If the super-rich want to live for ever our planet is truly doomed

If the super-rich want to live for ever our planet is truly doomed

John Harris writes: Welcome to the era of immortalists: scientists, dreamers and – crucially – billionaires, who want us to think of age as a curable disease, and our final end as something that could be indefinitely postponed. According to one estimate, the revenues of the global anti-ageing industry will increase from about $200bn today to $420bn by 2030. One sure sign of its rosy prospects is the involvement of high-profile people in the US who have made vast fortunes…

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Why air pollution can trigger depression

Why air pollution can trigger depression

Inverse reports: You may be breathing dirty air right now. Nine out of ten people in the world live in areas with high levels of air pollutants, according to the World Health Organization. This is a problem for physical and mental health. In addition to its well-established relationships to cancer and respiratory and heart diseases, a growing trove of scientific evidence links air pollution with depression and other mental health disorders. A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the…

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To steer China’s future, Xi is rewriting its past

To steer China’s future, Xi is rewriting its past

The New York Times reports: The glowing image of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, greets visitors to museum exhibitions celebrating the country’s decades of growth. Communist Party biographers have worshipfully chronicled his rise, though he has given no hint of retiring. The party’s newest official history devotes over a quarter of its 531 pages to his nine years in power. No Chinese leader in recent times has been more fixated than Mr. Xi on history and his place in it,…

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An idea about safety that keeps putting us in danger

An idea about safety that keeps putting us in danger

Tim Requarth writes: Remember March of 2020, before masks? Back then, as we became aware that the coronavirus was circulating around the country at an alarming clip, packed up our offices, and pulled our kids out of in-person school, the nation’s top experts urged us not to bother covering our nose and mouths. Among the complex reasons for the hesitation was a simple one: distrust of the public. “I worry that if people put on masks, then they’ll think, OK,…

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The partisan gap in Covid’s death toll is growing faster

The partisan gap in Covid’s death toll is growing faster

David Leonhardt writes: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point. In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened. Some conservative writers…

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The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses

The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses

Esther Landhuis writes: Dogs that habitually hear a bell at chow time become classically conditioned to drool at the mere chime, as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed in the 1890s: Their brains learn to associate the bell with food and instruct the salivary glands to respond accordingly. More than a century later, in a paper published today in Cell, the neuroimmunologist Asya Rolls has shown that a similar kind of conditioning extends to immune responses. Using state-of-the-art genetic tools in…

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Running out of time at the UN climate conference

Running out of time at the UN climate conference

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: For those inclined to see them, there were plenty of bad omens last week as the latest round of international climate negotiations—COP26—got under way in Glasgow. A storm that lashed England with eighty-mile-per-hour winds disrupted train service from London to Scotland, leaving many delegates scrambling to find a way to get to the meeting. Just as the conclave began, Glasgow’s garbage workers went on strike, and rubbish piled up in the streets. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in…

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Want to change the world? Then you’d better give up on self-defeating pessimism

Want to change the world? Then you’d better give up on self-defeating pessimism

Kenan Malik writes: The kind of facile optimism that a figure such as Boris Johnson exudes is deeply obnoxious. It’s a way of avoiding the issues, of pretending that we can resolve our problems by not thinking deeply about them, but by simply asserting “we can do it”. There is something equally objectionable about unthinking pessimism. About the insistence that a social problem is so beyond control that we cannot avoid catastrophe or so deeply rooted that it cannot be…

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Voices from across America on what the climate crisis stole

Voices from across America on what the climate crisis stole

The Guardian reports: The jubilation of the Paris climate agreement, where delegates from around the world triumphantly declared the climate crisis would finally be tamed, will have felt very hollow to many in the US in the six years since. Following the landmark 2015 deal to curb dangerous global heating, the US has experienced four of its five hottest years ever recorded. A drought of a severity unprecedented in modern civilization has tightened its grip upon the American west, parching…

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Young women are leading climate protests while old men run global talks

Young women are leading climate protests while old men run global talks

The New York Times reports: The week began with more than 130 presidents and prime ministers posing for a group photo in a century-old Baroque museum crafted from red sandstone. Fewer than 10 were women. Their median age, as their host at the climate summit, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, reminded them, was over 60. The week ended with boisterous protests of thousands on the streets of Glasgow. A march on Friday was led by young climate activists, some barely…

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Foreman says military jury was disgusted by CIA torture

Foreman says military jury was disgusted by CIA torture

The New York Times reports: A Navy captain who as head of a jury in a war-crimes court wrote a damning letter calling the C.I.A.’s torture of a terrorist “a stain on the moral fiber of America” said his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military. Capt. Scott B. Curtis, the jury foreman, said it is just that he had the opportunity to express his thoughts in a letter proposing clemency for the prisoner Majid Khan, a…

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The $30 billion woman: Megadonor Miriam Adelson leaps back into politics

The $30 billion woman: Megadonor Miriam Adelson leaps back into politics

Politico reports: Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson — the widow of casino mogul and longtime GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson — is staging a return to politics, positioning herself to be a force in the 2022 midterms and beyond. Adelson, who with her husband formed the Republican Party’s most powerful donor couple for the last decade, quietly held meetings in her Las Vegas home with a select group of GOP leaders and potential 2024 presidential candidates in the last few days. It…

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UK’s Brexit losses more than 178 times bigger than trade deal gains

UK’s Brexit losses more than 178 times bigger than trade deal gains

The Independent reports: All of Boris Johnson’s new post-Brexit trade deals put together will have an economic benefit of just £3 to £7 per person over the next 15 years, according to the government’s own figures. The tiny economic boost – amounting to just 0.01 to 0.02 per cent of GDP, and less than 50p per person a year – is dwarfed by the economic hit from leaving the EU, which the government estimates at 4 per cent of GDP…

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What collective narcissism does to society

What collective narcissism does to society

Scott Barry Kaufman writes: In 2005, the psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala was researching extremist groups, trying to understand what leads people to commit acts of terrorist violence. She began to notice something that looked a lot like what the 20th-century scholars Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm had referred to as “group narcissism”: Golec de Zavala defined it to me as “a belief that the exaggerated greatness of one’s group is not sufficiently recognized by others,” in which that thirst…

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