars’ ability to power their households for up to a few days at a time. Who needs a rooftop tent when your car is a rolling backup generator?

Water

Your next priority will be securing a supply of potable water for drinking, cooking and hygiene. The CDC recommends “one gallon of water per person per day for drinking and sanitation” and maintaining at least a 2-week supply. Bottled water is “the safest and most reliable” source in an emergency, per the agency, but that can become a pricey and space-consuming option if an outage drags on for an extended period.

You can store tap water in FDA-approved food-grade storage containers — after it’s been treated and sanitized with a mild bleach solution, of course — or you can fill your bathtub ahead of time and store around 100 gallons of water there using a plastic cover liner. Rainwater collection barrels can capture large amounts of water (or at least be used as pre-filled receptacles like a bathtub) but you will need to filter the water before consuming it. Gravity-fed cisterns like the Alexapure Pro Stainless Steel Water Filtration System, and the nearly identical Big Berkey, can hold up to 8.5 liters of fluid while filtering out a wide range of potential contaminants and supplying potable water to as many as 16 people. Regardless of how well these devices claim to clean the water, it’s always a good call to keep a small supply of iodine tablets on hand as backup.

If you’ve got access to a water source with a steady supply of unfiltered but otherwise clean water, take a look at the Portawell, a high-capacity water pump/filtration system that can produce up to 60 gallons of water every hour, using just 35 watts of power. Its 2-stage filtering process removes “100 percent of cysts including giardia, cryptosporidium, and 99.99 percent of pathogenic bacteria (including cholera, typhoid, coliform, chlorine, metals, and volatile organic chemicals),” down to half a micron in size, according to the product’s page. The optional 50W 12V solar panel comes bundled with a charge controller for an extra $170, a 12V battery to put that energy can be either lead-acid (car) battery or a Li-Ion brick and can be purchased at a local automotive or electronics store. All together, you’ll have a high-throughput water distribution device that can hydrate myself and a significant portion of your neighborhood indefinitely — or at least until the filters fail — and do so up to two and a half times faster than hand-pumped filters like the Katadyn Vario, the gravity-fed Platypus GravityWorks, the squeezable Katadyn BeFree or TIME’s “2005 Invention of the Year” winner, the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter can.

Fire, heating and cooking

The stress of displacement is going to take both a mental and physical toll, but you’ve already got light, a place to lay your head and a slake for your thirst. Next you’re going to want to square away your three squares a day.

If just your power is out, keep using your fridge as normal, assuming you have a generator (which we’ll get to below). Otherwise, standard power outage rules apply here: eat in order of perishability — refrigerator, then freezer, then canned — opening the doors as little as possible.

Having a smaller secondary cooler on hand for often-used items like milk, condiments and produce can help preserve the fridge’s contents for longer by reducing the number of door openings. Hydroflask’s $129 20L Day Escape pack cooler is easily portable and can keep items cold for up to 36 hours, while the $76 Coleman Xtreme Portable Cooler can keep ice in form for up to 5 days. If you need something more substantial, the $275 RCIT 65 QT hard cooler is a Wirecutter award winner and the $375 YETI Tundra 65 is sturdy enough to accommodate dry ice, which can keep food cold for up to three times longer.

For important items that will immediately spoil above a specific temperature, like insulin, consider investing in a powered refrigerator like the Dometic CFX3 35 or the 65W Whynter FM-45G. They’re nearly as expensive as regular kitchen fridges and you’ll need to have a beefier generator/solar array to accommodate their additional draw but they do offer added peace of mind knowing that your life saving medication will be viable when you need it.

Ольга Симонова via Getty Images

Eating cold beans out of a can loses its whimsey after the third or fourth spoonful and unless you plan on eating takeaway for the duration, you’re going to need something to cook with — whether that’s with your existing grill, over an open fire, a propane cooktop or electric hotplate. The RoadPro Portable Stove, for example, can heat food up to 300 degrees (like a Bizzaro-world CFX3) and runs through a vehicle’s 12V outlet. The Cuisinart CB-30P1 hot plate is equally at home in dorm rooms, RVs, and campsites but with a 1300-watt draw, you’ll need to use it sparingly.

The Solo Stove Ranger outdoor fire pit, conversely, will run for as long as you have fuel to feed it. The double-walled design maximizes combustion while minimizing smoke production, and can be converted into a woodfire grill with an optional cast iron griddle. At 16 pounds and 16 inches in diameter, it’s easily portable. It’s also $250, which seems expensive for what can be replicated with bare ground and a ring of stones. The INNO STAGE 15-inch portable fire pit is more affordable at $80 and can also run on wood pellets in addition to logs. Or if you want something more streamlined and durable, the Wolf and Grizzly Campfire Trio offers 120 square inches of cookspace and can hold up to 30 pounds — ideal for cast iron skillets and dutch ovens.

The Biolite line of firepits and camp stoves are unique in that they can convert thermal energy into electrical charge thanks to their incorporated heat converters. The Campstove 2 generates 3W of power which is stored in a 2600 mAh while still being able to boil a liter of water in under four and a half minutes. The larger FirePit+ offers a 12,800 mAh battery and can burn both logs and charcoal. If you want to stick with propane as your primary fuel source, check out the 7,000 BTU Coleman Gas Camping Stove which pulls double duty as both a wok and a grill. Of course, having a cook station is no good if you don’t know how to use it. Download a recipe app like BBC Good Food (iOS, Android), Epicurious (iOS, Android) or ​​SideChef Recipes (iOS).

