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Category: Society

Violence against women is global and enduring

Violence against women is global and enduring

Rebecca Solnit writes: On 2 July, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against the music mogul Sean Combs, accused of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He’s also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a 100…

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The history and future of societal collapse

The history and future of societal collapse

Damian Carrington writes: “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. “I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and…

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How the tech broligarchy is planning to use AI to destroy humanity

How the tech broligarchy is planning to use AI to destroy humanity

  Elon Musk and his racist billionaire friends are grooming J.D. Vance to install their dystopian plan for a techno-fascist future where they use AI to dominate and exploit humanity. What do the richest people on Earth want? More, according to author and astrophysicist Adam Becker, who has studied the ideology, motivations, and plans of the modern-day pharaohs. Instead of using their wealth to help humanity, they want control, dominance, and an exit strategy from Earth for themselves and their…

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Self-censorship and the ‘spiral of silence’: Why Americans are less likely to publicly voice their opinions on political issues

Self-censorship and the ‘spiral of silence’: Why Americans are less likely to publicly voice their opinions on political issues

Polarization has led many people to feel they’re being silenced. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik By James L. Gibson, Washington University in St. Louis For decades, Americans’ trust in one another has been on the decline, according to the most recent General Social Survey. A major factor in that downshift has been the concurrent rise in the polarization between the two major political parties. Supporters of Republicans and Democrats are far more likely than in the past to view the opposite side…

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Our crisis, not of loneliness, but of people becoming invisible

Our crisis, not of loneliness, but of people becoming invisible

Allison J Pugh writes: Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem. ‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told…

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Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

The Washington Post reports: For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found. Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime….

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From defenders to skeptics: The sharp decline in young Americans’ support for free speech

From defenders to skeptics: The sharp decline in young Americans’ support for free speech

Support among young people for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply. J Studios/Getty Images By Jacob Mchangama, Vanderbilt University For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech. According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has…

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What makes people flourish? A new survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries looks for global patterns and local differences

What makes people flourish? A new survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries looks for global patterns and local differences

Flourishing is about your whole life being good, including the people and places around you. Westend61 via Getty Images By Victor Counted, Regent University; Byron R. Johnson, Baylor University, and Tyler J. VanderWeele, Harvard University What does it mean to live a good life? For centuries, philosophers, scientists and people of different cultures have tried to answer this question. Each tradition has a different take, but all agree: The good life is more than just feeling good − it’s about…

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‘Fragile, impermanent things’: Joseph Tainter on what makes civilizations fail

‘Fragile, impermanent things’: Joseph Tainter on what makes civilizations fail

Jessica McKenzie writes: In the introduction to his seminal 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter explained that lost civilizations have a vise-like hold on the human imagination because of the implications their histories hold for our own, modern civilization. Untangling how and why civilizations fall could, in theory, help humanity avoid a future calamitous collapse. “The reason why complex societies disintegrate is of vital importance to every member of one, and today that includes…

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Federal work shaped a Black middle class. Now it’s destabilized by Trump’s job cuts

Federal work shaped a Black middle class. Now it’s destabilized by Trump’s job cuts

NPR reports: Shirley Hopkins built careers for herself and countless other Black workers through a federal government job. While working in the National Institutes of Health’s human resources office, she became known as the “recruitment lady.” It wasn’t spelled out in her job description, but she made it her personal mission to encourage more Black students in the Washington, D.C., area to apply for the federal agency’s internship and youth employment programs. “When I was young, I was not able…

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Musk and Trump’s fascism inspires young boys in Sweden

Musk and Trump’s fascism inspires young boys in Sweden

The Observer reports: Driving through western Sweden, through pine forests dotted with elk warning signs, Lars Stiernelöf says he has noticed a worrying new trend among young boys. Since the inauguration of Donald Trump in January, after which the US president’s top adviser and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, gave two fascist-style salutes, there has been a rise in children using the Nazi salute in schools in Värmland. “They don’t do it as a type of homage to Hitler…

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Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world as the U.S. falls to its lowest-ever position

Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world as the U.S. falls to its lowest-ever position

The Associated Press reports: Finland is the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, according to the World Happiness Report 2025 published Thursday. Other Nordic countries are also once again at the top of the happiness rankings in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Besides Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden remain the top four and in the same order. Aino Virolainen, a digital commerce director, has lived…

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Former OpenAI safety researcher brands pace of AI development ‘terrifying’

Former OpenAI safety researcher brands pace of AI development ‘terrifying’

The Guardian reports: A former safety researcher at OpenAI says he is “pretty terrified” about the pace of development in artificial intelligence, warning the industry is taking a “very risky gamble” on the technology. Steven Adler expressed concerns about companies seeking to rapidly develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical term referring to systems that match or exceed humans at any intellectual task. Adler, who left OpenAI in November, said in a series of posts on X that he’d had…

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Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

Derek Thompson writes: Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more…

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Bunkerised society – why prepping for end times is so American

Bunkerised society – why prepping for end times is so American

Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray write: A family of six pulls up to the Be Prepared Expo in Farmington, Utah. They are concerned about supply-chain failure, sure of the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic was only a taste of what’s to come. They want to buy seeds for their garden so they can grow food to preserve and stash in the basement. The kids pet the puppies at breeder booths selling guard dogs, the father exchanges opinions about the best…

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How America’s craven plutocrats busted the myth of the business hero

How America’s craven plutocrats busted the myth of the business hero

Ross Rosenfeld writes: Of the top 10 richest men in America, not one of them has publicly endorsed Kamala Harris or been willing to condemn Donald Trump. These supposed business heroes are mostly business cowards, the first to stoop to obey. Occasionally, we hear about the whispered condemnations that those in the billionaire class supposedly voice behind closed doors. Yet Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor who heads the Executive Leadership Institute, told Forbes, “They don’t antagonize Trump because … they…

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