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katherineharron

Italian hermit living alone on an island says self-isolation is the ultimate journey | ... - 0 views

  • "I am fine, I'm not scared," he tells CNN Travel via the mobile phone that is his link to the outside world. "I feel safe here. This island offers total protection. No risks at all. Nobody lands, not even a single boat can be seen sailing by."
  • Little has changed for Morandi since Italy's virus outbreak, except that he must now wait longer for people to bring him food from the mainland due to harsh restrictions imposed by Rome's government.
katherineharron

Donald Trump's 'bunker' story tells you everything you need to know about him - CNNPoli... - 0 views

  • "Well it was a false report. I was down during the day and I was there for a tiny, little short period of time. And it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day."
  • "I've gone down two or three times, all for inspection. And, you go there, some day you may need it. I went down. I looked at it. It was during the day, and it was not a problem. And I read about it, in like, a big thing. There was never a problem ... nobody ever came close to giving us a problem."
  • This re-framing of history is remarkable solely for the gall it takes to attempt it. After all, every single major media organization reported over the weekend -- with NO pushback from the White House -- that Trump had been taken into the bunker for his own protection, not to, uh, "inspect" it.
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  • "As protesters gathered outside the White House Friday night in Washington, DC, President Donald Trump was briefly taken to the underground bunker for a period of time, according to a White House official and a law enforcement source.
  • "A law enforcement source and another source familiar with the matter tell CNN that first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were also taken to the bunker.
  • So, why would Trump describe it falsely to Fox? Especially when there are a few other things going on in the country -- most notably ongoing protests over the murder of a black man at the hands of police in Minneapolis and a global pandemic that has killed 106,000 Americans and is projected to kill 135,000 by early August.
  • There is nothing Trump hates more than weakness. And the image of him cowering in an underground bunker while protesters stood outside the gates of the White House is simply not something he cannot accept. This is a man who has been telling himself a story of his life -- one in which he is always the toughest, the smartest and the winner-est -- for, well, his entire adult life.
  • He could have gone anytime, of course! It was just a coincidence he was down there amid the protests outside the White House! Just going down to make sure all the buttons worked! All the brass was sufficiently polished! And the like.
katherineharron

With just one ICU bed available, Montgomery, Alabama, is sending sick patients to Birmi... - 0 views

  • The city of Montgomery, Alabama, which has only one intensive care unit bed left, is sending sick patients to Birmingham, more than an hour away, officials said.
  • "Right now, if you are from Montgomery, and you need an ICU bed, you are in trouble," Reed said at a press conference. "If you're from central Alabama, and you need an ICU bed, you may not be able to get one."
  • Alabama had 13,288 confirmed Covid-19 cases as of Thursday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University data. At least 528 people have died. That's 2,358 more cases than reported the same time last week. At that time, 450 deaths had been reported.
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  • "This is a serious matter and we have to maintain our practices even as many people are relaxing restrictions and the economy is opening back up," Reed said in a phone interview.
  • Social distancing and masks "really work," she said.
  • Most states across the country can ease some restrictions safely, but projects spikes in areas that have broadly reopened early, according to the model put together by a team at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.
  • "While our models show that rising temperatures and humidity levels are having an impact on reducing the spread of Covid-19, those hot, humid days of summer are not going to eliminate the threat of virus resurgence," said PolicyLab's Dr. Gregory Tasian, senior scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.
  • Jefferson County, where Birmingham is located, had 1,453 confirmed cases as of Thursday, according to the state's health department data -- which is a jump of 35% from the 1,075 cases reported two weeks ago. The county has had 85 deaths attributed to Covid-19.
  • As of May 11, restaurants and bars were allowed to serve customers on site, gyms and athletic facilities, hair and nail salons and barber shops were allowed to open. Groups of any size are allowed, as long as the 6 feet distance guidance is followed.
katherineharron