Whether the smoke is coming from your cooking fire or the wildfire, you’re going to want to keep a supply of filtration masks at the ready for when the air quality dips into dangerous particulate levels. Standard Covid rules apply: cloth works in a pinch but n-95 is the superior choice if you can get your hands on them.

First aid and hygiene

Roughing it means just that. With many of the conveniences of modern life inaccessible as long as the lights are out, you’re going to be doing a lot more manual labor which means a litany of bumps, bruises, aches and pains along the way. And while you likely won’t have to concern yourself with performing surgery in the field — the power’s out, you aren’t marooned on a desert isle, just drive to the damn ER — a well-stocked first aid kit is essential to any bug out bag.

In the case of the My Medic 20L Survival Kit, the first aid kit is the bug out bag. This all-in-one healthcare suite offers more than 110 products spread across the National Park Service 10 essential first aid categories, but is both bulky and expensive. If you’ve already got your hands full, maybe consider a less wide-ranging kit. Something like the AMK Mountain Series Hiker Medical Kit, which can accomodate the normal injuries a pair of hikers might see over two days, or the Red Cross’ Family First Aid kit that contains more than 115 items. And if you have pets, you can bet there’s a Medpack for them too. You might consider keeping duplicates of important medical documents — immunization records, allergy information and such — tucked into the kit with the originals locked safely away somewhere secure.

In the event that you do need to be admitted to the hospital, or are interacting with FEMA or other government agencies, you’ll need to have your ID and other critical documents close by — and very preferably not on fire. The Thomas & Bond fireproof safe protects up to two pounds of documents from both fire and water damage thanks to its silicone-coated fiberglass construction. Maintaining a safe deposit box in the next town over is another, more extreme option.

Much like cold beans from a can, the musky scent of an unwashed human — especially mixed with sweat, wood smoke and despair — can get real old, real quick. But when the power goes out, your water heater might stop working as well, which means you could be in for a whole bunch of cold showers. Solar camping showers like those from Advanced Elements or Coghlan's can help bridge the gap.

Assuming you live somewhere that gets bright sunlight throughout the day (ie, not San Francisco), these devices can heat up to 5 gallons of water to a yelp-inducing 110 degrees F in about 3 hours. They’re less great at retaining that heat so you’re going to need to (ahem) “get ‘em while they’re hot.” Nothing says that just because they’re heated outdoors they have to be used there as well — simply hang the heated bundle from your shower curtain. Be careful though, as 5 gallons of water is quite heavy, weighing 41.6 pounds. It could snap the curtain rod and leave you recreating that Flashdance scene with a bag of scalding hot water — and again, you’re probably going to have a bad time.

But hey, maybe showering outdoors turns out to be your jam. First off, good on you finding that bright side in the midst of a climate emergency. Second off, it just so happens that Amazon sells a 5.5-gallon heated outdoor shower system that runs off a solar panel and a garden hose, not for nothing.

Your body isn’t the only thing that’s going to get soiled and stinky while roughing it. If you don’t have access to a laundry or coin-op, the Wonder Wash can at least keep your socks, undies and other small items fresh — and up to bath towel-sized items, if you do them one at a time. Tie off a length of braided cotton rope between two uprights and you’ve got yourself a functional clothesline.

To reiterate, this is a power outage, not The Revenant. You are not a bear, so please do not dump in the woods without at least bringing a trowel — maybe a pop-up poop tent and travel bidet for good measure.

Electronics

With the power out and no word from PG&E on when it might be coming back on, you’ll simply have to make some of your own. But before you go jury rigging your Peloton to a daisy-chain of lead-acid batteries and trying to stationary ride your way to electrical self-sufficiency, step outside. The sun in your eyes and wind in your face can just as easily be harnessed to put electrons in a battery pack.

Thanks to steady advancements in materials and engineering technologies today’s solar panels and home wind turbines are smaller, more efficient, and more affordable than ever — as are the battery systems that hold the excess charge for use when the sun isn't shining and wind isn’t blowing. The 15W, 12V Survival Wind Turbine Generator from Pacific Sky Power is fully portable and only weighs 3 pounds. Larger turbines like the 400W Primus Air 40 and Pikasola wind turbines will produce more power but at the cost of mobility — they’ll need to be statically installed somewhere windy to be most effective and then wired into the property’s grid.

Tanaonte via Getty Images

The same holds true for renewable solar. But unless you need to keep your crypto mining operation running nonstop through the outage, plenty of battery backup systems can provide the power your family needs without having to affix permanent panels in your yard or on your roof. The $3,600 Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, is essentially a ruggedized 2.1kWh power cell with six, 200W solar panels feeding it electricity.

“I feel like I could keep my refrigerator running in an emergency for quite a while,” Engadget Managing Editor Terrence O’Brien, who was sent a review unit for a separate post, said of the model. “I laid out four panels in my yard and charged it to 100 percent in a few hours and it’s been going for two months without a recharge.”

“It’s basically a giant battery,” he continued. “It’s quiet, so it’s not like running a regular generator.” The 2000 Pro is the biggest and baddest that Jackery makes and, “probably overkill for most people who aren’t using it for emergency purposes,” O’Brien noted.

Similarly, Geneverse and Bluetti Power both make solar generators parallel to Jackery’s offerings, and at roughly the same price point. But if you’re looking for something even more robust than that, Goal Zero offers a range of solar backup systems that can keep your house running up to 3 days without interruption. But be warned, anything beyond the starter kit is going to need installation by a professional electrician.

