Elise Loehnen writes: As Carl Jung famously said, nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent. My mother’s unlived life ricochets inside my life. My mom is an ardent reader — it’s probably no coincidence that my brother is a book editor and I make my living with words. And like her, I have children — but I wanted mine. In this anxious inheritance from my mother and my grandmother, I’ve both under-…
Annie Lowrey writes: Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it. This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. The best seller is at once a careful exploration of poverty statistics; a deeply reported depiction of the lived experiences of the poor; an examination of the ways America’s wealthy exploit the masses; and a case for ending poverty. Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial…
Laura Niemi, Jesse Graham, and John M Doris write: Classic research says we overlook situational factors in explaining people’s misdeeds. But the reality is more complex. The new principal of a school on the verge of closure has vowed to turn things around. Half a year in, however, the outlook is bleak. If students do not meet national performance baselines on their upcoming standardised tests, it will be the last straw for the struggling school. The principal knows that his teachers…
The New York Times reports: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative…
Following Harry Belafonte’s death at age 96, Rolling Stone‘s obituary recounts: Born in 1927 in Harlem, Harold Bellanfanti was the son of immigrants from Jamaica. His first creative love was the theater. He and Poitier got into acting together, which spun off into Belafonte’s music career. Before he became known, he was once backed by a band including Charlier Parker and Miles Davis; a switch to Caribbean music followed as Belafonte became entranced by the folk music of his…
Derek Thompson writes: Several months ago, while walking through my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I noticed an impressive number of front-lawn placards celebrating and welcoming refugees. The signs made me proud. I like living in a place where people openly celebrate tolerance and diversity. Several days later, my pride curdled into bitterness. As part of some reporting on housing policy, I found a State Department page offering advice to Afghans and Iraqis resettling in the U.S. The upshot: Stay away…
STAT reports: Black people in counties with more Black primary care physicians live longer, according to a new national analysis that provides the strongest evidence yet that increasing the diversity of the medical workforce may be key to ending deeply entrenched racial health disparities. The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, is the first to link a higher prevalence of Black doctors to longer life expectancy and lower mortality in Black populations. Other studies have shown that when Black patients are treated…
Matthew Desmond writes: The United States has a poverty problem. A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021,…
Adrienne LaFrance writes: In the weeks before Labor Day 2020, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, began warning people that he believed someone would soon be killed by extremists in his city. Portland was preparing for the 100th consecutive day of conflict among anti-police protesters, right-wing counterprotesters, and the police themselves. Night after night, hundreds of people clashed in the streets. They attacked one another with baseball bats, Tasers, bear spray, fireworks. They filled balloons with urine and marbles…
Russell Jacoby writes: Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, closes as its author emerges in 2002 from years in hiding; he bids goodbye to members of the security detail that has guarded him since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa called for his death. “That was it,” Rushdie writes. “More than thirteen years after the police walked into his life, they spun on their heels and walked out of it.” Still, he wonders whether “the battle over The Satanic Verses” has ended…
The New York Times reports: In recent weeks, two members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of artificial intelligence. Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, wrote in a guest essay in The New York Times in January that he was “freaked out” by the ability of the ChatGPT chatbot to mimic human writers. Another Democrat, Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, gave a one-minute speech — written by a chatbot — calling for regulation of A.I. But even as lawmakers put a…
Yair Rosenberg writes: Last week, a gunman shot two Jews at close range as they departed morning prayer services in Los Angeles. The first victim was shot in the back on Wednesday. The second was shot multiple times in the arm on Thursday, less than 24 hours later. The attacks sent fear pulsing through the Jewish community of Los Angeles, as members wondered if their own place of worship would be targeted next. On Thursday evening, the alleged assailant was…
Emily Harwitz writes: When Masashi Soga was growing up in Japan, he loved spending time outside catching insects and collecting plants. His parents weren’t big fans of the outdoors, but he had an elementary schoolteacher who was. “They taught me how to collect butterflies, how to make a specimen of butterflies,” Soga recalls. “I enjoyed nature quite a lot.” That early exposure helped foster Soga’s appreciation for nature, he says, and today, Soga is an ecologist at the University of…
Rolling Stone reports: When Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, began his antisemitic blitz late last year — threatening to go “death con 3 on Jewish people”; proclaiming his “love” for Nazis; and insisting it’s time for Jews to “forgive Hitler” — the hate didn’t just go viral on the Internet. It soon spread to college campuses and marred synagogues, and it filled the mouths of assailants attacking Jewish individuals in grocery stores and parks. A new report by the Anti-Defamation League…
Tessa Fox reports: It took three days for the U.N. to announce it was readying a convoy of aid to northwest Syria, following the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked Turkey and its neighbors in the early hours of Monday morning. While 79,110 search-and-rescue personnel, including international teams, had been deployed to Turkey’s east by Wednesday, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), those struggling for their lives under the rubble of their homes in northwest Syria could…
Jenna Krajeski writes: When the first earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, struck just outside Gaziantep on Monday morning, Gürkan Arpaci considered himself lucky. About eighty miles away, in Elbistan, the small Turkish town where Arpaci was born and lives, only three or four buildings had collapsed and there didn’t seem to be too many casualties. Almost everyone he knew appeared on the street in the freezing pre-dawn hour, wondering what to do next. Arpaci’s family has two cars, one belonging to…