What my Florida town can teach us about racist policing (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • Nine days before George Floyd died an agonizing death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while others watched, law enforcement officials broke up what has been described as a massive block party in my Florida hometown of DeLand and the surrounding unincorporated Volusia County.
  • this local example has lessons for all of us looking for ways to facilitate effective community policing of African American communities during the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • The mostly African American neighborhood known as Spring Hill is one of five historically underserved communities in the DeLand area where freed slaves settled to live separately after the Civil War. My elementary school — once heralded as a sign of this area's progress toward racial reconciliation when in the 1970s white students from the suburbs were bused there to implement the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation order — is still a neighborhood school for mostly black and brown students.
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  • Figuring out exactly what happened that Saturday night will take time and require generous listening to reveal important details about exactly what events took place, how law enforcement became involved and whether permitting and operational procedures were followed.
  • I'm convinced that the depiction of the event and the actions of law enforcement is contrary to what was initially reported. This was not a pop-up Spring Hill block party that spontaneously became massive, disruptive and violent. Instead, it involved groups gathered for a series of events (including, among others, a car show, a concert and memorial for a former Spring Hill resident who in 2008 was a victim of gun violence) that were promoted successfully enough to attract attendees from as far away as Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville.
  • And instead of becoming yet another incident where unarmed African Americans were shot by law enforcement officers who felt threatened based on preconceived fears and racist assumptions, there have been no reports or claims that these law enforcement officers shot, killed or inflicted life-threatening injury on any residents or visitors
  • law enforcement officers claim they were hit and injured that night by a sucker punch and the hurling of bottles, a bar stool and a mason jar; that they recovered one loaded Ruger 9 mm and other guns, some narcotics and $3,840 in cash; that they made seven arrests and issued five traffic citations. It remains the subject of further investigation and reporting to resolve community complaints in social media posts about undue provocation, escalation and unlawful business interruption. Videos of the incident shed some light but do not capture all aspects of a crowd this large -- the Volusia sheriff's office estimated it at 3,000 -- moving across multiple locations.
  • To facilitate effective community policing during this pandemic crisis, law enforcement leaders and African American leaders and residents need to further discuss and endeavor to reach consensus on four practical steps: suspending plans for any large gatherings until public health officials say they are safe; advocating for national and state leaders to put health over politics by warning about the continuing risks of asymptomatic virus transmission as the economy reopens; using social media to promote a consistent message about the danger of asymptomatic spread, especially given that the African American community is experiencing a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths, and ensuring that when large events are permissible organizers comply with local permitting requirements, which should be consistently enforced in ALL communities, not just in African American neighborhoods.
  • Ironically, on the same morning as the Spring Hill neighborhood events in question, I was part of a group of 19 racially, politically and socially diverse individuals from eight states and 11 cities gathered for a virtual "Color Line Roundtable."
  • participants thoughtfully discussed what values, beliefs and principles would guide their votes -- or abstentions -- in the November election. Each of us had a slightly different way of articulating those foundational beliefs, but, as one first-time participant emailed me after the discussion, it was "affirming to hear the commonality of beliefs and principles amongst a group of people who obviously also have some significant differences in opinions and positions."
  • upon further reflection, I have come to appreciate the value of our community's years-long series of roundtable discussions. Covid-19 restrictions and Floyd's murder might have complicated relations with law enforcement officials, but they offer yet another opportunity for us to talk candidly about the complex issues of effective community policing, racial diversity, equity and inclusion.
Javier E

COVID-19: Individually Rational, Collectively Disastrous - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • One major problem is that stopping the virus from spreading requires us to override our basic intuitions.
  • Three cognitive biases make it hard for us to avoid actions that put us in great collective danger.
  • if everyone who isn’t at especially high risk held similar dinner parties, some percentage of these events would lead to additional infections. And because each newly infected person might spread the virus to others, everyone’s decision to hold a one-off dinner party would quickly lead to a significant spike in transmissions.
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  • some activities, including dangerous ones, provide negative feedback only rarely. When I am in a rush, I often cross the street at a red light. I understand intellectually that this is stupid, but I’ve never once seen evidence of my stupidity.
  • Exposure to COVID-19 works the same way. Every time you engage in a risky activity—like meeting up with your friends indoors—the world is likely to send you a signal that you made the right choice. I saw my pal and didn’t get sick. Clearly, I shouldn’t have worried so much about socializing!
  • Let’s assume, for example, that going to a large indoor gathering gives you a one in 20 chance of contracting COVID-19—a significant risk. Most likely, you’ll get away with it the first time. You’ll then infer that taking part in such gatherings is pretty safe, and will do so again. Eventually, you are highly likely to fall sick.
  • 2. Individually Rational, Collectively DisastrousWe tend to think behavior that is justifiable on the individual level is also justifiable on the collective level, and vice versa. If eating the occasional sugary treat is fine for me it’s fine for all of us. And if smoking indoors is bad for me, it’s bad for all of us.
  • The dynamics of contagion in a pandemic do not work like that
  • 1. Misleading Feedback
  • The dynamic here is reminiscent of classic collective-action problems. If you go to one dinner, you’ll likely be fine. But if everyone goes to one dinner, the virus will spread with such speed that your own chances of contracting COVID-19 will also rise precipitously.
  • 3. Dangers Are Hard to Recognize and Avoid
  • Many of the dangers we face in life are easy to spot—and we have, over many millennia, developed biological instincts and social conventions to avoid them
  • When we deal with an unaccustomed danger, such as a new airborne virus, we can’t rely on any of these protective mechanisms.
  • The virus is invisible. This makes it hard to spot or anticipate. We don’t see little viral particles floating through the air
  • In time, we can overcome these biases (at least to some extent).
  • Social disapprobation can help
  • We all should do what we can to identify the biases from which we suffer—and try to stop them from influencing our behavior.
katherineharron

