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Category: Society

Vicious political disagreement is seeping into every corner of life

Vicious political disagreement is seeping into every corner of life

Quinta Jurecic writes: By now, the stories are familiar. Most, though not all, start on social media: a post on Facebook or Twitter identifies a name, and then the threats begin. Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, conspiracy theorists focused on a video of a voting-machine technician at work in Gwinnett County, Georgia. One Twitter user published the young man’s name, declaring him “guilty of treason,” along with, according to the Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, an animation of a…

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The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages

The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages

Michael E Smith writes: All cities have neighbourhoods. This may not sound like much of an observation, but it is in fact a powerful claim for archaeologists of early cities. We now know that neighbourhoods are the only true urban universal – a feature found in every city that has ever existed, past and present. Other seemingly ‘urban’ traits, from streets and big buildings to markets and specialists, are absent from many cities and urban traditions. But neighbourhoods are playing…

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The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

Elizabeth Preston writes: On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than…

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Roots of the resistance: Understanding national identity in Ukraine

Roots of the resistance: Understanding national identity in Ukraine

Aaron Erlich writes: Were Ukrainians sending signals to the world prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion that they believed, as Putin does, that they and Russians were part of “one people?” In the aftermath of the first stage of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, reporting has emerged that Russia expected to quickly win the war and consolidate its military victory by coopting local elected officials and citizens, who were expected to rejoice in or at least countenance Russian occupation. Social science…

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Young people are lonelier than ever

Young people are lonelier than ever

Vice reports: At the beginning of 2022, a TikTok video of a tearful woman talking about friendship and loneliness made the rounds on Twitter. “I have people who love me and who care about me but it was so clear that I’m a Tier 2 or a Tier 3 friend and that resulted in me having to spend the last two years literally alone [during lockdown],” she says. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what did…

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How trance states forged human society through transcendence

How trance states forged human society through transcendence

Mark Vernon writes: A change has come over the public discussion of religion in recent years. In the decade of the New Atheists, religion was the root of all evil. Nowadays, however, it tends to be thought of as a good, even necessary, part of society. In his recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019), the agnostic historian Tom Holland argues that Christianity underpins our civilisation; and the atheist philosopher John Gray has repeatedly stressed that atheism…

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There will be no return to normal for those with unending grief

There will be no return to normal for those with unending grief

Ed Yong writes: Lucy Esparza-Casarez thinks she caught the coronavirus while working the polls during California’s 2020 primary election, before bringing it home to her husband, David, her sister-in-law Yolanda, and her mother-in-law Balvina. Though Lucy herself developed what she calls “the worst flu times 100,” David fared worse. Lucy took him to the hospital on March 20, the last time she saw him in the flesh. He died on April 3, nine days before their wedding anniversary, at the…

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California pushing for 32-hour workweek at larger companies as part of pandemic-driven shift

California pushing for 32-hour workweek at larger companies as part of pandemic-driven shift

USA Today reports: California is trying to become the first state in the nation to make a four-day workweek a state law. The state introduced a bill that would make the official workweek 32 hours and no longer 40 hours for companies with 500 employees or more, giving higher raises and time-and-a-half pay to any worker who surpasses that cutoff. A typical workday would remain eight hours. The bill – AB 2932 – also states that 12 hours past the…

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Utopian thinking prompts us to get real about society’s needs

Utopian thinking prompts us to get real about society’s needs

William Paris writes: All politics seems to operate under the demand to be realistic. There is no quicker end to a political conversation than to describe someone’s ideas as ‘utopian’. The power of this pejorative draws upon seemingly obvious facts concerning human nature, empirical realities and social constraints. Whether we are considering demands to restructure our economic systems, how nations police citizenship claims and their borders, or our relationship to the environment, when these positions are called ‘utopian’, the assumption…

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What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

James Livingston writes: Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it…

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Grand corruption as a systemic parasite upon society

Grand corruption as a systemic parasite upon society

Sudhir Chella Rajan writes: In the 1970s, international development professionals settled on the following definition of corruption: the abuse of public power for private gain. For economic modellers and political sciences, this focus provided clear parameters to describe the institutional conditions that motivate government officials to make money on the side while providing public services. Bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, too, found the definition helpful to create programmes to reduce incentives for private gain by streamlining the bureaucracy, creating appropriate…

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After a half-century of federal oversight, segregated neighborhoods are still pervasive across America

After a half-century of federal oversight, segregated neighborhoods are still pervasive across America

ABC News reports: Milwaukee resident Exie Tatum III grew up in heart of the city and still lives there. The African American father owns a home in a predominantly Black neighborhood but has been house-hunting in pricey, majority-white suburbs, searching for an affordable home that he might someday pass along to his young son Charles through inheritance. “It would really change the game,” Tatum said of owning a suburban Milwaukee home. But statistics suggest he’s fighting an uphill battle. Despite…

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The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

Ezra Klein writes: If the C.D.C. had recommended better masks from the beginning, how many people would have worn them and for how long? If the Biden administration had flooded stores with cheap rapid tests, would people have used them? If boosters had been pushed earlier, and more loudly, would the United States no longer trail peer nations in vaccinations? Put differently: How much would getting our pandemic policies right have mattered? It’s easy to speak as if policy smoothly…

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The super-rich live on a different planet and their thoughts on U.S. salaries prove it

The super-rich live on a different planet and their thoughts on U.S. salaries prove it

Arwa Mahdawi writes: It’s an average American salary. What could it be? $800,000? It costs over $100,000 a year to attend the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know what you get for that money exactly but insights into the everyday economy clearly aren’t on the syllabus. Nina Strohminger, an assistant professor at Wharton School recently asked her students how much they reckoned the average American makes a year. A quarter of the class, she reported in…

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80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

The New York Times reports: On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes. Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it…

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How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

Law enforcement officials outside Congregation Beth Israel synagogue on Jan. 15, 2022, in Colleyville, Texas. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez By Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University The man who took a rabbi and three congregants hostage in Colleyville, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2022, believed that Jews control the United States of America. He told his hostages, as one revealed in a media interview, that Jews “control the world” and that they could use their perceived power to free Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani…

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