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The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture

The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture

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By Alexander Bevilacqua, Aeon, January 15, 2019 As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called ‘a culture of “calling out”, a culture of outrage’, she asked…

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Disruption for thee, but not for me

Disruption for thee, but not for me

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Cory Doctorow writes: The Silicon Valley gospel of “disruption” has descended into caricature, but, at its core, there are some sound tactics buried beneath the self-serving bullshit. A lot of our systems and institutions are corrupt, bloated, and infested with cream-skimming rentiers who add nothing and take so much. Take taxis: there is nothing good about the idea that cab drivers and cab passengers meet each other by random chance, with the drivers aimlessly circling traffic-clogged roads while passengers brave…

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The hidden resilience of ‘food desert’ neighborhoods

The hidden resilience of ‘food desert’ neighborhoods

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Barry Yeoman writes: Even before Ashanté Reese and I reach the front gate, retired schoolteacher Alice Chandler is standing in the doorway of her brick home in Washington, D.C. She welcomes Reese, an anthropologist whom she has known for six years, with a hug and apologizes for having nothing to feed us during this spontaneous visit. Chandler, 69 years old, is a rara avis among Americans: an adult who has lived nearly her entire life in the same house. This…

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It could take over 200 years for women to reach economic equality

It could take over 200 years for women to reach economic equality

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CNBC reports: The gender gap is narrowing, but there’s still a long way to go before parity is reached. How long? The 2018 Global Gender Gap Report, released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), estimates that it will take 202 years for economic equality between men and women to be achieved around the world. The report benchmarks how countries perform across four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The organization estimates that the…

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Wielding rocks and knives, Arizonans attack self-driving cars

Wielding rocks and knives, Arizonans attack self-driving cars

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The New York Times reports: The assailant slipped out of a park around noon one day in October, zeroing in on his target, which was idling at a nearby intersection — a self-driving van operated by Waymo, the driverless-car company spun out of Google. He carried out his attack with an unidentified sharp object, swiftly slashing one of the tires. The suspect, identified as a white man in his 20s, then melted into the neighborhood on foot. The slashing was…

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Millions of America’s school children are being terrorized by gun violence

Millions of America’s school children are being terrorized by gun violence

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The Washington Post reports: Locked behind their green classroom door, MaKenzie Woody and 25 other first-graders huddled in the darkness. She sat on the vinyl tile floor against a far wall, beneath a taped-up list of phrases the kids were encouraged to say to each other: “I like you,” “You’re a rainbow,” “Are you ok?” In that moment, though, the 6-year-old didn’t say anything at all, because she believed that a man with a gun was stalking the hallways of…

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Pope Francis promotes sharing and giving instead of devouring and hoarding

Pope Francis promotes sharing and giving instead of devouring and hoarding

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BBC News reports: Pope Francis has called on people in developed countries to live a simpler and less materialistic life. He also condemned the huge divide between the world’s rich and poor, saying Jesus’s birth in poverty in a stable should make everyone reflect on the meaning of life. He spoke out while leading a service in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican for the traditional Christmas Eve Mass. It is the 82-year-old’s sixth Christmas as head of the Roman…

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Strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones, study finds

Strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones, study finds

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PsyPost reports: New research suggests that phones are altering fundamental aspects of social life. According to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior, strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones with them. “Smartphones provide easy access to so much fun and useful content, but we wondered if they may have subtle unanticipated costs for our social behavior in the nondigital world. Smiling is a fundamental human social behavior that serves as a signal of people’s…

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Trump’s hostility towards immigrants is making Americans become increasingly immigrant-friendly

Trump’s hostility towards immigrants is making Americans become increasingly immigrant-friendly

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Francis Wilkinson writes: President Donald Trump may ultimately be a unifying force on one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics: immigration. That’s not Trump’s intent, of course. Having launched his presidential campaign in 2015 with a demagogic assault on immigrants, Trump has been a reliable fount of calumny ever since. His policies, from brutalizing children at the border — a 7-year-old girl died in U.S. custody last week — to terminating Temporary Protected Status for refugees, appear designed…

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United States ranks as 3rd worst country in the world for sexual violence against women

United States ranks as 3rd worst country in the world for sexual violence against women

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A Thomson Reuters Foundation poll of 548 experts focused on women’s issues including aid and development professionals, academics, health workers, policymakers, non-government organisation workers, journalists, and social commentators, finds: The United States ranked as the 10th most dangerous country for women, the only Western nation to appear in the top 10. The United States shot up in the rankings after tying joint third with Syria when respondents were asked which was the most dangerous country for women in terms of…

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America’s systemic failings

America’s systemic failings

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Julian E. Zelizer writes: The federal government released a devastating report last week documenting the immense economic and human cost that the U.S. will incur as a result of climate change. It warns that the damage to roads alone will add up to $21 billion by the end of the century. In certain parts of the Midwest, farms will produce 75 percent less corn than today, while ocean acidification could result in $230 billion in financial losses. More people will…

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Europe’s Jew hatred, and ours

Europe’s Jew hatred, and ours

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Bari Weiss writes: Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin. For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate. Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is…

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Life expectancy declines in the U.S. but is increasing in most other developed nations

Life expectancy declines in the U.S. but is increasing in most other developed nations

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The Washington Post reports: Life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2017, the government said Thursday in a bleak series of reports that showed a nation still in the grip of escalating drug and suicide crises. The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed…

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‘Why is Donald Trump so afraid of us?’

‘Why is Donald Trump so afraid of us?’

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Bryan Mealer reports from the migrant caravan: María Cáceres’s son Javier, who is 15, has Down’s syndrome. He’s a tall, chunky kid, with short dark hair, a missing front tooth, and eyes that are permanently crossed. María tells me how they fled San Pedro Sula after gang members constantly harassed her family for bribes and “taxes”. When they couldn’t pay, some men burned down their house, then murdered her two brothers. María had just finished burying them when – on…

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‘These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas.’

‘These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas.’

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The Washington Post reports: A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents. A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the…

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The chaos behind Trump’s policy of family separation at the border

The chaos behind Trump’s policy of family separation at the border

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60 Minutes reports: This past week, a federal judge struck down the president’s latest immigration order. It’s been a chaotic two years on the border as the administration imposed barriers with little consideration of their legality or consequences. The 2017 ban on travelers from Muslim countries was so abrupt it surprised the officers who had to enforce it. Before the midterm elections, President Trump ordered thousands of troops to Texas to stop what he called “an assault” by a caravan…

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