'Life or death still possible': 31 days at my dad's virtual bedside - CNN - 0 views

  • The attending physician at the intensive care unit had called that morning and asked whether they should include a Do Not Resuscitate order in my dad's chart. They had asked before. I had been indecisive. A successful resuscitation would extend his life. But it might also lead to brain damage.
  • "If it continues in this direction," he told me, "we're talking about a single-digit chance of survival."
  • I suspected that my father had a will and a health care directive inside the house. I put on my mask but couldn't find a clean pair of latex gloves in my duffel bag. It was cold in the backyard. I had a pair of leather gloves. I put those on and entered my childhood home for the first time in weeks. My mother barely registered my presence. She was crying on the couch.
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  • I was relieved -- we wouldn't have to make what felt like an impossible decision -- but then I kept reading. My father had noted that he did not want to be supported by a ventilator or hooked up to a feeding tube for any length of time. He had been connected to both for nearly two weeks.
  • There was grief on her face, but also curiosity. What had finally gotten to her younger son, the one who so rarely showed emotion during his father's hospitalization?
  • I called the hospital and approved the DNR. They told me his status was still dire. I called my dad's closest friends and started preparing them for the worst.
  • My father's lungs showed no signs of progress. The double pneumonia they diagnosed days before was worsening. His kidneys were failing. Dialysis was required but would put a strain on his blood pressure, which was already dangerously low. There was a special form of dialysis designed for delicate situations like this -- continuous veno-venous hemofiltration -- but it wasn't available at Lawrence
  • The morning after I searched for my father's health directive and drafted his obituary, I woke up and tried to turn on my laptop. It wouldn't start. When it eventually booted up, it asked if I wanted to restore an unsaved document. No, I thought, let's see what happens today.
  • It was the same doctor as yesterday, the one who asked about the DNR. "Look, your dad is on a ventilator. That's a form of life support. He's experiencing kidney failure and requires dialysis. His situation is still very acute. He was in good health before the Covid, but his kidney, heart, and lungs are 69 years old. It's tough for them to recover. But the numbers from today are undeniably better than yesterday. There's been an improvement at almost every level. Your dad is a tough guy."
  • One of my close friends, a nurse practitioner, would help me understand all the terminology and its implications. He was treating Covid patients at an ICU upstate. At the end of our calls I'd ask him how he was doing. "We ran out of gowns," he told me one day. "My ICU is out of ventilators -- we're diverting people to Albany," he said another time.
  • "There's a difference between good intentions and good outcomes," I explained to her. She would wave me away and pick up. Inevitably the call would bring her tears. I stewed on the porch. My brother, uncle and I would spend hours trying to ease her mind and pacify her anxiety. Any inquiry or outreach was like sticking a finger in the open wound of her anguish.
  • "He's only improving," I told her, "because of the life-saving care you guys have given him. The whole city is in awe of you. They should have a parade for you down the Canyon of Heroes."
  • The nurses and doctors who took care of my father -- first for four days at NewYork-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital, then for nearly a month at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia -- were always empathetic, straightforward and willing to trust me with complicated details.
  • About a week after writing -- then refusing to recover -- my father's obituary, his condition was continuing to improve.
  • I called my friend, the nurse practitioner, and gave him the latest update. He seemed upset. "You OK, dude?" "A nurse from my hospital died," he explained.
  • I wrote about my dad's volunteer work -- at the Special Olympics, at an organization he founded that helps police families with special needs, and at just about any Italian-American group that needed a lawyer. He was so proud of his Italian-American heritage. He loathed the mafioso caricatures and stereotypes found on TV -- he wrote countless op-eds attacking those -- but he revered the old-school virtues he associated with his Italian-American upbringing: loyalty, humility, hard work, dedication to family.
  • "Yesterday was a stumble, but we're getting back on course," I emailed the group. "We always knew this recovery wasn't going to be a straight line. It's important to remain resilient and optimistic even when there are temporary setbacks."
