Attention to the Unseen

Alex Blasdel writes: On a recent afternoon, Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author of upbeat books about human progress, was sitting in his summer home on Cape Cod, thinking about Bill Gates. Pinker was gearing up to record a radio series on critical thinking for the BBC, and he wanted the world’s fourth richest man to join him for an episode on the climate emergency. “People tend to approach challenges in one of two ways – as problem-solving…

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Ben Mathis-Lilley writes: Many Americans say they support immigration so long as it’s done legally, by waiting for one’s turn in line, but are alarmed by the idea of people walking into the country through the southwestern desert and going wherever they want. In theory, if you were able to dissuade or disincentivize potential immigrants from massing at the southern border or trying to cross it without authorization, you could gain enough public trust on the issue to expand the…

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POLITICO Magazine interview: Rick Hasen isn’t getting much sleep these days. One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine…

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The New York Times reports: The official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark. Bearing a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her new house as his own. She dismissed the letters as a hoax. And so it was with surprise that Ms. Little found herself in her yard on Ivy Street on a June afternoon…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Rank-and-file Taliban fighters have been having too much fun in Kabul after seizing the Afghan capital without a fight last month, and the Taliban leadership has now issued a stern order to stop. Thousands of young Taliban men from all over the country, many of whom have never been to a big city before, were deployed in Kabul after the Afghan republic collapsed Aug. 15. When not on duty, they sightsee, picnic and visit amusement…

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The New York Times reports: After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there. But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and…

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Jeff Greenfield writes: If anyone tells you they know how the battle among congressional Democrats will be resolved, wish them a good day and walk away very quickly. They managed to pass an infrastructure bill in the Senate — with Republican support! — and are now in total disagreement on whether to vote on it in the House, not to mention what to put in a massive social spending bill, and whether one can pass without the other. There’s a…

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