Tariq Ramadan: The rock star scholar and the rape claims
The male cultural elite is staggeringly blind to #MeToo. Now it’s paying for it
Moira Donegan writes: First, it was Harper’s. In their October issue, the magazine published an essay by John Hockenberry, the disgraced former public radio host who was accused of sexual harassment and racially inappropriate comments by women he worked with. He sent them emails asking for dates, made comments on their appearance and made sex jokes. In August 2017, after multiple complaints about his behavior were made to WNYC management, Hockenberry quietly retired from his program, The Takeaway. His behavior…
Hurricane Florence crippled electricity and coal — solar and wind were back the next day
CBS News reports: Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Florence swamped North and South Carolina, thousands of residents who get power from coal-fired utilities remain without electricity. Yet solar installations, which provide less than 5 percent of North Carolina’s energy, were up and running the day after the storm, according to electricity news outlet GTM. And while half of Duke Energy’s customers were without power at some point, according to CleanTechnica, the utility’s solar farms sustained no damage. Traditional energy providers…
Nanotubular highways between cells act as conduits for transferring all kinds of cargo
Viviane Callier writes: When the physician and scientist Emil Lou was an oncology fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center about a decade ago, he was regularly troubled by the sight of something small but unidentifiable in his cancer-cell cultures. Looking through the microscope, he said, he “kept finding these long, thin translucent lines,” about 50 nanometers wide and 150 to 200 microns long, extending between cells in the culture. He called on the world-class cell biologists in his building…
Music: Banda Magda — ‘Thiamandi’
Rosenstein is keeping his job for now, but our democratic institutions aren’t looking so healthy
Yascha Mounk writes: Humans are tribal animals. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, even—perhaps especially—the smartest and best educated among us don’t look at a body of evidence dispassionately, drawing logical conclusions from objective data. Instead, we approach any question with strong priors. If we want to believe some proposition because it fits our general worldview, we ask: “May I believe it?” If we know that it would challenge some of our long-held beliefs, we go: “Do I…
Trump allies pushing him to ditch Kavanaugh and nominate a woman
Gabriel Sherman writes: On Monday morning, a Republican briefed on Trump’s thinking said the president has been considering pulling Kavanaugh’s nomination. According to the source, Trump allies are imploring him to cut Kavanaugh loose for the sake of saving Republicans’ electoral chances in the midterms. The argument these advisers are making is that if Kavanaugh’s nomination fails, demoralized Republicans will stay home in November, and Democrats will take the House and the Senate and initiate impeachment proceedings. The end result:…
How Russia swung the election for Trump
Jane Mayer reports: [W]hen I met recently with [Kathleen Hall] Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.” Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would…
Yemen’s three wars
Gregory D. Johnsen writes: Last month, over the course of a few days in Yemen, one governor survived a roadside bomb while a second was denied entry through a checkpoint ostensibly run by his own government. At a military college in Aden, the government’s temporary capital, pro-secessionist soldiers opened fire on a graduation ceremony in response to the raising of the national flag. Three small security events—barely blips in Yemen’s daily catalogue of strikes that have already disappeared from the…
A tiny change in brain organization without which humans never could have evolved
Douglas Fox writes: Suzana Herculano-Houzel spent most of 2003 perfecting a macabre recipe—a formula for brain soup. Sometimes she froze the jiggly tissue in liquid nitrogen, and then she liquefied it in a blender. Other times she soaked it in formaldehyde and then mashed it in detergent, yielding a smooth, pink slurry. Herculano-Houzel had completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience several years earlier, and in 2002, she had begun working as an assistant professor at the Federal University of Rio de…
Georgetown Prep students ‘treated women like meat’
Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer report: [Christine Blasey] Ford’s allegation has made [Mark] Judge a potentially pivotal witness for Kavanaugh. Judge told The New Yorker that he had “no recollection” of such an incident. Judge, who is a conservative writer, later gave an interview to The Weekly Standard in which he called Ford’s allegation “just absolutely nuts,” adding, “I never saw Brett act that way.” Asked by the interviewer whether he could remember any “sort of rough-housing with a female…
Trump’s party of men
The Washington Post reports: The Republican Party’s fight to save President Trump’s embattled Supreme Court nominee amid allegations of sexual assault has surfaced deep anxieties over the hypermasculine mind-set that has come to define the GOP in the nation’s roiling gender debate. The images are striking: The specter of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee — all 11 of them men — questioning U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett A. Kavanaugh’s female accuser. A senior GOP aide working on the confirmation…
Why women’s rage is healthy, rational and necessary for America
Carlos Lozada writes: She looked at me with arched eyebrows as I read aloud several passages from the two books late one night. “You didn’t know that?” my wife asked quietly. No, I didn’t. Even now, a year since the Harvey Weinstein revelations and nearly two years since the “Access Hollywood” video, after hearing so many #MeToo stories and reading books on the structures of misogyny, there was still so much I didn’t know about the depths of anger that…
Memo to Kavanaugh’s defenders: Passage of time doesn’t erase youthful mistakes in the criminal justice system, especially for people of color
President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik By Eileen M. Ahlin, Pennsylvania State University The accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, made by California professor Christine Blasey Ford, has been met with a variety of responses. Among those responses has been the idea that what happens when someone is young should not be held against them, especially if they’ve led a commendable life ever since. My research and that of others on…
Big-spending casino boss Sheldon Adelson sees a lot to like in Trump’s Washington
The New York Times reports: The return on investment for many of the Republican Party’s biggest political patrons has been less than impressive this year. But not for Sheldon Adelson. Mr. Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate, and his wife, Miriam, a physician, have emerged as the biggest and potentially most influential contributors to Republicans in the midterm season. Despite initially harboring qualms about President Trump’s leadership, the Adelsons have found much to like in a Republican-controlled government that has aligned…
Many of America’s Jews are watching Israel in horror
Dana Milbank writes: My rabbi, Danny Zemel, comes from Zionist royalty: His grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, led the Zionist Organization of America in the late 1930s, and presided over the World Zionist Convention in Zurich in 1939. So Zemel’s words carried weight when he told his flock this week on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the Jewish year, that “the current government of Israel has turned its back on Zionism.” “My love for Israel has not diminished one iota,”…