  • "Oh Lou, I've been waiting for your call. I have such good news. They are planning to extubate him tomorrow. They are going to take your father off the ventilator!" She was practically screaming with excitement. I was speechless.
  • I had been withholding certain information from my family and friends during this whole ordeal. My dad had developed a blood clot two weeks into his hospitalization. Clots are extremely dangerous, of course, but it was small and in a relatively manageable location.
  • I called my brother and told him about the plan to get my father off the ventilator. Since there were a number of contingencies, we debated telling my mother. She was living and dying with every update.
  • My father's breathing was labored on the morning they were planning to extubate. They delayed the procedure a day. That next morning, April 16, a doctor called. I was in the shower and rushed out to answer my cell. He said they were doing the extubation within the hour. What do we want to do if the extubation fails?
  • "It went as well as we could have hoped for," the doctor said. "His vitals are stable and he's breathing well. He's resting now." She explained that my father was disoriented and it probably wasn't a great idea to speak with him that day. Whatever, I thought, I'll speak with him when he gets home. He had been on a ventilator for 28 days.
  • I called the doctor later in the day. She told me my dad seemed distressed. He was trying to speak, but his vocal cords were too swollen. "It's so frustrating," she told me. "I don't know what he wants to tell me."
  • "Each facility has their own Covid rules," she explained. "I'll send you over a list." On the list was the nursing home where my grandfather had died several years before. My father had visited him every day.
  • I called the step-down unit where he had been the past three days. They transferred me to his nurse. "He's doing better, love. We took him off the pressor and his blood pressure is in a good range. His heart rate is good. He's breathing fine. The doctors decided he didn't need to go back to the ICU. He's ok."
  • "I've repeatedly said that recovery isn't a straight line. ... Yesterday we managed the roller coaster ride as a family. My brother, uncle and I were with my mother the entire day. We never lost hope or confidence in my dad's medical care and ultimate recovery. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a blinking one. Right now, it shines again."
  • I drove back to my mom's house. I scanned the block for my brother's car. He had not arrived. I parked. I have to wait for him and then tell my mother, brother and uncle all at once, right? Should I call my wife first? Should I call my dad's best friend?
  • I called my wife. I called my dad's best friend. I called the guys he grew up with. I called his former colleagues. I began every conversation the same way, "This is that call." I listened to each of them yell and cry and ask if I was serious. Then I said I had to make another call.
  • I wrote about my father's career. How he got his law degree at night school and became a prosecutor at the city, state, and federal level. How he convicted mobsters, drug dealers, and those who abused power.
  • Covid-19 was new and largely unstudied. Maybe one of these seemingly odd treatments would work.
  • He was a Covid patient for 31 days. It was a painful experience, but ultimately unimportant. It doesn't matter how a man dies. It matters how he lives.
clairemann

Jonathan Haidt on the Pandemic and America's Polarization - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The best way to approach this question, he replied, is to look at the trajectory of American democracy over the past decade and a half or so.
  • increasingly concerned by how politically polarized America was becoming, and polarization has only worsened over the past dozen years. “
  • Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse; you can’t just extrapolate from the present. “
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  • “You can’t get compromise. You get exactly the situation that the Founders feared, that [James] Madison wrote about in ‘Federalist 10,’ which is faction, which is people care more about defeating the other side than they do about the common good.”
  • Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think.
  • it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.”
  • the pandemic is having the sort of unifying effect that major crises tend to have.
  • For example, 90 percent of Americans believe that “we’re all in it together,” compared to just 63 percent in the fall of 2018. The share of Americans who describe the country as “unified” has grown from 4 percent in 2018 to 32 percent today
  • Other polls show that the divide between Republicans and Democrats on social-distancing measures isn’t all that large.
Javier E

