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The miseducation of Brett Kavanaugh

The miseducation of Brett Kavanaugh

Hanna Rosin writes: Nearly a year after the fateful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have become martyrs in separate and hostile galaxies — one for #believeallwomen and the other for those who believe Democrats will use any means necessary to take down good and honorable men. So there is a weird satisfaction in rewinding the story more than 30 years, back to the moment when the two lived in suburban Maryland and coexisted as part…

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How rich donors like Epstein (and others) undermine science

How rich donors like Epstein (and others) undermine science

Adam Rogers writes: Imagine a billionaire with an abiding interest in science, but also in having sex with young girls. He’s famous, our billionaire, and he associates with what used to be called boldface names, some of whom know—they’d have to, right?—about his habits. But they let it go. And eventually the billionaire’s name gets associated with all sorts of do-gooderish public endeavors, before the truth gets told—mostly after the billionaire’s death under salacious and suspicious circumstances. To be clear—not…

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‘We have a once-in-century chance’: Naomi Klein on how we can fight the climate crisis

‘We have a once-in-century chance’: Naomi Klein on how we can fight the climate crisis

Naomi Klein writes: On a Friday in mid-March, they streamed out of schools in little rivulets, burbling with excitement and defiance at an act of truancy. The little streams emptied on to grand avenues and boulevards, where they combined with other flows of chanting children and teens. Soon the rivulets were rushing rivers: 100,000 bodies in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal. Cardboard signs bobbed above the surf of humanity: THERE IS NO PLANET B! DON’T BURN OUR FUTURE….

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What happens if Trump won’t step down?

What happens if Trump won’t step down?

Dahlia Lithwick writes: In February, Georgetown Law professor Josh Geltzer began to ponder aloud what would happen if President Donald Trump refused to leave office were he to be defeated in 2020. It sounded far-fetched, but Geltzer isn’t a conspiracy theorist. Actually, he served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council and, prior to that, as deputy legal adviser to the NSC and counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security. When he wrote his essay…

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Schiff accuses top intel official of illegally withholding ‘urgent’ whistleblower complaint

Schiff accuses top intel official of illegally withholding ‘urgent’ whistleblower complaint

Politico reports: The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday. Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.” “A Director of National Intelligence has never…

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I left Russia to escape Putin’s assault on reason. Now I fear the UK is on the same path

I left Russia to escape Putin’s assault on reason. Now I fear the UK is on the same path

Peter Pomerantsev writes: Nothing is true and everything is possible. That was my one-line attempt to sum up the politics and propaganda that enveloped Russia at the start of the 21st century. It was a world where politicians no longer cared whether they were caught lying; where old ideologies were dead and conspiracy thinking had become the new way to explain the world; where all the old political categories (socialist and liberal, conservative and communist) seemed utterly meaningless and it…

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Freedom (that others lack), American fast food, and internet access — Russia offers everything Edward Snowden wants

Freedom (that others lack), American fast food, and internet access — Russia offers everything Edward Snowden wants

In an interview with The Guardian: Snowden said it helped that Russia viewed him as useful publicity. “A country whose political troubles are legendary, whose problems with human rights we hear about every single day has finally, somehow, managed to have one bright spot on their human rights record … Why would they give that up?” He toyed with calling his memoirs The New Forever or Welcome to Forever before settling on Permanent Record, which reflects his concerns about the…

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Where our minds go when words let us down

Where our minds go when words let us down

Kenneth S. Kosik writes: The drive to express ourselves can be joined with the sense that we cannot quite express ourselves fully, that language is inherently the limiting factor. Why should that be? Via a complex circuitry, the brain delivers motivation to the body as a motor command to execute its will. One view is the brain is busy making predictions about the world such as what we will see when we turn the corner. If we are surprised by…

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Can physicists rewrite the origin story of the universe?

Can physicists rewrite the origin story of the universe?

Jess Romeo writes: During a 2015 conference on theoretical cosmology at Princeton University, Roger Penrose, a pioneer in the field of mathematical physics, was asked to speak on a panel about the origin of the universe. For decades, the leading theory had been that, during roughly the first trillionth of a trillionth of a nanosecond following the Big Bang, there was a single period of extremely rapid expansion, known as inflation, that formed the universe we observe today. When it…

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Hello from the year 2050. We avoided a climate catastrophe — but everything is different

Hello from the year 2050. We avoided a climate catastrophe — but everything is different

Bill McKibben writes: Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice. There was a point after 2020 when we began to…

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Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis, poll shows

Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis, poll shows

The Washington Post reports: A growing number of Americans describe climate change as a crisis, and two-thirds say President Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem. The results, from a poll conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), point to a growing disconnect between Americans worried about the warming planet and Trump administration officials, who have aggressively scaled back Obama-era environmental regulations and relinquished the nation’s role as a global leader in pushing for…

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China is positioned to lead on climate change as the U.S. rolls back its policies

China is positioned to lead on climate change as the U.S. rolls back its policies

Smoke from a coal-fired Beijing power plant that closed in 2017 as part of China’s transition to cleaner energy. AP Photo/Andy Wong By Kelly Sims Gallagher, Tufts University and Fang Zhang, Tufts University As the effects of climate change become more widespread and alarming, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called on nations to step up their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Every country has a part to play, but if the world’s largest emitters fail to meet their commitments,…

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Deforestation gets worse, five years after countries and companies pledged to stop it

Deforestation gets worse, five years after countries and companies pledged to stop it

Georgina Gustin writes: Five years after joining in a historic commitment to stop cutting the world’s forests, governments and companies are not only failing to slow deforestation, they are rapidly driving the disappearance of more trees. As fires consume Amazonian forests, stoking global concern about the loss of a vital ecosystem and climate regulator, a new report published Thursday finds that forests continue to be cleared at an alarming rate, driven mostly by agricultural expansion and demand for beef, palm…

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With Trump in office, major newspapers increasingly quoted anti-immigrant groups without explaining who they were

With Trump in office, major newspapers increasingly quoted anti-immigrant groups without explaining who they were

The Intercept reports: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday. Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist…

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