Music: Michael Mayo — ‘What’s My Name’
Kamala Harris is rightwing white America’s worst nightmare
Robert Reich writes: When Joe Biden stepped down in support of Kamala Harris, he didn’t just pass the torch to another generation. He passed it from old white men to America’s future. Consider that women now compose a remarkable 60% of college undergraduates. And that by 2050, it’s estimated that America will consist mostly of people of color – 30% more Black people than today, 60% more Latinos, and twice the number of Asian Americans. The power shift has already…
Harris candidacy offers foreign policy opportunity
Matt Duss writes: While no one expects Harris to dramatically distance herself from Biden, there are steps that she can take to show that she speaks for the Democratic Party of today and not 40 years ago. She can announce that as president, she will immediately suspend the U.S.-supplied military aid being used in violation of U.S. law. She can publicly make clear that she agrees with the assessment of countless Israelis—including Israeli opposition lawmakers and top sitting security officials—that…
How the crypto industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy political influence
Judd Legum writes: 15 years after Bitcoin was created, there are still few legitimate use cases. Today, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are primarily used for financial speculation and to facilitate organized crime. The broader crypto industry, meanwhile, has been rocked by scandals, including the spectacular implosion of FTX and criminal charges against Binance. But crypto lobbyists still have one ace up their sleeves: lots of money. The industry’s primary Super PAC, Fairshake, has raised over $202 million in the 2024…
The polarization of gender attitudes
Derek Thompson writes: Men have for decades preferred Republican candidates, while women have for decades leaned Democratic. In a 2024 analysis of voter data, Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results, “found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections,” [Rose] Horowitch wrote. One suggested explanation for these apparent contradictions is that the most alarming surveys are showing us the future, and this November will establish a new high-water mark in gender…
Social trends: The experiences of U.S. adults who don’t have children
Pew Research Center reports: The U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, with a growing share of women ages 25 to 44 having never given birth. And the share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023 (from 37% to 47%), according to a Pew Research Center survey. In this report, we explore the experiences of two groups of U.S. adults: Those ages 50 and older who…
Trump Media quietly enters deal with a Republican donor who could benefit from a second Trump administration
By Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica This month, former President Donald Trump’s media company announced it was making its first major purchase: technology to help stream TV on Truth Social, its Twitter-like platform. There was a mystery at the center of the deal: One of the companies on the other side of the transaction, which went unmentioned in Trump Media’s press release but was named in securities filings, is an obscure…
‘Metaphysical experiments’ probe our hidden assumptions about reality
Amanda Gefter writes: Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals in the deep scaffolding of the world: the nature of space, time, causation and existence, the foundations of reality itself. It’s generally considered untestable, since metaphysical assumptions underlie all our efforts to conduct tests and interpret results. Those assumptions usually go unspoken. Most of the time, that’s fine. Intuitions we have about the way the world works rarely conflict with our everyday experience. At speeds far slower than the…
Music: Michael Mayo — ‘The Way’
Massive appropriation of labor from the Global South enables high consumption in rich countries
Phys.org reports: The high levels of consumption enjoyed by wealthy countries in the Global North are only possible because of mass appropriation of labor from the population of the Global South. This is evidenced by research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which indicates that this appropriation takes place through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. The new study, published in Nature Communications, measured the flows of labor…
The decimation of Gaza’s academia is ‘impossible to quantify’
Ibtisam Mahdi writes: Dr. Refaat Alareer was a good friend of mine. A poet, writer, and prominent activist for the Palestinian cause, Refaat taught English literature and poetry for many years at the Islamic University of Gaza. He loved the works of Shakespeare, Thomas White, John Donne, Wilfred Owen, and many others, and he was the editor of two books: “Gaza Unsilenced“ and “Gaza Writes Back.” Refaat is one of at least 105 Palestinian academics killed in Gaza since the start…
Joe Biden’s plan to reform the Supreme Court and ensure no president is above the law
Joe Biden writes: This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one. But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that…
What Kamala Harris’s candidacy means for Black women
Nia Prater writes: More than half a century after New York Representative Shirley Chisholm became the first Black major-party candidate for president, Kamala Harris could do what seemed impossible in 1972. And while the vice-president’s rise to the top of the ticket has energized the entire Democratic Party, it has particularly thrilled Black voters and especially Black women. Still, Harris’s first week at the top of the ticket has been beset by a recent wave of racist attacks from commentators…
Election interference: The group behind a massive effort to ‘clean’ voter rolls
CNN reports: Police officers in Texas, senior citizens at a nursing home in Pennsylvania and people who had registered to vote at a Marine base in California. They are among the thousands of voters whose right to cast a ballot has been needlessly challenged ahead of this November’s election by activists — many of whom have been inspired by conspiracy theories — seeking to prevent voter fraud. “My simple right as a voter is being attacked,” said Daniel Moss, a…
How Elon Musk came to endorse Donald Trump
The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk began privately gathering support for Donald Trump’s second presidency long before he tweeted his public endorsement on July 13. At least five months earlier, Musk made a pitch for Trump at the Palm Beach oceanfront mansion of Wendy’s co-founder Nelson Peltz, where some of the billionaires and top political strategists who had gathered to discuss 2024 campaign strategy were surprised to see him. The Feb. 16 event included a number of Trump skeptics: Karl…
The picture of early-human origins in Africa grows more complex
The Washington Post reports: For decades, scientists who studied early modern humans believed that our ancestors initially inhabited only small areas of Africa, the savannas of the eastern and southern part of the continent, and then moved north into Asia, Europe and beyond. In this view, early humans bypassed West and Central Africa, especially tropical forests. These areas, the argument went, were populated much later. But now, a growing group of researchers has cast doubt on this narrative. Working in…