Covid-19 pandemic and chaos theory: Why the future is impossible to precisely predict -... - 0 views

  • In Washington state, a person with the virus attended a choir practice, and more than half of the other singers subsequently got sick. In South Korea, a 29-year-old man went out to nightclubs; he was Covid-19 positive, and he has since been linked to at least 54 new cases. In China, nine people sitting in the path of an air conditioning vent in a restaurant all got sick, most likely from one person, as the duct blew viral particles across their faces.
  • Small things could have changed these outcomes. The clubber could have decided to watch TV instead of going out dancing. If the choir practice was rescheduled for the next day, maybe the person would have felt sick and stayed home. The air conditioner in the restaurant could have been turned off.
  • “Little shifts can have really disproportionately sized impacts” in a pandemic. And scientists have a name for systems that operate like this: chaos.
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  • An outbreak isn’t a double pendulum; it’s much more convoluted. Myriad chains of events, operating in overlapping networks, conspire to chart its course.
  • It’s the double pendulum, and as a physical object, it’s very simple: A pendulum (a string and a weight) is attached to the bottom of another. Its movement is explained by the laws of motion written by Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago.
  • But slight changes in the initial condition of the pendulum — say it starts its swing from a little higher up, or if the weight of the pendulum balls is a little heavier, or one of the pendulum arms is a bit longer than the other — lead to wildly different outcomes that are very hard to predict.
  • The double pendulum is chaotic because the motion of the first pendulum influences the motion of the second, which then influences the entire apparatus. There isn’t a simple scale or ratio to describe how the inputs relate to the outputs. A one-gram change to the weight of a pendulum ball can result in a very different swing pattern than a two-gram change.
  • It teaches us to understand the mechanics of a system — the science of how it works — without being able to precisely predict its future. It helps us visualize how something that seems like it should be linear and predictable just isn’t.
  • That’s why, when pressed, epidemiologists have to say they don’t know what’s going to happen.
  • Climate scientists clearly tell us adding CO2 to the air will increase global temperatures. Yet they argue about when the worst effects of climate change will be felt and how bad it will be
  • Still, they know the mechanics of outbreaks. The chaos “doesn’t necessarily mean we know nothing,” Kissler says. They understand the conditions that make an outbreak worse and the conditions that make it better.
  • There is a tough tension of the current moment that we all need to work through: The future is clouded in chaos, but we know the mechanics of this system
  • Here are the mechanics. Scientists know that if we let up on social distancing, without an alternative plan in place, the virus can infect more people. They know this virus is likely to persist for at least a few years without a vaccine. They know it’s very contagious. That it’s very deadly. They also know that its pandemic potential is hardly spent, and that most of the population of the United States and the world is still vulnerable to it.
  • Will residents keep up with mask-wearing and social distancing, even when their leaders relax regulations? Plus, there are scientific questions about the virus still not understood: Will it diminish transmission in a seasonal pattern? Do children contribute greatly to its spread? How long does immunity last after an infection? Why do some people breathe out more of the virus than others? The answers to these questions will influence the future, and we do not know the answers.
  • Scientists are still unraveling what makes the difference between a sprawling outbreak in one city and a more manageable one in another. Some of it is the result of policy, some is the result of demographics, some is about structural inequality and racism, and some comes down to individual behavior. Some of it is just luck. That’s chaos for you.
  • “I don’t see uncertainty as a lack of knowledge,” says Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a physicist who studies the chaos of a different sort of viral dynamics. “I think it’s a fundamental part of how our world works. It’s not our fault we do not know where this all will go.”
  • Newton clearly told us what happens when an object drops from the sky. But follow his laws, and find that the path of a double pendulum is very, very difficult to predict.
  • There’s a simple mechanism that is helping me understand the many possible futures we face with the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Epidemiologists are clearly telling us what happens when you bring masses of people together during a pandemic. But they can’t tell us the exact shape this outbreak will take.
Javier E

