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From adding spikes to removing benches, anti-homeless architecture hurts us all

These "solutions" to homelessness issues are making things worse.

statue of man wrapped in cloak lying on a bench

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) on Unsplash

"HOMELESS JESUS" by sculptor Timothy P. Schmalz in Toronto, Canada

Have you noticed it's getting harder and harder to find a place to sit in public spaces these days? There's a reason for that. It's a purposeful choice many municipalities are making in an effort to keep people who are homeless from setting up camp or making beds out of benches.

The anti-homeless spikes that make lying down on steps, along buildings and on other flat surfaces have been addressed by communities in creative ways, such as the artists who set up a cozy bed with a bookshelf attached to it over one set of spikes in London. But there are other manifestations of hostile architecture popping up around the world as the homelessness crisis reaches dire proportions in some cities.

Hostile or anti-homeless architecture makes the environment incompatible with comfortable rest and relaxation, which serves the purpose of pushing homeless people out of those spaces (but does nothing to actually solve the problem). And at the same time, it makes shared public spaces a lot less comfortable for everyone.

Cash Jordan shared a bunch of examples of hostile architecture in New York City, from bumpy subway vent covers that prevent people from sleeping on them, to slanted benches you can just lean on but not sit on, to removing benches and seats from public transportation stations altogether.

Not only do such choices make life harder for homeless people, but people with disabilities, elderly and pregnant people and others need to be able to sit for a bit when they're out and about. And all of us could use a little respite from walking and standing sometimes. Hostile architecture choices remove features that make public spaces accessible and usable for us all.

Watch Jordan explain:

"It seems to me the 'hostile architecture' is only kicking the can down the road— if you notice they are not solving their homeless crisis—just keeping people out of certain areas," wrote one commenter.

"That's not stopping people from being homelesss, that's just making everyone uncomfortable," wrote another.

"Cities/people think homeless people will just go away with things like this. Unless you've been homeless (I have) you don't understand the desperation, fear, and embarrassment of it. Whether due to poor choices or not (and it's NOT always, even in America), no one deserves this," shared another.

"As someone with a disability that makes it very painful for me to stand for long periods, that train station would be absolute hell," added another. "So not only is this affecting the homeless population, it affects the many, many people like me with disabilities. I don’t like having to take my wheelchair places if I can help it, but places like that would force me to."

Homelessness is not a simple problem to solve, no matter what anyone says, but putting money into something like this, which doesn't actually address the problem itself, is wasteful in addition to making public spaces less usable. What if we invested that money into quality, affordable housing, programs that address the addiction and mental health issues that often perpetuate homelessness or other initiatives that actually stand a chance of solving the problem at its core instead?

Targeting the homeless population with hostile architecture is unkind at its core, and making public spaces uninviting, unwelcoming and uncomfortable for all is a short-sighted "fix" that doesn't actually help anyone. Let's take a step back, reset our moral compass and create spaces that are useful, accessible and comfortable for all.

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William Shatner describes the profound grief he felt when he finally went to space for real

The OG Captain Kirk's real-life space experience holds important lessons for us all.

"William Shatner" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

William Shatner's trip to space wasn't what he expected.

Statistically speaking, the number of humans who have traveled into space is insignificant. But the experience of leaving our home planet and venturing into the great beyond is incredibly significant for the individuals who have actually done it.

One of those fortunate humans is actor William Shatner, who spent three years pretending to hurtle through space in his iconic role as Captain James T. Kirk on the original "Star Trek" series. As captain of the USS Enterprise, Captain Kirk was dedicated to exploring "strange new worlds," seeking out "new life and new civilizations" and boldly going "where no man has gone before."

Naturally, Shatner has spent a lot of time pondering what it would be like to actually experience leaving Earth, and when he took the opportunity to join Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin trip to space in October 2021 at age 90, he was able to compare how his expectations met up with reality.

Shatner shared an excerpt from his new book with Variety, and it reveals that his initial reaction to being in space was surprisingly dark.