On the other hand if you’re under evacuation, a 23-pound power brick might not be the best traveling companion. In that case, scavenge the power you need off of nearby outlets using a USB adapter like the 20W Anker Nano, the 40W Anker PowerPort 4, or the RavPower Pioneer offering both USB-A and -C ports. And to save some of that power for later, the INIU Portable Charger holds 10,000 mAh for just over $20, as does the Anker Portable Charger. Be sure to keep a small pouch of common adapter types in your pack as well, just in case you need to share your supply.

Phone charges shouldn’t be the only thing you’re sharing during the event — accurate information will be a vital resource as well. At the very least, you’ll want a solar or hand-crank emergency radio like the Midland ER310 — it’s got a rechargeable 2600 mAh battery, solar panel, integrated flashlight, and an ultrasonic dog whistle for search and rescue canines. DaringSnail’s 4000 mAh emergency radio doesn't have nearly as many bells and whistles, but it also costs half as much as the 310. The Eton FRX3+ can be powered through a variety of means — USB, Li-Ion battery, solar, and hand crank — and will automatically broadcast NOAA weather alerts for your area.

When you think of study aids, TikTok is likely not what comes to mind. And, there’s probably a good reason for that. Scrolling your For You page may be entertaining, but it’s rarely productive.

But, a growing group of study influencers might be changing that. From #booktok, #studytok and #edutok, there are dozens of accounts that can help with study tips, math tutoring and even college admissions advice.

To be clear, it’s still a good idea to limit how much time you spend scrolling. And watching study-themed TikToks is not a substitute for… actually studying. But, videos from academically-minded TikTokers can offer advice on learning tough subjects and serve as inspiration for building new and productive study habits.

What to look for (and avoid)

If you’re looking for study help, well-established hashtags like #studytok or #edutok are a great place to start. Many tutors also post to TikTok, and you can find subject-specific content by adding “tutor” or “help” to the topic, like #mathtuor, #physicshelp etc.

But, as with everything on TikTok, not all study content is equal. And for every helpful account, there are also those who are sharing unhelpful shortcuts and too-good-to-be-true “study hacks.” So avoid accounts that post shady “advice” that’s actually cheating, like how to get an AI to solve your math homework or write an essay for you. And be wary of anyone who is more focused on selling products than usable advice.

Here are a few accounts that actually do a good job in the studying space.

Gohar Khan Goharsguide

Gohar Khan is most well-known for his college admissions advice, which he shares on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The 22-year-old recently graduated from MIT, but before that he was also accepted to Yale and Stanford. Now, he makes videos advising teens on how they can boost their chances of getting into Ivy League and other top-tier schools.

He shares videos with advice on all aspects of preparing for college, from application and essay-writing help, to how to choose a major once you get there. Even if an Ivy isn’t your ultimate goal, he also posts more general tips that will be helpful for students of all levels, In fact, some of his most popular content is geared around how to do homework more quickly, how to find the motivation to study and how to improve your test scores.

Kyle Johnson

Book lovers will appreciate Kyle Johnson’s TikToks for his concise but thoughtful book reviews and reading recommendations, but Johnson, who posts under the account panic_kyle, shares more than just reading lists. He also shares analysis of literary classics and other popular books you may often find as assigned reading in English class..

If you’re looking for a shortcut to avoid reading altogether, Johnson’s account won’t help much. He typically only gives a very brief summary of the books he covers. But if you want to think more deeply about literary themes, or get inspiration for an essay, his videos break down complex literary themes in an easy to digest way. He also shares more general advice, like how to take notes while reading fiction or how to analyze literature.

Your Bummy Math Tutor

I was awful at math when I was in school. Like, truly, awful; I had to repeat algebra three separate times. To the surprise of absolutely no one, I did not score well on the math portion of my SAT… or any other standardized test. And while I don’t know if any amount of TikTok-length videos would have helped back then, Your Bummy Math Tutor’s content makes me think it might have.

YBMT takes math questions from the SAT and practice tests and explains how to solve them, along with strategies for approaching different types of problems. It’s all fairly straightforward and yet, as a lifetime hater of math, the content is also way more engaging than any math class I can remember. Luckily for everyone, I haven’t had to do any algebra for more than a decade. But after watching enough of YBMT’s videos, I kind of feel like maybe I could solve a few problems that would have completely stumped my teenage self. At least, I might have had a few extra tools to try.

Study with soybean

You’ve probably heard of bullet journaling, the note-taking fad that’s part habit tracker, part diary and part to-do list organizer. While it can seem intimidating to start mapping out your entire life in a bullet journal, the system can be a useful study aid.

Study with soybean is a bullet journal pro whose content combines journaling inspo with study tips practical advice on how to take better notes. Her videos break down different styles of note-taking, and how to transform your notes into flashcards and other study aids. She also posts more creative content, like how to make your own greeting cards and improve your handwriting.

As the boundaries between developed spaces and wildlands continue to blur, the frequency and intensity of human-animal interactions will surely increase. But it won’t just be adorably viral trash pandas and pizza rats whistling on your veranda — it’ll be 30-50 feral hogs in your garbage and birds of prey predating upon your precious pekinese. Next thing you know your daughter’s knocked up and the fine china’s missing! But it wasn’t always like this, Peter Alagona explains in his new book, The Accidental Ecosystem. He explores how and why America’s cities — once largely barren of natural features — have exploded with wildlife over the past 150 years, even as populations have declined in their traditional habitats.

In the excerpt below, Alagona examines our long and complicated relationships with the coyote, one that has lasted for millennia and ranged from reverence to revulsion, a narrative now influenced by the social media hivemind.

