People
The prophet’s technological warning
Yuval Noah Harari is one of the most fashionable thinkers on the planet right now—and some of his thoughts are deeply alarming, says Cole Moreton in the Mail on Sunday (U.K.). The Israeli academic believes humans will soon become “cyborgs, combining organic and inorganic parts.” He says the human brain “will still be the command-and-control center, but you’ll connect it more and more directly to all kinds of devices, whether it’s bionic arms or direct brain-computer interfaces.” Some of this is already happening, he points out. “People already have bionic arms and legs that work by the power of thought. And we increasingly outsource mental and communicative activities to computers.” Our growing technological dependency will have political ramifications, Harari says. The ruling class of this new world will be people who understand algorithms and biotechnology. And “the pendulum may swing back to dictatorships, because it will become easier to process information centrally.” Tyrants will be able to use technology to “construct a total surveillance regime that follows every individual all the time and surveys not just your emails and your physical movements, but even what’s happening inside your body.”
Being gay in the NFL
Ryan O’Callaghan planned to kill himself when his football career was over, said Cyd Zeigler in Outsports.com. The 6-foot-7-inch, 330-pound offensive tackle had been using the sport to conceal his sexuality since he was a teen—rising all the way to the NFL’s New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs in the process. “No one is going to assume the big football player is gay,” says O’Callaghan, 34. To hide his orientation from his friends and family, he threw himself into the brutal sport, acted “straight,” and made sure his teammates saw him with women. After six pro seasons, he realized with dread that injuries were bringing his playing career to an end. Convinced no one would accept him as a gay man, he began abusing painkillers and planning his suicide. O’Callaghan would be dead now, he says, if it hadn’t been for the Chiefs’ clinical psychologist, who became the first person to learn he was gay. “Just telling her was like a huge weight off my shoulders.” When he began confiding his secret to others in football and to his family, O’Callaghan was astounded by their nonchalant reactions. “Did everyone totally understand what it meant to be gay? No. But they knew what my alternative was. They were just happy I was alive.” The former Chiefs player is now speaking openly about his sexuality. “People need to understand that we are everywhere. We’re your sons, your teammates. You just don’t know it yet.”
Gates’ education in Africa
Melinda Gates’ charity work has made her rethink some of her Catholic beliefs, said Alice Thomson in The Times (U.K.). The philanthropist has traveled the world with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, trying to eradicate polio, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases. But in doing so, she discovered that for many women in Africa and the developing world, the greatest fear is yet another pregnancy. “I would go to these dusty villages or slums. When I stayed long enough, and the men had faded away, the women would finally ask me questions, and they would always bring up contraceptives.” Distributing condoms, she found, wasn’t a solution, because men objected to them. “Women would tell me, ‘I can’t negotiate a condom in my marriage. It would look like either I had AIDS or my partner had it.’ They needed more covert methods and were prepared to walk 100 miles for them.” The foundation is now developing injectable contraceptives—and Melinda, who attended a convent school, refuses to feel guilty. “Without contraceptives, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I do. I went to graduate school, I had a nine-year career at Microsoft; I could plan my life…. In the U.S., 96 percent of married Catholic women use contraceptives. It shouldn’t just be a rich Catholic’s privilege.” ■