"I love the mystery of the universe," Shatner wrote. "I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years…"

However, as he looked out the window of the spacecraft—a real one, not a screen on a film set—and looked in the direction opposite Earth, "there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold," he wrote. "All I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing."

As he turned back toward "the light of home," he saw the opposite. "I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her."

Then he had a stunning revelation: "Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong."

Again, this is a man who has spent much of his life thinking about space—not as an astronaut or astronomer or astrophysicist, but as a human being stuck on the Earth's surface, struck with wonder about what's out there. He explained what he had been wrong about:

"I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film 'Contact,' when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, 'They should’ve sent a poet.' I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

"It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral."

Shatner explained how this "sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner" for many astronauts when they view Earth from orbit. It's part of the "overview effect"—the profound shift in perspective that comes with seeing our collective home from a distance. With no visible borders between nations or peoples, it becomes clear that our divisions are all manmade, which can change the way we view humanity as a whole.

The experience left Shatner with renewed conviction to focus on what we share in common.

"It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement," he wrote, "and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance."

Just beautiful. Since most of us will never leave Earth, we can take inspiration from those who have, acknowledge our essential oneness and do everything in our power to protect our beautiful, life-giving home.

Shatner shares more of his reflections on life on this planet and beyond in his most recent book, "Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder."

This article originally appeared two years ago.

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william shatner

Researchers found the most effective way to stop misinformation online and it's pretty simple

It's called 'pre-bunking.'

via Tim Dennell/Flickr

New research shows how to fight misinformation.

The rise of misinformation on social media has been a monumental stress test for the world’s critical thinking skills. Misinformation has had a huge influence on elections, public health and the treatment of immigrants and refugees across the world. Social media platforms have tried to combat false claims over the past few years by employing fact-checkers, but they haven’t been terribly effective because those who are most susceptible to misinformation don’t trust fact-checkers.

“The word fact-checking itself has become politicized,” Cambridge University professor Jon Roozenbeek said, according to the Associated Press. Further, studies show that when people have incorrect beliefs challenged by facts, it makes them cling to their false assumptions even harder. These platforms have also attempted to remove posts containing misinformation that violates their terms of service, but this form of content moderation is often seen as insufficient and is often applied inconsistently.

via Mattias Berg/Flickr

How do we combat dangerous misinformation online if removing false claims or debunking them hasn’t been effective enough? A new study published in the journal Science Advances by a team of university researchers and Jigsaw, a division of Google, has found a relatively simple solution to the problem they call “pre-bunking.”

Pre-bunking is an easy way of inoculating people against misinformation by teaching them some basic critical thinking skills. The strategy is based on inoculation theory, a communication theory that suggests one can build resistance to persuasion by exposing people to arguments against their beliefs beforehand.

The researchers learned that pre-bunking was effective after conducting a study on nearly 30,000 participants on YouTube.

“Across seven high-powered preregistered studies including a field experiment on YouTube, with a total of nearly 30,000 participants, we find that watching short inoculation videos improves people’s ability to identify manipulation techniques commonly used in online misinformation, both in a laboratory setting and in a real-world environment where exposure to misinformation is common,” the recently published findings note.

The researchers uploaded videos into YouTube ad slots that discussed different types of manipulative communication used to spread false information such as ad hominem attacks, false dichotomies, scapegoating and incoherence.

Here’s an example of a video about false dichotomies.

Researchers found that after people watched the short videos, they were significantly better at distinguishing false information than they were before. The study was so successful that Jigsaw is looking to create a video about scapegoating and running it in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These countries are all combating a significant amount of false information about Ukrainian refugees.

There’s an old saying, “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach that man to fish and he’ll eat forever.” Pre-bunking does something very similar. We can either play a game of whack-a-mole where social media platforms have to suss out misinformation on a minute-by-minute basis or we can improve the general public’s ability to distinguish misinformation and avoid it themselves.

Further, teaching people to make their own correct decisions about misinformation will be a lot more effective than pulling down content and employing fact-checks. These tactics only drive vulnerable, incredulous people toward misinformation.

This article originally appeared three years ago.