UC Press

Excerpted from The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities by Peter S Alagona, published by the University of California Press. © 2022 by Peter S Alagona.

Urban adapters and exploiters may be prepared for life among people, but are people prepared for life among them? In the 1970s and 1980s, when coyotes started showing up more often in dozens of American cities, residents and officials were unprepared, and many were unwilling to accommodate animals they saw as dangerous interlopers. As one teenager who lost her toy poodle to a coyote told the Los Angeles Times in 1980, “Coyotes make me mad. They take care of our rats, which are really disgusting. But I hate coyotes.” The same year, the Yale social ecology professor Stephen Kellert found that, among US survey respondents, coyotes ranked twelfth from the bottom on a list of “most liked” animals, above cockroaches, wasps, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes but below turtles, butterflies, swans, and horses. The most-liked animal was the dog, which is so closely related to the coyote that the two can mate in the wild and produce fertile offspring.

In his 2010 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals, the anthropologist Hal Herzog wrote that “the way we think about other species often defies logic.” This is not to say that our ideas about animals are arbitrary, but rather that the ways we think about them are shaped as much by history, culture, and psychology as by physics, chemistry, or biology. In the absence of this social context, people’s ideas about and actions toward other animals can seem nonsensical, hypocritical, or downright weird.

Animals are often presumed innocent or guilty — and thus treated with respect or contempt — based on the baggage our culture, through art or literature or tradition, has forced them to carry. An animal’s inherent or perceived qualities also matter. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to creatures that are big, that we think are cute, pretty, majestic, or humanlike, that seem to embody admirable qualities such as grit, entrepreneurship, or good parenting, or that at the very least leave us alone. Yet such perceptions rarely reflect a species's real behavior or ecology. Many people see rats as disgusting or dangerous, even though most rats pose little threat to most people most of the time. Cats, meanwhile, seem friendly and cuddly despite being ferocious predators and disease-ridden ecological wrecking balls.

Mass and social media play especially important roles in shaping perceptions. When large and charismatic wildlife species started showing up in many American cities more frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time of Kelly Keen’s death, newspapers and TV shows often adopted one of two tones: irony or sensationalism. Ironic images and stories emphasized how surprising it was to see wild animals showing up in supposedly civilized areas. Sensationalistic stories emphasized conflicts between people and wildlife. They often used military metaphors about wars and battles or echoed the paranoid, racist, and xenophobic tropes of the day, comparing wildlife to undocumented immigrants, gang members, criminals, terrorists, and “super predators.”

These images were circulating in the media during an era when the proportion of Americans with firsthand experiences of wild places was flattening or even declining. During the 1970s and 1980s, \consumer products and better infrastructure fueled the growth of outdoor sports, including non hunting wildlife activities like bird watching and photography. Yet technology, which enabled so many people to enjoy the outdoors, also began inserting itself into these same people’s encounters with nature, first mediating and then replacing them. Video screens allowed Americans to spend more time watching virtual creatures and less time interacting with actual animals. Animal-themed visual media exploded in popularity, while zoos and museums struggled to attract patrons. Between 1995 and 2014, even the National Park system saw its annual per capita visitation slide by 4 percent.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the people who encountered wildlife in cities often reacted by treating these animals like the caricatures they read about in the news or saw on TV. For many, creatures like coyotes looked like either cuddly pets or bloodthirsty killers. Neither image was accurate, of course, but both had real world consequences.

When people who viewed coyotes with suspicion saw them in urban areas, often the first thing they did was call the police. Involving the police tended to turn a non problem into a problem or make a bad problem worse. Yet moving away from a law-enforcement-based approach has been difficult.

As late as 2015, New York City, which saw its first coyote twenty years earlier, was still often approaching these creatures as outlaws. That April, the New York Police Department, responding to an early-morning 911 call reporting a coyote in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, deployed tranquilizer guns, patrol cars, and helicopters. The ensuing three-hour chase ended when officers failed to corner the fugitive canine. When questioned about the costly and time-consuming incident, the NYPD contradicted a statement previously issued by the Department of Parks and Recreation saying that the city would no longer pursue coyotes that did not appear to pose a threat. It turned out that the two departments did not have a written agreement spelling out this policy. NYPD officers were not trained on how to deal with coyotes, but it was up to them to decide how to respond. The result was predictable: the same excessive force that has plagued modern policing in general was mobilized to combat a wild animal that presented little if any risk.

Over time, some cities and their residents adjusted to their new reality of living with coyotes. Jurisdictions with ample budgets, supportive residents, and helpful institutions like zoos and museums developed research, education, conservation, and citizen science programs. Some parks and police departments started working together to develop new policies and practices, limiting the use of force and trying, with some difficulty, to respond only to genuine emergencies. One of the key messages wildlife officials stressed was that the decision to launch a response should depend on an animal’s behavior — whether it appeared injured or sick or was acting aggressively — and not its mere presence.

As such messages have percolated, attitudes have evolved. In New York, as people have become more accustomed to living with coyotes, fear has given way to tolerance and even a tenuous kind of acceptance. In some neighborhoods, individual coyotes have become mascots with names, backstories, and social media accounts. Few people actually trust coyotes, and most people don’t want them prowling around their backyards, schools, or playgrounds, but many communities have shown a growing willingness to embrace their furry neighbors.

