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Category: Society

What’s going on at the border is horrifying, but we can’t go numb and turn away

What’s going on at the border is horrifying, but we can’t go numb and turn away

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Dahlia Lithwick writes: As a purely descriptive matter, it’s surely true: We are all going numb. As Donald Trump makes war with Canada and peace with dictators and human rights abusers, the narrative is that everyone’s lost all feeling. Polls show the public believes that Trump paid off a porn star, and they don’t care. They believe that he lies habitually, and they also don’t care. A Pew poll released last week showed that nearly 7 in 10 Americans “feel…

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Laura Bush: Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’

Laura Bush: Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’

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Former first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, writes: On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children…

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Child abuse is now part of America’s official immigration policy

Child abuse is now part of America’s official immigration policy

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Michael Paarlberg writes: It’s impossible to look at the Trump administration’s practice of migrant family separation and see it as anything other than what it is: institutionalized child abuse. By now, there have been real horror stories: parents hearing their children screaming in the next room; a man who committed suicide when his three-year-old was taken from him; children kept in what Oregon senator Jeff Merkley described as a “dog kennel”; a woman being told by a border patrol agent:…

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Doctors concerned about ‘irreparable harm’ to children ripped apart from their parents by the U.S. government

Doctors concerned about ‘irreparable harm’ to children ripped apart from their parents by the U.S. government

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NPR reports: In South Texas, pediatricians started sounding the alarm weeks ago as migrant shelters began filling up with younger children separated from their parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The concerned pediatricians contacted Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and she flew to Texas and visited a shelter for migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley. There, she saw a young girl in tears. “She couldn’t have been more than 2 years old,” Kraft…

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The dangers of distracted parenting

The dangers of distracted parenting

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Erika Christakis writes: Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices. Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than…

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Mainstream politicians have long helped promote fear of ‘the other’

Mainstream politicians have long helped promote fear of ‘the other’

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Kenan Malik writes: In October 2013, a ship carrying migrants sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Some 300 people drowned. It was not the first time that migrants had drowned in the Mediterranean. In fact, at that time it was estimated that in the previous 25 years at least 20,000 people had died trying to reach the shores of Europe. The real figure was most likely much higher. But that sinking in October 2013 was the first time that…

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Aristotle’s lessons on happiness

Aristotle’s lessons on happiness

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Edith Hall writes: In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern thinking about morality, which assumes that gods do not exist, or at least do not intervene, is in its infancy. But the ancient Greeks and Romans elaborated robust philosophical schools of ethical thought for more than a millennium, from the first professed agnostics such as Protagoras (fifth century BCE) to the last pagan thinkers….

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How the resurgence of white supremacy in the U.S. sparked a war over free speech

How the resurgence of white supremacy in the U.S. sparked a war over free speech

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Alex Blasdel writes: Late last summer, the American Civil Liberties Union faced a mounting crisis over its most celebrated cause, which many consider the lifeblood of democracy: freedom of speech. For nearly a century, the ACLU has been the standard-bearer of civil liberties in the US, second only to the government in shaping Americans’ basic rights. Although the organisation has been at the vanguard of many of the country’s most hard-fought legal battles – desegregation, reproductive rights, gay marriage –…

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The total information awareness we feared the government acquiring, we have freely given to the tech giants

The total information awareness we feared the government acquiring, we have freely given to the tech giants

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Renee DiResta writes: “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into … a virtual, centralized grand database,” the New York Times columnist warns. On the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s numerous government testimonies and…

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ABC only did the right thing when it could no longer get away with ignoring Roseanne’s racism

ABC only did the right thing when it could no longer get away with ignoring Roseanne’s racism

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Roxane Gay writes: On Twitter on Tuesday, Roseanne Barr wrote that if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby =vj.” The message referred to President Barack Obama’s former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and in it Ms. Barr traded on age-old racist ideas about black people and primates. Then she shared some incorrect nonsense about Chelsea Clinton marrying into the Soros family. It was the kind of thing Roseanne Barr has been doing online for years. This time,…

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The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism

The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism

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Noah Berlatsky writes: Since the founding of the United States, politicians and pundits have warned that partisanship is a danger to democracy. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, worried that political parties, or factions, could “allow cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” to rise to power and subvert democracy. More recently, many political observers are concerned that increasing political polarization on left and right makes compromise impossible, and leads to the destruction of democratic norms and institutions. A new study, however,…

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A triumph for women and for Ireland

A triumph for women and for Ireland

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Barbara Wesel writes: It is such a resounding victory that campaigners in Ireland are weeping with joy. After a tense last few days when the referendum seemed too close to call, it turned out to be a landslide result. Irish people voted overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing the total abortion ban in the constitution. And with this amendment, the last part of an oppressive system that subjugated women in Ireland for centuries has gone. They have achieved what has long…

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Americans least likely to think we have a responsibility to accept refugees? So-called ‘Christian’ evangelicals

Americans least likely to think we have a responsibility to accept refugees? So-called ‘Christian’ evangelicals

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The Washington Post reports: In February 2017, as debate raged nationally over President Trump’s decision to curtail immigration to the United States, the conservative Christian Broadcasting Network dipped into the Bible to share what that sacred text said about refugees. “Treat refugees the way you want to be treated,” it said, quoting Leviticus. “Invite the stranger in” (Matthew) and “Open your door to the traveler” (Job). The first comment in reply to the article captures the tone of the rest…

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Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

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Henry Kissinger writes: The internet age in which we already live prefigures some of the questions and issues that AI will only make more acute. The Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason. The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever expanding data. Human cognition loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become regnant. Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or…

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Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

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William Sloane Coffin Jr., followed by his sister, arrives at federal building in Boston on May 20, 1968. AP Photo By David Mislin, Temple University In May of 1968, a high-profile trial began in Boston that dramatically illustrated a larger phenomenon fueling the rise of conservative Christianity in the United States. Five men had been charged with conspiracy for encouraging Americans to evade the draft. One of the prominent defendants in the trial was a Presbyterian minister and Yale University…

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Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

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David Graeber writes: One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I’m a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I…

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