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How crises so often bring out the best in us

How crises so often bring out the best in us

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The news that thousands of Burning Man festivalgoers were told to conserve food and water after torrential rains left them trapped by impassable mud in the Nevada desert led some to chortle about a “Lord of the Flies” scenario for the annual gathering popular with tech lords and moguls. Alas, I have to spoil the hate-the-tech-rich revelries. No matter how this mess is resolved — and many there seem to be coping — the common belief that…

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America’s surprising partisan divide on life expectancy

America’s surprising partisan divide on life expectancy

Colin Woodard writes: Where you live in America can have a major effect on how young you die. On paper, Lexington County, S.C., and Placer County, Calif., have a lot in common. They’re both big, wealthy, suburban counties with white supermajorities that border on their respective state’s capital cities. They both were at the vanguard of their states’ 20th century Republican advances — Lexington in the 1960s when it pivoted from the racist Dixiecrats; Placer with the Reagan Revolution in…

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What really happens when Americans stop going to church

What really happens when Americans stop going to church

Daniel K. Williams writes: Millions of Americans are leaving church, never to return, and it would be easy to think that this will make the country more secular and possibly more liberal. After all, that is what happened in Northern and Western Europe in the 1960s: A younger generation quit going to Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic churches and embraced a liberal, secular pluralism that shaped European politics for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Something similar happened in…

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The California megachurch pushing public schools to the far right

The California megachurch pushing public schools to the far right

The Daily Beast reports: Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God. Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming…

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‘Everything is ahead of us’: Ukraine breaks Russian stronghold’s first line of defence

‘Everything is ahead of us’: Ukraine breaks Russian stronghold’s first line of defence

The Observer reports: Ukrainian forces have decisively breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia after weeks of painstaking mine clearance, and expect faster gains as they press the weaker second line, the general leading the southern counteroffensive has said. Brig Gen Oleksandr Tarnavskiy estimated Russia had devoted 60% of its time and resources into building the first defensive line and only 20% each into the second and third lines because Moscow had not expected Ukrainian forces to get through. “We…

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Crimean Tatar set to become Ukrainian defense minister at critical moment in conflict

Crimean Tatar set to become Ukrainian defense minister at critical moment in conflict

CNN reports: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has tapped Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, to become his next defense minister, replacing Oleksii Reznikov at a critical time for Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Umerov will have a bulging in-tray if and when the Ukrainian parliament approves his appointment. The change in leadership comes as Ukraine’s relationships with allies and donors enter a new phase. Kyiv is trying to accelerate the training and deployment of F-16 combat planes and acquire a host of other equipment…

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Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

The Guardian reports: The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada. The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid…

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Will the universe ever stop expanding?

Will the universe ever stop expanding?

Sarah Scoles writes: From Earth, the night sky looks fairly static. Sure, the stars rotate from evening to evening, and the planets move among them. But from a terrestrial perspective, the celestial sphere appears essentially unchanging. Perception, though, is not reality: our eyeballs don’t hint that beyond nearby planets, stars and galaxies, everything is moving away from us. The universe is constantly expanding—at an ever faster rate. “When we say that the universe is expanding, we mean something pretty literal,”…

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Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

The Washington Post reports: In the aftermath of extreme weather events, major insurers are increasingly no longer offering coverage that homeowners in areas vulnerable to those disasters need most. At least five large U.S. property insurers — including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway — have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums…

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Biden tours Florida hurricane damage: ‘Nobody can deny impacts of climate crisis’

Biden tours Florida hurricane damage: ‘Nobody can deny impacts of climate crisis’

The Guardian reports: Joe Biden said that no one can deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore after he visited Florida on Saturday and surveyed the damage left behind by Hurricane Idalia. Speaking to reporters in front of fallen trees and debris, the US president pointed to this year’s extreme weather events and disasters, saying: “Nobody can deny the impact of climate crisis. There’s no real intelligence to deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore.” “Just look around…

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Musk’s new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, EU says

Musk’s new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, EU says

The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a study released this week by the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union. The research found that, despite voluntary commitments to take action against Russian propaganda by the largest social media companies, including Meta, Russian disinformation against Ukraine, thrived. Allowing the disinformation and hate speech to…

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Racism in online gaming is rampant. The toll on youth mental health is adding up

Racism in online gaming is rampant. The toll on youth mental health is adding up

USA Today reports: Not long ago, Amanda Calhoun, a periodic gamer, considered buying a video game with online multiplayer capability to play with other gamers online. But as she scrolled through the game’s reviews, she found complaints over the frequency with which the N-word was used by some on the platform. She decided not to buy it. For Calhoun, who is Black, the discovery was distressing, not just personally but professionally given her work in child and adolescent psychiatry. With so many…

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The real crime isn’t shoplifting — it’s wage theft

The real crime isn’t shoplifting — it’s wage theft

Jason Linkins writes: Last weekend, I stumbled across a viral tweet thread that provided a rather thorough debunking of one of my big bugbears: the insipid shoplifting panic that’s been coursing through the media the past two years. Over several posts, WBAI radio host Rafael Shimunov punctures what’s become a classic “too good to check” story and discovered that many of the foundational ideas behind what’s been sold as a bona fide crisis were falsehoods—and not particularly well-constructed ones at that. Once the evidence…

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Cats with bird flu? The threat grows

Cats with bird flu? The threat grows

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The global H5N1 avian flu outbreak, already devastating wild birds and poultry, keeps spreading to mammals, bringing it one step closer to a potential human outbreak. Of course, since the coronavirus pandemic taught us the importance of responding early and aggressively to outbreaks … Sorry, I’m joking. We don’t seem to have learned much from the Covid outbreak, and it’s not funny. Not enough has been done about an out-of-control H5N1 outbreak at fur farms in Finland or…

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