As early as 2008, studies from suburban New York showed that most residents appreciated coyotes, enjoyed having them around, and even “found the likelihood of injury from a coyote acceptable.” But people’s willingness to live alongside coyotes in their communities dropped quickly when incidents occurred, suggesting that tolerance for them remained fragile. Overall, however, the longer most people lived with urban wildlife like coyotes, the more they viewed these creatures not as threats but as natural and beneficial members of multispecies urban communities.

The skies overhead could soon be filled with constellations of commercial space stations occupying low earth orbit while human colonists settle the Moon with an eye on Mars, if today's robber barons have their way. But this won't result in the same freewheeling Wild West that we saw in the 19th century, unfortunately, as tomorrow's interplanetary settlers will be bringing their lawyers with them. 

In their new book, The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration, renowned astrophysicist and science editor, Donald Goldsmith, and Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal, argue in favor of sending robotic scouts — with their lack of weighty necessities like life support systems — out into the void ahead of human explorers. But what happens after these synthetic astronauts discover an exploitable resource or some rich dork declares himself Emperor of Mars? In the excerpt below, Goldsmith and Rees discuss the challenges facing our emerging exoplanetary legal system.

Harvard University Press

Excerpted from The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees, published by the Harvard University Press. © 2022 by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees.

Almost all legal systems have grown organically, the result of long experience that comes from changes in the political, cultural, environmental, and other circumstances of a society. The first sprouts of space law deserve attention from those who may participate in the myriad activities envisioned for the coming decades, as well, perhaps, from those who care to imagine how a Justinian law code could arise in the realm of space.

Those who travel on spacecraft, and to some degree those who will live on another celestial object, occupy situations analogous to those aboard naval vessels, whose laws over precedents to deal with crimes or extreme antisocial behavior. These laws typically assign to a single officer or group of officers the power to judge and to inflict punishment, possibly awaiting review in the event of a return to a higher court. This model seems likely to reappear in the first long-distance journeys within the solar system and in the first settlements on other celestial objects, before the usual structure of court systems for larger societies appears on the scene.

As on Earth, however, most law is civil law, not criminal law. A far greater challenge than dealing with criminal acts lies in formulating an appropriate code of civil law that will apply to disputes, whether national or international, arising from spaceborne activities by nations, corporations, or individuals. For half a century, a small cadre of interested parties have developed the new specialty of “space law,” some of which already has the potential for immediate application. What happens if a piece of space debris launched by a particular country or corporation falls onto an unsuspecting group of people or onto their property? What happens if astronauts from different countries lay claim to parts of the moon or an asteroid? And most important in its potential importance, if not in its likelihood: who will speak for Earth if we should receive a message from another civilization?

Conferences on subjects such as these have generated more interest than answers. Human exploration of the moon brought related topics to more widespread attention and argument. During the 1980s, the United Nations seemed the natural arena in which to hash them out, and those discussions eventually produced the outcomes described in this chapter. Today, one suspects, almost no one knows the documents that the United Nations produced, let alone has plans to support countries that obey the guidelines in those documents.

Our hopes for achieving a rational means to define and limit activities beyond our home planet will require more extensive agreements, plus a means of enforcing them. Non-lawyers who read existing and proposed agreements about the use of space should remain aware that lawyers typically define words relating to specialized situations as “terms of art,” giving them meanings other than those that a plain reading would suggest.

For example, the word “recovery” in normal discourse refers to regaining the value of something that has been lost, such as the lost wages that arise from an injury. In more specialized usage, “resource recovery” refers to the act of recycling material that would otherwise go to waste. In the vocabulary of mining operations, however, “recovery” has nothing to do with losing what was once possessed; instead, it refers to the extraction of ore from the ground or the seabed. The word’s gentle nature contrasts with the more accurate term “exploitation,” which often implies disapproval, though in legal matters it often carries only a neutral meaning. For example, in 1982 the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea established an International Seabed Authority (ISA) to set rules for the large portion of the seabed that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. By now, 168 countries have signed on to the convention, but the United States has not. According to the ISA’s website, its Mining Code “refers to the whole of the comprehensive set of rules, regulations and procedures issued by ISA to regulate prospecting, exploration and exploitation of marine minerals in the international seabed Area.” In mining circles, no one blinks at plans to exploit a particular location by extracting its mineral resources. Discussions of space law, however, tend to avoid the term “exploitation” in favor of “recovery.”

If you store all your passwords on Chrome and use an iPhone, signing into your various accounts is about to get easier. The latest release of the browser for iOS (version M104) will bring the ability for you to set Chrome as your Autofill provider. It'll also add new "enhanced safe browsing" and Chrome Actions to the app on iPhones and iPads. 

Many of this features are already available in the Android edition of Chrome, like the Password Manager, which uses data you've elected to store in the browser to sign into apps on your phone. Enhanced Safe Browsing, when activated on your iPhone or iPad, will check if websites you're visiting are dangerous. Also, "Chrome warns you if your username and password have been compromised in a third-party data breach" when you enter your credentials into a website. It'll then urge you to change them everywhere. 

Something that's not yet available on Android is the first page when you re-open Chrome after awhile. According to Google's blog post, "We're making it easier for you to discover new content or start a fresh search in Chrome for iOS when you've been away for awhile." This is supposed to make "it easier to browse content, start a new Search or easily get back to your most frequently visited sites" while still letting you locate your recent tabs. Google added that this "will also come to Android soon."

Those who rely on Chrome's built-in translation tools might find the updated language identification model helpful. Google says this new on-device version will help you "accurately figure out the language of the page you're visiting, and whether it needs to be translated to match your preferences."

