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Category: Society

ICE’s brutality is its weakness

ICE’s brutality is its weakness

Omar Wasow writes: I study the political consequences of protest and state violence. So when federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this month, I was reminded of Jimmie Lee Jackson. On the night of Feb. 18, 1965, police officers and state troopers attacked civil rights demonstrators in Marion, Ala. Jackson, a 26-year-old woodcutter, fled with his mother and grandfather into a cafe. Troopers followed them inside and began beating his mother; Jackson tried to protect…

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Resistance moms are defending America

Resistance moms are defending America

Amanda Marcotte writes: The videos pouring out of Minnesota onto social media right now are horrific, showing both ICE and Border Patrol agents acting like the Gestapo by assaulting peaceful people with impunity and suggesting that they will kill more people if residents don’t submit. But time and again, those videos also show reason for hope: Ordinary people are refusing to comply. They film Noem’s secret police, blowing whistles and making a fuss, even as those masked cowards attack them….

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Buddhist monks and their dog captivate Americans while walking for peace from Texas to Washington DC

Buddhist monks and their dog captivate Americans while walking for peace from Texas to Washington DC

The Associated Press reports: A group of Buddhist monks and their rescue dog are striding single file down country roads and highways across the South, captivating Americans nationwide and inspiring droves of locals to greet them along their route. In their flowing saffron and ocher robes, the men are walking for peace. It’s a meditative tradition more common in South Asian countries, and it’s resonating now in the U.S., seemingly as a welcome respite from the conflict, trauma and politics…

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What America might look like with no immigration

What America might look like with no immigration

The New York Times reports: One year into President Trump’s immigration crackdown, construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas. A neighborhood soccer league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up. America is closing its doors to the world, sealing the border, squeezing the legal avenues to entry and sending new arrivals and longtime residents…

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The goal of AI development is ownership of the means of thinking

The goal of AI development is ownership of the means of thinking

Matthew B. Crawford writes: As near as one can tell, the business rationale for artificial intelligence rests on the hope that it will substitute for human judgment and discretion. Given the role of big data in training AI systems, and the enormous concentrations of capital they require to develop, the AI revolution will extend the logic of oligopoly into cognition. What appears to be at stake, ultimately, is ownership of the means of thinking. This will have implications for class…

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Compassion makes people happy

Compassion makes people happy

University of Mannheim: People who treat others with compassion often feel more at ease themselves. This is the key finding of a new study by Majlinda Zhuniq, Dr. Friedericke Winter, and Professor Corina Aguilar-Raab from the University of Mannheim. The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports. While the link between self-compassion and well-being is well established, this effect has hardly been researched with respect to compassion for others. In a meta-analysis, the research team analyzed data from…

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Tech billionaires already captured the White House but they still dream of becoming unfettered rulers

Tech billionaires already captured the White House but they still dream of becoming unfettered rulers

Vittoria Elliott writes: The shirtless man in the golden mask and cape has plans to lead his own country one day. There is no location yet, but it will be a crypto- and AI-powered paradise of medical experimentation, filled with people who want to “make death optional,” he says. For now, though, he’s leading a sparsely attended rave on the second floor of a San Francisco office building. A DJ is spinning at one end of an open room. A…

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More women than ever want to leave Trump’s America

More women than ever want to leave Trump’s America

The New Republic reports: A growing percentage of young women no longer see a future in the United States. Roughly 40 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 said that they would permanently move abroad if they were able to, according to a 2025 Gallup Poll. That included 45 percent of single women, and 41 percent of married women. It’s a stark difference from how young women felt when they were asked the same question a decade…

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The resurgence of the politics of inequality

The resurgence of the politics of inequality

David Wallace-Wells writes: Last week’s elections have hardened quickly into today’s broad strategic wisdom: American politics is now, above all, about affordability, sometimes also called “cost of living.” The terms imply a new political landscape, defined by challenges emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic emergency — inflation and interest rates, housing costs and grocery costs and energy costs — which politicians have been slow to acknowledge and policy slow to address. But there is another way of looking at…

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The rise of a new American oligarchy: Top 10 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year

The rise of a new American oligarchy: Top 10 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year

The Guardian reports: The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide. The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap. Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top…

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Zohran Mamdani has a point about rent control

Zohran Mamdani has a point about rent control

Rogé Karma writes: Few policies disgust academic economists quite like rent control. In the 1970s, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously described it as the “most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” In a 2012 poll of prominent economists, just 2 percent said that rent-control laws have had “a positive impact” on the “amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.” (The Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler sarcastically proposed a…

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‘The greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’ as Americans brace for food stamps to run out

‘The greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’ as Americans brace for food stamps to run out

The Guardian reports: Two decades ago, Sara Carlson, then a mother of three, was newly single because of a traumatic event, and the US’s food stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), helped her feed her children with free food supplies. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford to live,” said Carlson, 45, who lives in Rochester, Minnesota, and now works as an operations manager for a wealth-management firm and serves on the board of Channel One…

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Majority of Black and Latino Americans feel like strangers in their own country, poll finds

Majority of Black and Latino Americans feel like strangers in their own country, poll finds

Axios reports: Black and Latino Americans are reporting record levels of alienation and pessimism about the nation’s direction, as President Trump tightens his focus on immigration enforcement and civil rights rollbacks, per a new poll. Why it matters: More Latinos and Black voters supported Trump in 2024 than in his two previous presidential runs, but early into his second term the sense of exclusion has deepened among communities of color. The big picture: Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, fueled…

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Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The Guardian reports: Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be…

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Portland: Anarchic hellscape or a mecca for coffee drinkers?

Portland: Anarchic hellscape or a mecca for coffee drinkers?

Jacob Grier writes: I like bikes. I like coffee. I especially like biking to coffee, which is one of the things that drew me to moving to Portland, Oregon, many years ago. Sometimes I also like giving myself a big dumb project, like, say, biking to 100 different coffee shops. Did Portland even have 100 coffee shops within biking distance that were worth visiting? I didn’t check when I started, but it seemed plausible. So one sunny spring day following…

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The struggle for attention in an age of distractions

The struggle for attention in an age of distractions

Nathan Heller writes: On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger’s phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for…

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