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Category: Society

Memo to Kavanaugh’s defenders: Passage of time doesn’t erase youthful mistakes in the criminal justice system, especially for people of color

Memo to Kavanaugh’s defenders: Passage of time doesn’t erase youthful mistakes in the criminal justice system, especially for people of color

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President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik By Eileen M. Ahlin, Pennsylvania State University The accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, made by California professor Christine Blasey Ford, has been met with a variety of responses. Among those responses has been the idea that what happens when someone is young should not be held against them, especially if they’ve led a commendable life ever since. My research and that of others on…

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Binge drinking and blackouts: Sobering truths about lost learning for college students

Binge drinking and blackouts: Sobering truths about lost learning for college students

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Young adults at a tailgate. Young adults are more likely than older adults to binge drink and are at greater risk when they do. Monkey Business ImagesShutterstock.com By Jamie Smolen, University of Florida Tens of thousands of college students nationwide will cheer for their football teams this weekend. Some of those who show up for the game after tailgate drinking may not remember the highlight touchdowns that they cheered so loudly for. Others may have trouble remembering even a rousing…

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Men are more afraid than ever

Men are more afraid than ever

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Lili Loofbourow writes: It is a remarkable fact of American life that hordes of men are now defending sexual assault. It’s not immediately clear why. It seems like the very definition of an unforced error. But a substantial group, many of them in politics, has taken to the internet to argue that a 17-year-old football player should get to do as he likes to a 15-year-old girl—say, for example, trap her in a bedroom, violently attempt to remove her clothes,…

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When I was in high school, I faced my own Brett Kavanaugh

When I was in high school, I faced my own Brett Kavanaugh

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Caitlin Flanagan writes: “Dear Caitlin,” an inscription in my 12th-grade yearbook begins. “I’m really very sorry that our friendship plummeted straight downhill after the first few months of school. Really, the blame rests totally on my shoulders. To tell you the truth, I’ve wanted to say this all year. I know you’ll succeed because you’re very smart and I regard you with the utmost respect … Take care—love always.” He was headed to a prestigious college. I was headed to…

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Utility companies are at odds with public demand for 100% renewable energy

Utility companies are at odds with public demand for 100% renewable energy

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Vox reports: Renewable energy is hot. It has incredible momentum, not only in terms of deployment and costs but in terms of public opinion and cultural cachet. To put it simply: Everyone loves renewable energy. It’s cleaner, it’s high-tech, it’s new jobs, it’s the future. And so more and more big energy customers are demanding the full meal deal: 100 percent renewable energy. The Sierra Club notes that so far in the US, more than 80 cities, five counties, and…

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1 in 3 children in UK live in poverty, study finds

1 in 3 children in UK live in poverty, study finds

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The Guardian reports: More than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, are living below the breadline, with more than half trapped in poverty for years, according to a new measure aimed at providing the most sophisticated analysis yet of material disadvantage in the UK. The measure seeks to forge a fresh political consensus between left and right over how to define and track poverty, with the aim of encouraging better-targeted poverty interventions, and making it easier to hold politicians…

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The real cost of the 2008 financial crisis

The real cost of the 2008 financial crisis

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John Cassidy writes: September 15th marks the tenth anniversary of the demise of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which presaged the biggest financial crisis and deepest economic recession since the nineteen-thirties. After Lehman filed for bankruptcy, and great swaths of the markets froze, it looked as if many other major financial institutions would also collapse. On September 18, 2008, Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, went to Capitol Hill and…

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Amazon’s antitrust antagonist has a breakthrough idea

Amazon’s antitrust antagonist has a breakthrough idea

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David Streitfeld reports: The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library. “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.” Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades. There are a dozen fat tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. At the end of the antitrust stacks…

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Wisdom on free speech from Justice Brandeis and William F. Buckley

Wisdom on free speech from Justice Brandeis and William F. Buckley

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Cass R. Sunstein writes: Which ideas, if any, are beyond the pale? Is it a mistake to “normalize” some speakers? When? To get some guidance, we would do well to look to the example of William F. Buckley Jr., one of the most influential conservatives of the last 60 years. For decades, Buckley was the host of a television show called “Firing Line.” Buckley hosted plenty of conservatives. But he was more than willing to provide a forum for people…

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The Gulf Coast is most at risk and least prepared for climate change

The Gulf Coast is most at risk and least prepared for climate change

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Eric Holthaus writes: There’s been a recent lull of high-profile hurricanes in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, but the Gulf Coast’s vulnerabilities go far beyond the attention-getting late summer storms. By many metrics, it’s the region most at risk — and least prepared — for climate change. A study published last year in Science magazine showed that for the country’s poorest counties, largely located in the Southeast, climate change could exacerbate already-pervasive economic inequality. If the region continues along a business-as-usual…

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I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on

I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on

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Stanisław Aronson writes: Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp…

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Britain’s shared spaces are vanishing, leaving a nation of cliques

Britain’s shared spaces are vanishing, leaving a nation of cliques

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John Harris writes: In our towns, villages and suburbs, they are now such a common sight as to be mundane: boarded-up pubs, awaiting conversion to some new use or forlornly falling into dereliction. The current rate of closure is put at 18 a week. In rural areas, shuttered hostelries represent something particularly tragic: with churches reduced to silent visitor attractions and shops long since gone, they embody the demise of precious local assets in places where maintaining community life is…

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‘Iraqis aren’t spiritual. They like to party’

‘Iraqis aren’t spiritual. They like to party’

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The Washington Post reports: It’s nearing midnight on a Thursday and the streets are jammed with traffic. There are people heading home after dinner with family and friends, and people for whom the night has just begun. At the newly opened Ibrahim Basha club, the party is just getting going. A Syrian singer with waist-length blond hair and sky-high pink heels is singing Arabic hits, accompanied by a talented Iraqi musician alternately playing the saxophone, the piano and the oud….

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The hidden injuries of the age of exposure

The hidden injuries of the age of exposure

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Rochelle Gurstein writes: What do we lose when we lose our privacy? This question has become increasingly difficult to answer, living as we do in a society that offers boundless opportunities for men and women to expose themselves (in all dimensions of that word) as never before, to commit what are essentially self-invasions of privacy. Although this is a new phenomenon, it has become as ubiquitous as it is quotidian, and for that reason, it is perhaps one of the…

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Catholics call for mass resignation of U.S. bishops

Catholics call for mass resignation of U.S. bishops

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Following the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on the sexual abuse of over 1,000 children by 301 priests, and following a similar scandal earlier this year in Chile that led to its Catholic bishops’ collective resignation, a statement by Catholic theologians, educators, parishioners, and lay leaders says: After years of suppressed truth, the unreserved decisiveness of the Chilean bishops’ resignations communicated to the faithful a message that Catholics in the United States have yet to hear, with an…

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Living in ignorance about our ignorance

Living in ignorance about our ignorance

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Kaidi Wu and David Dunning write: In 1806, entrepreneur Frederic Tudor sailed to the island of Martinique with a precious cargo. He had harvested ice from frozen Massachusetts rivers and expected to make a tidy profit selling it to tropical customers. There was only one problem: the islanders had never seen ice. They had never experienced a cold drink, never tasted a pint of ice cream. Refrigeration was not a celebrated innovation, but an unknown concept. In their eyes, there…

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