Meanwhile, Chrome Actions will make doing things like clearing your browsing data or opening an incognito tab easier on iOS. You won't have to go into the three-dot menu to hunt for those options anymore — you can just type a search term for the setting into the URL bar. "Delete history," for example, will bring you to the page to clear your browsing data. And if you were looking for info on that setting online, you'll still see the suggested search results below the suggested Action. 

Finally, Google also tweaked the three-dot menu "to be scannable and to highlight the most important destinations, such as your history, passwords and settings. The company said "your most commonly used destinations will be available at the top of the menu" and actions like creating Bookmarks or adding stuff to Reading List will be located higher up in the vertical menu. 

Many students have returned to in-person classes, but that isn't stopping Google from making online education more viable. The company has updated Classroom and Workspace for Education with a host of features that improve life for teachers and students alike. In Workspace, for instance, you can now auto-transcribe Meet calls directly into Google Docs — helpful if you want to quickly produce lesson material or help students catch up when they miss lectures. You can also host polls and Q&A sessions in Meet sessions, livestream public events (think school assemblies) to YouTube and use picture-in-picture to manage class presentations without losing sight of your pupils.

Teachers using Classroom, meanwhile, now have access to previously beta-only add-on support that extends functionality beyond what Google can offer. You can get an EdPuzzle add-on to automatically integrate and grade assignments, while a Pear Deck extension can create assignments using lessons from the Pear Deck library. The Classroom updates also make it easier to add YouTube videos to lessons, export grades and get updates through email notifications. An update later in 2022 will let teachers reply directly to students from Gmail notifications.

Google is expanding access to its Read Along app, too. It's rolling out a beta for a new web version over the next month, so students might not need to lean on their phones as they improve their literacy skills.

The announcements come alongside Chrome OS updates that include improved casting and optimizing educational apps like Figma. Although these updates might not matter much as the pandemic (hopefully) winds down, they could still be useful as schools increasingly rely on internet-based lessons and coursework.

The modern world as we know it simply would not exist if not for the mind of Sir Isaac Newton. His synthesis of differential calculus and pioneering research on the nature of gravity and light are bedrocks of the scientific method. However in his later years, Newton's interests were admittedly drawn towards a decidedly non-scientific subject, alchemy. Does that investigation invalidate Newton's earlier achievement, asks theoretical physicist and philosopher, Carlo Rovelli in the excerpt below. His new book of correspondence and musings, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World, Rovelli explores themes spanning from science to history to politics and philosophy.  

Riverhead Books

From THERE ARE PLACES IN THE WORLD WHERE RULES ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN KINDNESS: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World by Carlo Rovelli published on May 10, 2022 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 Carlo Rovelli.

In 1936 Sotheby’s puts up for auction a collection of unpublished writings by Sir Isaac Newton. The price is low, £9,000; not much when compared to the £140,000 raised that season from the sale of a Rubens and a Rembrandt. Among the buyers is John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, who was a great admirer of Newton. Keynes soon realizes that a substantial part of the manuscript writings deal with a subject that few would have expected Newton to be interested in. Namely: alchemy. Keynes sets out to acquire all of Newton’s unpublished writings on the subject, and soon realizes further that alchemy was not something that the great scientist was marginally or briefly curious about: his interest in it lasted throughout his life. “Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason,” Keynes concludes, “he was the last of the magicians.” 

In 1946 Keynes donated his unpublished Newtoniana to the University of Cambridge. The strangeness of Newton in alchemical guise, seemingly so at odds with the traditional image of him as the father of science, has caused the majority of historians to give the subject a wide berth. Only recently has interest in his passion for alchemy grown. Today a substantial amount of Newton’s alchemical texts have been put online by researchers at Indiana University and are now accessible to everyone. Their existence still has the capacity to provoke discussion, and to cast a confusing light over his legacy. 

Newton is central to modern science. He occupies this preeminent place because of his exceptional scientific results: mechanics, the theory of universal gravity, optics, the discovery that white light is a mixture of colors, differential calculus. Even today, engineers, physicists, astronomers and chemists work with equations written by him, and use concepts that he first introduced. But even more important than all this, Newton was the founder of the very method of seeking knowledge that today we call modern science. He built upon the work and ideas of others — Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, etc — extending a tradition that goes back to antiquity; but it is in his books that what we now call the scientific method found its modern form, immediately producing a mass of exceptional results. It is no exaggeration to think of Newton as the father of modern science. So, what on earth does alchemy have to do with any of this? 

There are those who have seen in these anomalous alchemical activities evidence of mental infirmity brought on by premature aging. There are others who have served their own ends by attempting to enlist the great Englishman among critics of the limitations of scientific rationality. 

I think things are much simpler than this. 

The key lies in the fact that Newton never published anything on alchemy. The papers that show his interest in the subject are extensive, but they are all unpublished. This lack of publication has been interpreted as a consequence of the fact that alchemy had been illegal in England since as early as the fourteenth century. But the law prohibiting alchemy was lifted in 1689. And besides, if Newton had been so worried about going against laws and conventions, he would not have been Newton. There are those who have portrayed him as some kind of demonic figure attempting to glean extraordinary and ultimate knowledge that he wanted to keep exclusively for himself, to enhance his own power. But Newton really had made extraordinary discoveries, and had not sought to keep those to himself: he published them in his great books, including the Principia, with the equations of mechanics still used today by engineers to build airplanes and edifices. Newton was renowned and extremely well respected during his adult life; he was president of the Royal Society the world’s leading scientific body. The intellectual world was hungry for his results. Why did he not publish anything based on all those alchemical activities?