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Retired elementary school teacher shares biggest parenting mistake she saw during long career

Few people understand kids better than elementary school teachers.

Photo by April Walker on Unsplash

Retired elementary school teacher shares biggest parenting mistake she saw during long career

Few people understand kids better than elementary school teachers. Not only do they spend all day with kids, but teachers get to know their students' parents pretty well, too. From parent-teacher conferences to field trips and snack days, it's a collaborative relationship meant to foster their child's development. (And let's be real: what parent hasn't gotten a call from their child's teacher to discuss their *questionable* behavior in the classroom?)

Teachers are full of wisdom about kids, which is why TikToker @elenanico22 interviewed her mom Lisa, a retired elementary school teacher, in an advice video. She asked her mom to share her insights on the question: "What's one thing you saw people messing up with their kids?"

And her response was simple: "They didn't enjoy them." Elena asks her mom to elaborate, and she goes on to share, "Kids are fun. You’ve got to enjoy them. They wanted them to be something that — most of us aren’t exactly what other people want us to be — so enjoy the kid you have."

@elenanico22
Lisa says it like it is #momlife #momsoftiktok #momwisdom #momtok #momhumor #parenting #parentingwisdom

Of course, Lisa fully accepted her own daughter, and turns to Elena in the video and says, "I enjoyed you."

And the comments were flooded with positive replies from parents to her response. "Kids aren’t a chore, they’re a joy. 🥰," one wrote. Another added, "Parents are stressed, and they don’t realize how quickly childhood goes by."

Parents Kids Love GIF by Pudgy PenguinsGiphy

The post also resonated with other teachers and professionals who work with kids. "This is so true. I work in childcare and lots of parents literally cannot stand their kids. They get so angry when we close. They can’t wait to drop them off and pickup last minute. Breaks my heart," one commented. Another wrote, "Toddler teacher. Same. So heartbreaking. I saw it a lot when I worked with highly educated parents with high incomes." And another teacher chimed in with, "So true. As a elementary teacher sometimes playing Barbie Dreamhouse with my 4 y/o is the last thing I want to do but I always do because I know I'll be wishing for it one day ♥️." And another professional shared, "As a pediatrician, I agree."

The video concluded with another piece of strong advice from Lisa, who also dropped this nugget: "Never send your kid to school with carrots." The reason? She explained a story involving a prominent doctor at her school who was "super strict" with what his kids could and could not eat at school.

Carrots hamster GIFGiphy

"So of course what did the kids want? Everything they couldn't," she said. "You are bound to have kids who are going to have food issues."

And plenty of parents offered their thoughts on this. "Omg I love her! Please post more. As a mom I’m enjoying time with my kids, loving their personalities and so anti food restriction teaching them intuitive eating. Because I wasn’t taught those things," one commented. Another shared, "The food statement is so true. My son shared that a boy from his class (who has food restrictions) steals the other kids snacks at school! 🙈❤️😂"

Mom realizes she's been duped by her 'sick' 5-year-old once she grabs a microphone

Sickness gone. Concert, on.

@dyweeeez/Instagram

Ah, the healing power of music.

Parents, is this situation relatable, or is it relatable? A mom named Dymond Edwards recently shared the impromptu serenade session given to her by her 5-year-old daughter Aryn Dennis after she was picked up early from school for having a "stomach ache.”

As we can clearly see in the Instagram clip, the supposed tummy issue is nowhere to be found as little Aryn, TV remote as a microphone in hand, belts out ROSÉ and Bruno Mars’ “APT” like she was performing at Madison Square Garden.

It’s hard to tell which is more funny, Aryn's unapologetic mic drop at the end, or Edwards’ face throughout…which is the face every parent has made at least once after realizing they were just duped by their kiddo.

Watch, and prepare for cuteness overload with those adorable “Apa tapa tays”:

See on Instagram

Talk about a miraculous recovery! However, as many noted in the comments section, Aryn very well could have been feeling anxiety, which manifested in stomach pain. As one person put it, “Maybe the stomachache was anxiety. Now she’s where she is comfortable and she belongs. Stomachache gone.”

