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Category: Society

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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Google tracks your movements, like it or not

Google tracks your movements, like it or not

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The Associated Press reports: Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request. For the most part, Google is upfront about asking…

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Let’s call Islamophobia what it is – mainstream, anti-Muslim racism

Let’s call Islamophobia what it is – mainstream, anti-Muslim racism

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Zubaida Haque writes: Tommy Robinson, lately the cause célèbre of the so-called “alt-right”, isn’t the only person to rally a small band of fundamental libertarians, fruitcakes and closet racists behind him while the public looks on in despair. Who’s the other one? Step forward Boris Johnson. Who else? This week, even the Prime Minister was moved to call on the ex-foreign secretary to apologise for claiming Muslim women in burqas “look like letter boxes” and comparing them to “bank robbers.”…

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Community

Community

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When I was a Buddhist monk and the Dalai Lama visited us in France, there was a meeting of most of the Western monks and nuns in our community. At that time, the majority were living in a monastery and neighboring nunnery near Toulouse, but others were visiting from elsewhere in Europe, America, India and Australia. We were about 100 people. We had the grandiose mission of preserving Tibetan Buddhism so that it could survive in exile and spread across…

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The U.S. education system has produced a society of ‘smart fools’

The U.S. education system has produced a society of ‘smart fools’

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Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg: IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world, and in the U.S., that increase is continuing. That’s huge; that’s two standard deviations, which is like the difference between an average IQ of 100 and a gifted IQ of 130. We should be happy about this, but the question I ask is, If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival…

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Immigrant youth shelters: ‘If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine’

Immigrant youth shelters: ‘If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine’

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ProPublica reports: Just five days after he reached the United States, the 15-year-old Honduran boy awoke in his Tucson, Arizona, immigrant shelter one morning in 2015 to find a youth care worker in his room, tickling his chest and stomach. When he asked the man, who was 46, what he was doing, the man left. But he returned two more times, rubbing the teen’s penis through his clothing and then trying to reach under his boxers. “I know what you…

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Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism

Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism

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Nabeelah Jaffer writes: A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’….

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