The answer is very simple, and I believe that it dispels the whole enigma: he never published anything because he never arrived at any results that he found convincing. Today it is easy to rely on the well-digested historical judgment that alchemy had theoretical and empirical foundations that were far too weak. It wasn’t quite so easy to reach this conclusion in the seventeenth century. Alchemy was widely practiced and studied by many, and Newton genuinely tried to understand whether it contained a valid form of knowledge. If he had found in alchemy something that could have withstood the method of rational and empirical investigation that he himself was promoting, there can be no doubt that Newton would have published his results. If he had succeeded in extracting from the disorganized morass of the alchemical world something that could have become science, then we would surely have inherited a book by Newton on the subject, just as we have books by him on optics, mechanics and universal gravity. He did not manage to do this, and so he published nothing.

Was it a vain hope in the first place? Was it a project that should have been discarded even before it began? On the contrary: many of the key problems posed by alchemy, and quite a few of the methods it developed, in particular with reference to the transformation of one chemical substance into another, are precisely the problems that would soon give rise to the new discipline of chemistry. Newton does not manage to take the critical step between alchemy and chemistry. That would be down to scientists of the next generation, such as Lavoisier, to achieve. 

The texts put online by Indiana University show this clearly. It is true that the language used is typically alchemical: metaphors and allusions, veiled phrases and strange symbols. But many of the procedures described are nothing more than simple chemical processes. For example, he describes the production of “oil of vitriol” (sulfuric acid), aqua fortis (nitric acid) and “spirit of salt” (hydrochloric acid). By following Newton’s instructions, it is possible to synthesize these substances. The very name that Newton used to refer to his attempts at doing so is a suggestive one: “chymistry.” Late, post-­Renaissance alchemy strongly insisted on the experimental verification of ideas. It was already beginning to face in the direction of modern chemistry. Newton understands that somewhere within the confused miasma of alchemical recipes there is a modern science (in the “Newtonian” sense) hidden, and he tries to encourage its emergence. He spends a great deal of time immersed in it, but he doesn’t succeed in finding the thread that will untie the bundle, and so publishes nothing.

Alchemy was not Newton’s only strange pursuit and passion. There is another one that emerges from his papers that is perhaps even more intriguing: Newton put enormous effort into reconstructing biblical chronology, attempting to assign precise dates to events written about in the holy book. Once again, from the evidence of his papers, the results were not great: the father of science estimates that the beginning of the world happened just a few thousand years ago. Why did Newton lose himself in this pursuit?

History is an ancient subject. Born in Miletus with Hecataeus, it is already fully grown with Herodotus and Thucydides. There is a continuity between the work of historians of today and those of antiquity: principally in that critical spirit that is necessary when gathering and evaluating the traces of the past. (The book of Hecataeus begins thus: “I write things that seem to me to be true. For the tales of the Greeks are many and laugh‑ able as they seem to me.”) But contemporary historiography has a quantitative aspect linked to the crucial effort to establish the precise dates of past events. Furthermore, the critical work of a modern historian must take into account all the sources, evaluating their reliability and weighing the relevance of information furnished. The most plausible reconstruction emerges from this practice of evaluation and of weighted integration of the sources. Well, this quantitative way of writing history begins with Newton’s work on biblical chronology. In this case too, Newton is on the track of something profoundly modern: to find a method for the rational reconstruction of the dating of ancient history based on the multiple, incomplete and variably reliable sources that we have at our disposal. Newton is the first to introduce concepts and methods that will later become important, but he did not arrive at results that were sufficiently satisfactory, and once again he publishes nothing on the subject. 

In both cases we are not dealing with something that should cause us to deviate from our traditional view of the rationalistic Newton. On the contrary, the great scientist is struggling with real scientific problems. There is no trace of a Newton who would confuse good science with magic, or with untested tradition or authority. The reverse is true; he is the prescient modern scientist who confronts new areas of scientific inquiry clear-sighted, publishing when he succeeds in arriving at clear and important results, and not publishing when he does not arrive at such results. He was brilliant, the most brilliant—but he also had his limits, like everyone else.

I think that the genius of Newton lay precisely in his being aware of these limits: the limits of what he did not know. And this is the basis of the science that he helped to give birth to.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed how we live, how we work, how we get from where we live to where we work or even if we have to leave where we live to get to where we work. But the number of workers that have had their commutes shortened from 45 minutes to 45 feet constitute only a fraction of the American workforce — the remainder are still making the twice daily trek. In his new book, Going Remote: How the Flexible Work Economy Can Improve Our Lives and Our Cities, urban economist Matthew E. Kahn examines how this tectonic shift in work-life balance might eventually play out, as well as the increased economic and social stratification it could bring about.

UC Press

Excerpted from Going Remote: How the Flexible Work Economy Can Improve Our Lives and Our Cities by Matthew E Kahn, published by the University of California Press. © 2022 by Matthew E Kahn.

Not everyone can engage in remote work. If 35 percent of the workforce is engaged in remote work at least a few days a week, this will have at least three effects on other workers. First, service jobs demand will rise in the residential areas where remote workers move to. As remote workers move farther from city centers, this will create exurban demand for service workers at the Starbucks and other stores where they shop. Land prices are cheap at the suburban fringe and the purchasing power of such local service providers will be higher than if they sought jobs in the center city. While service workers cannot work remotely, they can move to remote locations where rents are cheaper if more people work from home. If 35 percent of the workforce begins to work from home three days a week and thus are home five days a week, there is a demand for a service sector in areas where they live. This creates new jobs for less educated workers in such areas. In these areas, housing is cheap. This increases the quality of life for such service providers. There will also be new construction jobs as new homes are built farther from the employment centers. Families who spend more time at home will invest money to upgrade the home. This creates new opportunities for those who supply home improvement services. Some people may add a new office to their home or other features to customize it to their needs.

