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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As Afghan forces crumble, an air of unreality grips Kabul

As Afghan forces crumble, an air of unreality grips Kabul

The New York Times reports: The security blanket that the United States provided for two decades haunts the Afghan government’s actions, inactions and policies, fostering an atrophying of any proactive planning, in the view of some analysts. If there is a plan to counter the Taliban advance, it is not evident as the government’s hold on the countryside shrinks. Some intelligence assessments have said that the Afghan government could fall under pressure from the Taliban in from six months to…

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In case against Trump’s company, echoes of his father’s tactics on taxes

In case against Trump’s company, echoes of his father’s tactics on taxes

The New York Times reports: Long before Donald J. Trump’s company was accused of plotting detours around the tax code to compensate its chief financial officer with carpeting, televisions and car leases, there were the $16,135 boilers. The boilers were bought for that amount by Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, in the 1990s for his numerous apartment buildings. But in a bit of financial alchemy that embodied the family ethos of paying as little tax as possible, the elder Mr. Trump…

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‘Time cells’ identified in our brains encode the flow of time, scientists say

‘Time cells’ identified in our brains encode the flow of time, scientists say

Science Alert reports: How does the human brain keep track of the order of events in a sequence? New research suggests that ‘time cells’ – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which things happened. Evidence for these kinds of sequence-tracking time cells was previously found in rats, where specific neuron assemblies are thought…

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How to live in a climate ‘permanent emergency’

How to live in a climate ‘permanent emergency’

David Wallace-Wells writes: The phrase Jay Inslee used was “permanent emergency.” This was before Lytton — the town that had, days earlier, set Canada’s all-time heat record, drawing waves of “heat tourists” as witnesses to “desert heat” north of 120 degrees in a place where typical June highs were in the mid-70s — burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke. It was before wildfires raging in British Columbia produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced…

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Democrats have one option left

Democrats have one option left

Ronald Brownstein writes: Today’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster. Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis. In the state legislatures, Democrats lack the…

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The Supreme Court is putting democracy at risk

The Supreme Court is putting democracy at risk

Richard L. Hasen writes: In two disturbing rulings closing out the Supreme Court’s term, the court’s six-justice conservative majority, over the loud protests of its three-liberal minority, has shown itself hostile to American democracy. In one case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court has weakened the last remaining legal tool for protecting minority voters in federal courts from a new wave of legislation seeking to suppress the vote that is emanating from Republican-controlled states. In the other, Americans for…

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Why the law is strong enough to take on Trump

Why the law is strong enough to take on Trump

Donald Ayer, Norman Eisen and E. Danya Perry write: A 15-count indictment for tax fraud and other charges filed in New York on Thursday against the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has already stimulated as much hand-wringing as satisfaction from those who have called for accountability for Donald Trump. Some express concern that Mr. Trump himself was not charged and may never be. Others note that these are “only” state tax fraud counts against his…

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