What’s keeping democracy experts up most at night? An overturned election

What’s keeping democracy experts up most at night? An overturned election

NBC News reports: Congress is just beginning a new investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, but the movement behind it remains as active as ever. Former President Donald Trump is frequently repeating false claims of victory, plotting revenge against politicians who opposed his efforts to overturn the election, attacking key Republicans who refuse to back him up now and hinting at a return to power, either through another presidential run or some other means. There’s no legal…

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Anti-critical race theory laws are un-American

Anti-critical race theory laws are un-American

Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley and Thomas Chatterton Williams write: What is the purpose of a liberal education? This is the question at the heart of a bitter debate that has been roiling the nation for months. Schools, particularly at the kindergarten-to-12th-grade level, are responsible helping turn students into well-informed and discerning citizens. At their best, our nation’s schools equip young minds to grapple with complexity and navigate our differences. At their worst, they resemble indoctrination factories. In recent…

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Birthday parties as virus vector

Birthday parties as virus vector

Margot Sanger-Katz writes: At the height of the pandemic, it was easy to worry that strangers would give you the virus. But a new study of what happened after people’s birthdays suggests that people we trust were also a common source of viral spread. Private gatherings have been harder for researchers to measure than big public events — they’re private, after all. And there has been a fierce debate for months among epidemiologists about just how big a factor they…

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China’s big plan for post-U.S. Afghanistan

China’s big plan for post-U.S. Afghanistan

The Daily Beast reports: As the U.S. exits Afghanistan, Beijing is preparing to swoop into the war-torn country and fill the vacuum left by the departed U.S. and NATO troops. China is poised to make an exclusive entry into post-U.S. Afghanistan with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source close to government officials in Afghanistan told The Daily Beast that Kabul authorities are growing more intensively engaged with China on an extension of the…

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America’s obsession with self-help

America’s obsession with self-help

Chris Lehmann writes: Books about an idealized American character often make for a body of elusive, exasperating speculations, delivered either on the fly or from a special-pleading pulpit of one sort or another. So there’s something appealing about reversing the polarity of such inquiries, and pursuing the fugitive American character through a series of allegedly representative books. That’s the task literary journalist Jess McHugh has set herself in Americanon, gathering a baker’s dozen of influential and top-selling books that have…

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An artificial network kept on the ‘edge of chaos’ acts much like a human brain

An artificial network kept on the ‘edge of chaos’ acts much like a human brain

Science Alert reports: Researchers have demonstrated how to keep a network of nanowires in a state that’s right on what’s known as the edge of chaos – an achievement that could be used to produce artificial intelligence (AI) that acts much like the human brain does. The team used varying levels of electricity on a nanowire simulation, finding a balance when the electric signal was too low when the signal was too high. If the signal was too low, the…

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The Weisselberg indictment is not a ‘fringe benefits’ case

The Weisselberg indictment is not a ‘fringe benefits’ case

Daniel Shaviro writes: In the days before the July 1, 2021 issuance of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Weisselberg-Trump Organization indictment, public anticipation was positively underwhelming. It would just be a fringe benefits case, we were told – meaning, a dispute, of a picayune sort that almost never yields criminal charges, regarding whether or not an employee’s use of, say, a company car or apartment yielded taxable income, in the face of admitted personal benefit but also with plausible claims of…

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Critical race theory: What it is and what it isn’t

Critical race theory: What it is and what it isn’t

President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which aimed to do away with racial discrimination in the law. But discrimination persisted. AP file photo By David Miguel Gray, University of Memphis U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana sent a letter to fellow Republicans on June 24, 2021, stating: “As Republicans, we reject the racial essentialism that critical race theory teaches … that our institutions are racist and need to be destroyed from the ground up.” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a…

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The divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated America

The divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated America

Sarah Zhang writes: Last winter, when vaccines were still incredibly scarce in the United States, Ashish Jha told The Atlantic that he was feeling optimistic about summer: By July 4, Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, expected enough people to be vaccinated that he could host a backyard barbecue. Indeed, Jha confirmed to me this week, he will be grilling burgers and hot dogs for friends this Fourth of July. He had predicted back in…

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Partisanship has made American politics struggle to respond to real changes in the real world

Partisanship has made American politics struggle to respond to real changes in the real world

The New York Times reports: In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one. Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement…

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Massive ransomware attack may impact thousands of victims

Massive ransomware attack may impact thousands of victims

Bloomberg reports: Just weeks after President Joe Biden implored Vladimir Putin to curb cyber crime, a notorious, Russia-linked ransomware gang has been accused of pulling off an audacious attack on the global software supply chain. REvil, the group blamed for the May 30 ransomware attack of meatpacking giant JBS SA, is believed to be behind hacks on at least 20 managed-service providers, which provide IT services to small- and medium-sized businesses. More than 1,000 businesses have already been impacted, a…

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Researchers identify brain circuit for spirituality

Researchers identify brain circuit for spirituality

Brigham and Women’s Hospital reports: More than 80 percent of people around the world consider themselves to be religious or spiritual. But research on the neuroscience of spirituality and religiosity has been sparse. Previous studies have used functional neuroimaging, in which an individual undergoes a brain scan while performing a task to see what areas of the brain light up. But these correlative studies have given a spotty and often inconsistent picture of spirituality. A new study led by investigators…

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The North American heatwave shows we need to know how climate change will change our weather

The North American heatwave shows we need to know how climate change will change our weather

NASA By Christian Jakob, Monash University and Michael Reeder, Monash University Eight days ago, it rained over the western Pacific Ocean near Japan. There was nothing especially remarkable about this rain event, yet it made big waves twice. First, it disturbed the atmosphere in just the right way to set off an undulation in the jet stream – a river of very strong winds in the upper atmosphere – that atmospheric scientists call a Rossby wave (or a planetary wave)….

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Lawmaker threatens to subpoena Exxon after revelations from secret video

Lawmaker threatens to subpoena Exxon after revelations from secret video

The New York Times reports: The chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industry’s decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change. Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Friday he was prepared to use subpoena power to compel the companies to appear before lawmakers if they don’t do so voluntarily. The move comes a day after a secretive…

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