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Lawrence Hrubes

Iraqi refugee in Berlin praised for handing over cash find - BBC News - 1 views

  • "A student found a handbag with €14,000 and handed it over to police. The owner is happy. We say excellent and thank you," it said.The family, who live in a refugee centre, are likely to receive a reward for their honesty, say German media
Lawrence Hrubes

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia.
markfrankel18

Current Affairs | Culture & Politics - 0 views

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    "Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you? "
Lawrence Hrubes

How 'The Good Place' Goes Beyond 'The Trolley Problem' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How The Good Place Goes Beyond ‘The Trolley Problem’ In Season 2, the terrific NBC sitcom continues to explore ethics without sacrificing complexity or humor.
Lawrence Hrubes

Historians respond to John F. Kelly's Civil War remarks: 'Strange,' 'sad,' 'wrong' - Th... - 1 views

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    "White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was the guest for the premiere of Laura Ingraham's new show on Fox News Channel on Monday night. During the interview, he outlined a view of the history of the Civil War that historians described as "strange," "highly provocative," "dangerous" and "kind of depressing.""
Lawrence Hrubes

The A.I. "Gaydar" Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data | The New Yorker - 2 views

  • The researchers culled tens of thousands of photos from an online-dating site, then used an off-the-shelf computer model to extract users’ facial characteristics—both transient ones, like eye makeup and hair color, and more fixed ones, like jaw shape. Then they fed the data into their own model, which classified users by their apparent sexuality. When shown two photos, one of a gay man and one of a straight man, Kosinski and Wang’s model could distinguish between them eighty-one per cent of the time; for women, its accuracy dropped slightly, to seventy-one per cent.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Family That Built an Empire of Pain | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • “It’s a parallel to what the tobacco industry did,” Mike Moore told me. “They got caught in America, they saw their market share decline, so they export it to places with even fewer regulations than we have.” He added, “You know what’s going to happen. You’re going to see lots and lots of death.” In May, several members of Congress wrote to the World Health Organization, urging it to help stop the spread of OxyContin, and mentioning the Sackler family by name. “The international health community has a rare opportunity to see the future,” they wrote. “Do not allow Purdue to walk away from the tragedy they have inflicted on countless American families simply to find new markets and new victims elsewhere.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia. The sisters had been punished for refusing to salute the flag and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance, something state law required of students.
Lawrence Hrubes

How Science Saved Me from Pretending to Love Wine | The New Yorker - 2 views

  • was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, I could toss around the terms I had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why this man wants to take the words 'Allahu akbar' back from terrorists - Home | As It... - 1 views

  • Extremists on all sides not only hijack religion and identity and narratives, they also hijack language to rationalize their violent ideology and their violent actions. I want to take it back and say, "No. Allahu akbar means God is great. I use it in prayer."
Lawrence Hrubes

A Mass Shooting in Texas and False Arguments Against Gun Control | The New Yorker - 1 views

  • 5. The social science on gun violence is inconclusive.It will always be a given that it’s impossible to have real controlled experiments. The closest thing in this case would be to have two contiguous countries—both with similar “root” populations, and both subject to massive immigration from abroad.
markfrankel18

Fake news and gut instincts: Why millions of Americans believe things that aren't true ... - 2 views

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    "There are many individual qualities that seem like they should promote accuracy, but don't. Valuing evidence, however, appears to be an exception. The bigger the role evidence plays in shaping a person's beliefs, the more accurate that person tends to be. We aren't the only ones who have observed a pattern like this. Another recent study shows that people who exhibit higher scientific curiosity also tend to adopt more accurate beliefs about politically charged science topics, such as fracking and global warming."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Serial-Killer Detector | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime.
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