Another echoed, “Tbh it’s like when you have a headache at work but as soooon as you home you realise work was the headache ../”

Others were quick to defend the little one, who might have just needed a mental health day. One person shared, “I did this once for a ‘headache’ my mama knew I was lying but picked me up anyway & took me to McDonald’s back when they had the play place w/ the ball pit & to Barnes & Noble & read me books. In my 30s & still a fond memory.”

So who knows? Maybe there was never a tummy ache, but it's certainly going to be a sweet memory to hold onto, especially since it was all caught on tape.

And of course, there were plenty of comments that were just pure comedy:

“Singing is healing 😂”

“She left the stomach ache at school.”

“My mama would’ve took me right back! 😂😂”

“Stomach ache not mouth ache. Sing princess.”

“She looked around at school and said ‘that’s enough today-ing here for today.’”

“Is the stomach ache in the room with us?”

“As your daughter’s attorney she won’t be answering any more questions.”

“The stomach ache was the stage fright for this concert she knew she was gon be puttin on😂😂😂😂”

Whether it was because of actual stomach cramps, mental overload, or because she was just done with “todaying,” this little girl needed a break. Kudos to mom for giving her that…Hopefully next time it won’t mean disrupting the workflow with a living room concert.

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Woman who gets all her food from supermarket dumpsters only spends $100 a year on groceries

"I've only been sick one time because I ate a bad apple."

via Vanessa Hernandez/Flickr

An abundance of food taken from a dumpster.

In the United States, we have two big problems that should help solve each other, but unfortunately, the problems persist. According to the USDA, it's estimated that between 30 to 40% of the food supply in the U.S. is wasted. So, wholesome food that could help feed families instead winds up in landfills. At the same time, about 18 million households, or 13.5% of the population, are food insecure.

Five years ago, Sofie Juel-Andersen, 30, of Denmark, who was living in Sydney, Australia, was told by her sister that she could save a lot of money and prevent food from being wasted by diving into dumpsters at her local supermarket. Initially, Juel-Andersen was skeptical about her sister’s idea. “My sister sent me a photo of some hidden treasures she’d found dumpster diving. I knew about it, but I’d never seen it as an option to put food on the table,” she told SWNS.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

After Juel-Andersen made a few successful hauls and saw the amount of money she was saving, she was hooked. “What I found was insane. It was filled with food—some of it had expired, but a lot hadn’t,” she said. “It was like a treasure hunt for me. I quickly realized that there was so much good food in the dumpsters I didn’t need to go shopping anymore.”

After moving back to Denmark in 2022, she continued dumpster diving and has been so successful that she hardly ever has to shop at the grocery store. She estimates she only spent $100 in supermarkets in 2024, primarily on toiletries such as toilet paper and toothpaste. This allowed the restaurant manager to have a lot more money for traveling.

Her success as a dumpster diver has made her popular on TikTok, where she can share an important message about food waste.

— (@)

Why do grocery stores throw out good food?

Why are grocery stores throwing away so much good food? “I believe grocery stores throw out food because of the following reasons; the first is there's a small mark on the product or it's in a bag where one item is rotten,” she told Newsweek. “The second is they have a new shipment of a product, so they throw away the old ones which are closer to their sell-by or best-before dates. Thirdly, grocery stores may get rid of one product in a large container where another has been damaged.”

So how does Juel-Andersen avoid getting sick eating food she finds in dumpsters, a lot of it close to or past its expiration dates? "My main source of food is food from the dumpsters, and I've only been sick one time because I ate a bad apple,” she shared on TikTok. “Which was completely my own fault." She added that she avoids eating food that is "moldy, looks bad, or smells bad. I am very cautious of what I take."

Even though dumpster diving should never be the solution to the problems of food waste and insecurity, Juel-Andersen’s brave and creative approach to the problem has inspired an important discussion about sustainability and resourcefulness. Let’s hope that in the future, we can bridge the gap between surplus and need so no food is wasted, and no one goes hungry.

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