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The danger more Republicans should be talking about

The danger more Republicans should be talking about

Ibram X. Kendi writes: The day after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race last November, a Wall Street Journal headline declared: “Youngkin Makes the GOP the Parents’ Party.” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio exulted in this new party line on Twitter: “The Republican Party is the party of parents.” Polling data showed this new branding to be as misleading as the GOP’s framing of critical race theory. In a September Fox News poll, white respondents opposed the teaching of…

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How Zelenskiy’s team of TV writers helps his victory message hit home

How Zelenskiy’s team of TV writers helps his victory message hit home

The Guardian reports: On day 50 of Russia’s invasion, Volodymyr Zelenskiy made his nightly address to the Ukrainian people. Vladimir Putin had confidently expected to seize Ukraine in five days, Zelenskiy said, standing outside his neo-classical administration building in central Kyiv. Putin was now “making friends with reality”, he added mordantly, hailing the bravery and staunchness of his citizens. There was a reference to Russia’s flagship Moskva, which Ukraine says it audaciously sank last Wednesday with two lethal Neptune missiles….

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Fossil fuels v. our future — young Montanans wage historic climate fight

Fossil fuels v. our future — young Montanans wage historic climate fight

The Guardian reports: When Grace Gibson-Snyder was 13, she launched an independent project in her home town of Missoula, Montana, to encourage restaurants not to use single-use plastic containers. She found that youth activism enabled her to press the adults in her life to take the climate crisis seriously. Even if she was too young to vote, she could still be heard. Three years later Gibson-Snyder upped the ante by teaming up with 15 other young people on a novel…

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The real campus ‘free speech crisis’ is not what you think

The real campus ‘free speech crisis’ is not what you think

Lucas Mann writes: I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way,…

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The impatience of Job

The impatience of Job

Abraham Riesman writes: No one has ever known quite what to make of Job. The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a wager with a member of the Heavenly…

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WHO calculates 15 million people have died from pandemic

WHO calculates 15 million people have died from pandemic

The New York Times reports: An ambitious effort by the World Health Organization to calculate the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has found that vastly more people died than previously believed — a total of about 15 million by the end of 2021, more than double the official total of six million reported by countries individually. But the release of the staggering estimate — the result of more than a year of research and analysis by experts around…

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The West finally starts rolling out heavy weapons for Ukraine

The West finally starts rolling out heavy weapons for Ukraine

Foreign Policy reports: The United States and its NATO allies have ramped up the delivery of tanks, helicopters, and heavy weapons to Ukraine as the country’s forces prepare for large-scale battles against Russian troops in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The new arms deliveries represent a stark shift from Western support for Ukraine in the earliest days of the war, when U.S. and European officials, unsure of how long Ukraine could hold out against a massive Russian invasion, were…

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How the narratives from the Kremlin and Fox News have converged in recent months

How the narratives from the Kremlin and Fox News have converged in recent months

The New York Times reports: As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far. “No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said. While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s conservative audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the…

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Trump has turned the GOP into an authoritarian party

Trump has turned the GOP into an authoritarian party

Michael Kruse writes: In the summer of 2020, Ruth Ben-Ghiat was putting the final touches on her history of modern autocracy. She had to do it, though, without the benefit of knowing whether one of her most important subjects would remain in power come November. But she wasn’t exactly in the dark either. She had seen enough of Donald Trump’s behavior over the preceding five years to know how neatly he lined up with other strongmen she had studied and…

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The slime machine targeting dozens of Biden nominees

The slime machine targeting dozens of Biden nominees

Jane Mayer writes: During the autos-da-fé that now pass for Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, it’s common for supporters of a nominee to dismiss attacks from the opposing party as mere partisanship. But, during the recent hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Andrew C. McCarthy—a Republican former federal prosecutor and a prominent legal commentator at National Review—took the unusual step of denouncing an attack from his own side. When Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, began…

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Jared Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi payout follows decades of post-presidential money grabs

Jared Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi payout follows decades of post-presidential money grabs

HuffPost reports: Jared Kushner, ex-President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser, isn’t the first one to get a big payout after leaving his position as a senior adviser in the White House. Nor is he the first family member of a president or ex-president to use his position to get money. But the $2 billion stake invested by the Saudis in Kushner’s new private equity firm dwarfs all previous post-presidential money grabs in both size and scope. The…

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DeepMind software that can predict the 3D shape of proteins is already changing biology

DeepMind software that can predict the 3D shape of proteins is already changing biology

Nature reports: For more than a decade, molecular biologist Martin Beck and his colleagues have been trying to piece together one of the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzles: a detailed model of the largest molecular machine in human cells. This behemoth, called the nuclear pore complex, controls the flow of molecules in and out of the nucleus of the cell, where the genome sits. Hundreds of these complexes exist in every cell. Each is made up of more than 1,000 proteins…

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How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war

How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war

Natalia Antelava writes: “Your account has been suspended.” “You cannot post or comment for 3 days” “You can’t go live for 63 days” For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France. He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of…

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Interviews with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; warns of nuclear or chemical weapons threat

Interviews with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; warns of nuclear or chemical weapons threat

Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg write: Kyiv is halfway normal now. Burnt-out Russian tanks have been removed from the roads leading into the city, traffic lights work, the subway runs, oranges are available for purchase. A cheerful balalaika orchestra was performing for returning refugees at the main rail station earlier this week, on the day we arrived to meet Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. The normality is deceiving. Although the Russians botched their opening campaign, they continue to bombard…

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