Dhar Mann, YouTube's Moral Philosopher - The New York Times - 0 views

  • His “focus on universal truths,” he believes, is what has allowed him “to build such a massive audience.”
  • t’s 25 to 34. “Facebook and YouTube don’t give data for audience under 13 so I can’t say for sure 7 to 10 is the fastest growing audience, it just feels like it based on my interactions with people,” he wrote in an email.
  • Most of his videos incorporate timely narratives about police-calling Karens and Covid-19 hoarders, but in style and tone they are more reminiscent of 1980s after-school specials and the educational short films of the ’50s than other content that’s popular today.
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  • The characters are broad and simple, each representing a demographic that any fourth grader could recognize: angry mom, spoiled wife, mean girl, lazy husband. They seem almost like instructional videos an alien species might watch to learn the basic points of American social dynamics.
  • Mr. Mann’s moral philosophy can at times feel thin and absolutist. A common narrative arc involves a bully mocking the protagonist for being poor or having acne; then a twist of fate strikes the bully with poverty or pimples. The videos often imply that having any kind of social problem is a form of shameful karmic punishment.
  • the size of his audience suggests that Mr. Mann is tapping into something millions of people find compelling. In trying times — say, a pandemic with no end in sight paired with devastating wildfires on several continents and a bleak climate outlook — people want to see villains reformed and lessons delivered. No ambiguity, no debates. Everything turns out just right.
Javier E

What If Fox News Viewers Watched CNN Instead? - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today.
  • the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?
  • Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.
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  • Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?
  • Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead.
  • Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.
  • The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.
  • Switchers were five percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long Covid, for example, and six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the U.S. of controlling the virus.
  • They were seven points more likely to support voting by mail. And they were 10 points less likely to believe that supporters of then-candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers get shot, 11 points less likely to say it’s more important for the president to focus on containing violent protesters than on the coronavirus, and 13 points less likely to agree that if Biden were elected, “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”
  • These are meaningful differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very right-wing in their view of the American political landscape.
  • these are reasonably large changes from a one-month experiment. And they occurred despite the long-term effort of then-President Donald Trump to discredit CNN and other mainstream media outlets.
  • one of the things that switchers changed their minds about was Fox News itself: They became more skeptical that Fox would cover a story that reflected poorly on Trump, even if it were true.
  • This mode of political influence, where partisan media can simply ignore stories that are inconvenient, is a potentially powerful challenge to democratic accountability.
  • It’s also probably not symmetrical. Even media outlets that skew liberal in their coverage generally don’t shy away from covering the Covid death toll or the rise in inflation.
  • one lesson they can take from this experiment is that nobody is impossible to reach.
  • Broockman and Kalla’s research indicates that information flows at the margin really do matter. Any opportunity to present new facts to people, and new arguments, is valuable.
Javier E

How to Accept the Things You Can't Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Everyone—even the most privileged among us—has circumstances they would like to change in their life.
  • How might you improve the situation? Your answer might be, “I should move, get a new job, and meet new people.” In other words, you should change the outside world to make it better for you.
  • Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.
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  • Sometimes, changing your circumstances is difficult but absolutely necessary, such as in cases of abuse or violence. And sometimes, changing your circumstances is fairly easy: If you are lethargic every morning, start going to bed earlier.
  • But in the gray areas in between, fighting against reality can be impossible, or incredibly inefficient. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a chronic illness for which there are no promising treatment options. Perhaps your romantic partner has left you against your wishes and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
  • In these sorts of situations, changing how you feel can actually be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural.
  • No surprise, then, that chronic stress often leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms in modern life. These include the misuse of drugs and alcohol, rumination on the sources of stress, self-harm, and self-blaming
  • That can be blamed in part on biology. Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger.
  • In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.
  • But in the modern world, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.
  • you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.
  • Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis
  • Similarly, the Stoics believed that human reason, practiced studiously, could override knee-jerk emotions.
  • Buddhism posits that our minds are habitually unbalanced, but not intrinsically so; the key is to build new habits of thinking.
  • These ideas (especially the last) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy, such as rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies for changing our reactions to negative situations in our life—and thus becoming happier.
  • 4. Give more.
  • you can follow four steps to arrive at a happier frame of mind:
  • 1. Notice your feelings.
  • Self-observation requires that you be mindful of what you are feeling in the moment and approach your emotions with detached curiosity.
  • Say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless Zoom meetings and no real human contact. Rather than fantasizing about quitting, spend some time dissecting your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day are they worst?
  • Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, I started taking virtual meetings while out for a walk. It made a big difference.
  • 2. Accept your feelings.
  • in much of life, negative feelings are part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Furthermore, ample research shows that negative emotions and experiences help us find life’s meaning and purpose.
  • In the journal you started in Step 1 above, ponder the things that you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they spark in you. Ask what you are learning about yourself from each of these feelings, and how you might grow as a result.
  • 3. Lower your expectations.
  • Once, as a young man, I told my father over the phone that I planned to quit my job. “Why?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I told him. He paused for a long time, and finally said, “What makes you so special?
  • My problem—and it’s a common one—was that I had set unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.
  • Calmly ask yourself whether you’re asking the world for something it can’t or won’t give you. If you are, you might be looking in the wrong place for your bliss
  • you shouldn’t assume that all your happiness can come from any single romance, material object, or activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others.
  • Ancient thinkers recognized this difficulty but believed that we can manage our reactions effectively if we have the right tools.
  • Research from the INSEAD business school in France shows that people who consider themselves a victim of circumstances don’t feel like they have any responsibility for them. They are also likely to be victimizers themselves, hurting the people who try to help them.
  • One way to break this cycle is to help others voluntarily and charitably. Not only is serving others one of the most effective ways to raise one’s own happiness; maintaining the two opposing ideas that you are both a victim and a helper is very difficult.
Javier E

