Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem

Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem

BuzzFeed News reports: Facebook has created a ”playbook” to help its employees rebut criticism that the company’s products fuel political polarization and social division. The document, which cites a range of academic studies but does not include recent data from the company’s own research teams, was posted to Facebook’s internal Workplace discussion forum by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president of research, earlier this week. During a Thursday webinar for employees, Cox said the document would…

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Andrew Cuomo’s toxic governorship

Andrew Cuomo’s toxic governorship

Rebecca Traister writes: Joel Wertheimer took a job in Andrew Cuomo’s administration in February 2017, straight from his position in Barack Obama’s White House. He came on alongside almost 30 other new hires, many of whom had also worked for the outgoing president or on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and were seeking a progressive professional path through the Trump years. Some saw New York State government as a bulwark against what they feared Trumpism would bring. Others hoped it could be…

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Refugee flights canceled as Biden fails to lift Trump cutback

Refugee flights canceled as Biden fails to lift Trump cutback

The New York Times reports: More than 715 refugees from around the world who expected to start new lives in the United States have had their flights canceled in recent weeks because President Biden has postponed an overhaul of his predecessor’s sharp limits on new refugee admissions. Agencies that assist refugees poised to enter the country were notified by the State Department this week that all travel would be suspended until the president sets a new target for admissions this…

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How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

Karen Hao writes: Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience. It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, had surreptitiously siphoned the personal data of tens of millions of Americans from their Facebook accounts in an attempt to influence how they voted. It was the biggest privacy breach in Facebook’s history, and Quiñonero had been previously scheduled…

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Seattle’s virus success shows what could have been

Seattle’s virus success shows what could have been

The New York Times reports: Facing the nation’s first widespread coronavirus outbreak, some of Washington State’s top leaders quietly gathered on a Sunday morning last March for an urgent strategy session. The virus had been rampaging through a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs. By the time the meeting began, the region had recorded most of the nation’s first 19 deaths. New cases were surfacing by the hour. As the meeting’s presentation got to the fifth slide, the room grew…

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Joe Biden’s background presidency

Joe Biden’s background presidency

Philip Bump writes: When he was running for president last year, one of Joe Biden’s pitches to voters was that, if he won, they would be able to stop paying attention to the White House all the time. “Remember when you didn’t have to think about the president every single day,” one ad from Biden’s campaign began, “and instead there was someone in that office who thought about you?” After four years of President Donald Trump dominating the country’s attention…

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John Dean warns Trump that prosecutors are closing in: ‘Only a matter of days’

John Dean warns Trump that prosecutors are closing in: ‘Only a matter of days’

HuffPost reports: John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who was once dubbed the “master manipulator” of the Watergate scandal, says he knows legal trouble and former President Donald Trump is in it deep. Dean shared a report on former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has been meeting with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is investigating Trump for potential fraud, including tax fraud. It was Cohen’s seventh meeting with the DA’s office. Dean pointed…

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Resignation demands grow as police get Cuomo groping report

Resignation demands grow as police get Cuomo groping report

The Associated Press reports: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s grip on power appeared increasingly threatened Thursday as a majority of state legislators called for his resignation, Democrats launched an impeachment investigation and police in the state capital said they stood ready to investigate a groping allegation. The firestorm around the Democrat grew a day after the Times Union of Albany reported that an unidentified aide had claimed Cuomo reached under her shirt and fondled her at his official residence late…

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The link between bioelectricity and consciousness

The link between bioelectricity and consciousness

Tam Hunt writes: Life seems to be tied to bioelectricity at every level. The late electrophysiologist and surgeon Robert Becker spent decades researching the role of the body’s electric fields in development, wound healing, and limb regrowth. His 1985 book, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, was a fascinating deep dive into how the body is electric through and through—despite our inability to see or sense these fields with our unaided senses. But Becker’s work was far…

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Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?

Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?

Shadi Hamid writes: The United States had long been a holdout among Western democracies, uniquely and perhaps even suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at about 70 percent. Then something happened. Over the past two decades, that number has dropped to less than 50 percent, the sharpest recorded decline in American history. Meanwhile, the “nones”—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—have grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population. But if secularists…

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GOP decides equal representation is an ‘assault on democracy’

GOP decides equal representation is an ‘assault on democracy’

Eric Levitz writes: The Republican Party has won the popular vote in just one of the six presidential elections held this century — but has nevertheless held the White House for 12 of the past 20 years. Since 2000, the GOP’s Senate caucus has never represented more voters than their Democratic colleagues. Yet Republicans have controlled the upper chamber for more than half of the past two decades. Meanwhile, for the entirety of this millennium, the median House district has…

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How Biden funds his next bill: Shrink the $7.5 trillion tax gap

How Biden funds his next bill: Shrink the $7.5 trillion tax gap

Chye-Ching Huang writes: With the passage of a deficit-financed $1.9 trillion relief bill just hours away, Democrats in Congress may soon pivot to new agenda items, including President Biden’s Build Back Better plan for infrastructure and other critical investments. And those lawmakers will inevitably face intense pressure from fiscal moderates to include tax “pay fors” in spending legislation. One of the best ways to raise plenty of revenue — and help honest taxpayers — is to effectively battle tax cheats….

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Biden got the vaccine rollout humming, with Trump’s help

Biden got the vaccine rollout humming, with Trump’s help

The New York Times reports: When President Biden pledged last week to amass enough vaccine by late May to inoculate every adult in the United States, the pronouncement was greeted as a triumphant acceleration of a vaccination campaign that seemed to be faltering only weeks earlier. And it is true that production of two of the three federally authorized vaccines has sped up in part because of the demands and directives of the new president’s coronavirus team. But the announcement…

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DNA databases are too white

DNA databases are too white

Tina Hesman Saey writes: It’s been two decades since the Human Genome Project first unveiled a rough draft of our genetic instruction book. The promise of that medical moon shot was that doctors would soon be able to look at an individual’s DNA and prescribe the right medicines for that person’s illness or even prevent certain diseases. That promise, known as precision medicine, has yet to be fulfilled in any widespread way. True, researchers are getting clues about some genetic…

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