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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Where have all Britain’s insects gone?

Where have all Britain’s insects gone?

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Robin McKie reports: When Simon Leather was a student in the 1970s, he took a summer job as a postman and delivered mail to the villages of Kirk Hammerton and Green Hammerton in North Yorkshire. He recalls his early morning walks through its lanes, past the porches of houses on his round. At virtually every home, he saw the same picture: windows plastered with tiger moths that had been attracted by lights the previous night and were still clinging to…

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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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Arron Banks, Brexit and the Russia connection

Arron Banks, Brexit and the Russia connection

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Carole Cadwalladr reports: On 11 March 2016, three months before the European referendum, and long before anyone had started to wonder about foreign interference in the two political cataclysms of 2016 – Brexit and Trump – the Russian embassy in London put out a press release. Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, had made a speech at Chatham House a few days earlier. A speech in which he noted that “the only country who would like us to leave the EU…

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Trump takes his party back to the 1920s

Trump takes his party back to the 1920s

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Peter Beinart writes: The last few days—as President Donald Trump has savaged America’s allies over trade, demanded that they readmit Russia to the G7, and embraced North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un—make something clear: Cold War conservatism is dead. What’s replacing it resembles less the foreign-policy outlook that has animated conservatives since World War II than the sentiment that prevailed before it. In the 1920s, conservative Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover rejected both binding alliances and the…

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Conservative religious leaders are denouncing Trump immigration policies

Conservative religious leaders are denouncing Trump immigration policies

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The New York Times reports: Conservative religious leaders who have long preached about the sanctity of the family are now issuing sharp rebukes of the Trump administration for immigration policies that tear families apart or leave them in danger. The criticism came after recent moves by the administration to separate children from their parents at the border, and to deny asylum on a routine basis to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence. Some of the religious leaders are the…

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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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Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble

Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble

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The Washington Post reports: Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday. The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than…

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What matters

What matters

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Owen Flanagan writes: In “The Strange Order of Things” Antonio Damasio promises to explore “one interest and one idea … why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and how our brains interact with the body to support such functions.” Damasio thinks that the cognitive revolution of the last 40 years, which has yielded cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence, has been, in fact, too cognitive,…

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud

The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud

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Brian Resnick writes: The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature. The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they…

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How a ‘senile,’ ‘living corpse,’ and ‘dotard,’ became (in North Korea) ‘president of the United States of America’

How a ‘senile,’ ‘living corpse,’ and ‘dotard,’ became (in North Korea) ‘president of the United States of America’

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The Wall Street Journal reports: This week, North Koreans were introduced to a man named Donald J. Trump, who flew to this city-state to meet with their respected Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. Prior to this, they had known the U.S. president simply as “Trump,” who was described in the North Korean press last year as “senile,” “a living corpse” and, in one infamous turn of phrase, a “dotard.” As recently as March 6 this year, he was referred to…

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