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Category: Society

What can the coronavirus teach us?

What can the coronavirus teach us?

Bill McKibben writes: There’s nothing good about the novel coronavirus—it’s killing many people, and shutting millions more inside, with fear as their main companion. However, if we’re fated to go through this passage, we may as well learn something from it, and it does strike me that there are a few insights that are applicable to the climate crisis that shadows all of our lives. Some of these lessons are obvious: giant cruise ships are climate killers and, it turns…

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The rich turn to concierge doctors, yachts, and chartered planes in the hope of avoiding the coronavirus

The rich turn to concierge doctors, yachts, and chartered planes in the hope of avoiding the coronavirus

The New York Times reports: The new coronavirus knows no national borders or social boundaries. That doesn’t mean that social boundaries don’t exist. “En route to Paris,” Gwyneth Paltrow wrote on Instagram last week, beneath a shot of herself on an airplane heading to Paris Fashion Week and wearing a black face mask. “I’ve already been in this movie,” she added, referring to her role in the 2011 disease thriller “Contagion.” “Stay safe.” Ms. Paltrow did not pose with just…

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Coronavirus: How behaviour can help control the spread of COVID-19

Coronavirus: How behaviour can help control the spread of COVID-19

Commuters jam a Toronto subway platform. Widespread adoption of habits that help prevent infection may boost behavioural herd immunity. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graeme Roy By Peter Hall, University of Waterloo Amid the carnage of the First World War, a flu epidemic took hold in the front-line trenches and subsequently spread around the world, infecting one-quarter of the world’s total population and ultimately killing more people than the war itself. Before it was over, somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people…

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Italy, Europe’s coronavirus laboratory

Italy, Europe’s coronavirus laboratory

Beppe Severgnini writes: For a society like Italy, keeping company with others is better than sedatives, and if you have to do without, you suffer withdrawal symptoms. So there may be furious fallout. People have stopped shaking hands, let alone greeting each other with a kiss. If you sneeze or cough in public, people jerk away and show genuine alarm. Conversation is monopolized by coronavirus, and in the absence of clear rules, companies and organizations behave randomly. Why are people…

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Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Bruce Bower writes: Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense…

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When it comes to food, the more you have, the more you waste

When it comes to food, the more you have, the more you waste

National Post reports: Visualize the contents of your fridge: cartons of eggs, tubs of yogurt, chicken breasts or ground beef on Styrofoam trays, blocks of tofu or strips of tempeh, bags of apples, bricks of cheese, heads of broccoli and leafy greens, jar upon jar of condiments and other sundries, leftovers and prepared foods packed in containers. Now imagine pitching one-third of it. Until now, that’s been the commonly cited extent of our food waste — first put forward in…

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The loss of the extended family

The loss of the extended family

David Brooks writes: If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give…

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Response to coronavirus exposes history of racism and ‘cleanliness’

Response to coronavirus exposes history of racism and ‘cleanliness’

Vox reports: The coronavirus outbreak has created global anxiety since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China, late last year. So far, over 30,000 illnesses and 635 deaths have been reported in mainland China, with cases in the double digits found throughout Asia, parts of Europe, Australia, and beyond; in the US, 12 people have been found to have the pneumonia-like virus. In response, Chinese cities have been quarantined, borders have been sealed, and travel has been banned. The…

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The next big privacy hurdle? Teaching AI to forget

The next big privacy hurdle? Teaching AI to forget

Darren Shou writes: When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks. Since then, the issue of digital privacy has rarely been far from the spotlight. There is widespread debate in governments, boardrooms,…

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This is how democracy dies

This is how democracy dies

Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa write: Citizens in stable democracies are supposed to be satisfied with the democratic process. Individual politicians or administrations may be unpopular. But if the public lacks commitment to democratic principles, or loses faith in democratic institutions, demagogues and opportunists may brush these aside. That’s why we were concerned when, four years ago, we found that support for democracy in the United States, as well as many other countries around the world, was nearing dangerous…

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Auschwitz survivors warn of rising anti-Semitism 75 years on

Auschwitz survivors warn of rising anti-Semitism 75 years on

The Associated Press reports: Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp prayed and wept as they marked the 75th anniversary of its liberation, returning Monday to the place where they lost entire families and warning about the ominous growth of anti-Semitism and hatred in the world. “We have with us the last living survivors, the last among those who saw the Holocaust with their own eyes,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told those at the commemoration, which included the German president as…

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The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords

The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords

Lia Russell writes: Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service fee” that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to…

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Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?

Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?

Jonathan L. Fischer writes: Maybe it was fake news, Russian trolls, and Cambridge Analytica. Or Travis Kalanick’s conniption in an Uber. Or the unmasking of Theranos. Or all those Twitter Nazis, and racist Google results, and conspiracy theories on YouTube. Though activists, academics, reporters, and regulators had sent up warning flares for years, it wasn’t until quite recently that the era of enchantment with Silicon Valley ended. The list of scandals—over user privacy and security, over corporate surveillance and data…

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Fighting the fossil fuel economy in Appalachia

Fighting the fossil fuel economy in Appalachia

Michael Sainato writes: About 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River, lies one of the largest active construction projects in the United States. Dozens of cranes dominate the more-than-300-acre site, where hundreds of construction workers assemble a massive petrochemical facility set to convert natural gas into plastic pellets used to develop a range of products from plastic bottles to car parts. The ethane cracker plant being developed in Monaca, Pennsylvania, by Royal Dutch Shell is one of at…

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The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The New York Times reports: Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and…

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How to survive the internet in 2020

How to survive the internet in 2020

Farhad Manjoo writes: The new year is here, and online, the forecast calls for several seasons of hell. Tech giants and the media have scarcely figured out all that went wrong during the last presidential election — viral misinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, bots aplenty, all of us cleaved into our own tribal reality bubbles — yet here we go again, headlong into another experiment in digitally mediated democracy. I’ll be honest with you: I’m terrified. I spend a lot of my…

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