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Facebook and the normalization of deviance

Facebook and the normalization of deviance

Sue Halpern writes: When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term “the normalization of deviance,” she was referring to nasa administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode, in 1986. The idea was that people in an organization can become so accepting of a problem that they no longer consider it to be problematic. (In the case of the Challenger, nasa had been warned that the shuttle’s O-rings were likely to fail in…

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Cheney stokes GOP rift with ‘big lie’ rebuke of Trump

Cheney stokes GOP rift with ‘big lie’ rebuke of Trump

Politico reports: Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday escalated her feud with former President Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress, issuing a less-than-subtle swipe at the former president’s latest attempt to claim the 2020 election was stolen from him. On Monday morning, Trump issued a statement from his Save America PAC proclaiming that the presidential election “will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” — an attempt to appropriate the label given to the false claim by…

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Giuliani raids signal accountability is coming for the Trump era

Giuliani raids signal accountability is coming for the Trump era

Norman Eisen writes: Former President Donald Trump and his cronies should beware. The search warrants executed against Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, mark a leap forward in the Department of Justice’s look into the past four years of potential illegalities. It signals turbulent waters ahead for Giuliani and his former client alike. These warrants are not easy to get. You need to convince a judge there is probable cause of wrongdoing. The warrant must also pass tough review at…

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Trump’s secret rules for drone strikes and presidents’ unchecked license to kill

Trump’s secret rules for drone strikes and presidents’ unchecked license to kill

Hina Shamsi writes: On Friday night, in response to transparency lawsuits filed by the ACLU and the New York Times, the Biden administration released a redacted version of President Trump’s rules for the use of lethal force against terrorism suspects abroad. During the Trump administration, the Times and other media reported that the Trump rules weakened even the loose policy safeguards put in place by the Obama administration in 2013, which were also released in response to litigation in 2016….

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With constructor theory, the physicist, Chiara Marletto, invokes the impossible

With constructor theory, the physicist, Chiara Marletto, invokes the impossible

Amanda Gefter writes: They say that in art, constraints lead to creativity. The same seems to be true of the universe. By placing limits on nature, the laws of physics squeeze out reality’s most fantastical creations. Limit light’s speed, and suddenly space can shrink, time can slow. Limit the ability to divide energy into infinitely small units, and the full weirdness of quantum mechanics blossoms. “Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible,” writes the physicist Chiara Marletto. “Bizarre…

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We still don’t know who the coronavirus’s victims were

We still don’t know who the coronavirus’s victims were

Ibram X. Kendi writes: To reflect on the racial pandemic of the past year is to reflect on the ravages of multiple viruses, all mutating from the original American virus: racism. People of color—already forced into the shadows of society—were infected, hospitalized, impoverished, and killed at the highest rates by COVID-19. All the while, they received the fewest medical and economic protections—prolonging, deepening, and spreading their suffering. The groups of people who suffered the most from COVID-19 in the United…

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Joe Biden is electrifying America like FDR

Joe Biden is electrifying America like FDR

Nicholas Kristof writes: The best argument for President Biden’s three-part proposal to invest heavily in America and its people is an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s explanation for the New Deal. “In 1932 there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America,” Roosevelt said in 1943. “He was suffering from a grave internal disorder … and they sent for a doctor.” Paging Dr. Joe Biden. We should be cleareyed about both the enormous strengths of the United States…

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Why Kristi Noem is rising quickly as a Republican prospect for 2024

Why Kristi Noem is rising quickly as a Republican prospect for 2024

The New York Times reports: With Republicans hungry to cultivate their next generation of national leaders, it is not a Capitol Hill comer or a veteran battleground-state politician who is stirring interest by fusing Trumpism with a down-home conservatism spin. It is the first-term governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, a rancher who delights in sharing images of herself shooting pheasants and riding horses. Ms. Noem began drawing wider attention last year for cozying up to President Donald J. Trump…

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The legacy of the Order can be seen in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers

The legacy of the Order can be seen in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers

The New York Times reports: They robbed an armored car outside a sprawling Seattle shopping mall. They bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho, and within weeks assassinated a Jewish talk radio host in Denver. Then a month later, they plundered another armored car on a California highway in a spectacular daylight heist that netted more than $3.6 million. What initially seemed to F.B.I. agents like distant, disparate crimes turned out to be the opening salvos in a war against the…

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Giuliani’s legal trouble is Trump’s too

Giuliani’s legal trouble is Trump’s too

Renato Mariotti writes: You don’t need to be a lawyer to know that when federal agents knock on your door with a search warrant and seize your electronic devices, you’re in big trouble. Ever since that happened to former Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, he has tried to downplay the peril he is in, saying whatever evidence is on his phones proves that “the president and I…are innocent.” But it sure looks like he has a long legal…

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Space junk is blocking our view of the stars, scientists say

Space junk is blocking our view of the stars, scientists say

Live Science reports: The night sky is becoming increasingly filled with shiny satellites and space junk that pose a significant threat to our view of the cosmos, as well as astronomical research, a new study warns. The researchers found that the more than 9,300 tons (8,440 metric tons) of space objects orbiting Earth, including inoperative satellites and chunks of spent rocket stages, increase the overall brightness of the night sky by more than 10% over large parts of the planet….

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What might brainlets in a dish tell us about what it means to be human?

What might brainlets in a dish tell us about what it means to be human?

Alysson Muotri writes: When I moved from Brazil to the United States to train as a neuroscientist, I was shocked to discover that most of our ‘knowledge’ about the human brain in fact came from another species: the mouse. This struck me as pretty strange. After all, it wasn’t the mouse brain that put us on the Moon or that decoded the human genome. It was the human brain in all its complexity that generated our understanding of life and…

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With citizens desperate for oxygen, India’s politicians deny there’s even a problem

With citizens desperate for oxygen, India’s politicians deny there’s even a problem

Reuters reports: A forum of scientific advisers set up by the government warned Indian officials in early March of a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus taking hold in the country, five scientists who are part of the forum told Reuters. Despite the warning, four of the scientists said the federal government did not seek to impose major restrictions to stop the spread of the virus. Millions of largely unmasked people attended religious festivals and political rallies that…

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Severe Covid in young people can mostly be explained by obesity – new study

Severe Covid in young people can mostly be explained by obesity – new study

By Nerys M Astbury, University of Oxford; Carmen Piernas, University of Oxford, and Min GAO, University of Oxford From the start of the pandemic, it was clear that some people who were infected with the coronavirus were experiencing more severe illness, which increased their chances of being hospitalised, admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) or dying. As we age, a weaker immune system and chronic health conditions could influence the way our body responds to the virus. Indeed, age…

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