History Survives In The Hands Of Syrian Seamstresses:
By the time Ameera al-Hammouri was 10, her hands were dancing across the taut fabric beneath her grandmother’s aghabani embroidery machine. She was too short to sit, so she stood, working the foot pedal to coax floral patterns from metallic thread and her own memory.
Decades later, in a rundown apartment building on the outskirts of Damascus, her machine now runs on an erratic supply of electricity. The building’s elevator no longer works and many of its windows are broken, but inside the sanctity of Ms. Hammouri’s spotless home, the artistry lives on.
“Working on the embroidery machine for me is like drawing on paper,” she says, sitting beside neat piles of embroidered tablecloths in her living room. Trays of sweets are set out for guests. “It’s the art inside me that I express through my work. Whatever I imagine, I bring to life with my hands.”
Aghabani embroidery originated in Damascus more than 150 years ago, blending Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian design influences. Traditionally, patterns were hand-printed in Damascus onto fabrics that were then sent to Douma, about 8 miles from the capital, where women embroidered them at home. Their work, displayed on tablecloths and other household items, became a hallmark of Syrian hospitality.
Today, the survival – indeed, the revival – of this craft tradition rests in the hands of women from Douma, a city synonymous with both resistance and ruin. The women behind these works are not only artisans. They are mothers, widows, and survivors of siege, displacement, and economic collapse.
Not just history survives, so does humanity.
Have You Ever Been To Couples Therapy About How To Load A Dishwasher? Can’t even fathom this:
When the couples therapist inevitably asks, I’ll have an answer ready: The trouble began in August 2017, when my boyfriend and I moved in together, and I quickly revealed myself to be an absolute ding-dong at loading the dishwasher.
I am not what you would call “precise” or “tactical” in really any aspect of my life, but certainly not in front of an open dishwasher. I lack the structural engineer’s mind for space optimization, or maybe I lack the functional adult’s patience to figure it out. I don’t totally understand how the water moves around in there, or how the soap gets dispersed. (Also, because we’re being open and honest with one another, I have never been sure about prerinsing, though I do get the sense that the rules have changed recently?) I don’t have a philosophy about what should go on the top or the bottom—I basically just put things in the first semi-logical place I see, close the door, smash some buttons, and hope for the best. I walk away and hear my plates rattle.
Judging by the sheer volume of dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety on the internet, I am not alone in any of this. There are YouTube videos with titles such as “You’re Doing It Wrong!” and “Passive Aggressive Tutorials.” There are articles broken out by brand and by subtopic, thousands of words devoted to the intricacies of scraping, stacking, sorting, eco-washing, half loads, knives, pots, plastic, and more. There is a post from a woman who doesn’t understand how her “genius” husband “can do ANYTHING, but load a dishwasher sensibly,” and one from a person whose wife does it like “an escaped mental patient.”
Hmmm, I don’t have a subscription to Psychology Today, don’t know if it still exists. But something suggests to me that couples who have issues concerning this have issues much deeper than how to load a dishwasher. Cool article, though. Also provides insight into the invention of the dishwasher and how it’s supposed to work. Pro-tip: No, you don’t need to pre-rinse. You’re welcome.
The Invasion Of The Jellyfish. Yep, you’re getting stung more often. Here’s why:
- Construction: The infrastructure humans build in the water ‒ houses, piers, wharves, jetties, and even oil rigs ‒ create new habitats for juvenile jellyfish, called polyps, to attach and grow, Bologna said.
- Climate change: Warmer waters can encourage some species of jellyfish in certain regions to grow and reproduce more, Lucas said. Changes in ocean temperature can also allow jellyfish to move further north and survive in areas they previously couldn’t.
- Pollution: Eutrophication, a process that occurs when excess fertilizer and nutrients get into the water, can create algal blooms that result in low levels of oxygen in the water. Jellies thrive in these dead zones because they need less oxygen than other kinds of marine life and their prey can’t swim away as fast, Bologna said.
- Overfishing: When commercial fishing decimates other species of fish, jellyfish have less competition for food, Lucas said.
How The Right Wingnuts Came To Hate The Smithsonian–It’s even weirder than you’ve likely imagined:
Did you hear the one about the Smithsonian hiding the bones of Bible giants in the basement? No? Well, Missouri Republican Representative Eric Burlinson did, and he recently said he wants to develop a “strategy” to use Congress’s investigative power to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I do believe [giants] were real,” Burlinson told a Blaze TV program in June, shortly before he gave a speech at NephCon 2025, a gathering of people who are hunting the remains of the Nephilim, or the giants from the Book of Genesis.
Hooked you already, amirite:
Burlinson’s comments on Prime Time With Alex Stein were delivered with laughter, but his attendance at a Nephilim conference was not exactly funny. It came only weeks before the Trump administration sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian demanding a full review to ensure museum exhibits and curatorial processes conform to the president’s vision of history.
With the president declaring the Smithsonian “out of control” on Truth Social, the shape and scope of the growing threat to America’s premier public museum from the right wing is rapidly coming into view. And that shape is increasingly that of an internet fever dream of conspiracy, one that has been fomenting distrust of the Smithsonian for decades in service of a deeply conservative and religious agenda that sees both history and science as its ideological enemies.
For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize. That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized the National Air and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay. They considered any questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words, “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.”
The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development occurring on the nascent internet.
A year before the Enola Gay controversy, in 1993, future Ancient Aliens star David Childress, then a self-described “world explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote about this in his self-published magazine, World Explorer, and in the New Age Nexus New Timesthat year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker “Smithsonian Gate.”
There’s only one way to sing us out today. Somewhere, Nathan Arizona nods his head in agreement:
