Deborah Lipstadt writes: In a month of terrible anti-Semitic attacks, including a stabbing yesterday of multiple people at a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, the news that most depressed me did not involve violence. It was not something done to Jews but something Jews did. A synagogue in the Netherlands is no longer publicly posting the times of prayer services. If you want to join a service, you have to know someone who is a…
Batya Ungar-Sargon writes: There’s a poem Jews sing every evening after lighting Hanukkah candles. It’s called “Maoz Tzur” — Rock of the Ages — and was written during the Crusades, one of the many times when Jewish blood ran through the streets; its lines are laced with the tragedy and longing that typifies Jewish liturgy. One chokes me up every time I sing it – eight nights every year: “Our salvation takes too long, and there is no end to…
Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel write: If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it…
BBC News reports: If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said. Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren’t perfect, but are “indisputably better” than men. He said most of the problems in the world came from old people, mostly men, holding onto positions of power. He also spoke about political polarisation and the use of social media to spread falsehoods. Speaking at…
Matt Seaton writes: The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’…
John Harris writes: Ten days before the election, I was in the Dumbiedykes estate in Edinburgh, a high-rise scheme a few minutes’ walk from the Scottish parliament, where a shrinking working-class community is hanging on in the face of gentrification. The neighbourhood, which had a Labour MP until 2010, is the headquarters of an organisation called Edinburgh Helping Hands, whose motto is “Solidarity not charity”: its work runs from giving children in the city free bikes, through football and boxing…
Sue Halpern writes: Before Shani Hays began providing tech support for Apple from her home, in McKee, Kentucky, she worked at a prison as a corrections officer assigned to male sex offenders, making nine dollars an hour. After less than a year, she switched to working nights on an assembly line at a car-parts factory, where she felt safer. More recently, Hays, who is fifty-four, was an aide at a nursing home, putting in a full workweek in a single…
Matt Simon writes: The climate crisis is so epic, so vicious, so wide-reaching, that at this point there are few aspects of the human experience it isn’t transforming. Supercharged wildfires are devastating California, heat waves are killing more people and more crops, cities are struggling to adapt to strange new climates. The global transformation underway is also increasingly exposing a fundamental yet often hidden factor complicating matters: gender. Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers published an analysis of…
A mother hugs her son at the memorial of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2019, the first anniversary of the shooting at the synagogue. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar By Tisa Wenger, Yale University Americans recently observed the first anniversary of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 were killed and six wounded. A year earlier, white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted the slogan, “Jews shall not replace us.”…
Chilean police clash with anti-government demonstrators during a protest in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 12, 2019. Santiago is one of a dozen cities worldwide to see mass unrest in recent months. AP Photo/Esteban Felix By Henry F. (Chip) Carey, Georgia State University Numerous anti-government protests have paralyzed cities across the globe for months, from La Paz, Bolivia, to Santiago, Chile, and Monrovia, Liberia, to Beirut. Each protest in this worldwide wave of unrest has its own local dynamic and cause. But…
The New York Times reports: In Saudi Arabia, where a relatively closed culture leaves citizens few public forums to discuss news and politics, Twitter has become a kind of town square, the place where citizens meet to swap information and debate the latest issues. Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy has not banned the site, but it has taken extensive measures to shape the information that appears there and to silence or drown out dissidents who use it to post critical views….
By Hugo Mercier We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust. These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility. In fact, we don’t trust enough. Take data about trust in the United States (the same would be true in most wealthy democratic countries at least). Interpersonal trust, a measure of whether…
Science reports: For the first time, a state judge has forced a public genealogy site, GEDmatch, to allow police to search its entire database of DNA profiles. A detective wanted to find distant relatives of a serial rapist in hopes that their family trees could help him home in on a suspect—even though most of the 1.3 million people who have shared their DNA data with the site haven’t agreed to such a search. The search warrant, reported this week…
Natalie Parletta writes: The gregarious, small-brained vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum) forms complex, multi-level societies, according to new research. Published in the journal Current Biology, it challenges previous notions that only animals with large brains – such as humans, primates, elephants, giraffes and dolphins – are capable of such social structures. Lead investigator Damien Farine, from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Konstanz, Germany, says he was curious to know how groups of animals resolve conflicts and make collective…
Jack Shenker writes: “I’m 22 years old, and this is my last letter,” the young man begins. Most of his face is masked with black fabric; only his eyes, tired and steely, are visible below a messy fringe. “I’m worried that I will die and won’t see you any more,” he continues, his hands trembling. “But I can’t not take to the streets.” The nameless demonstrator – one of many in Hong Kong who have been writing to their loved…
The New York Times reports: In a viral audio clip on TikTok, a white-haired man in a baseball cap and polo shirt declares, “The millennials and Generation Z have the Peter Pan syndrome, they don’t ever want to grow up.” Thousands of teens have responded through remixed reaction videos and art projects with a simple phrase: “ok boomer.” “Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying…