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‘Never again?’ It’s already happening

‘Never again?’ It’s already happening

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Anne Applebaum writes: Because I write books about Soviet history, and because I often speak about them to U.S. or European audiences, I am frequently forced to confront the problem of Western indifference. Why, I am asked over and over, did British diplomats who knew about the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 do nothing to stop it? The Catholic Church at that time was also aware that millions of Soviet citizens were dying because Joseph Stalin’s state had confiscated their…

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The species that laughs

The species that laughs

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Chris Knight writes: The central question that anthropologists ask can be stated simply: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ In search of answers, we learn from people around the world – from city-dwellers to those who live by hunting and gathering. Some of us study fossil hominins such as Homo erectus or the Neanderthals; others look at related species, such as apes and monkeys. Something that sets us apart from these ancestors and primate relatives, and should be of…

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The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. It’s time to panic

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. It’s time to panic

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David Wallace-Wells writes: The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island. We are…

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My generation trashed the planet. I salute the children striking back

My generation trashed the planet. I salute the children striking back

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Wow this is really quite something. Thousands and thousands of children protesting against climate change in Westminster. pic.twitter.com/umE5ZtcpS6 — Joey D'Urso (@josephmdurso) February 15, 2019 George Monbiot writes: The disasters I feared my grandchildren would see in their old age are happening already: insect populations collapsing, mass extinction, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, floods. This is the world we have bequeathed to you. Yours is among the first of the unborn generations we failed to consider as our consumption rocketed. But those…

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Britain needs more time on Brexit, but we shouldn’t entrust it to Theresa May

Britain needs more time on Brexit, but we shouldn’t entrust it to Theresa May

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Gary Younge writes: [W]hen Theresa May asks for more time to negotiate with the European Union over Brexit, we would be wise to be sceptical. Not because Britain doesn’t need more time. It does. Hopelessly out of its depth, the country is neither ready to make a deal nor to crash out without one. As more than 40 former ambassadors argued in a joint statement this week: “We should not leave the EU when we have no clarity about our…

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Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril

Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril

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Trita Parsi and Stephen Wertheim write: This week Democrats plunged into two controversies that portend danger for the party as the 2020 election season begins. Both centered on freshman representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who, not coincidentally, came to America as a Somali refugee and is now one of the two first Muslim women in Congress. Absent an open debate about the party’s values on foreign policy, Democrats are hurtling toward an election more divisive than the one in 2016….

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Swarming bacteria create an ‘impossible’ superfluid

Swarming bacteria create an ‘impossible’ superfluid

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Charlie Wood writes: Outside of the imaginations of physics teachers, frictionless devices are hard to come by. But putting a bunch of swimming bacteria into a drop of water achieves just that: a fluid with zero resistance to motion. Incredibly, that resistance (or viscosity, as it’s properly known) can even go negative, creating a self-propelling liquid that might, say, turn a motor in a way that seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics. Recent work explains how bacteria conspire to…

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The Green New Deal battle ahead

The Green New Deal battle ahead

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Naomi Klein writes: “I really don’t like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!’” So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more. It’s worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a…

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Trump’s face-saving way out of a self-created political crisis raises fears over rule of law

Trump’s face-saving way out of a self-created political crisis raises fears over rule of law

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Mike Pence: The president usurping power and end-running Congress is "a profound mistake." pic.twitter.com/GjDbHDvh0u — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 15, 2019 The New York Times reports: The White House’s announcement Thursday that President Trump would claim emergency powers to build his border wall without congressional approval was a way out of the political crisis he created over shutting down the government. But while the move means the country will avoid another protracted shutdown, legal specialists warned that the long-term costs…

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The American aversion for psychological complexity

The American aversion for psychological complexity

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Dahlia Lithwick writes: The launch of the 2020 presidential contest has triggered yet another round of uniquely American anxiety around the stability of character. We’re only a few weeks into the nascent primary campaign, and already the public discourse is mired in a debate that seems to be consumed with which of the Democratic candidates is in fact tricking us. Amy Klobuchar appears to be a sweet Minnesota girl, but is she secretly a crazed, potentially abusive harpy? Elizabeth Warren…

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Latest hack proves Facebook’s a dangerous monopoly that a fine won’t fix

Latest hack proves Facebook’s a dangerous monopoly that a fine won’t fix

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Sarah Miller and David Segal write: Facebook is too big to control. That simple reality becomes clearer with each passing day. The most recent example is the news this past Friday of a security breach that allowed hackers to access at least 50 million accounts; earlier that week, Facebook admitted to sharing phone numbers users provided to improve their account security with advertisers. Over the past year, the social media giant has experienced scandals like these on a regular basis,…

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A border agent detained two Americans for speaking Spanish in Montana. Now they have sued

A border agent detained two Americans for speaking Spanish in Montana. Now they have sued

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The New York Times reports: The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Thursday against United States Customs and Border Protection on behalf of two American women who were stopped last spring in a small Montana city by a border agent who said he was asking for their identification because he heard them speaking Spanish. The border agent, identified in the lawsuit as Paul A. O’Neal, stopped the women, Ana Suda and Martha Hernandez, inside a convenience store in…

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McCabe’s disturbing account of working for Sessions and Trump

McCabe’s disturbing account of working for Sessions and Trump

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Greg Miller writes: He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects. He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness. This isn’t how President Trump is depicted in a new book by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. Instead, it’s McCabe’s account of what it was…

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People who are moved by sad music may be better at feeling the pain of others

People who are moved by sad music may be better at feeling the pain of others

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Amy X. Wang writes: While research into human cognition has long noted that music—chords, harmonies collections of sound comprising something of a universal language—has a profound relationship to the thoughts and emotions of people all over the world, a study published in the scientific journal Frontiers of Psychology peers into qualities and effects specifically associated with sad music. Think somber, angsty, tugging-at-your-heartstrings type of melodies. According to the study, appreciation for such melancholy tunes is intriguingly linked to one particular…

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