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Category: Society

The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

Ezra Klein writes: If the C.D.C. had recommended better masks from the beginning, how many people would have worn them and for how long? If the Biden administration had flooded stores with cheap rapid tests, would people have used them? If boosters had been pushed earlier, and more loudly, would the United States no longer trail peer nations in vaccinations? Put differently: How much would getting our pandemic policies right have mattered? It’s easy to speak as if policy smoothly…

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The super-rich live on a different planet and their thoughts on U.S. salaries prove it

The super-rich live on a different planet and their thoughts on U.S. salaries prove it

Arwa Mahdawi writes: It’s an average American salary. What could it be? $800,000? It costs over $100,000 a year to attend the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know what you get for that money exactly but insights into the everyday economy clearly aren’t on the syllabus. Nina Strohminger, an assistant professor at Wharton School recently asked her students how much they reckoned the average American makes a year. A quarter of the class, she reported in…

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80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

The New York Times reports: On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes. Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it…

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How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

Law enforcement officials outside Congregation Beth Israel synagogue on Jan. 15, 2022, in Colleyville, Texas. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez By Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University The man who took a rabbi and three congregants hostage in Colleyville, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2022, believed that Jews control the United States of America. He told his hostages, as one revealed in a media interview, that Jews “control the world” and that they could use their perceived power to free Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani…

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How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

Nature reports: Like many paediatricians, Dani Dumitriu braced herself for the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus when it first surged in her wards. She was relieved when most newborn babies at her hospital who had been exposed to COVID-19 seemed to do just fine. Knowledge of the effects of Zika and other viruses that can cause birth defects meant that doctors were looking out for problems. But hints of a more subtle and insidious trend followed close behind. Dumitriu and…

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The world we want to live in after Covid

The world we want to live in after Covid

Dhruv Khullar writes: In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published a book called “The Rites of Passage.” In it, he explored the rituals that cultures use to transition people from one stage of life to the next. Birth, puberty, graduation, religious initiation, marriage, pregnancy, promotions, the seasons—we’re always on the threshold of one phase or another. How do communities shepherd individuals from the pre- to the post-? Van Gennep argued that certain universal principles underlie rites of passage…

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For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults

For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults

David Leonhardt writes: Children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up. Among third through eighth graders, math and reading levels were all lower than normal this fall, according to NWEA, a research group. The shortfalls were largest for Black and Hispanic students, as well as students in schools with high poverty rates. “We haven’t seen this kind of academic achievement crisis in living memory,” Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B….

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A reporter reflects on conflicts over truth, trust and belonging in America

A reporter reflects on conflicts over truth, trust and belonging in America

Jose A. Del Real writes: The old textbook depository at 411 Elm St. isn’t especially eye-catching, but for nearly 60 years its awful past has loomed over downtown Dallas and, perhaps, all of American public life. “On November 22, 1963,” notes a modest historical marker fixed to its red-brick facade, “the building gained national notoriety when Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed president John F. Kennedy from a sixth floor window as the presidential motorcade passed the site.” Every…

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A history of disruption: From fringe ideas to social change

A history of disruption: From fringe ideas to social change

David Potter writes: On 3 April 1917, a crowd gathered to meet a train arriving from Helsinki at Petrograd’s Finland Station. The train carried Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He greeted his audience with a speech calling for the overthrow of Russia’s government – and, six months later, he made this happen. The world changed. Lenin, who had been living outside of Russia for more than a decade, was known as a theorist on the fringe of Russian political society, shaping Marxist…

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What the Amish can teach us about technology

What the Amish can teach us about technology

In 1999, Howard Rheingold wrote: Collective negotiations over the use of telephones have ignited intense controversies in the Amish community since the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, a dispute over the role of the phone was the principal issue behind the 1920s division of the Amish church, wherein one-fifth of the membership broke away to form their own church. Eventually, certain Amish communities accepted the telephone for its aid in summoning doctors and veterinarians, and in calling suppliers….

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American citizens are mostly subjects following the dictates of their employers

American citizens are mostly subjects following the dictates of their employers

Jamelle Bouie writes: For a vast majority of Americans, democracy ends when work hours begin. Most people in this country are subject, as workers, to the nearly unmediated authority of their employers, which can discipline, sanction or fire them for nearly any reason at all. In other words, Americans are at the mercy of what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “private government,” a workplace despotism in which most workers “cede all of their rights to their employers, except those specifically…

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What shape society must take in a post-pandemic world

What shape society must take in a post-pandemic world

Jill Lepore writes: In March 2020, Boris Johnson, pale and exhausted, self-isolating in his flat on Downing Street, released a video of himself – that he had taken himself – reassuring Britons that they would get through the pandemic, together. “One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society,” the prime minister announced, confirming the existence of society while talking to his phone, alone in a room. All this…

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The only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people

The only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people

CNN reports: Atlanta. Orlando. Las Vegas. Newtown. Parkland. San Bernardino. Ubiquitous gun violence in the United States has left few places unscathed over the decades. Still, many Americans hold their right to bear arms, enshrined in the US Constitution, as sacrosanct. But critics of the Second Amendment say that right threatens another: The right to life. America’s relationship to gun ownership is unique, and its gun culture is a global outlier. As the tally of gun-related deaths continue to grow…

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Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds

Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds

The Guardian reports: Citizens are alarmed by the climate crisis, but most believe they are already doing more to preserve the planet than anyone else, including their government, and few are willing to make significant lifestyle changes, an international survey has found. “The widespread awareness of the importance of the climate crisis illustrated in this study has yet to be coupled with a proportionate willingness to act,” the survey of 10 countries including the US, UK, France and Germany, observed….

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Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic growth?

Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic growth?

Josh Berson writes: Cities are hard on the body. We are all familiar now with how dense living facilitates the spread of airborne disease. But the stressors of urban life are manifold. They include air- and waterborne pollution, noise, heat, light – and an excess of social contact. Pollution represents, as a 2017 report by the Lancet Commission on pollution and health puts it, ‘the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death’ among humans, responsible, in 2015, for ‘three…

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What collective narcissism does to society

What collective narcissism does to society

Scott Barry Kaufman writes: In 2005, the psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala was researching extremist groups, trying to understand what leads people to commit acts of terrorist violence. She began to notice something that looked a lot like what the 20th-century scholars Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm had referred to as “group narcissism”: Golec de Zavala defined it to me as “a belief that the exaggerated greatness of one’s group is not sufficiently recognized by others,” in which that thirst…

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