Under Russian occupation, Crimea’s demographics are being reshaped

Under Russian occupation, Crimea’s demographics are being reshaped

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RFE/RL reports: An important but widely overlooked demographic transformation has been under way in the Ukrainian region of Crimea since it was annexed by Russia in 2014. Ukrainian officials and analysts say hundreds of thousands of people from across Russia have been brought into the disputed region in an effort by Moscow to transform the composition of its population. “Since 2014 there has been a mass movement of people from Siberia,” Sergei, who moved to Crimea from St. Petersburg and…

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Why Trump is winning and the press is losing

Why Trump is winning and the press is losing

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Jay Rosen writes: There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. For decades, the Republican coalition has tried to hang together by hating on elites who claim to know things, like: “What is art?” Or: “What should college students be taught?” Or: “What counts as news?” The media wing of this history extends back to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. It passes through Spiro Agnew’s speeches…

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World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

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HuffPost reports: Leading global forecasts widely underestimate the future costs of climate change, a new paper warns. The findings, to be released Monday in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, say projections used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on outdated models and fail to account for “tipping points” ― key moments when global warming rapidly speeds up and becomes irreversible. The IPCC, established in 1988, is the leading international body for assessing climate change,…

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The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

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Ephrat Livni writes: Scientists seek to quantify everything—even the ineffable. And so the human search for meaning recently took a physical turn as Columbia and Yale University researchers isolated the place in our brains that processes spiritual experiences. In a new study, published in Cerebral Cortex (paywall) on May 29, neuroscientists explain how they generated “personally relevant” spiritual experiences in a diverse group of subjects and scanned their brains while these experiences were happening. The results indicate that there is…

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Donald Trump now challenges the rule of law

Donald Trump now challenges the rule of law

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Jonathan Chait writes: For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of a coming constitutional crisis has loomed over the Russia investigation. The newly leaked memo by Trump’s lawyers, obtained by the New York Times, suggests that such a crisis is not merely a likelihood, but that it has already begun. The memo proposes several tendentious interpretations of the publicly available facts of Trump’s behavior, along with some legally questionable and amateurish citations of precedent. But the most important passage…

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Google’s artificial intelligence drone project for the Pentagon provoked backlash for the company

Google’s artificial intelligence drone project for the Pentagon provoked backlash for the company

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Gizmodo reports: Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud’s business. Google would…

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Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli

Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli

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Our brains make sense of the world by predicting what we will see and then updating these predictions as the situation demands, according to Lars Muckli, professor of neuroscience at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Glasgow, Scotland. He says that this predictive processing framework theory is as important to brain science as evolution is to biology. Horizon magazine: You have used advanced brain imaging techniques to come up with a model of how the brain processes vision – and…

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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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Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated

Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated

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The Guardian reports: Many of the ideas in Jaron Lanier’s new book start off pretty familiar – at least, if you are active on social media. Yet in every chapter there is a principle so elegant, so neat, sometimes even so beautiful, that what is billed as straight polemic becomes something much more profound. The concept of random reinforcement, for example: addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come, is well known….

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How music can fight prejudice

How music can fight prejudice

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Tom Jacobs writes: The outpouring of hostility toward immigrants and refugees has reminded us that ethnocentrism remains a fact of life in both Europe and the United States. Combating it will require teaching a new generation to view members of different cultures as potential friends rather than threatening outsiders. But what mode of communication has the power to stimulate such a shift? New research from Portugal suggests the answer may be music. It reports schoolchildren around age 11 who learned…

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Puerto Rico’s devastation takes a backseat to Roseanne coverage

Puerto Rico’s devastation takes a backseat to Roseanne coverage

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Pete Vernon writes: For those who argue that the media has misplaced priorities when it comes to coverage choices, this week has provided a case study to support their position. While media outlets from cable news to digital publishers obsessed over the cancellation of ABC’s Roseanne, a report on the staggering death toll in Puerto Rico has, in comparison, been met with relative silence. Researchers from Harvard University estimate that at least 4,645 deaths can be linked to Hurricane Maria…

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FBI official wrote secret memo fearing Trump got a cover story for Comey firing

FBI official wrote secret memo fearing Trump got a cover story for Comey firing

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The New York Times reports: The former acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, wrote a confidential memo last spring recounting a conversation that offered significant behind-the-scenes details on the firing of Mr. McCabe’s predecessor, James B. Comey, according to several people familiar with the discussion. Mr. Comey’s firing is a central focus of the special counsel’s investigation into whether President Trump tried to obstruct the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Mr. McCabe has turned over his memo to…

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