Plastic production just keeps expanding, and now is becoming a driving cause of climate change

Plastic production just keeps expanding, and now is becoming a driving cause of climate change

Rebecca Altman writes: Demand for plastic has been as manufactured as plastics themselves. Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems. For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while intensifying production and promotion. More plastics have been made over the past two decades than during the second half of the 20th century. Today, recycling…

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Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on Western diet

Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on Western diet

The Guardian reports: More and more people around the world are suffering because their immune systems can no longer tell the difference between healthy cells and invading micro-organisms. Disease defences that once protected them are instead attacking their tissue and organs. Major international research efforts are being made to fight this trend – including an initiative at London’s Francis Crick Institute, where two world experts, James Lee and Carola Vinuesa, have set up separate research groups to help pinpoint the…

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Human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Ian Stewart writes: In Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), the mathematician Hari Seldon forecasts the collapse of the Galactic Empire using psychohistory: a calculus of the patterns that occur in the reaction of the mass of humanity to social and economic events. Initially put on trial for treason, on the grounds that his prediction encourages said collapse, Seldon is permitted to set up a research group on a secluded planet. There, he investigates how to minimise the destruction and reduce…

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The racist 1890 law that’s still blocking thousands of Black Americans from voting

The racist 1890 law that’s still blocking thousands of Black Americans from voting

Sam Levine reports: The Mississippi officials met in the heat of summer with a singular goal in mind: stopping Black people from voting. “We came here to exclude the Negro,” said the convention’s president. “Nothing short of this will answer.” This conclave took place in 1890. But remarkably, approximately 130 years later, the laws they came up with are still blocking nearly 16% of Mississippi’s Black voting-age population from casting a ballot. The US stands alone as one of the…

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Biden may be paving the way for Trump to return in 2024 with a legitimate electoral win

Biden may be paving the way for Trump to return in 2024 with a legitimate electoral win

Adam Serwer writes: As 2022 begins, the risk American democracy faces is not just that Donald Trump supporters will repeat the events of January 6, 2021—attempting to overturn a free and fair election to illegitimately install Trump as president. It is that Trump will win outright, and use his second term in office to further erode popular sovereignty. During the four years of the Trump presidency, his opponents could draw comfort from the fact that a majority of Americans had…

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American support for conspiracy theories and armed rebellion isn’t new

American support for conspiracy theories and armed rebellion isn’t new

Rioters are tear-gassed as they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images By Amanda J. Crawford, University of Connecticut Americans had to confront a new reality when an angry mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Some of their fellow citizens were in the grips of a false reality and had resorted to violence to support it. Conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and the strange alternate universe of QAnon…

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Most Republicans really believe Trump won the 2020 election

Most Republicans really believe Trump won the 2020 election

Lane Cuthbert and Alexander Theodoridis write: All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. Even a Republican-sponsored audit of Arizona’s results found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most…

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Amid crisis, Kazakhstan’s leader chose his path: embrace Putin

Amid crisis, Kazakhstan’s leader chose his path: embrace Putin

The New York Times reports: The embattled president of Kazakhstan has the pedigree of an international technocrat. The son of prominent intellectuals, he studied in Moscow at a premier academy for diplomats, and later worked in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. He served as a key adviser to the strongman who ruled the oil-rich Central Asian country as a fief for nearly three decades — and then, in 2019, became his heir. The rise of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to the presidency…

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Omicron isn’t mild for the health-care system

Omicron isn’t mild for the health-care system

Ed Yong writes: When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are…

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‘Flurona’ is a great example of how misinformation blooms

‘Flurona’ is a great example of how misinformation blooms

Raghu Adiga writes: Earlier this week, Israeli media reported a person who was hospitalized with evidence of both seasonal flu and COVID at the same time. This unvaccinated and pregnant person had mild symptoms and was discharged without any complications. A person being infected with both the COVID-causing SARS-CoV2 virus and an influenza virus can happen; we just had one such person in our hospital last month whom we treated and discharged without a whole lot of fanfare. However, the…

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The forgotten role of religion in science writing

The forgotten role of religion in science writing

Adam Shapiro writes: It’s been nearly 30 years—a generation!—since professional science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model (sometimes just called the “deficit model.”) (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.) That model describes a way of thinking about people’s understanding and acceptance of scientific knowledge, supposing that the greatest barrier to scientific literacy was a lack—or deficit—of information about a topic. If only people better understood evolution, the thinking went,…

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How democracy gradually gets eroded

How democracy gradually gets eroded

Security fences stand near the U.S. Capitol on January 5, 2022. Drew Angerer/Getty Images By Ken Hughes, University of Virginia Now that a full year has passed since the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, the 2020 election and the republic, it’s evident that the attack never really ended. Instead, it spread out to other, less visible, more vulnerable targets. Donald Trump had hoped to reverse his election loss in a single, decisive, dramatic confrontation between his supporters and…

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Millions of Americans believe that violence against their political opponents can be justified

Millions of Americans believe that violence against their political opponents can be justified

The New York Times reports: Researchers led by Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth College, in a paper titled “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence,” argue that “documented support for political violence is illusory, a product of ambiguous questions, conflated definitions, and disengaged respondents.” Often, pollsters were just capturing people expressing their partisan tribalism. So in a new YouGov survey of 2,750 Americans conducted in November, a group of political scientists known as Bright Line Watch took another whack…

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Defusing the climate emergency depends on defusing the democracy emergency

Defusing the climate emergency depends on defusing the democracy emergency

Mark Hertsgaard writes: A year ago today, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the US Capitol. With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, McCarthy, the House minority leader, fruitlessly implored the president to call off the mob. Senate majority leader McConnell later called the rioters “terrorists” and said Trump…

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