What Do We Lose If We Lose Twitter? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • What do we lose if we lose Twitter?
  • At its best, Twitter can still provide that magic of discovering a niche expert or elevating a necessary, insurgent voice, but there is far more noise than signal. Plenty of those overenthusiastic voices, brilliant thinkers, and influential accounts have burned out on culture-warring, or have been harassed off the site or into lurking.
  • Twitter is, by some standards, a niche platform, far smaller than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. The internet will evolve or mutate around a need for it. I am aware that all of us who can’t quit the site will simply move on when we have to.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Perhaps the best example of what Twitter offers now—and what we stand to gain or lose from its demise—is illustrated by the path charted by public-health officials, epidemiologists, doctors, and nurses over the past three years.
  • They offered guidance that a flailing government response was too slow to provide, and helped cobble together an epidemiological picture of infections and case counts. At a moment when people were terrified and looking for any information at all, Twitter seemed to offer a steady stream of knowledgeable, diligent experts.
  • But Twitter does another thing quite well, and that’s crushing users with the pressures of algorithmic rewards and all of the risks, exposure, and toxicity that come with virality
  • t imagining a world without it can feel impossible. What do our politics look like without the strange feedback loop of a Twitter-addled political press and a class of lawmakers that seems to govern more via shitposting than by legislation
  • What happens if the media lose what the writer Max Read recently described as a “way of representing reality, and locating yourself within it”? The answer is probably messy.
  • here’s the worry that, absent a distributed central nervous system like Twitter, “the collective worldview of the ‘media’ would instead be over-shaped, from the top down, by the experiences and biases of wealthy publishers, careerist editors, self-loathing journalists, and canny operators operating in relatively closed social and professional circles.”
  • many of the most hyperactive, influential twitterati (cringe) of the mid-2010s have built up large audiences and only broadcast now: They don’t read their mentions, and they rarely engage. In private conversations, some of those people have expressed a desire to see Musk torpedo the site and put a legion of posters out of their misery.
  • Many of the past decade’s most polarizing and influential figures—people such as Donald Trump and Musk himself, who captured attention, accumulated power, and fractured parts of our public consciousness—were also the ones who were thought to be “good” at using the website.
  • the effects of Twitter’s chief innovation—its character limit—on our understanding of language, nuance, and even truth.
  • “These days, it seems like we are having languages imposed on us,” he said. “The fact that you have a social media that tells you how many characters to use, this is language imposition. You have to wonder about the agenda there. Why does anyone want to restrict the full range of my language? What’s the game there?
  • in McLuhanian fashion, the constraints and the architecture change not only what messages we receive but how we choose to respond. Often that choice is to behave like the platform itself: We are quicker to respond and more aggressive than we might be elsewhere, with a mindset toward engagement and visibility
  • it’s easy to argue that we stand to gain something essential and human if we lose Twitter. But there is plenty about Twitter that is also essential and human.
  • No other tool has connected me to the world—to random bits of news, knowledge, absurdist humor, activism, and expertise, and to scores of real personal interactions—like Twitter has
  • What makes evaluating a life beyond Twitter so hard is that everything that makes the service truly special is also what makes it interminable and toxic.
  • the worst experience you can have on the platform is to “win” and go viral. Generally, it seems that the more successful a person is at using Twitter, the more they refer to it as a hellsite.
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