While there are significant opportunities for less skilled workers to live and work far from the cities in the cheaper parts of metropolitan areas, one countervailing force is the rising minimum wage. In cities, the minimum wage is usually not binding as workers must be paid higher nominal wages to attract them. In contrast, in more suburban and exurban areas, being required to pay service workers $15 or more per hour may reduce demand for workers. If workers can find very cheap housing far from the cities, then many would be willing to work for less than $15 an hour. While most people think that a high minimum wage is “good” for low-skill workers, economists emphasize the likely unintended consequence. When employers are required by law to pay a higher than competitive market wage to people, they create fewer jobs. For example, such firms can substitute and rely on robots or other pieces of capital. Economists argue that a higher minimum wage increases unemployment for less skilled workers. In places where housing is cheaper, the minimum wage will more likely be a binding constraint on employers. The net result here is perhaps counterintuitive. Less skilled workers will gain more from the rise of WFH when they live and work in states with less generous minimum wages.

Throughout this chapter, I have focused on how the WFH eligible reconfigure their lives to make the most of this new opportunity. Here it is important to note that those who are currently not WFH eligible are not locked into this category. Younger workers can retrain in fields to open up this possibility for themselves. Parents of younger children can make investments in their children to raise their probability of being WFH eligible in the future.

Those who work in the service industry and thus earn a living from face-to-face interaction still gain from the rise of WFH because they gain from a larger menu of options of where to live their lives. If a wealthy environmentalist community forms in Bozeman, Montana, then this creates new opportunities for those in the service sector to live and work there. While this option may not be attractive to everyone, the key is to increase the menu of possibilities. Non-WFH-eligible workers know themselves and their life goals, and they will make the right choices for themselves and gain from having a larger menu of alternatives.

As more people have the opportunity to live and work where they want to be, this increases not only their physical and mental health but also the accountability of our institutions. If there are places whose governments are failing to meet the desires of local residents, then people will be more likely to move away. In this setting, real estate prices will more quickly reflect changes in local quality of life. If an area features a rising crime rate, in the new WFH economy people will “vote with their feet” and real estate prices will decline in that area. This demands that local officials be more responsive in addressing emerging quality-of-life challenges because if they fail to do so, the tax base will shrink.

While this has been an optimistic chapter, I must add a few cautionary notes about concentrated urban poverty. WFH creates an incentive for the American people to spread out. This chapter has sketched out the benefits from this emerging trend. At the same time, such suburbanization may contribute to the further isolation of the urban poor. Poor people live in center cities in areas such as Baltimore and Detroit because there is old, cheap housing and there is good public transit. If the poor remain in these center city areas and richer people are suburbanizing, then there is greater geographic isolation of the poor and this may reduce political support for programs that redistribute to them because there is an “out of sight, out of mind” effect and the physical distance between the groups acts as a type of moat. Past research in urban economics has documented that college graduates are more likely to suburbanize when violent crime increases in the center city. This propensity to engage in “flight from blight” is likely to increase in a WFH economy because educated people no longer commute to center city jobs five times a week.

US college students who want to keep learning over the summer break might be interested in checking out the latest promotion from Masterclass. They can get a three-month individual membership for just $1.

Masterclass hosts video-centric classes from notable, successful figures including Lewis Hamilton, Gordon Ramsay, Anna Wintour, Spike Lee and Serena Williams. The company says it now has more than 2,500 lessons on topics including gardening, writing, filmmaking, business leadership, wilderness survival and interior design.

You'll need a .edu email address and to meet a few other criteria, such as being a current student enrolled in a college or university program in the US. Masterclass says your promotional plan won't auto-renew. Once it expires, you'll have the option of continuing your membership at the regular price. The plans start at $15 per month.

It's not quite as great a deal as the one year of access for $1 Masterclass offered students in 2020. Still, it's a low-cost way to try the service and learn a thing or two.

You'll need to act swiftly if you're interested. Masterclass says there's a limited supply of promotional memberships available and the offer expires at 11:59PM PT tonight. You can sign up for the so-called Summer of Learning via a dedicated page on the Masterclass website.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Move over Discord, Niantic has its own messaging solution in mind for Pokémon Go players: a social AR app called Campfire. It'll let you organize for events, discover new locations and share content with other players. Think of it like a hyper-local social network built entirely for AR—it's "the 'homepage' of the real-world Metaverse," as Niantic says (as if that makes things any clearer). Campfire is already live in Ingress, the company's first AR game, and it'll be headed to all of its titles starting this summer.

Niantic

Pokémon Go players have typically relied on Discord and other platforms to communicate with others. Given Nintendo and the Pokémon Company's squeamishness around social networking, it likely would have been difficult for Niantic to build social features directly into the game. Ultimately, it makes more sense to release a separate app that can tie into all of the company's experiences.

On top of Campfire, Niantic also unveiled Lightship VPS (virtual positioning system), a new platform that will let developers more accurately learn the position and orientation of users. They'll also be able to anchor AR content in place with "centimeter-level" precision, according to Niantic. That'll help devs produce better localization and persistence, which are the most important factors in any AR experience. To power VPS, the company has produced 3D maps in over 30,000 locations across six cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, London and Tokyo), based on short video contributions from players.